SCEE has revealed two new PS2 games that will take advantage of new motion-tracking technology developed for the EyeToy.

Current EyeToy games can only detect basic movement in any area of the screen, but devs at SCEE London have developed new tech that allows the EyeToy to accurately track specific colours with one-to-one accuracy.

This tech will be utilised in a new first-person sword fighting game called Hero, which will come packed with a green foam sword that can be accurately tracked by the game.

Players slash the sword to perform blocking and attacking moves in the game, taking on enemies in what Sony says is a fully-fledged story-driven adventure, with a mini-game structure.

You earn new powers in the game, one of which is the ability to light up dark passages with a fiery sword (quiet at the back). An interesting stealth mechanic sees players hiding the glowing sword behind their back to mask its light as enemies pass by.

The other title, Pom Pom Party, is a cheerleading affair using similar tech presumably to track your dancing motions. One for your sister, then.

Both games are pencilled in for a late 2008 release.

The chequered history of Rock Band in Australia could be set to take yet another turn, as an undisclosed retail source told us today that the game's release may be delayed indefinitely. Word is that retail buyers simply aren't interested in stocking a bulky product that's a year old and will cost more than its similarly bulky – and up to date - competitor Guitar Hero: World Tour.

This is dire news if true, yet that's not the worst of it. Further rumours suggest that - for similar reasons - Rock Band 2 may not come out either, and that the Guitar Hero series has the market sewn up. Whether EA would simply cede control of such a lucrative genre to a competitor remains to be seen, however, and we're hoping that it will still push to release the second game in Australia.

We've approached EA for comment but have been unsuccessful so far. Stay tuned for more info.

It's summer vacations for most of us and as you've seen PCSX2 development has been pretty slow these days!
But, some great plugins for PCSX2 have recently got updated and are worth mentioning:

Gsdx 0.1.9: Gabest releases yet another version of his fast DX9 / DX10 GS plugin improving speed and compatibility.You can get it from our downloads page

Lilypad 0.9.4: Chickenliver keeps updating this pad plugin with constant bug fixes and features,so be sure to check it out.Also in our downloads

Gigaherz's cdvd plugin v0.7 WIP 3: A new CDVD plugin by Gigaherz which is in very early stages but making progress.You can download it and give it a try in this emuforums thread here

That's it for now,I'll try to keep updating the download section with the new releases.
Enjoy your summer vacations people.

It's summer vacations for most of us and as you've seen PCSX2 development has been pretty slow these days!
But, some great plugins for PCSX2 have recently got updated and are worth mentioning:

Gsdx 0.1.9: Gabest releases yet another version of his fast DX9 / DX10 GS plugin improving speed and compatibility.You can get it from our downloads page

Lilypad 0.9.4: Chickenliver keeps updating this pad plugin with constant bug fixes and features,so be sure to check it out.Also in our downloads

Gigaherz's cdvd plugin v0.7 WIP 3: A new CDVD plugin by Gigaherz which is in very early stages but making progress.You can download it and give it a try in this emuforums thread here

That's it for now,I'll try to keep updating the download section with the new releases.
Enjoy your summer vacations people.

And now for something completely different: DEmul WIP. There are so many changes compared to previous release so let`s describe only key points:

- alpha naomi support
- better compatibility

In a Gamasutra interview, Sega of America President Simon Jeffery hinted at a Western release for Phantasy Star Portable. Here is a quote from the interview:

Gamasutra: I was amused to see the Phantasy Star Portable news, because it was like a lightbulb went off at Sega. "Maybe we should take our idea back from Monster Hunter!"
Simon Jeffery: Right. (laughter) I think that's exactly what happened at Sega!

Gamasutra: Capcom has had difficulty putting that model forward in the west, but Phantasy Star has done okay. Maybe not as well as it should, but okay.
Simon Jeffery: It's done okay, and there's still quite a lot of people out there playing it every month.

Gamasutra: So do you think you can take that market here with that title?
Simon Jeffery: I think that it's not going to be a blockbuster success, but I think it will be a niche success. I'm certainly hopeful that it's more of a success in the west than Monster Hunter has been. There is a built-in audience for it already there.

I think the crossover of the PSP ownership will work quite nicely, so we're fairly hopeful we can make something out of it. It's not going to be huge, but hopefully it'll be interesting.

While a Western release has not been formally announced yet, these comments should be taken as strong indication that Phantasy Star Portable will be released outside Japan.

Oh, the heck! It seems like a good time to anounce it now... just to not make other coders double the work that's already done (well, unless you want to... there is nothing bad about it).

I already have PSX emulator for PS2 called "PS2PSXe" (obvious, isn't it?). At first I wanted to make it as pcsx port, but this emulator isn't very optimal and well coded (and on PS2 we have to use everything we can to make it work realtime). That's why most part of it is written from scratch, just few parts remained... but I'm working to getting everything written from scratch.

The good thing is that the architecture matches in general, so CPU code is really simple. For memory access I used hardware TLB capabilities of PS2 (same for hardware access), so the memory access is also faster than on PSX. The PAD is just translated and sent almost directly to IOP side... it's now also very compatible. Memory cards are emulated and can be stored on any media (alternatively they could be simply translated to use real PSX MC in PS2 memory card slot). The SPU is also simply translated and almost directly send to IOP side (though, the sound is a little bit jerky... I'll probably have to create some intermediate buffer first). The cdrom part is handled almost entirely on IOP in asynchonous mode, so it just reads some sectors ahead while the main program uses already transferred data on EE side... it's also quite fast (I use host mostly, but it works fine with usb and hdd, too). It supports, of course, subchannels and cdda (cdda is dummy supported, it simulates laser head movement and playback, but in fact nothing is played nor data is accessed). The GTE is done on VUs (not that there is really a need to, GTE commands are not a big part of the whole load... it was more like fun to work on it... and became quite a hell now when I try to synchronize it now with new HW GPU core, so I'll probably dump it for some versions now). MDECS are handled mostly with IPU, though, I didn't make them independent of the emulation yet (which means they go through emulated CPU first), but I'm working on it (it can be done, there are emulators that handle it this way). COP0 emulation is very simplistic (no real support for debug functions, though there is some code that simulates it enough to make games using it work).

The last part, and the bottleneck right now is GPU that uses software rendering. It's based on Pete's P.E.Op.S GPU plugin, though many fixes had been done to make it work much faster on PS2 as well as make some games run at all and other display everything properly. New HW GPU is still under development, but right now it makes most games work more than two times faster (it shouldn't be much lower in final version, as the most time consuming part: VRAM writes and reads are already implemented... though, a little bit suck yet ).

Anyway, the status is: it is quite compatible. Already runs some simpler games at full speed, some more demanding (like final fantasy series in cities) at 35-45fps (let's assume for simplicity 50fps is 100% for pal and 60fps is 100% for ntsc... though it's not that simple), while some really demanding 3D games at ~17-25fps... Currently the worse speed is achieved in games that are using a lot of Vram->RAM and RAM->Vram transfers all the time. The new HW GPU doubles that (ie. it gives in FF9 in cities ~85-105 FPS). Only few people tested this app, but dlanor (a mod here and co-developer of uLE) wasted a lot of his time on the tests (probably even more than I did ).

Though, recently ESR and few other projects have stopped the development... but I'll be on it shortly (I hope I'll be able to finish everything while there still are some PS2 users around ).

Just wanted to let you know . Oh well, it's not a secret anymore (I even posted a beta testers recruitment post some time ago, but only two persons answered, and only one decided finally to help - you guessed, dlanor ).

After a very long hiatus I'm very happy to announce an 08-08-08 release of the latest and probably final XDP. It is now available after being uploaded on my agonizing connection speed of less than 1KB/s. Links are now clickable on the download page. This one features some nice graphical changes as well as having the VMU loading bug fixed. Keep in mind that the version available for download is the smaller version, (to be friendly with my dialup and webhost). The full 700MB version with extra browsers and features on a printed CD with DVD case will be available via mail-order for now, (until I get better internet).

Sony boss Chris Deering has surprised many by predicting that the firm's PlayStation 2 console, which launched in the UK in the year 2000, will have more active users than Nintendo's Wii by 2011.

Speaking at the launch of Edinburgh's Interactive Festival, the games chief said all platforms will see major growth by 2011, predicting there will be 2.5 billion gamers worldwide.

Deering said the DS will have rocketed to 150m users, but top of the home console market will be the PS2 with 90m active users.

The Sony boss added the Wii will be second with 80m users, the PS3 and PSP will be at 70m and the Xbox 360 at 40m.