We all learned a few important things during the XBox 360 unveiling on MTV. First, with little more than an airbrush and a pair of LEDs in the right hands, it’s possible to take the original XBox to unimagined new levels of aesthetic tragedy. Second, professional gamers can earn more than $80,000 per year, which works out to about 50 cents per hour. Finally, women gamers can assert their professionalism by saying “bitch” more times than in an average episode of Showdog Moms and Dads.

Despite all this, the network responsible for attention deficit disorder was the perfect symbolic launchpad for the next generation of home consoles. Both the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 will meld video gaming, television watching, and multimedia to cater to today’s multitasking short attention span gamer archetype. Could it get any better?



It could, says Microsoft, which deserves kudos for recognizing the white elephant in the rosy room of industry growth. Both Sony and Microsoft noted Pong in the chronologies they presented leading up to their visions of the future. Microsoft, though, lamented how early home consoles really drew in the whole family, or at least appealed to a wider demographic than today’s far more sophisticated titles. The situation is poised to get worse as next-generation titles enable more complex gameplay in addition to eye-popping graphics and animation.

Microsoft offered a few ideas on how to broaden the market, most of which — such as tracking performance across games or enabling consumers to design their own virtual merchandise — still seem to appeal to those ensconced in game culture. The most promising was the availability of free classic arcade games and modern casual hits such as Bejeweled via the new XBox Live Silver service, but that seems like a way to appeal to other family members once the console is already in the door. Nobody is going to buy an XBox 360 just to play games that have counterparts freely available on the Web. Besides, it seems like a waste to use the teraflop-crunching power of the XBox 360 to play Tetris. Casual gamers should get to enjoy gorgeous graphics, too.

Why not just include simplified versions of games with the discs on which they ship? Instead of overwhelming casual gamers with choices like designing which tattoo their character should have, simply provide a stock, good-looking character. Instead of making them prove powerslide mastery by finishing first in six races before unlocking any car faster than a Camry, give them the Ferrari up front like the original Out Run did. Instead of a feature film’s worth of cut scenes that set up the elaborate plot that will take 40 hours to unfold, provide a series of simple objectives that allow them to have some fun and get on with their lives. Limited versions of console games are already available in the forms of demos, mini-games, and “quick play” features, but these often limit the game assets available. The idea is to streamline setup and controls for casual gamers, not withhold fun.

There are probably a lot of games that will never appeal to casual gamers — epic RPGs like the Final Fantasy series, for example, would be tough to dumb down. But for racing games, shooting games, and sports, there’s far more that can be done. Console manufacturers can do their part by encouraging a “Have Fun Now” logo that publishers can use to brand games that come with a casual version or allowing consumers to set a hardware preference that automatically favors the casual flavor of the game.

Pricing and distribution would remain challenges, though. Would a casual gamer pay $50 or more for a simplified version of Madden? Would Electronic Arts be able to garner shelf space for a separate, simplified product? Could next-generation download services for consoles deliver the simplified versions? The benefit of the exponentially larger market for game titles that would result from appealing to casual gamers would justify addressing these issues. ...

This is the release thread for ngPsp. A Neo Geo Pocket & Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator for PSP. It is based on NeoPop by NeoPop_uk. The PSP port is handled by me neXis with help from many people in the psp development scene.

Please read the readme.txt file before use.

-- Update September 20th --

By user request. I have posted up a 1.5 verion of the recent release. So enjoy.

-- Update September 15th --

v1.3.1
------
Sorry this build took so long. I actualy forgot to finish it off when I had issues with getting irda to work. I desided to just go ahead
and release this build as there are a few who wish to have it. Yet there is a few issues with this build. First Samurai Shodown 2 & Last blade
have some serious issues with the emulator. I have no idea what broke still but both games will lock up for a few mins durring a battle then
resume but yet keep repeating this every so often. Someone told me Sonic was not working in the last build but seem to be fine in this build
(I played till the 2nd world just fine). The game is actualy decent to play at 333 and a frameskip of 4. Well thats about it. Enjoy.

Oh one last thing. Thanks to everybody who donated for me to get a second PSP. I have been working on the wifi library, dubed Nemo, and I am
very very close to getting adhoc suport done for p2p. So hopefuly I can get a adhoc demo out in the near future once i can finish off the
rewrite of the librarys. Exspect a huge thank you personaly to every donator in the wifi demo.

Ps. I officialy changed my name from nexis2600 to PSmonkey now.

-- *NOTE* - This build defaults to 333Mhz as it was a development build. You can still downclock the emu to 222 via the menu.
.) Removed VSync from rendering. Games get a small boost and framerate is now around 40-50 fps in most games. A improvement over being a pretty solid 30.
.) Sound code is there but ungodly bad. I left it in this build in the hope someone can help me out with correcting it and getting it accurate.
.) Suport for using a real bios added but disabled in this build.

-- If you wish to donate to this project. Please use the link below -

ngPsp Paypal Donation Box ...

David Douglas has updated his Spectrum emulator for the GP32, heres whats new:

It is now using my ARM Assembly Core so it runs fullspeed with (48K) sound at a battery friendly 66Mhz (some games run fine at 40Mhz!).

It supports both 48K and 128K spectrums with all op-codes supported including all undocumented ones.

See the read-me file for further info.

Thanks to Christophe Lennard for the icon.

Download from the ZXGP Page here --> http://gp32emu.dcemu.co.uk/zxgp.shtml ...

good news for legal homebrewers of the xbox! im still hoping and praying for a legal dashboard replacement!

...

http://media.ps3.ign.com/articles/61...00/vids_1.html

I saw these earlier today and almost had a heart attack.

The first one i saw was the duck one. the physics are some of the best i have seen... ever. they drop alot of ducks... and... HOLY CRAP THEY DROP ALOT MORE DUCKS!!

the MOST stunning i saw was the doc oc one... the renders of his facial features tend to make you wonder if thats just a movie of some guys face or not. as impressive as just him by himself is... they display a whole city with rendering that could give the cg animators of any major motion picture movie a run for their money. I really recomend that you are sitting down when you view this one.

sony has certainly outdone them selves with both the psp and the upcoming ps3. ...

Khaos has released the holy grail as far as owners of the BLU + version of the Gamepark 32 are concerned, heres what he posted on the GP32X forums:

Well, after some (many) weeks of efforts, I finnaly achieved a recompilation of osnes9xGP 0.3 (thanks YoyoFr for his answers !), with added BLU+ support. The code try to autodetect wether it is running on a BLU+ (from the BIOS version). If this fails, one can still forces the detection via an option in the video submenu.

Since I
- converted the asm code from ADS asm to GNU asm syntax (no handy ADS compiler),
- did some horrible things to the code in order to bypass some memory problems,
- never developed on GP32 before,
- only tried it on my BLU+,
don't get your hopes too high, there might be some problems

Try and see...

Download Here ...

We are a site thats nearly 14 months old and we have now hit the 2 million visitors mark, which is great to say the console we support has been dead commercially for a few years now.

Lets hope the next millions come quick too

Congrats to all who make the site the succes it has been. ...

Nems Hello World demo released on PS2 Dev Forums started a major surge of Homebrew and Emulation releases for the PSP, that was followed by Marakichis Gameboy Emulator called Rin which is now nearon full speed, that has sparked off releases of games like Tetris and more emulators in the shape of a InfoNes Port and incredibly a Snes Emulator which is a port of Snes 9x add to that the release of the PSP Homebrew Emulator PSPE the last three all thanks to the guys at PSP Wiki.

In just a few short weeks we have seen the emergence of a scene that is chucking out so many releases that its very hard to keep up with all whats new.

Its great to see it though ...

Atani has released another new version of his homebrew game, Copper Swapperfor the Dreamcast, heres whats new:

New License
Added intro/credits screens showing logos URLs
removed custom plx/tsu packages, replaced with BZ2Texture

Download from Atanis site here --> http://www.atani-software.net/

Thanks to Atani himself for the email. ...