Tuxuser released a new version of his homebrew application that will allow you to easily update just the XeLL part of your freeBOOT NAND. It'd been updated following fbBuild v0.32's release, and adds support for the 13599 kernel:
Official Site: http://libxenon.org
http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/...lZuJcAjBoa.php ...

cOz released a new version of Dash Launch build for JTAG 360s.

What's new/fixed:
- added hddalive
- added 13599
- relocate external files so old files will no longer be used accidentally
new path is \default.xex dir\VERSION\files
ie: GAME:\13599\patches_jasper.bin

http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/...ElophLUmyf.php ...

News via http://blackbird.usask.ca/wordpress/?p=277

Since I did a similar post for the Xbox 360 XDK a while back and since this is intended to be mostly a developer-oriented blog, I thought it would be in keeping with that spirit to let people have a general idea of what to expect from a debug PS3 – which recently arrived.

Profiling/debugging
There are some limitations as to what you can do with regards to profiling – even on a Debugging Station. Code instrumentation through gcov is entirely possible, but this was not very appealing to me anymore given that we have been able to do this more or less even on Retail with Themaister’s net-stdio implementation. Gprof seems to have been made unavailable as Sony started moving more and more away from the open source GNU toolchain they originally based their development environment on. What’s left is a proprietary profiler that will not work on Debugging Stations but requires a Reference Tool instead – it has 256MB extra main RAM, bumping up the main system RAM in total to 512MB (plus 256MB RAM for the RSX) – which, together with the unit’s Communication Processor, gives it the extra horsepower it needs to do real-time profiling on-the-fly amongst some other things like realtime video capturing and graphical analysis through GPAD – which I’ll touch on in a moment.

LibGCM HUD

A very nice feature which seems to be only available on debug PS3s is the ability to run code with an RSX profiling tool called ‘GCM HUD’. As the name would imply, this is a Heads-Up Display overlaid on top of the application you’re running that neatly provides you with a point-and-click interface giving you access to features such as as:

•Fragment/Vertex program debugger (with the ability to set breakpoints and step through the code line by line from the console itself – with no PC having to be involved or connected to the PS3.
•RSX Performance Counters (telling you how effectively you’re utilizing the RSX).
•RSX Command Buffer log (showing you the workload of the RSX in real-time)
The whole interface is mouse-driven – so to interact with it, you have to hook up an USB mouse to be able to control it. This is not where the usefulness of this tool ends, however – GPAD (Graphics Performance Analyzer and Debugger) allows you to interface your PC with this HUD and dump all the performance data to your PC. However, again, some options – such as live video capturing – can only be done with the Reference Tool.

GPAD on a Windows PC interfacing with a debug PS3 running GCM HUD


Samples
A brief rundown of the samples that struck my eye -

Deferred shading
Deferred shading lends itself well to the architecture of the PS3 where you have a comparatively humble GPU (RSX) and up to 6 SPEs each running at 3.2GHz – the idea is to essentially subdivide the result of a shading algorithm into multiple parts that can be spread across different render targets/CPUs only to combine them at the end into one composite whole. Using this approach, the RSX can simply offload a lot of the vertex and fragment computations that are done in shaders to the SPEs which in turn crunch through the calculations (the original shader algorithm having been subdivided into parts for each SPE to chew through) only for the RSX to combine all these separate parts and render the picture.

Commercial game developers like DICE have started using this approach for games like Battlefield 3 to achieve graphical results and performance which normally would have been unattainable if all that was available to them was the RSX alone. A link to a slideshow presentation is available here.

Deferred shading sample pics



Yes, the FPS count starts to drop heavily once you start adding extra spot lights.

PSGL samples
At one point, Sony was asking developers whether they would be interested in having PSGL conform to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specs (link here). This has unfortunately never happened however, as developers seem to have mostly preferred to go with libGCM as their main graphics API of choice on PS3. This has meant that the development environment has started becoming more libGCM-centric over the years with PSGL eventually becoming a second-class citizen – in fact, new features like 3D stereo mode is not even possible unless you are using libGCM directly.

However, this has not deterred them from still making available a couple of nice samples that illustrate what PSGL is capable of in conjunction with Cg shaders (which is mostly what we use with the homebrew emulators up until now). Some nice examples show Cg being applied to render hair, skin mapping, normal mapping, parallax mapping, and sophisticated water effects (the latter ones definitely being a cut above our own water.cg shader – made by Themaister).

Conclusion
What the debug PS3 will allow us to do is to finally start getting rid of bugs – memory leaks that were simply impossible to flush out with a retail box because of the inherent ...

20th Century Fox is dipping its downloading toes into the 21st century's waters, releasing movies on Android in addition to good, old-fashioned Blu-ray. According to the Financial Times, retail discs of X-Men: First Class will direct owners to a website where they can sideload a digital version of the film onto their Android device of choice. Apparently some of the suits over at Fox caught wind of how popular Android tablets are getting, and now see them as complementary, not cannibalistic (remember that industry buzz kill?) Sure, right now you shouldn't expect any Netflix-sized library of titles, but perhaps we can all agree this is a step in the right download-to-own direction. Residents of the US, UK, Germany, and France will get the first crack at downloading the films. The rest of you can just stream and wait.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/22/2...droid-devices/ ...

Under eight hours. That was the time it took to jailbreak beta 3 of iOS 5, which dropped back on July 11th and was unleashed later that day. Now beta 4 is out and, well, our stopwatches are ticking. A new beta of iTunes has also been included, though looking through the change log there's nothing particularly amazing about this release. Among other minutia, the Twitter app will now prompt you if it's unable to identify your location before you exit it, MobileMe local contacts are deleted instead of being merged, and iCloud file names are now case sensitive. Yes, we can hear you CamelCase lovers cheering.

Interestingly, this is the first version of iOS5 that is said to be able to be applied OTA -- though that particular option comes with the warning that all photos will be deleted should you give it a try. We're guessing that "feature" will not be present in the final release candidate, but we could be wrong. Would certainly make for a fun Easter egg...

Update: We're actually having issues applying this on our many and myriad devices, and we're seeing others reporting the same. We'll keep trying, but let us know how you're getting on in comments.

Update 2: Looks like we got it. We had to go back to 4.3.4 and then we were able to move up to beta 4. Maybe that'll work for you. Maybe you'll be still stuck in the doldrums of beta 3. Either way, you're still okay by our book.

Update 3: Looks like the jailbreak is out in full force. Not too shabby, eh?

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/22/i...ilbreak-timer/ ...

Rare boss Scott Henson has explained why the Microsoft-owned UK developer is squarely focused on the Kinect Sports franchise and not hardcore genres such as first-person shooters.

Speaking to Eurogamer in an interview at the Develop conference in Brighton this week, Henson described some of the genres often linked to the Microsoft-owned UK developer as "limiting".

"It's interesting when people ask questions like, well, will you do this kind of game or that kind of game?" he said.

"Some of those things I find limiting in terms of what the experience is. If you go talk to just an average person about what we've done with Kinect Sports, honestly, it's magic to them.

"They cannot get their head around the idea they're moving and then there's an avatar on the screen doing the exact same thing. Just that simple thing. And then turn it into a sport and a whole bunch of activities with skill ranges and refined movement and big movements, it's an incredible thing.

"Hopefully people get as excited about that as we do. We know there are millions of customers out there that are getting excited about it."

Kinect Sports has sold over three million copies since its launch alongside Kinect in November last year. A sequel, Kinect Sports: Season Two, is due out later this year.

But despite the success of Kinect and Kinect Sports, Rare is often asked when it will dip into its rich back catalogue of games.

"When I get questions like that, hopefully people get the sense that what really excites me is what we're doing now and how we're driving and leading innovation," Henson countered.

Henson also said the sheer popularity of sports, and in particular football, validates Rare's decision.

"[Sports] has got to be one of the most accessible and evergreen categories in entertainment. You could make the definitive statement it's the most accessible category in entertainment.

"If you think about the number of people that engage in sports, it's the majority of the planet.

"The Premier League has two billion people who in some way, shape or form tune in. So then you have two billion people who have a general notion of what football is. That's a pretty cool basis to start an experience on.

"That fuels and motivates us as well."

In March this year images of the cancelled game that began as Perfect Dark 2 emerged.

Perfect Dark Core was to feature a more moody Joanna Dark than the one depicted in Perfect Dark and Perfect Dark Zero.

Before it was cancelled in 2009, the player controlled a male character. The game was still an action first-person shooter, but had mechs.

Xbox 360 game Perfect Dark Zero launched in 2005 to a 7/10 Eurogamer review. The original was remade for Xbox Live Arcade last year.

Henson told us he doesn't get sick of being asked when Rare will once again make a hardcore game.

"No, I don't get sick of it at all. One of the great things about Rare is it's got this great heritage and history people have passion around. I grew up on Rare games.

"I don't get sick of it. I would like for people to really understand our future is bolstered by the history we have, but we're buoyed by the innovation that's ahead of us."

Asked whether Rare may create a FPS with Kinect elements, perhaps for a Perfect Dark sequel, Henson said, from a technical point of view, "there is no reason why it can't be done".

"I've seen plenty of experiences that it can be done."

But, "For Rare's part, there is a huge opportunity for the studio and for experiences and for the audience for us to continue to raise the bar with sports.

"That's where our focus is, and that's what we're going to continue to push on. There is a massive opportunity there, not just for Season Two, but even further, for us to continue to push the boundaries around that."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...rares-priority ...

Glasses-free stereoscopic 3D has "inherent limitations", Sony has said.

Responding to complaints about having to wear glasses to view games and movies in stereoscopic 3D, the PlayStation 3 manufacturer explained why it's the best solution – and will be for a good while.

"There are already glasses-free TVs, big screens and small screens out there," Mick Hocking, Sony's 3D gaming boss, told Eurogamer at the Develop conference this week.

"The problem with glasses-free, or auto-stereoscopic as it's called, is that it has inherent limitations.

"With stereoscopic 3D, however you do it, you've got to get one image to the left eye and one image to the right eye to produce the stereoscopic effect. So with all these screens they typically have a sweet spot for where you need to put your head in distance and in angle, and if you move your head relative to it, you break the 3D effect until you get into the next pair of images, and you see artefacts going across the screen.

"We've also seen with mobile devices, if it's a mobile device you move relative to your head and it's got a 3D screen, that will break the 3D effect. It won't work very well.

"There's lots and lots of work going on on auto-stereoscopic screens because people wearing glasses is something extra for them to do to enjoy the content. We've been saying over the last 12 months, if the content is good enough and compelling enough, the only way at the moment to enjoy full high definition 3D is on TVs with the glasses."

In March Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung doubted glasses-free 3DTVs would be released within the next 10 years.

"Considering our current technology, we can make glasses-free 3DTV in R&D level, however it can be viewed from only a few viewing spots," Samsung said.

"To make naturally viewed glasses-free 3DTV, for instance in a living room where several people can watch TV from various angles, it needs at least 32 viewing spots.

"We believe that creating a prototype for lab-grade glasses-free 3DTV, broadcasting system and display will take about five years.

"For mass commercialisation to become possible manufacturing costs must come down and TV broadcasters will have to upgrade infrastructure, which includes securing transmission band.

"Attempts to put glasses-free 3DTV to market within the next 10 years will be difficult."

Sony has of course bet big on stereoscopic 3D, investing heavily in the tech for its TVs, movies and gaming on the PlayStation 3.

But for many, having to wear active-shutter glasses to see 3D visuals turns them off to the tech.

In October last year a study suggested 80 per cent of gamers were willing to wear 3D glasses to play video games, and Hocking told us the glasses are getting better.

"The glasses are getting cheaper and lighter all the time, and less invasive in the process," he said.

"With the way it's going, you could see a point in the future where someone will come up with a way of doing glasses-free technology without any of the restrictions.

"At the moment, if you want to sit there and watch a film or play a game, if you keep your head still you could do it on a glasses free. It would be OK. Then if your family or friends want to sit and watch it with you they can't share that experience with you at the moment.

"So it's not an easy problem to solve. Certainly in the short term, HD 3D is best enjoyed on an active shutter glass solution and big screen TV, and that's what we've been focusing on."

According to latest statistics, about 2.5 per cent of HDTVs in the UK are now 3D, and data suggests by 2015 nearly 40 per cent of all new TVs sold will be 3D-enabled.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ses-complaints ...

Kinect will not encroach upon the core FIFA football-match gameplay, EA Sports vice president Andrew Wilson has told Eurogamer

"The core FIFA gameplay is very, very strong based on the control mechanism we currently have," Wilson said.

"I'm not sure that we want to screw around with that if you will.

"What we're looking for," he added, "is how can a Kinect experience be additive to that without de-focusing or de-prioritising that core 11 on 11 twitch gameplay that happens on the pitch which, to be frank, the controller does a very good job of facilitating."

FIFA 13 remains the target for Kinect's FIFA debut, Wilson re-confirmed. A Kinect team at EA Sports is experimenting with newly received developer kits and the results, Wilson said, were surprising.

"We have already seen abilities and opportunities and capabilities of that technology that we didn't think were there."
Andrew Wilson, vice president, EA Sports
"We're in pre-production right now. We have a core Kinect incubation group that's looking at various different capabilities of Kinect. We have already seen abilities and opportunities and capabilities of that technology we didn't think were there," Wilson said.

"Based on some of the new technology in the SDKs we're getting, there's some things we can do there that give a greater granularity of control and fidelity that we didn't know were there. That points to what I think could be a very promising opportunity for us.

"What we're seeing is: through optimisation that Microsoft has done, and that some of our engineers are doing, there is potentially some cool stuff that we can do."

Kinect headers and volleys? Kinect Wembley? Kinect wall-ball? Kinect goal celebrations? Kinect dives? Kinect four? Oh the possibilities.

Andrew Wilson's boss, Peter Moore, took to Microsoft's E3 stage to announce planned Kinect support for mega-franchises FIFA, Madden NFL and Tiger Woods PGA Tour. His pledge of Kinect allegiance was a surprise, given his trepidation months earlier.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...crew-with-fifa ...

Though such a radical transition is still some way off, the senior VP of worldwide development at Electronic Arts has hinted that the FIFA series will at some stage have to move away from the annual disc release model.

“I think there are two things at play,” Andrew Wilson told Games Industry. “The first is the business model. There will come a time where the consumer is simply not prepared to pay $60 up-front for a game anymore, the same way they have said that for movies and music and television.

“That's one thing. And then I think it's the global infrastructure that facilitates the shift. As soon as technology provides a viable alternative to a disc, then that process will change.”

When will this change occur? That depends on two things – internet speeds and consumer behaviour.

“I think the most convenient way for the consumer to get 7GB worth of FIFA these days is still to buy it on a disc,” Wilson stated. “That will change.


“I think that Football Club this year is turning the FIFA you buy on a disc into a live service that changes every day and every week that you play. Over time, based on consumer feedback, those chunks that we deliver on that day-to-day, week-to-week basis are going to get bigger, and the releases that we do on an annual basis are going to get smaller, and ultimately you end up in a place where we are delivering a true, consumer-driven live digital service.

“We're building architecture and infrastructure to facilitate a time when the pipes into consumer homes are big enough to move that kind of data around.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/consu...anymore/082424 ...