DCEmu Homebrew Emulation & Theme Park News
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by Published on March 2nd, 2009 16:15
In like a lamb and out like a lion, or vice-versa? Whether March finds you digging out from a late-winter blizzard or reeling in the spring thaw, the fun is both mild and wild at the Wii Shop Channel. Even the littlest lambs in your household can take part in a cool new family-friendly WiiWare game, while strategy-loving gamers will be roaring like lions as they battle evil foes in a classic Virtual Console title.
Nintendo adds new and classic games to the Wii Shop Channel at 9 a.m. Pacific time every Monday. Wii owners with a high-speed Internet connection can redeem Wii Points to download the games. Wii Points can be purchased in the Wii Shop Channel or at retail outlets. This week's new games are:
WiiWare
Family & Friends Party (Gammick Entertainment, 1-8 players, Rated E for Everyone, 1,000 Wii Points): Have fun with all your friends and family as you take on some very exciting challenges. This is an interactive board game for as many as eight players of all ages. The goal is to be the first to complete a series of challenges. During each turn, a challenge will be played by one or two players per team depending on the type of challenge you've been given. (Other players on your team can still help and support you). There are six different "Single" challenges that must be played cooperatively by members of the same team. Family & Friends Party can also suggest "Versus" challenges, which must be played competitively by all teams at the same time.
Virtual Console
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen (Super NES, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 800 Wii Points): It's up to you to defeat the Empire. It's been nearly a quarter of a century since the Zetegenian Empire first conquered the Kingdoms of Zenobia with a wrath of fear and bloodshed. You are the leader of a band of rebels who've fought to preserve the last shred of honor in this desperate time of treachery. Manage the ranks of a full-blown rebel army, complete with hundreds of characters, magic items, weapons and mystical Tarot cards. You must succeed in ousting the evil usurpers-your fate, and that of the entire population, depends on it.
http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/958/958273p1.html ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 16:08
Air has just posted this on the PCSX2 blog:
Without a doubt, creating a public release of Pcsx2 is an exhausting affair. We just got finished posting the latest and greatest in 0.9.6 (available in our Downloads Section!), and while it's nice having everything done and over with for now, it sure feels like there should have been a better way.
This time around we tried to make use of our GoogleCode Svn in "smart" fashion, and created a branch for the Release Candidate. The jury's still out on if this proved to be successful or not. Several ground-breaking fixes were submitted shortly after the RC branch was made, so we had to merge all of that stuff in. Furthermore, I got carried away and experimented with partial merges, without fully understanding the advantages of reverse merges, so I had to undo several of my own merging errors. And just to add salt to the wound, TortoiseSvn had a bug that would frequently "forget" line breaks; merging all code changes into one super-long line.
So in the end, the merges required a lot of brain power, a lot of time, and may have led to some small mistakes. These were all things we were hoping the RC branch would help reduce, so it was a bit of a fail on that account.
The other stress tester when doing an official release is the updating of the compatibility list, which is both a lot of work for our dedicated testers and has the nasty side-effect of making us devs completely and totally aware of just how many games actually emulate worse now, instead of better. So each day was a mad dash to do regression testing on each new set of titles that came in as no longer being playable. This was made even more challenging by the fact that most of the regressions ended up being pretty old, dating back to the pre-Playground days (meaning they were attributed to 0.9.5 Svn revisions). We only managed to get a few of the riddles solved.
So yeah, it's true -- the overall "playable" number of games is lower in 0.9.6 compared to 0.9.4, due to many semi-obscure titles which are unable make it past the intro in 0.9.6. But on the other hand, games that are playable tend be much more accurately emulated now, and are certainly much faster. And 0.9.6 also runs a couple dozen games that 0.9.4 could not (most of which are big titles many folks have looked forward to for some time). In the meantime, though, you might want to keep that old 0.9.4 copy around for some of those titles that need it.
http://www.pcsx2.net/blog.php#h11385 ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 16:02
News via Emurussia
The Nintendo 64 emulator for Sony PSP has been updated.
Changes:
[+] Added exception handler to emulation (Chilly Willy)
[+] Made UI selection wrap at top and bottom (Chilly Willy)
[+] Cleaned up the ROM preferences (Chilly Willy)
[+] ME Audio uses CPU event (CPU event system made thread-safe) (Chilly Willy)
[+] ME Audio made conditional (Async = ME, Sync = Old Audio) (Chilly Willy)
[+] Several Custom Blends Added (Kreationz, ShinyDude100, Wally)
[+] Rewrote microcode detection to fix a couple of bugs (StrmnNrmn)
[+] Added support for LOAD_UCODE, fixes a number of rendering glitches (StrmnNrmn)
[!] Fixed an assert causing some homebrew not to run (StrmnNrmn)
[^] OSEHLE Enabled with several OSHLE commands (Small speed up)(howard0su)
[^] Improved Audio ME code (Faster with Audio on) (Chilly Willy)
[^] Use VFPU to handle more transform and lighting (StrmnNrmn)
[^] Various rendering optimisations (StrmnNrmn)
[^] Various ucodes, many games show up correctly now. (Wally)
[^] Corrected many savetypes in rom.ini (Wally)
Download and Give Feedback and Compatability Reports Via Comments ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 01:40
sammystag has released Toddtris 1.0:
One or two player tetris-like game for Wii.
Two player rules based on the gameboy classic:
4 lines = 4 lines attack on opponent
3 lines = 2 lines attack on opponent
2 lines = 1 line attack on opponent
1 lines - no effect
Thanks to Pete for the soundtrack.
The graphics and sounds are customisable to an extent. All the images and the soundtrack can be changed by swapping the files in the images / sounds directory. The background JPEG can be swapped no problem, the PNGs for the blocks and so on need to be in the format required by GRRLib. I use libogc's mp3player v1.7.0 for soundtrack, there seems to be an issue where the last second or two of the file are not played so I had to add some padding to compensate. It would be good to see what someone with better graphic skills than me could come up with.
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 01:34
Yes, this is another Wii rant. There are plenty of other articles talking about the poor recent game offerings, the hardware limitations, and the primitive online play. I’m not here to talk about those. Instead, I’m going to talk about the Wii’s software stack, and how it compares to other consoles.
The Wii’s software architecture sucks.
If you look at lists of software updates for the PS3 or the XBox 360, you’ll find things such as PS3 update 2.40, which made XMB available in-game, or XBox 360 update 2.0.7357.0, which added the New XBox Experience, among many smaller updates are stability fixes, new peripheral support, and new features like in-game screenshots. A large amount of the features affect or improve the in-game experience.
Meanwhile, the Wii got all of:
Things, such as copying saves to SD, which should have been there from the start
Support for new features for new games, with zero improvements for any games already released (USB keyboards, WiiSpeak, etc).
Updates to built-in channels (WiiShop, etc)
Wii menu or messageboard tweaks, like moving channels or, get this, a clock.
Security updates, or their failed attempts at stopping homebrew.
This isn’t a coincidence. As it turns out, Nintendo chose not to have any operating system or common code at all running on the Broadway CPU. When you run a game, everything that shows up on your screen, ever, is being loaded from that spinning polycarbonate disc. And there are no mechanisms for anything else to run on that CPU: no update infrastructure, no Home Menu updates, nothing. If they ever want to have a “hypervisor” run above games, they’ll need to get a new CPU with full-blown virtualization capability (or an emulator), because games assume they have direct access to the CPU and most of the hardware.
If you’ve been following the Wii scene, you might be thinking, “what about IOS?” Indeed, Nintendo’s security and I/O Operating System runs alongside games (on a separate CPU built in to the Hollywood chipset) and it is updated as part of system updates. It includes some important bits and pieces like some peripheral drivers. However, as it turns out, Nintendo has decided that every new feature will be developed as a separate fork. Your Wii contains many IOS versions, and the older have never been updated except for security reasons (to fix our exploits). Not that they’ve added many new features, but if you look closely, new IOS features do not operate when you’re playing older games. This includes any updates to the WiiConnect24 downloads code, and even some minor things like the “slot LED blinks when you eject a disc” feature - try it when you’re playing Zelda and you’ll see that it doesn’t work, because it’s using the very old IOS9.
There are 23 IOS versions installed with current updates (this is also wasting the scarce 512MB internal memory!). Any new feature that they want to use in older games would have to be retroactively and individually added to each version, and it could create compatibility concerns because the interfaces with IOS functions aren’t all that stable either. Just doing these updates would cost them an immense amount of effort - it took them well over half a year to fix the fakesigning exploit and ship the IOS updates for all 23 versions, and that’s a minor update that can’t possibly affect games. Every time they’ve added a new feature (for example, the recent Wii Speak support, or USB keyboard support, or USB mouse support) they’ve just made a new fork of IOS for it. And IOS is limited to what it already handles - the ARM CPU that it runs on has no access to the graphics capabilities of the Wii (nor is it fast enough anyway - it has no floating point capability and it is a lot slower than the Broadway), so they can’t add any user-interface features to it.
Even worse - some things that should have been implemented in IOS aren’t. Like the Bluetooth stack and the Wii Remote code. Forget about any Bluetooth device support in older games - they couldn’t pull off a VoIP feature, ever. The SD card filesystem code is implemented in the games, which means that they can’t possibly add any code that uses SD card files, because two filesystem drivers can’t be used on the same device at the same time. Some things, such as saving games to SD for titles that don’t otherwise use the SD slot, are possible, but the changes needed to accomplish them would be so hacky and intrusive that I doubt they’re ever going to happen. One of the few things they can update with relative ease is networking (because the TCP/IP stack runs in IOS), but even then they still need to touch all IOS variants to fix it retroactively in older games. We’ve seen some changes but I doubt we’ll see many more.
As a specific example, let’s look at the much-discussed future ability to load Virtual Console and WiiWare titles from an SD card (seriously, what the hell were they thinking with 512MB of internal storage and no sane infrastructure to ever expand ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 01:31
DQ Translations Presents:
Dragon Quest III
DaMarsMan has done what countless others have tried, a complete translation of Dragon Quest III for the SNES.
It’s finished, enjoy.
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/inde...opic,8186.html ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 01:30
Puyo Puyo Sun is the third Puyo Puyo game in the series. The game was released in 1996 by Compile on the arcade and was later ported to several consoles and the PC. This is the English translation of the PC version. The translation is complete, however it has some minor elements untranslated (title screen appearance and several backgrounds).
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/inde...opic,8181.html ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 01:29
After almost 3 years of work, Bare Knuckle 3 is finally available in English. That means you now have a chance to play Bare Knuckle 3 the way it was originally intended before Sega of America got their censoring hands on it. So grab the patch, a friend and enjoy some old school beat’em up action today!
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/inde...opic,8101.html ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 01:28
Today, I present you with the 100% complete Japanese to English translation of the game “Cadillac”.
Cadillac is a puzzle card game featuring several women that try to take every last bit of money from you. The object of the game is to clear all of the cards at the end of the deck, which can be pretty tricky. During the game, you have cards that come down from the top and make their way to the bottom where you position them to make poker combinations, like three of a kind, 4 of a kind, 5 of a kind, flushes and straights. There are 10 levels to beat in this game. Your reward on a few levels is to see a full screen view of one of the women that host the game. This game is a one or two player game.
Steve Martin translated the scripts, so thanks to him!
http://www.romhacking.net/forum/inde...opic,8077.html ...by Published on March 2nd, 2009 01:21
The ScummVM Team have released a new version of ScummVM for nearly every system released, heres the details and whats new etc:
Information about scummvm
ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!
Some of the adventures ScummVM supports include Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; Wyrmkeep's Inherit the Earth; Coktel Vision's Gobliiins; Westwood Studios' The Legend of Kyrandia and games based on LucasArts' SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system such as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more.
Todays release news:
As we turned to a 6 months release cycle, here is our newest and best ScummVM version for you!
A couple of new engines were added, and besides 2 Humongous Entertainment titles, we now support The 7th Guest and Bud Tucker in Double Trouble.
Among other notable things there is a completely new vector-based GUI, which is a merged work of our last year GSoC student Vicent Marti, as well as a General Main Menu which adds a common save/load interface to most of our engines, adding the much awaited Return to Launcher feature along the way. It was the work of another successful student, Chris Page.
release notes
Notes:
0.13.0 (2009-02-28)
General:
- Added MIDI driver for Atari ST / FreeMint.
- Added a 'Load' button to the Launcher (not supported by all engines).
- Added a new global main menu (GMM) dialog usable from all engines.
- Added the ability to return to the launcher from running games (via the GMM).
- Rewrote GUI renderer to use an vector based approach.
- Rewrote GUI configuration to use XML.
New Games:
- Added support for Blue's 123 Time Activities.
- Added support for Blue's ABC Time Activities.
- Added support for Bud Tucker in Double Trouble.
- Added support for The 7th Guest.
KYRA:
- Added support for Auto-save feature.
- Added support for MIDI music.
SCUMM:
- Implemented radio-chatter effect in The DIG.
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Catherine: Full Body’s English translation for the Vita