Indie game developer Cliff Harris has long waged war against games piracy, but has issued a call to pirates to tell him why he is wrong. Assuming that developers are missing out on potential sales from disgruntled pirates, Cliff wants to hear specifically from people who have pirated his games. Not to criticize or lecture them, but to answer a simple question. Why? The reasons people give for copyright infringement/piracy are many and varied, but much of the debate has centred around music and movies, with big 'Triple-A' games an occasional consideration. With specific application to the world of small budget 'indie' games like those Cliff makes, he wants to know the thought processes behind people pirating the games. What puts people off buying? Is it quality, cost, DRM, ease of access? Is there anything that can be done to convert those people to buyers? While many pirates often make good general points about the reasons for the widespread pirating of PC games, it's unusual to get a chance to address specific developers with specific reasons. If you knew 100% that the developer would read your email explaining why you pirated their game, what would you say?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/10/1553224 ...

A friend of mine is currently putting together a new game related TV show. Naturally he's asked my advise on what I think should be in the show (because I'm so awesome) and i have given him thousands of revolutionary ideas, but even my genius has limits. So I would like to throw the question out to you, the DCEmu Public.

What would you like to see in a Gaming TV show? ...

Craig one of the forces behind the Pandora Console posted this Pandora News

Hello everyone, Craig here,

It's been a busy month and if you visit the forums I'm sure you will have been following all the recent news posted there, if not Chip has made a great sticky post with all the little nuggets of information we post which is updated almost immediately, well worth checking out.

Now, interesting news for those of you who didn't get a MK0 dev kit, TI have now started taking orders for the Beagle board OMAP3 development kit. It shares some main parts with the Pandora and those of you eager to get in to the development scene can buy one of these now, check out their site for more info, programs written on the Beagle should be quite easy to port over to the Pandora, it is certainly the closest thing to a Pandora devboard you can currently buy on the open market.

Now, there have been a lot of videos posted in the last few weeks of Pandora dev kits running software, here are the direct links to some and we will post a highlights video soon.

A Jaguar emulator running Tempest2000 by Firefox.

Notaz running Megadrive and MegaCD games without a frame limiter. Seeing sonic going at 200FPS is quite entertaining.

Quake2 running in software mode (not using the 3D hardware yet, but still pushing 60fps).

SNES running Chrono Trigger without a frame limiter.

Now, another area which has a lot of strong opinions is the Pandora default GUI.

The original plan was keep the GUI simple and put as much time and effort in to getting as much cool software running as possible, but after a poll we have changed direction.

Since most potential customers seem to want a more advanced GUI as standard it's likely the default will be kDrive (X11 derivative) and any CPU intensive apps/games/emus can just kill kDrive when ran, set their CPU speed, have the system to themselves and just reload kDrive on exit.

For less CPU intensive games/apps/emus they can just run within X, so you can have your desktop like GUI (if you chose to set it up like that) with multitasking (ideal for browsers, media, chat).

Currently the Pandora defaults to 500mhz. As we know it can clock a lot higher. You will be able to change that to whatever you like, as you may have read the battery life is looking like it will be even longer than the estimated 10 hours, and clever CPU speed changes will be the key to optimising this even further.

We will have a real final MK0 Pandora complete with case later this month for photo goodness, if you write for a website or magazine and want to do a feature please get in touch. ...

Craig one of the forces behind the Pandora Console posted this Pandora News

Hello everyone, Craig here,

It's been a busy month and if you visit the forums I'm sure you will have been following all the recent news posted there, if not Chip has made a great sticky post with all the little nuggets of information we post which is updated almost immediately, well worth checking out.

Now, interesting news for those of you who didn't get a MK0 dev kit, TI have now started taking orders for the Beagle board OMAP3 development kit. It shares some main parts with the Pandora and those of you eager to get in to the development scene can buy one of these now, check out their site for more info, programs written on the Beagle should be quite easy to port over to the Pandora, it is certainly the closest thing to a Pandora devboard you can currently buy on the open market.

Now, there have been a lot of videos posted in the last few weeks of Pandora dev kits running software, here are the direct links to some and we will post a highlights video soon.

A Jaguar emulator running Tempest2000 by Firefox.

Notaz running Megadrive and MegaCD games without a frame limiter. Seeing sonic going at 200FPS is quite entertaining.

Quake2 running in software mode (not using the 3D hardware yet, but still pushing 60fps).

SNES running Chrono Trigger without a frame limiter.

Now, another area which has a lot of strong opinions is the Pandora default GUI.

The original plan was keep the GUI simple and put as much time and effort in to getting as much cool software running as possible, but after a poll we have changed direction.

Since most potential customers seem to want a more advanced GUI as standard it's likely the default will be kDrive (X11 derivative) and any CPU intensive apps/games/emus can just kill kDrive when ran, set their CPU speed, have the system to themselves and just reload kDrive on exit.

For less CPU intensive games/apps/emus they can just run within X, so you can have your desktop like GUI (if you chose to set it up like that) with multitasking (ideal for browsers, media, chat).

Currently the Pandora defaults to 500mhz. As we know it can clock a lot higher. You will be able to change that to whatever you like, as you may have read the battery life is looking like it will be even longer than the estimated 10 hours, and clever CPU speed changes will be the key to optimising this even further.

We will have a real final MK0 Pandora complete with case later this month for photo goodness, if you write for a website or magazine and want to do a feature please get in touch. ...

News/release from Tbag:


Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...

Wil has updated his Solitaire game for the Wii:


Download and give feedback via comments ...

News/release from Streak:

Simple Dev Studio 0.7b

Finally, its time to reanimate my oldie 4FloorDev page with another fine release/update - Simple Dev Studio v0.7b for GP2X.

Its almost FINAL release, so GP2X users, please send me infos about bugs, and every suggestions You may have. You can find my email in readme.txt.

BTW. another IDE will be for awesome PANDORA HandHeld, so stay tuned.

Whats new in 0.7b
- GP2X Help Button [ GP2x Icon on left ] has got 3 links which redirects you to excellent tutorials about gp2x / sdl / c++ programming
- Nasty timer "bug" about "working too hard" is turned off
- Added New Setup App to auto-setup your ide with sdk
- Corrected few small bugs..
- And finally SDK [ GP2x and Win32 ] is binded with SimpleDevStudio IDE

DOWNLOAD:My 4FloorDev site --> http://www.pandora.y0.pl/ ...

Zodttd is back with another release for "Beta testers" only


As i said above this release is for beta testers only but beta testers at the site have to donate to become a beta tester so in effect your paying for homebrew, if your happy to do that then see here ...

I was chatting with a fellow Chinese historian this weekend when he confessed that his interest in Chinese history could be traced back to receiving a copy of Romance of the Three Kingdoms for SNES. I thought of that while reading Duncan Fyfe's essay on the potential 'educational' uses of regular, AAA titles — which isn't really so much on the potential to educate as much as inspire (as insipid as that sounds) in subtle ways:

Video games can be gateways to higher learning. Is it idealistic? Sure. But the base repudiation of idealism is so often used as a shield against saying anything interesting. Anti-idealism is what keeps triple-A games generic, and the reversal of that trend should already be a good enough target.

Compare the social value of these games to that of Halo or Oblivion. They're just as entertaining, but they are not relevant to any humanitarian or political discussion, and are certainly not literary. The Wire and The West Wing will not reform government but they will challenge and galvanize their viewers.

I'd be curious to know how many people actually went out and tackled Ayn Rand after playing BioShock; I'm also a little skittish about the idea of heavy handed philosophy and the like making a strong appearance (one Xenosaga series was enough, thank you). Fyfe's opinions aren't new by any means, and can be found in just about any essay talking about more 'grown up' themes in games. Interesting essay and worth a look.

http://kotaku.com/5035171/games-and-...ening-gateways ...