Via CVG

Square Enix has announced a brand new Wii project and in news that will delight Nintendo fans, the Japanese RPG giant confirmed a follow up to Crystal Chronicles for Nintendo Wii.

Following on from the GameCube Crystal Chronicles, Crystal Bearers will feature wi-fi elements and is expected to feature some extra features when linked with the also newly announced Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Rings of Fate for Nintendo DS. ...

Via CVG

Square Enix has unsheathed its sword today in another cracker from its pre-show conference in the form of Dragon Quest Swords, a brand new title for Nintendo's Wii.

From the same series as the epic Dragon Quest VIII, Japan's all consuming monster RPG, Dragon Quest Swords is subtitled The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors and our man on the spot told us it was shown in trailer form only but described it as one amazing looking movie.

What's most intriguing is that Dragon Quest Swords will be in place for the Wii's launch before the end of this very year and the trailer was said to feature a heroic warrior fighting with a hideous monster in a darkened woodland setting, with the Wii's controller being used to direct sword strokes as he grappled with the beast. ...

Via CVG

We've known that Sonic Team has been slaving away on a next-gen game starring everyone's favourite blue hedgehog for a while now - and we've even seen some sumptuous pre-rendered footage, initially shown behind closed doors at TGS last year. Now though, Sega has revealed the first in-game footage of Sonic the Hedgehog for PS3 and Xbox 360 - and we've got the trailer right here.

Featuring a leaner, meaner looking Dr. Robotnik and a whole host of animal chums accompanying Sonic on his latest adventure, it seems that the usual running and jumping platform antics are intact, alongside some bouncy buggy-and-blasting action too.

It's all looking mighty pretty - as you'd expect on next-gen - and hopefully it'll have the gameplay to match. Check back later in the week for first impressions, just as soon as E3's doors swing open this Wednesday.

Check out the vid at the link above ...

Via Gamesindustry

Author Dean Takahashi has claimed in his new book, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, that half of Microsoft's Xbox 360 hardware team has moved onto a portable hardware project - designed to compete with Nintendo's DS and Sony's PSP - since the launch of the next gen machine.

Takahashi claims the team was split in two following the launch, leaving the other half to work solely on reduced production costs of Xbox 360.

According to the writer, the portable is planned to be released halfway into Xbox 360's lifespan, a strategy to assuage the crippling costs of moving through hardware cycles. Sony, obviously, has employed a similar approach with PS2 and PSP.

A Microsoft gaming handheld has been long-rumoured, the latest occurrence adding fuel to this particular fire being the release of a movie for the company's Origami project. A promotional video for the handheld PC showed Halo 2 running on its screen. ...

Hi All,

Here is a new version of portable VNC working with all firmwares (but not 2.7 )

What's new in this version 1.2.1 :

+ Modify wifi connection handler to work on 1.5FW
+ Check wifi switch on startup

** Many thanks to KingPSP to help me to test it on 1.5FW ! **

Thanks also to Yoyofr, Bigal90 and DeMoN X for their help.

My contribution on this app is minor (only code rewritting to fit new interface of PSPSDK, and copy/paste wifi code from psp-ftpd). I just wanted it to work on my PSP 2.5.

Portable VNC is distributed under GNU licence, and sources are provided with the archive.

Hope that helps,

Cheers, Zx. ...

ZereoX has released a new Lua Card game for the PSP, heres the info:

In this release(V0.1) : You can have up to 2 card on the Table the Dealer to. If you want only 1. Hit and Stand command works when you hit stand the dealer start drawing is cards(Max 2 for now). Note:You will have to press Home to exit and do not press on credits cause its long to load and does stay long.

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via zereox ...

HarleyG has released this new app: (although im not sure of its use but heres the info)

UMD Identifier v0.1 by harleyg - http://www.linuxlabs.co.uk
-----------------------------------------------------------
Ok, so this is the 1st program ive released, all it does it look through a giant array of UMD ID's/codes and compairs yours to everyone in the array, if it finds a matching pair it will look through and find the name of it in a second array.

This is confirmed to work by myself on 1.50, i havnt tested on any other firmwares so please let me know... Oh, this isnt released under any license, however if you use this it would be nice to get a little credit...

chow.

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Youresam has updated his Lua Netlib app, heres whats new:

Wow, this is what, my 4th program in 2 weeks?

Anyway, this is netlib v1.4. It features sending text messages (SMS) to a cell phone. (Its free for you, and cheap for them!) But seriously, it is free for you, but it acts like a normal text message for them. It might even cost them money if they dont have a subscription for text messaging so I advise you do NOT send random text messages as many times as you want unless you know if it would be ok with them. Imagine getting your phone bill and it has $20 worth of text messages

However, that doesnt mean you cant enjoy this new feature! Right now, the limitations are that it must be [not sure though] in the US, and you cannot use the 'enter' key. It has to be one line line.

The function added is:
netsms(number,text[,from])
number: a text string containing the 10-digit destination number
text: the content of the message
optional from: text string of who its from. If left blank, "PSP" is used.

I would also like to thank PsPmad for the idea...and well, finding the way to do it all!

As always, I have included an example for you to test it out.

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via youresam ...

Zodttd posted this news:

Hi everyone,

Unai, Chui, and I had a talk about GP2PSX. We're aiming for a GP2X release within 7 days. This means the Zaurus port (which is very fast now btw), will be ready in the same time period.

Chui has made great progress on the Dreamcast version of emulator's codebase. There's even a video of it floating around. It uses a dynamic recompiler.

The switch from the interpreter to the recompiler for the SH4 cpu gave us an indication of what to expect in terms of a performance increase. The CPU emulation currently is profiled as taking about 50% of the total runtime. With the recompiler we can expect around 3x the performance over the interpreter. Maybe even more as ARM has a very powerful instruction set.

Unai is making great progress on the GPU. He has a few bug's to work out, and it's going through a major reworking. Hopefully it can be in a good state within our release time frame.

I made some improvements to the interpreter (CPU emulation), and got another frame per second added to the slowest of games.

I also improved the ISO loading process and emulator's cdrom handling.

Compatibility is up, but there's one bug I want to get fixed. It seems Tekken and Einhander crash after running a bit. This bug was fixed at one point and has returned, anyone remember at what point this bug was fixed? If so, I can figure out how to get compatibility up further, much quicker.

Unai and I estimate most 3D games such as Wipeout, will run at lowest, around 20 FPS without frameskip. At this speed games should be playable with frameskip.

Currently Wipeout 1 runs at it's slowest, 7 FPS in-game. With frameskip it's still too slow to play. Though it is impressive to watch. Were hoping the dynarec and new GPU core will solve the performance issue.

Tinnus is working on the dynarec, and is making progress.

So, news is, we're aiming for a release within a week. Not sure if it's going to be the release everyone wants, but we're trying our hardest. Those with Sharp Zaurus' will be pleasantly suprised.

Oh, one more thing. We've named the codebase that GP2PSX runs on as...PSX4ALL. We have the domain, www.psx4all.net and we have hosting for an official site. Depending on how hard it is to maintain the website, we might need a webmaster to design the site to make it easy to update and interactive enough for people to get information they need on the ports.

That's all for now...

Awesome News ...