GameStop has announced the expansion of its trade-in program will have the retailer now accepting smartphones from Samsung, BlackBerry, and Motorola.
Trade-in customers can receive either cash or in-store credit at all US GameStop shops. The store has been building its trade-in program since it began in 2011, and now sells refurbished iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire devices.
GameStop is celebrating the news by offering $10 of additional in-store creidt for items valued between $20 and $49.99, $25 for items valued between $50 and $124.99, and $50 for items valued at or over $125.
Those interested in getting a quote on how GameStop values a particular device, can visit the official trade-in website.

http://www.gamestop.com/ ...

Established technology blogger Paul Thurrott has made several claims about the new Xbox – and chief amongst them is the scrapping of a second disc-less SKU.
"We have talked for a while about this notion that there might be another version of the Xbox that was just aimed at entertainment – a non-gaming device,” he said on the What The Tech podcast, as subscribed by All Games Beta.
“That device was code-named 'Yumo' and they're not making it. They may make one in the future, but it's not happening this year.”
News of this disc-less console was first broken by MCV in March of last year.
Thurrott also made claims about the name of the new machine, as well as suggesting it will not be backwards compatible and that a new version of Xbox 360 is also on the way
"So the new Xbox that comes out this year will [called] just be the Xbox,” he added. “And I mentioned before they're also going to sell a new Xbox 360 code-named 'Stingray' that will be $99.
“And you might look at that as two things: backwards compatibility, obviously, suggesting – I don't actually know this for a fact, but based on the fact that they're making one – I don't think that the new Xbox will play 360 games. But that I don't actually know.
“But, the other one is that, $99, that's a real cool price. And so we know that the Xbox 360 does Netflix, Hulu Plus, yada yada yada, and you can make the argument that's kind of a low cost entertainment device, too.”
But what of the Xbox 720 itself? Yes, Thurrott has heard it WILL require a permanent internet connection.
"Durango is going to be expensive – you know $500, $300 for the subscription model, that kind of thing,” he added. “But you know, Blu-ray, blah blah blah, but the thing that interest me, going back and looking at some of the stuff I got a long time ago, it actually says 'must be internet-connected to use' in the notes. And that's all I have, but it does say that.”
He also claims that plans to reveal the machine in April have been scrapped.
"Originally, they were going to announce this thing in April 24th, now they're going to announce it May 21^st,” he said. “We know there are events occurring this year where we're going to learn more about Durango.”
Adding that a November release is on the cards, the blogger also lashed out at those who have been slating Microsoft’s plans online.
"So I think there's a lot information to come, but I look at all this stuff that I've seen about Durango and I think, 'it's all positive',” he argued. “I don't really see any bad news here at all. Like to me, everything I've seen about this is really positive.
“It's amazing to me that, based on like no information at all, everyone is like freaking out about everything. Aside from this online thing, by the way, the number one question I've gotten from people is, 'What does it look like?' Who gives a shit what it looks like?
"I've actually heard from, by the way not one or two people, several people who've said, 'based on what I've seen, Sony is going to blow them away.' Based on what you've seen? You've seen nothing. What are you talking about? No, but you've seen literally nothing from Microsoft.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/disc-...report/0113742 ...

The Wii U’s use of an integrated second screen poses a notable threat to Microsoft and Sony’s rival machines.
That’s according to design legend Shigeru Miyamoto who speaking to CNN said that the Wii U’s impact will grow considerably over time.
"The challenge that we had was if someone wanted to view television, then you couldn't play games,” he explained. “We wanted to have a second screen for Wii U that would make it possible for people to essentially play games even if something else was on the TV.
"There was a period when we first released the Nintendo DS that people would say there's no way people can look at two screens at once.
"I almost feel like, as people get more familiar with Wii U and these touchscreen interfaces, that there is going to come a point where they feel like 'I can't do everything I want to do if I don't have a second screen'."
Miyamoto also believes that Wii U has another ace up its sleeve – the fact that its design affords it a purpose as a general living room device.
"I feel a device like Wii U, with its ability to continue to offer new features and that network connection and the connection to the TV and the interface, really makes it feel that it's more than just a game machine, but something that offers a lot of practical use and practical purpose in the living room," he added.
"I look at it as being a very useful device that can do many different things and therefore really seems to be the device that's ideal to have in the living room.
"The other thing I think about is how do we begin getting people to understand that and convey the usefulness of Wii U to them. For me as a game developer, obviously I look at Wii U from the perspective of what games I can bring to Wii U."

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/miyam...r-time/0113749 ...

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Durango will use development tools and APIs similar to those for Windows 8

The next Xbox will be officially unveiled on May 21st, according to a report.
In a What The Tech podcast, as transcribed byAllGamesBeta, technology blogger Paul Thurrott said that although the console had been set for an April 24th reveal, Microsoft had now moved the unveiling to the following month.

As well as seemingly revealing the date of the reveal, Thurrott also claimed the next Xbox would be priced at $500. He also claimed there would be a $300 subscription-based model of the hardware.
Thurrott also said that documents he had previously received stated the Xbox must always be connected to the internet to use. The statement further fuels previous speculation from a number of sources that the next Xbox will indeed require always-online functionality.
The tech blogger stated that Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox would launch in early November, close to the PS4’s “holiday” release.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...ay-21st-reveal
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The top games and franchises as voted for by game journalists

Develop’s ranking of the best games of all time as voted for by games critics is now live, and below we have the breakdown of the top five.
For the new volume of the Develop 100, published in association with Ukie, we pooled votes from over 200 journalists, covering online, print, broadcast and specialist press, each of whom submitted a list of up to ten games they felt were the best yet created.

If you bought last year's Develop 100 on iOS (via Develop's magazine app), the new listing is available as a free update.
Alternatively, we've cut the price of the book - which includes both last year's list of the world's most commercially successful studios and this new listing - at the reduced price of ￡1.49. This latest edition of the Develop 100 is also available in the browser here.

THE TOP FIVE GAMES

1. Half-life 2
2. BioShock
3. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
4. Portal
5. Mass Effect 2
Valve-developed shooter Half-Life 2 has emerged as the most popular game of all time, according to input from hundreds of professional video games critics
The ground-breaking title, released in 2004, has been eulogised by critics, developers and gamers alike over the last decade, dazzling them with its impressive graphics from the Source Engine, its game-changing physics engine, and the large-scale story of a dystopian future where its tyrannical rulers gradually lose control.
In second place is Irrational’s BioShock, another triple-A title that enthralled with its artistic vision and tense gameplay.
Nintendo 64 classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time makes it into third, loved by critics for its sprawling landscape, epic story of good and evil and ingenious dungeons and puzzles.
Half-Life 2 was not the only Valve-developed title in the Critics’ Choice list, with Half-Life and Portal also in the top 10, and Counter-Strike, Portal 2 and Team Fortress 2 securing places in the rest of the list.
BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 meanwhile rounds up the top five, a game which realised the huge potential hinted at in the original Mass Effect, with decisions resulting in real consequences by the end of the journey.
Below we have a breakdown of the top five game franchises, after counting the number of titles in a series as voted for by game critics.
A number of studios saw multiple entries in the list, including Nintendo EAD, Rockstar North and BioWare, while franchises that dominated counted among them Metal Gear Solid, Mass Effect, Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Grand Theft Auto.

THE TOP FIVE GAME FRANCHISES

1. Mario
2. The Legend of Zelda
3. Half-Life
4. Portal
5. Grand Theft Auto
With its long history and strong back-catalogue of games in the Mario and Legend of Zelda series, it's no surprise to see Nintendo's leading characters take up the top two spots of the list, with the duo synonymous with its own console platforms.
Having taken up two spots in our top ten, Half-Life eases its way into third spot, despite having only two entries, while Valve's first-person puzzle Portal also achieves the same feat.
Rockstar's hit and critically acclaimed series Grand Theft Auto rounds up the top five.
Sequels and series prospered throughout the list, with seven games in the top ten counting as direct follow-ons or spiritual successors to other games. There are just six games in the 100 that have never had a sequel and were original IP; namely Journey, Grim Fandango, Minecraft, Rez, Braid and Okami.
And 27 games on the list are games that are second-in-a-series, such as Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or a direct sequel to another title in a franchise, like Super Mario Galaxy 2.
After the Critics’ Choice list, three further volumes of the Develop 100 will be published this year. We will reveal which insightful metrics they will use at a later date.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...es-of-all-time
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via http://rpix86.patrickaalto.com/rblog.html

Okay, after working on rpix86 for the whole of my vacation week, I feel that I have managed to get quite a lot of work done on it. It was nice to be able to focus on it for a full week, especially as I had a good list of interesting new features that I wanted to implement. I am going to explain the new features and other fixes with a bit more detail this time, so let's get on with it.

1. EGA palette handling fix

In the previous 0.04 version I made some minor performance enhancements to the 16-color graphics modes palette handling. The change was so minor that I did not even think to run my small test.com x86 program that simply loops through all the supported graphics modes and prints some characters and lines with different colors. If I had run it, I would have noticed immediately that my small fix actually broke the 16-color palette handling! Sorry about this, I think in the future I need to always run this test program before the release, and it might be a good idea to always have the previous version available for download in addition to the just released version. So if the latest version breaks something, you can try running the previous one. In any case, now the palette problems are fixed in this version.

2. Hardware mouse cursor emulation

The next major feature is the addition of a hardware mouse cursor. Perhaps "hardware" is somewhat of a wrong term as back in the VGA days the cursor was usually drawn by the mouse driver instead of actual hardware, but I use the term to make a distinction between a (software) mouse cursor that the game itself draws, and a (hardware) mouse cursor that gets drawn simply by calling the int 33h mouse function "Show mouse cursor". My test.com tester program uses the hardware mouse cursor in all the different graphics modes, so it was a good test bench also for this work.
I wanted to see if I can use actual hardware (the OpenGL ES engine) in Raspberry Pi to draw the mouse cursor, my problem was just that I am still really unfamiliar with the OpenGL ES techniques and only barely understand how the vertex and fragment shaders work. However, I thought that attempting to make a mouse cursor for rpix86 would be a good learning experience, and thus I began working on it. I started with a simple OpenGL ES triangle tutorial, trying to get a white triangle visible on top of the actual background texture showing the PC screen. After I got that working, I began enhancing it by adding a texture to contain the actual mouse cursor shape. It took me some googling to get the alpha channel working properly, and then a lot of trial and error to get everything showing in the correct orientation. After some more studying I realized that I could perhaps have the vertex shader do all the position and scaling adjustments so that I don't need to do that in code. I was pretty happy with the end result, the vertex shader now shows the mouse cursor in the correct location and takes into account the current mouse cursor shape hot spot locations etc.

The current vertex shader code looks like the following, in case you are interested. The mouse cursor size is based on a 640x400 screen size, and it will then get proportionally larger when zooming the PC screen to larger displays.
static const char* mouse_vertex_shader = "attribute vec2 a_position; \n" "attribute vec2 a_texcoord; \n" "varying mediump vec2 v_texcoord; \n" "uniform ivec2 u_mouse_xy; // Mouse (x,y) position \n" "uniform ivec2 u_max_xy; // Max mouse coords (screen size) \n" "uniform ivec2 u_hot_xy; // Mouse hot spot position \n" "void main() \n" "{ \n" " // Adjust the mouse coordinates by the screen size. \n" " float x = float(u_mouse_xy.x)/float(u_max_xy.x)*2.0 - 1.0; \n" " float y = float(u_mouse_xy.y)/float(u_max_xy.y)*2.0 - 1.0; \n" " // Adjust the mouse hot spot position by the cursor size. \n" " x = x - float(u_hot_xy.x - 16)/640.0; \n" " y = y - float(u_hot_xy.y - 16)/400.0; \n" " // Adjust the vertex position by the mouse position. \n" " vec2 p = vec2(a_position.x + x, a_position.y - y); \n" " v_texcoord = a_texcoord; \n" " gl_Position = vec4( p, 0.1, 1.0 ); \n" "} \n";I also need to have code that converts the mouse cursor shape (given to the mouse driver using int 33h commands) to a texture. That conversion (which happens very rarely) is done with the following code. The name of the routine is from the DSx86 version where I used a hardware sprite to draw the mouse.
static u32 mouseTexture[16][16]; // RGBA valuesvoid CursorToSprite(u16 *mask){ // Convert from input 16 bits per 16 rows screen and cursor masks // to 16x16 matrix of RGBA values. int x, y; for (y = 0; y < 16; y++) { for (x=0; x < 16; x++) { if (mask[y+16]&(1<<(15-x))) // cursor pixel set = white mouseTexture[x][y] = 0xFFFFFFFF; else if (mask[y]&(1<<(15-x))) // screen pixel set = transparent mouseTexture[x][y] = 0; else // Both pixels clear = black mouseTexture[x][y] = 0xFF000000; } }}

3. Overscan adjustment support

I had also received reports that rpix86 does not handle screen overscan properly. Especially when using a PAL TV output, part of the rpix86 DOS screen is in the overscan area and thus not visible. This of course makes using rpix86 pretty difficult. I had assumed that setting the overscan values in the /boot/config.txt would affect all software, but it seems to affect only the console and X Window screens.

I decided to add support for reading the /boot/config.txt overscan values, and in addition I thought it might be a good idea to have command line parameters to allow still further overscan adjustment. Thus I added the following new command line parameters to this version of rpix86:
-olLEFT where LEFT is the amount of overscan on the left border. If not given, defaults to /boot/config.txt overscan_left value. -orRIGHT where RIGHT is the amount of overscan on the right border. If not given, defaults to /boot/config.txt overscan_right value. -otTOP where TOP is the amount of overscan on the top border. If not given, defaults to /boot/config.txt overscan_top value. -obBOTTOM where BOTTOM is the amount of overscan on the bottom border. If not given, defaults to /boot/config.txt overscan_bottom value.The current values are written to stdout (if they differ from zero) when rpix86 starts, so you can check that the correct values get used, and change them when starting rpix86 if necessary.

4. Support for running rpix86 in X Window environment

I also have been wanting to try adding support for running rpix86 inside the X Window graphical environment for some time now. Since many people run their Raspberry Pi "headless" without any screen or input devices connected, it would be nice if also those users could run rpix86. Of course rpix86 will run much slower when in the X Window environment, but there is a lot of old DOS software that is not performance critical and thus would run fine.
I started by googling for general information about coding for the X Window system (which was yet another completely new area for me). I found an interesting forum thread started by teh_orp, and example code in github by a forum member shirro. As the thread and code are both a bit dated already, I am not sure if this is the best way to do this, but I decided to give this approach a try. It looked like it did not require many changes to my existing OpenGL ES code, so I began adding the required changes. After a few hours of work I already had rpix86 showing up in a window (the picture was upside down, but that just needed some adjustments to the code).
I used a WinVNC connection from my Windows XP development PC to my Raspberry Pi to test this. At this point the keyboard and mouse reading still used the /dev/event files, and I knew I had to change them to use the X Window event system when running in X Window, otherwise it would not work via WinVNC and similar remote desktop connections.
I had coded touchpad mouse support into DSx86, which works by detecting the touch position on the screen and then converting these coordinates to the mouse position. I tested how the X Window mouse coordinates behave, and it looked like I can use this system pretty much as-is. The X Window mouse movement events give coordinates in pixels relative to the left top corner of the window, just like the mouse coordinates should work. This will work fine as long as the game does not use its own scaling system, which sadly many games do. Such games will most likely not be usable from within the X Window environment (thus I consider the X Window support in rpix86 to still be in the "experimental" state).
Adding keyboard support also introduced new problems. I could not find proper keycodes from the key press and key release events. Running rpix86 via VNC, and from the X window started from the console, had different keycodes for the same keys, so I knew that I can not use the keycode directly. After mapping the keycode to a KeySym value the result was (mostly) similar, but the problem was that I have a Finnish keyboard layout and rpix86 expects to get raw US keycodes, which it can then give the KEYB DOS program to convert. I haven't yet found a proper way to get the raw keycode (unaffected by the keyboard language) from the KeySym that the X Window returns. Thus some keys might not work or give incorrect keys when running rpix86 in X Window environment. It might help if you set the X Window keyboard mapping to US with a command setxkbmap us in the LXTerminal window before starting rpix86.

5. Option to run rpix86 without audio

When testing rpix86 in X Window via VNC, I realized that it might be somewhat useless to run the audio emulation if your Raspberry Pi is completely headless, with no I/O capability besides the ethernet connection. So I added a new command line option, -a2, which skips the audio emulation thread startup and thus plays no audio. This option will make rpix86 run around 10% faster, perhaps even more if a game uses both AdLib and SoundBlaster audio.

6. Added support for running "Chess Genius 3" DOS version

After releasing version 0.04 I got a rpix86dbg.log crash log from running Chess Genius 3 by Richard Lang DOS version in rpix86. From the log I could see that the game uses jpo (Jump if Parity Odd) opcode. This is a problem in rpix86, as my CPU emulation core does not support the Parity flag natively. Whenever a game uses either JPO or JPE (Jump if Parity Even) opcodes, rpix86 will quit with an error log unless I have coded specific support for this situation.

The game-specific support for Parity flag in rpix86 works by examining the previous opcodes whenever the JPO/JPE opcode is encountered. The specific code snippet in Chess Genius 3 had the following opcodes:
1AF0:3980 A818 test al,181AF0:3982 7505 jne 3989 ($+5)1AF0:3984 31BFB001 xor [bx+01B0],di1AF0:3988 C3 ret1AF0:3989 7B0D jpo 3998 ($+d)That is, the game tests the AL register for value 0x18, and if either of those two bits are set, it jumps to address 0x3989 where it tests whether the parity is odd (meaning that only one of those bits are set), in which case it jumps to address 0x3998. To support this in rpix86, I need to know what was the operation that was supposed to set the parity flag, calculate the result of this operation, determine the resulting parity flag value, and then either jump or not jump depending on the result. The problem is that I don't keep track of which opcodes have been executed and in what order before encountering the JPO/JPE opcodes.In the above situation it is not very difficult to determine the correct parity flag value. I can test that the opcode bytes before the JPO opcode are those 0xA8, 0x18, 0x75, 0x05, 0x31, 0xBF, 0xB0, 0x01, 0xC3, in which case I know the correct parity flag can be calculated by anding the AL register with 0x18, and counting the number of resulting bits. There is by the way a neat ARM ASM trick for calculating the parity of a register, created by FluBBa.
The problem in the case of Chess Genius 3 was that this was not the only location where it used JPO/JPE opcodes. Every time I fixed one location and tried to run the game in rpix86, it soon stopped in the next location and so on. After adding about a dozen or so special cases, I noticed that the code segment seems to stay the same, so I decided to disassemble this whole code segment and look for JPO and JPE opcodes from the disassembled result.

I found out that the game had 36 different locations in the code where it used the JPE opcode, and 35 places with JPO opcode, used in a variety of ways. There were even a couple of pretty difficult problems, for example in this code:
1AF0:58C6 A809 test al,091AF0:58C8 B004 mov al,041AF0:58CA 7A02 jpe 58CE ($+2)The code tests the AL value, then stores something else into AL, and then jumps based on the parity result of the test. When rpix86 encounters the JPE opcode, it has no way of knowing what AL value was used in the test, because the value had already been overwritten! I needed to add code to store the TEST AL,imm8 opcode (0xA8) result into memory, in order to use this later in the JPE opcode. This will marginally slow down the handling of that opcode, but luckily that is not the most commonly used opcode, and simply writing a byte to memory (into stack area, actually) should not slow anything down noticeably.I have been letting the game run a match (computer versus computer) for a long time and it does not seem to encounter any problems, so hopefully the game will now work properly in this 0.05 version.

7. Other JPE/JPO opcode support fixes

When adding the JPO/JPE opcode support for Chess Genius 3, I noticed that I had not ported the existing special support properly from DSx86 version to the rpix86 version. I fixed the problems in the existing support, which affected all the following games. If you have encountered weird problems in these games, they might work better in this version. Some of the names only show the executable name, as those are based on DSx86 crash logs so I have not known the actual game name:

• Amazing Spiderman
• Batman Returns
• Bubble Ghost
• BUBBOB
• CALGAMES
• F29 Retaliator
• GWBASIC
• Micro Machines 3
• STARGATE
• Super Solvers: Challenge of the Ancient Empires
• The Incredible Machine
• TOUTRUN
• Turbo Science

8. Help request

If you are graphically inclined, I could use your help with rpix86. I would like to have a rpix86-specific favicon for these web pages, and I think that rpix86 could also have its own icon, which could be used when running it in X Window environment. Also, the "box art" image that I have in the Raspberry Pi store for rpix86 is pretty horrible. If you have an idea for an icon, and/or interest in creating one, please let me know! If/when I decide to use your icon/image, I will certainly credit you on these pages.

Download Via Comments ...

Dragon Quest X's Wii U release sold 33,302 copies at retail in its first week in Japan. Granted, that first "week" lasted two days, as Media Create's weekly ranking period ran from March 25-31, and Dragon Quest X was released on the 30th, but that's still low for a Dragon Quest game. The Wii version of the MMO, for comparison, sold over 420,000 copies at launch, and Dragon Quest IX sold over 2 million before that.

Not only is that low for a Dragon Quest game, it's not exactly the boost the Wii U hardware so desperately needed. The Wii U only sold 22,829 units last week, behind both versions of the ever-popular 3DS (Luigi's Mansion 2 was the best selling game, and Animal Crossing: New Leaf is at #3, approaching 3 million copies life-to-date), and behind even the Vita, which is experiencing something of a resurgence.

The sales situation for Dragon Quest X is more complicated than it may seem. While the retail sales were disappointing, there's likely a significant number of digital sales, which wouldn't show up on Media Create's charts – and which we'll never know about unless Square Enix or Nintendo decides to tell us. Square Enix offers half-price downloads of the Wii U version to anyone who owns the Wii version, so it's safe to assume at least some of the Wii buyers took advantage of that offer.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/04/dr...panese-retail/ ...

There are at least two schools of thought when it comes to playing retro games. Let's call it two for the sake of argument. On one side, there are people who want all the modern conveniences, both in-game and out: save states, fast-forward and rewind in the games, and wireless controllers, high definition output, and non-finicky hardware to play them with. These are the people who like emulation the most, either through downloading ROMs or official downloadable re-releases of games.

On the other side, there are people who strive for absolute authenticity: real cartridges on real consoles, played on CRT televisions with real controllers. These are the people who, hypothetically speaking, stuff a Twin Famicom in their suitcase while on a business trip to Tokyo.

Somewhere in the middle is this thing.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/04/re...n-old-and-new/ ...