News via Emurussia

WiFi plugin for Nintendo DS emulator iDeaS has been updated recently. Changes:
- Fixed bug in building DNS IP table.

http://www.ideasemu.org/ ...

News via Emurussia

Audio plugin for Nintendo DS emulator iDeaS has been updated recently. Changes:
- Fixed a bug in resampling routines when the FPS is greater than ~60 FPS.

http://www.ideasemu.org/ ...

It could be the fact that the iPhone has been available for two years, or the fact that the iPhone is available in 3000 countries to the Palm Pre's one, but Google Trends shows much more interest in Apple's device.

You do see a pretty decent spike there at the end of the graph, probably beefed up by the Pre launch. What could also explain the disparity, beyond the fact that Apple has a bigger marketing machine than Palm, is the probability that most "normal" people haven't even heard of the Pre yet.

We take that for granted, but your mom or your neighbor is an order of magnitude more likely to be aware of the latest iPhone than this new "Pre" thing.

http://gizmodo.com/5295652/despite-h...ogle-as-iphone ...

Third-party wireless guitar controllers for the Xbox 360 have been disappointingly hard to come by to date, but Logitech has now come to the rescue with a new Guitar Hero-licensed controller that's similar to its PS3 and PS2 offerings, with the exception of being orange, and Xbox 360-compatible. Otherwise, you can expect the same wood neck, rosewood fingerboard, and metal frets as before, along with a touch-sensitive slider on the neck, strum bar and fret buttons that are "virtually silent," and a promised range of 30 feet. Unfortunately, the guitar also packs the same hefty $199 price tag as its PS3 counterpart, but if that's not too big a deterrent, you can look forward to picking up one of these up in August. Head on past the break for a quick video overview.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/18/l...-for-xbox-360/ ...

Via SceneBeta.com

A whole year has passed since the first Scenery Beta 2008, and our particular Homebrew Festival has returned with the summer time. This time we are glad to announce that we will give real trophies to the winners of each category. We hope that the Scenery Beta 2009 will bring to us even more Homebrews than the last festival (specially in sections like Wii and NDS). In order to achieve this purpose our Homebrew Festival will dristribute as much money as the last year (2.400€ even despite the global crisis), new model and capacity for the pendrives (4GB each one), new trophies, commemorative stickers and official diplomas.

Scenery Beta 2009 is not a competition, it is just a festival (similar to cinema festivals) which not only pay tribute to all those great coders who make the scene bigger and bigger, but also make the rest of us enjoy with new games and applications for our favourite consoles: PSP, Nintendo DS, Wii and PC.

Let's get this party started!


Changes since the last Homebrew showcase

We want to summarize the changes since the Scenery Beta 2008, specially for those who toke part on it. We have considered our experiences after the last showcase, and all the suggestions that we received from the participants, who complianed about the Staff scale and votings from one coder to another, just for being friends. So this year:

• There are no Staff scales.
• We will only accept Homebrews that have been accepted in the previous Scenery Beta 2008 only if there are major changes, or better funcionality. The organization will reject all the works which do not include substantial changes.
• Users voting will be more important, because the Homebrew are offered just for the general public. Besides, an user will not vote for only his favourite Homebrew, he will choose his 5 favourite Homebrews, in the correct order.
• Coders voting will remain present, but they will be less relevant for the final score to avoid that a friend can vote to another.
• The organization is testing these days different methods to avoid that some coders can get votes from the new users.
• This year we will send some marvelous trophies, designed by Nova Rosa.

We have also heared to the participants when they spoke us about the prizes: most of them prefer money. When this Scenery Beta 2009 finishes we will send again a questionnaire, to check which changes have been nice and how we can improve future events.


What is Scenery Beta 2009?

It's a Homebrew Festival, an "exhibition" or "fair" where we'll make know the works of coders from all around the world, and some of them as world novelty (hey, but always at coder's choice, that's absolutely only if you want!).

They may get to win cash prizes, which will be awarded by the score given by their fellow coders and the the users. You've got the details in the Scenery Beta Rules (link at the bottom of this new).




I'm a coder, can I enter the showdown?

Any coder can enter the showdown, of whatever country, as long as is willing to show his/her work. The only requisite is that the Homebrew has been under development during last year (or, of course, has been created purposely for this event!), and is available to some of the 4 platforms on which we have an active community at this moment: PSP, Nintendo DS, Wii or PC. You can see the submit periods and schedules at the end of this new).

Even more, we've open an "off-contest section", let's think of some SceneryAlpha, where to show those works which are proofs of concept, purely experimental, still unfinished or whatever, so you can get a broader audience and impact in the international Scene. We think that there is a huge load of really great ideas that get lost due to lack of, put simply, someone seeing them. And, yes, we think about giving some kind of award for great "off-contest" ideas.

We also want to tell you that you can publish your Homebrew in other Scene websites, even if it takes part in the Scenery Beta. But you should keep the Splash of the contest. It would be nice if you speak about the Scenery Beta in other websites, doing so the showcast will be better known and if an user checks your work and likes it, maybe he can vote for you in the contest, so it will also benefit you.

Inscription period: From the moment these rules are published until Sep, 1, 2009 at 24:00 hrs (UTC+2 timezone). Just send your works to [email protected] (check the rules, at the bottom of this thread, for more info).

All homebrews must include the Showcase starting/splah screen for its platform. (This is mandatory):

Official Splash Screens can be downloaded from the rules link, I don't atach them here because there are too big.
...

There's been a story floating around lately about the PS3 being banned from UK prisons. Well, that story is actually this one from 2007. But, all of this talk of consoles behind bars pushed INCGamers to action, and the site recently spoke with someone in the know and confirmed that UK convicts have not been able to use gaming systems with Wi-Fi capabilities for some time now.

"Prisoners in England and Wales have never been allowed access to wireless enabled technology such as that used in some games consoles," a spokesperson said. "A decision was taken some years ago that the then current generation of games consoles should be barred because the capability to send or receive radio signals is an integral part of the equipment. Future games consoles with this ability will be banned. This ban applies to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS." In fact, the only consoles prisoners have been able to use are the PS1 and PS2, which isn't too bad if the inmates have some copies of Oddworld: Abe's Odyssee and God Hand to go with them.

Actually, nix that first game. It could cause a riot.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/17/wi...om-uk-prisons/ ...

Vogster wants PSP brawler Unbound Saga to recapture the glory of Streets of Rage when it's released on PlayStation Network next month.

The nostalgic, tongue-in-cheek action focuses on Rick Ajax, a tough and grizzled comic-book hero surrounded by trouble. He's had enough of trouble, though, and enough of being in a comic book, and so he sets off to find his maker (the author).

Lori Machete - a quick and skilful fighter - will join and complement him, and they can both unlock new powers and abilities through a skill tree as they go.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/un...to-psp-in-july ...

Frontier boss David Braben reckons the problem with Wii review scores stems from the type of critic assessing the game.

"Ruling out a source of information is never a good idea," Braben told Eurogamer, responding to Peter Moore's declaration that Metacritic is irrelevant to the success of a Wii game.

"The main problem he is alluding to is that family games tend to get reviewed poorly, if at all, by many mainstream review sites, typically dropping 10 or more percentage points as a result. Anecdotally, this is because most reviewers are what are often called 'core gamers' - and these family-focused games tend to appeal less to them (us!).

"It throws up a difficult dilemma for those reviewers," he adds. "Are they reviewing the game for those people likely to play it, or for those people who form the bulk of their readership? Clearly it has to be the latter, as that is why they are writing the review, why they are getting paid, but it devalues the accuracy of reviews as a measure of quality for family games, as most reviews are targeted at these 'core gamers', despite the fact the core gamer is unlikely to play it whatever the score."

Peter Moore argued that an advert on a website for a woman's magazine drives as much interest and consequently sales as a high review score. Examples are common and frequent: Punch-Out!!, MadWorld, Boom Blox, Okami and No More Heroes all reviewed well but sold badly in the UK. Conversely, Carnival: Funfair Games received 5/10 on Eurogamer but still enjoys a top 40 spot in the UK All-Formats chart one-and-a-half years after release.

"At Frontier we also use review scores as part of a forecasting process, but this is an indication of perceived quality, and this accuracy problem for family games is an issue that has to be allowed for. So, though I agree with Peter Moore that there is an issue here, it is more one with family games - indeed any games that do not include conventional dedicated gamers in their main audience - which are very common on Wii," said Braben.

"If there were an equivalent rating to Metacritic that only indexed family review sites, MetaFamilyCritic say, indexing the 'mommy bloggers' to which he refers, then he is not circumventing review sites - simply using a more appropriate collection that better match the audience.

"It is not really the Wii that Peter Moore is complaining about but reviews of family games in general. 'Core gamer' games on Wii still track forecasts based on Metacritic scores just fine," he concluded.

Yesterday, various industry sources argued on Eurogamer that success on the Wii is dictated by the size of advertising budget available, or the strength of brand in question.

The Wii titles present in the UK All-Formats top 40 this week support that theory.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/wi...problem-braben ...

Augmented reality (AR) has mostly been limited to research labs and the occasional cool webcam trick, but it's slowly becoming more plausible as a means for new forms of portable games. We saw one such title -- Sony's Invizimals for PSP -- at E3 and were wowed by its insertion of CG objects into "reality" using the system's camera add-on. Now a tech demo from Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta) gives us a glimpse at even more possibilities for these games on devices such as iPhone, PSP and Nintendo DSi.

Titled ARhrrr (geddit?), the game is a zombie shooter in which a flat tabletop map produces a cityscape seen on the handheld (in this case a prototype device from Nvidia). The city's populated with zombies, the handheld can be moved around at any angle and the overlayed city rotates accordingly. The idea behind the demo is that players are controlling a helicopter flying above the outbreak and can shoot zombies by tapping the screen. It's limited, but nonetheless really cool.

We've popped the demo footage after the break to rock your non-augmented reality. It's pretty impressive. So, what implimentations of AR on handhelds would you like to see?

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/18/au...a-enabled-han/ ...