DCEmu Homebrew Emulation & Theme Park News
DCEmu Featured News Articles
by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:48
Chui our good friend who has a site hosted here at DCEmu posted news over at our spanish friends Dreamcast.es of a new SD Card Adapter thats coming soon for the Dreamcast, this could be the best thing homebrew wise to happen to the Dreamcast scene in years and makes you wonder if the SD cards can be used to play emulators and games that werent prevoiusly doable by using the additional space on the SD Cards, firstly heres a pic of the adapter:
Heres a translation of the Spanish Article
After turning several months, we've assembled an adapter to connect an SD card for the Dreamcast port of the link. The truth is that the speed is amazing and we already have a library to use. More info on our wiki.
But for the production of a few adapters and selling, we need to know how many people would be interested. Cost about 20 € with shipping to SPAIN (+10 € for some foreign countries) and sent with a CD with a program that will be able to exchange files with VMU BINS and launch from the SD card.
EDIT: The prices have been changed to make them accessible to the world, remember that this is not done for profit but for the common good. For this reason we have reset the price originally agreed to cover costs of materials, and assembly time.
Later we will use the library and implemented quickly to a pager for the big games of AES4ALL, load / save snapshots DCaSTaway all emulators and ROMS can be loaded from the SD card.
Are you interested? Book your already adapted in this thread!
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Reason for development
The Dreamcast has support CD / GD, and visual memory card (VMU). The first one is read-only, and the latter has clear shortcomings: transmission speed and size. For this reason, are always looking for an alternative storage unit that saves the main support (save states) and other files, such as the configuration in our emulators. For a time it was speculated that the port expansion (G2) where the currently connected network adapter (or modem) is ideal for access via the new peripherals. But unfortunately, its architecture and requirements are far beyond our reach. Therefore, the serial port of an alternative that, while not enjoying all the privileges of the port allows for expansion if the most part, our wishes for a new carrier additional capacity and speed. This port allows us to use an SD card adapter that are usually used in mobile devices such as phones, MP3 players, etc..
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Key Features
* Good transfer rate in both reading and writing (about 500 KBytes / s).
* Very low average access time for reading (a few milliseconds).
* Support for cards up to 2 GBytes of SDS (not tested with larger cards).
* Loading binary from the card as a backup utility dcload and to / from VMU.
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Driver software
Obviously the hardware is always in the hands of the software, otherwise their use is limited to decorate our desktop (because of the undesirable characteristics of the housing), so our first task was to create a driver / library to allow us to comfortably using our adapter. These are some of its features:
* Library FatFs by Chan: Support for file systems FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32. Directory Management (basic operations and navigation in trees).
* Control CRC32 Cyclic Redundancy Error.
* Extremely light: less than 30KBytes code.
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Use and objectives
Primarily used to store saved games (save states), configuration files and read-only memories (ROMs). Is scheduled for implementation in the following emulators:
* AES4All: It will allow a better performance of the MMU, making it virtually emulation is fluid, without needing to access the CD reader, which produces a constant slowdown.
* DCastaway: We will use the saved game. Can store items not currently on a permanent basis.
* Gens4all: Items stored and load ROMs.
Sounds Excellent, those interested should either reply here or at Dreamcast.ES and be amongst the first to enjoy a storage medium on the Dreamcast that Sega never got around to do. ...by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:37
Indiket has posted a nice pang game for the Dreamcast, heres the release news:
PixPang is another clone of the famous Pang follow a style. It is written with language Fenix and pixel is the author of this game (http://www.pixjuegos.com).
This version is an improvement of 2.0 that appears on the web for Dreamcast and GP32. Unfortunately, the version of the web does not work on the Dreamcast and it is the reason for this reissue.
It has been rewritten and optimized many parts of the code, in addition to changing the music to work on the Dreamcast: D
The game is for one player, is in 4 languages (Catalan, Castilian, French and English) and has two modes (tour mode and panic mode).
Some notes to consider:
- This version runs with the latest version of the Fenix 0.84b Chui.
- In the real DC takes a while to load (at least using the BBA itself).
- Operates in NullDC but not Makaron.
- The slides are cleared. Not activated in the menu since the game freezes!
- Surely after several minutes to hang because of memory: (
Controls:
D-Pad: Move Pix (the Protocol)
A: Shoot
Start: Pause
At the start screen, press Y to view the credits.
You can also play with the keyboard and turn some tricks ... but I have not said anything
The download is ready to test it and it is included in the original source code and optimized. Found in the Downloads -> IberDC.
Puch666 to thank for helping to create music files from your port: D
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:25
How's your "contrast sensitivity"? What's that? Well it helps you see in the dark, and read, and it degrades in old age. But a study found it improves in gamers who play shooters.
The research, reported in the latest edition of Nature Neuroscience, took a very deep look at how games affect vision. The results surprised the scientists - gamers got better at picking up changes in gray tones against a uniform background.
"This is not a skill that people were supposed to get better at by training," said Daphne Bavelier, the lead researcher and a professor at the University of Rochester. "It was something that we corrected for at the level of the optics of the eye – to get better contrast detection you get glasses or laser surgery."
What's more, it wasn't some temporary boost in vision. "The positive effect remained months, even years after training, indicating long-lasting gains," she said.
Just to make sure they weren't in a chicken-and-egg conundrum - whether people with strong contrast detection by nature self-selected into playing video games, skewing the results - they hooked study participants up for 50 hours of gaming. One group played Call of Duty, the other played an unnamed game that was "a rich visual experience, but bereft of action."
"We found that the people in the first group improved by 43 percent, and the other group not at all," she said.
Forty-three percent is what most would call statistically significant. From the writeup, it sounds like this are serious science and she are serious scientist. So, if someone sweats you for your obsessive L4D habit, just tell them that it's money in the bank for enjoying clear sight in your old age.
http://kotaku.com/5189115/study-says...mproves-vision ...by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:23
Rather than hoping that the merits of its soon-to-be-released handheld will sell themselves (a strategy commonly referred to as the "Game Boy Micro Maneuver"), Nintendo is apparently plotting a huge North American marketing campaign for the DSi. The company has already developed a schedule of television, online and in-store advertisements for the shutterbugged device from now until Christmas, making it Nintendo's biggest ad campaign of the year.
Step one in this campaign is already in action to ensure early adoption of the revamped handheld -- anyone who purchases a DSi and signs on to the Nintendo DSi Shop by October 5 will receive 1,000 free DSi Points. It's a succesful promotion that also accompanied the system's Japanese launch -- not that Japanese game consumers needed additional incentive to purchase yet another DS.
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/28/ni...ng-away-1-000/ ...by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:22
We're not quite sure how, considering the media blackout approach that Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment has taken, but Norwegian gaming site Gamer.no sat down for dinner with head of franchise development for Remedy, Oskari Häkkinen, this past week. New details were (unsurprisingly) scant, though we were able to glean a handful of facts from the interview. For instance, the game has, "a lot less action than Max Payne," the studio's last franchise which recently had a current-gen update announced.
Aside from an emphasis on story, Mr. Häkkinen says that weather effects will play a role in gameplay, specifically noting, "Everything in the game can be influenced by the weather. If you are running the car will run conditions will be worse by heavy rain, than if the weather was good ... the weather is dynamic, since it will influence how you play the game."
Furthermore, Mr. Häkkinen tells Gamer.no that, "Lighting is very important in the game, and this is a unique item that really has not been used in the game before on the way we do it." The obvious comparison here would be to last year's conceptually strong Alone in the Dark -- here's hoping Remedy can deliver on the lighting concept where Alone in the Dark more or less failed.
So, we officially still know little-to-nothing! We'll keep an eye out for information at E3 2009 in June, but, ya know, we're not holding our breath or anything.
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/03/28/ne...-light-of-day/ ...by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:20
An uncompromising vision of a future world dominated by roving, power-up-collecting bobsled gangs, Sega's new Storm-G arcade game puts a "spin" on things by rotating the rider a full 360 degrees in accordance with the action. It's not exactly the most immersive arcade experience ever produced -- at some point you'd think Sega would get tired of rolling people down virtual tubes -- but it does look pretty wild and stomach-wrenching. The folks at Akihabara News got to try it firsthand at Sega's Joypolis in Odaiba Japan, and found the experience rather exhausting.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/28/s...e-g-in-puking/ ...by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:17
You know what'll be awesome? Actual end products resulting from this presumably nonstop research on piezoelectric nanowires. Yet again we're hearing of a new group of researchers that have figured out a way to harness electricity from life's simplest things: walking, a heart beating or even the flowing of blood. Put simply, the gurus have discovered how to use zinc oxide nanowires in order to generate an electric current when "subjected to mechanical stress." The difference here, however, is that these critters could actually be implanted under the skin, though the scientists have made quite clear that there isn't a timetable for commercial production. In other words: yawn.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/29/p...d-ipods-cellp/ ...by Published on March 29th, 2009 17:17
You know what'll be awesome? Actual end products resulting from this presumably nonstop research on piezoelectric nanowires. Yet again we're hearing of a new group of researchers that have figured out a way to harness electricity from life's simplest things: walking, a heart beating or even the flowing of blood. Put simply, the gurus have discovered how to use zinc oxide nanowires in order to generate an electric current when "subjected to mechanical stress." The difference here, however, is that these critters could actually be implanted under the skin, though the scientists have made quite clear that there isn't a timetable for commercial production. In other words: yawn.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/29/p...d-ipods-cellp/ ...by Published on March 28th, 2009 17:33
Exciting news for gamers - Microsoft is deep in the development process for the successor to the Xbox 360 games console, it's been revealed.
One of the first credible reports on the topic, Blizzard's Rob Pardo has confirmed that his company has taken part in talks with Microsoft about the next-next-gen console.
Speaking at a lunch at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Pardo did not provide hardware details - only that Blizzard is "actively in discussions with Microsoft" about the new gaming hardware.
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/news...eveloper.phtml ...by Published on March 28th, 2009 17:30
Red kawa has released a new version of thier encoding software for a multitude of platforms:
.07 Changelog:
Updated: FFmpeg r17805
Updated: MediaInfo 0.7.12.0
Updated: AviSynth 2.5.8
First Public Release of Multiple Videora Converters
Release Notes:
This release includes an updated version of the conversion core as well as support for a number of mobile phones.
If this is your first time using version 4, you should really check out the release notes for 4.03 and 4.02 to understand some of the major changes that were made in version 4 compared to versions 2 and 3.
http://www.redkawa.com/blog/post.php?t=46110 ...- Search DCEmu
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