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  • DCEmu Featured News Articles

    by Published on June 14th, 2007 16:57

    Over at the PSPway site they have released a new font converter for the PSP. As with any tool flashing could brick your PSP, the readme to the app is in italian but the app itself is in english.

    Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 16:52

    via playstation.blog

    Our friends over at GamePro.com have written an interesting article on a topic I get asked about all the time — Is the PS3 harder to develop for than other systems? I gave them some feedback on this and the reporter, Blake Snow, does a nice job of presenting a well-rounded story. For this piece, I spoke to our PD group and asked them for input on this question and thought you might be interested in reading their full reply:

    This is an interesting question and hidden within the question is an enormously complex subject! If the game starts life on PS3, then man-hours per feature or costs related to asset production are comparable with industry norms. For that, you can include Xbox 360 and high-end PC games, and exclude PS2 and Wii. However, since PS3’s Cell processor allows MORE features - better physics, more complex graphical processing, lighting or sound, etc. — there is inevitably going to be more cost in supporting those extra features. It’s not that PS3 is harder to write for, it’s just that you can do more with it.

    Middleware tools like Havok and other specialist graphics tools are now customized to exploit Cell’s SPUs. These mean that developers don’t have to reinvent those particular wheels themselves. Also, PlayStation Edge does some very difficult and performance-critical aspects of the graphics pipeline on the SPUs: geometry processing, animation, compression - delivering performance unachievable on other systems. This is available for free to all developers from SCE. So, given that PS3 can draw more on screen, the assets required to fill that capacity go up, too. This can, but not always, require more people - however depending on the game, much of that extra content can be produced automatically - procedurally in software, not by hand. Compared to PS2, the SPUs are much easier to code for. In PS2 we had some custom chips called VU0 and VU1 which were powerful, but tricky to write for. The SPUs use a more standard programming language.

    Now, it’s not without challenges:
    1) SPUs are not ‘normal’ processors like the PPU. There is a trade-off between performance and versatility. A Ferrari is not the best car for a visit to Home Depot…

    2) If you are porting:
    If your game starts on Xbox 360 you will have to re-engineer aspects of the game to run properly on PS3. This means additional effort. Some developers have been complaining about this but I don’t believe we can solve that. Xbox 360 is a different machine with good, but lower powered hardware in a different architecture. Developers have to view them as two different machines not as a common platform.

    3) If your game has heavy online use:
    XBL provides more and better standard libraries for online gaming to developers. For the same features on PS3, developers have to do some extra work. We’re catching up, but there is a difference.

    BTW: Glad you guys and gals are enjoying the new blog!
    ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 16:49

    Heres word from Sony itself on PSP rumours of late

    The rumor mill is flowing about new PSP hardware and a PSP phone, and I just wanted to take the time to clear the air. We haven’t announced anything about a new PSP, much less one that would have any phone capabilities. As SCEA’s resident PSP guru, I’m thrilled to hear that there’s so much interest in the platform, but sorry folks, these reports floating around fall into the rumors/speculation category.
    ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 16:46

    News from Playstation.blog

    Jack Tretton posted this News over at the official Sony blog:

    I hope you’re enjoying our official SCEA blog. Personally speaking, it’s great to finally have a place where we can talk candidly about the things we (and you) care about. While it’s no substitute for a one-on-one conversation, I’m excited to have a chance to listen and talk with you here. With that said, everything communicated in any form these days has to be considered an “on-the-record statement” so as much as I’d like to, I can’t completely throw my corporate hat out the window.

    From where I sit, this industry has the most passionate consumers of any I’ve ever encountered. For some, gaming is a way to kill some time, for others it’s a favorite hobby, but for many it’s a way of life. As a gamer myself, I fall somewhere between a low to mid level enthusiast mainly because of free time. My day job is ironically eating away at my gaming time, although lately I’m finding the PSP has helped me reclaim some of this lost time on long plane trips.

    For twenty one years I’ve worked exclusively in the industry. The last twelve have been with Sony Computer Entertainment. It’s been just over six months since I became President and CEO here and I can assure you that gaming is clearly my life. Now that we’ve got the hardware to drive the business, we’re putting all our efforts into insuring that we help create the best games possible for you to enjoy. My pledge is that we will continue to put you first and foremost, to understand what you really want from us. In fact, this blog is one way that I’m hoping this happens.

    In 1995, when we launched the PlayStation, the majority of the gamers were twelve to seventeen year old boys. 2D platform, fighting, racing, and sports games were the norm. Platforms were born and died within five years maximum. There was minimal difference between hardware platforms. We here at Sony championed 3D graphics, CD based technology and a more mature diverse library of games. We believed that our platform had a lifecycle that should survive well beyond the traditional five years. Some of the initial criticism we received was that the hardware was a bit pricey, the system was hard to develop for and the early software line-up needed some work. When we introduced PlayStation 2 in 2000 we received much of the same criticism. When we introduced DVD based storage we were told that CD had more than enough capacity to store game data. In a few short years DVD had all but replaced CD and that storage capacity was being squeezed by the development community. In 2006 the song remained much the same. Most of you know what transpired: 100 million PlayStations and thousands of great games later, the PlayStation had a ten year run and could still be selling today. PlayStation 2 left our original success in the dust and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

    We fully realize that past success is no guarantee of future success, but it does give you some perspective. We have to bring the games to market that will showcase what the PS3 can do and ultimately entertain you like no other games have. We need to provide proof of what the PS3 can do for you and work tirelessly to improve the value and justify your investment. At the end of the day, it’s always been about the games. To push the boundaries of gaming beyond where they currently lie takes a great deal of risk. I think all the hardware manufacturers are doing that in some way. We could have easily produced PlayStation 2.5 at a slightly increased price over the older model, and driven some nice profits and marginal innovation for a few years but that’s not how we got where we are today. You have to gamble and make major investments in the present that will pay dividends in the future.

    We’re working hard to put the best tools in the hands of the development community so they can take you places you never imagined possible. We have more than 15 games coming from our own internal studios alone this year for PS3. Our third party partners will weigh in with a host of great games giving us more than 100 titles by year end on that system alone. At our Gamer’s Day event a few weeks back, we announced 18 exclusive games for PSP. This year, PS2 owners will get a little something for everyone with games like Buzz! and Singstar. Oh, and you certainly can’t forget the PlayStation Network. Right now, we are working on a slew of games and game packs that will be offered through the PlayStation Store in the coming months, including Warhawk, which personally speaking, is the PS3 game I’ve been playing most lately.

    We are heading into one of the biggest shows of the year for the videogame industry. E3 is only a month away. Everyone here at SCEA is working very hard and is dedicated to pushing the development envelope to show you not only new stuff for games like Heavenly Sword, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Ratchet & Clank
    ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 16:46

    News from Playstation.blog

    Jack Tretton posted this News over at the official Sony blog:

    I hope you’re enjoying our official SCEA blog. Personally speaking, it’s great to finally have a place where we can talk candidly about the things we (and you) care about. While it’s no substitute for a one-on-one conversation, I’m excited to have a chance to listen and talk with you here. With that said, everything communicated in any form these days has to be considered an “on-the-record statement” so as much as I’d like to, I can’t completely throw my corporate hat out the window.

    From where I sit, this industry has the most passionate consumers of any I’ve ever encountered. For some, gaming is a way to kill some time, for others it’s a favorite hobby, but for many it’s a way of life. As a gamer myself, I fall somewhere between a low to mid level enthusiast mainly because of free time. My day job is ironically eating away at my gaming time, although lately I’m finding the PSP has helped me reclaim some of this lost time on long plane trips.

    For twenty one years I’ve worked exclusively in the industry. The last twelve have been with Sony Computer Entertainment. It’s been just over six months since I became President and CEO here and I can assure you that gaming is clearly my life. Now that we’ve got the hardware to drive the business, we’re putting all our efforts into insuring that we help create the best games possible for you to enjoy. My pledge is that we will continue to put you first and foremost, to understand what you really want from us. In fact, this blog is one way that I’m hoping this happens.

    In 1995, when we launched the PlayStation, the majority of the gamers were twelve to seventeen year old boys. 2D platform, fighting, racing, and sports games were the norm. Platforms were born and died within five years maximum. There was minimal difference between hardware platforms. We here at Sony championed 3D graphics, CD based technology and a more mature diverse library of games. We believed that our platform had a lifecycle that should survive well beyond the traditional five years. Some of the initial criticism we received was that the hardware was a bit pricey, the system was hard to develop for and the early software line-up needed some work. When we introduced PlayStation 2 in 2000 we received much of the same criticism. When we introduced DVD based storage we were told that CD had more than enough capacity to store game data. In a few short years DVD had all but replaced CD and that storage capacity was being squeezed by the development community. In 2006 the song remained much the same. Most of you know what transpired: 100 million PlayStations and thousands of great games later, the PlayStation had a ten year run and could still be selling today. PlayStation 2 left our original success in the dust and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

    We fully realize that past success is no guarantee of future success, but it does give you some perspective. We have to bring the games to market that will showcase what the PS3 can do and ultimately entertain you like no other games have. We need to provide proof of what the PS3 can do for you and work tirelessly to improve the value and justify your investment. At the end of the day, it’s always been about the games. To push the boundaries of gaming beyond where they currently lie takes a great deal of risk. I think all the hardware manufacturers are doing that in some way. We could have easily produced PlayStation 2.5 at a slightly increased price over the older model, and driven some nice profits and marginal innovation for a few years but that’s not how we got where we are today. You have to gamble and make major investments in the present that will pay dividends in the future.

    We’re working hard to put the best tools in the hands of the development community so they can take you places you never imagined possible. We have more than 15 games coming from our own internal studios alone this year for PS3. Our third party partners will weigh in with a host of great games giving us more than 100 titles by year end on that system alone. At our Gamer’s Day event a few weeks back, we announced 18 exclusive games for PSP. This year, PS2 owners will get a little something for everyone with games like Buzz! and Singstar. Oh, and you certainly can’t forget the PlayStation Network. Right now, we are working on a slew of games and game packs that will be offered through the PlayStation Store in the coming months, including Warhawk, which personally speaking, is the PS3 game I’ve been playing most lately.

    We are heading into one of the biggest shows of the year for the videogame industry. E3 is only a month away. Everyone here at SCEA is working very hard and is dedicated to pushing the development envelope to show you not only new stuff for games like Heavenly Sword, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Ratchet & Clank
    ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 06:39

    New from Play Asia



    Trusty Bell takes place in a dream world which centers around the piano composer Frederic Chopin, who died at the age of 39 due to tuberculosis. The plot centers around the concept that three hours prior to his death, Chopin dreamed of a fairy-tale land, in which people with incurable diseases have great magical powers.

    In the dream world, Chopin meets a young girl named Polka, who lives in the Village of Tenuto. Polka also has a terminal disease, and her boyfriend Allegretto is searching for ways to convert her magical power into a cure.

    Eternal Sonata features a battle system centered around musical elements and character-unique special attacks. Light and darkness play a part in the appearance and abilities of enemies on the battlefield, as well as the types of magic that can be cast.

    The game does not only feature a selection of Chopin's compositions played by the pianist Stanislav Bunin, but also features additional in-game music composed by Motoi Sakuraba. ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 03:33

    I didn't like the rom list creaters for DCStella so I decided to create my own. Differences: you can select the folder, select where you want to save the rom list and it leaves the filenames alone.

    http://dchelp.dcemulation.com/?DCStella_ROMs_list_maker ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 02:59

    Via http://strmnnrmn.blogspot.com/

    Tracking down the SSB Dynarec Bug - Part 2

    On Monday I talked about the fragment simulator and how this could be used to help track down bugs in the dynarec implementation. In this post I'm going to talk a bit about a tool I use mostly for regression testing, but also to help determine the exact point at which the fragment simulator and the interpretative core go out of sync. It's a bit of a long post, so apologies in advance

    Daedalus can be compiled with a flag which enables a special 'synchronisation' mode. This build configuration creates an instance of a synchronisation class which can be initialised in one of two modes - either as a producer or as a consumer. At various points during program execution I pass information about the internal state of the emulator to the synchroniser for processing. In the case of the producer, it simply writes this data out to a file on disk. The consumer is a bit more interesting; it reads data of the required size from disk, and compares this 'baseline' value against the value provided by the emulator. If these two values are found to be different, the synchroniser knows that things have drifted out of sync and it can trigger a breakpoint and drop out into the debugger.

    This technique relies on the fact that the emulator is deterministic, i.e. running the emulator twice in a row with the same inputs generates exactly the same results. By 'inputs' this means not just the same rom image, but external inputs such as data from the controller must match exactly too. Obviously pressing buttons on the controller in exactly the same order with the same timings would be impossible to duplicate, so the other function the synchroniser performs is to record input from the pad in the case of the producer, or play input back in the case of the consumer. Other external input, such as calls to timer functions (e.g. time(), QueryPerformanceCounter() or rdtsc) can be synchronised in the same way.

    The synchroniser works with as few or as many sync points as you provide. For debugging very simple problems, you can get away with just checking the value of the program counter as each instruction is executed. For more tricky problems you can end up adding many more sync points - for instance you can synchronise the entire register set after every instruction to ensure that the synchroniser catches any instruction which generates a different result from the baseline.

    I add sync points to Daedalus using a set of macros. When synchronisation is enabled, the macros expand out to calls to a virtual method on a global instance of the synchroniser class. An example sync point in the code might look like this:


    u32 pc = gCPUState.CurrentPC;

    SYNCH_POINT( DAED_SYNC_REG_PC, pc );

    OpCode op;
    if( CPU_FetchInstruction( pc, &op ) )
    {
    CPU_Execute( pc, op );
    }



    The interesting line here is the SYNC_POINT macro, which synchronises on the current program counter value. For producers, this just writes the value of 'pc' to disk. For consumers, it checks that the value we have for 'pc' matches the one read from disk.

    The DAED_SYNC_REG_PC argument is simply a flag to describe what is being synchronised. Another global constant allows easy control of what is synchronised:


    enum ESynchFlags
    {
    DAED_SYNC_NONE = 0x00000000,

    DAED_SYNC_REG_GPR = 0x00000001,
    DAED_SYNC_REG_CPU0 = 0x00000002,
    DAED_SYNC_REG_CCR0 = 0x00000004,
    DAED_SYNC_REG_CPU1 = 0x00000008,
    DAED_SYNC_REG_CCR1 = 0x00000010,

    DAED_SYNC_REG_PC = 0x00000020,
    DAED_SYNC_FRAGMENT_PC = 0x00000040,
    };

    static const u32 DAED_SYNC_MASK(DAED_SYNC_REG_PC);

    #define SYNCH_POINT( flags, x, msg ) \
    if ( DAED_SYNC_MASK & (flags) ) \
    CSynchroniser::SynchPoint( x, msg )



    If I want to enable more thorough debugging, I can change DAED_SYNC_MASK and OR in more values:


    static const u32 DAED_SYNC_MASK(DAED_SYNC_REG_PC|DAED_SYNC_REG_GPR) ;



    Changing the mask value requires the emulator to be rebuilt from scratch and the baseline synch file to be recreated. This is a bit time consuming but doing it in this way means that the compiler can optimise out any synch points which we aren't interested in, keeping things running as quickly as possible.

    One problem with this technique is that the synchroniser can quickly generate a massive amount of data, so much that most of the execution time is spent shifting this data to or from disk, slowing debugging to a crawl. In the example I gave on Monday, it can sometimes take over 500 million instructions before things go out of sync. ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 02:01

    New firmware for Supercard rumble released:

    Fixed cheat code hotkey unable to work in playing game.

    http://eng.supercard.cn/soft_scrumble.htm ...
    by Published on June 14th, 2007 01:55

    CyBeRCeD has released a new Alpha version of his Cycling game for DS:

    - addition of a screen of démarage

    How to play - left: one pedals towards the left right-hand side: one pedals towards the line

    Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...
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