We're big fans of Atlus' stich-'em-up operation sim game Trauma Center (which hit Nintendo's DS earlier this year in Europe) here in the office. Despite a few interface quirks and random difficulty spikes which have caused people to forcibly remove our DS's, largely through fear for their own safety as a torrent of expletives rip through the air, it's a charming and compelling title.

Imagine our delight then, when we heard that Atlus was set to bring Trauma Center: Second Opinion to Nintendo's forthcoming Wii console. Although not much is known about the game yet, it's set to use the precision of the Wii's remote to simulate various operating techniques, in much the same way as the original Trauma Center put the DS's stylus to great use.

Current reports suggest Second Opinion will be launching around the same time as the Wii itself - but, in the meantime, we've got a brand new trailer for your delectation and delight. Well, we say trailer, it's more of a slideshow. Can we have some more in-game footage next time, please Atlus?

View the trailer Here ...

Nintendo's Wii may have won all the plaudits at this year's E3, but that doesn't mean its success is going to be vital to Nintendo's profit margins.

How do we know? Well, the big N admitted as much in a briefing over in Tokyo today, with company president Satoru Iwata saying that even if the company meets its sales targets, the Wii will add little to Nintendo's considerable cash stash and profitability - in the short term at least.

Iwata said: "Although I am not going to give a specific sales target for the Wii console, we promise here to achieve sales sharply above those that we have achieved with our Gamecube console."

But that's not necessarily bad news, as it means Nintendo isn't depending on the Wii's success in quite the same way as Sony is really counting on the PlayStation 3 to contribute to the company's balance books.

Although Iwata wouldn't name a specific figure, Nintendo is aiming to sell around six million Wii's up to the end of the next financial year in March 2007, with around 17 million pieces of software attaching alongside the console.

However, the company also said it had ramped up production of the ultra profitable DS handheld Lite, to around 2.2 million units a month since May, undoubtedly to meet the huge demand which will accompany US and European Lite launches.

Via CVG ...

Bungie has released the Halo 3 documentary 'short' that it confirmed was in the pipeline earlier in the week. Delivered in video form, the documentary takes us behind the scenes of the creation of the trailer for the sequel that Microsoft showed at this year's E3.

"In this fascinating short," explains the developer, "you'll see some of the teamwork, thought processes and imagination that went into this Halo 3 teaser. You'll see the actual orchestra and choir session, some of the in-studio production work and interviews with some of the key folks who worked on the E3 presentation. You won't see everyone - lots of folks who slaved over hot keyboards to make this trailer a reality were simply too busy to be interviewed - and to them, our heartfelt appreciation."

Advertisement:Included in the documentary is "some footage from the trailer that didn't make the cut", along with "angles and views from the real-time footage that we kept for this piece". Bungie also informs that, if we look really, really carefully at the documentary, we can glimpse a hint of things to come - "Nothing too dramatic, but the fans will spot stuff, of that we're certain".

You can view the Halo 3 documentary by clicking on the moving thumbnail up on the right.

Movie at CVG ...

The guys at matchingservice.dcarena.de keep making improvements to their homebrew ranking system.

So far you can upload F355 and MSR saves. They have started working on Virtua Athlete, SF Rush 2049 and Daytona USA 2001. You can also register your nickname now.

On the other hand, lordnikon at Onlineconsoles and Luigi Auriemma have been working very hard during months to release homebrew server software to keep Starlancer online forever. This might also affect in the future other games such as Unreal Tournament or PBA Bowling. ...

Devil 360: Modchip for the Xbox 360
This news I saw flying around at tweakers.net, some people might be very happy with this.

>> original news at: http://www.xbox-scene.com/index.php?...yuFFEkegQerZEd


Devil360team:

"Our server is currently down due the huge amount of hits we received yesterday. We will move to more powerful servers and we hope to be back online tomorrow.

The Devil360 will be a modchip for the Xbox 360 console, the 'small' security hole has been found! This device is in no way related to the DVD firmware exploits - it's a totally different approach.
However we did not manage to get the product ready for today (6/6/6), because we are working hard on improving it to:
* Try to protect it from any type of update
* Make it programmable via PC
* Boot unsigned code
* Allow to swap HD with larger drive with a special interface between the 360 and the HD (all types IDE/SATA).
* And more...

We understand, certainly after the ICE modchip story, that people will not easily believe this so we will send prototypes to some scene sites as soon as they are ready, so they can confirm it's real.
The modchip will be sold without any code.

We also discovered some shops already take pre-orders for this product. Do not pre-order it!
We did not announce any distributors yet and the device will not go on pre-order until at least after the prototypes have been tested/reviewed by independent sites."

Official Site: http://www.devil360.com (down at the time of writing) ...

To who want to try it.
Source code http://daedalus-n64.cvs.sourceforge.net/daedalus-n64/

Earlier this evening I updated the project CVS repository with the latest version of the code. Normally I only do this when I release a new build, but I know people have been playing with the code and have expressed an interest in seeing the latest developments.

I'm not quite ready to release a new binary yet (still a few more optimisations I want to make and various bugs to fix first), but I'll try and do this within the coming week.

Incidentally, updating the source normally only takes 20 minutes or so, but it took a good couple of hours tonight. Sourceforge updated their CVS service recently (May 12th) and as a result I had to spend a couple of hours updating WinCVS, generating new SSH keys and the like. Hopefully it won't be so painful next time around, or I might just lose the will to live.

As a more general update, I cleared a couple of things from my TODO list sorted this weekend. I'm caching floating point registers for most of the single-precision Cop1 instructions, which are now implemented directly in the dynarec code. I've not timed this in depth yet, but it's shaving 10-20ms/frame off the intro to Mario 64 (Mario's Head), which is particularly FPU heavy (i.e. I'm getting ~160ms/frame rather than ~180ms)

Finally I need to have a good think about how to go about optimising the double-precision floating point performance. As the PSP doesn't have hardware support for double precision floating point this is currently very expensive (i.e. adding 2 doubles on the n64 takes just one instruction - on the psp this balloons to several hundred as it all has to be done in software).

Currently I cheat and cast all the double-precision floats to single-precision values before performing the calculations. Although this is much faster it obviously loses a lot of precision, so I need to be careful it's not going to break any roms. Also even the float->double/double->float conversions are pretty expensive so it's still not an ideal solution. Fortunately not many roms seem to use double-precision maths extensively (presumably because it was relatively expensive on the n64), and where they do use it they don't seem to be too sensitive to the fact that I'm throwing most of their mantissa away


From http://strmnnrmn.blogspot.com/ ...

GMdude66 posted this news/release:


Download and Give Feedback Via Comments
via gmdude66 ...

News from PSP3D


Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...

Aserto posted this news:


PSPirc is an open-source IRC client written in lua for the PSP. PSPirc uses the wifi function to connect to IRC. With PSPirc you can chat with your friends, download and send files and more. PSPirc uses luaplayer to work.

Download and Give Feedback Via Comments ...