Week of March 23, 2008

Request the pSX source for Chui

28th March, 2008 Posted by: Maturion

Chui needs the source of the PlayStation emulator pSX in order to get a base for PSX4ALL. This emulator is available for Windows and Linux, but sadly the source code isn't available. Chui and DCiberia have started a petition to make the authors of pSX to relase the source code. We need a lot of people for this petition so post in the DCiberia forums or in topic in our forum so we can get enough voices for this petition or just post in the pSX forum.

Source: DCiberia

Giana’s Return (Beta) (26-03-2008)

28th March, 2008 Posted by: Maturion

Giana's Return team has updated their blog again. They informed us about bugfixes and they also said that they have created a group called "Giana's Return" on the German social network "StudiVZ" ("meinVZ"). You can talk to the beta testers there. To all Germans here: Join this group. ;)

Today we thought to keep you updated about the ongoing bugfixes and 
improvements.

*First of all we have extended the time limit from 99 seconds per level to 120 
seconds. A bunch of people who were able to play a preview complained about 
“lack of time” as they prefer exploring levels and collecting as many items as 
possible. Those 120 seconds should be now really more than enough for 
everyone, even for “explorers” and “diamond collectors”.

*We have two types of wall bricking now. As you know if Giana has her curly 
hairstyle she can destroy bricks - depending on her power there are two ways 
the brick disappears. If you have the energy-ball and you are bricking a wall, 
the brick get’s dissolved. As soon as you get stronger and have shooting 
ability, your “energy” level raises too and if you destroy a brick it splits 
into 4 parts as you know it from the preview videos. This is more like an eye 
candy and grant at least a little bit of difference during gameplay.
  
*Here comes something we have shameless stolen from “Super Mario”  If you 
destroy a brick, you will get one extra score. This might be not a lot, but 
the main goal is not to destroy as many bricks as possible. Maybe as soon as 
the game is out some ppl might be worried about “who has the highest” score, 
so adding this ability to bricks, will be an important factor for score 
hunters. One point might be not a lot, but see everything in bigger 
dimensions. We might raise the amount of points you get from 1 to 5 or 10, but 
we are pretty unsure about that. After all you get 50 points just for 
squeezing an regular enemy  

*The whole intro stuff is done - Credits, a “special inspriation screen”, 
language selection and then it goes over to the titlescreen from where you can 
start the game - just finetuning left there.
Last but not least, our coder fixed something which is of internal matter, the 
test mode shows everything animated now - which is a lot more comfortable when 
testing things 

Source: gianas-return.de (1)/gianas-return.de (2)

Makaqu 1.3

28th March, 2008 Posted by: Maturion

I'm posting this a bit late, but anyway: Manoel has released version 1.3 of his QuakeMod Makaqu. It can be downloaded from here. Visit the forum thread for a changelog and more information.

Source: DCEmulation forums

Makaron WIP - Time off

28th March, 2008 Posted by: Maturion

Deunan (a.k.a. dknute) has posted news about Makaron, his Dreamcast emulator.

I knew there was a good reason for not touching the GD-ROM code. But I did, 
and as it stands now it's pretty broken - I will need to redesign it quite a  
bit.
There are several major problems to solve, all tied to multithreading. 
Unfortunately I don't really know how to fix them. Or rather, I do, just 
haven't come up with an idea I feel like implementing. I'd rather spend some 
time thinking about it and do it right (well, mostly) than throw a ton of 
nasty patches in. I might actually have to pull out a drawing block, some 
pencils, and start designing it on paper first. This is a bit new to me, not 
being able to easily cover for all possible cases in my head. I guess that's 
MT for you...

I hope to release something in the first week of April. If the new GD code is 
not ready by then, I'll revert to the old one. I want to see if vibration 
works for other people too. By the way, I haven't done a single thing during 
holidays  I blame Knurek. And Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call he told me 
about. But mostly Knurek.

Source: dknute.livejournal.com

Giana's Return WIP - GFXxXx & more!

26th March, 2008 Posted by: Maturion

The Giana's Return-Team has updated their blog.

Earlier this morning (1am) [thUg] came up with a fixed tileset of World 1. It 
is looking a lot cleaner than the one we used before.

Some of you might think, why do you guys need to clean and detail pixel things?
It’s pretty easy to answer. The graphics are optimized for 320×200 pixel 
screens, this also keeps us the possibility open for a MS-DOS port. If we have 
“dirty” pixelgraphics and resize this to native solutions of other systems, 
things would look a bit rubbish. With this clean-pixel task we try to improve 
the quality for fullscreen stretching on any machine, while keeping the retro- 
style.

Due to the professional repixeling the amount of colors are also reduced a 
lot, which ensures we can save some RAM  This might not be relevant for new 
systems, but we want to have this game running on many beautiful (retro) 
systems such as GP2x, Amiga AGA, Dreamcast, Playstation Portable, etc…
  
Also some gossip about Giana’s Return GP32: As our music is available as .xm 
this willl eat lots of CPU speed, it might be a special difficult task to 
manage this game on a GP32, which does not mean it will not happen. We are  
currently discussing what to do and if it’s possible at all. Our musician 
op3rator took the old MOD’s and improved them and added more channels, which 
turned out in 8 channel .xm’s. His base music is basically available as .xm 
only now (specially the new composed tracks) and we wont give him more work 
with “backcomposing” to .mod. So either we can get Giana jumping on a GP32 or 
not… the chances are 50:50.

Also there are still thoughts which platform we should support first. 
Initially we have thought about a GP2x release, but it’s unsure at this time, 
if this will really happen first. There are severall reasons for this… we will 
just track the homebrew scene, follow comments and behaviours of users and our 
decision will be positive for the “most helpful and thankful” community.

With today we are one stop closer and many more steps will follow. While the 
tileset adjusting is not fully done, we are working on many “minor” engine 
improvements - specially eyecandies. Our genious french coder is working very 
hard to get the bugtracker empty and add improvements, which should work out 
really well for the final product.

Source: gianas-return.de

lxdream WIP - A distinct lack of time

26th March, 2008 Posted by: Maturion

There's new progress on the Dreamcast emulator for Linux.

I apologise for the lack of updates recently - unfortunately I have not had a  
lot of time to work on lxdream lately due to real life conspiring against me. 
I’ll try to update when I can, but for now there probably won’t be a lot to 
report until at least the end of May.

The good news is that lxdream-render is pretty close to mergeable now (doesn’t 
seem to break much now), and I’ve spent a bit of time trying to track down the 
irritating “geometry” bugs I’ve been seeing (It looks like bad geometry on 
screen, but the same data renders just fine on the DC). The bad news is that 
thus far, I haven’t really gotten anywhere with said bugs  .

Source: lxdream.org

New interviews

23rd March, 2008 Posted by: Maturion

I added 4 interesting interviews to our interviews page. (An interview with GPF, Dan Potter, DJGeki and Sin.) All those interviews were previously unreleased or had gone lost. We hope you enjoy reading them!