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Due to a conflict with the previous domain name owner, we have moved to a new URL. We are now permanently located at http://dcemulation.org/. Please update your bookmarks. See this announcement for more information.

The site is currently under renovation. We have moved to a private-wiki-based system and we all are working hard to present you a renovated DCEmulation. The majority of the pages here still has to be written and the content of the old site from years ago has to be transfered to our new wiki.

Please bear with us here.

In the mean time, you may go to the DCEmulation forums and find lots of information and help there. The site has been based on the forums for years, anyway.

News

We keep you up-to-date with Dreamcast scene news. Whenever something happens it will be posted here. If you are looking for any news older than this week, check our news archive.

PentagoDC for Dreamcast by Ron

Posted by Maturion 10:02, 11 May 2008 (CDT)

PentagoDC

Ron has released a Dreamcast implemenation of Pentago. Below is a roughly translated version of his release notes.

Pentago is an abstract game of strategy created by Flodén Takings and commercialized by the Swedish company Mindtwister. Pentago gambles on a board of 6x6 divided in four parts of 3x3. Each player, in turns, must place one of its cards in an empty square and next, to turn 90 degrees one of the quadrants. The player who is able to align five of his cards (in diagonal, vertical or horizontally), independently of if wins obtains it before or after the rotation. If it is gotten to occupy all the board without to have obtained the objective, the game is in tables. It is handled with the PAD. Experimentally pixels works in resolution FULL the PAL to 768*572. Podeis to unload it from the section of unloadings.

Source: dreamcast.es

Interview with Chui

Posted by Maturion 06:03, 10 May 2008 (CDT)

Today I've added an interview with Chui, I have done some time before. I have not changed anything (spelling, etc...), like always. Check it out here.

TecToy Dreamcast possible?

Posted by Maturion 04:02, 10 May 2008 (CDT)

An interesting article on insertcredit.com:

Tectoy (they used to be Tec Toy officially), which is the Brazilian Sega-affiliated company we like to cover, has a new poll on the main site asking which console consumers would like to see Tectoy re-release. The choices are Game Gear, Dreamcast, and Pense Bem (think well) - a children's computer from the 80s. Anyone can vote. The stats right now are:

• Game Gear (5.3%)
• Dreamcast (91.0%)
• Pense Bem (3.7%)

Dreamcast is a clear favorite here, and people are already speculating about what a Tectoy Dreamcast would be like. Tectoy's usual MO is to take a console like the Master System or Genesis and shrink it down, put a bunch of games on flash ram, and sell it as a stand-alone unit. However, when they re-released the Saturn and Dreamcast before, they just put them out straight (unfortunately those pages are down, but I talked about them here). So this re-release could really be a re-envisioning of the console - or it could be a re-release. My money would actually go toward a slimmer Game Gear, especially if I were the guy choosing the games to go on it! The Tectoy blog only has a ]http://www.tectoy.com.br/tecblog/?p=74 cryptic statement] "What should we release? Hmmmmm." So, a Dreamcast re-release of some kind seems likely, if they're going by the stats. It may not be soon, but it may be interesting!

Also keep in mind that Tectoy and AtGames have a relationship as well. What Tectoy is to Brazil, AtGames is to China, meaning the company has the rights to release OEM hardware with games based on any Sega console in the region. What's more, the portable Genesis from AtGames that went on sale a few months back is actually Tectoy's portable Genesis. The form factor and games are exactly the same. So, if Tectoy releases an OEM Dreamcast, we may see it with an English manual before long. Keep your eyes peeled! Thanks to Fernando M. for pointing this out.

Source: insertcredit.com via dcemu.co.uk

FreeDO update: project on hold, DC version buggy

Posted by Darc 00:42, 8 May 2008 (CDT)

An admin has posted an update on the FreeDO boards regarding the status of the project:

To summarize everything in couple of words -- project is in hold now. Here are the details:

• 3do-scene.com --- the guy who was responsible for site design and info convertion got a new job and has no time to deal with it anymore. We're stuck here
• FreeDO 2.0 -- was in works till a february -- now i don't have a time to work on it. Emulator coding requires great deal of free time, which i will not have now.
• FreeDO for GP2X -- same status as above
• FreeDO for MacOSX -- it's complete, but for PowerPC platform only -- it runs painfully slow on intel macs with rosetta.
• FreeDO for DC -- buggy, and silent... alas -- no sound emulation.
• FreeDO in Verilog (FPGA) -- video portion is buggy -- lack of transparency. CPU and DSP are running well. Requires original Toshiba VRAM (for now)
• IDE/USB-OTG for FZ-1 and others -- initial software and hardware prooved to be working, however i still need to code advanced GUI for the console itself....

The biggest problem is lack of time and lack of help. Right now i'm also single dad. That means -- i will not have enough time to dedicate to the project to move on. Considering all that i'm thinking about releasing the sources.
Please -- don't forget to comment your votes... it will help me to decide.

Source: FreeDO forums (requires registration) through DCEmu UK forums

Makaron news: VMU BIOS dumping

Posted by Darc 00:39, 8 May 2008 (CDT)

Deunan has updated his blog today: I put my ideas to the test and created a BIOS dumping tool for VMUs. Big thanks go (again) to Yuki who helped me out and run it on several cards. So far I've collected three BIOSes for J-VMUs: 1.001, 1.002 and 1.005. No luck with my own E-VMU though, I suppose the procedure address is indeed different. Actually, even J-VMUs have the code shuffled a bit depending on the BIOS revision - luckily the tool worked, more or less, in all cases. Dumps for the oldest versions came out corrupted but were still useful in finding out the correct entry point for the second attempt :)

I'm going to experiment some more on my VMU, but my chances of finding the right address are about 1/16000. No way am I doing an exhaustive search :)

Source: Makaron blog

Knights & Dragons - Demo 2 by Pierwolf

Posted by Maturion 11:47, 7 May 2008 (CDT)

Pierwolf has released Demo 2 of his BOR-Mod "Knights & Dragons" over at LavaLit.

Knights & Dragons - Demo 2

Author: Pierwolf

Description:

• Two different road to choose from in the beginning (ROAD OF DRAGONS, featuring the King of Dragons chars; ROAD OF KNIGHTS, featuring the knights of the round chars).
• Multiple paths in each road.
• Multiple endings.
• 47 music tracks.
• 8 playable characters, plus 2 secret chars that you will unlock during the game (if you find the right path Wink)
• Now every character can guard (behind + attack button), plus they all have new special moves (see the HOW TO PLAY to see the char's list of abilities.), be careful to use them, they consume mp points.
• 31 different enemies

Comments: With this demo, the game is 2/3 completed, consider it like the first and the second episode of a trilogy Wink in the final episode, all the chars from different games will be together to face the final threat!

I tested it until the v2.1823, but I'm pretty sure you can play it even with the last version of OpenBOR.

Anyways, Thanks to ALL OF YOU members of this great community for help and feedback, expecially (in no particular order) bWWd, lbf, Bloodbane, Orochi_X, Damon Caskey, Fightn Words, MCW, Mr.Q® for their help in my latest problems, i've visited many forums in my internet life, but no one is like this! cheers! cheers!

As always, any feedback is really appreciated.

Download it Here!!!

Source: LavaLit.com

Giana's Return - Almost daily betas…

Posted by Maturion 09:24, 7 May 2008 (CDT)

Another update on gianas-return.de:

…but not for the public. Considering we still have almost daily betas, the public release is getting closer and closer. Lot’s of tweaking and eye-candy stuff is going on, but yet we are still missing artwork from our new graphics guy thUg and minor SFX and jingles from our musician operator. Once the graphics part is done, we can go on converting and adjusting levels. From current view, we hope to be done in two to three months.

Source: gianas-return.de

Makaron update: It beeps! VMU Emulation

Posted by Darc 15:47, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

Deunan has posted an update regarding Makaron on his blog:

I've got good news and bad news.
Bad is I've not touched Makaron sources for weeks now. Guess it needs to ripen some more :) I got to the point where I have two or three ways to solve a problem, and each has it's pros and cons - and I just can't decide which one to pick. But I will get to it, eventually.

The good news is Yuki bought some VMUs with games on them and it got me pretty interested. I'm going to try and emulate standalone VMU now. Just think, since it's rather simple and low-spec I could easily use SDL to make it work. Hell, ScummVM uses SDL. I'm somewhat familiar with the API too (my old MOD player used SDL for both sound output and visualisation).
That would make a VMU-on-PC emulator. But guess what, there are SDL ports to Dreamcast available too! So the project could be made to compile and run on DC as well. And at this point it would run under Makaron of course. I mean, how do you say no to VMU-on-DC-on-PC emulator? :]

The main problem right now is VMU BIOS. Apparently it's not possible to access ROM memory directly while running from FLASH, so no easy way to dump it. KATANA dev kit comes with VMU BIOS but I'd rather not rely on it. You know, copyright stuff and all. Also, I'd like to have an English one from one of my own VMUs.

Source: dknute.livejournal.com

RACE!DC update coming soon

Posted by Darc 15:05, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

It's been two years since we've seen any activity regarding GPF's port of RACE!DC to the Dreamcast, but one of the original authors of the Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator has mentioned doing some work on it in an interview with GameSetWatch regarding his part in a project to translate the Japanese Neo Geo Pocket Color game SNK Vs. Capcom: Card Fighter’s Clash 2 to English:

GSW: Are you planning on working on anything else?

F: I've always got something else to work on. Though, I don't often plan what will be the next project. I don't know. I was fixing up the Dreamcast version of RACE the other day. That's pretty much done now, though. I've got some other ideas, but my main upcoming project is raising a - to be in about a month - newborn daughter.

It is possible that this release is just a bug fix, but we could perhaps also see some improvements in other areas.

UPDATE: I have spoken with Flavor, and it appears this will be a bugfix release. This is what he wrote to me regarding the update:

Well, there isn't much new code in it. It's mostly GPF's port of the emulator. There was one main problem with GPF's version, though. I don't think it had any way of writing a save-game file. My current version does.

Source: GameSetWatch

DUX pre-orders now being taken!

Posted by Darc 14:33, 5 May 2008 (CDT)

Posted today on the HUCAST blog...

You can now pre-order DUX for Dreamcast.

Here you can see DUXs cover art. The final may looks slightly different but all in all it will look like this. When pre-ordering you will receive an bonus poster that shows the cover art.

DUX will also runs region free on every DC build before 2001 which are the very most of DCs ever build.

Source: HUCAST blog

DUX Stage 1 Teaser Video Released

Posted by Darc 06:23, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

This video shows parts of the first stage finished to roughly 90%. The final stage has more lenght and the boss enemy will have more attacks.

Download: dux_stage1_teaser.avi (29,1MB/H.264)

Overall there will be 6 stages and I will explain each stage when time is given. Just for now you will encounter a space port, an water filled cave, a mine facility, a hyper space zone, an atomicly radiated den and last but not least the hideout of the terror itself.

Additional videos of DUX to follow when more stages are ready.

Source: HUCAST blog