Dear visitors,

my wonderful wife will give birth to a baby the next few hours, please understand that the news service will be on break for a few days. I’ll try to catch up, as soon as the time will allow this.

In the meantime I recommend these pages for getting your homebrew flash:

http://www.emuboards.com
http://www.dcemu.co.uk
http://www.dev-fr.org
http://www.playeradvance.org
http://www.tehskeen.com

The news service should return in 2 to 4 days. Thanks for your understanding!

Regards
Kojote

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Scrabble Assistant DS is designed to help players of the Scrabble board-game.

After some months, here is another coding competition organized by PDRoms. Please help spreading the word if you can.

First time in history we allow Playstation Portable and Nintendo DS. We had Atari 2600 supported in an earlier competition, but didn’t get enough support from it’s scene. Hopefully this time this will change.

Competition running time: 24th January 2008 to 2nd March 2008
Deadline: Sunday, 2nd March 2008 @ 23:59, in YOUR timezone!

Systems allowed: Atari 2600, Coleco Vision, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Game Gear, Genesis/Megadrive, GP2x, Intellivision, Master System, Neo Geo Pocket, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Nintendo DS, PC Engine, Playstation Portable (PSP), Wonderswan, Wonderswan Color

Topic: Create any kind of childproof game (no pr0n, racisms, extraordinary violence and adult humour, …) by using maximum four colors only on screen at once per scene (this could be a level, menu, etc) (also applies for dual screen systems). Black, white, grey do count as color! You can choose your four colors freely.

Prizes:
#1 – One brandnew GBA Micro console (without games) + One Mindcandy DVD (selectable between Volume 1 OR 2)
#2 – One copy of “Beggar Prince” (Megadrive/Genesis) + One Mindcandy DVD (selectable between Volume 1 OR 2)
#3 – One Mindcandy DVD (selectable between Volume 1 OR 2)
#4 – One “Digital Memories” DVD
#5 – One “Digital Memories” DVD

The prizes are donated by our kind sponsors:
http://superfighter.com/
http://www.go64.de/
http://www.fusecon.com/

Full details can be found on the PDRoms webboard.

Join the challenge and good luck!

http://www.pdroms.de/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=405

A new PDRoms Coding Competition with the topic “4 colors are enough!” is on the way. This time we permit the following systems: Atari 2600, Coleco Vision, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Game Gear, Genesis/Megadrive, GP2x, Intellivision, Master System, Neo Geo Pocket, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Nintendo DS, PC Engine, Playstation Portable (PSP), Wonderswan, Wonderswan Color.

Check back on 24th January for full details!

http://www.pdroms.de

Many people had the wish to have another coding competition organized by PDRoms… so we are going for it!

The topic is settled so we are just focusing on fine tuning and writing the rules now. The choosen topic will allow plenty of systems to join the coding fun, details as soon as the compo rules are out.

For now we are writing to various retailer stores, if they are willing to support our compo with vouchers or goodies. The main prize is already settled, like the last compo there will be a brandnew GBA Micro for the first place.

Retrogaming Times Monthly #44 is now available. RTM is a retro magazine, sometimes with focus on homebrew things.

In this issue:

01. Attract Mode
02. NES’Cade — Donkey Kong Jr.
03. Apple II Incider: Double High Resolution Graphics
04. Game Archaeologist: Mighty Bomb Jack
05. Radio Shack: Hungry Monster
06. What if… Atari released the Famicom in the West (Part 2)
07. Game Over

Thanks to http://www.atariage.com for the news.

http://my.stratos.net/~hewston95/RTM/RTM_Home.htm

Dear PDRoms visitors,

this year there were many ups and downs in the homebrew scene, but as usual everything developed out in a nice way.

PDRoms never had more news since it exists (~1998, since 2002 with own domain) than this year, even the month of December 2007 brought again another record with over 520 news.

The kings of homebrew this year were definatly Playstation Portable, Nintendo DS and the GP2x. Also not bad in the race is the iPhone along with a still active Atari 2600 community, mainly the guys at Atariage, who excessivly use Batari’s “batariBASIC”, which is a BASIC like language, which compiles into an Atari 2600 binary.

A heavy drawback was noticeable for Gameboy Advance and GP32, along with some 8 bit systems, who always had low attention. People love to go with new trends it seems…

On behalf of the PDRoms staff, a happy new year and good luck for everyones upcomming projects. Let’s hope for even more releases in 2008! We really hope you enjoy this little service and will stay with us the upcomming year, support and helping hands are appreciated anytime.

Your PDRoms-Team
Kojote, celeth, kedo

RGCD is a new downloadable CD-ROM based magazine containing the very latest retro reviews, features and developer interviews, providing its readers with an essential one-stop resource for all their retro gaming needs. RGCD’s main focus is on the new releases for 8/16-Bit computer platforms, but we also dedicate a good percentage of our reviews and feature space to retro look-and-feel PC-based remakes and independent games, so if that’s what you’re into then you are in the right place.

Release notes:

I’d love to be able to say otherwise, but RGCD #04 has been the most difficult issue to compile so far; with one team member gone AWOL and several others tied-up with real-life issues, its development has been exceptionally labour intensive for the loyal few of us left (and I’d like to say a big thank you to all involved for their contributions). However, all this hard work has been worthwhile and I’m proud to say that the standard raised by the release of our previous issue has been upheld (even with a smaller number of dedicated staff writers this time round). With over 31,000 words, 24 full reviews, 10 extra features and a wide range of platforms covered, there’s enough content in RGCD #04 to keep you busy long after the festive season has run its course.

As with the equally productive summer holiday period, the long winter nights have bought about an explosion of retro homebrew coding activity – we’ve really tried our best, but to be honest there was no way that we could have covered all of the new 8/16-Bit and indie PC games released since the last issue. Notable titles that didn’t make the final cut include multiplayer releases M.U.L.E. Wars and Speed Up! Gold for the 8-Bit Atari, Wizard of Wor, Egghead 5 and Phantomasa 2 for the ZX Spectrum, Bag Man and Penguin Mind on the MSX, the English translation of Black Sect for the Atari ST and many others that I’m too tired to list – so expect some of these to overflow into the next issue!

However, the good news is that this over-fruitful period has resulted in only the best (and some of the worst) titles being cherry-picked for review in RGCD #04, with the featured game (Transcendence) and its covermount-competitor Battleships Forever being particularly exciting PC titles. And whilst on the subject of PC games, as well as the regular reviews of top titles such as Pen Pen Christmas Olympics, Iwanaga, Wizball and Varia there’s also a new addition to the magazine in the form of our ‘Homebrew Retrospective’, featuring mini-reviews of some of our favourite PC freeware releases from those dark days before RGCD. This is set to become a regular fixture in the mag and we’ll be taking a look back at our most-played homebrew releases for the wide variety of computers and consoles out there, with the focus being on a different machine in each issue.

As mentioned above, there have been an insane number of new releases for 8/16-Bit platforms recently – including the much anticipated full versions of Tongueman’s Logic (PC Engine) and Crownland (Atari XE/XL) (as originally previewed back in RGCD #01). Other highlights include reviews of horizontal shooter Star Sabre (Amstrad CPC), single-screen avoid ’em up Get It (Commodore Plus/4), Aleksi Eeeben’s Redrunner (C64) and the awesome Yoomp! (Atari XE/XL) complete with in-depth developer interview. In terms of the number of new games it’s almost as if we’ve gone back in time 20 years to Christmas 1987!

But RGCD isn’t just game reviews and previews; Issue #04 also contains the second half of Mike Bevan’s acclaimed Llamasoft article, and on the technical front, RGCD/Cosine’s T.M.R has contributed a detailed essay explaining some of the problems faced by programmers whom choose to develop software for the most challenging gaming platform of them all; the good old Atari 2600.

Well, that just about wraps it up. From all of the RGCD team, I sincerely wish you a happy Christmas and all the best for 2008!

http://www.rgcd.co.uk/

This is a collection of covers/remixes for the NES using ppmck. Currently it’s only available as PAL version.

Retrogaming Times Monthly Issue 43 is out. It’s an online magazine about online gaming.

Content:

01. Attract Mode
02. The Many Faces of Miner 2049er
03. NES’Cade — Donkey Kong
04. Apple II Incider: Giving Thanks
05. Nintendo Realm
06. Mastering Sega – Bomber Raid
07. What if… Atari released the Famicom in the West (Part 1)
08. Game Over

Thanks to http://www.atariage.com for the news.

http://my.stratos.net/~hewston95/RTM/RTM_Home.htm