Happy New Year 2009 (misc) - News - Miscellaneous - PDRoms – Homebrew 4 you

Dear all, Happy New Year 2009!

Kojote, kedo and celeth wish you a successfull happy new year 2009!

Now a few uninteresting words from Kojote:

2008 has been a busy year, the busiest so far in the history of PDRoms. We served you with more than 6000 homebrew related news for handhelds, consoles and other mobile software.

The Nintendo DS scene has become very active and there were many high quality releases. It’s amazing to see what people were able to produce for it – from games to admirable technical demos, but even emulators, hit this sweet handheld.

The GP2x is getting few and fewer releases and can be considered dead already. In fact companies such as Gamepark Holdings don’t deserve such a loyal community staying behind anyway. Their marketing is a true pain and getting in touch with them is even more pain. We hope they will improve and do better with the upcoming Wiz.

While we are at GP2x and Wiz, the most wanted item of 2009 is probably the Pandora – which is dealt as unofficial successor of the GP2x. The Open Pandora Team is doing a great thing in the history of video gaming and their goal will be reached soon. Let’s look forward for Q1/2009 and see if the Pandora will change the world of homebrew.

Sony’s Playstation Portable is a nice homebrew toy too… but there are so many people who probably think, that this is a portable LUA interpreter only. It’s actually quite sad to see such potential power wasted. PSP Hero of 2008 is definatly Dark_Alex with his custom firmware – Thanks for all your hard work!

The launch of the Apple-Store pretty much destroyed real homebrew on the iPhone, but there are also programs offered for free – most of them are fun programs. No one can be blamed that most people try their luck now and at least charge 99 US cents per download. Still shocking to see, how fast things can change.

Another positive surprise of 2008 was the Wii scene. With the hard work of Team Twiizers the Wii has been exploited to run almost anything. With the futuristic control mechanism of the Wii also new homebrew concepts have seen the daylight, which was truly a fresh wind in the homebrew scene in general.

Android by Google is another interesting phenomenon, but it hasn’t really kicked in yet. Maybe 2009 will be the homebrew year of Android?

The ones who love Linux on their cellphone might be familiar with the NeoFreeRunner which runs the Openmoko Linux operating system. I tried to gain one of those babies but failed, because they were simply sold out. The community is pretty small but steadily growing. Still it’s hard to believe this stuff could get mainstream one day.

If it comes to very old consoles, we can’t leave out the Atari 2600. Most homebrew are nowadays made with BATARI Basic, a basic variant, which compiles into an Atari 2600 binary. Most active guy there is probably atari2600land, who updates his games on a regular base – some bad tongues even say too often.

The rest of the systems we cover are more or less alive, but struggling in favor for other, newer, systems.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts of homebrew for 2008 – the steadily increasing amount of homebrews indicates that homebrewing is getting a more popular sport, which is good for all of us.

On a side note I would like to thank a few brother and sister sites, who are directly or indirectly releated to PDRoms. In particular:

* NintendoMax – http://www.nintendomax.com – They are blazing fast at times, they really deserve our all respect.
* PlayerAdvance – http://www.playeradvance.org – The community of PlayerAdvance has been quite active the past years, but 2008 was a bit poor release wise. Nevertheless it’s a great addition and they also index all of their homebrew releases for everyone. A worthy resource of many years of homebrew scene.
* Dev-Fr – http://www.dev-fr.org – Splitted from PlayerAdvance dev-fr got their own community and also has the one or other quality release by one of it’s members. They don’t update too often, which is probably their only weak point.
* Tehskeen – http://www.tehskeen.com – Brakken is more into console modification but also likes the homebrew scene a lot and he shows his support regular. Recently with his recently held Wii coding competition.
* GBAdev – http://www.gbadev.org – GBAdev are a great community, but the GBA part has become pretty obsolet, which is a sad but true fact.
* DCEmu – http://www.dcemu.co.uk – Even if I and Mr. Wraggster didn’t had the best relation recently, he is still an important factor for all homebrewers. His crediting strategy could be a bit different, but for now this issue is solved. DCEmu also managed to gather the one or other hammer release during 2008 and has a large community.
* Drunkencoders – http://www.drunkencoders.com – An important community, but almost no news 🙂
* GBAtemp – http://www.gbatemp.net – GBAtemp has a focus on mainly commercial releases without downloads, but they also show that there is homebrew. Every site more reporting about homebrews is a profit for the scene. Someone got to show the ware…kidd…uhm… that there is legal stuff too 🙂
* DS-Scene – http://www.ds-scene.net/ – pretty much the same as GBAtemp 😉
* WiiBrew – http://www.wiibrew.org – WiiBrew is THE source for all kind of Wii homebrews and a big and useful resource. What the scene would be without WiiBrew?
* PALib – http://www.palib.info – PALib is one of the easier ways to get into Nintendo DS coding and a lot of quality homebrews for NDS were made with the help of it. Also they do have one of the most helpful communities.
* GP32x.com – http://www.gp32x.com – GP32x has been the main head office for the GP32 and GP2x scene, but the guys who acknowledge the news there are getting lazier and lazier 🙂
* GP32spain – http://www.gp32spain.com – This community is of course important for our spanish speaking GP32 and GP2x guys. They do have a proper news service, but a big lack of giving correct credits.
* XDA Devers – http://forum.xda-developers.com/ – If you are into Windows Mobile stuff, XDA devers is the way to go. Many people with rank and name publish their stuff on their boards.
* Openmoko Projects – http://projects.openmoko.org/ – The place to go for all your Openmoko needs, they also do have a Planet and a Wiki reachable trough the main page.
* ANDdev – http://www.anddev.org/ – If you are a freak of Android stuff, Android Developers might be your home base. After checking several pages of the Android community, this one seems to be the most useful one.
* OpenPandora – http://www.openpandora.org – The upcoming Pandora console already has it’s base and people should be keeping their eyes on it! We lay our all hopes into the Open Pandora development team to recieve a kickass toy!
* Emuboards – http://www.emuboards.com – Emuboards, formerly known as Emuholic, deals with emulation and homebrew, but doesn’t have too many updates recently.