News

Kay Hornig has released a chess game for GBA.

Here are his release notes:

After a while developing I’m proud to present my first public project called chessyka.
It is a chessgame. The main goal was not to made the next award winning chessgame. I just wanted to learn developing for the gba and I learn better if there is a real application as a playground.
Now this is the result of my study.

The AI use alpha-beta-search, 0x88 and bitfield representation of the board, hashing with zobrist keys and moveordering. There is an opening book included, but currently this is only a proof of concept and contain only some minor variants of the french defense. A special feature is the possibility to enter a custom position. Although there is only a very simple check for plausibility!
chessyka is aware of all chess rules, including “en passant”, castle, 50-moves-draw and 3x-repetition-draw.

Currently only the english language and basic undo of moves are activated. The multilanguage menu (english, german and espanol) and the advanced undo/redo feature are disabled.

There are some missing features e.g.: permanent brain, search depth extensions and an opening book which is worth the name. If I find the time and motivation I will try to add more of them.

I suggest the level 4 for the AI. Lower is probably to weak and higher needs to much time. A level is a combination of time and search depth. On level 4 chessyka will search at depth 4 (plys) but uses at maximum 2 minutes per ply (average). Which means it will use a part of the spared time from previous moves (e.g. from using the openening book). On level 5 it use 3 minutes per ply average. If you can afford this, it is obvious better.

Maybe later I also present the sourcecode, but not at the moment. chessyka was completely developed by myself. The same applies to the artwork. Only the charset was borrowed from auby.no with his kind permission.
For developing I used the DevkitPro toolchain, the tonclib and “Visual Studio 2003 standard” as an editor.
I want to thank the whole gba homebrew community. Especially I want to thank (in no particular order) Tepples, Cearn and Wintermute!
chessyka was succesfull tested with no$gba (thanks to Martin Korth), “VisualBoy Advance” and of course on real devices: GBASP and NDS lite. For the real devices I used the “EZF advance”, GBAMP v2 CF and Supercard mini SD.

!! Attention !!
chessyka is for evaluation purposes only! Use it at your own risk. There is no warranty, expressed or implied. I’m not responsible for any damage as a result of the usage of chessyka. You are allowed to use and copy the game only in a private environment. You are not allowed to use it on commercial base! With the download you accept this terms of use!

Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk for the news.

Tyrian is a computer game developed by Eclipse Productions (later named World Tree Games) and published in 1995 by Epic MegaGames.

The game was officially released as freeware in 2004, and the graphics have been made available under an open license in April 2007.

More Information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_(computer_game)

Now it turned up into Open Tyrian, since it’s been re-implemented to use SDL (check project here: http://code.google.com/p/opentyrian/ )

Kalimerou ported the engine to the GP2x, but you still need the original game files.

Modes:


You play either single player or with a friend.

Goals:
You must make it from 8:00pm to 5:00am
Stay intoxicated!!! (Your meter will always be dropping, replenish it by buying more alcahol.)

Tips:
Don’t get beatup! (It really hurts, plus it drains your intoxication meter.)
When you gotta go, you gotta go, but drinking too much too fast makes it happen quicker!
Weapons are good.
No ammo for your gun is bad.
If you are in multiplayer mode, as long as both players don’t get arrested, you can bond out of jail.

Controls:
Move – Left control stick.
Punch – A button.
Stab – X button.
Shoot – B button.
Gernade – Left shoulder button.
Pee – A button. (at top of screen)
Exit – Back button. (at main menu)

NIGathans has released a final of his game Shootuh. The authors PSP has been stolen, so he is releasing what he is having. Thanks to cid2mizard from http://www.dev-fr.org for the news.

Changes:

* Fixed bug causing the enemy to spawn above the slow-mo meter off of the screen.
* Added a “Kill Streak” counter which counts how ever many enemies you kill before you die.
* Added an increasing difficulty based on the kill streak, every 15 kills in a row the difficulty will increase.
* Added more slow-mo power ups (I never got a chance to actually randomize this so it will always appear in the same place.)
* Fixed bug causing your bullets to home on enemies even if its paused.
* Fixed background image so the shrinking is more noticeable.
* Added a secret cheat menu. To access make sure you are in the main menu, whether you just started the game or if you paused it and pressed triangle, and press these following buttons one at a time in this order R, Left, Down, Square, Triangle. The cheats can be disabled by clicking on cheats (I never got a chance to actually create the menu so when you activate it they are automatically enabled) The cheats that have been added are:
o Hyper Speed, lets you move a little faster than normal.
o Super Homing Missiles, makes your bullets home twice as
fast.
o Infinite Lives.
o Infinite Slow-Mo.
* Fixed homing missiles so they home on enemies more reasonably. (I never got a chance to perfect this but it is better than the last release.)
* I’m sure if there are more updates but as I stated earlier I cant look at it while writing this so I’m just going to leave it at this.

The members of playeradvance.org are very active today, here comes the second release.

Shup Sans Nom is an arcade style shooter, it probably does not need further information – just go ahead and shoot everything that moves.

Here are the release notes:

I don’t really have any applications to test this with right now, but over the last few days I’ve totally rewritten the scripts that compile the Open2x libraries which resolves a few long standing problems (not the MOD with SDL_mixer problem nickspoon but I am looking into that – I have confirmed it is true 😉 ), updated most of the libraries to their latest versions and have added a few new ones. Anything included will most likely be included in the Open2x firmware for dynamic linking (to give an idea of how much we’re trying to cram in there).

All this stuff should find its way into SVN within the next day or two, so if you prefer to compile your own libraries, it won’t be long now 🙂 .

To use it, just extract into your toolchain directory (compiled for the gcc 4.1.1 Open2x applications toolchain, but it will probably work on DevkitGP2X and maybe our kernel toolchain). If anybody who tests this could post here with your experiences, it’d be much appreciated!

http://x11.gp2x.de/open2x/libs/libpack-21-11-2007-orkie.tar.bz2

Akop Karapetyan can’t stop coding/porting emulators for the PSP. Here is his new port:

Caprice32 PSP is a port of the Caprice32 emulator to the Sony PlayStation Portable platform. It’s written in C/C++ and uses GU (Graphical Utility toolkit) for rendering.

In the year 2574 a lot of things have changed. Humans have colonized our solar system and the O81b “flying saucer”is the primary means of getting around town. However, some things don’t change, specifically the need for diamonds. In 2574, the largest known diamond in the solar system was found in the moon, Titan. But in the process of trying to mine it, the 2 petaton atomic bomb used was overkill and scattered diamonds across the planet and across the solar system. You are one of the many that have equipped their O81b’s with rock blasters and set off to mine for the diamonds. But watch out, the explosion also caused a lot of meteorites! Good luck diamond hunter, and get rich!

Changes:

0.6 minor changes mostly. refactored some code to make it smaller. tried making playfields smaller by using pfvline and pfhline but that didn’t work. lander position during select mode raised one pixel. fixed so won’t have quake and sound if you land on your base, and fixed player 2 collision sound. falling diamond

Motion Pong actually has been developed for the “Neoflash PSP Motion Kit”. It is a simple pong-game. The difference to other pong-games are the controls.You do not move the paddle with any keys, you just move it via the Motion Kit.That means you can move the paddle by tilting your PSP.

The goal of the game is to shake the baby without getting seen. If you are seen shaking the baby, you lose your points. You win when you get 2000 points.

This game shouldn’t be taken too serious, keep in mind it’s just a game.

This game requires the Neoflash PSP Motion Kit!!! It wont work without it.