Minor bugfix version of FluBBa’s PC Engine emulator.http://hem.passagen.se/flubba/gba.html

FluBBa updated his PC Engine (TG16) emulator for the Gameboy Advance. This version fixes a few sprite problems.http://hem.passagen.se/flubba/gba.html

GPoke is an early karaoke-player. Details on it’s official page. Thanks toGP32emufor the news.http://www.makenai.net/gpoke/

Andreas Gustafsson released his first ever GP32 game, it’s called GPBlocks and is a puzzle game similar to Columns. Try to remove the falling blocks by placing them so that four or more of the same color are next to eachother.Game features:* Easy to learn gameplay* 16 bit color graphics* Sound effects* Highscore is saved to SMChttp://www.lysator.liu.se/~sdw/

Pekele had a post on the GP32 Xtreme Webboard about the latest progress on his GP32 drawing program. Here is a copy and paste from Pekele’s posting:

now you can trace: -3 lines of various sizes.- a rectangle fills or empty – a circle fills or empty the pot of painting works, I attached it so that it fills of surfaces limited by a black color. the eraser and the eyedropper function work. The interface of the tool box was improved with a color of selection while moving cursor.

http://www.gp32x.com/board/

Another update of CaSTawayGP. The changes:

NEW: Added floppy disk image for showing disk reads — both Disk A and Disk B are shown as little disk images on the right bottom corner; try using GEM to copy from A: to B: and watch it 🙂 if the Drive B: icon flashes away and wipes out part of the virtual keyboard, it will try and redraw the virtual keyboard to compensateCHG: Added”-“to the keyboard (plus is shift-equals)CHG:”File open messages”aren’t shown anymore, so you don’t see filenames at the screen bottom anymore 🙂

http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/gp32.html

I got an e-mail from YiFei this morning containing a link to his latest”GBalpha Walkman”demorom for GBA. It includes a music player and an ebook option for eg the lyrics. The music example is some chinese popmusic by an artist I do not know. Here are a few lines from the mail:

It is a very cool music ROM with very good music quality and synchronous lyric. The music samplerate is 44100Hz/swith one channel. The compression rate is 1:5.32 which is the half of the mp3 compression. The codec is developed by YiFei in China. This rom can run in most GBA emulater (VisualBoyAdvance is recommoned) or on real GBA if you have a Flash Card for GBA. This rom and the GBalpha Walkman software were made by YiFei in China. If you are interest this software or the music player in it, please email to YiFei directly.

The e-mail adress to contact YiFei would be”gbalpha at vip dot sina dot com”. The page is in chinese language but I as non chinese found the rom link in less than 30 seconds. So it shouldn’t be a big problem to get it, otherwise you may send an e-mail directly to YiFei.http://www.fxjh.com

For now the most massive freeware game for Gameboy Advance were the Uranus series by ZoneGN. This isn’t anymore. At a well known emulation news page, they got a game submission”El-Hazard”. The whole rom is nearly 20 megabytes! This romis officialy declared as game, but it’s probably more an interactive story…oh well, here is a copy and paste of the news from zophars.net, btw a big thanks toGuyfawkesfor the news:

We’re looking at a full-sized (32MB) GBA ROM created in the course of about 2 weeks. This game is essentially”El-Hazard for the GBA”, a 4th port for a game that was seen only on two official platforms; the PC-9821 and the Japan Sega Saturn market. The game, which is based on a mostly cult-followed anime series, never had an English/US release and was pretty much squelched in its own markets. (Rare and very very out of print, although it pops up on eBay every couple weeks or so.)The game itself is nothing fantastic as far as technology goes; it barely used the Sega Saturn’s power. However it has literally hundreds of handdrawn, full-color backgrounds and a dynamic storyline based on a menu driven sort of RPG system.My original project was one of pity when I reverse engineered the Sega Saturn version’s data files to create a Windows PC runtime version (EHPC) which is fully documented here:http://www.el-hazardonline.net/cgi-bin/eholpage.cgi?series=PC;menu=6;content=elhazardpc/elhazardpc.htmlIt’s not just an emulation, but a complete, self-contained engine that runs script files and sprite animation files similar to the original Saturn version. It also has internal ability to use a real El-Hazard Saturn CD-ROM if you own it. The GBA version follows this mostly except of course it has a specific set of controls (A=Advance message, B=Turbo advance, START=Enter Option Menu during a dialog)But enough on that; the GBA ROM version is nearly identical to the PC version. Most of the C source used from the original, save for graphics-specific calls, compiled fairly easily under DevKit Advance with minimal changes. The major losses are mostly in color, since all Saturn graphics were 15-bit, and a bit of resolution.The GBA port runs Mode 4 (256 color bitmap mode) and of course the sprites are 16 or 256 color (GBA hardware limitation).This game is a”full”version, not a demo ROM. It contains the full eight”chapters”of the original Saturn version, fully functional save slots, and all necessary graphics/sounds/music as intact as they will ever be on a GBA. This ROM WILL boot from a real GBA BIOS startup in an emulator (i.e. the header appears to be correct), but so far only runs properly under VirtualBoy Advance. It has only been tested on the PC release of VBA 1.15, though I hope it works on the Mac port as well. It has not yet been tested on real hardware, and I suspect it won’t run without tweaking (but I don’t honestly know and will not know until I get a FlashLinker or related tool). There are still a few minor display bugs and a few technical bugs, but it’s otherwise quite playable AFAIK. I unfortunately didn’t have time to play it through nine times myself to test it every which way (which probably would’ve taken another week at least!)

http://www.zophar.net/

I got an email from Steve aka MrMr[Ice] containing a highly optimized version of his previous released Tweakmode 3D Demo. You can get the download at the GBA/Demos section. Thanks for the news mate!

A new shoter game is out! It’s called Mr. Monar! (Thanks toGP32emufor the news)http://www.tailzone.com/