News

StrmnNrmn who disappeared for a while from the scene, and famous for his Nintendo64 emulator Daedalus, spoke up on his blog recently.

Read on:

No, I didn’t choke on a mince pie 🙂

I’m sorry for the lack of updates, both to the blog and to Daedalus. I’ve been working on Daedalus for about 10 years now, and those that have followed the project from the beginning will know that I have fairly regular periods of ‘radio silence’ followed by bursts of activity. I have lot of inertia, so once my interest shifts elsewhere it can take a long time to get me back on track. That’s just the way I am.

This time around it’s because I’ve been really busy with work. I don’t want to go into specifics, but for the past couple of years I’ve been working on a high profile game, and since January most of my energy has gone into helping to get it finished.

I am unbelievably out of touch with the PSP scene. Recently, Kreationz got in touch to tell me about the progress that has been made with DaedalusX64. I was really pleased to hear that the project was being actively updated, particularly because I have a lot of respect for the people involved. The whole reason for making Daedalus open source was to give people the opportunity to learn from the source code and update it as needed, so it’s great for this to be happening.

I can’t guarantee that I’ll have the time to actively help with DaedalusX64, or even that I’ll be able to regularly update this blog. I thought it would be a good idea to give my public backing to DaedalusX64 so that the team can get on with rolling out updates. I probably won’t be making a PSP release of Daedalus any time soon.

For what it’s worth, I’m currently working on a new port of Daedalus. I’m going to keep the target platform secret for now, but I think it’s very exciting. At the very least it means that I’m working on Daedalus again – I’m hoping to keep merging changes from DaedalusX64 back into the Daedalus source, and hopefully provide DaedalusX64 with one or two fixes of my own.

That’s all for now. Apologies in advance if the next blog post is in December 2009 🙂

-StrmnNrmn

Thanks to Maturion / http://www.sega-dc.de for the hint.

Open2x is an umbrella project to bring open source, community friendly, solutions to the GP2X Linux handheld system. The project consists of a number of complementing sub-projects that work together to deliver things such as the Open2x toolchains, kernel and firmware.

Release notes:

All my enthusiasm has been sapped at the moment due to various changes in the scene, so I am going to throw this out there in the hope that I will get interested again. I’m not sure that many people on here now have even seen a GP2X/GP32 though.

F100 only for now, if (and only if) I see enough interest will I compile the kernel for F200 (I have tested it on an F200, but only messing around with quick kernel builds and much faffing).

Known issues (there are probably more, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head right now):
– Built in music player stutters on MP3s (recommend: install your own on SD).
– Built in video player menu gets a bit messed up after quitting a video (not actually seen this myself but enough people have said so that I believe it).
– Compatibility is pretty damn good, but not everything works. – Try compat, failing that, sorry. I have worked around many, many application specific problems and to be frank, it is boring. If you can nail down the problem precisely, tell me and I will see what can be done about it however. Also, have a look here.
– Very occasionally the sound patches mess up and get locked with no sound. Try pressing X on GMenu2x and watch the icon in the bottom right change.

Features:
– Built in GMenu2x
– Faster boot time
– Can have forced sound scaling/muting.
– Safe to install
– Can be installed from all firmwares
– Can revert to GPH firmware with no ill effects
– No need to reflash the bootloader
– Dynamic linking now possible
– Up to date libraries
– kexec syscall in the kernel
– Many, many more! If you discover something I forgot, let me know.

If anybody wishes to help, please come in our IRC channel, #open2x on FreeNode. We don’t just need help from kernel people. Libraries, built in apps, user/developer guides, any extra odds and ends you feel might be useful to somebody all need to be worked on!

Thanks to Orkie himself for the news!

zodttd ported Doom to iPhone and iPod Touch.

Quote:

Doom on the iPhone and iPod Touch, while still a work in progress, is shaping up well. It supports the retail/commercial WAD (game data) files for Doom 1 and Doom 2, assuming you provide them. Constructive feedback is greatly welcome.

More detailed instructions and videos of it in action coming soon! Meanwhile, hop on Cydia and grab the “Doom” package in the “Games” section!

CyBeRCeD is working on GeoDS for Nintendo DS. This homebrew is an application to increase knowledge of the department of France.

Changes:

The detection pen is now much more accurate!

Discussion: http://www.dev-fr.org/index.php/topic,3936.0.html

Task Facade, previously known as Dynamo 3, is a cool, animated task manager for your PocketPC 2003/05/06 device. Say goodbye to boring text lists of running programs and instead manage your programs by sliding in images of all your running applications onto your screen. For each program on your device an image is saved and when you click the hotkey they all zoom onto your screen. Simply click the one you want and it will increase to fill the screen. Quickly seeing all the running programs is far more efficient than having to read through a text-based task list so Task Facade can make task switching a much faster, and cooler, experience.

Task Facade also allows you to quit programs from inside the image view meaning that it does everything your old text-based program manager could do.

As well as just looking generally cooler, Task Facade offers far more customization than before and allows the whole application to be controlled using either your PDAs hardware keys or the stylus.

Changes:

# Task switch monitoring changed. The program uses less resources.
# Process info dialog changed.
+ Ability to ban a process or a window from the process info dialog.
+ Running time information in the process info dialog

***BEFORE INSTALL***: Before installing version 3.8, uninstall the previous version AND MANUALLY REMOVE THE ‘TASK FACADE’ FOLDER from Program Files’. You do not need its old content.

G-Alarm is an alarm clock with a special mechanism to wake you up. Before the alarm clock stops you need to guide a ball through a labyrinth.

Changes:

[FIXED] Small bug at the start of a fade in

Discussion: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=422362

TamerSpClock is a speaking clock application for Windows Moblie.

RedSquare is an open-source 2D action game. Click and hold the red square. Now, move it so that you neither touch the walls nor get hit by any of the blue blocks. If you make it to 31 seconds, you are doing brilliantly!

FBReaderJ is an e-book reader for the Android platform. It is a clone of the FBReader book reader written in Java by the same authors. FBReaderJ supports several e-book formats: oeb, epub, and fb2. Direct reading from zip, tar, and gzip archives is supported.

Changes:

Book scrolling is now more Androidish. To scroll a text, you should move your finger over the touchscreen. Volume +/- keys on the left side of the device are used for the text scrolling too. The ‘Add Book’ dialog has been changed to be more convenient for finger tapping. Book position saving has been fixed.

Peronal PPCWiki is a local WIKI application for PPC’s.

Features:

Quik Easy Markup
Mostly compatible with Blade Wiki
Take phots and save them directly into your wiki
Draw and save it into wiki
Some SQL data base connectivity
all files saved as text files
Field encryption
Code folding
Include one wiki page inside another