Goomba Color is a GBC emulator written for the GBA. Even though the GBA usually natively plays GBC games, Goomba Color provides the convenience to run multiple games from a flash cartridge, and also runs on the Nintendo DS and Game Boy Micro.

http://www.dwedit.org/gba/goombacolor.php

Sqdef is a tower defense game for the GP2X. The goal is to prevent enemies from getting from one side of the map to the other by placing towers along their way. There are over a dozen different buildings with upgrades, tech research, difficulty levels, and a whole lot of maps to try your defense skills on! Sqdef also has a powerful on-GP2X map editor that allows you to make your own maps and share them with others.

Changes:

New things in 1.2A (January 14th 2008):
-> fixed a bug that crashed the game when dealing with certain maps
-> added Fusion_Power’s 4 maps to One-Point-Two, making it a 20-map pack!
-> map preview in map browser and save/load panels shows dirt tiles
-> editor road-drawing mode shows dirt tiles

http://www.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,29,2261

This application might be interesting for muslims: Get prayer (salat/salah/namaz) timings for your local city along with Qibla direction, distance and athan (azaan/azan) now on iPhone and iPod Touch!

http://www.guidedways.com/mobile/iathan/download_iathan.php

While browsing trough the GP32x.com webboards our attention came to jbrodack’s post about a new shump game for the GP2x, which is currently beeing developed and in early stages.

You can grab Alert from it’s release page.

Additional sources:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/isshiki/20080105
http://www.the2bears.com/?p=1264

http://homepage2.nifty.com/isshiki/prog_gp2x_game.html

Woopsi is a Nintendo DS GUI library for rapidly creating user interfaces for homebrew software. Modelled after the AmigaOS windowing system.

Release notes:

The major changes this time around are predominantly improvements to the API and new features for developers (new drawing tools such as filled circles, scrolling panels, and so on). The most obvious changes in the demo are the addition of a simple Pac Man demo (ported from a JavaScript game I wrote a while ago) and bugfixes to the scrolling text gadget (it now clips properly). There’s also a debug console that will pop up when you press one of the d-pad buttons with the Pac Mac demo active.

The most interesting change is the addition of an SDL layer that can substitute for libnds. This means that you can create a new SDL project in your IDE, add the “woopsi” source folder to your project, drop the contents of the “sdl” folder into the “woopsi” folder, and immediately start developing Woopsi-based applications for your native platform with all the debugging features of your IDE. There’s now an XCode 3 project available from the SourceForge site that shows this in action – the standard Woopsi demo compiles and runs in OSX.

The SDL version will only work for applications that confine themselves to the Woopsi API. Any apps that use low-level features, such as the RTC or WiFi hardware, won’t work with the SDL version. For those projects you’ll need to continue developing with the usual libnds (PALib optional), devKitPro and emulator setup (unless you’re cunning and develop your GUI separately from your functionality).

Latest changelog:

– Fixes:
– Windows prevented from being dragged out of top of screen.
– ScreenTitle and WindowBorderTop make a copy of the text passed into them.
– BitmapButton’s drawing routine offsets its blit origin by 1 to account for the gadget’s border width if applicable.
– Replaced most of SuperBitmap’s draw(Rect) routine with a call to GraphicsPort::drawBitmap().
– Increased size of window gadgets in demo skin.
– Updated SuperBitmap to use s16 instead of u16 for co-ordinates.
– Text::wrap() correctly wraps the last line of text.
– Fixed more bugs in TextViewer.
– Removed old Debug methods.
– Fixed clipping in SuperBitmap draw routines.
– Fixed all warnings.
– Fixed GraphicsPort clipping – windows were wrapping around vertically when drawn in screens that were dragged down.
– Fixed bugs in setting gadget attributes from skins.
– Window was handling click() even if a child was clicked.
– SuperBitmap::drawFilledRect() was drawing the top line of the rect over itself.
– Removed all left bitshifts from GraphicsPort::clipFilledRect() and replaced with SCREEN_WIDTH multipliers (aid portability).

– New Features:
– Added SuperBitmap::drawFilledCircle().
– ScreenFlipButton uses GraphicsPort for all of its drawing operations.
– Added woopsiRGB() define as shortcut to RGB with alpha bit set.
– Replaced pixel plotting with DMA_Force() in SuperBitmap::drawHorizLine().
– Added SuperBitmap::clipBitmapCoordinates().
– SuperBitmap draw routines clip to bitmap dimensions.
– Added GraphicsPort::drawFilledCircle().
– Ball in Pong demo is now circular.
– Added PacMan demo.
– MultiLineTextBox outputs using the GraphicsPort.
– MultiLineTextBox automatically chooses smallest number of rows if no value (or 0) is given as the parameter in its constructor.
– MultiLineTextBox trims its text to match the number of rows specified in its constructor.
– Added MultiLineTextBox::setAutomaticDrawing() – if set to “false”, draw() must be called when changes are made to the textbox’s text for them to be shown.
– GraphicsPort has a new drawText() function with a length parameter.
– Added Debug console that automatically creates itself when called for the first time.
– Added Debug::printf().
– Changed skinning structs to be more descriptive.
– Added tiny font to debug console.
– Added ScrollingPanel gadget.
– Added SDL layer.
– Added vertical scrolling to MultiLineTextBox.
– Added macros for using the 2nd DMA channel.
– Added check for DMA active flag in SuperBitmap drawing code.
– Gadget class inherits from EventHandler, so any gadget can be subclassed and made to handle events.
– Screen decoration button gadgets have their parent screen set as their event handler.
– Screen decoration button gadgets raise release events to notify their screens of user input instead of calling functions (subclassing aid).

– Broken:
– Vertical alignment in MultiLineTextBox other than top.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/woopsi

Brakken, owner of http://www.tehskeen.com and supporter of the homebrew scene, in his very own way 😉 , got hands on insider information regarding the new Dark_Alex custom firmware for PSP, which was supposed the be already out.

To lower the hype here is his small article:

Well, for all of you Dark_Alex custom firmware fans I’ve had a chat with Matheiulh about the upcoming release. First off all, there was so “set” release date. This supposed release date was fabricated by a certain scene site, made it into publications which is why Dark_Alex’s responded to it’s delay.

Secondly, one of the main factors of the creating remote update function is the fact that so many “so called” scene sites are using the CFW to further their own greedy money making agenda’s.

Additionally, I was able to confirm that Zeus himself asked Matheiulh to add a function into the CFW to block out Datel’s batteries. This was of course before Zeus suddenly changed his mind (due to money) and now supports the batteries.

Lastly, which is the best part Dark_Alex won’t be releasing the CFW on Maxconsole.com anymore due to issues that Matheiulh wants me to keep confidential. Let’s just say both Dark_Alex and Matheiulh aren’t too happy with the state of the site at this point in time.

So once again you get the raw details straight from the source and not from biased sites out to make a buck, start rumors and spread misinformation to fill their own pockets. Don’t you just love “the scene”.

Here is a follow up by mathieulh:

EVERYONE PLEASE BEHAVE.

This is not only about zeus or Maxconsole or even Datel. We wish to only release on dark-alex.org or through network (not even on exophase, lan or anywhere else.) for the time being for our own reasons.

Mostly because we are tired of people making money on our backs, wether it is maxconsole, qj or anyone else. That doesn’t only include news sites but also shops that ILLEGALLY make money by flashing m33 firmwares on psps or even selling pandora batteries/memory sticks sets, some will ask over 50 euros per installs !
Some even have the guts to claim sending a percentage of the money to m33 or c+d when this is not true!

We took that decision not only against maxconsole but every other sites that do make money over our work. Of course most/all of news sites do exist for the purpose of making money and yet, those are needed.

We can always dream of decent sites that make news with no earning whatsoever but considering the tiresome job that it is and how time consumming it is for people to actually look for news and report it on a 24/7 basis, I doubt that we will see such a thing happening any time soon.

Nevertheless we hope to be able to move things and that such a change may happen if we keep having a fair release system between each and every psp related sites (by only releasing on our website or through network, then we do not care of what sites do of the binaries once they got those.)

Another thing we are pretty much fed up of is the “news race” that tend to happen between all sites that try to be the first to news stuffs all the time, and everyone of them try to get news from us almost every minutes despite the facts that we do have lives of our own for the sole purpose of getting ranked up on Alexa.

To be honest I like the maxconsole comunauty which seems more mature than the ones of most other sites, this is what kept and keeps me staying here, the fact that we stop releasing from that place does not mean we wont keep posting in there. I think that most sites got carried away and forgot that comunauties are before all created by the users, for the users.

P.S. I do not think that deleting the threads is a solution, and I do not believe that moderators were closing those on purpose. A forums need to be moderated. As long as we discuss of things peacefully there is no reason for a thread to be deleted, if not then indeed there is. If people start flamming, bitching or cursing all over the forums, then indeed those threads need to be deleted or closed. I personally know most of the moderators responsible for the psp section on the maxconsole forums, and I pretty much doubt that any of them would have deleted threads just to prevent anyone from express themselves or share their opinion (wether good or bad) about this forum.

Also a personal message to Brakken: We (the M33 team or even the Prometheus group) never worked for divineo even once, and even if we did, how would this be ANY of your business ? I have yet to see your so called “proofs” about us working for divineo (which do not exist since we never done such a thing) Keep in mind that we were not forced to make free releases available to everyone, we just CHOSE to do so. I can tell you for sure that we would have not if we worked for such company as divineo to begin with. Now please stop making pointless assumptions without proper evidences. Thank you for your understanding.

Have a nice reading.

http://www.brakken.net/comments.php?mid=7ce5b7ac18ec5ce75476d7744

TangledBugs is a remake of the good old Untangle game!

Changes:

– Reduced ram usage, faster loading
– Reduced CPU usage, should work better for most people and drain less battery…
– Fixed a small saves bug

Thanks to Mollusk himself for the news!

http://www.xflib.net/index.php?topic=29.0

Recovery Translator v.4 is an application that will allow you to change the language of the recovery menu on firmware 3.71 M33. The application is made to work on PSP Fat or Slim. Remember that this software manipulates files in the flash, so, use with caution & under your responsibility.

http://forums.qj.net/f-psp-development-forum-11/t-recovery-translator-v4-release-132364.html

FLASHX is a LUA program made for the PSP. It can view files from many place on the PSP. E.G: FLASH0 FLASH1 and MS0.

If you do not know what these are, google it up. In particular it’s just a basic file viewer, which uses: delete, copy, paste and more. Also has USB MODE TO MS0:/ only!

Leave feedback here: http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=132355

http://codelockdown.com/flashx/

News from Freeplay!

Read on:

Sony didn’t want us going back to firmware 3.60, I guess… so I made my own installer. Using an encrypted, un-sigchecked dump of firmware 3.60, the 3.60 IPL, and a few modules from the 3.52 updater, you can now install 3.60 again on slim PSPs.

The readme is intentionally hard to understand (written for experts) because of the risks posed in flashing your entire firmware this way. There are no safety checks in place or anything.

On the plus side, it will only run from a Pandora memory stick setup, so if you do manage to mess things up and brick your PSP, you can always get things back to normal.

http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=132378