News

JyCet comes up with an improved version of Drill2x Xtreme, which itself is an enhanced version from Drill2x (Final).

Changes:

-fix F200 compatibility by adding samplerate option in drill.ini
SAMPLERATE F100 F200
11025 YES YES
22100 YES NO
44100 (default) YES YES
-chg cpu speed from 60MHz to 66MHz by default du to samplerate increasing
but F100 owners can reduce samplerate to 22100 and cpu to 60MHz by drill.ini editing 😉

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Brakken, webmaster of http://www.tehskeen.com started a “Blogcast” – talking how he came into the modification and homebrew scene along with interesting information about tehskeen itself.

Release notes:

I’ve just uploaded my first “BlogCast” which is sorta like a “Podcast”, but better. Well, whoever came up with the name “Podcast” was an idiot because it’s just a damned audio file with some idiots rambling on about his life, kids, job or pets. Well, in this case it’s me rambling on about my life, how I entered the “scene”, started TehSkeen and founded brakken.net. Of course it’s me so there’s a lot of shit talking ass cracking to go around.

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ant512 was about to port Woopsi to the GP2x, but then abadoned it. Woopsi is a Nintendo DS GUI library for rapidly creating user interfaces for homebrew software. Modelled after the AmigaOS windowing system.

Read on:

Woopsi2x Abandoned
January 25th, 2008
Tinkering with and researching the GP2x’s touch screen reveals some answers to the questions posed last time around.

First off, my GP2x isn’t duff. There’s another guy here who has discovered the same problem I have – the only readily-available example of using the touch screen on the GP2x jitters like crazy.

I’ve tried swapping batteries, which often causes problems with the console, to no effect.

Testing the read() function reveals that the touchscreen will produce new values every time it is interrogated. There’s no need to wait for a VBL before it will produce new values. This means that my initial jitter-removal routine based on mean averages was actually doing something. I’ve increased the sample count from 5 to 40, which has improved things a lot, but it’s still nowhere near perfect.

I realised that I’ve got no idea what the “open(”dev/touchscreen/wm97xx”)” command does. Does it access the raw hardware, or does it just open a driver? Not having done any Linux kernel hacking I couldn’t say. I’ve looked through the driver sourcecode and it appears to have some jitter correction built-in. It definitely compensates for some of the quirks of the hardware. If the open() command works with the driver, there’s something seriously wrong if I’m still getting wildly different values back each time I poll the screen. If I’m working with the hardware, I’ll have to re-implement the driver for the 2x in order to get any decent values from the it.

Some digging around in the code for the 2x’s port of ScummVM suggests that the author built a time delay into its touch screen routines to cater for the jitter. At least that way you’re guaranteed to get steady values for the duration of the delay. Works fine for Scumm, as it doesn’t really require fine control. No good for Woopsi – any jitter is immediately obvious. One clever idea the author had was to use the SDL_WarpMouse() command to move SDL’s cursor to match the GP2x’s stylus position. This triggers an SDL_MOUSEMOVE event, which can then be interpreted in a standard SDL event parser block without any custom code. Neat.

The official SDK has no documentation. Nothing. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get the sourcecode, either (which is rapidly becoming my favourite way to understand a program – don’t tell me how it works, just show me the code).

Coupled with the fact that the GP2x has been abandoned by the majority of coders in favour of the forthcoming “Pandora” system (which looks like a weird cross between a 48K Spectrum, a dual-shock PS1 pad, a DS and an N-Gage), I think creating a GP2x port would be a painful waste of time. Shame, because the new d-pad does actually make it quite a good system.

Here’s the touchscreen class I came up with (credit to the author of the original “touchscreen_sample.zip” file, who neglected to include his details in the zip):

GP2xTouchScreen

I’ve switched it from using Woopsi-style “u8?, “u16?, etc types to using SDL-style “uint8_t” types. I haven’t compiled it since then, but it should be OK. Consider the archive public domain.

EDIT:

Increasing the number of samples to 100 further increases the accuracy, but has a noticeable impact on speed. It doesn’t solve the problem of the touch screen occasionally producing totally incorrect values. Having noticed that the amount of pressure needed to trigger a response isn’t even vaguely uniform across the surface of the touch screen, I’m growing more and more certain that GamePark skimped on the touch screen and used components that fell off the back of a lorry.

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Open Funk Sores is a Playstation Portable musicdisk. Music is powered by the famous swedish chipmusician Goto80!

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Achim posted a screenshot of the new ingame minigame, where you need to find pairs. A release it not out yet.

There are also more information about the minigame itself now. You start with 999 seconds, every time you mismatch a pair, the time will be reduced by 100 seconds. It’s for sure necessary to have a good concentration.

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News from the Giana’s Return front:

We had the honor to catch our musician today and he is ready to make Sound FX for the game. First results should be out in 2-4 weeks. As he has to write his master degree work, he will be busy for the next two months – after that, he can fully concentrate on finalizing music, soundfx and jingles!

Good luck, operator!

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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.

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Due to request NEO GEO CD is now allowed. As we don’t have the raw files of the banner anymore, we will not change the banner but go ahead if you love Neo Geo CD coding!

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kingromain released a space shooter written in Lua around one week ago. Grab it from it’s release thread.

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Quick Flasher is a simple application for Fat an Slims PSPs with custom firmware 3.71m33 and 3.80m33. This application gives you the possibility of keeping 6 themes in your memory stick and flash them wherever you want simply and confortably. Remember that this software touches files in flash0.

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