News

Here is a new release from Fort Apocalypse:

You may have played a guitar, but have you ever played the Atar?

The Atarinstrument is currently fairly basic, but supports 2 instrumentalists (2 joysticks). Have fun!

I’m thinking I’ll probably change the button to be a sharp instead of a flat in the next version and add some more instruments. One instrument I really want to add is the drum kit (down=bass, up=snare, button=hi-hat). The biggest question is how to make the choosing of the instrument intuitive, whether layered instruments should be allowed (via setting sound and doing drawscreen more than once per main loop). I’m thinking of just showing the letters “ATAR” on the screen while you play that are maybe different colors based on the instrument you are playing. Let me know what you think.

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ZodTTD, porter of Exophase’s Gameboy Advance emulator to the iPhone, posted some interesting information on his page.

Read on:

Work has begun on two projects involving emulating Playstation 1 (PS1) games on the iPhone, iTouch, and GP2X. I am involved with both projects, and will outline both.

psx4all – This project has a lot of time and work placed into it. It is already a featured emulator within the GP2X community. The GP2X is a great handheld for homebrew gaming, and I proudly display the gp2x-store banner ad above. psx4all is already ready to go, and I have it compiled for the iPhone already. This is the quickest way to get Playstation on the iPhone for me. It’s a complete emulator with sound, compressed ISO support, fairly fast, memory card support, and save states.

yapse4all – This project is currently a “work in progress”. It has a lot of potential. It’s code is clean and efficient, and written completely from the ground up for handhelds and dynamic recompilation. This project will take longer to complete than psx4all, but will have better performance in the long run. I am looking forward to help push yapse4all forward.

So in short, psx4all can bring PS1 emulation to the iPhone/iTouch while yapse4all is being developed alongside. 🙂

A lot of code in psx4all needs to be ripped out and redone, and I am able to produce a much nicer dynamic recompiler over my current one for this emulator to speed up performance. Other psx4all platforms will benefit from this and yapse as well. 🙂

Hold on tight, playstation emulation is on its way.

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SMSD is a simple application for iPhone to delete and forward individual SMS.

Changes:

New Feature: Sending of contact info is possible now.
New Feature: Support for templates. This feature can also be used to create group of people.
Fix: Progress bar used to get stuck in some conditions.
Fix: Some people reported message send failures.
Fix: Long SMS in the list were truncated in some cases.
Fix: Some Sent messages were not saved in MobileSMS.

This article is over 2 years old — the linked page may have changed, moved, or been taken over since then.

PSPTI99 is a TI-99/4 emulator for PSP.

Changes:

– Add save state feature !
– Display and save thumbnail images for each save state
– Disable speech system (make the emulator to freeze)
– Bug fix in the render function (dark screen)

This article is over 2 years old — the linked page may have changed, moved, or been taken over since then.

PSPCAP32 is an Amstrad CPC emulator for PSP.

Changes:

– Option to display in green (monochrome)
– Option to scroll up or down the screen (when the screen is not properly centered)
– Analog pad can now be used in the file requester to move faster through the disk/snapshot lists
– Check CPM disk automatically (and run |CPM instead of RUN”)
– Bug fix in the disk explorer menu (when the number of files on disk was too high)
– IR keyboard works now also in the keyboard settings menu.
– Bug fix in the render function, sometimes the screen became dark (it should not happen anymore).

This article is over 2 years old — the linked page may have changed, moved, or been taken over since then.

sephiroth ff7 has updated his 3D breakout game with a simple 2D mode. This is the only change for this release.

This article is over 2 years old — the linked page may have changed, moved, or been taken over since then.

Protect-Me is a C application which allows you to protect your PSP with a password.

To install it, run the PBP inclued with your PSP (to set the password) and then put the prx (password.prx) in ms:0/seplugins and activate it via the recovery menu… And now it will ask you a password at each XMB boot. You can change the password with launching the EBOOT.PBP which you ran to install the pass…

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Woopsi is a BSD-licenced windowing system for the Nintendo DS, written in C++. The aim of the project is to create a simple windowing system that programmers can use for their applications, decreasing the tedious amount of GUI code that people have to write.

The system itself is loosely based on the Commodore Amiga’s “Intuition” windowing system. Everything in the system is treated as a “gadget” (in the same way that Windows treats everything as a sub-class of a window), everything takes place within a “screen” environment, and the look-and-feel of the system intentionally resembles the old Amiga system.

The windowing system is *not* intended to be a complete desktop environment. It is *not* going to be a DS version of GNOME, KDE or Windows Explorer. It will simply provide a system for rapidly building window and gadget-based interfaces.

Changes:

– Fixes:
– Tidied up a lot of the code.
– Gadget deletion queue now handled solely in the VBL events.
– Optimised TextWriter by preventing it from drawing empty glyphs.
– Changed TextWriter into a static class.
– Optimised TextViewer so that it uses much less memory.
– Text font and glyph font now sent around hierarchy instead of each gadget creating their own font.
– Improved Font class.
– Removed 8-bit code from Bitmap class.
– General refactoring and code tidying.
– Made EventHandler methods virtual instead of pure virtual.
– Split gadget events into “raiseXEvent()” and “x()” functions.
– Clicking a gadget automatically notifies its parent that it is the new clicked gadget.
– Moved dirty child redraw function into gadget class.
– Added horizontal clipping to rect splitting functions.
– Fixed SuperBitmap border.
– Relevant gadget methods are now virtual for subclassing.
– Removed all unnecessary all_gfx includes.

– New features:
– Added non-draggable screens and windows.
– Added show/hide gadget functionality.
– Added ability to hide a window instead of closing it when the close button is clicked.
– Added closed/hidden/shown events.
– Added monochrome output to Font class and definable text colour.
– Added drawText() function to SuperBitmap class.
– Added window depth button.
– Added enable/disable gadget.
– Started work on alert requester.
– Moved text data manipulation out of TextViewer into a separate class.
– Added Gadget::moveTo method.
– Added Gadget::resize method.
– Added resize event.
– Added move event.
– Added value change event.
– Added window resizing (API only).
– Added radio buttons.
– Added radio button groups.
– Added “clicked” glyphs for screen and window depth buttons.
– Most gadget action methods (click(), moveTo(), etc) return bools to indicate success or failure.
– Added enabled/disabled events.
– Added checkboxes.
– Added NDS screen flipping and support for top NDS screen.
– Added screen flipping gadget.
– Updated screens to swap to front when clicked.
– Added a variety of gadget depth manipulation functions.

Thanks to http://www.dev-fr.org for the news.

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ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

Some of the adventures ScummVM supports include Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution’s Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; Wyrmkeep’s Inherit the Earth; Coktel Vision’s Gobliiins; Westwood Studios’ The Legend of Kyrandia and games based on LucasArts’ SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system such as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more. You can find a thorough list with details on which games are supported and how well on the compatibility page. ScummVM is continually improving, so check back often.

Changes:

* The “leftover” screenspace due to aspect ratio correction will now be 50/50 on each side of the screen (centering the image).
* Click-and-drag mouse mode now works for the right mouse button as well. Pressing down a second finger will now 1) release the left mouse button, then 2) click the right mouse button until you lift your finger. Means COMI inventory handling, and whatever games need mouse-dragging with right mouse button held down, should work better.

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Jayenkai has updated his retrogame collection for Nintendo DS. It now features 18 games!

They are:

Centipede : Shoot the centipede. Don’t let it escape.
Snake : Guide the Snake. Grab the numbered blocks.
Invaders : Shoot the aliens. Don’t let them get to the bottom.
Light Cycles : Try to get your opponents to crash.
Asteroids : Destroy the asteroids before they destroy you.
Pacman : Run around and collect things.
Frogger : Leap your way across 2 busy roads.
Pong : Beat your opponent, “one” ball at a time.
Tetris : Build low!
Buzzard Bait : You might like to call this game Joust. I owned a TRS-80, so I call it Buzzard Bait 😉
QBert : Hop around and change all the bricks.
Spike Dodge : Dodge the spikes, pick up the balls.
Extract : Keep Blue away from Red, and grab the Greens.
Missile Command : Tap to fire. Stop the missiles.
DotPop : Tap the squares. The quicker you tap ’em, the more you score.
Lights Out : Tap to invert a + of lights. Try to turn them all off.
5 In a Line : Shuffle the rows and columns around to make a whole line of a single color.
Tune Tap : Repeat the tune.

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