Playstation 2 News
RockBot v0.1 (RC 1) (PS2 Game)

RockBot is supposed to become a multi-platform action game and borrows elements from Capcom’s Megaman.

http://rockbot.upperland.net/

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ScummVM v1.2.1 (PS2 misc)

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.

General release notes:

The last ScummVM release in this year just has been released. This is a maintenance release and is aimed to fix several important bugs since 1.2.0. Particularly we added Hungarian and Brazilian translations of the GUI, and made bugfixes to the Cruise, Groovie and Lure engines.

Changes:

1.2.1 (2010-12-19)

General
– Add Hungarian translation.
– Add Brazilian Portuguese translation.

Cruise:
– Fixed a problem with Raoul appearing when examining the Book

Groovie:
– Fixed a regression that made the Russian version of T7G crash.

Lure:
– Fixed several NPC movement bugs

http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/downloads/

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ScummVM v1.2.0 (PS2 misc)

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.

General release notes:

CABAL (Coalesced ‘Adventures beyond Architecture’ League) finally came alive, and now for real. Yes, truly, it took us just 6.5 years, and today we are eagerly announcing that a universal adventure game interpreter, playing SCUMM, AGI, and SCI games has been released.

From now on, it is available on ScummVM’s downloads page (Look for version 1.2.0). You may jump straight there, or stay a bit longer and see what cool new features are included.

As you have probably already realized, this release has support for SCI, and moreover, the list of compatible games goes beyond the original FreeSCI which was merged about 1.5 years ago. We support Conquests of Camelot/the Longbow, Castle/Island of Dr. Brain, Codename: ICEMAN, EcoQuest 1&2, all four Hoyle games, Freddy Pharkas, Jones in the Fast Lane, King’s Quest I-VI, both Laura Bow games, Larry up to 6 (low-res 6 only), Police Quest 1-3, Quest for Glory I-III, Space Quest up to V and a few others. Incredible work by the FreeSCI team and our own SCI engine team!

Early SCI 16-color games can be optionally undithered by ScummVM, making them look much better. To see a comparison between undithered graphics and the original, watch this video produced by one of our SCI engine developers and see for yourself.

Besides SCI, we have added support for yet another Coktel Vision game called Fascination and we have a number of new ports: Android, Dingux, Caanoo and OpenPandora. Unfortunately we had to declare the PalmOS port officially dead.

As usual there are tons of engine-specific bug fixes. Take a look at the release notes if you want to know more. But wait! We would like to tell a little bit about another long-awaited feature new in this release. After all these years we are finally going international, and the ScummVM GUI can be translated into any language (well, almost any). Right now we have Catalan, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian localizations. Besides this there are a lot of smaller improvements like tooltips, radio buttons, improved usability and we support more games running from original media without the need to shuffle the game files.

Enough talking! Now it is time to download ScummVM and start playing!

Changes:

1.2.0 (2010-10-15)

New Games:
– Added support for Fascination.

New Games (Sierra SCI0 – SCI1.1):
– Added support for Castle of Dr. Brain (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Codename: ICEMAN.
– Added support for Conquests of Camelot.
– Added support for Conquests of the Longbow (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus.
– Added support for EcoQuest 2: Lost Secret of the Rainforest.
– Added support for Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist.
– Added support for Hoyle’s Book of Games 1.
– Added support for Hoyle’s Book of Games 2.
– Added support for Hoyle’s Book of Games 3 (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Hoyle Classic Card Games.
– Added support for Jones in the Fast Lane.
– Added support for King’s Quest I (SCI remake).
– Added support for King’s Quest IV (SCI version).
– Added support for King’s Quest V (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for King’s Quest VI (low and hi res).
– Added support for Laura Bow: The Colonel’s Bequest.
– Added support for Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon Ra.
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 1 (SCI remake) (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 2.
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 3.
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 5 (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Leisure Suit Larry 6 (low res).
– Added support for Mixed-up Fairy Tales.
– Added support for Mixed-up Mother Goose.
– Added support for Pepper’s Adventures in Time.
– Added support for Police Quest I (SCI remake).
– Added support for Police Quest II.
– Added support for Police Quest III (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Quest for Glory I/Hero’s Quest.
– Added support for Quest for Glory I VGA remake.
– Added support for Quest for Glory II.
– Added support for Quest for Glory III.
– Added support for Slater & Charlie go camping.
– Added support for Space Quest I (SCI remake) (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Space Quest III.
– Added support for Space Quest IV (EGA and VGA).
– Added support for Space Quest V.
– Added support for The Island of Dr. Brain.

New Ports:
– Added Android port.
– Added Dingux port.
– Added Caanoo port (based on the GP2XWiz port).
– Added OpenPandora port.

General:
– Removed the outdated PalmOS port.
– Switched to the “fast” DOSBox OPL emulator.
– Fixed a crash in the rjp1 player code affecting the FOTAQ Amiga version.
– Added support for more original media layouts.
– Added support for GUI localization.
– Improved GUI by adding tooltips and radiobuttons.
– Improved GUI usability by hiding more irrelevant options not supported by specific games.

AGI:
– Fixed number of GFX glitches.
– Made PIC drawing code picture perfect.
– Added support of MIDI devices.
– Added support for accurate Tandy sound emulation. Switched to it as default.

Broken Sword 2
– Fixed missing speech in some cutscenes.
– Fixed a memory leak that would eventually cause the game to hang. (#2976008 – BS2: Game lockup in British Museum)

Drascula:
– Fixed number of GFX glitches.
– Made many cutscenes smoother.
– Changed behavior of items menu. Now it shows up on mouse up.

Groovie:
– Added support for the Macintosh version of The 7th Guest.
– Added support for custom MT-32 instruments.

KYRA:
– Fixed some minor graphical glitches.
– Implemented formerly missing recreation of some in game items.
– Added support for playing Kyrandia 3 with the original CD file layout.

LURE:
– Fixed bug where Goewin could get stuck in the Weregate
– Fixed issue with Ratpouch repeatedly moving between two rooms
– Fix for Goewin losing her schedule after Were-cave
– Fix for player getting stuck in sewer exit room

Parallaction:
– Made part one of The Big Red Adventure completable.

SAGA:
– Fixed graphics glitches in several scenes.

SCUMM:
– Several improvements in Maniac Mansion NES.

PSP port:
– New backend design: fixed minor graphical issues and enabled 16-bit support.
– Enabled playback of MP3 files using the Media Engine. This means that the port is optimized for MP3 files (as opposed to OGG).
– Many optimizations. Everything should run faster.

Wii port:
– Added support for USB2 mass storage devices (requires The Homebrew Channel >= v1.0.8 with IOS58).

GameCube port:
– Added support for DVDs with the ISO9660 file system.

GP2X port:
– Added support for dynamic engine plugins (experimental).
– Reworked control system and better touchscreen support.

GP2XWiz/Caanoo port:
– Improved downscale code to minimise ‘tearing’ corruption.
– Reworked control system and better touchscreen support.
– Renamed backend from GP2XWIZ to GPH to better reflect the supported devices.

http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/

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RockBot v0.1 (Beta 7) (PS2 Game)

RockBot is supposed to become a multi-platform action game and borrows elements from Capcom’s Megaman.

Changes:

Fully playable (if you do not hit a bug) 8 stages and final boss.
Music for all stages and bosses.
More sound effects such as shot reflection.
Player death – after dead first time, you become half-invulnerable; makes easier for testing, will be removed on next version.
Sprites for all bosses.
Better artificial inteligence for NPCs and bosses.
Weapons for all bosses – for testing, you do not need to defeat the boss to try it.
Scaled window for Windows and Linux, as 320×200 is very small in a computer monitor.
Better menu – can leave pressing attack button now.
Water terrain and fixes on stairs and colision.
Port for Dingoo (Dingux).

http://rockbot.upperland.net/?p=500&lang=en

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Unofficial LaunchELF v4.42 (PS2 Application)

EP has released a new version of his Unofficial version of LaunchELF. uLaunchELF is a front end or operating system or sorts for the Sony Playstation 2 that allows you to browse and boot homebrew from various sources including memory cards, usb devices, hard drives and the built in dvd-rom drive.

Changes:

-Added kernel patcher and kernel patch as designed by jimmikaelkael to make v0 japanese consoles compatible with newer models in use of homebrews. This cures v0 problems for many other applications too (including ESR) as the kernel remains patched for the duration of a session (until next hard reset/power on). This patching is compatible with that to be added into new versions of “Open PS2 Loader” too, and includes conflict protection when multiple patchers are used. This change has no effect at all on newer consoles, but was required to make it possible to keep the homebrew MC modules in future versions of uLE, and still retain uLE compatibility to all PS2 models.

http://psx-scene.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37242

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RockBot v0.1 (Beta 6) (PS2 Game)

RockBot is supposed to become a multi-platform action game and borrows elements from Capcom’s Megaman.

Releases notes:

It is with pride, that we announce the beta 6 version. The new features are too many to be listed here, but we basically have now a complete stage with boss (still non-movable once we did not finished implementing the artificial inteligence for it), got weapon screens, sounds, music and pretty decent phisics.

We created versions for Ubuntu 10.04 (the editor requires Qt 4.7.0), Linux (TGZ), Windows (finally with editor package), Playstation 2 and Nintendo DS.

http://rockbot.upperland.net/?p=389&lang=en

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Unofficial LaunchELF v4.41 (PS2 Application)

EP has released a new version of his Unofficial version of LaunchELF. uLaunchELF is a front end or operating system or sorts for the Sony Playstation 2 that allows you to browse and boot homebrew from various sources including memory cards, usb devices, hard drives and the built in dvd-rom drive.

Changes:

-Updated ps2sdk and existing source files to SVN rev 1682.
-Fixed some compiler warnings with the vmcfs driver do to changes in the latest ps2sdk revison.
-Removed the modified screen update delay methods, restoring previous functionality.

http://psx-scene.com/forums/showthread.php?t=37242

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ScummVM v1.1.1 (PS2 misc)

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.

Release notes:

Only four weeks since our last release and already ScummVM 1.1.1 is available on our downloads page.

This release concentrates primarily on fixing bugs, bugs, and even more bugs. As such, we strongly recommend all and every ScummVM user to update to this latest and greatest version. In particular, just as promised we fixed the issues affecting Nippon Safes Inc and Pajama Sam 1 in 1.1.0.

Changes:

1.1.1 (2010-05-02)
New Ports:
– Added Nintendo 64 Port. (Actually added in 1.1.0, but forgot to mention it. oops)

General:
– Fixed several minor bugs here and there.

Drascula:
– Fixed regression that caused some texts to always be in English, even when using another language. (#2970211 – DRASCULA: missing german translation)

KYRA:
– Fixed a bug which caused the DOS versions to crash before the credits when AdLib music is selected.

LURE:
– Fixed several memory leaks.
– Corrected problems in the handling of followers when blocked from performing actions by closed doors between rooms.
– Solved issues with Goewin not always correctly following the player out of the caves

Tinsel:
– Fix video playback regression in Discworld 2.

Parallaction:
– Fix several crashes and other regressions in Nippon Safes, including bugs 2969211, 2969232, 2969234, 2969257, 2970141.

Wii/GameCube port: (Also forgot to mention in 1.1.0)
– Added support for games using 16bit graphics.
– Complete GFX overhaul (new video modes, better performance, picture smoothing, fine grained overscan settings).
– Added a new options dialog for Wii/Gamecube specific settings.
– Fixed a GFX glitch on savegame thumbnails.
– Added support for SMB mountpoints (Samba/Windows shares).
– Added an on-screen console, which is shown when ScummVM exits abnormally.
– Fixed a couple of crashes when using Ogg/Vorbis encoded sound files. See the bundled READMII.txt file for more information.

PSP port: (Also forgot to mention in 1.1.0)
– Added plugin support which allows the PSP Phat to run every game.
– Added a new virtual keyboard optimized for rapid D-Pad input.

http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/

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Open USB Loader Project v0.7 (PS2 Application)

Open PS2 Loader is a 100% Open source game loader compatible with USB Advance/Extreme game format. It’s more compatible and it should work without PS2Load or change DNASXXX.IMG tricks.

Open PS2 Loader also is developed continuously and anyone can contribute improvements to the project.

The main objective is to support both the PS2 and the PS3 with backward compatibility.

IMPORTANT:
* USB games must be unfragmented. If not, they might not work.
* The compatibility modes have changed

http://psx-scene.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62141

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RockBot v0.1 (Beta 5) (PS2 Game)

RockBot is supposed to become a multi-platform “Mega Man” style action game.

Changes:

* added gravity, so jump fells much better now
* added an options menu
* improved PS2 sound effects and speed
* better colision detection

http://rockbot.upperland.net/?p=238&lang=en

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