Playstation Portable News
POWDER is a roguelike game, which is not a port of an existing roguelike. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. Author of this piece of software is Jeff Lait, the PS3 port comes from Bill Blake.
Changes:
Two new exciting changes in this release. First we have a new spell: Animate Forest, for those who were wondering what the point of the Grow Forest spell was. Second we have the run mode which lets you auto-follow corridors, hopefully cutting your keystrokes substantially.
– Daemon now has the a in the summon daemon spell description. (FEG)
– If a daemon decides not to be summoned, an a is put in the daemon’s name.
– PSP character dumps should now say PSP Version rather than Linux version. (Dave Hong)
– If you were in the habit of quitting without saving, the random number seed would keep being the same between games, resulting in very similar games. For those keeping track, yes, this was caused by my naive attempts to make things *more* random. (Erik Spigel)
– If you manually climb a ladder while autoprompt is enabled you no longer are immediately prompted to climb back up the ladder when you get to the other side.
– New Run command, ‘r’ for SDL users, which will cause you to run in that direction until something interesting happens. You will turn corners if there is only one way to do so. You can interrupt by hitting a key / pressing a button, useful if you find yourself running a closed loop. As the name implies, this is not meant to be some super safe way to explore the map. (PBP)
– Vi keys now support the Ctrl modifier to turn them into safe walk (David Damerell, Cuboidz)
– New spell: Animate Forest (Adam Boyd)
– When level teleporting via Wishing, do not start on same square as a monster.
– Diminishing returns on piety gains when gods already like you.
– List of items in character dump should now match order of list in inventory. (Meddyan, Cuboidz)
– Soul Suck spell no longer grants caster spells or skills that are present only due to items such as staves. (Eilu)
– Creatures that die underground should no longer have their corpse and items float to the surface. (Meddyan)
– Properly assign guilt to party responsibly for filling holes with boulders. (Meddyan)
– Properly credit kills for creatures that die from suffocation from a boulder you place. (Meddyan)
– The support programs now include cstring.h so should compile with the latest gcc. (Joe B)
– Fixed the #define guard in stdafx.h (Malte Helmert)
http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release
Chilly Willy, one of the guys who keeps up with developing Daedalus for PSP has come up with work in progress news yesterday. Read on…
Quote from Chilly Willy:
Stupidly huge update committed to svn. 😀
Updated:
– Added lookup table to the fragment cache lookup function. The original code only checked if the address to be looked up was the same as the last one to be looked up. Otherwise it just went through the entire list of fragments looking for the address. I added a 256 entry table using a hash on the address to help speed this up. Now if Howard can profile this for me, we can see if it was a waste or not.
– Cleaned up the prefs a little since the ROM prefs in particular had the descriptions overlapping the element list. I also changed the audio setting so that you can select synchronous or asynchronous processing of the audio. Synchronous is the old method where everything is done by the main CPU. There may be times when that is better, so now you can select it. So the three audio selections are Disabled, Asynchronous, and Synchronous.
– Big update to the asynchronous audio. Howard and I had been doing a semi-polled method of waiting for the MediaEngine before terminating the RSP task. I made the CPU AddEvent thread-safe so that instead we can just do a single AddEvent when the ME is done. This seems to be better. There are still some roms that don’t work (well or at all) with asynchronous audio, hence the ability above to switch to sync audio.
One note: Switching ROMs is apparently not quite clean yet. I’ve noticed a few ROMs where you have to quit the emulator and start fresh or the ROM won’t work (properly or at all depending on the ROM). The two I’ve noted by name are Wave Race 64 and Zelda:OOT.
Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk once again for the news.
http://daedalusx64.com/index.php?topic=249.0
Akop Karapetyan has been informed by Carl Murray (author of Fuse) of a new update. Akop plans to update Fuse PSP soon, so all PSP users can enjoy new features such as upd765 FDC emulation.
Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk for the news hint.
http://0xff.akop.org/2008/11/24/fuse-emulator-010-rc-released/
Eskema released “War and Warriors” for PlayStation Portable.
Quote:
Well well, it’s me again, (voice saying: !!nooooooooooo!!) yes, you can run but you can’t hide from my crappy homebrews well, i’m very proud of this little one, well maybe not very proud….. ok ok this is another boring homebzzZZZzzz
This is and old classic style, you are a messenger, and your objective it’s simple, get the packets from one point to it’s destination, of course the destination has a little time to wait, if you can’t get it at time, gameover hehehe.
http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=146021
Blabberbot by Art is an experimental text to speech program for plain text files based on the Flite (Festival lite) speech engine PSP port provided by Mypspdev.
Changes:
Blabberbot V2 runs the speech engine in it’s own thread, so control is now very responsive. There are buttons assigned to pause, and quit the current text file, and text chunks are much smaller as originally intended.
http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=146025
UltimatePSPTube is a tool to let you watch Youtube videos on your PSP.
http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=146004
Nanodesktop is a library for the development of simple applications under embedded platforms, as the Sony Playstation Portable (TM).
The Nanodesktop library is totally written in C for maximum performance. If you have a platform where you cannot run traditional windows environments, as X-Window (TM), you can try Nanodesktop library.
Release notes:
Until now, the installation of Nanodesktop has been a difficult thing.
We’re working hardly on this aspect of our SDK, and we’re also
exploring new possibilities to installation.
As you know, from version 0.3.5 ONLYDEV0001 Nanodesktop has added the
support for Linux (before it used only Windows + Cygwin).
So, we’ve created a virtual machine for VirtualBox, that contains the entire
environment. All is ready to work.
http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=146008
dan369 released his first project, a 2D side-scrolling platformer written in Lua.
Features:
– Destroyable blocks
– Checkpoint System (Needs a little refining)
– Scrolling
– Jumping blocks
– Moving Platforms (Needs a little refining)
– Dying.
– End level sequence (has a bug )
– Full Collision
– Enemies (at a early stage, currently only one )
http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=146006
Blabberbot by Art is an experimental text to speech program for plain text files based on the Flite (Festival lite) speech engine PSP port provided by Mypspdev.
http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=145999
PMP VLC Player is a homebrew which plays streaming media with VLC Player without TV Card.
Changes:
– Changed Select/Enter Button to CROSS for reducing mistakes…
– Removed the background cube animation…
– Fixed the bug which causes in NetDialog when you select your AP.
http://forums.qj.net/showthread.php?t=145975