Targ is a one or two player shooter game released by Exidy in 1980. Your town is invaded by Targ riders, you must manouvre the heroic vehicle Whummel to destroy them. From time to time, a Spectar comes into screen, and can be destroyed for extra bonus.

Action takes place into a 9×9 grid, “Crystal City”, where the player’s vehicle must avoid and chase down 10 enemy wedge-shaped vehicles. When all enemies are destroyed, you are awarded an extra bonus and can access the following level. Two players can alternate in the game. You use a 4 way joystick to control the Whummel, and a pushbutton to fire at enemies. Progressing in the gameplay causes the Targs to become faster and smarter, for a fast and furious gameplay.

A small trivia on the game and characters name: apparently, Targ stands for Target, Spectar stands for Special Target.

While in that period many western companies licensed games from japanese developers (Exidy itself licensed Nintendo’s Sheriff as Bandido) targ is one of the few western games that made it in the opposite way, being licensed by Sega for japanese distribution.

This game has a sequel, always released in 1980, Spectar.

Thanks to the kind generosity of H.R. Kaufmann, president of Xidy, the original ROM images for Targ have been made available for free, non-commercial use.

http://mamedev.org/roms/targ/

ZodTTD, coder of PSX4iPhone and gbSPhone is working on a new project.

Here is what he wrote:

A completely new project from ZodTTD is on it’s way to an iPhone and iPod Touch near you! What is it? It’s currently a mystery. 😉

But I will say it will be fun to play, and will be ready for the Beta Testers Club this week if all goes well. This is all happening alongside large updates to psx4iphone. Very exciting news to come!

http://zodttd.com/wp/

Sqdef is a tower defense game. The goal is to prevent enemies from getting from one side of the map to the other, by placing towers along their way.

Changes:

-> improved game balance (including dynamic pricing for the more special items)
-> new graphics
-> special towers that boost the damage of every tower in range
-> fast-forward speed increased from 3x to 5x
-> bonus 60-wave mode after winning all three medals on a map
-> detailed score break-down at the end of every game
-> on-GP2X map editor, with everything you need to make new levels!
-> easily manageable map packs
-> you can download more map packs from the Sqdef site, as well as make your own and share them with us!
-> clear and concise readme.txt that explains everything there is to know about Sqdef

http://artraid.com/alex/

Converter is a units converter for iPhone.

Changes:

05 Jan: (0.14 release)
Fixed Celsius<->Kelvin, kg<->pound conversions
Moved Accuracy slider under the actual numbers (I thought it is a better place…)
Now when you change a measurement, the application will automatically bring you From and To screens (to save redundant clicks)
Added a few units to existing measures, and two new measurements: Power and Torque

http://code.google.com/p/iphone-converter/

We have found this interesting report from Ste, about a malicious repo for the iPhone. The issues are already solved, but by posting these lines here, we want to open your eyes, that even the iPhone can be affected by kiddies and so called hackers.

Read on:

The repository “Silver Repo”, with a maintainer of “Mikey”, a category of “Cool” and a URL of “jmwiki.com/repo” is malicious. Remove this Source from Installer as fast as you can.

Note: the problem app was originally found by an IRC user named “DeathHobbit”. Another IRC user, named “Francis”, figured out what Source that app came from and the original warning to the public was posted on the “ModMyiFone” forums. My thanks to all involved!

He has several malicious apps:

One is called “Important UPDATE”, with a description of “An important system update.”. It’s not clear, from looking at the plist file, if it will show up in the “System” category or the “UPDATES” category.

Another is called “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep”, with a description of “An important system update. Install this before updating to the new 1.1.3 firmware.” As with the other, it’s not clear, from looking at the plist file, if it will show up in the “System” category or the “UPDATES” category.

Both of these packages are BOGUS. What they do is download the zip file of Erica’s Utilities, version 0.53, from one of *my* mirrors. It then installs it. If you uninstall his package, it will uninstall the files it installed. What this means is that if you had Erica’s Utilities installed already, it will overwrite them, during installation and uninstall them during uninstallation, but Installer will think the Erica’s Utilites are still installed – but it’s files will have been ripped out from under it. Any other app that uses any of the files in her package will break too. If you didn’t have Erica’s Utilites installed, then installing and removing either of these packages will do no harm.

He has a third package called “Jo Mama”, with a description of “Potatoes are burning to the ground”, in the “JMCO Apps” category, that installs/uninstalls an old version of my OpenSSH app. This will conflict with any other ssh app you have installed. The zip file, in this case, comes from Nullriver’s site, where they once briefly hosted it for me.

The plist files for all three of these apps are lifted directly from me, with the name, description and category changed.

I’ve looked up the owner of the domain and called and left a message for him.

More, as I get it.

UPDATE: New information suggests this might be the prank of an 11 year old boy, heh.

UPDATE: Yes, it was a kid, I’ve spoken to his dad and the site will be coming down. End of story.

-ste

http://blog.psmxy.org/2008/01/05/warning-malicious-repo/

This program functions similar to the typical guitar tuners you buy in stores, and anyone familiar with these shouldn’t need to read these instructions. Basically, you play a single string on the guitar, and the program listens to the note and tells you if the note is sharp, flat, or just right.

Funiculus can only be run on an iPhone (and not an iPod Touch) because the iTouch lacks an internal microphone.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/funiculus/

Falafel has released a game called Grid Soccer.

Here is Falafel’s description:

hello everyone!

Well this is my first homebrew game 🙂

It’s a 2 player game you can play during boring lectures ^_^
the objective is to get to the goal on either side of the field (the one with the moving cube in your colour is the one you have to hit)
and if you hit a point where you hit another line you “bounce” and you can put down an extra line.
if the screen goes red, red player wins.
green is the same but (guess what?) green player wins :p
and blue means your stuck and noone wins (or whatever you want to happen anyway)
press B to restart

Have fun!

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

http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14795

“Moose At Play” updated their game Laser Hockey.

Changes:

We have a nice looking title screen with a single button for Practice which just launches the same old game with no way out.
Added a real player two paddle, it’s blue.

http://moose-at-play.blogspot.com/

roe-ur-boat has released an update to his game “Basket Catch”.

Changes:

0.91
– Small bug that didn’t reset the score after a game over

Thanks to http://www.dcemu.co.uk for the news.

http://forums.exophase.com/showthread.php?t=5119

PPaPP (Position Precise au Pixel Pres) shows you exact pixel positions on your Nintendo DS by touching the desired point with a touchpen.

http://virtuapeanuts.dev-fr.org/p3806/2008-01-06-ppapp-v0-1.html