News Archive: February 2002

Thursday, February 28, 2002

Snake3d Posted by CyRUS64 @ 11:49
As posted to the dcdev list, another made-for-dreamcast game, Snake3d has been released in binary-only form by Joshua Wise. He does warn that it is still slightly buggy however. It was put together by him and a few of his friends.

Links:
Local Downloads
Official Site

Also Omar Cornut who worked on some vms games intended for inclusion in the Evil Twin game, has obtained permission to release them as freeware, since the vms games never made it into the final release.
You can download them from his VMS tribute site. Now all we need is for the developers of Black and White and Half-life to show the same sort of attitude ;) (j/k)

DCAsteroids Posted by CyRUS64 @ 11:38
Jimbo, the author of DCFighting, has released a 3d asteroids game for the dreamcast, called DCAsteroids! It is currently at version 0.0.2.

Links:
Local Downloads
Official Site

Sunday, February 24, 2002

DreamSNES v0.9.6 Released Posted by Stalin @ 23:45
Peter Bortas has sent notice that a bug fix release of DreamSNES is now out.

• Fixed bug in saving.
  
• Fixed bug in multi-tap support. (Multiplayer in Bomberman works again.)
  
• Fixed interlace problems on PAL.
  
• Fixed glitches in stereo sound. Both ingame and in the menu.
  
• Support multiple mpeg layer 2 or 3 sound files in the sound directory. Song names and artists will be read from the id3 tag if it exists.
  
• Reenabled the "CPU optimizations" mode, which was accidentally disabled in the last release.
  

Saturday, February 23, 2002

FrotzDC Posted by CyRUS64 @ 13:55
A new version of Frotz-DC has been released. New for this version:
"New color scheme
No more freezing with Sega keyboards
File selector can handle 1024 files and can be controlled with the keyboard
Text in the right column is no longer cut off
Switched to using the TA, so things scroll slightly faster"

Links:
Local Downloads
Official Site

Also Stalin has released version 0.3 of his build script.

Friday, February 22, 2002

Posted by CyRUS64 @ 0:16
Nathan Whitehad has released a Slideshow app. for the dreamcast. Some of the features include zoom, pan, fades in and out, gamma correction, and bilinear filtering. Thanks to YoJ, the author, for informing us on the forums of this release.

Daniel Fairchild has also released a small KGL-based homebrew game called dRexLax, based on the Nehe tutorials code (ported by Hyper_gamer). There is also availalble a Nero/DJ image on his site which includes Dan Potters' Stars demo and David Bucciarelli's Tunnel Demo in the package, using DCGrendel's menu loader for the menu system.

Unrelated: Here's a pic of 3dtest running in Icarus under the new opengl / ta rendering system ;) Stay tuned for more...

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

DreamSNES 0.95 Posted by CyRUS64 @ 13:50
Peter Bortas has posted an errata regarding the recent DreamSnes 0.95 release, so any DreamSNES users may want to check out the DreamSNES site for further details. The most serious issue that crept in is a savegame-damaging bug.

PSe-X Posted by CyRUS64 @ 4:23
It's a shame to see another project end, but crt0 has ended his work on PSe-X, an attempt at playstation emulation on the dreamcast.
To quote,
"Well... PSe-X turned out just the way I expected. As an attempt to determine the feasibilty of homebrew PSX emulation on DC, I've come to the realization that the significant amount of time and resources needed to make the significant updates to the code to make it usable, I just don't have. The emu runs.. to put it bluntly.. like shit. At a mere .3 fps, with the speed bottleneck being in the CPU interpreter, it's not gonna do much good for pleasing end-users."

Anyhow, he has released the sources to what work he has done, which can be downloaded from his site.

Monday, February 18, 2002

Ganksoft Update Posted by ganksoft @ 8:25
Ganksoft Entertainment has posted an update at their site:

Update: We will be releasing a new version of SarienDC soon. Unfortunately we don't have a specific date due to real world pressures, but it will be soon. Among other improvements, the most notable will be save game support.

Request: After Sarien wraps up, we will start work on a brand-new, original game. In order to accomplish our goal, we are looking for artists experienced in both 2D and 3D. If anyone out there has any experience doing high-quality art and animation and would like to be a part of this project, please contact us.

Sunday, February 17, 2002

Tic-Tac-Toe Posted by CyRUS64 @ 23:05
Dirty Sanchez has released a version of Tic-Tac-Toe for the dreamcast... It supports the following game modes: human v human, human v comp, or comp v comp and has 3 in-game difficulty levels. 'It also plays ogg vorbis background music. Download and decompress into your kos/examples/dreamcast directory. Enjoy...'
Thanks to Elped2000 for the news.

Links:
Local Download
Official Site

TODC v2.0 Posted by CyRUS64 @ 22:57
Here's what's new:
-Complete rehaul of the emulator (now based on 'Thom et Teo')
-TO8D emulation (info)
-Dreamcast mouse support

Links:
Local Download
Official Site (in French)

On a side-note DCFighting has now reached version 0.24 aswell =) - lots new as always!

Links: (for DCFighting)
Local Download
Official Site

Saturday, February 16, 2002

KOS cvs Posted by CyRUS64 @ 17:54
For any of you who don't necessarily follow the KOS cvs closely, there have been some fairly significant api changes lately. Here are the latest updates from Dan:

"Just checked in a working Lan Adapter driver for the new KOS net core.
Paul also checked in the PVR fog stuff. Very cool! For the first time
ever, KOS will now have hardware fog support! [On top of the already new PVR api!]
My next stop will be ripping up and replacing the maple system. If I had to make a random guess, I'd say 1.1.7 is going to be the biggest release in quite a while. I figure we might as well get all the interface changes out of the way up front =)"

If you can't wait for version 1.1.7 then check out the latest CVS tree at Sourceforge. If you have problems for whatever reasons then be sure to check out the KallistiOS Mailing list or #boob / #dcdev on Efnet, or of course our forums!

Update: Already Dan has had some nice successes with new maple bus api ;)
Here's a tidbit about how it's essentially working:
"I've got the thing registering for maple DMA and vblank IRQs, and it
receives both successfully. In my small test, I've got it queueing up a DEVINFO request for the VMU in my A1 port in the foreground, and then it lets it go. A few ms later, the VBL IRQ picks it up and sends out a transfer to the maple bus. When that finishes, the maple DMA IRQ happens, and a callback is executed. That callback sets a flag, and then I print out the contents of the received buffer..."

Friday, February 15, 2002

And Now The Moment You've All Been Waiting For... Posted by Stalin @ 2:28
DreamSNES v0.9.5 is out. That's right ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. The best has just gotten better; new to version 0.9.5:

• Rewrote 65c816 CPU core to SH4 assembler
  
• Added light gun (SuperScope) support
  
• Fixed a bug that made it impossible to save unless the VMU was in port A, slot 1.
  
• VMU saving have been improved to work on all VMUs available for testing.
  
• Whenever a save is in progress a VMU icon will appear in the top left corner. If the save fails for some reason a message will be displayed with the reason for the failure.
  
• VMU saves are compressed. This reduces practically any save to two blocks.
  
• Yoshi's Island (and other SuperFX games) no longer crashes DreamSNES Controllers are now automatically configured based on what is connected to the Dreamcast. Check the heads up display in the top right corner when starting a game for the current configuration. The configuration can be dynamically changed while playing by removing or adding peripherals to the Dreamcast ports.
  
• A file (ROMS.LST) can optionally be added to the cd to speed up the rom scan. The game names will then be takes from the file instead of scanning the rom header.
  
• Added Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Spanish translations. Thanks to all locale contributors!
  

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

Clonetris Posted by CyRUS64 @ 4:25
Toastman has released version 0.90 of his new homebrew game clonetris. Thanks to sygnori for telling me about this new version on irc.

Links:
Local Download

Also the latest version of DCFighting (0.2.2) is now available for local download.

Monday, February 11, 2002

News Posted by CyRUS64 @ 3:12
Dan Potter has updated the Cryptic Allusion site stating that he has made some substantial changes to the KOS tree and has provided some instructions on how best to go about installing a clean KOS tree on your system.

Also the expansion of NesterDC (now the official nesterdc, I believe) has had a few updates over the recent days, and version 0.2.2 of DCFighting has been released. I'll update the local downloads to these latest versions in the next day or so.

Friday, February 8, 2002

TechTV discusses GypPlay and Boob! Posted by TheGypsy @ 18:58
Just a quick welcome to any TechTV viewers that saw the segment on their Call For Help program that demonstrated GypPlay and mentioned the Boob! Dreamcast Research site! We thank TechTV and Roger Chang for doing some coverage of the homebrew/hobbyist scene (but hope that, next time, they at least give a mention to the more current developments and KOS, of course)! For those that missed the show or don't get the TechTV channel, you can read the related article at TechTV's site. It may be rebroadcast today -- check your local listings for the Call For Help program.

- John...

Tuesday, February 5, 2002

DCDivx Player Alpha PR3 Posted by CyRUS64 @ 16:47
Alpha PR3 of the DCDivx player by Mark Dukette and Lienus has been released. Here's what's new:
- DivX 3.11 Support
- Stop/Pause/Next button support
- Better stability
- Slightly better performance

Links:
Mark Dukette's site (Latest updates/ binary downloads)
Betaboy's site (DJ/NRG downloads)

Monday, February 4, 2002

ScummVM Posted by CyRUS64 @ 22:17
A 2nd preview of ScummVM, a Scumm Interpreter for the Sega Dreamcast has been released. This now enables more games, *if* you own the original game data files, and it is getting closer to being in a playable state. Currently saving is disabled also. Thanks to HH for the news!

Also DC Fighting has had release 0.20.

Links:
ScuumVM for DC
DCFighting Site.

Stella / Frotz! Posted by CyRUS64 @ 7:53
Version 0.2 of DCStella, an Atari 2600 VCS Emulator has been released. This is a port of the pc emulator Stella by SvOlli.

Also Frotz, an Infocom Interpreter, has been ported to the Dreamcast by c99koder. "The Infocom interpreter allows you to play text based classics such as Zork and Adventure. There are also many Interactive Fiction titles available around the web."

Lots more games to play on the dreamcast =)

Links:
Local Download (DCStella)
DCStella Homepage
Local Download (Frotz)
Frotz Homepage

Sunday, February 3, 2002

Nehe Tutorials Posted by CyRUS64 @ 17:43
With permission of Hyper_gamer, since he has been having some host troubles, I have uploaded the ported Nehe OpenGL tutorials to the Developer tools page. These should act as good reference code to those trying to learn KallistiGL...

Friday, February 1, 2002

Project Mayo DreamCast Divx Player Posted by LiENUS @ 3:16
A preview the PocketDivx based Divx player for the Sega DreamCast was unveiled today after weeks of work you can see the post about it on the Project Mayo forums here, it currently works great at 300kbps 320x240 video 22khz mono mp3 audio with no framedrops. Give it a spin or check out the cvs and help speed it up.