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News Archive: October 2002

Thursday, October 31, 2002

nxDoom - Beta 2.2 Posted by Hollywood Hasney @ 15:59
BlackAura has updated is nxDoom to 2.2, changes:

VMU Saving now works
Keyboard and mouse support
Minor bugfixes all over the place
Links:
Homepage
The File

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

DreamSNES 0.9.8 Posted by CyRUS64 @ 23:50
Peter Bortas emailed to say that DreamSNES 0.9.8 has been released! Here's what's new:

  • SA-1 emulation fixed (Super Mario RPG now works (again))
  • C4 emulation implemented (MegaMan X2/X3 now works)
  • Putting a file called "NO_ROMS.HERE" in a directory prevents it from being scanned for roms.
  • Added in game menu that lets you choose among other things to reset the game or jump to the next or previous game on the CD.
  • Fixed memory map for Super Dante RPG maker.
  • Improved buffer handling in mpeg player.
  • New locales: Charnego and Romanian.

    Links:
    Official Site

    Monday, October 28, 2002

    LinuxDC Posted by CyRUS64 @ 23:19
    LinuxDC update:

  • M. R. Brown and Paul Mundt are currently porting the Linux-SH kernel to Linux 2.5.
  • M. R. Brown is working on converting the LinuxDC CVS kernel to 2.5 and bringing stable (2.4) up-to-date.
  • M. R. Brown is also busy writing specific LinuxDC HOWTOs on tool building, configuring and building the kernel, and creating a basic root filesystem and using the BBA to mount it via NFS.

    Wednesday, October 23, 2002

    c++ classes Posted by CyRUS64 @ 20:46
    Heinrich Tillack has released a collection of C++ classes for 3D games, using KGL-X. Current features are:

  • IMD, MD2, 3DS model loading and rendering
  • Rotation of 3d objects via Quaternations
  • Frustum culling of 3D objects using Bounding Spheres
  • JPG/PNG Texture managment methods

    However he has updated saying that he has found some serious bugs in his BoundingSphere Culler, so you might want to wait until a bug-fixed release is available in a week or so. He does though have some nice screenshots up and a little demo showing 'a fort, an invader and a red animated BUG' rendering at 60fps.

    Saturday, October 19, 2002

    PcsxDC Posted by CyRUS64 @ 18:40
    For those interested psxfanatics has a small update on the recent progress of PcsxDC.

    Thursday, October 17, 2002

    Feet of Fury Posted by CyRUS64 @ 15:15
    Dan has made a Preview/Beta release of Cryptic Allusion's dancing game 'The Feet of Fury' available.

    Here's a brief rundown from Dan's pr spiele:
    "The music's pumping. The arrows are flying towards the top of your screen and you're in the groove. Suddenly your opponent cackles and your arrows are going twice as fast and yet more spaced out. You got distracted by the anime cutie in the background, but you've got it covered and now it's their turn -- their arrows are waving around like a bad acid trip and you're both fighting to survive.

    Welcome to the wacky world of Feet of Fury, a game in the same vein as Konami(tm)'s ever-popular Dance Dance Revolution(tm) but with a far stronger emphasis on player-vs-player combat."

    You can find the official site at cagames.com or download the files locally from the games page.

    Wednesday, October 16, 2002

    DCStella v0.2d Posted by CyRUS64 @ 11:32
    New for this release:

  • DCStella is now based on Stella 1.2, so it now works with more games like Pitfall 2.
  • Basic paddle support (try up/down on d-pad for diffrent modes).
    Left trigger and right trigger are now also mapped to buttons C and Z for the arcade stick.
  • Swapping of joyports for Raiders Of The Lost Ark and others (use left trigger to swap after activating in the menu).
  • Thanks to a hint from Dan Potter, the author of KOS, sound now works like intended.
  • Note that the option "profiles.dir" in dcstella.ini has been renamed to "properties.dir" to match Stella's naming.

    Links:
    Official site

    Wednesday, October 9, 2002

    DC Land Posted by CyRUS64 @ 15:05
    Lord Kernow and GreenGianT write,
    'DC Land is a function library built on the fantastic KallistiOS by Dan Potter.

    DC Land has evolved from the basic things we have needed to do since we started Dreamcast programming. It was used to make both Pong and the 3dengine by GreenGianT. For what its worth, we have cleaned it up and decided to release it.

    This version of DC Land offers some common 2d graphics functions to draw pixels, lines, boxes, circles and text. There are also simple control pad and vmu functions, s3m sound support and other things like menus and tile grids. We also have implemented some string and conversion functions that we needed at some point as well.'

    Links:
    Local downloads (headers + examples)
    Stalemeat.net

    Monday, October 7, 2002

    VMU storage site Posted by CyRUS64 @ 18:53
    Curt28 posted on the forums about a new dreamcast vmu storage site.

    'The site supports German, Chinese, Japanese, English, Spanish, and Portugese Languages with Russian Support upcoming. It is also the only vmu storage site that can be used by any dreamcast web browser user who wants to upload and download vmu saves. (This includes Dreampassport 2 through to Dreampassport Premiere, Dreamkey 1 to Dreamkey 3, and all Planetweb Versions from 1.219 thru 3.0.)
    The site also carries several vmu web browser user tools that cant be found elsewhere, such as an Html 2 Vmu file creator, which allows dreampassport/planetweb/dreamkey users to input customized html/JS into a text area, then click a make vmu file button and it creates a loadable web document that is stored on the vmu! You can store ANY webpage with the tool and view later offline by loading it from the vmu to the t.v. screen.
    Another available tool is the vmu file renamer, which allows any vmu file to be renamed to whatever you wish. The site also allows users to save their files to a private area for their own personal use(requires a free membership,public area saves do not).
    The site currently has around 1000 individual saves. There is also a homebrew file section at the site called Independent File Makers. It has everything from flash games that load from the vmu to tv screen, to dreamcast browser web builders tools,etc..'

    VMU Storage site

    modem/bba/demos Posted by CyRUS64 @ 14:43
    Mathieu Legris sent in some docs for the broadband adaptor and also an updated pdf for the dreamcast modem.

    Also, unscrambled binaries of GreenGiant's demos have been added due to requests to him for them.


    Saturday, October 5, 2002

    Demos galore :) Posted by CyRUS64 @ 19:33
    GreenGiant emailed to say that he has launched the Dreamcast section of his website, and released 3 demos to go with it!

    First up is Pong, a single-player version of the game for the Dreamcast. It has basic 2D graphics and music, and displays a pong logo on the visual memory unit.

    Secondly, we have a 'simple 3d engine'. First you input a 2d profile using the control pad, and subsequently a wireframe object is generated from this and displayed. A volume sweep is used to transform the profile into a 3D object.
    You can then perform such tasks as translating, rotating and scaling the object, aswell as changing its perspective.

    Finally, there is OpenGL Objectorium. The program displays a spinning swirly thing in the background on top of which it shows 1 of 5 textured objects. There is also music in this demo. Control pad buttons A and B cycle through the objects. Each object spins in the centre of the screen when it has been selected.

    Links:
    Pong
    3d engine
    OpenGl Objectorium
    Stalemeat.net

    Modem Posted by CyRUS64 @ 19:20
    After doing a bit of googling, I recently found a Connexant/Rockwell pdf relevant to the Dreamcast modem :)
    For anyone who wants to have a hack-about, modem registers 0x00-0x1f are mapped to 0xA0600004 and following on the dreamcast, with 0xA0600000 being a general modem id / enable h/w register.
    The modem is designed to have programs run on its dsp, but can also seemingly be merely controlled via direct register writes. Already, NickK has made some great progress tinkering with it, and this would be a very cool piece of hardware to have supported both for developmental purposes (connecting it to direct to pc) and for other (online) projects.
    Anyhow you can download the pdf from the Developer docs page and check out this thread on the forums.

    Friday, October 4, 2002

    SDL-1.2.4-beta2 released Posted by Stalin @ 20:23
    There is now OpenGL support and hadware page flipping support. The website has also moved to http://sdl-dc.sourceforge.net/.

    Thursday, October 3, 2002

    MAIM with Lightguns! Posted by Hollywood Hasney @ 15:09
    Warmtoe, the man who does the MAIM for DC and did the lightgun driver has combined the two for a MAIM which supports the EXIDY440 series of arcade gun games such as Whodunit, Combat and Hit 'n' Miss. Here is what Warmtoe said about it:

    You may all remember I did some work on getting a lightgun driver into KOS. You may also remember that I'd done a mod of MAME on the DC (called MAIM). You may know that the latest source level of MAME (0.61) included lightgun support for arcade games that use it...

    You take these 3 things together, and what do you get? Well....

    A version of MAME that plays the EXIDY440 series of arcade gun games with a lightgun on a DC (badly).

    It's limited - Sound is broken, you have to have a gun in port A and a std controller in port B for the RTRIG (coin up). Escape (back to menu) is START+TRIGGER on the gun - and then a subsequent game run won't accept input on the 'OK' screen BUT it does work!
    You can download it from here

    Wednesday, October 2, 2002

    Iris Forum Posted by CyRUS64 @ 23:07
    We have now added an official forum for the Iris 3d-engine, which can be found here. Go here for all Iris game / development discussion!