News Archive: March 2002

Sunday, March 31, 2002

Md2 loader Posted by CyRUS64 @ 19:14
Sam Steele posted this to the devlist:
"I've posted the source to my md2 loader / displayer at http://c99.dyndns.org/~chip/md2.tar.gz. It assumes you are using the latest KOS from CVS. The main.c included allows you to "walk around" an animating md2, but the strafe functions in camera.c are broken right now and I don't have the time to fix it.. probably just need to switch some axis."
You can also find KamKa's older quake 2 model loader here. Join the devlist @ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dcdev if you are further interested!

Updates Posted by CyRUS64 @ 7:40
Local downloads for DCAsteroids have been updated to the latest version 0.0.7.

Also Christian Groessler has released a small update to his Atari compute emulator bringing it up to version 0.2. Here's what's new:

• implemented "keyrepeat" while in the emulator ui (controller only)
  
• fixed crash when system was set to atari 800 (not XL) and less than 3 controllers were connected
  
• some sound changes (but they don't improve anything :-)
  
• added support for 5200 controller 2nd action button

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

SMSPlus! sources released Posted by ss_teven @ 9:53
Yes, I have recovered another part of the cd, this time i've released the source code to SMSPlus!, binary versions were removed from this site due to GPL violations with some MAME code, hopefully we'll see it back up soon! For those who don't know SMSPlus! is a port of Charles Mac Donald's SMS Plus.

These sources are the latest code that I had done, it had a few minor patches since the previous binary release. Beware, this code is EXTREAMLY MESSY, most dc code should be found in the ./SMSPlus!/dc/ directory (mainly dc.c), and it's all over the place, some of the stuff that is linked isn't even used anymore, like I said, its messy.

From memory, experimental VMU support was added thanks to some code from Nester (v3.0?), and those VMU saves were compressed, it was a bit buggy, and crashed now and then, but it saved atleast :). Experimental zip support is included too, and this version ran from KOS-1.1.4 (no cvs). Feel free do what you want with it, but im pretty sure it's useless to most people, but if your up for a challenge go ahead and complete it, and dont forget, its GPL, release the source and don't wait forever like me!

Have fun! You can grab it from here or local copies here. (thanks to LiENUS for uploading them)

- Steven

Monday, March 25, 2002

Dreamcast 3d Asteroids 0.0.5 Posted by LiENUS @ 19:26
Jimbo updated Dreamcast 3d Asteroids last night to version 0.0.5 new stuff includes

added sounds for primary/laser fire and hit/explosion.
changed drawing of rocks to one color, rock texture...
all rocks are drawn as spheres with 1,2,3or4 slices.
the smaller ones look a little weird, kind of like chunks of rock... ill leave it for now.
added the explosion type, currently drawn as an orange sphere.
it indicates where a hit has taken place, and should probably go along with a sound effect.
color currently decreases with its lifetime...
transparency would be better.


Update: Local copy of the source now Here

DCDivx Beta 2 out Posted by LiENUS @ 5:34
DCDivx beta 2 was just posted, you can get it here. New features include

1) Minor performance improvements
2) Bug Fixes
3) Background Images swapping support(see below)
4) FFWD on the right D-PAD button(Still buggy)
5) Divx 5.0 support for all but Q-PEL and GMC
6) Fixed stretching of background image.
7) Added support for Nandub corrupted headers

Backgound image swapping:
the player will now look for new background image on each disk swap. it looks in the root of the cd for either background.jpg or backgr~1.jpg if you use jolliet. if it finds this image it will replace the current background with the new one. if it does not it keeps whatever the last image was that it loaded. Of course the first image to load is our default background.

If you would like to see the post by marc dukette see the forum topic on project mayo Here. Self-bootable images to follow shortly.

Sunday, March 24, 2002

lwIP in KOS Posted by CyRUS64 @ 0:40
Dan has submitted a "slightly kludgy for now" (his own words, not mine!) port of lwIP, a TCP/IP stack, to the KOS NetCore API. This is great news and theoretically should eventually open the gateway to homebrew dc webbrowsers. Now who is gonna port all 50+mb of the netscape src first? (j/k)
You can check this out by accessing the kos cvs.

Update: From Dan Again, "I corrected a bunch of issues with my KOS lwIP port and checked them in.
As far as I can tell, it should now function quite nicely. I have the
httpd example ported as well, in examples/dreamcast/network/httpd,
though as I note in there, the networking examples aren't particularly
DC-specific right now." (Note that DHCP mode doesn't work yet.)

Friday, March 22, 2002

Atari800 Posted by CyRUS64 @ 23:37
Christian Groessler emailed me to say that he has made available his dreamcast port of an Atari 800 emulator.
Sound is not yet working in this first release, although he has released both source and binary versions. There are no CD images though, since currently copyrighted BIOS ROMs are needed to make a CD.

Links:
Local Downloads

Luftvarg Posted by CyRUS64 @ 15:02
DCVision posted news about possibly the first console 4k demo (definitely the first dreamcast one), Luftvarg, which has been released by the demo group Outbreak. It displays a neat 3d landscape with some background music, which is all very impressive for < 4k! You can dowload it locally here.

TitanDC Posted by CyRUS64 @ 3:07
TitanDC is now located here at Boob!. This is an emulator benchmarks site currently with benchmarks for DreamSNES, so if you feel like helping out and submitting results to FusionPit or just to see the emulated speed of your favourite game then head over here.

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

Thenesis DC media player Posted by CyRUS64 @ 15:38
Thenesis have ceased work on their Dreamcast Media Player. They are still however working on their game engine. This news came from dcvision. I guess its lucky that dcdivx exists then...

DCStella Posted by CyRUS64 @ 15:09
SvOlli has released version 0.2c of DCStella. Here's what's new:

• New option that enables you to "simulate" power off/on on the VCS by doing a hard reset.
  
• Hooks for some background music, the bgm-kit will follow.
  
• A new 6502 illegal opcode (LAX) is now supported, so Qb can be played in the original NTSC version.
  
• Swap trick to exchange the CD with one containing the ROMs
  
• if you open the lid outside of the swap trick DCStella jumps to the Dreamcast menu just like a commercial game.

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

Feet of Fury Screenshots! Posted by CyRUS64 @ 6:07
Dan has posted 2 screenshots of Cyptic Allusion's wip game, one of the main menu with some sweet looking spheres, and the other an in-game pic.
Check it out at Cryptic Allusion.

[Sorry for any confusion before regarding the use of the word "polished" -- it came across differently than we intended. If you don't know what we're talking about, don't worry about it -- it was just that our original news post about this was worded poorly :) ]

Sunday, March 17, 2002

Icarus screenshots Posted by CyRUS64 @ 15:00
I've uploaded some screenshots to the Icarus gallery. These show off the Pelican codebreaker and a couple of katana samples. The katana samples don't look pretty, especially since jpg conversion messes up the palette slightly, and they are definitely much cooler to see in action ;)
I may release a dc 'movie' player, which will play recorded display lists. My only query is whether recording display lists from a commercial game/sample and making them available for download is legal or illegal! Discuss in this thread.
Here is one pretty sample though: (A rotating head)

Devcast sources Posted by ss_teven @ 14:17
I've slowly been able to rip parts of the Devcast sources from my cd-rom backup (water damaged cdr), so i've decided to release them in parts, today im relasing the sources to the beta of Gnuboy.

I was originally working with another programmer, but I havn't heard from him in a few months, and another few months back I sent this off to another programmer, and never heard from since. So it's going public.

No technical support is offered with these sources, and if you do try to re-release them, please, please credit me and Turrican2k, or atleast Turrican2k :) - the main problems we had with this were the controller, so go, download it, and fix that. :)

You can download it from my website or locally here.

Update: For those people that asked, it's a gameboy emulator :), sorry for not mentioning it i thought it was kinda obvious. Check out the official site here.

- Steven

Icarus (aka Boob!cast) Posted by CyRUS64 @ 1:50
I have made some great improvements in Icarus over the last few weeks, and one of the recent successes was to get katana samples running for the first time. After many further improvements I now have the Sea Lion demo running fluidly at 15fps in wireframe, with some more intensive demos running at 5/6fps. 3dtest runs fully emulated minus the background plane at a smooth 40-50 fps. [Each frame comprises of various listtypes... once all the enabled listtypes have been completed then that frame is done, so these figures are not relying on any possible dodgy timings]
Anyhow once I can connect up my laptop to the net again, i'll release more info on my progress and some screenshots. Much much work needs to be done on rendering these samples though, and remember that these are only a very few specific samples that have been worked on/tested. (Update: Azi actually got 140fps on 3dtest, and 30fps on seal on a 1.4ghz athlon, and I now have dreamspec somewhat running and displaying. Interestingly enough the controllers do work in it, implying my maple code is working well under katana also which is good.)

Friday, March 15, 2002

dcQuad Posted by CyRUS64 @ 23:00
Douglas Winslow has released dcQuad, "a damn near perfect clone of the A-Mode gameplay in the popular 1989 Nintendo Gameboy version of Tetris." This version supports up to 4-players split-screen on one dreamcast, and includes a secret challenge ;)
Check it out at Douglas' site, which includes some nice screenshots of the game, and you can download it here.

[Update: A nero image is now available. Thanks to SvOlli for giving us permission to use this image]

Feet of Fury Posted by CyRUS64 @ 15:05
For those who haven't necessarily been following the dcdev mailing list, Cryptic Allusion have been working on an original game for the dreamcast, entitled "Feet of Fury". Dan has now updated the Cryptic Allusion site with some details on the game. He hopes to be posting some screenshots in the coming weeks and the game is due to be ready in time for E3.

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

Warlord Posted by CyRUS64 @ 14:37
Nathan Whitehead has released a new homebrew game, entitled Warlord. It is loosely based on the old warlord game for the Atari 2600, and is currently 1-player versus 3-computer players. No self-bootable images are available atm, so if anyone enjoys making and testing them then feel free to send in dj/nrg images. Thanks to Sygnori for the news about Warlord on irc.

Links:
Local Downloads
Official Site

Saturday, March 9, 2002

DCDivx Beta 1 Released Posted by CyRUS64 @ 12:45
Here's what's new:

• New UI thanks to Pete.
  
• New Audio synch, nearly identical logic to the Pocket DivX Player
  
• Fixed bug with stopping in the middle of movies
  
• Fixed problem with occasional video corruption in display
  
• Support for play/pause/stop/next/previous (details in the FAQ below)
  
• Performance should be about the same as PR3
  
• Player should be far more stable.

Friday, March 8, 2002

DCBreakout Posted by CyRUS64 @ 4:13
Somebody requested the source code to DCBreakout, so David Persik has decided to release it. The game currently still uses libdream and requires a mouse + controller to play.

Local Download

Wednesday, March 6, 2002

Gypsy needs cash! :-) Posted by TheGypsy @ 18:56
Ok -- I'm in need of some cash, so I'm trying to sell off these DC LAN Adapters that I have. They are the Japanese HIT-0300 models -- which means that they will not work with commercial games, but will work with the included Japanese browser and, more importantly, for development using dcload-ip-la. They will work in all Dreamcasts (US/UK/JP). They are brand-new and still in the original box w/ shrinkwrapped browser disc.

They are US$75 each -- and I will ship anywhere in the world via Global Priority mail (3-5 days usually) for US$9. (If you don't like my price, then don't buy one. If you know of a cheaper place, feel free to buy it there instead of whining to me about it. As far as I know, GameChoice is out again and not getting any soon -- regardless of what their web site might say. Plus, I ship anywhere cheaply.)

If you want one, just email me. Thanks!

Tuesday, March 5, 2002

DCBreakout Posted by CyRUS64 @ 0:03
David Persik sent in a simple framebuffer breakout game. It currently has no sound, but is playable. Grab it from the user tools/games page.

Update: After having tested this game, it seems you need a mouse to run it (from what the serial output in my emulator tells me)... I dont have a mouse so I haven't yet played the game ;)

Sunday, March 3, 2002

KOS 1.1.7 Coming soon... Posted by CyRUS64 @ 7:48
Posted by Dan,
"Planning to do a 1.1.7 KOS release soon now. Soon probably means next weekend. If anyone has any last minute fixes or improvements they'd like to throw into the mix, then please do so.

I'll probably be making a few more changes to the maple API before it goes out. I'd like to make it use an address ID again rather than a seperate port/unit combo for one thing. Just not a weird uint8 =)

In the next week we'll be doing cleanup work and such. There are probably a few outstanding bugs still, with such a large amount of the core stuff being replaced (I'm especially leary about this issue people have seen with getting a fault at some random PC, but I can't find a good cause for it...) but hopefully if we have a wider test base people can help find the problems and we can do a 1.1.8 release with mainly bug fixes."

Also the latest cvs now contains a new demo called Bubbles, which renders "well over 1.1 million triangles per second at 60fps, with room to grow!" via a mixture of kallistgl and direct h/w access via inlined functions ;)

Friday, March 1, 2002

Tuxnes-dc Posted by CyRUS64 @ 8:11
Jim Ursetto has released version 0.2 of Tuxnes-dc. New in this version:

• Added experimental tile renderer (press Y at game select screen). Many games work fine. Press B to clear up screen corruption. Runs at 60 fps.
  
• Sound code much improved; will not break up when speed drops too low. This allows arbitrary frameskip (but the line renderer is still locked to 30 fps). Noise channel clipped from time to time due to synchronization issues.
  
• Fix palette bug that caused colors to be slightly off.
  
• Fixed some sound and video corruption due to global variables; sporadic problems remain.