News Archive: May 2003

Genesis Posted by CyRUS64 @ 17:55
Three Sega Genesis / Megadrive emulator updates (Genesis Plus! / ljsdcgen / DCGen) for those interested. Check this thread for links, and thanks to ZacMcD for the tip-offs.

Friday, May 23, 2003

KallistiOS 1.2.0 Posted by CyRUS64 @ 7:02
Dan has released version 1.2.0 of KallistiOS:

"This is basically just the latest CVS plus a few misc fixes and NickK's modem driver. I decided that since it's been so long and the
codebase is relatively stable now, might be a good time to switch to a 1.2.x version number.

The idea behind 1.2.x is that it will basically remain stable, both in the sense that the code is stable, and that the API is stable and won't change on you; you can upgrade to another 1.2.x without having to go refit a bunch of code. We'll probably stick with this series for a few more bugfix releases, and then move on to 1.3.x. If someone wants to pick up the maintenance of 1.2.x at that time, let me know. Otherwise it'll bitrot like the other earlier versions.

Also as I mentioned earlier, I am no longer distributing binaries with KOS releases. They are a pain to generate and take up huge amounts of space and upload time. I figure if you can compile KOS binaries at all, you can probably compile KOS itself. :)"

Links:
Sourceforge

Thursday, May 22, 2003

Game Trading? Posted by TheGypsy @ 17:37
Hi all! Long time, no news from me! As many of you know, I pretty much "retired" from Boob a few months ago. I've just been too busy with other projects and various things in my life -- blah, blah, blah.

In any case, I just wanted to drop a message to give a quick plug for a friend of mine who runs a used game/music/movie trading site. It is the Game Trading Zone, and I use it rather excessively to trade games (console and PC) and DVDs these days.

In any case, if you have old games that you don't want and/or various games that you are trying to acquire, they have quite a large userbase now and, in my opinion, it is the best trading site out there. Feel free to check it out. Legal game trading only, of course!

Note that it is mainly subscriber-funded, but, as a free non-subscriber, you can still list items that you have available and that you want to trade for -- you just can't initiate trades with other users (they have to come to you). If you want to initiate the trades yourself, then you have to subscribe to get access to the other trader's email and such. It's fairly cheap though -- especially if you trade a game or two. Just so you know.

Later, all.

- John...

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Sh'ump Posted by CyRUS64 @ 18:57
Toastman has released version 'Incremental 01' of his horizontal shooter Sh'ump : A Love Story.

Downloads are available at his site.

Saturday, May 17, 2003

The QNX Dreamcast Project Posted by CyRUS64 @ 7:47
Jeremy Penner has had some very neat success with his port of QNX. He has posted a screenshot of his Dreamcast 'wandering around [his] laptop's filesystem over QNET, and pinging google.com', via bba ethernet connection.
Visit his site for pics and more detailed info!

Wednesday, May 14, 2003

Scummvm Posted by CyRUS64 @ 3:25
Scummvm 0.40 has been released:

DC Movie Player Posted by CyRUS64 @ 3:20
Bero has released a 2nd test version of his movie player. Here's what's new:

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Blender 2.25+ export script Posted by CyRUS64 @ 7:52
James Helferty has written an export script for Blender 2.25+ outputting to a simple Dreamcast-ready file format.

"I cribbed a few parts of it out of the VRML2 export script by Ken Miller and Steve Matthews. (Just giving them props.) I'm using it to make my scene/location data files for this little game demo thingie I'm writing.

The exporter goes through the entire scene, and transforms it so that all of the points are global coordinates. Then it calculates the vertex color values based on their (Blender) materials and painted vertex colors, breaks the faces into triangles, and stuffs the whole thing in a bunch of vertex structures.

The resulting files can be pretty big. I'm not doing any triangle stripping because I haven't really investigated that yet. (The
documentation seems to suggest it isn't worth it?) Likewise, since I have no BBA, I haven't felt the need to try exporting something with textures yet, but in theory it should work. (Judging by the ugliness of having no textures, though, I think I'll be testing that pretty soon..)

Other fair warning; if your scene has objects in a hierarchy, it might not export the sub-objects. Don't know yet. Likewise, it's probably broken on Macs; the struct.pack function needs to be told the endian-nature of the machine. (I forget which is big and which is little-endian.) I'll fix this right now, if anyone can tell me.

Anyways.. Blender's currently undergoing a rewrite to the python bindings, so this is a stop-gap for anyone interested in using Blender right now; they broke the old scripts when they went to 2.25, see, and they'll be breaking it again in the next major release. A small, but I think important, part of the planned rewrite is that they'll be adding support for their "armature" objects. (Currently, there's no support for them whatsoever available through python.) Armatures are Blender's vertex skinning/articulated figure solution, so until that's finished, I can't write an export script for skinned animated characters.

I'll probably work on an object-hierarchy export script for rigid-bodies sometime over the next week or two. Hopefully not, though, 'cause I'm kind of hoping to have a job before then.."

Tuesday, May 6, 2003

DC Movie Player Posted by CyRUS64 @ 0:11
Bero has released a new DC Movie Player using the ffmpeg libavcodec/libavformat libraries... It supports the following formats:

Monday, May 5, 2003

LinuxDC Posted by CyRUS64 @ 20:01
LinuxDC progress update, including a SEGA Dreamcast SLIP/Linux HOWTO and a tutorial on using the DC as a VPN firewall and router both by Christian Berger.

Also whenever Adrian is online, you can now see real html served off a Dreamcast vmu here ;)

Sunday, May 4, 2003

LinuxDC Posted by CyRUS64 @ 16:04
Adrian McMenamin sent in some cool progress news regarding LinuxDC's latest vmu support:

"People who like to mess with their VMUs might want to have a look at the new code added to the LinuxDC CVS yesterday - most write operations (for data files only atm) on the VMU are now supported - so it is possible to move files from one vmu to another by commands such as cp /mnt/vmu0/SOME_FILE /mnt/vmu1/SOME_FILE.

Also arbitrary files can be saved to the vmu (though beware of the fact that the vmu expects everything in 512 byte blocks so file sizes get mangled by the VMU FAT).

It is even possible to edit files on the vmu using tools like vi.

To get to the CVS follow the links from http://linuxdc.net Please note these files are in the 2.4 branch of the CVS.

Happy to talk to anybody about this - either by email or on #linuxdc on irc.freenode.net"