The zx spectrum celebrates its 30th birthday with a raspberry pi birthday cake!

April 18th, 2012, 23:24 Posted By: wraggster

In recognition of the huge influence the ZX SPECTRUM computer has had on an entire generation in the creative and scientific fields, in the UK and beyond, SCI-FI-LONDON (The London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film) will honour Clive Sinclair’s invention in a light-hearted ceremony on Saturday, MAY 5TH, 2012 at 12noon at London’s BFI Southbank.

The birthday cake (baked to a bespoke recipe by Gordon Ramsey’s former pastry chef, Beth Watts) will be presented as part of HORIZONS: A CELEBRATION OF THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ZX SPECTRUM, the festival’s weekend-long FREE event, at the BFI South Bank.

The little machine that plugged into the living room telly will be honoured in a rich blend of fun, memories, and future-gazing. Visitors who were there the first time round will be able to play some of their favourite games and share their memories, whilst the generation who are only just beginning to scratch the surface behind their software can road-test the new RASPBERRY PI. These innovative new computers are currently like gold-dust as demand has far exceeded supply. They are credit-card sized computers which also plug into your TV and a keyboard. The inventors want to see them being used by children all over the world to learn programming – a very hot topic of educational debate currently.

Speakers and performers over the two days, include: Dylan Smith: demonstrating the amazing Spectrum-to-Twitter client Saul Metzstein: director of BBC film Micro Men discusses his influences from the golden age of 80s computing Matt Westcott: running the Chiptune music workshop – how to make music with the Spectrum Dr Bill Marshall of RS Components demonstrates the workings of the Raspberry PI. Matthew C. Applegate: the musician, teacher, and author on how the Spectrum gave birth to a generation of programmers MJ Hibbett: performing Hey Hey 16k and other evocative songs!

Louis Savy, Festival Director for SCI-FI-LONDON says:

“As well as screening great science fiction, we are also serious about promoting science fact. Where one meets the other is where all the fun happens. The 30th birthday of the ZX Spectrum gives us an opportunity to promote the best in computing innovation today as well as celebrating the halcyon days of Sir Clive’s ground-breaking machine. We hope people will enter into the spirit of the weekend and come along to the BFI to play. We’re hoping the next little Sinclair will find her way to the Southbank and have a go on a Raspberry Pi.”

Paul Squires, for Imperica, producers of the events says: “We're delighted to be working with SCI-FI-LONDON and the BFI on this celebration of one of the greatest machines – and greatest eras – of British computing. It helped to form and shape the career of many of the UK's creative and technical leaders, and continues to enjoy a lively, vibrant 'retrogaming' scene. With the Raspberry Pi, it's great to see this 'homebrew' culture coming back. Horizons is very much a celebration of the Spectrum and what it gave to us, and given that the event is free, we are looking forward to a well-attended and enjoyable two days.”

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Cge services announces dates and location for classic gaming expo 2012

April 17th, 2012, 13:49 Posted By: wraggster

The organizers of Classic Gaming Expo announced today that the 2012 Classic Gaming Expo will be held August 11 and 12 at the recently renovated Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The show’s historic ties with Las Vegas, and specifically the Plaza Hotel, made it the obvious choice to play host to this year’s convention.

“We were surprised to hear from many of our attendees and celebrity guests alike that they miss the old-school charm of the Las Vegas Downtown area,” said Joe Santulli, co-organizer of Classic Gaming Expo. “We have a lot of history with the Plaza Hotel as they hosted our show from 1999 through 2003. After seeing the work and improvements that they did during their remodeling, there was no question that it was time to bring the show home to the Plaza.”

The Plaza Hotel is located at the top of the amazing Fremont Street Experience, home to numerous shops, casinos, concerts, and the amazing Viva Vision light display. The Plaza recently purchased the assets of the aborted Fontainebleau Hotel project and completely overhauled their rooms, shops, convention area and casino. According to Santulli, the vast amount of things to do in Las Vegas should appeal to those attendees that make Classic Gaming Expo part of their family vacations.

Over the past fourteen years, people from all over the world have attended Classic Gaming Expo to see the latest offerings from the various exhibitors, visited the world’s largest and most comprehensive video game museum, played classic and modern games, and met the luminaries of video gaming’s past and present. “The excitement and response to this year’s show has been astounding,” stated show founder, John Hardie. “One quick look at the list of vendors and celebrities on our web-site and you’ll see why 2012 is shaping up to be the greatest Classic Gaming Expo ever. In addition, our museum collection has grown immensely and will surely be one of the major highlights for every show attendee.”

Classic Gaming Expo is open to people of all ages with an interest in video games – both classic and modern. Information about ticketing, attendance and past events is available at www.cgexpo.com.

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DCEmu Asks GP32 a History & Whats the Best release for the GP32?

April 16th, 2012, 02:14 Posted By: wraggster

Continuing our network wide feature for just about every console thats emulated and that we own, in time it can be used as a reference point for people to look at what games are the very best on each system

Firstly heres a look at each system and a description to remind you of the history of the console.

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Virtual Jaguar SVN r417

April 16th, 2012, 01:44 Posted By: wraggster

via http://www.emucr.com/

Virtual Jaguar SVN r417 is compiled. Virtual Jaguar is an open source emulator based on Jagem (Virtual Jaguar) for Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. The source also compiles on BeOS. Virtual Jaguar is an awesome Atari Jaguar emulator with great compatibility.

Virtual Jaguar SVN Changelog：
r414
Added switch to disable untuned tank circuit, for slower computers.
r415
Preliminary support for passing in filenames from the command line.
r416
Fix to compile on win32.
r417
Reverted win32 specific fix: wasn't necessary. :-P

http://www.mediafire.com/?4145asnmvfhzzj4

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Shin Megami Tensei and Magical Drop 2 Announced

April 16th, 2012, 00:07 Posted By: wraggster

Aeon Genesis has announced intent and progress on translations for Shin Megami Tensei: if… and Magical Drop 2, both for the SNES. Both have been in the works for about four years, and several screenshots of each are provided at the AGTP website. SMT is roughly half-way done, with 2/3s of the script having been translated, and Magical Drop 2 is about 70% of the way there, with a major script edit in the works and a number of graphical interface elements that still need to be replaced.
Relevant Link: (http://agtp.romhack.net/)

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Last chance to enter Pong indie dev challenge

April 13th, 2012, 23:41 Posted By: wraggster

Atari offers $50,000 grand prize for iOS re-imagining of the classic game

Atari is looking for help bringing Pong to the App store.
The Pong Indie Developer Challenge offers contestants a shot at winning "up to 100,000" for their new take on Atari's most iconic game.

Contestants should submit their idea for a mobile Pong title, to be released on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, by Sunday, April 15.
Twenty semi-finalists will be announced on the 24th of April, who will assemble a team and begin work on their game.
The ten finalists, announced June 19th, will be highlighted on Atari's Developer Spotlight, recieve full three year revenue-share publishing agreements including marketing and PR support, and cash prizes based on their final standings.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...-dev-challenge

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Conway’s Game of Life in HD

April 12th, 2012, 22:29 Posted By: wraggster


We’re going to have to take [Mike's] word for it that he built Conway’s Game of Life with high-definition video output. That’s because this screenshot is his only proof and it looks a bit fuzzy to us. But we are interested in the project which used an FPGA to generate a 1080p VGA output of the classic programming challenge.
One of the biggest benefits of using an FPGA for this application is the hardware’s parallel processing ability. For every frame of the game, the area around each living cell must be analyzed to produce the next evolutionary step. Most of the time this means processing all of the pixels in the playing area, which is the case here. [Mike] is using VHDL to program a Papilio Plus which has a Spartan 6 chip on it. He separated his code into the different components when writing about it. This makes it easy to find the chunks relating to the game if that’s what you’re interested in. If you just want to see how he implemented the VGA interface that’s well documented as well.
If you’re not familiar, Conway’s Game of Life has simple rules regarding when a cell will live, die, or be reborn. As [Mike] points out, every programmer should give it a shot at some point. We’ve seen many iterations from the very large to the very small.

http://hackaday.com/2012/04/12/conwa...of-life-in-hd/

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Veronica gets VRAM and its own boot logo

April 12th, 2012, 01:30 Posted By: wraggster


[Quinn Dunki] just reported in on the latest iteration in her computer project which is called Veronica. This time she added RAM to increase the VGA performance of her build. Like just about every other part of the project, [Quinn] knew what she wanted to do, but had to overcome a lot of issues along the way.
The goal is to implement a 256×240 display with 8-bit color depth. [Quinn] says this is on par with game console technology from the 1980′s. The problem is that the 10MHz AVR controller can’t really keep up with the scan rate of this size of display. The answer is to add RAM which stores all of the color data, the microcontroller will simply advance the address pointer on the memory chips to match the sync rate of the VGA output.
After hooking up her hardware design she gets a screen full of uninitialized pixel data. But moving from there to the final product seen above was quite frustrating. It turns out that noise on the breadboard was most of the problem, further compounded by entire breadboard row which wasn’t contacting the wires to make the temporary connections. A bit of jockeying for position and by Jove, she’s got a boot screen.
That breadboard sure has become crowded since her first VGA experiments.

http://hackaday.com/2012/04/10/veron...own-boot-logo/

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Demoscene: 64k Intros At Revision Demoparty

April 10th, 2012, 22:49 Posted By: wraggster

Last week-end at Revision demoparty, demosceners have pushed further the limits of what can be done in a single 64kb executable file. Using extensive procedural techniques and compression, Gaia Machina ([video=youtube;6CiF034IhgY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kx66_i3ue4&hd=1"]video capture[/URL]) and F — Felix's Workshop ([URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CiF034IhgY&hd=1[/video]) are realtime animations, featuring high quality rendering, sound, 3D models, and textures

http://developers.slashdot.org/story...sion-demoparty

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Commodore 64 pioneer Jack Tramiel dies ages 83

April 10th, 2012, 22:44 Posted By: wraggster

Holocaust survivor and tech mastermind leaves legacy of product ingenuity

Jack Tramiel, the entrepreneur whose start-up company went on to produce the Commodore 64, passed away on Sunday, his family has confirmed.
He passed away surrounded by his family, aged 83.

Having escaped Auschwitz in 1945, the technology mastermind had emigrated to America and went on to build various electrical office equipment. In 1982 his career transformed with the release of the Commodore 64 – one of the best-selling personal computers ever and a successful games system.
Standout games for the system included Paradroid, Uridium and Stunt Car Racer.
Following the videogame crash in the early eighties, Tramiel was forced out of Commodore International and bought a stake in Atari with the aim to revive its consumer division.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...l-dies-ages-83

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4do 1.2.0.1

April 9th, 2012, 22:35 Posted By: wraggster

via http://emu-russia.net/en/

Panasonic 3DO emulator has been updated. Changes:
- Bios 2 Support Added. Viktor determined how to added support for the second bios slot, used in Japanese hardware for the Kanji font. This should enable support for several Japanese games that require it (one example being Blue Forest Monogatari). Awesome!
- Daedalus Encounter timing fix added. This should alleviate many of the freezes encountered.
- Screenshot Feature added. Press F3 to take screenshots to a “Screenshots” subfolder.
- Russian translation fixes and improvements from both Viktor and Sedabi.
File: Download
News source: http://www.fourdo.com

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'Pac-Man Smash' trademarked in Europe

April 9th, 2012, 21:34 Posted By: wraggster

Namco Bandai filed a European trademark (number 010786341) for something called "Pac-Man Smash!" suggesting that, finally, Namco is making a spinoff game based on Pac-Man.

All right, maybe there's not enough information in the trademark listing to do much other than joke about the ubiquity of games starring Pac-Man, but the trademark does at least specify that it's for a video game (or card game, toy, or "gymnastic and sporting articles.)

The majority of Pac-Man-themed games end up on mobile or iOS these days (Pac-Man Arcade Golf, Pac-Man Kart Rally, Pac-Chain, etc.) so that's a likely destination for whatever this turns out to be. We're attempting to corner Namco now to ask about it, before the publisher can find a Power Pellet and turn on us.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/04/09/pa...ked-in-europe/

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The teensiest Atari 2600 ever

April 8th, 2012, 23:22 Posted By: wraggster


[Dablio] sent in an awesome console mod he made. It may just be the smallest Atari 2600 ever (Portuguese, here’s the Google translation).
The build began with a Dynacom MegaBoy, from the same company that put out many less-than-legal 2600 clones. The MegaBoy PCB is an exercise in parsimony consisting of only a single IC, a crystal, and some resistors and caps. [Dablio] made a new PCB board based on the schematic he reverse engineered andthis thing is tiny. It’s much smaller than even the smallest [Ben Heck] 2600 consolebuild.
[Dablio] now needed a case for his new console. He had originally planned to mount the whole thing in an Atari controller like this commercial product. Serendipity intervened and he realized the entire system (sans cartridge port) fit inside a plastic tube of m&m minis.
Currently, [Dablio] has two ports on his ‘Atari tube of m&ms’ – the largest is the cartridge slot, and a small VGA port sits in the lid of the tube. This VGA port carries the power supply, controller, sound and video signals to and from the console.
[Dablio] sent in a bunch of pictures of his build which are in a gallery after the break. Now for the million-dollar question: anybody know where to buy one of these Dynacom MegaBoys?

http://hackaday.com/2012/04/07/the-t...ari-2600-ever/

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Browser Emulation of 1975 Computer Runs First 16-Bit Home Game

April 6th, 2012, 01:01 Posted By: wraggster

Following up on the 2009 story about the first graphics game written for a 16-Bit Home PC, I thought Slashdot readers might be interested in seeing the game in question running in their browsers. The original hardware has been emulated and loaded with the original machine code transcribed from PDF scans. Some brief background here."

http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/0...-bit-home-game

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Giving an old Atari computer a much needed upgrade

April 4th, 2012, 23:48 Posted By: wraggster


As a kid, [Boisy] cut his teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer. It was a wonderful machine for its day, featuring a relatively powerful Motorola 6809 CPU. Although his CoCo was theoretically more powerful than its Commodore and Apple contemporaries, the graphics and sound capabilities of [Boisy]‘s first love paled in comparison to his friends 6502-based machines. A little jealously and thirty years go a long way, because now [Boisy] is adding a 6809 microprocessor to the 6502-based machines Atari put out.
[Boisy]‘s goal for his Liber809 project was simple: Put a 6809 CPU in an Atari XEGS and get NitrOS-9, the Unix-like OS for the TRS-80 CoCo running on his Frankenputer. After a few months of work, [Boisy] completed his goal and more so: the Liber809 also works on the Atari 1200XL.
To put [Boisy]‘s work in perspective, it’s like he took a Macintosh from 1993 and made it run on an Intel 486. While that’s not a terribly accurate analogy, we hope our readers will understand the fortitude needed to make a computer run on a completely different processor.
After the break, you can check out a neat demo app written by [SLOR] from the AtariAge forums showcasing a 6809 running in a machine designed for a 6502. Awesome work for all involved

http://hackaday.com/2012/04/04/givin...eeded-upgrade/

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4DO 1.1.6.5 Beta

April 2nd, 2012, 00:59 Posted By: wraggster

via http://www.aep-emu.de/

A new beta version of the 3DO emulator 4DO based on FreeDO is available.

Quote:
There are no functional changes in 1.1.6.5 beta. This release provides the introduction of the 4DO installer. If you find an issue, please provide feedback!

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New Hacks Added to RomHacking.Net

April 2nd, 2012, 00:12 Posted By: wraggster

The following Hacks have been submitted and approved to the database (in submitted order oldest to newest):

• DQ5 DS: Monster Trainer v1.0 (Improvement)(Dragon Quest V (DS): Hand of the Heavenly Bride)(NDS)
• Breath of Fire 2 GBA Palette Hack (Improvement)(Breath of Fire 2)(GBA)
• Digimon World - Giromon Jukebox Fix (Bug Fix)(Digimon World)(PSX)
• Super Mario Bros SUICIDEXTREME3 (Complete)(Super Mario Bros.)(NES)
• Rock and Roll Racing GBA Palette Restoration (Improvement)(Rock and Roll Racing)(GBA)
• SMB3J Damage System (Improvement)(Super Mario All-Stars)(SNES)
• Shin Megami Tensei automap enhancement (Improvement)(Shin Megami Tensei)(SNES)
• War Room Challenge 2012 - Advance Wars 2 (Complete)(Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising)(GBA)
• Rockman 4: Minus Infinity (Complete)(Mega Man IV)(NES)
• GoldenEye Spectrum Emulation Unlocked (Bug Fix)(GoldenEye 007)(N64)

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New Utilities Added to Romhacking.Net

April 2nd, 2012, 00:12 Posted By: wraggster

The following Utilities have been submitted and approved to the database (in submitted order oldest to newest):

• ztwedit (Level Editors)(NES)
• PSX-MODE2 (Miscellaneous)(PSX)
• LivePatch (Patching)(PSP)
• CD Replace (Miscellaneous)(Multiple)
• ztwedit (Level Editors)(NES)
• XM6 Pro-X68K (Debuggers / Special Emulators)(X68K)
• FISGON (Miscellaneous)(PSX)
• Groen (Level Editors)(NES)
• Sega Saturn Region Patcher (Miscellaneous)(SAT)
• PB Archives Extractor Tool (Game Specific)(PSX)

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Atari Pong review (1976)

April 1st, 2012, 23:15 Posted By: wraggster

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Prince of Persia creator to release source code

April 1st, 2012, 23:14 Posted By: wraggster

Jordan Mechner is trying to figure out how to put it into some "21st century readable format"
Prince of Persia, the classic 1989 Apple II game from Jordan Mechner, could soon find its way into the hands of interested programmers everywhere, as Mechner has announced his intention to distribute the source code.
Mechner acknowledged on his blog that he'd been searching for the game for the better part of 10 years, and lo and behold his dad found it and others in the back of a closet. It's worth noting that Mechner's father composed the original music for both Karateka and Prince of Persia.
"So, for all fifteen of you 6502 assembly-language coders out there who might care… including the hardy soul who ported POP to the Commodore 64 from an Apple II memory dump… I will now begin working with a digital-archeology-minded friend to attempt to figure out how to transfer 3.5″ Apple ProDOS disks onto a MacBook Air and into some kind of 21st-century-readable format," Mechner said.
He also noted that it might "take a little while" because of how busy he is. Mechner is currently working on a revival of Karateka for XBLA and PSN.


http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...se-source-code

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