VirtualBox v2.2.0

April 8th, 2009

VirtualBox is  a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

  • OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export (see chapter 3.8, Importing and exporting virtual machines, User Manual page 55)
  • Host-only networking mode (see chapter 6.7, Host-only networking, User Manual page 88)
  • Hypervisor optimizations with significant performance gains for high context switching rates
  • Raised the memory limit for VMs on 64-bit hosts to 16GB
  • VT-x/AMD-V are enabled by default for newly created virtual machines
  • USB (OHCI & EHCI) is enabled by default for newly created virtual machines (Qt GUI only)
  • Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts
  • Shared folders for Solaris and OpenSolaris guests
  • OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests (see chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), User Manual page 70)
  • Added C API in addition to C++, Java, Python and Web Services

admin Computers

Alex WIP

April 7th, 2009

Alex dumped The Typing Of The Dead - NAOMI :

Last week my friend Gareth sent me a faulty “The Typing Of The Dead” NAOMI Cartridge

He said the cart was not working, in adition the cart arrived pretty destroyed (one of the connectors was totally destroyed), so i desoldered the Mask ROMS

After 8 hours of soldering (i still dont have  a SOP44 socket) i dumped the 18 maskroms

Unfortunally one of the roms seems faulty (i tried to redump it 4 times (desoldering it and soldering it again) and allways got the same crc)

Anyways the game works pretty well at Makaron emulator, so i had a look into the damaged rom and noticed that only sound that was there.

So IC15 needs to be redumped 

Got another faulty “The Typing Of The Dead” Cartidge ? Just contact me

admin WIP

Guru WIP

April 7th, 2009

Some news from Guru :

More stuff from Japan just arrived today!

Otenami Haiken (G-Net card)
Shanghai Sangokuhai Tougi (G-Net card)

Plus some other items…
Hana Jingi PCB (to decap/trojan CPU internal ROM)
Mahjong Cafe Doll CPU (to decap/trojan internal ROM)
Legend of Hero Tonma 8751 MCU and PAL
Pound for Pound M85 PALs and BPROMs
Great Sluggers ‘94 C369 KEYCUS

Thanks to a member of Team Japump for helping to locate the G-Net cards and sending the other chips for decapping. Also thanks to Tokrot for buying my Taito G-Net Super Puzzle Bobble card so that we actually had enough money to buy the two G-Net items.

Also, here’s a pic of the last Japanese haul…

I forgot to mention a couple of items in the news below. In this lot were also two Konami boards that were not working that we obtained for free, Cows Boys of Moo Mesa and Mystic Warriors. It turns out that Mystic Warriors is the JAA version which is not dumped so we have a nice bonus!
The last item I want to mention is at the very top left. It’s a NAOMI Virtua Golf panel to fit my Sega Astro City cab. There’s an extra I/O board under the panel containing a ROM that is currently not dumped. That should help some way towards getting it booting in MAME.

admin WIP

bsnes WIP

April 7th, 2009

Some news from byuu :

I was planning to keep this a secret until I got at least one game running correctly, but it didn’t take long at all.
So far, Kirby’s Dream Land 3 and Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension are fully playable. Marvelous has graphical issues. Super Mario RPG and Parodius 3 lock up. Mostly because I’ve only emulated the core SA-1 CPU, the Super MMC and the ALU. Still have to implement interrupts and timers, bitmap<->bitplane character conversion, variable bit-length reading, DMA, RAM protection, etc. I plan to support the entire chip, even if most games don’t use much of it.
Speed isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I get about ~88fps in Kirby 3 in the most intensive parts on an E8400 @ 3GHz. This is compared to ~148fps in Zelda 3. Speed may drop a bit more, especially after supporting the H/V timer, but I’m hoping my theory on how the counters work is correct; such that most games won’t need these to be active most of the time.
Overall, it’s easily the lowest-level SA-1 emulator around. It’s bus-cycle accurate, and syncs immediately with the S-CPU. So even if the S-CPU modifies RAM in the middle of an SA-1 opcode, the SA-1 will immediately detect this ‘just-in-time’, and vice versa. I even have rudimentary bus-conflict timing support. Eg when both the S-CPU and SA-1 attempt to access game pack ROM at the same time, the SA-1 will stall to allow the S-CPU unfettered access. It isn’t perfect, but it should average out to almost exactly the same speed as the real processor. I can improve it easily enough, but it would cause a speed hit in all games. We previously estimated that this level of accuracy would require at least 10GHz. Then again, perhaps it does on the Pentium IV architecture :P
I’m really happy I was able to get this running at a semi-decent speed. Given it’s the only co-processor to actually have real timing, and I get to use the cycle-perfect S-CPU core with almost no modifications, I intend to get this as bit-perfect as possible.
Speaking of which, the speed hit for adding SA-1 to other games is roughly ~3-5%. This is because the core timing mechanism of the emulator needs to support a co-processor thread. There’s just no easy way to avoid adding co-processor checks to the most CPU-intensive part of the emulator.
Lastly, this isn’t an invitation to harass me about adding SuperFX support :P
I recently re-wrote the S-CPU opcode macro processor to use a more generic approach, and decided to abstract the opcodes to share them with an SA-1 core. Needless to say, I was quite surprised to get at least two games fully playable with only two days’ worth of effort.

admin WIP

NeoRaine v1.2.6

April 7th, 2009

NeoRaine too :  

neoraine (1.2.6) unstable; urgency=low

  * There was again a bug in the crc calculation of the cache, which prevented
    neoraine to load a file it should have loaded from the game in some cases.
    Since I really had too many bugs of this kind, I completely disabled the
    optimization and thus fixed this bug for good this time. You should get
    much more reliable savegames now, especially with games which load tons of
    files like king of fighters. (It also affects normal play, when loading
    files between rounds).
  * See raine 0.51.5 changelog for generic changes in this version (gui,
    double bufer, etc…).

 – Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:27:01 +0200

admin Consoles

Raine v0.51.5

April 7th, 2009

New build from Raine :

Thanks again to some crazy testers on the forum who probably spend too much time playing neocd games !

So the main fix this time is for a big bug found again by mer-curious in neoraine. I wasn’t very subtle to fix it, I used the fastest way. I’ll try subtelity next time…
Except that, some gui improvmeents, the console finally calls m68kdis to disassemble 68000 code automatically, generic usability improvements, and some more bug fixes.

See the changelogs for details, I hope it will take more time to find some new bugs in this one !

admin Arcade

WinArcadia v10.0

April 6th, 2009

WinArcadia is open source freeware. The source code was compiled using SAS/C 6.58. It was written by James Jacobs of Amigan Software. AmiArcadia emulates AmiArcadia emulates console family, Interton VC 4000 console family and more.

admin Consoles

FCEUX v2.1.0a

April 5th, 2009

FCEUX is a cross platform, NTSC and PAL Famicom/NES emulator that is an evolution of the original FCE Ultra emulator. Over time FCE Ultra had separated into many separate branches.

 2.1.0a fixes a minor issue involving movie recording on both platforms. It fixes an issue where extra bytes where being appended to the author field of the .fm2 file, resulting in bloated files.

admin Consoles

DCMOTO.2009.02

April 5th, 2009

DCMOTO is an emulator for Windows of all Thomson 8 bits computers

Emulated computers :
MO5, MO5E, german MO5E
MO5NR, MO6, Olivetti Prodest PC128
T9000, TO7
TO7/70, arab TO7/70
TO9, german TO9
TO8, TO8D, TO9+

Version 2009.02
Error fixed in TO9+ key decoding function
New tuning : display contrast and brightness
New dialog box for speed tuning, sound tuning and display tuning
4096 color palette computed with EF9349 gamma coefficients
8 and 16 color palette computed with genuine four level color coding

admin Computers

DEmul 0.5.3 WIP

April 5th, 2009

DEmul is a Sega Dreamcast emulator for Windows.

Changelist:
- vertical shooters screen rotate
- screen filter shaders similar to Pete OGL2 plugins (find examples at gpu)
- spu sync and buffer options
- added all NAOMI/NAOMI2 dumps (not tested at all)
- autosave SRAM/EEPROM settings
- FLASH file autocreation
- fixed sound in most arcade games
- added multiple ROM path support

admin Consoles