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Dreamcast News - The Latest in Emulation and Homebrew is a News and downloads site for Sega Dreamcast, Sega Saturn and Vintage Sega Consoles like the Megadrive, Master System and 32X, We have all the latest emulators, hack, homebrew, commercial games and all the downloads on this site, the latest homebrew and releases, Part of the
DCEmu Homebrew & Gaming Network.
THE LATEST NEWS BELOW
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December 6th, 2007, 19:00 Posted By: Dr._Zoidberg
Dreamcast 2 in the works?
Trademark application sparks excitement over SEGA re-entry into console market.
SEGA Corporation has filed a new application to protect the trademark Dreamcast - sparking rumours that the Japanese publisher is planning on making a shock return to the console manufacturing market with the Dreamcast 2.
The application, sent to the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Trademark Applications and Registrations Retrieval (TARR) dated August 13 2007, relates to:
"Home video game machines; player-operated electronic controllers for electronic video game machines; video game interactive controller, namely, hand held pads, and floor pads or mats; joysticks for video games; computer cursor control devices, namely, computer mouse; flash memory cards; video game software, computer game programs".
Web chatter suggests the proof is in the detail of the application - the original Dreamcast didn't have a floor mat accessory and the Dreamcast's Visual Memory Unit (VMU) is far from the flash memory cards we know and use today - although we'd say that the VMU is pretty similar to the modern day memory cards.
The filing could, of course, simply be a further effort from SEGA to protect the Dreamcast name. According to the USPTO the original Dreamcast trademark is still active. However, the two descriptions are very different. You can see the original trademark description here.
Digg tHis
We've contacted SEGA UK for comment. We'll update you on this potentially megaton story as we get it.
Source: VideoGamer
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December 6th, 2007, 18:22 Posted By: wraggster
The GP2X Store have just posted that they have the special edition Treamcast back in stock for those interested.
Heres more info on what a Treamcast is:
Treamcast Special Edition is the latest edition of the Treamcast family. This special edition comes in matt black with a sharp TFT screen for optimum performance. This collectors edition has also be redesigned using the some of feedback we have received from happy users.
Description
Comes with: Treamcast console, Joypad, AC adaptor, Car adaptor, Case. Everything in the picture is included.
- Matt Black for a more sleek look
- The first 128bit console
- Advance PowerVR graphics chip
- Samsung 5” TFT screen for optimum performance
- Brightness and Volume control
- Headphone output
- Plays all region Dreamcast games
- Plays Dreamcast homebrews
- 12v car adapter
- 100-240V auto switching power adapter comes with 2 pin cable (cable can be changed to suit your needs)
- Comes with an original Dreamcast controller for optimum performance
- Can be connected to a normal TV (cable not supply and its outputs a NTSC signalfor best compability)
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December 6th, 2007, 13:30 Posted By: JKKDARK
via Kotaku
Even though SEGA isn't producing the Dreamcast anymore, the console lives on. Heck, tiny Japanese hobby developers still make shooters for it. The DC's legacy continues in our hearts, minds and Czech children's books. Over at UK:RESISTANCE, a reader writes:
"Hello from Czech republic. I like to read UKR so I decided to send you pics from book I found in niece's hands. It shows many common life things include electronics in form of drawn pictures. The author of book had to be very distinguished as Dreamcast was choosed as example of true video game system (and not the Sony crap) which should be recognized by kids"
The Mac clearly dates the book, but still. There's a generation of Czech kids who equate the Dreamcast with a video game console. Think about that!
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December 2nd, 2007, 20:10 Posted By: wraggster
The ScummVM Team recently posted 2 updates on their site, heres the info:
We are pleased to announce another series of games from HorrorSoft are supported, which use the AGOS engine:
Elvira - Mistress of the Dark
Elvira II - The Jaws of Cerberus
Waxworks (Amiga version only)
Help rescue Elvira in Elvira 1/2, and resolve a family curse in Waxworks.
And also this
ScummVM now adds another freeware title to its list of games: Lure of the Temptress, which was the first game to use Revolution Software's Virtual Theatre engine. Players must help Diermot escape imprisonment, unravel the mysteries surrounding the Skorl occupation of the town, and eventually defeat the evil enchantress that controls them.
Excellent News for fans of ScummVM 
What Is ScummVM?
ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!
Some of the adventures ScummVM supports include Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; Wyrmkeep's Inherit the Earth; Coktel Vision's Gobliiins; Westwood Studios' The Legend of Kyrandia and games based on LucasArts' SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system such as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more.
Among the systems on which you can play those games are Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PocketPC, PalmOS, AmigaOS, BeOS, OS/2, PSP, PS2, SymbianOS/EPOC and many more.
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November 29th, 2007, 18:24 Posted By: Christuserloeser
The folks at Cryptic Allusion released a new CryptoCast episode:
Below, you'll find the podcast notes for the highly uncensored and very wandering podcast. It's basically a recorded conversation where everyone sat down in one room at my house and talked everything from beer to niche gaming. Hopefully you guys will enjoy this! But beware that it is NOT SAFE FOR WORK (unless you're wearing headphones). We do a bit more cursing than usual, and I'm too tired this week to bleep it all out. Plus, I'm going on a honeymoon tomorrow...sue me ^_^ Enjoy!
---
CryptoCast 006 - Konnichwa, Bitches!
Direct Download: Linkypoo
All apologies for the odd sound quality. The mic I was using is mostly for close-up vocal recording, and we were surrounding it. Some of us behind the cardioid (your's truly) sound like we're in the back of a room, and that's because the mic was picking up the reflections of our voices from the walls in the room. Everything should still be intelligible though.
Links:
Street Fighter 4 - Video Link to Capcom's site
Pizza with crazy toppings - Link
Here's the picture in which you're supposed to figure out who the statue is of (from TIGSource): Link
The shirt Pam was wearing: Link on Jinx.com
Source - Cryptic Allusion Forums
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November 29th, 2007, 17:41 Posted By: Christuserloeser
Guess we're a bit late on this one, but Chui posted about his plans on some of his current and future projects in his forum a while back:
SNES4ALL project is stopped now, sorry. Fox and me are thinking to rebuild ALL for making a ZNES multiplatform port with some SH4 assembler cores. It is very crazy and we will spend a long time.
Also now Fox and me are working on a secret project  I think that we could have a decent release for christmas.
About PSX4ALL is very complex project and maybe it will be the definitive project and i am sure that it will be the last project for me.
Now PSX4ALL is developed for GP2X and PSP coders, really friends and i hope that they will get the best results at near future.
Finally, the next is: ZX4ALL with new ZX/Spectrum games, other Fenix games/remakes, Neverball, MAME4ALL and the secrect project ;-) also i hope release some commercial games for Dreamcast at the next years with 3dfxdev.net
Source: Chui's Dev and Discussion Forum, hosted here at DCEmu UK
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November 27th, 2007, 14:40 Posted By: Max
On November 27th 1998 the Dreamcast had its birth in Japan. Reason enough to celebrate its 9th birthday with many prizes and annoucements.
Dreamcast Scene presents - in cooperation with Sega Germany, redspotgames and Van Basilco - a sweepstake that haven't been there in this form. Good Dreamcast knowledge is required and the prizes grow from day to day.
Information: www.dreamcast-scene.com
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November 27th, 2007, 14:25 Posted By: JKKDARK
In 27th November 1998 the sixth generation started and the Dreamcast was released. Happy birthday Dreamcast
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November 24th, 2007, 00:25 Posted By: JKKDARK
lxdream, the Sega Dreamcast emulator for Linux, was ported to x86-64 and Mac OS X.
From the official page:
It must be porting week - both the x86-64 and mac ports should (fingers crossed) work out of the box now. (Note that the mac port is intel only, and still requires X11+GTK 2.0 to build). Real native mac support will probably follow slowly as time permits - I’m getting something of a crash course in mac programming at the moment ^_^.
Changes
* Added x86-64 support to the translator
* Initial Mac OS X support (configuration and translator ABI changes)
* Fix buggy TRAPA instruction (translator only - fixes several homebrew games)
* Improve error handling of a few situations (can’t connect to display, etc)
* Esound is now optional (but without it you’re not getting any audio)
* Re-add the “Load Binary” menu entry that somehow got lost in the GUI revamp.
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November 22nd, 2007, 17:54 Posted By: wraggster
With thanks to the web archive ive now managed to fix Chuis Site, as you all know Chui is the coder of
NEO4ALL : Alternative open source NEOGEO/CD emulator.
AES4ALL : NEO4ALL fork for emulating home and arcade NEOGEO systems.
DCASTAWAY : The first Atari ST emulator.
UAE4ALL : Open source Amiga500 emulator.
SNES4ALL : Alternative Snes9x port (Super Nintendo emulator).
ZX4ALL : Open source ZX-Spectrum emulator.
MAME4ALL : MAME GP2X adaptation for Dreamcast.
PSX4ALL : Open source Playstation emulator.
NOIZ2SA : Abstract shoot'em up.
FENIX : The way to game development.
SDL : My Dreamcast SDL driver.
Im going to ask Soully later to see if we can adapt Chuis site with a News Forum and Comments section.
For now enjoy having the site back here --> http://chui.dcemu.co.uk/index.html
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November 19th, 2007, 21:18 Posted By: wraggster
via elation comes more news of the upcoming Dreamcast Emulator for Windows:
Okay, so most of SEGA Mega Drive (Genesis for you US folks) aren't that playable. Too many graphics bug for one - the emulator makes heavy use of PVR OIT capability. Sound will usually get ugly when heavy action starts even though it's fine in menus. And there are other nasty problems as well, like falling through floors in alternate Prince of Persia.
But some games do work well enough (too bad Lotus 2 RECS is not one of them
By the way, I can't shake that crazy idea of connecting a hard drive to Dreamcast off my mind. I'm pretty sure it can be done. Basically all that's needed is some hardware to translate SEGA Packet Interface commands into HDD reads, and that's exactly what Makaron's GD module is doing. Right now there is logical link on register level but I'm confident I can extend it to handle singal layer as well. I do have some experience with ATA/ATAPI hardware.
At first I was thinking of FPGA to handle the ATA part, but perhaps a fast clocked ARM7 would suffice - I need research it some more and see what kind of latency I can expect. I really don't have time for this though... but if there's anyone out there with the money, skills and time and wants to try - contact me. I'll help
I feel like I could...
ScummVM works now (except the newest 0.10 version which is known to have sound problems on the Dreamcast port). Thanks to it crashing frequently on T8 I managed to nail down a bug in the MT version of Makaron.
Running emulator inside emulator is fun! Also, FreeSCI 0.3.5 port is actually performing better on Makaron than the native PC version...
SEGA Genesis emu works as well. I'll update tomorrow with some pictures.
More at the homepage here --> http://dknute.livejournal.com/
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November 15th, 2007, 23:54 Posted By: wraggster
More news from Makaron the Dreamcast Emulator for Windows:
I figured out what made most of the casted shadows look wrong. It's again the problem of 1/Z -> Z conversion, and really limited precision of 32/24 bit floating point numbers. But that doesn't mean it's resolved now I'm afraid.
Quick summary: PVR2 expects 3D data to be registered as [X; Y; 1/Z], or [X; Y; 1/W]. X and Y are already in screen space, so those actually hold pixel position value. 1/Z is used for two things: Z-buffering and perspective-correct texture mapping.
What is W exactly anyway? Well, all 3D transformations can be undone one way or the other. That's beacuse the end result is always a homogeneous space. To simplify things consider it always being a subset of space that can be fitted into a cube. For example, to keep visibility clipping fast the hardware assumes it needs to fit into [-1; 1] data range. So your task is to write the matrices in such a way that in the end everything you want on the screen will fit into [-1; -1; -1] / [1; 1; 1] cube. That's the price for having the hardware do it for you so the CPU can spend more time on AI or whatever.
But there's a catch, as always. Namely perspective transformation is one-way and once applied it cannot be reversed to produce exactly the same input data. That's because the last step is a division that looks like this: K / (K + N). Having only a number as the end result you can't tell what original K & N were. However, since the division is the very last thing to do, there is a workaround
Keep 3D data as 4D vectors, that is [X; Y; Z] becomes [X; Y; Z; W] where W is always 1. Always, except the perspective transformation, after which W becomes something else and the last division is actually [X/W; Y/W; Z/W]. Since we keep W we can always reverse it if needed. What's more, you need only to invert W once into 1/W - one easy case division and then 3 multiplies is faster than 3 full-blown divisions. Not by much perhaps, but still, every cycle counts if you want a high fill rate.
Since PVR2 has no hardware transform engine of any kind (all it does is rasterization) it will happily accept the bare minimum - that is X, Y (already after the division!) and 1/W. In most cases you can freely substitute 1/Z for 1/W as both will produce required Z diversity for Z-buffering and the correction factor for texturing. In other words, if you are emulating PVR2 you know not if what you get is 1/W or 1/Z, and you still need to recreate all four vector elements for the PC graphics card to work with.
And it's not only that... the 1/Z isn't actually 1/Z, it's just referenced to as such so you don't have to write 200 / (Z + 200) every time. And this is more likely what it is. Except of course 200 can be any number and you don't know it anyway
Not difficult enough yet? Then how about when you start messing with Z too much you suddenly realize you're loosing precision bits. Fast. If you do (N * N) / N, or (N / N) * N, you will most likely not get exactly N in return. Worse even, if N is very big or very small the end result might be quite different from what you'd expect.
Ah, but that is still not all there is to it. Some games out there are not too shy of registering Z values as low as 0.00001 and as big as 10000 at the same time. Now try to compress that into required [0; 1] range and you'll realize there are simply not enough precision bits in modern 24-bit Z-buffer implementations. 24 because it's 32 minus 8 bits for stencil buffer (and stencil buffer is no longer optional, there is simply no support for plain 32-bit Z-buffering).
Wait, have I forgot to mention that some titles go as far as throwing infinities and even NANs into 1/Z? Have fun with these.
So... shadows look much better (some issues still remain). Train wheels in Evolution 2 intro should not be visible through the floor. But that broke Dead or Alive 2 intro in few places (eyeballs sticking out of skulls, anyone?). That too can be fixed, more or less, but it will break Soul Calibur character selection screen. Getting this to work will in turn cause menus and other stuff in Soul Reaver become invisible. And so on...
I see no other way now but to break some games on purpose (keeping the glitches to minimum) in order to make others work at all. The alternative would be to try and create several profiles for different games and use those. I'll have to think about it some more.
http://dknute.livejournal.com/
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November 15th, 2007, 23:47 Posted By: wraggster
The rather excellent and very honest GP2X Store have today added the Treamcast Special Edition to their store, priced at $199 (£95)
Heres more details
Treamcast Special Edition is the latest edition of the Treamcast family. This special edition comes in matt black with a sharp TFT screen for optimum performance. This collectors edition has also be redesigned using the some of feedback we have received from happy users.
Description
- Matt Black for a more sleek look
- The first 128bit console
- Advance PowerVR graphics chip
- Samsung 5” TFT screen for optimum performance
- Brightness and Volume control
- Headphone output
- Plays all region Dreamcast games
- Plays Dreamcast backups
- Plays Dreamcast homebrews
- 12v car adapter
- 100-240V auto switching power adapter comes with 2 pin cable (cable can be changed to suit your needs)
- Comes with an original Dreamcast controller for optimum performance
- Can be connected to a normal TV (cable not supply and its outputs a NTSC signalfor best compability)
Buy at GP2X Store
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