January 1st, 2007, 23:36 Posted By: Christuserloeser
The classic Dreamcast homebrew website DCEmulation.com is finally seeing an update!
Here's what Darc wrote about the plans for the update: A new front site is being created, because the current one is in hideous disrepair. souLLy and I will be working on that.
Once the site is done, everything will be moved over to a new server, free from ZTNet's problems.
At first a new logo has been created by Melancholy:
removed
Basically, I want to do away with all the clutter. The ads, the rotating sigs, the hideous pure colors. My intention was to break apart the essense of the site and create clean shapes to emphasis a rejuvenation. A return to why we play the Dreamcast in the first place. So I took an element I felt that best related to this:
The power light.
The power light is where it starts. It didn't start with the homebrew. It doesn't matter what kind of system specs sit inside. It all started when we first hit that power button. I want to return the feeling of the first time they put that disc in, started it up, and seen that bouncing logo on the screen. That's where I feel we need to go. People started coming here because they loved their Dreamcast. And that dream started with the first blink of that orange light.
The logo tries to remind people what it was like when they first powered up the Dreamcast. The symbol in the bottom left represents the action of putting the disc in the machine and turning it on. The curves try to not only mimic the lid, but the movement involved with CDs. The white oval where the DC swirl should be is intentionally left blank. I will get to why I decided this later. The top right represents the bouncing ball on the startup screen of the Dreamcast. I made the ball orange to match the power button because I still want it to represent the fact that the system is still on. And the dropped 'E' on 'Emulation' represents the bouncing effect the ball has on the startup screen when the ball hits a letter. In short, the bottom left represents the physical aspect startup whereas the top right represents the visual aspect.
As for the colors, I know that it is a big argument with many on which Dremcast swirl color to put on the page. Here in the US, it's red, and in the UK, it's blue. So instead of picking one, I thought we should do some site colors to represent both. The orange reflects more on the US version, but at the same time does not outright say it. And if some hints of a light blue were added to the site, it would make a nice cool contrast that would relate to the UK swirl. That is why I left the DC swirl off of the logo. I felt that it should not be up to the logo to pick a side, so it instead opts to pick neither and leave that decision up to the visitor.
January 3rd, 2007, 04:22 Posted By: Christuserloeser
Beats of Rage creators SENILE TEAM revealed their new Dreamcast project: A 'Micro Machines'-like 2D racer! Here's what jeroen wrote on the Senile Team Forums:
In our interview with destructoid a month ago we mentioned that a surprise was coming, and here it is:
The first quarter of 2007 promises to become a small revival of the good old Dreamcast™. Time to dust off your console and get ready for three brand new shooters. Last Hope, Trigger Heart Exelica and Karous are all on preorder to ship within the next three months.
Right on time, we have restocked limited quantities of official Sega Dreamcast Controllers and Dreamcast Visual Memory Cards. Both items are brand new European version items and suitable for any Dreamcast™ console sold worldwide. Available now as long as supplies last at a great bargain.
Dreamcast Controller Euro US$ 14.90
Dreamcast Visual Memory Card (VMS/VMU) Euro US$ 9.90
update:
I got an email from play asia about my last Hope pre-order:
We would like to inform you that next to the Last Hope standard edition
that you have already preordered, a Limited Edition has now been announced
as well. The Limited Edition contains an Original Soundtrack Album and
ships in a white color Double Disc Jewel Case (similar to the Border Down
Limited Edition).
The Limited Edition will be strictly limited to only 500 units (!) and
will exclusively be available at Play-Asia.com. If you wish to upgrade or
add the Limited Edition to your order, you can use the amend order
function in your customer account or contact our customer service for
assistance.
Due to its limited availability, only one unit is available per customer.
Preorders will be closed once our allocations have been pre-sold. Both
editions are currently expected to be in stock by end of January.
Intro-------------------------------------------------------------
PCECast is an Pc Engine emulator. Games in PCE and ISO+WAV format could be played.
Suport------------------------------------------------------------
- Games in PCE, ISO, HCD, TOC, NEC (*read more) are playable
- Cd-Rom Games are suported as ISO+WAV (HCD, TOC, NEC)
- Sound & CD Sound
- Zip PCE game files
- Analog pad movement
- Savestate with mini-screenshot
- Pad 6 buttons
- FPS counter
THIS Version------------------------------------------------------
Speed is good but not perfect, sometimes the emu could slow down for a while, for this reason I recomend disabling CD audio.
you can get more speed disabling sound, but you can only do it one time for running emu and after loading any game.
Many option in Gui are disabled or unoperative, as soon as I had more time this would be solved.
ToDo-------------------------------------------------------------
- Savesatate would be sooner full active, now saveste are too big for vmu.
- More speed
...
Many thanks to----------------------------------------------------
Ron (http://www.tronvideogames.net), Timofonic, Juarrox, Kupra, Kortex, Adrian, Chui, Fox, Dnkroz, MadriDC & MadridSX pelople, Cuqui, H-Bonzo music band,... and many others.
Only a few days ago Play Asia announced that it had 500 Last Hope [Limited Edition] ((Dreamcast Independent published game by redspotgames) units and exclusively available to them for sale
Play Asia are still taking Preorders for the normal version of Last Hope for $39.99/Ł20.90 (rumored to be about 2000 copies pressed in total)
January 10th, 2007, 16:57 Posted By: Darksaviour69
Max (founder of dreamcast-scene.com) personal online shop, vanbasilco/onlineshop, is selling Last Hope, regular and LE version (order now as play-asia have sold out) and reveals in the description, that Last Hope will be in stock on Wednesday 31 January, 2007
Its rumored that Max it the man behind Last Hope publisher, redspotgames
update: ok, I got it a bit wrong, here is the info from the man himself
Van Basilco isn't my "personal" shop but the company I work at. Indeed it has a shop with Dreamcast-Scene and redspotgames items since the first is part financed by it and the last is the intern publishing brand of it.
The 31st January isn't the real release date since there isn't one yet, but I need to write down some date in the webshop.
The release depends on the delivery of the CD factory, we can't control it. But I guess the regular edition will be indeed available in the third week of January.
It is nearly certain that Sega of Japan plans to discontinue production of GD-ROM media in February, 2007. This media is used almost exclusively by the Sega Dreamcast home console, and the NAOMI arcade system. By stopping production, future official games (licensed by Sega) on the Dreamcast or NAOMI will not be possible.
(The NAOMI is important, because games such as Ikaruga, Border Down, Puyo Puyo Fever, and nearly all official import DC games from 2004-2007 originated on NAOMI.)
If GD-ROM production is discontinued, this means:
* No more NAOMI arcade games
* No more NAOMI ports to Dreamcast (Recent NAOMI ports include Under Defeat and Radirgy)
* Trigger Heart Exelica (February 2007) and Karous (March 2007) will unexpectedly be the final official Dreamcast games.
This doesn't need to happen, as developers are fond of the NAOMI for its relative low cost, ease of production and accessibility, and straightforward ports to the Dreamcast home console. Warashi returned to the scroll shooting genre with Trigger Heart Exelica on NAOMI, and Milestone would likely gladly continue to produce further games following Karous on the system as well.
Sega themselves have recently presented Dynamite Deka EX running on NAOMI. If GD-ROM production continues, there is a much greater chance that we'll see a home console port of this game on DC within a year. Please speak up now, and help us to ensure the continuation of GD-ROM production.
In order to show your opposition for the ceasing of production of GD-ROM media, please click on the image below, save and print, sign and date it, and then mail it to Sega of Japan, located at the following address:
Sega of Japan
1-2-12 Haneda
Ohta-ku, Tokyo, 144-8531
Japan
Because of the urgency of this matter, we, as Dreamcast-Scene, do not have time to compile collected signatures and send them in a large package as usual. These letters will need to be sent straight to the source. If you bring the sealed and addressed envelope to your local post office, they will be able to affix the exact amount of postage.
Click image to enlarge
Time is of the essence. Please do this as soon as you can. Thank you. - Dreamcast-Scene.com, and Dreamcast fans everywhere. digg the story
I'm releasing a new version with the following changes:
- convert enabled for Katana, WinCE and Naomi binaries
- checking for new version
- manual binary identification
- doesn't try to convert if scanned binary was deleted
A new Sega Dreamcast Emulator called Makaron has appeared, heres some WIP News.
It imitated me to lay paw on very interesting stuffs Spore this it is, of couple hours impounded me oneself revisal - I will have employment on any time.
Interim I decided you somewhat to tease and to insert a few samples from the employ newly of conquered knowledge in practice.
So yea, I've been working on this for a few months now off and on, have made a couple of changes I feel are important, and so ... yea a new release was had by all.
Here are the changes, straight from the new part of the readme (from frontpage you won't see anything, click comment to read it):
alpha4 (01/18/07):
*after more of eke-eke's changes, the sound stuff now works properly.
alpha3 (01/17/06):
*Slightly newer fame
*put in the code for eke-eke's changes to the sound driver to fix FM sound in some games. Doesn't work properly so it is defined out.
alpha2 (10/26/06):
*Uses DMA for texture transfer, but only partially. Should speed up texture transfer by ~2x
*Uses SQs in more places that affect speed more.
alpha1 (10/22/06):
*Faster assembly twiddling function
*Uses store queues when possible for speedups
*New FAME core from fox68k
*Multilingual Menu - automatically set by the DC's BIOS settings
*Re-Added FPS showing option
*Modified the romlist system, so that it can now read files with spaces in their names (use an | to seperate filename from real name)
*Small speedups in many places
TODO:
*Add switch for mameZ80 and Cz80
*use DMA for sound
*Make menu able to list roms without romlist
For reference, this was built off the july release of gpdc by BlackAura, and includes all files except roms that you need to use it (and more!).
The download is HERE. It includes all files needed, including the source code.
A note to those looking at the source: every change I made is marked somehow (usually by a comment including my name or a similar define).
If you repost this news elsewhere, please do NOT use your own download link. I'd much rather have all downloads go through this original file (I want to be able to track the number of downloads).
January 21st, 2007, 23:00 Posted By: Christuserloeser
News from the Project Firestorm website about their commercial Dreamcast project Push the Button: Feuer Frei:
You can preorder the game now for 24,95 Euros at Project Firestorm's online shop Game-Trader.de. The game is sheduled for 15. March 2007.
Some info on the game:
Push the Button: Feuer frei, is a 4 Player 2D Shooting Battle Game. The Game-System is very Simple. Shot the others, avoid the Bullets.
We will provide a very simple free download Version of the multiplayer part. For the CD Version there is an extra 1 Player Mode incl. a Highscore-table. Also more Multiplayer Options. And a small Demo of [our WIP game] Time Hunter.
A page for this homebrew Fenix game is now up at The Fenix for Dreamcast Technical Page. Just click the link under the game projects heading to get to the page.
While preorders are already accepted by various international retailers Last hope for Dreamcast will be released on January 31, 2007.
We've made Last Hope for Dreamcast more accessible, added visualizations of boss hit zones and made it easier to differ between bullets and explosions. For experienced players we've included the original NEO·GEO game mode which means speedier bullets and a harder difficult setting. To stay arcade typish, the original Dreamcast Arcade Stick is next to the standard Controller fully supported. You also can save your game progress and score on your Visual Memory Unit as usual.....
On a sidenote, in agreement with the publisher we've decided to release this Dreamcast version first. An release date of the NEO·GEO CD version isn't estimated yet.
I wanted to release this a long time ago, but a lot of things got in the way, and I wasn't sure if anyone wanted to work on it. Now some time has passed, and my mind changed. I don't care about this anymore.
January 5, 2007.
This is the JoyMenu 2.2 source code. You can do whatever you want with it, and seeing how ugly some parts of the code are, probably the first thing you will do with it is to have a laugh.
It must be compiled with FrikQCC 2.4, because it uses some static variables.
Yes, I'm releasing this in the public domain. I don't care what you do with it.
Quick entry. Time to open this up for the new year. I've got my fingers crossed that we can release a patch for Segagaga before summer hits, but I won't promise anything.
Technical, material, and personal considerations stalled our work over the holidays, and we're picking up where we dropped our bit back in early December. We have lately given our attention to the movie files on the Segagaga disc. These contain the animated sequences available for viewing on Youtube, as well as other segments such as the Mogetan commercials.
Mogetan is a saurian handpuppet who is supposed to be a kid, curious about Sega and videogames. He asks questions to a female puppet named (in lieu of an actual name) Miss, voiced by Kikuko Inoue, the same woman who plays Alisa.
These files are encoded in .sfd format on the Dreamcast disc. We're ripping the files from our backup of the disc, converting them to AVI format, adding subtitles, and converting them back into .sfd format movies. These movie files will form part of the patch that our audience will apply to their backup copies.
I'm not sure how the subtitles will look on the screen, since the videos are stored at a smaller aspect ratio than they appear on a player's television. The videos are stored at a 4:3 ratio, and they play at a 5:3 ratio. I have .wmv versions of three of the opening movies uploaded onto my personal site, and they are versions of the movies stretched to a 5:3 aspect ratio. The Dreamcast presumably applies some sort of filter to the compressed images that make the jaggy sprites seem smoother, so hopefully the same standard will be applied to the subtitles.
Here are the videos, followed by some notes. I have chosen only those videos that play at the start of the game, in order to prevent spoiling anyone who's keeping himself fresh for the game.
This video plays right after the Sega and Hitmaker logos run across the screen at startup. I had to block the kanji at the top of the screen in order to make the English text readable. Thankfully, this is the only video that has distracting text over the space where a subtitle will go, so this does not need to happen again.
This is also one of the few instances where I've put the translation at the top of the screen-technically making it a supertitle-in order to prevent blocking the majority of the original material's activity.
This video plays right when the player starts the game. I had to hunt around the internet in order to learn the specific script language used in .SSA subtitle formats in order to change the text color. I have decided to use alternating yellow and white letters for now.
Since the text-only portions of the game assign specific colors to specific speakers, I will try to assign those colors to each character's subtitles in the final version.
During this scene, the screen quickly cuts to a black background with Japanese writing. In the effort to make our localization as thorough as we can, I have cut those frames from the animation and replaced them with English frames.
That's all for now. This blog ought to see more regular updates now that we're on the move again.
Source: Thanks go out to Sultan of Saturn at DCEmulation.com
Animated flowers in the home certainly aren't a new fad, as we've seen talkative ones, printing ones, networked ones, and even petals that douse fires. Sega Toys' latest gizmo takes the electrified flower to another level, as it looks to integrate the bouncy demeanor of the iSmile flower with your music to create a housemate that jumps and grooves to your tunes right alongside of you. The device accepts any musical source via a 3.5-millimeter input jack, and also features a built-in speaker, illuminated petals, moving leaves, and an expressive face to boot. The iSmile even reacts accordingly to the genre of music coming through, as it gracefully grooves to slow jams while shakin' it until the leaves fall off when listening to heavy metal. Sure, this thing desperately needs a speaker pass-through output so you're not stuck utilizing the presumably weak integrated driver, but nevertheless, you can pick up your own iSmile now for just about 40 bucks.
Here's my Shenmue Save Converter, so you can load your completed Shenmue 1 (US/JAP) save on Shenmue 2 (PAL), to continue the story.
Using the converter is pretty simple: browse and select your Shenmue 1 savefile, press "A", and then select the destination VMU to save the fixed PAL Shenmue save.
If everything went fine, you'll be able to start Shenmue 2 using your Shenmue 1 save, keeping your money, prizes and moves learned.
Spore this it is, of couple hours impounded me oneself revisal - I will have employment on any time. 
