After reading the great comments in this topic about strengthening the development side of the Dreamcast community, I wrote a few php scripts to facilitate some of the ideas, and set it up on Dream On.
The Developer's Hub is intended for anyone interested in Dreamcast development. This includes programmers, artists, musicians, and writers. At the moment, there is an automated system for placing help wanted ads for people with the skills to hook up with people looking for people with those skills to get projects done.
Over at DCiberia they have news of a soon to be released ZX Spectrum emulator , check out the screenshots and news at DCIberia here --> http://www.dciberia.net/
Some great news for Dreamcast Homebrew Developers:
Holly is a 3D engine SDK for the Dreamcast and is build on top of KOS 1.3.x (KallistiOS). It is implemented in C++, with some amount of SH4 assembly. The main developer of Holly3D is Heinrich Tillack. You can get in contact with him via E-mail info(at)tillack.org.
History - from Iris3d to Holly: In 2002 I added Triangle Strips clipping and IMD animation with vertex interpolation to Iris3D V0.7 by Olivier Chatry. Olivier the author of Iris3D included the patches into Iris3D V0.9.1. Which is the last official version of Iris 3D. In 2003 I started to modifiy this C++ code just for fun! Since 2003 I replaced (rewrote) around 95% of the C++ code, so I called the SDK Holly and NOT Iris-3D V2 as I thought before. Too much has changed - compared to Iris3D. I used the modified 3d engine for my own game projects (like DCASTLE). So here it is. Stay tuned for the upcoming release....
DCParticlez, an interactive technical demo for the Dreamcast, has been released. This demo displays a blast of particles onto the screen, from the bottom up, like fireworks. There are several factors that can be controlled in regards to the particles flying. You can adjust the max life (the maximum number of frames a particle can stay onscreen), gravity (the amount a particle's Y position is changed), size (the size of particles in pixels (square)), frameskip (the number of frames to wait before creating particles), Intensity (how many particles are created at one time). There is a display on the screen that displays the number of particles onscreen at the given time, and the X and Y coordinates of the particle's origin.
DCEmu UK is around 16 months old and is the premier english news site for the Dreamcast Emulation and Homebrew scene, (Dreamcast Scene is the killer site for Commercial and other scene news) and 2 days ago we broke the magical 3 million mark and not only that celebrated the biggest day for visitors since the site began.
Thanks to all the visitors and Developers who help keep this site and scene alive
What's new:
- New: Error handling (should've been done sooner)
- New: BootDreams' settings are saved in an INI, not registry now
- New: Association with CDI images
- Fixed: A lot, if not all, of the run time errors
- Fixed: Same as above, but unknown errors
Sorry to the people that couldn't get BootDreams working cause it'd give you a runtime error or an unknown error - I was too lazy to type out the entire path to the programs, which was causing the problem.
Download it at the <a href="http://www.consolevision.com/members/fackue/prj_bootdreams.shtml" target="_blank">project page</a>.
Many people where requesting a complete listing of the contents of my VMU Backup CD. So I decided to make an online listing... including all the files available to download!
So, enjoy this online catalog with over 3200 saves for over 330 Dreamcast games, in the classic VMI/VMS format.
It seems that more and more Jaguar programmers are becoming interested in Dreamcast programming lately.
The remake of the arcade classic, Gorf 3D, will be getting a Jaguar, Dreamcast, and PC release.
Gorf 3D, as the name suggests, is Gorf with three dimensional graphics and other improvements.
The cool thing about this game is that the original creator of Gorf, Jamie Fenton, tried the classic version of the Jaguar version of the game at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas in 2002 and loved it.
The Homebrew scene is impressive but we now have such homebrew as a port of Doom for the Ipod (check out our sister site Ipod News here --> http://ipodnews.dcemu.co.uk/ ), also this last week we have seen ports of ScummVM, Hexen, Heretic and Nes, Snes and Colecovision emulators released for the Nintendo DS ( Check out the leading DS news site here --> http://nintendo-ds.dcemu.co.uk/ ), also keep your eye on our new sister site at http://gpx2-news.dcemu.co.uk/ for the latest news of the new homebrew compatible GPX2 console.
DC France have posted news of a CVS (beta probably unstable) release of ScummVM for the Dreamcast. more info and downloads here --> http://www.dc-france.com/
Adrian McMenamin emailed me this news concerning Dreamcast linux
After a long period in the doldrums there are some early signs of life
in the Dreamcast Linux effort.
A bootable, if basic kernel is now available at http://newgolddream.dyndns.info/zImage - it doesn't require a BBA but it
will send output to a serial console so you need the coders' cable.
VMU Backup CD v1.3.0 by El Bucanero, released on 11th August 2005
A new version is ready, and this time with a pretty nice surprise.
The VMU CD now implements the VMU emulator SoftVMS by Marcus Comstedt (ported to KallistiOS by DirtySanchez). With the built-in VMU emulator you'll be able to play VMU minigames on your TV without having to transfer the minigames to a visual memory unit.
Changes:
VMU emulator SoftVMS implemented
Added more games and saves
60 mini games available
350 games listed with over 3200 saves
UPDATE: I've fixed the .CDI image!
I did a clean rebuild, then made a .ISO with MKISOFS and then just "BIN2BOOT vmucd.iso /nohack". I burned the disc, tried it on my Dreamcast and worked perfectly. yeah!
Again, sorry for any inconvenience and wasted CDs
Stonewall Interactive, an independent game developement team, has announced a Dreamcast port of their puzzler Celestial Mage. For more information about Celestial Mage and the Stonewall Interactice team, as well as a Windows XP demo of the game, check out their website:
Some great news and screenshots have been posted overat Dreamcast scene:
As announced, we're currently at the Games Convention, Europe's most important videogame convention, and present the Dreamcast history, homebrewn scene and rarities to the public.
After Thursday, the build-up and professional press visitors day, today was the first day for the public and we had many many vistors at our booth. In our eyes even more than 2003.
We present you exclusive photos of the Sega booth (which is in the same hall as we and only 50 meters away from ours), general impressios from the Games Convention and today's highlight - a little present for Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic and games like Phantasy Star Online or ChuChu Rocket.
I have set up a blog at http://atarikee.1up.com to document the trials and tribulations of working on a game in Fenix. I'm hoping that by doing so, this will help others in their pursuits. There is more information about this idea in the greeting at the blog page.
The Beats of Rage site has posted news of a new look for the site and more interestingly that videos of the new game in action will be at the Games Convention in Germany, not to mention some new artwork too
Tyne has updated his Quake Mod for the Dreamcast, heres whats new:
Attempted to fix Dreamcast support, untested
- Vigil can now run along walls!
- Updated readme.txt
- Castle2.bsp is included, however far from finished as you'll see .. simply knock down that door at the end of castle and you'll go into it!
- A few new special effects, mostly looks good with transparency
- New sprite explosion for the Flaming Head Smash attack
- New music for Castle 2 (temporary?)
- Vigil's animations have been tweaked
- A few bug squashed
- New dynamic camera that works on Dreamcast and low level engines even!
- New animation for Vigil! for example, when Vigil dies he now does a forward flip to get up and looks pretty cool
- Fire Beam has increased twice in size and is more effective
- Vigil has a new attack, an auto aiming diving swallow performed while wall running, he can also do a wall run spinning jump!
- Ledge grabbing is overall improved
- Vigil can now double jump after a wall jump, meaning he can climb verticle tunnels very fast and gain more overall height
As you can see, the list of changes is growing smaller compared to older versions! The reason for that is, it's almost gold in terms of gameplay!
I just need to add bosses, way more monsters, levels, and a cutscene for the ending and whatever else I can think of.
Hi all its been a while since we discussed v2 and to be fair its been long overdue, mainly to the fact that i have been looking after my own sites and the other webmasters have had busy lifes of their own but in the next week im going to use a lot of my spare time (mainly at work in dinner breaks etc) to work on the new site.
Heres a few things that we will have in future
- A much nicer site with less loading times
- rss feeds from not only here but also Dreamcast Scene and PdRoms, Emufanatics.
- More forum/Site integration
- Nicer news layout
- More special features
- More than likely having every Dreamcast homebrew and emu release on here.
- multi language versions of the site (hopefully)
We also want to bring fringe Dreamcast sites into the fold because all together we keep the Dreamcast scene going.
Ill report back in a week and hopefully have the first rough copy that ill use up for people to digest.
What's new:
- New: ELF support
- New: Use complete paths option
- New: Choice to open folder once image is done
- New: Help file
- Fixed: A couple important bug fixes
- Fixed: Spaces turned into underscores in CD label
- Fixed: CD label no longer capitalized when a folder selected
- Fixed: CD image renamed as CD label (no longer BootDreams)
- Fixed: Slight grammar fix in CDI Burner
- Fixed: Dummied session max size 665MB
What's new:
- Fixed: Invalid call or argument error in CDRecord
- Fixed: CDI Burner
You can download just the EXE and replace the current one with 0.5.1 only if you had downloaded 0.5. If you have an older version, you must download the complete install.
Kamjin who is hosted by Dreamcast Homebrew has silently (and under the wraggy radar) released an update to his port of Dope Wars for the Dreamcast. Heres what he says:
Anolther test Release of Dope Wars for the DC.
Most of the change are not visible, but you shouldn't loose your gun just after you bought it
Should be playable with just the controller, the triggers can now be used to scroll the cursor
If you find any problems let me know
VG Software have posted news that they have released the source code to their Tetris game for the Dreamcast, check it out here --> http://www.vgsoftware.com/index.htm
2005-08-30:
now with serial output window (for debugging), check the snapshot at the end of this page.
cd loading is broken but will fix soon, use 1st_read.bin in dcemu dir.
should be faster (it's still TOO slow though).
source cleaned a bit, still a big mess.
window is always opengl 800x600, framebuffer gets scaled (looks fine).
now using libcdio & guichan.
'official' dev environment is dev-cpp, should compile using the SDL dev paks available from dev-cpp itself, and the guichan devpak (available from guichan's page).
have to fix most GL stuff, some demos run fine but others show garbled textures (probably related to the gui lib).
big thanks to Rui Caridade for help & speedup patches.
