Zophar's Domain: "Lite"

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Last Updated Thursday, March 02, 2000 07:01:46PM EST

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What's New

03/02/2000

Emulator Release: SADnes32 0.12 Criptonyta
19:01: A new version of SADnes32 has been released, and here's what's new:

Option Dialog available for configuring the Emu, not much for now, but something, you can configure the Frameskip, and support for Instant Redraw (recomended only for P3-500+), enabling Instant Redraw should fix the bugs with pacman ...

Get it at the NES page.

Misc. News: Importing PS2 is Prohibited?
15:45: According to GameSpot News, the PS2 cannot be taken out of Japan without consent from the Department of Trade and Commerce. Here's what the official Japanese Playsation website had to say:

"As of June 18, 1999, the International Foreign Exchange and Trade Law prohibits transporting of Sony PlayStation2 and the Sony PlayStation2 Memory Cards outside of Japan without a consent from the Department of Trade and Commerce."

You can read the full article at GameSpot. Thanks to Bytoro for the news.

Emulator News: Corn is not dead!
15:35: The website for the N64 emulator Corn was recently updated. The site says that the emulator itself is not dead, with a new release coming soon, and it also has quite a few awe-inspiring screenshots of the emu in action. (The screenshots look quite nice, I might add.)

You can read more at the Corn homepage.

Mucho thanks to Saboya of JC Emulation News.

Misc. News: DarkMazda's barrage of Neo Geo CD covers continues
15:30: DarkMazda's Domain has released the CD cover for Neo Geo game "Neo Driftout" today. That gives them a total of 63 Neo Geo CD covers. Go visit and view them. =)

Misc. News: The Scribe's D2 List 1.40
15:21: The Scribe has released a new version of his Dreamcast Database; a catalog of all DC titles released in all markets around the world. You can go download it, or view it off the net.

Happy Birthday Scribe!

Utility Release: PSmplay 0.3
14:12: A new version of PSmplay, a great str and xa player for PSX games, has been released, and here's what's new:

The process of the Y parameter was strange at the time of the YUV change.

All XA channels are supported (32ch). But, not perfect.

The FF8 data of only the audio can play-back.

Copes with the output which LAME was used for.

The Analyze process of the STR data was changed. (I thinks that many STR forms are found.)

CDXA was added to the object of Analyze.

The STR form of "Gran Turismo", "Gran Turismo 2" and "Ace Combat III" can be play-back.

Get it at the PSX ultilities page. Thanks to Saboya for the news.

03/01/2000

Emulator Release: RockNES 1.02
14:16: A new verison of RockNES, a NES emulator for DOS, has been released, and here's what's new:

New IRQ handler system (using 'hooks');

Fixed MMC5 support (CastleVania 3 US works, still unplayable);

Added mapper #226 support (76in1 cart, partial);

Added mapper #227 support (1200in1 cart, does not work);

More minor bugs fixed.

You can get it at the NES page.

Emulator News: Nemu64 3dfx grudges
11:50: Here is a post from the news at the Nemu64 Homepage:

It is a fairly poorly kept secret that I, hWnd, have a grudge against 3DFX. I won't get into the details, but as a coder, I refuse to write any special code to accomodate a 3DFX product. Because of this decision, secondary boards such as the Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 do not and will not work with Nemu64. Though I did not intend it, it seems that Banshee users are also experiencing problems such that they are either unable to run Nemu at all or are getting frame rates in the single digits. This is regrettable. Even Voodoo3 users are having difficulties, though I have heard there is a driver/settings combination that gives decent, though not ideal, results. Please stop writing me asking for Voodoo support. Nemu's graphics have been optimized for use with recent nVidia boards, such as the TNT, TNT2, and GeForce, mainly since the TNT2 is the board that I own. I don't have access to others. My suggestion if you are interested in N64 emulation is to make your next board a TNT2-Ultra, or GeForce, since Nemu is optimized to these boards, and UltraHLE 1.5 will be using OpenGL, which is highly optimized under nVidia Boards. (See screenshots on UltraHLE page taken with TNT2 board). Once again...I regret that the Voodoo users among you are disappointed, but there will be no graphics code written to accomodate a 3DFX product. I won't go out of my way to make things not work, so if 3DFX decides to stop making developers jump thru hoops, their boards will start working too.

It is their emulator, and it is up to them if they want to support 3dfx or not. If you would like to discuss this, please talk about it on our General emulation board.

You can download Nemu64 from the N64 emulators page.

Misc. News: PSXemu.com returning soon?
09:03: Darkzone e-mailed in and let us know about a shockwave video on the PSXemu website that states that they will be coming back soon. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

Emulator News: A-Saturn discontinued
09:01: Sad news, as A-Saturn's website announced that A-Saturn has been discontinued:

"00/03/01 A-SATURN discontinued
I have a nervous break down by A-SATURN.
I will don't open A-SATURN's source code."

Thanks to Consollection for the news.

Misc. News: Cherryroms is back
08:54: Cherryroms is back up and running fine. Seems as if this was a planned outage. The following comes from their website:

"Hi All,
There will be an interruption of service soon and this
will be for a few days for some people and very quick for others. The reason for this is that we are having to move location of the servers for DeathaceNET which as CR is hosted on it will result in DNS problems as your ISP may have cached the IP's of the servers and will still think that they are there for a few days. It won't be until Network Solutions and Nominet update their root servers to know the new ip range for the servers that you will be able to connect to us.
and due to the nature of the apache webserver it will not allow to do a temporary ip without a reverse on the domain.
So my appologies to all for this and hope to be back to all of you in no more than 2-3 days.

...Deathace"

So, everything is fine. You can still check them out at cherryroms.com.

Thanks for all the E-Mails letting us know!

Misc. News: Minibosses - The Band
00:03: We received an E-Mail from Eosdis of the band Minibosses. They have done some excellent remixes of the music from some of your favorite 8-Bit NES classics, such as Castlevania (AWESOME!), Metroid, Wizards and Warriors, and more! If you are a fan of video game music, you owe it to yourself to go check them out at their official website at www.minibosses.com!

02/29/2000

Misc. News: Cherryroms is down
23:41: It would seem that the site which is famous for SNES ROMs would be down. Right now, it is not known why or when it was taken down.

If you like, you can try to access the Cherryroms website.

Utility Release: SPCTool 0.6
20:30: A new version of a great SPC conversion utility has been released. This SPC utility lets you convert SPC files to Midi's, or WAV's. It also has the best sound from compared to any SPC core ever. Here is what's new:

MAIN Improved command-line parsing

MAIN GUI can be disabled for a 'play only' mode

MAIN Added a poorly drawn, incomplete JIS-X0201 character set (If anyone has information/character maps, e-mail me.)

MAIN Screens are now dynamic (Should fix some problems, as well as create some new ones)

MAIN Buttons that get disabled now look disabled

MAIN Sound card can be disabled

MAIN Channels can be muted with the keyboard instead of the mouse

MAIN Can use the tilde key to fast forward

MAIN Wave options lists a GM instrument instead of a number

MAIN Wave form options can be changed with the mouse

MAIN Wave form options can be saved on exit

MAIN Output to .WAV can be customized

MAIN Loader correctly reads text ID666 tags

MAIN Fixed a major bug when files were loaded from a different directory

MAIN 16-bit DMA transfers can now reside above [1000:FFFF]

MAIN Rewrote DMA routines for 8-bit sound cards

MAIN 8kHz mixing works

MAIN Fixed a minor bug in the OK buttons of the dialog boxes

DSP Optimized interpolation routine

DSP Optimized FIR filter

DSP Mixing routine is now dynamically created to eliminate repetitive branching

DSP Improved interpolation routine to taper off the samples of instruments that don't end on the base-line (No more clicking in Starfox)

DSP Made pitch modulation 256 times finer

DSP A negative channel volume no longer corrupts the instrument

DSP Echo volume was corrupt in monaural mode (SB owners can hear now)

DSP ADSR is more accurate

DSP Bent line doesn't stall

DSP Linear interpolation doesn't overflow

DSP The noise generator is a little more random

DSP BRR decompression method 3 works better (No noise in Toy Story)

DSP Fixed a small bug in the pitch converting code

DSP Fixed a bug in pitch modulation when using cubic interpolation (wind doesn't crackle anymore)

DSP Echo works in the MMX code (MMX instructions are now enabled)

DSP Output is logged correctly when other than 16-bit stereo

DSP Temporary file created during MIDI logging gets deleted

CPU Added a hack to eliminate polling the counters (speeds up overall processing by as much as 25%)

CPU Optimized opcode handler and paragraph aligned short jump destinations

CPU Added a trace log option to debugger

CPU Fixed a stupid bug in the 16-bit memory checker that was causing random crashes and Vortex to get stuck

CPU PCALL jumps to the right location (Terranigma doesn't stall)

CPU STOP and SLEEP actually stop the CPU

You can download the new version of SPCTool from the SPC utilities\players page.
You can download some new SPC's from the ZD's SPC archive.
And you can download an SPC Internet plugin for Netscape\IE from the ZD-spc homepage.

Misc. News: Nogginknockers X - Final Version
11:38: The final version of Nogginknockers X was released earlier today. New features include:

Now 8 paddles total, including the classic "Sh*tman" from NESticle
Cameos by Overclocked's Pretzel and Green
"Hidden Heads" Featuring some known people in the emu scene
Lots of really stupid toilet humor - ie NOT FOR KIDS OR THOSE OFFENDED BY DISGUSTING BRAINLESS HUMOR

You can check it out at Bloodlust Software's website, but the warning above applies to the site as well.

Thanks to Ethan Petty for the news.

Translation News: Correction
03:11: Yesterday I posted about the Blob Muncher Rom Hack. Accidently, I wrote that it was a hack for Pac-Man, but it's actually a hack for Ms. Pac Man.

This has been corrected. Sorry for the inconvience.

News Archive

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Copyright ©1996-2000 Brad Levicoff. All Rights Reserved.
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