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OpenSource Handheld News - Gp2X, Dingoo, Wiz, Pandora, GCW Zero and Caanoo is a News and downloads site for Open Source Handhelds, 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
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June 17th, 2013, 13:54 Posted By: wraggster
via http://zerox86.patrickaalto.com/zblog.html
During the past couple of weeks I have made quite a few enhancements to zerox86, but it still is not quite ready for release. There are some essential features still missing, and there is a very annoying bug or race condition that occasionally crashes the whole program. I have had a similar problem in DS2x86, and I am pretty certain that the problem is caused by lack of proper thread synchronization in the IRQ emulation. I have divided my time between trying to hunt down this bug, and adding some new features.
Jazz Jackrabbit support
For some reason I had thought that Jazz Jackrabbit uses virtual memory and thus will not run in zerox86, but a beta tester reported that he got it running by disabling all audio. There were some bad graphics glitches, though. So, I decided to test it myself and fix at least the graphics glitches. One graphics problem was quite obvious, I had not yet implemented the file data reading directly to VGA VRAM, which Jazz Jackrabbit does. It is the only game I have encountered that does that while in Mode-X graphics mode. After that the sprites began to work correctly, but still the bottom part of the screen flickerd, and I found a bug in my Mode-X VGA Line Compare Register handling. Fixing that made the game run the demo game with no graphics glitches that I could see.
After those fixes I tried to get the audio support also working, but even after spending several hours with that I still could not find out the reason for the immediate crash. It does not actually crash zerox86, instead it causes a General Protection Fault when loading an invalid value to a segment register. I was able to determine that in DS2x86 it does not load this invalid value to the register, but I could not yet find out why it runs differently in zerox86 and what is the original cause for this difference. So, Jazz Jackrabbit does not yet run with audio enabled.
EMS memory and SuperVGA support
After I got frustrated with lack of progress on Jazz Jackrabbit support, I decided to work on some easier features, first by adding EMS support. This was pretty simple, as my EMS support is coded in C so I could port it from rpix86 with very few changes. Since 4DOS.COM by default swaps to EMS if it is available, it was easy to see that EMS memory support began to work. I also tested Wing Commander 2 digitized audio, which also needs EMS memory to work. I found a small bug in my SB digitized audio support, it played one more samples than what it should have, which sometimes caused a click to the sound, so I fixed that problem as well.
After EMS memory I coded support for SuperVGA 640x400 and 640x480 screen modes. I decided to support these modes scaled to 320x200 and 320x240 resolution, which meant averaging every four input pixels to one output pixel. As this needs to be done with CPU (at least for now), it will slow down the emulation somewhat. I tested my LineWars II and Little Big Adventure, both of which use 640x480 SVGA mode. Below is a screen copy from Little Big Adventure running in zerox86.
80x25 scaled text mode
Next I changed the 80x25 text mode to use 4x8 pixel font, so that I could fit all 80 characters to the 320 pixel wide GCW0 screen. The font is not nearly as readable as my default 6x8 font, but using that gets rid of the need to scroll the screen. I plan to have an option to switch between scaled and scrollable screens, same as I did in DSx86, but for now I will use scaled mode in all text/graphics modes.
I also found and fixed a problem I had in the text mode cursor routines where extra cursor images were sometimes left around the screen, for example in Norton Sysinfo. This was caused by the software setting the cursor start scanline to a large value, like 63, with the ending scanline being the default 7. This should skip the cursor drawing completely, but my routine always drew at least one scanline of the cursor, which was wrong.
PC Speaker support
I also added support for PC Speaker sounds. The game I use to test these is the old CGA game Paratrooper. It plays some musical tones using the PC Speaker, so it is good test bench for that, as well as CGA graphics. It was one of the first games I got working in DSx86, so I like to test that in all my emulators during their early development phase.
Virtual keyboard
The next step is to add a virtual keyboard to zerox86. I am thinking of having the virtual keyboard be visible always when in 80x25 (or 40x25) text mode, as these will only need 320x200 pixels, while the zerox86 screen is 320x240 pixels. So I have an area of 320x40 pixels to use for virtual keyboard. Since the standard PC keyboard has 6 rows of keys, I have 6 scanlines to use for each row, and still have 4 scanlines left over. I decided to use the 4x6 pixel font for the key labels, which allows me to fit the full 101-key PC keyboard image to the 320x40 area.
You can see the keyboard image in several of the screen copies above. I haven't yet decided how I handle the keys selection, it might perhaps be made to work using the analog controller for key selection and then either A or Start to actually press that key. Or simply using the D-Pad to move the focus from one key to the next, but since especially on DOS prompt the cursor keys are used while joystick is not, the analog joystick control would be a better choice. I will continue working on this feature, as well as trying to hunt down the annoying crashing bug during the upcoming weeks.
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June 10th, 2013, 13:47 Posted By: wraggster
We have shipped 60 SE units so far between my day job and time I have at night another twenty were QA/QC again last night and package they just need to be weighed and labels printed for them.
By June 12th to 14th, I plan to be done with all SE shipments and then focus on flashing and shipping all the remaining orders. We will have a team of six this weekend two will be flashing, two will be QC/QA, and two will be doing the packing and printing of shipping labels.
Once we complete this all shipping of KS models should start on 14th or 15th of June 2013.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/503210
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June 2nd, 2013, 23:11 Posted By: wraggster
After 11 long months we are thrilled to announce the release of ScummVM 1.6.0.
It's not very often (if ever) that we add 4 new engines in a single release, but yes, these have been busy months for the team indeed.
Let's just list the new games 1.6.0 contains for you:
- 3 Skulls of the Toltecs
- Eye of the Beholder
- Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon
- Hopkins FBI
- Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths
- The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
Other significant features include support for the Macintosh version ofDiscworld 1 and the music in the Macintosh versions of LucasArts adventures, an update to the latest Roland MT-32 emulation code, a new cool grid chooser for your savegames, an extended FluidSynth configuration dialog, and major bugfixes to bike fights in Full Throttle. We have also added Belarusian, Finnish and Galician translations to our GUI.
Of course, there is much more; you can find the full list in our release notes and the release itself on our downloads page.
Enjoy!
http://www.scummvm.org/news/20130531/
For a list of changes since the previous version, read the release notes.
1.5.0 is also apt-get'able from Debian unstable (sid).
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June 2nd, 2013, 22:29 Posted By: wraggster
GCW Zero Flash Party Pics and Pictures of GCW HQ. Hope you enjoy the pics... I'm bushed now the fun of packing and shipping the SE's... It was a lot of work but enlightening to the task ahead and the time it actually takes.
It was a blast today a lot of laughs and fun while we worked, Good sushi, friends and drinks.
Also two pics of Thad one of our flash party attendee's relaxing and stating all mine hehehe. I want to take the time to thank Peter, Jon, and Thad for taking the time to assist me in making this dream a reality and all of you and the SE early adopters.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/498013
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June 2nd, 2013, 22:27 Posted By: wraggster
Ok everyone has asked questions in comments. The way we are currently doing the GCW Zero SE is flash a batch pack them and ship them this process will carry out the same way for the KickStarter GCW Zero model also. Once all is completed we will then go retail with the remaining units. No for pics of the box and HQ....
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/497424
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June 2nd, 2013, 22:24 Posted By: wraggster
Last week I worked on the high-resolution EGA graphics modes, first the 640x200 (which only needs horizontal scaling) and 640x480 (which needs 2-to-1 scaling in both directions). On Friday I then implemented also the 640x350 EGA mode, after I figured out that the easiest way to fit this vertically into 320x240 would probably be to alternatively copy one scanline directly and then average the next two scanlines, so that every 3 input scanlines generate 2 output scanlines. This just leaves a few black lines on the bottom.
The next step was to add audio support, which I then started working on Saturday morning. I began with the AdLib emulation, as that is easy and I could copy the code pretty much directly from an old version of DS2x86 (before I switched to my own transfer code and began using the ARM7 processor for audio). First I needed to look into how audio is supported on GCW0, and it looked like using SDL would be quite easy. I found a very simple tutorial and used that as an example, and it didn't take very long to have the audio framework in place. Next I just added a call to my AdLibEmulation routine from the audio callback code, and already at 9am I had AdLib audio working in Doom (which I used as my test bench). So, I decided to continue immediately with Sound Blaster support.
The AdLib support can manage with reasonably long latencies (longer latency just sounds like some inaccurate note timing, not as any distortion or other more distracting artifacts), but SoundBlaster digital audio support is rather timing-critical. For example Doom needs an IRQ after every 128 samples have been played (at 11.1kHz sample rate), and it will immediately cause audio problems if it does not get an IRQ when it expects one. I play audio at 22kHz, so that 128 samples translates pretty closely to 256 samples. I decreased the SDL sample buffer size from 512 to 256, and luckily this seemed to work fine without buffer underruns, and so Doom began to play also digital audio. I still need to do some adjustments to the audio routines, and all ADPCM audio playing code is still commented out, but I was pretty happy to get the audio code already mostly working, after basically just one day of work.
Next I will continue enhancing the emulation and adding the still missing features, hopefully I can release the first version publicly within a couple of weeks. The most important still missing features (in no specific order) are the following: - Proper keyboard mapping supoort, with game-specific configuration possibility.
- Virtual keyboard support.
- Mouse support.
- EMS memory support.
- SuperVGA support.
- Non-scaled support for high-resolution screen modes.
- Text mode 4x8 font, to show the full 80x25 chars.
- FPU support.
- Virtual memory support.
- A lot of minor fixes to other features.
http://zerox86.patrickaalto.com/zblog.html
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May 20th, 2013, 16:09 Posted By: wraggster
During the past couple of weeks I have focused on getting the GCW-Zero port zerox86 of my emulator running. I have not worked much on rpix86, although I have done some small preliminary work for additional hardware support. I plan to look into supporting GPIO access and possibly USB-parallel port device access. I haven't yet finished either code, so I have no new version to release yet. I plan to still continue working on the zerox86 a bit further before getting back to enhancing rpix86 as well.
http://rpix86.patrickaalto.com/rblog.html
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May 14th, 2013, 01:05 Posted By: wraggster
Just a quick information:
I got the results of the survey.
Everyone who chose to upgrade for 270 EUR will get an eMail real soon as well as the first ones who selected to get it for 200 EUR.
If you haven't gotten your survey link email although you tried to contact Craig, you can also let me know your details.
In that case, send me a PM with your order number and address and choose what you would like:
* A 1GHz RIGHT away (for 270 EUR)
* A 1GHz (for 200 EUR), would be the next ones to get it.
* A 1GHz (for 150 EUR), they come after the 200 EUR ones
* A 1GHz (for 100 EUR), they come after the 150 EUR ones.
* A Rebirth (without any payment), though this might take a while
* A CC unit (without any payment), should happen faster as well
http://boards.openpandora.org/index....survey-thread/
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May 14th, 2013, 01:04 Posted By: wraggster
via http://boards.openpandora.org/index....ed-2013-05-03/
Global Components just received a prototype for the TV Out Cables!
I'm going to pick it up today and will do a lot of testing with it.
If it works fine, it's finally time to go ahead and start the mass production (takes about 2 months - yes, REALLY  ))
Remember: If you're interesting in getting one, please put yourself on the waiting list on the shop:
https://www.dragonbo...-out-cable.html
This helps me to find out how many cables I need to order and you'll also receive an eMail as soon as the cable is finished.
(If you already preordered right from the beginning, no need to do that, we got your order already).
Now, about already preordered cables:
I'm currently trying to ship out the cables to everyone who has preordered and paid one without any further costs (means: to both mine and Craigs customers).
However, Craig has over 500 customers waiting for a TV Out cable, which means it'll cost me a couple of thousand euro to ship them out.
I'm trying to compensate this, if everything works out fine, you'll all get them without any further payments.
But I cannot tell for sure if this works. In worst case, I'll have to charge production and shipping costs for you - but will give you a corresponding voucher for my shop as compensation.
So i.e. if I have to charge 10 EUR for the TV Out Cable, you'll get a 10 EUR voucher and could use that to order an SD Card cheaper together with it).
I'll let you all know in time 
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May 5th, 2013, 22:43 Posted By: wraggster
As you saw from the video below from Qbert we do indeed have a test version of the kernel and bootloader running that recognizes 512MB. Qbert is testing the unit now and the developers will use this test to optimize and clean up the code on the bootloader and kernel. I would say just a couple days and the SE models will start to be flashed and ship soon to be followed by the KickStarter.
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May 5th, 2013, 22:00 Posted By: wraggster
via http://rpix86.patrickaalto.com/rblog.html
During the past week I have not worked much on rpix86, as I got my new GCW Zero "engineering sample" game console. I began porting my DSTwo version to that device, and that has taken pretty much all of my free time for the past week. I plan to continue working on this during the following week as well, so my work on rpix86 is on a small break until I get something running in the GCW0 as well.
Working on GCW Zero is interesting because it uses a processor that has a MIPS32r2 architecture. This Release 2 version of the architecture brings a couple of very powerful and useful new opcodes to the MIPS ASM language, namely EXT and INS. I can use these new opcodes in quite a few places in my code to speed up the emulation, so I am very interested to see how fast zerox86 (current working name of the project) will run on the device.
I began my porting project by first porting my unit test program. I then began changing the code to use the new EXT and INS opcodes where possible. After a few changes I run the unit test program to make sure I don't break anything, and then continue making the changes. Since I use the unit test program from the special 386-enabled DSx386 version, I have also needed to fix some incompatibilities between the unit test program and my old DS2x86 sources. The current status is that opcodes 0x00..0x0E work fine, and I am working on the 386-specific 0x0F group opcodes, mainly fixing those incompatibilities.
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May 2nd, 2013, 00:40 Posted By: wraggster
 Virgin Media doles out many minutes and data to mobile users with its Premiere plan, but it hasn't had a truly unlimited option for those who don't want to even think about their calling habits. It's assuaging those minds today with new VIP tiers that offer unlimited domestic voice, data and text messaging. The exact perks depend on the level of commitment, however. Traditional customers can pay £26 per month (£31 if they're not already Virgin customers) with promises of unlimited calls to frequently costly 08 numbers. For SIM-only customers, it's all about the price -- while they don't get the 08 number exception, the £15 they pay per month for otherwise unlimited access is comparatively cheap. The new rates may not always make sense depending on local coverage and a desire for LTE, but we'd at least keep them in mind.
Virgin Media (1), (2)
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April 29th, 2013, 21:49 Posted By: wraggster
The promise of OpenMobile's Application Compatibility Layer is enticing: seamlessly run Android apps on another operating system as if it was meant to be there. Unfortunately for fans of Palm's last hurrah, the project's webOS port died with the HP Touchpad. That won't stop dedicated fans, however -- Phoenix International Communications plans to resurrect webOS ACL. Taking the project to Kickstarter, the team is showing an early build on an HP Touchpad, seamlessly running Android apps in cards alongside native webOS applications. Phoenix hopes that a functional ACL will reduce Touchpad owner's reliance on dual-booting Android, giving them the freedom to enjoy webOS without sacrificing functionality. The team is promising a relatively short development time, thanks to OpenMobile's early work, and hopes to deliver a consumer ready build in July. But first the Kickstarter campaign will need to meet its $35,000 goal. Interested in pitching in? Check out the Kickstarter link at the source.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...he-hp-touchpad
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April 28th, 2013, 23:43 Posted By: wraggster
via http://dingoonity.org/
This is a reimplementation of Metal Slug. Enough said go grab it now!
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What we have here is a project of the talented programmer Clément CORDE, Slug Mini, in its version for OpenDingux. Unlike Airball, the Mini Slug is not a remake, but rather a kind of reimplementation using sprites and sounds ripped from some of the games in the series, but the stages are totally new and difficult .
The Mini Slug Project by Clément CORDE
OpenDingux Build by Shin-NiL
Controls
* D-Pad - Move
* A Button - Shoot
* B Button - Jump
* X Button - Grenade
* Y Button (at name entry only) - alternate characters
* L Shoulder (at menu only) - alternate number of credits
Discuss it here: http://boards.dingoonity.org/dingux-...ug-opendingux/
minislug_dingoo_03-03-2013.zip
Author/Porter: Shin-Nil
Download: http://oldschoolprg.x10.mx/projets.php#minislug
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April 28th, 2013, 23:41 Posted By: wraggster
via http://dingoonity.org/
Checkout this classic-megaman-style-game.
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Hellow freinds, after a long time, I have the pleasure to announce a new version of the classic-megaman-style-game, Rockbot for Dingux. This version is a big improvement over previous beta, and should be finishable from start without major issues.
Get here http://rockbot.upperland.net/?p=782 and if you find any relevant problems, please tell me.
About a native version: the native SDK support to C++ is really poor, so, unless it chances (any clues?), I won't be able to port it for native, sadly :-(
Discuss it here: http://boards.dingoonity.org/dingux-...ot-1-0-beta-4/
Rockbot_Dingux_1.0b4.zip
Author/Porter: protomank
Download: http://rockbot.upperland.net/?page_id=301&lang=en
Download Source: http://rockbot.upperland.net/?page_id=301&lang=en
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