GCW-Zero Status Update

July 1st, 2013, 00:05 Posted By: wraggster

Everyone if you have an SE with Sticky D-Pad the three options are:
1. Send it back and we will replace it with a new smaller one for you.
2. Request a replacement D-Pad and once we get them from Factory we will mail it to you.
3. You can use the work around youtube video Relay01 has posted which shows how to use Silicon lube to resolve the issue.
We will be changing out the D-Pad on the few SE units we have left 30 or so to ship and 150 which will be used for warranty replacement if they are needed once we recieve the new smaller replacement D-Pad from the factory.
KS buyers once the issue was seen at my cost all units were sent back to factory to have the D-Pad replaced at the factory to insure they were done correctly and would be warrantied by factory.
Those units ship back to me today and should be here some time next week. I apologize for the delay but once this was seen we had to resolve the issue ASAP.
As for exact date of shipping they will start to ship once we get them back from the factory...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/523750

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GCW-Zero Status Update

July 1st, 2013, 00:04 Posted By: wraggster

Yes the KS models will have the smaller D-Pad and buttons to prevent any sticking of them that appeared in some of the SE models that have been shipped.
We are working vigorously to get this done and doing vigorous QC/QA testing of each unit to insure they work right when they are received by you the user.
I apologize for the delays but want to make sure this does not continue to happen or be an issue in the future. As it has for other unnamed consoles recently in the news.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/522292

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GCW-Zero Status Update

June 24th, 2013, 10:37 Posted By: wraggster

We are wrapping up shipping the SE aka Early adopter models today/tonight. We then will commence/continue flashing and rigorous QA/QC testing of the consoles as some of the first SE models that shipped exhibited issues with the D-Pad sticking which seems to resolve itself with regular gaming use after 6 to 8 hours.Once that is completed we will ship KS models as we do the QA/QC process and if a big enough batch is done we will hand over to a fulfillment house as we get batches done.
Either way we will be shipping on a regular basis till all pledges are fulfilled....

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/513768

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NEO Summer Retro Coding Contest 2013 for all retro platform announcement

June 17th, 2013, 14:23 Posted By: wraggster

News from Neoflash:

NEO Summer Retro Coding Contest 2013 for all retro platform announcement
*** Close time: Aug.20th 2013 ***
more info: http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php/topic,7624.0.html

* Homebrew Game division
There are top 3 winners for all platform

* Homebrew APP division
There are top 3 winners for all platform

Note: The platform just specify to the retro console, something like NES/PC-E/MD/SNES/N64/GBA/NDS/PSP/Wii ......

The rules of NEO Summer retro coding contest 2013:

[1] All original entries will get +5 "original score " , but the second entry (same project from last contest but improved, and just enter one more time again ) will don't get any "original score" in this contest.

[2] If your production have enter other contest before, you can use it to enter this NEO contest still.

[3] The No.1 winner from last Neo contest can't use their same project (even it come with many updated) to enter this contest again.

[4] You can submit more than one project for any platform at the same time, without any limit.

[5] You must put the NEO Retro Compo badge and NEO website link to your program and show it in the first page.


The top 3 prize list for the winners:
The No.1 : US$500 cash , OR choose any items from the NEO online shop, just not over U$800 total value.
The No.2 : US$300 cash , OR choose any items from the NEO online shop, just not over U$500 total value.
The No.3 : US$200 cash , OR choose any items from the NEO online shop, just not over U$300 total value.

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NEO Summer Retro Coding Contest 2013 for all retro platform announcement

June 17th, 2013, 14:23 Posted By: wraggster

News from Neoflash:

NEO Summer Retro Coding Contest 2013 for all retro platform announcement
*** Close time: Aug.20th 2013 ***
more info: http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php/topic,7624.0.html

* Homebrew Game division
There are top 3 winners for all platform

* Homebrew APP division
There are top 3 winners for all platform

Note: The platform just specify to the retro console, something like NES/PC-E/MD/SNES/N64/GBA/NDS/PSP/Wii ......

The rules of NEO Summer retro coding contest 2013:

[1] All original entries will get +5 "original score " , but the second entry (same project from last contest but improved, and just enter one more time again ) will don't get any "original score" in this contest.

[2] If your production have enter other contest before, you can use it to enter this NEO contest still.

[3] The No.1 winner from last Neo contest can't use their same project (even it come with many updated) to enter this contest again.

[4] You can submit more than one project for any platform at the same time, without any limit.

[5] You must put the NEO Retro Compo badge and NEO website link to your program and show it in the first page.


The top 3 prize list for the winners:
The No.1 : US$500 cash , OR choose any items from the NEO online shop, just not over U$800 total value.
The No.2 : US$300 cash , OR choose any items from the NEO online shop, just not over U$500 total value.
The No.3 : US$200 cash , OR choose any items from the NEO online shop, just not over U$300 total value.

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GCW Zero Update

June 17th, 2013, 13:57 Posted By: wraggster

For those who did not yet know we have partnered with Evil Dragon aka Michael of Open Pandora and their project to bring all of 3D Realms titles we have licensing for to be sold on the Pandora repo/app store under the GCW name.
Right now Duke Nukem, Hocus Pocus,Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, and Monster Bash are for sale under the GCW name now for the Pandora on their repo/appstore.
We feel this will be a great partnership and hopefully attract more commercial software companies to sell their games on our repo/app store in turn we will also sell them on the Pandora repo/appstore.
We also hope this will attract more homebrew/indie developers to the GCW Zero that had no clue we existed until we got this exposure.
Status update on progress we hope to have all GCW Zero SE models completely shipped on Tuesday 6/18/2013 and start the process of shipping the KickStarter models.
Another question was asked about shipping yes vendors will be shipped at same time as Kickstarter orders but will not be shipping their models till after all the KS orders are filled.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/509115

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zerox86 progress

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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GCW Zero - KickStarter Units

June 10th, 2013, 13:47 Posted By: wraggster

GCW Zero - KickStarter Units
This form is for GCW KickStarter backers.
Thank you so much for believing in the project and helping us get fully funded. We have reached the address confirmation phase. Please input your information in this form.
Please fill out address changes and final address confirmation here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1wjZ...0C_Uk/viewform

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/503288

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GCW Zero Shipping Party for SE this weekend

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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ScummVM 1.6.0 "+4 to engines"

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

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GCW Zero Flash Party Pics and Pictures of GCW HQ

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.

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More pics at GCW HQ and info

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....

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Dos Emulator for GCW Zero news

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.

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GCW Zero Update

May 20th, 2013, 16:12 Posted By: wraggster

Shipment hit the Kansas City Hub at 6:30PM tonight and is slated for delivery tomorrow I will try to get off in time to receive the package if not able due to work will make request for early day Wednesday to get shipment

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/480294

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GCW Zero porting work continues

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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EvilDragon's Pre-Order Survey Thread

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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TV-Out Cable - Prototype finished (2013-05-03)

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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MAME4ALL v1.1 for Dingoo A320 Native

May 14th, 2013, 00:58 Posted By: wraggster

MAME4ALL v1.1 for Dingoo Native! Hooray!

I hope it's been worth the wait. There are LOTS of updates and changes.

There's a huge list of "what's new" so I won't list all the gory details here, suffice to say this release is bigger, better and stronger - meaning that more games work, they work faster and it's more reliable!

See the included "whatsnew.txt" for a full description of what has changed.

MAME4ALL v1.1 Splash Screen



Download MAME4ALL v1.1 for Dingoo Native Binary release
Download MAME4ALL v1.1 for Dingoo Native Source code
MAME4ALL v1.1 discussion thread

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GCW Zero Update

May 14th, 2013, 00:38 Posted By: wraggster



At 9:45PM the shipment was cleared from customs no movement as of yet but the shipment has cleared customs finally...
Next here is a video of some of the great things now working on the console. We also now have the video driver working in 16bpp which means when playing games they get 60fps on average now.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...d/posts/476954

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GCW-Zero Kernal and Bootloader Video

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.



http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...handheld/posts

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