Square Enix held a press conference in Tokyo today to announce the next entry in the main Dragon Quest series. In a surprise move, Japan's most popular series will continue not on the PS3 or the Wii, as many had expected. Instead, Square Enix will be bringing the game to the DS.

The full name of Dragon Quest 9 is Dragon Quest 9: Hoshizora no Mamoribito. The surname can be translated to "Protectors of the sky."

Level 5 will be handling development on the game. The hot-shot development studio headed up development on Dragon Quest 8, before turning to a couple of projects for Sony. On the DS, the studio is currently working on Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village, to be self-published early next year.

Development staff on Level 5's end is the same as from Dragon Quest 8, right down to company president Akihiro Hino, who's serving as producer. Other staff members should come as no surprise. Series father Yuji Horii, heading up the project once again, was in attendance at the press conference, and said, "The DS version is not a side-story, but a true part of the series." Kouichi Sugiyama will be lending his talents to the game's soundtrack. And all future Dragon Quest soundtracks, it seems, as he took the stage today to say "I will continue making Dragon Quest music until I die."

Development seems to be quite far along. The online arms of magazines Famitsu and Gemaga, report that a demo was held at the press conference, with Horii and other guests playing the game live. Dragon Quest 9 features an action-oriented battle system playable cooperatively by up to four players via Wi-Fi. This is the first network-based Dragon Quest, Horii noted. The DS's dual screen setup is also put to use, with the top screen showing a map and the bottom screen housing all the action.

Horii is aiming for a Japanese release some time in 2007. With Dragon Quest 8 pulling in favorable sales internationally, expect a release outside of Japan to follow.

DS.IGN.com

GoNintendo.com

Gameplay Footage(From Kotaku.com)

Footage from the press release. (Japanese) (on youtube)

DQ9 Website

Wonderswan emulator

Adding the setting of the wav directory to the ini file. When there is no SRAM even, being able to write in, correcting the bug which memory leak has been done. NO WAIT (there is no VSYNC) it adds to Configure dialogue. While pushing the NO WAIT key, it executes with CPU100%. When there is no saving function in the cartridge, it tried not to make the sav file. 1024 bits in capacity inside EEPROM (16 bit *32) correction.

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MAME32qa

Wolfmame

MAME32FX

Mameinfo.dat

SDLMAME

The latest version is 0.111. This includes 1 additional fix: the MC68000 core bug that affected Sega games on GCC 4.x is now fixed, so Altered Beast and Moonwalker should work fine with a normal GCC4 or Xcode 2.x compile. The NeoGeo fix from u5 is now in baseline so it’s not an add-on anymore. (Thanks to AWJ for chasing down both problems!).

 

NOTE: The WolfMAME 0.111 patches (wolf111.diff and mamerand111.diff) do apply cleanly to SDLMAME 0.111, although I can’t officially support that configuration (it’s too much extra support load for me). If you’re on Linux/Mac and want to compete on MARP, you might give it a try though. Like this:

 

(copy the 2 diffs in to your sdlmame0111 folder)

% cd sdlmame0111

% diff -p1

% diff -p1

http://mamedev.org/

0.111

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MAMETesters Bugs Fixed

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perfrman0110u5gre [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

 

Source Changes

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Properly removes the "Autocenter Speed" from the UI when not used. [Derrick Renaud]

 

Fixed decryption of some NeoGeo bootleg sets (specifically, kf2k2mp and kf2k3upl) on platforms/compilers that don't implement memcpy as memmove. [Alex Jackson]

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