November 9, 2005

 

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Fixed a DMA latency issue in the SHARC core. The graphics problems are now fixed.

http://www.mameworld.net/vlinde/

Nintendo has announced that more than 15,000 Wi-Fi Connection hotspots will be active in time for the European launch of the service - a figure which is set to almost double by the end of the year.

 

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, senior director of marketing Jim Merrick said: "We've been on the sidelines of online gaming for a long time, because we just didn't see the right combination of value for the consumer and technology and gameplay."

 

"Now I think the time is right. We talked about the promise of Wi-Fi when we first introduced the DS, and now we can show you what Nintendo's vision of online gaming is."

 

More than half of the hotspots will be in the UK alone, thanks to deals with BT Openzone and The Cloud. Piggybacking their infrastructure, Wi-Fi Connection will allow gamers to play Wi-Fi-enabled multiplayer games like Tony Hawk's American Sk8land (Nov 18) and Mario Kart DS (Nov 25) from a vast number of locations.

 

These will include branches of McDonald's and Coffee Republic, Hilton and Ramada Jarvis hotels, Road Chef and Welcome Break service stations, First Great Western railway stations, more than 25 student unions, city centre BT payphones, airports, football stadiums, the British Library and Canary Wharf.

 

Nintendo will be launching a new website, Nintendo Wi-Fi.com, where visitors can input a postcode to find the location of their nearest hotspot. The site will also give gamers the chance to see how their high scores compare with other players, and will offer technical support - those with wireless networks at home will be able to search a database of more than 200 routers for advice on configuration.

 

Those who don't have a home wireless network will be able to purchase the Wi-Fi USB Connector dongle, which attaches to a PC, to get their DS online. It will retail for around GBP 30.

 

Nintendo is keen to stress that there are no fees or subscription costs for playing, and no risk of harassment as players do not directly communicate with each other.

 

Instead of entering a name and password, each DS owner has a unique identifier number entered into the DS's memory. Users can swap numbers offline to build up a friends list, or play anonymously against gamers from all around the world.

 

Wi-Fi Connection will launch in Europe on November 25. Nintendo has confirmed that its next-generation console, codenamed Revolution, will also make use of the service.

ZSNES was updated once again.

ALL: Updated BG scroll register behaviour using anomie's formula. Got it done thanks to pagefault, too. [grinvader]

ALL: Fixed small screen extra line issues (fixes Super Metroid annoying line issue). [pagefault]

ALL: Fixes for DMA, so we can have the recent improvements without breaking tons of other game. (SSF2, SFA2, FFMQ, TOP, CT, YI, Probably others). [pagefault]

SDL: SCons now using parsegen the right way [snarius]

TOL: Architecture detection tool which may be used for various purposes. [Nach]

SRC: Updated tools compile info and 'make tools' for new tool. [grinvader]

SRC: Typo fix in todo list. [grinvader]

SRC: Cleanup (whitespace & useless EXTSYM). [grinvader]

Get it from Ipher's WIP Site.

0.101u5

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MAMETesters Bugs Fixed

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vf097u2gre [R. Belmont]

daytona099u4gre [R. Belmont]

memoryupdate0101u1red [Aaron Giles]

 

 

 

Source Changes

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Added a FIFO for the sound commands in Sega Model 1 driver so they no longer

get lost at startup. Fixed the CPU speed of the 68000. [R. Belmont]

 

Several fixes and improvements to the C352 sound emulator.

[hoot development team]

 

Implemented several missing features in the Namco NA sound emulator. [cync]

 

Added conditional dip switches and a missing dip switch to excelsr.

[Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

Fixed J. League protection workarounds so they work for 2 player games as

well. Also fixed sonic so it works as well as the prototype version (still

major graphics issues). [Anonymous]

 

Marked several large arrays properly as const. [Atari Ace]

 

Fixed 6805 core so that CLRA does not modify the carry flag. [Ernesto Corvi]

 

Fixed sprites wrap around in st0016 (needed in nratechu).

[Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

Model 3 update: [Ville Linde]

* Added Daytona USA 2 Power Edition

* Huge update to the video hardware, including:

- Transparency support (polygons and textures)

- Nearly perfect rendering order (something we never got right in

Supermodel

- Parallel lighting

- Texture coordinate mirroring

 

Added very experimental rasterizer generator for the Voodoo emulator, which

generates X86 assembly blitters optimized for each case. Unfortunately, it

doesn't help performance much and they are still too buggy so they are

disabled for now. Enable them in the makefile. [Aaron Giles]

 

Made some of the hack optimizations runtime enableable in the Voodoo

emulator, and added a frameskipper. Use Ctrl+1-6 to control frameskipping,

Ctrl+F/H/Q to run at full/half/quarter resolution. [Aaron Giles]

 

Rewrote most of the validity checks so the full set now completes in well

under 1 second, minus I/O time from paging in data. Also added region

size checking versus memory maps to the validity checks. Moved all validity

checks to a new file validity.c. [Aaron Giles]

 

Changed the AM_REGION() macro to store region/offset information instead of

a pointer to simplify some of the region valdation code. [Aaron Giles]

 

 

 

New games added or promoted from NOT_WORKING status

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Wonder Stick [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

 

 

New clones added

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Atomic Robo-kid (Japan, Set 2) [brian Troha]

Raimais (Japan) [brian Troha]

 

 

 

New games marked as GAME_NOT_WORKING

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Ping Pong Car [David Haywood, Guru]

Daytona USA 2 Power Edition [Ville Linde]

As usual, get the.diff update at http://www.mamedev.com

Also, thanks to Pudding from RS for the news