When Metroid Prime Pinball hits shelves next week, the game will come packaged with a Rumble Pak accessory that shoves right into the Game Boy Advance slot of your Nintendo DS system.

 

The Rumble Pak, called quite simply the "Rumble Pak", vibrates when the Nintendo DS tells it to. Code within DS software will trigger the innerworkings of the cartridge to spin and vibrate, which, in turn, causes the Nintendo DS system to vibrate as well.

 

 

The Nintendo DS system will note that the Rumble Pak is installed on the system menu screen with a special "DS Option Pak inserted" message where "Start GBA game" would show up. Putting the Rumble Pak cartridge in a GBA system will not work -- the system won't boot up beyond the Game Boy screen.

 

The only game that officially supports it right now is the game that it comes packaged with it. Games will have to be written with the Rumble Pak in mind for the vibration feature to work. Metroid Prime Pinball puts the Rumble Pak to work by offering jolts and shimmies when the Samus ball whacks into obstacles and hazards.

 

Either our cartridge is broken, or the DS Rumble Pak is one of the noisiest Rumble Paks Nintendo has ever built. When playing Metroid Prime Pinball, we can hear the rumble mechanism more than we can feel the rumble effects in the system. It's so loud, in fact, that it sounds like a metallic "chirp" whenever the rumble is activated. We'd rather just not put it in the system at all. Good thing it's free, because at this point we wouldn't bother buying it as an extra.

 

This is odd because we've experienced handheld rumble in other Nintendo forms. Wario Ware Twisted GBA and Game Boy Color games like Pokemon Pinball used types of rumble that were quiet but effective in their feedback. Our Rumble Pak for the DS doesn't perform nearly as well as Nintendo's previous rumble efforts.

 

The game, however, performs much better than the rumble pak does.We'll have a full review of Metroid Prime Pinball later this week.

There was a slight problem with anomie's HDMA notes. Specifically, you must set the DoTransfer flag after decrementing NTLRx, otherwise if you have a table entry of $80, two transfers will occur. This fixes the bug in Charlie's stage in SFA2. I also did some tests and verified that enabling HDMA mid-frame does not clear the DoTransfer flag, however the flag is cleared at the start of a new frame (probably during HDMA init). It is possible this flag is cleared at the end of HDMA (V=225/240), but there's no real way to tell. The result is the same either way. The only edge case I can think of is to try enabling overscan at V > 225, and then enabling HDMA and seeing if a transfer occurs or not. I'll do that later.

 

    I also fixed a bug with color add/sub, and it fixed both Energy Breaker and the ToP opening battle screen! Finally. That ToP bug annoyed the hell out of me.

 

    Energy Breaker seems to work perfectly now, even the world map has zero glitches that I can see. The only problem now is that Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest has an odd glitch with HDMA on the map.

 

    Lastly, I finally feel that the accuracy of the emulator is good enough to block VRAM writes outside of vblank. This means a few fan-translated games that won't run on hardware will no longer work in bsnes. On the positive side, it should hopefully fix glitches in a few commercial games such as Peter Pan. I even found a neat quirk. If you write to VRAM at exactly V=0,HC=6, it will write the CPU MDR (open bus value) to VRAM. Hah. Reads/writes to VRAM with the display disabled ($2100.d7 set) always work. When it's clear, then they only work during vblank. They will not work outside of vblank and inside of hblank. Also, reading from VRAM outside of vblank usually returns $00, $01, or $ff. I haven't found the pattern yet. Maybe it's even returning some of the VRAM the PPU is accessing? Who knows. Writes to $2116 update the VRAM read buffer, this won't work either outside of vblank.

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* misc: www profiler red-* icon for sites *only* appears when at least one file of the site is new / was updated

* misc: little speed optimization for chd detection in unneeded rom tests

* fixed: several old browse-folder settings aren't remembered correctly

* fixed: some issues while loading wwwdats.ini/urls.ini

* fixed: wwwprofiler doesn't display empty sites

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version 4.7.5 changelog:

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.bug fix: Sorting by manufacturer not working

.added: New File "<frontend>\ini_files\control_types.ini" containing a list of all control types listed in -listxml output (MAME based emulators)

.changed: Games list files (*.el) are updated to support "ini_files\control_types.ini" Unfortunatelly you will have to recreate your games lists... except for Daphne games

.bug fix: Control type not correct for lots of games

.bug fix: Games tooltip hints not displaying the correct string in columns other than description

.bug fix: A few more memory leaks caused by the IconTools component... there are a bunch  of leaks caused by this component that I've been unable to fix :_(

.bug fix: Game play time and times played not being updated after playing games

.bug fix: Read-only checks on files before updating and/or saving to prevent  crash errors

.added: Option: "Display Read-Only Message" (preferences screen)        A warning message is displayed when atempting to write on an existing file that is marked as read-only (disabled by default)

.bug fix: Error when setting a MAME emulator in the second MAME tab (Emulator Setup) When f using only one binary, you must set it in the first MAME tab

.bug fix: Feature "Delete gamename.zip File" was not deleting AGEMAME games

.changed: Unique sound clips folder for each system (preferences, "Folders / Files" tab)

.changed: Background images for messages and input box screens

.changed: Buttons icons <frontend>\resources\images\toolbars\buttons)

.changed: Removed the "flat" state of all buttons

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