J Allard reveals the packed-in hard drive content. What could it be?

 

October 5, 2005 - In a behind-closed-doors session with Microsoft Corporate Vice President J Allard(News Poster Note: Allard looks like Micheal Stipe ), IGN learned the specialized Hard Drive peripheral will come bundled with special content.

 

Don't get your feathers too ruffled, it's not Perfect Dark Zero. The Hard Drive contains a custom soundtrack, a few videos, one of which is "The Making of Xbox 360," a few gamer tiles, and the arcade puzzle game, Hexic.

 

Now before you run away whining, as if this weren't enough, consider the material. First, Allard confirmed the content is the same on every single hard drive, whether you buy it bundled or separately.

 

Second, Hexic is created by Alexy Pajitnov, the original creator of Tetris. You know, one of the greatest games of all times? I have played this game, and it is as addictive as candy is to a kid. Before you even slip a disc in the 360, give this game a whirl and you'll spend the next two hours playing it.

 

Third, the packed-in content is designed to show consumers what they can do with their new sophisticated game unit in addition to playing games. They can instantly play a free soundtrack (though who knows what this soundtrack will sound like), stylize their GamerTag with the bundled Gamertiles, dress up the interface with wallpapers, tune their settings, and watch a video offering insight into just how this crazy machine was made. The content is in itself a roadmap to the system's other uses, besides games.

 

Does it come with the backward compatible data necessary to play Halo or Halo 2? Ha, well, Allard wouldn't say, but Microsoft long ago confirmed Halo 2 will be backward compatible, so whether it's on the hard drive or not, that shouldn't be a worry. If there was one "best selling game" on Xbox, Halo 2 was never in question.

He does.

MAME32FX is a derivative unofficial build based on the original MAME/MAME32 source code with improvements and has been updated.

Updated to MAME 0.100u4 - MAME32 0.100u3

 

- Added speedup cheat to Jr. Pac-Man. (As requested, button 1 to enable)

»» http://mame32fx.altervista.org/

7th October 2005 - GameEx 5.13

 

New installation option to setup only as an MCE MAME Plugin, like original versions of GameEx (eg. V1.x), but with MAME Favorites, most played MAME games, and last played MAME game. This disables a lot of features and configures for the initial GameEx crowd, including removing  the startup banner.

NOTE: All of the above can be done through the configuration of GameEx, but I guess people don't realise that initially.

>> Get it HERE

It has been necessary for me to alter the Emulator Enhancer interface somewhat for Xcode compatibility, with the unfortunate side effect of requiring me to update every single emulator I maintain. Since these changes were made, I have had only limited spare time for development work, and as such no more work has been done on porting to Xcode. This is not a situation I expect to change for the forseeable future. Rather than sit on some pretty major improvements that users could be enjoying, I have decided to release new updates today. The significant changes are as follows:

 

    * Several bug fixes in the emulator shell code.

    * Roughly a fifty percent performance increase in Nestopia, which is now in sync with the latest version for PC.

    * Preliminary sound emulation in Oswan.

    * Major update to KiGB, bringing it in sync with the latest version for PC.

    * Major update to TGEmu, bringing with it improved compatibility. Note that this release should be considered beta quality.

    * Joystick support has been fixed in Arnold.

    * Mugrat is now compatible with Atarisoft games.

 

So just to reiterate, updates are available for Arnold, Boycott Advance, Emulator Enhancer, fMSX, Frodo, Generator, Genesis Plus, Handy, Horizon, Jum52, KiGB, MO5, Modeler, Mugrat, Neopocott, Nestopia, O2Em, Oric, Oswan, Rainbow, RockNES, SimCoupe, SMS Plus, TEO, TGEmu, Thom, Vecx, and ViBE. Whew.

>> Get the emulators HERE (Note: You must use Firefox browser)

Credits: AEP Emulation for the heads-up.