Given the success of Nintendo's new puppy simulator Nintendogs and the company's focus on its DS handheld system this holiday season, it was only a matter of time before prospective DS owners were offered a bundle deal. However, Nintendo's doing the conventional wisdom one better by creating a limited edition bundle with DS colors and a variant version of Nintendogs, neither of which will be available separately.

 

The bundle hits stores October 24 with a $149.99 price tag, and includes either a pearl pink or teal-colored system, and a "Best Friends" version of Nintendogs that lets gamers start the title with the six most popular breeds from the three existing Nintendogs games: Labrador retriever, golden retriever, German shepherd, beagle, Yorkshire terrier, and miniature dachshund. As with the other versions of the game, all 18 breeds are unlockable in the "Best Friends" edition. Other bonuses in the package include a Nintendogs-branded, bone-shaped screen cleaner and a paw-print-riddled Nintendogs skin for the system.

Just in time for all those waiting out for Nintendogs and don't have a DS.

Linuzappz the lead coder for the PCSX2 project has 'officially' quit. This is due to several reasons, from slowly loosing interest in the project, to simply not having enough time to work on it.

 

I won't pull punches here, this is a major blow to this project as he is responsible for so much code, plugins and has an extensive knowledge of the PlayStation 2. Whilst he will pop in 'rarely' to lend a hand, or some advice he won't be working on it further

 

All of the betatesting team, his fellow developers and the general people who lend help in #PCSX2 will greatly miss him. We send him all our best, wish him luck with his hectic life and lets hope he gets atleast one date with Carolina Ardoháin (Pampita)

 

PCSX2 is far from dead and both shadow, Saqib will maintain the project with the heap of coders we do have (Refraction, auMatt, GoldFinger etc..) Given this project has come so far just recently we won't be letting it go the way of the dodo.

Thanks to Refraction for letting us know about this sad news. On the behalf of Linuz and his contributiions, we wish him the best of luck on his future endeavors, and hope he can find interest again in the project.

For all you Sony PSP owners out there who are looking for a good buy; we have found you a great deal! Credits to Milkstyle on #1emu @ EFNET, he has pointed this spectacular deal to us!

The final price becomes approximately $120 for a 2GB Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo which can be used with a PSP! The price is dirt cheap and even less than a 1GB memory card in most stores.

»» http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/product...19&sku=a0522939

NOTE: Coupon code is suspected to expire in less than 24 hours!

Raine 0.43.2 !

 

8 new games (3 from Haze, thanks !), a big amount of fixes, the return of some forgotten compiler optimizations (but not all of them in windows because of gcc bugs), and some changes for the drivers devs in the way raine handles the graphics layouts.

 

Also for the linux users : I don't know of any distribution which uses allegro 4.2.0 yet, but it has a lot of improvements including better non english keyboard support and better console support (if you use fbcon). So be aware of the limitations of allegro 4.1.x or 4.0.x if you use it with your distribution.

raine (0.43.2) unstable; urgency=low

 

  * Haze added diverboy, mugsmash, cross pang.

  * I added Jumping pop, and Tetris 2+ (or fixed it since there was a preliminary driver in raine since 0.28, but it was really the begining).

    I also added the esd16 driver from mame, with multi champ, multi champ deluxe, and head panic. All of these are using lots of colors !

  * A few fixes for extreme video modes situations (linux console). WARNING: if you want to play with the frame buffer in linux, use allegro 4.2.0, frame buffer support has been broken for a very long time in allegro-4.1.x.

  * Also some fixes to really prevent raine from changing the current video mode if the user forbids it or if the current video driver can't give the list of supported video modes by the monitor (which is the case of frame buffer driver for linux).

  * Bezel fixes : when the video mode is not automatically changed, the bezel now adapts to the current mode (instead of not displaying anything).

    Also if you load a 2nd game which also uses a bezel, the 2nd bezel is now correctly handled.

  * The buffer for the history.dat is doubled (for dkong for example), I should probably use a dynamic buffer for that... maybe later.

  * Now raine supports multiple layouts / gfx layers, and is automatically calling make_solid_mask for a region when a layout is defined for it.

    gfx[n] always contains the nth layer in the layouts list, and gfx_solid[n] is the result of the call of make_solid_mask on this region, and max_sprites[n] contains the number of sprites for this area.

    Also the driver's loading function is now called BEFORE the layouts are applied, which allows to decrypt/convert the sprites and still use automatically the layers. This should have been added a long time ago, it became obvious just recently with all these drivers which needed manual graphics decoding.

  * raine does its own tests for svgalib in linux now. If it does not detect vga.h at the standard places when compiling, then svgalib support is disabled.

  * Fixed the fg layer of the 2nd tc100scn not updated in thundfox (thundfox seems to be the only game which uses a 2nd fg layer, so it escaped me !)

  * while testing stuff with the eeproms, fixed pang3j which never worked (!), and added service mode controls for the pirates driver.

  * fine tune the music of the hammer in donkey kong so that the other sounds can be heared while it's playing.

»» Official Site