A compliation of the Mana games.

Back at E3 Square Enix announced a new project titled "World of Mana," which at the time led gamers, publications, and the like to believe a MMORPG of some sort was in the works. Wrong! Last weekend at Square Enix Party 2005, we were given our first real information regarding Square's latest project. "World of Mana" is not a game, it is a complete revival of the project, similar to what Square Enix is doing with Final Fantasy VII. According to their official press pamphlet:

 

"Our staff are working hard to bring the world of Mana to everyone in various genres and platforms. Please look forward to the Mana series from now into the future."

 

While we don't have any additional information, we do have the project logo along with a screenshot of a house and some trees. GAF will make certain to report any details of new game(s) as they arise.

gamesarefun.com

A few interesting tidbits about the Xbox 360 were revealed at a recent campus party in Spain. The following list was highlighted over on the Team Xbox forums:

 

    * Square is developing multiple games (not just FFXI)

    * The internal fan will be variable—very quiet during movie playback

    * Controller can turn the system “ON”

    * Videochat will support 8-player minigames

    * HD cable will be included, plus component AV adaptor (dispelling all speculation)

    * Price & additional content will be revealed at a game conference in Liepzig, Germany (Aug 18th-21st)

Tons of pics

> Joystiq

Among the revelations at the two-day Square Party 2005 event were some details surrounding the highly-anticipated Final Fantasy XII. The first news, which Square planned to make an official announcement about, despite it being projected on the huge walls surrounding the FFXII theater, is that the game will ship in Japan on March 16, 2006. That's pretty late for a game considering the localization on the game's storyline is 100% complete, according to a source within Square-Enix. The current logic is that Squenix is holding it back to avoid it locking horns, sales-wise, with Tetsuya Nomura's upcoming Kingdom Hearts II. FFXII is still coming out within the fiscal year, though, so sales will still count towards the company's annual revenue -- savvy, but tough for gamers waiting to see the Empire Strikes Back-meets-Final Fantasy themes in action.

 

The second revelation, and far more surprising of the two, is that FFXII director, Yasumi Matsuno, is no longer working on the game. The former Quest developer (Quest made games like Tactics Ogre and Ogre Battle for the SNES and Sega Saturn) is the mastermind behind such brilliant games as Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but is said to be temperamental. When part of the FFXII team was said to have left Square-Enix for Hironobu Sakaguchi's new development studio, Mist Walker, Matsuno was reported to have not shown up for work for a month until the crisis was resolved. In fact, we're not sure what Matsuno is working on now, and whether he was kicked off the team or if he voluntarily removed himself, although he is still said to be at Square. The RPG powerhouse is reported to have a replacement at the helm already, the choice of whom is likely to raise the eyebrows of many people who have been following the troubled chapter's evolution. As we learn more about this development we'll let you know.

www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3142452

**Update: The reason why Mr. Matsuno stopped working on the game was apparently due to a health reason and concern.

Source

Version 1.52 (August 1, 2005) - "The first light doesn't count!"

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We decided as a team that there's no real need to upgrade to the latest M.A.M.E. core. We now have support for all the CPUs ever used on pinball hardware, and all the other type chips that aren't supported yet won't probably be supported by M.A.M.E. anytime soon either, so we'll stick with the tested, proven, reliable, and FAST older 0.76 core. Why break a good thing?

 

Much to our surprise we've added some nice improvements since the 1.52 beta release just six short weeks ago, so enjoy our latest version!

 

Bugs Fixed

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- Fixes for Bally Vector switches

- WMS-S7: Fixed multiplexed solenoids on Defender

- WMS-S4: Defined missing special solenoids on some games

- GamePlan: These games are now well behaved on game over/match

- Bally-35: Fixed switch column 6 on Vector and added some missing sound diagnostic switches

- Spinball: Some improvements and tweaks. These games should work much better now (We still need to find the roms for Verne's World)

- Overflow Interrupt handling improved on I8051 CPU core to help prevent hang-ups on Spinball emulation [Thomas Behrens]

 

- Mr. Game: Video dip switch bug resolved that permanently disabled collision detection

- Gottlieb: System3 driver bug found that kept displays from working perfectly, so now all alphanumeric games should have their correct displays [Gerrit Volkenborn, Steve Ellenoff]

 

- No Good Gofers flippers working reliably now [Gerrit Volkenborn]

 

New Features

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- Premier Strikes n' Spares: Support for 2nd DMD, fully working.

- Mr. Game: Support for 2nd Generation Video & Sound Hardware, working very well, but still some glitches exist.

- Mr. Game: Rom support for World Cup 90 [steve Ellenoff]

 

- Premier Strikes n' Spares: Support for Sound, fully working.

- Added CDP1802 CPU support from MESS (for Playmatic games)

- Working support for Peyper / Sonic (Spain) hardware

- Added preliminary support for Playmatic, Sleic (Spain), LTD (Brazil)

- Sound support for GamePlan Cyclopes and Inder Brave Team [Gerrit Volkenborn]

 

- Bally sound diagnostic function implemented [Thomas Behrens]

 

- Support for Gottlieb's "Bone Busters Inc." extra DAC sound board [Gerrit Volkenborn, Steve Ellenoff, Tom Haukap, Brian Smith]

 

- Added support for ROMs: RCT, Playboy (Stern), NFL, House of Diamonds, Dinosaur Eggs, Mach 2, 250cc, Corsario, Night Moves, alternate sets for Data East Star Wars and Mr. Game Motor Show, and some others.. [all]

»» Official Site

You can download Visual PinMAME, PinMAMEW, and PinMAME32 from here

Credits: Official Site