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!"

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

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

----------

- 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

------------

- 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

0.98u3

------

 

 

MAMETesters Bugs Fixed

----------------------

spidman098gre [Mamesick]

astormj098u1gra [Mamesick]

ehrgeiz097u4red [smf]

rdft2us098u2red [Ville Linde]

pc_bstar079u1yel [Mamesick]

playch10c080u1gre [Mamesick]

espial096u3gra [Mamesick]

 

 

 

Source Changes

--------------

Added step in/out support to the Z80 disassembler. [Aaron Giles]

 

Fixed subtle bug in ES5505/6 interpolation code. [Jarek Burczynski]

 

Some more minor fixes to System 32 sprites. [Aaron Giles]

 

Changed memory display in the debugger so that it doesn't lock to where the

cursor is. Also fixed it so that it can align against odd addresses.

[Aaron Giles]

 

Some minor cleanup to the Police Trainer driver. [Aaron Giles]

 

Some progress on Double Cheese, still not playable. [Aaron Giles]

 

Fixed some problems in Power Spikes bootleg. [Weisse Eins]

 

Fixed wrap around issue with sprites in the aerofgt driver.

[Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

Fixed the sound banking in Raiden Fighters 2 - 2000. [Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

Fixed unknown DIP switch in SAR. [Corrado Tomaselli]

 

Fixed 4th player inputs and added 1 frame delay for sprites in goal92.

[Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

Added coin counter and fixed sound adding the 2 sample chips in Tecmo Bowl.

[Pierpaolo Prazzoli]

 

Cleaned up and fixed input ports for all games in the suprnova driver.

[Mamesick]

 

Fixed crash in MAME if 0-length data block was found in a WAV file.

[Roman Scherzer]

 

Changed the windows code so the map file isn't loaded unless the

profiler is enabled. This stops you running out of memory when the memory

tracking is enabled. [smf]

 

Fixed unknown DIP switches in Merlin's Money Maze. [James Wallace]

 

Corrected visible area in esckids. [Mamesick]

 

Improvements to the S2650 core: [Manfred Schneider]

- Fixed LPSU opcode

- Changed cycle counts to match technical documentation

 

Fully emulated deco 156 encryption. [David Haywood, Nicola Salmoria,

Olivier Galibert, Bryan McPhail]

 

 

 

New games added or promoted from NOT_WORKING status

---------------------------------------------------

Joe & Mac Returns [David Haywood, R. Belmont]

Party Time: Gonta the Diver II [David Haywood]

Ganbare! Gonta!! 2 [David Haywood]

 

 

 

New clones added

----------------

Enduro Racer (YM2203, FD1089B 317-0013A) [Aaron Giles]

E.D.F. : Earth Defense Force (North America) [Aaron Giles]

Grab the diff update here:

http://www.mamedev.com/