After
days of inactivity due to the removal of all four wisdom teeth
from my mouth :(, I am finally back and ready to do a major
update! After
days of inactivity due to the removal of all four wisdom teeth
from my mouth :(, I am finally back and ready to do a major
update!
First
off, please note that all binaries have NOT been updated yet, so
until tomorrow, get the files from their source.
Somewhat
disappointing news from Jerremy Koot today... He still has not
gotten Gary's sound code, so the chances of there being a new
public release of SNES97 within the week are slim.
I'll get
the bad news out of the way I suppose.... The !SNES! project has
been dropped before there was any public release. I have learned
of two more SNES emulators in the works however!! GrimSNES and
BagiSNES. Check out the "Chasing the
Pack" section for more info.
A
wonderful resource for technical documents has been put up. It
has tons of docs for various console systems. Follow the link
below...
http://www.inmind.com/people/jturner/
I chatted
with Paul Robson for a while yesterday about his GameBoy '97
emulator. He said that the EMU is largely complete, and that
there really isn't that much more to do to finish up the project.
He hinted at perhaps doing a Lynx EMU after he finishes this one.
You may
have noticed the new graphic on the front page for the EMU Review. I am still hard
at work testing ROMs on SNES96 for the review, and we want
everyone to check it out. I will be adding 40 reviews to the site
tonight, so look for great things. If anyone out there has a
registered copy of VSMC, and would be willing to do some ROM
testing, let me know. Zorkwiz@aol.com.
Jim
Pragit, my now long-time EMU friend, has released another version
of his universal frontend Game Menu. It now supports the
directory structures needed for the arcade emulators, and has
been even further optimized. Try it out, it is a wonderful piece
of work.
Get it from the Utilities page, or from the GameMenu homepage
On the
topic of frontends, there are some great SNES frontends out there
that until now, I had given no credit to. One of them, which I
feel deserves special mention because of my failure to mention it
in the past on more than one occasion, is called SNES Launcher.
This frontend, written by Robert Wayne of Smog Moon Software,
supports the special functions of both SNES96 and ESNES, and is
done quite nicely. The other, called SNEWF is for SNES96
exclusively, and can be found at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/4072/.
Both of them are deserving of your consideration.
A fairly
new utility called SNESKey has been released, which allows you to
plug your SNES controller into your PC to simulate keyboard
input. I have not tried this myself, but give it a whirl, and let
me know how it works!
Handy has
been updated twice this week, to version .30, and now .31. The
following has been fixed/added. See the Lynx
page for more.
V0.31 Fixes-
V0.30 Highlights
GameBoy
'97 has been updated several times, and is currently at build #
2.892. The following has been fixed/added since the initial
release. See the GameBoy page for
details.
-No, you aren't dreaming, I'm actually updating the site for two consecutive days! Lack of school helps.
-Yet another build of GameBoy '97 is out. This time it's build 2.753, and fixes some problems associated with the new real time saving, as well as fixing a few other minor issues. See the GameBoy page for more.
-VGB (Virtual Gameboy) DOS was updated again today, to version .87. This version has more benefits for linux users than for DOS users, but at least the Donkey Kong 95 bug which GB '97 had fixed is now fixed here as well. See the GameBoy page for more.
-Jerremy Koot sent me a more updated beta of SNES97, and I must say that I am even more impressed! The speed has been slightly improved, and the interface is SOOO much better. The emulation options are all on one big Win95 box, with everything very easy to use, and it even loads a ROM automatically now at startup, I suspect that based on this beta, SNES97 is only a week or two away from a major release. (But don't quote me on that)
-Apparently Markus Gietzen of GenEm fame was discussing his EMU on IRC recently. We can expect version .21 to be out in about 2 weeks with a considerable speed boost.
-I'd like to once again thank Jim Pragit for making today's news easy to find. Check out the EMU News Service for the best overall news source out there.
-Well, I'm back with a High School diploma in hand and my "whole future ahead of me". These damn graduation speeches get old fast... Anyway, now for what you care about, what's happened in the EMU scene since Thursday....
-I changed the name of the SNES Emulator Riview link to "SNES ROM Compatibility info" because it's a bit more accurate. More importantly, I've added a section called "Chasing the Pack", which will cover the up and coming SNES emulators such as !SNES! and NLKsnes, and follow their development. Once these EMUs reach the level of emulation of the leaders, they will each be given their own dedicated section.
-I got a copy of the SNES97 beta that I had been hearing about. It seems to be an incomplete version, but it has a much improved file system and video mode selection, it should be awesome when it's finished!
-Game Boy '97 version 2.732 was released, with support for real-time saves, a reset and a pause button and more! Check the Gameboy page for more info.
-NESticle .34 was released with a few bugs fixed, but no major improvements. See the NES page.
-Ben Haynor's MetaLynx was updated to version 0.0.2a, and now has an accurate pallate among other improvements. Check the Lynx page.
-The final Fantasy 5 Translation project which was being worked on seperately by both David Timko and "Shadow", is now a joint effort, so hopefully development will hasten. Check out Shadow's FF5 page for the latest patch. I may be adding a section dedicated to ROM hacks, patches and translations soon.
-The site got over 1000 hits for the first time Saturday! Thanks for your support! It's continuing to grow, so I know there are many more potential users. If you use the page regularly, do me a favor and tell people about it, I'd appreciate it.
-I am graduating from high school tommorrow! yay! And then we are going on a rafting trip for project graduation, so I won't be back till Saturday night, and I'll be too tired to update the page till Sunday, so bear with me. I hope I don't miss too much.....
-Although the SNES9X website has not yet been updated, there is a new version of SNES96 DOS out. The new version .72 fixes a few bugs including making Battletoads:Double Dragon playable again. The EMU is available at the "zips" directory of the SNES9X site, but has no Readme file attached to it. I also am hearing lots of rumors concerning the next release of SNES97. It may or may not have partial sound. Gary Henderson claims to have FM sound working in a few games such as DKC, but it remains to be seen which EMU will have sound support first, or what the quality will be.
-NESticle .33 is out with support for Mike Tyson's Punchout!!! I have played through to Piston Honda's second appearance, and the game plays great! The other fixes are fairly minor however, and Star Tropics, my all time Fav, still isn't fixed. Oh well, we'll just have to wait for the next one I guess. I also hear that SimNES should be released publicly soon, but I wouldn't expect NESticle quality right off the bat.
-A new SNES emulator called SNES! has been started by Andy Simpson, (Original author of SimNES), although there has been no release yet. Look for a release soon though. This one may catch up faster than we think..
-Jens Restemeier has released public beta .1 of his TG-16 EMU called VPCE, the vidoe functions are a bit faster, but it is still in the early stages. Find out more at the TG-16 page.
-Another new version of Paul Robson's GameBoy '97 has been released (Build 2.524). The following fixes/additions have been implemented since the initial release. Find out more at the GameBoy page.
-Thanks goes to my friend Jim Pragit and his EMU News Service for today's stories.
-Added the 1000 top web sites graphic to the front page so that I could get detailed data about my site. Goto http://w12.hitbox.com/wc2/index.cgi?F22125154, if you want to check it out.
-NLKsnes was updated to version .0.013d, and it fixes a few bugs. It's still not far enough along to be a real contender however.
-Paul Robson released Gameboy '97, a new ASM GameBoy emulator. It is already almost as good as VGB!! Check out the GameBoy page for more info.
-Ben Haynor released a new version of his Lynx EMU MetaLynx (.0.0.1b). Get it from the Lynx page.
-My friend and fellow EMU freak Jim Pragit has just released the next version of his Universal frontend GameMenu. New in version 1.5 is support for Stella .7's new VCS files, and cleaner code. The frontend now loads faster, and uses less system memory. Now that the 1.X versions of GameMenu are largely complete, Jim can start work on 2.0, which will have many more features, such as switching EMU's on the fly....Look for it later this summer. For now though, you can get GameMenu 1.5 from the Utilities page, or from the GameMenu homepage.
-Once again I must apologise for the infrequency of updates. I have been very busy with the SNES Emulator Review, and with finals etc. and it has been hard for me too find time to work on the site. I'll try to update at lease every 2 days throughout the summer however.
-All of the binaries have been updated, and the download links at the top of the pages should all work, and give you the right versions now.
