A bugfix plethora for the new ScummVM version
Apparently spring affected the ScummVM coders in a positive manner, because after a waiting of six months between release 0.12.0 and the 0.13.0 one only two months more were enough to see a new version coming, namely the 0.13.1 one available on the official servers since a few days. The short period intervened since the previous release justifies the lack of new supported games, as this time the focus is bugs correction and the improvement of consoles and portable platforms versions.
Home of the Underdogs is back on-line. Twice. With downloads
The phoenix of abandonware hasn’t had the time to rise again from its ashes, that it has soon split in two separate parts with no communication between them. The efforts of the community gathered around the discussion group Home of the Underdogs Revival Project have actually led first to houtd.org and, some weeks later, to homeoftheunderdogs.net. Both sites claim to be the “official” home of the new Home of the Underdogs, and plan to pursue its “mission” in different ways, rather difficult to conciliate in a unitary approach.
Home of the Underdogs, the phoenix of abandonware
Like the legendary bird rises again from its ashes, the most important site of abandonware recently sunk into the oblivion of disconnection is preparing to return to life thanks to the joined efforts of enthusiasts and experts and with consent of its original caretaker, which announces the start of the revival project and apologizes for having been absent so much time to let such a precious resource for classic videogaming die from starvation.
PCSX2 0.9.6, PC emulates the PS2 way better than PlayStation 3
“PS2 emulation is a complex task“, as it can be read on the about page of PCSX2, but it isn’t an impossible task as demonstrated by the advancements achieved during time by the only software currently able to replicate the most successful Sony console (a hit enduring even today) with an accuracy level that is enough to run a good number of commercial games. PCSX2 emulates the PS2 on PC, and the last release of the emulator delivered in these days, version 0.9.6, once again confirms that a group of talented and passionate coders is generally much more capable of achieving such kind of objectives than a multinational investing billions of euros and obtaining in return results embarrassing at least.
ScummVM 0.13.0 delivers new adventure games
The classics, by definition, never go out of fashion, let alone if they are the graphic adventures of past decades. And the preferred tool of true adventurers is ScummVM, a software that works as an interpreter between data files of such adventures and modern operating systems. After 6 months since the release of version 0.12.0, in these days developers have delivered a new main release of the virtual machine, which includes novelties both for the interface and supported games.
KEEP, a universal emulator or a complete waste of time?
Alerted by the inexorable advancing of the next digital dark age, the European academy started a preservation plan for digital contents and artefacts with great ambitions. The KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) project considers with particular care videogames and intends to create what has been defined the first “general purpose” emulator, capable of providing access to obsolete media and formats for nowadays and future generations.
Requiem for the champion of abandonware
Home of the Underdogs is dead, long live to vintage videogaming. It’s unlikely that memorial words will be wasted in the IT industry for the occasion, nevertheless the event is worth highlighting: founded by the Thai woman Sarinee Achavanuntakul in September 1998, HotU eventually became the largest historic videogames archive (mostly) for DOS and Windows platforms, representing one of the major landfall points of the phenomenon at the boundary between illegality and collective cognizance better known as abandonware.
CPS Changer, the first and last Capcom console
Capcom makes videogames all along, and there are no doubts about the fact that the company is particularly good at it. But there was a time, around the half of the Nineties, when the award-winning Japanese producer tried to enter the hardware market too, during the fourth generation of consoles when Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo shared the domestic market while the others were watching.
Model 2 Emulator 0.9, Sega 3D classics once again on these screens
There’s no doubt about the fact that ElSemi take his time when it’s about updating his Sega Model 2 arcade board emulator, but it’s similarly true that any new Model 2 Emulator update offers such an amount of improvements to give meaning to the time gone-by between a release and another. Seven months after the last revisions, therefore, the talented Spanish coder has in the past days delivered the 0.9 version of his thoroughbred arcade emulator.
Promote retrogaming by purchasing retro-games
If there’s something that the new digital store Good Old Games has clearly emphasized is the fact that retrogaming can become a business, but at its heart there must necessarily be the passion and the commitment of hobbyists able to feed that business with their coding and software engineering efforts. Without projects amateurish in shape but extremely sophisticated in essence like DOSBox and ScummVM, to say it frankly, probably GOG.com would have never opened.
MAME 0.129(u1), the new year among lasergames and emulated multiplayer
The first two weeks of 2009 have marked significant news for MAME, the most advanced and complex arcade machines emulator kicking around. The development cycle of the main release 0.129 has ended and another one has unfolded to lead the code toward the next version 0.130, in the middle the Nicola Salmoria and mamedev’s virtual machine has brought further, radical changes, the likelihood that in the future there will be multiplayer for those games that comprise it and the emulation of two new laserdisc videogames.
The return of (old) PC graphic adventures
Though they belong to a genre already considered defunct and inadequate for the mainstream videogames market years by now, adventure games have a glorious past, a past that deserves to be remembered and of course replayed. At the center of a good part of this effort of collective memory there is ScummVM, the already quoted virtual machine which acts like an interface between the feelings and the puzzles from the good old times and the modern operating systems.
MAME 0.128u4, structural changes and a new emulated lasergame
The development cycle for the MAME 0.129 release isn’t finished yet, but the last intermediate version delivered by the mamedevs brings such important changes and novelties that it’s worth to look closely at them. The structural design of the emulator of emulators has undergone the nth shift while the list of emulated games includes now Firefox, the second laserdisc videogame to be added to MAME after Cube Quest.
MESS, a doomed emulator?
Dark clouds await on the horizon of MESS, the all-inclusive emulator of home systems that shares a great part of the MAME base code and that above all embraces its philosophy of great fidelity to the inner workings of the hardware reproduced within the software. According to Haze, one of the eldest mamedevs that has been a long-time coordinator of the development on the Nicola Salmoria’s emulator, “the MAME framework is too fundamentally flawed to actually emulate these things properly“.
Good Old Games betatesting goes public
A few weeks after the announcement of the private beta program broadening, the Good Old Games folks are officially stating the public opening of the site in these hours. The retrogaming digital store is now ready to receive the orphans of the good ol’ games and who struggles in the abandonware and the incompatibilities between old software and new OSes, hoping that the economic results will be enough to attract new publishers willing to a embrace the peculiar business model chosen by the CD Projekt guys.
Where to download the Cube Quest CHD?
UPDATE: As widely expected, all the sources quoted in the post are now offering the download for the first laserdisc videogame emulated by MAME, though with various shapes and variously practical modes. The guide has been modified and updated according to the new wider availability.
Passed away the emotional fuddle for the news of the emulation of the first lasergame in the MAME history, here it is the question that necessarily follows: where to get the ginormous file in CHD format, of more than 10 Gigabytes, containing the dump of the game laserdisc? What I propose here is a brief yet useful (or at least I hope that) guide to the Internet recesses from which is currently possible to obtain this digital moloch to feed the emulator of emulators with.
Good Old Games, who wants a beta invite code?
UPDATE: A lucky user writing from the USA has received via mail the invite code that GOG.com has granted me. Happy retrogaming to him, to me and everyone enjoys the experience 
Dunno why (yet), but the beta of Good Old Games, the digital store of retrogaming that would like to become a point of reference for the peculiar audience to which it refers, isn’t closed yet. Not so bad, anyway, personally I’ll profit to continue to test the service, buy some old classic that I still haven’t played and more generally devote myself to my preferred activity after sex. That is retrogaming 
Good Old Games, first use impressions
A month after the announcement of the Good Old Games beta broadening, the CD Projekt folks have finally sent to me the access code for the retrogaming store, the digital delivery portal that would like to become a reference point for gamers with a folk memory to protect and above all the desire to replay the good old times of the former videogaming. Waiting for the store’s public opening and to spend some money for the first purchases, in the next paragraphs I’ll begin to report some preliminary considerations drawn from the brief “tasting” sessions of what GOG has currently to offer.
ScummVM 0.12.0, all your adventures are belong to us
Waiting for the Architect of adventure games Ron Gilbert to unveil the (certainly) moronic face of the DeathSpank hero to the world, if one was in withdrawal from “point & click” games he could always practice with ScummVM, the virtual machine designed for the preservation of the good old adventures from Lucasfilm/Lucasarts (and much more) released in these days in its new, sparkling version 0.12.0.
NullDC 1.0.3, Dreamcast emulation returns on PC. Carrying NAOMI with it
After nine months of waiting and the recent foray in the meanders of the technologically gifted (but maybe not enough) handhelds, nullDC returns on PC with version 1.0.3 released in these days. The plug-in based emulator that has renewed the glories of the Sega Dreamcast console, offering its most advanced and accurate emulation available by now, is for this time coupled with its arcade counterpart, that is the NAOMI system supposed to be impossible to emulate in the past years and now turned into the nth technological wall knocked down thanks to the work of drk||Raziel & fellows.
-
· Subscribe to Sir Arthur's Den ·
-
· © Some Rights Reserved ·
The exclusive contents of Sir Arthur's Den are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, and must be ascribed to Alfonso Maruccia as the sole owner of the related copyrights.
