31 MARCH 2009

 

As many of you are aware the old cheat engine was hacked to death during the 0.125 update cycle, it was so bad that the whole cheat engine was ripped out during the 0.126 update cycle. A completely new and more resilent cheat engine was written by Aaron Giles during the 0.127 update cycle. This new cheat engine works in a completely different way than the old cheat engine, though the casual cheater should notice few differences as the differences are behind the scenes. The cheat.dat is now officially dead, replaced by 7000+ xml cheat files (though they can be kept in a single zip). The cheat format as expected is unrecognisable from before, but it is a lot more powerful. Unfortunately, so far there is no cheat finding functionality in the new cheat engine...hopefully this will get addressed soon.

 

Right there are two releases today. First of all, to close off cheat.dat once and for all I include the LAST EVER cheat.dat file. This cheat file is meant for use with MAME 0.126 that's been compiled with a working cheat engine rather than the one contained with the 0.125 update. I've included a link to the last known good cheat.c for MAME 0.126 so if you are capable of compiling you own - drop that into the right place and type make. Before anybody asks, no it's NOT possible to compile the old cheat.c into newer MAMEs as since 0.126u1 there have been a series of changes to the memory/cpu system that makes it all but impossible.

 

Secondly, I've converted the above 0.126 cheat.dat file into the 7000+ xml files of the new format. This cheat collection is for use with 0.130u2 or later.

 

Note: The XML Cheat Collection archives are double packed. Inside the downloaded zip/7z archive you will find a large cheat.zip. It's this cheat.zip that should be placed in the same directory as your MAME executable.

 

Read the cheat.txt file contained in the cheat130u2 archives for more information.

>> Get it HERE.

Atari Lynx emulator for the Wii

0.3 - March 31, 2009

 

- Ability to enable/disable vertical sync (NTSC/PAL60 only)

- Ability to set the gamma level of the display

- Added option to load Lynx boot ROM from the root directory

- Gamecube controller support

- Fixed a couple of buffer overflow issues causing periodic crashes

- Refactor of the source code

>> Get it HERE.

PS2 emulator

Also there are new Plugins available.

>> Download from HERE.

SNES emulator

A new release quite a bit faster than I was expecting, but a lot has changed. Most importantly is a new Windows input driver, "RawInput". The downside is that this makes bsnes require at least Windows XP, as Windows 2000 and earlier lack RawInput support. The upside is that input from multiple keyboards and mice can be distinguished from each other — very useful for dual-Justifier support in Lethal Enforcers. Users of previous versions of bsnes will need to manually select the new driver via Settings->Configuration->Advanced->Input driver, and will need to re-map all assigned input keys, including the default user interface hotkeys. Or alternatively, delete the configuration file under %APPDATA%\.bsnes or ~/.bsnes.

 

Also new is an XInput driver, which avoids the DirectInput driver limitation of being unable to distinguish the two shoulder trigger buttons. This makes bsnes require DirectX 9.0c or later for the necessary drivers. Note that Windows Vista SP0 does not ship with these, so if you haven't installed it yet, you'll need to do so. This driver is part of the "RawInput" driver mentioned above.

 

This part is important: if you receive an error regarding xinput1_3.dll, you need to download and install the DirectX 9.0c run-time.

 

For those on Windows 2000, or without DirectX 9.0c, it is still possible to compile and run bsnes with the older DirectInput driver only; but I won't be providing a binary myself for this — at least not at this time.

 

More bad news for some: hiro, my Win32 / GTK+ API wrapper, has been discontinued and removed from the source tree for this release. Qt 4.5.0+ is now required for the user interface. Very sorry to the Linux distros that do not have packages for QT 4.5 yet. You'll need to continue with v041 for now.

 

Changelog:

 

- Fixed a bug that was preventing BS-X carts from loading and mapping properly

- Fixed a bug with mapping joypads after the first

- Improved window centering code to reduce flickering, still a bit volatile on Linux due to Qt/X11 limitations

- Minor cleanup work on S-PPU BG renderer

- Improved mouse axis / button mapping

- Added proper support for analog joypad inputs: both sticks and triggers are now fully supported

- Windows: added RawInput support, allows up to 16 keyboards + mice to be mapped independently

- Windows: added XInput support, allows Xbox 360 controller triggers to operate independently

- Windows and Linux: Screen saver and monitor power saving disable re-added

>> Get it HERE.