Release notes for 1.77June 18th, 2007

 

* New Xfire In-Game interface, using the mouse, is in beta testing! It is enabled for all Dawn of War games.

* Fixed a game detection issue for some people with World of Warcraft and Warcraft III.

* Displaying friends' screenshots in the infoview was enabled last release, but it was so popular that it caused some server problems. We expect to reenable this within days.

* Improved the profile page web interface to display screenshots.

* New games supported: Crazy Taxi, Last Chaos USA, The Sims 2 Deluxe, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Broken Sword - The Sleeping Dragon, Syberia, Syberia2, Voyage Century Online, Sauerbraten, Dogz 4, Freeciv - beta, Tibia, UFO - Extraterrestrial, Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End, Halo 2, Attack on Pearl Harbor, Red Alert - A Path Beyond, Entropia Universe, World of Padman, Populous - The Beginning, Populous - The Beginning - Undiscovered Worlds, Tomb Raider - Anniversary, Baldur's Gate II, Birth of America, and Neverwinter Nights 2 AMD 64 Version.

Changelog / Download

PS2 emulator

Let me say firstly I have no idea if this is real or fake, please add your comments to this news thread.

Click-2U Playstation 2 Emulator is an emulator which can load Playstation 2 CD/DVD's and run the game like A Playstation 2. This Software contains the best plugins for the best quality. The new version is 600% FASTER THAN THE PREVIEWS VERSION

* link removed *

The download file size is about 21.2 mb.

EDIT: I had this checked out, and it turns out to be a RIPOFF of PCSX2 0.9.2 !!

The PCSX2 team has been informed!

These guys are seriously on a roll.

Dox made a suggestion, I implemented it, and now the tile DMA is fixed.

 

Basically the RLE byte should affect the last normal byte before it, NOT the byte after it. This simplifies the code, and produces much better results.

>>Source And more Screenies

CPS3 emulation is seriously picked up speed! Yesterday it was sounds, backgrounds, and now it's sprite data compression.

CPS3 uses compressed data for it’s BG tiles and Sprite Data. The system has a ‘DMA’ list in Video RAM, and when given the command the video hardware will process this list, and copy + decompress graphic data from the FlashROMs into Video RAM for use by the game.

 

The compression initially looked rather complex, but actually turns out to be much more simple than first thought (although emulation still isn’t perfect)

 

The basics of it are simple. The first command in the DMA list is a special command, telling the chip to upload a 256 byte table to its internal memory. The Compressed data contains 8 bit values from 00 - FF. Byte with 0×80 set (0×80 - 0xFF) are treated as a lookup into the table it uploaded, replacing one byte, with one word from the table. This allows them to compress the 128 most common words to a single byte instead of a word, thus saving 50%.

 

After that there is an RLE stage, bytes with 0×40 set are command bytes, telling the chip to repeat the next byte a certain number of tiles. What you’re left with is a series of values between 0×00 and 0×3f, giving 6bpp (64 colour) sprite / bg tiles.

 

What isn’t quite understood is what happens if there is an RLE command byte followed by an RLE command byte, or if RLE is applied to a 0×80 byte, does it just affect the first value in the table, or do both get repeated etc.

 

Here are some screenshots, they’re not quite as good as ElSemi’s, probably due to a bug in the code I’m using right now. Also I’ve had to disable the text layer palette for now because MAME can’t handle over 0×10000 colours in a palette without custom drawing functions.

The progress has truly become a beautiful sight to see! Keep up the great work Haze, ElSemi, and all the developers.

»» More Screenshots & Original Post