Entries from August 2005 ↓

Ok. This might be a couple of days old but I’ve been away due to work so it’s new to me… Looks like there is a new version PSPmame97! A bunch of people were more then a little confused (where were you during the last release?) when they noticed a bunch of zips inside the main release. I decided to start with this one:

pspmame04tc.zip

Which is the Techno Soft specific Mame build. The following games don’t work at all. All the rest in the set at least get to the title screen and most will get in game (but run really slow).

ctribe – _sbrk_psp:overflow!!
ddragon3 – _sbrk_psp:overflow!!
wwfwfstj – _sbrk_psp:overflow!!
wwfwfest – _sbrk_psp:overflow!!
wwfwfsta – _sbrk_psp:overflow!!

Anyway all of the games for this build seem pretty worthless… ‘Double Dragon’ doesn’t even play anywhere near full speed even with turning off the sound and jacking up the CPU speed. The nice thing about this release is that the source has been released for this finally. I grabbed a copy of DevKitPRO ( http://www.devkitpro.org/ ) but I haven’t got it to compile yet. I did work out the Makefile issues though (I think). Now, if I can just fix the relocation overflows (I doubt it). At the moment thought the entire Technos build needs a bit of work I doubt it will ever really amount to anything. I’ve put together a ClrMamePro ( http://www.clrmame.com/ ) dat for the Technos set which you can find here:

http://www.shindakun.net/pspmame_.04_.97_technos.zip

There is a webpage ( http://pspmame.s151.xrea.com/ ) up that with a list of working roms it’s in Japanese though…

Well, I’m going to try out the Namco set now…

Looks like joeblackstilES has updated Doscollection to 0.7! It adds like four gigs too. I better get that torrent started… That reminds me I need to call Matthew Robert and find out about those floppies he has.

What do you do when you’ve got 4+ gigs of old school MS-Dos games and DosBox ( http://dosbox.sourceforge.net ) just doesn’t seem to cut it? Well, using ‘Bart’s Bootable Dos CD’ ( http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/ ) as a base I started putting together a CD package which would make it a bit easier to play the games. I have an old Compaq lappy with a questionable hard drive which makes it perfect for testing… Oh and thanks to joeblackstilES for the Doscollection. I hope I can send a couple more games soon.

Using Bart’s system with some small tweaks I quickly set up a CD with ‘X-Com: UFO Defense’ on it for testing. I’ve already thrown Pkunzip 2.04g and UnArj into a utils directory on the CD. Upon booting the CD it creates a 32Mb RamDrive and leaves you at a Dos prompt (I might put together some sort of menu or something). From there it’s just a matter of typing:

pkunzip -d .\games\x-com.zip q:\x-com

Then just change over to the Q drive (that’s the RamDrive) change directory to x-com and run ufo.bat.

There are still quite a few things to consider. For instance, with X-Com the save games are kept in the X-Com directory which as you can guess are destroyed on shutdown. So, saving right now is not an option. I could probably set something up to copy saves over to the C drive but you should hear the sound the hard drive is making right now. I wonder if I can pick up a cheap drive for it off Ebay. And then there is a game like ‘Sam And Max: Hit the Road’ which is hard coded it seems to save to C:\SAM.CD (at least the version I have tested seems to be). I wonder if I can get around that using some Dos trickery? On a computer with a working C drive it wouldn’t be a problem but on the lappy it won’t cut it. I can probably get around it with the Dos command subst or just hex editing the exe.

It’s probably not worth the bother for most people but if I get bored maybe I’ll look further into it…

What’s the best emulator on PSP so far? For me I’d have to say it’s PSP Genesis by Sougen. This weekend I had some spare time while not house hunting to get a few hours of ‘Phantasy Star’ in. And I enjoyed every second of it. The game speed and music seemed right on. If you’ve got a PSP (1.0 or 1.5) check it out over at DCEmu
( http://tinyurl.com/9emot ).

After Genesis I’d have to go with the PSPWiki ( http://psp.holybell.to/ ) release of MAME 96. After all I am a Namco arcade freak. I’m going to try to fit in time to try some more emulators of the next couple of days and we’ll see if any others are worthy of staying on the memory card.

And last but not least… PSP Downgraders. A lot of you have been finding your way here via Google during your search for the holy grail that is the PSP firmware downgrader. It does not exist yet. And when it does I’m sure you see it posted every blog under the ‘interweb’. But it’s probably going to be a little while before one is released…