News Roundup: November 8 - December 8
There’s a new PSP emulator on the scene! From one of the members of the Dolphin team, in collaboration with the fine folks of the Internet, PPSSPP uses a JIT (just in time) compiler to keep its hardware requirements minimal, and it’s looking very promising. At this early stage (0.4 at the last release) it has been confirmed as supporting several games, but nothing at 100% compatibility. It’s being developed on five platforms simultaneously, so expect rapid progress. Check it out. (The Mac version must be built from source.)
The classic and groundbreaking real-time-strategy game Dune II is now playable in your web browser. Based on the game’s open-source implementation OpenDune, Dune 2 Online seems pretty faithful to the original experience. I haven’t encountered any problems yet, but I’m still early on in the campaign.
ZX Spectrum emulator zxsp reached version 0.8.0.pre9 this week. The developer wrote a long-ish post explaining the new features in detail. In short, the emulator now supports audio input from a standard audio input device, and it includes memory inspectors. Get it here (scroll to the bottom).
It was a quiet month in emulation on the Mac, but continue reading for more updates—including progress on the Mini vMac Cocoa port and new versions of QEMU, VICE, and FCEUX.
Early Macintosh emulator Mini vMac has made some promising progress. Developer Paul C. Pratt announced on December 6 that the OS X Cocoa port “seems to be feature complete.” This means that the app will run faster on current Macs, and it will be somewhat future-proofed as Carbon continues to be phased out of existence. If you want to have a try of the work-in-progress, check out the Development snapshots. Otherwise we should have a stable version soon.
Dolphin, a Nintendo Wii and Gamecube emulator, is continuing its neverending onslaught of daily builds. At the time of writing it’s up to 871 builds since the last official release. No signs of a new stable release yet, but we’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, updating multiple times a week should keep you busy.
DOSBox front-end Dapplegrey got a minor update last month. Version 3.1.1 fixes a bug that caused the app to crash if a selected category is empty when listing Favorites only. Get it from the Classics For X Dapplegrey page.
Open-source machine emulator and virtualiser QEMU has been updated to version 1.3.0. Notable changes include “vastly improved” USB3 support and two new CPU models: Haswell and Opteron_G5. See here for the full list.
Arcade emulator MAME, and its Mac-specific port SDLMAME, has been updated to version 0.147u3. The list of changes is long and unwieldy, as always. Head over to the MAMEDev site for more information, or download a Mac binary from the SDLMAME website.
NES/Famicom/Famicom Disk System emulator FCEUX has been updated to version 2.2.0. Changes include improved Lua drawing, a “huge mappers overhaul,” bugfixes in the movies engine, and SDL segfault fixes. You can grab the source or SDL version from the FCEUX website.
8-bit Commodore computer emulator VICE has been updated to version 2.4. New additions include supercard+ support in C64 emulation, Atari mouse support, and lots more. Get it from the official VICE SourceForge page.
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