Ahh, the last emulator release for 2008 (in my time zone, although the release was in 1/1/09 in Japan and Europe). SSF .10 prototype R2 is the best Sega Saturn emulator available for Windows, although SSF is still far from being considered “complete” or near complete. SSF 0.10 prototype R2 has the following changes (rough Japanese to English translation:

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DS2Key is an application for Nintendo DS that allows you to send key signals to your PC thus emulating a PC game pad. Utilizing the touch screen you can also control the PC mouse.

iDeaS 1.0.2.8 is a Nintendo DS emulator for Windows. This release of iDeaS 1.0.2.8 is the NON-BETA, full release of the DS emulator. This DS emulator does play a few commercial games. iDeaS 1.0.2.8  has the following changes:

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Well I guess for those of you who love Mahjong games in MAME, Luca Elia has added a  gambling by Taiwanese Subsino, that uses Mahjong tiles instead of cards. Its name roughly translates to Sakura Love (actual title?):

Luca has  written three drivers for games by Subsino. This game, as figured out by Angelo, runs on the tilemap based hardware emulated in bishjan.c, but with an AMD AM188EM CPU (basically an 80188 + peripherals).

This game uncovered some previously unemulated features of the video chip, such as row and column scroll. And, unlike other Subsino games, this one has emulated sound since it uses an M6295 and an YM3812.

Dknute posted the following infos on his progress for his Dreamcast emulator Makaron:

The GD-EMU project has advanced a bit. Not without a fight though :)

Quartus SOPC Builder allows user to change component names to something more suitable than the default ones – so you can name JTAG UART anything you like but unless it’s “jtag_uart” there’s a very high chance it won’t work as NIOS IDE terminal.
There is a FAQ on that on Altera website, true, but it took me 2 days to find the information I was looking for…

I had some trouble figuring out a way to create a register stack that could be accessed for read/write operations from two separate interfaces – one synchronous (Avalon bus) and one asynchronous (GD ATA). It finally worked today, so now I can intercept ATA/ATAPI commands sent by Dreamcast on NIOS side, using C code.

33.8688MHz clock generator is finally complete. I’ve used 74AC04, though with short connections a HC part should do too. Output is clean enough for a clock, the only thing that worries me a bit is the voltage swing. Even if powered from 3.3V the generator manages to output a whooping 5Vp-p – probably due to parasitic capacitances that create a pump. I could put a small resistor in series with the output but that will form an unwanted low-pass RC filer… Looking at the specs the FPGA should be able to handle this kind of abuse. I hope.

Lastly I’ve wasted a better part of the day chasing bugs, before I realized I’m trying to control a memory-mapped I/O via cache. Not such a great idea :) Kinda funny seeing how just a few days ago I wrote a simple memory testing routine that bypasses the data cache, for the same purpose I/O accesses should.

I’ve already a pretty good idea of how the whole data exchange system should look like. On PC every operation could block the main emulation thread (if needed). That won’t work on the hardware – I need to deliver the data on time in every case. Including situations where audio playback has been started and a PIO/DMA request comes up as well.

Dolphin SVN r1697, Wii and Gamecube emulator for Windows. It also basic Triforce emulation (this is pending a commit, and does not run games yet). Gamecube compatibility is about the same Wii emulator support games show their intro movies. There is preliminary Wiimote emulation. This package also contains both 32bit and 64bit versions. Download at our WII emulator page.

WinUAE 1.5.4 beta 6 is easily the best Amiga emulator available for Windows.. WinUAE 1.5.4 beta 6 is the sixth beta of the WinUAE 1.5.5 beta cycle. This update has these changes since the last Win UAE 1.5.4 public beta:

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FB Alpha 0.2.97.01 is an arcade emulator supporting the following hardware platforms;

- Capcom CPS-1
- Capcom CPS-2
- Capcom CPS-3
- Cave
- Neo Geo
- Sega System 16 (and similar), System 18, X-Board, Y-Board
- Toaplan
- Taito
- Psikyo 68EC020 based hardware
- misc stuff

What’s New in FB Alpha 0.2.97.01:
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Ootake 1.63 is a PC Engine emulator for Windows. Ootake is the most frequently updated PC Engine emulator available for windows, and Ootake is also one of the more complete. Also, Ootake is FREE unlike Magic Engine. Ootake 1.63 has the following changes:

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Dxbx a Delphi port of the original Xbox emulator CXBX for windows. Dxbx is much like Dolphin is for WII emulators. Don’t expect Dxbx to run all your favorite Xbox titles at 60 FPS and have 100% compatible. Infact, don’t even expect Dbxb to run ANY of your favorite commerical games, is it does not support any yet. This has the following changes:
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Kega Fusion for MacOS has seen an update from Steve Snake. Kega Fusion emulates the Sega SG-1000, SC-3000, Master System, and GameGear with a high degree of accuracy,  emulates the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis more accurately than any other emulator and emulates the Sega MegaCD/SegaCD more accurately than any other emulator. Kega Fusion also emulates the Sega 32X more accurately than any other emulator.  emulates the Sega CD+32X together, no other emulator can do this. And finally, Kega Fusion emulates the Sega Pico and Sega Virtua Processor. Needless to say Kega Fusion is a great emulator for Sega console system (aside from Saturn and Dreamcast I guess). Download at our Emulators for Macintosh page.

MAMEUI .128u7 (previously named MAME32) is a build of MAME with an integrated frontend. MAMEUI seems to be the popular choice for users of the MAME emulator, as its easier to deal with than a command link based version of MAME. This version of MAMEUI is available in both 32bit and 64bit versions. Download MAMEUI .128u7 at our MAME page.

MAME Plus  .128u7 is an unofficial build of MAME  .128u7. MAME Plus contains all the changes and updates found in the regular release of MAME, but with added features such as high score save support. Additionally, the author of MAME Plus has added support for the MESS core as well. Download at MAME Plus  .128u7 at our MAME page.

MAMEXT32 V0.128u7, previously named MAMEXT is a cool unofficial version of MAMEUI with highscore save included. (You will need the hiscore.dat file in order to use this feature). MAMEXT32 also has some extra features that plain vanilla MAME doesn’t. MAMEXT64 .128u7 is the 64bit optimized version of the emulator, which will run on Windows 64bit operating systems. Download MAMEXT32 .128U7  and/or MAMEXT64 0.128u7 at  our MAME page.

Kega Fusion has seen an update from Steve Snake. Kega Fusion emulates the Sega SG-1000, SC-3000, Master System, and GameGear with a high degree of accuracy,  emulates the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis more accurately than any other emulator and emulates the Sega MegaCD/SegaCD more accurately than any other emulator. Kega Fusion also emulates the Sega 32X more accurately than any other emulator.  emulates the Sega CD+32X together, no other emulator can do this. And finally, Kega Fusion emulates the Sega Pico and Sega Virtua Processor. Needless to say Kega Fusion is a great emulator for Sega console system (aside from Saturn and Dreamcast I guess). Heres what’s new:
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MAMEUIFX32 .128u7 is a derivative unofficial build based on the original MAME/MAMEUI source code. MAMEUIFX32 .128u7 has these these improvements over regular MAME:

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In what is likely the last release of MAME for the year 2008, MAME  .128u7, the 7th U release of the MAME .129 beta cycle is here. MAME  .128u7  most major change is the final retirement of the global Machine pointer, which has been part of MAME for many years. Giles never thought we’d hit this point so quickly, so my hats off to Atari Ace who helped push through the final round of changes needed to make this happen finally. As a result of this change, it should be possible in the coming year to finally write a driver that runs two full machines simultaneously. The second big change is that the CPUs are now full-fledged devices, and participate like all other devices in the system configuration. This is mainly an internal structural change, but in the end removes some redundant code and behavior. In a future dev cycle, a similar thing will happen with the sound cores. Starting now, the focus for MAME will be to iron out remaining issues and release a MAME 0.129 sometime around the 1st of the year.  A list of changes in MAME  .128u7  over the previous release is as follows:
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iDeaS 1.0.2.8 Beta is a Nintendo DS emulator for Windows. This Nintendo DS emulator does play a few commercial games. iDeaS 1.0.2.8 beta. has the following changes:

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Wine 1.1.11 is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris. Wine 1.1.11 has the following changes:
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dknute posted the following regarding an update to his Dreamcast emulator for those having crash issues:

The idea was to have FPGA handle the ATA interface, including DMA burst transfers, while external MCU will run part of Makaron GD code and take care of all the high-level stuff. 2GB Secure Digital card will provide necessary GD data.
I realized that EP2C20 can easily host both the interface and a soft-core NIOS II CPU with all the supporting logic for onboard memory chips. Now this is neat, I can actually run the NIOS faster than my ARM7 and it has more memory too (I mean, just the SDRAM is 8MB vs 64kB on-chip SRAM on ARM). The only problem is I don’t have license for that IP core so the USB programming cable needs to be attached at all times, or the board will freeze eventually. Both ARM and Cyclone boards have SD slots so I can change my mind anytime :)

Anyway, SPI<->SD communication works both on ARM and NIOS now (it’s the same C code, save the low-level I/O stuff). Now I need to handle FAT. There is a free library for that but I want to write my own with a bit more buffering as an option. Since it’s read-only it shouldn’t be much of a problem, it’s just that both target CPUs can only do aligned memory accesses and that needs to be worked around for the FAT structure parsing.

VHDL code for ATA i/f is progressing, but slowly. I haven’t done any of this before – I doubt programming GAL devices counts :)

UPDATE: There is a new MKFro available for download. It’s a GUI for Makaron T11/1 – both Dreamcast and NAOMI versions.
MKFro requires NET Framework 2.0 or higher. Please direct any questions you might have to it’s author slrhui.

Also, there are more interesting hardware projects on this page: JJ10DM. Though I have to say that the USB-based serial uplink to Dreamcast doesn’t have to be that complicated – if anyone is interested I can provide more details.

UPDATE 2: To those who reported the following problems in the comments:
- Games crashing with Internal error -1005 on STARTRENDER
- DirectSound error in UzupelnijBufor/Lock

Please download this file Inside you’ll find updated executables to replace the T11/1 ones. Try those out and tell me if it helps.