PortaMod by Syphus, mentioned earlier, is now announced for the public here! It’s a new player for older music formats, which offers alot more than performing/visualizing recorded music. It’s basically a library for Processing to play MOD/XM/S3M, currently presented in a few different forms, for example the Chipdisco. It offers two decks for DJ-action, and is also a great way to perform your own music live. You can tranpose songs, tempo changes, automatic beatmatch, loop quarters of patterns and jump inbetween them, mute individual channels. And you can use either keyboard, mouse, or MIDI. Chipdisco also allows you to navigate through songs with the cursor keys. Left/right changes the song position in the pattern list, while up/down goes a step up or down in the current pattern playing.

The source will be shared, so it will be interesting to see what the future holds for MOD/XM/S3M performances/visualizers in Processing. (For those using Supercollider, you can use Fredrik Olofsson’s redMOD and redXM here.)

SDL MAME for Mac OSX saw an update yesterday. I am playing catch up so, let’s see what changes were made. As always, you can find this and any other download in the Box File widget on the right. Cheers!

1) Up to date with baseline 0.135u1 (RB)

2) Compile fix for PowerPC Linux (and BSD?) targets (sashz)

3) IA64=1 compile option changed to NOASM=1. This is the first step towards being able to build SDLMAME for ARM and other architectures we don’t explicitly support. (RB)

I almost forgot, don’t forget to download the proper version. There are Universal (non-intel) and Intel optimized (x86) versions. Make sure you download the one that will work best for you! I think this is the first time there is an Intel optimized version over here in Mac land. I used to look at that “Intel Optimized” with a gleam of envy in my eyes.

You can also check out the SDL homepage for more information and downloads. Cheers!

My internet is down and will be down until Monday of the following week. I’m sorry but, things happen. I will be back in full force Monday. This is in no way a cop-out and I’m not going to let this become like similar emulation things and fade away. I will be back.

Back in early September, Manomio LLC released a Commodore 64 app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. A mere 2 days later, it was pulled by Apple after they found it was possible to run programs via the emulated C64 app. Only C64 programs you understand, but Apple didn’t like it regardless.

However Eurogamer are reporting that the app is finally back, all locked down but with 3 new games included – International Soccer, International Basketball and International Tennis – which takes the game count up to 8. They also mention version 1.2 of the app is on it’s way, along with more games and some freebies including Bruce Lee. Hey, shame there’s no Speccy emulator on the iPhone, or you could play the superior version of Bruce Lee!

The C64 app is available now and will cost you £2.99, which may or may not be value for money depending on your views about emulation.

(Source: Eurogamer)

Yet another Java emulator for “windows” saw an update today. Most Java emulators will run on a Mac. I was unable to run Super Mario 64 however, the GUI loaded just fine. This emulator is in the early stages of development but, I like to see more Java emulators. More Java emulators means more universal emulators. Java runs on pretty much every operating system. Apparently this new update adds sound. This emulator MIGHT NOT actually work for your Mac but, you are welcome to try. Mostly I’m posting this so that some one might be inclined to make it work for the Mac.

There was an update to a Java emulator created for a Computer Science class at the University of Central Florida and I was able to give it a go with my Mac. It runs Gameboy and they are hoping it will eventually emulate Gameboy Color. It will run on any machine with JVM installed. I was able to run Mega Man V using my Macbook Pro, which is running the new Snow Leopard operating system. I also have Ubuntu installed using rEFIt but, that is a story for another day. Mega Man ran good but, with no sound. Seemed to run glitch free other than the lack of sound. I was not able to use my controller, but I reckon that with a keyboard mapping utility it might be possible.

r78
Fixed a small bug in the window drawing.

r77
Optimized window and sprite drawing. Also, performing the interrupt check every opcode instead of every scanline has a small performance hit, but gives better emulation accuracy on some games so I´m leaving it for now.

r76
Some optimizations.

r75
Allow reverting back to slow background rendering for games that swap tile maps intra-frame.

r74
Window drawing! It´s slow, but I´ll optimize that later. Also, throttling is turned on by default now.

r73
Small update. A little bit faster.

r72
Preliminary background tile caching. Good for about a 2x speedup. Sprites still have some room for optimization.

To download grab it from the Box File Widget or go to the Gameguha Home Page.

Cheers!

The Zelda-esc game for the Nintendo Famicom, the Japanese version of our little old school Nintendo Entertainment Center. It is an RPG, like I said, that is very similar to Zelda. For people, like myself, who have never had the pleasure of playing this game, now can. Don’t let the language barrier keep you from enjoying a perfectly good Japanese role playing game.

Download the patch from the Box File Widget on the right or go to The Homepage.

I won’t put the Rom in the Box File Widget however, I will give you the Link Where to Find It.

In a blistering essay in Armed Forces Journal, William Owen takes aim at those who litter their interpretations and theories of war with careless assertions of ‘newness’ and ‘change’:

War isn’t just transforming — it’s ushering in a whole new language to describe conflict, and this language is used in a way that pays little attention to logic or military history. Thus the forces we used to call guerrillas are now “hybrid threats.” Insurgencies are now “complex” and require “complex and adaptive” solutions. Jungles and cities are now “complex terrain.” Put simply, the discussion about future conflict is being conducted using buzzwords and bumper stickers.

The evidence that the threats of the 21st century are going to be that much different from the threats of the 20th is lacking. Likewise, there is no evidence that a “new way of war” is evolving or that we somehow had a previously flawed understanding. In fact, the use of the new words strongly indicates that those using them do not wish to be encumbered by a generally useful and coherent set of terms that military history had previously used. As war and warfare are not changing in ways that demand new words, it is odd that people keep inventing them.

I broadly agree with him that there is often an assumption that just because things might be difficult, it does not a priori mean that big changes are afoot in the character of war. I’ve often pointed out here that words can obfuscate reality, particularly when budgets or service identities are on the table. There is a political dimension too, and the unfortunate experience of post-9/11 CT/COIN operations has unleashed a huge literature on the misuse of language and the deleterious effect this has had on rhetorical space and degrees of political freedom, not to mention operations themselves.

One passage triggered a reminder of something I felt I ought to post:

To say “warfare is changing” is banal, obvious and thus irrelevant. When did warfare ever not evolve? The acts of Sept. 11 changed nothing in the Thucydidean and Clausewitzian nature of war, or even its modern practice. America’s choice of response did change U.S. foreign policy and defense planning, but the attacks themselves were in no way indicative of any change in the aims and purposes, or even methods, of political violence.

To add to the idea of complex warfare you have the use of the word “adaptive,” as in “adaptive systems.” In relation to military history and thought, adaptation is a normal and enduring phenomenon of armies and participants in war. If you want to see true adaptation, or even “a complex adaptive system,” then look at the British Army from 1914 to 1918.

This led me to recall an important distinction – between adaptation, innovation, and emulation. The following short passage is from Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff’s The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), p.6:

Major military change is often treated as being synonymous with military innovation. According to our definition, it is the outcome of military change that determines whether it is major or minor in character. Innovation, on the other hand, is one of three pathways whereby military change occurs, the other two being adaptation and emulation. Innovation involves developing new military technologies, tactics, strategies, and structures. Adaptation involves adjusting existing military means and methods. Adaptation can, and often does, lead to innovation when multiple adjustments over time gradually lead to the evolution of new means and methods. Last, emulation involves importing new tools and ways of war through imitation of other military organizations. It is only when these military means result in new organizational goals, strategies, and structures that innovation, adaptation, and emulation lead to major military change.

I find this a useful terminological and analytical framework for discussions of organisational change, military or otherwise. My doctoral thesis will examine how UK security organisations adapt/innovate/emulate to combat ‘cyber threats’, and this kind of distinction will be a good stepping-off point for that research.

This is an awesome Laserdisc Emulator that has some interesting features as of 2008. If you remember the classic Dragon’s Lair but, you couldn’t get past that darn drawbridge, here is your chance. This emulator offers some new features that will allow you to download games right through the program itself.

This is an oldie but a goodie. It hasn’t been updated since 2008. It is also emulated in MESS but, just in case you didn’t know, now you know. This is a Atari Jaguar emulator for Mac OSX. Download it from the Box File Widget or check out the Virtual Jaguar Home Page.

*Made a correction to the date. It was supposed to read 2008, not 2009.

This is a plugin for your Apple TV 2.x that will launch such rad emulators as, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, SDL MAME, GBA, N64, and Sega Genesis. I don’t own an Apple TV but, for those of you who do, you can now do some simple emulating with “minimal overhead”. To download this check the Box File Widget. The plugin and the source code are in there and available for download. You can also check out the Google code page by clicking on the link below.

Emulators PlugIn Home Page

Cheers!

Do not take the title serious. As long as there is no release, this is strictly Vaporware(TM). Or something like that…. However, with the release of Mahatma68k, the likeliness of such a release has become somewhat more probable.

When I started the project, which has the current working title “I Heart Amiga”, it actually started as an attempt to make WinUAE’s features available in Unix versions. I have to admit it, I do not like C when it comes to writing a virtual machine. The abstraction level is simply too low and I like to look at a virtual machine as a system of components (a job for an object-oriented language). There is no sense for me to write a lot of extra code that has nothing to do with the problem. You can get it done in pure C, but then you could also use Notepad to create whole web sites.

I then had this crazy idea that the JVM might actually be fast enough nowadays to at least reach the performance of an Amiga 500 (something that has yet to be proven) and so I just kind of started hacking together some code in Scala. The nice thing about doing side projects is that you can just choose what you think suits the problem and I wanted a static JVM language (for performance), which allows me to avoid writing tons of boilerplate and “syntactical noise”. Scala seemed to be much more difficult than Java at first, but when I saw that the “difficult parts” were actually in the library and not part of the language, I realized that it is actually simpler. I like functional languages, but after having done the Z-machine in Erlang, using a object-oriented language to implement a VM feels more natural to me.

The emulator is still in its early stages and I do not know how fast I will progress. However, I wanted to share some details of my current design, that might be useful to anyone who is trying to implement an Amiga.

The Amiga is the most fascinating computer system ever created. That’s why I am trying to implement it in software. You might think differently, but ask yourself: can you think of any other system that was years (released in 1985) ahead of its competition and yet those competitors slowly incorporated all of its features and eventually surpassed it in the nineties. I have a feeling that if the Amiga would have been an Apple brand, it would have probably been much more successful, but then, the competition would also have tried harder to catch up quicker. The way the Amiga was marketed, it did not really pose a threat to the established competition. That’s sad, but there are lessons to learn from that. We see everyday that technological excellence is not everything, and great marketing and business development can make up for not having the best product.

I digressed. I actually wanted to show the current system design of my emulator. Here is an UML diagram of it:

Current System Design

I like to keep it simple and my approach for this project is to only add new components when it seems to be necessary. On ZMPP I admittedly got a little overboard and created more classes than I actually wanted to, which has to do with the TDD approach I took and especially my inexperience with TDD when I started ZMPP. This time, I did not use TDD (I did use a couple of unit tests to enhance my confidence on some tricky parts, though), but entirely focussed on understanding the problem and keeping it simple.

As you can see, this is currently a CPU and an address space which maps to the various system components.The Amiga uses memory-mapped I/O, and one of the most important concepts I had to learn as a non-Hardware person was “incomplete address decoding”. As I have documented in the diagram, some system components respond outside of the documented addresses (e.g. Chip Memory if you have less than 1 MB and the Custom Chips). You could learn this by looking at UAE’s memory map, but I actually found out by looking at a disassembled Amiga Exec. Finding the disassembled (and commented !) Exec source code was almost like having found the Rosetta Stone for me and I am grateful to Markus Wandel (I noticed that a lot of Amiga fans seem to be german !) for doing this hard work. So far, this has been one of my most important tools (besides the Hardware Reference Manual). I just kind of progressed by stepping through the ROM listing. I currently reached a point where I am outside of the commented part (probably dos.library and graphics.library). Getting this far gives me some confidence that my CPU emulation seems to work pretty well and that my memory mappings are working.

Some time ago, I purchased the Cloanto DVD set: “Amiga Forever”. Looking at the videos, I am fascinated by the passion, enthusiasm and the incredible skill that the original Amiga team had and I am inspired by that. Reading through the Amiga OS assembly code is an exciting experience as well. This is the beginning of a wonderful journey into computing history, and into the internals of a computer system that is unlike any other that has come before or after it.

Line in Fix/Virtual Audio Cable

(WIP)

Thought this software was neat.  I looked at it when I couldn’t get audio recording to work for input
http://www.techbuzz.in/virtual-audio-card-to-save-real-time-streaming-audio-wave.php
This website also has a link to a hardware fix, if you can’t get line in on laptops and will give you more options to manipulate audio.
http://www.techbuzz.in/fix-audio-stereo-mixwave-missing-problem-in-laptops-when-you-record.php

Virtual Audio Cable — $30  more features
http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html
It has a demo to try before you buy.  http://software.muzychenko.net/eng/vac.html#download

Other brands:

—I also looked into freecorder version 3.0/ 4 but it  didn’t work for me on Vista and installs a toolbar.
—Total Recorder pro is more expensive, standard version is cheaper  ~$18
http://www.totalrecorder.com/
http://www.totalrecorder.com/productfr_tr.htm

We started the 2009 Rally Agile Success Tour (AST) Series in March in Denver, CO; we just concluded it in London, UK. In between the AST “train” stopped at:

• Atlanta, GA
• Boston, MA
• Chicago, IL
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Santa Clara, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC

All in all we hosted about 1,000 participants in these cities. More than 40 panelists shared Agile experiences with their local colleagues. Some 200 meetings were held with various participants in conjunction with the events. Obviously, I cannot write here about the level of business generated by the success tour, but none of my Rally colleagues complained so far…

The breadth and depth of topics that were covered is mind-boggling. Here are a few of the most intriguing ones:

• Agile Business Service Management
• Agile contracts
• Agile Governance
• Beautiful software
• Lean
• Sausage Syndrome
• Software capitalization
• Use of emulation in Agile projects
• Virtuous Cycle of Agile
• Why Agile is natural for Business Intelligence

The success tour proved successful to a degree that actually perplexed me for quite some time. I had certainly expected a strong series of events from the outset and could point out to various things we were doing right along the way. Yet, the very simple ‘secret sauce’ that made the event series so remarkable eluded me until I collected my thoughts for writing this post:

The Agile Success Tour proved phenomenally successful because the Rally team is so much like the customers and prospects that participate in the events, license the Rally software and work hand-in-hand with Rally coaches.

A few words of explanation for what might seem on the surface like a somewhat banal statement. The various members of the Rally team – sales reps, coaches, technical account managers, marketing professionals and execs – resonated with participants in the events due to exceptionally high level of congruence in values, thinking and practices. If Ryan were the CTO of eBay he would probably have licensed Rally software; Jean would have re-architected the flow of eBay processes; Zach would have integrated the ALM tools eBay uses. As for Lauren, she would have single-handedly created a world-wide marketing events organization for eBay.

The power of being like your own customers is magnetic. Digital Equipment Corporation was immensely successful selling minicomputers to engineers like their own engineers in the 60’s and 70’s. Sun Microsystems rode the early Internet wave as their product designers were carbon copy of the folks who roamed the World Wide Web. Apple triumphed with the iPod because just about every Apple employee would have murdered for such a cool device. Nothing beats the intuitive understanding that comes with designing, marketing and selling the kind of product you will buy, play with and use yourself.

After the Santa Clara event, Forrester’s Tom Grant told me the following about Rally:

What a smart company – everyone gets it!

Though a slightly different perspective than mine, Tom had actually identified the outcome of the company-customer congruence I am highlighting in this post. Everyone at Rally gets it due to natural identification with his/her customers. Contexts and experiences of customers are exceptionally well understood and often replicated in Rally’s Boulder, CO headquarters and its various branch offices.

Fundamentally, the success of the success tour reflects the affinity between Rally and its clientele.

There is currently a new NES/Famicom emulator for Mac called MaciFom. It is brand spanking new and only for Mac OSX. In true OSX style it tries to take advantage of AppKit, OpenCL, CoreAudio, and OpenGL. Here is the information from their Homepage.

Cycle-exact CPU (6502) emulation for valid opcodes

Scanline-accurate rendering by the PPU

Windowed and full-screen display modes.

Controller input via keyboard.

Support for NROM, UNROM, CNROM and MMC1 mappers.

A debugger featuring live disassembly of program code, reading and writing of memory values, display of CPU registers, breakpoints and step-through of opcodes.

You may download the emulator from the Box File Widget on the right hand side of this blog.

Cheers!

There’s been another discussion at 8bc about what chipmusic is. It seems to me that there are more people talking about genre than technodeterminism compared to a few years ago. There are thoughts about what building blocks make it sound chip (Sound chip here means: proper chipstyle, sounding-like chipstyle, soundchip). That could be due to the new perspectives that come with non-techno-purism. If you don’t use soundchips and trackers you need to be aware about what you’re doing in order to make it sound chip. When you’re using soundchips and trackers, you don’t have to worry about those things. (form vs medium)

It is interesting, because the technodeterminst view has tended to build this defensive discourse during the 2000s. “If you make chipmusic that’s not coming from a soundchip, we don’t want you around here boy!”. In the 90s it was about filesize instead, because a lot (if not most) chipmusic in the 1990s was sample-based on Amiga or PC. But still, if we say that the Paula chip of the Amiga is a soundchip, it is possible to stick with the soundchip-determinst definition of chipmusic. (A bit like pretending that the Gameboy has a soundchip)

Anything made with the internal sounds of the Amiga then, is chipmusic, e.g. Amigacore, Osdorp Posse, Bruno. Which finally brings us to the reason of this post. Up Rough has posted mastered MP3-versions of four Amiga MOD-classics by Mortimer Twang (Lukas Nystrand): Agima Blues (515kb), All Times by Music (588kb), Burning Chrome (350kb), Moonmaster (390kb). Calling this chipmusic is a bit useless, because the music form is quite far from quantized geek bleep museek. This has more to do with hip hop, jazz, and drum n’ bass. If you put Mortimer’s music into a mix, you no longer have to put your brain into tracker-data-analysis-mode when you hear it. Just listen to the music. Sometimes music is just music, nowhaddayouknow.

Well, now with the quickdev16 you can. This is a developers cart for loading homebrew and other roms to your SNES system. Build your game and then try it out on your SNES. Both NTSC and PAL SNES consoles work with the kit. You can develop and upload a game up to 16Mbits. They have patched upload software running under Mac OSX and other various Operating Systems. It sells for $120 dollars and that price includes shipping.

Quickdev16 Home Page

I have scoured the internet to find all the possible Playstation emulators for the Mac. FlareStorm and PCSX are the most popular ones out there right now, however there are others. VGS was the first commercial Playstation emulator for the Mac, but soon faded away. The demo is still available for download, so I have posted it and the others in the Box File Widget. The Pi and PSMac are smaller, less known Playstation emulators for the Mac. Those have also been posted as well. Last, but not least, there are plugins for Flarestorm and PCSX available for download too. To get certain games working properly, you will need these plugins. Many of these emulators require older operating systems and won’t function in Leopard, even with their Classic Environment support. I was unable to try VGS. I did manage to get PCSX running after installing Rosette. Your Mac will tell you to install Rosette and then install it for you. After installing Rosette, you should be free to play Playstation games on your Mac. For better compatibility, don’t forget to install the extra plugins too.

Grab all these emulators from the Box File Widget on the right. Flarestorm, PCSX, The Pi and PsMac are all in there. I’ve renamed them so that they might be easier to pick out from the Box File Widget.

Cheers!

There is a fairly new game for the old Nintendo. It’s done in the spirit of Guitar Hero, but it’s for the old 8bit NES. It is free for download from their site. You can download it and run it in any of your favorite NES emulators. Songs include Sweet Child of Mine and The Way You Make Me Feel. Check out their Home Page to Download, or grab it from the Box File Widget on the right.

Dpad Hero Home Page

Download

Send them Support Via Paypal

Cheers!

Yabuse is a Sega Saturn Emulator for the Mac OSX and other various platforms. It was last updated on 05/31/2009. As it is a top search right now, I though I would make a post about it. It runs several games and is still being updated. It’s nice to find Emulators people are actually still working on.

To Download – Use the blue Box File Widget on the right panel.

You can check the Yabuse compatibility list by clicking the link below.

Yabause Compatibility list

Every game console emulator from Richard Bannister’s site has now been added to the Box File widget on the right hand side of the blog. You can now directly download everything from the Gameboy Advance emulator aka Boycott Advance to the Super Nintendo emulator aka BSNES. I will be adding more stuff everyday until the widget is completely filled with every emulator available for the Mac.