General Update - Priority Readjustment

I'm not meant to be a hacking "scene" news reporter, I just don't have the time. So I'll be closing http://1ntrusion.com in October when the hosting runs out due to a lack of time on my part to maintain the site and due to a lack of user activity. A general hacking site as an alternative to profit-hungry, unmoderated, and incompetent GBAFail is a great idea and one that I fully support. I just don't have the time to do anymore than that. http://www.gc-forever.com and http://rvlution.net and http://pdroms.de are all great sites for general "scene" hacking and cover tons of news and new ideas. I'd like to maybe one day pitch in and help one of these sites, but I am in no way inclined to ever be able to run one.

I'm changing the purpose of my IRC channel, #arikadosblog on EFNET from a chill anything goes channel to a channel dedicated primarily to DOP-Mii, DeSmuME Wii, and libwiisprite support. Of course I'll gladly help people out with their Dingoos, general Wii hacking, and offer support for all my other projects. But those projects will be my main three which will be discussed in the channel. We usually have about 30 members in the channel, so I strongly encourage everyone reading this to stop by. News is usually broken in there before anywhere else ;-)

Regarding DOP-Mii, Lunatik is now the primary developer of that application. I'm taking more of an advising role. Lunatik is extremely talented, hard working, and dedicated and he will take the project to great new heights. I have a few things left I want to add myself (like savegame support functions) but the project is no longer a priority for me.

Regarding DeSmuME Wii, scanff and Dancingninja are rewriting our renderer in GX. It's already mostly completed and games are seeing a 20% (or more) speed boost from it. When they're done, I will work on expanding the emulator with a proper GUI (finally) and finish giving it the 0.9.6 DeSmuME core update (which means another big speed boost). With that in mind, DeSmuME Wii is still one of my top priorities, but, I'm taking a little time off while the other devs work on it so I can do other cool things ;-)

Regarding libwiisprite, I've had an e-mail to chaosteil sitting in my draft box for about a month now discussing the finer points of the changes I hope to add to the library. libwiisprite development is probably my top priority right now and you will all hear more about it very soon.

Some of you may know that I've been working on porting RealityBoy (virtual boy emulator) over to Wii. It's an extremely difficult task to say the least. Since it's written in ALLEGRO, almost every line of the emulator must be completely rewritten. Development is slow and frustrating but I hope to have a first release no later than this Christmas. Yes, that's a bit far down the line, but it will be worth the wait.

I'm still working on porting Hexen to Wii too. Despite some comments I've made claiming otherwise, I'm going to try to rewrite a ton of the engine using the WiiDOOM port. Speaking of WiiDOOM, as I've been playing with the source, I've made a ton of improvements to the app. I'm going to try and contact the authors to see if I can push my changes into their repository. If I can't (I've heard they no longer answer their e-mails) I might branch the project under a new name. I still have a bit of work left to do before either of these outcomes anyways.

Lastly, let's talk about donations. I think it's safe to say there's no way I'll meet my Chip-In goal of $45,000 USD for a chance to go a better school. However, I'm leaving it up since I can't accept PayPal donations any other way (since I'm only 17, I have a student account). Each and every donation is greatly appreciated and will most likely be used to get me through my local college (books are super expensive).

That's all for now. Hope everyone likes the new directions I'm taking :3

libwiisprite 0.3.0d Released

I love libwiisprite. I really do. In my personal opinion, it's the only developer library geared exclusively towards game development. It's focus on game development makes it extremely simple to use with a very small learning curve. With libwiisprite, your most complex code will be generated by you, the author. Not by a spaghetti mess of library function calls. No other library can compare to that (of course, no other library is geared exclusively toward game development either).

libwiisprite's grown old though. Recent updates in libogc and libpng have caused it stop working. I took it upon myself to fix these problems and libwiisprite now looks and works as good as it ever did. Since I was rewriting a handful of it to compensate for the compatibility issues, I also fixed a bug in the layer manager and made a few minor "under the hood" improvements to improve the performance of the library.

I showed chaosteil my work and asked him if I could become an official maintainer of the library and he very warmly granted my request.

I am now continuing to work on and improve libwiisprite. I have a handful of ideas including a sound manager that I'm discussing with chaosteil that I'd like to add to the library. libwiisprite is only going to continue to get better and better. I believe that loyal users of the popular library such as myself are going to be thrilled.

Download libwiisprite 0.3.0d: Mediafire
Get the source to libwiisprite 0.3.0d: Mediafire
IRC Channel: #arikadosblog on EFNET
Follow my Twitter: http://twitter.com/OArikadoO

If you'd like to donate to me, please use the ChipIn widget on the upper right hand corner of this blog or follow this link: http://arikado.chipin.com/college-fund

Libwiisprite compiled under devkitPPC r19

For anyone interested, I just recompiled the wii homebrew libwiisprite game programming under devkitPPC r19.

You can grab it here: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?n2mjnqmymbh