June 15, 2004
Wrapper Updated

Chankast 2.0a is out so I updated the wrapper accordingly.

Also I added every single option to the wrapper, allowing you to save settings for each game, overclock/underclock the cpu automatically, and various other junk.

Wrappers page is on the right....have fun.

Posted by Howard at 10:41 PM
June 05, 2004
Fullscreen Chankast Anyone?

For those of you living in a cave chankast is the great new dreamcast emulator. It runs well, already runs a lot of commerical games, and is fast enough to run on the average modern pc.

Unfortunately, it's currently in the very early alpha stages, which means no fullscreen and no command line options.

Guess who your hero is? (Me) I whipped up a wrapper that allows you to launch virtual discs via the command line, set the window to fullscreen and exit with a keypress of your choosing.

It's on the wrapper page to your right.

Go get it now!

Posted by Howard at 09:13 PM
June 02, 2004
Quick Note on the Aftermath

The new skin page is up now to your right. Many are especially designed for the new "list-specific skin" option and contain animations, videos and such. go try them out.

The docs are somewhat updated. I'll get around to it eventually.

The faq needs updated as well. Ditto.

Edit: Skinner is up... it's slightly more stable as I used it to make all the new skins.

These new and improved skins and features may be a strain on kelsey's generous offer to host this site. Mirrors, bittorrent seeds, ect for skins and the main exe are welcomed.

Posted by Howard at 11:07 PM
Dragon King 0.99 Released!

Dragon King

What's New .99
=================

General:

Bug fixes galore.... Any minor bugs should now be gone.

Fixed a bug in the new path features.... you should now be able to add spaces to your custom path string.

Volume for each part of the sound engine can now be set at a ratio via the frontend.ini, so you have a mixer of sorts.

A few more misc settings were added to the frontend.ini

Tweaked the default skin some more... adding music and sound effects.

Modified the intro.mpeg to be a little less scary for children/pets/the mother-in-law. ;-)

Various bugs in the info screen have been fixed regarding the artwork search routine.

The same type of bugs were fixed in the general renderer.

Holding down a key while you launch dk will bypass the intro video.

Fixed some bugs involving the recently added cd support.

If you are running noname mame, dk can optionally pass the color scheme of your skin to it and your mame menus will match.

Graphical:

Different skins for each list are now supported!
On a related note... I've already made a few emu-specific skins featuring custom blending effects and custom animations.

Attract Mode videos are now treated as textures, so blending and layering effects are now applied to them.

When a com.mpeg is present, the inteface no longer renders after the video is finished, giving a cleaner look.

Animation folders are no longer pre-cached, which means even lower memory requirements.

Added a new blend mode.... color keyed black. This will be useful for removing backgrounds from cabinet images.


Core:

Fixed a huge memory leak, which will definately improve performance.

Cfg files for each emulator now support a total override of the way dk launches a game,
letting you make your own string via special tags (gamelauncher fans know what I mean about this.)

Cfg files for each emulator now support adding additional command line arguments on a per-game basis,
allowing special configurations for problem games.

The delay before an attract mode video starts is now configurable.

Listinfo, History, and Gamefaq data read in on the info screen are now more accurately formatted.
They should appear nearly identical to how they look if you simply open the files in notepad.

Previous path and Next path buttons now serve as "pageup/pagedown" keys when viewing things in the info screen.

The "print to list" function has been expanded upon.
Now via an optional template, these gamelists can contain whatever you want in whatever format you want,
saved to whatever name you choose.
The sample template is in html, just to demonstrate the power of the new option.


Since you can now have different skins for each list, you can also have different
frontend.ini/dirs.ini options for each skin.
The list of supported options is limited right now, but I will expand upon it.


Skinner:

Updated and fixed bugs as usual. In all honesty, the poor skinner app is showing it's age. A rebuild might be in order.


Things To expect in the next (final??) release:

3d model support.

Full control of the layering of elements, including animations and overlays.

A "random" element that is displayed randomly...for lightning strikes and such.

A video texture element.

Optional treatment of com and end videos as textures (for cool blending effects with the actual skin).

Hardware communication via the parallel port.

Posted by Howard at 10:59 PM