As I undertake the task of finishing up half-completed code in dk to get it ready for next month's release it has become apparent to me that I might not get around to updating the documentation anytime soon. (Or ever, for that matter.) So the easiest thing for me to do is to psuedo document new features via wip as I button them up.

Today's task involves skinning. People have often complained about how terrible the skinner app is and I seldom get user skins submitted to me. So I've internalized it. You can now set 90% of the skinner settings, on-the-fly from within dk. No more excuses people as now any idiot can make a skin.

Here's the new main menu. As you can see there are a few new options, including "edit skin"



Once inside you can manipulate any of the entries' properties, from their position to the blend mode and color tint.




So there you have it. Finally I've decided to make things a tad more user friendly. I am currently buttoning up this feature and should be done with it by monday. I'll post a new wip with my next project then. See you soon!

Ever had one of those days where you try to solve a problem the hard way only to find out later that the solution was actually MUCH simplier than you thought? Ever had an entire YEAR like that? Well, apparently I did. Aside from the lack of a new skin an a few very minor bugs, one of the main reasons I hadn't released a version of DK in so long was the fact that there was this "memory leak" that kept slowing down the fe after changing a skin. Well today I was determined to figure out the cause and it turned out that a minor bug fix I applied OVER A YEAR AGO had accidentially moved the function that sets the fps for a skin down to a section where it would never get called after the initial time.

So what was happening was the fe would have the fps set to 0 after a skin is changed. This doesn't cause the screen to stay blank rather is causes the screen to refresh as quickly as possible, so quickly that there isn't a processor on the face of the earth faste enough to keep up. It actually causes the processor to bog down so much that windows calls for more virtual memory and starts buffering commands like mad, which makes the memory useage goes up and appears to be a memory leak.

Needless to say, the "leak" is fixed and I can get a rock-solid 100 fps on even the most narly of skins!

But enough of the boring stuff....

What this means to you, the user is that, yes, DK will get a release very soon. Like before Feburary is out soon!

So spread the word... DK is back!

There hasn't been much activity because the holidays kept me busy. Unfortunately, there probably won't be any significant releases for a while still. I've been experimenting with new programming languages and (gasp!) some hardware programming as well. There are a few neglected releases that are over-due that I'll hopefully release before the month is out so keep your eyes peeled.

Headkaze has sent me a number of apps to host. One of them is Patcher FE. This handy little app patches in the best fe-friendly hacks into the mame source code. For those of you who insist on hiscore support or want to remove those disclaimers this will save you a lot of time! The app is in the Misc Utilities section.


Enjoy!

Version 2.1 of the source code is up. Be warned, the addition of the pac-drive was a bit of a hack and as of this build it is rather messy in there.