12:08 PM - FF Translation Wars - Jandar
As promised, Neil_ has completed his Reflections project for release on New Years Eve. As the "millenium of popular opinion" (^_^) draws to a close everybody seems to be looking back into the past, and here we have done that by providing a look into the period of time in the translation community that has come to be known as the "Final Fantasy Translation Wars." Unfortunately, Neil_ is not here to unveil the project himself, but he has completed it, and I ask you..if you have any interest or involvement in translations..read the article. With any luck it will provide some helpful insight into the past, and perhaps the future as well.
- The FF Translation Wars

1:42 AM - Dinesquick's Translation Page. =) - Neil_
Dinesquick has a cool page with some screenshots of the work he's done on implementing variable width fonts, and cracking compression is RS3 and EnergyBreaker. It's got some nice screens of various joke text he inserted for the heck of it. Looks rather impressive I'd say. ^_^
The Page

1:14 AM - Neil_ - Neil_
DoE2's name space concerns have been all but aleviated, and there are two lovely screenshots to show the lovely work. =)
Shot 1
Shot 2
CTC WWW Board Post

10:25 PM - Naughty v0.0 Added - Airety
Naughty is a DOS NES emulator that is utter garbage. But we strive to bring you everything, so it is added. It supports mappers #0 and #2.

Yandar will add it sometime.

10:17 PM - Fine Nine of 99 - Jandar
If anybody has yet to notice, Emulation Camp is doing a countdown to the new year by counting down the nine most influential emulators of the year. They are currently at number three..only two more to go..

8:57 PM - Hash Added, Discontinued - Airety
Hash is a Windows based Gameboy emulator which was showing some progress, but never made it because the author's computer crashed. It doesn't have sound, but he did release the most up to date source he had (it does not include openGL, and a few other features).

I can't upload right now, so once Yandar or one of the staff members uploads Hash, the links in the Windows Gameboy section to Hash will not work. Sorry :)

5:46 PM - Danish Translations Added - Jandar
I have added Danish translations to our already extensive archive of foreign translations. Danish is language number 18 to be added to our translations archives. Thanks to Sago, who posted a message in our guestbook, for informing me of his groups Danish translation projects.

5:32 PM - Pretendo v0.051 - Airety
Quickly Download it.
Here's the whatsnew blurb:
How the hell did you get here. Oh okay, I guess you want to know what's new in this version. Just a few notes. First of all please understand that this version kinda sucks. We only released it because there was somewhat of a demand for a release by our fans, we haven't released anything for six months, we want to (try to) demonstrate some attempt at actual progress, and mainly because we would like people who want to develop plugins to have something to work with. The program errors somewhat, and moans more than a yak in heat. If you dont' like this version, don't use it, pretty simple.

And Below it:
What's New:
Everything

5:21 PM - French Translations - Jandar
I have added several more French translations to the French Translations page. These come from a group known as TeRMiNuS TRaDuCTioN, and include translations of Arcana, Castlevania II, Mega Man X, Dragon View, and several others.

5:07 PM - NesToy v2.7 - Airety
Download Quickly
Updated at SGC for the first time since v1.6, so I do not dare listing all that is new. I will instead tell you the latest things. . .

• (-sub) now works correctly if you do not specify a directory on the command line. (It will scan the current directory and all directories under it.)
  
• (-res) Now detects and resizes ROMs with extra, unused banks at the end of the ROM. (In other words, if the ROM header specifies that there are 8 PRG banks and 8 CHR banks, but the ROM contains 17 banks total, the extra banks will now be removed.)
  
• (-ren) now has the option of placing periods in appropriate ROM names. Example: Dr Mario.nes would be named Dr. Mario.nes. Also periods will be used instead of underscores in the version #'s. This naming scheme was purposely left out of earlier versions because Nesticle will not load a ROM if the filename has more than one '.' in it. This feature is enabled through (-ren[p]).
  
• Fixed a bug where (-ren[t]) would do nothing if used with everal of the other renaming options.
  (-sort) now has a new command line option (m), which will sort the ROMs by mapper # under the appropriate country or type.

4:59 PM - Spanish Translation: Castlevania Bloodlines - Jandar
PKT has released a 75% complete Spanish translation of the game Castlevania Bloodlines. The PKT site doesn't mention the game yet, but Paladin was kind enough to send me the patch. It can now be found on the Spanish Translations page.

4:52 PM - Amiga Flashback adds 39 mods - Airety
Amiga Flashback has added 39 more new mods and also the entire collection of LSD Sprint Doc disks and also disks #11 - #20 of the LSD Doc series.

4:50 PM - Raine Update: Metal Black - Jandar
The Raine site is reporting that another game has been added to the emulator and will be supported in the next release. The game is a shooter by the name of Metal Black. Here's what the Raine site had to say about it:
Tired of hearing about the Y2K bug? Then this is your chance to take revenge and start killing a lot of weird bugs in this awesome shooter called Metal Black , it was released by Taito and it's the sequel to Gun Frontier.

4:48 PM - Visual Boy WIP - Airety
The Visual Boy author has passed along some news about WIP for Visual Boy, a DirectX Windows Gameboy Emulator.

• ROMS can be played directly from .ZIP files
  
• bug fixes in HDMA and memory handling (more games playable)
  
• sound is almost complete! Just missing some adjustments

4:39 PM - MAME Release - Jandar
A new version of MAME, the amazingly popular multi-arcade emulator has been released. The latest version can be found now in the MAME section.

4:22 PM - Amiga Freeware - Airety
For some odd reason, the Amiga is dead. (*cough* so is the NES, Nintendo) Some very kind programmers decided to release "Lost on Parrot Island" and "Blade" as freeware. Such nice people! (*cough* unlike Nintendo *cough*)
I have to thank Emucamp again.

4:15 PM - RockNES WIP - Jandar
The RockNES homepage has been updated with some more information on the progress of the emulator. Fx3 had the following to say:

• WIP - Readded configuration file and basic GUI, just missing Game Genie codes and VS Unisystem.
• This is my last report for 1999. Let´s hope for a nice January 1st 2000 with everything´s OK.

4:14 PM - Meka 0.33 released to beta testers - Airety
Changes:

• Improved Master System Sportpad controller emulation. Games are easier to play now, even if it is not perfect.
  
• Added preliminary EEPROM model 93c36 emulation.
  
• This chipset is used by three Game Gear baseball games to save custom teams and game progress.
  
• Added Rapid Fire emulation.
  
• Improved video mode 2 emulation, fixing Cosmo Fighter 2 (Coleco).
  
• Added video mode 3 emulation, used by two painting programs for the Colecovision, and very probably by many SC-3000 programs.
  
• Improved SG-1000 interruption emulation, fixing:
  -Orguss (no hang when exploding with the small robot)
  -Safari Hunting (no hang when entering in the game area)
  -Safari Race (better response of buttons on the title screen)
  
• Definitively removed the snow effect that pissed everyone :-(, I would have stopped on the 28 of December, anyway. Instead, added the "special=snow" parameter in the theme file, to create your own themes using that effect. And added a Christmas theme.
  
• Added product numbers for all Game Gear games released in Japan and dumped (about 150).
  
• Also added a bunch of new names and fixed some.
  
• Added IPERIOD_SG1000_SC3000 setting in the configuration file.
  
• Added a patch to fix the bug in Sport Pad Soccer which make it hang on systems without the FM chipset.
  
• Fixed bad screen size bug in certain cases after freeing ROM.
  
• Added /LOG command line parameters to log all messages to a file.

3:07 PM - 4600 hits to go. . . in two days :) - Airety
C'mon, don't you guys want an active three man team? We could cross oceans, climb mountains and do something in valleys. We could make an up to date version of Kris Kros' "Jump", we could translate Pokémon Gold. (ok I am a little off base on the Pokémon thing)

Just call all your friends and visit SGC about 10 times a day, and after the New Year we will make it worth your while.

11:19 AM - New Genesis Emulator (Gens) - Jandar
There is a new Genesis emulator out by the name of Gens. Well, actually, it's not brand new. But it's relatively new, and it just now came to my attention, so I've added it to the Genesis emulators page. Right now it's not really worth using, as it only plays a small number of games, and is still quite buggy. Thanks to Reijin for the information.

10:21 AM - YAY for GGR, FEG, and Mage ^_^ - Neil_
Mage, a regular poster on <shameless plug> this sites lovely ApocEmu Message board</shameless plug>, has announced that he is currently working on Ganbare Goemon RPG for the NES/Famicom. Also, if you're enterprising enough of a reader to read to the last paragraph of his post, you'll find a nice little status update of Fire Emblem Gaiden. The project is currently undergoing beta testing for bugs, and only needs translations for a few more sections of script. YAY

10:23 AM - While I was sleeping ( - _ - ) - Neil_
A French group called TeRMiNuS TRaDuCTioN released a 95% complete patch for their French translation of ChronoTrigger!

12:37 AM - GBEmu Release - Jandar
A new version of GBEmu, a Gameboy emulator for Windows, has been released. The homepage of this emulator is entirely in Japanese, and I don't know much about the emulator, let alone what has changed in this release. I will add the latest version of SGC ASAP, but for now you can find it on the GBEmu homepage.

10:28 PM - Reflections... - Neil_
I've decided that rather than do a nightly reflection I'm going to concentrait on the reflection I was planning for New Years Eve. It's gotten a bit bigger than I anticipated it would. ;)

7:58 PM - Re: News Bits - DoaE2 - Neil_
As I noted below, it was a little pre-emptive to announce they had reached a solution, as Taskforce just posted a notice that they will indeed not need to cut all the names, but at this time it looks like only two will need to be shortened. Here's his announcement.

4:38 PM - DGen (MacOS port) Release - Jandar
Richard Bannister has released a new version of his MacOS port of the Sega Genesis emulator DGen. The latest release can be found on the Genesis emulators page. Here's what's new in this release:

• RAVE Mode has been added, for smooth double size video. [Gil Pedersen]
• Saved states now work properly. Unfortunately, the format has changed completely, so in the unlikely event that you have any saved states from previous versions which actually worked, they will be unusable. [Richard Bannister]
• Freeze and Defrost now work in Full Screen mode. [Richard Bannister]
• Put the "Raster Effects" option into the Video Options dialog, and moved the "Full Screen" option into the menus. [Richard Bannister]
• Made an attempt at solving the intermittent "black screen of death" after loading more than one ROM. If you have a ROM which gives a black screen even when it is the first ROM loaded, it may be damaged. Genesis ROM Info v1.4b3 or later can fix some of these. [Richard Bannister]
• If for any reason loading a ROM fails, DGen should catch it now instead of crashing. [Richard Bannister]
• Updated to ZLIB 1.1.3. [Richard Bannister]
• Interlaced mode (2 player in Sonic 2) no longer flickers alarmingly. [Richard Bannister]
• A few speed optimizations here and there. [Richard Bannister].

4:24 PM - RockNES WIP - Jandar
The following WIP information was posted on the RockNES homepage:

• WIP - Fixed an old problem with save/load state feature (games with no video ROM, or VROM, such as MegamanIV). They're restored correctly, with no gfx corruption.

3:54 PM - News Bits II: Son of a (news bit). =) - Neil_

• Bastard Son has released a bunch of cool little editors and scthuff. Some really usefull tools, most interesting of which is his "hackers toolkit". Enjoy.
• WakdHacks has announced a new project, called Fuzzical Fighter, a little NES RPG/Shooter game.

10:29 AM - News Bitz dewd ^_^ - Neil_

• Musashi speaks on Musashi
  "The rom work on Musashi was not done by me but by The MadHacker. Unfortunately time and interest was pulled The MadHacker further away from romhacking and the Musashi project (this is how I understand it). In fact the patch will not be a complete patch with several minor elements unfinished however the game is complete for playability's sake (start to finish). I can not release the patch because the final version is still in The MadHacker's hands. We've been trying to meet online at some point so files can be passed along and thus distributed. Right now I'm waiting for hoping The MadHacker will show up despite his understandably busy life."
• Also, a very happy birthday from us at the SGC to Kagami, lead translator at WakdHacks! A bit belated now, but ah well. ;)
• In an IRC conversation with Lina'chan, she informed me that a Tenchi Muyo RPG patch should be out within a week.
• X Translations has released a patch for Christopher Columbus with some menus, items, and weapons and armor translated. They also have a patch out for Rockman 6 which translates some of the intro. That patch is stalled until someone can help him with translations. Other projects include Daiva, Rockman 4, and RockBoard. However there are no current patches out for those projects.
  Thanks to Zophar's Domain for the news (hey, there's a first for everything.)
• RPGd is reporting on a DOE2 event which shouldn't have been reported yet as its still in the process of developing. On christmas day, Taskforce proposed one solution to a problem with the names of the war lords. Jair also proposed a second solution, and now they're talking it over to see which one will work best. It's not exactly a finalized thing, and I think RPGd's posting of that news was a bit premature. I've still posted the link anyway, because it's rather interesting to see the discussions develop as various group members contribute ideas, and it gives you a good view into what really goes on during the work on a translation project.

10:43 PM - Sinistar: Unleashed Review - Jandar
Back in Time has done a review of Sinistar: Unleashed, the modern version of the classic arcade game Sinistar. How is this emulation related? Well, we can certainly thank emulation for bringing Sinistar back into the public eye, and the review reflects this. Thanks to Mike Stulir for the news.

9:21 PM - Raine Update - Jandar
The Raine site is reported that yet another game is now supported by the emulator. Some screenshots of this game (Dead Connection) have been posted on the site.

4:30 PM - Reflections II - Dragon Quest Translations - Neil_
At first glance, Dragon Quest games seem to be the overlooked series, with almost every Final Fantasy game being retranslated compared to no complete translation for any Dragon Quest game other than those done by Enix and Nintendo. However, upon closer inspection, there have actually been dozens of attempts at Dragon Quest translations. Some of the earliest attempts at translations were done by various groups on the SNES Dragon Quests. RPGe working on DQ12r, Enix Translations working on DQ3r and DQ5, DeJap working on DQ3r and 6, Off Course Translations working on DQ5, and countless others. Also, unbeknownst to most newbies, there were retranslation attempts on DQ3 and DQ4 for the NES. See, not until NESticle v.42 were both DW3 and DW4 playable, however DQ3 and 4 worked fine. Thus, DW fans decided that they didn't want to wait for some emu author to find a way to support them and began translating them. As near as I can recall, 2 different groups were working on them back in the day. They never got anywhere however as DW4 had evil text compression, and before anyone could make any progress, support for the english versions became available. DQ SNES projects have met the similar problem of text compression. Of all the pre 1999 groups who attempted translations of the SNES DQ games, only DeJap is still working on them. DeJap also has the significance of being the only group to have managed to edit the SNES Dragon Quest compressed text. A bit of useless trivia: DQ12r and BS Dragon Quest are the only two SNES Dragon Quest games that which don't employ text compression.

12:09 PM - RuMSX Release - Jandar
RuMSX is an MSX emulator for Windows. It has been updated to version 0.2000, and can be found (along with partial source code) on the MSX emulators page. Thanks to M.E.P. for the news and the download.

9:47 AM - News Bits - Neil_

• Lina'chan of Lina`chan and Nuku-Nuku's Translations Domain has announced that despite a text display bug in the battle system, a patch will be released soon.
• Go Go Ackman! translations has decided that Go Go Ackman 2 & 3 are unrealistic projects due to text and font compression.
• A new Romancing Saga 3 translation is underway, and by the pictures up for display on the page, the translation is looking rather nice.
• For all of you asking when DeJap's Tales of Phantasia patch will be released, DarkForce has informed me that the work that is left to do shouldn't take more than about two months (unless he find a few days off from work that he wasn't expecting), so the end of Februrary would be a nice target date, however it may happen much earlier. In other words, just sit tight, and wait, because there isn't that much longer to go.

11:34 PM - Reflections II - Neil_
I aparently typed too much, so go here. =)

10:22 PM - JNes V 0.30 - Airety
Quickly download it.
What's New:

• Internal NSF Player
• Added nsf files to command line load
• Added NINA-1 Emulation (iNES #34)
• Fullscreen Triple Buffering
• Improvements to PCM decoding
• Solved an mmc3 IRQ problem
• Fixed sprite priorities a little more
• Fixed zapp er in 24/32 bpp
• Screen captures work in 8bpp
• Performance enhancements
• Keyboard reading now includes the numkeys for d-pad.
• DirectX dialog more informative
• Fixed the CPUID problem on Cyrix CPU's
• Removed surface fills at the beginning of f rame, this reduces DirectDraw overhead for old hardware

9:02 PM - DarcNES Release - Jandar
Well, DarcNES has seen it's first release in a while, and I've added version version 991226 to the Multi-console emulators page. Here's what's new in this version:

• Removed all of the debugger code (it's been dead for ages, time to get it out of the way)
• Removed all ASM CPU cores (they weren't being used, and they were buggy)
• Added a program to test the emu68k core
• Fixed the ColecoVision driver to ru n again (still no keypad, though)
• Started debugging the emu68k core (still a ways to go)
• Added preliminary support for DMA to the Genesis VDP
• Changed the Genesis VDP interface not to use procpointers
• Stripped out the code in the Genesis driver that compared CPU cores
• Added some (disabled) debugging code to the Genesis driver
• Added preliminary implementation of Z80 RAM to the Genesis driver
• Cleaned up some code in the NES driver
• Cleaned out some dead code and includes from the PCE d river
• Cleaned up the sg1000 driver
• Fixed the sg1000 driver to close down the sound system when it exits
• Cleaned up the SMS driver
• Fixed SMS VDP to initialize the VDP registers to default values
• Fixed some bugs with the sn76489 (SMS/GG, SG10 00, CV) psg noise channel (still disabled)
• Changed snd_unix.c to support (and default to) FreeBSD
• Fixed an obi-wan error in the tms9918 sprite renderer
• Fixed a typo in the new system detect routine ("smd", not "smb")
• Moved all battery file sup port to tool.c (from SMS and NES drivers)
• Changed the cheap hack used for the battery filename to be endian-independant
• Stripped out a lot of dead code in the XWindows UI code
• Added a new, hopefully easier to port, type system
• Removed the Zarz on driver from distribution (what? didn't I do this ages ago?).
• With the number of changes in the codebase, I've probablt forgotten something, but those are the salient points. ^_^

7:04 PM - MacOS Archive Completed - Jandar
Nothing overly important seemed to be happening in the emulation world today, and I have quite a bit of time on my hands, so I took the opportunity to finish up the MacOS emulators archive, which carries tons of emulators that run on Macs. While there are probably other divisions of the section (other systems that have been emulated), which will be added in due time, all of the initial divisions are complete. M ac users rejoice.

6:06 PM - Minor ZD-SPC Release - Jandar
ZD-SPC was updated today to version 2.31. The latest release is actually very minor, and has the following changes:

• Whoops! I forgot to add an important file in the installation. Sorry.
• Fixed up some snes9x core bugs

12:46 PM - RockNES YAY - Airety
RockNES, my favorite emulator that I don't use, has a bit of a progress update that I would like to share with you.

It seems all broken stuff is working again. Right now, config file, VS Unisystem, Game Genie and GUI are missing, they should be added soon. All mappers are ok, big fix to Mapper #1 (MMC1), with a couple of games now working, game Rad Racer works fine again (the road is fine). The sound & gfx drivers remains the same, with very minor changes (startup/shutdown). A lot of Mapper #0 games and demos work too.

10:02 AM - Magic Engine Beta Released! - Neil_
The Magic Engine Team has released what they call their third and last beta.
Thanks to EmuCamp for the news. =)

9:56 AM - News Bits... again?!?!? - Neil_
Didn't I just do one of these? Ah well.

• WakdHacks released a patch for their newest project, Rudora no Hihou. This patch includes some 8x8 (item) translations and a bit of dialogue.
• Warui Toransu Translations has announced that a new patch for Der Langrisser will be released soon.
• To Jason Li: I will, you know I will. ^_^

10:16 PM - News Bits & Reflections I - Neil_

• Ethereal Productions, currently working on Fist of the North Star 3 is in need of translation help. Fist of the North Star 3 is an RPG based upo n a popular Japanese manga/anime series.
• Every day from now until Janurary 1st, I'm going to post a link to some long dead Translation Group, or talk about some long past event in the Translation Community to let all you newbies see where translat ions came from and thus, where they're going. Tonight, TransBRC. I'm not absolutely sure this group is dead, but the page hasn't been updated in 6 months. Back when the groups page was still active, they were working on 9 projects, and it wouldn't be uncommon to see several patch releases from them a month. Originally hosted by Omizone, and now on emucamp, Blibber seemed to exemplify the ideal of the translation community. That being Work on what you like, and enjoy doing it.

7:47 PM - Zsnes Christmas Special - Jandar
Don't get too excited. There havn't actually been any improvements to the Zsnes emulator, but the team released a Christmas version that has snowflakes in the GUI. If you played the Christmas release from last y ear then you know what I mean. Other than that, nothing has changed, but it's sort of nifty, and you can find it on the SNES emulators page.

11:43 AM - Happy friggin Holidays - Airety
Well. . . I got an Old Navy Performance Fleece in light blue, definitely my color :) I also got Final Fantasy VIII without hounding family members which tells me they are starting to smarten up.

I hope everyone got more stuff than I did and that you enjoyed Christmas. If you don't celebrate Christmas. . . sorry :( Christmas has so much more spunk.

The only thing I hated about this holiday was I had to be Santa! What the hell, I thought he was real until 24 hours ago. . . Then again it wouldn't be too bad being Santa, he seems like a lazy guy.

Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that my promise remains. . . if we hit 100k visitors before sometime Jan 1st, I won't be lazy anymore. Just think, three people who update constantly! Also, if I am not consumed by FF8, I plan on making the KOC section to SGC.

What's KOC?
Kids on Crack, KOC for short, will be the section for us staffers to vent our rants during temporary insanity. You can expect to find Gatorade, Chu Chu Rocket, Sea Monkeys and other great items of life. Maybe even the return of the LHAACUP (I might have m y acronym wrong, so correct me Jandar).

Kthnx, happy holidays

11:05 AM - French Emulator Translations - Jandar
Over at http://www.power3d.com/, they have French language translations of several emulators. The most recent release has been a French translation of SMYGB, but they also h ave translations of Snes9x and Bleem. Thanks to Vintage Gaming for the information.

10:59 AM - WinEMU Release - Jandar
A new version of WinEMU, the C16/Plus4 emulator for Windows, was released recently. The latest version (0.47) can be downloaded here, and also fou nd on the C64 emulators page. This release sports the following changes:

• New Setup program
• Configurable joysticks
• Better loader (F1 - Load/Run)
• Built-in game database (Shift F7)
• Supports:
  • C16 with 16K Ram
  • C16 with 64K Ram
  • Plus4 with the built-in programs
• Some minor bugfixes