EmuWiki.com’s blog

I’m very proud to announce that EmuWiki.com now runs on a brand new Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz/2 Gb RAM dedicated server. You may have seen the improvement in performance at the beginning of the week; yep it’s pretty intense. When I started EmuWiki.com about a year ago on November 2007, I guessed that I needed approximately 1 year to bring EmuWiki.com to a publishable (opening) state. Just give me a couple of more weeks and we should reach that state. Why keep the pre-opened state while the site is presentable ? Because I don’t want to lose time with news updating. It will take me a lot of time when we start updating the news every day and I want to spend this time right now to building the base of the encyclopedia. So a couple of more weeks, maybe 1 or 2 months, and we should be ready to open.

Meanwhile EmuWiki.com received its first hit from the new [http://www.google.com chrome browser from Google.com] :

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.14 9.27 Safari/525.13

I myself tried Chrome on EmuWiki.com and it’s pretty nice. Of course you don’t benefit all the Firefox-specific improvements in esthetics such as round corners, but beside that the experience is good. And I would add that it’s crazy how FAST it is. I mean, there’s no latency when you click on a link the new page just appear, at first I had the impression that Chrome was actually caching the whole site and I was browsing it offline. The latency is completely crazy. Try it if you want, however I still recommend Firefox as the most stable browser to navigate through EmuWiki.com.

You might not have seen EmuWiki.com grow as fast as it did previsouly in the last month but altough the site has not changed a lot in appearance, the mechanisms behind the website changed a lot. Now every element on EmuWiki.com is classified, except the emulators which are still being updated. What that means is that Videos, Documents, Websites, Emulebrities, and news are all associated with 3 values : The emulated machine category, the emulator name category, and the host machine category.

Why do that ? Well when a user [[Emulation Videos|submits a video]] for example, we want that video to appear on the [[Emulation Videos|Emulations Videos page]]. But if the video is related to, let’s say the emulator Final Burn. We also want the video to be available on [[History of Final Burn|Final Burn's history page]]. Same thing with a technical document for example. And eventually it becomes possible to link all these informations together : If I have a page that talks about [[Website:FinalBurn.com|FinalBurn.com]], I may want to have links in this page that would relate to anything that’s related to Final Burn. It’s now possible to do that because every [[Emulation Videos|video]], every [[Document Archive|document]], every [[Emulation Websites|website]], every [[EmuWiki.com - The Emulation Encyclopedia|news]] abd every [[Emulebrities|emulebrities]] has flags that says : Hey I’m related to Final Burn. Or Hey I’m related to Sega Genesis, etc… Go see the [[History of Final Burn|Final Burn history page]] to feel the power of this new mechanism.

I have to say that I’m pretty deceived by the contributions I get from the community : where are you emulation ? It’s now easier than ever to add documents, videos, and other information on EmuWiki.com so I expect you guys to start going around Youtube, google, and the others and find all you can find and contribute to EmuWiki.com. I mean look at the [[Special:ContributionScores|Top contributors]], I basically made the whole encyclopedia up to now. It’s up to you to use all these new features I added and contribute!

Here is a compiled version of [http://www.fakenes.tk/ FakeNES] v0.5.9 beta 3 for Yellowdog Linux running on Playstation 3. Emulation, sound, and plugged-in PS3 joystick support are just perfect. Best of all, FakeNES is a great emulator with a nice GUI, and it’s click & play. Download the [http://www.emuwiki.com/Emulators/fakenes-0.5.9-beta3.PS3.PPC64.zip FakeNES package]. [http://www.emuwiki.com/Emulators/fakenes-0.5.9-beta3.tar.gz Sources] for this compilation have not been modified, they are the originals v0.5.9-beta3. Extract the package and follow the instructions in the readme :

Compiled & tested on YDL 6.

1. Click on the executable to see if it works.

2. The sound may be crappy at the beginning. You need to change Audio->Output-> to OpenAL. You can do this manually or copy the config file to /YOURUSERDIRECTORY/.fakenes/.
The config file also has the PS3 joystick already mapped.

3. If after choosing the option OpenAl, you don’t get any audio, you may need to install openal. Enable the fedora extra repos for Fedora Core 6 and type yum search openal. Install all the openal files. Really do this only if you don’t hear anything.
You should have perfect emulation, perfect sound, and plugged-in joystick support. Compatibility is not 100% yet but comparable to the other version of this emulator and totally acceptable.

Here is a video showing the results :

http://www.youtube.com/oqrpPJcbLBo

wp_post_title=FakeNES for Playstation 3 (YDL)
wp_url=http://www.emuwiki.com/wordpress/

=Category=

[[Category:News]]

[http://stella.sourceforge.net Stella], the great Atari 2600 emulator, can be compiled for Playstation 3 (YellowDog Linux) ! Why play those new games like Grand Theft Auto 4 when you can actually play California Games on your new console!! Here is the procedure for those who don’t know how to compile programs. I will also provide you with a special configuration file that includes mapping for the PS3 joystick (plugged-in, no wifi yet, unless you know something I don’t know) and correction of a small display problem. Here are the steps :

* Download the [http://www.emuwiki.com/emulators/stella-2.6.1-src.tar.gz Stella v2.6.1 sources].

* Open up a terminal, go to the directory where you downloaded the Stella sources and type :

tar zxvf stella-2.6.1-src.tar.gz

* Go to the directory where it extracted. Type these lines one after another :

./configuremakemake install

* Download the [http://www.emuwiki.com/emulators/stellarc EmuWikiAdmin's Configuration File for Stella]. 2 changes were made to the default configuration : the menu size was reduced (the problem was that all the options of the Stella menu could not be clicked because they were hidden when Stella was ran in Gnome on PS3 in 1080p). I have also mapped the PS3 joystick. Start = Reset, Triangle = Pause, Select = Level, X = Red button. Take this file and copy it to /YOURUSERNAME/.stella/ and erase the default configuration file. That’s it, you’re ready to play Atari 2600 games on your Playstation 3 !

There’s probably more to come, I’ll go around the good Linux emulators like those for Nintendo 64, Atari, Playstation, etc… and try to see if they can compile so come back for some more guides on EmuWiki.com.

wp_post_title=Atari 2600 on Playstation 3
wp_url=http://www.emuwiki.com/wordpress/

=Category=

[[Category:News]]

Have a look [[FinalBurn.com|here]]. The page contains a new extension I just designed. The Wayback Machine extension allows you to browse through archived versions of a given website. In this case, you can browse through the history of FinalBurn.com. How did the site look like in 2001, 2003, 2007 ? The extension is based on the archives at http://www.archive.org. Eventually, it will be possible to browse through the history of any emulation-related website directly from EmuWiki.com. Have fun!

wp_post_title=New Wayback Machine invented
wp_url=http://www.emuwiki.com/wordpress/

=Category=

[[Category:News]]

I was recently contacted by a guy named Ido Setter. He was telling me that they made a wiki extension that allowed collective video editing by all users and then displaying of the video to the community. I installed it and it’s pretty funny. You can see my first test [[http://www.emuwiki.com/index.php5?title=Video:Testing_Kaltura_video_extension|here]]. It’s pretty nice you can actually cut and paste bouts of Youtube videos or your own videos and make a complete sequence, and every user can contribute. It’s really nice, I don’t know if it’s going to serve a lot for emulation fans who are not necessarily bent toward web 2.0 (they actually prefer playing atari 2600 games), but if you have ideas of videos you want to make just go ahead and use the extension!

I finally decided to put myself on the task of developing this linkage between the blog program Wordpress and Mediawiki that was already started but that was unfortunately one-way (Wordpress comments could be printed in Mediawiki, but Mediawiki news could not be automatically imported to Wordpress). What this means for you is that every user that submits news on the wiki using the [http://www.emuwiki.com/index.php5?title=Submit_News News submission system] will automatically see his news text in a new entry in our collective [http://www.emuwiki.com/wordpress/ EmuWiki Blog] and it will be possible for users to comment the news. The coordination between MediaWiki and Wordpress is now 2-way : if you comment in Wordpress, you will see the comments in the mediawiki [http://www.emuwiki.com/index.php5?title=EmuWiki.com_-_The_Emulation_Encyclopedia news page] and if you comment in the mediawiki [http://www.emuwiki.com/index.php5?title=EmuWiki.com_-_The_Emulation_Encyclopedia news page] you will see your comments in the Wordpress version. We’re not talking only about comments here; every user can actually post a news, so this is really a collective blog, I hope to see you guys use it (for the beginning, I would recommend using it only for emuwiki-related things, but eventually this will be the system to use to publish news about new emulator releases).

Hi guys. Well I had been off the site for about a month but now I’m back and stronger than ever. Some of you may be interested in helping but may not know where to start so I started what I consider to be a complete historical page just so you see what I would like to have for every emulator. I decided to make the history page of Final Burn (http://www.emuwiki.com/index.php5?title=History_of_Final_Burn). Have a look at it, and you’ll see what I mean by a complete history page. It’s not over yet I still need to find some more versions but it’s a good model if you want to do the same thing for other emulators that would be really cool. As you can see, we’re trying to get all the versions we can find to see the evolution of the emulator. For some versions, we can find information about the release itself (what’s new, etc…) but we can’t find a downloadable version. In these case we just put the description and no download link. I’ve made all the required templates so that it’s now easier to do the same thing for any other emulator, but just to give you an idea, I’ve spent about 10 hours making this history page, including the templates and everything, so it’s a huge job, but I think the result is great so don’t hesitate to mail me (admin@emuwiki.com) if you’re interested in helping but don’t know where to start.