For those who are wondering, I’m not dead - just swamped with work and an unhealthy obsession with Fable II. Which is unusual for me, considering that I’m really not much of an RPG buff.

Some great news in the PSP-3000 hacking front came and went, the most promising one being the motherboard of the new system — it’s a TA-90, hence “pandorizable”, though currently with some sort of protection. Let’s hope not for too long.

In other news, I’ve noticed that while Atari800 has not seen any releases since mid-last year, work on it has been ongoing. While the changes are mostly structural (code reshuffling, etc…), they have made me consider an intermediate, possibly beta release of Atari800 PSP, based on code in the CVS repository. If that happens, I’ll most likely post a build in the forum for those interested to test (I’ll post an update here as well).

For the Fuse fans, here’s the situation on future releases: Philip Kendall, the principal developer of Fuse, commented earlier about changes coming to a future release; these changes will be substantial (from the sound of it, and at least from a structural standpoint), going so far as to change how extended disk support functions. Fuse PSP is being actively developed, and will be updated when the next version of Fuse is released, or shortly before.

There are other things being worked on at the moment, but as I’m not certain of their status, I’m going to keep any comments to myself, until I know for sure.

The forum has started to get bombarded by spam from China; this has led me to block a number of IP ranges, as well as add spam protection - full details here. I’ve also added a new forum for posting bug reports — if you have any bugs to report, please do so here.

In the upcoming month or so, expect to see updates to a number of existing emulators - Fuse and fMSX are likely to be some of those updated. Updates are likely to range from very small fixes, to new (and hopefully interesting) features.

If you also own a GP2X, good news — I’ve been contacted by the author of the GP2X port of RACE!, who plans to use RACE! PSP’s state saving code his port. Speaking of which, all signs indicate that state saving works without a hitch — if you’re interested in details, here’s a list of tested games.

In an earlier post, I noted that extended DSK support in the latest version of Fuse PSP does not function correctly. After some testing, it looks like extended DSK’s do work, but only outside ZIP archives - I tested this by loading Robocop 2, and it works fine. Extended DSK support is provided by libdsk, which does not support loading from binary data, and which will be replaced in a future release of Fuse.

Until the next version of Fuse comes along, please keep extended DSK files decompressed if you wish to use them with Fuse PSP. Note that not all DSK files use the extended format, though there’s no easy way to tell the difference between the standard and extended formats without examining the file’s header.

This is a small update to fix current known issues. Changes in this version:

• A Spectrum joystick button/keyboard key can now be assigned to multiple PSP buttons
• Sticky key status will now be correctly reset when the virtual keyboard is toggled on/off

Download

I must say I find myself pleasantly surprised by the fan base of the Sinclair Spectrum. Not only has the interest in Fuse PSP been immensely overwhelming since release, but the fans of the system appear to be a hardcore and dedicated bunch. There have been already over 500 downloads from my page alone; I regularly receive suggestions and bug reports (not too many of the latter, thankfully ), and the interest doesn’t seem to fade.

Anyway, it’s great to see a classic system still enjoy popularity decades after its release, and have such dedicated fans.

This update fixes the following issues present in version 0.9.0.2:

• Palette corruption on various PSP units
• Bug in the sound rendering engine that would cause occasional sound slowdowns

Updates from 0.9.0.1 (just to reiterate):

• Added various game image types missing from the initial release
• New virtual keyboard
• Added monitor type selection (color/grayscale)
• Fixed a serious memory leak, which would manifest itself when opening ZIP files
• Fixed the “tape loading hang” bug
• Added +3 support
• Added Kempston joystick support
• Added “hack cursor” support (keyboard up/down/left/right)
• Lots of code reshuffling

Download

New in this version:

• Added various game image types missing from the initial release
• New virtual keyboard
• Added monitor type selection (color/grayscale)
• Fixed a serious memory leak, which would manifest itself when opening ZIP files
• Fixed the “tape loading hang” bug
• Added +3 support
• Added Kempston joystick support
• Added “hack cursor” support (keyboard up/down/left/right)
• Lots of code reshuffling

This version also includes extended DSK support; however, this does not seem to work correctly at the moment. Since the next version of Fuse is going to have drastically revamped 765 support, I’m probably not going to work on this until the next version.

UPDATE At least one user has reported palette corruption problems, so I’m pulling the new version down until I can revert the psplib code back to an older version. Please bear with me, and if you have the version originally released, please don’t distribute it.

Most of the bugs/known issues from the last release of Fuse PSP have been fixed (the sole exception being the speed of tape loading, and there’s not much that can be done about that).

Next version will also include a bunch of new features and improved hardware support — exact details are currently being worked out.

I tracked down the source of the tape loading freeze: the problem is in the sound code, and should be fixed in the next release.

As I mentioned before, psplib is currently undergoing some changes; some will be noticeable immediately; others will take a while. One of these changes is an improved virtual keyboard interface, which should resemble an actual system keyboard more closely. The new keyboard will be released with the next version of Fuse PSP.