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.

A new emulator is currently in the works. If all goes well, there should be a release within the next couple of weeks.

Second, according to the folks at the MSX Resource Center, there is an MSX ROM mapper database, licensed under GPL. This may well mean the end of ROM type selection for fMSX. Special thanks to Manuel Pazos and Manuel Bilderbeek for their help.

If you can help with similar information for the Atari800 (ROM CRC and ROM type information), please let me know.

Great time to be part of open source development, to be sure.

One feature that both fMSX and Atari800 could use is auto ROM type selection, as I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds selecting correct type of ROM an annoyance. I’d like to ask those of you who are dedicated fans of fMSX or Atari800 for help.

The method I have planned involves mapping a ROM CRC32 value to specific cart type, maintaining the settings in a growing list. Bunch of these lists would eventually be consolidated into a larger “super list” that would be included with the emulators, effectively eliminating the process of cart type selection (for vast majority of carts, anyway).

If anyone is interested in working to create such lists, please let me know by leaving a comment. Alternatively, if you’re aware of an existing list (perhaps for a different port), it would be great if you could point out the location. Thanks

PSP “Slim”-compatible binaries have been added for all my emulator ports. Visit the specific emulator’s site and click the ‘Firmware version 1.00 and 2.00+’ binary link to download EBOOT’s compatible with older 1.00 firmware as well as the newer custom firmware.

Many thanks to the administrator of pspslimhacks.com for his help in testing.

Also, please note that I don’t have access to the “Slim” PSP model for testing. If any of the binaries don’t work, let me know.

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This version adds the ability to switch/eject the disk in drive 0

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A reader recently left a question asking whether Atari800 supports switching disks mid-emulation without rebooting (similar to fMSX PSP).

There’s currently no such feature, but improving classic computer emulators are what we’re all about, here at akop.org (all one of us)

The crashing bug that affected Atari800 also seems to affect NeoPop. Another release should be up in a few days - in the meantime, if you had success getting Atari800 to run, please let me know.

Thanks

UPDATE It’s official — the Atari800 bug is fixed. Thanks, ChaosOrg

Today’s release fixes the controller loading bug, which resulted in saved control configurations not being loaded when switching games

UPDATE Version 2.0.3.26 released - this update fixes the crash caused by having many files with long filenames on the screen at the same time. Numerous users reported this issue, which is most obvious when scrolling through the file list using a PSP with custom firmware. The problem also affects firmware 1.50 users, though it’s more difficult to reproduce on that version (the crash is not immediate, but compounding).

Anyway, version 2.0.3.26 fixes this problem, which was caused by a display list of insufficient size. If you’re running custom firmware and were having difficulties earlier, please let me know if this resolves the issue. The bug most likely also affects NeoPop.

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A bug is confirmed in Atari800 - the emulator does not load predefined controls. Thanks to those who reported

As promised, new version of Atari800 is now out. New in this version:

• Fixed mislabeled ‘Joystick Right’ control (thanks Robert)
• Updated GUI - menu animations
• Fixed various bugs dealing with controller configuration
• Improved state saving/loading screen

I’m interested to know what folks think of the new menu system - please leave comments below. Thanks!

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