Today, I'm very happy to announce that a new site has joined the NGEmu network called Shendo's software. While this name might not be known to you, I'm sure you heard of his great utilities such as the memory card manager for the playstation MemcardRex or his excellent emulator frontend Emu-Raptor! His site also contains other great utilities for every emulation gamer, so make sure to give it a visit.
So everyone go ahead and update your bookmarks to point to http://shendo.ngemu.com/ from now on.
It's about time for a new contest here at NGEmu, after we've kept quite silent for the past years here. Having reached nearly 62 million visitors, it might be hard to belive, but we here at NGEmu have never had any official t-shirts.
To change this nuisance, we decided to start a t-shirt contest. There rules are quite simple, we don't give any regulations for colors or logos you have to use, though it might be the easiest way for you to use one of the official logos - but feel free to become creative here.
To keep track of the submissions and recive feedback from the staff and users, I've created a new t-shirt subforum over at Emuforums, which contains further information and also a template to start your shirt with!
We'll have this contest open until we found a shirt we'd like to go with. The winner will of course get one of these shirts for free, together with a 25$ gift certificate to spend at your own will.
Can you beleive it? The last interview that was added to NGEmu dates back to November 28th, 2001! It sure has been a long time since we've made any interviews but this might change in the future as we plan to do more than one every six years... (at least I hope ;) ).
Many thanks goes to Hard core Rikki who made this interview with mudlord. If you have no clue who mudlord is, he's the lead developper for the VBA-M project. It's in the process of merging all the different builds that were made off the VBA source code.
1. Could you present yourself ?
Mudlord:Online, I go by the handle Mudlord. I am currently a university student undertaking a degree somewhat relevant to my interests in software design and development.
Attention all new and old members. The NGemu Awards polls are now open. Every member has the chance to vote once in each category:
Member of the year
Staff of the year
Board of the year
New member of the year
Thread of the year
Avatar/sig of the year
Coder of the year
Emu innovation of the year
New emulator of the year
Most helpful member of the year
Crazy threads of the year
Artist of the year
Desktop of the year
Post of the year
Think long and hard about your choices, for as looking back into previous NGemu Awards, there has been some cases in which "every vote counts". Keep an open mind, and vote for the right person you think deserves to win in each category :)
Actual poll closing time has not yet been determined. I'm guessing no more than 2 or 3 weeks
Here we are, it's the 6th October 2007 and that means your (hopefully) favorite emulation site turns 6 years old (you can find the first newspost from NGEmu in our news archive)! That's right folks, NGEmu has been around for 6 years now and has always (well, more or less) served you with the best out of the next-gen emulation scene for 2191 days!
So what did we do in the past 6 years? Here are some figures what kind of data went through NGEmu during this long period:
2100 news posts on the main page (hrmm, that's less than one a day!)
Over 1 million posts on the board (well, that's more than one a day!)
Nearly 18 million file downloads
Roughly half a million screenshots have been viewed
Over 80.000 members registered over at Emuforums
... and over 52.000.000 people visited NGEmu's mainpage!
None of the original staff members are around any more (well okay, I'm still here but that doesn't count :))
And we're still around, even though we have, as any other site, seen our good and bad times. We're looking quite optimistic into the future, let's see what the next year well have for us! Happy birthday NGEmu!
Well, as some of you might have already noticed, NGEmu is now back in a quite more updated state - and we're working on improving this even more. Additionally, we're working on improving your overall experience, so here is a quick runup about all the changes which happened to the site in the past days:
vBulletin updated
The forum software over at Emuforums has been updated to the latest release of vBulletin to fix several security holes and bugs. During the upgrade, our ad management over at the forums went a bit crazy, this is now fixed again and you should be able to use the boards at full speed again.
We've also updated our arcade section and made some tweaks here and there, so if you spot any errors caused by this, please let us know!
Logins fixed
The login box here on the main page on your right handed side wasn't working for roughly ... two years? ... this is fixed now as well, thanks to the friendly guys over at vbulletin.org for their great help with this!
RSS on the forums
By popular demand, Chrono has recently enabled RSS support on the forums. To make it easier for our visitors to find the right forum ID and build the link, I've added a small icon to the top of every forum, which allows you to quickly grab the RSS link. Check the screenshot on your left handed side to find out, where I've hidden the icon with the link.
Our buddy TerrorShocked had a little conversation with caustik, author of CXBX. Since Martin started to work on the emulator, caustik is interested to know which game poeple would like to see emulated next on CXBX. He kindly asked if NGEmu would like to put this poll on the frontpage.
Our poll was quite old so we had no problem changing it for him. Now I'm not the biggest X-Box fan but I gathered some of the better rated games on the platform for you to choose from. Here are your choices :
Halo : Combat Evolved
Fable
Burnout
Ninja Gaiden
Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas
SSX 3
Of course, if you have other games you feel should be emulated before these ones, you can always post the title in this comments thread.
PS... For those who didn't notice, the poll is on the right hand side of the mainpage :)
ZTNet Store are our long term friends and partners who distribute (and partially manufacture) products relating to PC gaming and emulation. Many of you may remember Adaptoids (USB devices that allow you to use N64 pads with accessories on emulators) and that they had been out of production and unavailable for a few years.
Well our friends at ZTNet Store have recently started producing them again (to the original design!). They have lots of other stuff, for both next-gen and classic emulation fans alike. Check them out, every sale through links in this post benefit NGEmu! :)
Phew, has been quite some time since I fixed major parts of the main page for the last time - luckily, I've found some time (like ... a whole day?) today to fix many things on the mainpage.
Apart from optimizing the complete news generation code (going down from five down to one SQL query to generate the news, not quite bad), the whole news layout has been improved a bit with some small icons here and there and some more space between the single news posts, as especially in high resolutions the whole text seemed way to close.
Furthermore, the "Who's online" box on your right handed side is back, as well as the ability to leave comments for news posts (the number of comments isn't displayed yet, give me a bit to think of a proper way to handle this). The forum highlights at the top of the page are updating again and the whole appearence of the upper part has been improved. But why were these dynamic things gone in the first place anyway?
After we've improved the overall site/forums loading times by doubling the server power in our network (did you ever notice people always complain about lack of speed but never notice when things are real speedy?), the mainpage had to connect to way too many servers to generate it's content; that's why many features had to be disabled; these parts have been recoded and are now working in a proper way.
Last but not least, we do have a new poll - we'd like to know, what kind of emulation gamer you are: Do you mostly play next-gen emulators or are you a retro gamer? Place your vote in the poll on your right handed side. Previous poll results can be found in our poll archive.
It's that time of year again! The polls are open for the 2006 awards here at NGEmu. Everyone be sure
to get your votes in. The polls will close on January 21, 2007 at 5:00
AM GMT. Enjoy.
As most of you might have noticed, NGEmu's message board is currently down. The release of PCSX2 0.9.2 has caused an enormous boost of traffic on Emuforums.
If you have downloaded PCSX2 0.9.2 and you are in need of support, you can visit PCSX2's IRC channel. If you are new to IRC, you will need a client like mIRC to connect to the channel. (A guide to connect to NGEmu's IRC channel is located here).
PCSX2's IRC channel is located at #pcsx2 on EFNet.
Exodus has pointed to us yesterday that we have finally reached a total of 1,000,000 posts on NGEmu's board Emuforums! The staff would like to thank all the members who use the message board and help keep it alive and kicking. We especially thank those who spend some of their time helping out others by giving friendly advice or by pointing them in the right direction.
Emuforums has seen its share of action and drama. From fanboy flame wars to question after question of ROM/ISO requests, from members needing advice for personal problems to announcements of events they want to share with everyone (marriage, new baby, job promotion, etc...), Emuforums is not just a place for emulation. The range of discussions is much larger than just gaming.
So if you have been watching the mainpage for the last couple of months or even years and have not dared to wonder off to Emuforums, I'm inviting you to give it a try and you may find poeple from around the world that share common interests, wether it be about emulation or not.
Once again, thanks to all the members and also a big thanks to the staff for keeping the board clean!
After PS2 emulation started to be a realistic topic thanks to the great work of the PCSX2 team, |Gand|Alf| wrote a great review in which he compares different CPU speeds and their effect on PCSX2. Here's a small summary of the content:
Many of you have probably wondered how much faster will PCSX2 run with overclocked or faster CPU and with a dual core CPU. Will the performance be nearly same or will you see a significant performance increase? That's questions that come into my mind and being a person familiar with overclocking and the fact that I've recently ordered an AMD64 Opteron 165 1.8GHz dual core which is pretty equal to my AMD64 "San Diego" 3700+ 2.2GHz other than the dual core vs single core technology and different stock speeds. I thought what the heck, I'll do a little review for you guys & girls to show how good PCSX2 scale with different CPU speeds and single vs dual core with MTGS and Dual Core Mode enabled.
As you noticed, the site has been down for a bit. This was related to a hardware failure in one of our servers, which I didn't imediately notice as I was in austria for 2 weeks. The faulty hardware has been replaced and everything should work again. No data has been lost thanks to the great work of our data center.
If the site is slow, don't worry either - this is because of our crons catching up, and should be over soon as well.
Lots of changes happening at NGEmu right now. First off, I decided that it's about time to clean up the lousy XHTML compatibility of NGEmu (roughly 450 validation errors), and I'm happy to announce that the mainpage is now 100% XHTML 1.0 transitional compatible! I'm working on cleaning up the remaining bugs in the page code, should be done early next week.
Furthermore, a new version of the 3D benchmark utility 3D Mark has been released. As modern emulators (such as PCSX2) require more and more speed, I thought it might be interrested to see what kind of speed your PCs actually get. That's why I created a poll, asking you "How many points do you get in 3D Mark 2006" - you can find the poll on your left handed side. If you don't have 3D Mark '06 yet, you can find it at this adress.
On another positive note, according to Alexa, the loading times for our mainpage improved by 70% since christmas. Seems the move to our new server + the previously mentioned code optimizations worked out quite nice. More changes coming soon (together with the new NGEmu mascot), so keep an eye at this place!
Recently, I found some time again to fix and change around several
parts here at NGEmu - take a look:
vBulletin v3.5
Our message board Emuforums has
been updated to use the latest vBulletin version. This version features
some cool new improvements, which makes browsing the board faster and
easier. Should you not be able to use certain features, make sure to do
a full site refresh to clear your cache, as some major javascript parts
have been updated.
Arcade section
If you're a gamer, you might be happy to hear that our arcade section has
been refreshed with a new version of the software and tons of
games for you to enjoy. We're still going through all of them to remove
the boring ones, but you can already try and get a trophy here.
Furthermore,
to improve the sites speed and keep up the quality, we're going to further
improve the NGEmu network by adding a new server in the following weeks.
This server will be used to speed up the main page and to spread the
downloads across several servers.
This involves heavy changes in the sites backend - if you come across a 404 or an error during the following days,
please don't contact us about it - we'll let you know when the move is finished!
As in the years before, we're happy to announce that the NGEmu awards are running again this year. This voting contest created by and for our members allows you to vote your favorite in differnet topics. Right now, nominations are accepted, take a look at the announcement:
The long awaited Ngemu annual awards 2005 have finally started. Please be sure to visit the nomination thread and tell us who do you think are worth of receiving the greatest award Ngemu offers to it's members, in the different categories.
PS: Nominations will be closed on December 11th so be fast.
The Awards committee ^_^
So make sure to check out the nomination thread. I'd like to thank all the committee members for their dedication during the past weeks and I'm really looking forward to the results!
As it has been a quite slow week, I spent some time into optimizing the whole site. Beside a more optimized site code which should speed up your loading times as well as fix some 404s and other errors you could possibly get, you can now also browse previous polls in our poll archive and entering URLs directly should now work way better.
To end the week with a nice piece of news, I also took the time to clean up our PCSX2 screenshots section and added some nice shots by praful from Smackdown VS Raw 2006, made by praful - take a look:
As I had some free time left this week, I decided to convert over
the old articles database into the current site system. There're some
quite interresting articles in that database, and to "celebrate" the
conversion, I added another review kindly written by Syed Fawad
labeled: "Resident Evil 4 on PS2/PCSX2".
The review describes
the gameplay on the real PS2 and gives a small insight on how the game
runs in the current PCSX2 version (expert broke it in the new beta ;)).
And this year.....my dreams came true. RE4 announced for PS2!!
And maaaaaaaaan, I was damn eager to play it. Reading its GC reviews
and listening to ppl's comments about how good it is, I was really
really anxious to get my hands on it, and as soon as it is
released... I bought it, I played and am through it. And now wanna
share a piece of my mind on it.
» Check out the complete review here.
» Check out older stuff in our articles section.
Nearly a month passed since my last post, but I'm happy to say now: We're finally 100% back in business. The CMS is working with the new code now, the scripts (over 700 KB of code!) have been changed to work with the new security changes we've done - so we can finally get back to what this should all be about: Posting news and bringing you the latest in next-gen emulation. We'll catch up on all previous news tomorrow and start covering the scene way closer from now on.
A first small change is in the poll on your left handed side. Our old one (how old was it? A year?) became kinda outdated, but we finally have an easy way to update these polls now, and it can count above 6000 votes now as well :) In our new poll we're asking you, which of the 3 Next-Gen systems will steal the show at this year's E3 ?. Cast your vote in the poll to your left, and check back tomorrow for the whole news coverage of the last month :)
Furthermore, a new version of the 3D benchmark utility 3D Mark has been released. As modern emulators (such as PCSX2) require more and more speed, I thought it might be interrested to see what kind of speed your PCs actually get. That's why I created a poll, asking you "How many points do you get in 3D Mark 2006" - you can find the poll on your left handed side. If you don't have 3D Mark '06 yet, you can find it at 
