For those of you who are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Konami's latest installment in the Metal Gear Solid series, here's a quick fix for gamers looking for some excellent storytelling from Hideo Kojima. Sony's PlayStation Store Japan has recently delivered the Kojima classic interactive adventure, Policenauts, to help tide people over before the arrival of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. More details in our full article.

PC-8801 is a vintage computer developed by NEC Corporation back in 1981. Sony PlayStation Portable homebrew coder bkclog, now, has created an emulator for that system known as QUASI88.

This day marks the release of version 0.6.3. Know more about the emulator after the jump!

Download: QUASI88 v0.6.3
Download: QUASI88 v0.6.3 (source code)

International market research and market data company Research and Markets just announced that it has added "The Market for Portable Video Games" in its huge roster of studies. If you are not familiar with this company, you can actually think of it as a one-stop shop for market research reports and industry newsletters.

Anyway, like we said, a new report has been published that tackles the market for portable game systems. The study itself contains a detailed five-year forecast for each platform. Aside from that, the study also discusses the potential impact of yet-to-be released gadgets.

Aside from the above mentioned, a sub-report has been attached to the study that concerns the mobile game market and you can get a lot of insights from it given the round table discussion with leading players and visionaries in the mobile game space. The companies included in the study are:

• Atari (Atari Lynx)
• Bandai (Bandai Wonderswan)
• NEC (NEC Turboexpress)
• Nintendo (Game Boy, Virtual Boy, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo Ds)
• Nokia (Nokia N-Gage)
• Sega (Sega Game Gear and Sega Nomad)
• SNK (SNK Neo Geo Pocket Color)
• Sony (Sony PSP)
• Tiger (Tiger Gamecom and Tiger Telematics Gizmondo)

Quite interestingly, the study also gives a detailed history of the portable game market as well as an overview of failed systems. Video game genres were also discussed aside from complete business models for third-party software sales broken down by platform.

Refer to the Read link below for more details and how you can get the study.

Despite reports that the three prime consumer electronics giants will be working on next-generation, cutting-edge chips by 2010, Sony, Toshiba and NEC Electronics have all denied such claims. In fact, only Toshiba and NEC Electronics are attempting to renew the chip development alliance, and have left Sony out of the talks.

For the next line of 45nm chips for consumer electronics, Sony will be going their own separate way. "We have no intention of joint production. We make products ourselves, and if our capacity is not sufficient, we can turn to outside suppliers," a Sony representative said.

Next-generation development of smaller and more intricate chips require deeper pockets as development costs and upgraded facilities require more financial resources than usual.

Only experienced and money-burning giants, such as Intel and IBM, have every ability to develop next-generation chips without outside help. Whether or not this has any effect on the STI alliance (Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM) for the Cell BE, Sony consumers will just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, Intel has already been successful with a next-gen, 45nm-prototype of the Core 2 Duo processor ("Penryn"), and plans to mass produce a 32nm, 80-core processor ("Westmere") by around 2009.

If you've been following our coverage of bkclog's homebrew emulator QUASI88, you've probably noticed that his previous updates on this emu have been beta releases.

This time though, bkclog is proud to announce that "the plan to run QUASI88 0.6.1 on the PSP has been completed." Meaning, you won't be seeing any more beta releases fellas 'cuz this is THE real thing -- QUASI88 0.6.1 Release 1!

If this is your first time to have heard of QUASI88 and are feeling a bit lost as to what exactly we're talking about here, let us give you a brief primer: QUASI88 is a homebrew emulator developed by bcklog that allows your PSP to emulate the vintage NEC-made computer, PC-8801. Got that? Good. So go on, no one's stopping you from clicking on the link below, y'know. *winks*

Download: [QUASI88 0.6.1 Release 1]
Download: [QUASI88 0.6.1 Release 1 Source Code]

bkclog came up with a Christmas build of his PC-8801 emulator for people to try out. Say hello to QUASI88 v0.6.1 beta 6.

For those who don't know what it does, QUASI88 emulates a little-known piece of computing called the PC-8801, a computer made by NEC around 20 years back. It's old as heck to most people these days, but for some homebrewers, it's that esoteric piece of knowledge that often starts them on the path to homebrewing and programming in the first place.

Beta 6 is mostly an attempt at bugfixes, and while the commenters appreciate the new build, they noticed some slowdown with the sounds and a sort of "I saved it but it didn't actually save" problem when they tried to save their config. Still, we give bkclog snaps for trying, and we're looking forward to seeing beta 7 soon enough.

Download: [QUASI88 v0.6.1 beta 6]

bkclog just made a QUASI88 update, and now v0.6.1 beta 4 is up for grabs! For those who aren't familiar with it, QUASI88 is a NEC PC-8801 emulator for the PSP.

Uh yeah, some of you are probably not familiar with the NEC PC-8801 as well. More known as the PC-88, this "home computer" makes use of the 8-bit Zilog microprocessor. We also heard that it was quite popular in in Japan, where it originated, back in the '80s. A couple of Famicom titles were ported to this system, such as the early Mario Bros. games.

Anyway, here are the new features of QUASI88:

• Addition of keyboard lock
• Addition of [kibodokonhuigu]
• Addition of analog input
• Adding clock modification to the menu

This one's worth a try, so better check it out. Enjoy!

Download: [QUASI88 0.6.1 beta 4]