Just around a week after PSMonkey has said goodbye to the homebrew scene, his Nintendo 64 emulator for the PSP, Monkey64 (M64), has already made a quick comeback, thanks to the help of his fellow coders.

PSDroideka has just released his own take on PSMonkey's work on the M64, dubbed as MONKEY 64 ATLANTIS: Droideka Build. At the moment, he has specified the following features that can be found in the latest version:

• Zelda OOT Now Loads, Microcode: F3DX2 (Monkey)
• Beginnings of expansion pack support (Monkey)
• You can choose EEPROM (save) size
• Roms now load from a roms directory
• Old Pochi icon
• New Pochi eboot background
• Implemented the one word source change StrmnNrmn Found (1-2 VSYNC's a second speed increase) (Droideka)

In the included readme file, Droideka also noted that fans can look forward to the following features, which will be added later on:

• Automatic Microcode loading
• Further tlb emulation
• Further Expansion Pack support
• Possibly a file browser (but i doubt it)

Download: [MONKEY 64 ATLANTIS: Droideka Build]


Erratum: We have previously mentioned that Zion and Droideka have been working on this emulator together, but as Zion has pointed out, this is not the case. We have corrected this article as requested. Our apologies to Zion and Droideka for the mix-up.

When do you know if it's too much? How do you know if you've gone too far? What if you found out that it might just be beyond you? Sometimes, it's better to let others continue your work.

This is what Yoyofr and Laxer3a have decided. Letting someone else's hands develop your creation takes a lot of willpower. They have layered down the integral foundations for other homebrew developers to build on.

According to Laxer3a, "I am not sure neither yoyo and I want to go that far in tuning. If any good coder is interested to join in... May be worth sending a bottle to the sea actually. As the source matches the latest binary."

So what does this mean for the SnesTYL9x? According to the developers, they have done all that they can regarding the speed of the emulator. A 10% increase in performance may be achieved if there was a near-complete overhaul of the code to incorporate a dynamic recompiler/JIT and if the graphics code was rewritten. It seems majorly difficult, but feasible. However, time is not on their side.

They have a life beyond game emulators, and decided that doing the modifications above would take a major chunk of health points out of them. Let's hope that others will carry on the torch these people have helped light.

Yoyofr and Laxer3a, thanks for the great SnesTYL9x. It will be one of the better emulators out there for a long time. For the next generation of developers, the ball is in your court.

Sadly, a well-known member of the PSP Homebrew community has to leave the scene. According to a public letter that PSmonkey has posted on his website, he is forced to stop releasing homebrews to the public because of his new job with one of the major publishers of PSP games. He did not name the company that he now works for, but he did note that his contract restricts him from making further contributions to the homebrew community.

However, he did say that his two most popular projects Iris (an FPS) and Sandbox (a physics demo) will be taken up by fellow-enthusiasts, as stated in part of his letter.

"Yes Iris 0.3 is still coming. I have a few people interested in redoing the game like I intended as well as continue to progress KohKae engine.

Sandbox is also not going anywhere. One of this scene's great coders is going to pick up where I left off to continue the game.

Regarding my other projects, I personally will continue my fight to conker N64 & DD emulation on the PSP. M64 will still continue but no releases will be made public. I will how ever make my DD research public once finished.

ngPsp 1.3 ( the neogeo pocket emu) is still coming, A friend is gonna finish writing a GUI for my latest version.

Other then that, sadly all my other work is now dead (new fps will migrate into Iris 0.3, beat-em-up is dead).

That's it.

I will still lurk around and try to help people out with technical info but it will be sad to no longer work on homebrew for the scene I loved so much. Yet who knows what the future will bring and maybe I will end up being in a position that it's legally possible for me to do homebrew again."

So until then, we say "thank you" for all the tips and most of all, for the games.

PSMonkey (otherwise known as nexis2600 in the QJ forums) just came out with an entry to the NEO Summer Coding Contest: Sandbox v1.0. According to PSMonkey, the game basically is a physics demo with modifiable themes. Of course, we did not want to leave it at that. We tried it for ourselves.

The object of the game is to destroy! Well, actually not as simple as that.

Think bowling (which incidentally is included as a mode). You have a ball and across you are pins. Angle + Force = Score. We think you now have a basic feel of the game. Variety comes from the different themes such as demolition, battle space, and - as PSMonkey promises - mini golf.

Aside from a few tinkering with some of the modes (especially battle space) and the audio, Sandbox is a pretty game. We found the demolition mode most exciting though.

Well, good luck to PSMonkey - here's hoping for more games. Try out this game and tell us what you think about it!

Download: [Sandbox 1.0]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Kangaeru Exit or Thinking Exit is the follow up to Taito's highly successful action/puzzle game called Exit. In this latest release (or is escape more appropriate?), you once again take on the character of the daredevil escapologist, Mr. ESC. Part of your mission will be to lead helpless individuals, trapped by fire, earthquakes and other disasters, out of hospitals, underground facilities, offices and other buildings within a specified time limit.

Based on the game's title, it will put more emphasis on the puzzle solving aspect of the game rather than the action element. Reports say that it will have over 110 stages to give your brain cells a rigorous exercise. It is due September 7th with a ¥5,040 price tag or roughly $43.64 USD. Thanks a whole lot to PSMonkey for the tip!

There's a PSP demo of the new puzzle game Mercury Meltdown now available on Sony's official Japanese PSP page. Unfortunately, you'll need Firmware 2.80 to run this...still, it's always cool to see downloadable demos of upcoming games.

The full version of Mercury Meltdown hits shelves on August 28.

To save you the effort of browsing through Sony's cryptic PSP site, we've put the demo up for download on our servers. Put the EBOOT.PBP in a folder called "UCJS10043" in your PSPGAME directory, and it should work fine!

Thanks for the tip, PSMonkey!!

Download: [Mercury Meltdown Demo]

PSMonkey has released a small fix for his first person Homebrew game, Iris. This fix was designed for temporary use until PSMonkey can fix the full Iris Package, hopefully later on tonight. Here's what PSMonkey said:

"I found the bug. I will issue a revision tonight for it. It's trying to load the health packs from "ms0:/BspMaps/models/items/healing/medium/tris.md2" and not "ms0:/Iris/models/items/healing/medium/tris.md2".

A simple fix now would be to make a folder called BspMaps on the root of your memory stick and copy the models folder into it (not players folder)."

To fix this bug, simply download the Zip file and copy the "BspMaps" folder to the root of your memory stick. PSMonkey will release a revised version soon that will fix this bug and and the AI crash problem. Until then, use this fix as a temporary solution if you have problems with Iris 0.2 alpha.

Download: [Iris v0.2 alpha Q2DM fix]

Well, PSMonkey has just revealed that he will be pausing work on his N64 emulator for a while. In his own words, "After all the recent crap I have decided to go back to my plan on taking a small break to reflect where I want to head on this project. The project is far from dead but there will probably not be any updates for a few weeks."

Well, that's the bad news. I'd like to shed light on some good news which he has announced too. He's been working on Iris and it'll be released soon. How soon? How about later today! But, it's gonna be an alpha release and very much a Work-in-Progress. There will be a few things missing (like bots). "The point of the alpha release is to get everybody up to date on the latest engine so modders can start taking better use of Iris. There has been huge improvements in overall performance and of course all the new goodies like surface clipping (still has bugs), improved collisions and all that jazz will be there to play with. So consider the build to be more BspViewer 0.3 then Iris (Do note BspViewer is now dead, The engine is now Iris, not bspviewer anymore, and will stay that way from here on out)."

Plus, you guys can also look forward to another new project which he'll begin work on. He's gonna be creating a brand new game for the PSP, similar to the classic coin-op game Demolish Fist. It's still in the planning stage, but once work begins on it, you can expect a lot of work being put into it. He also has a video of Demolish Fist in action. Check it out below.

View : [Video of Demolish fist in action]