Homebrew developer cdesseno has decided to show off his stuff by releasing the NeoFlash edition of the PlayStation Portable homebrew game Avoid It. The latest version 0.2 includes a lot of new features which steps up Avoid It's gameplay up a notch, making the game a lot more challenging and enjoyable than before. You can check out all the new stuff in Avoid It v0.2 by reading our full article.

Download: Avoid It v0.2

Having trouble properly tweaking World of Warcraft's resident hybrid build, the shaman? Player Solemn over at the WoW Europe forums may have something that could help, if you're looking for a guide that could help you bring out your Burning Crusade Elemental shammie's fullest potential for both PvE and PvP scenarios.

The guide's already been picked up by forums moderator Salthem, and features some very specific target numbers you'll want to strive for depending on your intentions. Here's a sampler of Solemn's suggestions for those already at level 70, and planning to optimize their build for PvE:

• … of the Invoker and Sorcerer items: Generally +spell crit and spell damage. To advance from this, I worked on getting all my heroic keys and from that I got a lot of set pieces of Tidefury, your dungeon set, which gives you a good amount of crit and spell dmg. And remember – cloth does NOT gimp your dps, use it if you like, I did. (Some might prefer NOT to look like a weakling in a dress, but to be honest. It’s only about the looks. If the stats are great for you, don’t hesitate just because you loose some armor, any improvement in the beginning is still an improvement, just don’t ninja anything other clothies can use of course.)
• Stamina: 7000-8000 hp is what I call “decent” for PvE. Your not as squishy as most think, unless you for some unreasonable reasons think you can mass AoE grind. Short: Stamina is not a huge must.
• Intellect: 8000-9000 mana is what I call “decent” for PvE. Intellect is an important fact in all situations and you should definitely aim for a lot of this to boost your crit, expand your mana pool and less downtime.

Just be prepared for some serious sit-down time with this guide - it's calculated to be around 2,725 words long. We imagine it'll come in handy for both WoW's newcomers, and veterans who don't mind picking up some ideas from their fellow players. Solemn's shaman guide for Blizzard's MMORPG is accessible via the read link. Just keep in mind that this guide may be subject to change come WoW's later patches (such as 2.3).

 

Bumuckl from QJ's PSP Development Forums has been hard at work since the release of Bermuda CS 7 'patched' to bring us an update to his portable image editing studio for the PSP. Today that hard work has paid off with the hopefully bug-free release of Bermuda CS 8. Many new features have been added, including the option to add your own fonts and brushes in order to customize Bermuda CS.

However, bug fixes was the name of the game and along with the 'thousands' of bugs that bumuckl has fixed for this release comes a lot of code optimizations to make Bermuda CS run faster and more smoothly on the PSP. Let's just say it runs a lot faster than Photoshop does on QJ Office computers! Anyway, back on topic, here's the giant changelog:

• New interface GIMP-style Interface with new menu navigation
  
• Fixed bug that made the app crash during creating a new picture
• Improved menu-handling and code optimizations
  
• Grafitti-tool added
  
• Line-tool has been improved
• CPU speed an be changed to 333 mhz, 222 mhz and 100 mhz
• Fuzzieborad has been improved, now capital letters can be used as well
• New fonts and brushes added, as well as the option to add your own
  
• Added option to save your picture as a brush
• Small canvas preview with cursor positions
• Option to change default settings using the CONFIG.CFG file

If you are a graphic geek and enjoy manipulating or creating images on the move, then this app is for you. Catch the download below.

Download: Bermuda CS 8
Visit: PSP Development Forums

Well actually, it has been run natively, but it doesn't mean it loves OSX. In fact, M. Gagnon, the GIMP tweaker who we extracted this find from, has been able to build the GNU Image Manipulation Program in Mac OSX with Imiendo's GTK+ porting kit.

This isn't exactly new, but the porting of GIMP to Mac OSX is actually common practice for GTK+ porters, so that they can experience the porting process first-hand and then begin their own porting projects in greater detail. While it isn't exactly required that you know Linux code, it would be a great help to know if what you're doing is right.

But more importantly, perhaps, is that direct porting isn't always as simple as cha-cha. For a basic port, GIMP will sneeze a few glitches once in a while. But more often than not, it wouldn't be safe at all for everyone to use. Plus, as Gagnon found out, the ported program is difficult to distribute because of lack of package support.

If there's anything that you know that you think could help, hop on over to the GTK+ dev site and suggest your input at the forums. It's here you'll be able to view a step-by-step guide to performing your own port.

 

Customizing a PSP may be fun, but it's admittedly tricky with all that fiddly coding required. Now, if you've been reading up on Vulpix's tgaWave Custom Wave Texture Injector, but don't have the technical finesse to run it, this latest update makes his latest XMBwave editor app even easier to use:

Instructions for use
------------------------------
!!!!NO MORE HEX EDITING REQUIRED!!!! [<---Yup, that's why]

1. Read the tutorial by Al-Zamli from QJ.NET forums (2 mirrors), you can read it at: http://pspjunk.org/tgawavetut/index.html OR http://vbmaster.portablesofdoom.org/tgawavetut/index.html
2. Open your TGA in Photoshop/GIMP/etc. Edit to your satisfaction (but make sure you read the tutorial first!)
3. Save it exactly how the tutorial says (Indexed Color, Local (selective), 32 (or less) colors, Black and White with Transparency, and Diffusion.) You can now save the TGA as any name you wish.
4. Run start.bat. It will guide you through the rco creation process. Specify the TGA you would like to inject and relax as it does the rest (no more hex editing required)
5. Put system_plugin_bg.rco that was created in /vsh/resource/
6. Done!
   

As always, be sure to view the README for extra details (such as the team that helped put this together).

We also highly recommend a visit to the forum boards - they've been cranking out some beautiful work using this and his previous apps, which may give you ideas on how you can customize your PSP.

Download: [tgaWave Custom Wave Texture Injector v0.7]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Want to pimp your PSP without hassle? One of the few good places to start is with your unit's cross-media bar. The homebrew scene was recently bombarded by a lot of custom XMB waves, so this should be easy. (One homebrew coder even came out with a flasher application to preview these custom xmb waves first before actually trying them out.)

This app that's just been released adds to the long list. However, coder Vulpix's tgaWave Custom Wave Texture Injector v0.3 is somewhat different as it doesn't require hex-editing.

All you need is an image editing program such as Photoshop and you can already edit your wave's texture by applying filters to whatever image. Vulpix was good enough to provide all readers with a step-by-step process on how to use this application:

• Open system_plugin_bg_deflate_part2.tga in your favorite image editing program (Photoshop/GIMP/etc).
• Change the wave texture as desired by using filters in Photoshop or whatever.
• Save the targa file with the same name as you opened it with.
• Run start.bat.
• Put system_plugin_bg.rco that was created in /vsh/resource/
• Done!

Download: [tgaWave Custom Wave Texture Injector v0.3]
Discuss: [Forum Release Thread]

Now what exactly are the images above all about? To a highly trained eye and someone with a good knack at guessing, the answer is obvious. But for those who don't have a clue, these are actually screenshots of Windows2000 Pro running on the PlayStation 3, both of which have been posted by WickedWanda, over at the official Playstation forums. We're quite a bit baffled ourselves as to how this one was done, so we'll just quote the poster. According to him:

Got Qemu built, installed, and running in YDL and installed Windows 2000 Pro into a virtual machine then installed Wizardry Gold in Windows 2000 Pro. Complete with Soundblaster 16 sound. Used the Gimp in YDL to grab the screens. At any rate another milestone for the PS3!

WickedWanda then went on to explain that this success can be attributed to the intelligence of the PS3 and Microsoft's bloatware. According to him, it all began when he wanted to get access to a full featured web browser in high definition, but one without any of the limitations we currently have (i.e. no Flash support in PPC linux, the inability to play windows media stuff, etc.).

After that, WickedWanda shared that he has been playing Wizadry Gold as well as the DOS-based game Eye of the Beholder in HD.  He needed to play within dosbox with the latter one, though. Lastly, WickedWanda added that he is now attempting to run an N64 emulator on the PS3 by next week.

Here's a heads up for you Popstation users out there. GTK PopStation, the latest product of LiraNuna's coding skills, has just been released in the QJ forums.

This is LiraNuna's first ever GUI app made for GNU/Linux, made due to the absence of non-Windows GUIs for the Popstation converter. Here's what he has to say about it:

After being frustrated of all the Win32 GUIs out there, I was thinking of coding my own Linux one. GTK PopStation is based on the original popstation sources and the GIMP Tool Kit (GTK).

Be aware that using libgtk-2.0.dll and compiling using x86 w32 gcc, there is a high chance of running it on w32 platforms (Similer to the w32 xchat compilation of silvertear).

There is no readme as I think the program is obvious to use.

To download GTK PopStation, click on the link below. If you have any questions of suggestions, feel free to talk about this release on the QJ forums by clicking on the "discuss" link below.

Download: [GTK PopStation - binaries]
Download: [GTK PopStation - source code]
Discuss: [Forum release thread]

It's a couple of days late, but we think it can still afford to be labeled important news. Now up for beta testing is the Gentoo PPC64 PS3 LiveCD, which will enable you to use a GNOME desktop environment on both the PS3 and the G5 Apple PowerMac.

If you don't know what GNOME is, it's a kind of open-source desktop environment that people have updated with open source versions of the software normally found in other operating systems. In other words, it's an alternative desktop choice that also has a big, supportive fanbase for newbie questions.

In addition to GNOME, the LiveCD also has Audacious, Evolution, Firefox 2-X (Bon Echo), Gaim, Gimp-2, and Xchat software included, which make it a pretty hefty package. You can find more information on the ins and outs of this new development at the source, and feel free to check the additional link for download mirrors. Just look for the "experimental/ppc64/livecd" directory in your respective mirror sites. Enjoy!

Offsite Link: [Gentoo Download Mirrors]

Three days after hitchhikr released PSPTex v1.03, he came up with the updated version: PSPTex v1.04.

We already mentioned the details on the first version of the application, PSPTex v1.01, but for the sake of those who haven't been acquainted, we'll brush up on a little info here. hitchhikr's app is basically a save plugin for GIMP 2.2.x and 2.3.x that allows anyone to create textures on the PSP. The program, apart from being able to save RGBA, indexed textures, and DXTC compressed ones, can also support swizzle mode. It actually has a handful of other features, too, such as generating mipmaps, color key feature, and gray scale to alpha channel texture conversion.

With the updated version in PSPTex v1.04, hitchhkr was able to fix the DXT1 compression and DXT3 fetching issues. Also, the developer added an option to save picture data and palettes as source codes in this version.

Download: [PSPTex v1.04]