August 2002

DRC300N Photos & Video 8/27/2002 by K3V

UPDATE: It seems the DRC300N does play homebrew games after all. BeefMan was able to get Doom running rock-solid for an hour straight by removing a few lines of N50x-specific code from the source. So, ironically, this machine can run homebrew games but not official NUON games. He is going about testing a few other games to see how consistently homebrew stuff will run. We've got a bunch of pictures of the RCA DRC300N, sent in from BeefMan who just got the machine today. He reports that the player does not run official NUON games or homebrew stuff. The VLM is high-res, but is only in random mode - i.e. you can't select the effects. The three videos show Doom loading and freezing, T3K getting a disc incompatibility error, and a sampling of the VLM. Check out the batch of photos & video in the updated DRC300N Preview.

New Game Release: Snake! 8/27/2002 by K3V

A new open platform game was released today in the form of Snake by Chad "BeefMan" Tindle. Check the Snake page in the Download section for screenshots, gameplay features, the readme file and to download it and try it out for yourself. BeefMan says that "This is a game that most of you know as Nibbles in DOS and later as Snake on the Nokia cell phones. This is my first real attempt at a game and it seemed like the simplest type to try and implement for NUON." I've gotten some good playtime in on the game, and 2 player mode especially fun if you've got someone to go up against. Also be sure to check out the cool NUON logo and title screen provided by yours truly.

The Peripheral Side of NUON 8/26/2002 by K3V

A collection of NUON-related images and files is now available for purchase from former VM Labs Director of Peripheral Licensing, Don Thomas. To purchase and for more information, visit ICWhen. Here is a description of what you'll find on the disc: The disc offered here is a commemorative compilation of images and files created between June 25, 1999 and June 29, 2001. They were taken and collected by Donald A. Thomas, Jr., Director of Peripheral Licensing. It was Don's job to attract and sign up third-party companies to make, and distribute an assortment of video game controllers and other peripherals and accessories. In all, Don signed up five companies and two of them actually made product that shipped. The content of this disc is largely from that one perspective with images of controller prototypes, diagrams and more. Also included are behind-the-scenes shots from the major trade shows at E3 in Los Angeles and CES in Las Vegas. In all, there are over 420 Mb of data with over 700 files; including BONUS photos from Classic Gaming Expo 1999. None of the images on this disc are offered as forms of art or promised to be high-resolution depictions. Many were captured from a low resolution video camera. But virtually all of the images are exclusive to the disc and not to be found anywhere else on the planet.

Site Upgrade (mostly) Complete! 8/24/2002 by K3V

If you hadn't noticed, the site has been completely overhauled with a new look which is much quicker to load and is hopefully more functional. Some of the main pages need to be tweaked, and the Unreleased Games still need to be converted to the new style, but other than that the change is complete. Did I miss something? Love or hate the new look? Drop a note over in the forums!

RCA DRC300N Now Available! 8/22/2002 by K3V

The NUON-Enhanced RCA DRC300N is now available on RCA.com. This is the first, and perhaps only North-American NUON DVD player with the Aries 3 processor inside, but does not feature NUON ports. Other features are MP3Pro support, High Resolution VLM and Digital PhotoView™. I called their sales number and they confirmed that they do have them in-stock, and got some names of stores that MAY have them in stock: Radio Shack, Circuit City, K-Mart and Sears. You can order one by heading to this page on RCA's website and scrolling down to the "Order Now" button. The price is $149, $50 less than the MSRP of $199.

Decaying Orbit Progress 8/22/2002 by K3V

DragonShadow Industries continues to make progress on the port of their Yaroze game, Decaying Orbit. Today a small demo of a splash screen and moving starfield was posted to the DragonShadow site, along with more info on how things with the port are progressing. Check that out if you're curious to see the first displaying sprites for Decaying Orbit running on your NUON.

Doom Source Code and CD Reading Library 8/19/2002 by K3V

The source code for Doom has been added to the Doom Page, which (aside from being great from a programming standpoint), has some great documentation on how the port came about. Here's an excerpt: "Notes on Porting DOOM to Merlin Eric R. Smith, VM Labs Inc. 0. INTRODUCTION Most of you have probably seen the infamous DOOM demo on Merlin, and heard the story of how quickly it was ported. I managed to get DOOM up and running very soon after id Software released the source code in December of 1997. Once it was running, other more pressing priorities intervened. Matthew kept urging me to write something up about the port. John and Andreas suggested that we should try getting audio to work. And various people suggested that I should look at speeding it up (let's face it, the quick n' dirty port running on 1 MPE and without any knowledge of Merlin was not very impressive). So several months after doing the initial port, I dove back into the code. Well, "dove" is probably an overstatement -- there were still more pressing priorities, but I did manage to steal some time from other things. I started over from scratch, and kept notes on what I did." Also now available for download is the CD Reading Library which allows Samsung N50x machines to access more than 4.5 MB of data on open SDK applications. Included is a sample program that will read all MIDI files on a CD. ( Note: Midi files have to be in format 0. Use the SDK tool "mergemf.exe" to convert the midi files first.)

New Synth Demo and Updated libsynth.a 8/15/2002 by K3V

Some new files are available for download thanks to Andreas Binner. Two Synth Demos (known as wurlitz1 and wurlitz2) which are more goodies from the early days of VM Labs, and an updated libsynth.a which corrects a bug in the SDK that prevented the synth from working on open-platform apps.

Breakout Back on Track 8/15/2002 by K3V

Stephen Anderson has decided to continue development on Breakout after a 5 month hiatus. An Official Site is being constructed where eventually you will be able to find screenshots and other information on this in-progress game for NUON. Be sure to download the current version of Breakout, and leave some feedback/input/comments over in the forums.

Doom Update/Fix 8/14/2002 by K3V

The original Doom file had a glitch that wouldn't allow the second level to load properly. The Doom zip file has been updated with the fixed nuon.cd, so those of you who downloaded the original will have to give it another shot with this one.

Doom for NUON is Here 8/13/2002 by K3V

Remember that much-talked-about "weekend port" of Doom that was put together early in the life of Project X/NUON? Well, now thanks to Andreas Binner you can check it out on your Samsung N501 (or N504 or N505) by downloading it here. You'll notice that there are 2 files in the zip. Once extracted, burn both to the root directory of your CDR, in the same manner you would burn a standard NUON game or application. You'll notice that the game and .wad file total more than 4.5 MB, which is fine since a library was written to allow separate files to be read at runtime. More details to come, but in the meantime, get playing some Doom! Update: The Doom Page is now up on the Games Page featuring the download, screenshots, DVD Case artwork and CD Label art. Dig in!

T3K MP3's Now Available 8/11/2002 by K3V

All of the T3K-specific songs (meaning everything that wasn't on the original T2K soundtrack) have been added to the Media Page in MP3 format. Thanks to Skah_T of DragonShadow Industries for sharing the files with NUON-Dome!

N501 Blue LED Mod 8/5/2002 by K3V

NUON-Dome Forum member Shemp Mo-Din posted a cool mod for the Samsung DVD-N501 which replaces the red Standby LED with a blue one to match the display of the machine better. You can read the how-to over in the forums, and be on the lookout for some pictures that follow along in the procedure.