The Dolphin Team has released a new update for the Gamecube, Nintendo Wi and Triforce emulator for Windows. The latest unofficial SVN build of Dolphin features lots of code cleanups, additional new features, minor speedups and various other improvements.


Download: Dolphin Unofficial SVN build 4525

Alex St. John, the CEO of online video game company WildTangent, has predicted at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle that consoles will be "extinct" by 2020. He said that "the PS3, the Wii and the X-box are the last generation of consoles that you either see or that anybody regards as successful in the market." Want to know what else he had to say? Well, the "read more" link is right below, use it.

Whoa, hold your horses, people - we say preliminary Wii support because while there is Wii remote and emulation code integrated into the latest build of Dolphin, the GameCube emulator does not successfully play Wii games. Also note that while this update is Wii-centric and applies directly to Windows gamers, it's essentially here to call out to developers who would like to pick up the project. Learn more about it at the full story.

One topic that this year's Nordic Game conference aims to discuss is regarding game development. To this end, Nordic's organizers have unveiled their initial line-up of professional programmers who will be giving talks at the event grounds. Details are available in the full article.

Middleware provider AtOnce Technologies recently announced that its tools suite called Neova CoreEngine is now compatible with the Nintendo Wii. This is something game developers should be excited about as this tool could possibly cut down on the development time of video games.

Furthermore, the Neova CoreEngine was designed for game developers and is said to offer "all services related to hardware facilitating its high-performance use." Among the things touched on by this tool is 2D and 3D display, sound, input/output, streaming, and memory management not to mention management of the Wiimote.

The middleware suite is also said to be compatible with existing toolchains and production flow due to its open and modular architecture. This compatibility should also theoretically make cross-platform compilation significantly easier.

So far, the Neova supports the Nintendo Wii, Sony consoles PlayStation 2 (PS2) and PlayStation Portable (PSP), as well as DirectX. Companies should really be taking a long hard look at this product to see if it will help speed up production times on the games that are currently under development.

The whole videogame industry is currently in the middle of the transition to high-definition next gen visuals with the introduction of DirectX 10, and to make the transition an easier process, here comes Nvidia with the "definitive" game development platform, Nvidia SDK 10.

The core of Nvidia's new platform is the new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit. It promises to "save developers time and money in creating games that deliver almost lifelike graphics and physics realism." The platform consists of Nvidia GeForce(R) 8 Series graphics cards, Nvidia nForce(R) 680 motherboards, and DirectX 10.

The new NVIDIA Developer Toolkit also includes instructive code samples, advanced shaders, performance tuning, and more, all in a bid to make the creation of Microsoft DirectX 10-compatible games easier.

The Nvidia Developer Toolkit also includes the following:

• SDK 10: all-new DirectX 10, OpenGL, and CUDA code samples for the latest GPUs
• Texture Tools: Powerful libraries and plug-ins for working with textures - now with DirectX 10 support and approximately 10x faster due to GPU acceleration via CUDA
• PerfKit 5: powerful tools for debugging and profiling GPU applications for Windows Vista and DirectX 10 -- now with shader edit-and-continue, render state modification, customizable graphs and counters, and more
• ShaderPerf 2: detailed shader performance information with support for new drivers
• FX Composer 2: a world-class development environment for cross-platform shader authoring; DirectX and OpenGL support with HLSL, Cg, and COLLADA FX
• Shader Library: the world's largest collection of GPU shaders featuring more than 100 different shader effects and support for external submissions

Nvidia is currently demonstrating the entire development platform and distributing some of its components free of charge at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).