There’s a new bugfix for Linux NEStopia, bringing it up to 1.40 Release H. This fixes issues with keyboard inputs getting stuck in some circumstances.

Richard Bannister and I decided to stop monkeying around with beta numbers and call the new Audio Overload release 2.0, as in final. 33 music formats are now supported, including the big new addition of .DSF (Dreamcast sound rips). As always I’ve built native 32 and 64 bit versions for both Linux and Windows. Find out more from this forum post or go straight to the download page.

I am extremely proud to announce the release of NEStopia 1.40 release A B C D E F G for Linux. You can find it on the NEStopia Linux page.

This brings all the NEStopia core improvements since 1.37 to Linux and also a vastly improved and reworked new Linux GUI shell, with many new features supported. Some of the highlights include an archive browser, updated 7zip support, a Cheat Manager, more flexible video configuration, automatic soft-patching, support for XML ROMs, start button support so you can play the Vs. system games, and more. Have a fun!

I’ve had a lot of major updates this week to get used to, and I thought I’d say a few words about ’em. (Note: Revised one major section!)

– Fedora 9 is nice as usual, although also as usual you get a noticably better system if you back up your home directory and do a complete wipe-the-drive new install. For whatever reason Anaconda just doesn’t always cough up a perfectly working system when you just have it upgrade. I think this is why people use Ubuntu.

Pluses: the new PulseAudio no longer has infinite latency and it plays a lot nicer with everything than it did in F8. Minus: KDE3-based apps like Amarok and KMail wouldn’t work properly after pulling down al the updates. A reboot or 2 later and they’re happy again – I have Amarok blasting away as I type this. Still not sure what actually went wrong though.

– Firefox 3 is snappier and uses less memory. However, the “AwesomeBar” (new super-auto-completing URL entry field) is the worst idea in software since ever. Luckily the “OldBar” add-on restores sanity.

– KDE 4 (4.0.5 specifically) is a lot nicer than I’d initially feared. The good: KTorrent’s been upgraded to 4.x spec and they didn’t change a thing (yay!), there’s a bunch of whizzy Compiz effects you can enable without making everything explode like in 3.5, and the new concept where widgets are everything and everything’s a widget is very powerful and very customizable once you get your head around it. The bad: it defaults to having all manner of intrusive sounds and I couldn’t figure out how to shut them off on a notification-by-notification basis so I ended up just turning off all KDE-generated sound.