I bought and Guru dumped Metro/Enix’s Bust a Move 2, known outside Japan as Bust a Groove 2. Not as good as the original cult favorite dancing game due to a less interesting soundtrack, but still well worth a play and better than the later “Dance Contest 2001”. The emulation currently lacks the music (which streams from a hard disk under the control of an H8/3644 MCU) but the MCU checks pass correctly so it at least detects the proper device and starts. (All of the game graphics and data are on ROMs).

If you’re wondering about all the logos, Metro developed the game for Enix, who also published the Japanese PS1 version. (Sony’s 989 Studios did the English localization and published it outside of Japan). Namco did the arcade distribution and possibly the custom ZN-1 based hardware design. The other 2 logos are the design guys and the record company: the panda is Frame Graphics, and the other logo is of course EastWest Japan. (Thanks to Justin Kerk for correcting this).

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.

Tomorrow is Aaron’s panel. I figure the artiest possible way to cover the material would be to just pull out a boombox, play Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”, and then leave. Aaron’s probably not that arty though.

The initial version of the SH-2 UDRC frontend has been submitted. It’s missing the “direct RAM” feature that will make it much faster, but performance is already promising. For example, a -nosound -nothrottle -str 120 run on sfiii3 gets 609% on stock 0.126 and 961% with the DRC. The results are less flashy on more intense games like diehard (230% on 0.126, 278% on the DRC), but there’s still a consistent gain over the interpreter and hopefully more to come.