Pianoteq : Celeste add-on

Modartt presents Celeste (Celesta & Glockenspiel) add-on for Pianoteq. Audio demos are available. It is priced 49 euros.

Sarah McLachlan : Laws of Illusion

New album of Sarah McLachlan, Laws of Illusion, has been available for close to two weeks. The sound is great (very warm and strong piano, that reminds Galaxy Vintage D or Roland’s Complete Piano), and one song distinguishes from the whole, Love Come, also provided as a solo piano version.
What seems uncommon is that we can listen to the full songs at deezer.

Spectrum games from a browser

The site zxspectrum.net allows to play Spectrum games from a browser. For year 1988 for example we can find Gauntlet II (choose the Keyboard option for characters control, and then use shift 1 to go up for the first character, Q to go down, S for left, D for right, and Z to fire).

ZX Nostalgia for iPhone

A ZX Spectrum emulator, ZX Nostalgia, appeared at the AppStore (0,99$). It is bundled with 14 games (among those the famous Manic Miner) and allows 100% of original performance, on all iPhone models. Display can be set to portrait or landscape.
The developer stated that a future update will bring an Add buton for in-game purchase of new games. First users reviews report that the provided virtual joystick (that is displayed contextually) isn’t well suited for some games, and that a fixed virtual D-pad option would be required, as well as a virtual keyboard if adventure games are added later.
Games license question (not easy as most companies do not exist anymore, and rights owners often prefer not giving written agreement) is explained further at worldofspectrum site.

Dragon’s Lair not working with iOS4

Dragon’s Lair does not work anymore since iOS4 update (no controls displayed). We can find a related thread here at EA forums.

Lemmings porting to iPhone

The site mobile1up opened a blog about porting Lemmings to iPhone and Palm Pre (from Palm OS). It only took 31 hours !

Hollywood Strings 1.0.1 update

EastWest provides a 1.0.1 update to Hollywood Strings.

IE9 / HTML5 rocks

The latest IE9 preview brings support for GPU accelerated 2D Canvas, as well as Web Open Font Format management, and some of CSS3. We can then expect Silverlight’s core moving to HTML5, in the same way as Adobe’s supposed Flash transition.

Google provides HTML5 tutorials.

X-Plane 9.55 update

A 9.55 update to X-Plane is available for iPhone. It brings a new option (storms) in wheather conditions settings.

Real Racing 1.22 : better textures/gyroscope

A 1.22 update of Real Racing is available at the AppStore : it brings higher resolution textures, better performance and support for gyroscope on iPhone 4, anti-alisasing on iPhone 3GS (not 3G) when using iOS4, multitasking, and various fixes and enhancements.

EA discounts at AppStore

EA provides discounts on some of its games at the AppStore during 48h (are available for 0,99$) : Need for Speed Shift, Need For Speed Undercover, Sim City, Dragon’s Lair, etc.

OnLive review

At Wolfwire blog we can read a review of OnLive gaming platform (provides FPS games whose images are computed on remote data centers, in the same way as Quake Live). The used bandwith is 5,5 mbits/s (700 kbyte/s), as required to transfer at least 30 (compressed) images per second. Recent famous game Mass Effects 2 is however missing, due to exclusive avaibility for Windows and Xbox.