As you might've noticed as a Mac user, the regular updates have been lacking quite a bit. This has two reason: one is several hardware failures of my Mac, and thus not being able to do any compiling at all; the other is PPC/x86 compilation support broke for me since revision 12184.

Update:
Maarten ten Huurne (mth) has done some nice work today, and after mth and I both successfully compiled x86 and ppc using the 10.6 SDK from XCode 3, he committed several patches that now allow me to continue making Mac OS X Universal builds that should support PPC, X86 (i386) and x86_64 architectures.

What does this mean for you?
It means that from now on that you, the mac user, can now just grab the most recent builds from the Mac OS X Universal Builds directory again, regardless of whether you use Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard! (I assume Lion will work without problems as well, but I haven't been able to test this yet).
Sadly my MacBook Pro is having hardware issues again, so I still won't be able to continue the regular uploading of builds.

The openMSX team was preparing for the official 0.8.1 release and therefor we had some Preview Builds (release candidates) available here on the openMSX Builder that already have been marked as 0.8.1. Please note that the versions we have here, are *not* an official 0.8.1 release yet..
32-bit Windows users were able to grab the 0.8.1 Preview ZIP archive for x86 or the 0.8.1 Preview Installer for x86.
64-bit Windows users had the chance to go for the 0.8.1 Preview ZIP archive for x64 or 0.8.1 Preview Installer for x64 instead.
Mac OS X users finally had access again to a new 0.8.1 Preview build for Mac OS X x86_64 that was on Snow Leopard.

Updated 15 March 2011:
Removed the links to the release candidates because they have been outdated by the Official 0.8.1 Release.

Just a small note to let you know I’ve cleaned up the stored builds. All 0.7.2 builds and some of the earlier 0.8.0 builds have been removed from the windows and mac directories.
I’ll be regularly cleaning up these directories to conserve disk space.

Have you ever tried to record a video of a game or demo, only to find out the sound went out of sync half-way due to a frame rate switch while recording?
BiFiMSX and FiXato have been working on a script that will help work around this by stopping the recording and immediately starting a new one as soon as it detects a frame rate change.
Download and save it as vblank.tcl into your openMSX scripts directory, usually ~/.openMSX/share/scripts on *NIX systems or My Documents/openMSX/share/scripts in Windows.

The next step is to load your software in openMSX, open the console and type:
record_with_vblank -doublesize -prefix "My video name"
For instance:
record_with_vblank -doublesize -prefix "\[MSX\] N.O.P. - Unknown Reality - "

Files will now be saved into your openMSX user video directory as [MSX] N.O.P. - Unknown Reality - NNNN.avi where NNNN is a number that will automatically be incremented.

If you find bugs or have suggestions, feel free to fix them yourself if you have a GitHub account, or contact FiXato, optionally via Facebook, or leave a comment here.

Thanks to the services of Disqus you can now leave comments on the blog posts here, using various social network profiles.
I’m still trying to enable Facebook Connect for Disqus as well, but so far no luck; most likely due to a bug on their end.
Anyway, have fun commenting!

I have finished some more cosmetic changes to the site this evening. Since the lowest resolution used by the visitors seems to be 1024x768, the content area of the page has been made a bit wider, giving space to more text.
The sidebar has been condensed a bit too, hopefully putting everything in sight for users of resolutions of 1024x768 and above.

As for openMSX, development is coming along nicely still. The devs are doing a good job on optimising openMSX even further, mostly by improving parsing of the XML files.
Also the replay loading should be sped up now and the directory creation of savereplay should be fixed.

Join us on Facebook, or pop into the #openMSX chatroom on FreeNode and let us know what you think of openMSX and what you would still like to see.

I’ve recently made some small changes to the site.
Google Analytics and some small Adsense links have been added to the site and the index listings, hopefully assisting in tracking the site’s traffic.
Another change I made to the index listing is setting the default sort order to descending modification dates. This means that the latest builds should now appear at the top of the build listings.
The last changes are minor layout changes, so there is a bit more space for the content. I’m still not quite satisfied and might make the site a bit wider, depending on the results of the site stats provided by Google Analytics.

Finally I’d like to point out the new openMSX Facebook group started by Vampier. It tries to keep you up to date with all openMSX-related information such as tutorials and latest features.

The openMSX team over at openMSX.SourceForge.net have just officially released version 0.8.0 after several days of testing with release candidates.
After some mirroring this latest release was cleverly nicknamed CSI Dresal.

If you are reading this here, chances are you’ve already been testing a few of the latest new features in 0.8.0, including Laserdisc and reverse support, as they’ve already been in the unofficial 0.7.2 beta builds available here at openMSX Builder.
A couple of other features and bugfixes worth mentioning include:

• improved debugging, such as the new debuggables keymatrix, joystick ports and romblock,
• several Windows Unicode support fixes,
• several new scripts demonstrating for instance On Screen Display possibilities and experimental Tool Assisted Speedrun utilities.
• the Arc mapper
• trackball emulation.
• 64-bit support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
• and many more

Mobile device and handheld enthusiasts may also be happy to know that Dingoo support has been improved due to several speed and code size optimisations, an added OSD virtual keyboard and a new icon skin for handhelds.

So, without further ado, we are proud to announce openMSX 0.8.0: CSI Dresal:

• openMSX 0.8.0 x86_64 Universal for Mac OS *
• openMSX 0.8.0 for Dingux (Dingoo)
• openMSX 0.8.0 Windows 32-bit Installer
• openMSX 0.8.0 Windows 32-bit Zip Archive
• openMSX 0.8.0 Windows 64-bit Installer
• openMSX 0.8.0 Windows 64-bit Zip Archive
• openMSX 0.8.0 platform-independant source code tarball
• openMSX Catapult 0.8.0 source code tarball

Of course you can find these releases as well in the build directories here at openMSX Builder. Just use the appropriate links in the sidebar on the right to grab the builds for your operating system of choice.
After this release we’ll of course continue with building the upcoming beta builds again, since development on openMSX will continue.

* Note that the Universal build for Mac OS is a little different from the ones I’ve built in the past here on openMSX Builder, since the official build is packaged on Snow Leopard, which added support for 64-bit systems through x86_64, while my unofficial builds are still 32-bit since they are built on Leopard.

If you are still on Leopard and normally run openMSX directly from the command line, you will need to add “arch -i386” in front of it now, to force the app being launched in 32-bit mode. For example:

• `arch -i386 /Applications/openMSX.app/Contents/MacOS/openmsx -machine Boosted_MSX2_EN -diska "~/Downloads/Software/MSX/Music Project/MBWave2/" -ext "msxdos2"`

Or get my unofficial 0.8.0-r11491 32-bit build which shouldn’t have this issue since there is no 64-bit support added to it.

As the openMSX is preparing for the official 0.8.0 release, they’ve set the version number to 0.8.0 for their release candidates.
Result of this is that we now currently have unofficial 0.8.0 preview builds available.

32-bit Windows users can grab the 0.8.0 Preview ZIP archive for x86 or the 0.8.0 Preview Installer for x86.
64-bit Windows users should go for the 0.8.0 Preview ZIP archive for x64 or 0.8.0 Preview Installer for x64 instead.

Mac users can try the openmsx-0.8.0-11486-mac-univ-bin.dmg preview instead.

Please test these preview releases and report any problems to the openMSX team!

As the Mac users might have noticed, I’ve been building Debugger builds on a daily basis, at the same time as the regular openMSX builds.
Since the openMSX and openMSX Debugger projects both share the same repository, and since the builder script was only looking at the most recent revision number, a new Debugger was built every night and tagged with the latest revision number, even though nothing might have changed in the openMSX Debugger project.

I’ve updated the script a bit now so it should only build and release a new openMSX Debugger if there has actually been a change committed to the openMSX Debugger project. Besides this, I’ve also changed the directory to which the Debugger builds are published.
This means that the latest available Debugger build is revision 11151 and is available from the new Mac Debugger Builds directory.
The menu on the right has been updated accordingly.

Please note though that to make the About box show the correct revision number, I’ve applied a building hack by setting the CHANGELOG_REVISION variable myself. I do this because openMSX Debugger normally still determines its revision number from its Changelog, which hasn’t been updated since 10055.
This is a bug in openMSX Debugger and has been reported.

I’ve also updated some older news posts to hopefully reduce some of the technical terms for the Windows users. I kind of hope the Mac users to be more used to terms like x86 and PPC.

Silly me (FiXato) forgot to enable the OPENMSX_TARGET_CPU=univ flag, so all previous Mac OS builds were only aimed at my host system, x86 Leopard. Thanks go out to mth for pointing it out.
However, now that I’ve enabled the above mentioned flag, all openMSX builds for Mac will be Universal builds instead! This means that people still stuck on PPC, should be able to use my new builds as well now.
So, you can now grab the openmsx-0.7.2-11332 universal build straight from the new Mac OS Universal Builds directory. Enjoy it while it’s hot!

Since I’m still on Leopard (Mac OS 10.5.x) instead of Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6.x), I won’t be able to support the new x86_64 platform yet, so don’t expect 64-bit support for Mac yet in these builds.

Thanks to Vampier we’ll also be offering builds for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows from now on! Currently they are still manually build, but he is also working on an automated way.

Till I’ve added links to the latest versions of every build, head over to the Windows Builds directory to grab them!
If you are in doubt whether you need 64-bit or 32-bit, just go for the 32-bit builds (or try a 64-bit build first, since it will just fail to run if you are not on a 64-bit system ).

Since this is based on the default Dark Glass theme provided by RapidWeaver, I’m still working on making it look more unique.
I’d also like to thank Eric Boon for allowing me to use his awesome Penguin icons that are used for the openMSX logo, thanks man!

So, what do I have in mind for this site?

1. Add openMSX-Builder fork instructions
   I’ll be adding a separate page that shows detailed instructions on how you can get started with setting up your own openMSX-Builder and commit your own patches and suggestions. I’m still planning on adding support for automatic builds after each commit, instead of depending only nightly builds. The code is also still untested, so anyone willing to help me out there, would be welcome to do so!
2. Add links
   All the side projects such as the Twitter account and the source code of the builder and site deserve some links in the sidebar as well.
   Of course dynamic links to the latest builds and the index of all builds will be added too!
   Finally, let’s not forget links to the openMSX homepage, compile instructions and project page.
3. Add Twitter widget
   Keep you updated even if you don’t use Twitter yourself.
4. And probably more
   that I can’t think of right now.

Welcome to the first version of openMSX.FiXato.net.

Here you will be able to find the latest builds of openMSX and openMSX-debugger for Mac. These are built automatically every night, straight from their SVN repositories over at SourceForge.
For now you are only able to find Mac OS X builds here, but with help of Vampier we’ll be releasing Windows builds here as well eventually.
If you’d like to know straightaway when a new build is published, be sure to follow @openMSX_Builder on Twitter.
Contributing to the openMSX Builder project is also possible. Just checkout the source at git://github.com/FiXato/openMSX-builder.git or fork the project and commit your changes!

I hope this project will make it easier for Mac users to keep up to date with openMSX, so they can enjoy the new features such as Reverse Replay, before they are officially released!
Also, if you encounter bugs in openMSX, be sure to checkout their Bugtracker and report them if they haven’t been reported already.