Apparently the Nintendo Wii uses bluetooth for its wireless devices. A few clever users found a way to use this with Project64 through third-party drivers and software hacks. There is a video up on youtube about this, here's the video below.

The most important thing you'll need to get this working is a bluetooth dongle, you can find these on eBay rather cheap, and obviously a Nintendo Wiimote. I haven't tried this myself, if anyone has we'd be curiuos to here from others!

Jabo's recent video update brought up the issue of Windows version compatibility. Currently the core PJ64 team all use WinXP or MCE but we want to assure people that the recently launched Windows Vista will definitely be supported in the next version of PJ64, and internally (for members) will be supported... as soon as Jabo gets access to Vista to develop on (the next build hopefully, so a matter of weeks).

So the list of supported operating systems for PJ64 will include at least: XP, Vista and the MCE (Media Center) versions of both (if there's time we have planned some features specifically for cabinets&HTPCs)

The question is, should we drop support for Win98&WinME at this point? I think probably we're better off spending our limited time on other things, like MCE support and emulation, but here's your chance to make a case for supporting Win98 - or for dropping it. also, is Win2000 support important to people? Please use the comments if you have any opinions on any of this.

Before we start with the best part of this blog series, if you haven’t read the first part I suggest going back a few posts and doing that, its kind of a prerequisite.

 Now that our textures are baked … er dumped, we have made a replacement for a texture and we want to test it out in a game, we take the replacement texture of the same name and place it in the textures-load folder underneath the PJ installation folder. This is a simple, yet effective way to start testing new images, no fuss just – moving files. 32-bit RGBA PNG files are supported … as well as the preferred format of DXT compressed textures since they are significantly smaller and load fast.

To make a bunch of textures into a pack you simply put them into a zip file, with a file in the root called 'pack.xml'. As you can guess PJ supports the ability to load textures from a zip file, so you don't have to extract hundreds of images as well. Below is an example pack.xml from a mario kart texture pack.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<pack>
 <supported>
   <rdb>C3B6DE9D-65D2DE76-C:50</rdb>
   <rdb>2577C7D4-D18FAAAE-C:50</rdb>
   <rdb>6BFF4758-E5FF5D5E-C:4A</rdb>
   <rdb>C9C3A987-5810344C-C:4A</rdb>
   <rdb>3E5055B6-2E92DA52-C:45</rdb>
 </supported>
 <author>Kerber2k</author>
 <version>1.2</version>
 <description>Mario Kart Pack</description>
</pack>

This complete package defines what games it applies to, as well as who created it. For a user who downloaded this zip file to their desktop -- they can either right click in the rom  browser and select "Install Pack" from the menu or manually move the ZIP file into the textures-load folder.

This next part is cool, and one aspect I’m particularly happy with. To use the texture pack right click on the game you want to play and click “select texture pack” as shown above.

This dialog will show you all the available texture packs available for the game that you selected as well as the one currently in use for that particular game. The nice part about this is you can have multiple packs installed for multiple games at once.

So in closing, this is one feature people have wanted the PJ core team to have for a while, I know it took a long time but I think it was well worth the wait

Seems there was a bug in some of the new code that handled self modified code. It broke half a dozen reported games, that has now been fixed and a new build has been uploaded.