Let's immediately overlook the suggestion that Asphalt 4 drivers have girls locked away, and only set them free when it comes to taking them on high-speed, nitro-fuelled burnouts around the city. Although that concept is somewhat in keeping with the loading screen's hints and tips that advise you to perform 'illegal acts' to earn more money and get on the telly. It's all in good humour and is in no way the kind of gameplay that'd rile up, but there is something a tad gratuitous about the way Asphalt 4 attempts to court controversy right from the start. Being chased by smokies is a great addition to a city-based racing game, but curt statements about how cool it is to do illegal things (without specifying their gaming benefit or making them particularly apparent during play) comes across as quite distasteful.
Putting our pedal to the floor, we'll race past the vulgarity of strained controversy and check out this latest addition to the popular Asphalt franchise. This standard version (as opposed to the also available), doesn't make a huge improvement on the previous game, but it does make a small effort to give fans something extra to burn their rubber on. New cars, new tracks and new girls form the crux of those additions, which is no bad thing as these are the core elements of modern racing games. Gameloft has had a lot of practice when it comes to making these urban racing games, so naturally Asphalt 4 is well polished. The different game modes add a decent number of reasons to circle the same, albeit diverse, city circuits that bring the game closer to typical console racers than previously seen. The Cop Chase and Beat 'em All modes are particularly interesting and give the game a significantly different tang from the usual knockout racing.
The addition of police involvement in the races also throws an intriguing spanner in the works (I love that phrase), and gives you something else to contend with other than simply jabbing away at the boost button in an attempt to squeeze past the next competitor. But that doesn't entirely camouflage Asphalt 4's underlying problem. The game is anchored down by its own far-reaching scope. It struggles as the cars fill up the screen, and when the news chopper sweeps into view to give you 15 minutes of notorious fame, the game system stutters trying to keep up.
Lewis Hamilton has declared his new love for motorbike racing after completing a test day. Sebastian Vettel set the fastest time on the first day of Abu Dhabi's. Learn more details about Asphalt 4: Elite Racing for Nintendo DS and take a look at gameplay screenshots and videos.
Hitting the boost button in busy traffic jumps the car ahead a few hundred yards, often into a building or streetlamp, with enough of a reduced frame rate for your to lose all visual coherence. The drift function, which is remarkably slick in operation, works by sliding your thumb up from the '4' or '6' buttons (which control steering) onto '1' or '3'.
The car then begins to slide around the corners and, with careful control, you can perform some pretty amazing and reckless rubber-burning antics around the tracks while adding a pseudo-analogue steering mechanic to the gameplay. Other than this superb drift capability on the corners, the driving feels rather disjointed. One moment you'll be catching up on the car you're chasing, the next you've fallen behind without any clear indication as to where your lead boots went. The Police will come and go seemingly at random, while the boost is so negligible on a pimped out motor that you feel to be very limited in your top speeds.
There's no denying the Asphalt series is an overall success, but this fourth game doesn't offer enough to warrant a significant resurgence of interest. Mobile racing fans without a hot new car to drive should certainly look into Asphalt 4, but casual gamers or those who're expecting a noteworthy upgrade from the third instalment might find pickings a little slim.
Just uploaded no$gba v2.8. The new version is now having real non-experimental DSi emulation. And it's more or less working with DSi software. So far, it's tested with two DSi cartridges, and two DSiware programs: System Flaw (cartridge): Works, but the camera emulation is showing only a dummy picture with snow (which is making the game unplayable, since it misuses the camera as gyro sensor). Cooking Coach (cartridge): Hangs for whatever reason. It doesn't seem to be related to DSi I/O ports, so it might be some more basic problem, like some of the new/bigger memory regions not being properly emulated yet, or some memory not being initialized as how the DSi firmware would do it) (running the game in NDS mode works, the problem occurs only in DSi mode. DSi Browser (DSiware): Boots, but complains about non-emulated WLAN access point.
Flipnote Studio (DSiware): Hangs for whatever reason, might be the same problem as with cooking coach. Would be great if anybody figures out what is causing the problems! DSi emulation requires a copy of the lower 32K-halves of the ARM7/ARM9 BIOSes (BIOSDSI7.ROM and BIOSDSI9.ROM). And don't forget to enable DSi emulation (default is still set to NDS mode, for better compatibility with games like Cooking Coach). Some advice on how to capture camera pictures under windows would be nice! I need something with good backwards compatibility (which would be probably directshow), and it should be something that can be implemented by plain source code (without code from external libraries). Thanks so much for this release nocash, very nice work with DSI enhanced features.
Hope you continue keep it up!, and maybe it could work upto 3ds someday too!, Now that Citra can nearly run Cave Story at good speed and Zelda OOT at slow speed, We may see some think that may come up with you're own work!, from ideas of there source codes. Just a though't. Just to let you know, (EXiMiUS) (PROPER) are now release-ing New games with full DSI enhanced DATA dump's, included camera data. I have Reported to avast to clear false positive, Then I can test it!. EDIT: Emulation is no longer broken from no$gba 2.7d, Thanks nocash! Having the bios is better since my BIOS clone isn't reproducing all DSi functions.
It's supporting most of them though. For the four tested DSi games (see above), it doesn't seem to matter if you have the DSi bios or not. Only requirement is that you need the old NDS bios in case that the NDS/DSi games are containing a blowfish encrypted secure area (you will see a warning message in that case). None of that four games is causing a 'CPU - Bad operation, Undefined Opcode' warning. Are you sure that you have dumped the complete cartridge including the DSi specific areas? Hitting undefined opcodes wouldn't be too surprising if the games are crashing for whatever reason.
![Set Set](http://dsmedia.ign.com/ds/image/object/143/14348421/Asphalt-4-Elite-Racing_DSiWare.jpg)
It's just something that didn't happen with that four games. For the four tested DSi games (see above), it doesn't seem to matter if you have the DSi bios or not. Only requirement is that you need the old NDS bios in case that the NDS/DSi games are containing a blowfish encrypted secure area (you will see a warning message in that case). None of that four games is causing a 'CPU - Bad operation, Undefined Opcode' warning. Are you sure that you have dumped the complete cartridge including the DSi specific areas? Hitting undefined opcodes wouldn't be too surprising if the games are crashing for whatever reason.
It's just something that didn't happen with that four games. My current config: - win7 x64 - no$gba 2.8 debug version - NDS mode set to 'DSi retail' - BIOSGBA.ROM, BIOSNDS7.ROM, BIOSNDS9.ROM are in the same folder as no$gba.exe - game roms are in the same folder as no$gba.exe too When I try to launch a rom I can confirm that 'DSI9' is noted at the windows' bottom right corner. I tried all the recent roms released by eximius last month. Their nfo said that DSi sections are present so it should be ok.
Secure area is decrypted, but not the DSi parts. In the best cases I got a white (or black) screen, with no image/sound. In the worst ones I got the message 'CPU - Bad operation: Undefined Opcode' But no problem at all with the NDS mode, all games are booting fine. Am I the only one experiencing this? Some good news from my side too.
I finally managed to get it working. Results after some tests: - for DSiwares I got the same results as the compatibily list posted in the other thread. Lot of them can't boot and hand on a white screen. Few others can be played fine, sometimes with minor grafx issues.
Corrupted save error is present with all of them. For dsi only titles I tested System Flaw. Got it running fine with the grey fog instead of camera capture, as announced. for ds titles with dsi features, the results are different depending of the title.
![Asphalt 4 Elite Racing Dsi Rom Set Asphalt 4 Elite Racing Dsi Rom Set](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125498680/812036069.png)
Pokemon Black/white games are displaying a white screen directly when they boot but won't go further. And for games like SolatoRobo, Tron Evolution, Personnal Coach and all the recent Eximius titles I directly got 'CPU - Bad operation, Undefined Opcode' warning. Hope it helps a bit Nocash. Keep on your hard work, results are already really impressive! That old problem. I would assume that it is still there. I don't have that game.
And for the 5-10 games that I do have: My PC is too slow to play continous sound in any NDS games. So to me, all NDS games are sounding totally distorted.
Which is making it hard to test if the sound emu is flawless (I have mainly tested it by comparing the binary data from the capture unit, which should give 1:1 exact results, but I seem to have missed some small detail somewhere). Does anybody know if that game is doing anything special with sound hardware?
When having looked at a wav recording, it appeared as if there would be some overflow problems; cutting off the sign bits of the samples instead of saturating them to min/max values (?) fixing that kind of problems would be probably quite simple. I didn't find any saturation bugs in no$gba though (aside from the two 'Capture Bugs' which should theoretically occur on real hardware, too, unless there are ways to avoid those glitches).