On this day in 1996, id Software unleashed Quake on the unsuspecting public. The game’s influence is difficult to overstate, with its pioneering 3D engine inspiring the first wave of 3D accelerator PC expansion card purchases, the establishment of online multiplayer competitive culture, and much more. Perhaps its impact on 3D gaming can only be matched by the same development team’s previous outing with Doom.

At launch, Quake drew criticism for its intense violence and gore, which also echoed Doom’s path to infamy among media and political pundits, and caused problems for ratings boards and regulators. However, id Software ignored such noise, insisting they simply made games they enjoy playing. Quake would be the last major id Software production with the ‘classic lineup’ due to burnout and various personal conflicts, notes Wikipedia.

Looking more closely at the technology behind Quake, it was clear the dev team eschewed ‘faking it with 2.5D tricks’ like in previous seminal PC FPS titles such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, System Shock, and others. Instead, Quake hit the scene with true 3D polygonal worlds and character models. The true 3D transformation meant that for the first time in FPS, games could enjoy real 3D collision and physics, as well as things like fully 360-degree vision and movement, and more.

With id Software’s new game engine arriving in the Pentium era, but still crushing the best CPUs of the time, it made a market for PC 3D accelerators. These add-in cards first became essential to PC gamers in the late 90s with full 3D engine titles arriving, led by Quake. So in the same era, we saw important hardware releases like the 3dfx Voodoo, ATI Rage, and Nvidia Riva cards. QuakeGL became the killer app to drive sales of these products.

As mentioned in the intro, 3D gaming engines and hardware aren’t the only long-lasting legacies we can attribute to Quake. The game also popularized online multiplayer gaming. Another huge influence Quake had was in inspiring (and allowing) the growth of a talented modding community. As well as numerous custom maps and campaigns, the moddability of Quake enabled total conversions like Team Fortress and Quake Rally, to drop a few names.

Quake would inspire imitators, tributes, and influence many more 3D gaming titles in the years and decades to come. There have also been several Quake sequels, remakes, and the game even sparked machinima film-making, where a game’s 3D world becomes a movie set. Many modern developers, including the founders of Valve, first cut their teeth on Quake modding.

Nowadays, folks have the luxury of the complete source code for winquake, glquake, quakeworld, and glquakeworld available on GitHub. It was released “for entertainment and educational purposes,” but under GPL, it can be used for possible commercial projects, too. Those into this kind of digital archaeology may also be interested in the GitHub repositories for Quake 2 and Quake III Arena.

In summary, Quake didn’t just splash down with one big innovation; it was the weight of multiple key advances that made it so important to the history and the future of PC gaming.

Goldeneye Recomp v1.0 has been released on GitHub by developer SunJaycy. Gaming-focused social media channels are excited with this release, which provides “a native PC port of GoldenEye 007 (Xbox 360 / XBLA), built by statically recompiling the original game into C++ with the ReXGlue SDK,” states the dev. “No emulator — the game runs as a real native executable.” I played the original Nintendo 64 classic for hours in the late 1990s, but this version comes with numerous benefits, including support for modern Windows controllers, online multiplayer, widescreen support, and post-FX filters, all at a purported stable 60 FPS frame rate.

GoldenEye was a seminal release for consoles, establishing that FPS games were a compelling proposition beyond the realms of PCs and keyboard/mouse control. Nintendo / Rare showed that slick, responsive FPS controls were possible on a console, and it felt good to play, with widespread praise from both reviewers and fans. In effect, GoldenEye trailblazed this genre on consoles, thanks in part to the N64’s 3D power and sensitive analog controller. Without its strong approval, we may not have seen the subsequent console developments/releases of games like Perfect Dark, Timesplitters, and many more.

Though it may be exciting for old GoldenEye N64 players (and even those who’ve only experienced the game on N64 emulators), getting the GoldenEye 007 — PC Recompilation installed isn’t a cinch right now. As SunJaycy highlights on the GitHub page for the project, “This repository contains no game code or assets. It is only the source that wraps the game (menus, hooks, online, post-FX, build config).” They go on to explain that “You must find the game files yourself. This game was never released publicly.” So, that’s a challenge you’ll have to work through on your own.

If and when you get the Xbox 360 version of the game recompiled for PC, though, you should expect the following thrilling benefits:

• Runs natively on Windows — no emulator, no BIOS.
• Controller support.
• Online multiplayer — host or join matches over the internet (LAN, Hamachi, playit.gg, or a public server).
• In-game pause/settings menu (ESC): video, resolution, frame limit, fullscreen, online setup.
• Post-FX filters (brightness, contrast, saturation, vignette, presets…).
• Smooth, stable 60 FPS (recompiled, with GPU-pacing fixes for the original's frame timing).

Instructions are provided for building the Windows version of the game from its collected sources, plus the Goldeneye Recomp v1.0 code.

Coincidentally, this Recomp release comes as the latest James Bond title, 007 First Light game, rides high in the charts on PCs and current-gen consoles. First Light is also the centerpiece of the latest Nvidia GeForce bundling promotion. PC gamers can grab a free copy of the action-adventure game 007 First Light when they purchase a qualifying GeForce RTX 50-series graphics card, gaming desktop, or laptop.

A quirky tech enthusiast has attempted to load games to their Sega Genesis console through a vinyl record player. “The idea is, basically, we’re going to record the game data as sound and then play it back,” using a turntable connected to a Sega Genesis, explained Throaty Mumbo, a self-described “weird and impractical tech challenge” aficionado. As well as a console and a record deck, a Mega EverDrive Pro and Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board were used for this project. “This should be a quick, easy project,” predicted Throaty, knowingly.

As the TechTuber indicated, this project shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge. The Sega Genesis was released in 1989, offering a super-fast and convenient game cartridge loading system. However, using designed-for-audio media like compact cassette tapes was a common way for home computer users to load apps and games until the mid-1980s, when the slow but widely available and cheap tape format gave way to floppies. Vinyl was/is just another contemporaneous hi-fi audio format.

After introducing the challenge, the first serious step towards the intended goal was to test loading a small homebrew title to the Genesis using the Mega EverDrive Pro cartridge-to-SD card backup system. It worked, as expected.

With that foundation laid, it was time to (re)prove the sound-as-data concept by using an old Nintendo Famicom Data Recorder and a standard cassette tape. A Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was utilized as the bridge to convert audio signals to data ready for the Genesis. It connected to the EverDrive via USB. You can see in the video from around the 25 to 27-minute mark that some small homebrew ROMs were indeed loaded and run on the console (a fractal demo and a version of Breakout) this way.

Now came the time to switch to vinyl. It's only a format change, so what could go wrong? The Teenage Engineering PO-80 Record Factory was chosen as the vinyl player. Assembling this device was a frustrating process for the TechTuber, who blamed the quality of the instructions. Then the Genesis ROM data was transferred to vinyl using a 3.5mm audio connection.

The PO-80 was chosen for its advertised ability as being much more than a player; it can also be used to “cut your very own first 5-inch vinyl record,” according to the packaging shown in the video. Checking out the official PO-80 product page, it is difficult to complain about audio quality, though, as the makers are upfront about this $149 gadget’s “lo-fi sound.” Sadly, lo-fi lived up to its billing, as it simply wasn’t hi-fi enough for storing and playing back Genesis ROM data without corruption.

Throaty spent hours trying to get the loading from PO-80 recorded vinyl to work, fighting against audio clipping (too loud) or inputs being too quiet, but this vinyl-to-Genesis data attempt ultimately failed. At least tape was proven to be a functional, though slow, alternative to game cartridges for the Genesis.

Head Over Heels was a hit isometric arcade puzzler adventure game originally published by Ocean Software in 1987 for home computers. Development of the game’s sequel was canned in 1989, when Ocean decided to pivot to console gaming titles, notes ITV News. However, with retro gaming booming in the 2020s, the sequel has finally been released for Atari ST and Commodore Amiga - 37 years later - coded by original programmer Colin Porch. The sequel’s full title is Return to Blacktooth, a Head Over Heels adventure.

In the ITV News video, we see Colin sat at his trusty Atari ST playing the new Return to Blacktooth game. The veteran developer, now in his 80s, was inspired to finish the work he had started on the Head Over Heels sequel nearly 40 years ago after an Ocean Software reunion event. A conversation with his old Ocean boss spurred Colin into working to complete the game he had started working on, but had then abandoned as it was no longer wanted, 37 years prior.

During the reunion, the programmer's ex-boss said, “Oh, you have to finish it. There’s a big demand for retro games now.” Colin was more than pleased to return to his keyboard to complete the development of Return to Blacktooth. “It’s been a labor of love because I was so passionate about the game,” said the veteran programmer.

As well as appealing to older computer enthusiasts and gamers, retro games can find a market among younger players attracted to the simpler arcade-like experience, which can have a lot in common with recent mobile games. In the case of Return to Blacktooth, though, gamers will find some deep puzzles beneath the cute retro isometric graphics.

Return to Blacktooth features the same pair of characters as the original, Head and Heels, who must explore the game’s five distinct planets (across 300+ rooms) in a quest to collect the priceless crowns. There are a plethora of cunning puzzles, devious traps, and hidden surprises in store, and the two characters’ unique but complementary in-game abilities must be used to succeed.

Your ST or Amiga (or emulator) needs to be configured with at least 1 megabyte of RAM. Sorry to share that bad news during the ongoing RAMpocalypse, half-meg machine owners. The game is ready for download now, priced at $12.99, but Thalamus says physical boxed copies will also become available from Q3 this year.

A Lenovo-branded G02 retro handheld launched in China earlier this month, coming in at an affordable $63.56 on AliExpress compared to the thousands you have to pay for the Lenovo Legion Go 2. There were some questions if this was a legitimate Lenovo product or just another hardware manufacturer using the logo of a prominent brand, but a Lenovo employee in the company’s Product and Licensing department reportedly confirmed to Retro Dodo that it was an official, white-labeled device the company intended to sell only in China. More interestingly, they have unearthed that the handheld ships with thousands of copyrighted games, mostly from Nintendo.

“The G02 device is produced through a regional brand licensing agreement meant for the China market only and is not part of Lenovo’s official global product portfolio,” the company told the publication. “As such, products developed through these agreements may differ from Lenovo products sold through authorized channels.”

However, it wasn’t the handheld’s branding that caught Retro Dodo’s attention — instead, it was the fact that it came with thousands of copyrighted titles out of the box, most of them from Nintendo. It’s unclear if these games are licensed at all; after all, Nintendo is famously protective of its intellectual property, and it’s unlikely that it would readily allow a third-party hardware manufacturer to include Nintendo titles. Furthermore, the Japanese company built a reputation as a litigious company, targeting anyone that poses a threat to its IP.

The G02 is just a white-labeled device, meaning that its manufacturer just signed a deal with Lenovo to use its name for marketing purposes. However, the maker of the Legion Go handhelds still approved the regional licensing deal, even though we’re unsure if it reviewed the final product before it went on sale. One possibility is that the factory behind this retro handheld console loaded these ROMs after approval to boost sales, even though its AliExpress product page does not advertise that it comes with these games. Another alternative hypothetical scenario is that the developers behind this console accidentally included all the titles they were using to test the device in the general release.

Whatever the case, this could become a legal problem for Lenovo. After all, even if it’s just a white-labeled device made by a third-party manufacturer, it still carries the company’s branding. The company, in theory, could do some damage control to prevent this from becoming a bigger issue, like recalling the affected products or remotely deleting them, if possible. But the fact that Nintendo games were likely distributed outside of official channels would catch the attention of the Japanese company’s lawyers.

Retro Games Limited (RGL) has announced that the release of TheA1200 computer has been delayed by almost six months. The Commodore Amiga-emulating full-size A1200-like design has been up for pre-order since Nov 2025, and retro-hungry fans were anticipating deliveries of the first units on June 16, 2026. In a social media post on Wednesday, RGL announced that the machine won’t be available until December 4, 2026. It blamed a combination of “global chip shortages and rising plastic production costs” for the setback. However, the firm insists that TheA1200 specs and pricing will not be adjusted.

In some ways, we are surprised that the release plans for TheA1200 have been impacted by the global chip crunch. An original Amiga 1200 had such puny specs compared to systems nowadays – it used a 14 MHz processor, 2MB (not GB) of RAM, and zero fixed storage, just a floppy disk drive. We would assume RGL is going to create TheA1200 using the magic of emulation and a cheap Allwinner/Rockchip Arm SoC backed by 512MB to 1MB of RAM. However, the tendrils of the AI boom are now beginning to spread and strangle tech production beyond the high-end RAM, NAND, and processor niches.

RGL also notes that TheA1200 OS “isn’t yet where it needs to be.” This aspect of the product is currently functional, it is explained, but for the best possible Amiga experience, the dev team needs more time “to get it right.”

Obviously, delays like this are frustrating to folks who have already endured a protracted pre-order period. An extra (almost) six months of patience is quite a lot to ask. With this in mind, RGL has prepared an FAQ regarding the delays. We’ve embedded the full blurb above, but key takeaways are that pre-orders will stand unless you are fed up enough to cancel, the price isn’t going to change, and the machine specs will not be adjusted. Furthermore, TheA1200 is “fully on track for release on 4^th December 2026,” insists RGL.

We visited the U.S. distributor’s TheA1200 product page on Amazon.com and saw that the machine is still up for pre-order at $189.99 at the time of writing. However, the release date hasn’t yet been updated; it still says “June 16, 2026” is when TheA1200 will become available.

TheA1200’s price looks quite competitive for a bit of retro fun in 2026, with the entry price of even basic computers and SBCs ratcheting up lately. The pre-order value looks even better compared to RGL’s TheA500 Mini, which is listed at $218.95. This well-reviewed Mini Amiga can also play A1200 games, but it doesn’t have a functional keyboard, and thus lacks the real Amiga feel and presence.

Retro computing fans with a love of Commodore now have three more C64 Ultimate products to choose from. The reborn and revitalized Commodore has announced that it will be producing the C64C Ultimate Edition, leveraging the slimmed-down chassis design originally used by machines between 1986 and 1994. Interestingly, the new C64C Ultimate chassis will be made using original Commodore injection molds and tooling. Readers may also be interested in the pre-order pricing of the ‘modernized’ machines, starting at $299 for the BASIC Beige model.

The Commodore 64 Ultimate we reviewed last year was based on the original ‘breadbin’ style devices, which launched in 1982. However, the iconic home computing firm admits that “for many users,” their nostalgia is “intrinsically tied to the C64C.”

Commodore hasn’t just gone out and gotten a compact case redesigned or fabbed from some hobbyist 3D printing source files. The blog about the new C64C boasts that “Commodore has reacquired the original injection tooling that was used to create the plastic housing of the original 40 years ago.” Moreover, the firm has access to original injection molding tooling.

“The C64C molding was created using a 2-point flow pattern that resulted in the plastic cooling unevenly in the original production run, creating faint, semi-circular flow marks that have largely gone unnoticed,” said Peri Fractic, President and CEO and Chief Product Officer, Commodore. “By using the original tooling, we’re even bringing these back. Today, these newly formed marks are a seal of authenticity – the unmistakable signature of genuine Commodore parts born from original molds.”

Under the hood of the new C64C machines, you’ll find the same high-performance recreation of the original Commodore 64, driven in as accurately as possible using FPGA technology. The computing experience will be exactly the same as with the C64U we reviewed.

For icing on the nostalgia cake, fans will notice that, in parallel to the C64U lineup, C64C machines will also be available in BASIC Beige, the translucent Starlight Edition, and the opulent gold Founder’s Edition. For a limited time, these will be up for pre-order priced at $299, $349, and $499, respectively. Unfortunately, Commodore says shipping will only “begin in late 2026,” with the pre-orders page hinting at a late September shipment of the first batch (295 pre-order slots left at the time of writing).

Lastly, Commodore wants to remind retro fans that this is just the latest announcement from its busy roadmap for 2026. We can still look forward to “a number of new initiatives in the coming months,” including new platforms and accessories.

Two new hanadheld gaming devices inspired by legendary '80s home computers are on the way. Retro Games Ltd and Blaze Entertainment joined forces to release the C64 Handheld and the Spectrum Handheld, two $129.99 handheld gaming devices inspired by the legendary 1980s Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum 8-bit home computers, respectively.

The C64 Handheld and Spectrum Handhelds aim to capture the nostalgia of retro gaming but also deliver convenience and portability. The portable gaming devices arrive in a clamshell form factor that measures 5.35 x 1.02 x 3.39 inches (136 x 26 x 86m m) and weighs just 0.52 pounds (235 grams). The C64 Handheld sticks to the classic beige theme, while The Spectrum features a sleek, black exterior. The D-pad, face buttons, and four mappable function keys are the same on both devices, except that the former is plastic and the latter is rubber.

Both handheld gaming consoles leverage 4.3-inch IPS screens. with a resolution of 840 x 480, which is sufficient for those old-school 8-bit titles. Meanwhile, a quad-core processor with a 1.2 GHz clock speed and 256 MB of DDR memory powers the C64 and Spectrum handhelds. The devices come with a 2,000 mAh battery that offers three hours of battery life and charge via a standard USB Type-C port.

The C64 Handheld and Spectrum Handheld Specifications

The handhelds come with a USB Type-A port for connecting a keyboard or joystick, if you prefer to play the old-fashioned way. Additionally, both devices have high-quality stereo speakers and a standard 3.5m m headphone jack.

Each handheld gaming device comes pre-loaded with an impressive collection of 25 retro titles. The list of games spans from arcade classics to beloved adventure titles. Don't worry if the game you want to play isn't on the list. In addition to the carefully curated selection, the integrated microSD card slot opens up even more possibilities. You can expand the device's game library by using a microSD card to add ROMs you have legally obtained, of course.

The C64 Handheld and The Spectrum Handheld Game List

You can pre-order The C64 Handheld and The Spectrum Handheld for $129.99 at U.S. retailers, including CastleMania Games, Funstock, and Songbird Productions. They are expected to ship on October 15.

There's an exclusive collector's edition, which is exclusive to Funstock and limited to 2,000 units, that includes a hard-shell travel case and an exclusive edition of Crash Magazine in addition to the handheld. The C64 Handheld Collector's Edition and The Spectrum Handheld Collector's Edition retail for a $149.99, a $20 premium over the standard version.

ZSNES is a legendary Super Nintendo Entertainment System emulator with its roots stretching back to the DOS era. Created by zsKnight and Demo, the last major release of this seminal hand-tuned, assembly-coded emulator was nearly two decades ago. It has been reborn this week as Super ZSNES with “super enhancements” powered by your system’s GPU. Rewritten from scratch by the aforementioned dynamic duo, Super ZSNES now boasts “far more accurate CPU and audio cores than the original ZSNES,” as well as a “GPU-powered PPU core.”

See some hands-on Super ZSNES footage and discussion from MVG, above. The RetroTuber has had access to this emulator reboot for a couple of weeks.

Before deciding to go ahead with this project, zsKnight had pondered what to do differently for a reboot. The dev told MVG, “I had to brainstorm a bit, thinking what I could do differently. So, I started out by writing a GPU renderer that replaces a large chunk of the SNES PPU emulation with rendering done mostly on the GPU through shaders.”

The big underlying challenge here was the SNES architecture being CRT-based and GPUs being geometry-based, but zsKnight enjoyed jumping the hurdles. In the first release of Super ZSNES, MVG confirms tasks such as “palette lookups, tile rendering, transparencies, mode 7, color math, main and subscreen combinations, mosaic effects are all handled via GPU shaders.” This architecture unlocks some ‘Super’ enhancements in the new UI, and some intriguing possibilities for coming releases – like high-res textures, for example.

Another aspect of this new emulator that makes it 'Super' is its new Super Enhancement Engine, and it is here that we reckon the new GPU-powered architecture will also often come into play. We’ve tabulated what this means to your old SNES games, below.

Before we go, we note that the new Super ZSNES was put together using Unity. However, the devs insist that there’s been “no vibe coding” and everything under the hood was completed “classic development style.”

Naturally, as this is version 0.100 of the new emulator, there are bugs to be fixed, improvements to implement, and enhancements to come – such as netplay. There’s also a disclaimer that “This is an early build, so there are still emulation bugs and special chips (DSP1, SuperFX, etc.) have yet to be implemented. A bunch of optimization work has yet to be done so performance may be a bit slow.”

MVG notes that zsKnight has highlighted work-life-ZSNES development balance. While the devs are loving being back in the saddle for this project, and the initial reception to the reboot has been great, more direct support via platforms like Patreon would perhaps help oil the wheels.

You can grab Super ZSNES now for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android, and there is an iOS release “coming soon.”

Commodore fans were split earlier this month as an official document revealed the firm planned to prevent tinkerers from loading third-party firmware to the C64 Ultimate computer by locking down such upgrades to the FPGA. The iconic home computer brand has now backed down, reversing the decision but issuing a statement making it clear that users can enjoy “free experimentation, just no free support/replacement for bricked modded units.”

It is evident that the FPGA firmware gatekeeping decision had been a tricky one for the new Commodore. And telegraphing a change “preventing firmware not released by Commodore from being loaded onto the hardware,” split the user base, but we think most comments were on the side of user freedom. As social media and forum discussions heated up on the topic, Commodore published a detailed blog with a point–by-point defense of its new policy.

To be clear, the FPGA firmware flashing blocks were not rolled out yet. The 1.1.0 firmware release simply came with a statement that “A future update may introduce safeguards to help make sure incompatible firmware not released by Commodore does not damage your motherboard.” In the follow-up blog the seminal home computing firm highlighted that it had already seen non-functioning casualties of third-party firmware updates requiring support. This wasn’t sustainable, it reasoned. Servicing “hardware returns and replacements due to actions entirely out of our control” was a step beyond what Commodore was prepared to do.

The new Commodore “values freedom of choice the most.”

The official blog post update from Commodore regarding firmware is pretty clear about the change in policy. “We will not prevent you from installing other firmware on your Commodore 64 Ultimate,” states a key highlighted phrase in the post.

It goes on to say it remains worried about users bricking their C64U machines and then putting in return and replacement requests (under warranty, we guess). However, it admits “that's 'Ultimately' an "us" problem, not a "you" problem.”

In the firmware block policy's place, there will instead be a stern disclaimer. Commodore will insist that “community-installed firmware, patches, or other modifications are used at the owner’s own risk, and Commodore cannot provide free support, free warranty service, or free replacement for units bricked or damaged as a result.” Most retro gaming community and tinkerer folks will probably be pleased with Commodore gracefully bowing to popular pressure on this. It will be interesting to see how the new policy affects the warranty returns process.

Apple’s Pippin was plucked from the tree 30 years ago today. But it turned out to be a rotten Apple, which failed to catch the interest of the public, despite it being heralded as an open standard for home entertainment. From its launch on April 21, 1996, this expensive device with lethargic performance only sold ~42,000 units worldwide. The Pippin was put out of its misery shortly after Steve Jobs returned to the helm in 1997.

The promise of Pippin

Development of the Pippin began shortly after Japanese entertainment firm Bandai approached Apple, hoping to collaborate on a CD-ROM-based living room entertainment system. According to various sources, the project expanded from a scaled-down (680X0 era) Mac that could play games directly from CD-ROMs to a much broader home entertainment device packing a PowerPC chip.

Initial marketing pitched the Pippin as “an integral part of the consumer audiovisual, stereo, and television environment.” Interestingly, Apple didn’t want to be the sole brand behind Pippins, and the devices were ultimately made by Bandai and Katz Media.

Perhaps Apple thought its transition from Motorola 680X0 to PowerPC chips gave its new hardware an unbeatable console performance profile for the time. But despite its computing performance, the early PowerPC chips would be outmaneuvered and outclassed by the broad swing to 3D gaming in 1995/96, which the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64 all successfully capitalized on and grew.

Compared to those rivals, the Pippin looked like a rehashed version of the old guard. Like a CPU-accelerated version of the 3DO or CD32 machines that had already slid by the wayside. Thus, the Pippin definitely failed to catch the coattails of the mid-1990s zeitgeist.

Pippin hardware / software

As we’ve said, the Pippin was based on the PowerPC architecture, which Apple had recently begun transitioning to. These new chips were doing an admirable job making Macs look computationally competitive with Wintel PC clones again, but consoles and home entertainment – and the new era of 3D gaming – would shift public desires. Additionally, the Pippin’s chip, a low-end of the range PowerPC 603 @ 66 MHz, wasn’t one of the best.

Other key specs of the Pippin were its 6MB of shared memory, 128KB SRAM for saves (no HDD), and its 4x CD-ROM. There were no custom chips to offload graphics or audio processing; the single-core PPC would have to do everything.

Another drag on the Pippin was likely the chosen OS. It used a stripped-down version of Apple’s old System 7.5.2 at launch. This OS was long in the tooth at the time, and was well known for its less-than-ideal cooperative multitasking, lack of protected memory, and 68K emulation overhead. It may have been tolerable on a desktop, but it wasn’t ready-made for a slick home entertainment box.

The Pippin also suffered from a weak entertainment software library, say sources like Wikipedia. But perhaps that issue was overshadowed by the pricing of $599 (≈$1,200 today), which was double the price of the stunning-for-the-time PlayStation (PS1) or triple the price of the aggressively priced but remarkable N64.

The Pippin platform was discontinued globally in 1997, but Japanese partners would continue to hold out, unaware that the living room entertainment war was over for Apple, until 2002.

Playmaji has opened pre-orders for the Polymega Remix, a $199 USB peripheral that lets owners digitize and play physical retro games on Windows 11 PCs, laptops, and PC gaming handhelds through a free companion app, and is scheduled to ship next month, having completed mass production.

Remix accepts CD-based games from consoles including the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Sega CD, TurboGrafx-CD, and Neo Geo CD through a built-in optical drive. Cartridge-based systems from the NES through the N64 are supported via Playmaji's Element Modules, which are sold separately at $80 each. There are six modules in total: NES/Famicon, SNES/ Super Famicom, Genesis / Mega Drive, TurboGrafx-16, Nintendo 64, and Atari 2600 / 7800. Once a game is digitized, users can disconnect the Remix hardware and play from their device's local storage.

The Remix connects over USB and is controlled entirely through the Polymega App, which Playmaji plans to release as a free download in May. The app replicates the Polymega console's interface, including its game database, virtual CRT display filters, save states, and custom playlists. Platform support at launch covers Windows 11 machines and Intel-based Macs, but Playmaji said it plans to expand to iOS, Android, and Apple Silicon in the months following launch, though no specific dates were given.

Alongside the Remix announcement, Playmaji confirmed it has overhauled the Polymega's standalone base unit with “new, upgraded hardware” that’s reportedly “several times more powerful” than the PM01.

The company said the revised hardware includes additional CPU cores, higher clock speeds, double the RAM, and more internal storage compared to the original, which retails for $450. Existing pre-orders will be upgraded to the new revision at no extra cost, with fresh pre-orders reopening in early summer.

This all follows a long stretch of production challenges for the Polymega, which was first announced in 2017 under the name RetroBlox, with pre-orders opening in 2018. Manufacturing setbacks in Myanmar, COVID-era component shortages, and supplier lead-time problems repeatedly delayed fulfillment.

By late 2022, the company acknowledged output had fallen to as few as 50 units per month as a best-case scenario. Atari invested €4.6 million in Playmaji in 2023, acquiring a 53% non-diluted stake, with Atari CEO Wade Rosen commenting at the time that the investment was intended to help Playmaji work through its order backlog.

The Remix sidesteps much of that manufacturing complexity by offloading processing to the player’s hardware. All emulation runs on the host device through the Polymega App, with the Remix itself serving as the interface between physical media and the user's PC or gaming handheld. Emulation performance will naturally scale with whatever the host device can deliver, with a Steam Deck or ROG Ally carrying substantially more processing power than the original PM01.

If you miss the old magazine cover-mounted demo disks of yore, the dominant channel for discovering new apps and games before the broadband internet age, be assured that many of these artifacts are preserved on the Internet Archive. Earlier today, our sister site PC Gamer revealed that there is now a treasure trove of its cover disks (floppies, CDs, and DVDs) archived and ready to enjoy.

PC Gamer’s headline highlights the 758 cover disks on the Internet Archive, but there are actually even more gems to be found. Our search uncovered over 1,500 PC Gamer software archives, thanks to a trove of floppy disk offerings from yesteryear. The total collection spans 1.2TB of material, according to the site.

The archive is a nostalgic reminder of the exclusive content these important printed media outlets used to offer. Such was the power of the printed word (plus cover disk) back then, app and games publishers would be eager to write custom demos and editions for the cover disks. PC Gamer highlights a few things, like its exclusive Freedom Force character skins on the June 2002 demo disk.

I remember Amiga Format cover disks going further, with special editions like Christmas Lemmings, Cannon Soccer, and even an exclusive Syndicate level put on cover disks for readers.

While rooting through the Internet Archive’s similar collections, I was also happy to find a bounty of PC Format disks of various eras, ST Format disks, CU Amiga disks, and Computer Shopper disks. There are surely many more - check for your favorite old magazine.

While you are there, browsing software cover disks at the archive, remember that many of the old print magazines have also been preserved. So, you’ll often be able to find both the cover disk and a PDF of the magazine it was originally attached to. That may be useful if a special code or instructions are needed to get the cover disk content up and running.

Internet Archive issues

There’s no doubt the Internet Archive is both a treasure and an important reference, but recent reports suggest its future worth may be being eroded. Last week, we noted that many news outlets were blocking the IA’s Wayback Machine from archiving their pages.

Among the reasons given for the blockages were that some publishers feared AI companies would abuse fair use policies and train their models on the snapshots of old articles. However, the good news is that Wayback Machine director Mark Graham is reportedly in talks with several outlets so that the archiver’s bot can gain access to these websites once more.

If you told me last week that we were getting a 1:1 hardware reincarnation of the ultimate '90s nerd status symbol, I would have laughed. We've seen the "mini" consoles. We've seen the arcade sticks with built-in ROMs. What SNK and Plaion just dropped is an absolute bombshell in comparison: the Neo Geo AES+ is real, it's coming this November, and it is going to completely empty our wallets.

If you're not familiar with the Neo Geo, potentially because you were born after it left the market, it was a bold idea from SNK circa 1990: what if we launch a modular arcade system with swappable games like a home console... and then sell the same hardware in a home console? Arcade operators liked it because it was cost-effective, and every single gamer in the world wanted one; the idea of "arcade games at home" was nuts in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, the $649 (in 1991!) starting price of the machine, as well as the $200-$300 required per game, priced the machine well above the budgets of the majority of gamers.

So it goes that we now have the Neo Geo AES+, an all-new machine that fully replicates the original system. Indeed, let's get straight to the biggest talking point of this entire announcement: no emulation. Instead of relying on software emulation or even an FPGA chip (like the brilliant Analog machines or MiSTer setups), Plaion and SNK have apparently custom-fabricated new ASICs to replicate the original 16-bit chips. The decision to go with actual silicon this time around communicates a massive amount of sincerity; SNK and Plaion are clearly intent on honoring the legacy of the most powerful 16-bit machine ever made.

That being said, it's worth noting that the hardware inside the AES+, whatever it actually is, isn't identical to the original 1990 motherboards. SNK has added a built-in overclocking function (accessible via system DIP switches) to iron out some of the infamous slowdowns in heavy-hitting games, as well as a low-latency HDMI out for modern displays. The machine still supports A/V out if you're keen to use it on a CRT, though it's a bit of a shame there's no S-Video or RGB out.

The new AES+ controllers, both the classic clicky Arcade Stick and the Neo Geo CD-style Gamepad, are a modern retro enthusiast's dream. They can be used completely wired via the classic 15-pin connector, or wirelessly using a special dongle. They feature a rechargeable battery that charges via USB-C, and yes, they are fully backward compatible with your original 1990s AES hardware.

SNK is dropping a launch lineup of 10 physical cartridges for $70 a pop. Because this is an authentic hardware recreation, the system features a full-sized cartridge slot that supports original AES cart from the 1990s. The ten games launching with the Neo Geo AES+ are:

• Metal Slug (action)
• The King of Fighters 2002 (fighting)
• Garou: Mark of the Wolves (fighting)
• Big Tournament Golf (sports, aka Neo Turf Masters)
• Shock Troopers (action)
• Samurai Shodown V Special (fighting)
• Pulstar (shoot 'em up)
• Twinkle Star Sprites (shoot 'em up)
• Magician Lord (role-playing, sorta)
• Over Top (racing)

Looking at the AES+ launch lineup, it is undeniably banger after banger. However, it's a little odd that only the first Metal Slug made the cut. There are also some glaring omissions; where is Magical Drop III? Where is Waku Waku 7? And most importantly, where is Blazing Star? "YOU FAIL IT!"

The absence of these heavy hitters just points to the overwhelming likelihood that Plaion and SNK are planning to release more waves of games in the future. The Neo Geo library isn't the biggest in the world, but it has way more than just ten excellent games. Another interesting detail is that there are numerous brand-new games either released in recent years or currently in active development for old machines, particularly the Sega Genesis and the Nintendo NES. With the AES+ making genuine Neo Geo hardware accessible again, perhaps there might be wholly new, modern indie games on the way for the AES+.

Writing about this brings up a lot of memories. Growing up, the Neo Geo MVS (the arcade cabinet version) was relatively common out in the wild thanks to the aforementioned solid value proposition for arcade operators. My local Mazzio's Pizza joint had one with several games, and even my local corner store had a big red cabinet with a couple of games in it. That machine in particular ate a great many of my quarters, mostly for Samurai Shodown 2. The AES home console, though? That was nearly a mythical beast.

My only real experience with the home console back in the day was when my friends and I pooled our cash to pay an enormous $300 deposit to rent an AES from a local video store for a weekend. We brought home the console along with World Heroes, Ninja Commando, and Burning Fight, and we stayed up almost the entire weekend chugging Jolt cola (yes, really) just to maximize our time with this awesome, impossibly powerful machine... even though we didn't actually like any of those three games all that much. That was the only time I ever saw an AES in person until they suddenly became a "retro" luxury item in the 2010s.

If you're chomping at the bit for a chance to own a new Neo Geo, you can head on over to Plaion's website to lock in your pre-orders. You can grab the standard black console (with one wired stick) for $249.99, or the gorgeous "Ice White" 35th Anniversary Edition (with a wireless stick, memory card, and Metal Slug) for $349.99. Then there is the $999 Ultimate Edition, which includes all of the new AES+ products: the system, both types of controllers, a memory card, and all ten games in the launch lineup.

A thousand bucks is a terrifying amount of money for a retro console, but if you actually do the math, the Ultimate Edition is saving you a solid bit of cash (about $175) over buying the console, the controllers, the memory card, and all 10 launch games separately. Oddly, though, there is no "Ultimate" bundle available for the white 35th Anniversary system—if you want the big kahuna package, it only comes in classic black.

The retro community seems sharply divided over a decision by Commodore to lock down firmware access in its C64 Ultimate computer. In a post entitled Why We're Protecting Your Commodore 64 Ultimate FPGA, the iconic retro computing company telegraphs a change “preventing firmware not released by Commodore from being loaded onto the hardware.” This blog post seems to be designed to calm social media and forum commenters' concerns about the C64U breaking the spirit of the vibrant C64 scene, implementing an anti-tinkering change, and making a move that is really about IP control.

The latest firmware, version 1.1.0, was released a few days ago. You can see the announcement in the X post above, and can expand the embed to read some of the comments it has received.

Social media and forum posters started to grumble about the impending firmware locks soon after some users highlighted a section concerning firmware tinkering in the official 1.1.0 release notes. There are some very welcome changes in 1.1.0, including a new Left Arrow key implementation, USB mouse support for “most mice,” and enhancements for LED lighting interactivity – as well as a long list of fixes.

However, some enthusiasts found it. problematic that Commodore wrote that “A future update may introduce safeguards to help make sure incompatible firmware not released by Commodore does not damage your motherboard.”

Commodore and its supporters characterize the change as one safeguarding user hardware while official firmware updates still flow.

“The Commodore 64 Ultimate is not a static product," the blog post reads. There will be new hardware revisions, new components, and new capabilities! This is foundational to our roadmap and, frankly, core to the Commodore 64 Ultimate's value proposition." But then it warns about firmware built for different boards, causing issues on the C64U.

Probably most concerning for Commodore is that it says it has already seen non-functioning casualties of third-party firmware updates requiring support. This isn’t just hypothetical, insists Commodore. No company would find it sustainable to service “hardware returns and replacements due to actions entirely out of our control.”

It also uses the blog to make clear it isn’t intending to stomp on system patches, like the popular SPIFFY. The distinction is that SPIFFY is a community patch for the C64U - improving quality-of-life in many ways, and is not a replacement firmware. “This policy is not aimed at that kind of community-driven ingenuity,” Commodore makes clear.

A so-called ‘walled garden’ is also not on the menu, according to the new Commodore blog. In this section it warns that the C64U is different from the closely related Ultimate64 from the same designer/developer. Specifically, it says that “Our hardware roadmap for the Commodore 64 Ultimate includes board revisions and component changes that Gideon's Ultimate64 firmware has no reason to address, since it's built for his product, not ours.” In other words, as the systems diverge and develop, more and more problems could arise from swapping firmware files.

We don’t know if the Commodore Blog post is going to satisfy the sternest critics and worry worms on the great WWW. Surely it helps explain the thinking behind the upcoming restrictions, but folks will always hate restrictions and others deciding what is best for them.

A TechTuber with a fondness for older hardware has managed to get Doom to run on a 40-year-old print controller. Much of the video retelling this tale covers the work needed to add new firmware, plus display and audio out to the controller board. Once that hurdle was overcome, though, it doesn’t take long for Adrian’s Digital Basement to progress into some playful demos and, of course, get Doom up and running.

To be clear, the printer hardware here isn’t a typical old e-waste consumer device, it is actually the powerful Agfa Compugraphic 9000PS. This box would interpret the complex resolution-independent PostScript files sent to it by pre-press operators and change them into raster images that could be printed on the next piece of hardware down the chain, usually an imagesetter that produced high-resolution printing plates. That’s why the Agfa’s motherboard packed a powerful-for-the-era 68020 CPU. Interpreting and outputting work like this was computationally and resource-heavy.

This is the 4^th video from Adrian using the Agfa RIP, as the unassuming beige box holds numerous interesting components. For example, not only does the main PCB feature a 16 MHz 68020, the I/O controller board it is paired with packs its own 68000 CPU.

A significant part of this latest adventure with the Agfa concerned reverse engineering the ROM code for the now ancient and obscure Agfa hardware. A significant step forward was made after replacing the Adobe PostScript interpreter in ROM with custom firmware based on AGFA-MON (available from GitHub) to establish a monitoring app, provide some OS boot stub options, and even add a BASIC interpreter to the system.

Before demos and the mighty Doom could run Adrian also needed to install the VERA 8-Bit Video Card, designed for homebrew computer projects like this.

After about 1hr 6mins into the video we finally get some demos shown running on the repurposed Agfa RIP. Adrian started with CP/M stuff, but quickly moved to a Unix OS (Minix). The full shareware version of Doom 1.9 was run via this OS “on what was just a printer freakin’ controller,” underlines the TechTuber.

But for those with experience of a 68020 (like an Amiga 1200), Doom is unsurprisingly a slow performer on this hardware. That isn’t the worst playability issue anyway, as the game wasn’t really controllable due to lack of PS/2-compatible keyboard support, noted Adrian. The terrible FPS reminds us of the recent 4FPS Red Dead Redemption 2 gaming shenanigans.

The TechTuber ends by reiterating what an astonishing transformation the Agfa RIP has been through, from redundant “trash” hardware of a bygone era to something that can provide retro computing fun (if not playable Doom).

Watchmaker Nubeo has put its Torrent Automatic Atari Rainbow Limited Edition timepieces on sale, so they’re all available at 20% off. Five colorways are there for the picking, each one reduced from $564 to $451 with the auto-applied coupon. If you are one of the folks who appreciates retro consoles and bold design-forward wristwatches, these designs might scratch your itch.

The Torrent Automatic Atari Rainbow Limited Edition from Nubeo comes in the following five colorways: Azure Arcade, Orange Curve, Pine Pixel, Shadow Console, and Spectrum. The watchmaker has only produced 100 of each variant.

Nubeo explains the watches were “inspired by the iconic design language of classic Atari consoles” and therefore mix pixel-era nostalgia with its modern watches, to celebrate color and culture. The firm usually specializes in designs inspired by sea and space, so these are something of a departure. However, we note it has previously collaborated with Atari on its Ventana Automatic Atari Retro Gamer Limited Editions, its Console Automatic Atari Asteroids 2600 Limited Edition, and its near-$2,000 Ventana Automatic Atari Asteroids 45th Limited Edition timepieces. Then it also has some eye-catching Space Invaders themed wristwatches.

Behind the colorful retro-future face of the Torrent Automatic Atari Rainbow Limited Edition, all these watches feature a Japanese automatic movement with three-hand date illuminated by Swiss Newlite. Their stainless-steel casings measure 48mm in diameter and are a chunky 16.4mm thick. An anti-reflection coated sapphire glass lens protects the watch face. Regarding protection, these 141g timepieces are water resistant to 20 atmospheres, and come with a 2-year international warranty.

“Each Nubeo timepiece is defined by performance, functionality yet with a design language that blends the organic and natural with the industrial in a manner that makes for a truly unique exhibition of time,” explains the firm behind these retro console-inspired watches.

Atari hits and misses

We’ve seen companies like Atari sometimes lending their esteemed brands to less than stellar products, so it is refreshing to see some high-end merchandise bearing the marque. There have been some hits and misses from Atari recently, though. I enjoyed testing the Atari Gamestation Go (from MyArcade) with 200+ games and SD card expandability last year. In contrast, the 2021 Atari VCS reboot was slated for its price, convoluted setup, and noise.

Do you remember Nvidia’s 3D Vision 2 glasses, which launched about a decade and a half ago? It isn’t clear whether retro gaming Redditor sinrivers does, exclaiming, “I can’t believe this find” after unearthing a pair buried in a thrift store’s home décor bric-a-brac section. They bought this sealed Nvidia retail box featuring the 3D glasses for just $2.99. That’s a great saving on the launch price of $149 or $99, depending on whether they included the IR transmitter. But what use are these artifacts in 2026?

I can't believe this find from r/nvidia

If we wind back the clock to the early 2010s, there was some momentum behind 3D gaming with the added magic of 3D monitors combined with active-shutter 3D glasses. This was the peak 3D monitor era, with several big-name monitor vendors supplying compatible 3D monitors and graphics cards with the requisite port selection. Big PC brands like Asus could provide a whole ecosystem at the time: monitor, glasses, and graphics card.

Nvidia’s solution was 3D Vision (AMD offered HD3D), and to enjoy the experience as intended, you would want a compatible GPU plus a LightBoost-certified monitor, providing both a 3D HDMI 1.4 input and a dual-link DVI input. On the human side, you’d wear active-shutter glasses like these Nvidia 3D Vision 2 spectacles, and an IR emitter was also necessary – but sometimes built into the 3D monitor you bought.

The experience was loved by some, but others considered it overrated. For a snapshot of the ecosystem and its capabilities at the time, check out the Tom’s Hardware archives. For example, in September 2011, we published a 22-page, 18-game comparison featuring the best solutions for Nvidia 3D Vision vs AMD HD3D glasses users.

Whatever your opinion, it is undeniable that the 3D glasses and 3D monitor-driven experience faded rather quickly. So, what can sinrivers do with their $2.99 bargain today?

As the simplest option, they could leave the package untouched as a shrink-wrapped pristine tech artifact. It would also probably be possible to make a quick profit through sites like eBay. Alternatively, if enough complementary ecosystem components are within sinrivers’ grasp, there are classic 3D gaming experiences of the era to enjoy, some 3D movies of the era to soak up, and even some emulators covering consoles of the era that support this system. Please note that Nvidia removed 3D Vision support from its GeForce drivers in 2019.

A maker with a love for synthesizers and retro gaming has showcased their latest project, the NES-SY2.0. This bewitching new device is not just an homage to Nintendo’s legendary mid-1980s vintage console but also chip tune synthesizer music and the archaic luggable computer form factor.

Above you can see the creator of the NES-SY2.0, Love Hultén, a self described provider of “tech, noise and craftporn from Sweden,” playing a selection of compositions on the device. A couple of short melodies later, Hultén flips NES-SY2.0 modes, plugs in a gamepad, and enjoys a session of Mega Man 2 on the built-in visualizer screen.

Fans of the video are full of questions about the design, such as how the NES electronics are integrated with the synthesizer side of the device. Also, we see maker Love Hultén change cartridges during the brief three-and-a-half-minute demo of the device. Some wonder if that changes the synthesizer tones or features. But there are some clues to the making of the NES-SY2.0 in the brief video description.

“This is NES-SY2.0 - incl NES Poly, Keystep, FS22 delay/rev, and a custom made MIDI visualizer created by @p1xelfool, and yes, the system supports cartridges!!” notes Hultén.

The first of those key components is the NES Poly. It is as foundational as it sounds, delivering a MIDI-controlled, 4-voice polyphonic synth that emulates the sound of the NES console. It also features two-oscillators per voice, real-time waveform switching capability for NES pulse “pluck” effects, vibrato pre-delay, attack, and 4 vibrato low frequency oscillator waveforms, and 16 sound parameters that can be edited with MIDI CC messages.

Then the ‘keystep’ refers to the compact MIDI controller from Arturia, which will have been the donor for the keys you see being played, and several more bits and pieces.

We reckon the “FS22 delay/rev” is a reference to the tri-mode effects stomp box produced by Flamma. This will add a luscious feeling of space to the sounds coming from the NES-SY2.0 and can even be tuned for delays affected simultaneously by shimmering reverbs.

Finally, the visualization screen is said to be based on a project from another artist / maker called p1xelfool.

What we can say is that the blend of all those technologies put together so stylishly by Hultén is indeed “craftporn.” But it isn’t just a fantastic-looking project, it is a great musical instrument and a luggable, perfectly playable original cartridge-loading NES.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that this isn’t Hultén’s first mix of retro gaming and music tech – as this example is so polished. The maker’s YouTube channel also features such wonders as a VIC-4 custom synth, a MIDI NES axe (guitar), and some Pac-Man-themed synths.

A developer has demonstrated an open-world engine in a Nintendo 64 game, which offers a “seamless, massive world with zero loading screens” on original hardware. In essence, James Lambert and a handful of other contributors behind Junkrunner 64 have coaxed the 30-year-old N64 into delivering draw distances matching the scale of Skyrim. The video below explains how this feat was achieved.

The majority of this video showcases Junkrunner 64 gameplay and features. You will see a cute character walk and ride a jet bike around a gigantic, open-world environment in real time, with expansive draw distance. Basically, a player can stand on one corner of the map and see across the entire world.

Anyone with experience owning or playing an N64 will have experienced the sharp end of the retro console’s draw distance problem. It is an old console, of its era, and system resources are meager compared to what developers in the first open-world gaming era and beyond would expect.

Typical visual issues in worlds that try to be too ambitious include pop-ups and clipping. In particular, at a distance, Lambert’s video highlights the phenomenon of Z-fighting, where some objects closer to the user might actually be obscured by farther-away objects.

The developer explains that the N64 features a 15-bit Z-buffer, which can hold ~32,000 unique values. But in his game development tests, about 90% of those values are used for things that are very close to the camera. Resources are slim for the oodles of distant objects in an open-world game, leading to Z-fighting.

What can be done to fix pop-ups and combat the occasions when closer objects are obscured behind more distant objects? “The solution is I just draw the world twice. First, I draw everything that's far away scaled down by about 100, and then I do a separate pass where I draw everything that's close,” explains Lambert. “So that gives me the best of both worlds. I can draw large objects at a small scale where details don't matter. And then when I'm drawing things close, I'm able to retain that near clipping plane and render things more detailed.”

So, that’s one solution, but memory constraints and performance considerations remain. Another innovation that has been shoehorned into Junkrunner 64 to help mitigate the scarcity of processing power and memory is the engine’s implementation of world tiles of various detail levels, cleverly layered.

Texturing in the demo game was handled by contributions from fellow developer Pyroxene, using a technique called baking. This is implementing lighting and material details directly into the textures, particularly on low-detail models.

Additionally, Pyroxene worked on a new kind of N64 fog: implementing RGB color-mixed fog gradients in the distance, plus locally colored fog. This further enhances open-world visuals.

In Junkrunner 64, the map starts hidden, as in many modern open-world games, and exploring the environment reveals the map little by little. Thankfully, there’s a super-fast 180 mph hovercycle that can be acquired and upgraded to get you around. Towards the end of the video, we see a small segment of gameplay demonstrating map exploration on a hovercycle.

Lambert closes the video by teasing a new (unnamed) full game that will be coming to the N64, ModRetro, and the Analogue 3D. It will, of course, use the above-mentioned technologies.

You can grab the code for the Junkrunner 64 demo, which was the main topic of the video. Version 2.1 is now on GitHub as a 16.5MB z64 file for your emulators, flash carts, etc. The source code is there too.

Mere weeks after successfully using a ZX Spectrum to fly a simulated spacecraft, space enthusiast and YouTuber Scott Manley has successfully “landed” on the moon using the home computer from the 1980s. Of course, Manley didn’t have an actual lunar lander with him, so he used the 2015 spaceflight simulator Kerbal Space Program, using a ZX Spectrum to control the spacecraft. For those unfamiliar with the Spectrum, it’s a home computer built by UK company Sinclair Research, released in 1982.

This 8-bit device had a Z80A CPU that ran at 3.5 MHz with either 16, 48, or 128 KB of memory. It ran on the Sinclair BASIC operating system and was known for introducing kids to gaming and programming in the 80s because of its relatively low price. This might seem sorely underpowered compared to today’s computers, with Manley saying that some phone chargers are much more powerful than this device. However, we must note that the ZX Spectrum launched 13 years after Apollo 11 actually landed on the moon. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which was in charge of the spacecraft’s guidance, navigation, and control, was far less powerful with its 2.048 MHz processor and 15-bit word length and 1-bit parity, capable of storing 2,048 words.

Because of this, programmers had to be extra creative when writing code, ensuring that they used as little data as possible to achieve what they wanted. Even though the ZX Spectrum had so much more memory than the original AGC, that is still a challenge that Manley had to go through, programming the virtual PC with the variables it needed to operate the virtual spacecraft and computing the attitude and acceleration required to maneuver and land on the moon.

The challenge does not end there, though, as he also needed to virtually connect the ZX Spectrum to the simulator. Since the device is so old, it does not have any modern I/O ports like USB. Thankfully, Sinclair Research also produced Interface 1, the proprietary storage system for the ZX Spectrum, which included an RS232 Serial port, allowing the ZX Spectrum to talk to a Windows PC. But because Kerbal Space Program does not support Serial input, he had to install the Kerbal RPC mod, which lets users control the ship remotely using Python or whatever language you like.

With everything set up, Scott fires up the program, and his virtual lunar lander starts to slowly descend. As the spacecraft approached the surface of the moon, Manley talked about how slow the system is, saying that it sometimes had a lag of about two seconds. Nevertheless, he also said that the AGC “ran on a 2-second cycle, where it would compute some values at that rate and it would be able to land on the moon like that.”

NASA is planning to get back on the moon before the end of the decade, and it will certainly use hardware that’s 100,000 times more powerful than the ones that first landed there nearly 60 years ago. Still, that should not take away from the ingenuity of the scientists and engineers who worked on the original program and were able to land Neil Armstrong on computers that had less power than the device you use to recharge the phone you have in your hand today.

U.S. gaming retailer GameStop has “officially” declared that the Sony PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii U are, “for all practical purposes, now officially retro consoles.” This new classification, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, references the consoles’ age, lack of Fortnite, and their use of component cables as justification.

This isn’t just a joke, however. The change in policy means that gamers are now free to trade in these old timers, even if they’re defective or “aesthetically unfortunate,” as long as they power on. These consoles will likely go on sale in larger stores that cater to displaying old school consoles and games, as well as via its website, with GameStop also referencing other “beloved legacy hardware” like the Sega Saturn and Nintendo DS on its list.

The company shared its message in a letter shared on its social media channels. In the message, GameStop also confirmed that from now until March 21, anyone who trades in a Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or any other retro console, game, or accessory will gain an extra 10% in trade credit on the transaction.

While confirming that these consoles are “still very cool” and that anyone who owned one at launch is “absolutely not old,” which is a relief to this writer, who happens to be among them, it’s not a huge surprise to see GameStop do this. Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 launched in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and while the Wii U launched in 2012, that console has also been long superseded by the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. All three consoles are products of a different era, and modern gaming has simply moved on.

Of course, a retro console isn’t the only way to play games from this era. PlayStation 3 emulation has long been possible, although tricky to optimize, while emulators for the Xbox 360 and Wii U have also grown in strength and quality over the years. However, the best option remains, in many cases, to run these games on their native consoles —as long as they still work, that is.

Old or not, there’s likely to be a significant number of still-working PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U consoles out there ready for a second life, and it looks like GameStop is preparing to support the transition. You can view GameStop's full list of retro consoles, games, and accessories over at GameStop’s Retro website.

A groundbreaking hack for Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One was revealed at the recent RE//verse 2026 conference. This console has remained a fortress since its launch in 2013, but now Markus ‘Doom’ Gaasedelen has showcased the ‘Bliss’ double glitch. Just as the Xbox 360 famously fell to the Reset Glitch Hack (RGH), the Xbox One has now fallen to Voltage Glitch Hacking (VGH).

“In 2013 some kind of iron curtain came down on security, of the Xbox ecosystem, and the Xbox One never got hacked,” noted Gaasedelen in his introduction. The same is true of the Xbox One’s successors, and Microsoft was rightly proud. Seven years after its launch, Microsoft engineers would still assert that the Xbox One was “the most secure product Microsoft has ever produced.”

What made the Xbox One so secure, so special? Gaasedelen referenced prior work and presentations to convey this information. I’ve shared a summary slide about this, too, but let’s fast forward to the demo of the new Bliss hack, which takes place from about 46 minutes into the presentation.

Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat, as Gaasedelen couldn’t ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so had to develop new hardware introspection tools.

Eventually, the Bliss exploit was formulated, where two precise voltage glitches were made to land in succession. One skipped the loop where the ARM Cortex memory protection was setup. Then the Memcpy operation was targeted during the header read, allowing him to jump to the attacker-controlled data.

As a hardware attack against the boot ROM in silicon, Gaasedelen says the attack in unpatchable. Thus it is a complete compromise of the console allowing for loading unsigned code at every level, including the Hypervisor and OS. Moreover, Bliss allows access to the security processor so games, firmware, and so on can be decrypted.

What happens next with this technique remains to be seen. Digital archivists should enjoy new levels of access to Xbox One firmware, OS, games. There could be subsequent emulation breakthroughs thanks to this effort. We also now have a route to making a Bliss-a-like mod chip to automate the precise electrical glitching required.

Whether PC users, our core readership, will be interested in actually emulating Xbox One, looks unlikely. The 2013 system’s game library is largely overlapped in better quality on the PC platform.

A member of the Save Myrient community has announced that the colossal video games archive has been “100% backed up!” This retro-gaming resource was on the precipice of collapsing last month after collection admins revealed that insufficient funding, rising costs, and abusive download managers were taking a heavy toll on the operation. Costs concerns were particularly strong with skyrocketing RAM, SSD, and hard drive prices.

It is great to share good news regarding the preservation of classic video games. Redditor and SaveMyrient mod, Ill-Economist-5285, fanfared the success of backup efforts just ahead of the weekend. “We've been kicking major ass in the background getting downloads completed and validated,” wrote the mod. “We can now announce that the Myrient mirror is now 100% COMPLETE!!”

As for getting the mirror up and operational, remember the original site doesn’t get decommissioned until the end of this month. However, with the 385TB resource now backed up, work is underway “generating torrents and getting them available.”

Torrents? Yes, but another SaveMyrient mod has confirmed “Torrents is only a temporary solution as of now.” With commenters pledging to make sure to seed their file-collections. Meanwhile, Ill-Economist-5285 reassures Myrient fans that things will be back to normal soon, with some resources being taken down temporarily only to make things ready for the next stage of the plan. More news will come, we are teased. Hopefully soon.

As mentioned previously, Myrient is still operational. So I thought I’d take a look. It was good to see some old favorite Atari ST apps like Calamus there. Moreover, if you feel like celebrating the 30^th anniversary of the release of Descent II on MS-DOS (March 13 in the U.S., March 29, 1996 in Europe) then today may be a good day to do it.

Myrient and AI

The AI industry frenzy undoubtedly contributed to the original Myrient archive’s soaring costs, ahead of its closure announcement. Perhaps ironically, if Myrient hadn’t been saved, retro fans may have looked to AI to generate copies of their favorite apps and games of yesteryear?

A developer has completely rebuilt the classic Gradius arcade game, first introduced in 1985, using ASCII. The newly launched Steam PC game page boasts that Battle for Asciion “is not just styled like text — it is text.” Nevertheless, the recorded on-screen action shows this 'bullets flying horizontal' scrolling shoot ‘em up shares many of the lures of the old-school pixel-based original. As a 2026 bonus, the reimagined ASCII Gradius remake is very RAMpocalypse-friendly, with its recommended specs of a mere dual-core 2.0 GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM.

“There are no sprites, no textures, no PNGs hidden behind the scenes,” the Battle for Asciion devs assure gamers. “What you see on screen is literal text.” This doesn’t mean the pace of the action is restrained in any way, though. Videos show the game running fast and fluid, and in some ways, it's surprisingly detailed.

As shoot ‘em up aficionados might expect, your ASCII ship in the game can be upgraded through stages to wield spectacular firepower. Moreover, there are five long stages, with giant end-of-level bosses to contend with, to beat the Battle for Ascension.

Some alternative history retro-style touches have been added to the configuration options for Battle for Asciion. The devs have implemented several display modes inspired by old monitors, including scanlines and simulated green, amber, or white phosphor dots. The game could be adapted to run on ancient MSX or PCW machines connected to real CRTs, hinted the dev on social media.

It is recommended to play Battle for Asciion PC/Steam using a keyboard “for precision and that ‘terminal shooter’ feel.” That’s entirely optional, though, as this 2026 release features full controller support via Steam Input and is listed as Steam Deck compatible.

The game’s 'Textshot' feature is fittingly unique. Instead of saving screenshots as images, this feature saves the current gameplay screen as a plain .TXT file, which can be edited, shared, or printed just like any ASCII file.

If you think the Battle for Asciion looks kinda familiar, and not just because of its Gradius-a-like gameplay, you may have played an earlier version of the game on the web in 2012. That was back when Adobe Flash was still a dominant interactive player supported by web browsers, and portals like Newgrounds and Miniclip still thrived.

Developer Relevo goes back even further than that in retro gaming terms, even though it was only set up in 2009. It has released games, not just for PC and web, but for classic retro hardware like the MSX, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC.

If you've got a plethora of older IDE (PATA) hard drives that you need to run data recovery, backup, or for the fun of running retro hardware, then your biggest issue is connecting to a more modern system. JJ Dasher, from JJ's Messy Bench, has created ATAboy, an open source IDE to USB interface designed specifically for older hard disks.

The premise is simple. You have a drive that uses CHS (Cylinder Head Sector), PIO Mode 0 ATA and you want to get data to and from it. With ATABoy you connect up the drive, external power and then connect the USB Type C to your modern day PC. Jump into a serial terminal (PuTTY for example) and then use the very authentic "Award" style BIOS menu appear. From there you can auto detect the geometry, or manually enter the details. Mount the drive and your modern PC will detect and offer the drive as USB Mass Storage. That's it! ATAboy works with Windows, macOS and Linux devices, but the USB interface is "only" USB 1.1 (for now) and while that may sound sedentry for 2026, we have to remember that for older IDE drives that use CHS, this is still a fast interface. Often these drives were at most only a few hundred Megabytes in capacity.

The "Award" influenced BIOS screen is a sheer joy to behold, spoken as a person who was tinkering with 486 PCs back in the 1990s. The interface is simple, clean, and heavily nostalgic.

On the PCB we have the Raspberry Pi RP2350 SoC (System on Chip) as used in the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the Pico 2W. This potent dual core Arm CPU runs at 250MHz, and the onboard GPIO handles the IDE to USB interface. The PCB was designed using KiCad, a popular open source CAD application.

ATAboy seems like a dream come true for those of us who enjoy using older PCs. It is compatible with CHS and LBA-type IDE disks, but it is geared more towards CHS. If you want to preserve an old drive, create an image, or simply move files to your modern PC, then ATAboy could be the tool for you. For some of the legacy disks, you will need to experiment with manually configuring the interface, usually because of unusual geometries.

If you want to buy one, JJ has them for sale for $50 or you can get the schematics and bill of materials (BOM) from JJ's GitHub repo to build your own. There, you can also find the latest firmware. You can also find a 3D printable case, designed using FreeCAD, to keep your ATAboy safe from harm. You could print this on one of the best 3D printers or even one of the best budget 3D printers.

Developer Daivuk has released QUOD, a 64KB ‘boomer shooter’ with an uncanny resemblance to id Software’s seminal FPS title, Quake. Astonishingly, this tiny executable delivers a Quake-like 3D gaming experience with “3 levels, 1 boss fight, 4 unique enemies, 4 weapons, and a handful of power-ups.” Moreover, it doesn’t call on any external resources; the whole caboodle of textures, sounds, music, levels, models, animations, and code is compressed into that minimal 64KB download.

Above, you can see Daivuk present his own tiny FPS masterwork, in a nicely structured step-by-step video, which touches on topics such as optimizing the textures, maps, models & animations, audio, code, and even creating a virtual machine for a further 2KB of file size savings.

The developer starts by explaining that the QUOD project has been about 10 years in gestation, but has only really been worked upon in the last year. Daivuk indicates to viewers that he has long thought 64KB is the sweet spot for such impressive demos. “It’s very small, but still leaves room for creativity,” he says.

Devotion to optimization shows in several key segments of the video explaining how this 64KB feat was achieved. For example, instead of saving image file resources into the tiny file, Daivuk saved ‘action-based textures’ which are a Photoshop-action-like ‘recipes’ for creating these visual ingredients. The dev even went as far as developing a custom VM and programming language for the sake of smaller file sizes.

Despite its 1980s-era (tape drive, pre-floppy drive) game file size, QUOD.exe still requires a 2010s era CPU and GPU to render its frantic FPS-blasting fun. The minimum specs for this demoscene title include an “Intel i5 or equivalent, GTX 770 or equivalent, 8GB RAM.” Of course, you will also need a spare sliver of disk space – that’s also a mere 64KB, as this is a self-contained non-install application.

Daivuk seems to have plenty of ideas on how to make 64KB demos and games even better. In the video outro, he mentions a host of possible optimizations and refinements that may come to QUOD v2, or whatever may be next. We will be staying tuned to this creator’s channel, for sure.

We’ve seen and reported on impressive small-file-size demo works before, like a colorful ray tracing animation app squashed into a minuscule 483 bytes! We also wrote about a Quake-like JavaScript game in 13KB. Nevertheless, QUOD remains outstanding for its slick Quake(y) FPS playability, looks, and feel. You don’t have to rely on watching the video to judge this, you can download and run it in seconds…

30 years prior

Incidentally, id Software’s Qtest multiplayer-only demo of Quake was released exactly 30 years ago today. But Quake’s shareware release was on June 22, 1996 (MS-DOS), with the full version becoming available to buyers a month later.

The Interim Computer Museum (ICM) and SDF.org have made 28 vintage computer systems accessible online for free. There’s a plethora of old but gold - some legendary - systems available, so your visit should be like entering a living museum of computing.

All you have to do is point your browser at connect.sdf.org and login by typing ‘menu’ to gain guest access to the systems. Typing ‘1’ toggles between pages, revealing the full 28 choices.

Please be aware that choosing an option will drop you to a command prompt on the system in question. No big deal if you have experience with that particular system and are scratching a nostalgia itch. Others may find that a bit of research is required to do anything productive or fun from the blinking prompt.

In the system menu, there are three columns. The first column begins with a command letter to select a system. Pressing the corresponding key, then Enter, will begin a session on the selected system. The second column shows the operating system, and the third, the ‘hardware.' We’ve put hardware in quotations as SDF explains,” these systems are a mix of emulation, hybrid, and vintage hardware running historical operating systems.” Which systems are real, hybrid, or emulated isn’t immediately clear.

Some notable systems from the menu

Some of the systems accessible, thanks to the efforts of SDF.org and the ICM, are legendary. The Multics (option a, page 1) operating system is a pioneering OS from 1964, designed by MIT, GE, and Bell Labs. It was a big influence on Unix and was still in use as late as 2000. Here it is available at your fingertips on a 'Honeywell 6180.'

Then there is a trio of TOPS-20 systems. These sport the iconic @ prompt and run classic PDP-10 software from the ARPANET era.

Another system with spectacular lineage is the DCD 6500 (option m, page 1) NOS 1.3. Designed for scientific computing by Seymour Cray, before Cray Research was founded, the CDC 6500 was architecturally split with a single main CPU and 10 Peripheral Processors (PPs).

On the UNIX systems submenu, you can see UNIX V7 on PDP‑11/70 at pole position ‘MissPiggy’ (option a, page 2). This system is considered by some to be the Rosetta Stone of UNIX, overflowing with the DNA of this remarkable OS.

I managed to play Chess on the UNIX v7 ‘MissPiggy’ PDP-11/70 system. It wasn’t the most fun I have had today, though. A chess program with graphics and a UI can give me a headache, so this command-line chess game, played without a board, quickly lost its novelty.

The SDF says that funding to run the museum and projects like this comes from BOOTSTRAP membership, sponsorship, and donations. So, if you enjoy this kind of project and want to encourage more, consider signing up for that.

Self Organizing Systems researcher and self-confessed mad scientist, Alex Mordvintsev, has shared a spectacular new CMOS FET-level visualization. In the video below, you can see the Floppy Rescue homebrew ROM running on a FOSS silicon clone of an Atari 2600. What is magical about the video, though, is that the data being fetched from ROM is visualized using multicolor light traces. The scene is almost as mesmerizing as witnessing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

This simulation tool appears to be still in development and not distributed, as Mordvintsev indicates they are still “working on it.” The embedded video starts with a full-screen overview of the Tiny Atari 2600, which is a clone of the classic VCS console’s SoC that forms part of Tiny Tapeout 9. Then the camera zooms in and around, from one end to another, showing the pulsing light travelling through the circuit’s gates and wires.

The signal propagation, as data is loaded from ROM, is shown as a colorful, evolving pattern. Moreover, you can see on the VGA monitor panel, to the right, that it takes the whole video (32s) to display just half of the Floppy Rescue title screen. That would usually load, in full, in an instant on an Atari 2600, meaning this visualization is massively slowed down, so it isn’t an opaque blur.

By today’s semiconductor standards, one might describe the Atari 2600 as Neolithic, but in this animated video, the Tiny Atari 2600 looks so futuristic due to the visualization style. The original 2600 was built around three core chips: the MOS 6507 CPU (a cut-down version of the MOS 6502), the TIA (video, audio, input, and collision detection), and the RIOT (RAM, I/O, and timer). These have been folded into an SoC for the Tiny Tapeout project, and that is what you are seeing in action in this video.

Atari hits and misses

We’ve written about the 1977 vintage Atari 2600, also sometimes called the Atari VCS, several times before. Last November, the Atari 2600+ Pac-Man Edition was rolled out to scrape more cash ($169) from the old games barrel. More ambitiously, in 2021, Atari launched a ‘modern’ VCS based on a Ryzen APU, but that was a $399 clunky flop, as you can read in our review.

The driving force behind Sega’s iconic console hardware passed away just ahead of the weekend. Hideki Sato, widely known as the ‘Father of Sega Hardware’ according to Japan’s Beep21 gaming magazine, which broke this sad news, was a key player behind the creation of the full gamut of classic Sega consoles. From the SG-1000, through the Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast – Sato and his R&D team architected and helped define multiple home console generations.

Sato began his Sega career as an engineer in 1971. This was just a couple of years ahead of the iconic gaming firm’s first electronic coin-op, the discrete logic driven Pong-Tron arcade machine (1973).

The long-serving Sega stalwart and his R&D team would subsequently be responsible for the development of the firm’s first home console, the SG-1000. This lesser-known (in the West) console was the first public showing of the (in)famous Sega-Nintendo rivalry, launching on the same day in 1983 as the Nintendo Famicom (NES in the West).

Sato’s team would roll out a couple of revisions of the SG-1000 before the popular Sega Master System arrived, in 1986. However, the most famous Sega console of them all, the MC68000-powered Genesis (AKA Mega Drive) would launch in 1988/89 to fire the opening salvo of the 16-bit wars, some time before Nintendo could get its SNES ready (1990/91).

Sega, with the capable help of Sato and team, released its first handheld, the Game Gear, in 1990, and there would be a number of add-ons for the Genesis cash cow, to extend its life before the 32-bit era was defined by consoles like the Sega Saturn, and contemporaneous Sony PlayStation.

Next up was Sega’s wonderful swansong, the Dreamcast. But by this time, Sato’s role was more in executive oversight, rather than as the designer, architect, and hardware lead positions he took for the prior generations.

Sato continued to climb in the Sega corporate ranks, even as it found its feet in its initial post-hardware years. The recently deceased gaming industry titan would take on the role of Sega’s acting president from 2002 to 2003. He eventually left Sega in 2008, after holding chairman and similar high-end advisory roles at the gaming company. His post-Sega career was largely as a Professor at Tokyo University of Science, lecturing on engineering and gaming hardware history.

Hideki Sato passed away on Friday, February 13. He was 75 years old. Sega co-founder David Rosen’s death was reported only a few weeks prior.

A canny developer has managed to coax a Game Boy Color (GBC) into running an interactive, user-controlled, real-time 3D shader demo. Danny Spencer shared a video, blog post, downloadable ROMs, source code, and even embedded the demo in an online GBC emulator, so anyone interested can give his Lambert-shaded 3D teapot a spin.

It is always fascinating to see developers squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the available hardware. So, seeing this interactive spinning teapot demo for the GBC is super cool. Moreover, Spencer reveals all the nitty-gritty behind this feat.

Getting this real-time shader running on the GBC wouldn’t be a big deal if the handheld had a powerful processor. Nintendo’s second handheld was far from powerful, though. It retained the Sharp SM83 SoC, as used in the original Game Boy, but boosted it to “dual-speed mode” at a smidgen over 8 MHz. This mode switching, single-to dual-speed chip, was great for backwards compatibility, though.

While the extra speed is useful for this real-time 3D demo, the GBC’s processing is still sorely lacking for running a user-interactive shader. For example, Spencer devotes a significant section of his blog explaining how the SM83’s lack of a multiply instruction was deftly sidestepped by using logarithms and lookup tables. To reduce computation overhead, the developer converted vectors to spherical coordinates. Then the Lambert shader is implemented using a spherical dot product. Far more detail about the programming, math, and rendering is available at the linked blog post.

Download and play with the demo

Spencer has made the gbshader code and related resources available on GitHub. There you will also find links to grab GBC ROM releases for this interactive 3D shader demo.

It will be most convenient for the majority of readers to run the shader demo inside the embedded emulator, via the blog post. Here you can use the cursor keys to adjust the position of the light source, while also manipulating the teapot view angle. On my computer keyboard, I could adjust both parameters simultaneously to control the animation and lighting.

Another day, and another Z80-based news story showing that there is life in the old microprocessor. Internet rocket scientist, gamer, astronomer, and YouTuber Scott Manley has taken the venerable Sinclair ZX Spectrum to another world. Well, virtually!

Manley's project aims to control a lunar lander through an elaborate process that uses a four-decade-old computer to communicate with Kerbal Space Program. How does the ZX Spectrum communicate with the game? Serial!

The ZX Spectrum did not come with a dedicated serial port, but there were first and third-party offerings, such as the ZX Interface 1, that could provide up to 19,200 Bits per second (19.2 KB/s). Using a little BASIC code to read the serial port, Manley can see real-time numbers and control his planetary descent. Manley confesses that the BASIC code on the ZX Spectrum is inefficient, largely down to the speed of the serial interface and how overworked the CPU will be, but you have to admire the approach.

The project appears to be all running on one PC, and this is where emulation comes into its own. In the top right of the video, we can see what appears to be the Fuse ZX Spectrum emulator running the BASIC code, and a virtual ZX Interface 1 is being used to send and receive the serial data to a Python script, which uses kRPC — it enables external control of Kerbal Space Program via programming scripts — to interact with the simulation. That is a lot of work, but we love the final result.

Could this be done for real? Yes! At a hardware level, it would require a USB to RS-232 adapter (I use something similar to connect a Psion 3A to my Windows XP virtual machine) to connect the ZX Interface 1 to the PC. Then it would require telling a Python script which serial port and speed to communicate with the ZX Spectrum. After that, it's "just" a matter of getting the data between the two machines. Formatting / sanitizing the data so that the two machines can communicate. Could it be done with another 1980s home computer? Yes! The Commodore 64's User Port had a serial interface, so with some clever BASIC coding, the same project could be created for the MOS 6510 microprocessor.

Manley's project is simply sublime and shows that the Z80 and the 1980s home computer era are still firmly in the public zeitgeist.

A recently published video shows real-time raytraced shadows in a game environment running within the improbable confines of a mid-1990s console. The Sega Saturn was notoriously complex and difficult to optimize games for when it was introduced. However, this video shows that there are still surprises being wrung out of Sega’s dual-CPU and dual-video-processor system, which debuted in late 1994. Match that PSX!

Real-time raytracing began to become a mainstream feature of gaming graphics on PCs with the launch of Nvidia’s first RTX 20-series graphics cards based on Turing GPUs (late 2018). Some would argue it took another generation and the wide adoption of modern upscaling tech to actually see mainstream raytraced games' momentum. Thus, seeing any kind of real-time raytracing in action on a 1994-vintage console is fascinating.

XL2 introduces their real-time raytracing on the Saturn video clip by saying, “Here is a raytracing test in a small room. The function is pretty simple and could be optimized further: I simply test all the vertices using the BSP [Binary Space Partitioning].” Moreover, it is explained that several other optimizations are in place: the engine only tests the vertices of 3D objects, with only a quarter of them updated per frame, and light sources are kept to a minimum.

The Saturn homebrew dev hints that the demo we see may be improved in due course. They indicate that a number of paths to refinement are available, some of which would be “super easy,” while others may need “a bit more maths.” So stay tuned to XL2’s channel if you like what you see.

Some Sega Saturn history

Sega’s Saturn was the iconic game company’s first 32-bit console from the ground up, designed to excel at 2D arcade ports, yet still capable of running emerging 3D-centric titles.

Launched in Nov 1994 in Japan / May 1995 in the U.S., it would become available at roughly the same time as the original Sony PlayStation (PSX, PS1) in both these key territories. In general, the PSX was weaker at 2D, but offered more balanced, dev-friendly 3D capabilities. Both the Saturn and PSX pre-dated the Nintendo 64, still cartridge-based but a strong 3D performer, by a year to a year and a half.

Sega followed up the Saturn with its awesome Dreamcast, which would be its final console hardware release, giving way to the Sony / Nintendo / Microsoft era.

One of the most important games in PC gaming history turned 30 on Thursday. On January 29, 1996, 3D Realms introduced its 2D platformer star to the 3D FPS world on PCs. However, Duke Nukem 3D did much more than add another dimension to the series; it broke the new era of 3D FPS gaming out of a Doom clone rut. It did so with a multitude of seasonings: interactive and destructible environments, real-world settings, 1990s pop culture and satire, and plenty of Duke-branded humor.

Moving FPS action to space stations and strip clubs

One of the key changes that allowed Duke Nukem 3D to make a splash in the mid-90s FPS world was its eschewing of the abstract corridor-based status quo. Duke famously fought through settings like space stations, sushi bars, and even strip clubs.

The game’s maximized 2.5D Build Engine (this was pre-Quake, which brought along true 3D FPS action) helped game designers render recognizable real-world environments and made them destructible and more interactive.

Levels were also far less linear, with the arrival of Duke on the 3D FPS scene. For example, some areas would include air ducts, back doors, and other hidden passages to help the protagonist avoid certain enemies or find interesting loot.

Within levels, there were opportunities for interactions to change or improve gameplay in some way. For example, some rooms might have a light switch to boost visibility, or a water fountain to gain health points. There were the fun mix of realistic and fantastic weaponry in the game, too. Other ‘skills’ that would become commonplace in future FPS action and adventure titles included med kits, night vision goggles, a jetpack, and even a hologram decoy projector.

Duke was full of character and humor

Another way that Duke Nukem 3D pushed the boundaries of the FPS world at the time was with the larger-than-life character and humor of the protagonist.

Nukem was very much an all-action, self-aware parody of the 1990s Hollywood action hero. Looking back now, this aspect of the game, and its use of a loud, crude, exaggerated machismo character, is in some ways a pop culture time capsule of the era. With its crudity and gore, the game also unapologetically targeted a mature audience, making it a controversial release at the time.

If all this reminiscing has made you feel like jumping into some Duke Nukem 3D action, there are official releases like the Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour available on Steam and consoles for just a few dollars. There are also a few online DOS emulator sites that allow you to play the original title in a browser.

A developer has ported Doom to a pair of earbuds. That kind of statement might not have the impact it once had, after tales of high jinks and ports of Doom stretching from quantum computers, to USB chargers, to lawn mowers. However, as earbuds don’t have displays (yet), Arin Sarkisian also devised a canny method to stream the Doom action to another device, or even via the internet.

You can’t just use any earbuds for this latest Doom-on-x episode of development gymnastics. Currently, this Doom port only works on the PineBuds Pro, which Arin-S says are the only earbuds with open source firmware. And, yes, these buds are made by the same folks behind the RISC-V-powered soldering irons, like the Pinecil V2 we reviewed in Aug 2022.

In terms of improbable CPU horsepower, the PineBuds Pro are right up there. Inside their snug ear-fitting shells, alongside the audio drivers and battery cells, there is an Arm Cortex-M4F processor. Arin-S tweaked the open-source firmware to boost the CPU clock from 100 to 300 MHz (an astounding OC nowadays), and disabled the low-power mode for the most Doom-tastic experience.

Some more hurdles of using the PineBuds were the less-than-ample RAM and storage. The developer managed to get Doom to run in under 1MB by “pre-generating lookup tables, making variables const, reading const variables from flash, disabling Doom's caching system, removing unneeded variables.” Moreover, the shareware Doom 1 WAD assets file was 4.2MB, just over the 4MB storage on the PineBuds. This payload was reduced to 1.7MB after borrowing some pre-modded-for-size Doom resources.

Lastly, the no-screen conundrum presented its own set of challenges. Arin-S decided the PineBuds Pro’s UART connection was the best choice for achieving game visuals (the only other choice was Bluetooth). A mix of bandwidth, image compression shenanigans, and demands on the Cortex-M4F ultimately meant the best achievable performance was about 18fps, in practice. In theory, it should have been nearer 25fps, but the dev reckons the CPU hadn’t the grunt to keep up with converting the MJPEG stream at that rate.

No PineBuds Pro, no problem

Arin-S shares all the resources needed to get your own set of PineBuds Pro up and running, with Doom loaded. However, the developer has also generously decided to set up a website that streams Doom action from his own pair of PineBuds Pro.

Head on over to this nicely crafted webpage to join the queue (yes, it is popular) and partake in some online Doom powered by the remote earbuds.

Lastly, the developer says that he is currently looking for work if you think you might need someone with his unique set of skills.

A programming, electronics, and retro enthusiast has showcased an open-source Intel 486 motherboard that they claim was “made from scratch” in under six months. The M8SBC-486 isn’t based on existing designs, but on previous experimental work by the maker, Maniek86. This real Intel 486 CPU packing project originally began with the goal of creating a system that could run Linux and Doom. However, Maniek86 excelled themselves and noted that the system also runs various flavors of DOS, Windows 3.1 (kinda), various programs, and games like Prince of Persia and Wolfenstein 3D.

It is quite astonishing how quickly Maniek86 put together this working 486 system. Research on the project started in April last year, even though actual work is said to have begun in August, which adds a little more time to the achievement clock.

Another thing that helped Maniek86 was a relaxed attitude to compatibility. The target was ‘simply’ to be able to run Linux and Doom on the assembled machine. Providing a speedier route to this goal, the dev’s chipset (Codename Hamster 1) was implemented in an FPGA, as were some other essentials like input device controllers, CMOS RTC, and storage. PCB prototyping and manufacturing outfit PCBWay was also praised for its help and support.

Maniek86 also didn’t care too much about functions that weren’t essential to the original goal. Thus, “the secondary PIC and DMA” are missing. Check out the list below for the full specs of M8SBC-486, as of January 14, 2026.

• 150 x 150mm 4 layer PCB. Custom hole placement! (a bit smaller than the 170mm square Mini-ITX standard).
• PGA-168 socket for 5V 486 CPUs. FSB currently runs at 24 MHz, meaning that DX2 CPUs work at 48 MHz
• Currently operating at 24 MHz FSB
• Xilinx Spartan II XC2S100 FPGA as the chipset. Codename "Hamster 1"
• 4MB of SRAM
• 256KB (224KB accessible) ROM for BIOS
• 8254 Programmable Interval Timer (PIT)
• 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC)
• Two 16-bit ISA slots
• PS/2 keyboard port. Controller is implemented in the FPGA
• Simple CMOS RTC and CMOS storage. Implemented in the FPGA too
• ATMega128 as reset circuit handler, nonvolatile CMOS storage and bitstream loader.

Since this project is open source, it might be interesting for like-minded readers to tinker with the source files and even build their own M8SBC-486 derivative design. Maniek86 admits that “There are still many issues,” but is gratified that the capabilities of this motherboard exceeded the initial goals already.

Meanwhile, the open source nature of the project beckons contributions. “I am pretty sure that this work could be used to build something more robust and stable or even to develop fully custom-made boards for other x86 CPUs,” says the maker. We’d also like to see the ISA slots become more useful, as graphics cards have poor or glitchy performance, sound cards are almost 100% incompatible, and a swathe of other cards are untested and not likely to work without ISA PnP feature support and DMA.

A 20-year-old Nintendo Wii console has been demonstrated making an online Domino’s Pizza order in the U.S. This is quite a feat for several reasons. Firstly, the Wii’s online services were shuttered by Nintendo last decade. Secondly, as PCGamer notes, the service that has been resurrected to order at your local U.S. Domonio’s was previously a Japanese-only app called the ‘Damae Channel,’ which was deactivated in 2017. Lastly, the Wii app seemed to work very smoothly – we’ve definitely seen worse takeaway ordering apps on Android and iOS.

In the video above Pete from Retro Game Attic talks us through the surprisingly painless process of ordering a Domino’s Pizza online using the old but once revolutionary Wii console. Pete mentions up front that the ‘magic’ behind this Wii Food Channel is reliant on a WiiLink.

In the words of the team of tinkerers behind WiiLink, this software “attempts to revive all WiiConnect24 channels, region exclusive channels, and Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.” WiiLink went into development in 2020 and supports nine channels, including the headlining Food Channel.

When you open up the Food Channel, though, the cupboard is a little bare. As of now, the only vendor in the channel was Pete’s local Domino’s . It isn’t mentioned in the brief video whether Pete populated that option, but it is explained that it integrates with Domino’s web API for digital orders. The WiiLink wiki confirms that Domino’s is currently compatible with the Food Channel for residents of the U.S. and Canada. Sadly, support for other online ordering APIs like Deliveroo and Just East seem to have come and gone, since they were added to WiiLink’s Food Channel.

Clicking the Domino’s icon in the Food Channel brings up a portal which shows your delivery address, order history, T&Cs, and the all-important ordering menu. Once into Domino’s you can browse the UI for all the currently available foodstuffs on the menu. Pete even goes and customized his Pizza toppings.

All throughout the process, the Wii doesn’t seem to skip a beat, which actually puts some modern food ordering apps to shame. Perhaps some notable restrictions that seem to be in place at this time, though, are that you have to use the pay on delivery option, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to input the discount codes that canny pizza pickers will be familiar with from Domino’s flyers and online offers.

Reassuringly, after the order goes through, the UI provides confirmation, including your phone number, address, and food order details. We didn’t see Pete input these details, and they were blurred for privacy. Thankfully it looks like you just set them once – using the Wii’s slow soft-keyboard input method, and they will be remembered.

As once-connected PCs consoles age, there is a lot of concern about preserving their access to games and apps that may have had an online element to them. Thankfully, community projects like WiiLink exist, so features don’t disappear and render once beloved old devices inanimate, irrelevant, old hunks of hardware.

An Atari computer enthusiast is planning to produce a compact computer dubbed the MiniST. Yes, you’ve guessed it, the Atari ST 16-bit home computer is getting some mini-love at last, albeit in a very limited initial batch of five units at “approximately 350 euros” (~$400). Information shared by Dennis Shaw in the Atari ST and STe users Facebook group indicates that this cute black TKL encased computer will be powered by a Tang Nano FPGA running the MiSTeryNano core.

Shaw makes it clear in his post that “all the materials are open source and can be freely obtained.” So the makers out there with modernized Atari ST yearnings and the ability can make something similar with the open source components linked below.

For example, the 3D printer files for the Creative Commons case design chosen by Shaw are available under the moniker Atapi STx. That particular case is designed for Raspberry Pi use, but Shaw has modified and shared the mods for this FPGA-powered ST computing solution.

Under the hood (or inside the wedge), you will find a motherboard featuring the Tang Nano FPGA, running the MiSTeryNano core (GitHub project link, ported from MiSTer). Like the FPGA Amigas, C64s, and other retro remakes, the FPGA raises the vintage computing experience above and beyond the use of an emulator.

Shaw indicates that the MiniST, thanks to the aforementioned MiSTeryNano core, offers a “cycle exact 8 MHz 68000 CPU,” with complete chipset, multiple Atari TOS ROM versions, color and monochrome video modes via HDMI, YM2149 and STE DMA sound via HDMI, Blitter chip, ASCI hard disk support (Atari's SCSI version), and the all-important MIDI via physical MIDI-IN and OUT ports. It has a mouse, keyboard, and joystick mapped to USB.

We also read that this project uses an RP2040 microcontroller “as a companion chip for OSD, USB,” and more.

Moving onto the scale of this production run, Shaw makes it clear that producing a MiniST is rather time-consuming, as “it takes an awful lot of time to print, sand, and paint them.” Thus, only five fully assembled, ready to plug and go, MiniST machines are planned to be sold as an initial batch. Perhaps the maker should invest in one of our best 3D printer choices to boost production…

The project seems wildly popular on the Atari ST and STe users' Facebook group. So we hope Shaw, or another enterprising individual/group, can look at doing a Commodore 64 Ultimate-style job with the ST. Commodore computers seem to have got a lot more love with Mini (and full-sized) remakes, and we think it is about time for the ST to be represented in the mid-2020s with its own modernized, reimagined retro computer.

A computer historian has documented the moment a 1974 kit computer successfully ran its first program – in 2016. The ancient Altair 8800 computer is thought to have been “partially assembled with some errors” by its original owner, but it has now been fixed, with the aid of a new PSU, after 52 years of neglect. SDF, from the Interim Computer Museum (ICM), shared the momentous moment on their X profile.

You may know about the Altair 8800 computer, as it has a special place in computer history. It was introduced back in 1974, and according to places like Wikipedia it “was the first commercially successful personal computer.” Some other distinguishing characteristics of this configurable and expandable machine were its supply to the public in kit form, it introduced the S-100 bus standard, and its use of the Intel 8080 CPU (at 2.0 MHz).

The Altair 8800 also came without any screen or video output, as standard, and that’s how you see it in the embedded Tweet – brought to life for the first time in 52 years.

SDF demonstrates the Altair 8800 being programmed, screen-less and keyboard-less using the front panel switches, each which has its own LED. We’ve managed to clip the video to show that the computer historian input the Kill the Bit game, by Dean McDaniel (written May 1975) into the Altair. It is a rather rudimentary game, but perhaps back in 1975 it had greater entertainment value.

Sources indicate the Altair 8800 computer you see demonstrated by the ICM in the video was sold in kit form for $439. That’s over $2,500 in today’s money. The original owner of this particular sample might have been better served buying the pre-assembled model at $621 (over $3,500 in today’s money). Then, at least they could have used it once or twice in the past 52 years.

Remembering the Intel 8080 and Am9080

We’ve reported on the Intel 8080 multiple times previously. Some attribute it as the first commercially viable general‑purpose microprocessor. Whatever the case, it was one of Intel’s most significant early advances, designed by Federico Faggin – an engineer who was also behind legendary chips like the Intel 4004, and Zilog Z80.

Recently we also highlighted AMD’s first steps into computing were done off the back of this same chip. It entered the CPU market with a reverse-engineered 8080 clone (the Am9080), and enjoyed incredible profit margins thanks to the military customers it serviced.

A YouTuber has managed to run Doom on a Krups Cook4Mec smart pressure cooker after dumping and reflashing the firmware on the appliance’s touchscreen control hardware. Documented in a teardown and reverse-engineering video, the YouTuber shows the game running locally on the cooker’s display without modifying the electronics responsible for heating or safety systems.

The starting point was the built-in Wi-Fi of the Cook4Me. While browsing the settings menu, the creator noticed that “the first three bytes are from Espressif… so there’s most likely an ESP inside.” That observation prompted a full teardown of the appliance.

Opening the unit reveals split hardware. At the bottom of the device is what the creator describes as “really just a temperature sensor, a heating element with a safety switch.” This lower board is built around an STM microcontroller and handles the heating relay, temperature measurement, and a fail-safe cutoff “in case something or the relay got stuck.”

Connected to it by a simple four-wire cable is the front touchscreen module. Removing that assembly exposes significantly more capable hardware. The Wi-Fi module is confirmed to be an ESP32, while the main processor on the display board is identified as a Renesas R7S721031VZ. The creator calls it “quite a nice chip,” adding that “it is quite powerful and it has a lot of GPIOs. It’s an Arm core.”

The touchscreen board also includes 128MB of flash, 128MB of RAM, a capacitive touch controller, a display driver, a beeper, an external EEPROM, and “a non-populated SD card slot.” The ESP32’s flash was dumped and found to be encrypted. Logging suggested cloud connectivity, with the creator noting that it hints “it being connected via AWS cloud so MQTT via a private key,” if he wanted to do anything with it.”

Access to the main Renesas processor came via SWD. After hooking up an SWD flasher to the correct pins, the creator successfully dumped the flash. Bootloader logs made it possible to reverse-engineer how the LCD was initialized, enabling custom firmware to be built and flashed onto the chip.

With a working firmware environment in place, Doom was ported to the touchscreen system. “After writing enough wrapper around Doom and porting it to the firmware, we can fully make it run on the cooking pot,” the creator explains. The game runs on the Cook4Me’s display, with the touchscreen mapped to different regions for buttons, delivering what he describes as “a quite nice frame rate.”

Absurd, yes, but the video gives us an interesting view into how smart appliances are built. The Cook4Me’s cooking logic remains isolated on a simple controller, while its interface and networking are handled by a far more capable embedded computer. In this case, that separation made it possible to run Doom on a pressure cooker, and no doubt the Internet will bring us even more outlandish examples of weird devices to play Doom on in the near future.

There again, we’ve already had Doom in space, so perhaps that’s as weird as things are going to get.

Would you like to face a gaming challenge every time you start up your computer? If you answered in the affirmative, then Alejandro Armas, AKA mycroftsnm on GitHub, has a treat for you. The Linux enthusiast has created a quintet of UEFI games with the premise of “Win -> Boot, Lose -> Shutdown.” Head on over to the UEFIGame repository on GitHub (h/t Hackaday) and you will find five games to provide a PC booting gaming challenge.

Armas appears to have been working on this compendium of UEFI games for approximately 10 months. The games offer a mix of challenges spanning quiz-style games, a Simon-like challenge, and even a vertical scroller to make sure your reaction times are up to speed before you access your computer.

1. User Evaluation for Ineptness challenges the user to add two random numbers from 0 to 99. “If your answer is incorrect, the system mocks you and shuts down,” says Armas.
2. Insult Sword Fighting is a Monkey Island-inspired diversion. Users are asked to choose the correct comeback to continue booting. You can manually edit insults.txt to expand the scope of this UEFI game.
3. Fall To Boot presents the user with a “vertical scrolling procedurally generated tunnel,” and Armas underlines that you will have to “reach the bottom, or you'll Fail to Boot.” Failure is caused in this game if your star-like cursor hits the tunnel walls during its rapid descent.
4. Age Verification is a Leisure Suit Larry-inspired 80s pop culture trivia quiz. Due to the subject matter, this kind of filters out those “too young” to use the computer, snarks the Linux enthusiast dev.
5. Lastly, there is the UEFI Says game, which is another graphical, rather than text-based title. UEFI says it is “a memory test... but not for the computer,” quips Armas. Again, you must succeed at this pattern-matching game to boot your computer.

You can see videos of some of these games in action if you head to GitHub and expand the Demo videos section.

UEFI games?

These games can run directly from a PCs Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) at boot. Many people still refer to the PC’s UEFI as the BIOS, as they basically do the same job of betting your system ready to boot into an operating system. UEFI is just the modern, modular, more secure and flexible successor to the BIOS.

Armas’ compendium of games aren’t the first UEFI gaming apps we’ve featured. They are kind of unique, though, as they offer a fun boot-time challenge. Back in October 2025 we wrote about the retro-licious Zaxxon recreation in UEFI, by Inkbox Software.

Retro computing has steadily getting ever more popular, and Acemagic, maker of diminutive computers, probably thought, "Why not combine old and new?" The company's new mini-PCs come with a homely beige and gray styling reminiscent of the venerable NES and PlayStation 1 consoles, but are stuffed full of modern hardware. We talked about the NES-inspired Retro X5 a few days ago, so it's nice to see it in the flesh. Tom's Hardware stopped by its CES setup in Las Vegas for a closer look.

As the picture shows, with just a quick glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking these were the actual consoles, at least until you notice the ports and labels. Both machines pack the same selection of hardware, including AMD SoCs up to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 and Ryzen AI 9 465. The integrated graphics are the Radeon 890M with 16 compute units or the Radeon 880M with 12, depending on chip choice.

The boxes can take up to 64 GB of DDR5 and two M.2 NVMe drives up to 4 TB in size each. On the connectivity front, there are dual LAN ports, WiFi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4. A set of USB-C, USB-A, and audio connectors adorn the front panels, and at least in the "NES" model, the case can be opened with just latches.

Acemagic only presents the physical dimensions as 140 x 128 x 41 mm, or 5.5" x 5" x 1.6" for the almost-NES, though judging by the picture, the quasi-PlayStation ought to have quite similar measurements. The Copilot label on the latter model is quite the irony, but we'll let that slide for nostalgia's sake.

The retro-inspired mini-PCs weren't the only wares that Acemagic had on hand. The unassuming looks of the machine above belie its inner strength, as it can contain Intel Panther Lake chips up to the Intel Core Ultra X 9 388H or Core Ultra 9 386H, tuned to a 65 W TDP. The corresponding GPU is the Arc B390 either way.

The maximum RAM capacity is 96 GB, presumably spread across two 48 GB DIMMs, while storage comes by way of two M.2 NVMe slots that can handle 4 TB SSDs. The usual smattering of ports includes an OCULink connector for VR headsets, and once again, there are two Ethernet ports along with WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity. This beastie measures 147 x 1447 x 39 mm, or 5.8" x 5.8" x 1.5".

In case you want something with horsepower that rivals that of a standard desktop machine, then look no further than the 120 W version of the machine above. The spec sheet is the same, but the massively higher TDP should clock higher, and most importantly, maintain high clock speeds while running lengthy tasks. Be sure to check out the gallery below for the full set of pictures.

David Rosen, one of the co-founders of Sega, passed away on Christmas Day. His funeral took place on January 2 at Inglewood Park Cemetery in California, according to RePlay Magazine. Rosen founded Sega after staying in Japan after he completed his Air Force service in the Far East.

Most will know Sega as a “Japanese video game company,” as per the Wikipedia page dedicated to the company, so it might come as a surprise that ‘Sega’ isn’t a Japanese word but a portmanteau of ‘Service Games.’

As mentioned in the intro, Rosen was a U.S. airman. He was stationed in Japan from 1948 to 1952 and saw service in the Korean War. Instead of returning to his hometown, New York, or even the USA, after the war, Rosen decided to stay in Japan and start a business. His early dealings in the recovering post-war nation were focused on bringing Japanese art to the American market and operating a chain of photo studios in Japan.

By the late 1950s, Rosen began to see an increase in disposable income among the Japanese, so he thought it was a good idea to import coin-operated amusement machines from the U.S. Despite 200% import fees on these machines, the bet paid off handsomely, with the machines being paid off within two months.

Sega Enterprises Ltd was formed when Nihon Goraku Bussan, founded in Hawaii by Martin Bromley and Richard Stewart and operating in Japan under the name Service Games, merged with Rosen Enterprises, which had by then become a major importer of coin‑op machines.

The first Sega-branded game is thought to be 1966’s Periscope. Of course, this was an era before video game arcade machines roamed the earth in search of quarters. Periscope is a “fun – suspense – excitement” shooting game amusement based on an electromechanical mechanism. The game was a huge hit and is attributed as a turning point for the industry, and a formative moment for Sega and developer Namco (then Nakamura Manufacturing).

As the new breed of electronic coin-op machines became available, Rosen was happy to jump on board with games like Pong from day one. Sega saw the opportunity to develop and produce its own arcade titles, beginning with the obviously pong-influenced Pong-Tron discrete logic arcade title in 1973.

Rosen took Sega back to the U.S. in person in 1986, when he agreed to form Sega of America in Los Angeles. At that helm, he stayed until retirement in 1996, overseeing the launch of all its major games console up to the Sega Saturn.

Rosen took Sega back to the U.S. in person in 1986, when he agreed to form Sega of America in Los Angeles. At that helm, he stayed until retirement in 1996, overseeing the launch of all its major games console up to the Sega Saturn.

Retro fun-loving developer Rodrigo Delduca has succeeded in prompting Claude to write “a functional NES emulator.” Claude generated a series of Lua scripts that worked in tandem with Delduca’s Carimbo 2D game engine to create the emulator. You can give the code a spin for yourself and enjoy a bit of retro Donkey Kong action online, simply by visiting this link.

The NES is one of the most widely emulated game consoles ever. And, as one of the older cartridge-based platforms, it provides a good baseline for emulator development on new platforms, or for demonstrating new emulator creation technologies. We’ve seen AI generate playable games before, as in the recent competent Minesweeper clone test using four competing LLMs. However, emulators present a very different challenge for developers (and AI).

Some insight into the NES emulator is provided by Delduca’s GitHub, where the source scripts are shared. Here you can dive into the Lua scripts that breathe life into the emulator. From the file names alone, you can see separate scripts targeting the NES CPU, PPU, Input, bus, and more. These all have to work in harmony with the game code.

Lua and Carimbo

Delduca’s Carimbo 2D game engine powers the Lua scripts to create the working NES emulator. Lua is a “powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language,” that is free and open source (MIT license). Claude can generate scripts in this robust, fast, portable, and embeddable scripting language.

Carimbo is described by Delduca, its creator, as a simple yet complete 2D game engine written in modern C++23 using SDL. Importantly, it is scriptable in Lua, and can run natively on Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and the web (via WebAssembly). Carimbo relies on libraries such as boost, Box2D, EnTT, stb, simdjson, sol2, PhysFS, SDL, and OpenAL.

In addition to this emulator, there are a handful of other Carimbo engine games and demos available for you to try.

In my testing, the AI coded NES emulator felt slow, but depending on your system and web browser, you may get different results. Some of the comments on the emulator highlighted its sluggish performance. One cruelly notes that the 'cost of slop' was a 40X drop in performance, without sound, compared to rival online embedded NES emulators. Indeed, I remember playing with NESticle in the late 1990s, enjoying fast and responsive NES emulator fun on an old Pentium 120.

Epilogue, the maker of the GB Operator dock that lets you use the Game Boy Camera as a webcam, recently announced the SN Operator cartridge reader and has opened pre-orders for the $59 device. The company says this USB-C gadget will read SNES cartridges, allowing you to play your collection on your PC or handheld console via the Playback in-app emulator compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The SN Operator dock also makes it easy to back up your saves and game data on your computer. This is particularly important as the SNES is already 35 years old, with many game cartridges failing simply because of age. But aside from just reading the cartridge contents and backing up your extensive library, you can also use this USB-C reader to write new save files. This means you can play your SNES games on your PC, Mac, or even handheld consoles like the Steam Deck or ROG Ally and keep your progress on the original game cartridge.

Although you can play most SNES games using modern game controllers, there are a few titles that require the old Super Scope (which only works with curved-screen CRT displays) or SNES Mouse peripherals. But even if you no longer have these accessories, the Playback app can still let you play them by using your modern mouse as a stand-in for these accessories, allowing you to enjoy the old classics without having to find specialized hardware.

Another important feature that Epilogue added to the SN Operator is the ability to detect the authenticity of a particular cartridge. This can help you validate your collection and avoid counterfeit cartridges when you’re looking to expand your SNES game collection.

This SNES cartridge dock is a crucial tool for SNES fans who want to keep a backup of their game library, and for game preservationists who want to ensure we don't lose any SNES titles to history.

Nintendo is, of course, known for blocking emulators that promote ROM distribution and the unauthorized copying of games, but given that the SN Operator (and the older GB Operator) is specifically designed for personal, non-commercial use and for backing up legally owned cartridges, we hope that the company won’t take steps to kill this product that’s intended to lengthen the lifespan of the game libraries of Nintendo’s biggest fans.

A Chinese device maker is teasing a new mini PC inside a chassis that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Acemagic’s blog and social media share images and a handful of specs for this AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 machine, which it has dubbed the Retro X5. The maker characterizes this mini PC as “an all-in-one solution created to simplify classic gaming,” which makes us wonder if it will come with Batocera Linux, SteamOS, or another non-Windows OS/UI.

We don’t know a lot about the hardware inside the Acemagic Retro X5 as yet. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside is a capable processor, though. It features a 4x Zen 5 performance cores and 8x Zen 5c efficiency cores for a total of 12 cores and 24 threads, running at up to 5.1GHz. Onboard is a decent iGPU in the shape of the Radeon 890M (RDNA 3+). This packs in 16 CUs and runs at up to 2.9 GHz. There’s an XDNA 2 NPU with 50 TOPS, too.

If we are thinking about PC gaming with this processor, it should easily overshadow the Steam Deck. However, you will be targeting higher resolutions on a desktop. Also, as a mini PC, the HX 370 should run without the thermal constraints typically experienced in handheld or laptop designs. Thus, the Retro X5 might push this processor to the upper part of the processor’s configurable 15-54W TDP range.

From the few images of the new mini PC we can see a USB-C, 2x Type-A, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a power button up front. We also know that the “Retro X5 supports expandable memory and storage, multiple display outputs, and high-speed connectivity,” as it says so on the blog. Hopefully, that means at least: twin SODIMM slots, twin M.2 SSD slots, HDMI, USB-C monitor connectivity, USB4 or USB5, OCuLink, and Ethernet, multiple extra ports along the back, and built-in Wi-Fi / BT.

RetroPlay Box

It looks like Acemagic will try and differentiate its latest mini PC with some kind of launcher, dubbed RetroPlay Box, which you can see represented by swirling tiles in the Tweet embedded above. It could be an app that is pre-installed on Windows 11 – the least adventurous option.

There’s also the chance that Acemagic might go with a Linux-based OS to host its RetroPlay Box. It may save money on a Windows license by choosing SteamOS or Batocera Linux, for example. We shall have to wait and see.

Surfing the retro-wave

Acemagic is riding on the coattails of Ayaneo (and Nintendo) with its “inspired by iconic gaming consoles” design here. But, perhaps its timing, surfing the wave of retro-enthusiasm precipitated by Windows 11 disillusion, the rise of SteamOS, and yet another PC AAA gaming hardware cost crunch, will help it achieve better success.

The Acemagic Retro X5 is “coming soon,” according to the firm’s social media postings.

Vintage game emulation just got another slight boost, thanks to the release of D7VK version 1.1. This Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer makes it possible to run old Direct3D 7 games on contemporary hardware, and it got some meaty improvements, including a new front-end, and experimental support for Direct3D 6.

In case you're a little confused, D7VK is a translation layer that turns Direct3D 7 calls to Direct X 9 running under Proton's DXVK layer, thereby taking advantage of DXVK's tried-and-true infrastructure and software ecosystem. Being a mere translation layer, it has a minor performance penalty and can run several times faster than a full emulator like WineD3D.

Alongside with a new front-end, the 1.1 update adds Direct3D 6 support as an experimental option. The author mentions that judging by its documentation, adding this API shouldn't be a lot of work. That's in sharp contrast to the lawless lands of Direct3D version 5 and under. Even as it stands, in their own words, "D3D7 is a land of highly cursed interoperability", with many games mixing Direct3D calls with older Windows APIs like DirectDraw and even GDI for 2D graphics.

In turn, this means that support for games is hit-or-miss, depending on how "hacky" the game was initially programmed. For example, this latest version adds a workaround specific to Sacrifice, which uses a wholly unspported depth buffer format. Likewise, support for strided primitive rendering makes Sacred playable, and fixes to mipmap swapping enable gamers to once again enjoy Gothic, Gothic 2, and Star Trek DS9: The Fallen as if they were just released.

Many popular Direct3D 6 titles have seen re-releases using modern APIs, including Final Fantasy VIII, Resident Evil 2, and Grand Theft Auto 2.

Additional fixes for games include workarounds for Conquest: Frontier Wars, Tomb Raider Chronicles, Darkan: Order of the Flame, Earth 2150, Tachyon: The Fringe, and Arabian Nights. If you have a particular game that doesn't run well, visit the issues section in the D7VK GitHub to lend your feedback. In the meantime, if your game doesn't run or is too old to use even Direct3D 7, you can use Wine's WineD3D instead.

WinD3D ironically also works in Windows itself, making older games easy to run on contemporary versions of the OS. If your vintage title used old Glide or OpenGL instead, the author recomments nGlide.

One of the rarest video game consoles ever made has been acquired and tested by YouTube docu-channel Fern. What you will see and hear about in the video embedded below is the Bildschirmspiel 01, or BSS 01 for short, produced in East Germany from 1979 to 1981. This is a basic gaming machine, offering only four Pong-like variants and monochrome graphics, played via a pair of tethered paddle controllers. Nevertheless, the rarity factor means this sample, one of just a handful thought to remain, costs around $1,000 to buy at auction.

The docu-channel claims that only about a thousand BSS 01 consoles were made, and the rarest model – white with white controllers - is the one that they managed to snag for their analysis.

BSS 01 tech specs

Like other early electronic games, this console wasn’t built using a general purpose microprocessor, RAM, storage, etc. Instead, it featured hard-wired transistor-transistor logic (TTL) circuits. However, the key gaming logic was all handled by an Eastern Bloc clone of the AY-3-8500 chip.

The chip was the only ‘foreign’ ingredient, with other key electronic and support components made locally – PSU, controllers, switches, RF output, speakers, case, and so on.

Why did the GDR want to make a console?

Fern spends considerable time discussing why the GDR, a proxy state of the USSR, a state behind the Iron Curtain, would want to create a games console. Given the central planning and resource allocation of such a state, it was indeed the government that decided to enter the video gaming market in 1977.

It wasn’t created just for fun and frolics, though, as you can imagine. Fern suggests that the populace in the West was seen to be advancing into the computing and video game eras at a rapid pace since the early 1970s (arcade and home gaming, home computing). While those behind the Iron Curtain could restrict popular knowledge of the goings-on in the West to some degree, there was some information flow, so something had to be done to avoid the West getting too far ahead in tech and prevent feelings that the GDR was being left behind.

So, in 1977, the GDR made microelectronics a new priority. The policy shift was made to strengthen the country’s position as an industrial nation and to benefit the public by expanding access to home computing and gaming.

An East German Electrical Engineer with a reputation for delivering results, Karl Nendel, was appointed to lead the development of a GDR games console. Nendel visited a semiconductor plant in Frankfurt Oder, previously busy building components for radios and TVs. In 1976-77, Nedel arrived with both an Atari console and some ROMs containing Pong, tasked with building a GDR version. The result was the BSS 01, which first hit production in 1979.

According to the new video tests, the games available on the BSS 01 are very much like the early Pong variations available on home consoles in the West in the early 1970s. The host didn’t seem very impressed or entertained, noting one variant was an “exact copy of the western version of Pong.”

Pricing problem

Unfortunately for the BSS 01, its price tag would be too high to make it attractive. According to the video, it would launch at a price approximately equivalent to half a month’s salary for an average citizen of the GDR.

The pricing put the brakes on the GDR government’s purported plans to use video games to eventually push communist messaging. Apparently, most of these consoles ended up in youth centers, shared by communities.

Production of the BSS 01 ended around two years after launch. Plans for a color model plans were reportedly shelved. The manufacturing facility went back to producing AV equipment – radio alarm clocks, says Fern.

This wasn’t the end of the road for the communist nation’s video gaming ambitions, though. The GDR developed the Poly–Play arcade machine in the mid 80s with twice as many, more advanced, games onboard. For the clips shared, these look heavily influence by classics such as Pac-Man and Robotron.

A retro computing aficionado with a love of the classic mini releases has built a complementary compact and cute monitor. Press any Key to Continue (PKC) shares their philosophy, chosen components, and methodology in a new video called Mini monitor for the Amiga A500 Mini & The C64 Mini: Commodore 1081/1084 in 3D-printing. It’s embedded below, for your convenience, but we needed to turn on English closed captions as the narration is in French.

Games shown in the video: Barbarian on the Amiga, Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga, and Commando on the Commodore 64.

During its all-too-brief life as a computer industry leader, Commodore built “80 different screen variations, 30 of which were just of the Amiga ecosystem,” notes PKC, in the video introduction (machine translation). The TechTuber and maker narrowed down the Commodore 1081 and 1084 as the ideal remake targets, concluding that these particular models “truly symbolize the C64 and early Amiga.”

Though CRT vs. LCD debates can (and do) go on for pages, PKC whittled down several LCDs they had considered on Amazon to just one. It's an 8-inch model with HDMI, various analog inputs, speakers, and a remote. It looks like PKC cannibalized this security camera monitor, which is currently available on Amazon.com for $69.99.

With the LCD choice out of the way, PKC did their 3D modeling in Fusion 360, and it looks like they have some skills in this department. They kept the essence of the 1081 and 1084 styles and distilled the design down to just four major parts to be 3D printed.

A Bambu Lab A1 was selected as the 3D printer. We note that a significant portion of the monitor chassis was printed as a single piece, but with extensive supports that had to be cut out before use. PKC seemed pleased with the output, and rightfully so, with all the parts we saw in the video snapping precisely into place, as per the master plan.

The maker reused the existing LCD mounting system from the disassembled purchased part, and the remote buttons could be used to provide user-accessible touch controls on the monitor bezel.

Once the LCD and controls were all in the frame, PKC slid closed the monitor chassis – it looked great for servicing, or upgrades. Lastly, they finished the design with some custom stickers – logos, model numbers, branding, etc.

With the project finished, PKC claims the 3D print quality is just as good as the A500 Mini they purchased, the inspiration behind this maker effort. They find the screen to be pleasing to use, and the speakers “not bad at all.”

Another judgment from the maker was that the quality of an original CRT wasn’t reproduced here. Nevertheless, it makes gaming much more enjoyable with the A500 Mini or C64 Mini, especially when friends come over – thanks to the cute factor, the maker said. When not in use, PKC has this monitor on show, with the A500 Mini in front, and some other retro minis around. It has “become my favorite decorative object,” they admit.

Many people play games after work to relax, but a study has just proven that these could help reduce the risk of burnout among young adults. According to the study published in JMIR Publications, popular titles like Super Mario Bros. foster “childlike wonder” and increase the overall happiness in life of the participants. The study was conducted through in-depth interviews among 41 university students to gather qualitative data, with the respondents having an average of 22 to 23 years. 46.3% involved in the study were female, and 51.2% were male, while the remaining 2.4% preferred to not disclose their sex. The research team also conducted cross-sectional survey among 336 participants for quantitative data.

All the respondents played the mentioned titles, and analysis showed that the games brought back good childhood memories among the players, giving them happiness. This in turn reduced their feeling of burnout and helped improve the status of their mental health. The study also found that “childlike wonder” did not have direct impact on addressing burnout — instead, it’s the increased happiness from the memory that has a significant effect on reducing mental stress.

JMIR say that this is one of the first studies to look at childlike wonder and how mainstream video games use this in reducing the effects of burnout and improving the emotional well-being of its players. This goes beyond the widely accepted ideas that gaming lets players escape from their problems for a while and have some relaxation. “By moving beyond escapism and nostalgia, it offers a new perspective on how well-designed, globally familiar games can function as accessible, resilience-building digital microenvironments,” the authors said in their report. “These findings contributed to research bridging gaming and mental health and have practical implications for game designers, educators, and health professionals interested in promoting mental wellness through everyday play.”

Gamers have likely experienced these effects for decades now, but, as the publication says, this seems to be the first time that nostalgia and childhood memories have been quantified in a study.

However, other studies have looked at the effect of video games on stress and mental health. A 2021 meta-analysis of research performed between 2006 and 2021 found that games reduce stress across a variety of genres. It concludes, "Efficacy in reducing stress and anxiety has been demonstrated not only for exergames and casual video games but also for other genres such as action games, action-adventure games, and augmented reality games. Various gaming platforms, including consoles, PCs, smartphones, mobile consoles, and virtual reality systems, have been used with positive results. Finally, even single and short sessions of play had benefits in reducing stress and anxiety."

Although the research suggests a positive correlation between video games and happiness, further research is still needed. A 2014 study linked poor sleep to video game play before bed, and a 2022 meta-analysis found that previous studies included a "high risk of bias," and "low quality" research.