For Asus ROG's 20th birthday, the company released a slew of computer parts (enough for a supremely expensive build). But it's not overlooking its more recent entry into gaming handhelds, with the new Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20, a revamped version of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, which is already one of the best handheld gaming PCs.

The $1,299.99 gaming handheld ($2,499.99 if you get it in a bundle with XR glasses, a Pelican case, and a Dbrand Killswitch case) doesn't change performance at all. Instead, it makes some common-sense tweaks to its existing $999.99 handheld, adding TMR joysticks, rubberized grips, a see-through design, a transforming D-pad, and, most importantly, an OLED display.

If you already have an Ally X, this isn't a reason to upgrade. But if you're looking to get into handheld PC gaming and are willing to splurge, the changes here sure are nice.

Design and Display on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20

If you put the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 and the original next to each other, it's impossible not to notice the differences. But still, these are largely the same system, inside and out. They have the same button layout, the same grips, the same screen size, speaker placement, and vents.

The most visible difference is that the X20 has a new, transparent plastic case with a black tint, along with gold menu buttons, a gold stripe across the back (rather than silver), and a large "20th Anniversary" ROG badge on the rear. I prefer the original Xbox Ally X's plainer design; the clear plastic looks more like a toy. I also found that it let the status lights shine through the top of the system, just abover the screen, which is distracting.

There is one minor change in the menu buttons: where the Ally X had a library button, the Ally X20 has a screenshot button. It's more useful in general, but it's also a great way to accidentally take a screenshot.

But once I picked up the Ally X20, the original couldn't compare. The chassis feels more substantial, especially with rubberized grips on the back of the prongs. There's a new directional pad, which feels more substantial; it also twists between a 4-way and 8-way pad, though I found switching between these two modes quite awkward. The 8-way D-pad is better for fighting games, while the 4-way with more distinct cardinal directions will make more sense for action-adventure and platform games.

The new TMR joysticks, which should show less wear with age, feel tighter. All of this adds up, even though there is no performance difference between the two devices. They share the same AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chip.

The other big change is the screen. Both use 1920 x 1080 touchscreens, but the Xbox Ally X20 has a 7.4-inch OLED panel, slightly larger than the original's 7-inch IPS display. While the screen size isn't much of a difference, the narrower top bezel is noticeable.

And the OLED screen looks great. It's only slightly more vivid on measured color tests. But it's definitely brighter, and it's absolutely an improvement. The OLED screen doesn't measure as well as the OLED screen on the Steam Deck OLED, but in isolation, I thought Asus's panel looked great, and it has a much more recent chip than the Steam Deck.

Forza Horizon 6 looked beautiful, with lush greenery on the sides of tracks and realistic, colorful paint jobs. In God of War: Ragnarok, dark areas with deep blacks made dim light stand out.

Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 Specifications

Battery Life on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20

The Ally X20 has the same 80 Whr battery as its predecessor. To get an idea how long you can play a demanding game for, I booted up God of War: Ragnarok, set the screen to 50% brightness, and used the 17W performance mode. With the game running on low settings with AMD FSR 3.1.4 at 720p, the machine had 47% charge left after an hour and 15 minutes of gameplay.

That suggests that I could have hit about 2.5 hours had I kept going. That's down from about 3 hours on the original Ally, though it's not apples to apples, as I played different games. It's to be expected that an OLED display would use a bit more power, however.

Software and Warranty on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20

The ROG Xbox Ally X20 uses the same Full Screen Experience that the original Xbox Ally X originated. Portions of Windows don't even load unless you switch to desktop mode, which saves RAM and helps boost performance.

For some features, Asus includes Armoury Crate SE. That's where you can make changes to the lighting around the joysticks, adjust power management (whether in the app or in the Xbox menu), and calibrate your joysticks and triggers.

Asus sells the ROG Xbox Ally X20 with a 1-year warranty.

Bottom Line

The Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 is the definitive form of Asus' handheld. It feels better in the hands, has joysticks that should last longer, and the OLED display is a noticeable improvement.

All of that being said, games play the same across the two devices. If you already have an original ROG Ally X, this isn't worth the upgrade. You won't get any more performance, and the IPS screen on the original is still plenty bright and colorful, even if the blacks aren't as good as on an OLED screen.

If you're buying a new machine, it's a tougher choice. The X20 is $1,299.99 — a $300 increase over the original, which is staying on the market. If this is your sole gaming machine, that may be worthwhile for the improved screen, TMR joysticks, and a slightly more solid build. But it's a lot of money; the original Xbox Ally X will play games the same way for $300 less. Neither will play games as well as the Intel Arc G3, but the only system with that available right now is $1,799.

The X20 is worth getting if it's going to be your only gaming PC for a few years. The $1,299.99 price is high for a handheld, but given that the $999.99 version is effectively the best deal in handhelds right now, it makes some sense to invest if you want the best experience.

YouTube retro gaming experiment channel Throaty Mumbo created a Windows-like desktop environment on the NES. The project took advantage of the EverDrive N8 Pro, an FPGA-powered NES cartridge that handles the heavy x86 emulation. Throaty Mumbo has made the NESPC project available on GitHub and included firmware for an RP2350 he used to make a USB interface for keyboard, mouse, and MIDI functionality.

Throaty Mumbo started out with ROMs he found on the internet, trying out a Chinese Windows 98 ROM that didn’t really do much. It had Paint, Windows Explorer, and plenty of things that looked like Windows 98 programs, but none of them were actually functional; only images of what the programs approximately look like. He also tried out a ROM of Linux, a project named NES86 by decrazyo, but it was incredibly slow and unusable, leading him to create his own ROM.

Since the NES’ 6502 8-bit microprocessor was too slow to emulate x86, Throaty Mumbo used the EverDrive N8 Pro, which has a much more powerful ARM-based Cyclone IV FPGA. It simply goes into the cartridge slot and takes advantage of the NES’ cartridge-side processing, basically making it act similarly to an external graphics card by outsourcing tasks to another processing unit. To run x86, Throaty Mumbo used Next186, an open-source FPGA soft processor core that can make the FPGA execute Intel 80186-compatible instructions as if it were an x86 CPU.

Throaty Mumbo first showed his NESPC project with a command-line interface, demonstrating how fast you can navigate the environment and run command-line programs like tty-tetris, which didn’t work well at such a low resolution, but he did show a command-line train animation running quite smoothly. He finally showed that he built a whole desktop environment that looked like a very stripped-down version of the Windows 98 ROM earlier. His UI, however, was more functional, serving as a menu replacement for the EverDrive N8 Pro menu ROM, even having a fully playable Minesweeper in the Start menu. The UI also had program icons that served as ways to start game ROMs and access files inside the EverDrive N8 Pro cartridge’s storage.

Throaty Mumbo wasn’t satisfied, however, as moving a mouse cursor and typing with an NES controller isn’t the best desktop experience, so he tried adapting a Family BASIC keyboard for the Famicom to it using the NES expansion slot and a breakout board to connect jumper wires to specific pins. It didn’t work very well, with each keystroke outputting multiple letters and symbols; the bulk on the bottom also didn’t allow the NES to sit flat on the desk.

Throaty Mumbo then thought of using an RP2350 microcontroller with custom firmware so he could connect a USB device into the NES controller ports. This worked much better, even allowing smooth mouse inputs, but it only had one USB port, so it could only take either a keyboard or a mouse. His solution to this was to use a keyboard with a USB hub built into it, which worked great. Throaty Mumbo further experimented with this USB input as a MIDI device, plugging in a USB piano keyboard and playing with a very basic digital audio workstation (DAW), even playing some Mario soundtracks from NSF (Nintendo Sound Format) files.

To get even more of a retro PC experience, he added his previous 3D-printed NES CD drive project, the NESCD, which plugs into a port on the EverDrive N8 Pro cartridge and the expansion slot, allowing him to play music in the background while playing an NES game at the same time without losing any performance. He then upgraded the NESCD with a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32 to add WiFi capability, allowing for 4 MB/s download and 90 KB/s upload speeds. Since the internet capabilities are very limited, the NES uses Throaty Mumbo’s laptop as a proxy to fetch the NES’ requests from the internet and simplify them to be more easily displayed on the limited resolution. However, Throaty Mumbo also added an option to connect directly to the internet, which would be a miserable experience.

Gamers can now experiment with playing their favorite Steam titles on a jailbroken PlayStation 5. The game launcher is actually based on the Playden launcher designed for macOS and adapted for the PlayStation, allowing you to sign in with your Steam account and install games from your library directly to the console. Playden for PS5 is a GitHub project that lets you run Steam games on the console, notes VideoCardz. When you launch a game on Playden for PS5, it sets a private Windows environment and is run through prospero-win, which is a PS5 port of Wine.

Note that the launcher itself does not run the game — instead it builds a separate PS5 app created for the game that you installed, allowing the Steam title to appear as a separate tile on the console’s home screen. Aside from that, its files, settings, and crashes are isolated from the launcher and other games. There’s also a separate runtime kit that handles Wine for PS5, the required graphics drivers, the Windows environment, and a template app shell for your games.

While Playden for PS5 successfully launches Steam games, it does not necessarily mean a smooth start-to-end experience for every title. The creator notes that it’s still in the Alpha stage of development, with X user v7dt1 saying that even though they were able to launch a game, it eventually crashed. On the other hand, u/Cevap shared on the r/PS5_Jailbreak subreddit that they were able to play Portal through the launcher with no issues, except for the lack of a mouse cursor and the inability to hit ESC to open the options menu. Still, the developer of the launcher lists several compatible games, including American Truck Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, GTA: Vice City, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, and more.

Of course, users need a jailbroken PlayStation 5 if they want to use this launcher. But aside from that, the creator said that using it poses several risks, including the fact that it’s an unofficial Steam client. While there haven’t been any problems with third-party Steam clients, the app notes that Valve does not officially support it and any risk that comes with the use of the launcher “is yours to accept.”

Sony announced that it will cease physical game disc production by January 2028, which did not sit well among many fans. In fact, a petition against the move has nearly hit 200,000 signatures just a week after the announcement. Alongside that announcement, we started seeing a number of jailbreaks and emulators for the PS5, allowing users to take back control of their hardware, likely to the chagrin of Sony executives.

These days, it's exceedingly difficult not to be jaded and weary about the tech market. Memory, graphics cards, and now storage are becoming impossible to obtain; there's basically no new consumer hardware being released; and there's AI everywhere. Technology YouTuber TrashBench (TB), too, is tired and was harkening back to the halcyon days when everything was fresh and straightforward — so he went back in time with a retro build.

More specifically, he recreated a facsimile of the first machine his parents bought him in 1996 when he was a wee lad, to play The Need for Speed: Special Edition — a PC-improved version of the first ever game in the series. According to the man, it was thanks to this machine that he fell in love with computers in general.

TB kicked things off with an Intel Pentium MMX 200 MHz CPU sitting atop an Epox Pronix EP-P55-BT motherboard, boasting what was at the time a new, fresh, convenient ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket. This motherboard popped up during the RAM transition from SIMM to DIMM, which is why you'll see two slots of each on the top. 32 MB of RAM went right in, a generous amount for the year.

Funnily enough, the CPU barely needed cooling, which is why a simple 40-mm fan suffices, although anyone who's lived through this era will tell you that those were guaranteed to start whining after just a few months of heavy usage. There is no case cooling, as it's just not needed.

However, he did need to correctly set the motherboard's jumpers, as such luxuries like automatically detecting CPU speed and voltage were just becoming normal. Yes, this meant that you could burn out a CPU if you played the jumper game wrong.

For graphics card duty, he enlisted an S3 Trio32 card, which was pretty, ahem, modest even in the era, and had no 3D rendering capabilities whatsoever. In this era, the now-ubiquitous 3D accelerator cards were just coming into fashion, and he eventually replaced the S3 with a Matrox Mystique 3D, another offering of dubious quality. Yet those were happy days, as any form of 3D acceleration was far better than none.

Storage comes by way of a Western Digital Caviar 22100 hard drive with a whopping two gigabytes of storage and the uncanny ability to emulate the dulcet tones of a jackhammer. TB eventually swapped it later for a roomier 80 GB unit. Again, due to the idiosyncrasies and constant transitions of the era — hardware doubled in speed and capacity nearly every year — he had to set a jumper to clip it to the likely amounts of either 8.4 GB or 33.4 GB, as the addressing space of BIOSes and disk controllers of the time were limited.

The build wraps up with an OG Sound Blaster 16 sound card and a CD-ROM drive. After test-driving the machine with Need for Speed, he moved on to Microsoft Flight Simulator 98, which necessitated a joystick. Naturally, he got the much-beloved Quickshot QS-123, a staple in many home PCs, and one that needed replacement in about six months, as its build quality matched its price.

A video purported to be “authentic, original 360p footage captured inside a CompUSA retail store in New York City” has been shared on YouTube, allowing retro computing fans to step back in time to November 2000. This was the Windows Me, Pentium III, and Athlon era, dominated by computers constructed using a lot of translucent plastics and beige boxes already a distant memory. However, computer stores like this bulged with displays and fast-selling stock before internet shopping would start to eat many of these businesses away.

The video reveals a nostalgic CompUSA, greeted by a wall of CRT monitors. The store looks crowded and almost chaotic with peripherals, PCs, and devices - and boxes filling a lot of space in the aisles.

The first item is a noteworthy trio of laptops. It looks like three stylish Sony VAIO machines in a line. In the center of this display is probably the most interesting device from the time, which we believe to be a Sony VAIO C1 Series ‘PictureBook’ PCG-C1VN subnotebook. Searches indicate this device was powered by the Transmeta Crusoe TM5600 processor running at 600 MHz, supported by 128MB of SDRAM, and a 12GB HDD. The tiny form factor, weighing in at around 2.2 pounds (1kg), was built around an 8.9-inch TFT display of 1024 x 480 pixels. It also had a dGPU, an ATI Rage Mobility with 8MB dedicated VRAM.

Above this trio of laptops, there's a spec card for one of the larger laptops available in store. Squinting at the 360p video, it appears the unnamed portable has an Intel Pentium III 700 MHz CPU, S3 graphics, 128GB of RAM, and a 20GB HDD.

Next up, the video shows some New Yorkers (or tourists) browsing desktop machines including Compaq Presario PCs, with characteristic translucent accent faceplates – clearly inspired by the iMac. Again, we would expect these came with Celeron/Pentium III processors, or AMD Athlon/Duron chips from that era. Graphics cards in these would typically be Nvidia RIVA TNT2 or GeForce2 MX cards.

Later on, the video shows a significant amount of store space stacked with boxes for perhaps 100 Compaq Presario desktops. On one box you can see the model number ‘5WV294.’ According to our searches, that model would come with an AMD Athlon 1.0 GHz, 128MB RAM, 30-40GB HDD, an optical drive, and Nvidia GeForce2 MX or S3 Savage4 / ProSavage 3D graphics.

The video also shows Apple Mac desktops powered up next to matching monitors. Even with Apple’s serious professional desktops, by 2000 the beige era was long gone. A spec card shows that one of the Apple desktops on display is the Power Macintosh G4 Dual 500. Yes, it had twin 500 MHz G4 processors, as well as 256MB memory, a 40GB HDD, a DVD RAM drive, and a 16MB video card, costing an eye-watering $3,500. We previously mentioned the ‘iMac era’ and indeed, an in-store wall of perhaps 50 boxed iMac computers is shown later in the video.

A 21-inch ViewSonic A110 monitor displaying a demo reel with Apple monitors and Apple Macs is also featured. It is a high-end model, priced at $750. Printers appear in the video too, with various HP models boxed up. The video also shows a shelf of unboxed printers and MFPs on display, and you can see someone pondering over one. Mice, mouse mats, and a Windows Me ‘Take Me Home’ promotional in-store display also catch the cameraman’s eye.

The video ends with a scene at the checkout, and folks buying sundries and peripherals. The last customer appears to be inquiring about a mail-in rebate for an HP printer. Some things never change.

CompUSA collapsed due to competition from big box stores, the ascent of online retailers, and various managerial missteps. The store brand saw mass closures and liquidation in 2007/8, with a handful of stores kept alive by Systemax/TigerDirect. The CompUSA retail identity was finally retired in 2012.

A rare, prototype copy of Pokémon Red for the Nintendo Game Boy, originally released back in 1998, is on sale at auction, with a single bid of $25,000 currently registered so far. This prototype, spotted by Retro Dodo, is "incredibly rare" and features 32KB of readable data. According to the Goldin auction page, the cartridge has been authenticated by specialists at PSA, who examined the card. According to them, while a "complete data read" wasn't possible, the first 32KB of data was, a "technically unique" result. The PSA notes, however, that the game data is otherwise "completely identical" to the U.S. release version of the game, with PSA "expressing confidence" that the rest of the data, if it were readable, would match.

The PSA report does note two changes to the ROM's header data that don't affect the game data. According to PSA, "the difference is at offset 0x014C, which denotes the Mask ROM version and is incorrectly set to 55 when it should be 00. This has the effect of changing offset 0x014D, which is a calculated header checksum, to CB instead of 20."

This prototype development cartridge has a sticker reading DMB-MBC-16M-FLASH, with a part number DMG-(F)KGDB-01. DMB likely refers to Dot Matrix Game, the original internal codename for the Game Boy, while MBC likely means Memory Bank Controller, a custom chip that allowed games to use more than the Game Boy's 32KB ROM limit. 16M likely refers to a 16 megabit limit of flash-writable memory. Retro Dodo notes that the cartridge is longer than a standard Game Boy cartridge, too.

The auction notes that this uses a "previously undocumented" development board, although the DMG-(F)KGDB-01 part number has been seen before. The Rare Gaming Dump wiki, for instance, lists the same part number for a development cartridge from 2000. It, too, had a 16 megabit Sharp flash chip, with U1 FLASH MEMORY printed on the board. Close-up views from the Goldin auction page show an almost identical design, although the wiki entry shows a slightly different DMG-MBC3-16M-FLASH cartridge sticker.

Pokémon Red is a gaming classic that helped kickstart the global Pokémon franchise in the 1990s, along with Green and Blue. Combined with Blue, Pokémon Red is reported to have sold more than 31 million copies. There are several days left to go on this auction, so while the single bidder may secure this piece of gaming history for $25,000, it may sell for an even higher price before the auction process ends.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform puts local AI inference and content creation first, but Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra really wants to game, too. The vented keyboard keeps the critical WASD keys cool under load by design, the smooth 120Hz screen can get as bright as 2000 nits with HDR games, and the built-in speakers may be the best I've ever heard on a laptop, period.

There's just one problem: that 3270x2180 screen asks a lot of DLSS upscaling. The computation that DLSS performs doesn't come for free, and the load increases with higher output resolutions. This is especially relevant with the Surface Laptop Ultra's high-density panel, which has just 14% fewer pixels than a 16:9 4K display.

The Surface's unusual 3:2 aspect ratio (at least compared to the average gaming laptop) also means that scaling content up to fill the screen isn't straightforward in many games. 16:9 and 16:10 content gets stretched vertically, causing obvious distortion of character models and objects like tires. And if you use windowed mode instead, playing in a 16:9 or 16:10 window on a relatively small screen like this quickly tires the eyes.

The thing is, all this is easy to solve—easy enough, in fact, that I'm surprised I had to do it myself at all.

Microsoft seems aware that lower 3:2 resolutions are useful for this system, as it put a 1600x1024 custom resolution in the list of display modes that's slightly less than half of native on both axes. But at roughly 1.6 megapixels in total, that image offers less resolution than even a 1920x1080 display does. Scaling up from such a low-res baseline on the Surface screen results in a noticeably soft image even before we dial in DLSS.

What we really want, for reasons of both performance and adequate sharpness, is a 3:2 resolution that comes close to the 2.07 megapixels that 1920x1080 yields. Some quick math and rounding to whole numbers gives us 1764x1176 as an optimal target.

With those ideal dimensions in hand, the next step was to create a custom resolution to match. The Nvidia Control Panel doesn't work on Windows on Arm, but we can still use the Nvidia App to set custom resolutions.

After diving into the System tab and expanding the Display Properties pane, I found the "Customize Resolution" button to open an editor to that end and added 1764x1176 at 120Hz. I then tested it and confirmed that it worked as a supported display mode. (If you want to match the 3.7 MP of 2560x1440, set up a 2352x1568 resolution while you’re at it.)

If for some reason you don't want non-3:2 content to fit the entire Surface Laptop Ultra screen, there is a Scaling pane in the Nvidia App that lets you control that behavior. The "Aspect Ratio" scaling mode will letterbox 16:9 and 16:10 material if you set the display resolution accordingly. But if you're paying $5899 for this system, I presume you want to use every one of its pricey pixels rather than leaving some of them dark.

So what does that bit of tweaking buy us compared to our initial gaming results with Control Resonant?

As someone who primarily games on our Ryzen 7 9800X3D GPU testing system and not a laptop, I wanted to make sure I wasn't setting unreasonable expectations for the Surface Laptop for input latency or CPU performance. So I hauled out an older 17" gaming laptop with a Core i9-11980HK and an RTX 3080 Mobile 16GB inside to get some perspective.

To level the playing field with the Surface Laptop Ultra and its native support for frame generation, I modded Optiscaler into Control Resonant on that system to enable Intel's Xe Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency features.

I conducted my testing with Control Resonant's High raster preset and medium RT preset, which gets you a noticeable boost in image quality thanks in part to DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

You can see that with these settings, trying to upscale Control Resonant to the Surface Laptop Ultra's native resolution is too much to ask for a smooth or responsive gaming experience. Even with DLSS Ultra Performance (an input resolution of 1090x727) and 2X frame generation, we only just break 60 FPS, and latency is at an unacceptable 87 ms average. There's no latency budget left to turn up MFG without turning down other image quality settings.

With our 1764x1176 custom resolution, however, we're off to a great start with DLSS Quality upscaling (an input resolution of 1176x874). The resulting 83.4 FPS average, 42.9 1% low FPS, and an average input latency of 67.8 ms is a fine experience. We still have room to dial in MFG 3X, leading to a 123 FPS average and 55 FPS 1% lows while keeping latency a reasonable 71 ms.

The RTX 3080 Mobile system with XeFG and XeLL, meanwhile, turns in an 87.1 FPS average, 53 FPS 1% lows, and a 69 ms average input latency at 1920x1080 with the same image quality settings. Its key advantage is in 1% lows, but that win comes with significant trade-offs.

Plugged into our Watts Up meter, the RTX 3080 system draws 250 W from the wall to deliver the experience it does, but according to a USB-C power meter, the Surface Laptop Ultra pulls between 110 W and 120 W under load. Silicon has come a long way since Tiger Lake and Ampere.

The RTX 3080 system and its enormous power adapter together also weigh over nine pounds (4.1 kg). It's technically portable but practically a pain to haul around. The Surface Laptop Ultra and its 140W adapter weigh just 5.3 lb (2.39 kg), which isn't featherweight but won't break your back.

And the Surface will actually fit on a tray table or your lap, with enough battery life that you can use it through a transcontinental U.S. flight, say, and still have plenty of juice left for either side of the trip.

So at least in Control Resonant, the Surface Laptop Ultra is delivering largely the same gaming experience as that high-end RTX 3080 Mobile system, but in a much smaller and lighter total package that draws less than half the wall power. And if you want to stretch frame rates further with MFG 3X, the Surface has MFG support that the older system doesn't. Just add in the 1764x1176 intermediate resolution that Microsoft forgot, and you’ll be well on your way to a better gaming experience.

After years of delays, Atari released its reimagined hybrid VCS console-PC in mid-2021. Now the modern Linux-based AMD APU-powered device is being officially retired with the firm’s decision to shut down the Atari VCS software store early next year (scroll to the end of the page to see the October 21-dated announcement). It isn’t all bad news; the machine already had a PC mode users could take advantage of. But after the store closes, Atari says it will “make an OS update available that allows you to migrate all functionality to your local machine, removing any dependencies on Atari infrastructure for authentication and software.” All players will also get access to an Atari Homebrew App to let users build and add new games independently.

Via the above link and the lengthier statement by the moderator of the Atari Club Discord channel, you can see a few important dates broadcast to those who still cherish their VCS machines. You will still be able to add software to your library via the official store until January 31, 2027. The store will finally be closed on February 1, 2027. Then “After the store closes, our plan is to make an OS update available that allows you to migrate all functionality to your local machine, removing any dependencies on Atari infrastructure for authentication and software,” wrote an Atari Club mod. “Once that transition is complete, we will end support for the platform.”

Importantly, the Atari Home Brew app is being pushed to all players during the above transition period. This will allow anyone to add games to their console and devs to continue to build apps for the VCS and share with the community. If this affects you, it looks like it will be worthwhile joining the Discord community for walkthroughs of OS migration and using the Homebrew app, and more.

What was the Atari VCS (2021)?

The modern VCS shared the same chassis styling as the venerable Atari 2600 (the 1977 console was originally called the Atari Video Computer System, hence VCS). However, under the hood it was a far different beast. It came packing an AMD Ryzen Embedded R1606 APU with 2C/4T CPU and Vega 3 iGPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and 32GB of eMMC storage. However, both RAM and storage were upgradable. The DDR4 could be upgraded using a SODIMM, and there was an M.2 (SATA) SSD slot. Completing the hardware spec, there was also Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n 2.4/5GHz, Bluetooth 4.0, HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and 4x USB 3.1 (2x front, 2x rear).

Even when it was launched, it was possible to run a mainstream OS like Linux, Windows, or Chrome OS on the VCS 2021. But Atari sold the machine with the Atari Custom Linux OS (Debian-based). This enabled a custom UI featuring 100 classic games, its retro-inspired store, and the ability to install popular streaming apps, like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max, among other things.

We reviewed the Atari VCS in July 2021, after it had become available to folks who weren’t crowdfunding backers. However, our editor’s nostalgia-tinted glasses were soon shattered by the price ($399), necessity for a keyboard and mouse for streaming apps, poor responsiveness, and its clunky PC mode. An unforgivably noisy fan didn’t help, either. The conclusion at the time was most would be better served by buying a budget mini PC or Raspberry Pi and making their own retro system with a joystick/controller of their choice. Even in 2026, with the component price crunch, there are still mini PC systems with far more grunt and RAM/storage pre-installed than the VCS, for under $400.

Electronic Arts (EA) is closing BioWare and its Edmonton studio, according to a recent letter to employees, which confirms that early development on the next Mass Effect game has also been canceled. The studio was behind Mass Effect and other popular franchises such as Dragon Age, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate during its 31-year history. EA is focusing on Battlefield, Iron Man, and a Fight Night revival instead.

BioWare, a “legendary studio,” in EA’s words, had a small team working on early development of the next Mass Effect game, but the company “made the decision not to move forward with this development.” BioWare was acquired by EA in 2008, and EA itself went private in August. The next game in the series was first announced in November 2020 and teased that December with an official trailer on EA’s Mass Effect YouTube channel. In 2021, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster of the original trilogy was released. Since then, the studio has been relatively quiet except for Dragon Age: The Veilguard in 2024.

EA spared only a few lines for BioWare, instead focusing on three priorities: Deepen Our Core, Expand Our Reach, and Transform Our Business. Battlefield 6 is touted as “a great success” as the company is focusing on Apex Legends modes, Marvel’s Iron Man, and the next Star Wars Jedi game. “Project Gridiron” falls under the EA Sports heading as a social-first, open-world experience from EA’s American football team, with a Fight Night revival currently in pre-production. The company hasn’t forgotten about The Sims, either, and intends to “prioritize [its] efforts on ‘Project Evergreen.’”

Those impacted will be supported “in exploring other opportunities within EA.” EA did not give a job count, and neither the Mass Effect nor the Dragon Age series was declared dead. BioWare’s released games were also not mentioned.

Veilguard, as EA described it early last year, engaged only about “1.5 million players during the quarter,” which was “down nearly 50% from the company’s expectations.” That reception may have played a partial role in the decision, though EA did not say so. Around the same time, BioWare general manager Gary McKay said that only “a core team” was working on the next Mass Effect game and didn’t “require support from the full studio,” as colleagues were matched “with other teams at EA.”

The move is not entirely unexpected, with job cuts being common in the industry, for example, with Microsoft announcing 3,200 Xbox job cuts in July, citing low margins.

EA did not reveal any dates for major titles, but it plans to discuss its direction and the work ahead with staff at its Global Town Hall in November. For now, it looks like EA is doubling down on its core franchises and dropping the studio to refocus on what’s been working.

The revelation that there was a ton of performance lying on the table in the remastered The Elder Scrolls Part IV: Oblivion won't be a surprise to people who have played the game, which is notorious for its hitching and stuttering. The reason primarily lies in its poor utilization of hardware, and that's a big part of what LTSharpe and Claude have addressed in the new Oblivion Remastered Performance Fix that changes nothing about the game's visuals yet increases performance by as much as 68% in the worst case. (h/t to ComputerBase)

Yes, this mod is just about 100% vibe-coded, and yet, rather than hacking Minecraft into GTA V on iPhone, or hacking CoD Black Ops 2 maps into Minecraft, this mod is a binary code modification for Oblivion Remastered that seeks to improve performance and stability considerably, and according to numerous jubilant and thankful posts on NexusMods, it seems to do exactly that, with one user proclaiming that the performance increase was "dramatic" and that the overworld stuttering that plagues the game is "completely gone."

The story goes like this: gamer and mod creator LTSharpe has a slightly older system with a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU. Not the newest chip on the block to be sure, but Zen 3 isn't so old that it should be crumpling under the weight of games just yet. Frustrated with the verifiably awful performance of the remaster of The Elder Scrolls Part IV: Oblivion, he paid for a subscription to Anthropic's Claude AI agent and started working with the assistant to diagnose and fix the performance problems.

"Diagnose" is a critical keyword here, because it isn't like Claude was hallucinating an engine.ini tweak somebody else published for the original game 20 years ago. The partners, with Claude doing the hard work and LTSharpe directing, reverse-engineered the game to the point that they were able to build a repeatable benchmarking framework. That allowed them to systematically diagnose the causes of the performance problems and then test fixes against the real behavior of the game with modified machine code.

That's the thing; this was done without source code. Neither TES4 Oblivion nor the remaster's Unreal Engine is open-source software. The sheer magnitude of the task would be incredibly daunting to a team of human engineers, much less a single person. According to LTSharpe, over the course of two weeks Claude successfully diagnosed and fixed bugs in not only the Remaster's Unreal Engine code, but also in the underlying Gamebryo original engine, in AMD's frame generation code, and even in the Unreal Engine itself, improving performance and avoiding crashes.

The developer—or perhaps we should say, coordinator?—is careful to acknowledge that the performance tweaks were created with his system specifically in mind and that they may not work well for others. Indeed, he has a Radeon graphics card, which puts him within a surprisingly small minority of PC gamers, and some portion of his fixes were aimed at making sure AMD's FSR upscaling and frame generation remain in effect despite a long-standing game bug that disables them when you task-switch (Alt+Tab) out of the game. The good lieutenant invites other gamers to try out the fix and report back, and he's even helping out with support requests on NexusMods, too. Head over there if you're keen to grab the fix and try it for yourself.

The game of Minecraft is no match for a team of four Gemini 4 Argon agents, as they were able to defeat it in 27 hours with 2,783 self-written programs, a paper from Google DeepMind reveals. The agents did die 605 times, even on Easy, and about half the run was spent fighting the Ender Dragon, the final boss of the game. The run finally came to completion when the End was solved by stacking dirt to reach the boss’s crystals, at an estimated cost of around $520 in tokens.

The experimental run was designed from the get-go with one goal: kill the Ender Dragon. The playthrough involved a random, shared survival world on Easy with four agents — a fifth agent existed only for reporting — from Gemini 4 Argon, Google’s latest frontier model. Each agent had its own player through the open-source Mineflayer JavaScript library for Minecraft bots, but they were able to coordinate through in-game chat and shared notes. Every program used in the run was written by the agents themselves, and the emphasis is on coding and teamwork rather than game-playing.

The authors say this is the “first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents,” at least “to our knowledge,” qualified by the use of Mineflayer “without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans.” Mineflayer tells the agents where blocks and creatures are, with a pathfinding plugin to plan routes. There was “no human input during the run” and “no one assigned roles or wrote game logic.” The run, starting with the first program and ending with the dragon's death, took 27 hours and 14 minutes.

Although the agents were not given roles, within about 10 minutes a division of labor was proposed in chat by bot janesick. Bot Auratian offered an alternative plan while Bot Gyldenia acknowledged it. The roles ended up being: Gyldenia for food, beds, and flint; Bulicame for diamonds; Janesick for iron and tools; Auratian for the Nether portal. Moments of losses, such as a Ghast fireball destroying dropped items, led the team to diagnose the cause and write rules to prevent it in the future.

Finding the stronghold involved janesick, who threw two Eyes of Ender from different spots and sampled each eye’s flight once every 50 ms, triangulating the location. Carrying the eyes involved its own dire moment when Auratian drowned during the task, but the spot was noted, and the eyes were rescued.

The eventual fight with the dragon led to 69 deaths, and the ten crystals kept regenerating the boss until Auratian discovered they could use dirt pillars to reach the crystals. Four hours and 40 minutes later, all ten crystals were downed, and the dragon was dead 39 minutes after that.

The agents operated by writing short JavaScript programs, almost 2,800 in total, with 42 helper functions kept alive between programs, while a Mineflayer bot ran them in the shared world. Text was returned with status data, not pictures. This is a shared approach to the non-screenshot GPT-6 Astra clear of the Orc starting zone in World of Warcraft earlier this month. AI agents playing games is an ongoing trend, with Pokémon Red probably being the most popular, a game defeated in multiple ways, including with a Jev decision model layer.

Minecraft has also been a popular target, and the authors admit this, highlighting two earlier community dragon kills: a planner with an action-selection model on a fixed speedrun seed in Peaceful mode, and a single Claude Opus 5 agent that used 37 ready-made, high-level tools on Normal, versus Mineflayer alone for the Gemini team. AI Bengineering’s Claude run, relying mostly on Opus 5 at high effort, took 3 hours and 56 minutes from start — “no human input after the prompt” — to kill with 388 tool calls and only one death. The cost in that case, at API-equivalent rates, was about $93.

Google’s Minecraft run, using Gemini 4 Argon’s 50% introductory pricing, which runs from initial API access that followed the model announcement through Nov. 30, cost more than half a grand; at normal pricing, that’s more than a grand. A GPT-6 Astra Portal run last month, which took about 24 hours, came in at $571 in tokens.

Google’s run took about 1.35 billion input tokens with 91% served from cache. About 24,000 model calls involved around 16 million output tokens, a quarter of them thinking. In total, if we’re also including the observer agent, the session would be estimated at $810, or $1,620 after the promotion, at list prices.

Each player is driven by a “general-purpose Gemini 4 Argon coding agent,” which is a fancy way of saying that it’s not specialized for Minecraft. Gemini 4 Argon itself is a frontier model for “real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense,” according to a company blog. With Minecraft, 22% of the agents’ programs ended in an error, with more than 600 deaths.

Although the model was used for a game here, the run was designed to show that Argon is capable of “complex, long-horizon workflows” for complex real-world tasks and agent coordination. Such long projects can involve decompiling a game back into source code, as we covered recently with a Modern Warfare 2 rebuild that now has 83% of its functions matching the original byte for byte.

Leading French eSports club Team Vitality has confirmed that its Paris HQ has been smashed up, with trophies, computer equipment, and more looted over the weekend. Thankfully, no team members or staff have been hurt. The team’s V.Hive premises were attacked by criminal opportunistic looters under cover of the widespread protests in France over issues related to school funding, living costs, and government spending cuts. Other shops, public buildings, and property have been smashed, looted, and sometimes burned.

Above, you can see the confirmation of the serious, unfortunate events seen over the weekend. “Our display windows were destroyed, and our trophies and computer equipment were stolen,” lamented the post [machine translation], while being thankful that no members, staff, or fans of Team Vitality were hurt. The bulletin ends with the news that the V.Hive will remain closed for now, until after damage has been assessed. More information is promised in due course.

There are a multitude of social media posts sharing images, videos, and pointing fingers at what they see as the cause of the protests, riots, and looting. Of course, fingers point in all directions, and unfortunately there are also reports of AI-generated rage-farming media, so keep a critical eye open should you dare to doom scroll.

Of course we’ve focused on the damage and looting of Team Vitality’s HQ due to the tech angle. The compendium of video clips shared by the news organization NEXTA provides evidence of the extent of the V.Hive attack. This 30-second clip appears to show rioters hammering at and kicking in the eSports HQ’s windows, taking items from the premises, and throwing gaming chairs onto bonfires in the street.

We also see accounts like ElBuni share clips of looters brandishing what appear to be eSports trophies from Team Vitality’s HQ (embedded above). The second clip shows looters with their hands inside gaming PCs opened up on the sidewalk. It looks like the hooded and gloved looter in the video is removing RAM sticks, an easily pocketable yet highly valuable PC component, as you will all know.

This morning, the French Prime Minister has called for local and partial curfews to contain the post-demonstration rioting. Meanwhile, there are concerns that there could be copycat behavior across Europe.

A new 3D web game where you live "A Day in the Life of a Semiconductor Wafer Factory Worker" has gone viral in Taiwan, where it was developed. Available in Chinese, English, and Japanese, Fab24hr is a work simulator where you play one of several semiconductor engineer roles in a blocky isometric 3D factory. Though the graphics might look basic, Taiwan’s TVBS news says that the game is so realistic that it resonates with fab workers but not always in a good way – some have likened it to "a horror game" or "prison" [machine translation].

If you head over to the Fab24hr site, the game UI loads pretty quickly and you are asked to input a character name and ‘Clock in.’ Then two game modes are presented. You can play the main story, dubbed ‘The life of a chip’ where you character works through 12 chapters shepherding a hearing-aid chip from the R&D line into the hands of an end user. In this mode your blocky fab worker character will simulate dealing with equipment failures, process anomalies, and production progress emergencies. You might also have to file reports about operational errors. Apparently there are three endings to this 12-chapter game, depending on your progress and decisions.

Another game mode is called ‘A day in the fab.’ Here you pick a factory location and role. For example, you can choose to be a Process Engineer. Your day started with the ETCH-03 semiconductor tool breaking, and “everyone is waiting for you to say what time it will be fixed.” Though this might sound like you’ve been thrown in at the deep end, if you pay attention to the handover from the previous shift, there should be clues to get you by. Technical terms are explained in the game so even those with no semiconductor industry experience should be able to ‘enjoy’ this escapade.

I briefly tested the game in my browser, where it ran without issues. It didn’t take long to understand why some Taiwanese fab veterans felt this simulator was kind of stressful, or even “super scary.” It isn’t the kind of free-time escapism I’m looking for.

The decomp.dev community that tracks and centralizes game decompilation progress is shutting down its public index and leaderboard, claiming in a site update that the acceleration of AI has damaged the decompilation community. The creator, who goes by @encounter, points to abuses related to AI usage, such as AI helping forks “finish” others’ projects and a general attitude of rushing to complete PC ports, often with little regard to quality. Simply banning AI-assisted projects is a difficult task, as not all of them have the same standards, and @encounter feels it shouldn’t be the role of one hobbyist to decide what does and doesn’t stay on the leaderboard.

The decision was made because AI greatly speeds up decompilation “in a significant way,” especially with human guidance, but misuse of the technology has broken the community aspect. AI has made the progress percentages on decomp.dev easier to push up. As a result, the site’s index and leaderboard are now “causing more harm than good,” as the competitive spirit has been corrupted. The scene has become “a hollow numbers game” where people throw AI usage at things “to make number go up.”

The site was created in 2024 “as a way to centralize matching decompilation progress” and to grow a community around it. Each project page shows game progress with its history. The goal of matching decompilation is to have hand-written source code that could compile back to the same machine code as the original game. The site’s creator is a GitHub maintainer of decomp-toolkit, a GameCube and Wii decompilation toolkit, and objdiff, a local diffing tool for decompilation projects.

Matching decompilation used to be a “brutally difficult, time consuming [sic] task,” taking years for many games. Better tools and community knowledge sped up the progress. AI worked its way in through the years, but results were generally mixed. Things changed earlier this year with Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4, which seemed to know the community’s tools without being told; encounter writes that it was “clear that the models were being trained on matching decompilation.” However, the models’ results still needed “a significant amount of human cleanup,” and the cost per task was “prohibitively expensive relative to the results.”

More recent models, with OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra specifically named, are much better at handling complex directions and at writing natural code and are “exceptionally good permuters.” The models can stay on task longer, finish tasks more quickly, and in general operate more cheaply. However, applying the models without guidance means that the code can compile to the same machine code but wouldn’t pass as the original developers’ work. Humans learning to apply the technology better is a pattern in this space, as Maurice Heumann’s Modern Warfare 2 decompilation project showed; in that case, Heumann’s agents tried to cheat the byte-for-byte check itself, but then Heumann adapted.

The projects, which are open source and welcome contributors, have been tainted by “bad actors” who abuse that openness. Some original projects avoid AI for legal or ethical reasons, and AI forks may put “little to no effort” into contributing back. Because AI has improved, anyone with an AI subscription can now create ports that work “at a basic level,” using tools “written by talented humans.” This allows opportunists to race out half-working decompilation ports. Ports can be fun, but decompilation is “primarily for research,” and the creator calls out YouTubers, dubbed “Sloptubers,” and subreddits like r/decomps for falsely synonymizing “decomp” and “PC port.”

The site was originally built “to gamify decompilation,” a fun way to stay motivated back when “every fraction of a percent took real human effort.” While the widening of the community has had positive aspects, it has also brought “slop,” which is admittedly “hard to define, and even harder to moderate,” so an outright ban on AI-assisted projects isn’t practical. Judging and policing “hundreds of projects” is too difficult a task. AI-generated code has made headlines in other open source areas, such as with Linux.

Existing projects, some of which have achieved 100% decompilation progress, such as Super Smash Bros. Melee and Animal Crossing, will keep on reporting, and their pages and history will remain. However, no new projects may join, and nobody may rebuild the site from its code. There is no successor named, and no shutdown date. Decompiling goes on, and AI is making it even faster, but the percentage scoreboard is gone.

The Xbox 360 has been cracked open multiple times over the years, and almost every time Microsoft's updates plugged whichever hole let hackers through. The first method was modded DVD firmware in 2006, a hypervisor hack followed in 2007, and a wiring hack exposing JTAG debugging ports was revealed in 2009. The longest-lasting physical hack was 2011's CPU force-reset exploit. That maneuver needed specialized hardware along with a voltage-glitching chip, but an enterprising techie showed how it can be performed nowadays with the assistance of a Raspberry Pi Pico, costing all of $4 (or about 5€ / £5). The crack marks the culmination of a nine-year effort by the modder.

To get the elephant out of the room, yes, just last week the PeerPressure Xbox 360 persistent soft-mod was released. But we're here to talk signals and wires. The aforementioned reset exploit involves sending a teeny weeny tiny signal directly into the CPU's reset pin. You'd think this would do what it says on the label, but what happens instead is that the CPU executes the current instruction incorrectly.

Naturally, someone figured out how to leverage that to run any code on the CPU, thus completely bypassing Microsoft's impressive and frankly rather effective layers of cryptography within the console. Sending said signal for an effective hack, though, requires spectacularly precise timing with a resolution down to nanoseconds, and glitch-chips may even require several attempts to get a successful "latch."

Joshua Kennedy, a Scottish hacker, bought a Matrix Coolrunner Rev D modchip board back in 2017 to hack his console this way, but it required soldering wires, NAND, and programmers, and patience. He once tried rolling his own programmers using an old PC's parallel port (a common substitute), but never got the project off the ground and shelved the idea.

Fast-forward to 2026, and a new tool presented itself: the highly successful Raspberry Pi Pico, a highly capable microcontroller-on-a-stick, whose price starts at all of $4. Armed with this, he started the procedure. He connected the Pi Pico to the NAND interface header on the console to be able to dump the console's NAND flash firmware — a task easily accomplished with just some wiring and the PicoFlasher utility. Although the post doesn't mention it, Kennedy likely took the NAND data, patched it with XeLL, and reuploaded it.

He moved on to download Octal450's Timing Files, a set of mini-programs triggering the glitch chip at the best possible timing to try and reset the CPU. These are necessary because the window of opportunity is different across every hardware revision of the Xbox 360. Enlisting the Pi Pico once again, he uploaded the timing files to the Matrix Coolrunner, and presumably ran the rest of the hack process. And thus the task was complete, and "a project that defeated [Kennedy] in 2017 was made trivial in 2026 by a £5 microcontroller."

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15th congressional district has introduced the Power To The Players Act. This new legislation aims to protect consumers by directing the FTC to establish regulations on game ownership to curb anti-consumer business practices. "Under the bill, buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," the release says. "Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down."

Games having an expiration date despite being more expensive than ever has been scrutinized by players all over the world, along with aggressive monetization schemes within the games themselves. Rep. Ritchie Torres isn’t the first to fight for gamers, as Pennsylvania state senator John Kane also recently introduced the Protect Our Games Act, requiring publishers to provide an offline mode, community servers, or a 25% minimum refund. Players want to be able to enjoy their games even if the publisher decides to stop supporting the game, but Sony doesn’t think the players own their games and that they have the right to pull the rug from under them. Sony’s lawyers even recently said in a defense in an ongoing class action lawsuit that clicking on the “purchase” button would obviously not lead the consumer to think that they were acquiring a durable right to use the game instead of a revocable license; basically a one-time rent fee that Sony could take away at any moment that benefits them.

One of the most prominent recent examples of players not owning their games came in 2024 with The Crew, an online-only racing game that Ubisoft shut down for server upkeep, making it unplayable even for those who had recently purchased it. Ubisoft had not provided a way for community servers to be set up, nor an offline mode, since even the single-player campaign depended on a connection to Ubisoft’s servers. Another is the notorious yearly sports games released by EA, 2K, and Sony, with NBA 2K25 specifically being cited by Rep. Torres in his announcement of the Power to the Players Act; NBA 2K25 is being pulled from digital storefronts, with the online servers being shut down only two years after release, leaving players unable to use a main feature of the game they purchased, and new players unable to purchase the game at all. Overwatch 2’s release also killed the first Overwatch game, replacing it outright instead of the first game becoming a purchasable and separately playable game.

The Crew’s shutdown prompted the Stop Killing Games movement, demanding that publishers leave the games functional after discontinuation in the form of an offline mode, peer-to-peer patching, and the ability to host community servers. The movement also pushes back against the industry standard of selling games as revocable licenses rather than outright ownership of the copy. Concrete definitions and details of the bill have yet to be released, but it aims to require publishers to provide an offline mode before shutting down servers and actual consumer ownership instead of a license that can be taken away, potentially satisfying the demands of the movement. We don’t know whether the right to transfer that Rep. Torres mentions is mandatory for digital purchases, but it will likely be relevant for physical copies. It is also important for the bill to strictly define what ownership is and what rights the owners have over their copy.

One popular phrase against these practices is “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing,” pushing strongly against these revocable licenses that the companies want you to purchase. Piracy is often touted as a better experience by players, as it removes DRM that often slows games down and provides a permanent copy that the publishers cannot modify to be dysfunctional; many players say they would be more glad to purchase the game if it were actually a better experience. It is still yet to be known how well the bill will execute its aims, but this is a big step towards correcting the direction the gaming industry is currently on.

Epic Games says that it’s working on an update for its anti-cheat solution for Linux that would close the gap in capabilities with the Windows version of Easy Anti-Cheat. The company said that EAC Linux V2 will use existing Linux features to make it easier for distribution maintainers to meet these requirements by default, which should allow more Linux gamers to play competitive titles without needing to make changes to their current setup, but with the trade-off of forced adherence to certain security measures that the Linux community often avoids.

EAC Linux V2 currently has the following requirements: Signed Kernel and Kernel Modules, TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, Measured Boot, Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU), Kernel Lockdown Integrity Mode, Kexec Disabled, and Linux Security Module BPF. The company says that it expects to iterate on these requirements over time, and that it’s looking to work with developers and distribution maintainers to refine these requirements. Using these features means that EAC Linux V2 will not need a kernel driver like the Windows implementation of anti-cheat, although it may require some distro maintainers to effect a configuration change to work with EAC Linux V2.

As for Linux players using an EAC-Linux-V2-compatible game and distro, they need to install an anti-cheat systemd service that only runs alongside a protected game. Once they quit the protected title, the anti-cheat service would also end its process. Some of the distros the EAC Linux V2 recognizes signing keys from include Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Bazzite, and Debian, among others, meaning gamers already using these would be able to play protected games provided that their machine also meets all other requirements.

Even though Epic is trying to reach as many Linux gamers as possible, these features will likely not be well received by the community. Some Linux users don’t trust big tech, and it is often one of the reasons why they switched over to the open-source platform in the first place. Enforcing these requirements just to play a single game would go against the ethos of having full control of one’s hardware and software, which is one challenge the anti-cheat systems working on Linux must deal with. Epic does offer some compromises, like allowing multiple boot options so that Linux gamers can still maintain their preferred configuration when they do not intend to play a protected title. But the fact that something with this many stringent requirements is installed on their system may not sit well with many users.

The list of things a jailbroken PS5 can do gets longer, as Reddit user u/AdIllustrious7246 posted his fork of PS5LM, a llama.cpp port on the PS5 to run AI LLMs locally, with a massive improvement, allowing PS5LM to run natively on the PS5 and utilize the GPU to run bigger AI models such as Qwen3.8-27B at 20 tokens per second.

GitHub user cobanov posted their unofficial port of llama.cpp on Reddit 14 days ago to enable jailbroken PS5s to run AI chat models locally and offline. cobanov’s version, according to u/AdIllustrious7246, runs as a payload on the CPU, limiting it to 6 GiB of memory. Running it as a payload is basically hijacking the CPU, inserting the LLM into its instructions alongside the home screen and system services; however, RAM access is limited to about 6.25 GiB because holding more would freeze the home screen. cobanov did this just to get the llama.cpp running as soon as possible, but eventually wanted to utilize the GPU so it could run larger models; however, it seems that u/AdIllustrious7246 beat him to it with his fork.

u/AdIllustrious7246 utilized PS5_Vulkan, a port of the RADV graphics driver that allows instructions to be sent to the PS5 GPU. Normally, the PS5 GPU would be locked down and cannot be accessed like a PC GPU, despite being an AMD GPU. PS5_Vulkan is one of the projects that made plenty of homebrew projects possible by opening up what could be done on the GPU, including making it run LLMs.

Now that llama.cpp runs natively on the PS5, fully utilizing the GPU and opening up more RAM to be used, u/AdIllustrious7246 was able to run a 27B parameter model on it at 20 tokens per second, and smaller models like Gemma 4 E4B and Llama 3.2 3B at 61 and 124 tokens per second, respectively. Previously, the large 6.8 GiB LLM would make the system freeze and crash due to the CPU bottleneck, but GPUs are much better at processing LLMs, which is why GPU and RAM prices are insane these days.

Running it on the GPU allowed for much faster token output, and running natively allowed it to use more RAM, up to 11.4 GiB, according to u/AdIllustrious7246. Not only did the developer run the app natively, but they also gave it a dashboard, showing useful data such as live token-per-second generation, GPU and CPU use, power draw, temperatures, and how the memory splits between the model and KV cache. They also made it work with llama.cpp’s web UI, allowing users to chat with the LLM from other local devices using a browser.

While this is an impressive feat, allowing the PS5 to run as an AI assistant when it’s not used for gaming, commenters are getting flashbacks to the crypto mining GPU crisis. This is unlikely, however, as we already have an ongoing GPU and RAM crisis thanks to the demands of large AI data centers, and the PS5 doesn’t exactly have the fastest GPU or the most RAM.

Epic Games has a new launcher available to download now, which was redesigned with AI. The company says it "vibe coded" the new launcher, and claims it's "way faster" than the current version, as well as 46% faster to start up compared to Steam. Epic Games has set up a landing page where you can download the new launcher, as well as browse its new enhancements.

"Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look," wrote Epic Games in a blog post discussing the new launcher. The launcher is currently in "preview" phase, which is somewhat of an open beta. Epic is gathering feedback, and anyone is free to download the launcher. In the future, it plans a stable release after it gathers and addresses feedback.

Although the headline startup figure is what Epic focused on its blog post, the updated launcher comes with several additional features, many of which are preset on Steam but weren't previously available with Epic. There are dedicated pages for games in your library now, for instance, as well as a unified downloads page. The app also includes collections, a big feature of Steam, allowing you to organize your library into different categories. On the landing page, Epic claims the new library is "30x faster," though doesn't provide any details beyond that point.

Although the launcher has new features, it's still rough around the edges. For instance, the new social menu now follows you around from the store to your library, with no option to close or resize. Epic also highlights that "certain social features and account management options" are missing from the new launcher. The company says it's working toward "feature parity."

Additionally, Epic Games suggests developers working on Unreal projects, as well as competitive players in Fortnite and Rocket League continue to use the old launcher. It's not clear why Epic is pointing these groups toward the older launcher, but it raises some red flags about what gaps might be present in the new, vibe coded launcher.

Epic says its new launcher is 46% faster than Steam from a cold start, as well as 14% faster when restoring from the system tray; though, the latter metric only accounts for a whopping 0.06 seconds. Epic commissioned the testing from Keywords Studios, somewhat of a matchmaker in the video games and entertainment industry for a variety of services (including benchmarking, apparently). Epic says its results were gathered from five tests across 13 Windows platforms.

Interestingly, Epic didn't provide any performance details about the new launcher compared to the old one, outside of saying the new launcher is "way faster and more responsive."

The Epic Games Launcher preview is available to download now, with native versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Windows 10 and 11 are supported, as is macOS 12 or newer. On Linux, you'll need at least Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Fedora 43, or Debian 12.

Epic has recently pivoted to an AI-first company, at least according to Epic boss Tim Sweeney. The company has reportedly delayed a Disney-based shooter, with another director telling staff that there should be "no more handwritten code" and that art will be "generated with full AI workflows."

Overdrive, a homebrew games library offering over 1,600 PS4 and PS5 games, went viral after a video of its demonstration on X by Edigax caught online attention. Shortly after the influx of attention the Overdrive project received, it was shut down, reportedly after the developer received a cease-and-desist letter in an X post by Oliver Darko. However, two GitHub repositories have taken its place, reviving the project after one day of downtime.

The storefront for jailbroken PS5 models was released on GitHub on October 9, with reception being relatively tame. It was only after Edigax, a popular jailbreak installation tutorial account, posted their video on X for Overdrive’s installation on October 12 that it went viral, receiving over 7.9 million views with over 600 comments, many commenting on how Sony deserves this over their controversial effort to produce no physical copies of games: “Only digital, as Sony wanted,” one commenter says.

A day after the project went viral, Sony reportedly sent the developer a cease-and-desist letter and had it shut down. There are no concrete sources for this cease-and-desist, but it likely doesn’t matter because just a day later, like a single-headed hydra getting its head cut, two more popped up in its place; one is a fork of the original, while the other is a clone of the original under a different account.

The jailbreak community seems keen to preserve this homebrew because of its incredible library and as a protest against Sony’s business practices, making it unlikely that Sony will ever get rid of this problem for good. If Sony manages to take down another, more will likely pop up in its place.

The PS5 jailbreaking community has been on a roll in the past few weeks since the Relapse jailbreak’s release on September 29. Since then, an influx of homebrew apps has been developed, including a range of emulators, launchers, and streaming apps; even Xbox Cloud Gaming runs natively on the PS5. It seems that this giant library of PS4 and PS5 games, easily accessible and completely free, is the climax of the past month’s notable releases that finally caught Sony's attention.

A Ukrainian DLSS 5 experimenter is back at it again, this time testing the original Quake game. It’s running as a post-process, not natively integrated into the game engine, using 4x Multipass to enhance the effect, but it doesn’t look so good.

Valery Kryzhanovsky has posted multiple videos running DLSS 5 on games it was never meant to be used for, nor were the games built with AI upscaling and image enhancements in mind. We previously covered a few of Valery’s projects, running DLSS 5 on 2D games like Duke Nukem and Pac-Man, resulting in weird and cursed images.

However, this time Valery uploaded a video of it on the 1996 Quake, considered to be the very first true 3D FPS in history. Valery explains in the description that the game is not running the leaked DLSS 5 build natively, but as a post-process using ReShade through RenoDX to play with the parameters and settings and inject the effect on DOSBox’s rendered frame. So it’s an emulated version of Quake with basically an AI filter with the DLSS 5 algorithm over it four times, except it’s running in real time on a game. This is similar to how others have experimented with DLSS 5 on videos, applying the effect on top, like JackSpace’s video to “fix” bad CGI in old movies with DLSS 5.

Before DLSS’ popularity, Nvidia released an RTX demo running Quake II with ray tracing in the game engine to improve the lighting. That demo looked stunning, with realistic lighting and reflections, but DLSS is not ray tracing/RTX; it’s an upscaling technology that runs well on RTX cores. And on top of that, DLSS 5 is not even integrated into Quake’s engine, explaining the terrible results. However, this is a very early build of DLSS 5, and Valery says in his blog that the leaked build is undertrained. I honestly thought it would do better, considering there are more obvious 3D elements for the upscaler to work with compared to the 2D games Valery has experimented with. It seems that it darkens everything so much, possibly because of the sparse distribution of torches and highlights.

This might fare better if DLSS 5 were integrated into the engine, like how Sultim Tsyrendashiev modded ray tracing into Quake's engine, similar to Nvidia's Quake II demo.

Earlier this week, Nvidia announced that it had improved the performance of its DLSS 5 model by 2x, while shrinking its footprint by 24%. The result should be higher FPS while using less VRAM, drastically increasing performance.

Grand Theft Auto VI, or as its friends call it, GTA 6, will be a console-only game when it goes on sale on November 19. But while Rockstar Games has yet to confirm when PC gamers will be able to get in on the action, a new GamesBeat report claims that it will be within the first three months of 2027.

With GTA 6 launching on Xbox Series X|S and PS5 in around a month, PC gamers have been left wondering if they should consider picking up the console version — and even buying a whole new console to play it. But GamesBeat reports that might not be necessary, with a Q1 2027 release potentially sooner than a lot of gamers had worried may be the case.

Those gamers had plenty of reasons to be worried that a longer wait could be in the cards, too. GTA V was released on consoles around a year and a half before the PC version. Console gamers were able to put the game through its paces in September 2013, with PC owners waiting until April of 2015.

While far from official, the news comes from industry sources "familiar with the studio's plans," although they were given anonymity for obvious reasons.

It's perhaps no surprise that Rockstar Games is keen to open GTA 6 up to as many potential buyers as possible. It's thought to have cost upwards of $2 billion to create, and making that money back is a lot easier when you add PC gamers to your list of customers.

Rockstar Games will also likely want to get its money-making online version of GTA 6 into the hands of players as soon as possible, too. It won't be ready at launch, but is expected to debut in 2027.

While GTA games have historically been popular among console gamers, there are reasons to choose the PC version if it's available to you. The console version of GTA 6 is expected to run at just 30 FPS at launch, for example.

GTA 6's development hasn't been an easy one. The game itself is thought to be in the hands of "Cyberleek," someone who has already shared clips of the game and has threatened to leak the entire game if their demands are not met. Those demands include their memecoin reaching a $30 million valuation, perhaps hinting at their true motivation.

Epic Games has reportedly delayed a shooter based on Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars franchises, with its developers told to use more AI. According to Bloomberg, the yet-to-be-named game was supposed to be released in March of 2027, but its launch date has been pushed back to an unspecified date. Aside from that, the company also told the people working on the project to switch to an “AI first” production model. One of the game directors was quoted telling staff that there will be “no more handwritten code” and that the game’s art would now be “generated with full AI workflows.”

Around the same time this news came out, Epic boss Tim Sweeney posted an update on X that seemingly confirms the change. “We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration,” the Epic founder said on the platform. “The aim isn’t to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.” Sweeney has previously criticized Steam for putting AI tags on games, calling it “irresponsible of Valve.” He says that AI is just a tool and that it’s useful for handling boring, menial, and repetitive tasks like finding errors in code or rigging 3D models. “We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” Epic Games communications director Jake Jones told the publication.

The announcement still reportedly left some of the developers working on the project in a state of astonishment. They were hoping that the directive wasn’t serious or that Epic Games would change its mind about the decision, while others jokingly asked if they should ask Claude to fix its own errors. The delayed title was supposed to be the first in a series of games involving Disney intellectual property, which had invested $1.5 billion in the game developer and publisher in 2024. However, Bloomberg reports that progress on the game has suffered because it lacked the number of people required to keep the schedule on track. It seems that the company is trying to make up for lost time by pushing its people to use AI in the hopes that they’ll be able to work much more quickly.

AI is indeed quite a useful tool, with some developers using it to build surprisingly complicated vibe-coded games, like this GTA clone set in Taipei or this decompiled version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. One group even used Gemini for their free game demo, leading to a cost of $1,000 a day in AI usage bills. Despite that, many creators and developers have been against the use of AI in the industry, with one major gaming convention in the UK outright banning games that were built mostly using AI.

While Sony remains committed to phasing out physical media, Nintendo is taking the opposite approach. In a recent interview with the Brazilian YouTube channel Coelho no Japão, Bill van Zyll, Nintendo's VP and General Manager for Latin America, confirmed that the company has no plans to abandon cartridges.

"Historically, we’ve been very agnostic, right?" stated van Zyll in the interview.

The Nintendo executive firmly continued, "We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily. We also have a platform that was just launched. We're barely just over a year into NS2. It's got both digital and physical – that capability. There's no plans to ditch physical. We know how much the fans like it as well, so our position has been to be agnostic."

In an era where the gaming industry is rapidly shifting toward digital distribution, it is comforting to see at least some companies still supporting physical media. The core issue with digital purchases is that you do not truly own what you buy; instead, you are purchasing a license to access the game, unlike owning a cartridge or game disc. Some storefronts, such as GOG or itch.io, offer DRM-free downloads of the titles you purchase, but only a handful of them exist.

However, even cartridges cannot completely escape the march toward digitalization. With the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo introduced game-key cards, physical cards that contain a license to download the full game data. Modern AAA game releases have exceeded the storage capacity of traditional cartridges or discs. For instance, Black Myth: Wukong and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI use this code-in-a-box model.

On the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, cartridges max out at 32GB and 64GB, respectively. That is not much capacity by modern standards, so publishers turn to game-key cards as a compromise for a physical release. Compared with fully digital releases, game-key cards bind the license to the card, so owners can still trade or sell them like normal cartridges.

Owning physical copies can sometimes cost more than going digital, especially for Nintendo’s first-party titles. Effective as of May 2026, physical versions of first-party Nintendo titles sell for $10 more than their digital counterparts. The price increase was due to manufacturing, packaging, and distribution costs for cartridges. However, Nintendo frames the pricing adjustment differently, claiming it lowered digital game prices by $10 to pass the savings on to consumers.

Nintendo has announced plans for the Switch 2 to mirror its predecessor's lifespan, about six to seven years. No one anticipated Sony's decision to phase out game discs, so Nintendo's future remains uncertain, even though the company pledged to continue physical releases. With the Switch 2 launching just last year, we can at least look forward to another six good years of physical media.

Brazilian developer RafaelNGP has created his own Homebrew called PSBox Cloud Gaming on his jailbroken PS5 and released it for download on GitHub. The mod, created in part using Claude, allows Xbox Cloud Gaming to run natively on a PS5, with up to 4 DualSense controllers mapped to Xbox for compatibility.

The lines between consoles and PC have been blurring lately, and even more so for the PS5, with jailbreak mods allowing for many new capabilities it was never intended for. We recently covered a story about the original Xbox being emulated on a jailbroken PS5, but a more modern and usable mod is this natively running Xbox Cloud Gaming mod. Gone are the days of switching to your Xbox or PC to play xCloud; just run it on your PS5 — that's what RafaelNGP thought to himself before making PSBox Cloud Gaming.

Rafael explains how easy it is to get it running, with just a .zip file download from their GitHub, extraction to a specific folder, waiting for a Homebrew loader to mount the “game,” then launch and sign in as usual. Users are able to sign in using their phone through a code on the TV. It currently supports a 1080p60 stream, but can be upscaled to 4K using the PS5’s GPU with AMD FSR 1 or Anime4K upscalers. The application is still not perfect, with testers reporting video issues such as macroblocking, pink artifacts, and vibration issues on the DualSense controllers, while others are thrilled and having a good experience.

As if emulating the original Xbox and playing xCloud on a PS5 weren’t enough, a comment under the Reddit post asked whether they could use local Xbox Remote Play on it, intending to stream games from an Xbox they already have to the PS5. Rafael said it didn’t work yet, but promptly created an update days later enabling Xbox Remote Play.

The PS5’s library of exclusives may be lackluster, but it seems that the PS5 has more to offer than its own games outside of what Sony intends for it, thanks to the jailbreaking community.

A vibecoder and modder has revealed they successfully launched Minecraft inside a modded iPhone port of GTA V, immediately showing the Minecraft HUD and loading in Steve. This was done using Claude Opus 5.5, doing everything from writing the code to testing the game; 0xProbability claims that they have not touched the phone while Claude successfully flies the Ender Dragon around Los Santos.

Minecraft in GTA V isn’t surprising, considering the vast amount of wacky mods you can put into the game. However, running it on an iPhone, now that’s just absurd. 0xProbability wasn’t the one to port GTA V onto the iPhone; they credit that to C22, a student of EPFL, a prestigious school in Switzerland. C22’s port is impressive; it’s running GTA V natively on the iPhone, based on a version of GTA V that was adapted to run in a web browser, and making that run as a native iOS application instead — even supporting multiplayer. The README states that it runs on iOS 15 or later and even macOS 14 or later on Apple silicon, ideally with 8GB of RAM or more. The port runs at an impressive 50-60 FPS on an iPhone 17 and only uses 1.1GB of RAM, as shown in C22’s video on X, showcasing their work.

As if GTA V on an iPhone isn’t impressive enough, vibecoder 0xProbability modded this version of GTA V with Minecraft. Before putting it on the iPhone, the developer experimented with possibly the same browser version of GTA V with Minecraft, complete with block-building mechanics, not just Minecraft mobs and characters. On one of their posts, they stated: “It’s crazy what you can run in a browser nowadays,” emphasizing how web browsers used to be for simple .io games, while in 2026, you can now play heavy 3D games on them.

While it would be impressive if the developer manually modded the iPhone port of GTA V himself, it’s also interesting to see how much Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 is able to write code and test it all on its own.

Video game console sales in the U.S. have cratered, with both the PS5 and Xbox seeing a massive drop in YTD sales through the end of August compared with last year. Mat Piscatella, the video game industry advisor at research firm Circana, shared the numbers on his Bluesky account — PlayStation 5 sales have dropped by 25%, putting it at its lowest point since 2013, when gamers held off buying PlayStation consoles in anticipation of the arrival of the PS4, while Xbox’s retail figures have cratered by 33% YTD, putting its sales numbers at an all-time low since its launch almost 25 years ago.

From Circana's US Retail Tracking Service:For 2026 YTD ending August, Xbox hardware unit sales are down 33% versus a year ago in the US, while PlayStation hardware units are 25% lower.Xbox YTD US hardware unit sales are at an all-time low, while PlayStation is at lowest point since 2013.

— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-10-11T15:51:03.015Z

Piscatella said price sensitivity is becoming a real problem among gamers, especially as the chip shortage has pushed console manufacturers to raise prices. Microsoft has raised the price of the Xbox three times in the past two years, with the 512GB versions jumping by $100 and 1TB models becoming $150 more expensive. Worse, the company has killed off the 2TB model. This brought the Xbox Series S to $499.99 (512GB) and $599.99 (1TB), while the Xbox Series X now costs $749.99 for the Digital Edition, and the disc version costs $50 more at $799.99.

PlayStation fans haven’t escaped these price hikes, as Sony raised prices for that console by $100 to $150. The base Digital Edition PS5 now costs $599.99, while the version with an optical drive is priced at $649.99. If you want the PS5 Pro, you’ll have to shell out $899.99, while those who want to stream games from their console via the PlayStation Portal must now pay $249.99 — $50 higher than its $199.99 launch price. Even used consoles didn't escape inflation, with Sony bumping the price of refurbished PS5 Slim consoles by $100, bringing them to $399.

Despite the higher prices, the PS5 Pro remains in short supply, which is why used prices have now reached the stratosphere. Refurbished PS5 Pros now cost $1,399 at GameStop, almost $500 more than the MSRP of a new one (if you can find one in stock at that price). While this price might feel egregious, it’s about $100 less than the prices of new units we found at Best Buy and Walmart, and sealed units on online marketplaces sell for about $100 less than this.

AI chip shortage-driven price hikes, along with rising living costs, have made console purchases less of a priority for many families, driving this massive downturn in retail sales. The arrival of the much-anticipated GTA VI in November, along with the upcoming holiday season, will hopefully help consoles bounce back. Still, Piscatella says the U.S. hardware market has never been more precarious since the early 1980s.

Cyberleek, the infamous group that's been drip-feeding the gaming community with improperly tone-mapped leaks of GTA 6 from what appears to be a real final build of the game, has just put down an ultimatum for Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games: do a physical release for GTA 6 and apologize, or the group will release a full build of the game with the complete story mode. It's not clear exactly what Cyberleek wants an apology for, but that's the demand.

As we reported previously, Cyberleek is leveraging its stolen build of Grand Theft Auto VI to try and pump its memecoin, $CYBERLEEK on Solana. That has seemingly always been the plan; the leakers cashed out some $250,000 just hours before Rockstar's Extended Look show went live on Netflix. We thought that would probably be the last we heard of Cyberleek, but the outlaw has returned this week with more leaks, including footage of both main characters as undressed as they get and numerous major story spoilers.

This time, Cyberleek's goals are grander, and also more transparently self-serving. While the leakers previously spoke of high-minded ideals, like preserving gamer ownership of games, this latest message, titled "The Offer," simply demands that the Cyberleek memecoin hits "30 million marketcap" before they will release the build. That's right: even if Take-Two completely ignores Cyberleek, apparently nothing will happen unless the memecoin hits $30 million.

That's not happening soon, because the market cap of the memecoin is only $5 million and is actually trending sharply downward from a peak of $7.6 million at 5:00 AM Central US time. Have the people lost faith in Cyberleek? Or is it simply that people are realizing what a scam this whole operation is and doing the mature, intelligent thing by electing to wait for the official release of the game?

Well, it could be something to do with the image above, where Cyberleek demanded a $6 million market cap for the Cyberleek memecoin to provide "4K closeups, fully naked" of the main character, Lucia. Those promised prurient photos have not appeared on the site yet, but speaking as a gamer myself, this shameful scenario really isn't doing anything to help the reputation of gamers everywhere.

GTA VI launches on November 19, 2026, barely more than a month away. Neither Rockstar nor Take-Two have addressed the leaks directly; Rockstar said that the situation is "heartbreaking" for the development team, which is understandable. If you're excited for GTA VI, do yourself a favor and stay away from these poor-quality leaks. Whoever has the development build doesn't play the game very well and doesn't understand HDR tonemapping, so all the clips are badly washed out and some of the most boring gameplay you have ever seen in your life. Take my word for it and go listen to "Love is a Long Road" one more time.

A creative director just created a AAA version of the classic Minesweeper game that used to come with Windows. Mike Lacher shared his creation on LinkedIn, which he called a “big-budget, triple-A” reboot, with “loot boxes and brand integrations” set to arrive in the first quarter of next year. When you visit the Triple-A Minesweeper page, you’ll be greeted by the classic Minesweeper logo similar to what you’d expect to see on a Windows 95 desktop. But when you double-click on the icon, you’ll be greeted by the usual sweeping audio entrance that you find on big-budget games, alongside a series of logos from the usual suspects — Unreal Engine, Nvidia, Bink Video, and Wwise — before finally seeing the Minesweeper title splash appear across the page.

Once the loading screens finish, you’re immediately transported to the Minesweeper game. But instead of just loading the game window, you’re greeted by the screen as if you’re coming to after being knocked out in a first-person video game. This is where Nora, your apparent handler, calls you “Sweeper” and introduces what you need to do. It also says, “I’m patched into your neural hub,” just like what many sci-fi games do.

If you wait a while before pressing anything, you’re going to be greeted by a series of voice messages from the apparent antagonist, called “The Don,” plus a series of annoying side characters like your apparent best friend “Clyde,” and some scientist telling you to find things for a neural HUD upgrade called “Dr. K.” There’s also a “DJ Dan” calling you a “mysterious hero” on the radio, similar to the radio station that you’d expect in the coming GTA VI. In between the annoying voice messages, you also get this constant internal monologue saying, “Time’s wasting. Better sweep these mines,” and “It’s time to sweep these mines.”

As you play one round of Minesweeper, Nora practically gives away the game with a yellow mark telling you where to press so that you don’t die. But if you’re hard-headed and prefer to step on the mines instead, the game doesn’t end. Instead, you’re just given a red damage marker, just like in Call of Duty. Unfortunately, it’s just a single round, so once you complete the level, you’re presented with the rolling credits.

It’s unclear if Lacher used AI to build this version of Minesweeper, but the final version is apparently a jab at how modern video games hold the player’s hand to get them through the first few rounds, plus all the voices that fill in the dead air to keep the “conversation” going. While they’re designed to be helpful, not every game needs them, so it’s a good idea to have the option to shush them if you want to explore the map in peace. Now, even though Triple-A Minesweeper can get on your nerves if you don’t get through it as quickly as possible, there’s a twist in the ending suggesting a sequel. You'll have to visit the website if you want to find out what the surprise is.

The Nintendo 64 game Super Mario 64 has come to the Microsoft Zune HD, Hackaday reports, through a project that runs natively on the device’s hardware through the unofficial OpenZDK kit, per the repo’s README. A touchscreen controller overlay is drawn over the game’s video, and the game “plays (mostly) at full speed with sound, touch controls and saves,” from the rsheldiii repo, although no ROM is included and one dumped from your own cartridge is required. The Zune HD, a 2009-era media player that rivaled Apple’s iPod, has Nvidia Tegra hardware inside, and the project is built on sm64ex, a fork of the unofficial, decompiled Super Mario 64 PC port.

The Zune HD, part of our 2009 gift guide, was marketed as having a “3.3-inch glass screen” using OLED and touchscreen technology, from Microsoft’s media alert at the time, with Tegra providing the “multimedia muscle,” according to an Nvidia release. The unit was originally priced between $219.99 and $289.99, depending on capacity, and uses the Nvidia Tegra APX 2600 chip. The operating system is Windows CE-based, with third-party games going through Microsoft’s XNA. The Zune was short-lived, with Microsoft halting production in 2011, but an exploit led to OpenZDK coming out that allowed for homebrew.

The implementation depends on native ARM code on top of the Zune HD’s OS, using OpenZDK. The device’s firmware is not modified, but the port, according to the developer, should only be used “at your own risk,” a standard disclaimer. It leverages an OpenGL ES 2 renderer derived from Fast3D with prebuilt shader variants, using Nvidia’s cgc and shaderfix tools, because the Zune’s graphics driver can’t compile OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) shaders. Blending is compiled into the fragment shaders as well, since the GPU lacks fixed-function blending hardware. These workarounds are what make the project interesting.

The game’s logic runs at 30 ticks a second, but some lag is present when the Zune is unable to keep up. There is also no official FPS number. The game renders at 480x272 in landscape, with the device rotated to match. The audio synthesis runs on its own thread at a higher priority than the game, so it is not impacted by a slower frame rate. The touch control overlay provides a facsimile analog stick as well as the A, B, Z, R, four C, and Start buttons, with customizability for button style and opacity.

The project itself relies on a Super Mario 64 decompilation effort completed by fans in 2019, with a C source that rebuilds a matching ROM. The decompilation doesn’t include all of the game’s assets, and extraction requires a copy of the game. The ROM is read on the PC during the build, and the finished game can later be moved over to the device through USB. The build runs on Docker in Linux, so no Windows PC is required. The repo has no releases, and the port, which applies 14 patches to a pinned version of sm64ex, has only been tested on firmware 4.5.

The full PC port arrived in May 2020, of which sm64ex is a fork with extra features, such as mouse look and a cheats menu. Nintendo’s legal representatives responded quickly, targeting “sites hosting the compiled version of the Mario 64 PC port” and at least one gameplay video, Video Games Chronicle reported. However, a number of ports have found their way out for the 3DS, Wii U, PS2, PlayStation and PS Vita, Dreamcast, Nintendo DS and DSi, the web, and now the Zune HD.

The project shows what could have been on the Zune HD had Microsoft been less restrictive with development. Ports are nothing new, but the number has been increasing lately, potentially due to the wider availability of powerful AI tools; the repo’s first commit ends “Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5,” so AI was used at least in part. An example of something different is a decent Doom port to an $8,000 Hasselblad X2D camera, born from firmware research, showing there are multiple pathways to the same goal.

When it comes to the gaming industry, the billions bandied about regarding AAA titles often lead many to think that if your game scores a hit, you're essentially set for life. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that indie developers often have to end up pinching pennies or outright in a deficit despite strong sales. Omer Develioğlu, the co-founder of Northend Games, offered a candid breakdown of how $560,000 in income over five years for sales of his games ended up as just $134,000 split two ways, with $73,000 in his and the co-founder's pockets. In the end, the co-creator got only $15,000 per year and continues to drive his 2012 Mazda, hardly the riches one would expect.

The $560,000 gross figure refers to sales for two titles: Northend Tower Defense and Deepstone Rift (Early Access), both sold on Steam, for a grand total of 135,000 units. In an accompanying video, Develioğlu mentions that an impressive 53.3% of sales come directly from China.

Unfortunately, he also says that the country's customers are very demanding, and that the refund rate there is disproportionately large. Thus, $134,000 goes right away towards said refunds, with a rate of 22%, "way above" the purported standard of 10-15%. For what it's worth, the Chinese refund rate is corroborated by both older and recent third-party figures. Current tally: $426,000.

Then there's Steam itself. The platform is widely beloved by gamers everywhere for its value-add features like the Workshop, but also for the basic notion of not making the other platforms' questionable business decisions. Having said that, Gabe Newell's enterprise has also been on the receiving end of criticism thanks to fees starting at 30%, which only go down for amounts over $10 million and beyond. As Develioğlu's games are nowhere near those figures, 30% it is: $127,000 for Steam, and $297,000 for the devs... or so you'd think.

Next up, there's the U.S. withholding taxes. The developer lived in Iraq and moved to Thailand, a country that has a tax agreement with the U.S. to prevent double taxation. Even still, Uncle Sam's slice is 5%, bringing the total down to $287,300.

Now, it's time for one of the more controversial aspects: the publisher's cut. According to Develioğlu, his Asian publisher took care of PR, distribution, and marketing in the China, Japan, and South Korea regions. The fact that the majority of the game's sales came from China could mean the publisher did a good job, but the cut was hefty: $115,000, seemingly in a sliding scale, leaving take-home at $172,000.... before local taxes.

Develioğlu doesn't clear up what the publisher's cut, perhaps due to an NDA. The most logical option is that the $115,000 fee refers to the sales in Asian countries. Given that 53.3% of sales are in China, and that the publisher also handled Japan and Korea, this would mean a percentage cut of around 35-40% of net income.

As an exercise, we ran the figures assuming no publisher, only 15% of sales in Asia, and a lower refund rate. Interestingly, the net amount was nearly the same.

Thailand's offices also want in on the action, and take 15% away from Northend Studios, a mercifully low rate as it's a digital product. Even still, it's $26,000 off the cash pile, now reduced to $146,000.

Finally, Develioğlu split this 50/50 with his co-founder at Northend Games, for a grand personal total of $73,000 for five years' work, or roughly $15,000 per year of work. As the developer notes, he lives in Thailand, and this comparatively small amount is still more than the country's average wage, letting him make games as a full-time occupation. (For reference, the average wage in Thailand is around $5,280 a year).

But as he says, despite making half a million dollars in sales, instead of buying a Lamborghini, he still drives a 2012 Mazda.

Don’t throw away your PlayStation 2 games just yet. Modder Sword has released PS5SX2 for jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles. This new software brings PlayStation 2 games to Sony’s latest console and supports physical discs, letting you relive your favorite classics in their original form.

For those active in the PlayStation emulation scene, the name PS5SX2 will immediately ring a bell, and for good reason. PS5SX2 is a native port of PCSX2, a very popular PlayStation 2 emulator for PC. Sword has successfully adapted the PCSX2 CPU recompilers to run on the PlayStation 5’s powerful custom Zen 2 chip. Unlike previous hacks that run PCSX2 on a host system and stream to the television, the PlayStation 5 does the recompiling and rendering.

PS5SX2 uses Vulkan as its backend renderer. However, since the PlayStation 5 lacks a standard operating system with official Vulkan driver support, emulation software requires a custom translation layer. Instead of developing a Vulkan driver from scratch, Sword uses a modified version of ps5vk, developed by renowned coder Mihawk-99, who has brought us projects like RetroArch.

PS5SX2 embraces virtually all popular disc image formats used for PlayStation 2 emulation, including ISO, CHD, CSO, and ZSO. More impressively, it fully supports physical PlayStation 2 game discs. It supports built-in optical drives and external USB optical drives. It reportedly works with discs from all regions. The only drawback is that the software can only read PlayStation 2 games released on DVDs, not CDs. It is more of a hardware limitation, though, since the PlayStation 5's optical drive lacks the laser needed to read standard CDs.

Beyond bringing PlayStation 2 fun to the PlayStation 5, PS5SX2 adds an impressive suite of features to enhance your retro gaming experience. One standout feature is high-resolution upscaling, enabling 6X scaling over the PlayStation 2's native resolution for up to 4K on modern displays. The emulator also supports a wide variety of upscaling and post-processing filters, including AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). Patch files (.pnach) are also compatible with PCSX2, so that games can unlock widescreen or 60 FPS support for certain titles.

Beyond graphical enhancements, PS5SX2 packs other cool features. Gamers can fine-tune graphics, audio, and gameplay settings directly from their smartphone or tablet, and changes take effect instantly. PS5SX2 also lets gamers play online by emulating the PlayStation 2's network adapter and routing traffic to community servers. It also supports keyboard and mouse, couch co-op for up to four players, and the ability to create virtual memory cards up to 64MB per game.

PlayStation 2 disc support is only the tip of the iceberg. When asked about the potential inclusion of PlayStation 3 disc support for an RPCS3 port currently under development, the developer, Sword, responded affirmatively: "Yes, it’s coming with it :)." Sony's decision to kill game discs only further spurred the homebrew community to develop methods to preserve disc usage. The irony is that community projects, such as PS5SX2, have contributed to boosting the PlayStation 5's value.

Sony implemented backward compatibility on the PlayStation 5 for both physical and digital PlayStation 4 games. It is evident that the console can play games from older generations of consoles all this time. This raises an interesting question: why has Sony been holding out on its fans?

Easy Fox, the developers behind a free, AI-powered game demo on Steam, has been forced to take out a bank loan as more players tried out its title. The game, called Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, uses Google Gemini to listen to your voice commands and generate responses, with ChatGPT serving as a fallback system. In its latest update, Easy Fox said that the number of players trying out the game has grown over 20 times, which is more than what it expected. This led its costs to skyrocket to more than a thousand dollars daily, and cheaper fallback AI models have led to slop injected into gameplay, impacting the user experience.

SteamDB showed an average player count of under 10 people until late August, when it started gaining steam. By late September, this had ballooned to around 50 players, before finally hitting a peak of 431 on Oct. 1. “We are currently spending over $1,000 per day on AI services for the demo,” the team wrote on its Steam update. Easy Fox also added, “This isn’t because each player is particularly expensive to support. The total cost has increased because so many people are playing, and we have taken out a bank loan to help keep the demo running.”

Since the game’s sole control method is your voice, AI is a critical part of its programming to recognize your commands and translate them into instructions for the virtual little sister. Since the game is still a free demo, Easy Fox needs to pay for the ongoing usage costs of the game. However, the developers said that the cost of using AI will be included in the price of the game once it gets final release. “For the paid release, we plan to account for expected AI usage in the game’s price,” the team said in its update. “Players will not be charged separately for their individual AI token usage after purchasing the game.”

The developers also said that they plan on introducing local AI models for gamers with capable hardware, so they don’t have to rely on external services, which could run into limits. This is one of the issues that the game has been grappling with, especially as the increased number of users has caused it to hit usage limits on Google Gemini. This has forced the game to fall back on the less capable ChatGPT Realtime Mini 2.1 model, which has led to some player issues, like delayed responses and wrong inputs. It also said that it’s testing alternative AI models for smoother gameplay in Russia, which does not have easy access to Western models because of sanctions. They might find it hard to find suitable replacement AI models, though, because Ukraine has struck Russia’s largest data center.

Increasing AI costs is one of the reasons why some companies have abandoned tokenmaxxing. Even though the price of AI has been falling quite rapidly compared to other technologies, the fact that AI agents use so many more tokens than AI chatbots has made the use of the technology more expensive than anticipated, especially as AI subscriptions have hit a pricing wall.

Ukranian DLSS 5 experimenting YouTube channel Valery Kryzhanovsky showcases the MS-DOS version of Pac-Man with 4x Multipass in four different rendering modes. The video shows weird and glitchy effects, with some rendering modes completely removing green Inky’s eyes and the dots.

This cursed experiment is another attempt at putting DLSS 5 in games it wasn’t designed for, nor are the games designed to use such upscaling technology. While Nvidia’s leaked upscaler has been used for modern 3D games it’s designed for, it has become a meme to run it in games that aren’t even 3D at all, and some attempts aren’t even games at all.

Valery was able to do this by running Pac-Man through the MAME arcade emulator and using ReShade to inject DLSS 5 into the graphics pipeline, and RenoDX to allow the DLSS 5 parameters to be tweaked. Valery emphasizes that this is not native, and of course it isn’t; the game was never designed to accommodate anything like it — that’s why it needed to be injected externally.

Valery elaborates why 4x Multipass is needed in his blog post, saying that 1x basically does nothing for some older games. Multiple passes are needed in order for the changes to stack up, stating that this usually makes it look bad, but in some cases, photorealism could be achieved. However, for Pac-Man, there is basically no 3D information DLSS 5 could gather. The game is flat, and it has barely any human-like features for DLSS to enhance, except eyes, which is probably why it gave it sunken eye bags or cheekbones, as Valery described in the description of the video. Duke Nukem, however, fared a lot better with the metal environment and occlusion along the walls and ceiling.

In the video, Valery tries out 4 different rendering modes: Natural, Default, Cinematic, and Denoise. Valery describes each mode: “Natural keeps the maze readable. Default decides the ghosts need cheekbones. Cinematic puts Blinky in a film nobody greenlit. Denoise clears the board of everything, dots included. One yellow circle, four ghosts, and four different opinions about what any of them are supposed to look like.”

The video doesn’t state which modes are enabled, but one of the modes definitely removed the eyes from the green ghost, making it look genuinely terrifying, as if it were one of those cursed game Creepypastas. All it needs is some red dots in that hollow chasm, and you’d have a stereotypical 2013 scary meme.

Valery further explains in his blog post that DLSS 5 is still undertrained, lacking temporal context, and is similar to earlier DLSS models. The 150MB DLSS 5 build is only a small peek into what it could be come release date — which will come with a more mature model and likely a larger file size.

The open-source AnyPS5 project has reached 100% GPU shader instruction coverage, a significant milestone in its effort to run PlayStation 5 games natively on Windows and Linux PCs. The project's live progress tracker now lists all 1,166 instructions in its tracked AMD RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 instruction set as implemented. There's a fairly important asterisk attached to that number, though: it doesn't mean the PS5's GPU is fully supported, much less that PS5 games are ready to run on your PC.

The distinction is in how AnyPS5 defines "implemented." In this case, it means the project's shader decoder recognizes an instruction. That's an essential first step, but it doesn't necessarily mean every instruction is implemented in translation to SPIR-V, never mind a guarantee that the instruction's behavior is correct in every situation, that every GPU feature is supported, or that a game's shaders will render properly. Consider the network libraries: libSceHttp is reported at 95% implementation, but the technical-debt document explicitly states that no HTTP request reaches the network in the current implementation.

If you're confused about AnyPS5, let me break it down for you. The most accurate starting point is "native porting through binary transformation and API reimplementation," rather than conventional PS5 emulation. AnyPS5 takes an existing PS5 executable (in standard ELF format, like Linux) and relinks it into a native x86-64 Linux ELF or Windows PE executable. It doesn't need the game's original source code, and it doesn't rebuild the game from scratch; instead, it adapts the existing machine code and supplies native replacements for the PS5 system libraries the game expects to find.

The line gets blurrier when we reach the GPU. PS5 games use Sony's proprietary AGC graphics interface and AMD RDNA-specific shader instructions instead of the standard graphics APIs and shader formats familiar to PC developers. AnyPS5 reimplements the necessary graphics behavior and translates RDNA shader programs into SPIR-V for execution through Vulkan. That's translation, reimplementation, and arguably some emulation of hardware behavior at different levels, but it's not a conventional emulator recreating an entire virtual PS5 and running the game inside it. The CPU code can generally execute directly on a compatible x86-64 host, though AnyPS5 also provides a "--to-intel" option to convert supported AMD-only instructions for Intel processors.

There's plenty left to do beyond shader decoding. The project's tracker reports 84.69% implementation across 2,578 of the 3,044 system-library functions currently declared in its codebase. That figure doesn't represent every function in the PS5's firmware, nor does it guarantee that each implemented function behaves exactly as it does on the console. Graphics state, texture formats, synchronization, memory management, audio, and other system services must also work correctly for an entire game to run.

The project's official compatibility list currently identifies Dreaming Sarah, a charming but technically very simple 2D platformer, as its single verified playable title. Developers are making progress with more demanding games (including the recent Ghost of Yotei), but experimental bring-up reports still document substantial rendering, stability, and performance problems. Reaching a game's intro or rendering its first 3D scene is real progress; obviously, it isn't the same thing as playing through the game.

There's also no retail-disc-to-desktop shortcut here. AnyPS5's documented workflow starts with an already-extracted game ELF, its associated modules and resources, and a properly built set of host-side compatibility libraries. It isn't a disc-ripping or decryption tool, so you're going to have to figure out how to extract the game ELF and resources yourself.

Hardware requirements will vary by game, but memory headroom is a big concern: on Windows, the project warns that a title may request up to 13,824 MB (13.5 GB) of direct memory, with the full allocation charged against the system's commit limit immediately. That's not a universal free-RAM requirement, but it does mean that this isn't something to try on any old PC with 16GB of RAM and a small page file.

To be clear, none of this should be taken to mean I'm not gobsmacked by the achievement. Recognizing every instruction in the project's tracked RDNA list is a critical step toward broader compatibility, and the work now being done to translate those instructions and reproduce the surrounding GPU behavior is precisely what makes the project interesting. There's real work by humans going on here, too; the project counts over 100 human contributors besides the expected assistance from Claude (and potentially other assistants not credited directly on GitHub).

The more likely long-term outcome of AnyPS5 isn't a universal PS5 emulator where you insert a disc and press "play," but a powerful framework for unofficial native PC ports of individual games. There's a tricky legal tangle to work out there, though, and there's also still a tremendous amount of work between today's milestone and that future, but progress on the project is rapid. It may well be the case that we end up playing the PS5 version of GTA VI on PC before Rockstar drops an official PC release.

The publisher behind Arc Raiders is now training in-house AI models to detect cheating as the arms race escalates with persistent cheaters. Cheating on online games is a perennial problem, and it only gets worse the more a title becomes popular, which is why the Arc Raiders developer released an update on its anti-cheat measures. According to Arc Raiders executive producer Aleks, Embark Studios has been working on the issue, and it has deliberately been scant on details to make it harder for cheat engine makers to adapt. However, this stance has been frustrating some players, which is why the company finally gave some details of what it has been working on behind the scenes.

Embark Studios said that it’s already using kernel-level anti-cheat from Denuvo, and that it also detects cheaters using Anybrain’s AI service. But aside from those third-party providers, the company said that it’s also using artificial intelligence to build in-house models to help detect cheating. “In addition to kernel-level protection from Denuvo and detections from Anybrain, we’re using a growing set of in-house models built around machine-learning and other data,” Aleks wrote. “These systems work together to identify suspicious behavior and build confidence before action is taken, while allowing us to continue improving detection as new cheats emerge.”

Aside from building and using anti-cheat tools, the developer is also tightening its enforcement of anti-cheating rules. A permanent ban is now the standard sanction for anyone caught cheating, and it will not give any warnings or second chances to offenders. It has also started associating copies of the game to accounts accused of cheating, so cheaters can’t simply make a new account using the same game license to get back into the game. Other accounts linked to a banned copy of the game will receive the same permaban, as well.

Aleks also said that Embark Studios is working on a hardware ban to cut the number of repeat offenders, and that it hopes to implement this solution later this year. This may be the biggest move that Embark Studios will make, but it also risks other players who buy used hardware that’s been previously flagged and get their account banned, too. One unfortunate Valorant player experienced this recently, but since Riot’s bans are temporary, they could get back into the game after a few months. This might be a different case for Arc Raiders, though, since the game enforces permabans, so this is something that it must consider so it doesn’t prosecute innocent gamers.

All these changes might seem harsh, but it seems that the crackdown is driven by complaints from the game’s burgeoning community. Aleks even noted some players’ frustrations, especially when they see streamers boasting their cheats, but said that the company is careful so that it doesn’t incorrectly ban legitimate players.

Anti-cheat technology is a game of cat and mouse between developers and cheaters, and Aleks said, “it will never fully go away.” Embark Studios is trying to make it as difficult as possible, though, and has employed these strict measures as a deterrent to prevent players from even thinking about cheating. It’s also not the only developer trying to clamp down on cheating, with an individual researcher even building a technique to fingerprint players using their mouse and keyboard inputs and track cheaters across accounts and hardware.

Pre-orders for the Atari-licensed THE 800XL began today. This is a modernized yet claimed-to-be-faithful recreation of the classic 8-bit home computer, popular in the early 1980s. While it comes with era-appropriate features like built-in Atari BASIC and a working cartridge slot, this remake should be elevated by its mechanical keyboard, 25 built-in games, save states, quartet of USB ports (controllers, storage, power), and HDMI connectivity. Sadly, Atari / Plaion / Retro Games Ltd has stuck with the glaringly unergonomic CX40 joystick design for the bundled THECXSTICK, guaranteed to leave a lasting impression on your palm's tendons. THE 800XL’s pre-order price is a rather steep $219, and it isn’t going to ship until April 23, 2027.

“What I love most about THE 800XL is that it captures an entire way of experiencing technology,” said Namer Merli, the Senior Product Marketing Manager at Plaion. “Real keys, real cartridges, a proper joystick, BASIC programming, games, secrets and discovery.” Indeed, it does these things, with enough modern niceties (USB, HDMI, built-in game, etc.) to make it both accessible to newbies and appealing to Atari 8-bit computer veterans still maintaining ancient hardware.

Overall, the design appears to maintain the look and feel of the original, though we’d need to test it to confirm feelings about the build. Purchasers will also likely appreciate the immediate power-up-and-play capabilities of this recreation. There’s an instant software library, built in, and among the games I can see is Star Raiders II - the Atari 8-bit computer ‘killer app’ sequel. Of course you get versions of some Atari arcade/console classics too, like Asteroids, Centipede, Battlezone, and Missile Command. As well as the 25 instantly accessible games, there are two more - Castle Crisis and Super Breakout – that are only unlocked when you plug in an analog controller (not included).

With its cartridge port, obviously the new 800XL can use a range of cartridges that also worked with the original. Specifically, the product page mentions that “most Atari 400, 800, XL, and XE cartridges” are supported by the new system.

The original Atari 800XL was powered by the MOS Technology 6502B processor, supported by Atari's custom ANTIC, GTIA, and POKEY chips, which handled graphics, sound, and input duties to raise the audio-visual abilities of this machine up a peg or two. This predecessor to the Atari ST 16-bit home computer shipped with 64KB of RAM. We don’t have any technical details about the hardware/software in THE 800XL.

Specifications:

• Faithful design features a working cartridge slot and full-size mechanical keyboard.
• 25 built-in games, including Centipede, Missile Command, M.U.L.E., and Battlezone.
• The cartridge slot supports most Atari 400, 800, XL, and XE cartridges.
• Also features support for software created for 8-bit computers and the Atari 5200 console.
• Load your own games and software from USB flash drives with cartridge, disk and cassette image support.
• 4 save slots per game.
• Rewind feature allows you to skip back up to 40 seconds.
• Built-in Atari BASIC.
• HDMI output with PAL (50Hz) and NTSC (60Hz) support, authentic 4:3 and pixel-perfect display modes, plus optional CRT filters.
• Choice of 12 display frames.
• Includes updated THECXSTICK, a modern recreation of the joystick with eight buttons.
• Connect additional controllers and USB storage devices via four USB-A ports.

The original Atari 800XL launched in November 1993 at $299 in the U.S. and £249 in the UK, so enthusiasts could get them under the TV for Christmas. The revamped model is available for pre-order now for USD $219.99, GBP £199.99, EUR €219.99, and AUD $349.99.

A master’s student from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology developed a fingerprinting technique that identified gamers from their mouse and keyboard input patterns as part of their thesis. u/Magga_ shared the results of their study on the r/GlobalOffensive subreddit, where they tracked the mouse and keyboard signals from more than a thousand players and then correlated them to each other. Using this technique, they were able to fingerprint unique users and match them to specific accounts, even those that used multiple smurf accounts.

u/Magga_ said that his technique was able to determine unique players 100% of the time from the mouse dataset, while keyboard fingerprinting was able to pick the right player 98% of the time. Since both metrics measure entirely different movements, combining them makes for highly accurate detection. There are concerns that unrelated people could potentially have the same play style, especially as Counter-Strike 2 still has over 1.2 million players at peak, resulting in false positives. However, u/Magga_ said that even though complete strangers can have similar signals for either mouse or keyboard, there’s very low statistical probability that two people would have similar mouse and keyboard habits.

“Across pairs of strangers, the correlation between how alike their mouse habits are and how alike their keyboard habits are is just 0.11, where 0 means unrelated and 1 means they always go together,” the researcher wrote. Interestingly, they faced an obstacle during the testing of their method for a time after it kept on returning a number of “false positives.” But once they investigated deeper, u/Magga_ found out that these accounts were actually related to each other, revealing unknown account pairs and even connecting four different accounts to one person.

They even claimed that this method of fingerprinting accounts and matching them to specific players isn’t a proof of concept but a working system. It’s designed to take in demos and link accounts continuously, allowing it to build a reference system with every uploaded match. Despite the massive number of matches and players that it must handle, it’s designed to work on a single 20GB slide of an Nvidia A100 GPU. Still, the author said that the amount of data they tested on it is pretty thin, and they want to see it in action on the real population size of CS2 players. Another limitation they noted is that shared accounts would break the system.

While this system might be a good idea to help game developers find cheaters and prevent them from ruining the online gaming experience, it also raises issues regarding privacy and ethical use. Some players have been criticizing invasive anti-cheat measures, which led to Riot dropping its controversial always-on anti-cheat requirement. There were also complaints when Valorant soft-bricked $6,000 cheating hardware, with some saying that this was a step too far for the developer. The researcher understood the implications of their anti-cheat technology but said that it’s up to the game developer how it would implement this anti-cheat measure.

“Cheating once as a kid should not bar you from a game for life, so I think a ban passed on through a link should expire after a set period,” u/Magga_ said. “Where to draw that line is a real question, but it is a policy choice, not a limit of the method.”

The original MSI Claw (A1M) was forgotten about almost as quickly as it launched, being the first handheld from MSI, and the first one to sport an Intel CPU (in this case, the Core Ultra 7 155H from the Meteor Lake family). Unsurprisingly, Best Buy has the handheld on clearance, and right now it's available for a surprisingly good price of $562.99 considering how expensive newer handhelds are.

• Check out this deal at Best Buy

In this case of handheld gaming PC, this is the cheapest option you can get right now. Even the ROG Xbox Ally with the Ryzen Z2 A and 512GB of storage is $600. Handhelds with 1TB of storage and the Ryzen Z1 Extreme (the chip Intel originally targeted) will run you north of $1,000.

In both build quality and layout, the A1M is nearly a carbon copy of the original Asus ROG Ally. It sports a 7-inch 1080p display with a 120Hz refresh rate, a single USB-C port for charging and peripherals, and a microSD card slot for storage expansion; though, you can replace the SSD inside, as well.

This is a great deal considering the price of handhelds right now, especially those packing 1TB of storage, but the A1M was glossed over quickly for a reason. The Meteor Lake chip inside wasn't built for handheld gaming, so although it offers decent performance, it does so at relatively high power draw.

In a game like Horizon Zero Dawn, it's able to achieve around 30 FPS at native 1080p with the Balanced power plan, which uses a 30W target. Plugged in with a full 40W power budget, the game can crack 30 FPS in titles like Cyberpunk 2077 with the Steam Deck preset.

It falls between 5% and 10% short of the Z1 Extreme, and with worse battery life. With prices equal, we'd normally recommend the ROG Ally. Considering the price gap, the A1M is worth considering. The software isn't as clear as what you get with an Asus handheld, but MSI has made dozens of updates to its firmware and overlay software since the original A1M launched.

Performance is less of a concern than battery life, with the Meteor Lake chip sucking down quite a bit of power relative to modern PC handhelds. That's not a dealbreaker at this price, but make sure to have a quality USB-C charger at the ready.

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An independent camera researcher experimenting with the firmware for expensive camera brands like Hasselblad and Ricoh just built software that lets photographers play Doom directly on the X2D. This feature is part of the Hasselblad-X-System-CIM-Firmware-Research-Feature-Extensions repository on GitHub, which also experiments with capabilities that factory units don’t come with. The creator, Radium Wang, says that this only contains source code, offline tools, tests, and sanitized research findings, and it seems that it’s not meant to “level up” the expensive camera.

This isn’t the first time that someone installed Doom on a camera, as we saw another GitHub programmer do the same on the other end of the price spectrum a couple of months ago. That project brought the game to an entry-level DSLR from 2010 with an 18-megapixel sensor. This makes that camera the polar opposite of the Hasselblad X2D series, which costs thousands of dollars and is designed for professional photographers with its 100-megapixel resolution. Both projects highlight just how powerful embedded systems have become, to the point where even digital cameras can now run a complete game.

When id Software launched the game in 1993, its minimum system requirements were an Intel 386 processor, 4 MB RAM, and a VGA graphics card. These requirements often meant a desktop PC that looked like this Retro95 beige PC from Maingear, with its massive footprint and accompanying 13-inch CRT monitor. However, technological advances have made it so that even the most unlikely gadgets are now capable of running the landmark FPS title. In fact, “Can it run Doom?” has now become a meme and a running joke among tech enthusiasts, with programmers taking up the challenge of porting the game to the weirdest of devices. Some of the weirder examples that we’ve seen recently include an electric cooking pot, an orbiting satellite from the European Space Agency, and even an Apple Lightning-to-HDMI dongle.

Playing Doom on a tiny 3.6-inch touchscreen isn’t exactly fun, especially as the medium-format camera form factor does not lend well to gaming. However, gaming on cameras isn’t actually the point of this and other similar projects; instead, it’s the achievement of making something run somewhere unexpected. Now, if you happen to have an extra Hasselblad lying around in your house and don’t mind experimenting on your expensive equipment, you can take part in the joke by downloading this repo and following Wang’s instructions to reproduce the “research.”

Do you or someone you know have a Nintendo Switch 2? What about accessories for your new console? Whether you want to play with others, increase your storage, or add functionality, you may want some extras to deliver the best gameplay experience possible, or even add accessories to make it your own. Now is the best time to score a big deal on them during Amazon's Prime Big Deals Days 2026.

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There are many official, licensed accessories alongside third-party extras available at a wide range of prices. Now is an excellent time to hunt for deals and the best prices on Switch 2 peripherals and accessories.

One of the most important extras you'll most likely want to pick up is a microSD Express memory expansion card. If you know that's what you want, check out our handy list of the best Prime Day microSD Express card deals for the Switch 2.

Other accessories to consider are screen protectors, carrying cases, and peripherals such as controllers, headsets, and cameras, as listed below.

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An unofficial GTA V port on a web browser went live and was taken down within hours. Alex St. Louis, the founder of Wonder Interactive, shared a clip of the in-browser gameplay on X, which he said was ported to WebAssembly using AI. It’s unclear what made the website become inaccessible in such short notice — people who tried to access the page received Cloudflare Error 1014 for some time, before the PlayGTA5.com page was replaced by a food ad from the ‘70s — but Take-Two would likely have raised copyright concerns if it saw the project. The game can still be accessed via online archives.

While Take-Two does not have the same reputation as Nintendo when it comes to litigation, it’s still quite protective of its intellectual property. It has previously shut down a similar browser port of GTA: Vice City and has even sent the creator of the GTA V Homebrew port on the Nintendo Switch a cease-and-desist letter. While Rockstar allows anyone to create mods for its games, it has strict guidelines on what they could and couldn’t do with these mods, with the guiding principle of “Respect Our Games.” While these ports show how far modern browsers and computing hardware have come, IP like GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 generally can’t be used to showcase these capabilities, even if the creators of the port don’t charge users, add a caveat, or even require players to own a copy of the game.

What’s quite interesting, though, is how AI may have helped accelerate its development, with St. Louis suggesting that the developer/s used the technology to build the GTA V port. It took Rockstar about five years to make the original GTA V, with development beginning in 2008. And even after it launched in 2013, Rockstar still took over a year and a half to launch the title on PCs. Although it’s unclear who made this short-lived GTA V port or how many were involved in the project, it seems that it was backed by a significantly smaller team compared to other AAA game studios.

Some gamers also asked this question: what’s the difference between game streaming and porting a game to a browser, and why don’t game developers and publishers use the latter instead? Game streaming services like GeForce Now run games server-side and then stream the video and audio output to users, while browser ports download or load the game assets into your browser while processing almost everything on the host device. While this removes most of the drawbacks of streaming, like latency or input lag and video compression artifacts, it also introduces a new host of challenges like performance issues, memory limitations, and compatibility constraints. So, for major commercial releases with huge budgets, it makes more sense to run games natively instead of relying on browsers that could break the game with just one bad update.

Nvidia's highly advanced DLSS 5 photographic realism injector has been discussed to death and back. The internet has largely made peace with what the technology is and what it isn't, but that's not stopping anyone from adding DLSS 5 in places where it definitely wasn't meant to go: old DOS games like the original 1991 Duke Nukem, and even the 1972 Pong.

Valery Kryzhanovsky is the man who embarked on a mission to use the tech with old games, and the results are visible on his YouTube channel. His testing comprises most every type of game ranging from 2D platformers and RPGs, up to contemporary titles like The Witcher 3 and Marvel's Spider-.Man. If you want to try your hand at the same activity, he provides a blog post with instructions and some downloadables.

As you can see in the video below, Duke Nukem's gameplay actually looks interesting in parts, despite the amusing intro sections with race-changed characters. In the actual platforming, rectangular visual elements get embossed, adding a sense of depth, and the filter does a decent job of detecting objects like the player, enemies, and bullets, and not messing too much with inner portions of said sprites. Predictably, if the filter is applied too strongly, the results quickly start looking like an acid trip.

To inject the filter into 2D titles, Kryzhanovsky ran them in DOSBox, then used the popular ReShade filter to add DLSS 5 on top. The UI for configuring the parameters comes by way of RenoDX.

In a second blog post detailing what's happening and how, Kryzhanovsky explains that since DLSS 5 was never meant to be used on 2D static images or dumped into unsuspecting 3D titles — thus without motion vectors, object selection, and associated sundries that would inform it — it's important to choose at which rendering level it's injected: the render stage, after upscaling, or final output.

The injection point is as important as choosing the strength of the filter, which of the three color presets to use, or the number of passes. The techie notes that, for example, injecting DLSS 5 at the render stage in a 3D game changes actual face geometry, as he came to find when trying out RBDOOM-3-BFG.

Kryzhanovsky concludes that force-injected DLSS 5 works best with still images, a fact illustrated by the surprisingly consistent results he got with Heroes of Might and Magic. He believes the technology is promising but quite undercooked, and the lack of a temporal element (it only analyzes the one current frame) is currently one of its key drawbacks.

GameStop has increased the price of refurbished PS Pros from $800 to $1399.99, meaning used units cost 55% more than their list price for brand-new consoles, and well over double the PS5 Pro's original MSRP. A Redditor working at the retailer has leaked a memo telling employees that the higher price of used consoles versus new ones is intentional. A r/GameStop subreddit moderator has confirmed the validity of the post, saying that the original poster has been properly vetted. The leaked prices are now showing on the GameStop website.

Brand-new PS5 Pro units have an MSRP of $899.00, which has already increased from $749.99 earlier this year because of chip shortages. It’s unclear whether Sony requires retailers to sell brand-new PS5 units at or close to the MSRP, but they generally have more freedom in setting the prices of pre-owned devices. Unfortunately, it seems that there’s a shortage of new PS5 Pros across several retailers. Sony, GameStop, and Target, which list the consoles at $899.99, are out of stock. While new consoles are available on Best Buy and Walmart, they’re priced at $1,496.01 and $1,554.99, respectively. Gamers who find these prices too rich might want to take their chances on eBay or Facebook Marketplace, but the situation there isn’t any better. New sealed PS5 Pros are going for more around $1,300 or more on these platforms. While they might be cheaper, you’ll miss out on some of the protections and peace of mind that retailers with brick-and-mortar stores provide.

Many people blame the AI-driven memory chip crisis for the PS5 Pro shortage. AI data centers’ appetite for HBM and willingness to pay top dollar for these chips meant that DRAM manufacturers have pivoted most of their capacity towards this more lucrative market, with manufacturers of consumer goods fighting over a smaller pie of DRAM production. The situation has led to a 500% increase in RAM prices in the past 12 months, with the shortage now starting to spill over into other industries like smartphones and automotive manufacturing.

The situation is likely compounded by the anticipated launch of GTA VI this coming November, which started pre-selling in June 2026. While Rockstar isn’t targeting 60 FPS for the game at launch, it seems that gamers are willing to pay top dollar just to ensure that they can get the best possible performance when the game finally arrives after years of waiting.

It seems that buyers who have saved just enough cash to buy a PS5 Pro are out of luck as retailers are taking advantage of the shortage and jacking up prices, even for used models. The basic PS5 Digital (Slim) and Disc (Slim) editions are still priced at or close to the MSRP, though, so those who want to get their hands on a PlayStation right now without overpaying scalpers would have to settle for these instead. Gamers who are specifically buying a console just to play GTA VI at launch could also settle for an Xbox Series X instead, which is a bit cheaper than the PS5 Pro at MSRP while offering more performance than the base PS5, or they could experiment with the open-source AnyPS5, which runs PS5 console games natively on PC.

A TechTuber, disappointed with a 1980s VHS tape-based gaming video console, decided to brew up a superior system backed by modern tech such as a DE1-SoC FPGA board and a Raspberry Pi RP2350 MCU. The video below documents Throaty Mumbo’s frustrations with the old ActionMax (1987) VHS-connected system and his progress in building a modern VHS-based FMV-enhanced gaming system that plays versions of Super Mario Bros. and Doom.

NSFW alert. Video includes frequent swearing.

Mumbo, a self-described “weird and impractical tech” lover, begins the video by tinkering with an ancient VHS-based entertainment system which, after much effort in setting up, is ultimately disappointing. The interactivity on offer using the ActionMax and its peripherals is so limited and imprecise that it is a clear dud, and though it sounds fun, it truly lacks novelty in 2026. However, the ActionMax wrangling time wasn’t wasted, as it inspired Mumbo to remake a VHS-video gaming system augmented by some of the widely accessible modern maker tech that is available nowadays.

On the journey, we learn how the old ActionMax worked and how an FPGA-powered SBC improves the VHS 'gaming' experience. At its heart, as demonstrated in the Doom version on the system, the FPGA powers overlay graphics and switches to one of eight simultaneous video streams being played by the VHS deck. In every new scene, your timely interaction selects another of the eight streams. Meanwhile, a counter tallies your timely pressing of the correct button on the controller and keeps score. This on-rails game is nothing like the original Doom in terms of gameplay but feels close in the audio/visual department.

The version of Super Mario Bros. offers a different take on FMV in games. Here, the SBC plays a faithful-looking version of the Nintendo classic, but the game backdrop is replaced by some snazzy VHS-taped imagery. I think a similar technique was sometimes used in early CD-ROM games to raise their visual appeal above the standard computer or console version of the game upon which they were based.

Mumbo was last seen on Tom’s Hardware running Sega games off vinyl records. This was a pretty straightforward adaptation of how software used to be loaded from a cassette on a wide range of retro computers.

Rising component costs have forced every major console maker to raise prices. However, Amazon U.K. has stepped up for Nintendo fans by slashing the Switch 2's retail price by 15%, bringing the console to an all-time low of £354.99. Other U.K. retailers, including Argos, John Lewis, and Smyths Toys, have also followed suit.

• Check out the Nintendo Switch 2 deal on Amazon
• Check out the Nintendo Switch 2 deal on Argos
• Check out the Nintendo Switch 2 deal on John Lewis
• Check out the Nintendo Switch 2 deal on Smyths Toys

The Nintendo Switch 2, which debuted a little over a year ago, originally entered the U.K. retail market at an MSRP of £395.99. Like its competitors, Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo ultimately raised the Switch 2's MSRP to £419.99 just last month due to the memory and storage shortage. This context makes the current offer of £354.99 exceptionally compelling, since you are essentially saving up to 10% off the launch price and up to 15% off the newly adjusted MSRP.

Not only is the Switch 2 available at a fantastic price, but it also opens the door to an unmatched library of franchises and upcoming blockbuster releases. Major titles, including the highly anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, and Metroid Ravenous, are set to launch soon, so you can secure your Switch 2 now at an unbeatable price.

If you are a longtime Nintendo fan, you already know that Nintendo rarely offers direct price cuts or holiday discounts on its highly sought-after consoles. It is uncommon to find a Nintendo console priced below the MSRP. Being able to buy the Switch 2 at a record-low price is already a blessing given how recent the handheld console has been on the market. Having a handful of retailers to choose from, including Amazon, Argos, John Lewis, and Smyths Toys, feels like an early Christmas.

Despite being in the midst of an unprecedented memory chip shortage, it seems that gamers are still willing to invest in their gaming PCs to extract the best performance out of their favorite titles. The September 2026 Steam Survey results show that 42.22% of the surveyed units now have 32GB of system RAM — a 4.77% increase compared to the previous month — while 16GB configurations have shrunk by 3.38%, falling to just 37.82%.

We’ve also seen increases in “weird” memory configurations — 24GB has grown to 2.56%, increasing by 0.34%, while 48GB inched up to 1.46% after a 0.26% increase.

This comes as a surprise, as some manufacturers have reintroduced laptops with 8GB of RAM even as Microsoft called 16GB the new “practical starting point,” and recommended 32GB as the future-proof “no worries” configuration for gaming. It should be noted, though, that the company quietly erased this suggestion after it released 8GB base models for its Surface laptops a few months later.

It’s quite possible that memory capacities were always destined to increase for gamers, especially as titles become more demanding. Minecraft, which hasn’t updated its system requirements for 17 years and is known for being potato-PC-friendly, even increased its recommended memory to 16GB earlier this year, forcing players on older systems to switch to the Java Edition or play retro games instead. Because of that, the memory shortage may have merely postponed the inevitable reign of 32GB RAM on gaming PCs.

Another metric we’ve been following in the survey results is AMD’s slow but relentless march toward taking away Steam Survey market share from Intel. Team Red’s 48.37% market share across all platforms is the highest we’ve seen so far this year, with Team Blue now at just 51.63%. The May 2026 Steam Survey showed AMD at a little under 45% — at this pace, it’s possible that it will overtake Intel in just a matter of months.

If we break it down by operating system, 52.59% of Windows users are on Intel, while 47.41% use AMD. Intel may have an advantage here compared to the overall result, but it’s just a tiny margin, and the trend shows that AMD is gaining ground month after month. The difference between Intel and AMD is more glaring when it comes to Linux users, with an overwhelming 66.18% preferring Team Red over Team Blue’s 33.71%.

The Steam Survey is far from scientific and may not even reflect the broader movement of the overall PC market. But with Steam reporting a peak of more than 38 million concurrent players at the time of writing, the survey still offers a useful snapshot of what’s happening in the gaming PC market.

Popular Xbox emulator Xemu has just been ported to jailbroken Sony PlayStation 5 consoles. Reddit user u/Yzenxam posted a video of their PS5 running the emulator with three games installed: Forza Motorsport, Halo 2, and Crash Bandicoot. The port, playfully named XPSemu, is on their GitHub page: ZiZc3.

The modder has stated that XPSemu is Xemu and is nothing different; all they did was allow it to be opened on the PS5 as an application. Xemu uses QEMU’s TCG JIT to translate the Xbox CPU to the PS5 CPU in realtime, allowing for fast performance compared to interpretation-based translation.

Xemu has its own translation for the Xbox’ NV2A GPU and uses a Vulkan renderer to work with modern GPUs; thanks to the modder behind PS5_Vulkan, Xemu can talk to the PS5’s AMD GPU through the open-source RADV Vulkan driver — allowing the porter to run Xemu as a native PS5 application.

ZiZc3 also added their own touches as explained in their GitHub repository:

"On top of the port, XPSemu adds its own controller-friendly dashboard, per-game settings, cover art, play time, game patches, a performance overlay, a per-game log and a set of CPU optimizations made for the PS5's Zen 2 processor."

While QEMU's TCG JIT is relatively fast, it still leaves plenty to be desired. ZiZc3 explains that the emulated Xbox CPU is the bottleneck, loaded at 85-97% while the PS5 GPU remains mostly idle. As a consequence, the resolution multiplier up to 3-4x barely affects performance, and upscaling with FSR does not add performance.

The developer further explains that the PS5's Zen 2 cores are slower per core than a fast PC, and CPU-heavy games suffer from this. In terms of performance, ZiZc3 has provided a table of their experience and performance of the games on XPSemu:

As of writing, there are fewer than 15 fully PS5-exclusive games, while the number of emulators the PS5 can run is increasing by the week. On X, users BrinoTk and Mihawk9_9 (the same person behind PS5_Vulkan) announced their Xbox 360 and PS5 Proton projects on the same day, with the Xbox 360 emulator already available for testing.

The PS5 already has emulators for PS1-3, with PS4 emulation technically built in. Non-PlayStation emulators besides the XPSemu include the Nintendo Switch, Wii U, 3DS, and of course the myriad of emulators available on RetroArch as well. On the other side of the coin, the PS5 itself has also been emulated on PC and the Xbox Series X — at this point, the lines are blurring faster than owners know what to do with their jailbroken PS5.

Thanks to a Rhysida ransomware attack in December 2023 aimed at Sony and Insomniac, the 1.7 TB of data stolen contained an early version of Wolverine. The source code of the leaked PS5 exclusive paved the way for u/Clean-Market5761 to create their own PC port.

It is currently a buggy mess; textures are missing, and Wolverine’s whole head is missing from multiple screenshots. Ironically, there is another screenshot where only Wolverine’s head is present, with no body in sight. The developer claims that neither KytyPS5 nor AnyPS5 were used, like in a recent story of Wolverine on KytyPS5. The developer says that the 2023 leak was key to understanding how they could generate a PC executable program.

Skeptics are claiming the developer’s screenshots are fake and from the old 2023 build; one claims they were able to port Wolverine to PC before u/Clean-Market5761, but the developer argues the screenshots are from a Jailbroken PS5 in dev mode. The developer further defends himself by comparing screenshots of Wolverine’s appearance in the 2023 leak versus their assets.

The developer has admitted to using AI for assistance in creating scripts and automated asset conversion, but trial and error were done manually. u/Clean-Market5761 further elaborates that the playable character doesn’t have a head because they haven’t ported over the PS5 shader library to render the hair, and it freezes the game. They have disabled the whole head asset, focusing on getting the game to run and become “playable.”

As excited commenters are about the port and the work of the developer, they are not thrilled about Wolverine itself. One commenter applauds the dev, but says, “You can keep it, though.”

The PS5 exclusive has not been received well, being regarded as an “interactive movie.” A viral video shows a motorcycle chase scene completing itself without any player input, with Wolverine riding along walls, seemingly with no way to crash or fail the segment. Other instances show Quick-Time Events completing themselves if the player chooses not to press any buttons. Players feel the game is making it too easy and holding their hand too much.

Even if there were an official port of Wolverine, it seems likely that the game itself isn’t attractive to players.

It's the year of two thousand and twenty-six, and "Running Doom on X" is still probably the most popular software hacking hobby. From pregnancy tests to space satellites, the 1993 game has been ported to pretty much anything under the sun that has a CPU and some memory in it. Now it's time to run the game in a database, in this case CedarDB, courtesy of the SQLDoom project by Lukas Vogel, who previously authored DoomQL.

If you're wondering how the heck one runs a game in SQL, it's actually much easier than you imagine, so long as you think like a database architect. The actual frontend displaying the graphics, playing sound, and taking inputs is in Python, but that part acts only like a PC's peripherals — all the math is done inside the database.

The backend is written for the performance-focused, Postgres-compatible RDBMS CedarDB. Much like modern Doom ports, SQLDoom uses two paths: one running at the game's original 35 Hz for handling all the logic, and a separate thread for displaying graphics, interpolating camera position between game updates.

To start, Vogel had to convert the entities in Doom's WAD package file to databases. That was easier than expected, as the data therein "is highly relational already," with Vogel presenting the example of map levels ultimately being structured in parent-child relationships that are trivial to replicate in plain tables. 1000 lines of Python was all it took.

For the main gameplay loop, Vogel was once again pleasantly surprised that the game logic was easy to convert. The resulting code was 5,900 lines of SQL, compared to the original C source code's 9,000. A lot of the savings came from the fact that whereas one has to iterate over entities with "for" or "while" loops to update values, a simple "UPDATE... WHERE" is enough in SQL to do that in just one statement — and in parallel, no less. As an added bonus, the fact that everything is a row in a database table makes for some trivial instant modifications, like changing weapon characteristics or enemy behavior on-the-fly.

The graphical renderer is also small at 1,300 lines, but it's trickier as it's the one query spanning 89 tables. Vogel notes that the pipeline is ultimately very similar to that of Doom. Data for Carmack's then-revolutionary Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) traversal, an implementation of binary trees, can be easily represented as a table.

Each left/right value can be converted to a bit, and ultimately the vertex order value can be reduced to just the one number. Thus, a simple "SELECT... ORDER BY" automagically sorts the walls front-to-back for you. Amusingly, I used the very same database technique when I wrote the defunct Tech Report's threaded comments system. Despite his best efforts, Vogel says the floor and ceiling renderers didn't map very cleanly to SQL, as ultimately they're clever flood-fill algorithms.

When it came to multiplayer, that's when using a database was actually much better than the original game. The reason is simple: maintaining synced states across many tables with copious amounts of interdependencies is literally what databases are designed for, so snapshots, authentication, access control, are all effectively free and implemented for you. To run a game tick, all you need is "START TRANSACTION," run the logic, and "COMMIT," and everything magically synchronizes.

You can peruse or download SQLDoom from its GitHub repository, or read Vogel's entertaining blog post detailing the adventure.