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.

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."

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

The developers of the Sony PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 have warned their social media followers about “a recent influx of fake Blu-ray drives.” According to the emulator devs, scammers are putting inferior optical disc mechanisms in higher-end Blu-ray drives for extra profit. Such skuillduggery could directly affect potential RPCS3 users, looking to ensure any Blu-ray drive they buy is compatible with the emulator.

“BEWARE OF FAKE BLU-RAY DRIVES!” warn the RPCS3 devs. “There has been a recent influx of fake Blu-ray drives. These fakes use older drives that cannot read PS3 discs, with enclosures and packaging for higher-end models, plus spoofed firmware.” The team also helpfully links to a wiki with images and details to help you know if you acquired a “fake drive.”

Telltale signs that you have a fake Blu-ray can include misspelled words on the drive label, misaligned logos, incorrect manufacturing dates, and the covering of certain PCB markings. We guess that another symptom that RPCS3 users might notice is that their supposedly compatible Blu-ray drive won’t work properly with the emulator.

Blu-ray drought

In 2026, after 20 years of commercial availability, the hardware options for living room Blu-ray players and PC drives are narrowing due to the withdrawal of several big brands from these markets. Media makers are dwindling, too. Meanwhile, interest in the highest-capacity consumer optical standard for media playback and backups is rising. The price of HDDs and SSDs in 2026 has also resulted in increased numbers of computer enthusiasts looking at Blu-ray storage.

So, what should those on the lookout for a Blu-ray drive do? According to the RPCS3 experts the best way to keep out of the reach of scammers is to only order from stores with good buyer protection. The above-linked Wiki warns specifically against buying your next Blu-ray drive from Newegg or AliExpress marketplaces. Unfortunately, we’ve now got another piece of tech to add to the beware-of-scams list.

Few projects in the software world have experienced such rapid evolution as PlayStation 5 emulation. A few hours ago, a video popped up of Demon's Souls Remake running at 40-50 FPS, seemingly with accurate graphics. Coincidentally or not, only scant months after Sony ditched physical releases of games — an announcement that landed as well as the Hindenburg — progress on KyTyPS5, SharpEmu, and AnyPS5 has gone into overdrive.

The video above is short and only shows a few sections of the game, but it's an impressive watch. Even acknowledging that the hardware specs displayed comprise an RTX 5090 and a Core i9-14900K, having a game working this well, at least graphically, only a month after "barely works" was a landmark is nothing short of staggering.

To wit, KyTyPS5 was running Demon's Souls Remake with 1-2 FPS on actual gameplay three weeks ago, and struggling to reach 30 FPS a fortnight past. The same emulator has been shown partially running GTA V before at 40-60 FPS, but that's an older title that presumably isn't as demanding as Demon's Souls.

The fact that the PlayStation 5's architecture is so similar to a standard PC apart from unified memory is a big reason why progress has been so speedy. As it stands, the major roadblocks aren't emulating a CPU or a GPU, but rather writing compatibility layers for the console's operating system and drivers, including but not limited to converting native graphics shaders to Vulkan's SPIR-V language.

Given the demo video's lack of stuttering, it's a reasonable assumption that the captured video was done after an initial run to avoid shader recompilation hitches. This particular aspect of emulation has always been a constant thorn in developers' side, as it's exceedingly difficult to predict which shaders a game will need before they're actually used.

The current best approach is to asynchronously compile and collect shaders from gamers' playthroughs and build a community database for preloading. This concept was popularized by RPCS3 around 2018, with a small team and limited to no budget.

Although Nvidia and AMD drivers have cached shaders in limited fashion for a long while, RPCS3's effort appeared seven years before Nvidia and Microsoft, with their gigantic piles of money, bothered to try and fix this issue properly with their Auto Shader Compilation and Advanced Shader Delivery, respectively.

The developers of the open-source PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 are celebrating finding a workaround for an Nvidia driver bug. The social media celebration stems from their testing showing that some PC configurations with Nvidia GPUs can enjoy up to 37% faster gaming performance. That’s more than a small wrinkle that’s been ironed out.

We don’t know the exact nature of the Nvidia driver bug here, but the RPCS3 devs say that it bottlenecks the performance of their PS3 emulator. The first example cited provides two PC configurations running Red Dead Redemption in a scene featuring a paddle steamer. This is a popular ‘benchmarking’ scene focused on the Blackwater docks in the game, featuring relatively consistent camera paths and water effects.

Those are very gratifying performance uplifts resulting from a driver bug workaround. Plenty of readers are probably more interested if the purported bug might also be bottlenecking native PC gaming performance. If it were, that would be a hugely significant find/workaround from the RPCS3 team, specifically ‘Yahfz.’ Please note that “AMD GPU drivers do not have this bug, thus seeing no change,” say the emulator developers.

Gran Turismo 5 ran 37% faster, used far less VRAM

Follow-up social media postings underline that RDR isn’t an outlier, and “most games are impacted” by the bottleneck in the Nvidia driver. Great frame rate improvements can also be seen when using lower-end GPUs, too. The open sourcerers tested Gran Turismo 5 and saw frame rates climb by an incredible 37%, while VRAM usage dropped from 7.1 to 4.8GB. Meanwhile, playing Saints Row IV on a more mainstream GTX 1060 saw a 20% improvement in performance.

Sadly, RPCS3 dev reach-outs to Nvidia are falling on deaf ears. Another follow-up tweet states that “We tried using the developer forums in the past to no avail and gave up.” It then asks @Nvidia to establish a direct communication channel to receive driver bug reports. Nvidia Software QA boss Manuel Guzman has now replied directly, so we will see what happens in due course.

Games optimization specialist OptiProjects (AKA OptiJeugos) has released a new port of Minecraft Legacy for the Sony PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii consoles. The project is based on the Minecraft Java 1.2.5 source code, rewritten in C++, and using a recreated legacy console interface (machine translation). Even on the quarter-century-old PS2 with its cramped 32MB of RAM, the OptiCraft Heritage Edition runs at 15-30 fps. Check out the video demo embedded below.

Minecraft is one of the best-selling games of all time, with sales above $400 million according to an Entertainment Weekly report earlier this year. Meanwhile, the PS2 is the best-selling home console in history, with 160 million units shifted worldwide. When Minecraft first launched, the PS2 had already been kicking around for close to a decade and was rapidly reaching retirement age. Thus the Minecraft PS2 game release was never a thing (it did launch on PS3 in 2013-14). Similarly, the Wii got overlooked by Minecraft's publishers, with the Wii U only getting the game in late 2014.

Ponder over the features and performance comparison table we have nailed together, above. You can see how tightly the PS2 version is constrained by its hardware limitations. In comparison the Wii version is significantly more comfortable. Moreover, the Wii version has experimental online gaming functionality.

If you are interested in enjoying some retro Minecrafting on your old PS2 or Wii, or emulators for either system head on over to the official OptiProjects page linked top for your downloads. Those aiming to play on original hardware will need to be able to load .ELF files from USB (on PS2), or access the game via SD card and the Homebrew Channel (on Wii). To my knowledge that means your PS2 or Wii must be soft or hard modded to play homebrew code.

Retro gaming fans who own Nintendo Switch consoles now have several classic Windows titles they can now enjoy. A video shared on Twitter/X shows the well-loved Need for Speed Underground 2 running pretty smoothly on Nintendo’s hybrid device. Meanwhile, a forum about Wine-NX says that Quake III and OpenTTD are also playable, with WarCraft III nearly ready, too. It's early days for this 'experimental' software, but things look very promising.

In the embedded video you can see NFSU2 runs rather well on Nintendo’s hardware. Older PC games are perhaps a good fit for what many consider to be the rather anemic specs of the Switch. A status panel shows CPU and GPU usage. According to the forum post “Races run at roughly 20–45 fps at default detail with the CPU overclocked.”

Other games that Wine-NX can handle well at this time include OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe), which runs at up to 60 fps. Quake III Arena is also capable of running at around 37 fps at 1,280 x 720 pixels, according to the source. The last PC game mentioned as being compatible, almost, is WarCraft III, and specifically this work in progress has working “menus, campaigns, and now cutscenes.”

The Wine-NX forum page linked to helpfully explains what exactly this is, and how it works. In brief, Wine-NX is a port of Wine 11 to the Switch’s native Horizon OS. It comes as a homebrew package in the NRO format Horizon expects games to be in, but that allows it to run Windows programs and games with Box64's ARM64 dynarec translating the x86 code. Graphics are handled through Mesa 20.1's nouveau driver. It supports audio and touchscreen, and the Switch controllers can also handle mouse / keyboard duties – as well as doubling as an Xbox 360 controller.

You can’t use any Nintendo Switch to load Wine-NX and Windows PC games. You’ll need to have a console that can boost custom firmware, and run homebrew NROs. That means an older unpatched Switch or one with a hardware mod.

A retro video gaming devotee has showcased Lara Croft adventuring in and among ancient tombs on a humble ESP32-P4 microcontroller. This highly affordable device (available as a sub-$25 dev board) packs a pair of 32-bit 400 MHz RISC cores and delivers a slick, playable 1,024 x 600 pixel experience for TheAlexKid777, yet consumes roughly 1 watt at peak. It is good to see someone having video-gaming fun with cheap, power-sipping new tech in 2026.

When it launched in the mid-90s, Tomb Raider quickly became a classic by successfully capturing the add-a-third-dimension-to-all-games-and-IPs trend while delivering an eminently enjoyable adventure game. Not all games were better because they were in 3D rather than 2D. Far from it. Now the compute power required to run a title like OpenLara doesn’t require an expensive and power-hungry game console - a cheap dev board that typically consumes milliwatts is capable enough today.

But the high-efficiency low-wattage gaming feat described above is just half the story. The other phenomenon demonstrated here is the beefing up of commonly available microcontrollers. Developers no longer need to be extremely resource thrifty when coding for these humble devices. They now pack plenty of horsepower to spare.

In the case of Espressif’s ESP32-P4, there is “a dual-core RISC-V CPU featuring AI instruction extensions, an advanced memory subsystem, and integrated high-speed peripherals,” the maker highlights. There’s also up to 64MB PSRAM, 768KB SRAM, an FPU, DSP, ISP, 55 programmable GPIOs, and more. It sounds almost like an original Tomb Raider era dream.

In TheAlexKid777’s demo, this hardware is attached to the back of what looks like a 7- or 8-inch LCD. It runs OpenLara at 320 x 240 pixels, which is PPA hardware scaled to 1,024 x 600 pixels. The game also features stereo audio pumped through the dev board’s ES8311 codec, and it's controlled via a connected USB keyboard.

We’ve previously reported on various ESP32 family microcontrollers being used to: power a retro Mac emulator, host a tiny ad-blocking dongle, and even run a 28.9 million parameter LLM. Some of these projects use far cheaper ESP32 microcontrollers, too, starting at $5.

Plaion's release of the NeoGeo AES+, a contemporary, hardware-level 1:1 replica of SNK's evergreen NeoGeo console, is being delayed by 10 months, with a new September 16, 2027 release date. Predictably, Plaion says the main reason is the AI-driven RAM shortage, though it remarks that demand is higher than expected.

Unlike nearly every other modern console re-release, the AES+ is intended to be an exact, 100% compatible replica of the original, by way of physical hardware rather than emulation software. Plaion says it's using dedicated ASIC chips and presumably contemporary clones of processors like the Motorola 68000 and Zilog Z80A.

The team counts long-time MiSTER core developer Jotego among its staff, lending serious pedigree to the project and assuaging concerns about whether the AES+ will perform just like the original. They're even going as far as using 5 V power delivery to be directly compatible with the original cartridges.

It's expected that every game cartridge from the original NeoGeo AES (Advanced Entertainment System) home console will work on the AES+, and there are modern third-party adapters for using original arcade cartridges. Plaion is re-releasing ten iconic games in cartridge form, including Metal Slug, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Pulstar, and King of Fighters 2002.

The NeoGeo was the greatest 2D arcade/home system that ever existed (according to me), with production lasting for 14 years from 1990 to 2004. It had a number of "firsts," being the first system that used the same exact hardware for the home version as it did inside an arcade cabinet, with nothing but the form factor, the name (AES vs. MVS), and a defeatable lockout mechanism as a distinction. Arcade operators loved the then-new swappable cartridge system, and there were variants that could hold four games that were switchable on the fly.

The AES also marked the appearance of memory cards for save games, and that came with a serious arcade joystick, unlike its competitors' gamepads. Every home console release at the time promised "arcade-quality games in your home," but only the Neo Geo actually delivered.

Of course, all this goodness had a small problem: the AES cost $399.99, or $1,028 in today's dollars — for just the base system with the one joystick and no games. The Gold package with two sticks, one game, and a memory card would set buyers back a cool $649.99, or $1,671 today.

The technical reasons for the NeoGeo's longevity are quite straightforward: it was ridiculously overpowered from the start. Its architecture covered almost every possible use case and lent itself well to most every type of 2D game. The NeoGeo packed a total of seven processors and co-processors, and a GPU with a 24-bit bus, capable of 3840 simultaneous colors across 380 sprites. The graphics chip also had hardware scaling and used an unconventional but effective vertical-strip sprite mechanism, unlike tile maps of the era.

The expandable storage also played a big part in longevity, with late-day cartridges storing as much as 716 Mb, or 89.5 MB. The only notable omission is the lack of a direct-to-screen drawing mechanism (aka framebuffer), precluding Doom ports — but as always, people are finding a way regardless.

If you're looking to order a NeoGeo AES+, the base model with the console and one stick will set you back $249.99 (or 199.99€), an affordable amount considering a decent joystick can cost $75-100 on its own. The Anniversary Edition comes in a white finish, with Metal Slug, a wireless joystick, and a memory card, for $349.99 (or 299.99€). Finally, the Ultimate Edition comes with all ten re-released games, two joysticks (one wired, one wireless), and a gamepad, for $999.99 (or 899.99€).

A Super Smash Bros Melee decompilation project hit its key long-standing goal a few hours ago. Nintendo’s legendary platform fighting game, which launched on the GameCube in 2001, has now been 100% decompiled by a team of developers. This is a complex game to convert to C code, but the project code can now be compiled into a binary byte‑for‑byte identical to Nintendo’s original main.dol. The effort has taken the team six years or more to get to this stage, with OpenAI's Astra part of the effort to get it over the line. Gamers may already be excitedly anticipating Super Smash Bros Melee ports and modding tools, but these too will take time and effort.

Decompilation projects seem like the latest trend to grasp the retro gaming and development communities, but some, like this, have been in progress for a very long time. Enthusiasts are spurred on by old console hardware becoming scarce, expensive, or uneconomical to repair. Thus, they want to preserve the original game code in a manner that can be ported to modern supported systems. Demanding 100% accuracy with a complex game like this was ambitious, but now that milestone has been reached.

Preservation isn’t the only goal, or result of projects like this. Seasoned developers will now be able to pore over the game’s C code and gain insights into Melee’s engine, physics, game mechanics, and more. Armed with this knowledge, we should eventually see the modding potential of this game blossom. This has happened in the wake of previous successful decompilation projects.

If you drop in on the doldecomp/melee GitHub page, linked above, you can check over the code for yourself. There are instructions for compiling this Super Smash Bros Melee C code on various platforms, including Windows. However, please remember these aren’t ports; you will just be recreating the v1.02 US release main.dol file from the GameCube, which weighs in at 3.88MB. You'll also need the original assets (textures, audio, etc.) from the GameCube disc that you own, in order to run the game.

Some highlight that the project was finalized with thanks in part to the latest AI tech, including GPT-6 Astra. Similar tech might also be used to rapidly develop the ports and mods that the crowds are looking forward to.

Musicians and synth-heads in the audience, rejoice. A new vintage synthesizer plugin has arrived that has the potential to blow many commercial offerings out of the water — and it's completely free, to boot. Audio software maker Autodafe has released the Vintage Emulator Studio (VES), a fresh new plugin that integrates a fair number of the open-source MAME emulator's synthesizer cores in one neat package.

The entire list of emulated synths is below, but it includes iconic entries like the Akai MPC3000, LinnDrum, Oberheim DMX, and Roland TR-707 — used by names like Dr. Dre, New Order, The Police, INXS, and Prince, among many other high-level acts. There are a total of 44 machines, all with component-level emulation.

What makes VES different from most other synth plugins is that instead of presenting a facsimile of the final output or a hybrid mix of component- and output-stage emulation, it employs — by way of MAME — full component-level emulation. Each processor, tone generator, envelope generator, filter chip, and converter should be faithfully reproduced, potentially resulting in a "perfect" emulation of the gear in question, more or less depending on the status of each driver core.

Notably, on machines whose MAME emulation is farther along, analog and/or digital output stages are faithfully recreated, meaning you won't need additional low-pass filters or any other trickery to make the synth sound like the actual hardware. Additionally, the skeuomorphic, HiDPI-ready UI replicates the units' control panels, dials, buttons, and LCD displays, making them easy to interact with if you're familiar with the real hardware — and probably a nightmare if you're not, as "ease of use" wasn't high on the list of priorities back then. Floppy disk, CD-ROM, and peripheral emulation ought to be included too.

If by now you're thinking this is all too good to be true, there are indeed a couple or three catches. First and foremost, as with any emulator, you'll need to provide your own ROM/firmware, and depending on the synthesizer, any associated sample packs. Although obtaining those is not too difficult, having a copy of that data is a legal gray area if you don't own the original hardware. Although we haven't tested it ourselves, the CPU usage of the plug-in ought to be somewhat high, considering all the work it's doing simulating every single component.

Additionally, while MAME's emulation cores aim for full component-level emulation, not every synth driver has had the same amount of work put into it. For example, the Akai MPC-3000 driver is nearly complete, while the Prophet-5's has only been introduced to MAME fairly recently — so your mileage may vary. We'd expect this VST to be updated somewhat frequently as work on its MAME core moves forward.

For the sake of argument, though, if only a handful of synths are fully emulated, that's still an impressive showing out of a list of 44, given that in theory you'll get output that tracks exceedingly close to that of the original hardware, all from one plugin. You can download the Vintage Emulator Studio right here, in VST3 or AU format, for every major OS: Windows, macOS Intel/M-series, and Linux. It's also available as a handy standalone application.

Getting a retro game console to look right on a modern TV can be a challenge, as legacy video signals need to be scaled or de-interlaced, while latency and aspect-ratio issues can further make retro games look or feel different from the original experience. In an attempt to recreate the nostalgic experience, retro gaming hardware manufacturer Unico has introduced the Traveller ULW10, a CRT-inspired 10-inch TV.

According to the company, the ULW10 is a PVM (Professional Video Monitor) with a vibrant 4:3 panel that “combines the character of a classic display format with the reliability of modern technology.” In terms of connectivity, the monitor comes with RGB, VGA, and HDMI video inputs, offering support for a wide variety of consoles. There is also a USB Type-A port, while the rear compartment provides storage for compatible consoles that can be tucked behind the display. It also includes knobs and physical buttons for various settings, similar to those found on old-school televisions.

Unfortunately, the ULW10 does not include a composite video input, and Unico says the decision ultimately came down to the limited space inside its compact chassis. With room needed for the signal board and other components, the company had to choose which video inputs to include. HDMI and VGA were retained for modern devices, PCs, and video converters, while RGB SCART was selected as the analog option because it offered the best balance between compatibility and image quality. It is also worth mentioning that the ULW10 is not a CRT monitor, but it can simulate the CRT or pixel-art style of old games.

The monitor will be offered in three color options: red and white, cream white, and studio gray. The casing includes built-in carrying handles as well as speaker vents, although the monitor itself does not include any speakers. The Traveller ULW10 will be available via Kickstarter, and while pricing information has not yet been confirmed, you can reserve a ‘Founder Spot’ for $5 and receive $30 back when you back the monitor on Kickstarter.

The developers of the Sony PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 have told their social media followers that it is now possible to play games straight from discs. As announced on Twitter/X, the emulator’s latest refinement works only with certain internal and external Blu-ray drives. Happily for retro gamers, there’s a lengthy compatibility list of drives featuring many models and brands, and the same drives are also compatible with dumping your media to fixed storage.

Above you can see the RPCS3 devs are pretty happy with the slick new “plug and play” refinements that are available to users of the latest version of the emulator. “You can now play your PS3 games on PC... DIRECTLY FROM THE DISC DRIVE!” boast the open source emulator programmers. “PLUG AND PLAY! Owning your games as physical media allows you to play games released as far back as 20 years ago without relying on any servers!” The RPCS3 team thanks digant73 and Megamouse, specifically, for contributions making this feat possible.

Indeed, this is another step forward in making a slick emulator that works in a surprisingly frictionless fashion. Though the Tweet mentions PC, specifically, extended disc drive play support is also available on Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. You just need to check that drive compatibility list. Moreover, all users can enjoy “optimized install times for package installations from the disc drive.” It has also been confirmed that PS4 and PS5 console users with Linux installs can launch PS3 games directly from disc using RPCS3.

Here’s a quick tip for folks who have an obscure Blu-ray drive that isn’t in the list. If you want to confirm compatibility with the drive, just put a PS3 disc in it. If you can browse its files, it's compatible; if nothing shows up, then it's not.

With pricing for the best SSDs now sky-high, being able to test-run new (old) games before dumping them to fixed storage could be a boon. It might also be good for auditioning a batch of discs you have recently bought, to see which ones are keepers.

The first units of the ‘world’s first fully transparent video game console’ are shipping to founders, and now the project is on its way to Kickstarter. Above and below you can see images of the new Arduview. As you can see, it isn’t just another clear-shell console or handheld; the makers of this device have fully embraced the latest in transparent electronics. Thus, here we have a crystal shell handheld with a see-through motherboard, using a transparent display.

There have been quite a few transparent shell consoles over the years, with some of the best-known probably being the Game Boy Color in Atomic Purple and the N64 Funtastic series. Earlier this year we saw the new Commodore release a dazzling Starlight edition of the C64U. Most recently, Microsoft has revealed its translucent green Xbox Series X25.

Adruview founder Louis Huang told Tom’s Hardware that while he has always loved transparent consoles and clear-shell mods, he was disappointed that the transparency always just stopped at the frame. “So we pushed it further with a transparent OLED screen, board, and case. You can see straight through the whole device,” wrote the Babson College student.

That's enough about the console’s appearance, what about the guts of this handheld? Well, the Arduview project is based on the open-source Arduboy. You guessed it, this console is based on the Arduino platform, designed for DIY electronics tinkering and coding, and here it is purposed for playing hundreds of community-made 8-bit games on the ATmega32u4 microcontroller with its meager resources (2.5KB RAM, 32KB storage).

Huang highlights that the Arduview weighs just 50g (<1.8 ounces), connects to your computer and charges via USB-C, and there is no app store, no Wi-Fi. Users just power on and play.

If you are interested in this kind of handheld, the Arduview early access program still appears to be open, despite the site mentioning it runs “in August 2026.” I guess we are only just into September… I clicked the button and could still reserve a unit for $5 and benefit from the $49 'founder price.' Apparently it will be $100 at retail.

We don’t have a date for the Kickstarter launch yet, and perhaps there will be similar cheaper-than-$100 offers for early birds, and so on. However, the Kickstarter backers won’t get their hardware until 2027.

As an open-source platform, there are other makers and suppliers of Arduboy hardware, such as Seeed Studio. If the Arduview’s clear charms aren’t reeling you in but the portable platform appeals, you can grab the not-very-transparent Arduboy FX-C available on Amazon at $79.99, for example.

In the wake of AI vibecoding infiltrating the retro revival scene, human efforts tend to stand out, especially when they're as novel as this project. A bunch of developers have rebuilt Donkey Kong 64 from scratch for PC, recompiling the original N64 code to C and unlocking a myriad of features that make the game run even better. You just need to provide a ROM, and "DK64: ReKONGpiled" will play it without any emulation overhead, giving you engine-level control of the classic.

DK64: Recompiled uses the open-source N64: Recompiled framework from Wiseguy and is rendered via RT64. The project is the result of combined work from veteran programmers who also made DK64 Randomizer — Rainchus, Ballaam, Killklli, 2dos, and Umedtakes. It takes N64 machine code not meant for modern hardware, reverse-engineers it, and recompiles it into C, which x86- and ARM-based machines can natively understand. As such, this project is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

It features true high-resolution support, including different aspect ratios like ultrawide, and uncapped framerates without the need to speed up the game. You get modern controls mapped perfectly to keyboard and mouse, as well as controller. It includes quality-of-life improvements like near-zero latency, near-instant load times, cutscene skipping, better camera controls, and even the option to switch between characters at any time.

Everything else about the game is preserved in its original state, and all the enhancements remain faithful to the source material. The art style, along with the low-poly 3D graphics, is untouched, and the audio is pristine. You only get useful changes like a better in-game menu that allows you to change settings on the fly, like increasing draw distance and saving/loading. Mod and multiplayer support are built in, too.

Keep in mind that there are no game assets provided here, though; you have to bring your own legally acquired ROM. For our trial, we downloaded the file from GitHub and got the ROM from Vimm's Lair. It ran flawlessly and even switched back and forth between a keyboard/mouse and a 2.4 GHz wireless controller in real-time, as if it were a modern title. Everything scaled perfectly, the game felt smooth, and cutscenes were rendered in an ultrawide resolution inside a 16:9 window (not fullscreen).

Overall, this is an impressive project that highlights how human ingenuity still beats AI slop. Sure, Claude can do this faster, but it will come with its own issues, become unmaintainable over time, and never match the passion these programmers have. The DK64: Recompiled devs even called out competing projects for relying on vibecoding and proudly claim that their work involves zero generative AI usage.

A special edition of the Commodore 64 Ultimate made in collaboration with CD Projekt Red has been announced today. The new Commodore 77 takes its stylish inspiration from Cyberpunk 2077, of course, and is skillfully melded into the game's universe. This isn't just a paint job. Commodore has packed in a faster FPGA, for one thing. It also comes with an exclusive 2MB demo cartridge, a themed Commodore 77 BASIC 2.0 boot screen, and several further flourishes of sheer finesse.

• Check out the new Commodore 77 at Commodore.net

Commodore says that the C77 is the first franchise hardware partnership in the firm's 68-year history. "I have been a fan of the game since its release, and it was rewarding to learn in my discussions with their Joint CEO, Michał Nowakowski, that he was a lifelong Commodore 64 fan in turn," said Peri Fractic, President, CEO, and Chief Product Officer, Commodore, discussing this collaborative product. "For us both, this has been a collaboration where art imitates life, and in turn, life for the denizens of Night City now imitates that art. We hope they enjoy their new terminal."

There's plenty to be said about the artistic style of the new C77, but we'll let the video and images do the talking. It might be worth pointing out some of the finer points, though. Like, yes, that is a brushed metal plate to the right of the keyboard deck, which is distinctly different from the original beige bread bin.

Turning on the C77, there are new experiences to be had. In addition to the custom Cyberpunk 2077-themed Commodore 77 BASIC 2.0 boot screen, there are new menu colors, fitting in with the game universe. Moreover, there's a 2MB Cyberpunk 2077-inspired demo cartridge in the (themed) packaging. You can plug in this cart to enjoy an exclusive, distinctly Cyberpunk demo created by the long-running Polish C64 demo group Arise, with an original soundtrack by chiptune legend LukHash. The audioscape makes use of the C64U's 24 channels of stereo SID chip music, while demo viewers can watch the LEDs behind the Commodore 77’s smoked translucent base light up and dance in time.

Inside the new C77 you won't find the AMD Xilinx Artix‑7 XC7A50T, as used in the C64U. The system instead employs the next-tier Artix-7 XC7A100T with twice the logic, twice the block RAM, and more I/O.

It is interesting to learn about the change of processor, but we don't get any firm hints about how the extra compute resources will be used in the C77. "Word on the neon-soaked street is it will achieve speeds of 77 MHz, vs. the original Commodore 64’s 1 MHz processor speed," teases the official press release, in the only section which mentions the new FPGA. "This is achieved by utilizing the more powerful AMD Artix XC7A100T processor, compared to the 50T found in the Commodore 64 Ultimate."

The C77 is up for preorder from today, at $377. We've already mentioned, and you can see some of the obvious enhancements, but buyers will also get a "custom neon power light, stickers, pins, collectible themed packaging, a custom Cyberpunk 2077 spiral-bound user guide packed with lore, exclusive Cyberpunk 2077-themed type-in BASIC programs, and more." Product shipments will begin in "early 2027."

Incidentally, on Monday, Commodore released the Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection for PCs and consoles. That's six classic titles beloved of Amiga gamers, and PC users can wishlist them now on Steam.

Back before fast broadband internet came to most homes, game developers released their latest titles through shareware CDs so gamers could try them out before buying. And that's what id Software did when it released Quake in 1996.

As recounted by Google software engineer Fabien Sanglard, the company put both a shareware version and the complete version of Quake on a CD for just $10. But because the shareware version and the complete game only took up 22MB of a 640MB CD, the remaining 618MB had practically no use. id Software came up with the idea of including full, encrypted versions of all its other titles of the time on the CD, too.

If you wanted to unlock any of the full games on the disc, you just needed to call the “Quake Unlock Center," present a challenge code displayed by a program on the CD, and hand over your credit card details (or your parents'), after which the person on the other end would give you a code to unlock your game of choice.

That was a brilliant concept on the surface, as gamers who picked up Quake could just as easily buy any other id game they wanted without having to go to a local retailer. It also meant cutting out the middleman, allowing the developer to get the bulk of the proceeds of the sale.

Unfortunately, the developer underestimated the threat of hackers and crackers to this model. Freeloaders took to breaking the CD’s encryption as soon as it was released. It took hacker group GNOMON just 39 days to release a tool—QCRACK.exe—that could generate serial numbers for all the games on the CD, making for an incredible return on investment for that $10.

It turned out that id and TestDrive, a DRM company it had contracted to create the shareware disc, had relied on a form of security by obscurity. Even though the serial number that the agent handed back to anyone buying the game over the phone was semi-random due to the rotating challenge code the unlocking program asked buyers to present along with their payment, it could also be generated using data permanently molded onto the disc.

And in the days before online authentication, that hard-coded data proved to be the downfall of the entire scheme. The app that unlocked the full version of the games worked by checking whether the serial number the owner typed in matched one generated from the hard-coded local data. If one were to derive the scheme used to retrieve serial numbers according to the challenge code, one could bypass the need for payment entirely.

And that's exactly what the GNOMON hackers did in a little over a month. The hacking group did not reveal how it built the cracker, and the inner workings of the crack were only revealed in 2018 through reverse-engineering performed by Ruben Molina.

No matter how the GNOMON figured out id Software’s protection, this revelation was an absolute disaster for the company. In the end, it had to stop the distribution of the shareware CDs, meaning it ended up with 150,000 discs that it couldn't sell because of the existence of the crack.

The Quake crack shenanigans show that the race between game publishers and pirates has been going even before the advent of the internet. Even today, the infamous Denuvo DRM has already been cracked in all single-player games that it protected, rendering it effectively useless. Still, the company is likely taking steps to harden its DRM app in this cat-and-mouse game between anti-tamper software and pirates.

Running Doom on the weirdest hardware and software has become a challenge in the developer community. The latest feat that we see today has been achieved by lauris-nl, after they built a port for the Canon EOS 550D digital SLR camera. The intrepid programmer achieved this by using the open-source Magic Lantern firmware that was supposed to unlock extra features for the camera. We’ve seen weird and quirky projects running on “exotic” hardware like an electric cooking pot, an Apple Lightning-to-HDMI dongle, or even an orbiting satellite, but this is the first time that I've seen one running on a camera.

The Canon EOS 550D, also known as the Rebel T2i, is an entry-level digital SLR that Canon launched in 2010. It had an 18-megapixel APS-C sensor paired with a DIGIC 4 image processor and features a 3-inch TFT LCD display and a rear mono speaker. This is apparently powerful enough to run Doom, with lauris-nl showing off the game running smoothly on the camera. The up, down, left, and right buttons serve as the camera control and navigation, while the set button is the select and fire button. You can press the Menu button to open the in-game menu, and then the DISP. button to go back while in the Doom menu. Since the 550D comes with a speaker, you can hear in-game sounds as you go through its different levels.

Unfortunately, its developer said that this port only works on the Canon EOS 550D with firmware version 1.0.9. They specifically said, “Do not install this binary on another camera model or firmware version.” Although they did not say why, you don’t want to run into the risk of bricking your camera if you attempt to do so (unless you know what you’re doing). Now, if you have this specific gear and want to give it a try yourself, it’s relatively easy to do. You just need a compatible Magic Lantern 550D.109 build on an SD card, copy the released module to ML/MODULES/doom.mo and create the ML/DOOM/ folder, then paste your Doom-compatible files into it.

From there, plug the SD card into your Canon camera, turn it on and select Doom > WAD in the Magic Lantern Games menu, and then restart the camera. From there, you’re off to blasting demons and the undead into kingdom come straight from your camera. This is a great way of relaxing after an entire day of shooting your subjects, although it’s ideal that you keep your Doom game on an SD card that’s separate from where you keep your photos. If you don’t have a Canon EOS 550D, another developer created a Doom port for the Canon PowerShot SD1000 / IXUS 70 point-and-shoot camera from 2007, so you might want to give it a try if you have it stored in your drawer.

A reverse engineering and retro gaming enthusiast has finally succeeded in their goal of decompiling GoldenEye 007, the monumental James Bond adventure shooter from Rare. This half-decade project led by KholdFuzion reached 100% on its GitHub decompilation status page a few hours ago. The milestone opens the doors to a myriad of possibilities, including complex modifications of the original Nintendo 64 code, as well as ports to other systems.

GoldenEye 007 launched on the Nintendo 64 in August 1997, and was an immediate hit. It would also become one of the most influential titles in console gaming history. It brought fast, thrilling first-person shooting action to consoles, with multiplayer (up to four players on screen). Moreover, Rare broadened the traditional run-and-gun style game appeal by rewarding tactical play via in-game features like alarms, security cameras, and silenced weapons.

Eventually, GoldenEye 007 would sell over eight million cartridges for Nintendo and become the console’s third biggest-selling title. Its influence would be felt on later classics like Perfect Dark, as well as on other platforms in franchises like Halo and Call of Duty. So this decompilation project hitting 100% is a true milestone.

For some more perspective, in 1997 dedicated 3D accelerators were only just starting to be added to PCs, with the earliest models from 3dfx and Nvidia luring the mainstream gamer. So slick and smooth 3D graphics on the N64 would have been stunning considering the console’s $199 ticket – similar in price to an early 3D accelerator for PC alone.

On the topic of PCs, the source article tips us off about a PC port of GoldenEye 007, based on this decompilation, already in the works. However, it advises against quick AI-led ports being spawned from the now freely available source. Instead, enthusiasts should wait until good human-built and tuned ports start to be released. With KholdFuzion’s foundational work finished, these should start to appear soon.

Recompilation projects are arriving thick and fast now, as an alternative to playing old games via emulators. We've seen prior claims of N64-to-PC conversions using this and similar technology. Earlier this year, we also reported on a cancelled Xbox 360 version of GoldenEye 007 getting recompiled for the PC.

A games industry veteran is selling off what is “probably the rarest arcade game in existence” via Boston’s RR Auctions. The fully working Computer Space 2-player arcade video game cabinet looks incredibly alluring with its Jetsons-esque styling and green sparkle finish. It is estimated that the hammer price will be $200,000+, but bidding is just $6,748 at the time of writing.

Computer Space may not be the most famous retro arcade game, but it certainly has pedigree. The arcade machine was originally released in 1971 by Syzygy Engineering, the company that evolved into Atari. RR Auctions asserts it was both the “first arcade video game ever created and the first commercially available video game.” What we have on auction here is the supposedly far rarer 2-player ‘green sparkle’ cabinet from 1973.

Above: Sample Computer Space (1 player) gameplay recorded from a real arcade machine.

RR Auctions photos show a close-up of the dual-player controls on the upright arcade machine. After inserting a quarter, players could optionally select a 2-player game. Then each player would ready themselves by grasping the joystick.

Pushing the stick left and right rotates your on-screen craft appropriately. Nudging it up thrusts your ship forward. The fire button is the red button on top of the joystick. Not very ergonomic by today’s standards, but game designers were definitely still finding their feet. The Computer Space arcade machine was an important ancestor to the revolutionary releases of Pong (1972) and the Atari 2600 home console (1977).

After that description, it is easy to understand why Perry, the games industry veteran behind Shiny Entertainment and Gaikai, held this arcade cabinet in his collection. On X, the developer and entrepreneur explained the sale as an act precipitated by his home arcade collection running out of space. Indeed, it is probably fair to describe Computer Space as a museum piece rather than a seminal video game that everyone remembers.

The auction is scheduled to close on August 20, 2026. Perry notes that a more common single-player version of this machine sold for $69,000 (in 2024), so perhaps the $200,000 estimate will prove accurate. Perry’s sale is part of the Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution: The Apple 50th Anniversary Auction Part Two, packed with many more interesting artifacts.

Commodore has brought back the “Totally Accurate Controller” joystick, better known by C64 and Amiga aficionados from the 80s as the TAC-2. In an email to Tom’s Hardware, a Commodore exec explained that used TAC-2s are becoming rare. “Secondhand units in decent shape go for $100 or more,” it was noted, so the decision was made to remake these controllers that have been out of production for more than 40 years. Commodore has sprinkled some worthwhile new and improved features on the TAC-2, too, pricing the new model at $49.99.

• See the new Commodore TAC-2 Joystick

In addition to the observed shortage/skyrocketing pricing of used TAC-2 units on marketplaces like eBay, Commodore surveyed its fans before deciding to remake the TAC-2. Apparently, it was one of the top two suggestions from fans. The other one was “something called an ‘Amiga,’ whatever that is,” teased Commodore in its official press release. Amiga talks are ongoing, so a revamped 16-bit home computer isn’t ready yet.

The original TAC-2 controller was released in 1983 by a firm called Suncom and earned a reputation for durability, backed by manufacturer claims that units had been tested for 3 million moves without failure. It also earned a reputation for accuracy, and fire buttons on its left and right front corners made the TAC-2 a great choice for both right-handed and sinistral folk.

After securing exclusive trademark rights, Commodore has set out to not just remake but meaningfully enhance the TAC-2 for 2026. Starting from the outside, there’s the chicken-lips logo integration… That’s not all though, as Commodore has also decided to reissue the TAC-2 in five colorways. These include three options that mirror the C64 Ultimate, providing BASIC Beige, Starlight, and Founders (gold) color options. It has added LEDs in the clicky fire buttons of these models, too, which is new. Two further color options are C= White (like the C64C) and Knight Black, and “for purists,” these eschew the LEDs.

Beyond the cosmetics, it is good to hear Commodore has actually strengthened the assembly at the heart of this joystick. Apparently the original design used an automobile TR-418 tire valve assembly, but as these are “made with weaker, thinner copper today,” Commodore has fabricated its own steel shaft, boasting “we think ours is even stronger.”

Just like the original, the TAC-2 connects using a 9-pin controller port so will work with your original retro gaming hardware, including the C64 Ultimate. Commodore reminds those eyeing this stick that USB adaptors are easily sourced via various outlets, so you can use joysticks like the TAC-2 with modern PCs and devices. This joystick measures 101 x 101 x 114mm, weighs about 300g, and the supplied cable is 2 meters in length.

You can purchase a new TAC-2 for $49.99, or $64 for a limited Founders Edition with gold PVD accents. Pre-orders are open, and shipping will commence on October 20, 2026.

A Steam Deck enthusiast and modder is close to finalizing the ‘SteamBoy.’ Of course, this WIP project shoehorns the brains and brawn of Valve’s Steam Deck into the form factor of the original Nintendo Game Boy. If it were the other way around, for some bizarre reason, it would be called the GameDeck. PhyFawkes’ project appears to be progressing splendidly, though the non-trivial hurdles of designing a custom display adapter PCB and fitting a new screen remain.

PhyFawkes’ SteamBoy project began after a handheld gaming lightbulb moment. “The Steam Deck motherboard seems pretty small,” the Redditor thought to themselves. “I wonder if you could make a Steam Deck the size of a Game Boy?”

As you can see from the embedded photos, a lot of the design already completed for this hybrid modern heart in a retro shell device seems spot on. We’d appreciate more beige, but that’s mere cosmetics and a simple 3D printer filament swap in the future, perhaps. PhyFawkes says that, as the project stands, “It has a fully functional LCD Steam Deck motherboard, battery, speakers, and all the face buttons you see here. No custom PCBs needed (so far), and all within the dimensions of a Game Boy.”

Elsewhere in their Reddit post, we learn that a 30 x 7mm fan and heatsink from AliExpress have been used, alongside a custom 3D-printed mount, to cool the new SteamBoy. Using this cooler design and a smidgen of undervolting, reasonable max temperatures of between 70 and 80 degrees Celsius have been observed when gaming.

Getting the screen to interface and fit doesn’t sound like an insurmountable task from the description. The Redditor admits it will be a challenge to fit the “1200x1080, 90Hz AMOLED panel, originally intended for VR” into the shell, but they have a plan. A custom adapter PCB, to be situated between the Steam Deck ribbon cable and the display, is in the making. Then, a BIOS mod will need to be implemented. PhyFawkes says this firmware change will be similar to those seen in the DeckHD and Deck Sight projects.

For those of you thirsty for more SteamBoy info, the modder has also just shared a Reddit post packed with teardown images, and another post demonstrating the unit. This video demo shows the SteamBoy operating while attached to a monitor. That’s the only way to use the device until the aforementioned screen integration challenges are met. “Hopefully it won't be too long before that's working as well,” added PhyFawkes in a comment.

Some announcements arrive with fireworks, while others show up as a single easily missed tweet during a flurry of QuakeCon announcements to quietly close one of the longest-running oddities in PC gaming. After roughly 25 years, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RTCW) is finally available in Germany in its original, uncut form. Bethesda Deutschland dropped the news amidst its QuakeCon announcements, bringing an end to a censorship saga regarding Nazi symbolism that stretches all the way back to the game's original 2001 release.

If you weren't around for PC gaming in 2001, it's hard to overstate how different the landscape looked. NVIDIA's GeForce 3 had only recently introduced programmable shaders to consumer graphics cards, the ATI Radeon 8500 was fresh competition, Windows XP was brand new, and legendary pioneers 3dfx had just disappeared after being acquired by NVIDIA. Broadband internet was becoming more common, but plenty of multiplayer sessions still happened over LANs, and a Pentium III or Athlon paired with 256 MB of RAM was enough to run one of the latest engine technology showcases.

Built on id Tech 3, perhaps better known as the tech that powered the incredible Quake III Arena, Grey Matter's Return to Castle Wolfenstein looked fantastic for its day, and it also inherited the series' unmistakable identity. See, ever since Castle Wolfenstein in 1981, and even more so after Wolfenstein 3D essentially invented the first-person shooter as we know it a decade later, the games have been about one thing above all else: shooting Nazis.

That identity created a problem in Germany. For decades, games depicting Nazi symbolism faced legal and regulatory hurdles that films did not, resulting in a heavily modified German version. In RTCW, swastikas disappeared, Nazi organizations were renamed, Heinrich Himmler became the fictional "Heinrich Höller," and references to the Third Reich gave way to the equally fictional "Wolf Clan."

At first glance, that sounds like the sort of censorship that simply strips away context, yet RTCW was already a strange game. The opening hours suggest a relatively grounded World War II action title. You wake up in a prison with a knife, you fight Nazis in a castle, and things seem normal for about a whole hour before rapidly veering into supernatural pulp. Within a few missions, you're fighting zombies, exploring haunted crypts, and watching the SS dabble in increasingly implausible occult experiments.

By the end, the final boss isn't Hitler (mech suit or no) or a secret superweapon, but Heinrich I, historically known as Henry the Fowler. He was a real 10th-century German king, supposedly resurrected in the game through dark ritual. He's also somewhat infamously a surprisingly manageable final boss, making for a finish both absurd and anticlimactic after the game's escalating parade of undead knights and bizarre experiments.

Seen through that lens, the censored version accidentally became a different story. Instead of Nazis attempting to exploit medieval occult power, it played more like an ancient secret society preserving itself across the centuries before trying to resurrect its long-dead founder. It's arguably a cleaner fantasy premise. The "Wolf Clan" makes more narrative sense once the game fully commits to gothic horror. However, it does make the opening chapters, where an OSS Ranger is somehow investigating a shadowy organization seemingly unrelated to the wider war, a bit awkward.

The catch, of course, is that it stops feeling much like Wolfenstein. The series' DNA is inseparable from infiltrating Nazi strongholds and sabotaging increasingly desperate attempts to turn the tide of World War II. Remove that element, and the title itself starts to feel like an artifact from another game series altogether.

It's a curious example of something that occasionally happens with censorship across entertainment. More often than not, edits simply leave a work feeling diminished. Every so often, though, these constraints produce something unexpectedly memorable. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre owes much of its enduring reputation to how much horror it leaves to implication rather than explicit gore, and that decision was made due to the ratings board. Similarly, action film edits for TV often cut gory death scenes, which can ironically improve the pacing of the film.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein belongs in that same conversation, albeit for different reasons. The German version wasn't a better version of the game in any objective sense, but it accidentally shifted the genre. Instead of occult Nazis, it became a story about an ancient cult whose descendants had survived into the modern era. That's a premise that I personally find more appealing and even internally consistent, even if it comes at the expense of the series' defining theme.

So, after a quarter of a century, German players can finally buy the same uncensored game that much of the rest of the world has had since 2001. It's ironic, and it's about time, too. While Germany relaxed its gaming rules in 2018, allowing modern entries like The New Order to go uncut in 2019, Grey Matter's 2001 classic remained stuck in censorship limbo until now. For game preservation, historical authenticity, and simple consumer choice, that's unquestionably the right outcome. Yet it also marks the quiet retirement of one of gaming's strangest alternate versions; a release that, through a combination of legal necessity and narrative coincidence, accidentally stumbled into telling a very different and potentially more compelling story.

Folks in Germany should now be able to pick up the uncensored version of the classic game on sale for just two dollars at Steam and GOG, or you can get a bundle that includes the original Wolfenstein 3D for just a dollar more. If you grab it, make sure to check out the RealRTCW overhaul mod that radically improves the game with modern features like proper widescreen support and cleaner OpenAL audio.

An extensive Atari ST floppy disk database can now easily be accessed by all netizens. Originally created to serve floppy images to the owners of the SidecarTridge multi‑function hardware add‑on for the Atari ST family (ST, STE, Mega ST, TT, Falcon), anyone can now browse, search, and download the .ST files to use with other hardware, emulators, or even to rewrite the disk images to actual floppies.

After reading the announcement, I decided to check out the online repository. My favorite old platformer series was there, with more than one disk featuring the legendary Turrican and Turrican II releases. I also checked and confirmed public domain/shareware favorites like Gravity Force were available, as was Llamatron, and the mono high-resolution Bolo. Some things I looked for, like the Stupendous Demo, seemed to be missing, as were serious art and DTP tools I used to dabble with in the 90s.

The database is pleasingly new and regularly maintained, though. For example, it has 41 Atari ST disks flagged as recent arrivals. These are a mix of old releases being added, and some extremely new titles like new homebrew games, and a collection of demos released at Sommerhack 2026 just last month.

As indicated in the intro, this disk database was originally collated for direct access via hardware designed to bring several modern conveniences to those who still cling to original Atari ST-family computers. The SidecarTridge slots into the computer’s cartridge port, hence the name. It is much more than a ‘Gotek-style’ flash card floppy loader, though. This Raspberry Pi Pico W RP2040 microcontroller-powered device can also load different ROMs (the Atari ST’s entire OS and GEM desktop were loaded from ROM for super-fast,t no-disk-needed booting) via its microSD card slot. It also provides hard disk emulation, networking features (Wi-Fi for downloading Atari ST Public Floppy Database disks), access to RTC, and modern keyboards, mice, and other peripherals.

Another day another Doom port, but the new DoomPaint stands out from the crowd for a few reasons. Firstly, it has been developed by Mark Russinovich, the Microsoft Azure CTO. Secondly, DoomPaint runs the actual original shareware Doom release using MS Paint as the monitor or viewport for in-game action. That’s different, and it is remarkable to read that the OLE clipboard hack behind this latest Doom escapade allows the game to run at a fair pace, up to 35 FPS, but might also sometimes be “spreadsheet-tier,” according to the author.

“The actual Doom engine (ViZDoom) runs the real shareware DOOM1.WAD — with the BSD-licensed Freedoom WADs covering the episodes shareware doesn't ship — and renders headlessly,” explains Russinovich on the project GitHub page. “Every frame is placed on the Windows clipboard and pasted into Paint's canvas as a genuine document edit.” The Microsoft CTO adds that the relatively low frame rate “is part of the charm” of DoomPaint, but 35 FPS isn’t bad, if you can make it, especially in 1990s PC gaming terms.

There are files, resources and instructions on how to run DoomPaint on the GitHub site. Depending on your machine you may be able to run this version of Doom at a full 35 FPS at 320 x 200, or even 640 x 400 pixels. It even includes sound and music.

Towards the end of the README file, Russinovich says that “Paint renders the game but does not compute it. Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke.” DoomPaint is distributed under the MIT license.

Russinovich started at Microsoft in 2006, where he’s transformed SysInternals into the backbone of Windows diagnostics. More recently he’s shaped Azure’s architecture, security, and reliability. Over the past year he has, accidentally or by design, become well known as a leading voice behind addressing the many shortcomings of Windows 11.

It's therefore kind of surprising that this busy CTO has time to fiddle with projects like DoomPaint. However, the most dedicated coding and computer enthusiasts will also code and compute in their spare time.

GameStop has listed a Doom Floppy Disk Limited Edition Imitation Gold Plated Replica at $29.99. Let’s unpick that for a moment. These are imitation floppy disks coated in imitation gold, delivered in a commemorative box. There’s a display stand included, too. However, these are non-functioning 'floppy disks' inspired by the Doom v1.2 shareware release and don’t contain any game data. Doom's single-level ‘Knee‑Deep in the Dead’ shareware release is still free to download, though, as it has been for many years.

“What's more retro than obsolete technology?” asks Fanattik, the collectibles maker behind this useless physical media. “Celebrating the humble 3½-inch, 1.44 MB floppy disk that the game was originally released on back in 1993, this limited edition Doom Floppy Disk Replica plated with imitation gold comes in a box displaying the original game artwork, has a display stand included, and is individually numbered as one of 5,000 worldwide.” Pre-orders are now open at GameStop in the US for $29.99 or directly from Fanattik in the UK at £19.99.

The 89 x 89 mm dimensions of the golden-but-not-gold and 3.5-inch-but-not-floppies make them at least the correct size. However, if I were buying fake floppies, I think I would appreciate a movable protective sliding mechanism and the write-protect cutout toggle to move, so I could fidget with them from time to time.

Also, in some ways, it is ironic that game media is now being licensed and hawked to fans, at non-trivial prices, without any game data contained on them. This seems to be a growing trend as the games industry moves inexorably to a digital-only future. People still covet the physical media so much that they are now willing to pay for it, even without any game data or download code being associated with it.

The original Doom v1.2 shareware edition was released on two floppy disks in Feb 1994, and it is famous for adding modem support to this seminal game. If you paid and registered Doom v1.2, you would get four floppy disks from id Software containing the full three-episode campaign. The registered release disk set stayed on four floppies until the CD-ROM era.

A retro shop owner based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, located some 15 miles west of Milwaukee, discovered that he was holding on to a rare stash of NES carts in his storage room. According to Nintendo Wire, these cartridges were never-before-seen versions of Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros., which were some of the most popular games on the Nintendo Entertainment System. What’s more important is that these haven’t been opened, and the original owner said that these supposedly came directly from Nintendo of America. Their condition is so pristine that PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) gave them extremely high grades of no less than 9.6, with five units getting the coveted perfect 10.

Kevin Braun, the owner of the retro shop OneStopWonders, said that a person sold him the cartridges years ago and that they’ve just been sitting untouched in his storage unit. The man said that his grandfather owned a business that recovered precious metals from circuit boards, and that this box was supposedly sold to him for salvaging. It’s unknown how it ended up in storage instead of recycling, but Braun bought it from the seller, thinking he could resell it in his shop for around $10 to $15 each.

Thankfully, he forgot about these cartridges until his friend and EIC of Nintendo Wire, Jason Ganos, got a chance to look at them. When he saw the carts for the first time, Ganos knew that he was looking at something special but didn’t realize how exceptional they were until he shared the find on a high-end gaming Facebook group. Two different people working as directors at different grading companies then reached out to him, telling him that there was something strange about these cartridges. They then asked for more photos of one cartridge and the manual and even told him to disassemble one unit for a deeper inspection.

This is where he discovered that these cartridges were some of the last produced units made during the 40th week of 1993. The manuals weren’t seen before, either, with the back page saying, “maintenance or service,” whereas previous known versions said, “maintenance or repair.” Because of these finds, he proceeded to take a flight to PSA in California early the next morning, where the grading company confirmed its authenticity.

It seems that the cartridges in the box were made as replacements for warranty repairs or refurbished consoles, or as part of a bundle that never saw release. We would never know which is true, though, unless Nintendo of America confirms why they were made. If you’re an avid collector or simply want to get your hands on an original Nintendo game that hasn’t been released, three carts will be auctioned off at Goldin Auctions starting August 12.

It’s unclear how much these carts will go for, but it’s estimated that they’d cost at least four digits, with the perfect 10s possibly hitting five digits. This is possible, given that an ultra-rare NES Gold Nintendo World Championships cartridge auction sat at $77,000 and probably sold for a much higher price. So, if you want to get your hands on this, you’d better have a war chest of at least $100,000 to guarantee that you can get one — just don’t blow on it if you insert it in your NES console and it doesn’t work for the first time.

As fans wait for Nintendo's announcement of a release date for its The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake for the Nintendo Switch 2, developer Chris "Kahris" Sotraidis has introduced something to tide over the more impatient among them. HarkinianPad is a port of the Nintendo 64 classic that runs natively on iOS and iPadOS.

Leveraging OpenAI's Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol, Kahris overcame the limitations of traditional emulation and the restrictions of the Nintendo 64 and delivered modern features like widescreen, full-screen support, and buttery-smooth 60 FPS gameplay—but you'll still need to bring your own ROM.

Released in 1998 on the Nintendo 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is widely regarded as one of the greatest titles in gaming history. Nintendo later launched a remake for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011. For those without a Nintendo 64 or Nintendo 3DS, the classic was eventually available on the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 through the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. Those restrictions were a drag for gamers who wanted to experience the game but did not own a Nintendo console.

Fortunately, a group of developers known as the Zelda Research Team (ZELDARET) decompiled The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time into C in 2021, which enabled developer Harbour Masters to create Ship of Harkinian, an unofficial native port of the Nintendo 64 classic, compatible with Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Wii U.

As you can probably guess by the name of Kahris's project, HarkinianPad is based on the engine from Ship of Harkinian. Kahris had Codex 5.6 Sol adapt the already decompiled C code for iOS. The agent essentially rebuilt it as a native Arm64 application with rendering through Apple's Metal API. It paves the way for better performance and support for higher native resolutions and features that were not available with the original.

HarkinianPad not only runs at full resolution with widescreen support, but it does so at a buttery-smooth 60 FPS. That's a big upgrade over the original's 240p resolution at 20 FPS, which is the best the Nintendo 64's hardware could do at the time.

With HarkinianPad, Kahris introduces a new touch-friendly control scheme. You can use the iPhone or iPad's touch controls or opt for a more traditional setup by connecting a Bluetooth controller, mouse, or keyboard. This flexibility lets newcomers and diehard The Legend of Zelda fans enjoy the game that best suits their play styles.

HarkinianPad is compatible with both iOS and iPadOS, allowing gamers to play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on a wide range of Apple devices, from iPhones to iPads. As an open-source project, HarkinianPad is freely available to anyone interested; the latest version and source code are live on the project’s GitHub page. Although HarkinianPad, in keeping with Ship of Harkinian, is not a traditional emulator, it still requires users to possess a legally owned or obtained copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ROM. The ROM serves as a library where HarkinianPad pulls assets, such as graphics, music, and sound effects, during gameplay.

While Nintendo's official Ocarina of Time remake will doubtless be a boon for Switch 2 owners, it's interesting to see how AI coding tools can allow a solo developer to bring an existing community preservation codebase to a new audience. As these tools become more capable, it'll be interesting to see which other retro titles get a new lease on life as motivated developers pursue new ports for modern platforms.

Back in April of this year, SNK announced the Neo Geo AES+ home console, reviving a legend for the modern era. It was priced at $250 for the base system with a controller, with a release date set for November 12, 2026. Fast forward to today, and you can now pre-order the AES+ on Amazon, along with all ten games launching for it. These games are recreations of the original cartridges, just like the console itself is a 1:1 revival of the OG hardware.

• Buy the Neo Geo AES+ for $249
• Buy the Neo Geo AES+ for $349

The Neo Geo was an icon of its era, responsible for bringing arcade gaming to the couch without compromise. At the time, all the home consoles relied on cut-down silicon from arcade machines, and even their games were highly compressed to save manufacturing costs. SNK and the Neo Geo did things differently. Its games had 300-700 megabit file sizes compared to just 4-16MB the competitors were limited to.

The Neo Geo also had dedicated Zilog and Yamaha chips for high-resolution audio. It had significantly more power than the Sega Genesis and the SNES, which relied on tilemaps, while the Neo Geo could scale, shrink, and animate massive, multi-layered 2D character sprites with zero flickers. It was also marketed as the first 24-bit console on technicality, even though it was really just a very powerful 16-bit system in reality.

Because of its $700 price tag, the Neo Geo was limited to a niche audience of enthusiasts who wanted an uncompromising arcade experience. The new Neo Geo AES+ basically takes that experience and repackages it as faithfully as possible, and ends up providing much better value, especially when adjusted for inflation.

The AES+ looks exactly like the original and features silicon-level recreation of the OG architecture thanks to re-engineered ASIC chips; there's no emulation involved here. Any game cartridge from the 90s will work on it just fine. You still get the crisp AV out if you're still nostalgic about CRTs, though HDMI is available for realists, and there are DIP switches onboard to adjust region/language settings or enable a quick overclock.

The $249 base system doesn't come with games, but SNK is re-releasing 10 classics that you can also buy on Amazon. Each of them costs $90, which is more than a PS5 game, and just $10 short of the ultimate edition of GTA VI. Just to be clear, you can emulate all of these games pretty easily, but owning the cartridge physically is a different kind of feeling, especially these days when it's become a dying breed.

The following games are available for the Neo Geo AES+ on Amazon:

• Metal Slug
• The King of Fighters 2002
• Garou: Mark of the Wolves
• Big Tournament Golf
• Shock Troopers
• Samurai Shodown V Special
• Pulstar
• Twinkle Star Sprites
• Magician Lord
• Over Top

There's a $349 Anniversary Edition, too, that comes in white and includes an exclusive all-white Metal Slug game cartridge in the box. You get a wireless Arcade Stick (instead of wired) and its accessories, along with a memory card. The wireless Arcade Stick costs $120 on its own, while a gamepad is also available for $60.

If you're a true baller, then the $1,000 Ultimate Edition might entice you since it includes the gamepad, one wired stick and one wireless stick, along with all ten of the aforementioned games and a rack to display them. Keep in mind that anything you buy will only be delivered after November 12, 2026, which is the official release date of the Neo Geo AES+.

Not to mention, if you're just a retro gaming enthusiast and not necessarily a collector, then just emulating these games on even your phone should be enough of a nostalgia hit. Nonetheless, projects like these ultimately help preserve culture and remind us of a time before the great evil of today (and tomorrow) known as digital licenses. If you buy the AES+, it will never be at risk of going down offline, and you'll own the games forever.

The developers of RPCS3 have announced that their PlayStation 3 emulator’s minimum system requirements have been adjusted to include a crop of even older Radeon graphics cards. This well-regarded application already supported ATI Terascale 2 GPUs from the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series, but now gamers still cradling Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series can join in the fun. Some of these GPUs date back nearly 20 years. Please note that while RPCS3 is available for a range of platforms, this extended ATI architecture support is only for Linux users.

Fine wine on Terascale 2

Back in 2021, the RPCS3 devs lowered the emulator’s system requirements to embrace Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 (Terascale 2) series graphics cards. In the subsequent five years, the emulator has been tuned to improve performance on hardware from these generations. An example provided asserts that when using Persona 5 as a benchmark, performance in Kamoshida’s Castle went from 35 to 49 FPS between 2021 and today (on a PC system with an ATI Radeon HD 5850, AMD FX-8350 CPU, and 8GB of RAM).

Inspired Terascale 1 experiments

Success spurred the devs to investigate TeraScale 1 performance and compatibility. Some OpenGL wrangling ensued due to TeraScale 1 GPUs only reporting OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 3.30 support, but getting these old and unloved ATI cards to work with the RPCS3 OpenGL renderer was surprisingly simple. It was done by overriding the reported OpenGL levels to 4.3 and 4.40.

Initial tests made use of a system packing an ATI Radeon HD 4890 with 1GB of VRAM – the most powerful Terascale 1 GPU ever sold. According to the RPCS3 blog, this card has a more powerful GPU than the PS3, but the emulator’s complex shader code is not optimal for older architectures like this. Nevertheless, “Simpler games work perfectly fine, with playable performance,” notes the blog, “while games that have more complex graphics are GPU bottlenecked with subpar performance.” Screenshots show Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Outrun Online Arcade with frame rates close to 60 FPS.

Moving down the stack and further back in time, GPUs like the ATI Radeon HD 3870 are “still able to render very simple games with playable performance in RPCS,” assert the devs. To achieve playability, you will want to dial in PSP-like resolutions, though. Specifically, 273p was mentioned.

What about the weakest TeraScale 1 GPUs? The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with a measly 256MB of VRAM even performs poorly at 273p. Screenshots from RPCS3 tests show it only managing 8 FPS in Outrun Online Arcade and 13 FPS in Portal.

With RPCS3’s progress over the last half decade, these performance numbers could also improve. In fact, the blog states that “future optimization should improve performance by quite a bit on these old GPUs.”

It looks like a good time to dust off your retro PC and try a few old PS3 classics on your ATI TeraScale 1 GPU-accelerated rig. Remember this extended graphics card support requires a Linux distro with the Mesa driver r600. Then you need to launch RCPS3 with the following environment variables: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=440 ./rpcs3.AppImage

Developer PaisleyBoxers has released Backrooms 32X, with the strap line “welcome to the cutting edge of 1994.” Yes, this is a Sega 32X game set in the Backrooms, the dingy, yellowing internet phenomenon given a huge boost with the release of the psychological horror indie film earlier this year. Despite the ancient and relatively resource–starved console platform, the devs appear to have captured the Backrooms' essence of “buzzing fluorescents, damp carpet, walls that go on too long” with a raycasting engine written from scratch in C and SH-2 assembly (with some Claude AI assistance).

Above: a slightly earlier Backrooms 32X release running on real Sega 32X hardware. Since this release, some objects can now be pushed over, and there can be chairs in the rooms.

In keeping with the Backrooms theme, this is a claustrophobic adventure game in the signature endless yellowed beige rooms setting, where you seek the exits, then another exit, and another. The game packs in procedurally generated levels, providing endless ‘fun.’ However, there are also community maps built by your fellow players. As a bonus, there’s a browser-based level editor so you can contribute to map designs, too.

When playing the game, your first-person character can crawl and crouch, squeezing through crawlspaces, maintaining Backrooms aesthetics and mechanics. A six-button (rather than a 3-button) Sega control pad is recommended if you are using original 32X hardware to enjoy full control.

Technical achievements

Probably the most noteworthy element of Backrooms 32X, though, is the technical achievement. Highlights include:

• the endless liminal space with procedurally generated levels,
• dual-CPU rendering utilizing both 32X SH-2s,
• a real raycaster rendering textured DDA walls, dynamic ceiling lighting, distance fog, thin partition walls, and half-height cubicle dividers you can see over,
• crawl and crouch — full eye-height perspective,
• and a live, not pre-rendered,  3D intro to the game.

If you are interested in Backrooms 32X, or even in playing any of the new wave of Backrooms gaming content, feel free to give this a spin. Literally free, as it is open source, available on GitHub, and a trivial 1.5MB ROM-ready download via the itch.io link we shared in the intro (version 164, released a couple of hours ago).

You don’t need an actual Sega 32X and flashcart hardware to play. PaisleyBoxers assures that Backrooms 32X also works on MiSTer FPGA, as well as 32X-capable emulators such as RetroArch, BlastEm, Ares, or Kega Fusion.

The static recompilation craze has just hit a milestone with developer @patchzyy sharing a slick and smooth-looking version of “Mario Kart Wii, rebuilt for PC.” Mario Kart Wiicompiled, created using the help of AI coding, is being teased now, with a video embedded below, but isn’t expected to become available as a beta until next month. That is, if it doesn’t get whack-a-moled somehow by the notoriously litigious Nintendo.

For context, several developers have been busy with static recompilation projects over recent years. Successes in recompiling games from platforms like the Nintendo N64 (and Xbox 360) have clearly inspired a generational jump, with patchzyy’s claimed “first static recompilation of a Wii game.” From the brief video, it looks pretty good.

Static recompilation transforms the binary machine code into equivalent native code for the target platform, like PC. Digital archivists and retrogaming fans like static recompilation as it can offer higher performance and stability, removing emulation quirks and overheads. It can also make use of the best features of the modern platform, so Mario Kart Wiicompiled is going to run at up to 4K, with an unlocked frame rate. Moreover, in this case, Retro Rewind community mod compatibility is confirmed, which means that recompiled players will be able to access 200+ race tracks.

At this time, the static recompilation doesn’t use 4K or HD textures or character models. However, these are options open to the community/modders, going forward, just like we see with N64 and other console recompilations.

It will be interesting to see if the Wii’s big gimmick of motion controls, which could be used for Kart steering, will work on Mario Kart Wiicompiled. Perhaps it could even work with original Wii Remotes you might have lying around.

So, are Wii static recompilation title floodgates about to open? There is certainly a nice selection of games folks with Wii disk collections might enjoy playing on their modern PCs connected to their 4K TVs. So, Nintendo might not like seeing this kind of project getting popular, but the devs studiously separate the static recompilation code from the game ‘ROM’ files, which retro gamers may or may not actually own.

Many social media commenters point out that AI was used in the development of Mario Kart Wiicompiled, but that was already made clear in the project FAQ. That document clearly states that AI was used to assist with code only, not for the generation of art or other assets.

An ex-Sega engineer has created a CRT emulator for macOS so realistic that it even supports screen tapping to fix the notoriously sketchy performance of the technology. On Tuesday, a developer showcased a CRT emulation project which some commenters complained was more like a CRT damage simulator. In other words, the CRT effects like flickering, noise, and aberrations were judged by the masses to be somewhat overdone. Today, @GOROman has followed up by demonstrating that the famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software’s CRT rendering can be improved via an old-school whack to the top of the monitor. See it with your own eyes, in the video embedded below.

The developer of this CRT emulator, GOROman, is an ex-Sega and ex-Facebook software engineer. They explain that the famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software receives VHF RF output (NTSC-J) from their Famicom (Nintendo NES) via an open-source SDR (software-defined radio) solution dubbed the HackRF One.

With the software running and the NES plugged into the HackRF One, the console’s RF-modulated video can be displayed on VHF channel 1 or 2. However, here you can see it on a modern LCD, in a window on the desktop. Thus the GOROman project is performing a full NTSC-J color decode in software and displaying the result on the desktop in real time via SDL2.

It is further explained that the Famicom “is not broadcast-compliant (non-interlaced 240p, chroma phase advancing 120° per line, one short line per frame).” Therefore, the decoder has to run several processes in the background to avoid quirks like drifts, wobbles, and color burst instability.

In summary, the Famicom’s RF output isn’t ideal for piping into modern monitors, so the decoder has to effectively simulate an analog TV’s brain, locking in the image stability and color. The initial demo shared by GOROman looked so much like a ‘damaged TV’ because the dev wanted to play around "by shifting the VHF frequency (exaggeratedly)." [machine translation] It was an eye-catching, humorous demo.

So, what’s happening with the new video and demo of percussive maintenance support? On social media, some have guessed that the fun picture stability-fixing mechanic could be using feedback from the Apple MacBook’s lid angle sensor. However, I looked at the GitHub page for GOROman’s famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software, released under the MIT open-source license, and there appears to be an input variable for "audio tap," so the effect may be based on mic audio input.

Someone in the comments has requested a magnet mode to play with the ‘CRT,’ so guess what might happen tomorrow.

The adventurous developer who recently released Linux for the Atari Jaguar (1993) has brewed up a version of the open-source OS for the Sega 32X (1994). If you can’t remember the 32X, it was Sega’s mid-gen answer to early fifth-generation challengers like the Jaguar, 3DO, and Amiga CD32. Sega’s solution added some potent processing power to a mushroom-like slot in an expansion to its popular Mega Drive/Genesis. Now cakehonolulu has got it running Linux, despite facing several major hurdles.

Compared to its Genesis host, the Sega 32X was incredibly muscular. The Genesis had relied on the capable but long-in-the-tooth Motorola 68000 (7 MHz) for years, but the 32X add-on boosted that with a pair of Hitachi SuperH SH2s (SH7604) CPUs (23 MHz). It also ramped up system RAM from the base 64KB by adding 256KB of its own. Sega’s expansion offered more than just speed; the console’s color palette was ramped up from 64 to 32,000 simultaneous colors on screen, and it was powerful enough to introduce hitherto unachievable 3D graphics elements to mainstream console gaming.

As with cakehonolulu’s tale of Linux wrangling on the old Jag, the above-linked blog talks through a long list of hurdles that needed to be leapt to get the Linux kernel booted and running BusyBox. This time around, particularly steely roadblocks included: the even more constrained RAM situation, the lack of hardware synchronization primitives, the desire to get SMP working across the pair of SH2 CPUs, no direct UART access from the 32X, and scheduler bugs, among other things.

On the positive side, smoothing the development process along were access to Chilly Willy’s 32X devkit, the linuxmd project, the Krikzz FPGA-based flash cart with ROM – RAM mapping tools, and existing SH2 documentation and sample projects. Please check through the linked blog for far more technical details from cakehonolulu.

As you can see, cakehonolulu was successful again. So, what’s the next stop for this adventurous dev – the Sega Saturn? Whatever the project may be, it was interesting to read that works like this are basically forming a portfolio for the Spanish dev, which they hope will help them with job hunting.

Barely a day goes by without some retro system developer accomplishing a technical feat that beggars belief. OpenStrike is the latest mad project, creating a proof-of-concept reimplementation of the seminal Counter-Strike for the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), a 22-year-old system that arguably has no business running the game.

The port was made by Yifeng Wang (aka doodlestrike), who apparently created his own Rust-based 3D engine called Pocket3D for the affair, along with the PocketJS JavaScript engine for the game rules and UI. Despite the proof-of-concept status, Wang says that elimination matches with bots are already playable, though the game's famous buying stages aren't yet functional. The full set of eight original Counter-Strike maps have already been tested, and interested modders should easily be able to roll their own.

The engine manages to run the game with bots at a steady 60 FPS at the PSP's native 480x272 resolution, thanks to pre-processing graphical assets to directly bake lightmaps into vertex colors (as opposed to real-time or on-startup calculations). Interestingly, Wang kept the old-school BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) rendering method to cull non-visible areas rather than use a fancier modern algorithm, lending credence to the "don't fix what isn't broken" motto.

The game also runs on the PS Vita, a system with 4x the effective resolution of the original at 960x544, with native graphics, without upscaling of either 3D rendering or 2D assets. You should also be able to run the project as a standard desktop game, and naturally, it's playable on the popular PPSSPP emulator. To get the project going, you'll have to provide your own copy of the Counter-Strike asset data, similar to using Doom's original WADs in one of the many ports.

The project's entire technical architecture is impressive, as Wang went way beyond the scope of "make a 3D engine that load maps." Both the Pocket3D and PocketJS 2D engines are generic, and OpenStrike is merely the first "product" that uses them. The code runs on a server/client/event architecture, and the event handling (ex: shooting) is decoupled from the rendering core, preventing nasty FPS dips. The game is testable offline, and most everything is trivially moddable. You should check out the OpenStrike repo if you're interested.

Tobias Friedly, also known as Game of Tobi on YouTube, is quite the wizard when it comes to making the seemingly impossible happen on early Nintendo hardware. His latest venture is getting a limited version of Minecraft running on the Game Boy Color (GBC)... but in 3D. As an added bonus, he even got the game working on the original Game Boy in limited fashion, thanks to both machines' interoperability.

Friedly demonstrated his work in a short YouTube video, where it's plainly visible that he managed to coax the GBC's 8x8 sprites into something visually resembling Minecraft in a three-dimensional projection. Although there are no enemies, inventory, or game logic, the feat is exceedingly impressive given that the hardware was never meant to have 3D games.

This is a significant departure from existing Minecraft demakes for old Nintendo gear, seemingly all of which tried implementing the original game's mechanics in a flat two-dimensional space. Friedly's project appears to be an offshoot of his existing Minecraft 3D for the Gameboy Advance.

Even with the limited GBC hardware, he even went as far as adding a map generator that can create flat or bumpy maps. Blocks of various types (including portals) can be placed and removed, and he even added the Nether area of the game. Game saving and loading is included, and there's an option to enable block textures. Predictably the results are a bit iffy given the limited resolution of the display and the inherent difficulty in faking texture mapping with 8x8 tiles.

Despite running at different speeds and color levels, the Game Boy Color and original Game Boy are for the most part compatible, and Friendly even showed that his clone does run on the original black-and-green Game Boy. It's hard to distinguish blocks on that screen — but it works. If you're interested in trying it out yourself, download the cart files that Friedly published.

Nvidia and Sega have scheduled an event next week to celebrate their history and longstanding friendship. The invitation-only shindig takes place at GiGO Akihabara, Tokyo (you can apply via Twitter/X). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will star at the July 15 event, officially unveiling the RTX Spark for the first time in Japan. Attendees will also get a chance to win a GeForce RTX 5090 FE in a raffle.

If you will be in Tokyo on July 15, it might be worth pitching for an invite, and if you’re exceptionally lucky, you might visit the event, then go home with one of the best graphics cards available in 2026. The GeForce Japan social media managers are asking for comments that encapsulate 'memories of Nvidia or Sega' with photos, videos, anecdotes,” and so on (machine translation). You have until sometime on July 12 to concoct your invitation pitch. Remember, Japan time is about half a day ahead of the mainland US time zones.

Though it is clearly spelled out what the Nvidia side of the celebration will present on the day (the RTX Spark and a raffle RTX 5090 FE), no such specific teases have come from the Sega camp.

The lack of any teaser might make you think that Sega isn’t going to reveal anything new at the event, or conversely that something big is on the horizon. But if Sega were to pull a hardware surprise out of the bag, it could make quite a splash.

The Japanese gaming icon exited the console race back in 2001, when it ceased production of the Dreamcast. However, it released rehashed mini consoles like the Genesis Mini and Game Gear Micro at the beginning of the 2020s. More recently, some Mini Arcades (like Sonic, OutRun, and Golden Axe) have been released in partnership with MyArcade. It would be great if Sega could do something ambitious again, or even come out with a mini console capable of handling Saturn or Dreamcast titles. With some kind of lightgun support, please.

Nvidia and Sega – an enduring bond

As mentioned in the intro, Nvidia and Sega are old buddies. Nvidia nearly collapsed in 1996, just three years after its founding, and only the belief and generosity of a senior Sega executive at the time saved Nvidia from the graveyard. This is according to Huang’s recollections of a very difficult time for Nvidia, shared in interviews in 2024.

The story goes that Nvidia’s work to design a GPU for a next-gen Sega console fell through largely due to incompatibility with the emerging DirectX API. Sega’s management appreciated the efforts, though, and believed in young Mr. Huang enough to invest $5M in the green team. This investment gave Nvidia the breathing room to pivot from its previous graphics architecture and come out with the DirectX-friendly RIVA line (1997), followed by the unstoppable GeForce series (1999).

Flipping the infamous early 1990s anti-piracy campaign messaging on its head, the Future Nostalgia Project is asking retro hoarders to Copy That Floppy! Backed by the Cambridge University Library and supported by the Digital Preservation Coalition, the project went online late last year. The project includes an extensive, indexed how-to guide to preserving data currently on your dusty old floppy collection. It covers a plethora of removable media from 8- and 5.25-inch floppies to the iconic 3.5-inch ‘save icon’ diskettes. I’ve been archiving my own very poorly labeled collection of diskettes before bit rot gets them, and while the necessary hardware remains affordable.

The published guide focuses mostly on saving the material stored on the old removable media. Rewriting the disks to new media and/or accessing the old data that was squirreled within is beyond the scope of the still extensive guide. However, there are links provided to further guides and documentation that cover those subsequent steps.

My 3.5-inch floppy jumble

I originally acquired a good-condition working USB floppy drive from the iMac era to image my collection of 3.5-inch floppies dating back to the 16-bit era. Buying a USB-attached optical drive has already been great for accessing and imaging old CDs and DVDs. However, due to the mix of (poorly labeled) Atari ST, Amiga (OFS, FFS, PFS), PC, Mac, and even Archimedes floppies, I have the USB floppy, which doesn’t cut it. I had to acquire a Greaseweazle because a PC‑compatible USB floppy drive cannot read or write the raw, low‑level disk formats used by Amiga, classic Macintosh, and many other vintage systems.

It’s a bit of a rabbit hole in a minefield, but some vintage used drives you can get via places like eBay are better than others at reading flux transitions (the raw magnetic pulses on the disk) on non-IBM formats. Then, when you image disks, and it isn’t 100% successful, you wonder if your drive is the problem or if it’s the old media…

My first diskette archiving tests immediately hit a speedbump. After a lot of forum reading and investigating, I determined the used 3.5-inch floppy drive I’d sourced to pair with my Greaseweazle had one malfunctioning head. Having the other USB floppy drive allowed me to verify that using a standard PC disk.

My second used floppy drive appears to be OK. I’ve managed to image some Amiga and Atari ST disks and access them, reading files and running programs within the respective emulators. If you don’t know what format the source floppy is, Greaseweazle can handle it by doing a complete flux copy. Then you can look at raw data in tools like HxCFloppyEmulator to understand the original format and make disk images for common emulators. These can be saved to backup disks, as well as the current PC SSD. That’s what I’ve been doing.

I’m also currently digitally archiving compact cassette audio tapes (Yamaha Natural Sound deck), and scanning 35mm film (Canoscan film scanner), among other things, when I’m not writing here. In all these cases, the media is getting so old now that it could be degrading, if not already useless. Moreover, the devices you can wrangle these old formats with are also often nearing the ends of their service lives.

It’s been over 30 years since the cringeworthy Don’t Copy That Floppy campaign hit the airwaves. You can watch the Software Publishers Association-backed video online anytime now, as it's been digitally archived on YouTube. The messaging was clear: copying software results in a loss of income for artists, writers, designers, and programmers, meaning there will be fewer software products in the future.

The Internationale Computerspielesammlung (ICS), a German effort to assemble the world's largest publicly accessible video game archive, is being wound down after roughly €1.5 million in public funding expired at the end of April and the federal government declined to renew it. GamesWirtschaft reported on July 3rd that the project's shareholders voted unanimously to shut it down, leaving the future of its database of more than 60,000 cataloged titles unresolved. This decision comes the same week that Sony confirmed it’s ending physical PlayStation disc production.

The ICS held more than 60,000 games spread across cartridge, floppy disk, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, alongside manuals, packaging, and hardware, assembled since 2012 from the USK (Germany's game-ratings authority), the Computerspielemuseum Berlin, the industry association Game, and the University of Potsdam. Its public online catalog launched in April 2019 with tens of thousands of entries. The physical holdings remain with the institutions that own them, and whether the shared database and its infrastructure survive is under legal and technical review, according to GamesWirtschaft.

Funding for the ICS came from the Berlin Senate and the federal government's culture commissioner and ran only through late April. Germany's Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), which took responsibility for games policy in 2025, examined a model for permanent institutional funding and concluded it wasn’t economically viable given the scale of the work involved. Berlin economics senator Franziska Giffey had cautioned earlier in the year that support beyond April wasn't guaranteed.

A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation and Software Preservation Network found that 87% of classic games released in the U.S. are out of print and commercially unavailable, a survival rate the researchers put below that of American silent films. In October 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office refused for the fourth time since 2015 to grant a DMCA exemption that would let libraries share preserved games with remote researchers, siding with the Entertainment Software Association.

Meanwhile, fan-run archives face a different set of challenges. Myrient, a repository holding more than 385 TB of preserved games, was set to go offline in early 2026 as AI-driven demand drove up RAM, SSD, and hard-drive prices, before volunteers backed up the collection in full. The ICS shutdown coincides with Sony's confirmation that it will end physical PlayStation disc production in 2028, which will make any future archival attempts all the more difficult.

The appetite for retro computing grows ever larger, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of homebrew software projects targeting machines from the last century. However, few of those are full-featured, 32-bit, and GUI-driven operating systems that can fit in a single floppy, with some modern conveniences to boot. Enter the upcoming HamsterOS, set for release in November.

HamsterOS is seemingly targeted at using PCs from the 386/486 era, along with DOS software. After loading from the floppy disk, it'll present a user interface with most every commonly used utility: a notepad, image viewer, calculator, file finder, drive icons, and a window manager. The file browser should have up to five windows once, complete with per-type icons.

Crucially, HamsterOS includes an in-kernel VM86 DOS box, and a FreeDOS fallback for programs that might not run well within. Other noteworthy tech aspects include support for FAT 12/16/32 with read-back verification, dedicated format and disk utilities, a partition manager, and even SCSI diagnostic tools. The operating system defaults to 16-color VGA resolution, but the ability to use 256 colors exists as a diagnostic option. There's a neat fallback to VGA as a safe mode after three failed crashes, too.

Mean Hamster, the company developing HamsterOS, didn't publish any sort of mission statement, but judging by the feature set and integration with its HamsterWeazle floppy image management utility (for use with GreaseWeazle drives), it seems to be a more practical means of managing and/or using machines from the era.

The list of hardware support is what you'd expect for 1980 and 1990's era machines, comprising ATA IDE and CD-ROM, ISA floppies, serial and PS/2 mice (with wheel support, too). The only supported soundcard is the Sound Blaster 16, though loadable drivers should let tinkerers expand the list; plus it's possible that the built-in FreeDOS support allows for using most any type of hardware regardless.

The multitasking architecture is cooperative, meaning it's somewhat old-school in its approach, with each program in charge of regularly yielding control back to the OS. This is different and inferior at face value than the now-standard preemptive multitasking, but it ought also to allow for generally increased responsiveness with slow disks, lower RAM usage, and broader compatibility with DOS applications. To keep things running smoothly, HamsterOS includes I/O stall detection if it's frozen for over 8 seconds. HamsterOS isn't just meant to run DOS stuff, though, as it has its own app format.

Mean Hamster flatly says that "HamsterOS is well past the 'can it boot' stage" and that most every listed feature is already implemented. The company says it's focusing on stability and performance improvements as well as bugfixes. It seems to be calling the OS a "product," so it seems likely that it'll be commercial and closed-source, unlike most projects of this type. A good tool is always worth paying for, though.

Enterprising enthusiast Wenting has turned an M5Stack PaperS3 dev kit with an e-ink screen into a more-or-less fully functional Game Boy. If you're not a hardware hacker yourself, there's a fair chance you've never heard of Wenting Zhang or Modos Labs. The engineer's "Wenting Channel" on YouTube has been a favorite of niche tech nerds for a long time, showcasing all kinds of hardware hacking expertise. Zhang spent the last several years turning that expertise into Modos Labs, a company whose high-refresh e-Ink displays we've covered before.

Okay, it won't play real cartridges, the sound is kind of jank, and the performance isn't always full speed. Still, this is quite an achievement for a few reasons. The PaperS3 is an e-Ink dev kit, not really a commercial product. It's intended for prototyping and, well, exactly this sort of hardware hacking. A key detail to understand is that this device isn't powered by some multi-core Rockchip or Allwinner SoC, but rather by an ultra-low-cost ESP32-S3 microcontroller with just two cores running at clock rates measured in hundreds of MHz, not GHz. Moreover, its e-Ink display is not really intended for the kind of smooth refresh normally required for playing video games, yet Zhang pulled it off.

To understand how this Game Boy emulator is even possible, you have to understand Zhang's breakthrough with E-ink hardware, which he originally developed for his open-source monitor project, the Modos Flow. He has a whole video explaining the tech, but the summary is basically that he replaced the display controller of a typical e-Ink display with a powerful FPGA so that he could treat every single pixel as an independent display region and then only update the parts of the screen that are actually changing each frame.

How, then, did he achieve this on the embedded controller in the PaperS3? It's only possible because the Game Boy screen is very low resolution by modern standards at just 160x144 pixels. The screen on the PaperS3 is 960x540, so he was able to multiply the resolution by three to give him enough room for dithering to reproduce the four possible shades of the original Game Boy screen. This process takes up almost the entirety of the second CPU core in the ESP32, leaving just enough room for audio processing while the actual emulation happens on the first CPU core.

The end result is a very convincing facsimile of the Game Boy's display, except instead of being a tiny and dim LCD, it's a razor-sharp, crystal-clear e-Ink display. Zhang even implemented some quality-of-life features, such as partial Bluetooth LE controller support as well as dedicated quick-save and quick-load touchscreen 'buttons' to save the emulator's state. You can even load a state directly from the front-end, allowing you to instantly resume where you left off when you have to stop.

That's not to say the project is flawless, though. For one thing, it relies on touchscreen controls with no haptic feedback because the device simply doesn't have the requisite hardware for it. Perhaps more pressingly, the PaperS3 only has a simple piezo buzzer for sound, and while Zhang pulled off some real hackery to get recognizable Game Boy audio out of the mono buzzer (by using pseudo-polyphony like a ZX Spectrum hacker), it doesn't quite sound like a real Game Boy. The hacker also doesn't discuss the battery life of the device while running his emulator; given that he's pushing both CPU cores of the microcontroller to their limits, and also that e-Ink displays are actually quite power-thirsty when driven at 60 Hz, we can't imagine it's great.

If you're keen to try out "Paper Boy S3", Zhang says he's uploaded it to the M5Burner tool that serves as both a firmware flasher and app store for the M5Stack devices. However, as he notes himself in his video on the project, PaperS3 is actually already discontinued by the manufacturer, so you might have a hard time getting hold of one if you don't already. Still, the project serves as a fascinating demo for what can be done with ultra-low-end hardware and a direct counterpoint to at least one of the weaknesses of e-Ink displays.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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