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.

The PlayStation 5 emulation scene has been a wonder to witness, with rapid progress matching the community's ambition. The latest development on this frontier is SharpEmu, an open-source PS5 emulator, successfully running on the Steam Deck with Astro's Playroom even booting to show the PlayStation Studios loading screen. The framerate doesn't go past 1 FPS, but the fact that it's even running is very impressive.

We scoured the internet for more information on this but couldn't find anything. This seems to be the first and only case of someone getting a PS5 game to load on a Steam Deck without streaming involved. The video above shows the Steam Deck in its desktop mode inside SteamOS, which is based on Linux. Performance fluctuates between 0.5 FPS and 1 FPS according to the overlay in the corner, and the audio is just as choppy.

SharpEmu can smoothly run lightweight 2D titles like Dead Cells and Dreaming Sarah on more capable hardware, but the team's focus is not on compatibility. KytyPS5 is far more advanced in terms of the games people have been able to boot on it, including 3D titles like Demon's Souls. However, Kyty is limited to Windows while SharpEmu has native support for Linux and Mac, and there's even an unofficial Android fork.

We tried this version on a OnePlus 12 and were able to get Dreaming Sarah to show an initial splash screen with the developer's logo. After that, though, the screen turns black, and nothing happens, despite the FPS counter constantly hovering around 60 FPS. A few questionably optimistic users on Reddit have even suggested running SharpEmu on Android through Winlator, so that GTA VI can be played on Android once it launches.

Just like the Steam Deck, even the fact that the game launches on Android is a mighty feat and a testament to the sheer ambition of this community. SharpEmu is only meant for x86 devices; it runs on Apple Silicon Macs through the Rosetta 2 translation layer, and on Windows-on-Arm devices through Microsoft's Prism translation layer. But since it's written in C# from scratch, evidently, the code can be recompiled for Android.

With the ongoing component crisis making even consoles more expensive to purchase, and the death of physical media right around the corner, emulation is once again being touted as a cornerstone of preservation. With a roadmap to playing GTA VI on PC without waiting a few years for a port no doubt in the back of everyone's minds.

Sony lets gamers access their PlayStation consoles remotely through a couple of different tools. The Remote Play app lets gamers stream titles from their consoles to their phones, tablets, and PCs. The PlayStation Portal handheld has an extra trick. It can stream PS5 games both locally from a gamer's own console or directly from the PlayStation Plus Premium service's cloud gaming library.

Third-party apps like Chiaki have already brought PS Remote Play functionality over to Linux, but the new Asobi Remote Play app promises to make that functionality available directly from Steam. It also boasts an exclusive feature that can turn your Steam Deck into a virtual PS Portal, allowing you to play cloud games from the PlayStation Plus Premium library. The app is in a pre-release play test right now, but its capabilities are intriguing.

As long as you have a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription, you can stream select PS5 titles directly from Sony's servers inside Asobi, even if you don't have a PS5 console. This hasn't been possible on any device other than the PS Portal until now. Only the titles Sony has approved are available for cloud streaming on PS Portal, and that same restriction will apply within Asobi.

That said, hundreds of games are already available through this subscription, so you likely won't run into any trouble finding something to play if you want to try the PlayStation library without committing to a PS5.

The Asobi team has just released the app for SteamOS (and, by extension, Linux), which means you can install it on a Steam Deck or Steam Machine and essentially turn your existing Steam Deck into a Portal, saving you from buying a $250 device just to enjoy PlayStation games without a console.

Asobi is not associated with Sony in any way, so there's no guarantees for future compatibility or even a stable experience, but the developer does promise 1080p 30FPS streaming with the app's free tier. The premium tier bumps that up to 1080p 60 FPS with HDR and 4K upscaling support, as well as manual bitrate selection, controller haptics, and lower latency.

All of these premium features are currently free on the Steam playtest, which is also why pricing for the premium tier hasn't been announced yet. Some users already part of the testing are reporting issues, which is to be expected for pre-release software.

But if the team can iron out the kinks, and assuming that Sony doesn't block whatever method Asobi is using to mimic the PlayStation Portal for cloud game streaming access, this app could become the most accessible way to play PlayStation games on the Steam Deck (apart from native PC ports, of course).

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.

The campaign to recruit video gamers into Air Traffic Control (ATC) jobs has been a resounding success, according to U.S. Department of Transport head Secretary Sean P. Duffy. This groundbreaking campaign was launched by the USDOT and FAA back in April, hoping to net a bumper intake of skilled operatives with transferable gaming‑related skills such as spatial awareness, multitasking, strategic thinking, and rapid problem‑solving. By the U.S. politician’s account, “the results are HISTORIC” with the campaign the fastest ever to hit its target, and 2,000+ hired.

The recruitment ploy of appealing to young adults who love video gaming seems to have been a smart idea. Duffy highlights three metrics to backup his claims that the campaign was a “game changer.”

Firstly, the Secretary of the USDOT says that this recruitment drive for skilled ATC staff achieved a 94% hiring goal, and has seen the “fastest time ever to reach target.” Secondly, they’ve hired the most candidates in a single year – that’s over 2,000 ATC operators. There’s also another 2,000+ recruits in the pipeline, boasted Duffy.

The Secretary of the USDOT went on to claim that, with the gamer recruitment drive now well underway, “we’re building the strongest, sharpest workforce in aviation history.”

In the Tweet from the politician, it is interesting to see the news presenter's tone regarding ‘gamers’ shift from questioning to appreciation, mirroring what might be expected of their audience. We see various games being played in the video reel, but probably the best fit for ATC roles are those who get their kicks from flight simulation games. The video ends with an unnamed exec, standing next to Secretary Duffy, gushing that “we’ve never had a group perform that well.”

The original video that helped this ATC recruitment drive hit the headlines back in April is embedded above, for context. “You’ve been training for this,” states the USDOT video. “Become an Air Traffic Controller.” The message goes on to inform those already interested that the average salary in this role is $155,000 after just three years. Not only that, a successful applicant will “keep millions of people safe every day.”

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.

Microsoft is working to bring an unprecedented level of backwards compatibility to its upcoming PC-console hybrid, the Xbox Helix, according to a new report from The Verge. The outlet obtained leaked screenshots of an internal memo allegedly sent to publishers, asking them to opt into a new model that makes legacy titles from old Xbox consoles available for modern devices without additional effort.

Microsoft began charting this course with the release of four original Xbox titles on PC last month that shipped with an Xbox 360 emulator baked in. That discovery led many to speculate that Xbox 360 backwards compatibility is right around the corner, too, and the memo indeed confirms it to be in the works for 2027-28. That's around the time we expect to see the next-gen Xbox Helix console as well, which may or may not have a disc drive.

Recent reports suggest Microsoft wants to follow in Sony's footsteps and move away from physical discs by offering a way to digitize them. This would tie the game on the disc to a license instead, and you'd be able to access it anywhere with your Xbox account. This kind of universality is the direction Microsoft has been heading in for a decade at this point, and the memo says a public beta for this feature was coming in July 2026 (we're in August now).

To support this digitization, Microsoft seems to be asking publishers to join hands in offering original Xbox and Xbox 360 games on Xbox Helix, PCs, and handhelds. Keep in mind that Xbox One and Xbox Series backwards compatibility is already expected (and obvious) given the architectural similarities between the three consoles — the OG Xbox and Xbox 360 need emulators for modern hardware since they weren't x86-based.

As such, the leaked memo says that Microsoft will generously "manage all engineering, the bespoke emulator, title-by-title certification and testing, storefront merchandising and player support." Leaving the developers to simply give permission for their legacy titles to appear on the storefront and reap the profits in return. Microsoft promises devs that they will retain "rights, pricing, and brand control."

All of this makes it sound like the ball is entirely in the developers' courts, and it is, because the next screenshot is an even more explicit sales pitch. Microsoft wants them to know just how beneficial it would be to revive older titles and how there'd be zero effort required on their part, so it's really a win-win scenario. The company is promising a "modern ecosystem" with cloud saves for old games that would be convenient for the player, too.

This kind of proposal makes sense when you realize that backwards compatibility on this scale doesn't work like it would between recent consoles. As we mentioned, the underlying, PC-like x86 architecture makes it possible for an Xbox One disc to be plopped into an Xbox Series console and just work. Microsoft even has a Smart Delivery system in place to download additional content best suited to your hardware.

This is simply not possible for older titles that require explicit permission if the emulator already supports them, or titles that are delisted because of third-party licensing issues. For instance, an old racing game won't have the rights to the cars and music featured in it anymore, and relicensing those assets wouldn't make sense even if Microsoft is handling the actual distribution for you as it promises in this memo.

Therefore, the idea of converting discs into digital games is perhaps more enticing and less legally binding, while serving the same concept of organizing all Xbox generations under one roof. The memo calls that "Program 01" as if that's the more preferred option anyway. The call to publishers is labeled "Program 02" and seems less likely to prevail, at least at the scope Microsoft wishes for, but only time will tell.

Ultimately, if the Xbox Helix can play PC games (all of them?) and at least three separate generations of Xbox titles — Helix, Series, One — it's already going to have a vast catalogue. Add emulated backwards compatibility and disc digitization to the mix, and you'll have by far the largest library on a console, ever. Of course, it can be argued whether Xbox Helix is even a traditional console to begin with, hence undermining this achievement in hindsight, but let's table that debate for later.

Xbox price increases across the UK and Europe have been revealed, reports the Video Games Chronicle. Promotional graphics for these markets show that Microsoft is stoking prices up as much as £170 or €200, depending on the model buyers are interested in. The confirmation comes a little more than a week after it was revealed that U.S. customers were going to be facing Xbox price increases by as high as $150 from August 1.

The unquenchable thirst of AI data centers for computing hardware has precipitated the unusual sight of consoles actually getting more expensive as their life cycle extends. Now we are seeing consoles priced as much as $300 more than when they originally launched in 2020. Yes, this latest price rise isn’t the first.

The worst hit are those looking for the most capable SKUs. Specifically, all the big numbers we’ve used to illustrate the scale of these rises reference the Xbox Series X (1TB, Disc) pricing. This device now costs $799 in the U.S., £669 in the UK, and €799 in Europe. Check the table below for the full range of SKUs and new prices.

It looks like those in European markets will be hardest hit, as a €200 increase converts to an approximate $230 increase. Remember that UK and European prices for consumer goods will always include all sales taxes, though.

In our recent story about the Xbox price hikes (in the U.S.), we noted that the 2TB console was also killed off by Microsoft.

Readers won’t be surprised that this latest set of hikes is another symptom of the AI boom and RAMpocalypse. The pricing of essential components used by servers, computers, smart devices, and consoles alike has all skyrocketed over the last year, led by RAM and SSDs.

Sony increased all its PlayStation 5 prices in April, with every SKU going up by $100. Perhaps it will have to revise things upwards again, shortly. Meanwhile, PC buyers are also glum with the rapidly increasing prices of components and pre-built console-killers like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, all seeing significant price increases.

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.

Team Fortress 2 cases are worth pocket change. There are a few select cases that scale up to a few dollars, and even fewer with a market price in the double digits, but the vast majority of cases are worth a few pennies, no more than a Steam Trading Card. But one player, Vincent Stech, started collecting cases nearly a decade ago, racking up over 1.7 million cases across several Steam accounts. And now, he’s selling the whole collection, with an estimated value of $100,000.

Stech started collecting cases around Team Fortress 2’s last major update, in late 2017, outside of annual Halloween events that persisted through 2022. In order to accumulate so many cases, Stech largely automated the process, noting that he was careful not to upset the string-pullers at Valve as he amassed a stash of seemingly innocuous digital assets.

“That’s always been one of my biggest fears over the past decade, is one day they wake up like ‘hey, we don’t like what this guy’s doing,’” Stech told Tom's Hardware. “Because I know people with accounts with like 50,000 items that won’t load, and Valve won’t delete the items off their account, so they just can’t access Team Fortress 2 inventory ever again on their main account.”

Before understanding Stech’s process, however, we have to start with how Team Fortress 2’s in-game economy works. Like other Valve titles, you’re able to list items you earn in-game on the Steam Community Marketplace, selling them for real dollars or spending real dollars of your own to buy other items. That’s the normal way of doing things, but this in-game economy has grown beyond the bounds of Steam. A lot of transactions happen off the platform.

Websites like backpack.tf and stntrading.eu take trading off of Steam, allowing you to use in-game crafting materials (along with keys) to buy and sell items. There are several reasons for these third-party marketplaces to exist, not the least of which is bot automation, which is against Steam’s Terms of Service. This exchange of in-game currency for items happens through trades on Steam, creating a separate marketplace where real money doesn’t change hands.

That’s not where Stech started. “Team Fortress 2 cases, they weren’t worth anything. They were… people were just giving them away because they take inventory spots,” Stech said. “People were deleting things, and so I decided to scoop them up.”

The problem Stech quickly ran into was inventory space. You can only have a few thousand items in your inventory (Stech told me 4,000 for Team Fortress 2, others say it’s around 2,000). Regardless of the number, it’s far too low a limit to amass nearly 2 million items, even with dozens of alternative accounts. Stech bypassed this issue by using the community marketplace. He listed the cases at very high prices where they were unlikely to sell. That’s because you can have tens of thousands of items on the market “before Steam gets really angry at you.” It effectively multiplies inventory space.

As his inventory began to grow, Stech started automating the process of taking inventory and accepting trades, the latter of which was handled through a simple batch file. At first, Stech was just buying cases in bulk at relatively low prices, but the inventory escalated once he started digging into Steam’s local pricing in different regions.

“In Venezuela and, like, Russian [Rubles]... they are very weak currencies compared to the U.S. dollar,” Stech said. “What I found out is the lowest you can sell an item on Steam for us is three cents. For them, it’s a 10th of a penny. So I found this one guy in Venezuela… he would buy almost every case off the Steam Community Market for their extremely low price, and then he would sell it to me, and I would just give him, like, keys. And he was actually a doctor in Venezuela, and they don’t make much at all by comparison to, like, what $50 would be in USD. So a large majority of his income was case money.”

For context, $50 is equivalent to just over 37,000 bolívares (the official currency of Venezuela).

Stech’s first cash-out from Steam was $50 when he was around 16 years old. A few years later, he cashed out $2,500 to buy his first car. Stech stopped collecting cases about three years ago, and now, he’s looking to sell off the entire collection, which he estimates is worth around $100,000.

Selling this collection is no easy feat, however. For starters, Steam can break when trades get too large, necessitating hundreds of trades across dozens of different accounts. Further, Stech controls quite a large portion of known cases. “At one point, I calculated I had, like, 17% of all TF2 cases that are publicly known… I would have an extremely hard time selling it off because I am a large [portion] of the market. It’s like, you know, Elon Musk couldn’t dump a lot of his stock.”

Stech has, apparently, found a buyer that wants the whole collection, however, and the selling process is already underway. “The transaction has kind of started… he has admin privileges on the trade offers he sends to my accounts, so my accounts just automatically accept any trade from him,” Stech said. “An option was for him to just buy the accounts, but we know that is very bannable, so we haven’t done that.”

Stech says he expects to have the process complete around October. Just as he used case money to buy his first car, he says he plans to use the money from the sale as a down payment on a house.

Despite widespread public backlash, Sony has reaffirmed its plan to transition PlayStation to an all-digital platform during the company's FY26 Q1 earnings call. The company is moving forward with ending the production of physical game discs in January 2028. After this date, the company will no longer manufacture physical media for new game releases. This decision gives PlayStation fans and retailers a little over a year and a half to prepare for the change.

When asked about Sony's decision to end production of physical game discs during the Q&A session, Lin Tao, Executive Officer and CFO for Sony, replied that:

"On this point, we announced that January 2028 onwards, we will no longer be manufacturing game discs. One and a half years ahead. We made this announcement at this time. There are various reasons we made this decision."

Tao further explains the rationale behind the digital paradigm shift, a move that was met with negative criticism from PlayStation fans and parts of the industry.

"The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing. That’s the big factor. It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of contents; digitalization is progressing. When we think about the future, we put in a lot of thought and time; we cautiously considered this, we came to this conclusion, we’re going to cautiously move this forward.

To this decision, we have received various opinions; people have strong views. We understand that the community has put forth those views to us.

Games are loved by many people. It’s a form of entertainment that’s loved by people; it’s connected to people’s fond memories in many cases. We understand those emotions. We want to consider that."

According to Sony's financial results for FY26 Q1, which covers the period from April to June, the company raked in $1.2 billion in digital game revenue. In stark contrast, physical game sales brought in only $128 million for Sony, meaning digital revenue was more than 9X higher than physical sales. The growth in digital sales and the disparity with physical sales shows why Sony is eager to go all in on digital.

Sony was asked directly about the impact of discontinuing physical discs. In response, Ishii, a Corporate Communications executive at the company, provided the following statement:

"Well, up until 2028, well, at this point in time, well, we are not seeing any impact on our business as of now. Going forward, about the content sales, I think a large part is already digitized.

Therefore, as a result of the discontinuation of a disc, we don’t see that there will be any negative impact on our business. However, as I already said, the users, the players, have attachments, and we have to think about how to respond to that feedback."

Phasing out game discs will undoubtedly have a significant financial impact on gamers. Physical game discs not only provide ownership, but they also come with the benefit of resale. Gamers can recoup some of what they paid for it once they are finished playing. The extinction of game discs represents the loss of the ability to share physical games with friends and family. The PlayStation platform does not support sharing digital games, unlike services like Valve’s Steam Families or Nintendo’s Virtual Game Cards.

Game discs enable gamers on a tight budget to purchase second-hand copies of games at great prices at their local game stores or online marketplaces. For instance, used copies of The Last of Us Part I, which came out four years ago, go for as little as $25, while the digital version remains priced at around $69.99 on the PlayStation Store. Even during major promotional events like Days of Play or Black Friday, digital discounts have rarely brought prices below $29.99. Second-hand physical copies are simply a more affordable choice for many players.

Without game discs, PlayStation console owners will have to rely more on internal storage, and when that depletes, they will have to expand the storage with the best PS5 SSDs. The issue is that SSDs are ludicrously expensive right now due to the storage shortage, which could last way beyond January 2028.

The discontinuation of physical discs does not just affect consumers but also retailers. However, Sony expects limited business impact in that aspect since the digital transition has somewhat started a long time ago. Tao elaborated, "For the last 30 years, we have been selling PlayStation, and the retail partners have always been important to us. With the completion of the disc production, we communicated this at an early stage so that we have enough time to be able to listen to various partners’ voices.”

Tao continued, “In North America, this has already happened, but without discs. In the package, there’s a code. That’s how they sell in North America. About the retailers, there are regional characteristics. For each regional partner, we try to have thorough dialogues so that we can end up in a win-win situation. Now, the differentiation from PC. We don’t feel that the disc is the factor to differentiate from the PC."

Gamers are actively voicing their opposition to Sony’s move away from physical media. DoesItPlay, a community dedicated to game preservation, has organized a large-scale boycott dubbed #PSBlackout, urging PlayStation users worldwide to turn off their consoles for an entire week, from August 23 to August 30. The X post has amassed over 1.8 million views and 7,500 shares, but it is uncertain how many users will participate. In addition to this digital protest, a Change.org petition with more than 350,000 signatures is asking for Sony to reconsider its decision to end physical game production.

Sony has been winding down its physical media production over the years (for example, physical boxes with a download code), so it was just really a matter of time before the PlayStation ecosystem adapted to the changes. Unfortunately, the die is cast, and there are rumors that Sony has already started repurposing its factories for other endeavors. There is little to no hope that Sony will reverse its decision to discontinue physical game discs.

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.

A Nintendo DS game that was classified as ‘lost media’ for nearly two decades is currently within tantalizing reach of video gaming fans and archivists. All the fans need is about $9,100, and no rival bidders on an eBay auction for an ultra-rare, perhaps one-of-a-kind, development cartridge thought to contain the PokePark Fishing Contest DS minigame.

Japanese game archaeology enthusiast Yoshino @ Federation (renpou.com) shared details of the eBay auction and its significance to their tens of thousands of social media followers.

So, what’s the deal with PokePark Fishing Contest DS, and why is it ultra-rare or even classified as ‘lost media?’ This fishing mini-game was lost for several reasons. Firstly, it was a download-only title. Secondly, its distribution was limited to those attending a short-lived Pokémon theme park venue in Japan (PokePark 2005). It also eluded archivists because it would be removed from a DS handheld when it was powered off, or after a 12-hour limit, whichever triggered first.

The eBay listing shows a large development and testing cartridge, front and back. There’s also an image showing the cartridge working. However, the on-DS-screen proof of viability is limited to “a Japanese-language screen indicating a high-score ranking communication program.”

The Germany-located seller, catbearpaws, says the cart was acquired as part of a private lot, and is selling the hardware as-is, with no promises regarding functionality, compatibility, or provenance. Catbearpaws has a 100% selling record and is asking for bids starting at €7,999 ($9,100), with less than three days left to run. They also may accept offers via the eBay Make Offer button/process.

Our machine-translated version of the eBay listing screen content appears to confirm that this is indeed a dev cart that was used for hosting “PokePark Fishing Contest DS” assets of some kind. Whether a playable version of the game can be downloaded, transmitted, or extracted from this hardware remains to be seen. As mentioned, the seller isn’t guaranteeing anything about this expensive but potentially important retro gaming artifact.

The state of PlayStation 5 emulation has been rapidly evolving, partially in response to Grand Theft Auto 6's release later this year. The latest milestone is the first 3D games being playable at very respectable framerates of around 30 frames per second.

The two emulators at the forefront of all this are KytyPS5 and SharpEmu, the former of which is intensely focused on expanding compatibility. KytyPS5 was already able to boot 3D titles and go until their loading screens, with at least two smaller games actually rendering graphics. Now, the same emulator can run two 3D games at around 30 FPS, though there are some glitches.

The first game is XIII, the 2020 remake of the 2003 classic, and it's "playable" at up to 30 FPS with real-time gameplay that accepts player input. We put playable in quotation marks because there are very obvious visual glitches that manifest in the environment not rendering correctly. The textures seem to be broken in multiple scenes, though they don't entirely kill the immersion. XIII is a relatively lightweight game but its cell-shaded aesthetic might be adding to emulation complexity.

The same person who tested XIII also tested Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Wrath of the Mutants and managed to run it at just under 25 FPS with real-time gameplay. The game crashes on the first launch, but once initialized, it's stable and does not seem to have any bugs or glitches like XIII. The framerate looks visibly choppy but is undeniably impressive, on a technical level. Kyty can run other 3D PS5 games as well, but not nearly at this level of performance.

KytyPS5 is advancing at a faster pace than SharpEmu, and that's true for the most part, but not out of stagnation. The team behind SharpEmu is busy tackling a different challenge: accuracy and infrastructure setup rather than game-specific compatibility, per its GitHub repo. In other words, it means fixing low-level issues that are preventing games like Astro Bot from currently reaching the gameplay state.

Both emulators are now part of an unexpected emulation race. With GTA 6 just a few months away and GTA 5 already booting in Kyty, it clearly has the better support for now, and its demos are very promising. SharpEmu's work will undoubtedly help the emulation scene at large, along with RPCSX and other independent developers. The craziest part is that you can try all of this at home for free, and just by doing that you're already contributing to the scene.

An intrepid TechTuber has tested a trio of passive mini PCs from the Subway sandwich chain to check if they can be repurposed for gaming fun. In a recent video, Garkus indicates that the three Intel Skylake-powered mini PCs that had been displaying sandwich menus above the serving counters for a decade but were saved from scrap/landfill, alongside a matching set of LG digital signage TVs. Spoiler: they are too puny for mainstream AAA gaming in 2026, even after doubling the RAM installed.

Before getting on with the digital signage-to-gaming conversion, Garkus investigated the hardware in hand. Labeling indicated that the three slim mini PCs were all Advantech DS-081 models (official PDF link). Pondering over that data sheet, we see that the variant with the Intel Core i3 6100U, as these were, carries the full designation of DS-081GB-U21A1E.

The processor is now both long in the tooth and low powered, so immediately we know this 2C/4T @ 2.3 GHz CPU, configured to suck between 7.5W and 15W, won’t be ideal for modern AAA titles. Moreover, the iGPU is the Intel HD Graphics 520 with 24 EUs and clocks up to just 1.00 GHz, sharing the DDR4 system RAM.

A DS-081GB-U2A1E is quite expandable for such a small, low-powered set-it-and-forget-it unit. It has twin HDMI 1.4, twin Ethernet, four USB 3, audio in/out, and an RS-232 serial port accessible from the outside. Inside, users can configure the machine via twin DDR4-2133 SODIMM slots (up to 32GB total), a SATA III HDD/SSD, and an mSATA port that looked like it was an M.2 2242 slot in the video. This passive machine is designed to run signage 24/7 in environments with 0 ~ 40° C (32 ~ 104 ° F) ambient temperatures.

Setup and gaming

These systems were found to actually come with just 4GB of RAM (one slot used) and with a 64GB SATA SSD installed. They booted to Windows and went straight to kiosk mode, displaying the Subway sandwich menu. We saw an extra 4GB DDR4 stick added to bring the test system(s) up to 8GB RAM in total.

After a bit of OS wrangling, Garkus decided to set up the salvaged trio of passive mini PCs as follows. One kept Windows 10, another got Bazzite Linux (because SteamOS balked at the SATA-only storage), then another went Hackintosh with macOS Monterey installed.

Gaming tests began with a very light test. The system ran Peggle, and this 2D puzzler posed no problems. After this modest victory, Garkus ambitiously leapt straight to GTA V. This legendary but now older title could only reach a frame rate of about 15 fps. But it was found to have defaulted to high settings, took ages to get ready to run on Bazzite, then crashed on exit.

Probably not following best benchmarking practice, the tech tinkerer appears to have decided to test Mario Kart Wii emulation performance while GTA V was still compiling shaders… Later, a test run in Minecraft delivered a wildly inconsistent but roughly 25 fps performance. As is now established as the Garkus testing MO, resolution, quality settings, and so on weren’t shared.

To conclude the gaming part of the video, the TechTuber suggests that these ex-kiosk machines are probably best suited to emulating older consoles up to the PS2 and original Xbox era. We think that for PS2 emulation, you will still need to restrict yourself to lighter titles and reduced settings for smooth action.

The Peaceful Outcome, a retro gaming solutions provider, has announced an SSD upgrade kit for the Wii U, allowing owners to increase the storage on their console from 8GB or 32GB to 1TB or higher. You get the kit for $21.99 on the TPO shop. It lets you internally attach a SATA or NVMe M.2 drive of various sizes so you can directly load your games on your Wii U without needing an external drive or to swap out DVDs. It also comes with a USB port that lets you transfer files to your SSD without needing to disassemble your console again.

You can already get a 3.5-inch SATA hard drive mounting kit at the same price (or a 2.5-inch kit for $17.99), but TPO said that it created the M.2 version for longevity reasons. It also noted that SSDs won’t give you a significant performance boost on the Wii U — an SSD loads just 7.5% faster than the DVD drive and 6% quicker compared to a hard drive — but it does give you more space to save your games on the console. TPO said that this does not offer any performance uplifts versus SATA drives, but it created this anyway because of easier M.2 NVMe drive availability in the future.

Note that this isn’t a straightforward upgrade — first, you have to provide your own drive, which could be one of the best SSDs you can get today or one that you already have lying around at home, and then you’ll need to break open your console to install the kit. This is the easy (and most expensive, given current storage pricing) part. Once done, you’ll need to hack into your console so that it can use the custom Aroma firmware. While there’s a complete guide on how to install it, it’s not without risk, as there’s a small chance that you could brick your device during the process.

If you’ve previously purchased a drive upgrade kit from TPO in the past, you could get updated parts to upgrade your current kit at shipping cost. All you need to do is upgrade the firmware on your interposer board, and you should be good to go.

While the Nintendo Wii U already accepts external drives, installing this upgrade kit will give your console more storage without needing to have a bulky drive hanging outside it all the time. This upgrade is more for aesthetics, but if you’re willing to accept the risk of (or already have) homebrew software, then finding a way to have a “permanent” storage upgrade on your Wii U is a no-brainer.

Despite the storage shortages, a brave team of Minecraft players has successfully mapped the entirety of 2b2t, arguably Minecraft’s oldest and most notorious server, and have now shared it as a 15TB download of highly compressed data that can be unpacked to the full 80TB archive. The team had to create its own custom compression format to pull off the feat.

The 2b2tplace preservation project started in 2024 and finally concluded in April of 2026 after an intensive 22 months of hard work. The team employed 28 bot accounts that tirelessly flew across the vast 2b2t world to map every single block with precision. The sheer scale of 2b2t is staggering because it encompasses well over one million blocks and includes the three primary Minecraft dimensions: the Overworld, the Nether, and the End.

The 2b2t server has a data footprint that exceeds 80 TB. Even if the team began their efforts before the recent storage shortage, it would still require an immense amount of storage capacity. Storing the entire 2b2t server would demand at least eight 8TB M.2 SSDs or, as an alternative, five 16TB SATA SSDs. Even with traditional storage, you still need three massive 36TB hard drives. We estimate the team has likely spent several thousand dollars on storage equipment, not to mention priority queue purchases and server rental costs, which totaled over $3,000 alone, according to the GitHub page.

If you are not a big Minecraft fan, 2b2t, short for 2builders2tools, is a Minecraft server characterized by its anarchic nature that launched in 2010. Unlike typical Minecraft servers, 2b2t operates with absolutely no rules, no staff moderation, and no map resets, so players have complete freedom to do whatever they want. Over the years, countless updates have dramatically reshaped the landscape, which has fueled several enthusiasts, including crayne, Fuch, mahan, Steve3, and others, to preserve the original state of 2b2t before it loses all of its essence for good.

Storing or sharing 80TB of data is insane, especially given the limited availability and overpriced storage solutions today - something on the scale of 2b2t can rapidly cause file sizes to spike to impractical levels. The archival team originally promised back in April to make the archive available in a compressed format, but that obviously created issues. As such, the team engineered a custom file compression format specifically for this project, named .zvcr (Zstd-compressed Version Controlled Regions). Common Minecraft servers use the .mca (Minecraft Anvil) file format, which is fine for single-player worlds or even small servers.

Unlike the .mca file format, which normally uses Zlib or Gzip compression, .zvcr uses the Zstd (Zstandard) algorithm that yields higher compression ratios. Zstd is superior in every way to Zlib or Gzip, whether it be compression and decompression speed or final file size. As a result, the team was able to compress the entire project to 15TB, saving up to 81.25% of space. So, now instead of needing eight 8TB M.2 or five 16TB SATA SSDs, you only need two or one to store the compressed archive, respectively. Unpacking the archive, on the other hand, is a different story.

The 2b2t server remains online so that Minecraft players can join in for their daily dose of chaos. Nevertheless, many longtime gamers argue the server has strayed from its anarchic roots. The eventual shift is the main motivation behind the 2b2tplace preservation initiative.

Xbox consoles recently experienced a worldwide outage, during which people were unable to access even disc-based games that should have been playable offline. Service was restored within a day but the impact of this discovery could be significant as tensions run high surrounding the crumbling state of physical media. Microsoft, however, was quick to suppress the negative PR, telling The Verge that discs should have never been affected by the outage in the first place.

"Disc-based entitlement checks should not prevent players from accessing their games and this is by design," said Microsoft tech chief Scott Van Vliet. He went on to confirm that discs go through license checks in the form of verifying entitlements. These entitlements determine what content a user is entitled to access, including when said user is offline, since they're saved directly on the console. Van Vliet clarified that the team caught an issue that stopped the consoles "from correctly using saved entitlements during the outage."

Xbox uses the Smart Delivery system for distributing games that automatically installs the best version of the title for your hardware. Smart Delivery has an alternative implementation called full-disc support, where developers can choose to put all executables of their game on the disc instead of relying on a license to digitally download content. That means when you insert the disc, there's no need to even connect to the internet as the file should be ready to run out of the box. That's precisely what failed to occur yesterday.

The outage itself affected everything from log-ins to application launches, and from online play to this strange issue of discs not running as intended. It was tied to an external service provider suddenly going down, and remaining down, for 16 hours. Xbox relied on that external provider for license and entitlement checks, so when a console failed to connect to those servers, it simply locked out players from accessing the game. It worked as fail-close mechanism instead of the fail-open it should have been, at least for discs.

If you're even a little bit tech-savvy, this probably sounds familiar to you as DRM checks have been a part of gaming for a long time. It used to be limited to just digital releases, but disc-based media has evidently fallen to the same problems as of late. The 100GB storage capacity of Blu-ray discs is a genuine limitation, but that's rarely the cause behind stories like this. Microsoft says it's already working on releasing an update to address this issue, but has not provided a timeline.

Sony faced similar vitriol earlier when the community discovered mandatory 30-day online check-ins had been added to PlayStation 5 and 4 consoles, but that claim was later refuted. In 2024 , Steam came under fire for ambiguity over perpetual licenses as well, which just goes to show that even the Valve isn't safe from this great evil. Now that PlayStation discs will cease to exist by 2028, concerns over ownership tied to physical media are growing every day.

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.

Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet said in a post on X that a licensing service sitting outside Xbox, which the platform depends on, began failing late on July 26 and took roughly 16 hours to clear, blocking sign-ins, library listings, and game launches across Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Microsoft restored service at 2:30 p.m. PDT on July 27.

For part of that window, Microsoft's status page warned that players might have trouble launching disc-based games, leaving a physical copy sitting in the tray no more useful than a digital one. Discs on Xbox One and Series consoles carry encrypted XVC packages with attached licenses, rather than acting as bootable media, per Microsoft's documentation.

Automated monitoring caught the failure overnight, and on-call engineers declared a major incident, according to Van Vliet, who said the team rerouted traffic onto healthy systems while the root cause was still being investigated. Anything requiring an entitlement check broke, including listing a full library and launching an owned game, and several of Microsoft's publishing and store partners depend on the same systems, which is why some titles kept working, and others didn't. "I care less about the one-line root cause," Van Vliet wrote, saying the review will look at why a failure in one service took down that much and why recovery took as long as it did.

Microsoft hasn't explained why disc-based games were caught up in the failure, but its developer documentation splits loss of connectivity into two separate categories: complete loss of internet service, and loss of one or more online services.

Console behavior is built around the first case, where the system reads a game's manifest declaration and launches anything with a mode of play that doesn't require connectivity. The second case, where the network is fine but a specific service isn't answering, is documented only as something individual games should handle without hanging or crashing. During the July 2024 Xbox outage, players recovered access to installed single-player titles by forcing the console into an offline state through Network settings.

Xbox services also went down last week during the early access launch of Halo: Campaign Evolved, and PlayStation Network took a multi-hour outage of its own on July 24. The timing of all this isn’t brilliant, given that Sony recently announced the end of physical disc production for new games in January 2028.

A Change.org petition opposing that decision has since exceeded 348,000 signatures. Microsoft, meanwhile, is testing a disc-to-digital program that grants a digital entitlement tied to a specific disc, and multiple reports say its next console may ship without a drive, though the company hasn't confirmed that. Van Vliet joined Xbox from Microsoft's Azure organization alongside CEO Asha Sharma, weeks before Microsoft cut 3,200 Xbox roles across its 2027 fiscal year and divested five studios.

I recently tested the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ handheld gaming PC, and came away incredibly impressed with its performance. Put simply, it has no rival in gaming performance, easily eclipsing all other handhelds on the market. Even better, the battery life is also stellar.

However, if there’s one thing that it could use, it’s a storage boost. Despite the $1,800 price tag as tested for our review unit, it still only includes a 1TB SSD. After installing a handful of games from Steam and from the Xbox Store, I was left with 128GB free of the 953GB available on the SSD.

I happen to have a 2TB PNY CS2150 PCIe 5.0 SSD that I used for testing a Thunderbolt 5 SSD enclosure with Thunderbolt 5 docks. Since it was currently sitting unused, I decided to take a stab at replacing the 1TB SSD in the Claw 8 EX AI+ with the CS2150 for some extra storage headroom.

Getting the hardware setup for the transition

Fortunately for me, much of the legwork had already been finished. The CS2150 was already installed inside an Orico SSD Thunderbolt 5 enclosure, which would serve as my destination drive.

Although I could complete the entire transfer process using only the input methods on the Claw 8 EX AI+, it’s rather tedious to navigate the Windows 11 user interface and enter text on the 8-inch screen. So, I decided to use a Thunderbolt 5 dock to streamline the process. I used:

• OWC Thunderbolt 5 Dock
• Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse
• Orico SSD Thunderbolt 5 enclosure with 2TB PNY CS2150 SSD installed

I connected the Thunderbolt 5 dock to one of the two Thunderbolt 4 ports at the top edge of the Claw 8 EX AI+. I then plugged the Logitech USB-A receiver into the dock. Finally, I connected the Orico enclosure to the second Thunderbolt 4 port on the Claw 8 EX AI+.

Finding the proper software for cloning the drive

It’s been a while since I last cloned a drive, so I did a quick Google search for free drive-copy software for Windows 11. My search led me to a Reddit thread where the majority of commenters recommended the freeware version of Macrium Reflect 8.

I downloaded the software and installed it without issue. The interface in Reflect 8 was about as straightforward as you can expect, with my source C: drive showing up at the top. The destination field was empty, so I had to select the drive I wanted to use. I pulled up the CS2150, which I have named as Orico in Windows 11 as the D: drive.

After clicking Next, I was prompted with a warning about BitLocker encryption, so I clicked OK to acknowledge it (you’ll definitely want to re-enable BitLocker once you reinstall the SSD). The next screen showed a summary of the operations to be performed: copying the EFI and Windows partitions to the 2TB SSD. I clicked Finish, which brought up another prompt asking if I wanted to run the backup. I clicked OK, which displayed a warning that the D: drive would be overwritten. After clicking Continue, the process started.

After about an hour and a half, the cloning process was completed. At this point, I shut down the Claw 8 EX AI+ and disconnected all of the accessories.

Disassembling the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ and installing the 2TB SSD

Next, I removed the back panel of the Claw 8 EX AI+, which required removing six screws and using a plastic prying tool. I then removed the single screw holding the already-installed 1TB SSD in the M.2 slot and extracted it. I next removed the 2TB SSD from the Orico enclosure and installed it in the M.2 slot, securing it with the screw I had just removed.

I then reinstalled the back panel for the Claw 8 EX AI+ and secured it with the previously removed screws.

Booting up and checking my work

I powered the Claw 8 EX AI+ back on, and it booted without issue. I was also surprised to see that Windows 11 didn’t throw up any activation errors. I’ll chalk that up as a win. I went to Windows Explorer to see if I was indeed utilizing the full 2TB of storage, but I instead saw that 128GB was free of 953GB – the same predicament as before.

I might have missed a setting during the cloning process that would have expanded the partition to use all free space on the larger SSD. But the fix was simple enough. I opened up the Disk Management utility, selected Windows (C:), and chose “Extend Volume.” After that process was complete, I saw the full 2TB (actually, 1.81TB), with 1.02TB now free for additional game installs.

A Steam Deck devotee was so fed up with their family borrowing their handheld and leaving it with a flat battery that they have resorted to quite extreme measures. On the Steam Deck subreddit, ConroyyJenkinss says that they have modded the console with a range of anti-sharing measures, including a 3D-modeled spiky case and a taser, among other things.

In the video embedded above, you can see ConroyyJenkinss augmented Steam Deck, which has basically sacrificed the Steam Deck’s comfy ergonomics on the altar of defensive design. Its hand-filling gentle curves have been nullified with a 3D-printed case that was modeled by the anti-sharing Steam Deck owner in Blender. We hope this Steam Deck chastity belt is easily detachable by the owner for when ConroyyJenkinss wants to have some fun.

The hostile architecture-inspired case has another scary trick or two up its sleeve, though. “To make it worse, I rigged up a Raspberry Pi with a small speaker, an object detection camera, and a servo motor,” the Redditor explains. “[I] wrote a py script so if the camera sees someone in frame, it plays a goofy audio clip, waits a few seconds and then the servo triggers a taser to scare them away.” So at least those tempted to touch this spiky handheld get warned before potentially being tased.

Most importantly, ConroyyJenkinss asserts that their Steam Deck anti-sharing measures have done the job. “Nobody touches my Steam Deck anymore,” concludes the dangerous DIYer. Answering some queries in the Reddit thread, the embattled Steam Deck owner admits having to remove the case and disarm the taser to use their own handheld is “a hassle but overall worth it.” Now other family members ask permission to have a gaming session on the portable console.

In recent weeks, Steam Decks have joined the ranks of the desirable devices that have been heavily impacted by the RAMpocalypse. It’s nice to share things, but we fully understand ConroyyJenkinss protecting his precious unit, especially against the devil-may-care battery drainers in the family.

Microsoft announced that it’s increasing Minecraft’s minimum and recommended system requirements for the first time in 17 years. According to the company’s blog post, Minecraft: Java Edition will get a spec bump to ensure that the game runs smoothly today and in the future. While it’s understandable that the game’s developers would want to increase the performance of the hardware that the title runs on to implement more advanced features, the new requirements are significantly higher than the previous minimum specification. This could negatively affect players on older hardware that barely hits the minimum requirements, who would have no choice but to upgrade their PCs at a time when RAM prices are at a record high.

The new minimum specifications are quite reasonable, with the recommended specs falling squarely within the performance of the most common hardware in June’s Steam Hardware Survey (which also indicates that AMD now has more than 45% market share compared to Intel). If your system used to be at or higher than Minecraft: Java Edition’s previously recommended specifications, but no longer hits the current minimum requirements, you can switch over to the Bedrock Edition to continue gaming, although you might have to forgo some of your favorite mods.

If you’re running the bare minimum hardware to play Minecraft, Microsoft said that you could still possibly launch the game, although it warned that you might run into some issues. “These updated recommended system requirements won’t stop you from playing Minecraft: Java Edition today. If your computer falls below the new minimum requirements, Java Edition should still launch,” the company said in the Minecraft blog. “However, its performance and visual quality are no longer guaranteed on below-spec hardware, and it may struggle or fail to launch Java Edition in the future – especially as we transition away from OpenGL and towards Vulkan. We will keep players informed of these changes, especially changes that will sunset hardware that previously supported Minecraft: Java Edition.”

This means that you’ll have to spend some money to upgrade your system to just to continue playing your favorite game. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to get a new PC or join a giveaway to be able to play, though. If you know what you’re looking for, you can plausibly buy a used gaming laptop or desktop PC for around $350 to $500 — that should give you about a decade or more to enjoy the game if Microsoft keeps its spec upgrade cadence of 17 years for future versions of Minecraft.

Microsoft just released four original Xbox games on PC as part of its efforts to bring backwards compatibility to the platform. For years, Xbox consoles have enjoyed a similar luxury, with the latest Series X|S systems being able to play two-decade-old OG Xbox titles. However, to achieve this on PC, Microsoft used a native x86 version of its in-house Xbox 360 emulator. As you might expect, modders were quick to pounce on the opportunity to run 360 games on PC, with "varying degrees of success" so far.

How do you log in to your PC?

The discovery was initially made when data miners looked at the package contents of these backwards-compatible titles. Neo Te Aika found out that they were packaged as standard Games on Demand, or GOD files, which is the official file format used by Xbox 360 hardware. A GOD package contains the actual game, its headers, and DRM. By using a GOD extractor, modders were able to open them and convert them into a base ISO that can be played with an emulator, or on a jailbroken Xbox 360. All this would be a huge development on its own.

What followed, though, has the potential to change the original Xbox and Xbox 360 emulation scene forever. Nathan on X scoured through those same files to find something called Xe03. Also called Fission, Xe03 is Microsoft's official Xbox 360 emulator that comes baked into the Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles for backwards compatibility.

Within the Xbox 360 environment, Microsoft already had another emulator called XeFu, or Fusion, that emulates the original Xbox. So, it's basically an emulator within an emulator. That's how modern Xbox consoles have been able to play OG Xbox titles. To Xe03, it's just opening a standard Xbox 360 package, but the binary inside is coded to launch XeFu, which then takes over to run the original Xbox game

When Microsoft released backwards compatible Xbox games on PC, people expected the company to have built an x86-native OG Xbox emulator from scratch. An emulator that didn't rely on an outer layer or any external components. Instead, what Microsoft did was simply recompile Xe03 to run natively on x86 PCs instead, indirectly handing over the ultimate 360 emulator to the community.

By modifying the app container and swapping out game packages, projects like XWine1 and independent reverse-engineers bypassed the inner OG Xbox layer (Fusion) and managed to load raw Xbox 360 executables (.xex files) directly into Xe03. The results have been mixed but incredibly promising, nonetheless. The XWine1 team was able to get Plants vs. Zombies, Steins: Gate, Fuzion Frenzy, and Midnight Club: Los Angeles to boot and run with varying degrees of stability.

Fuzion Frenzy is actually one of four OG Xbox titles that Microsoft officially released so that one is particularly well-optimized. Since the hard part of reverse engineering first-party code has already been done by Microsoft, optimization remains the only challenge. As time goes on, and the specific emulator files are fine-tuned for general usage, we should expect more and more titles to run flawlessly.

Microsoft has also promised to release more official backwards compatible titles on PC, but it hasn't said anything about Xbox 360 games. Therefore, the discovery of Xe03 holds immense potential for the future of Xbox 360 emulation on PC — the community just has to focus on optimization now. This development can be particularly fruitful for handhelds that are power-constrained; Xe03 has very light minimum requirements for devices like the ROG (Xbox) Ally and Lenovo's Legion Go lineup.

Moreover, Microsoft's PC version of Xe03 also upscales the original 480p output of OG Xbox games to 4K. It also adds built-in V-Sync, anisotropic filtering, enhanced anti-aliasing, and borderless windowed modes. Since the games were distributed though the Xbox PC app, they're part of the Xbox Anywhere program so if you own the digital license of said game on console, you get it for free on PC (and other places). Microsoft will also bring Xbox Achievements support to backwards compatible titles soon.

The last two elements will likely be ignored by the modding community since the OG Xbox virtualization is the important part, enabled by the Xe03 engine that has now become the main takeaway from all this. To be clear, open-source emulators such as Xenia have existed for years and provide a highly-satisfactory Xbox emulation experience, but Microsoft's official, in-house solution should be more efficient.

What OG Xbox or 360 games would you like play on PC?

EA just announced FC 27, the latest release of its soccer franchise that it releases annually, and many players were shocked to learn that it came with a $149.99 Ultimate Plus Edition. This led to many complaints, with some comparing it to GTA VI Ultimate, which comes with extra side missions, activities, vehicles, guns, outfits, and other cosmetics, for just $99.99. However, it should be noted that FC 27 is available in three tiers — the Standard Edition for just $69.99, the Ultimate Edition, which costs $99.99, and the Ultimate Plus Edition, with its shocking $149.99 price tag.

Despite the availability of the base game at its usual price, the cost of the top-tier edition has caught the ire of many gamers. One user commented on X that they’re willing to “pay $200 for a game that’ll last 15-20 years,” while another said that EA wants “€150 for a roster update and some blue points you’ll spend on a player you’ll never use.” However, others pointed out that the $150 version is “for people who not only play it but spend money on it; 10,000 FC points is about £70/€82/$93.”

The FC franchise (previously known as FIFA) has been around for over 30 years now, with EA releasing a new title annually since 1994. That means fans have to pay at least $70 every year if they want to stay updated with the latest team rosters. This might be too much for some people, but hardcore fans seem not to mind spending that amount just to be able to have their favorite players on their team. In fact, they might even consider the $149.99 Ultimate Plus Edition good value as the $80 premium comes with 10,000 FC Points spread out over five months, five seasons of Premium Pass, and several other goodies. By comparison, FC 26 lists 12,000 FC Points for $99.99.

Even though gamers get additional value from the most expensive edition of FC 27, it still did not sit well with some people. Aside from that, they’re comparing it to the GTA franchise, with Rockstar continuously dropping updates to GTA Online for more than a decade, even for those who only purchased the game once. But even though EA did not change the price of the base game (and even the mid-tier Ultimate Edition), the fact that they’re asking more than double the price of the cheapest option is what caught the ire of the public, especially as the current FC 26 has mixed reviews on Steam.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has a rich history when it comes to modding and tinkering, but we're pretty confident the community has never seen anything like this. Created by Dryxio, this new mod combines GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas, and GTA III into one multiversal entity interconnected through real-time, fully functional portals that let you travel between the three different games as if it were just a regular window.

The video above showcases just how insane this mod really is. It starts with CJ on Grove Street in San Andreas shooting at NPCs in different parts of the game (The Strip). Then, he moves toward the pink portal, shoots at NPCs once again, and just casually goes through it to end up in GTA Vice City as Tommy Vercetti. He wreaks havoc, walks back to the portal, and crosses through to Vice City as CJ, only to go to GTA III and repeat the same thing there.

The craziest part is how these portals genuinely act as windows to another world where you can stand in one game and shoot inside the other one. It's unclear whether there's a limit to the level of interaction, like if you can't drive cars through them, but it's impressive, nonetheless. The video also shows how you can place these portals anywhere in the world in any of the three games yourself.

All of this begs the question: how? The modder explains that all three games are running simultaneously inside one process, sharing one Direct3D device. Each portal is a live GPU texture; there's no video capture to fake the realism, and the transition to each game happens in real-time via an engine swap. When you walk through a portal, it simply switches to that game's engine while the others keep running in the background.

Each game and its world retain full native functionality such as its own AI, traffic, physics, saves, missions, and even settings. There's no loading screen when you use the portals either; you enter the world on the other side instantly, just the way you saw it before going through. This is largely possible because the source code of each game has been reverse-engineered and recompiled using an open-source engine.

Dryxio modified re3 and reVC — community projects that decompile the original source code of GTA III and Vice City into clean, readable C++ code — and used plugin-sdk to interface with San Andreas. Since these games used the proprietary RenderWare engine that can't render multiple spatial scenes together, an open-source reimplementation of it called librw was used to compile all three games into a single unified process.

The mod isn't publicly available at the moment, but you can bet everyone in the community now has their eyes on it. It's by far the most technically complex GTA mod ever, one that doesn't even require any understanding of software to grasp its ambition. There's also the elephant in the room known as Rockstar Games that could see this as copyright infringement and order it to be taken down, but for now, it lives as proof of human ingenuity (and vibe-coding).

Xbox has announced a new Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC program, which will let gamers play a selection of classic Xbox titles on PCs and handhelds, a move the company says marks the beginning of a bigger push into Xbox game preservation. The announcement begins with four titles that can now be played on PCs and handhelds, including the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X.

"This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation" Jason Ronald. Alongside backward compatibility, the company says games will also include new features. The four titles in the announcement are:

• BLiNX: The Time Sweeper 
• Conker: Live and Reloaded 
• Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge 
• Fuzion Frenzy

You can now buy all of these games on PC, and they're also included in all Xbox Game Pass plans. Anyone who already owns these titles digitally on console can also now play them on PC or handheld, with support for Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Crucially, this appears to be a digital-only preservation effort, so it won't help anyone who only owns physical copies of these games. Xbox has reportedly been testing a way to digitize physical games as far back as Xbox One, but that hasn't yet materialized yet.

Alongside the preserved original gameplay, Xbox claims these games will let users customize graphics settings, with up to 4x resolution scaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing, with more features to come in the future. Notably, Xbox will add achievements to select original Xbox games on console and PC.

Users who want to play these titles will need to meet the following system requirements:

Microsoft's emphasis on preserving older games is particularly noteworthy given recent backlash against Sony over its decision to end physical games with its next console generation, and the shuttering of some of its online stores. While Xbox's digital emphasis on game preservation still can't match the solidarity of physical media preservation, the timing of this announcement seems like more than just a coincidence.

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.

A Grand Theft Auto (GTA) modder has developed a mod that lets you run Grand Theft Auto III (GTA 3) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA VC) as mini games right inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA SA). The modder, DryxioGTA, demonstrated the feat in a video posted on YouTube on Thursday, running the game on a Windows virtual machine on macOS.

In the video, GTA SA’s main character, CJ, can be seen stepping up to a TV, apparently inserted into the game by the mod. Once in front of the TV, the option to start either GTA VC or GTA 3 appears. The selected mini-game immediately starts running on the TV.

Gamers can switch between controlling the main GTA SA game or the mini game, using the F10 key. When controlling the mini-game — say, GTA 3, as in the video — players can play it as normal while the rest of the outer SA game continues to run, with characters roaming about. Similarly, switching control back to the outer SA game leaves the mini-game running on the TV.

Just a few hours after uploading a brief gameplay video, the modder released another video demonstrating an even more mind-blowing mod, this time running GTA Vice City inside GTA 3, inside GTA San Andreas!

As shown in the clip, the game starts with GTA SA, where players can walk up to a large screen to activate and start running GTA 3. Within GTA 3 — now running on the large screen inside San Andreas — gamers can drive to another specific screen and launch GTA VC. So you can be playing GTA SA, switch to a fully functional GTA 3 within SA, and then switch again to play Vice City right inside the GTA 3 sandbox, all while the other games are simultaneously running.

The remarkable mods are just one of thousands that developers have created since the game was first released on PC over 20 years ago in 2005. There are also several Mods for other GTA titles. Older GTA games have seen renewed interest as anticipation builds for GTA 6, which is scheduled to be released on consoles on November 19 after several postponements.

In the modern age, password cracking is an activity that generally begets quite powerful hardware, usually high-powered GPUs. Hashing algorithms have gotten trickier, and brute-forcing them has become computationally expensive. It's only natural, then, that a new software project has come up to port the common hashcat cracking utility to the mighty... Gameboy Advance (GBA).

The gba-hashcat software is the brainchild of security engineer solstICE (Ice), to whom the question of "why" is seemingly answered with "why not." Running on an original GBA, the app can power through SHA256 hashes at 727 h/s. At that rate, the author estimates that one year's worth of gba-hashcat would be equivalent to one second of a modern GPU-accelerated rig.

The GBA's main processor is an ARM7TDMI chip, a 32-bit RISC affair clocked at all of 16.8 MHz. It connected to most of its data buses and memory on a 16-bit bus, though, and the machine only carried 288 KB of RAM, plus 98 KB of VRAM. Most password-cracking software makes use of precomputed tables to help speed the repeated attempts along, but given that standard GBA cartridges are limited to 32 MB in size, all that Ice could include was the ignis-1M (one million) word list that rings in at 8 MB.

The software itself is quite small, given that Ice made good use of the Butano engine, a library that allows developers to easily write GBA games using plain C++ code. The gba-hashcat user interface is quite sparse, showing only an intro screen, progress statistics, and the current password attempt. It's not like you need much more for this application, save perhaps for a "please be patient" message.

In the GitHub commit, Ice calls gba-hashcat "[their] dumbest app of all time." That's quite the statement, but X commenters were quick to request networking support so they could make a cluster of password-cracking Gameboys, an idea that may have merit considering the price of graphics cards these days. At any rate, joke all you want, but for the one really important password retrieval I was once tasked with — recovering access to an Excel payroll sheet — even the original Gameboy would have sufficed. The password was "123".

The CEO of GameStop — one of the world's largest video game retailers — has said that Sony’s decision to halt the production of physical game discs in 2028 is “totally irrelevant” to the company's business. Speaking to BloombergTech in an interview on Thursday, July 16, Ryan Cohen made the comments while responding to questions on how console makers’ going disc-less might affect GameStop amid the company's controversial bid to buy eBay.

When asked, “If the hardware makers are reportedly moving to disc-less on the console side, future game launches are digital only, where does that fit in for the business plan?” Cohen responded, “It doesn’t matter at all. Software, it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectables makes up over half the business. So, it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”

Cohen's characterization doesn't exactly match GameStop's own filings, but the underlying trend does. In fiscal year 2025, the company reported total net sales of $3.63 billion. At $729.3 million, Software — which includes physical game discs, game cartridges, and digital download codes by GameStop’s classification — accounted for 20.1% of the total, the lowest among the company's product categories. Collectibles brought in $1.06 billion at 29.2 percent, while hardware and accessories — including new and pre-owned hardware, accessories, hardware bundles, interactive figures, strategy guides, and mobile/consumer electronics — remained the largest single line at $1.84 billion, or 50.7 percent.

The year-on-year growth figures also appear to support Cohen's stance, with software revenue dropping 27% in FY24 and hardware revenue dropping 12%. Meanwhile, revenue from collectibles — covering apparel, toys, trading cards, gadgets, other pop-culture products, and submission services for authentication and grading of trading cards — grew by 47%.

Much of the Bloomberg interview was focused on Cohen's somewhat controversial bid for eBay. GameStop began accumulating eBay stock on February 4 and delivered an unsolicited, non-binding proposal on May 3 to acquire all outstanding shares at $125 apiece, split evenly between cash and GameStop stock — an offer valuing eBay at roughly $56 billion, against GameStop's own market capitalization of around $10 billion. eBay's board rejected it on May 12, with chairman Paul Pressler writing that the board had determined the proposal was "neither credible nor attractive." Cohen has said he intends to take the offer directly to eBay shareholders.

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.

RPCS3, a multi-platform open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger, has revealed that 2,681 of the total 3,559 PS3 titles are now compatible with its software, meaning a huge majority of games can now be played on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. The developers of the app said on X that RPCS3 is continually being worked on and that they’re targeting full preservation of the entire PS3 library. This is an important development for PlayStation 3 owners and enthusiasts, especially as Sony said that it will stop making physical game discs by 2028 and shut down the PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita a year before that.

Ensuring that over 2,600 games are compatible with your emulation is no mean feat, especially for a project that’s mostly supported by Patreon and volunteers. The team has already achieved more than 75% compatibility with the entire PS3 library, with less than a thousand titles needing to be worked on. Of this, 816 are now playable but encounter serious glitches or performance problems, 60 reach the game’s main menu but fail to load past that, while only two titles initialize but are stuck on a black screen. If you want to check if you can now play your favorite PS3 title on your PC, you can go to the RPCS3 compatibility page and type in the name of the game.

This is a huge win for the game preservation community, as this would ensure that you can continue playing your PS3 game library even if your console no longer works. The beautiful thing about RPCS3 is that it works with a lot of different hardware — aside from support for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, it’s also compatible with both x86 and arm64, so you can install it on some of the best handheld gaming PCs to play your PS3 games on the go.

Emulation is quite controversial among game publishers and developers, and many companies have historically taken steps against those who make these apps. However, the courts have said that emulation isn’t necessarily illegal, as long as the people who use them only play games that they’ve already paid for. In fact, the Patreon page of RPCS3 was once hit by a DMCA takedown request from Atlus, the maker of Persona 5, arguing that “no version of the P5 game should be playable on this platform; and [the RPCS3] developers are infringing on our IP by making such games playable.”

While it ultimately failed in its request, it showed how some companies think that their games should only be played on the platform that they designed it for. They argue that emulators might introduce performance issues, meaning players will not get the optimal experience when playing their games. However, RPCS3 has proven that emulators could deliver a similar (or even better) performance than the PS3, with newer versions getting a 5% to 7% boost in FPS numbers compared to previous builds and even hitting more than 1500 FPS on the Minecraft title screen.

A PC gamer has created and demonstrated a handy Steam Game Cartridge system. Over on PCMR, Jibril-sama introduced the system, which blends the old-school console convenience of cartridges with Steam’s awesome and agreeably flexible games library. Ingeniously, it upcycles a bundle of old SATA SSDs into Steam-ready game cartridges using a disk mount detect and execute script on the software side and a SATA dock on the hardware side. Icing on this already tasty cake is provided by Jibril-sama’s colorfully encased and custom-labeled Steam Game Cartridges. Nice.

“Got a couple of used 2.5" SSDs for cheap so I decided to make a Game Cartridge system,” the Redditor casually informs the PCMR masses in the post embedded above. “Games are actually on those SSDs with a script to auto-navigate Steam to the game's page. Auto-starting the game right away is also possible.”

Further comments by the OP explain that all the drives bought for this project were 128GB in capacity, and €7 a piece ($8). That’s not bad in the current RAM and NAND crunch, and keeps these files off your built-in primary storage. As many readers will know, PC game libraries can easily grow to hog a lot of storage.

We reached out to Jibril-sama for some more background info about how the Steam Game Cartridge system is designed to work with as little user friction as possible. They informed us that the system in the video runs Linux and Valve’s Steam URL Protocol is leveraged to navigate to the game's page or launch the game.

“All it needs is a systemd template to check for a script on the SSD and launch it. And a udev rule to trigger the system,” Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware. “So basically: Plug in SSD -> udev rule sees the event -> triggers the systemd daemon -> systemd daemon looks into the SSD and finds the script -> execute the script.”

Commenters on PCMR have overwhelmingly welcomed the Steam Game Cartridge future teased by this system. Some want to see the system extended to include GOG game libraries. Others query how the system handles the inevitable hefty multi-gigabyte updates that are pushed (even to older games) from time to time. Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware that they didn’t plan to deal with updates often, as they didn’t use cartridges for ‘live service’ titles, and they are mostly used for the “games that I want to replay once in a while.” If and when updates have been flagged, “I just let Steam handle the updates and wait a bit before I can play,” they added.

I’ve had repeated firsthand experience with Steam Games libraries being fussy when moving across different PCs, so stretching the library system this way could reveal cracks and wrinkles as more games are tested. We shall see.

Hopefully, fuller implementation guides, scripts, and resources to help others purchase or 3D print their own Steam Game Cartridge shells will be shared in due course.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform arrives later this year, and the company is hard at work building the partner ecosystem around the GB10 Superchip to ensure that Windows and applications are ready for its agentic AI PC vision. As part of that groundwork, the two companies announced today that Sega will support the RTX Spark platform with its upcoming Virtua Fighter Crossroads, coming in 2027.

The two companies also committed to RTX Spark support for "future Sega titles,” meaning that we might see official support for other evergreen franchises like the Yakuza series, the Persona games, and the upcoming Alien: Isolation 2 and Total War: Warhammer.

Although the companies didn’t go into detail about exactly what full support for the RTX Spark means for Sega games, one would expect that the developer’s titles will be natively compiled for Windows on Arm instead of relying on the Prism x86 emulator for compatibility.

It also seems safe to expect that future Sega titles will incorporate DLSS technologies like upscaling and Multi Frame Generation in order to deliver the best possible experience on RTX Spark systems. Despite having GPU compute capabilities similar to those of a desktop RTX 5070 on paper, the unified memory architecture and relatively limited memory bandwidth of the GB10 Superchip behind the RTX Spark platform present challenges for gaming performance that are likely to make the incorporation of DLSS tech important for the best experience.

The relationship between Nvidia and Sega spans over 30 years, tracing its roots to the ultimately abandoned development of the GPU for the Dreamcast console. Despite its eventual decision to use an NEC-produced PowerVR GPU for that system, Sega offered Nvidia a $5 million lifeline that gave the company the runway that it needed to develop and deliver the Riva 128, its first DirectX-compatible GPU.

That investment proved to be historic, as Nvidia now has a market cap of over $5 trillion and is in the process of shifting the very foundations of computing through its Grace Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin AI platforms for the data center.

Whether the RTX Spark platform reshapes the PC when it arrives in the fall of this year remains to be seen. But if you’re a fan of Sega’s IP, this partnership means that you can at least look forward to a first-class experience with its games on RTX Spark systems.

For years, the PS5 emulation scene has remained dormant, with updates few and far between as most projects become abandonware. However, Sony's recent decision to stop physical disc production and the impending release of GTA VI later this year have created an unprecedented demand in the market. All of a sudden, an influx of PS5 emulators has popped up online, and they're swiftly hitting development milestones, including actually being able to boot recent PS5 titles.

The most prominent name in the news cycle is SharpEmu, which serves as a PS5 emulator for Windows. It's written entirely in C# and works more like a translation layer since modern consoles and PC share the same x86 underlying architecture. SharpEmu allows the PC to execute CPU instructions natively while translating OS-specific API calls and graphics.

Since it's aiming for accuracy, only some 2D titles such as Dreaming Sarah are running on SharpEmu with solid performance and no hiccups. As far as 3D titles go, that's a different story since it's significantly harder to emulate those. At first, the PS5 remake of Demon's Souls successfully booted, but it didn't go past the startup screen. Then, in a major development, Discord user RShantila was able to boot Astro Bot, which is a PlayStation exclusive from 2024, on SharpEmu.

Getting such a recent game to run is extremely promising and shows that PS5 emulation is currently outpacing PS4 emulation at the same point in its life cycle. And SharpEmu is just one project among what's starting to seem like a sea of hopes and dreams.

The other emulator gaining traction is KytyPS5, which started as a cross-platform PS4 and PS5 emulator in 2021 but was abandoned in 2022. Fast forward four years and developer Nmzik has revived the project, creating their own fork that focuses only on PlayStation 5. According to reports online, within just a few weeks, KytyPS5 can boot commercial PS5 games running in Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and other custom engines.

KytyPS5 was able to boot and run Silent Hill: The Short Message till the menu screen. Remember, 3D games were previously limited to just their boot screens, so this is yet another major accomplishment. However, earlier today, the project's GitHub page was updated to show two new 3D games actually running with their graphics being properly rendered, shattering all expectations set thus far.

These two games are PowerWash Simulator and Pac-Man World, both of which are playable with functional gameplay, though we don't have any idea about performance or stability. Even more impressively, and perhaps more on-topic, the KytyPS5 version 0.0.3 successfully booted the commercial PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto V far enough to display the loading screens, main splash art, and actually navigate the in-game display settings.

KytyPS5 has also recently received updates to its shader compiler for better graphics, better memory management that leads to faster load times, and better audio support as well. The emulator works on Windows for now, but a Linux version is also planned for the future.

Finally, we need to mention RPCSX, which isn't exactly an emulator but rather just a research project dedicated to better understanding both PS4 and PS5 software. The devs are still working on being able to boot games from the user interface, but in a race like this, you need every hand on deck, and the team behind RPCS3 is one of the most experienced in the field.

The PS5 emulation scene has suddenly exploded, and the pace of these developments is astonishing. At this trajectory, it won't be unreasonable to expect GTA V to actually run on SharpEmu or KytyPS5 by next month. That being said, emulation is a marathon that takes a long time to perfect, so it's almost guaranteed that the official PC version of GTA VI will be out long before the emulated version becomes playable.

A new Nintendo Switch dock shell has been designed to mimic the sleek undulating curves of the classic Nintendo 64 (N64). Dubbed the 64BITDOCK, this Switch accessory kit can be bundled with an 'N64 cart' that will help you keep your Switch Game Cards tidy. The 64BITDOCK is available now direct from the maker on Etsy, priced from $89.

In the assorted images of the 64BITDOCK from Nintendo Switch accessories specialist Krasivoe, you can see that the ‘N64’ cradles the Switch (Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 / LCD / OLED) horizontally, so the upper curves of the ‘N64’ are uninterrupted. Pleasingly, the ‘N64’ cart slot is actually useful here as a Nintendo Switch Game Card silo if you buy the optional magnetically secured storage receptacle (with 6 slots).

● Check out this product on Etsy

This is a cosmetic kit for your original Switch Dock

The 64BITDOCK is basically a snap-on cladding kit for your existing original Switch Dock. What you are buying is a set of “custom plates inspired by the iconic 64-bit console… [which] snap onto your Switch dock in seconds, transforming it into a nostalgic centerpiece while keeping all sides open to prevent overheating.”

The Krasivoe 64BITDOCK is available in light grey and ‘original’ charcoal finishes, with matching Game Card storage receptacles. For the dock plates alone, the Etsy store asks $89. If you want a Game Card cartridge holder, the price rises to $103. Worldwide shipping is $6.99.

This isn’t Krasivoe’s first retro-inspired Switch Dock makeover kit. It also sells the 8BITDOCK, 16BITDOCK, and CUBEDOCK. Fans of retro Nintendo consoles will surely know what those look like.

The market is overflowing with Nintendo Switch docks, so Krasivoe has cannily sought to offer some eye-catching differentiation in the form of this 64BITDOCK. Its $89 starting price is quite a premium offering, though, as it doesn’t even include docking hardware – it’s just a cosmetic 3D-printed shell for your original Nintendo Switch Dock. We see that you can get basic, fully functional Switch docks from $20 or $30 on Amazon, with original ‘toaster’ style replacements priced at about $40.

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.

A Brazilian gamer who lost his Microsoft account and all his digital games has won a court order forcing the company to hand it all back, after support staff told him to simply repurchase his library. The user, who posts as Ordo_Liberal on Reddit, shared a screenshot of a small-claims ruling in the Xbox subreddit that gives Microsoft 15 days to restore access or face fines and roughly $400 (R$2,000) in damages. He said the account had two-factor authentication enabled when it was flagged and permanently suspended, and that none of Microsoft's recovery options allowed him to regain access before he filed his lawsuit.

According to the support emails he posted, Microsoft suspended the account after detecting what it described as unauthorized access, and said an investigation found the account's security information had been changed. The company treated the suspension as permanent and directed him to buy his games again rather than reinstating the ones already tied to the account.

Anyone with a large Microsoft account might want to take note here, because the suspension didn’t target a single game or console but the user’s entire account. Microsoft accounts can carry Xbox purchases, Windows licenses, store apps, 365, and OneDrive data, and a permanent suspension blocks all of it, even, as in this case, when you’ve got strong security and two-factor authentication set up.

Brazil's Consumer Defense Code and its small-claims track allow individuals to bring cases without a lawyer and without paying court costs, meaning Ordo_Liberal was able to take Microsoft to court without incurring any costs. If Microsoft misses the payment deadline, an additional 10% penalty will be imposed. While the damages awarded in this case are minor, it's notable that Microsoft has been compelled to restore the account and its contents, which runs counter to the standard platform position that customers license digital games rather than own them.

This, of course, is a first-instance small-claims judgment, not binding precedent, and it covers one account in one jurisdiction. Courts elsewhere have gone the other way. Chinese courts have recognized game accounts as inheritable property, while U.S. rulings generally treat games as revocable licenses. The case comes as both Microsoft and Sony push players away from physical media, with Xbox testing a way to convert discs into digital entitlements and Sony ending new PlayStation disc production in 2028. Microsoft hasn’t publicly commented on the ruling.

According to new research published by Alinea Analytics, Valve has grossed an estimated 11.1 billion dollars throughout the first half of 2026. If correct, the estimates would make it Valve's most profitable half-year on record, as digital storefronts become the norm throughout the games industry. Earlier this month, Sony announced that it would stop making new physical PlayStation discs by 2028, instead turning its efforts digital.

According to a Substack post from research firm Alinea Analytics, games sold on the platform accumulated $11.1 billion in revenue in the first six months of this year, which is a 14.5% jump compared to the first six months of 2025. Even more impressively, though, Steam's H1 2026 has posted 8% higher numbers than H2 2025, which includes the lucrative holiday season where most of the biggest sales happen. The store generated "only" $10.3 billion in revenue during the latter half of 2025.

Steam has been on a consistent incline for 10 years, boasting record revenue numbers almost every successive year. Even if it hits a slump, the data shows Valve has never had two bad years in a row; a recession is always followed by a boom. Alinea says five main factors contribute to the storefront's growth: a surge in Chinese players, higher prices, viral co-op hits, and smarter back-catalogue categories from big publishers.

The last one is rather ironic, as it involves third-party publishers quietly returning to Steam after their own launchers faltered. Some companies like Activision still inject their proprietary launchers between Steam and the game itself for titles like Call of Duty, but the situation has generally improved.

What display resolution do you use on your primary monitor?

Almost 10 years ago, in the first half of 2017, the platform made a little less than $2.5 billion, which means the H1 2026 revenue is 4.7 times higher, almost quintupling in a decade. Moreover, it's remarkable to believe that Steam also made more in the first six months of this year than it did in the entirety of 2020, when most of us were confined to our homes, free from responsibilities, and with a lot of time on our hands.

Alinea lists Forza Horizon 6, Resident Evil Requiem, and Crimson Desert as the top three games for Steam's explosive H1 2026 numbers — all of them made almost $200 million. Games from prior years also played a bigger role this time since 2026 releases only accounted for 21% of the $11.1 billion, while 27% of H1 2025's revenue came from 2025 launches; 29% of H1 2024's revenue was accumulated from 2024 releases.

Amidst all the data, a clear trend is forming. People are looking back in their libraries and appreciating older games more than ever before, while new releases still make an impact if they're universally acclaimed. With the highly anticipated GTA VI coming soon (with no current PC release date), it'll be interesting to see how these numbers change. Now, if only Valve could make more Steam Machines to play all those older games everyone seems to be playing.

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.

Game anti-tamper app Denuvo has been completely bypassed in pre-release versions of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, allowing pirates to distribute copies of the game days before its official release. A cracked version of the remake has been circulating since June 7 — more than a month before its July 9, 2026, release date. While the game is a remake of the original Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, which launched way back in 2013, it’s still expected to offer new content and enhanced graphics brought by newer, more capable hardware.

This isn’t the first major title to be hit by a leak before its official release day this year. Forza Horizon 6 leaked four days before early access and more than a week before its general launch date of May 19. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Subnautica 2 also suffered similar leaks, with playable versions of the games circulating online even before early access was opened to players. While Forza Horizon 6 and Subnautica 2 aren’t protected by Denuvo, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight and Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced use the controversial anti-tamper DRM tool.

Denuvo has been in hot water among gamers, especially as it was blamed for performance issues plaguing games that used it. Aside from that, many consider its mandatory 14-day online checks as intrusive, especially for story-driven single-player games where cheating won’t affect the gaming experience of other players. While a few users might’ve understood the studios’ need to protect their titles and reduce piracy, the fact that Denuvo has been cracked in all single-player games that had it felt like its addition to games is pointless.

This is especially true now that we’re seeing pirated pre-release versions of games that are supposedly protected by Denuvo. While it’s unclear how Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced leaked, the fact that the app that reduces performance and reminds gamers that they don’t own the games they buy has seemingly failed at its one job is making users think that it’s unnecessary.

Game studios need to protect their intellectual property, which is why it’s understandable that they’d want to deploy tools like Denuvo. However, they shouldn't do so at the expense of gaming performance and the user experience, which are some of the primary reasons why gamers are pushing back against Denuvo. If these anti-piracy measures don’t punish legitimate players with reduced FPS and always-online requirements, among other negative side effects, then most gamers will have zero problems with using apps that protect the makers of their favorite titles.

DLSS Swapper is an open-source app that does exactly what it sounds like — it swaps out the appropriate DLSS files for any game, helping downgrade or upgrade its native DLSS version. While the tool itself is safe, along with the verified files it hosts, users can also upload their own DLLs to the app's GitHub repo. Unfortunately, it seems like some of these files can contain malware, disguised as helpful solutions.

To understand how this can even happen, we need to look at the way DLSS Swapper is set up. The app uses a manifest file to dig out DLLs from verified DLSS, FSR, and XeSS libraries. The verification process is thorough, and you won't see any file pop up in-app until its security hashes match official sources. However, it can also detect unknown files from new game releases installed on a user's computer.

These files are automatically uploaded to the repository as "issues," and the app also includes an option to upload your own DLL to help out fellow gamers. As you can probably guess by now, this is where the problem lies. These files are not vetted and remain in a grey area. DLL files are basically executable code, so if any of them were modified to include malware, you wouldn't even be able to detect it before it's too late.

The file would've already executed malicious code and installed a crypto-miner, for instance, in the background that hogs your PC's resources until you finally notice something's off. As such, the creator issues a clear warning to not download random files that show up on the GitHub repo, especially if they include comments that claim some sort of miracle cure. Stick to only the sources you trust if you must go outside of the officially supported libraries.

Previously, the developer already warned against the fake DLSS Swapper website posing as the real thing. Let this serve as your reminder that the app's GitHub page is the only place you should download DLSS Swapper from. Moreover, keep in mind that hardware support is just as important as software support, so if you have an older GPU that doesn't support the latest upscaling tech, a DLL swap cannot magically fix that.