AmigaOS 3.2.1 fixes several bugs and additionally comes with new features. The team of developers and testers have worked ever since the release of AmigaOS 3.2 fixing bugs and implementing new features. They have read social platforms for user anecdotes, videos and reviews, and are excited by the positive reception and feedback. The Amiga will never die.

Space Cadet Pinball has a special place in the hearts of many Windows enthusiasts. A customer used their support contract to ask how to change among the three levels of play in Space Cadet Pinball. My proudest achievement of Windows XP was fixing the game so it didn’t consume 100% CPU. People keep asking if it can be brought back. One point of contention is over my claim that I removed Pinball from Windows because I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to work. Retrocomputing enthusiast NCommander even undertook a Zapruder-level analysis of all of the 64-bit versions of Windows he could find to prove or disprove my story. I was amazed at the level of thoroughness (and the fortitude it required to get those Itanium systems up and running, much less debug them), but there’s one version of 64-bit Windows that NCommander didn’t try out, and that’s the one that’s relevant to the story. This story and investigation into Space Cadet Pinball is wild. At this point we seem to have a pretty complete picture of its entire history, but it too some serious digging to get there.

Windows 11 is going to be a year old in July 2022 and Microsoft will be giving users an anniversary present – a new feature update with a long list of much-needed improvements. The update is apparently codenamed “Sun Valley 2” internally and it is going to be similar to the anniversary update for Windows 10. Sun Valley 2 or version 22H2 would be a version of Windows 11 with some important improvements to make it faster, smoother and more modern, and to integrate WinUI more closely with the rest of the operating system. For example, a new Windows Run with dark mode could show up in this release. We’re also expecting new native apps. Considering Windows 11’s modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu, I think they still got some work to do.

So, AMD, Intel, and Nvidis all decided to announce their latest products all on the same day yesterday. Let’s start with Intel, who announced the laptop version of their latest generation of processors, and if the performance claims hold up, they’re some damn good chips – but as always, we’ll have to await proper benchmarks. These laptop chips use Intel’s new hybrid processor architecture, which combines larger, faster performance cores with smaller, more efficient cores (P-cores and E-cores, respectively). How many P-cores and E-cores you get depends on the processor you’re buying, and you’ll need an operating system that supports Intel’s “Thread Director” technology to get the most performance out of the chips. Windows 11 supports it now, Linux support is in the works, and Windows 10 doesn’t have it and won’t be getting it. AMD, not wanting to be outdone, introduced its Ryzen 6000 series of mobile processors, which finally move their integrated graphics to RDNA 2m, and are the first to include Microsoft’s Pluton security chip. Yesterday AMD disclosed that they would be launching the new Ryzen 6000 Mobile series today – updated cores, better graphics, more features, all in a single monolithic package a little over 200 mm2. There will be 10 new processors, ranging from the traditional portable 15 W and 28 W hardware, up to 35 W and 45 W plus for the high-end gaming machines. AMD is expecting 200+ premium systems in the market with Ryzen Mobile in 2022. Finally, we have NVIDIA, with the smallest announcement of new high and low-end mobile GPUs.

MicroWeb is a web browser for DOS! It is a 16-bit real mode application, designed to run on minimal hardware. This is a thing that exists. Incredible.

Libadwaita 1.0 has been released, just at the end of the year. Libadwaita is a GTK 4 library implementing the GNOME HIG, complementing GTK. For GTK 3 this role has increasingly been played by Libhandy, and so Libadwaita is a direct Libhandy successor. Libadwaita is quite controversial, as aside from dark mode and a (promised) colour API, applications that use Libadwaita cannot be themed. It’s all the result of developers being unhappy us pesky users get to decide what our computers look like, so they decided to prevent users from theming their systems at all. GNOME’s own applications will surely transition to it, and it remains to be seen if the wider Gtk developer community will opt for it as well. Libadwaita hjas already led to two major departures from GNOME, and other Gtk-based desktop environments, such as Cinnamon and Mate, may follow.

Dear friends, we’re gathered here today to mourn the death of that once-beloved monarch of the mobile world: BlackBerry. And, yes, I realize that this is not the first time we’ve announced the death of the company or its devices (and, for reasons I’ll explain below, it likely won’t be the last) but this is a very definite ending for legacy BlackBerry hardware. As of January 4th, any phones or tablets running BlackBerry’s own software — that’s BlackBerry 7.1 or earlier, BlackBerry 10, or its tablet operating system BlackBerry PlayBook — will “no longer reliably function,” says the company. Whether on Wi-Fi or cellular, there’ll be no guarantee you can make phone calls, send text messages, use data, establish an SMS connection, or even call 9-1-1. That sounds pretty darned dead to us. This seems ripe for a community of dedicated fans to build custom servers to keep things going – much like exist for many older games.

The first phone I ever owned was a Motorola Razr. The Razr’s buttons are some of the finest ever to grace a mobile device. The keypad is laser-etched out of a sheet of shimmering aluminum, and when pressed, ignites in a lambent blue glow that looked like the sci-fi future. But there was one button that I was terrified to press. In all my years of owning a Razr, I can’t say I tapped it more than once or twice, and never on purpose: the internet button. A lot of much younger people will never understand the dread that these internet buttons filled us with in the early 2000s. Whether true or not, I didn’t know anyone who was not terrified of accidentally pressing one of these buttons on their phones and racking up a massive bill, or rushing through your prepaid card. Times certainly have changed.

So, you want to use Windows 2000 in 2021? Well, you’ve come to the right place, although we’re not the only place you’ll want to keep handy. You’ll find some great tips, software advice, and know-how at the MSFN Windows 2000 Forums. Special thanks to @win32, who provided many of the pointers and suggestions used in this guide. This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

I’ve been keeping an eye on MauiKit for a while now, and over Christmas, they surprised us with their brand new convergent desktop environment – Maui Shell – targeted at both desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. After developing a whole set of applications, as well as a Linux distribution to use them, their next step is now a complete desktop environment. The objective of Maui Shell is to deploy a convergent desktop shell with different form factors, from mobile phones and tablets to desktop computers. Maui Shell will adapt to various form factors, and there’s no need for multiple versions targeting different form factors. Maui Shell is still in early development, but they’ve published a tight schedule with the first complete release scheduled for late 2022, with several preview releases in between then and now. In fact, the next release of Nitrux will include the first test release as an alternative shell for users to log into. If you’re interested in a modern take on the Linux desktop, phone, and tablet – these are the projects to follow. They’ve got some good stuff under their belt already, a proven track record, and a clear vision of what they want Maui Shell and its applications to be.

Intel apologized on Thursday after a letter in which the chip maker said it would avoid products and labor from Xinjiang set off an outcry on Chinese social media, making it the latest American company caught between the world’s two largest economies. The chip maker apologized to its Chinese customers, partners and the public in a Chinese-language statement on Weibo, the popular social media site. The company said that the letter, which had been sent to suppliers, was an effort at expressing its compliance with United States sanctions against Xinjiang, rather than a political stance. Intel following in the footsteps of major US companies supporting genocide – Ford, IBM, Apple, and countless others.

To be clear, you absolutely can still run your own email infrastructure, getting email delivered to you, filtering incoming spam, sending email (with DMARC signatures and other modern email practices), providing IMAP access, and even run your own webmail setup. You can even do this with all open source software. But the email environment you get this way is increasingly what I called an artisanal one. It’s cute, decent enough, and hand-crafted, but it doesn’t measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers. Your IMAP access might be as good as theirs, but things like your webmail, your spam filtering, and almost certainly your general security will not be as good as they have. In short, if you run your own email infrastructure, it will not be up to the general quality you could get from outsourcing to big providers (they can’t really be called specialists). And you cannot fix this by trying harder, nor with the magical right choice of open source software, nor with the magical right choice of commercial software. Entirely “on premise” email is now an inferior thing for almost everyone. I’ve always wanted to try and run my own email server, but I’d never run my main email address myself, since my income and interactions with the government depend on it. Still, it’d be a fun side project.

The Dreamcast is a bit of an odd beast. Coming on the heels of the unpopular Sega Saturn, the Dreamcast was meant to be a simple console built with off-the-shelf parts. The PlayStation 2 was already tough competition, and ultimately the Dreamcast fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released with incredible fanfare. In some sense, it’s a footnote in console history. But despite not achieving the success that Sega hoped for, the Dreamcast has formed a small cult following, because as we know, nothing builds a cult-like following like an untimely demise. Since its release, it has gained a reputation for being ahead of its time. It was the first console to include a modem for network play and an easy storage solution for transferring game data between consoles via the VMUs that docked in the controllers. It had innovative and classic games such as Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and Shenmue. Microsoft even released a version of Windows CE with DirectX allowing developers to port PC games to the console quickly. We see our fair share of console hacks here on Hackaday, but what is the ultimate legacy of the Dreamcast? How did it come to be? What happened to it, and why did so much of Sega’s hopes ride on it? I missed out on the Dreamcast, but I’ve always been deeply fascinated by it, and on many an occasion I’ve come close to pulling the trigger on eBay. What always holds me back is the knowledge that most likely I’ll buy it, mess around with it for a few days, and then rarely look at it again. To any Dreamcast owners among our readership – would any of you say the Dreamcast and its most prominent titles are still worth it in 2021?

Proton has made enormous strides toward game compatibility through advances in related technologies like DXVK, which enable DirectX 9, 10, and 11 games to run through the Vulkan API. In fact, the project is so far along that Amazon has thrown its hat in the ring, working toward streaming Proton enabled games through Luna. The progress of this effort is updated all the time on ProtonDB, and today they crossed a major milestone as user reports on the site reveal that 80% of the top 100 games on Steam now run on Linux, and by extension, Steam Deck. I have long stopped even checking ProtonDB to see if the games I’m interested in run well on Linux – I just assume that the games I’m into belong to the 80%, with the remaining 20% being the massive garbage pile that are abandoned indie games, anime nonsense, and porn that have infested Steam over the years. Proton, and all the work Wine, Valve, and open source developers have poured into it, is arguably one of the biggest contributions to desktop Linux in a long, long time, and with the Steam Deck on the horizon, it’s only going to get even better from here.