It turns out that this story is a lot more intricate - and mysterious - than I thought. Since I've been using snes9x for ages to play SNES games, it never dawned on me that Nintendo's own later consoles did not get any SuperFX-powered games.

It's hard to believe that things like this happen - Icewind Dale II was released about 15 years ago, developed and published by big, popular companies. You'd think the source code would be properly protected and stored.

Back before MiNT became officially supported by Atari Corp, there were a few attempts at adding multitasking on the Atari ST. One of them was Geneva, a multitasking environment that was very light on resources and worked on a standard ST. NeoDesk is a desktop replacement that works well with Geneva.

Quite a long time ago there were some questions posed to the writer of these great software packages, Dan Wilga, in an attempt to see if the source could be opened. After a successful petition caught the attention of Wilga, he explained he still had his Atari TT030 sitting around, with the source code for a version that was never released.

Sadly, one of the hard drives with some of the required code to build everything was damaged, and it was too expensive to have the drive fixed. Thanks to a member of the Atari community, the drive has been fixed, and this should mean we're going to see open source releases of Geneva and NeoDesk soon. New builds are being tested, and they will be released soon - followed by the source code.

This is amazing news, and a fantastic example of software conservation. Thanks to OSNews reader Leech for pointing this story out and writing the first two paragraphs of this story so I had an idea of what was going on!

I've said this countless times, but I want to keep bringing this one home: this is what competition does. It lowers prices, improves performance, and makes Intel looks like a stumbling fool. And what better day to celebrate the benefits of competition than today?

Cheers, America. Party safe!

A great collection of classic DOS fonts.

In light of yesterday's post, here's a short look at the early days of Ethernet.

On a related note, in one of the recent Xerox Alto restoration videos, two of the people who worked on the invention of Ethernet, Dave Boggs and Ron Crane, helped out fixing the Alto Ethernet card - carrying some very old-fashioned Ethernet equipment and telling some great stories from the early '70s.

Sadly, Ron Crane passed away 19 June.

Ars has started a series on the advent of the IBM PC, and today they published part one.

Fascinating history of the most influential computing platform in history, a statement that will surely ruffle a lot of feathers. The IBM PC compatible put a computer on every desk and in every home, and managed to convince hundreds of millions of people of the need of a computer - no small feat in a world where a computer was anything but a normal household item. In turn, this widespread adoption of the IBM PC compatible platform paved the way for the internet to become a success.

With yesterday's ten year anniversary of the original iPhone going on sale, a number of people understandably went for the hyperbole, such as proclaiming the iPhone the most important computer in history, or, and I wish I was making this up, claiming the development of the iPhone was more important to the world than the work at Xerox PARC - and since this was apparently a competition, John Gruber decided to exaggerate the claim even more.

There's no denying the iPhone has had a huge impact on the world, and that the engineers at Apple deserve all the credit and praise they're getting for delivering an amazing product that created a whole new category overnight. However, there is a distinct difference between what the iPhone achieved, and what the people at Xerox PARC did, or what IBM and Microsoft did.

The men and women at PARC literally invented and implemented the graphical user interface, bitmap graphics, Ethernet, laser printing, object-oriented programming, the concept of MVC, the personal computer (networked together!), and so much more - and all this in an era when computers were gigantic mainframes and home computing didn't exist.

As for the IBM PC compatible and Wintel - while nowhere near the level of PARC, it did have a profound and huge impact on the world that in my view is far greater than that of the iPhone. People always scoff at IBM and Microsoft when it comes to PCs and DOS/Windows, but they did put a computer on every desk and in every home, at affordable prices, on a relatively open and compatible platform (especially compared to what came before). From the most overpaid CEO down to the most underpaid dock worker - everybody could eventually afford a PC, paving the way for the internet to become as popular and ubiquitous as it is.

The iPhone is a hugely important milestone and did indeed have a huge impact on the world - but developing and marketing an amazing and one-of-a-kind smartphone in a world where computing was ubiquitous, where everybody had a mobile phone, and where PDAs existed, is nowhere near the level of extraordinary vision and starting-with-literally-nothing that the people at PARC had, and certainly not as impactful as the rise of the IBM PC compatible and Wintel.

It's fine to be celebratory on the iPhone's birthday - Apple and its engineers deserve it - but let's keep at least one foot planted in reality.

Matt Gemmell, iPad-only user:

Once you let go of the trope about an iPad replacing a laptop, take a step back, and see it as a device that is great for some but not for all, this whole discussion becomes irrelevant in a heartbeat. Just because iOS isn't the same as macOS or just because iOS is not a good fit for your general purpose computing needs does not mean that applies to everyone.

While you might say iOS can't do overlapping windows and window management!, somebody who prefers the iPad for their computer needs would say why would I want to manually fiddle with all these annoying overlapping windows?

For me personally, I feel like the ideal mobile general purpose computer lies somewhere halfway between the Surface Pro and the iPad Pro - which is exactly why I ordered a brand new iPad Pro 12.9" today, so that I can compare it to my Surface Pro 4 and see where, exactly, that halfway point lies and which of these two major platforms is closest to it.

These are, actually, quite exciting - although not necessarily positive, see e.g. the lack of control we have over these devices - times in the world of general purpose computing.

Articles like this are very satisfying to post, because we can all agree this is just plain awesome, no ifs or buts.

The two core offences as noted by the European Comission are as follows:

Much like Apple's and Ireland's illegal tax deal, fines like this can be easily avoided: respect the laws regarding doing business in the EU. I don't expect the current (or the previous, for that matter) US administration to keep these incredibly powerful tech giants in check, so I guess it's up to the EU.

Cyrus Farivar, for Ars:

Her website is incredibly entertaining, and you'd think such use of photos falls squarely under fair use. It sucks that she had to shutdown her website, and I'm hoping Zillow loses this case hard.

No Chrono Trigger.

Why would I buy a SNES if I can't play the best game ever made on it? This is a baffling, dealbreaking omission.

Seeing "Windows 10 source code leaked!" headlines or tweets? Not so fast - while there was a leak, it wasn't anything particularly interesting. The only truly interesting bit is this, as explained by Ars' Peter Bright:

Microsoft routinely gives access to the source code of a wide variety of parts of Windows to academic institutions, certain enterprise customers, and, of course, hardware makers - which is what the above mentioned source code package refers to. While interesting, it seems unlikely this leak is of any significance to anyone.