The Epoch Cassette Vision is often reported as the first Japanese cartridge-based game console. But reality is always a bit more complicated. In 1978, years before the Cassette Vision, two Japanese companies put together cartridge-based game consoles that were unique to Japan, but relied on technology and chips licensed from American firms. And hey, despite my whirlwind tour of Pong consoles, I never looked at GI chips. Behold, the *breathes in* Bandai Video Mate All Color TV Jack Addon 5000. (longest console name in the history of the blog?) This 1978 console was the follow-on to Bandai’s earlier Video Mate TV Jack consoles, which were more or less the same as everyone else’s Pong-on-a-chip consoles. (The TV Jack 2500 appears rather intriguing, but we’re not looking at that one today) ↫ Nicole Express As usual, Nicole’s deep dives into weird consoles you’ve never heard of are a great read, and this one is no exception. There are many things that make the Jack Addon 5000 unique and interesting, but the one thing that’s really cool is that while the game lives on the cartridge, the colour lives inside the console itself. Inside the cartridge you’ll only find the monochrome game chip; the colour is added by another chip that’s fitted inside the console. Only four cartridges were ever released for the system, so it’s not particularly more versatile than contemporary Pong clones that had multiple built-in games or game modes. Still, it’s an interesting footnote, and I’m so happy we got such a detailed look at this console.
I don’t use GNU Screen so I don’t have much to say here, but I do know it’s a popular tool among the kind of people who read OSNews, so a new major release should be covered here. In case you’re not aware, “Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells”. Basically, it’s window manager for terminals. You can download the tarball yourself, or just wait until the update hits your distribution of choice.
When one of China’s once-popular electric vehicle startups went bust, car owners encountered an unexpected problem: Their vehicles went “offline.” Richard Qian didn’t know what to expect when he heard that WM Motor, a Shanghai-based EV maker popular for its low prices, filed for bankruptcy in October 2023. He tried to drive his compact EX5 SUV as he normally would, but discovered that he could no longer log into WM Motor’s smartphone app, which remotely controlled the car lock and air conditioner. He also couldn’t see his car’s mileage and charging status on the dashboard. ↫ Tianyu Fang at rest of world Chinese car makers are heavily pushing to gain a foothold here in Sweden, it seems, as ads for these brands are popping up all over the place, and dealerships – although most likely not dedicated dealerships – are present even here in the Arctic high north. I have no idea how successful they are, as I don’t think I’ve ever seen one out in the wild, but with such massive presence they must be doing something right. Considering most of the cars they sell are electric, I assume if any of them go under, buyers would suffer the same issues as Qian did. Of course, EV startups aren’t exactly a China-only thing, but there are definitely more of them than there are non-Chinese ones, since even brands already well-established in China will effectively be startups again when entering the European or American markets. If an otherwise successful Chinese car maker doesn’t survive in Europe, the end result is the same as if it were a European EV startup: no dealer network, no spare parts, and most likely, no servers to run your EV app. This issue alone keeps me from taking EV startups – Chinese or otherwise – seriously until they’ve got several solid product generations under their belt. The idea of spending tens of thousands of euros on a car that randomly loses a bunch of its functionality because its brand went under sounds like a nightmare to me, especially since so many features are now shoveled into electronic black boxes, down to even the door handles. I’ll stick with established brands, for now.
The internet is a complex network of routers, switches, and computers, and when we try to connect to a server, our packets go through many routers before reaching the destination. If one of these routers is misconfigured or down, the packet can be dropped, and we can’t reach the destination. In this post, we will see how traceroute works, and how it can help us diagnose network problems. ↫ Sebastian Marines I’m sure most of us have used traceroute at some point in our lives, but I never once wondered how,, exactly, it works. The internet – and networking in general – always feels like arcane magic to me, not truly understandable by mere mortals without years of dedicated study and practice. Even something as simple as managing a home router can be a confusing nightmare of abbreviations, terminology, and backwards compatibility hacks, so you can imagine how complex it gets when you leave your home network and start sending packets out into the wider world. This post does a great job of explaining exactly how traceroute works without overloading you with stuff you don’t need to know.
The Windows patch that’s supposed to improve Windows’ performance on AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 chips has been backported from Windows 11 24H2 to Windows 11 23H2. Now, AMD has confirmed that it’s bringing the same branch prediction optimizations to Windows 11 23H2 via backporting. The new update will be listed under the Windows Update menu in the “Optional Updates” section as “KB5041587” which makes things a lot easier for those who haven’t updated or opted into the 24H2 preview. ↫ Hassan Mujtaba at Wccftech If you’re using Windows on a Ryzen 9000 chip – or even other recent Ryzen chips, who may also see a benefit from this patch – you should strongly consider installing this patch.
The Box64 project, which allows you to run Linux x86-64 binaries on non-x86 architectures like ARM and RISC-V, has achieved a major milestone with its RISC-V backend. It’s been over a year since our last update on the state of the RISC-V backend, and we recently successfully ran The Witcher 3 on an RISC-V PC, which I believe is the first AAA game ever to run on an RISC-V machine. So I thought this would be a perfect time to write an update, and here it comes. ↫ Box86/Box64 blog Calling this a monumental achievement would be underselling it. Just in case you understand how complex running The Witcher 3 on RISC-V really is: they’re running a Windows x86 game on Linux on RISC-V using Box64, Wine, and DXVK. This was only made possible relatively recently due to more and more x86 instructions making their way into RISC-V, as well as newer RISC-V machines that can accept modern graphics cards. The Witcher 3 can runs at about 15 frame per second in-game, using the 64-core RISC-V processor in the Milk-V Pioneer combined with an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU. That may not sound like much, but considering the complexity underpinning even running this game at all in this environment it’s actually kind of amazing. It seems Box64 could become as important to gaming on ARM and RISC-V Linux as Wine and Proton were for gaming x86 Linux. There’s still a lot more work to be done, and the linked article details a number of x86 instructions that are particularly important for x86 emulation, but are not available on RISC-V. The end result is that RISC-V has to run multiple instructions to emulate a single x86 instruction (“a whole of 10 instructions for a simple byte add”), which obviously affects performance.
Microsoft is handing over the Mono project to WineHQ, which came as a bit of a surprise announcement today. We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream at wine-mono/Mono · GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existing mono/mono and other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years. Microsoft maintains a modern fork of Mono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repo and has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to .NET which includes work from this fork. ↫ Mono’s website Wine make use of Mono, so this seems like a natural home for the project. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET, and is available on a wide variety of platforms, but lately it’s been languishing a bit, with no major release since 2019, and only small patches since then. Microsoft gained stewardship over the Mono project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.
This is freebsd-rustdate, a reimplementation of freebsd-update. It’s primarily written because of how slow freebsd-update is, and is written in rust because I felt like it. In usage, it’s expected to be similar, but not identical to freebsd-update. There are probably a number of minor edge-case differences I don’t even know about, but there are a number of larger ones that are intentional too. ↫ Matthew Fuller I love it when someone takes on a very well-established tool that’s used by countless people who probably barely think about how it could be improved. In this case, the performance improvements are nothing short of extraordinary, but of course, its author Matthew Fuller rightfully points out that you really shouldn’t be using this on any production system. It has not received even one percent of the kind of testing and eyeballs that the regular update tool in FreeBSD has received, so there may be edge cases or bugs. Improving the speed of the update process is always welcome. If it’s slow and time-consuming, people might postpone the updates because they’re getting in the way of what they want to do at the moment. Sure, I doubt the average FreeBSD user is the kind of person to postpone updates and run an insecure system in the meantime, but it might still draw a few people across the line to quickly get them done before continuing their work. This new rust-based FreeBSD update tool is definitely not going to be replacing the current one any time soon, nor is it even a part of the FreeBSD project in the first place, so there’s no need to worry about any potential breakage to your FreeBSD system because they’re replacing a battle-tested tool with a new one. All this does for now is highlight that there’s gains to be made here, and that’s a goal worth pursuing.
I have been working on an emulator for early (Motorola 68000-powered) Macintosh computers. While implementing the disk drive, I noticed documentation was scattered and hard to find. Now that I have a working implementation, this post is my attempt to document everything in one place. ↫ Thomas Exactly what it says on the tin – everything you ever wanted to know about the disk drive on early Macintosh computers.
On the whole, I’m satisfied that Lineage OS, as I use it, is preventing nearly all of Google’s data collection. I don’t install or use any Google services, I don’t enable A-GPS, I don’t use Chromium or the built-in browser. I could eliminate more arcane aspects of data collection – like the Internet connectivity check – if I wanted to take the trouble. I don’t think that taking reasonable precautions to avoid becoming part of Google’s data collection economy makes me a tinfoil-hatter. Nevertheless, I would probably use GrapheneOS instead, if I had devices that supported it. Ironically, if I wanted to use GrapheneOS, I’d have to buy Google-branded mobile devices, which is an irony that really stings. ↫ Kevin Boone The existence of Android versions like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, and similar, other de-Googled mobile operating systems is absolutely vital. The market is dominated by Google Android and iOS, and since full alternatives that aren’t Android or iOS are effectively impossible, de-Googled Android is the best we’re going to get. Regulators must ensure that banks, government ID applications, popular messaging platforms, and similarly crucial applications work 100% reliably on de-Googled Android, and do not require Google Play Services in any way, shape, or form. In The Netherlands, there are basically three banks that control the market, and there’s really just one messaging application that rules the country – WhatsApp – and their use is effectively required to participate in society. Consequently, these applications and platforms should be accessible by as many people as possible, and that definitely includes de-Googled Android devices. Being alive should not be taxed by Apple or Google.
If you are looking to upgrade your TV and want a long-lasting option, you may consider getting a Samsung AI TV powered by Tizen OS. The reason is that Samsung announced plans to offer seven years of Tizen OS upgrades for some of its Smart TVs. ↫ Sagar Naresh Bhavsar at Neowin Since buying a dumb TV is no longer possible, you might as well get the one with the longest possible support lifecycle. This new policy covers Samsung TVs from 2024 onward, as well as a few modls from 2023. There’s no word on if the ads that I’m assuming are part of Samsung’s smart TVs will also receive seven years of updates. Or, you know, get a good Android TV box and never plug your actual TV into your network to begin with.
Due to its limited RAM of 1,920 bits, the Programma 101 was mostly a machine conceived to make arithmetic calculations – sums, subtractions, divisions, multiplications, square roots -, yet, like modern computers, it could also perform logical operations, conditional and unconditional jumps, and print the data stored in a register, all through a custom-made alphanumeric programming language. This was, in the early ’60s, what set computers apart from calculators, indeed. Overall, in today’s terms, Programma 101 can be considered a sort of “transitional fossil” between desktop calculators and personal computers. ↫ Riccardo Bianchini Olivetti sure is a name that carries an exceptional amount of weight in the retrocomputing world, as classic Olivetti computers, even standard Olivetti PCs, tend to be highly desirable. A Programma 101 in amazing condition is currently for sale on eBay for a massive €20000, and while there’s quite a few relatively cheap ’80s and ’90s Olivetti PCs for sale, a sizable number of them are far more desirable and carry massive premiums for their unique design. It’s sad how many once great and influential computer makers have been relegated to the dustbin of history, outcompeted, acquired, or run into the ground. Some of these once great brands live on as mere badges on electronic junk, and Olivetti, too, was not spared this fate. In fact, what is generally considered the worst PDA ever made, the Olivetti daVinci, was a generic product that just had an Olivetti logo slapped onto it. I have one in-box, and intend to one day write about it, because its awfulness needs to be shared with the world.
Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a so-called “Account Manager” for Windows 11 that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu (apparently, my 43-inch display does not have enough space to accommodate them). Now, the “Account Manager” is coming to Windows 10 users. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin Yes, this is a really small ad int he grand scheme of things, but the mere concept of my operating system showing me all kinds of ads and upsells, as both Windows and macOS have been doing aggressively for years now, is so deeply offensive to me. It shows such utter disrespect to me as a user, and shows that Microsoft and Apple see me not as an end user, but as a ripe plum ready to be bled dry at every turn. It’s revolting. As the latest release, Windows 11 has always been the most ad-ridden of the Windows releases still in use, but it seems Windows users can’t escape the onslaught either. I’m especially expecting ever more aggressive ads and upsells for Windows 11 to appear in Windows 10 now that the 2025 cutoff date for Windows 10 support is nearing, of course appearing at the most inopportune times – because everybody loves a giant fullscreen ad on your operating system when you’re trying to give a presentation or meet that tight deadline you forced yourself yo stress about by playing a bit too much League of Legends. If you want an ad- and upsell-free operating system, your options are legion – there’s countless Linux distributions and the various BSDs to choose from.
The greek quiz is so obscure that it is ridiculous — noone can play this. Replace it with a new quiz about galley (ship) parts. This commit changes the LAST UNMODIFIED ORIGINAL FILE (meaning revision 1.1.1.1) from the original import that created OpenBSD on Oct 18, 1995. With this commit, we have completed an amusing mission of replacing the final parts of the original OpenBSD. We have reached OpenBSD of Theseus. ↫ Theo de Raadt With this change to a quiz game in OpenBSD, every single file of the OpenBSD code base is newer than that first, original import. Now I’m curious to see which other projects have achieved this milestone, and when.
Virtually every tech media outlet has been reporting that Microsoft is deprecating the Control Panel in Windows as if that’s some sort of big revelation we should be outraged about. They’re basing this on the following, now changed, paragraph someone found buried deep in a Windows support site somewhere: The Control Panel is a feature that’s been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more. The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. ↫ Windows support website It seems the sudden avalanche of articles about this spooked Microsoft, because when you open the same website now, that last line instead reads: Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. ↫ Windows support website The idea that the Control Panel is being “deprecated” is not exactly a new one; it’s been an ongoing process since the release of Windows 8, twelve years ago now. With every new Windows release, more Control Panel applets are removed in favour of expanding the Settings application, to a point where few regular users have a need to open it directly. Settings still does rely on old Control Panel applets, though, and it won’t take you many clicks through Settings to end up at a classic applet. So, while directly opening the Control Panel might not be a common thing people do, using classic applets sure is. Microsoft may be changing the verbiage of its support page to remove the word “deprecated”, but that ain’t fooling anyone: the Control Panel has already been gutted beyond recognition, and it’s definitely in the process of being deprecated – in true Microsoft fashion, it’s just taking them a really long time, because nobody inside Microsoft seems to really care about Windows anymore.
German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft’s Copilot to see how his culture blog articles would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR. The answers shocked Bernklau. Copilot falsely claimed Bernklau had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical mortician. Copilot even went so far as to claim that it was “unfortunate” that someone with such a criminal past had a family and, according to SWR, provided Bernklau’s full address with phone number and route planner. ↫ Matthias Bastian So why did Copilot (which is just OpenAI’s ChatGPT with sparkles) claim Bernklau did all sorts of horrible things? Well, his occupation – journalist – is a dead giveaway. He has written a lot of articles covering court proceedings in Tübingen on abuse, violence, and fraud cases, and since Copilot is just spicy autocorrect, it has no understanding of context and pinned the various crimes he covered on Bernklau. Adding in his address, phone number, and a damn planned route to his home is just the very disgusting icing on this already disgusting cake. What makes matters even worse, if you can believe it, is that Bernklau has absolutely no recourse. He contacted the public prosecutor’s office in Tübingen, but they stated they can’t press charges because the accusations coming from Copilot aren’t being made by a real person. And to make it still even worse, Microsoft just threw its hands in the air and absolved itself of any and all responsibility by pointing to its terms of service, in which Microsoft discards liability for content generated by Copilot. Convenient. This is nothing short of a nightmare scenario that can utterly destroy someone’s life, and the fact that Microsoft doesn’t care and the law isn’t even remotely prepared to take serious matters like these on is terrifying.
A page is the granularity at which an operating system manages memory. Most CPUs today support a 4 KB page size and so the Android OS and applications have historically been built and optimized to run with a 4 KB page size. ARM CPUs support the larger 16 KB page size. When Android uses this larger page size, we observe an overall performance boost of 5-10% while using ~9% additional memory. In order to improve the operating system performance overall and to give device manufacturers an option to make this trade-off, Android 15 can run with 4 KB or 16 KB page sizes. ↫ Steven Moreland Android 15 has been reworked to be page-size agnostic, meaning that a single binary can run on either 4 KB or 16 KB versions of Android. Any assumptions about page size have been removed from Android as well, the EROFS and F2FS file systems as well as UFS are now compatible with 16 KB, and a whole lot more things have been changed and refactored to make this transition as effortless as possible. Application developers do need to do a few things, though. They’ll need to recompile their binaries with 16 KB alignment, after which they’ll need to be tested in a 16 KB version of an Android device or emulator. To make this possible, starting with Android 15 QPR1, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will get a new develop option that will reboot the device in 16 KB mode. In addition, Android Studio will gain a 16 KB emulator target as well. The 16 KB page size is an ARM-only feature, so people running the emulator on x86 devices will emulate the 16 KB page size, in which “the Kernel runs in 4 KB mode, but all addresses exposed to applications are aligned to 16 KB”. Of course, Google urges Android developers to test for 16 KB page sizes as soon as possible.
All, in all, It was much easier to program for Windows using Turbo Pascal 7 than with anything else. Not only did it provide a programming model that matched the way the Windows user interface worked, the application itself had a Windows graphical interface – many Windows programming tools at that time actually ran under MSDOS, and were entirely text-based. TP 7 also had fully-graphical tools for designing the user interface elements, like menus and icons. Laying out a menu using a definition file with an obscure format, using Windows Notepad, was never an agreeable experience. Microsoft did produce graphical tools for this kind of operation, but Turbo Pascal combined them into a seamless IDE. All I had to do to build and run my programs was to hit the F7 key. I could even set breakpoints for the debugger, just by clicking a line of code. As I said, common enough today, but revolutionary for early Windows programming. ↫ Kevin Boone Even as a mere child who didn’t even know what programming was, I was aware of Turbo Pascal. It was a name that you just encountered all over the place as a DOS and Windows 3.x user, even if you didn’t know what it was. The author of this article, Kevin Boone, even claims Turbo Pascal “contributed to the widespread uptake, and eventual domination, of Microsoft Windows on desktop PCs”, which is not something I can verify because I was far too young, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it holds water. This article made me wonder if Pascal is easy to learn, and if someone wanting to learn programming can do worse than start with a Windows 3.x virtual machine and Turbo Pascal. Sure, it’s probably not very relevant today, but it might serve as a good, solid base to work from? I have no idea.
The history of Ethernet is fascinating. The reason why we have three different frame types is that DIX used the Ethernet II frame that is prevalent today, while IEEE intended to use a different frame format that could be used for different MAC layers, such as token bus, token ring, FDDI, and so on. The IEEE were also inspired by HDLC, and modeled their frame header more in alignment with the OSI reference model that had the concept of SAPs. When they discovered that the number of available SAPs weren’t enough, they made an addition to the 802 standard to support SNAP frames. In networks today, Ethernet II is dominant, but some control protocols may use LLC and/or SNAP frames. ↫ Daniel Dib I just smiled and nodded.
The conversation around gaming on Linux has changed significantly during the last several years. It’s a success story engineered by passionate developers working on the Linux kernel and the open-source graphics stack (and certainly bolstered by the Steam Deck). Many of them are employed by Valve and Red Hat. Many are enthusiasts volunteering their time to ensure Linux gaming continues to improve. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a history lesson, but it’s an appropriate way to introduce yet another performance victory Linux is claiming over Windows. I recently spent some time with the Framework 13 laptop, evaluating it with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the AMD Ryzen 7 7480U. It felt like the perfect opportunity to test how a handful of games ran on Windows 11 and Fedora 40. I was genuinely surprised by the results! ↫ Jason Evangelho I’m not surprised by these results. At all. I’ve been running exclusively Linux on my gaming PC for years now, and gaming has pretty much been a solved issue on Linux for a while now. I used to check ProtonDB before buying games on Steam without a native Linux version, but I haven’t done that in a long time, since stuff usually just works. In quite a few cases, we’ve even seen Windows games perform better on Linux through Proton than they do on Windows. An example that still makes me chuckle is that when Elden Ring was just released, it had consistent stutter issues on Windows that didn’t exist on Linux, because Valve’s Proton did a better job at caching textures. And now that the Steam Deck has been out for a while, people just expect Linux support from developers, and if it’s not there on launch, Steam reviews will reflect that. It’s been years since I bought a game that I’ve had to refund on Steam because it didn’t work properly on Linux. The one exception remains games that employ Windows rootkits for their anticheat functionality, such as League of Legends, which recently stopped working on Linux because the company behind the game added a rootkit to their anticheat tool. Those are definitely an exception, though, and honestly, you shouldn’t be running a rootkit on your computer anyway, Windows or not. For my League of Legends needs, I just grabbed some random spare parts and built a dedicated, throwaway Windows box that obviously has zero of my data on it, and pretty much just runs that one stupid game I’ve sadly been playing for like 14 years. We all have our guilty pleasures. Don’t kink-shame. Anyway, if only a few years ago you had told me or anyone else that gaming on Linux would be a non-story, a solved problem, and that most PC games just work on Linux without any issues, you’d be laughed out of the room. Times sure have changed due to the dedication and hard work of both the community and various companies like Valve.
