Month: June 2016

The Dreamcast Ecco sequel you never expected is now available as a prototype download. (credit: Hidden Palace)

You probably thought that Sega's official abandonment of the Dreamcast back in 2001 meant we wouldn't see any new, Sega-produced Ecco the Dolphin games for that system. If so, you thought wrong. That's because a newly unearthed prototype of the Dreamcast's cancelled Ecco II: Sentinels of the Universe has hit the Internet, more than 15 years after it was made.

The prototype build, uploaded by the game preservationists at Hidden Palace, is dated February 19, 2001, less than a month after Sega announced it would stop supporting the Dreamcast and step away from the hardware business for good. It comes to the Internet via a large lot of Ecco Dreamcast assets acquired by Hidden Palace, and the site promises "more exciting (and long overdue) [Ecco] stuff in the weeks to follow."

In addition to the ripped GD-ROM version, which is fully playable on PC Dreamcast emulators, Hidden Palace also released a self-boot CDI image that can be burned to disc and played on actual Dreamcast hardware (and hopefully on a real CRT television, for that authentic 2001 console gaming experience). We can thank the Dreamcast's extremely broken copy protection technology for that little wrinkle and for the widespread piracy that helped doom and/or popularize the system back in its day.

(credit: Pearl)

There have been a lot of rumors over the past year or so about Apple secretly working on a car. While we don't have anything concrete to report on that front, we do know that some former Apple employees have left the mothership to work on car-related tech. Their company is called Pearl, and it just emerged from stealth mode with a rather cool wireless backup camera system, called RearVision.

As you might know, Congress has mandated that all cars from 2019 have a backup camera installed. And indeed, many new cars come with backup cameras already, with varying quality (some of them are truly horrible). But with about 260 million cars already on the road, the vast majority have to rely on old-fashioned mirrors to see behind them. Enter RearVision. We spoke with company cofounder and CEO Bryson Gardner ahead of the launch to find out a bit more.

"At Apple we loved taking the very latest technology and getting it into the hands of the consumer as quickly as possible," Gardner told Ars. "We wanted to find something that was infused with technology but ripe for change—we started looking at how technology gets into cars, and it's quite an extended timeline. There's a long design cycle, and it only appears in some makes and models; it can take 10 to 20 years to appear across the production line. The other challenge is the technology in new cars is designed to be stagnant, so it stays the same throughout the lifetime of the car, which is over 17 years now."

(credit: Erik (HASH) Hersman)

Reproducibility of findings has been a hot-button issue in social science over the last year, and as the election approaches, the reproducibility of findings related to voting is especially relevant. A recent study published in PNAS reassesses previously published data about ways to increase voter turnout and finds that language cues actually don’t have a significant effect on voter behavior.

The study revisits some field experiments conducted by Bryan et. al., which were also published in PNAS. These earlier experiments looked at voter behavior during the 2008 presidential election in California and the 2009 gubernatorial election in New Jersey. Using online surveys to prime voters, the previous study had shown that use of nouns or verbs affected whether voters went to the polls—verbs did better at getting out the vote.

This new study follows up on that work, looking at how subtle language manipulations can prime the behavior of voters.