Month: March 2016

3DNES brings a new perspective to some very old games.

The world of NES emulation hasn't been all that exciting since the late '90s, when NESticle provided "good enough" emulation accuracy and stability for any NES game out there (though there has been a lot of subsequent work to get that final bit of true emulation accuracy). So it was a bit of a surprise this week to stumble across a new NES emulator that provides a genuinely new perspective on decades-old games by rendering them in three dimensions.

The 3DNES project, as the name implies, extends the 2D sprites of the NES into the Z axis, letting players rotate the camera around to see the sides and back of the formerly flat sprites. This isn't just a conversion of every pixel into a uniform voxel, either. In a game like Super Mario Bros., for instance, 3DNES converts pipes to into cylindrical 3D models, with bulging piranha plants embedded in the center. In Mega Man, ladders remain in the background while wall-hugging enemies are accurately placed on the sides of thick blocks.

The emulator's developer, who goes by the handle "geod" online, has been posting videos of the work-in-progress emulator for months. This week, he finally took his work public, posting a playable beta version that runs through the Unity Web player and can load arbitrary (and definitely legally obtained) ROMs from the cloud.

(credit: Bleecker Street)

While there have been no shortage of lackluster dramas featuring drones, there has yet to be a definitive Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now-type war epic that really brings drama and pathos to drone warfare. Eye in the Sky, opening March 11 in the US, aims to be that movie. And it does a remarkably good job, not only of building tension around the act of firing a missile from a drone, but also of making the bureaucratic arguments behind the drone strike seem as interesting as the action.

Part of the horror of drone warfare is that the drama is one-sided—only the victim has a full story to tell. The drone is emotionless. Even for the drone operator, killing becomes the cold-blooded entry of GPS coordinates, a joystick maneuver, the calm pull of a trigger in a quiet room. If pathos exists within this narrative, it merely runs in parallel to the calculating and detached drone operations.

But with Eye in the Sky, director Gavin Hood tries to capture some of the human emotion that goes on between the command to fire a missile and the pull of the trigger. The plot goes like this: Helen Mirren plays Colonel Katherine Powell, a British military officer who’s been following a number of targets, including a British woman who has been working with Somalian terrorist group al-Shabaab in Kenya. When Powell gets word that a number of her targets, including the British woman, will be meeting at the same house, she asks for assistance from the US military for the capture mission.

(credit: Replay Technologies)

Intel is diving further into 3D technology, and it's hoping to bring sports fans along for the ride. The company announced overnight that it acquired the Israeli company Replay Technologies, which makes "free dimensional" 3D video technology. Intel has been partnering with Replay since 2013, and most recently the two companies joined forces during the NBA All-Star Weekend, where fans got to experience a full 360 degrees of the popular Slam Dunk contest.

Intel explains how that collaboration worked: Replay's freeD technology created a 3D video rendering of the entire court using 28 ultra-HD cameras placed around the area. Those cameras were connected to Intel servers, which then allowed broadcasters to transmit the contest from various angles and give fans a 360-degree view of the dunks. This kind of 3D video technology is extremely computation-intensive, so Intel had to use a lot of servers to pull of this experience.

Intel is no stranger to 3D technology: the company's RealSense 3D cameras have been around for the past couple of years and have been integrated into PCs and laptops. The cameras allow users to do things like implement a green-screen effect to change the background behind them and look around Google Maps' Street View using just head motions, but those features are more along the lines of fun and interesting than practical. Acquiring Replay Technologies is a way for Intel to expand 3D video technology into a different industry, not to mention on a larger scale. The company refers to the next iteration of broadcast sports as "immersive sports," which it says is inherently more interactive and collaborative than simply watching a basketball game on TV.

(credit: OWC)

There's very little you can do to upgrade most modern Mac laptops. Even when parts aren't soldered directly to the motherboard (as is the case for RAM in all Retina MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs), Apple has a penchant for proprietary connectors that can make it hard to find aftermarket parts.

Other World Computing has built its business around making and selling upgrades compatible with Macs, and now it's finally selling aftermarket SSD upgrades that are compatible with MacBook Airs and Pros manufactured in or after 2013. That was the year Apple began shipping speedy PCI Express SSDs in its Macs, but they all used proprietary connectors instead of standard (but then either nonexistent or uncommon) interfaces like M.2. OWC's Aura drives come in 480GB and 1TB capacities, and they'll work in all modern MacBook Airs and Retina MacBook Pros (you can check the site for specific model compatibility).

OWC says the drives come with a three-year warranty and will begin shipping in late March. It also says that "you’ll never need to compromise your data by relying on complicated software hacks or TRIM enablers to get the most from your upgrade," which either means that the drives natively support OS X's TRIM feature somehow (not normally the case for aftermarket SSDs) or that the drive controllers' normal garbage collection capabilities work fine without TRIM.

Inside Slack's SF office (though there's a distinct lack of visible emoji in your official office visual, Slackers). (credit: Slack)

Walking into the Slack offices in downtown San Francisco feels like walking into a Slack channel online.

Brightly colored sofas in the shape of hashtags fill the shared spaces, surrounded by a comfortable margin of airy whitespace. As company rep Katie Wattie leads me around, I realize that every conference room is named after an emoji. There are emojis everywhere I look. Clocks have emoji instead of numbers. New employees have foil balloons floating over their desks with the :heart eyes: emoji emblazoned on them.

Slack CTO Cal Henderson is waiting for us in the ⛵ room. I've been so inundated with emoji that I have to ask: "Do you guys have a poop-emoji room?" Henderson doesn't bat an eye. "Not even the bathrooms have that on them, which is surprising," he muses in a British accent that has been slightly eroded after many years in the States. With his slightly mussed brown hair and casual shirt, Henderson looks the part of a Silicon Valley executive.