Month: August 2019

When it comes to emulator design, there's something to be said for trying to capture the workings of the original system as accurately as possible, warts and all. But there's also something to the idea that emulators can improve on the original hardware, smoothing problems like frame rate slowdown that plagued the underpowered processors of the day.

That brings us to the latest update for storied, accuracy-obsessed SNES emulator bsnes, which adds the ability to overclock the virtual SNES processor. While bsnes is far from the first SNES emulator to allow for simulated overclocking, it does seem to be the first that does so "without any framerate or pitch distortion, and without harming compatibility in 99% of games," as bsnes programmer byuu puts it.

Fast, but not too fast

Most SNES games were locked to a 60fps frame rate, and designers of the time tuned their games so the SNES hardware could maintain that frame rate. But in some in-game situations, when the screen got too full of moving sprites, the processor could fail to create the next frame within the 16.66 ms window, leading to noticeable display lag.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | AFP)

With all due respect to games, porn, and lion kings, virtual reality's killer app might just be saving lives.

At a Stanford-affiliated children's hospital, pediatric cardiologists use an interactive virtual heart to help young patients and their families better understand congenital defects. Researchers in Maryland put on headsets to study viruses in the pursuit of a universal flu vaccine. In Minnesota, surgeons stood inside a VR model of the circulatory systems of conjoined twins—which proved integral to the ensuing separation surgery.

Great uses, certainly, but all variations on The Fantastic Voyage (or Innerspace, if you prefer). Now, building on a pile of evidence stretching back more than a decade, VR is finally getting clinical validation for actual surgical training. In a pilot study conducted at UCLA and presented recently at a meeting of orthopedic surgeons, medical students who practiced a common procedure in VR significantly outperformed those who used conventional preparation methods.

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  Cody Wilson (right), the founder of Defense Distributed, spoke to reporters in Austin on August 28. [credit: Nathan Mattise ]

It's been nearly a year since 3D-printed firearms activist Cody Wilson was arrested for the alleged sexual assault of a female minor. Yesterday, he appeared in an Austin, Texas courtroom and plead guilty to lesser charges that will likely see Wilson register as a sex offender and serve multiple years probation. He won't be able to possess any firearms and must consent to a consent to keystroke/remote monitoring during that time.

But long before Wilson's plead, his situation quickly prompted an unexpected change in leadership at Defense Distributed, the now-infamous Austin, Texas-based digital printing and firearms company he started in 2012. News of an arrest warrant for Wilson came on September 19, 2018, and Paloma Heindorff was named the company's new director less than a week later on September 25.

At the time, Heindorff stated that Wilson would no longer have any involvement with the company. She also promised business would continue on as normal and that she would likely take a different approach publicly than her outspoken, interview-friendly predecessor.