Month: August 2021

Project Starship's frog cops out in force. (credit: Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

The ScummVM community has just made the early CD-ROM gaming era more accessible. For five years, multiple people have worked on making Macromedia Director games playable on modern hardware, and today, that work is done.

Director was a critical component of early CD games that failed to scale up as Windows advanced (and as software like QuickTime fell by the wayside). But playing Spaceship Warlock or the bizarre Japanese art piece Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou is now possible on current hardware—without the use of specific emulators.

Time travel and killer robots at their most '90s. (credit: The Obscuritory)

Librarian, historian, and game archivist Phil Salvador, who runs The Obscuritory, tweeted about the project on Tuesday. "In many cases, the classic games you can purchase on platforms like GOG.com are being run through an emulator like DOSBox or ScummVM," Salvador told Ars. "But because Director games use features of their operating systems like Windows 3.1 or external plugins like QuickTime, there's been no clean, easy way to re-release those [games] on the commercial marketplace. As the ScummVM team continues to improve support for Director, there's a good chance we could see some of these games on the market again."

Enlarge / The destabilization of ice sheets in West Antarctica would be a major climate tipping point. (credit: Alessandro Dahan / Getty Images)

Rising temperatures are producing some very predictable effects: gradually worsening droughts, a steady rise in sea levels, and so on. But we also risk crossing thresholds in which aspects of the climate suddenly shift to new behaviors. That process seems to have happened in part of the Arctic Ocean, and there are indications that the main circulating current in the Atlantic Ocean may be approaching a shutdown.

A lot of effort has gone into modeling the economic cost of climate change in general, but we haven't figured out what crossing a tipping point might do to the world economy. This week, three researchers attempted to explore the subject, integrating estimates of the cost of tipping points with combined economics/climate models. The results suggest that we may be under-valuing the current cost of our carbon emissions and accepting a much higher level of financial risk than we might think.

What percent do you tip?

Climate tipping points are easy to understand on a conceptual level. At some poorly defined point in the future's warming, some natural systems will shift to a different type of behavior. That behavior will make it unlikely that the system will return to its initial state.

Enlarge / Experts in the region said shutting down the WhatsApp numbers was "absurd" and "unhelpful." (credit: SOPA Images | Getty Images)

WhatsApp has shut down a complaints helpline set up by the Taliban when it took control of Kabul, after the messaging app came under pressure to block the group from using its services.

The complaints number was supposed to act as an emergency hotline for civilians to report violence, looting or other problems. The Taliban advertised the helpline on Sunday when it captured the city, and has used similar WhatsApp hotlines in the past, for example when it took over the city of Kunduz in 2016.

After taking Kabul, the Taliban pledged to create a stable government and not to harm the “life, property and honor” of citizens.

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  The Pixel 5a. [credit: Google ]

Google has officially unveiled its next mid-range phone, the Pixel 5a. The big news today (and always the main selling point of the Pixel A-series) is the price, which is $449, or $100 more than the Pixel 4a. Google's blog post has a phone comparison sheet showing its lineup as the Pixel 5, Pixel 5a, and Pixel 4a, so hopefully, the $349 Pixel 4a is sticking around?

Part of the reason for the price increase is that the Pixel 5a is a bigger phone, with a 6.34-inch display and 73.7 mm width compared to the Pixel 4a's 5.8-inch display and 69.4 mm width. Another big change is the addition of IP67 dust and water resistance, which means the phone should survive submersion in 3 feet of water (1 meter) for 30 minutes. Like the Pixel 5, the body is metal coated in plastic instead of the pure plastic body of the Pixel 4a. We did not really see the appeal of this in the Pixel 5, but presumably, the phone is stronger now.

As usual, we're getting a no-frills design that just takes care of the basics. On the front, there's a slim-bezel OLED display and a hole-punch camera in the top right, while on the back there are two cameras (main and wide-angle) and a capacitive fingerprint reader. Specs include a Snapdragon 765G (that's a 7nm chip with two Cortex A76 cores and six Cortex A55 cores), 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and the biggest battery of any Pixel: 4680 mAh. The main camera is 12.2 MP and looks like the same Sony IMX363 sensor that Google has used for the past four years. There's a 16 MP wide-angle and an 8 MP front camera. Oh yeah, the headphone jack is sticking around for at least one more year.

Enlarge / A Gigabyte power supply explodes during Gamers Nexus' testing. (credit: Gamers Nexus)

If you've been trying to buy a GPU this year, you may be familiar with the Newegg Shuffle, a lottery system that Newegg instituted in January to try to beat bots and scalpers. You may also know that the GPUs and consoles in the Newegg Shuffle are often bundled with components like RAM, motherboards, and power supplies as a package deal—if you want dessert (in this case, a GPU), you have to eat your vegetables (or, a product you might be able to use but weren't looking to buy).

Earlier this month, the PC gaming YouTubers at Gamers Nexus posted a video showing that two Gigabyte power supplies commonly bundled with GPUs in the Newegg Shuffle were prone to "catastrophic" failure. Some of the GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM models that were tested sparked as they died, creating a fire risk, and one also ruined an attached RTX 3080 GPU. Gigabyte has now released a statement that (inaccurately) takes issue with Gamers Nexus' findings before outlining how the company is addressing the problem and offering exchanges for anyone who has bought a power supply within the affected range of serial numbers (the company has stopped short of a formal recall, however).

Affected GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM models can be exchanged, whether they've actually failed or not. (credit: Gigabyte)

Gigabyte claims that the Gamers Nexus team ran the power supplies over capacity for "extended lengths of time" and that these conditions "would not be typical of any real world usage." In a response video posted today, Gamers Nexus pointed out that this mischaracterizes their tests, which were carefully designed to find where the power supplies' Over-Power Protection (OPP) feature would trigger and shut the power supply off (as OPP is designed to do, when functioning properly). The power supplies were then left to sit for a few minutes and brought back online at 60 percent of their capacity to ensure that they were still working properly after the shutdown—the full testing methodology section of the first video is here. Gamers Nexus also pointed to numerous product reviews claiming that the power supplies had shown up dead on arrival, before they were ever installed or used.

Enlarge / This image depicts the ground tracks of NASA’s Perseverance rover (white) and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter (green) since arriving on Mars on Feb. 18. The upper yellow ellipse depicts the “South Séítah” region, which Ingenuity flew over during its 12th sortie. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's tiny helicopter on Mars, which has a fuselage about the size of a small toaster, has successfully flown above Mars for the 12th time.

Nearly half a year after the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, the Ingenuity helicopter is still going strong on the surface of Mars. The small flyer has done so well that it has been separated from Perseverance for some time as it scouts ahead on the red planet.

Ingenuity completed its latest flight on Monday, ascending to 10 meters and flying 450 meters across Mars to investigate what scientists call the “South Séítah” region of Mars. The helicopter was aloft for a total of 169 seconds during Monday's flight. In its dozen flights, Ingenuity has now covered 2.67 km, which is farther than Perseverance has rolled during nearly six months.

Enlarge / MEADVIEW, AZ - JUNE 29: A dock, which has become unusable as a worsening drought drops the water level of Lake Mead to new historic low records, is seen at South Cove near the upper reaches of the reservoir near Meadview, Arizona. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

Two decades of drought have exacted a heavy toll on the Colorado River, bringing Lake Mead to its lowest level since 1937, when the reservoir was filling behind the newly completed Hoover Dam. That situation has prompted the US Bureau of Reclamation to declare the first-ever shortage for water users along the river. 

Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico all rely on Lake Mead for fresh water, and all but California will see their supply drop due to negotiated agreements among those and four other states that draw water from the Colorado River. Nevada has already reduced its use through conservation, so the state doesn’t expect to be affected, but Mexico will see a 5 percent reduction, and Arizona will have its allocation slashed by 18 percent. 

“Reclamation does not take these actions lightly or do so easily. We do so because it is necessary, protecting the system and implementing the agreements we have in place,” Bureau of Reclamation Deputy Commissioner Camille Touton said in a news conference.

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  Atlas, Boston Dynamics' humanoid research platform, is all scratched up after some parkour practice. [credit: Boston Dynamics ]

New Boston Dynamics video alert!

The robot developer and YouTube sensation is giving us another peek at its robot-building efforts, this time by having its humanoid robotics research platform, Atlas, do some more parkour. Besides releasing a highly polished video, the company also posted a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to get a robot to jump through an obstacle course. It's the best look at Atlas we've gotten yet and shows incredible footage of manufacturing, software, and repairs—plus some gnarly wipeouts when the stunts don't go according to plan.

This is the third video we've seen of Atlas doing parkour, and you might wonder why Boston Dynamics is so obsessed with making its robots jump on boxes and do backflips. Atlas does parkour for the same reason car companies do motorsports. Using sports to push the performance boundaries of a machine leads to the development of better parts and techniques, and the tests have a trickle-down effect for consumer products. Just as motorsport has led to the creation of all-wheel drive, disc brakes, and tons of safety features for production cars, teaching Atlas to do backflips will hopefully result in better robots from Boston Dynamics.