Month: April 2022

Enlarge / The Infinite Mac project emulating a classic System 7 Mac. (credit: Infinite Mac)

For retro computing enthusiasts, there's no substitute for unearthing ancient hardware and computing like it's 1999. But as with old video games, emulation offers a much more convenient way to run old software. Now, running System 7 or Mac OS 8 on a virtual 68k Mac is more convenient than ever, thanks to a clever project dubbed "Infinite Mac."

What makes the project unique isn't necessarily the fact that it's browser-based; it has been possible to run old DOS, Windows, and Mac OS versions in browser windows for quite a while now. Instead, it's the creative solutions that developer Mihai Parparita has come up with to enable persistent storage, fast download speeds, reduced processor usage, and file transfers between the classic Mac and whatever host system you're running it on. Parparita details some of his work in this blog post.

Beginning with a late 2017 browser-based port of the Basilisk II emulator, Parparita wanted to install old apps to more faithfully re-create the experience of using an old Mac, but he wanted to do it without requiring huge downloads or running as a separate program as the Macintosh.js project does. To solve the download problem, Parparita compressed the disk image and broke it up into 256K chunks that are downloaded on demand rather than up front.

Enlarge (credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii)

The nearby volcano blackened the sky and swallowed the city in clouds of ash; centuries later, robot dogs now prowl the ruins, guarding the city's dead against the ravages of time.

That’s not a movie plot. It’s what’s actually happening at the 2,000-year-old Roman ruins of Pompeii, in Southern Italy. Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, Spot, will help archaeologists and preservation crews by patrolling the 66-hectare site for signs of erosion, damage, and looting.

“They’re good dogs, Brent”

The volcanic ash that buried Pompeii in 79 CE turned a thriving Roman coastal city into a well-preserved tomb—and a time capsule. Today, the archaeological site is one of the most famous in the world, and it continues to reveal new glimpses of life in a cosmopolitan Roman city during the empire’s heyday, like an ancient fast-food counter excavated in 2020.

Enlarge / Stretch is ready for warehouse work. (credit: Boston Dynamics)

Boston Dynamics has launched its second commercial robot. After launching its four-legged robot dog, Spot, on the market in 2020 for $75,000, it's now showing off the commercial version of Stretch, a warehouse box-moving robot that is now available for purchase.

Stretch was introduced in prototype form in March 2021, and after a year of on-the-job trials and more development, it has been refined into a real commercial product. The purpose of the bot is still the same: it's a box mover. Stretch is a warehouse worker that is meant to quickly take over unloading trucks, depalletizing boxes, and building orders without any need to build additional infrastructure.

Box-moving arms are nothing new, but usually they are stationary, which means you have to bolt them to the floor in a specific spot and design your warehouse around the robot location. Stretch is mounted on a big, wheeled base, so it has more human-like flexibility in what it can do throughout the day. You can have Stretch drive right into a truck and do some box unloading in the morning and then move on to the order building later in the afternoon. The base is the same size as a pallet, so it can go just about anywhere in a warehouse.

Enlarge / E2M1 has never looked so cool. Welcome to the ray-traced Doom experience. (credit: id Software)

Since the launch of Quake II RTX in 2019, fans have kept their eyes peeled for similar ray- and path-tracing updates for other classic '90s shooters. It's fertile upgrade territory, since modern machines push vanilla versions of Doom and Quake to over 1,000 fps by default—that's wiggle room for computationally expensive lighting techniques—but those games's official handlers haven't really moved the ray-tracing needle.

Instead, Friday's good news comes from the Doom community: The first three episodes of Doom 1 (1993) can now be played with top-to-bottom ray tracing enabled. Yes, I know, I see the date at the top of this article, but I swear: I installed and tested Doom within the new PRBoom+RT engine, and the results have not only looked quite good but felt surprisingly performative.

• 

  E1M1 hits differently with ray tracing enabled. (Note: This is with bloom set to its default, overwhelming setting. This looks even better with bloom toned down.)

That is helped in large part by native support within the new engine for both Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR. While you wouldn't need either to run vanilla Doom, both of these upscaling systems help in a ray tracing update because they also shrink the base resolution of so many realistically rendered light bounces. The upscaling toggle makes a big performance difference: On my default testing rig (RTX 3080 Ti, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X overclocked), the "DLSS quality" toggle at 2160p resolution increases ray-tracing performance nearly 100 percent compared to a raw 2160p signal, from 33 fps to 61 fps in E1M1. You can scrape even more frames by playing around with lower-resolution DLSS and FSR settings.

Enlarge / Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. (credit: Jason Connolly-Pool/Getty Images)

The Biden administration slapped a new round of sanctions on Russia, with a focus on technology companies that support the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Among the sanctioned companies is Mikron, Russia's largest chipmaker.

“We will continue to target Putin’s war machine with sanctions from every angle until this senseless war of choice is over,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in the Treasury Department's press release announcing the action.

Many of Mikron's chips are used in bank cards, identification cards, and RFID tags. The company also manufactures power management chips. In addition to supplying technology for Russian military operations, the US says Mikron is responsible for a majority of Russia's chip exports. So hobbling the company could help starve Russia of the hard currency it needs to pay for imports.

Enlarge / While some see NFT games like Axie Infinity as the future of gaming, the IGDA is increasingly worried about the ethical issues inherent to the space.

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA), a professional group of thousands of game makers from around the world, is increasingly concerned that the "ethical issues" surrounding the use of non-fungible tokens in gaming represents a "socio-political explosion waiting to happen." That's according to Dr. Jakin Vela, the founder of social justice-focused gaming nonprofit Games for Me. Vela was recently named interim director of the IGDA.

In an interview with Ars, Vela expanded on the IGDA's "call to action" statement on NFTs in gaming from last July. That statement was critical of the technology and focused on the "energy inefficient methods" inherent to the proof-of-work blockchains that dominate the cryptocurrency and NFT space. "NFTs should never be used [by game developers] when a simple and far less costly database table can be managed to provide the same information and benefits," the group said.

The IGDA's Climate Special Interest Group also compiled a growing list of arguments against NFTs in gaming. That document notes that gaming communities and game developers are largely uninterested in the technology, with 70 percent of game makers saying in a recent survey that they have no interest in using NFTs in their upcoming projects.

Enlarge / A 0.96-inch PC monitor. (credit: mitxela/YouTube)

When you think of a display that connects to its source over HDMI, you probably think of the TV in your living room, your desktop monitor, or maybe even a smaller display, like a portable monitor. You probably don't think of an OLED PC monitor that measures 0.96 of an inch diagonally.

While acknowledging the limited uses for a tiny HDMI PC monitor, maker mitxela had the urge to get a 128×68 dot matrix OLED screen up and running as a PC monitor that connects directly to its system. The maker described the creation as the "smallest and worst HDMI display ever."

A small OLED screen isn't special on its own. Makers use them for all sorts of projects, like DIY smartwatches, message boards, or weather displays, for example. What makes mitxela's project unique is that it turns the OLED panel into a standard PC monitor that can be plugged into the PC's HDMI port directly—no Arduino or microcontroller required.

Enlarge / You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a WRX, but it's actually the new Toyota GR Corolla. (credit: Toyota)

By and large, Toyota is known for dependable but boring cars. But among the millions of RAV4s and Camrys, there is evidence of a wilder streak. There's the Supra, of course, which is flashy in a way that few cars are today. And there's the GR Yaris, which was designed to homologate a rally car before a rule change rendered it obsolete.

"GR" stands for Gazoo Racing, and it seems that the GR magic transformed the Yaris into a cult favorite. Toyota didn't sell this little three-cylinder, all-wheel-drive pocket rocket in the US market, but it will bring the follow-up, the GR Corolla, to the country. The GR Corolla is also powered by a turbocharged 1.6 L three-cylinder engine and features AWD, and it goes on sale later this year.

Like the GR Yaris, the GR Corolla is built at a special factory in Motomachi, Japan, as opposed to being made at the normal Corolla line at the company's Takaoka plant. The car's body has been strengthened with stronger welds and adhesives, and buyers get the option of a forged carbon-fiber roof to save weight where it really counts.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The last time Western sanctions hit Russia after it annexed Crimea, President Vladimir Putin turned to Huawei to rebuild and upgrade the territory’s communication infrastructure. Now, the controversial Chinese technology company is positioned to aid the Putin regime on a much larger scale, despite the threat of Washington hitting it with more sanctions.

In Crimea, Russia “ripped out Western telecom gear in the heavily militarized territory and replaced it with Huawei and ZTE,” said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, a telecoms expert at the European Centre for International Political Economy. If Nokia and Ericsson do fully exit Russia, Moscow would “need Chinese companies more than ever, especially Huawei,” he said.

Despite an initial plunge in phone shipments, Huawei has been an early winner from the Ukraine war. Its phone sales in Russia rose 300 percent in the first two weeks of March, while other Chinese brands Oppo and Vivo also recorded triple-digit sales increases, according to analysts at MTS, Russia’s largest mobile operator.