Month: August 2024

Enlarge / A thing that exists through ROM hacking, and ROMHacking.net: Super Mario Land 2, in color. (credit: Nintendo/Toruzz)

If there was something wrong with an old game, or you wanted to make a different version of it, and you wanted people to help you fix that, you typically did that on RomHacking.net. After this week, you'll have to go elsewhere.

For nearly 20 years, the site has been home to some remarkable remakes, translations, fix-ups, and experiments. Star Fox running at 60 fps, Super Mario Land 2 in color, a fix for Super Mario 64's bad smoke, even a Pac-Man "demake" that Namco spiffed up and resold—and that's not even counting the stuff that was pulled down by corporate cease-and-desist actions. It's a remarkable collection, one that encompasses both very obscure and mainstream games and well worth preserving.

Preserved it will be, but it seems that the RomHacking site will not go on further. The site's founder posted a sign-off statement to the site Thursday night, one that in turn praised the community, decried certain members of it, and looked forward to what will happen with "the next generation."

Enlarge / NZXT's subscription program charges $169/month for this build. (credit: NZXT)

NZXT, which sells gaming PCs, components, and peripherals, has a subscription program that charges a monthly fee to rent one of its gaming desktops. Subscribers don't own the computers and receive an upgraded rental system every two years.

NZXT's Flex program subscription prices range from $49 to $169 per month, depending on the specs of the system, as you can see below:

The footnote is: "Specs of PCs subject to change based on availability." (credit: NZXT)

There's also a one-time setup and shipping fee for the rentals that totals $50. NZXT says it will "likely" charge subscribers a separate fee if they return the rental without the original box and packaging (NZXT hasn't disclosed how much).

Enlarge / Some solar panels, along with a diagram of a perovskite's crystal structure. (credit: Subhakitnibhat Kewiko)

As the price of silicon panels has continued to come down, we've reached the point where they're a small and shrinking cost of building a solar farm. That means that it might be worth spending more to get a panel that converts more of the incoming sunlight to electricity, since it allows you to get more out of the price paid to get each panel installed. But silicon panels are already pushing up against physical limits on efficiency. Which means our best chance for a major boost in panel efficiency may be to combine silicon with an additional photovoltaic material.

Right now, most of the focus is on pairing silicon with a class of materials called perovskites. Perovskite crystals can be layered on top of silicon, creating a panel with two materials that absorb different areas of the spectrum—plus, perovskites can be made from relatively cheap raw materials. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to make perovskites that are both high-efficiency and last for the decades that the silicon portion will.

Lots of labs are attempting to change that, though. And two of them reported some progress this week, including a perovskite/silicon system that achieved 34 percent efficiency.

Enlarge / Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during an interview at Bloomberg House on the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

OpenAI is facing increasing pressure to prove it's not hiding AI risks after whistleblowers alleged to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the AI company's non-disclosure agreements had illegally silenced employees from disclosing major safety concerns to lawmakers.

In a letter to OpenAI yesterday, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded evidence that OpenAI is no longer requiring agreements that could be "stifling" its "employees from making protected disclosures to government regulators."

Specifically, Grassley asked OpenAI to produce current employment, severance, non-disparagement, and non-disclosure agreements to reassure Congress that contracts don't discourage disclosures. That's critical, Grassley said, so that it will be possible to rely on whistleblowers exposing emerging threats to help shape effective AI policies safeguarding against existential AI risks as technologies advance.

Enlarge / AI-generated image by FLUX.1 dev: "A beautiful queen of the universe holding up her hands, face in the background." (credit: FLUX.1)

On Thursday, AI-startup Black Forest Labs announced the launch of its company and the release of its first suite of text-to-image AI models, called FLUX.1. The German-based company, founded by researchers who developed the technology behind Stable Diffusion and invented the latent diffusion technique, aims to create advanced generative AI for images and videos.

The launch of FLUX.1 comes about seven weeks after Stability AI's troubled release of Stable Diffusion 3 Medium in mid-June. Stability AI's offering faced widespread criticism among image-synthesis hobbyists for its poor performance in generating human anatomy, with users sharing examples of distorted limbs and bodies across social media. That problematic launch followed the earlier departure of three key engineers from Stability AI—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz—who went on to found Black Forest Labs along with latent diffusion co-developer Patrick Esser and others.

Black Forest Labs launched with the release of three FLUX.1 text-to-image models: a high-end commercial "pro" version, a mid-range "dev" version with open weights for non-commercial use, and a faster open-weights "schnell" version ("schnell" means quick or fast in German). Black Forest Labs claims its models outperform existing options like Midjourney and DALL-E in areas such as image quality and adherence to text prompts.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia’s acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, for potential antitrust violations, said a person familiar with discussions the government agency has had with third parties.

The DoJ has asked market participants about the competitive impact of the transaction, which Nvidia announced in April. The price was not disclosed but a report from TechCrunch estimated it at $700 million.

The scope of the probe remains unclear, the person said. But the DoJ has inquired about matters including whether the deal could quash emerging competition in the up-and-coming sector and entrench Nvidia’s dominant market position.

Enlarge / There is something so wonderfully obscene about having a town with hundreds of people living their lives, running into conflict, hoping for better, and your omnipotent self is stuck on which bookcase best fits this living room corner. (credit: YesBox)

Naming a game must be incredibly hard. How many more Dark Fallen Journeys and Noun: Verb of the Noun games can fit into the market? And yet certain games just appear with a near-perfect, properly descriptive label.

Metropolis 1998 is just such a game, telling you what you'll be doing, how it will look and feel, and what era it harkens back to. You can verify this with its "pre-alpha" demo on Steam and Itch.io. There's plenty more to come, but what is already in place is impressive. And it's simply pleasant to play, especially if you're the type who wants to make something entirely yours. Not just "put the park inside the commercial district," but The Sims-style "choose which wood color for the dining room table in a living room you framed up yourself."

You start out in a big field with no features (yet) and the sounds of birds chirping. Once you lay down a road, you can add things at a few different levels. You can, SimCity-style, simply plot out colored zones and let the people figure it out themselves. You can add pre-made buildings individually. Or you can really get in there, spacing out individual rooms, choosing the doors and windows and objects inside, and realizing how hard it is to shape multi-floor houses so the roof doesn't look grotesque. You can save the filled-out house for later reuse or just hold on to its core aspects as a blueprint.