Author: Kyle Orland

Update: Nintendo has answered some frequently asked questions as a follow up to yesterday's announcement of the NES Mini. Apparently, the system will not accept any external media, connect to the Internet, or ever officially support anything other than the 30 games included. Nintendo refused to discuss technical specifications of the device, including use of emulation of graphical effects like artificial CRT scanlines.

And it can now be be pre-ordered in the UK for £49.99 from Amazon, with November 11 as the scheduled release date.

Original Story

So you want to play Pokemon Go, but you're stuck at the office and/or too lazy to get up and walk around? You could go to the trouble of jury-rigging an elaborate Pokemon Go emulator on your PC. Or you could just go on Twitch and help control a similar emulator with a few hundred strangers.

Yes, nearly two years after Twitch Plays Pokemon first hit the scene, the idea has now evolved into Twitch Plays Pokemon Go, a new stream (from a different creator) that lets users collaborate on the mobile-gaming hit. Players vote on what area of the screen to tap using an alphanumeric grid system, with a new command entered every few seconds. The stream can even virtually walk around the map using some GPS spoofing (sorry, no Segway-powered robots here... yet).

The stream creators over at HackNY say they realize that this method of playing is technically against the game's terms of service. "If Niantic or Nintendo wish to ban the account that we're playing with we would understand, but we assume they know this is all in good fun," they write in the stream's description.

Given enough time, and enough focused ingenuity, any copy protection method can probably be circumvented. For the latest evidence of this truism, look no further than the Sega Saturn. A hacker has developed an external, plug-in solution that lets the two-decade-old system play games off a generic USB drive, without the need for heavy internal hardware modifications like a soldered, hard-to-find mod chip or a full disc drive replacement.

The news comes via this fascinating 27-minute video that outlines how a hacker going by the handle Dr. Abrasive spent years looking for a way past the system's particularly robust disc-checking scheme. To prevent regular old CD-Rs from working on the system, Sega had the Saturn disc drive check for a microscopic "wobble" pattern etched into the outer edge of the game disc itself (a CD-R's pre-set spiral pattern makes replicating the pattern with a regular CD burner pretty impossible).

In addition, the Saturn has an extra CPU dedicated exclusively to handling the CD sub-system. Before now, that CPU has been a frustrating black box for hardware hackers; they could send commands and get data, but they couldn't decipher its inner workings to try to develop a workaround. Even opening the chip up to examine the ROM via microscope failed, thanks to an implant ROM process Sega used in creating the chip.

It has been a full two-and-a-half years now since we first saw the game-playing TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot) take full control of a Super Mario World cartridge. In that time, you would think we would have gotten tired of seeing the machine mangle classic games using nothing but data sent through the controller ports on actual gaming hardware.

Then last week's Summer Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon came along, and on Saturday, TASBot showed off its newfound ability to beat Super Mario Bros. 3 in less than a second (the marathon run had some padding, so it's actually visible to the audience). Our jaws were on the floor once again. There must be some sort of trick. How in the world is this possible?

Exploiting a decades-old hardware bug

TASBot's newest bit of game-breaking magic relies on the vagaries of the NES' DPCM (differential pulse code modulation) sound channel. This one-bit data stream was used to play extremely basic audio samples in select games, including Super Mario Bros. 3.

If you didn't jump on the VR bandwagon the very second Oculus announced the availability of its $599 (£499) Rift headset back in January, you may have ended up waiting months for your ticket to the virtual world. Now, Oculus says that waiting is over, and the company has cleared out the backlog of pre-orders over the last few months. New Oculus Rift orders are expected to ship within two to four business days, according to an announcement blog post.

The ability to keep up with demand has been a long time coming for Oculus, which faced an "unexpected component shortage" that delayed many early shipments shortly after the official March launch. The company offered free shipping to pre-orderers to make up for the early problems.

The $799 (£689) HTC Vive, which started shipping in April, saw backorders pushed back to June shipment but is now available for immediate shipping from HTC's website. It's hard to directly compare demand for the two units, though, without solid knowledge of how many units both headset makers were able to supply.

Sometime over the weekend, Niantic's Pokémon Go went from being a fun time waster for nostalgic Nintendo fans to a bona fide viral hit that's drawing mainstream media coverage and questions from well-meaning but confused parents. The humble geolocation game has shot to No. 1 on the iTunes App Store download and earnings lists and is already threatening to surpass Twitter in daily users on Android devices. Nintendo stock is up about 25 percent today on news of the game's success, and Spotify says all five of its most-streamed songs over the past week have been Pokémon-related.

This is officially a phenomenon.

In the wake of the game's stratospheric success, you could already sense a few embryonic media storylines brewing over the weekend. Here are some of the major angles we can already see developing around Pokémon Go and some instant, skeptical analysis you can break out when you want to show off your industry smarts at your next dinner party.

Long time readers may recall that we used to pay close attention to the monthly drops of US game and console sales information provided by the industry analysts at the NPD Group. We've stopped covering those reports as closely in recent years for a couple of reasons. The first is that NPD has taken steps to drastically limit the amount of information that it provides to the public, making these monthly reports less and less useful.

The more important reason, though, is that NPD data only includes estimates of retail, packaged game sales. In a gaming world that's dominated more and more by revenue from digital downloads, the retail-only NPD reports have become misleading at best and useless at worst.

Today, NPD announced an important step towards improving its data. Starting with its June report (to be released on July 21), NPD data will include digital sales reported directly from some of the industry's biggest publishers. Activison Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Electronic Arts, Square Enix, Take-Two Interactive, and Warner Bros. Interactive will now tell NPD how many games they're selling on Xbox Live, PSN, and Steam every month.

Back in 2014, we marveled at the announcement of the Analogue Nt, a heavily modified version of the original Nintendo Entertainment System with a solid aluminum case and an even more solid starting price: $500. We’ve been playing with our loaner unit for a few months now, and we’ve come away impressed with this sleek, modern love letter to classic gaming. While the price will put it beyond all but the most dedicated retro gaming hobbyists, we’re glad a product made with such obvious care and devotion exists for those who value authenticity and style above all else.

Before you go comparing apples to oranges, let’s be clear about what the Analogue Nt is not. It’s not one of those gray-market “Famiclone” systems that uses knock-off chips and provides “close enough” compatibility with most NES and Famicom cartridges (see our review of the Generation NEX for an example). It’s also not a system that uses an Android-based software emulator to run legitimate cartridges (like the Retron 5) or ROMs loaded onto an SD card. And it’s not one of those do-it-yourself kits that upgrades an existing NES with more modern features.

At its core, the Analogue Nt is actually a Famicom, the original Japanese version of the NES. Designer Christopher Taber tells Ars he sourced the system’s internals from “a large quantity of HVC-001 Famicom systems that were in cosmetically undesirable/unsellable condition.” That means the CPU and PPU that power the Analogue Nt were produced by Nintendo to run Famicom software about three decades ago. This means in turn that, unlike some other modern hardware that runs NES cartridges, the Analogue Nt should be compatible with any and all of the hundreds of NES/Famicom cartridges in existence with perfect accuracy (every game we’ve been able to test has run flawlessly). The Analogue’s authentic core also means it can take the Japan-only Famicom Disk System as an attachment. We haven’t tested that, but it’s an important feature for a certain subset of collectors.

With so many important news stories fighting for our attention these days, it can be hard to get people to care about a simple gaming crowdfunding effort. But sometimes a crowdfunding publicity stunt breaks through the noise and turns into something you have to gawk at.

Richard Garriott selling vials of his blood for thousands of dollars is one of those stunts.

Yes, Lord British himself, the 55-year-old creator of the Ultima series and noted space tourist, is auctioning off samples of his actual blood to raise money for his new fantasy RPG, Shroud of the Avatar. The six reliquaries—which we'll note again are full of Richard Garriott's actual blood—are being marketed as limited-run art pieces, "made of bakelite, copper, nails, glass, and mirrored glass that can be hung on your wall."

Probably only the oldest of old-school online gamers can remember playing Habitat, an MMO that ran on the Commodore 64's Quantum Link online service starting way back in 1986. The early LucasArts classic (dating back to the days when the company was still called LucasFilm Games) went offline in 1988, living on briefly as the revamped Club Caribe and in a short-lived Japan-exclusive version under electronics maker Fujitsu.

Now, after years of work by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment and some partners, the source code for that early experiment in online game design has been fully preserved and posted on Github.

The effort to revive Habitat began back in 2013, when MADE was researching a "History of LucasArts" exhibit for the 2014 Game Developers Conference. As part of that effort, MADE recruited original designers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer to help decipher old bits of PL/1 code and 6502 Assembly.