Kushan

@JJtheTexan It's also worth knowing that "Deep Blue" isn't considered a particularly good Chess AI by today's standards. I'm sure I remember testing out one called Fritz or something many years ago that's claim to fame was it could beat Deep Blue while running on commodity hardware.

I thought this was an April fools, but it seem legit. Damn.

Interesting, my understanding is the Agelix 5 is about 2.5x as powerful as the Cyclone V, but it's hard to put into perspective what that means for an FPGA. Is it a linear uplift, or is it more complex?

If the PS1/N64 is about the limits of the Cyclone V, could the Agelix 5 ever hope to emulate the PS2, given that's something like 15x more powerful than a PS1? (I mean it uses the PS1 CPU for the sound alone!).

@KingMike you're about half right. The PS3 had an "OtherOS' mode that let you install Linux, which Sony removed in a later update (and the PS3Slim). That bright extra scrutiny to the system.

Fail0verflow then discovered the critical flaw in Sony's private key generation (there's a fantastic ccc presentation you can watch on this if you're interested) that meant you could figure out the private signing key. Geohot used their work to derive and publish that root key.

The PSN shutdown was not a DDOS, but rather due to how far reaching this was - with those private keys you essentially had full access to the network. Sony has to take it down while they worked on a way to fix all the damage.

The 360 has to be one of the most underrated consoles ever made. Even moreso than the Dreamcast. It raised the bar for gaming in a myriad of ways and the fact that it has taken until 2025 to create a software exploit like this is telling.

Meanwhile, the PS3 had a USB updating exploit back in ~2011, patched now of course but due to a MASSIVE blunder on Sony's end.

EA hasn't treated the C&C franchise particularly well but I'll give them credit they've been pretty decent to the community. They've given plenty of fan projects to keep the games going their blessing, released C&C and RA as freeware and now this.

Isn't R for "redial"?

Woah, this is a welcome surprise! I loved the Dino Crisis games, many fond memories of the first and second game.

I am ever hopeful Capcom gives them the remaster treatment, I think they'd benefit from it a lot and be a good excuse to revisit the franchise.

Wow, I haven't really been following this that closely as Sega doesn't have a huge amount of Nostalgia for me, but that promotional video was incredibly cringeworthy.

Yeah, everything about this feels fishy. Don't let nostalgia cloud your judgement here.

Weird timing for this article? The issue occurred over a month ago - the embedded tweet is even listed as September 1st. It has long since been resolved and now two batches of Mister Pi's have shipped.

IANAL, but I'm fairly sure companies have a legal responsibility to protect their own copyright, otherwise it can expire.

I have no idea why they think Sega would have no issues with this. The only reason Sega's lawyers won't have been in touch is because they're not actually trying to sell anything. Yet.

There's some irony in a lot of these comments, complaining about elitism within the FPGA scene while decrying that software Emulators are just as good and much cheaper. I hope the irony isn't lost on those folks.

I managed to pick up a Mister Pi in the first batch and have been playing with it for a few days now. I am definitely a "casual" when it comes to playing games, I'm not super sensitive to any latency added via emulation and I'm not precious about authenticity and junk like that - though I appreciate some folks are and I can understand why.

I wasn't going to fork out $400+ on a MiSTER setup but I was curious about the difference, having used software emulators quite happily for decades now so this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

And you know what? I like it. I like it a lot. It could well just be that out of the box, given the MiSTER ecosystem is very focussed on emulating games in a particular way that the mostly default settings and filters are just very well curated and I'm sure you could achieve similar results with various software emulators but I really liked how things "felt", I really enjoyed how they looked (especially with some of the built in filters) and it certainly was more pleasing to the eyes than I've ever managed to make RetroArch or similar look. Maybe that's enough to justify these devices, I don't know.

I'm still going to be using software emulation a lot, I love having my favourite games on my Steam Deck and I'm certainly not lugging an FPGA on holiday with me any time soon, but I'm definitely much more understanding of why people like these FPGA devices and appreciate everything that has gone into making them a possibility, the software and now the drive to get the price down.

I have no horse in this race, but as a software engineer myself I am a big believer in "release early, release often". I can understand the mentality of not wanting to release something until it's "perfect", especially given the goals of the FPGA work, but perfect is the enemy of good and the faster you get feedback on something, the faster you'll be able to get it to that "perfect" state. I know it gets a bad rep, but it's what "agile" software development is meant to be about; moving quickly, getting fast feedback and iterating lots.

I completely get why Molyneux gets a lot of hate due to how he overhypes his games, but I don't think it's fair to claim that all of his games are terrible or bad. They often didn't live up to expectations because he put far too high an expectation on them but if you hadn't seen all the hype and just played the games, they were more often than not really good and worth playing.

Black & White, Syndicate, Theme Park, Populous, Fable, Dungeon Keeper - nobody can honestly say these weren't great games, they were all a joy in their own way and did a lot of unique and creative things.

Err....I'm no expert, but what I'm reading on the linked twitter post and what I'm seeing speculated in the article are quite a jump away from each other.

The Xbox 360 wouldn't let you plug any ol' hard drive into it,
even if you opened the HDD shell and put a different drive into it - it has to have a signed security sector. We can rip those security sectors from official drives and copy them onto 3rd party hard drives to make cheaper (than official) 360 drives easily enough, but only in sizes that match the officially available drives. I did this myself years ago, turning my 20gb HDD into a cheap 120GB model by putting a cheapo 120gb laptop HDD into the shell and doing some copying/formatting with an adapter.

What I am gathering from this post is that someone has managed to get an SSD to report to the Xbox 360 with one of those security sectors, so it can be used like it's an official drive. Which is pretty cool as this previously only worked for Hard Drives.

However, aside from being able to use an SSD instead of an HDD, I don't believe this bypasses any security on the 360 that wasn't already bypassed. It doesn't get anyone any closer to being able to run homebrew on an unmodified 360 because even back in the day you could stick plug your 360 Hard Drive into your PC (with an adapter as mentioned) and read/write the contents to it all you wanted.

All this is, which is not to understate or undervalue the work as it's still very cool, is a way of using SSDs on an Xbox 360 instead of a HDD.

I don't think Retro Bench exists anymore, fyi

Classic Nintendo, giving fans terrible ports while suing those trying to give fans good ports.

Interesting development, I'd be keen to play the original again. I wonder if it will be just the original or Directors Cut or some other version?

Hopefully it's not a badly emulated PSX port like the MGS collection was.

There is precedent for this:

Turing Pi
Orange Pi
Banana Pi
Pine64 (Which isn't ARM, either)

I'm super excited for these developments. I'm looking to get into FPGA gaming but was always put off by the cost. This seems ideal.

Am I being dumb, but is there a link to the actual translation instead of just the excerpts?

@sdelfin I'd never even heard of Metal Warriors before, but the game looks baller! Definitely not confusing it, it was 100% Cybernator that I played as a kid.

That's what I am wondering! Sadly it has been a couple of decades since I last saw the cart, I'm not sure where it would have ended up.

@Damo I definitely remember the anime pictures being in the game, I played it a lot and their absence later has always been something that has bothered me. I remember staring at the back of the box as well as I was sure it contained hidden secrets (Or maybe they just spelled Napalm wrong!).

The game I bought was used, as we couldn't afford new games so it's entirely possible I had a rogue review copy (I don't remember there being anything special about the cartridge that would suggest such a thing).

So I made an account just to post this comment because I'm very confused about something.

I had a SNES as a kid and owned a copy of Cybernator, it was a great little game and I was a huge fan of it. It's only relatively recently did I learn that it was known as Assault Suit Valken in Japan and only recently that I've learned about the censorship of the western versions.

But here's the weird thing, one of the censorships is the removal of the anime profile pictures in-mission - but the version I had as a kid, which was definitely Cybernator and definitely in English, also definitely had the anime profile pictures.

I distinctly remember this because years later as I got into emulation I tried out the game and was disappointed that the pictures were missing - I thought it was an emulator bug (fairly common in the early 2000's) and didn't think much of it but now years later people are discussing this game and it seems like I may have inadvertently had some special copy.

I couldn't tell you if the other censored elements had been changed, I would have been fairly young at the time. I definitely don't remember ever seeing the president or "that" scene but I'd love to know if there was a known English release of the game with the anime pictures because I swear I had it.