Microsoft just released four original Xbox games on PC as part of its efforts to bring backwards compatibility to the platform. For years, Xbox consoles have enjoyed a similar luxury, with the latest Series X|S systems being able to play two-decade-old OG Xbox titles. However, to achieve this on PC, Microsoft used a native x86 version of its in-house Xbox 360 emulator. As you might expect, modders were quick to pounce on the opportunity to run 360 games on PC, with "varying degrees of success" so far.

How do you log in to your PC?

The discovery was initially made when data miners looked at the package contents of these backwards-compatible titles. Neo Te Aika found out that they were packaged as standard Games on Demand, or GOD files, which is the official file format used by Xbox 360 hardware. A GOD package contains the actual game, its headers, and DRM. By using a GOD extractor, modders were able to open them and convert them into a base ISO that can be played with an emulator, or on a jailbroken Xbox 360. All this would be a huge development on its own.

What followed, though, has the potential to change the original Xbox and Xbox 360 emulation scene forever. Nathan on X scoured through those same files to find something called Xe03. Also called Fission, Xe03 is Microsoft's official Xbox 360 emulator that comes baked into the Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles for backwards compatibility.

Within the Xbox 360 environment, Microsoft already had another emulator called XeFu, or Fusion, that emulates the original Xbox. So, it's basically an emulator within an emulator. That's how modern Xbox consoles have been able to play OG Xbox titles. To Xe03, it's just opening a standard Xbox 360 package, but the binary inside is coded to launch XeFu, which then takes over to run the original Xbox game

When Microsoft released backwards compatible Xbox games on PC, people expected the company to have built an x86-native OG Xbox emulator from scratch. An emulator that didn't rely on an outer layer or any external components. Instead, what Microsoft did was simply recompile Xe03 to run natively on x86 PCs instead, indirectly handing over the ultimate 360 emulator to the community.

By modifying the app container and swapping out game packages, projects like XWine1 and independent reverse-engineers bypassed the inner OG Xbox layer (Fusion) and managed to load raw Xbox 360 executables (.xex files) directly into Xe03. The results have been mixed but incredibly promising, nonetheless. The XWine1 team was able to get Plants vs. Zombies, Steins: Gate, Fuzion Frenzy, and Midnight Club: Los Angeles to boot and run with varying degrees of stability.

Fuzion Frenzy is actually one of four OG Xbox titles that Microsoft officially released so that one is particularly well-optimized. Since the hard part of reverse engineering first-party code has already been done by Microsoft, optimization remains the only challenge. As time goes on, and the specific emulator files are fine-tuned for general usage, we should expect more and more titles to run flawlessly.

Microsoft has also promised to release more official backwards compatible titles on PC, but it hasn't said anything about Xbox 360 games. Therefore, the discovery of Xe03 holds immense potential for the future of Xbox 360 emulation on PC — the community just has to focus on optimization now. This development can be particularly fruitful for handhelds that are power-constrained; Xe03 has very light minimum requirements for devices like the ROG (Xbox) Ally and Lenovo's Legion Go lineup.

Moreover, Microsoft's PC version of Xe03 also upscales the original 480p output of OG Xbox games to 4K. It also adds built-in V-Sync, anisotropic filtering, enhanced anti-aliasing, and borderless windowed modes. Since the games were distributed though the Xbox PC app, they're part of the Xbox Anywhere program so if you own the digital license of said game on console, you get it for free on PC (and other places). Microsoft will also bring Xbox Achievements support to backwards compatible titles soon.

The last two elements will likely be ignored by the modding community since the OG Xbox virtualization is the important part, enabled by the Xe03 engine that has now become the main takeaway from all this. To be clear, open-source emulators such as Xenia have existed for years and provide a highly-satisfactory Xbox emulation experience, but Microsoft's official, in-house solution should be more efficient.

What OG Xbox or 360 games would you like play on PC?

EA just announced FC 27, the latest release of its soccer franchise that it releases annually, and many players were shocked to learn that it came with a $149.99 Ultimate Plus Edition. This led to many complaints, with some comparing it to GTA VI Ultimate, which comes with extra side missions, activities, vehicles, guns, outfits, and other cosmetics, for just $99.99. However, it should be noted that FC 27 is available in three tiers — the Standard Edition for just $69.99, the Ultimate Edition, which costs $99.99, and the Ultimate Plus Edition, with its shocking $149.99 price tag.

Despite the availability of the base game at its usual price, the cost of the top-tier edition has caught the ire of many gamers. One user commented on X that they’re willing to “pay $200 for a game that’ll last 15-20 years,” while another said that EA wants “€150 for a roster update and some blue points you’ll spend on a player you’ll never use.” However, others pointed out that the $150 version is “for people who not only play it but spend money on it; 10,000 FC points is about £70/€82/$93.”

The FC franchise (previously known as FIFA) has been around for over 30 years now, with EA releasing a new title annually since 1994. That means fans have to pay at least $70 every year if they want to stay updated with the latest team rosters. This might be too much for some people, but hardcore fans seem not to mind spending that amount just to be able to have their favorite players on their team. In fact, they might even consider the $149.99 Ultimate Plus Edition good value as the $80 premium comes with 10,000 FC Points spread out over five months, five seasons of Premium Pass, and several other goodies. By comparison, FC 26 lists 12,000 FC Points for $99.99.

Even though gamers get additional value from the most expensive edition of FC 27, it still did not sit well with some people. Aside from that, they’re comparing it to the GTA franchise, with Rockstar continuously dropping updates to GTA Online for more than a decade, even for those who only purchased the game once. But even though EA did not change the price of the base game (and even the mid-tier Ultimate Edition), the fact that they’re asking more than double the price of the cheapest option is what caught the ire of the public, especially as the current FC 26 has mixed reviews on Steam.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has a rich history when it comes to modding and tinkering, but we're pretty confident the community has never seen anything like this. Created by Dryxio, this new mod combines GTA Vice City, GTA San Andreas, and GTA III into one multiversal entity interconnected through real-time, fully functional portals that let you travel between the three different games as if it were just a regular window.

The video above showcases just how insane this mod really is. It starts with CJ on Grove Street in San Andreas shooting at NPCs in different parts of the game (The Strip). Then, he moves toward the pink portal, shoots at NPCs once again, and just casually goes through it to end up in GTA Vice City as Tommy Vercetti. He wreaks havoc, walks back to the portal, and crosses through to Vice City as CJ, only to go to GTA III and repeat the same thing there.

The craziest part is how these portals genuinely act as windows to another world where you can stand in one game and shoot inside the other one. It's unclear whether there's a limit to the level of interaction, like if you can't drive cars through them, but it's impressive, nonetheless. The video also shows how you can place these portals anywhere in the world in any of the three games yourself.

All of this begs the question: how? The modder explains that all three games are running simultaneously inside one process, sharing one Direct3D device. Each portal is a live GPU texture; there's no video capture to fake the realism, and the transition to each game happens in real-time via an engine swap. When you walk through a portal, it simply switches to that game's engine while the others keep running in the background.

Each game and its world retain full native functionality such as its own AI, traffic, physics, saves, missions, and even settings. There's no loading screen when you use the portals either; you enter the world on the other side instantly, just the way you saw it before going through. This is largely possible because the source code of each game has been reverse-engineered and recompiled using an open-source engine.

Dryxio modified re3 and reVC — community projects that decompile the original source code of GTA III and Vice City into clean, readable C++ code — and used plugin-sdk to interface with San Andreas. Since these games used the proprietary RenderWare engine that can't render multiple spatial scenes together, an open-source reimplementation of it called librw was used to compile all three games into a single unified process.

The mod isn't publicly available at the moment, but you can bet everyone in the community now has their eyes on it. It's by far the most technically complex GTA mod ever, one that doesn't even require any understanding of software to grasp its ambition. There's also the elephant in the room known as Rockstar Games that could see this as copyright infringement and order it to be taken down, but for now, it lives as proof of human ingenuity (and vibe-coding).

Xbox has announced a new Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC program, which will let gamers play a selection of classic Xbox titles on PCs and handhelds, a move the company says marks the beginning of a bigger push into Xbox game preservation. The announcement begins with four titles that can now be played on PCs and handhelds, including the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X.

"This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation" Jason Ronald. Alongside backward compatibility, the company says games will also include new features. The four titles in the announcement are:

• BLiNX: The Time Sweeper 
• Conker: Live and Reloaded 
• Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge 
• Fuzion Frenzy

You can now buy all of these games on PC, and they're also included in all Xbox Game Pass plans. Anyone who already owns these titles digitally on console can also now play them on PC or handheld, with support for Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Crucially, this appears to be a digital-only preservation effort, so it won't help anyone who only owns physical copies of these games. Xbox has reportedly been testing a way to digitize physical games as far back as Xbox One, but that hasn't yet materialized yet.

Alongside the preserved original gameplay, Xbox claims these games will let users customize graphics settings, with up to 4x resolution scaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing, with more features to come in the future. Notably, Xbox will add achievements to select original Xbox games on console and PC.

Users who want to play these titles will need to meet the following system requirements:

Microsoft's emphasis on preserving older games is particularly noteworthy given recent backlash against Sony over its decision to end physical games with its next console generation, and the shuttering of some of its online stores. While Xbox's digital emphasis on game preservation still can't match the solidarity of physical media preservation, the timing of this announcement seems like more than just a coincidence.

The developers of RPCS3 have announced that their PlayStation 3 emulator’s minimum system requirements have been adjusted to include a crop of even older Radeon graphics cards. This well-regarded application already supported ATI Terascale 2 GPUs from the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series, but now gamers still cradling Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series can join in the fun. Some of these GPUs date back nearly 20 years. Please note that while RPCS3 is available for a range of platforms, this extended ATI architecture support is only for Linux users.

Fine wine on Terascale 2

Back in 2021, the RPCS3 devs lowered the emulator’s system requirements to embrace Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 (Terascale 2) series graphics cards. In the subsequent five years, the emulator has been tuned to improve performance on hardware from these generations. An example provided asserts that when using Persona 5 as a benchmark, performance in Kamoshida’s Castle went from 35 to 49 FPS between 2021 and today (on a PC system with an ATI Radeon HD 5850, AMD FX-8350 CPU, and 8GB of RAM).

Inspired Terascale 1 experiments

Success spurred the devs to investigate TeraScale 1 performance and compatibility. Some OpenGL wrangling ensued due to TeraScale 1 GPUs only reporting OpenGL 3.3 and GLSL 3.30 support, but getting these old and unloved ATI cards to work with the RPCS3 OpenGL renderer was surprisingly simple. It was done by overriding the reported OpenGL levels to 4.3 and 4.40.

Initial tests made use of a system packing an ATI Radeon HD 4890 with 1GB of VRAM – the most powerful Terascale 1 GPU ever sold. According to the RPCS3 blog, this card has a more powerful GPU than the PS3, but the emulator’s complex shader code is not optimal for older architectures like this. Nevertheless, “Simpler games work perfectly fine, with playable performance,” notes the blog, “while games that have more complex graphics are GPU bottlenecked with subpar performance.” Screenshots show Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and Outrun Online Arcade with frame rates close to 60 FPS.

Moving down the stack and further back in time, GPUs like the ATI Radeon HD 3870 are “still able to render very simple games with playable performance in RPCS,” assert the devs. To achieve playability, you will want to dial in PSP-like resolutions, though. Specifically, 273p was mentioned.

What about the weakest TeraScale 1 GPUs? The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with a measly 256MB of VRAM even performs poorly at 273p. Screenshots from RPCS3 tests show it only managing 8 FPS in Outrun Online Arcade and 13 FPS in Portal.

With RPCS3’s progress over the last half decade, these performance numbers could also improve. In fact, the blog states that “future optimization should improve performance by quite a bit on these old GPUs.”

It looks like a good time to dust off your retro PC and try a few old PS3 classics on your ATI TeraScale 1 GPU-accelerated rig. Remember this extended graphics card support requires a Linux distro with the Mesa driver r600. Then you need to launch RCPS3 with the following environment variables: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=440 ./rpcs3.AppImage

Developer PaisleyBoxers has released Backrooms 32X, with the strap line “welcome to the cutting edge of 1994.” Yes, this is a Sega 32X game set in the Backrooms, the dingy, yellowing internet phenomenon given a huge boost with the release of the psychological horror indie film earlier this year. Despite the ancient and relatively resource–starved console platform, the devs appear to have captured the Backrooms' essence of “buzzing fluorescents, damp carpet, walls that go on too long” with a raycasting engine written from scratch in C and SH-2 assembly (with some Claude AI assistance).

Above: a slightly earlier Backrooms 32X release running on real Sega 32X hardware. Since this release, some objects can now be pushed over, and there can be chairs in the rooms.

In keeping with the Backrooms theme, this is a claustrophobic adventure game in the signature endless yellowed beige rooms setting, where you seek the exits, then another exit, and another. The game packs in procedurally generated levels, providing endless ‘fun.’ However, there are also community maps built by your fellow players. As a bonus, there’s a browser-based level editor so you can contribute to map designs, too.

When playing the game, your first-person character can crawl and crouch, squeezing through crawlspaces, maintaining Backrooms aesthetics and mechanics. A six-button (rather than a 3-button) Sega control pad is recommended if you are using original 32X hardware to enjoy full control.

Technical achievements

Probably the most noteworthy element of Backrooms 32X, though, is the technical achievement. Highlights include:

• the endless liminal space with procedurally generated levels,
• dual-CPU rendering utilizing both 32X SH-2s,
• a real raycaster rendering textured DDA walls, dynamic ceiling lighting, distance fog, thin partition walls, and half-height cubicle dividers you can see over,
• crawl and crouch — full eye-height perspective,
• and a live, not pre-rendered,  3D intro to the game.

If you are interested in Backrooms 32X, or even in playing any of the new wave of Backrooms gaming content, feel free to give this a spin. Literally free, as it is open source, available on GitHub, and a trivial 1.5MB ROM-ready download via the itch.io link we shared in the intro (version 164, released a couple of hours ago).

You don’t need an actual Sega 32X and flashcart hardware to play. PaisleyBoxers assures that Backrooms 32X also works on MiSTer FPGA, as well as 32X-capable emulators such as RetroArch, BlastEm, Ares, or Kega Fusion.

The extremely popular Woot deal that scored new customers a Nintendo Switch 2 for just $399 has returned. Right now you can grab a brand new console for just $399 thanks to an extra $50 discount at checkout. If you've used Woot before, the same code (GIFT26) will get you an extra $22 off instead, making this the cheapest Switch 2 on the market right now.

• Check out this deal at Woot

Woot is Amazon's outlet website, so you'll often see refurbished or reconditioned items for sale. However, this is a deal on a brand-new console, making it an extra special (and rare) treat.

The Nintendo Switch 2 needs no introduction. First unveiled on June 5, 2025, the ultra-popular handheld features a 7.9-inch 1080p screen, also supporting gameplay at 4K up to 120 fps when docked with a TV. You also get Joy-Con 2 controllers, which can be used in a variety of modes.

Naturally, the big allure of the Switch 2 is access to Nintendo's delightful world of IP and first-party titles, including games like Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, and, of course, games like Legend of Zelda.

More noteworthy than the Nintendo Switch 2's specs or games, however, is the price. Owing to the global AI pricing crunch that is driving up the cost of flash memory, Nintendo recently announced price hikes, bringing the MSRP of the console to $499, a $50 increase. Today's deal means you're not only avoiding that recent hike, but you're actually saving on the original $449 MSRP too. A $399 Nintendo Switch 2 will sell out fast, so don't hang around if you're interested. Even the $427 deal is the best Switch 2 for returning customers

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

A Grand Theft Auto (GTA) modder has developed a mod that lets you run Grand Theft Auto III (GTA 3) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA VC) as mini games right inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (GTA SA). The modder, DryxioGTA, demonstrated the feat in a video posted on YouTube on Thursday, running the game on a Windows virtual machine on macOS.

In the video, GTA SA’s main character, CJ, can be seen stepping up to a TV, apparently inserted into the game by the mod. Once in front of the TV, the option to start either GTA VC or GTA 3 appears. The selected mini-game immediately starts running on the TV.

Gamers can switch between controlling the main GTA SA game or the mini game, using the F10 key. When controlling the mini-game — say, GTA 3, as in the video — players can play it as normal while the rest of the outer SA game continues to run, with characters roaming about. Similarly, switching control back to the outer SA game leaves the mini-game running on the TV.

Just a few hours after uploading a brief gameplay video, the modder released another video demonstrating an even more mind-blowing mod, this time running GTA Vice City inside GTA 3, inside GTA San Andreas!

As shown in the clip, the game starts with GTA SA, where players can walk up to a large screen to activate and start running GTA 3. Within GTA 3 — now running on the large screen inside San Andreas — gamers can drive to another specific screen and launch GTA VC. So you can be playing GTA SA, switch to a fully functional GTA 3 within SA, and then switch again to play Vice City right inside the GTA 3 sandbox, all while the other games are simultaneously running.

The remarkable mods are just one of thousands that developers have created since the game was first released on PC over 20 years ago in 2005. There are also several Mods for other GTA titles. Older GTA games have seen renewed interest as anticipation builds for GTA 6, which is scheduled to be released on consoles on November 19 after several postponements.

In the modern age, password cracking is an activity that generally begets quite powerful hardware, usually high-powered GPUs. Hashing algorithms have gotten trickier, and brute-forcing them has become computationally expensive. It's only natural, then, that a new software project has come up to port the common hashcat cracking utility to the mighty... Gameboy Advance (GBA).

The gba-hashcat software is the brainchild of security engineer solstICE (Ice), to whom the question of "why" is seemingly answered with "why not." Running on an original GBA, the app can power through SHA256 hashes at 727 h/s. At that rate, the author estimates that one year's worth of gba-hashcat would be equivalent to one second of a modern GPU-accelerated rig.

The GBA's main processor is an ARM7TDMI chip, a 32-bit RISC affair clocked at all of 16.8 MHz. It connected to most of its data buses and memory on a 16-bit bus, though, and the machine only carried 288 KB of RAM, plus 98 KB of VRAM. Most password-cracking software makes use of precomputed tables to help speed the repeated attempts along, but given that standard GBA cartridges are limited to 32 MB in size, all that Ice could include was the ignis-1M (one million) word list that rings in at 8 MB.

The software itself is quite small, given that Ice made good use of the Butano engine, a library that allows developers to easily write GBA games using plain C++ code. The gba-hashcat user interface is quite sparse, showing only an intro screen, progress statistics, and the current password attempt. It's not like you need much more for this application, save perhaps for a "please be patient" message.

In the GitHub commit, Ice calls gba-hashcat "[their] dumbest app of all time." That's quite the statement, but X commenters were quick to request networking support so they could make a cluster of password-cracking Gameboys, an idea that may have merit considering the price of graphics cards these days. At any rate, joke all you want, but for the one really important password retrieval I was once tasked with — recovering access to an Excel payroll sheet — even the original Gameboy would have sufficed. The password was "123".

The CEO of GameStop — one of the world's largest video game retailers — has said that Sony’s decision to halt the production of physical game discs in 2028 is “totally irrelevant” to the company's business. Speaking to BloombergTech in an interview on Thursday, July 16, Ryan Cohen made the comments while responding to questions on how console makers’ going disc-less might affect GameStop amid the company's controversial bid to buy eBay.

When asked, “If the hardware makers are reportedly moving to disc-less on the console side, future game launches are digital only, where does that fit in for the business plan?” Cohen responded, “It doesn’t matter at all. Software, it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectables makes up over half the business. So, it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”

Cohen's characterization doesn't exactly match GameStop's own filings, but the underlying trend does. In fiscal year 2025, the company reported total net sales of $3.63 billion. At $729.3 million, Software — which includes physical game discs, game cartridges, and digital download codes by GameStop’s classification — accounted for 20.1% of the total, the lowest among the company's product categories. Collectibles brought in $1.06 billion at 29.2 percent, while hardware and accessories — including new and pre-owned hardware, accessories, hardware bundles, interactive figures, strategy guides, and mobile/consumer electronics — remained the largest single line at $1.84 billion, or 50.7 percent.

The year-on-year growth figures also appear to support Cohen's stance, with software revenue dropping 27% in FY24 and hardware revenue dropping 12%. Meanwhile, revenue from collectibles — covering apparel, toys, trading cards, gadgets, other pop-culture products, and submission services for authentication and grading of trading cards — grew by 47%.

Much of the Bloomberg interview was focused on Cohen's somewhat controversial bid for eBay. GameStop began accumulating eBay stock on February 4 and delivered an unsolicited, non-binding proposal on May 3 to acquire all outstanding shares at $125 apiece, split evenly between cash and GameStop stock — an offer valuing eBay at roughly $56 billion, against GameStop's own market capitalization of around $10 billion. eBay's board rejected it on May 12, with chairman Paul Pressler writing that the board had determined the proposal was "neither credible nor attractive." Cohen has said he intends to take the offer directly to eBay shareholders.

The static recompilation craze has just hit a milestone with developer @patchzyy sharing a slick and smooth-looking version of “Mario Kart Wii, rebuilt for PC.” Mario Kart Wiicompiled, created using the help of AI coding, is being teased now, with a video embedded below, but isn’t expected to become available as a beta until next month. That is, if it doesn’t get whack-a-moled somehow by the notoriously litigious Nintendo.

For context, several developers have been busy with static recompilation projects over recent years. Successes in recompiling games from platforms like the Nintendo N64 (and Xbox 360) have clearly inspired a generational jump, with patchzyy’s claimed “first static recompilation of a Wii game.” From the brief video, it looks pretty good.

Static recompilation transforms the binary machine code into equivalent native code for the target platform, like PC. Digital archivists and retrogaming fans like static recompilation as it can offer higher performance and stability, removing emulation quirks and overheads. It can also make use of the best features of the modern platform, so Mario Kart Wiicompiled is going to run at up to 4K, with an unlocked frame rate. Moreover, in this case, Retro Rewind community mod compatibility is confirmed, which means that recompiled players will be able to access 200+ race tracks.

At this time, the static recompilation doesn’t use 4K or HD textures or character models. However, these are options open to the community/modders, going forward, just like we see with N64 and other console recompilations.

It will be interesting to see if the Wii’s big gimmick of motion controls, which could be used for Kart steering, will work on Mario Kart Wiicompiled. Perhaps it could even work with original Wii Remotes you might have lying around.

So, are Wii static recompilation title floodgates about to open? There is certainly a nice selection of games folks with Wii disk collections might enjoy playing on their modern PCs connected to their 4K TVs. So, Nintendo might not like seeing this kind of project getting popular, but the devs studiously separate the static recompilation code from the game ‘ROM’ files, which retro gamers may or may not actually own.

Many social media commenters point out that AI was used in the development of Mario Kart Wiicompiled, but that was already made clear in the project FAQ. That document clearly states that AI was used to assist with code only, not for the generation of art or other assets.

An ex-Sega engineer has created a CRT emulator for macOS so realistic that it even supports screen tapping to fix the notoriously sketchy performance of the technology. On Tuesday, a developer showcased a CRT emulation project which some commenters complained was more like a CRT damage simulator. In other words, the CRT effects like flickering, noise, and aberrations were judged by the masses to be somewhat overdone. Today, @GOROman has followed up by demonstrating that the famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software’s CRT rendering can be improved via an old-school whack to the top of the monitor. See it with your own eyes, in the video embedded below.

The developer of this CRT emulator, GOROman, is an ex-Sega and ex-Facebook software engineer. They explain that the famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software receives VHF RF output (NTSC-J) from their Famicom (Nintendo NES) via an open-source SDR (software-defined radio) solution dubbed the HackRF One.

With the software running and the NES plugged into the HackRF One, the console’s RF-modulated video can be displayed on VHF channel 1 or 2. However, here you can see it on a modern LCD, in a window on the desktop. Thus the GOROman project is performing a full NTSC-J color decode in software and displaying the result on the desktop in real time via SDL2.

It is further explained that the Famicom “is not broadcast-compliant (non-interlaced 240p, chroma phase advancing 120° per line, one short line per frame).” Therefore, the decoder has to run several processes in the background to avoid quirks like drifts, wobbles, and color burst instability.

In summary, the Famicom’s RF output isn’t ideal for piping into modern monitors, so the decoder has to effectively simulate an analog TV’s brain, locking in the image stability and color. The initial demo shared by GOROman looked so much like a ‘damaged TV’ because the dev wanted to play around "by shifting the VHF frequency (exaggeratedly)." [machine translation] It was an eye-catching, humorous demo.

So, what’s happening with the new video and demo of percussive maintenance support? On social media, some have guessed that the fun picture stability-fixing mechanic could be using feedback from the Apple MacBook’s lid angle sensor. However, I looked at the GitHub page for GOROman’s famicom-rf-hackrf-decoder software, released under the MIT open-source license, and there appears to be an input variable for "audio tap," so the effect may be based on mic audio input.

Someone in the comments has requested a magnet mode to play with the ‘CRT,’ so guess what might happen tomorrow.

RPCS3, a multi-platform open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger, has revealed that 2,681 of the total 3,559 PS3 titles are now compatible with its software, meaning a huge majority of games can now be played on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD. The developers of the app said on X that RPCS3 is continually being worked on and that they’re targeting full preservation of the entire PS3 library. This is an important development for PlayStation 3 owners and enthusiasts, especially as Sony said that it will stop making physical game discs by 2028 and shut down the PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita a year before that.

Ensuring that over 2,600 games are compatible with your emulation is no mean feat, especially for a project that’s mostly supported by Patreon and volunteers. The team has already achieved more than 75% compatibility with the entire PS3 library, with less than a thousand titles needing to be worked on. Of this, 816 are now playable but encounter serious glitches or performance problems, 60 reach the game’s main menu but fail to load past that, while only two titles initialize but are stuck on a black screen. If you want to check if you can now play your favorite PS3 title on your PC, you can go to the RPCS3 compatibility page and type in the name of the game.

This is a huge win for the game preservation community, as this would ensure that you can continue playing your PS3 game library even if your console no longer works. The beautiful thing about RPCS3 is that it works with a lot of different hardware — aside from support for Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, it’s also compatible with both x86 and arm64, so you can install it on some of the best handheld gaming PCs to play your PS3 games on the go.

Emulation is quite controversial among game publishers and developers, and many companies have historically taken steps against those who make these apps. However, the courts have said that emulation isn’t necessarily illegal, as long as the people who use them only play games that they’ve already paid for. In fact, the Patreon page of RPCS3 was once hit by a DMCA takedown request from Atlus, the maker of Persona 5, arguing that “no version of the P5 game should be playable on this platform; and [the RPCS3] developers are infringing on our IP by making such games playable.”

While it ultimately failed in its request, it showed how some companies think that their games should only be played on the platform that they designed it for. They argue that emulators might introduce performance issues, meaning players will not get the optimal experience when playing their games. However, RPCS3 has proven that emulators could deliver a similar (or even better) performance than the PS3, with newer versions getting a 5% to 7% boost in FPS numbers compared to previous builds and even hitting more than 1500 FPS on the Minecraft title screen.

A PC gamer has created and demonstrated a handy Steam Game Cartridge system. Over on PCMR, Jibril-sama introduced the system, which blends the old-school console convenience of cartridges with Steam’s awesome and agreeably flexible games library. Ingeniously, it upcycles a bundle of old SATA SSDs into Steam-ready game cartridges using a disk mount detect and execute script on the software side and a SATA dock on the hardware side. Icing on this already tasty cake is provided by Jibril-sama’s colorfully encased and custom-labeled Steam Game Cartridges. Nice.

Steam Game Cartridges from r/pcmasterrace

“Got a couple of used 2.5" SSDs for cheap so I decided to make a Game Cartridge system,” the Redditor casually informs the PCMR masses in the post embedded above. “Games are actually on those SSDs with a script to auto-navigate Steam to the game's page. Auto-starting the game right away is also possible.”

Further comments by the OP explain that all the drives bought for this project were 128GB in capacity, and €7 a piece ($8). That’s not bad in the current RAM and NAND crunch, and keeps these files off your built-in primary storage. As many readers will know, PC game libraries can easily grow to hog a lot of storage.

We reached out to Jibril-sama for some more background info about how the Steam Game Cartridge system is designed to work with as little user friction as possible. They informed us that the system in the video runs Linux and Valve’s Steam URL Protocol is leveraged to navigate to the game's page or launch the game.

“All it needs is a systemd template to check for a script on the SSD and launch it. And a udev rule to trigger the system,” Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware. “So basically: Plug in SSD -> udev rule sees the event -> triggers the systemd daemon -> systemd daemon looks into the SSD and finds the script -> execute the script.”

Commenters on PCMR have overwhelmingly welcomed the Steam Game Cartridge future teased by this system. Some want to see the system extended to include GOG game libraries. Others query how the system handles the inevitable hefty multi-gigabyte updates that are pushed (even to older games) from time to time. Jibril-sama told Tom’s Hardware that they didn’t plan to deal with updates often, as they didn’t use cartridges for ‘live service’ titles, and they are mostly used for the “games that I want to replay once in a while.” If and when updates have been flagged, “I just let Steam handle the updates and wait a bit before I can play,” they added.

I’ve had repeated firsthand experience with Steam Games libraries being fussy when moving across different PCs, so stretching the library system this way could reveal cracks and wrinkles as more games are tested. We shall see.

Hopefully, fuller implementation guides, scripts, and resources to help others purchase or 3D print their own Steam Game Cartridge shells will be shared in due course.

Nvidia's RTX Spark platform arrives later this year, and the company is hard at work building the partner ecosystem around the GB10 Superchip to ensure that Windows and applications are ready for its agentic AI PC vision. As part of that groundwork, the two companies announced today that Sega will support the RTX Spark platform with its upcoming Virtua Fighter Crossroads, coming in 2027.

The two companies also committed to RTX Spark support for "future Sega titles,” meaning that we might see official support for other evergreen franchises like the Yakuza series, the Persona games, and the upcoming Alien: Isolation 2 and Total War: Warhammer.

Although the companies didn’t go into detail about exactly what full support for the RTX Spark means for Sega games, one would expect that the developer’s titles will be natively compiled for Windows on Arm instead of relying on the Prism x86 emulator for compatibility.

It also seems safe to expect that future Sega titles will incorporate DLSS technologies like upscaling and Multi Frame Generation in order to deliver the best possible experience on RTX Spark systems. Despite having GPU compute capabilities similar to those of a desktop RTX 5070 on paper, the unified memory architecture and relatively limited memory bandwidth of the GB10 Superchip behind the RTX Spark platform present challenges for gaming performance that are likely to make the incorporation of DLSS tech important for the best experience.

The relationship between Nvidia and Sega spans over 30 years, tracing its roots to the ultimately abandoned development of the GPU for the Dreamcast console. Despite its eventual decision to use an NEC-produced PowerVR GPU for that system, Sega offered Nvidia a $5 million lifeline that gave the company the runway that it needed to develop and deliver the Riva 128, its first DirectX-compatible GPU.

That investment proved to be historic, as Nvidia now has a market cap of over $5 trillion and is in the process of shifting the very foundations of computing through its Grace Blackwell and upcoming Vera Rubin AI platforms for the data center.

Whether the RTX Spark platform reshapes the PC when it arrives in the fall of this year remains to be seen. But if you’re a fan of Sega’s IP, this partnership means that you can at least look forward to a first-class experience with its games on RTX Spark systems.

For years, the PS5 emulation scene has remained dormant, with updates few and far between as most projects become abandonware. However, Sony's recent decision to stop physical disc production and the impending release of GTA VI later this year have created an unprecedented demand in the market. All of a sudden, an influx of PS5 emulators has popped up online, and they're swiftly hitting development milestones, including actually being able to boot recent PS5 titles.

The most prominent name in the news cycle is SharpEmu, which serves as a PS5 emulator for Windows. It's written entirely in C# and works more like a translation layer since modern consoles and PC share the same x86 underlying architecture. SharpEmu allows the PC to execute CPU instructions natively while translating OS-specific API calls and graphics.

Since it's aiming for accuracy, only some 2D titles such as Dreaming Sarah are running on SharpEmu with solid performance and no hiccups. As far as 3D titles go, that's a different story since it's significantly harder to emulate those. At first, the PS5 remake of Demon's Souls successfully booted, but it didn't go past the startup screen. Then, in a major development, Discord user RShantila was able to boot Astro Bot, which is a PlayStation exclusive from 2024, on SharpEmu.

Getting such a recent game to run is extremely promising and shows that PS5 emulation is currently outpacing PS4 emulation at the same point in its life cycle. And SharpEmu is just one project among what's starting to seem like a sea of hopes and dreams.

The other emulator gaining traction is KytyPS5, which started as a cross-platform PS4 and PS5 emulator in 2021 but was abandoned in 2022. Fast forward four years and developer Nmzik has revived the project, creating their own fork that focuses only on PlayStation 5. According to reports online, within just a few weeks, KytyPS5 can boot commercial PS5 games running in Unreal Engine 4/5, Unity, and other custom engines.

KytyPS5 was able to boot and run Silent Hill: The Short Message till the menu screen. Remember, 3D games were previously limited to just their boot screens, so this is yet another major accomplishment. However, earlier today, the project's GitHub page was updated to show two new 3D games actually running with their graphics being properly rendered, shattering all expectations set thus far.

These two games are PowerWash Simulator and Pac-Man World, both of which are playable with functional gameplay, though we don't have any idea about performance or stability. Even more impressively, and perhaps more on-topic, the KytyPS5 version 0.0.3 successfully booted the commercial PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto V far enough to display the loading screens, main splash art, and actually navigate the in-game display settings.

KytyPS5 has also recently received updates to its shader compiler for better graphics, better memory management that leads to faster load times, and better audio support as well. The emulator works on Windows for now, but a Linux version is also planned for the future.

Finally, we need to mention RPCSX, which isn't exactly an emulator but rather just a research project dedicated to better understanding both PS4 and PS5 software. The devs are still working on being able to boot games from the user interface, but in a race like this, you need every hand on deck, and the team behind RPCS3 is one of the most experienced in the field.

The PS5 emulation scene has suddenly exploded, and the pace of these developments is astonishing. At this trajectory, it won't be unreasonable to expect GTA V to actually run on SharpEmu or KytyPS5 by next month. That being said, emulation is a marathon that takes a long time to perfect, so it's almost guaranteed that the official PC version of GTA VI will be out long before the emulated version becomes playable.

A new Nintendo Switch dock shell has been designed to mimic the sleek undulating curves of the classic Nintendo 64 (N64). Dubbed the 64BITDOCK, this Switch accessory kit can be bundled with an 'N64 cart' that will help you keep your Switch Game Cards tidy. The 64BITDOCK is available now direct from the maker on Etsy, priced from $89.

In the assorted images of the 64BITDOCK from Nintendo Switch accessories specialist Krasivoe, you can see that the ‘N64’ cradles the Switch (Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 / LCD / OLED) horizontally, so the upper curves of the ‘N64’ are uninterrupted. Pleasingly, the ‘N64’ cart slot is actually useful here as a Nintendo Switch Game Card silo if you buy the optional magnetically secured storage receptacle (with 6 slots).

● Check out this product on Etsy

This is a cosmetic kit for your original Switch Dock

The 64BITDOCK is basically a snap-on cladding kit for your existing original Switch Dock. What you are buying is a set of “custom plates inspired by the iconic 64-bit console… [which] snap onto your Switch dock in seconds, transforming it into a nostalgic centerpiece while keeping all sides open to prevent overheating.”

The Krasivoe 64BITDOCK is available in light grey and ‘original’ charcoal finishes, with matching Game Card storage receptacles. For the dock plates alone, the Etsy store asks $89. If you want a Game Card cartridge holder, the price rises to $103. Worldwide shipping is $6.99.

This isn’t Krasivoe’s first retro-inspired Switch Dock makeover kit. It also sells the 8BITDOCK, 16BITDOCK, and CUBEDOCK. Fans of retro Nintendo consoles will surely know what those look like.

The market is overflowing with Nintendo Switch docks, so Krasivoe has cannily sought to offer some eye-catching differentiation in the form of this 64BITDOCK. Its $89 starting price is quite a premium offering, though, as it doesn’t even include docking hardware – it’s just a cosmetic 3D-printed shell for your original Nintendo Switch Dock. We see that you can get basic, fully functional Switch docks from $20 or $30 on Amazon, with original ‘toaster’ style replacements priced at about $40.

Barely a day goes by without some retro system developer accomplishing a technical feat that beggars belief. OpenStrike is the latest mad project, creating a proof-of-concept reimplementation of the seminal Counter-Strike for the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), a 22-year-old system that arguably has no business running the game.

The port was made by Yifeng Wang (aka doodlestrike), who apparently created his own Rust-based 3D engine called Pocket3D for the affair, along with the PocketJS JavaScript engine for the game rules and UI. Despite the proof-of-concept status, Wang says that elimination matches with bots are already playable, though the game's famous buying stages aren't yet functional. The full set of eight original Counter-Strike maps have already been tested, and interested modders should easily be able to roll their own.

The engine manages to run the game with bots at a steady 60 FPS at the PSP's native 480x272 resolution, thanks to pre-processing graphical assets to directly bake lightmaps into vertex colors (as opposed to real-time or on-startup calculations). Interestingly, Wang kept the old-school BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) rendering method to cull non-visible areas rather than use a fancier modern algorithm, lending credence to the "don't fix what isn't broken" motto.

The game also runs on the PS Vita, a system with 4x the effective resolution of the original at 960x544, with native graphics, without upscaling of either 3D rendering or 2D assets. You should also be able to run the project as a standard desktop game, and naturally, it's playable on the popular PPSSPP emulator. To get the project going, you'll have to provide your own copy of the Counter-Strike asset data, similar to using Doom's original WADs in one of the many ports.

The project's entire technical architecture is impressive, as Wang went way beyond the scope of "make a 3D engine that load maps." Both the Pocket3D and PocketJS 2D engines are generic, and OpenStrike is merely the first "product" that uses them. The code runs on a server/client/event architecture, and the event handling (ex: shooting) is decoupled from the rendering core, preventing nasty FPS dips. The game is testable offline, and most everything is trivially moddable. You should check out the OpenStrike repo if you're interested.

A Brazilian gamer who lost his Microsoft account and all his digital games has won a court order forcing the company to hand it all back, after support staff told him to simply repurchase his library. The user, who posts as Ordo_Liberal on Reddit, shared a screenshot of a small-claims ruling in the Xbox subreddit that gives Microsoft 15 days to restore access or face fines and roughly $400 (R$2,000) in damages. He said the account had two-factor authentication enabled when it was flagged and permanently suspended, and that none of Microsoft's recovery options allowed him to regain access before he filed his lawsuit.

According to the support emails he posted, Microsoft suspended the account after detecting what it described as unauthorized access, and said an investigation found the account's security information had been changed. The company treated the suspension as permanent and directed him to buy his games again rather than reinstating the ones already tied to the account.

Anyone with a large Microsoft account might want to take note here, because the suspension didn’t target a single game or console but the user’s entire account. Microsoft accounts can carry Xbox purchases, Windows licenses, store apps, 365, and OneDrive data, and a permanent suspension blocks all of it, even, as in this case, when you’ve got strong security and two-factor authentication set up.

Brazil's Consumer Defense Code and its small-claims track allow individuals to bring cases without a lawyer and without paying court costs, meaning Ordo_Liberal was able to take Microsoft to court without incurring any costs. If Microsoft misses the payment deadline, an additional 10% penalty will be imposed. While the damages awarded in this case are minor, it's notable that Microsoft has been compelled to restore the account and its contents, which runs counter to the standard platform position that customers license digital games rather than own them.

This, of course, is a first-instance small-claims judgment, not binding precedent, and it covers one account in one jurisdiction. Courts elsewhere have gone the other way. Chinese courts have recognized game accounts as inheritable property, while U.S. rulings generally treat games as revocable licenses. The case comes as both Microsoft and Sony push players away from physical media, with Xbox testing a way to convert discs into digital entitlements and Sony ending new PlayStation disc production in 2028. Microsoft hasn’t publicly commented on the ruling.