Tag: microsoft

News 6/26/22: Path of the N64 Controller Minecart

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Graham Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun lets us know that the team who made AM2R, which infamously Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist, are working on a new game that’s a Metroidvania, but has nothing to do with Metroid, called Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus. It’s awful that Nintendo did that, and it’s great that they didn’t let the experience sour them!

Over at wccftech, Aernout van de Velde writes of an N64 emulator plug-in that supports many advanced graphics features, such as ray tracing and 60 fps output! Ocarina of Time ran natively at just 20 fps, seeing it at 60 is like opening your eyes opened for the first time. Here’s the announcement tweet, with embedded demonstration video:

At Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech reviews Sonic Origins, and notes a discomfiting thing about it: it costs $40 for many fewer games than a standard Genesis rom collection, yet on top of that also locks features and music behind DLC charges. Boo!

Matt Purslow of IGN tells us that Microsoft is confirming shortages of Xbox controllers. I’m sure some people are already trying to figure out ways to blame this on Joe Biden.

Ollie Reynolds writing on Nintendo Life relates an interesting discovery about Super Mario RPG back on the SNES: during its minecart section, if you don’t touch the controls at all, the game will play itself, and complete it for you. They found the news from the Twitter feed of splendid Mario arcana site Supper Mario Broth!

Link Roundup 5/6/2022

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Tyler Wilde of PC Gamer: Activision/Blizzard shareholders approve Microsoft buyout.

Alice O’Connor of Rock Paper Shotgun tells us about Backpack Hero, a demo with a lot of buzz around it. I’ve played it, it’s cool, drebnar!

Liam Doolan of Nintendo Life points us to a Kickstarter for a Game Boy Advance add-on that lets you play games on an HDTV television. It does require opening up your device, though! Gizmodo has its own report. What it is is basically an alternate case for the guts of a Game Boy Advance, that provides it with output ports.

One of the humorous bits about Facebook’s (I refuse to call them Meta) Metaverse thing is that it’s dragging out all the dumb old corporate internet tie-ins, just like it did when the web became big, and again when they tried to make a go of Second Life. So the wheel turns again, as Ryan Gilliam tells us on Polygon, with “The Metaverse’s first Coke product,” Byte, which is reputed to be “pixel-flavored.” The only thing it’s missing is an NFT. All the news sites are talking about it, because all the news sites have space to fill and read press releases, drebnar. It comes with a QR code with “an AR game unlock.” The kids still care about those things, right?

Some emulation news: 3DS emulator Mikage is in development again, as is PS4 emulator GPCS4.

Matthew Carlson of hackaday.com brings us news that long-time fangame editor Zelda Classic now runs in web browsers! Zelda Classic can do a lot, so it’s great to see developments in that area! Here’s the technical details.

Andy Brown writing for NME tells us that the time is right for a remake of Simpsons Hit & Run.

And Jeremy Winslow at Kotaku points out the point-and-click adventure game Perfect Tides.

Windows 3.1 Turns 30

Windows 3.1 logo

Windows 3.0 is where it became obvious that Windows was going to be a big thing. Previous versions of Windows were novelties. Now Microsoft had something that looked as good as a Mac. MS-DOS had become the de-facto standard for computing, but its UI was a command prompt, great for power users but impenetrable for the average PC owner. Windows 3.0 began to change that, and Windows 3.1 was a substantial improvement upon that.

April 6th is the 30th anniversary of Windows 3.1, released in 1992. While many of its elements may seem unfamiliar to younger users-there is no Start Button, desktop directory, taskbar, Windows Explorer or web browser-millions of people got their first exposure to Windows here. It used a “Program Manager” to allow users to launch their software.

File icons don’t appear on the Desktop. Minimized programs appear there instead, at the bottom of the screen. And under the hood is MS-DOS, which would remain around in some form until Windows XP finally annihilated it completely in 2001.

Benj Edwards of HowToGeek spoke with former Microsoft VP Brad Silverberg on the version of Windows that many cut their teeth on.

Benj’s Twitter feed has some more discussion.

You can run Windows 3.1 in your web browser at pcjs.org.

The file manager of Windows 3.1, called File Manager natch, has been officially remade for Windows 10 and later, and is available on the Microsoft App Store.