fidzu : computers

"Just the anachronism of seeing Doom, one of the poster children for the moral panic around violent video games, on a Nintendo console is novel," writes Kotaku - especially with the console's underpowered "Super FX" coprocessor Hampered by a nearly unplayable framerate, especially in later levels, and mired by sacrifices, like altered levels, no floor or ceiling textures, and the entire fourth episode being cut, [1995's] Doom on the Super NES was not a good version of the game, but it was Doom running on the Super NES, and, for that alone, [programmer Randal] Linden's genius deserves recognition. But then in 2022 when Audi Sorlie interviewed Linden on the YouTube show DF Retro, "Not really knowing where fate was going to take us, I asked [Linden] a throwaway question regarding the source code for Doom." If you ever worked on this again, Sorlie asked, would you make any improvements or do anything differently?" "Yeah," Linden replied. "I have plenty of ideas if I could go back, but, you know, I don't think anyone's asking me to go back to Super Nintendo Doom and improve it." A few years passed, and Sorlie joined Limited Run Games as lead producer for their development department. When LRG asked him to run down his craziest ideas, a new, improved release of Randal Linden's Doom loomed large. Convincing Linden was easy, and Sorlie said even the folks at license holder Bethesda were more amused than anything. "You want to go back and develop for Super Nintendo?" they asked Sorlie. "Like, for real...?" "The trick was actually pretty cool," Linden said. "It's right here." He pointed to a chip on the prototype SNES cartridge, similar to the one Limited Run sent me to test out the game. "It's a Raspberry Pi 2350." Super FX chips are no longer in production for obvious reasons, but with a clever bit of programming, Linden was able to load software onto the Raspberry Pi that fools the SNES into thinking the game has one. "The Super Nintendo doesn't know that it's not talking to a Super FX," he explained. When he programs for it, he writes code almost identical to what he'd write for an authentic Super FX chip. "I had to go back and reverse-engineer my own code from 30 years ago," Linden laughed. "It's like, what was I doing here? And what was I doing there? Yeah, it was pretty tricky, some of the code. I was like, wow, I used to be very smart." The result of Linden's work? It's Doom, running right on a Super Nintendo, but it's smoother, packed with new content, and even includes rumble.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Mar 2026 11:34pm GMT

Plug-in (or "balcony") solar panels can also be hung out a window or be set up in a backyard, reports NPR. They channel energy from the sun straight into a home's electrical outlet, generating enough electricity to power a refrigerator or microwave while "displacing electricity that otherwise would come in from the grid..." But what's holding up their adoption in America? For the panels to become more widely available in the U.S., state lawmakers are proposing bills that eliminate complicated utility connection agreements, which are required for larger rooftop solar installations and, most utilities say, should apply to plug-in solar too. Those agreements, along with permitting and other installation costs, can double the price of solar panels. Utah enacted the first law, last May, supporting plug-in solar, and now some 30 pieces of similar legislation have been introduced around the United States. [And Virginia seems poised to pass a similar law.] But the drive toward plug-in solar is facing pushback from electric utilities. They are raising safety concerns and prompting legislators to delay votes on the bills. So far, utilities have won over lawmakers in five states and convinced them to delay votes on plug-in solar bills... Plug-in solar advocates say that safety concerns about the new technology have been addressed and that utilities are really just worried about losing business, because every kilowatt-hour generated by a plug-in solar panel is one less the utility sells to a customer... There are safety risks with any electrical appliance, and it's true that plug-in solar panels present some unique problems. But safety experts also say those issues can be managed.... German utilities expressed many of the same concerns nearly a decade ago when plug-in solar started to become popular in Germany. But with more than a million systems installed, no safety incidents have been reported for customers who used the panels as instructed, according to a research paper funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Mar 2026 9:34pm GMT

What if you have a very modern machine that is entirely UEFI-only, meaning it has no compatibility support module and thus no way of enabling a legacy BIOS mode? Well, install a CSM as an EFI application, of course! CSMWrap is an EFI application designed to be a drop-in solution to enable legacy BIOS booting on modern UEFI-only (class 3) systems. It achieves this by wrapping a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) build of the SeaBIOS project as an out-of-firmware EFI application, effectively creating a compatibility layer for traditional PC BIOS operation. ↫ CSMWrap's GitHub page The need for this may not be immediately obvious, but here's the problem: if you want to run an older operating system that absolutely requires a traditional BIOS on a modern machine that only has UEFI without any CSM options (a class 3-machine), you won't be able to boot said operating system. CSMWrap is a possible solution, as it leverages innate EFI capabilities to run a CSM as an EFI application, thereby adding the CSM functionality back in. All you need to do is drop CSMWrap into /efi/boot on the same drive the operating system that needs BIOS to boot is on, and UEFI will list it as a bootable operating system. It does come with some limitations, however. For instance, one logical core of your processor will be taken up by CSMWrap and will be entirely unavailable to the booted BIOS-based operating system. In other words, this means you're going to need a processor with at least more than one logical processor (e.g., even a single-core machine with hyperthreading will work). It's also suggested to add a legacy-capable video card if you're using an operating system that doesn't support VESA BIOS extensions (e.g. anything older than NT). This is an incredibly neat idea, and even comes with advantages over built-in CSMs, since many of those are untested and riddled with issues. CSMWrap uses SeaBIOS, which is properly tested and generally a much better BIOS than whatever native CSMs contain. All in all, a great project.

14 Mar 2026 9:06pm GMT

"A few developers found a way, for now, to turn a few of these increasingly mediocre Amazon Show devices into friendly, useful, open computers," writes the co-founder of the gaming/tech news site Aftermath. For under $50 each, he bought some used versions of the devices and tested their instructions, partly to escape the full-screen ads Amazon began showing late last year, and also to overwrite Amazon's locked down Android fork "Fire OS" (and "a similarly neutered version of Linux called Vega OS") Customers who bought these devices and used them for several years were not used to them showing full screen ads, and now they do. People were justifiably pissed. So what do you do when an already evil device gets shittier...? I wiped Fire OS from the device and used ADB sideload to directly load two packages on the device: LineageOS and MindTheGapps. MindTheGapps lets you turn the device into something resembling a traditional Android device, for both good and bad.... It took a few times of wiping the device, but after a few tries it finally worked as intended... I immediately installed the Home Assistant app... Not only can the hacked Echo Show 8 control my entire smart home, it now plays back my entire local music library as well as any internet radio channels like The Lot Radio and NTS. It can also synchronize with any additional Echo Show running LineageOS in my house using the SendSpin protocol... I would gladly take it any day of the week over most of the devices these companies offer, especially Amazon. It may not be as intuitive as out-of-the-box smart home products, but I don't need my devices to be intuitive, I need them to behave. I had finally found a smart display that wasn't a cop... The hardware is old and creaky, and after the hack it can only use 1GB of the 2GB of ram. And yet it still manages to feel snappier than the stock hardware. "The amount of telemetry, ads, and general bloat Amazon shoves down our throats definitely doesn't help performance," [XDA Devs Forum user] Rortiz2 told me. "That's actually another reason why we did LineageOS, it kind of gives the device a second life. Even though it's still a bit buggy, it feels way better to use than the stock firmware...." If you want a smart speaker with a display that just runs a stripped-down version of Android that you have full control over, you're going to have a hard time finding it outside of these three specific models unless you cobble something together yourself. It is a deceptively simple thing to desire - the kiosk computer from science fiction that isn't a narc - yet few companies really offer it. "It should be against the law to not give an end user the ability to consensually load whatever OS or program they want on their device..." the article concludes, arguing that "If we budge on the inalienable right to modify our hardware then we forsake a key part about what makes computers special." And in the mean time, "There are so many devices that could be put to use rotting in e-waste facilities and thrift stores..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Mar 2026 8:34pm GMT

Staff complain that the constant upheaval is destroying morale.

14 Mar 2026 7:14am GMT

"This ought to make for some good reading," NASA's mission management team chair said.

14 Mar 2026 12:17am GMT

SMF is the illumos system for managing traditional Unix services (long-lived background processes, usually). It's quite rich in order to correctly accommodate a lot of different use cases. But it sometimes exposes that complexity to users even when they're trying to do something simple. In this post, I'll walk through an example using a demo service and the svcprop(1) tool to show the details. ↫ Dave Pacheco Soalris' system management facility or SMF is effectively Solaris' systemd, and this article provides a deeper insight into one of its features: properties. While using SMF and its suite of tools and commands for basic tasks is rather elementary and easy to get into - even I can do it - once you start to dive deeper into what is can do, things get complex and capable very fast.

13 Mar 2026 11:49pm GMT

Google has announced that it will release Chrome for Linux on ARM64 in the second quarter of this year. Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google's most helpful services into their browser. This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features. This release represents a significant undertaking to ensure that ARM64 Linux users receive the same secure, stable, and rich Chrome experience found on other platforms. ↫ The Chromium Blog While the idea of running Linux on Arm, only to defile it with something as unpleasant as Chrome seem entirely foreign to me, most normal people do actually use Google's browser. Having it available on Linux for Arm makes perfect sense, and might convince a few people to buy an Arm machine for Linux, assuming the platform can get its act together.

13 Mar 2026 11:37pm GMT

She made a full recovery, despite the maggots.

13 Mar 2026 10:38pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT