TRIPITAKA (Xuanzang Sanzo’s Dharma-Seeking Journey) is the sequel to Cosmology of Kyoto and second episode in the Cosmology of Asia series. Developed by Soft Edge. Published by PD Inc., 1999.
While I don’t have any ultra-rare games, I did manage to get a copy of the rare Clue: The Storybook, scan it, and provided the internet a copy.
Yesterday I uploaded the ISO image of one of the rarest videogames in history, of which a single copy is known to exist in the online world. After years of appeals, its owner finally agreed to share it with me so that I could in turn share it with the world. Do spread the word! https://t.co/XB403DQZNCpic.twitter.com/FGhVQ1BhJ5
MangoHud is a nice little Linux package that provides a Vulkan and OpenGL overlay for monitoring FPS, temperatures, CPU/GPU load, and lots of other parameters. Source is provided on github.
The Corsair Xeneon Edge 14.5″ Touchscreen is an interesting little display. It’s a 14.5″ touchpanel, but at an very wide 32:9 aspect ratio. It makes it a niche 2nd display device for displaying system info, a news feed, displaying Twitter/Discord feeds, or maybe even something mounted to a computer case.
Mike Saxton, the owner of the Portland-based FreePlay Gaming Arcade, has decided to shutter the arcade after just six months of business. Turns out, the business model simply doesn’t work. The arcade needs to make £500 per day each weekend to reach the break-even point, yet it’s making less than half that. Some weekdays he makes zero.
Sadly, I think the retro arcade craze has definitely peaked and is waning. People have full access to games on handhelds, home consoles, and even their phones. Nostalgia runs in waves, and it seems the revival of 80’s and 90’s arcade games has peaked and is now subsiding.
Use Steam overlay instead of Windows Taskmanager for GPUs
The Steam client overlay got a recent patch [Tomshardware] that introduced frame-level granularity like distinguishing between native frames and those generated by DLSS/FSR, alongside real-time readings of CPU load, RAM usage, clock speeds, and frame timing graphs. Those features have already transformed Steam’s HUD into one of the most comprehensive in-game instruments—effectively matching tools like MangoHud and MSI’s RivaTuner.
A beta was released, but quickly rolled back, that claimed to be better than Task Manager. The claim was that Task Manager can be inaccurate because it measures GPU usage on a per-process basis and relies on the GPU driver to report statistics according to the WDDM specification. Games that split work across multiple processes can therefore have portions of their GPU activity missed, and certain workloads can appear less intensive than they actually are. By aggregating usage across all related processes, Steam’s overlay purported to give a fuller and more precise picture of a game’s GPU demands.
THS is currently offering an interesting little app on Steam called Lossless Scaling. It proports to triple your frame rate, and actually does so, but with some interesting caveats.
Frame generation isn’t new, there’s a lot of vendor solutions out there like DLSS and FSR already. What lossless scaling does is work on games that do not have those features. It is a purely post-processing effect that works on any game by taking 2 rendered frames and generating up to 2 new in-between frames using an AI trained model.
As you might guess, this has some interesting limitations and artifacts. Firstly, input latency goes up slightly because it relies on 2 fully rendered frames to generate the in-between frames. Also, since lossless scaling is a purely post-process effect, it cannot utilize motion vectors to help calculate in-between frames like FSR/DLSS. This leads to some interesting motion artifacts.
Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia did a video on Lossless Scaling and covers all the pros and cons with some great video clips. His takeaway? He really liked it. You should use the much better FSR/DLSS if you have it, but lossless scaling is great for older games that do not have those technologies. It’s also great for increasing frame rates on games that were traditionally locked to lower frame rates (though you want to carefully tune it to a multiple of your monitor refresh rate). It also seems to work ok with some games that have aggressive anti-cheat systems that usually detect frame-rate changing apps.
Ink Console takes inspiration from choose-your-own-adventure books and retro text-based video games. It lets you play as you read, turning reading into a dynamic and interactive adventure. And the aim is to encourage people to develop their own gamebooks too.
Grant Smith got one of the USPS delivery scam text messages. He decided to track the scammers and uncovered a Chinese-language group behind the campaign. He hacked their systems, discovered their mechanisms, and gathered victim data. He handed it to USPS, bank, and FBI investigators – as well published information about their operations online and at Defcon.
He discovered the group sold their scamming kits to set up their own operations for a $200/mo subscription. Similar scams showed up in half dozen other countries.
What’s interesting is he reported how many people fell for it. The triad sent 50,000-100,000 text messages a day. In total, US victims for just this one (albeit very large) operation entered 438,669 credit card numbers. Many people entered multiple cards.
Scientists have used a innovative method to map out the transition of symbols into words. Using an interesting strategy, scientists tracked the how our visual system picks up on the shapes and converts them into symbols, then into concepts.
Over two weeks, the scientists taught made-up words written in two unfamiliar, archaic scripts to 24 native English–speaking adults. The words were assigned the meanings of common nouns, such as lemon or truck. Then the researchers used functional MRI scans to track which tiny chunks of brain in that region became active when participants were shown the words learned in training.
The way letters look — curves or staunch lines — takes hold in the back of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, the team found. But when sounds and meanings come into play, an area further forward in that brain region that better handles abstract concepts seemed to kick into gear.
