For years, Microsoft has leaned heavily into extensive backward compatibility across multiple generations of Xbox hardware as a major selling point for its consoles. Today, that effort expands past the console ecosystem, making select original Xbox titles officially playable (and purchasable) on Windows PCs for the first time.

The appropriately and bluntly named "Xbox Backward Compatibility on PC" program kicks off today with compatibility for BLiNX: The Time Sweeper, Conker: Live and Reloaded, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and Fuzion Frenzy. PC players can download each title for $10, but those with Xbox Game Pass subscriptions or existing digital licenses for these games on console will have instant access without an additional purchase (no such luck if you simply stick an original Xbox disc in your PC drive, alas).

Playing these older Xbox titles on PC enables some bonus graphical features like Vsync support, anisotropic filtering, enhanced anti-aliasing, and up to 4x resolution scaling of the original SD signal (to 2560x1920). Games are limited to their original frame rates and aspect ratios, though, which means a 30 fps 4:3 image in most cases. Microsoft says this first batch of games should be playable with 11-year-old GTX 950 graphics hardware, but recommends a 2017-era GTX 1070 Ti with 8GB of VRAM for best performance.

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Meta's AI glasses are arriving faster than regulators can respond. New York's courtroom ban highlights the growing privacy concerns that countries like Singapore may soon have to address.

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Just when you thought we’d run out of things to port DOOM to, here comes [Ahmed Amer] with his CSS-DOS, a massive 300 MB CSS style sheet, that runs not just DOS, but Windows 1.0 and, of course, DOOM. The CSS sheet isn’t holding a DOOM port this time, though — it’s holding a full IBM PC compatible, with a simulated 8086, 640 kB of RAM, floppy and VGA controllers. Yes, in one style sheet. We did mention it was 300 MB, right?

CSS is not a very good programming language. It’s got functions and if statements nowadays, but it doesn’t really do programs in the usual sense. That is, lists of instructions that feed one into another. You can’t change a variable without jumping through hoops. The sort of static behavior you get from a CSS sheet actually matches hardware architecture better than software, which was the key insight [Ahmed] had to make the project possible. It’s still not easy, or elegant, or perhaps even sane, as you can find out from the excellent write-up he has describing how he pulled this off. We particularly like the interactive guide to the full mountain of madness that is the .css file.

Now, we admit that “runs DOOM” may be an exaggeration — even if the maddeningly massive CSS sheet ran an IBM-AT full speed, that hardware can’t handle the game at any playable speed. It doesn’t emulate at anything close to full speed, though. Because this is such a gratuitously weird hack, it only runs at two instructions per second. No, not FPS, instructions, as in at the CPU level. Well, it could be worse, at least it’s not clock ticks. Still, if you’re time-dilated enough you can wait the 3 weeks to boot DOS, and the 3 months to load a level, you can play DOOM at 0.0001 FPS.

Look, we didn’t make the rules — they say everything has to try and run DOOM. They don’t say everything has to run it well.

Copilot+ PCs promise smarter Windows search, local AI tools, and longer battery life, though the badge comes with strict hardware rules and several important caveats.

My Copilot+ PC has dedicated AI hardware and its own Copilot key, yet Microsoft’s assistant has barely earned a place in my daily workflow.

As unique the Nintendo Wii U Gamepad may appear to be, at its core it’s pretty much just a tablet with game controls stuck on it. Now that the communication between the Wii U and the Gamepad have been fully reverse-engineered and poured into easy to use software, this opens the possibility of using other tablets with suitable controls on them for Wii U Gamepad purposes, like the Windows-capable Samsung tablet that [Bringus Studios] decided to experiment on.

Originally designed to run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, the Samsung Q1 series of ultra-mobile PCs (UMPC) was first released in 2007, featuring a 900 MHz Celeron M CPU. Amusingly [Bingus] mixes up mAh and mWh when comparing battery capacities, as the Li-ion battery pack for this UMPC is an 11.1V one, whereas a smartphone battery is 3.7V nominal.

To turn this UMPC into a Wii U Gamepad, first 32-bit Debian 12 is installed along with the Vanilla Wii U Gamepad project. The main challenge then is to find a Wi-Fi adapter that works for this purpose, as the connection uses a slightly non-standard handshake. Naturally the TP-Link USB WiFi adapter that [Bingus] used changed from its previous and better supported Mediatek chipset to a Realtek one with typical poor Linux support, requiring manual driver compiling.

After more troubleshooting, it’s unfortunately found that the 900 MHz Celeron M in this UMPC just isn’t up to the task, with the decoding of the compressed HDMI stream correspondingly pegging the CPU at 100% with all the frame dropping. It’s likely that this is due to a lack of h.264 hardware decoding support, as this would push this burden onto the CPU. The system uses the Intel 915GMS chipset with the GMA 900 iGPU, which appears to just provide hardware acceleration for MPEG 2.