Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale […]

Long-time Slashdot reader ardiri remembers his days writing applications for the Palm OS. And he's now released approximately 1.5 GB of historical Palm OS development resources, "accumulated during the early days of handheld computing and preserved on hard drive backups for more than 25 years... to preserve the tools and knowledge that helped define an important era of personal computing." The collection includes historical SDKs, developer conference presentations, technical documentation, programming examples, limited source code, and development utilities. (ROM images, commercial applications, and simulator binaries have deliberately been excluded....) Making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community, the archive is available at GitHub.com/ardiri/dev-palmos and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform... Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and has started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books. And somewhere along the way, Ardiri rediscovered the original source code for "The Palm OS Virus That Never Was — Lost for 25 Years, Found in 2026." Lurking on a CompactFlash card containing files dated June 2001, he found the self-replicating Palm OS virus that he'd developed and tested in June 2001, months before the planned PalmSource developer conference in San Jose. Named 'Virii,' the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference. The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments. He promises the functional source code and binaries will remain private.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s might be familiar with the Atari 2600 console and its now relatively unrecognizable (by modern standards) controller with only a single button and stiff whole-hand joystick. By comparison, the Steam Deck has somewhere around 24 buttons and two joysticks depending on how they are counted. But even the Atari might be providing more user inputs than are really necessary for quality gaming. Take a look at the Dinoboy, a handheld console with only a single button.

Part of what makes this system work is that it’s playing the classic dinosaur jumping game first included in Google Chrome which loads when the browser can’t connect to the Internet, and the user’s single input was the space bar. In this case, the handheld has its single button where the user’s thumb naturally rests. The console itself is in two parts, hinged where the button is placed. When unfolded, the top half reveals a wide screen and the bottom half is held by the hand. The screen supports two color formats, a black and white style and another which replicates the dot matrix display of the original Game Boy.

The small handheld console has another trick up its sleeve too. [Paul], the system’s creator, built it as a way to stop doomscrolling so along with having this quick-deploying game on hand, there’s also an NFC tag hidden near the hinge which, when swiped passed a phone, also turns that phone’s airplane mode on. It’s a double-whammy of removing the gamer from the dark patterns and algorithms dominating the mainstream Internet. And, this isn’t [Paul]’s only dinosaur jumper console either. We recently featured a similar (but much larger) build of his housed in a classic arcade-style cabinet.

For years, Chinese hardware manufacturers have carved out a market niche with an array of handheld Android gaming devices focused on retro emulation and/or more modern game-streaming capabilities. Now, though, a major game industry trade group is targeting one of those manufacturers, Anbernic, asking the US Trade Representative (USTR) to add the company to its list of "Notorious Markets" that "engage in or facilitate substantial copyright piracy or trademark counterfeiting."

TorrentFreak was among the first to notice the request from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which was submitted to the USTR last week. In it, the US trade group—which represents major publishers including Nintendo, Microsoft, PlayStation, Amazon, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, and more—notes that Anbernic devices "are routinely offered or shipped with removable memory cards preloaded with hundreds or thousands of unauthorized copies of copyright-protected video games published by ESA members."

While many online sellers do include an SD card full of ROMs alongside emulation hardware of all types, Anbernic itself does not appear to do the same when selling directly from its website. Regardless, the ESA argues that these ROM-laden Anbernic devices selling through "normal retail channels" help to "normalize hardware-based piracy by delivering illicit catalogues through a polished consumer product." This, the ESA says, meets the threshold for a "superfake," an ill-defined designation that applies to "high-quality counterfeit trademark goods ... on a commercial scale."

Read full article

Comments

© Anbernic