How Resident Evil 2 For The N64 Kept Its FMV Cutscenes

February 3, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Originally released for the Sony PlayStation in 1998, Resident Evil 2 came on two CDs and used 1.2 GB in total. Of this, full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes took up most of the space, as was rather common for PlayStation games. This posed a bit of a challenge when ported to the Nintendo 64 with its paltry 64 MB of cartridge-based storage. Somehow the developers managed to do the impossible and retain the FMVs, as detailed in a recent video by [LorD of Nerds]. Toggle the English subtitles if German isn’t among your installed natural language parsers.

Instead of dropping the FMVs and replacing them with static screens, a technological improvement was picked. Because of the N64’s rather beefy hardware, it was possible to apply video compression that massively reduced the storage requirements, but this required repurposing the hardware for tasks it was never designed for.

The people behind this feat were developers at Angel Studios, who had 12 months to make it work. Ultimately they achieved a compression ratio of 165:1, with software decoding handling the decompressing and the Reality Signal Processor (RSP) that’s normally part of the graphics pipeline used for both audio tasks and things like upscaling.

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KDE Binds Itself Tightly To Systemd, Drops Support For Non-Systemd Systems

February 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 97 Comments

The KDE desktop’s new login manager (PLM) in the upcoming Plasma 6.6 will mark the first time that KDE requires that the underlying OS uses systemd, if one wishes for the full KDE experience. This has especially the FreeBSD community upset, but will also affect Linux distros that do not use systemd. The focus of the KDE team is clear, as stated in the referenced Reddit thread, where a KDE developer replies that the goal is to rely on systemd for more tasks in the future. This means that PLM is just the first step.

In the eyes of KDE it seems that OSes that do not use systemd are ‘niche’ and not worth supporting, with said niche Linux distros that would be cut out including everything from Gentoo to Alpine Linux and Slackware. Regardless of your stance on systemd’s merits or lack thereof, it would seem to be quite drastic for one of the major desktop environments across Linux and BSD to suddenly make this decision.

It also raises the question of in how far this is related to the push towards a distroless and similarly more integrated, singular version of Linux as an operating system. Although there are still many other DEs that will happily run for the foreseeable future on your flavor of GNU/Linux or BSD – regardless of whether you’re more about about a System V or OpenRC init-style environment – this might be one of the most controversial divides since systemd was first introduced.

Top image: KDE Plasma 6.4.5. (Credit: Michio.kawaii, Wikimedia)

Teardown Of An Apple AirTag 2 With Die Shots

February 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

There are a few possible ways to do a teardown of new electronics like the Apple AirTag 2 tracker, with [electronupdate] opting to go down to the silicon level, with die shots of the major ICs in a recent teardown video. Some high-resolution photos are also found on the separate blog page.

First we get to see the outside of the device, followed by the individual layers of the sandwiched rings of the device, starting with the small speaker, which is surrounded by the antenna for the ultrawide band (UWB) feature.

Next is the PCB layer, with a brief analysis of the main ICs, before they get lifted off and decapped for an intimate look at their insides. These include the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 Bluetooth chip, which also runs the firmware of the device.

The big corroded-looking grey rectangle on the PCB is the UWB chip assembly, with the die shot visible in the heading image. It provides the localization feature of the AirTag that allows you to tell where the tag is precisely. In the die analysis we get a basic explanation of what the structures visible are for. Basically it uses an array of antennae that allows the determination of time-of-flight and with it the direction of the requesting device relative to it.

In addition to die shots of the BT and UWB chips we also get the die shot of the Bosch-made accelerometer chip, as well as an SPI memory device, likely an EEPROM of some description.

As for disabling the speaker in these AirTag 2 devices, it’s nestled deep inside, well away from the battery. This is said to make disabling it much harder without a destructive disassembly, yet as iFixit demonstrated, it’s actually fairly easy to do it non-destructively.

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How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source

February 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 108 Comments

Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some modelling. Their warnings mostly center around the way that user interaction is pulled away from OSS projects, while also making starting a new OSS project significantly harder.

“Vibe coding” here is defined as software development that is assisted by an LLM-backed chatbot, where the developer asks the chatbot to effectively write the code for them. Arguably this turns the developer into more of a customer/client of the chatbot, with no requirement for the former to understand what the latter’s code does, just that what is generated does the thing that the chatbot was asked to create.

This also removes the typical more organic selection process of libraries and tooling, replacing it with whatever was most prevalent in the LLM’s training data. Even for popular projects visits to their website decrease as downloads and documentation are replaced by LLM chatbot interactions, reducing the possibility of promoting commercial plans, sponsorships, and community forums. Much of this is also reflected in the plummet in usage of community forums like Stack Overflow.

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Running DOOM And Super Mario 64 Inside A PDF File

February 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Although generally described as a document format, PDFs have ballooned from a Postscript-lite format into a mutant featuring XML and JavaScript support, basically turning what once was a fairly simple format into an interactive page. Naturally, this has to be used for good, and that is why we have the Doom PDF project, as well as [Game of Tobi] using that project as the inspiration for a Super Mario 64 port based on the decompiled source code.

The nice thing about the Super Mario 64 version is that it’s stand-alone, running from a 23.5 MB PDF, unlike the Doom PDF which runs the game in DOSBox. The compromise is that Super Mario 64 PDF runs at just a few FPS, with the output in glorious ASCII.

What enables this feat is to open the PDF in a viewer that supports JavaScript, with the PDF.js that comes with most browsers generally allowing for integrated JS in the PDF to be executed. Unfortunately [Game of Tobi] hasn’t released source code for this project, but we hope that this is forthcoming.

While one can argue about the practicality of this whole demonstration from a gaming perspective, it definitely shows that PDF as a format has gotten way out of hand now that it’s even overrun with hellspawn and Italian plumbers.

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Fixing Sony And Philips’ Doomed CD-i Console

February 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Although not intended to be a game console, the CD-i would see a a couple of games released for it that would cement its position in gaming history as the butt of countless jokes, some of which still make Nintendo upset to this day. That aside, it’s still a fascinating glimpse at the CD-based multimedia future envisioned in the early 90s, starting with its release in 1990. Recently [MattKC] decided to purchase another CD-i in a fit of nostalgic rage, and repair it to show the world what the future could have been like.

Although Sony and Philips co-developed the device, Sony would go on to release the PlayStation a few years later, which made the CD-i’s life and expectations for it that much harder, leading to it slowly fading into history. The Magnavox one that [MattKC] got is one of the later models, based on the CD-i 450 that was introduced in 1994 as one of the more gaming-oriented models.

As is typical with older devices that use optical media, it would not read discs. It also would sometimes boot up with a ‘Memory Full’ error. This is a common fault due to the built-in battery having run out, erasing RAM-stored values and causing random glitches like this when garbage values were read in on boot.

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Writing An Optimizing Tensor Compiler From Scratch

January 30, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Not everyone will write their own optimizing compiler from scratch, but those who do sometimes roll into it during the course of ever-growing project scope creep. People like [Michael Moroz], who wrote up a long and detailed article on the why and how. Specifically, a ‘small library’ involving a few matrix operations for a Unity-based project turned into a static optimizing tensor compiler, called TensorFrost, with a Python front-end and a shader-like syntax, all of which is available on GitHub.

The Python-based front-end implements low-level NumPy-like operations, with development still ongoing. As for why Yet Another Tensor Library had be developed, the reasons were that most of existing libraries are heavily focused on machine learning tasks and scale poorly otherwise, dynamic control flow is hard to implement, and the requirement of writing custom kernels in e.g. CUDA.

Above all [Michael] wanted to use a high-level language instead of pure shader code, and have something that can output graphical data in real-time. Taking the gamble, and leaning on LLVM for some parts, there is now a functional implementation, albeit with still a lot of work ahead.