Sony has opted to license a long-running open-source PlayStation emulator, PCSX, to power the games on its upcoming plug-n-play PlayStation Classic system. 

Ars Technica has a pretty detailed write-up worth reading on what exactly the PlayStation Classic’s PCSX roots mean, but its an interesting observation given that Nintendo’s recent mini systems were powered by an emulator of the company’s own design. 

In short, the PlayStation Classic runs on PCSX ReARMed, a modern version of an emulator that has been around since the early 2000s. PCSX has seen its fair share of versions and plugins over the years from a variety of developers, resulting in versions like PCSX reloaded and PCSX ReARMed. 

Sony has obviously used emulators in the past to do things like bring PlayStation 2 games forward to PlayStation 3 and, through a subscription service, PlayStation 4. The recent HD release of Parappa the Rappa on the PlayStation 4 was even found to be the PSP version of the game running on an emulator. But the notable departure in this case is that Sony is looking to community-made tools to power the PlayStation Classic rather than create their own emulator or enlist another developer to create one for the system. 

A few weeks ago, Papers, Please developer Lucas Pope released his latest game, a mercantile murder mystery called Return of the Obra Dinn. It’s another entry in Pope’s history of making interesting games about ordinary people, and its deductive sudoku-like nature have captured the attention of other game developers. 

Luckily for you, Pope was game to come by and chat about his experience making Return of the Obra Dinn over on the GDC Twitch channel and answer questions about everything from 1-bit art direction to his work/life balance on the four-and-a-half year project. 

Be sure to click the video above for the full conversation! And For more game developer interviews, you can now follow the GDC Twitch channel and participate in regular Q&As with talented developers behind interesting games. 

Starting at 2:00 p.m. PDT today, members of the Xbox One Preview Beta and Delta Rings will begin receiving a new 1811 Xbox One system update (181030-1920). Read on for more about the fixes and known issues in the latest 1811 system update.

New Features:

Family Settings

• Children signing up for new accounts will now be asked to add a parent only if required to by local privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR or COPPA). This means that some minors, like teens in the U.S., will no longer have to add a parent and join a Microsoft family during signup. Xbox privacy and online safety defaults will still be applied based on age, and in order to change those, the minor would need to add a parent on Xbox who can then change their settings. Minors not in a family can add a parent anytime in Settings > Account > Family settings > Add a parent. Joining a family would also allow the parent and child to use other family features like content restrictions, screen time, activity reporting, and spending.
• Children that are subject to local privacy regulations will still be required to add a parent during signup. While this will create a Microsoft family through which the parent can use family features like content restrictions, screen time, activity reporting, and spending, the parent will no longer be required to sign in on Xbox. If a parent wants to change their child’s Xbox privacy and online safety settings, the parent can sign in separately on Xbox and manage their family in Settings > Account > Family settings.
• Existing child accounts are not affected by this change and will remain with their parents in their current Microsoft family.

 Mouse & Keyboard Support

• We have enabled mouse support in this release.  Please check out the Quest in the Xbox Insider Hub to experience mouse and keyboard support in Warframe.

 Search Enhancements

• The search function has been enhanced across the console and will now return responses from the Xbox Assist application for example to help with help, support and troubleshooting.  Please check out the Quest in the Xbox Insider Hub to help us gather feedback.

Fixes:

Audio

• Several fixes to improve the stability of Audio and enhancements to Spatial Audio.  The fixes address the issue in which some users would experience no audio or inconsistent audio in games/apps.  The enhancements to Spatial audio improve the user experience.

Game Hubs

• Game Hub pages will no longer display a blank white square in the top left corner of the screen while in High Contrast Light theme

Networking

• Additional fixes to address the console loosing network connectivity at random times.
• Additional fixes to address the console fully powering off when it is placed into Instant On mode.

System – USB Keyboard

• Fixes to address several areas of navigation when using a USB keyboard:
  
  • Users are now able to scroll horizontally through the tiles displayed within the Welcome screen of official clubs
  • Users are now able to set focus to the Redeem Code or Launch Site button options within Xbox Live Messages
  • Focus will remain on the Profile tile when attempting to scroll down to the More Actions and Comments button option within the Activity Feeds
  • Users will now not lose focus within the Welcome tab of Official club pages when scrolling down the screen via the usb keyboard
  • Scrolling through Profile cards within the guide will appear without choppy navigation

System – General

• Fixes to address memory leaks that led to app and system instability.
• UI fixes to address spacing of text/Profile cards and game tiles throughout home.

Known Issues:

Profile Color

• Sometimes users may encounter the incorrect Profile color when powering on the console.

Earlier this year in July, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against two ROM and emulator websites at the federal court in the US state of Arizona for trademark and copyright infringement. The latest development is the owners and operators of these now-defunct websites – a married couple – have agreed to a settlement exceeding $12 million in favour of Nintendo.

In August, it was revealed both parties wanted to avoid prolonged court proceedings – with consent judgment and permanent injunction now resolving all of the outstanding disputes. The owners of the sites admit their involvement was both direct and indirect copyright and trademark infringement, resulting in irreparable injury for the Japanese video game company. Below is the unsigned verdict:

Plaintiff is hereby awarded judgment against all Defendants, jointly and severally, in the amount of $12,230,000.

As noted by TorrentFreak, this high sum is likely intended to act as a deterrent for any other ROM and emulator website operators. It is unlikely the couple has this amount of money and presumably a jury would not have reached this same figure. If this is the case, it would not be the first time a judgment in court has been more than what two parties agreed to privately.

The permanent injunction in the settlement prevents the couple from infringing Nintendo’s copyrights in the future and requires them to hand over both website domains as well as all of the games and emulators in their possession.

Self-proclaimed Prime Minister of Australia Oscar Brittain and also the creator of Desert Child has revealed his upcoming Switch eShop release – published by Akupara Games – will be available on 11th December.

This racing game, containing RPG elements, has you speeding about on vintage hoverbikes as you attempt to escape from planet Earth before it explodes. In between races, you’ll eat ramen, deliver pizzas, sell gun parts for money and repair and customise your bike. The title draws inspiration from anime-hits Cowboy Bebop, Redline and Akira.

Having been developed down under, there are seemingly a number of references to local culture. This includes the addition of Aussie hip-hop in the game’s soundtrack and lines of dialogue comprised of Australian slang. Take a look at the original Switch announcement trailer below to get a better idea of what this game is all about:

Will you be downloading this racing RPG when it arrives on the Switch next month? Tell us in the comments.

Kynseed is Now Available on Steam Early Access!

You’ve been given the Kynseed, a mystical acorn that grows into a family tree where your choices manifest in its branches. Raise a family, farm the land, run shops, and explore a world where everyone ages. When you die, step into the shoes of your children and continue your legacy.

Inspiring students to look beyond themselves

Disale is not alone. Shiva Kumar, who teaches in the sweltering farmlands of southern India, is Asia’s first Skype Master Teacher, a designation for volunteers who use Skype often in their lessons and are willing to train other teachers in how to use it to connect their classrooms.

Through Skype sessions, his students have traveled millions of miles around the world, virtually. Living in a flat, hot region, Kumar’s students were amazed when they experienced a Skype call with an Arctic research team. “It was eye-opening for them to discover that such a cold region exists in the world,” he says.

After more than a thousand interactions with classrooms or experts in dozens of countries since 2015, he’s still amazed by the surprising lessons learned.

Take the time his class of 8- to 10-year-olds had a Skype call with kids in a Kenyan refugee camp. “We found out that six kids were sharing one textbook there, and my students were shocked to learn of the difficulties they have and yet see the empathy flowing among them despite it all,” Kumar recalls. “My students realized there are a lot of poor people in the world, and it inspired them to start sharing more amongst themselves. Even small things like lunch, or a pencil or eraser, or sports equipment — they began sharing everything.”

“We’ve had sessions with 78 different countries,” says Kumar. “But in spite of all that diversity, the sense of commonality is what comes through to the kids. When they laugh and share things, that’s what they identify: oneness within diversity.”

For this year’s Skype-a-Thon the students in Kumar’s 10 STEM classes will bring their sleeping bags to school so they can do eight-hour shifts of 30-minute Skype sessions. The two-day marathon of virtual travel has become a staple for Kumar’s classes ever since they did the first one four years ago, when the students’ connections with classrooms around the world spanned more than a million miles. The kids decorate their school with lights and showcase their Indian culture through traditional dances and musical instruments, as well as modern STEM projects.

Disale will also be participating in the Skype-a-Thon, where he will be connecting 30 classrooms across 17 countries. Last year, almost half-a-million students from more than 90 countries participated, traveling 14.5 million miles. The goal is to meet or exceed those figures this year. For every 400 miles virtually traveled in the Skype-a-Thon, Microsoft will donate the resources for a student to attend school in one of the nine WE Villages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with a goal of helping 35,000 kids.

Continuing the quest to become a command-line power user, in this installment, we will be taking on the find command.

Jack Wallen already covered the basics of find in an article published recently here on Linux.com. If you are completely unfamiliar with find, please read that article first to come to grips with the essentials.

Done? Good. Now, you need to know that find can be used to do much more than just for search for something, in fact you can use it to search for two or three things. For example:

 find path/to/some/directory/ -type f -iname '*.svg' -o -iname '*.pdf' 

This will cough up all the files with the extensions svg (or SVG) and pdf (or PDF) in the path/to/directory directory. You can add more things to search for using the -o over and over.

You can also search in more than one directory simultaneously just be adding them to the route bit of the command. Say you want to see what is eating up all the space on your hard drive:

 find $HOME /var /etc -size +500M 

This will return all the files bigger than 500 Megabytes (-size +500M) in your home directory, /var and /etc.

Additionally, find also lets you do stuff with the files it… er… finds. For example, you can use the -delete action to remove everything that comes up in a search. Now, be careful with this one. If you run

 # WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT $HOME find . -iname "*" -delete 

find will erase everything in the current directory (. is shorthand for “the current directory“) and everything in the subdirectories under it, and then the subdirectories themselves, and then there will be nothing but emptiness and an unbearable feeling that something has gone terribly wrong.

Please do not put it to the test.

Instead, let’s look at some more constructive examples…

Moving Stuff Around

Let’s say you have bunch of pictures of Tux the penguin in several formats and spread out over dozens of directories, all under your Documents/ folder. You want to bring them all together into one directory (Tux/) to create a gallery you can revel in:

 find $HOME/Documents/ \( -iname "*tux*png" -o -iname "*tux*jpg" -o -iname "*tux*svg" \)   -exec cp -v '{}' $HOME/Tux/ \; 

Let’s break this down:

Once you have the basics of modifying files using find under your belt, you will discover all sorts of situations where it comes in handy. For example…

A Terrible Mish-Mash

Client X has sent you a zip file with important documents and images for the new website you are working on for them. You copy the zip into your ClientX folder (which already contains dozens of files and directories) and uncompress it with unzip newwebmedia.zip and, gosh darn it, the person who made the zip file didn’t compress the directory itself, but the contents in the directory. Now all the images, text files and subdirectories from the zip are all mixed up with the original contents of you folder, that contains more images, text files, and subdirectories.

You could try and remember what the original files were and then move or delete the ones that came from the zip archive. But with dozens of entries of all kinds, you are bound to get mixed up at some point and forget to move a file, or, worse, delete one of your original files.

Looking at the files’ dates (ls -la *) won’t help either: the Zip program keeps the dates the files were originally created, not when they were zipped or unzipped. This means a “new” file from the zip could very well have a date prior to some of the files that were already in the folder when you did the unzipping.

You probably can guess what comes next: find to the rescue! Move into the directory (cd path/to/ClientX), make a new directory where you want the new stuff to go (mkdir NewStuff), and then try this:

 find . -cnewer newwebmedia.zip -exec mv '{}' NewStuff \; 

Breaking that down:

• The period (.) tells find to do its thing in the current directory.
• -cnewer tells find to look for files that have been changed at the same time or after a certain file you give as reference. In this case the reference file is newwebmedia.zip. If you copied the file over at 12:00 and then unpacked it at 12:01, all the files that you unpacked will be tagged as changed at 12:01, that is, after newwebmedia.zip and will match that criteria! And, as long as you didn’t change anything else, they will be the only files meeting that criteria.
• The -exec part of the instruction simply tells find to move the files and directories to the NewStuff/ directory, thus cleaning up the mess.

If you are unsure of anything find may do, you can swap -exec for -ok. The -ok option forces find to check with you before it runs the command you have given it. Accept an action by typing y or reject it with n.

Next Time

We’ll be looking at environmental variables and a way to search even more deeply into files with the grep command.