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YouTube modder Devran Cosmo Uenal demonstrated an experimental Xbox port of KytyPS5, an open-source PlayStation 5 emulator, playing titles like Quake 2, Gex Trilogy, Hellboy Web of Wyrd and Marvel Cosmic Invasion on a Series X. He also showed the PS5 interface running with an option to launch the PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto 5, though he says compatibility remains limited.
Discord confirmed on X that an experimental Game Mode, spotted in leaked screenshots over the weekend, will begin rolling out to users next week. The toggle is designed to reduce Discord's CPU and GPU usage while a game is running, and the company says it plans to add more resource-saving features over time.
Ayaneo's budget sub-brand Konkr unveiled the Pocket Block, a compact vertical handheld resembling a Game Boy, priced from $89 with a $79 preorder deal. It features a 3.3-inch 960x720 LCD screen, a MediaTek Helio G85 chip, a 3.5mm jack, microSD slot, USB-C, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth. Higher storage models cost $99 and add color options, with shipping expected by the end of October.
Sam Tooley founded Alpha Fit Club in a 700-square-foot New Jersey studio in 2019, starting as a personal training business before his father's sudden death pushed him to grow it into a full venture. The strength-and-conditioning franchise now has 20 studios operating and 30 more sold across the East Coast, and will host its largest event yet, Alpha Games, on October 3 at American Dream Mall, featuring 1,550 members and 750 teams.
A developer shared a Show HN project that overlays an animated stickman fighting game onto any website, letting visitors interact with a destructible interface layered over live pages. The tool includes controls for restarting matches, opening new sites, adjusting background and sound, and embedding the effect elsewhere.
Valve has integrated Pyrowave, a video codec built by open-source developer Hans-Kristian Arntzen specifically for in-home game streaming, into the Steam beta client's Remote Play feature. Unlike general-purpose codecs such as AVC or AV1, Pyrowave is designed to cut encoding and decoding delays and avoid chroma subsampling artifacts that cause blurry text, though it reportedly requires roughly 5 to 10 times more bandwidth to do so.
A developer building a 3D polygonal game engine describes using Haar wavelet basis functions to compress low-contrast textures and their mipmaps. The piece explains that a typical 256x256 texture consumes 256KB of RAM, and that a scene with dozens of visible textures plus many more stored off-screen can require roughly 200MB of memory, a burden for typical end-user computers at the time.
A new alpha-stage project called ProsperoEden ports the open-source Eden Nintendo Switch emulator to jailbroken PS5 consoles, according to a report from VideoCardz. Testing shows games like Cuphead, Metroid Dread, Hollow Knight and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe running at playable frame rates, while titles such as Breath of the Wild are unplayable and Animal Crossing: New Horizons runs poorly at around 15 FPS.
UK Games Expo, the UK's largest tabletop convention, issued a new policy prohibiting exhibitors from displaying or selling games, art, text or related products created completely or mostly by AI tools. Exhibitors who refuse to remove such items risk having their booth shut down and being barred from future events. The policy allows only minor AI use, such as spell-checking or accessibility aids.
State Sen. John Kane has introduced the Protect Our Games Act in Pennsylvania, which would require video game publishers to give 60 days' notice before cutting off access to a title. Companies would then have to offer offline play, a server-independent patch, or a refund based on the game's highest price over the past year, capped at no less than 25% of its original cost.
An online geography game called Borderline has compiled roughly 37,500 crowd-sourced drawings of country borders and coastlines, aggregating them into a visual map that overlays every submitted outline against the real one. The project breaks results down by country, drawing type (land border, coastline, or daily challenge round), and includes median accuracy scores and error rates for each nation.
A solo developer working on a Minecraft-style voxel game called Block Game (working title) implemented a custom software occlusion culling system to improve rendering performance, particularly on weak integrated GPUs like the Radeon Vega 8. The developer reports the system runs in roughly half a frame at 60 FPS, culling 50-60% of chunks above ground and up to 95% underground, pushing framerates above 400 in cave scenes.