Eben Upton

Corporate bean counters hamstring the legendary idTech engine Corporate suits at Microsoft just threw decades of collective technical brilliance into the woodchipper. In a ruthless 30-second video call with chat disabled and microphones muted, management gutted id Software, laying off 136 staff members in their Texas office. This fifth round of layoffs since 2023 hit right after the studio rolled out the expansion for Doom: The Dark Ages. While corporate PR insists they still have the hands on deck to build future games, internal leaks paint a far grimmer picture. The layoffs targeted the exact team responsible for maintaining and developing the proprietary idTech engine. This highly regarded engine powers not only id Software's own titles but also games from sister studios like Wolfenstein developer Machine Games. Crucial engineers who understood the engine's inner workings are gone. Without these specialized developers, the future of this iconic proprietary graphics engine looks incredibly shaky. This short-sighted decision proves once again that under major publishers, studio success does not guarantee job security. Upton boots a wireframe Doom on the ancient BBC Micro On the hardware front, Eben Upton pulled off a spectacular retro engineering feat by porting Doom to the 1981 BBC Micro Model B. This machine is an iconic staple of 1980s British classrooms. Getting the game to run on this ancient machine requires conquering massive hardware limitations. The original game relied on a 32-bit CPU, 16.16 fixed-point math, and large look-up tables. By contrast, the BBC Micro has a measly 2 MHz 8-bit 6502 CPU with no multiply instruction, and just 32K of RAM. Upton's wireframe port renders the famous E1M1 level at roughly seven frames per second. It implements full binary space partitioning (BSP) tree traversal, analytical hidden surface removal, and perspective projection. It even supports functional lifts and doors. Interestingly, Upton co-authored this port using Anthropic's Claude LLM coding agent, logging over 500 commits. While some retro purists might balk at using modern AI helpers for assembly-level coding, it shows how modern developer tools can accelerate low-level hardware optimization. Spotting the tells in a fake Unreal Engine 5 leak Internet rumors recently flared up over a supposed leaked screenshot of Half-Life 3. Fans immediately started digging into the files, but seasoned engine builders spotted the fake right away. The scene, which depicts Eli Vance and Gordon Freeman in a dense forest facing a glowing blue orb, bears all the unmistakable tells of a rapid Unreal Engine 5 mockup rather than a native Valve Source 2 project. First, the screenshot exposes default Unreal Engine 5 volumetric clouds. Valve would never rely on stock Epic Games assets for their flagship sequel. Second, the environment reveals a classic bowl map structure. The landscape simply ceases to exist beyond the immediate hills in the player's view, pointing to a scene thrown together in a few hours. Finally, the foliage distribution gives it away. The trees are far too dense for natural gameplay and feature identical models rotated at awkward angles. This is a classic side effect of using the Unreal foliage brush tool on default settings. The pistol model also appears to have volumetric lighting slapped on afterward using Blender or AI. Build your own physical Steam cartridges with cheap SATA SSDs If you miss the tactile satisfaction of slamming a physical cartridge into a console, you will love this clever hardware project by maker Jabril Sama. Instead of relying entirely on digital library launchers, Sama upcycled a pile of cheap 128 GB 2.5-inch SATA SSDs into custom-labeled PC game cartridges. The hardware is wonderfully simple. Sama bought used SSDs on eBay for around eight dollars apiece, housed them in 3D-printed custom-labeled cartridge shells with built-in handles, and paired them with a standard SATA dock. On the software side, the rig runs on Linux. When you slide the SSD into the dock, a custom udev rule detects the storage connection and immediately fires up a systemd daemon. This daemon searches the drive for a launch script and executes it. The script utilizes Valve's Steam URL protocol to automatically mount the drive, navigate Steam directly to the game's page, and launch the title. This project keeps massive modern games off your primary OS drive while reviving old-school physical media. Enthusiasts shove Linux onto Atari's failed Jaguar console Developers continue to prove that if a device has a processor, someone will find a way to run Linux on it. A system software developer recently successfully ported Linux to the notoriously difficult-to-program Atari Jaguar console. Originally released in 1993, this console features a 13.3 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU alongside its custom Tom and Jerry co-processors. Porting a modern operating system to this hardware is a nightmare. The system completely lacks a memory management unit (MMU) and offers only 2 MB of system RAM. While the port does not serve any immediate practical purpose, it demonstrates the absolute limits of low-level 68000 assembly programming. It keeps the spirit of open-source hardware hacking alive on historically challenging platforms. Microsoft open-sources the nostalgic comic client that popularized Comic Sans Microsoft threw retro enthusiasts a bone by open-sourcing Microsoft Comic Chat, the quirky Windows 95 communication client. Released in 1996 alongside Internet Explorer 3, Comic Chat allowed users to connect to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers and render text conversations as a real-time comic strip. Built using Visual C++ 4.0 and Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) libraries, the software automatically translated text inputs into distinct comic panels. Users could select custom characters and manually change their avatar's emotional expressions. Crucially, Comic Chat was the software that gave the infamous Comic Sans font its first major platform. Designed by typographer Vincent Connare to match the informal, hand-lettered aesthetic of speech bubbles, the font became a staple of digital communication. Now that the source code is on GitHub, developers can study its unique text-to-panel rendering algorithms or port the classic client to modern platforms.