Indice dei contenuti per PC PowerPlay: Dream Machine in PC Powerplay

Let’s start off with Ryzen 3, the first true overhaul of the Ryzen processor since its launch in Q1 of 2017. It’s known by several codenames, with Zen 2 being the best descriptor. The desktop Zen 2-based CPU family is known as ‘Matisse’, while the refreshed APUs with integrated graphics are known as ‘Picasso’. Zen 2 brings a fundamental and drastic change in design and manufacturing. It introduces a multi-chip module design where the CPU core complexes and I/O components are contained on their own, separate dies. MCM designs bring many advantages. The smaller individual dies mean manufacturability is improved, with less defects and higher yields compared to a single large monolithic design. Modularity and scalability is also improved. We see this with the relative ease that AMD is able…

At the heart of your processor is the section that takes the data and runs the x86-64 instruction set over it — this defines the PC. This is the microarchitecture. Around this sits a host of other transistors, the caches, memory controller, I/O controller, possibly on-board graphics, and more. What was once spread out across a motherboard has migrated into the silicon. The microarchitecture defines the abilities, efficiency, and ultimately the power of your chip and system. We are not going to delve into the inner workings of the actual execution units here, so you’re spared the block diagrams. And we’re going to skip over mobile, embedded, and server offerings, too, otherwise we’d need the whole magazine for this. But if you’re going to pick the right chip, you need…

Once upon a time, every PC needed a graphics card; now, many processors come with a decent one ready to roll. If you haven’t used a processor’s on-board graphics for a while, you may be pleasantly surprised — they are actually perfectly usable. Not top-title-games or productivity good, but for most other things, perfectly adequate. Intel uses its UHD series in desktop chips — virtually all of them, in fact. All Coffee Lake chips, bar the Celeron version and those bizarre KF series, sport a UHD 630 engine. This runs at a base clock of 350MHz, and a slightly faster boost as you move up the pecking order, from 1.1GHz to 1.2GHz. It can handle a 4K screen, and can access a maximum of 64GB video memory (an unlikely scenario,…

A quick Google search for “failed game streaming services” rather damningly places OnLive at the top of the results list. It wasn’t the only one to fall in the face of traditional downloads and physical copies, though. Gaikai’s tech might have gone on to form a powerful baseline for PlayStation Now, but its original service failed to gain much momentum. Elsewhere, Square Enix’s ill-fated effort Shinra lasted less than two years before it admitted defeat and shut it down, resulting in a loss of more than $16 million. Others simply vanished into the ether. If you’ve heard of InstantAction or GameFly, congratulations — you’ve been paying more attention than most. GeForce Now, Nvidia’s attempt at a cloud gaming platform, has been in an open beta state for months now. It…

If your Internet connection is even vaguely important to you, a quality router is the way to go. How far you go depends largely on what sort of user you are. If, say, you fancy yourself as something of a serious gamer, you should at least consider Netgear’s Nighthawk router, which will set you back a not-insignificant $670. That big pile of cash does get you some serious cutting-edge technology, though, and it’s the kind of device that should serve all your networking needs for many, many years to come. Apart from the incredible array of connectivity standards supported, including six Gigabit Ethernet ports and tri-band wireless support, there are plenty of other features to get excited about as well. For instance, the USB ports tucked out of sight on…

Almost a year ago, Dell’s 8K UP3218K landed in the Lab. What was it like? If you’re into font rendering, the answer is seriously sexy. With the 8K resolution compressed into 32-inch proportions, the result is Retina-style 275 dpi pixel density. Yum. Seeing really high res photos, renders, and video in all their glory is another upside. The ability this screen gives image professionals to survey the full detail in multi-megapixel pictures certainly separates it from the 4K masses. Editing 4K video in a small window but at full resolution is a neat trick, too. The UP3218K requires dual DisplayPort 1.4 connections for 60Hz operation, which is a pain, and it ran painfully hot across the top of its main bezel, which didn’t bode well for long-term reliability. You can…

LENGTH OF TIME: 20–30 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: EXTREME 1 TWIN SYSTEM PREP Our Dream Machine is extra special, because we’re fitting two full systems in one super-tower chassis, under one cooling loop. It’s a complex affair, but the first thing we knew we needed to do was prep both the motherboards. That meant seating the CPUs into their respective LGA sockets, installing the memory, and more importantly, installing the CPU blocks ahead of time. The Phanteks blocks are actually fairly simple to fit, with the only noticeable challenge being the backplate on the ITX build requiring us to position the stand-offs correctly. Other than that, they also come with RGB cables. Those are a little funky to set up, and if we’re honest, we’re not convinced they add much,…

One of the earliest machines to be accepted as an analog computer is the Antikythera Mechanism. Dated to around 100 BC, it was used in astronomy to determine the positions of celestial bodies decades in advance. Only fragments of it remain, but detailed imaging suggests it could even model the irregular orbit of the moon. You can find a simulation of the Antikythera Mechanism at www.etl.uom.gr/mr/index.php?mypage=antikythera_sim. It only has a Windows executable, but it runs under Wine. In the 13th century, we find Turkish inventor Ismail al-Jazari and his automata, laid out in his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Al-Jazari made complex mechanical musicians that ran via clockwork, and even had a programmable drum machine, coded by altering the movement of cams. However, documentaries usually start just before…

If you fancy a bash at Spacewar!, the easiest way is just to play it online—we especially like the version by Norbert Landsteiner at www.masswerk.at/spacewar. The screen surrounds and image blur are especially nice touches, and Norbert has gone into exceptional detail, making the experience as authentic as possible. If you’re determined to play it locally on your own machine, you’re in luck if you own a Raspberry Pi. User Warpshock has written a tutorial for RetroPie users at https://bit.ly/2RtkTm6. If you would like to run a PDP-1 emulator, your distro should have the simh package in its repositories. You can run the emulator by entering the following command: $ pdp1 We tried to get Spacewar! running on our own machine through the PDP-1 emulator, but it’s not as though…

SPECIFICATION CPU: MOS Technology 6510 @ 1MHz RAM: 64K Graphics: 320x200 resolution, 16 colors Sound: SID 6581 chip Storage: Cassette, 5.25-inch floppy, and ROM cartridge OS: Commodore KERNAL/Basic 2.0 Released: August 1982 Launch Price: US$595 Production: 1982–1994 Worldwide sales: 17 million Named after its 64K of RAM, the Commodore 64 was designed to be a great games machines from the outset, using custom chipsets to power functions separately from the CPU. The powerful VIC-II chip gave the Commodore 16 colors, hardware sprites, smooth scrolling, and a high resolution. The SID sound chip was developed by an actual musician, and wiped the floor with the competition — it’s still used by musicians today — see the box opposite for more. While many micros had features that were technically superior to the…

The 16-bit computers would be dominated by one man and one CPU. The CPU was the Motorola 68000, known in the business as the 68K — a multimedia powerhouse whose potential had not yet been tapped. The man was head of Commodore, Jack Tramiel. Tramiel was an aggressive man with even more aggressive business ideals — Commodore was sick of Jack, and Jack was sick of Commodore. Atari was old, bloated, and bleeding money, and parent company Warner wanted rid of it. Key Atari engineers wanted to make a new machine based on the 68K, but Atari wasn’t interested, so they left to create their own company, Amiga. Tramiel also left Commodore to go his own way, and bought Atari’s consumer division. Tramiel now had an established brand under which…

ATARI ST If you just want to boot into an ST, Aranym basically simulates an ST wholesale. It was in our repositories, but needed a system ROM to start. Enter EmuTOS, an open-source TOS replacement that even works on a real Atari ST. Grab the EmuTOS tarball from http:// emutos.sourceforge.net, and then copy the contents into Aranym’s config folder in “~/.aranym.” That should sort it. Hatari is like most emulators (well optioned), rather than a straight simulation — you can find out more at https://hatari.tuxfamily.org. It’s probably in your repositories, but will need its own TOS image as well. Once again, EmuTOS can provide that. AMIGA The most popular emulator is FS-UAE, which should be in your repository, but make sure you install the launcher package as well. If you’re…

Unlike the PlayStation, the Saturn is a deeply complex machine, with a dual-CPU setup, and eight processors overall. Initial sales were good in Japan, but Sega ruined its launch in the West, and never really recovered from it. Unfortunately, the Saturn was not well documented and is considered tricky to program, so most games never harnessed the performance the system could have given. Despite this, Saturn games are aging nicely, and fetch top-dollar on the second-hand market. The Saturn was a beautiful machine crippled by company mismanagement, but that makes the Saturn history’s interesting underdog, with many gaming gems westerners have never heard of. Unfortunately, all those processors make the Saturn very difficult to emulate, and years later, things are still quite patchy. The favorite emulator is still Mednafen, but…

Intel was not afraid to look far ahead during one of its Computex presentations this year. The chip maker has been threatening to step into the mainstream graphics market for a few years now, but the futuristic concepts pictured here are truly forward-looking. Created by designer Cristiano Siqueira, these concept cards are a glimpse of graphics hardware circa 2035! Of course, they might also hint to the exterior design of the long awaited Xe hardware lineup, apparently gracing our PCs some time next year. If it is a hint, well… yeah, any of these would like great in a nice, windowed case. “Created by designer Cristiano Siqueira, these concept cards are a glimpse of graphics hardware circa 2035!”…

Let’s not forget that AMD is also a graphics manufacturer. As a company, both from a market and Wall Street perspective, AMD has received a huge amount of attention for its resurgence since the release of first generation Ryzen, and its stock price reflects investor’s confidence. It’s been a long time since we saw AMD really hit one out of the park with a GPU though. We’ve long been hoping that AMD would have a Ryzen-like impact with a new graphics architecture. It’s what we’re hoping to see with its long awaited new Navi GPU. Has that moment arrived? Again, we’ll have to wait until we’ve got samples in hand to really know. Navi as it is now is NOT a high-end GPU. 2080 and 2080 Ti owners will still…

There is a practical limit on how much heat a chip can handle before going pop, and keeping cool is a fundamental part of processor design. The goal is more performance per watt. Thankfully, chips don’t go pop anymore, either; there are sensors and systems that throttle back or close down a chip if it gets too hot. Overclocking used to be potentially a rather expensive practice… A figure attached to every processor is its Thermal Design Power, or TDP. This is supposedly the most heat it can generate, for which you have to allow cooling, measured in watts. Only it isn’t. Under heavy loads, and with boost engaged, it will sail past this figure, by 150 percent or more. Actually, you can make it do this all the time…

Gaming PCs emerged in the 1980s (their specifications would make you laugh now); by the 2000s, custom-built gaming machines were everywhere; and now you can buy just about everything you need off the shelf, from colored cables to whole systems swathed in lights. Tinkering with multipliers and clock frequencies has gone mainstream. If you’re putting together a gaming rig, you’ll want a gaming motherboard — obvious, right? But are these motherboards really worth it? What can a gaming motherboard actually do to improve gaming? In a word: overclocking. This is really what they are all about, squeezing every ounce of performance from your processor and subsystems. You know how this goes: You need a big cooler, an unlocked processor, and the right motherboard chipset. But getting the right motherboard to…

Console gaming numbers have always fluctuated up and down, but home consoles do seem to be steadily trending downward as the costs associated with them increase. The peak of console gaming occurred around the turn of the millennium, with Sony’s PlayStation 2 smashing every record to sell a whopping 150 million units. By comparison, the PlayStation 4 has only sold around 95 million units in the five-plus years since its release, while the Xbox One barely managed a measly 39 million. Nintendo dominated the handheld console market, with the Nintendo DS managing to match PS2-tier sales figures, and the Game Boy and Game Boy Color before it both topping 100 million units sold. The rise of gaming-ready smartphones has hammered the handheld console market, though. The strange home-handheld hybrid Nintendo…

Much like PlayStation’s Remote Play, there are other ways to stream games yourself, without the aid of a hulking data center. Kids hogging the TV? Xbox One enables you to stream games to any Window 10 PC connected on the same network, using the computer’s monitor as a second screen, and connecting a standard Xbox controller. Because the game is effectively played in situ on the console, players can return directly to the big screen once the living room has been vacated. Steam users have this option, too, albeit in reverse; in November 2015, Valve launched Steam Link, which enabled anyone to stream their Steam library from their gaming PC to their smart TV or mobile device, over a local connection. Initially, Valve sold a piece of hardware that supported…

Bigger is better. Eight is twice as big as four. Therefore 8K video must be twice as good as 4K. Not convinced? Well… you may have a point. 8K is, of course, four times as big as 4K when it comes to the number of pixels on offer. But that isn’t the point. It doesn’t help us get at the underlying question that the very existence of 8K video raises. Is increased resolution necessarily better? More specifically, is there any upside in stepping up to 8K from 4K? After all, 4K offers over eight million individual pixels. Could 8K’s 33 million pixels be overkill? Likewise, what’s the point of 8K if there isn’t any 8K content? Even 4K content is hardly ubiquitous. 8K content barely exists. Not that display makers…

At last, the beast of bedlam rises again from the mist. Its elegant form glinting in the sunlight, as those charged rays sheen across its metallic surface. Dream Machine 2019 hath cometh, with back-breaking labor, a price list that only the divine could conjure, and a time frame in which to build it that makes memory latencies look lethargic. The Dream Machine is a labor of love, a challenge undertaken by only the most ardent of PC enthusiasts working for the magazine. Not only does it require an almost barbarous level of organisation and charisma to will this thing into existence, but it also stretches those who undertake the mighty burden to the absolute limits of their creative output. As much as you build it, craft it, develop it and…

Oh boy, when it came to testing this behemoth, it didn’t exactly play ball. The main system’s motherboard decided to have a dead memory slot on arrival, along with a couple of bent pins in the socket, requiring a complete mobo swap out, and the ITX rig wouldn’t put out any display signal at first. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, it resulted in us having to awkwardly drain the entire loop (not exactly easy with a chassis that weighs 65lb on its own, never mind all the hardware installed inside), then disassemble the system, replace the faulty hardware, and get to work, adding another two days to our overall build time. In the print industry, with fixed deadlines, we can tell you now that ain’t exactly a…

Other than the emulator, you usually need two things: some ROMs and a BIOS. “ROM” is a blanket term for programs you want to emulate. Although it should refer to an image of a system’s Read Only Memory chip, it is often used in the context of normal disk images that can be altered. Either way, you search for ROMs on specialist ROM sites. The BIOS is another blanket term for the program responsible for controlling the machine. Distributing ROMs is generally illegal, unless there’s a license that allows it — the exact legality varies between territories. Dumped copies of a system BIOS are legal under some legal frameworkls as long as the user owns the original machine. As you will see later, some emulators have their own substitute BIOS,…

ZX SPECTRUM The Fuse emulator should be in your repositories; install the fuse-emulator-gtk package, as it’s much easier to run and configure. You’ll need a system ROM to get started — our repositories had one, with spectrum-roms being the package. http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net COMMODORE 64 The best emulator is VICE, though it’s not the most user-friendly. Chances are it’s in your repositories, but doesn’t have a “KERNAL” for licensing reasons. First install your distro binaries, then grab the source tarball. Open a file browser (with superuser privileges) to “/usr/lib/vice,” compare these files and folders with the data folder in the source tarball, and copy any that are missing. http://vice-emu.sourceforge.net…

SPECIFICATION CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 8MHz RAM: 512K (up to 4MB) Graphics: 320x200 with 16 out of 512 colors, 640x200 with 4 out of 512 colors, 640x400 monochrome Sound: Yamaha YM2149F three-voice squarewave plus one-voice white noise OS: GEM, via Atari TOS Storage: 3.5-inch floppy, optional HDD Released: June 1985 Launch Price: US$800 (base model) Production: 1985–1993 Worldwide sales: 2.2 million Regarded by many as the first proper 16-bit computer, the ST was a powerhouse bargain for its time. Jack Tramiel wanted to make something that would walk over the Mac and IBM PC for a much lower price. Arriving a month before the Amiga, prices were around US$500 cheaper than the upcoming Commodore Amiga 1000 equivalents. For an operating system, Atari rejected Microsoft’s unfinished version of Windows in favor…

Computex gets bigger every year and it’s something we always look forward to. It’s as vibrant, colourful and busy as ever. This year saw the debut of a second packed Nangang exhibition hall, which, combined with numerous hotel suites, the packed out World Trade Centre and International Convention Centre on top of far flung company headquarters, dinners and briefings, means it’s not a stretch to say that Computex takes over Taipei. Taiwan is arguably the centre of the PC industry and there’s no doubt that Computex remains as relevant as ever. Unlike last year, which was relatively quiet as far as major releases go, this year saw the introduction of a new CPU and motherboard platform from AMD. The company came out of the blocks and dominated the news cycle…

Computex officially kicked off on Tuesday the 28th of May, but that doesn’t stop many companies from holding pre show press briefings and keynotes. So it was with AMD. Anticipation around Ryzen 3 CPUs and Navi GPUs has been building for some time, and AMD made the smart PR decision to get out in front of the news cycle with an early Monday keynote delivered by its CEO; Dr Lisa Su. AMD has taken the bold decision to essentially refresh its entire product portfolio all at once. How about all this: a new multi die CPU architecture, higher core counts, a new 7nm process node, new X570 motherboard chipset, a new GPU architecture, also on the 7nm node, and announcements that the next PlayStation and Xbox consoles will use AMD…

1 RTX HEART There’s a total of 68 ray-tracing cores buried inside here—22 more than the RTX 2080, and only four fewer than a Titan RTX. To give you some numbers, if this processor didn’t have ray-tracing cores, it should house around 15 billion transistors. It actually has 18.6 billion. That’s 20 percent of the hardware dedicated to ray tracing. 2 11GB GDDR6 To denote how similar this card is to the Titan RTX, there’s a single memory chip missing. Aside from that absent 1GB, there’s little else between the two, except a few disabled shader processors (down from 4,608 to 4,352), and slightly fewer ray-tracing cores. 3 POWER MANAGEMENT The standard Founders Edition card comes with some seriously impressive power management hardware. In fact, each eight-pin PCIe power is…

In the summer of 2017, two security vulnerabilities were discovered, which went public in January 2018, and caused something of a panic. Meltdown and Spectre, as they were dubbed, did something really nasty. The loopholes were in the very fabric of the microarchitecture, built right into whole families of processors, including every Intel one since 1995 (mostly). A nightmare for the chip makers. Both vulnerabilities exploit speculative execution, including branch prediction, which is as it sounds, where the processor works on data it hasn’t been asked to yet, in the anticipation that it will. Meltdown works because, as part of the speculative execution, prefetch cache data is not checked for permissions. This opens the door to malicious code getting executed, leading to cache data being open to be read —…

If you like to keep abreast of tech news, you’ve probably heard of Shadow. A service operated by French company Blade, it allows users to access their own personal “Shadow,” a virtual hosted environment on a server running Windows 10, which acts as a replacement for a pricey gaming PC. Shadow’s servers are continually upgraded with the most recent hardware, ensuring that performance stays at the best possible levels. Users can download any games they own on to their Shadow, and play them at max settings, streaming input and feedback to and from the server. With that in mind, we come to Blade’s latest innovation: the Ghost. A replacement for the aging Shadow Box, the Ghost is designed to plug into a TV and bring high-end gaming to the couch,…

Playing games over a stream is a tricky business, not least because some games stream better than others. One of the key benefits of cloud gaming is the fact that it enables games to be played at a high level of graphical quality (thanks to powerful data center GPUs) on even the most basic devices. In theory, if you’ve got a screen and an Internet connection, you should be able to instantly play games on ultra graphical settings. In practice, not every service has managed to deliver this. We’ve been banging on about latency a lot in this article, we know, but the fact is that it tends to tank a lot of fast-paced games. With that in mind, what are some good games to play over cloud gaming platforms?…

Shining a big backlight — or a huge number of individual backlights — through a grid of millions of tiny, imperfect shutters is a silly way to go about engineering large-format, full-color displays. But that’s LCD monitors for you. With that approach, contrast and viewing angles will always be a problem. Ditto pixel response. Admittedly, LCD tech has improved dramatically, but it will always be suboptimal for this application. For smartphones and some HDTVs, the alternative to LCD is increasingly OLED, or organic LED technology. The main upside is that each pixel is its own light source, so “off” really means “off,” and the achievable contrast is therefore essentially infinite. But OLED comes with its own problems. It too suffers from off-axis image quality issues. More troublesome is burn-in, which…

Over the years, we’ve worked our way through giant cases, separate loops, hard tubing, soft tubing, air cooling — you name it, we’ve done it. This year, though, we decided to try something a little different, something we hadn’t attempted in some time: a dual-system rig. That’s right, two systems in one case, under one liquid-cooled loop, into which we packed some of the best and brightest hardware we could muster. 1 One of our favorite bends in this build is the D bend connecting the two GPUs together. It took a lot of work and several tries, but in the end we nailed it thanks to a handy cup we had lying about that we could bend around. You’ve gotta think outside the box sometimes. What’s also pretty cool…

Thermaltake cares about PCs looking and performing their best. Its goal, with every one of their products, is to give you the best experience possible – you want a PC with some serious power, but that also runs smoothly, looks stylish, and lets you play your games any way you want to. Thermaltake isn’t afraid to try new things, to look at new ways to improve the PC experience, and to offer innovation where other companies don’t think to look. The Level 20 RGB Battlestation Gaming Desk is an exciting new concept. Thermaltake knows that your tower, your monitor, and your peripherals aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of the perfect PC gaming ADVERTORIAL experience – there are ways to improve and innovate outside of the traditional parts you’ve kept up to date…

Although there are plenty of contenders, generally the entry that gets awarded without controversy is 1958’s Tennis for Two. An astonishing technical achievement, the title suggests something like Pong, but the reality is far grander. Designed by American physicist William Higinbotham, it was built over three weeks using a modified oscilloscope. Whereas Pong has a simple top-down viewpoint, Tennis for Two is viewed side-on, and has real-time physics, with gravity and inertia shaping the game’s dynamics. There is a simulation you can run on your PC, but don’t bother with that. Just search for it on YouTube, and watch it being played on an oscilloscope — it’s an exquisite piece of engineering that makes the likes of Atari look positively vulgar. However, these were one-off machines. The first known game…

SPECIFICATION CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 3.5MHz RAM: 16/48/128K Graphics: 256x192 resolution, eight colors Sound: CPU-driven single-channel onboard speaker Storage: Cassette and ZX Microdrive OS: Sinclair BASIC Released: December 1981 Launch Price: US$220 16K, $350 48K Production: 1982–1992 Worldwide sales: 5 million The Speccy. It had an awful “dead flesh” keyboard, visually offensive color-clash, and truly disgusting audio, but it was cheap—real cheap. If you were a British kid in the ’80s, this was the machine to fight for, the blue-collared hero that ushered in US$4 gaming and earned Clive Sinclair a knighthood. After losing the BBC contract to Acorn, Sinclair had to fight back, and did so by targeting the budget market, this time with a machine that could hold its own with videogames. Originally the “ZX82” (after the ZX80/81…

SPECIFICATION CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 7.16MHz RAM: 512K (up to 8.5MB) Graphics: 4,096 colors at 320x256, 16 colors 640x512 Sound: Custom MOS Paula chip, 28KHz OS: AmigaOS 1.2 Storage: 3.5-inch floppy, optional hard disk Released: July 1985 Launch Price: US$1,300 Production: 1985–1996 Worldwide sales: 4.85 million At first glance, it appears the ST had the Amiga licked for price and power, but lsook more closely, and the picture becomes very different. Both these machines use the 68K CPU, but the Amiga had a large color palette and a proper multitasking GUI. More importantly, the Amiga was designed around multiple co-processors for handling audio, video, and memory access, thereby freeing up the CPU and outperforming the competition. Unlike the ST, the Amiga had a great sound chip, with advanced features that…

Out of all the consoles we could have covered, we chose the PlayStation because of its influence on emulator history. Initially, emulators for the PlayStation were buggy, unprofessional, and just too niche to worry Sony. However, two polished commercial titles would completely rock the boat and reshape history: bleem! and Connectix Virtual Game Station. In the mid-to-late ’90s, the Macintosh was starved of games, and emulators were becoming more popular. Connectix was a small company with a talent for virtualization, which was working on a PlayStation emulator for the Mac — Virtual Game Station (VGS). Having the PlayStation library would immediately expand Mac users’ gaming options, and VGS could run PlayStation games at full speed on a relatively modest iMac G3. Connectix tried to do the right thing by running…

We’ve mentioned the illegality of ROM downloads numerous times, but there are legitimate avenues. Machines like the Commodore 64 and Amiga had thriving demo scenes with tape-trading and magazine coverdiscs, and consoles like the PlayStation and Dreamcast had magazine cover CDs. Public archives are available online to preserve much of this data. Then there’s homebrew gaming, where hobbyists publish unofficial titles for other enthusiasts, and traditionally this software has been public domain. However, the easiest form comes from game companies themselves, which are using technologies such as DOSBox and ScummVM to sell their old games on stores like Steam and GOG. Even if there’s no Linux version for what you’re chasing, there’s still a very good chance it will work under Wine or Proton.…