APCの October 2020 の目次

In a press release announcement Toshiba has come forward with news that the company is officially stepping away from the PC manufacturing market. For decades, Toshiba has been a global competitor in the PC industry, going as far as introducing one of the first commercially available laptops in the 1980s. Over the last few years, however, Toshiba has been slowly removing assets – including major shares in its PC business. In June of 2018, Toshiba relinquished over 80% of its PC subsidiary shares to Sharp, which rebranded Toshiba Client Solutions Co., Ltd under Dynabook. Since the purchase, Toshiba has still maintained ownership of the remaining 19.9%. As of early August, Toshiba has officially sold that remaining stake, giving complete ownership of the PC business to Sharp under the Dynabook name.…

Over the last few years, all of the major NAND makers have been in a race to build NAND memory with incredibly high layer counts, and now, these efforts are paying off for SK Hynix. The South Korean memory manufacturer is unleashing its Gold P31 SSDs onto the open consumer market, making SK Hynix the first to sell an SSD with 128-layer NAND. The Gold P31 SSDs come in the form of M.2 NVMe drives operating over the PCIe 3.0 interface, packing capacities of either 500GB or 1TB. Both of the drives feature read speeds of up to 3500 MB/s and writes of up to 3200MB/s, which is in-line with the best PCIe 3.0 based NVMe drives, saturating the PCI-Express bandwidth.…

While the GPU takes a lot of the limelight for gaming performance, your CPU actually plays a critical role in the performance of modern games too. It may not actually render anything, but it is responsible for lining up what will be shown on screen and in games with a lot of complicated computational processes (like when you have lots of independently moving soldiers) the CPU is doing the heavy lifting in working out where all those bits need to be. There’s two important factors in how good a CPU will be for gaming: clock speed and the number of cores. Depending on the specific game you are running one or both of these factors could be a critical component. As a minimum, modern games require a quad-core CPU. This…

$99-$249 | brydge.com.au Brydge Surface Accessories Bridging the gaps in Microsoft’s Surface accessory range. Microsoft actually makes plenty of awesome accessories, but it doesn’t cover everything and Brydge is very good at filling the gaps that Microsoft misses. The most obvious is the new W-Touch and Brydge W-Type for the Surface Studio, which is the first stand-alone trackpad we’ve seen built for a Windows PC. The company also has a new version of its trusty Surface Pro Brydge 12.3 Pro+ keyboard that turns the device into a clamshell laptop. If you love the Surface Pro, but sometimes wish you could use it on your lap, then the Brydge keyboard is a neat accessory. From $649 | samsung.com/au Galaxy Watch3 Samsung’s got a new watchie. We’re not totally sure what happened…

$6,399 | dell.com/en-au The Alienware m15 laptops have been a staple of Dell’s gaming laptop range for years now and as per the company’s business model you can get this new 15-inch rig with just about every CPU and GPU combo you could want. At the lower-end this includes a new 10th Generation Intel Core i7-10750H CPU, an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti GPU, 16GB of RAM and a tiny 256GB PCIe SSD for $3,199. If however, you’re after a top-tier pro setup then you can drop $6,399 on a unit with a Core i9-10980HK CPU, a Nvidia RTX 2080 Super GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD. The entire range come with a base FullHD 144Hz (7ms response time) IPS panel with G-Sync that can be swapped out…

$119 | www2.hp.com The HP LaserJet Pro M15w is aimed squarely at the booming micro economy and the legions of workers whose home is also their office, because HP’s latest laserjet is not only the smallest in its class, but the cheapest too. The M15w may be a very basic print-only monochrome printer with just one input tray that will only take A4 and a few smaller paper sizes. You won’t find fancy features like duplex printing here and if you require a flatbed scanner, then you should wait for the similarly styled HP LaserJet Pro MFP 28w. “What the M15w offers is a fast printing (19ppm), with the economy and consistency associated with laserjet technology, in a compact unit that takes up little more desk area than a sheet…

$1,599 | www.lg.com On paper, the 34GN850 certainly ticks plenty of boxes. The 34-inch curved panel sports 3,440 by 1,440 pixels. If that’s predictable, LG’s Nano IPS screen is a bit special. LG says it’s good for 1ms response, which puts it on a par with the best TN panels. Impressive. Speaking of speed and slickness, you also get 160Hz refresh, plus both Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium support. For the record, G-Sync support is G-Sync Compatible Verified rather than one of the fuller featured G-Sync offerings based on Nvidia’s in-monitor image processing chipset. But what of HDR support, you ask? It’s present, but also an area where the LG UltraGear 34GN850 is a little light on spec given the heady price point. You only get VESA DisplayHDR400 certification.…

$219 | phanteks.com Phanteks offers a massive variety of PC cases, from hulking full towers to diminutive ITX boxes. Yet they’re still finding holes to plug within their own range, and that’s what the P500A does. It’s not the most expensive Eclipse case, but it’s still a large, premium case with space for E-ATX boards. Airflow is the name of the game here. The entire front panel is carved from a single flat piece of metal and employs Phanteks’s “ultra-fine performance mesh,” with 1mm perforation that provides a large, flat surface for air intake. As any mesh-heads will know, mesh cases eliminate the need for removable dust filters, allowing for superior airflow. Three 140mm D-RGB fans (or two plain black ones if you opt for the cheaper RGB-less model) sit…

“The most thorough noise-cancelling we’ve ever experienced by far. Everything from low traffic rumbles to voice chatter and even wind is comfortably excluded.” AU$549 | sony.com.au There’s an unsurprising heir to the wireless, noise-cancelling throne, and while Sony certainly hasn’t strayed far from its regal headphone lineage, the WH-1000XM4 is better for it. Quite frankly, it was hard to imagine what could be improved upon when reviewing the forebears to these new cans, but Sony has added enough polish to the WH-1000XM3 crown to keep its gleam intact and add some new precious gems in the process. From a design sense, very little has perceptibly changed – the lightweight, comfortable, and subtly stylish pair of headphones that you’re used to has returned unscathed. You won’t be able to see the…

The rear panel is essentially the input and output section of the motherboard, with plenty of different connector types featured depending on the motherboard itself. The most commonly found connectors include USB, RJ45/Ethernet, and 3.5mm audio jacks. Looking at USB, there are many different types, with motherboard vendors opting to colour-code them for easy identification, but this isn’t a general rule of thumb. Black ports typically signify basic USB 2.0 ports, with deep blue often associated with USB 3.0 ports. Other colours generally indicate USB 3.2 or USB 3.1 connector types, but as mentioned, this varies on both vendor and model. There are also two types of USB interface found on modern motherboards, including Type-A and Type-C. The difference between the different standards of USB, including 3.2, 3.1, and 2.0…

Arch users may be shocked to find their distro of choice not mentioned in this page on new technology, and perhaps they have a point. But then so too might Gentoo or Linux from Scratch users, who also have access to the latest versions of everything, and can also compile it with whatever optimisations suit their CPU. We’ve focused instead on what distros offer out of the box, and with Arch, and more so with Gentoo, well, you barely get a box. Be that as it may, Jonni uses Arch, and so should you. Manjaro did the unthinkable and made Arch Linux easy to use, and continues to be one of the most popular desktop distros around. Manjaro doesn’t (directly) use the same repositories as its progenitor, since things move…

Sonos One $480 | sonos.com It should come as no surprise that the room-filling Sonos One is an exciting compact smart speaker. You can’t help but notice it; there are cheaper options, but the additional multiroom expertise inside may be worth the extra expense. Bose Portable Home Speaker $449 | bose.com.au Bose’s all-in-one device has a handle, so you can cart the smarts around with you – as long as you’re within Wi-Fi range. It’s loud, water resistant, has a big battery, and it too is multiroom ready. Sonos Move $615 | sonos.com Sonos has its own ‘portable’, the Move, though it’s more of a luggable, at over twice the weight of Bose’s smaller smartie. There’s a weight to its sound as well as its form, and dual-assistant support means…

$79 | www.amazon.com.au/echoauto Now that you’ve read about how to improve Alexa and her digital companions in your home, it’s time to find out how to get it working in your car. To that end, Amazon has recently released the Echo Auto which is a simple device, featuring two buttons, a light-strip and eight (count’em) microphones. It promises to hear whatever you’re saying, even in the noisiest vehicle. At only $79 it’s not going to break the bank but, is it worth buying? The Echo Auto a slight device that weighs only 45g. It connects magnetically to an air-vent mount which is simple to attach. The downside is that it requires USB power from the cigarette lighter and this requires an unsightly cable to be plugged, awkwardly, into its side.…

CPU Intel Core i9-10900K $999 The crem de la crem of Intel’s arsenal, the Intel Core i9-10900K is the kingpin at the top of Team Blue’s latest processor pile. Complete with 10 cores, 20 threads, 20MB of smart cache, and a 5.3GHz max turbo speed across two cores, it’s Intel’s fastest mainstream processor to date. It’s certainly not flawless, however. With those 10 cores comes an incredible amount of both heat and power draw. 14nm++ isn’t the best manufacturing process to leverage this design on, and because of that, even at stock with a triple rad/360mm AIO, you’re looking at temps well up into the 80 C range. On top of that, power draw can often be above 200W under load. These are all things Intel’s tiptoed around with some…

Unexplainable data loss I have an HP Elitebook that is currently fitted with a 2.5-inch SSD as the main Windows 7 drive, and a 1TB mSATA that contains working files and a majority of VirtualBox images as both VHD and VDI files. I have recently swapped out the 2.5-inch SSD with another one and installed Windows 10 on it, which has gone very smoothly apart from one issue: When I swap back to the Windows 7 SSD I notice that I have lost some VDI files completely, and others have been corrupted. I have managed to recover some of the lost files from backups and have tried the swap again, and the same thing keeps happening. What is causing this, and is there anything I can do to stop this?…

01 CATEGORISED SETTINGS TaskbarX’s settings are divided into various categories, all of which you can access from this tab. 02 RELOAD AND RESET Sometimes you need to refresh the app’s settings. The left button here resets all settings to default, while the right button reloads the current settings. 03 DETAILED SETTINGS The settings for each category can be accessed and tweaked in the right-hand panel. 04 APPLY YOUR CHANGES Make sure to click “Apply” once you have made some changes to ensure that TaskbarX implements them. 05 YOUR MODIFIED TASKBAR You can see TaskbarX’s changes on your Windows 10 taskbar. Here, we have chosen to make our taskbar transparent, alongside the default centering position for the icons.…

Fans of the Wunderlist cloud-based task manager will by now know that Microsoft has finally pulled the plug on the venerable service, which was launched in 2011 by a German company (Wunderkinder) before being bought by Microsoft in 2015. Users were directed instead to switch to Microsoft’s own To Do application, but while it retains many of Wunderlist’s features, it’s not the same experience – plus there’s no official client for Linux. Thankfully, project management specialist Zenkit has spied an opportunity and developed its own Wunderlist clone. Zenkit To Do mirrors the Wunderlist experience as closely as possible, aiming to replicate not just its look and feel, but the feature set, too. The application harnesses the Zenkit eco-system to provide a cut-down version of its main offering, with the promise…

Following Microsoft’s closure of its beleaguered Mixer streaming service in July, high profile streamers are flowing back to their former homes. In August, both Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins and Michael ‘Shroud’ Grzsesiek commenced streaming on Twitch again, with the latter’s return amassing upwards of 500,000 viewers. Shroud reportedly received a $10 million payout upon Mixer’s closure, though it’s unclear if he’s struck a commercial deal with Twitch. Ninja hasn’t struck any deal, either. While Shroud chose Twitch because it’s “the best,” in his words, Dr Disrespect’s recent ban from the platform is still a point of contention. For his part, Dr Disrespect has started streaming on YouTube, though in a statement provided to PC Gamer it was confirmed the popular streamer has no exclusivity deal with YouTubeas yet, and will likely…

Activision Blizzard isn’t quite ready to say how much their games will cost when the PS5 and Xbox Series X usher in the next-gen, but news on that front is coming shortly. During the Q&A section of this month’s quarterly earnings conference call, Activision president Rob Kostich was asked about the company’s plans regarding pricing their next-gen games. “What I’ll say here is we’ll be sharing our plans soon,” Kostich said. “For now, we’re just very excited for the launch of the new generation of hardware. We think it represents another strong leap forward in creating really incredible entertainment and value for our fans as we move forward.” This comes as Take-Two Interactive is grappling with the response from its own next-gen pricing model, which has NBA 2K21 launching at…

Free | PC | bit.ly/SymphoniaGame It’s a music-themed platformer set in a sumptuous concert hall, stuffed with platforms and spikes that will kill you in one hit. There are no enemies to fight, but the later jumping challenges are difficult, requiring masterful use of your high jump and wall-hanging powers. In most games you simply tap jump again in mid-air, to give your character additional height, but here you have to physically whack the ground with your violin bow, to perform a bigger leap – a nifty little ability that takes some skill to use, particularly on temporary platforms. Moreover, it looks, sounds and feels just lovely to bounce off the ground this way. We’re always jumping on or off platforms in games, but rarely does it feel like we’re…

$28.95 | PC, PS4, XB1, Switch, Linux, Mac | carrion.game We spend a lot of time running from rampaging monsters in video games, but rarely do we get the chance to play as the creature in question. Devolver Digital’s latest retro-styled throwback, Carrion, let’s you do just that, placing you in charge of a tentacle-covered alien monstrosity as you tear through the facility that imprisoned you. Kicking off with your escape from a scientific chamber, Carrion sees you use your tentacles to traverse around large underground rooms in an incredibly fluid manner, as you attempt to escape your captors. Controlling the monster is fairly simple – use your left stick to move around, your right stick to control your tentacles, and hold the right trigger to grab objects (or hapless…

Android becomes an earthquake detection tool Android’s new feature will rock your world... or at least tell you it’s rocking. While the accelerometer in your Android phone is generally used to track your daily steps, or help your GPS navigation be more accurate, Google says that it can also be used to detect earthquakes... if you have enough of them. Initially Google is just providing alerts for those in areas with existing earthquake detection, but once there is enough data the service aims to use networks of smartphones to provide alerts in areas without a local seismometer system. While individual phones are theoretically capable of detecting earthquakes, the network will increase the accuracy and information of event-detection. Boeing 747s get critical updates via floppy disk You think Windows 10 updates…

In mid-August, the Windows 10 team released a preview of build 20190 to Windows Insiders via the Dev Channel. The new update comes with a change that gives users more control over GPU settings – especially those with multiple GPUs. The first new change enables Windows to determine which is the power-saving GPU and which is a discrete graphics card. When starting an application, Windows 10 will decide what GPU an application requires. So if gaming, Windows 10 will use a discrete graphics card. For web browsing or productivity it will switch to a power saving GPU. Another change is an option so users can assign a specific GPU to individual applications.…

AMD has been granted a patent for heterogeneous microprocessors featuring two types of general-purpose cores. The technology resembles Arm’s famous Big.Little architecture and could be used for CPUs aimed at mobile and low-power devices. The patent outlines a microprocessor featuring two types of general-purpose cores running two different subsets of the same instruction set architecture (ISA). The first type of cores is set to support a larger subset of the ISA and feature high performance, whereas the second type of simplified cores is configured to consume less power. Different types of cores can share memory locations as well as cache. The technology enables AMD to build power-efficient processors based on x86, Arm, and other architectures (but not all at the same time) and featuring two classes of general-purpose cores. One…

If you’re looking into building a new system, of course you’ll need some RAM. The DDR4 standard is now well and truly mature and speeds are faster than ever. While the base speed for DDR4 is 2133MHz, that speed is obsolete. Even 2400 and 2666MHz kits aren’t much cheaper than a now commonplace 3200MHz kit. That means 3200MHz is effectively the current baseline, and there’s an argument that 3600MHz is becoming the sweet spot in 2020. We won’t focus on timings here other than to say that lower timings are advantageous, though comparing the performance of something like DDR4-3200 C14 to DDR4-3600 C16 is highly application-specific. So, is it worth going for RAM at 4000MHz or even higher? Unless you’re a competitive overclocker, the answer is no. Intel CPUs tend…

“We tested the Aurora R9 with 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super, for a nicely balanced configuration that offers a lot of power without being too expensive.” $4,199 | dell.com/en-au Alienware’s Aurora R9 was released earlier this year and while it’s taken a little while for us to cover it, this isn’t a reflection on how keen we’ve been to look at this machine. The Aurora range from Alienware have traditionally been some of the most powerful pre-built PCs money can buy and the R9 is no different. The Aurora R9 utilises a 9th generation Intel Core i7-9700K, which is an unlocked CPU that can be easily tweaked using the Alienware Command Centre. This bundled software takes a lot of the complications out of…

“Once that was done we were promised a 10-minute setup process. Oh, if that were true!” $429 | www.amazon.com.au Eero is a mesh Wi-Fi system that promises to make upgrading your wireless network a simple process. It’s available for purchase as a single node ($199) which covers 140m2 or in a $429 three pack which covers $460m2 . It promises to act as a single, stand-alone router that can connect directly to your modem. Plus, that its network is easily expandable, that it works with your existing internet service provider, that it takes minutes to set up and that it gets better over time thanks to automatic updates. The problem is that absolutely none of this is new. Eero does have something going for it, though – the company was…

$90 (250GB), $190 (1TB), $570 (2TB) | kingston.com Kingston’s new KC2500 leverages the same components as its predecessor, the KC2000 from 2019. But this time around the firmware has things cranked up a notch. With Silicon Motion’s SM2262EN and Kioxia’s latest BiCS4 96L TLC NAND flash, it can hit read/write speeds upwards of 3.5/2.9 GBps. And with XTS-AES 256-bit hardware-based encryption on top, it’s an ideal business-class storage device for your laptop when on the go, or for a high-performance workstation at the office. Its only fault is its high price when purchased in low volume. Kingston’s KC2500 comes with mature 96L TLC that can operate at the higher speed needed to be competitive, without sacrificing long-term reliability. With this boost, Kingston’s KC2500 is capable of delivering much faster sequential…

$229 | logitech.com/en-au While there are countless peripheral options for Windows-based systems on the market, it can be a little tricky finding anything as solid for Mac outside of Apple’s own line of Magic Keyboards and Mice. Thankfully, Logitech has brought its much-celebrated MX series to the Mac, offering the same sleek operation and style as its PC counterparts but with those final touches that make it truly integrate with your Apple ecosystem. Of those extra tweaks, the most obvious are the macOSspecific key layout and language, and the striking Space Grey finish (which is still quite pleasant to look at, no matter how used to it we are). Other than these changes (and the included USB-C to USB-C cable to better communicate with your latest MacBook), the two MX…

Adobe Photoshop CC 2020 | Photography bundle $14.29/Mo | www.adobe.com Affinity Photo 2020 | Single purchase US$79 | www.affinity.serif.com The world of professional image-editing applications is not a wide one. There’s Adobe Photoshop, and then there’s everything else: Maybe PaintShop Pro or PhotoPaint from Corel, or the open-source GIMP, or Paint.net if your needs aren’t very great. Then Serif, maker of the also-ran app Serif PhotoPlus, decided to play Adobe at its own game with the Affinity suite. First came Affinity Designer, then Affinity Photo, then Affinity Publisher, rivalling Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign in terms of features and usability. Serif is quick to retweet stories on social media of professionals abandoning Photoshop for Affinity Photo, often underlining the difference in payment schemes adopted by the two software developers. But just…

Linux | dxt2.co.za RoboLinux is a project that we’ve been meaning to look at for a while. It’s a one-man effort, Ubuntu-based affair, but stands unique among its numerous peers. The project’s website (which may have used WordArt for its logo, which of course is absolutely acceptable) carries the headline “Robolinux runs Windows XP, 7 & 10 Virus Free”. A bold claim indeed, and perhaps one that needs some degree of qualification. Its main feature is access to a one-click Windows XP or 7 installer, so that users can run their current Windows applications inside a virtual machine (VM). Keen readers will note that Windows XP and 7 are both now EOL (end of life) products, and are susceptible to all kinds of malware, VM or no. Granted, if that…

Cast your mind back 15 years, to that pre-credit crunch optimism of the mid-2000s. Windows users were appalled by Windows Vista, and this new Ubuntu operating system was claiming that it could displace Windows. This, despite being based on Linux and thinking that orangey-brown hue was a good desktop colour. Well, Windows may not have been wiped out by Ubuntu. But Linux has developed in leaps and bounds. It’s more useable than ever and key industry players take it much more seriously now. Thanks to Valve and Vulkan, we can play thousands of Windows-only titles on our Linux boxes. More companies than ever are shipping Linux on consumer hardware. Your wireless hardware probably works with it. Best of all, there’s a fine range of distros to choose from. Ubuntu has…

It would be remiss of us not to mention, in a spread about beautiful distros, Pop!_OS. We were thoroughly impressed by the 20.04 release back in April. Pop (we like most everything about it, bar the awkward punctuation) is made by Colorado-based Linux system manufacturer System76. Being an OEM, they wanted to be able to ship an OS guaranteed to work with their hardware. But also, just like the other distros named in these pages, an OS that makes it easy for users to do whatever they want to do. Pop’s desktop is much closer to Gnome 3 than what Mint, elementary and Solus offer, but don’t be afraid. Don’t also be afraid that the latest release gives you the option to experience (in a very gentle way) the joys…

“One thing that caught my attention during all this was when we needed some more laptops. I was looking at what Dell had on offer and wondered where are all the Ryzen 4000 series laptops? There were none!” As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the economy seems to be bifurcating into boom or bust businesses. You are either doing really well at the moment, or you’re struggling. Fortunately, I’m seeing the boom side of the economy at my work, and like so many others as a result, our IT needs have ballooned with a great need to order everything from printers to monitors, new PCs and more. One thing that caught my attention during all this was when we needed some more laptops. I was looking at what Dell had on…

PC BUILDER Budget Bangs for few bucks. Both budget builds have seen small increases this month, with the AMD system just managing to remain the cheaper option. We’ve made plenty of changes here; first, both motherboards are now Phantom Gaming 4 models from Asrock. The Intel build has received the Z390 motherboard because it’s the most affordable option, but the AMD build has given us a chance to both upgrade and make a saving with a new B550 board, bringing us forward a generation. This should see minor general improvements in performance and power management, but the crucial addition is PCIe 4.0 support, allowing us to use 4th-gen M.2 SSDs for maximum transfer speeds. We’re not doing that yet, though. Why? Because this is a budget build, and currently the…

The Windows 10 taskbar may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but you can give it a healthy dose of visual flair with the help of TaskbarX, an app that makes it easy to center your taskbar icons – and a whole lot more. It works particularly well if you want to have a cleaner, more understated look for your taskbar. Centering your icons with TaskbarX gives a more modern look than the default Windows taskbar appearance, especially if you only have a couple of pinned icons. You can take things further with some of TaskbarX’s built-in options. For example, you can make your taskbar entirely transparent, making your icons appear to be floating against your wallpaper. You can change how your icons animate into position when…

Microsoft’s xCloud game streaming service won’t be available on Apple’s iOS devices, despite a lengthy testing period on the platform. The reason, according to Apple, is that the company requires game software submissions to be reviewed on a title-by-title basis. In a statement given to Business Insider, an Apple spokesperson claims the policy is designed to “protect customers and provide a fair and level playing field to developers.” It continued: “Our customers enjoy great apps and games from millions of developers, and gaming services can absolutely launch on the App Store as long as they follow the same set of guidelines applicable to all developers, including submitting games individually for review, and appearing in charts and search. In addition to the App Store, developers can choose to reach all iPhone…

$99.95 | PC, PS4 | deathstranding.com It’s best when Death Stranding shuts up. Being a game by Hideo Kojima, it’s naturally filled with bizarre characters, lengthy screeds of exposition, and indulgent cutscenes. But it’s in the long, quiet stretches between all this, when it’s just you hiking alone across a stark, haunting post-apocalyptic wilderness, where it really shines. In these moments, Death Stranding is quite unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in a game – or any other medium for that matter. That’s not to say there’s no value in the plot. When you’re not being bombarded with backstory, it’s pretty interesting – and deeply weird. You are Sam Porter Bridges, a courier delivering cargo across what’s left of the United States. A supernatural cataclysm called the Death Stranding has driven…

Free | Browser | tora-group.itch.io Dark Souls but sci-fi. Dark Souls but 2D. Dark Souls but rubbish. I do enjoy a good Dark Souls clone, and here’s another in Tyrant’s Realm, which is Dark Souls, but made for the PS1. Not literally, obviously, but this retro-styled action game is surprisingly convincing, boasting the jagged polygonal look, the slightly awkward combat system, and even the level design of a 32-bit game. The only thing letting it down is the framerate, which is disappointingly rock-solid, as smooth as velvet. Real PS1 games ran at 14fps, and we loved every chunky second. Similar to Souls, you’ll biff baddies in third-person as you explore a medieval prison, stopping occasionally to chug a potion. Where other Souls-likes try to move the genre forwards, or at…

Free | PC, Mac, Linux radiatoryang.itch.io A few years ago, some men got together and decided to whack each other with a chair among other very silly things. The resulting video went viral, and now Robert Yang has made a game about it: a sort of interactive YouTube clip that you can replay and replay in search of answers, much like the video itself. You play as the cameraman (perhaps the least ‘hard’ of the group), and by clicking on-screen icons you can direct the men to smoke, to drink, to wield the chair and to kiss each other, all of which happened in the original video. You can then perform the actions yourself, by moving the mouse or analogue stick. You can make the smoking turn into a lung-clearing…

Regarded by many as the first proper 16-bit computer, the Atari ST was a powerhouse for its era and price. If you don’t associate this kind of serious product with Atari, fair enough. This is not the same company that put Pacman into American living rooms – this was a new era led by the most bullish man in the business: Commodore founder Jack Tramiel. Tramiel spent the early 80s aggressively expanding Commodore’s market share, undercutting the competition. The results led to the Commodore 64 becoming the best selling computer of all time, but Tramiel’s brutal methods were unsustainable and burned too many bridges. Commodore was sick of Jack, and Jack was sick of Commodore. Tramiel left in a huff in January of 1984. Meanwhile, Atari was reeling from America’s…

The reveal of the Intel Xe HPG during Intel’s Architecture Day 2020 was part of a virtual firehose of information on a ton of upcoming products and technologies. One of the products we’re most interested in seeing and testing is Intel’s Xe Graphics. Intel originally had plans for a single graphics architecture with two micro-architectures back in 2018. Two years later, the number of microarchitectures has doubled to four. Xe LP is for integrated graphics and entry-level solutions, Xe HP is for high-end compute and data centre workloads, and Xe HPC is basically Xe HP on steroids, targeting supercomputing exascale solutions. That leaves the fourth and final microarchitecture that Intel just announced: Intel Xe HPG, which will be the heart of the consumer card. Given what we know of Xe…

Originally called the Video Computer System (VCS) until 1983, the Atari 2600 was released in 1977. The system was originally released with all six switches on the front of the console, but the console was redesigned in 1980 with only four of the switches on the front, and the other two on the back. The console featured here is a post-1980 model. Major tech specs • 1.19MHz eight-bit processor • 128 bytes RAM • 192 x 160 pixel resolution • 128 colors, with max four colors per line two-channel mono sound Key findings • Video game consoles these days may not have a sense of home decor, but some computer companies still believe in the aesthetics of wood paneling. As soon as users figured out that the Atari 2600 could…

$2,899 | lenovo.com/au/en Lenovo is pitching its new Legion 5i 15-incher as the everyman’s gaming laptop, balancing price and performance to hit the most broadly popular configuration for those on an average budget. Price is a critical factor at this end of the market and the Legion 5i starts at $1,599 for a laptop with an Intel Core i5-10300H CPU, 8GB of RAM, a GTX 1650 GPU, 256GB M.2 SSD and a 120Hz FHD screen – a pretty sweet deal for something that is capable of entry-level 1080p gaming. The model we were given to test had an Intel Core i7-10750H CPU, 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, which is a good step-up arrangement if you’re trying to get the best performance at an entry level…

$2,099 | msi.com MSI’s been bolstering its offerings for creatives in 2020, and no creative suite is complete without a colour calibrated, high resolution screen. The Prestige PS341WU from MSI is about as high specced as they come, offering a 34-inch, 21-by-9 WideUHD screen with a 5120 x 2160 pixel resolution. While it’s not quite the 6K, 220 PPI of one of Apple’s Pro Display XDR units, it’s enough for high resolution image and video work. “The Prestige PS341WU from MSI is about as high specced as they come, offering a 34-inch, 21-by-9 WideUHD screen with a 5120 x 2160 pixel resolution.” This is backed up by a VESA 600 HDR certification, which is solid for something like a laptop, but is probably around the lower limit of brightness you’d…

$69 | www.bequiet.com Don’t forget air cooling! These days there’s a lot of emphasis on closed loop water coolers but in many use cases these are overkill both in terms of unnecessary complexity and expense. The Be Quiet Pure Rock 2 is a cost-optimised single tower cooler that can dissipate up to 150W, making it a capable option for all but the highest-end mainstream 2020 processors. “It’s nice to have coolers aimed at users who want to enjoy, but not see or hear their PC” Be Quiet! is a German manufacturer, and as the name suggests, it offers products including cases, coolers and power supplies designed with an emphasis on low noise levels. Low noise optimisation and marketing is perhaps one of those things that has retreated a little in…

“The display is a vibrant 6.5-inch AMOLED number which, save for a small punch-hole selfie camera, is largely uninterrupted. It’s curved at the edges, similar to Samsung’s Galaxy S flagship range, which makes for a very comfortable and slim-feeling grip in the palm.” $999 | oppo.com/au It’s been a year since we reviewed the Oppo Reno 5G, and both the Chinese phone manufacturer and the 5G network have come a long way in that time. That handset and the newly launched Find X2 Neo share many similarities, but with a retail price $500 less, is the Neo better suited to today’s market? Available in either blue or black – both of which are subtly iridescent – the Neo offers a decent balance between flashy, premium looks and a more subdued…

Linux distributions have come a long way since the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros. You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realise you’d got your Makefile wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was all great fun. More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science department). Then in 1992 came SLS, which inspired Slackware and later frustrated Ian Murdock into creating Debian. Yggdrasil, the first Linux live CD, was launched shortly after SLS, which required a gluttonous 8MB of…

Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages: they all seek to make it easier for developers to ship software in a distribution-agnostic manner. Whereas Snaps rely on a central app store, anyone can set up their own Flatpak remote. The Flathub repo (https://flathub.org) is a good place to find popular apps. Flatpaks are OSTree images too, which is why the two integrate so nicely in Endless OS. When you download your first (non-trivial) application on Endless OS (or your first Flatpak on another OS), you’ll find the download is very large. This is because it depends on a large runtime (e.g. Gnome) Flatpak. Once you have this you won’t need to download it again for Flatpaks, which depend on it. These runtime Flatpaks are updated incrementally, so subsequent large downloads should be a rarity…

We’ve looked at Loupe Ventures’ research, and the company’s most recent suite of AI IQ tests has determined that the Google Assistant is the smartest thing going. That’s both in its digital assistant form (as in, when accessed through a phone) and when powering a smart speaker. It understands best, and it provides relevant responses most frequently. That said, each time Loupe Ventures does a new test, every major platform improves a little; Alexa took the ‘most improved’ crown in the most recent suite. Too bad for Siri? Not so fast – it seems that Apple’s assistant is, by their metrics, by far the smartest in the ‘command’ category, which relates to its ability to perform on-phone functions like texting, calling and emailing. We’re not surprised, as that’s very much…

Garmin Drivesmart 65 $328 | garmin.com The Drivesmart 65 builds Alexa support right into it. You can ask for directions, or use any Alexa feature you like. You get hands-free calling, full Australian and NZ map regions, and it’s a good size. Roav VIVA Pro $175 | goroav.com This two-port 12V charger gives access to Google Assistant even when your phone is locked; connect it via Bluetooth or an aux cable to your car stereo, and it’ll pipe your tunes right in. Neat, tidy, and pretty cheap. Nextbase 522GW $399 | nextbase.com One of the best dash cams you can buy, with great resolution, a strong suite of safety features, automatic emergency calling and, yes, Alexa built in. The camera features are great, and Alexa is a bonus.…

Comet Lake hath cometh, and with it Intel has brought a bevy of new features into the headlines of its latest processors. That means a new socket, a new chipset, more cores (more heat), and of course, more performance. But is it quite enough to compete with the juggernaut that AMD has become? We already know that 3rd-gen Ryzen represents incredible multi-threaded power at a comfortable price. But the one area those zenified processors don’t quite match up is typically in the gaming department. On the whole AMD’s IPC (instructions per clock cycle), although much improved on Ryzen’s debut, still aren’t up to Intel’s level. The big question, then, is whether Intel’s IPC advantages in its flagship 10-core processor give it the edge over the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X in…

If you’re not sure where to start with image enhancement or just want a helping hand, Luminar’s AI-powered tools can analyse your image and get you started. The software also features ‘looks’ which are presets that change multiple aspects of an image from colours, exposure and brightness to sharpness and vignetting. Although other photo apps let you tweak pictures, Luminar is particularly user-friendly and powerful. And if you’re a beginner or just in a hurry, its AI features are a great helping hand. Looks work by automatically dialling in a bunch of adjustments and there’s an amount slider so you can choose how strongly the look is applied. In the Essentials edit tab you’ll find more quick enhancement tools including Colour, Details and Light all with variable sliders, so you…

As your usage of Zenkit To Do grows, you’ll start to notice more views appearing underneath the Inbox – these are so-called smart lists, automatically populated according to the status of your to-do items. For example, once you start adding deadlines to to-do items, you’ll start to see time-sensitive lists such as Today or Week, enabling you to view items whose deadlines are approaching. Other smart lists include Assigned to Me – for viewing tasks you’ve been allocated as part of collaborative projects – and Starred, which you can use to list specific tasks of your choice by clicking the star button at the top of a task’s Edit pane. Items can belong to multiple smart lists, so if you’ve starred a task that’s been assigned to you that’s due…

Your PC’s power supply unit has one job to do – and that’s convert the 240VAC AC mains power generated by the power utilities into DC power your PC components can munch on. The vast majority of the time, it all works smoothly, but on the rare occasion something electrically goes wrong in your PC, you want to know that problem won’t cause you even more grief. That’s the job of the myriad of protection systems inside PC PSUs. But what do these protection systems do? That’s what we look into this month. Stuff happens Mistakes are made, components die, computers fail – not often, hopefully, but it does happen. That’s why electrical engineers design in safety measures into PSUs, so that when things do go wrong, you’ve got some…

Call of Duty 2020 is in development at studios Treyarch and Raven Software and will drop later this year, as both studios announced on Twitter. “Activision will continue to build on its direct digital relationship with this expanded community as it delivers the next premium installment for Call of Duty, which comes from the wholly owned Call of Duty studios Treyarch and Raven Software,” Activision said on an earnings call reported by CharlieIntel.…

$84.95 PC, PS4 XB1, Stadia | codemasters.com/game/f1-2020 Being an F1 driver must mean a lot of weight to carry on your shoulders. When thousands of hours have been poured into crafting your race car, imagine having to face your boss after shoving it into the wall on lap one. Well… what if you are the boss? F1 2020 lets you be driver and manager of your own team, so you can ignore your own inadequacy and instead punish disgruntled aerodynamic staff by closing their R&D department. The F1 series has offered comparable depth in its career mode for a few years now, but creating and managing your own team really does make a difference to the emotional attachment you’ll feel. From press interview answers and sponsor choice to how you…

$49.95 | PC | revolution.co.uk The 1994 adventure game Beneath A Steel Sky was considered quite good (like 91 percent good), and to call it fondly remembered would be an understatement. And now, in 2020 of all years, it gets a sequel. The last time protagonist Robert Foster was in Union City it was under the benevolent authority of his pal Joey. Ten years later, he’s dragged back to find it’s now under the control of The Council, and that everyone is really happy. They’ve got to be, because their lives hang on their Qdos scores. It’s nudge theory run rampant, as things like turning up for work and taking part in daily votes alter your score, which affects where you can go and how low in the towering arcologies…

DEVELOPER EASYGAMESTATION PUBLISHER CARPE FULGUR RELEASED SEPTEMBER 10, 2010 WEB bit.ly/30LzS36 It’s undoubtedly right to assume that Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is one of the more important indie games that you’ve never have heard of. You see, it was the first Japanese PC game ever released on Steam, and its success helped kickstart a chain of events – including the release of Dark Souls’ own hugely popular PC port – that proved there was an enormous demand for Japanese games on PC and not just consoles. Recettear’s developers thought it’d only sell 10,000 copies, but instead it sold over 500,000. “For years I had always played the hero and never given a second thought to the non-playable characters I found in every village and town. But Recettear is a…

The obvious place to find games is via general ROM sites, but they are fraught with legal issues. These sites can also be a great source for system ROMs (TOS images in the ST’s case), and switching between system ROMs can help get pesky programs running, but copyright issues still apply. For visual demos and non-gaming apps, you usually need to look elsewhere. Archive.org has a few gems you can play with, and you don’t have to sort through legally suspect ROM sites. However, the easiest way to find legal software of any sort is through magazine coverdisk archives, which usually mix gaming and utilities. We had most luck with Exxos’s archive (www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari), which has a collection of disks from ST Format (a Future Publishing magazine that ran from 1989…