"Why not play Doom using Twitter via short commands and videos?" Kotaku asks bored internet users.

"Tweet2Doom is a new Twitter bot that started up in September of this year and which lets folks play through the original game using a series of commands." Those commands are translated to the bot and you are sent back a video showing you what happened, then you can continue to send more commands and progress through levels. The full list of commands and how it works can be found in this pinned tweet from the account...

Tweet2Doom now joins a long and ever-growing list of "Ways To Play Doom." That list includes a pregnancy test, unreleased indie console, cash registers and much, much more.

"The recently released Far Cry 6 video game from Ubisoft has drawn the ire of the animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)," reports ComicBook.com: While PETA has been known to issue statements on the handling of animals in video games over the years, and Far Cry 6 includes a variety of animals and instances that might have been the subject of such a statement, it is the cockfighting minigame in Far Cry 6 that has been specifically called out.

"Turning a horrific blood sport like cockfighting into a Mortal Kombat-style video game match is a far cry from real innovation, as today's society is strongly opposed to forcing animals to fight to the death," the statement from PETA Latino Senior Manager Alicia Aguayo reads. "Roosters used in cockfights are fitted with sharp spurs that tear through flesh and bone, causing agonizing and fatal injuries. PETA Latino urges Ubisoft to replace this reprehensible minigame with one that doesn't glorify cruelty."

"A newly-enhanced edition of the original Quake has been officially revealed by Bethesda at QuakeCon 2021," reports GamesRadar+ The updated edition of the classic 1996 first-person shooter is out right now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Nintendo Switch.

There's updated visuals, online and local multiplayer, and new content available in the enhanced edition of Quake. Two expansions for the original game — The Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity — are included in all purchases, as are the Dimensions of the Past and the brand new Dimension of the Machine expansions, the latter two of which are developed by Wolfenstein studio MachineGames.
"Those who own Quake on Steam or from the official Bethesda.net store can access the update for free," reports Ars Technica: The multi-platform release could be seen as positive news after Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, a move that generated worries about Microsoft/Bethesda exclusivity moving forward. For those who don't mind waiting, Limited Run Games will offer physical disc and card releases for the PS4 and Switch, respectively, including a pricey limited edition that comes in a box that looks like the in-game nail-gun ammo...

According to a press release, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game will run at full 4K and 120 fps once a future update goes live.

Valve expects that its recently announced Steam Deck portable gaming console will be able to run "really the entire Steam library" on its 1280x800 LCD screen at frame rates of 30 fps or higher. Ars Technica reports: That's according to a recent IGN video interview in which Valve Hardware Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said that "all the games that we wanted to be playable had really good [performance], a really good experience" in Steam Deck testing. Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais expanded on that statement by saying that "all the games that we wanted to be playable" means "really the entire Steam library." "We haven't really found something we could throw at this device that it couldn't handle yet," he added.

Griffais said initial prototype testing for the Steam Deck focused on older games in the Steam catalog and that there were "games that were coming out last year that just couldn't really run very well on the previous types of prototypes and architectures we were testing." On the finalized version of the hardware, though, he said the company has "achieved the level of performance that is required to run the latest generation of games without a problem." "The entire Steam catalog is available to people who have this device," Aldehayyat added. "That's where we knew we had a product that was going to deliver the experience we were looking for."

Aldehayyat attributed Steam Deck's wide compatibility in part to "future-proofing" internals that include a custom APU incorporating AMD's latest generation of GPU and CPU technology, as well as 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Griffais added that the performance scalability of modern PC games helps Steam Deck achieve a playable frame rate at its native 800p resolution (which is relatively low compared to desktop gaming PCs). "If people are still valuing high frame rates and high resolutions on different platforms, I think that content will scale down to our 800p, 30 Hz target very well," he said. "If people start heavily favoring image quality, we might be in a position where we might have tradeoffs, but we're not in a position where we really see that yet." In a follow-up tweet late last week, Griffais clarified that the 30 fps target is the "floor" for what Valve considers playable: "games we've tested and shown have consistently met and exceeded that bar so far. There will also be an optional built-in FPS limiter to fine-tune perf[ormance] vs. battery life."

A Google proposal which enables a web browser to treat a group of domains as one for privacy and security reasons has been opposed by the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). From a report: Google's First Party Sets (FPS) relates to the way web browsers determine whether a cookie or other resource comes from the same site to which the user has navigated or from another site. The browser is likely to treat these differently, an obvious example being the plan to block third-party cookies. The proposal suggests that where multiple domains owned by the same entity -- such as google.com, google.co.uk, and youtube.com -- they could be grouped into sets which "allow related domain names to declare themselves as the same first-party." The idea allows for sites to declare their own sets by means of a manifest in a known location. It also states that "the browser vendor could maintain a list of domains which meet its UA [User Agent] policy, and ship it in the browser."

In February 2019, Google software engineer Mike West requested a TAG review and feedback on the proposal was published yesterday. "It has been reviewed by the TAG and represents a consensus view," the document says. According to the TAG, "the architectural plank of the origin has remained relatively steady" over the last 10 years, despite major changes in web technology. It added: "We are concerned that this proposal weakens the concept of origin without considering the full implications of this action." The group identified some vagueness in the proposal, such as whether FPS applies to permissions such as access to microphone and camera. A Google Chrome engineering manager has stated: "No, we are not proposing to change the scope for permissions. The current scope for FPS is only to be treated as a privacy boundary where browsers impose cross-site tracking limitations." But the TAG reckons that the precise scope of FPS should be laid out in the proposal. A second concern is over the suggestion that browser vendors would ship their own lists. "This could lead to more application developers targeting specific browsers and writing web apps that only work (or are limited to) those browsers, which is not a desirable outcome," said the TAG.

Long ago there were plans for a remastered Xbox 360 version of the Nintendo 64 game "Goldeneye 007" — but they never materialized, and that game became a lost legend. But then Monday Ars Technica interviewed longtime Spanish game streamer Graslu00, who had somehow uploaded a two-hour video demo-ing the lost game. The files came with a peculiar note: "Never say never, release coming soon, James."
Days later Engadget reported: This week, a ROM of a canceled 2007 Xbox 360 remaster of the game appeared online, allowing those with a PC to play it using an emulator. According to VGC (via Polygon), the leaked ROM includes the game's entire single-player campaign, as well as its multiplayer component. It also allows players to seamlessly toggle between the remaster's enhanced textures and effects and the original's blocky N64 graphics.
So this weekend the BBC tracked down videogame designer David Doak, who'd worked on the original 1997 game, who admitted it was fun finally seeing the remastered game "out in the wild." "It is always heart-warming to see that the original game is still so fondly remembered and has obviously brought joy to so many people over almost 25 years since release.

"The current excitement over the leak of this 'naughty remaster' speaks volumes for the impact and enduring legacy of GoldenEye 007."

David Doak also appeared as a character called Dr Doak in the original game, but was replaced in the remastered version. Some gamers have already modified the leaked software to put him back in, which he said was "particularly touching."
Since 2009 he's been using the Twitter handle @DrDoak.

In March he'd tweeted, "Dr Doak works in a chemical weapons facility. He washes his hands regularly and is careful to avoid touching his face. This is good practice. Be like Dr Doak."

Game streaming has been slowly growing in recent years with the launches of Nvidia's GeForce Now, Google's Stadia, Microsoft's xCloud and Amazon's Project Luna. This year, however, it looks to finally be picking up more steam. At CES 2021, LG announced that some of its 2021 TVs will support apps for playing games from Google Stadia and GeForce Now right on the TV. From a report: Those who subscribe to Stadia Pro, Google's subscription offering for Stadia that runs $10 per month that allows gamers to play an assortment of games for free, will be able to stream in 4K HDR, 60 FPS and 5.1 surround sound to their LG TVs. Stadia support is expected to arrive in the second half of the year in a handful of countries including the US, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands and Belgium. At launch, the app will only work on LG TVs running the company's webOS 6.0 software though the company says it will come to webOS 5.0 TVs "later this year." Support for Nvidia's platform is slightly less vague, with LG only promising that it will be available in the fourth quarter. The company did not mention which countries would be able to access the service.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After over a year of requests from fans and enthusiasts, and months of official teases, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a virtual reality mode. Whether you play the game via Steam or the Windows Store, you can now take advantage of "OpenXR" calls to seemingly any PC-VR system on the market, aided by an "enable/disable VR" keyboard shortcut at any time. This summer, ahead of the game's final-stretch beta test, the developers at Asobo Studio used a screen-share feature in a video call to tease the VR mode to us at Ars Technica. This is never an ideal way to show off VR, in part because the platform requires high refresh rates for comfortable play, which can't be smoothly sent in a pandemic-era video call. But even for a video call, it looked choppy. Asobo's team assured us that the incomplete VR mode was running well -- but of course, we're all on edge about game-preview assurances as of late. Now that users have been formally invited to slap Microsoft Flight Simulator onto their faces, I must strongly urge users not to do so -- or at least heavily temper their expectations. Honestly, Asobo Studio should've issued these warnings, not me, because this mode is nowhere near retail-ready.

Ultimately, trying to use the 2020 version of MSFS within its VR mode's "potato" settings is a stupid idea until some kinks get worked out. It's bad enough how many visual toggles must be dropped to PS2 levels to reach a comfortable 90 fps refresh; what's worse is that even in this low-fidelity baseline, you'll still face serious stomach-turning anguish in the form of constant frametime spikes. Turn the details up to a "medium" level in order to savor the incredible graphics engine Asobo built, of course, and you're closer to 45 fps. I didn't even bother finding an average performance for the settings at maximum. That test made me sick enough to delay this article by a few hours. [...] The thing is, my VR stomach can always survive the first few minutes of a bumpy refresh before I have to rip my headset off in anguish -- and this was long enough to see the absolute potential of MSFS as a must-play VR library addition. I don't have an ultrawide monitor, so testing MSFS has always been an exercise in wishing for a better field of view -- to replicate the glance-all-over behavior of actual flight. Getting a taste of that in my headset -- with accurate cockpit lighting, impressive volumetric clouds, and 3D modeling of my plane's various sounds -- made me want to sit for hours in this mode and get lost in compelling, realistic flight. But even the most iron stomachs can only take so much screen flicker within VR before churning, and that makes MSFS's demanding 3D engine a terrible fit for the dream of hours-long VR flight... at least, for the time being.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This weekend, Intel released preliminary information on its newest laptop part -- the Xe Max discrete GPU, which functions alongside and in tandem with Tiger Lake's integrated Iris Xe GPU. We first heard about Xe Max at Acer's Next 2020 launch event, where it was listed as a part of the upcoming Swift 3x laptop -- which will only be available in China. The new GPU will also be available in the Asus VivoBook Flip TP470 and the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1.

During an extended product briefing, Intel stressed to us that the Xe Max beats Nvidia's entry-level MX 350 chipset in just about every conceivable metric. In another year, this would have been exciting -- but the Xe Max is only slated to appear in systems that feature Tiger Lake processors, whose Iris Xe integrated GPUs already handily outperform the Nvidia MX 350 in both Intel's tests and our own. The confusion here largely springs from mainstream consumer expectations of a GPU versus what Intel's doing with the Xe Max. Our GPU tests largely revolve around gaming, using 3DMark's well-known benchmark suite, which includes gaming, fps-focused tests such as Time Spy and Night Raid. Intel's expectations for the Xe Max instead revolve, almost entirely, around content creation with a side of machine learning and video encoding.

Xe Max is, roughly speaking, the same 96 Execution Unit (EU) GPU to be found in the Tiger Lake i7-1185G7 CPU we've tested already this year -- the major difference, beyond not being on-die with the CPU, is a higher clock rate, dedicated RAM, and separate TDP budget. Tiger Lake's Iris Xe has a peak clock rate of 1.35GHz, and it shares the CPU's TDP constraints. Iris Xe Max has its own 25W TDP and a higher peak clock rate of 1.65GHz. It also has its own 4GiB of dedicated RAM -- though that RAM is the same LPDDR4X-4266 that Tiger Lake itself uses, which is something of a first for discrete graphics and might lead to better power efficiency.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the better part of the last decade, Google's Chromecast dongles were the company's primary homegrown solution for streaming video to your TV. But with the recent explosion in streaming services, even the most sophisticated Chromecast wasn't really cutting it anymore, which is something the new Chromecast with Google TV is hoping to change in a big way, but bringing an actual streaming device OS to a Chromecast dongle. The big change for this new $50 Chromecast is that it's not your typical Chromecast at all. Sure, it still plugs in via HDMI and you can still use it to stream videos and content to your TV from your phone. However, instead of being based around the very basic Chromecast interface, this new Chromecast runs on Android TV platform which Google has improved with an enhanced UI and a few new features, which is where the Google TV part of Chromecast with Google TV comes in.

And when you factor in the Chromecast with Google TV's new dedicated remote these upgrades could completely change how you watch and interact with content. Starting with the hardware, the Chromecast with Google TV consists of two parts: there's the dongle that plugs into your TV and Google's included remote. For the Chromecast with Google TV, Google is going with a simple ovular puck that comes in three different colors (Snow, Sunrise, and Sky) and features an attached HDMI cable that plugs into your TV along with a USB-C port and bundled cable that you'll need to plug in for power. The Chromecast with Google TV comes with support for 4K video at 60 fps with HDR via Dolby Vision, which ticks all the major boxes when it comes to streaming video quality.

Oakland's nonprofit "Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment" housed 40,000 historic pieces of videogame memorabilia — including 11,000 playable games. In 2017 they were the ones urging America's copyright office to allow museums and libraries to circumvent DRM to preserve abandoned online games like FIFA World Cup, Nascar and The Sims. The museum's sponsors include GitHub, Google, PlayStation, and Dolby Digital.

But now the MADE is "set to close its doors, with uncertainty ahead about whether it'll ever be able to reopen," reports GamesIndustry.biz: Founder and director Alex Handy said in an interview with GamesBeat that the group managing the museum couldn't reach an agreement on rent for the place during the COVID-19 crisis... 80% of its budget comes from admissions, its website says, and since it's been closed since March due to the pandemic, it's now forced to shut down and move its collections to storage.

Storage will be paid for thanks to donations — still open on this page and will also go towards eventually finding a new space for the museum. "The current plan is to stay in storage for two years while we raise the funds and make plans to create our dream video game museum," the museum's website reads. "When we're ready, we will be back and better than ever, mark our words."

"A photo and film restoration specialist, who goes by the name of DutchSteamMachine, has worked some AI magic to enhance original Apollo film, creating strikingly clear and vivid video clips and images," reports Universe Today: Take a look at this enhanced footage from an Apollo 16 lunar rover traverse with Charlie Duke and John Young, where the footage that was originally shot with 12 frames per second (FPS) has been increased to 60 FPS... And I was blown away by the crisp view of the Moon's surface in this enhanced view of Apollo 15's landing site at Hadley Rille... Or take a look at how clearly Neil Armstrong is visible in this enhanced version of the often-seen "first step" video from Apollo 11 taken by a 16mm video camera inside the Lunar Module...

The AI that DutchSteamMachine uses is called Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation, or DAIN for short. This AI is open source, free and constantly being developed and improved upon... "People have used the same AI programs to bring old film recordings from the 1900s back to life, in high definition and colour," he said. "This technique seemed like a great thing to apply to much newer footage...."

DutchSteamMachine does this work in his spare time, and posts it for free on his YouTube page. His tagline is "Preserving the past for the future..." And he's planning to keep it all coming. "I plan to improve tons of Apollo footage like this," he said. "A lot more space and history-related footage is going to be published on my YT channel continuously." He also has a Flickr page with more enhanced imagery. [And a Patreon page...]
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 calls it "similar to what Peter Jackson did with old World War I footage for They Shall Not Grow Old ."

Microsoft will be holding its next Xbox Games Showcase on July 23, the company announced today. Ars Technica reports: Unlike Microsoft's May promotional event, which focused on third-party launch titles for the upcoming console, the July 23 event is expected to discuss first-party exclusives from Microsoft's own Xbox Game Studios. That likely includes new footage of Halo Infinite, which saw a new teaser trailer a few weeks ago. That lineup of first-party studios now includes Psychonauts 2 developer Double Fine, which Microsoft acquired in June, and The Outer Worlds developer Obsidian Entertainment, which Microsoft acquired last November.

Long-time Slashdot reader frootcakeuk quotes an article from Hot Hardware: Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch.

Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The talented engineer had been working on the Vulkan driver in his spare time for more than two years.

Technically, Thomas' iteration isn't a Vulkan driver per se because it doesn't comply with the official standards established by The Khronos Group. Nonetheless, the resourceful developer produced a driver that adheres to the Vulkan parameters as much as possible, and as close as the hardware would permit it. There's just one limitation with the RPi-VK-Driver though. Unlike the official Vulkan driver that's still in the works, Thomas' version is only compatible with the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU that's found inside the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, 3 and Zero devices.

AMD "has a potent combination of both CPU and GPU technologies," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid, that "can play well in the laptop market especially, where a tight coupling of the two processing engines can mean both performance and cost efficiencies." One of the first all-AMD laptops to hit the market powered by the company's new Ryzen 4000 mobile processors is the Dell G5 15 SE, it's a 5.5 pound, 14.4-inch machine [with a 15.6-inch display] that sports an understated design for a gaming notebook but with an interesting glittery finish that resists fingerprints well. With a retail price of $1199 (starting at $879), the model tested at HotHardware is powered by an AMD Ryzen 4800H 8-core processor that boosts to 4.2GHz and an AMD Radeon RX 5600M mobile GPU with 6GB of GDDR6 memory...

In the benchmarks, AMD's SmartShift technology load-balances CPU and GPU power supply for optimal performance and very respectable numbers that are competitive with any similar Intel/NVIDIA powered machine. The Dell G5 15 SE put up north of 60 FPS frame rates at maximum image quality in current-gen game titles, but with a significantly better price point, relatively speaking.
The GPU also has 2,304 stream processors across 36 compute units, and "Overall, we think Dell hit it out of the park with the new G5 15 SE," the review concludes.

"This all-AMD budget blockbuster has all of the gaming essentials: a fast processor, a powerful GPU, and a 144 Hz display."

Jeff Grubb, writing for VentureBeat: One of the tidbits revealed during the first Xbox 20/20 event today is that Dirt 5 supports 120 frames per second on Xbox Series X. Publisher Codemasters' racing game is coming in October, but it supports Smart Delivery. So if you get it for Xbox One, you'll get the Xbox Series X version at no additional cost. And what does the Xbox Series X-optimized version of Dirt 5 get you? In an interview with the Xbox team, Codemasters confirmed that Dirt 5 supports the next-gen console's high-framerate feature. This means you can drive around the rally racer at 4K and 120 frames per second. High framerate is one of a number of key features for the next-gen consoles. And that makes sense. Racing games already have nearly photorealistic visuals. More graphical effects are not going to make much of a difference to the presentation of a Dirt 5. So this enables Codemasters to put that extra horsepower toward running the game faster.

OK, so the Xbox Series X can run Dirt 5 at up to 120fps, but that's not going to matter if you don't have the right display. High-refreshrate content is common on the PC, but consoles have primarily topped out at 60fps. Because of this it hasn't matter that most TVs top out at 60Hz. But it is a problem for the next-gen consoles. To actually see Dirt 5 running at 120fps, you'll need a TV that runs at 120Hz or faster. That means the TV updates its frames 120 times every second. The good news here is that a lot of TVs already have this feature. The bad news is that even if you have an HFR panel, support is a lot more complicated than that. The issue comes down to the audio/video interface running between your TV and the Xbox Series X.

Mike Bouma is Slashdot reader #85,252. (And judging by his Slashdot profile, he was also a participant in the short-lived Amiga webring.) He writes: KK of the demo scene group Altair is making a Doom clone for the Amiga 500. The system requirements are a mere 7 Mhz Amiga 500 with 1 MB of RAM!

Have a look:

Dread Ep 01 — making "Doom" clone for Amiga 500

Dread Ep 02 — "Doom" clone for Amiga 500 — Laying out the map...

You can find KK/Altair at the English Amiga Board.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hollywood Reporter: Call of Duty maker Activision has prevailed in a closely watched trademark dispute brought by AM General, the government contractor for Humvees. On Tuesday, a New York federal judge responded favorably to Activision's argument that it had a First Amendment right to depict contemporary warfare in its game by featuring Humvees. "If realism is an artistic goal, then the presence in modern warfare games of vehicles employed by actual militaries undoubtedly furthers that goal," writes U.S. District Court Judge George B. Daniels in granting summary judgment in favor of Activision. The video game publisher fought AM General's claims along with Major League Gaming Corp., a professional esports organization. The dispute was potentially worth tens of millions of dollars, and the discussion attracted intellectual property professors and the Electronic Software Association to weigh in with amicus briefs. You can read the full opinion here.

Today, we get another diminutive desktop option, but this one is designed for Linux and privacy. From a report: Yes, Purism is finally launching a tiny desktop, and it will come pre-installed with the Debian-based PureOS. Called "Librem Mini," the cute bugger has 4 USB-A ports on the front, along with a 3.5mm audio jack, and the power button. On the rear, there are two more USB-A ports, a single USB-C port, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the power port. "Announcing the Purism Librem Mini. Our small form-factor mini-PC that puts freedom, privacy and security first. We're really excited about the Librem Mini, it's a device our community have wanted and we've wanted to offer for some time. The Librem Mini is accessible, small, light and powerful featuring a new 8th gen quad core i7 processor, up to 64 GB of fast DDR4 memory and 4k 60 fps video playback. It's a desktop for your home or oïfce, a media center for your entertainment, or an expandable home server for your files and applications," says Purism.

Microsoft has provided detailed tech specs for its forthcoming Xbox Series X gaming console, reader Dave Knott shares. Full system specs are as follows: CPU: 8x Cores @ 3.8 GHz (3.6 GHz w/ SMT) Custom Zen 2 CPU
GPU: 12 TFLOPS, 52 CUs @ 1.825 GHz Custom RDNA 2 GPU
Die Size: 360.45 mm2
Process: 7nm Enhanced
Memory: 16 GB GDDR6 w/ 320b bus
Memory Bandwidth: 10GB @ 560 GB/s, 6GB @ 336 GB/s
Internal Storage: 1 TB Custom NVME SSD
I/O Throughput: 2.4 GB/s (Raw), 4.8 GB/s (Compressed, with custom hardware decompression block)
Expandable Storage: 1 TB Expansion Card (matches internal storage exactly)
External Storage: USB 3.2 External HDD Support
Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-Ray Drive
Performance Target: 4K @ 60 FPS, Up to 120 FPS. Digital Foundry visited Microsoft and provides a deep dive article detailing their hands-on experience with the new hardware including the following information.