Talynebear

SAN FRANCISCO—Last year's inaugural PlayStation Experience closed 2014 with a surprising number of game and product announcements, and Sony appeared ready to double-down on this new end-of-year tradition with a follow-up, fan-focused convention full of playable demos and new products, and its two-hour keynote led off with the big Final Fantasy remaster that Sony announced at this past summer's Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Final Fantasy VII Remake's battle system still has a menu system, but it plays out from a behind-the-back angle with apparent active maneuvering, a la the series' more recent entries.

Final Fantasy VII Remake—the classic remaster's official name—had a gameplay-trailer reveal that showed less of a remaster and more of a total overhaul. For starters, the new version of FF7 includes a third-person, over-the-shoulder camera as its default viewpoint. That'll certainly show off the new, fully 3D content better than the original version's pre-rendered, top-down environs—and the footage showed more intense movement maneuvers like slides and hops through the world of Midgar, so the camera change isn't just for show. The trailer's dialogue was entirely spoken aloud, as well, and its combat showed off an apparent active-battle twist, though it was hard to tell whether players will gain as much active control of Cloud Strife and other characters as the trailer appeared to show, or whether the footage simply looked more dynamic from a new perspective.

Final Fantasy big-wig Tetsuya Nomura took the stage after the presentation, but not with news of a release date or when fans can expect any playable access to the remaster. Instead, he announced that the PC version of Final Fantasy VII had already launched on PlayStation 4 via its online store.

According to sources speaking to Variety, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has been green-lighted for a 10-episode TV adaptation on Spike TV.

Each episode will be an hour long, and J. Michael Straczynski, creator and writer of Babylon 5 and co-creator of Sense8 will serve as Red Mars’ writer, co-executive producer, and showrunner. Vince Gerardis, co-executive producer of Game of Thrones, will also serve as executive producer on Red Mars with Straczynski. Robinson will reportedly be an on-the-set consultant.

The Red Mars project has been on Spike TV’s plate for some time, but the network only just decided to move full-speed ahead with it, according to Variety. The show will go into production this summer and premiere in January 2017.

AMD announced its new Crimson drivers, replacing the Catalyst name and software, with great fanfare earlier this month. The first Crimson drivers are now out, and they appear to have a serious problem. There are widespread reports of cards overheating and perhaps even failing permanently.

It appears that the new driver is setting the video card fans to 20 percent and then leaving them there. Normally, the fan speed should increase as the GPU temperature goes up, but that is not happening with Crimson. Even during games and intensive workloads, the fans are sticking at 20 percent, allowing GPU temperatures to climb to more than 90° C. These high temperatures are causing poor performance due to thermal throttling, graphical glitches and crashes, and some users are reporting permanent hardware damage. Although the GPU itself throttles when it overheats, there's speculation that other components on the cards, such as the VRMs, can still be damaged.

AMD has acknowledged the fan speed issue and says that a hot fix will be published today. This is unlikely to be any great comfort to those whose cards have bitten the dust, and it makes for an inauspicious debut for AMD's new driver. This is, however, not a problem unique to AMD; in 2010, Nvidia published a driver update that had a similar fan controller issue that led to cards overheating and in some cases breaking entirely. Another Nvidia release in 2013 also yielded complaints of overheating and video card destruction.

Printer giant Epson has developed an in-office paper recycling machine. Called the PaperLab, you put waste paper in, and then new, bright white printer paper comes out. Epson says this process is more efficient than sending paper to an off-site recycling plant, and it's also much more secure: the PaperLab, which breaks paper down into its constituent fibres before building them back up into new sheets, is one of the most secure paper shredders that money can buy.

The specs of the machine are truly impressive. Within three minutes of adding waste paper to the PaperLab, it starts pumping out perfectly white sheets of new paper. The system can produce around 14 A4 sheets of paper per minute, or 6,720 sheets in an eight-hour workday. The PaperLab can also produce A3 paper, and you can tweak the thickness and density of the paper as well: if you want really thin white paper, that's cool; if you want thicker paper for business cards, it can do that too.

Epson says that the PaperLab is the world's first paper production system to use a "dry process." Paper-making processes usually require a lot of water, but the PaperLab requires only a tiny amount of water to "maintain a certain level of humidity inside the system," so it doesn't need to be plumbed into the mains. Presumably there's a small tank of water that needs to be filled up occasionally—hopefully with normal tap water, not £50-per-litre Epson Purified PrintXL Water.

The 8-player NES in all its glory, upon a custom-made octagonal pedestal.

18 more images in gallery

What do you get if you combine the nerdy ingenuity of ETH Zurich, the creativity of Disney researchers, and a swanky Swiss night club with a 360-degree projection system? The world's only cooperative 8-player, 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System capable of continuous, panoramic side-scrolling on that aforementioned 360-degree display, of course.

At this point I would recommend that you look at the photo gallery and at least one of the videos below so that you have a mental image of how this all slots together. I will attempt to describe the system, too, but words don't really do it justice.

So, as you probably know, Super Mario Bros is a single-player side-scrolling game for the NES/Famicom. You constantly move forwards, jumping over obstacles and on top of goombas, until you get to the end of the level. That's about it. There's no going back, you can't zoom out to see where you've been, and the max number of players is two: one for Mario, one for Luigi.

After 20 years, developers will finally be able to ape this Ridge Racer screen.

Back in 1995, Namco threw in a playable, miniature version of the arcade classic Galaxian to keep players amused during the lengthy loading times for PlayStation launch title Ridge Racer. In the decades since, other developers have largely been prevented from copying the idea of minigames on loading screens. That's because of a broad US patent Namco got for games that prevent "unnecessary wastage of time... by first loading the smaller, auxiliary game program code into the games machine, before the main-game program code is loaded, then loading the main-game program code while the auxiliary game is running."

Some games, like FIFA and Bayonetta, have managed to skirt that patent by including load-screen minigames that are simply smaller versions of the full game rather than "auxiliary" games as mentioned in the patent. Still, for the most part, developers have been forced to use those unskippable load times to display concept art or in-game statistics rather than playable diversions.

The dark era of dull loading screens may finally be coming to an end, though, because the 20-year term on Namco's 1995 patent expired last week. To celebrate, a number of indie developers are getting together for a Loading Screen Game Jam, devoted to "creating interactive loading screens... and defiling the patent that held back game design for so many years!"

(credit: Apple)

When Apple unveiled Swift 2.0 at WWDC back in June, one of the bigger announcements was that the language would be going open source by the end of the year. The time has come—­just a few weeks before its self-imposed deadline, Apple has launched Swift.org and is releasing a big chunk of code (as well as some guidance for Swift 3.0) to the public.

Swift is being released under an Apache 2.0 license, which is incidentally the same license Microsoft used when it open-sourced a big chunk of its .NET framework last year. The project is hosted on GitHub and includes the compiler, the LLDB debugger, the REPL command-line environment, the standard and core libraries, and code from supporting projects. New to Swift (and also open source) is the Swift Package Manager, described as an “early-stage project” that will serve as a repository for Swift modules and will evolve with input from the community.

Apple has also posted information about the next version of Swift. Instead of getting a big Swift 3.0 info dump at WWDC 2016 in the summer and then digging into the Xcode betas and adapting, developers can already find an “evolution" document on the Swift site that maps out where the language is headed in its next major version. One of Apple's major goals for Swift 3.0 is source compatibility, meaning that code written to target Swift 3.0 will continue to compile properly even as the language continues to develop. This isn't true of older Swift versions, and Apple is already warning developers that some things are going to break between Swift 2.x and 3.0.

Enlarge / A die shot of the A9X. The ratio of GPU to CPU is becoming pretty insane. (credit: Chipworks via AnandTech)

Apple makes interesting chips for its mobile devices, but it doesn't talk about them much aside from extremely high-level relative performance comparisons. That means it's up to experts like the ones at Chipworks to open them up and figure it out, and they've partnered up with AnandTech to dig into the A9X in the iPad Pro.

The most significant news is about the GPU, which is a 12-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series 7XT design. The company doesn't generally offer a 12-core design, as shown in the chart below, but the architecture is designed to be easily scalable, and it wouldn't be the first time Apple had gotten something from a supplier that other companies couldn't get. The standard A9 in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus uses a 6-core version of the same GPU. Apple feeds that GPU with a 128-bit memory bus, something it also included in other iPads to boost memory bandwidth and GPU performance.

The Series 7XT lineup. The iPad Pro's GPU falls somewhere in between the stock 8-cluster and 16-cluster designs. (credit: Imagination Technologies)

Imagination's chart for the Series 7XT GPU puts a hypothetical 12-core design in the same general performance neighborhood as an Nvidia GeForce GT 730M, a low-end discrete GPU that's a bit slower than the stuff Apple is shipping in its high-end MacBook Pros. Our own graphics benchmarks place it a bit higher than that, but as some of you have pointed out, iOS may have a small advantage in some of these tests because of differences between the mobile OpenGL ES API in iOS and the standard OpenGL API used in OS X.