today's leftovers
GNU/Linux
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Games
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Hackaday ☛ Give Your Animal Crossing Villagers The Gift Of Linux
If you’ve played any of the versions of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing over the years, you’ll know that eventually you get to the point where you’ve maxed out your virtual house and filled it with all the furniture you could possibly want — which is arguably as close to “winning” the game as you can get.
But now thanks to the work of [decrazyo] there’s a piece of furniture that you can add to your Animal Crossing house that will never get old: an x86 emulator that boots Linux. As explained in the video below, this trick leverages the fact that Nintendo had already built a highly accurate Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator into Animal Crossing on the GameCube, which could be used to run a handful of classic games from within the player’s virtual living room. But it turns out that you can get that emulator to load a user-provided ROM from the GameCube’s memory card, which opens the doors to all sorts of mischief.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Open Hardware/Modding
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CNX Software ☛ Vaaman reconfigurable edge computer features Rockchip RK3399 SoC and Efinix Trion T120 FPGA (Crowdfunding)
Vaaman is a reconfigurable single-board edge computer that integrates a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core ARM processor with an Efinix Trion T120 FPGA, offering a reconfigurable platform for edge computing applications. The board combines the flexibility of an FPGA with the raw power of a hard processor to create a system capable of adapting to varying computational demands in real time. The compact SBC features the Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor with two Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores, as well as an Efinix Trion T120 FPGA with 112,128 logic elements, interlinked with RK3399 via a high-speed 300Mbps bridge (but it’s unclear how this is implemented).
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Events
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Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Status update, February 2025
Hi!
This month has been pretty hectic, with FOSDEM and all. I’ve really enjoyed meeting face-to-face all of these folks I work online with the rest of the year! My talk about modern IRC has been published on the FOSDEM website (unfortunately the audio quality isn’t great).
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Programming/Development
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppDE 0.1.8 on CRAN: Maintenance
A maintenance release of our RcppDE package arrived at CRAN. RcppDE is a “port” of DEoptim, a package for derivative-free optimisation using differential evolution, from plain C to C++. By using RcppArmadillo the code became a lot shorter and more legible. Our other main contribution is to leverage some of the excellence we get for free from using Rcpp, in particular the ability to optimise user-supplied compiled objective functions which can make things a lot faster than repeatedly evaluating interpreted objective functions as DEoptim does (and which, in fairness, most other optimisers do too). The gains can be quite substantial.
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