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Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is just around the corner, with a release date of October 25, and Microsoft has temporarily removed the $1 Xbox Game Pass 14-day trial from stores again. Some gamers may remember that Microsoft pulled a similar stunt last year just before Starfields release. Essentially, this keeps players from trying out a big new release like Black Ops 6 without paying for a full subscription. The trials removal happened on October 8, but it was only caught by The Verge today. The most likely primary reason is to prevent gamers from playing through the campaign without paying the full price. Of course, even millions of $1 sales wouldnt be profitable for Microsoft. A decision like this isnt without reasons, as Microsoft is hoping to increase the number of Game Pass subscriptions. Since the number of new subscribers over the last two years has slowed, Microsoft hopes that removing the trial forces gamers to purchase a full Game Pass plan to enjoy Black Ops 6. The Game Pass trial isnt back yet, so those who want to dip their toes into the water before plunging in will have to wait. Its also good to remember that the trial used to be for a whole month before its current 14-day form.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/microsoft-removes-the-1-xbox-game-pass-trial-just-before-call-of-duty-black-ops-6-155058295.html?src=rss
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Hosting a property on Airbnb is no longer a simple process. Customers can be finicky, ideal pricing can change on a dime, markets can become flooded and earnings can be difficult to track. The platforms trying to simplify matters by introducing the Co-Host Network, which allows hosts to hire other hosts to manage properties. Heres how it works. Property owners can peruse the network for other hosts and scoop them up into a loving embrace of hospitality. The hired hosts can help with just about anything, including setting up listings, selecting prices and availability, cleaning, maintenance and guest management. Its a disruption of the blazing-hot building superintendent industry. Airbnb These hosts for hire must be highly rated and local, with Airbnb saying it has only included hosts with a rating of at least 4.8 and a minimum of ten hosted stays. The would-be co-hosts/employees can set their own service rates on a profile page. The company says it has onboarded over 10,000 people so far, in countries like Australia, Brazil, France, Mexico and the US. One of the requests that we had from hosts is that they would really love to be able to find professional, high-quality co-hosts with a great track record in their area whom they can trust. And they can really be completely hands-off, Judson Coplan, VP of Product Marketing at Airbnb, said to TechCrunch. While this feature should be a boon for actual people who just need a little bit of help, the phrase completely hands-off gives me pause. It seems like it could easily be used by gigantic real estate monoliths that own hundreds and hundreds of properties across the platform. This isnt a bad thing, per se, as these mega-hosts are generally considered to be a reliable option for guests. However, this certainly doesnt help the public perception that Airbnb and its ilk participate in the hollowing out of neighborhoods, turning them into ghost towns. There is, after all, a housing crisis across the country. In any event, this could be a decent way for some people to make a few extra bucks. Airbnb introduced other stuff besides the Co-Host Network, including a feature for hosts to check out similar listings in an area. As for guests, theres a new welcome tour in the app for first time users, updated search filters, local payment options and more. The platform has been busy lately. Earlier this year, Airbnb started a program to provide discounts on EV chargers for hosts. It also now allows the app to display smart lock codes to guests.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/airbnb-now-lets-hosts-hire-other-hosts-to-manage-properties-153748730.html?src=rss
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A year after it was first teased, Analogue says its nailed its most complicated project yet: rebuilding the Nintendo 64 from scratch. The Analogue 3D will ship in Q1 2025 it was originally slated for 2024 and pre-orders start on October 21 at $250. Like all of the companys machines, the Analogue 3D has an FPGA (field programmable gate array) chip coded to emulate the original console on a hardware level. Analogue promises support for every official N64 cartridge ever released, across all regions, with no slowdown or inaccuracies. If it achieves that goal, the Analogue 3D will be the first system in the world to perfectly emulate the N64, though other FPGA and software emulators get pretty close. The company has been selling recreations of retro consoles for over a decade, starting with high-end, bespoke takes on the Neo-Geo and NES. Over time its gradually shifted over to more mass-market (though still high-end) productions, with versions of SNES, Genesis and Game Boy all coming in at around the $200 mark. All of the companys systems support original physical media, rather than ROMs. Analogues original unique selling point was its use of FPGA chips. Rather than using software emulation to play ROMs, Analogue programs FPGA cores to emulate original console hardware, and its consoles support original game media and controllers. Compared with software emulation (especially in the early 10s when Analogue got started), FPGA-based consoles are more accurate, and dont suffer from as much input lag. FPGA emulation has come a long way over the past decade. Where Analogue was once the only route into the world of FPGAs for most people, theres now a rich community of developers and hardware manufacturers involved. The open-source MiSTer project, for example, has accurately emulated almost every video game thing produced up to the mid 90s. And plenty of smaller manufacturers are now selling FPGA hardware for very reasonable prices. The FPGBC is one good example: Its a simple DIY kit that lets you build a modern-day Game Boy Color for a much lower price than an Analogue Pocket. A DE10-Nano board produced by Terasic. Terasic Amid all these developments, Analogue occupies a strange spot in the retro gaming community, which has evolved into an open-source, people-powered movement to preserve and play old games. It produces undeniably great hardware that doesnt require expertise to use, but its prices are high, and its limited-run color variants of consoles like the Pocket have both created FOMO in the community and been a consistent target for scalpers. Analogue is, in many ways, the Apple of the retro gaming hardware space. With that said, its hard to deny that the Pocket has brought more players into the retro gaming world and attracted talent to FPGA development. And if Analogue comes through on its promise here, the Analogue 3D will be another huge moment for video game preservation, and could be the spark for another half-decade of fantastic achievements from the FPGA community at large. Breaking the fifth-gen barrier While the FPGA emulation of the first few video game generations is largely a solved problem, theres a huge leap in complexity between the fourth generation (SNES, Genesis, etc.) and the next. Strides have been made to rebuild the PlayStation, Saturn and N64 in FPGA, but there is no core for any fifth-gen console that has fully solved the puzzle. The current state of the MiSTer N64 core is pretty impressive, with almost every US game counted as playable, but very few games are considered to run flawlessly. So how did Analogue solve this? The studio does have a talented team, but it importantly has a leg-up when it comes to hardware. The Analogue 3D has the strongest version of the Intel Cyclone 10GX FPGA chip, with 220,000 logic elements. For context, the MiSTer projects open-source DE-10 board has a Cyclone V FPGA with 110,000 logic elements, while the Analogue Pockets main FPGA offers 49,000 elements. Theres a lot more to an FPGA than its logic elements, but the numbers are illustrative: The 3Ds FPGA is undoubtedly the most powerful Analogue has ever used, which clearly gave it more flexibility in designing its core. While we cant verify Analogues claim of 100 percent compatibility by looking at a spec sheet, the company does have a good track record of programming fantastic FPGA cores, so its likely itll get incredibly close. Kris Naudus for Engadget Of course, if you just wanted to play N64 games accurately, you could plug an N64 into any TV with a composite or S-Video connector, or use one of many boxes that converts those formats into HDMI signals that modern TVs require. The problem with running an N64 on a modern TV is that its games run at a wide range of resolutions, typically from 320 x 240 up to (very rarely) 640 x 480, the max output. There are countless oddball resolutions between, and some games run below 320 x 240. This is a nightmare for modern displays. Some will scale to a full screen very nicely both of the common resolutions I listed multiply neatly to 4K, albeit with pillarboxing. The situation gets more confusing with PAL cartridges, which can run at fun horizontal resolutions like 288 and 576. Theres also the issue that the vast majority of these games were designed with the CRT displays of old in mind, taking advantage of the quirks of scanlines to, say, make a checkerboard pattern look translucent. This makes playing N64 games on a modern TV a bit of a hassle. There are fantastic retro upscalers like the RetroTINK series, but when plugging in a game for the first time, you wind up deciding between integer and good enough scaling, dealing with weird frame rates and tweaking blending options to get the picture just right. Many people enjoy this fine-tuning and customization aspect, and all power to you! But it's undoubtedly a barrier to entry, and much of the hard work done on upscaling has been focused on 2D gaming, rather than 3D. Analogue says its scaling solution will solve many of these issues. The Analogue 3D supports 4K output, variable refresh rate displays, and PAL and NTSC carts. On top of those basics, its building out Original Display Modes to emulate the CRT TVs and PVMs of old. Calling ODMs filters feels a little reductive, as theyre a complicated and customizable mix of display tricks, but essentially you pick one and it changes the way the picture looks, so. ODMs were used effectively on the Analogue Pocket to emulate various Game Boy displays. Perhaps the most impressive example is a Trinitron ODM that came to the Pocket in 2023 that, when used with the Analogue Dock, does a pretty incredible job of turning a modern TV into a high-end Sony tube TV. We dont have a ton of information on which ODMsare coming to the 3D, but I will share the very 90s ad for the feature below: Analogue The final piece of the image-quality puzzle is frame rate. The N64s library is full of some spectacularly slow games. My memory may be scarred from growing up in a PAL region, which meant, while the US and Japans NTSC consoles were outputting a blistering 20 fps, I was chugging away at 16.66 fps. But even in the idealized NTSC world, lots of games outright missed their frame rate targets comically often. As an example, the majority of Goldeneyes single-player campaign plays out between 15-25 fps, while a four-player match would typically see half that number. And lets not speak of Perfect Dark. These glacial frame rates are far less noticeable on a CRT than they are on modern displays with crisp rows of pixels updating from top to bottom. While the ODMs go some way to replicating the feel of an old TV, they cant change the underlying technical differences. The Analogue 3D does support variable refresh rate output, but that won't do much when a game is running at 12 fps, and instead is intended to help the system run like the original N64 did at launch. In its initial press push last year, Analogue told Paste magazine that youll have the option to overclock the 3Ds virtual chips to run faster "overclocking, running smoother, eliminating native frame dips" but the company hasn't mentioned that in its final press release. Instead, Analogue CEO Christopher Taber told Engadget that its solution "isn't overclocking, it's much better and more sophisticated." It revolves around Nintendo's original Rambus RAM set up, which is often the bottleneck for N64 performance. Solving this bottleneck "means that games can run without slowdown and all the classic issues the original N64 had," he explained. By default, though, the Analogue 3D is set up to run exactly like original hardware, albeit with the RAM Expansion Pak attached. "Preserving the original hardware is the number one goal," Taber explained. "Even when bandwidth is increased, its not about boosting performance beyond the systems original capabilities its about giving players a clearer window into how the games were designed to run." Analogue The hardware Analogue has a rich history of making very pretty hardware, and the Analogue 3D is clearly no exception. As with the Super Nt, Mega Sg, and Duo, the 3D calls back to the basic form of the console its based on, while smoothing out and modernizing it somewhat. Its an elegant way to pull on nostalgia while also being legally distinct enough to avoid a lawsuit. (Analogues FPGA cores and software also dont infringe on any Nintendo IP.) The Analogue 3D has a similar shape to the N64, but the front pillars have been erased, the four controller ports match the housing and the power/reset buttons are slanted inwards to point toward the cartridge slot. Despite the tweaks, it still undoubtedly evokes a Nintendo 64. Around the back, youll find a USB-C port for power, two USB ports for accessories like non-standard controllers, an HDMI port and a full-sized SD card slot. Analogue A new operating system from Analogue, 3DOS, will debut with the system. It looks like a blend of the AnalogueOS that debuted on the Pocket and the Nintendo Switch OS, with the homescreen centered on a large carousel of square cards. The screenshots Analogue provided show options for playing a cartridge, browsing your library or viewing save states and screenshots. Some N64 games have the ability to save data to the cartridge, while others rely on a Controller Pak, but the ability to quickly save progress as a memory, as introduced with the Pocket, will be useful nonetheless. 3DOS can also connect to the internet over the consoles built-in WiFi chip for OS updates, which is a first for Analogue. While you can browse your library in 3DOS, you wont actually be able to load any game that isnt physically inserted into the cartridge slot: The Analogue 3D only plays original media. Its also worth noting that the Analogue 3D also doesnt have an openFPGA setup like the Analogue Pocket did, which opened the door to playing with a wild array of cores that emulate various consoles, computers and arcades. It doesnt usually take long for someone to jailbreak Analogue consoles to play ROMs (or other cores) via the systems SD card slot, but this is not officially supported or sanctioned by Analogue. The console comes with a power supply (with a US plug), USB cable, an HDMI cable and a 16GB SD card. As per usual, no controller will be packed in its up to you if you want to use original hardware or something more modern. I managed to make at least one reader extremely mad (Im sorry, Brucealeg) last time I wrote about the Analogue 3D and called the N64 controller a mistake. Personally, though, it feels really rough using one in 2024. Analogue/8BitDo If you enjoy the three-paddled original controller, the 3D has four ports for you, and the system will also support the myriad Paks that plug into those controllers. For everyone else, there's Bluetooth Classic and LE support along with two USB ports for wired controllers. Accessory maker 8BitDo has created what seems to be a variant of its Ultimate controller specifically for the Analogue 3D. (Analogue's CEO, Taber, is also 8BitDos CMO, and the companies have collaborated on controllers for many consoles at this point.) The 8BitDo controller looks like a fairly happy middle ground between old and new, with an octagonal gate around the thumbstick, and nicely raised and sized C-buttons. It has a Rumble Pak built in, which works on both the Analogue 3D and Nintendo Switch. Its available in black or white hues that match the console, and sells separately for $39.99. Pre-orders for the Analogue 3D open on October 21 at 11AM ET, with an estimated ship date of Q1 2025. Its unclear how many will be available, but if past launches are any indication, you should be ready to click buy as close to 11AM as possible if you want a hpe of being in the first wave of shipments. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/analogues-4k-remake-of-the-n64-is-almost-ready-and-its-a-big-deal-150033468.html?src=rss
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