Fun & Games

IGN has a blurb about DSpeak at e3. DSpeak let’s DS users make Voice-Over IP calls to other DS owners. The DS has an icon for a headset so perhaps we’ll see something soon. I’d propose a Skype/SIP/Vonage cartridge or prepaid cartridge and turn it in to a real phone. We’re getting more homebrew DS things, so who knows. Link.

Grand Theftendo is a new homebrew game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is a tribute to Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto III running on the 8 bit, 256×240 resolution, 2 bit colour x 2 bit palette, 1.79 Mhz system, written entirely in 6502 Assembly Language! [via] Link.

Leaving for another day the question of whether consumers have the right to modify video-game software they’ve legally purchased, a federal judge last week dismissed a lawsuit by California game maker Tecmo against the proprietors and users of a game-hacking website, after the company quietly settled with the two main defendants. Not sure what the settlement was so this might not be over yet. Link.

A handful of clay, yesterday’s coffee grounds and some cow manure: the ingredients that could bring clean, safe drinking water to much of the third world. The simple new technology, developed by [Australia National University] materials scientist Mr. Tony Flynn, allows water filters to be made from commonly available materials and fired on the ground using cow manure as the source of heat, without the need for kiln. The filters have been tested and shown to remove common pathogens including E-coli. Via BoingBoing. Link.

Add a NES emulator to the growing list of hardware you can emulate on a PSP. But this is for the 1.0 version of the PSP which was on the early units in Japan and now Ebay. So for now, there’s only a handful of folks that can run these emulators and homebrew games, but there’s a lot of effort being put in to this and soon we’ll see emulator and other apps for our 1.5 PSP units. Via Waxy. Link.

Today Sony announced the new PlayStation 3 IGN has the specs here. Last week was the Xbox 360 (specs here). Both impressive devices, I’m more excited about the millions of “old” Xboxes and PS2 out in the wild and how they’ll find new uses in the hands of Makers. For under $50 (eBay, etc..) you’ll be able to get an amazing system to do a ton of projects- we’ll of course have them here and in the magazine.

This week 8 years ago, the humans lost the chess battle to Deep Blue. I netflixed “Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine” a great documentary on Kasparov’s Chess match with IBM (he lost, but they’ve yet to rematch) but noticed Netflix branded the DVD as well as watermarking the menu system. Is this a new way netflix will cut down on the “Netflix project” – an effort to copy of 25k DVDs. Or is Netflix Longtailing DVDs becomming a distributer for independent films? Photos of the DVD and menu here. IBM, how about open sourcing Deep Blue, it’s been 8 years. We’d love to do a DIY chess supercomputer for MAKE.