Do you have your best shocked face ready? Microsoft just announced a slimmer Xbox One, the Xbox One S. Okay, so the surprise was kinda ruined by a month of leaks, culminating in a picture of the thing finding its way into the wild yesterday morning. But at least now that it’s official, we know exactly why Microsoft thinks you should buy a new Xbox. The big-ticket item is 4K support. That doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to play games in crazy high-res, but if you have a fancy TV it’ll provide plenty of options to watch content at 4K. In addition to supporting 4K versions of Netflix and Amazon Video content, there’s also 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray support. It’s not clear if that drive will be as standard, or an optional upgrade. The new console also supports HDR sets, and Gear of War 4 will be the first to support the wider color range. The Xbox One, as attractive or unattractive as you think it is, is undoubtedly a large machine, especially compared with its main rival, the PlayStation 4. The Xbox One S is 40-percent smaller and can be safely used vertically with an official stand. Elsewhere there’s an integrated power supply, meaning no more brick, and the option to include a more capacious 2TB hard drive. It’s also mostly white — a colorway Microsoft debuted for the original Xbox One. Other changes include a USB port in the front for easy access and the dropping of the Kinect port — there’ll be a USB adapter if you want to plug in Microsoft’s unloved camera accessory to the new machine. Oh, and there’s a new controller that’ll be bundled with the S, which has textured grips, improved range and Bluetooth. The Xbox One S launches this August at $299 for the 500GB version. No word on the price for the 2GB version yet. Source: Engadget Live Blog
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This is the Xbox One S
An anonymous reader writes: The Digital Foundry blog reports that Sony has added functionality to the PlayStation 4 that allows it to act as an emulator for some PlayStation 2 games. Surprisingly, the company did not mention that this functionality is live; a new Star Wars game bundle just happened to include three titles that were released on the PS2. From the article: “How can we tell? First of all, a system prompt appears telling you that select and start buttons are mapped to the left and right sides of the Dual Shock 4’s trackpad. Third party game developers cannot access the system OS in this manner. Secondly, just like the PS2 emulator on PlayStation 3, there’s an emulation system in place for handling PS2 memory cards. Thirdly, the classic PlayStation 2 logo appears in all of its poorly upscaled glory when you boot each title.” Sony has confirmed the games are being emulated, but declined to provide any further details. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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An anonymous reader writes: Programmer Michael Fogleman recently built his own emulator for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. He’s now put up a post sharing many technical insights he learned along the way. For example: “The NES used the MOS 6502 (at 1.79 MHz) as its CPU. The 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed in 1975. … The 6502 had no multiply or divide instructions. And, of course, no floating point. There was a BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) mode but this was disabled in the NES version of the chip—possibly due to patent concerns. The 6502 had a 256-byte stack with no overflow detection. The 6502 had 151 opcodes (of a possible 256). The remaining 105 values are illegal / undocumented opcodes. Many of them crash the processor. But some of them perform possibly useful results by coincidence. As such, many of these have been given names based on what they do.” It’s an interesting look at how software and hardware interacted back then, and what it takes to emulate that in modern times. Fogleman released the source code on GitHub. Read more of this story at Slashdot.