Day: October 29, 2024

A screen capture from Portal 2 running in Asahi Linux. The Asahi Linux logo is in the bottom right of the image as a watermark. The environment is a concrete and glass building with elements of nature taking over the room on the other side of the glass from the character. A red circle with a grey cube above it is in the foreground.

Asahi Linux Brings Better Gaming To Apple Silicon

October 29, 2024 by 8 Comments

For those of you longing for better gaming on an Apple Silicon device, Asahi Linux is here to help.

While Apple’s own line of CPUs are relatively new kids on the block, they’ve still been around for four years now, giving hackers ample time to dissect their innards. The team behind Asahi Linux has now brought us “the only conformant OpenGL®, OpenCL™, and Vulkan® drivers” for Apple’s M1 and M2.

The emulation overhead of the system means that most games will need at least 16 GB of RAM to run. Many games are playable, but newer titles can’t yet hit 60 frames per second. The developers are currently focused on “correctness” and hope to improve performance in future updates. Many indie titles are reported to already be working at full speed though.

You can hear more about some of the fiddly bits of how to “tessellate with arcane compute shaders” in the video below. Don’t worry, it’s only 40 minutes of the nine hour video and it should start right at the presentation by GPU dev [Alyssa Rosenzweig].

If you want to see some of how Linux on Apple Silicon started or some of the previous work on hacking the M1 GPU, we have you covered.

Continue reading “Asahi Linux Brings Better Gaming To Apple Silicon” →

Compact Dedicated News Reader Always Brings You CBC

October 29, 2024 by 2 Comments

Your phone or laptop will give you access to the vast majority of news in the world, in languages you can read and a few hundred you can’t. Maybe you only like one news source, though, and that news source happens to be Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If that’s the case, you might like to give this project a look from [Ron Grimes].

[Ron] built a device that does one thing and one thing only: it displays news stories from CBC. It’s built around a Raspberry Pi 2, and the project began when he wanted to interface a keypad just to see if he could. With that done, the next challenge was to integrate a 16×2 character LCD display of the HD44780 persuasion. With those two tasks completed, the question was simple — what to display? He figured tuning into the CBC news feed would be useful, and the Chocolate Box News Reader was born.

The device displays 29 news feeds in total, including the main top stories, world news, and Canadian regional news. It stores 15 news items per feed and will hang on to those stories even if the Internet drops. The reader will display the whole stash of stored news in around 90 minutes or so, and each stored item comes with more information if something strike’s [Ron’s] curiosity or interest. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

It’s a neat build, and we can imagine it being a smart item to have kicking around the house. It was also a great way for [Ron] to build on his familiarity with the Raspberry Pi, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own nifty Pi-based projects—or others!—don’t hesitate to drop us a line!