News

A brand new Feature has arrived here at Frag-Net! We had the chance to talk to TC, who is known for creating the gaming website MeccaWorld and the 1998 podcast/internet radio show Daily Dementia on which he interviewed countless people from all over the games industry.

The interview covers his start with computers to the days of the early World Wide Web and beyond. We talk about the games everyone played then, the sites people went to, the industry of making sites for games - plus all the guests on his show, some of the people on his crew and our shared love for music and games.

Looks like the interviewer is about to be interviewed - on Frag-Net. Check it!

Playback.dem

Welcome to another entry in our Playback series, where we try to have a round up of interesting news on the gaming community along with a status report on our gaming network.

Frag-Net Status Report

It’s that time of the year again, and you know what that means! In addition to the season, we also have a couple exciting announcements!

Read Our New Interview This Sunday

Remember that interview we mentioned a while ago? Yeah it was a while ago, we know, but hey life happens. The interview needed a bit more time in the oven and it’s all the more better for it. One of the main problems has been the audio segment as there has been a lot of editing and clean up, but we think it’s finally ready to be published and you’ll see it this Sunday at Noon (EST)*.

Here is a little snippet to appease your appetite:

Guest: And yeah since I was kind of- There was a guy named Kevin something, the “Captain Immy” guy? Have you come across him?

FN: I don’t know, he doesn’t sound familiar.

Guest: Kevin- he did the “Attack of the Show!” on like G4 TV?

FN: Ohh that guy!

Guest: Kevin Pereira that’s who it was yeah!

FN: Oh my- Pereira yes!

Guest: Yeah so I think he was uh- he wanted to be me.

both chuckle

Guest: And so yeah and so he started a show I think it was called, Captain Immy [Pointless Audio], I think he was called - he was called “Captain Immy”.

FN: I didn’t know that he went that far back.

Guest: Yeah! But this was probably in ’99, and then I got wind of it somebody sent me some stuff because he was like, making fun of [me] you know.

FN: Wow.

Are able to guess our guest? Find out this weekend!

Halloween Event

It’s spooky month, and Halloween is upon us! Not only will Frag-Net suit up for the month, we will also be host our annual game! We have decided to host another Steam based (at the moment) game of Vampire Slayer and Zombie Panic! Here’s the details for the event:

Hope to see you there!

HL2, Garry’s Mod, and Quake III Anniversary Events

In the next couple of months, Half-Life 2 and Garry’s Mod will have their 20th Year Anniversary and Quake III will have its 25th Year Anniversary! (feel old yet?)

We are waiting to see what the communities will be doing before we announce any game events here, however we do plan on releasing some pieces, videos, and projects related the celebrations.

Be sure to check our Calendar or our Fediverse page to see all events!

Gaming News

New Half-Life Beta Build Found & Released

Last month was a bit of excitement in the Half-Life community as a personal copy beta build was discovered by its original owner, Chad Jessup. The industry veteran shared their storage findings in a Twitter thread, when they discovered a disc any Half-Life fan would die for, a beta build. Eventually, Chad got in touch with the community and Reagan45 uploaded it on Archive.org.

The build is interesting for a few reasons, and you should head over to The Cutting Room Floor to find out why.

Thatcher’s Techbase Haunts Bethesda

For those unaware, the recent “remasters” of DOOM on Steam feature a Mod Browser, a useful addition for sure, however it has not been without controversy. Ignoring problems of improper credits or compatibility, some mods were never made for such a walled garden. Take for instanace the slightly controversial DOOM II mod called “Thatcher’s Techbase” featuring the former Prime Minister of England - as a resurrected hellspawn.

As you can imagine, the suits at Bethesda (or is it Zenimax? Microsoft? Who is keeping track of accountability exactly?) did not find any humor in the mod and removed it for it’s “real-world politics”. As a result, the mod author has come back with [REDACTED] Techbase, a version poking fun at the gatekeepers. In it you can see enemies with “CENSORSED” comic-sans bars, bad smilies covering the obvious former un-dead Prime Minister, and so on. You can see a preview here from the author, here’s what they wrote:

To celebrate its 3rd birthday, I am rereleasing THATCHER’S TECHBASE for “DOOM+DOOM II”!

However, in light of the recent Educational Notice received from Bethesda, all real-world politics have now been removed.

Please enjoy ███████’█ TECHBASE on PC, PlayStation and Xbox!

Unforunately, this did not satisfy the company’s requirements and the mod was removed once again from the Mod Browser. As always, services like Archive.org, DoomWorld and the rest of game communities are the go to place for creating, playing and preserving mods, maps and other addons.

Source: PC Gamer

Sony Unveils and Takes Pre-Orders for PS5 Pro

Sony has revealed the $699 PlayStation 5 Pro version of their popular console.

The annoucement has had a lukewarm reception on the web so far, but we’ll see how the general sales figures pan out.

John Romero and Jordan Mechner Interview with MinnMax

We hear from good old Romero and Jordan Mechner talk about their preservation efforts in the industry and them encouraging other developers to share their development history through various means. As we archive this stuff ourselves, the topic hits close to home and we thought it was worth sharing.

Watch it here!

Thanks to Blues News for the heads up on this and some of our other stories featured here.

(Rumor) Valve Testing ARM64 and Android Support

We mentioned a while back that the world is slowly moving away from x86, and it seems Valve is the latest to join the 21st century of computing.

Of course a Steam Deck with much higher power efficiency is on our mind - and in fact highly desired. We will have to wait and see if/how that manifests.

Tech News

Apple Forced to Pay $14 Billion in Irish Taxes

The European Court of Justice tells Ireland and Apple to knock off their weird backroom deals and tells Apple to pay back $14.4 billion in taxes to Ireland. As Axios reports, Apple and Ireland have been appealing this for a while.

The nation of Ireland apparently doesn’t like receiving $14.4 billion in taxes. The staff of this website wonders if its citizens do.

Let us know, in chat.

Windows 10 and 11 Fight for Install Numbers

In another round of Steam Stats, it was revealed back in August that Microsoft had successfully bullied enough of their user base to start using Windows 11 to topple the number one place of Windows 10. However this was not meant to last as this month, Windows 10 usage shot back up +1.57% while Windows 11 went down by -1.48%.

When it comes to Mac OS and Linux, it seems 0.06% crawled back to Windows.

Discord Limits Upload Size to 10 Mb, Demands Money for Increase

Speaking of userbases that tolerate too much, Discord has now limited their file upload size to the size of a 2004-era E-Mail attachment: 10 MB.

Discord of course states the obvious: Running a centralized datacenter serving billions of messages is “costly”.

Look guys, the idea was that after they were done growth-hacking and nailed your favorite people/communities to their platform that you pay for their “great service” by upgrading to Nitro. Which you won’t, because you’d never gone there in the first place if it had a price tag. Will this change make people who hesitated before… finally start paying for Nitro? No. Does this mean more free features will be on the chopping block? Absolutely.

Source: Slashdot

Rust vs. C

The programming world was butting heads last month, with the boiling point issue being over the use of the Rust programming language in the Linux Kernel and its usage over the traditional C language.

As The Register reports, even Linux author Linus Torvalds was getting in words on the issue.

With many people programming as a passion, it is naturally a diverse space full of opinionated individuals.

Needless to say, you cannot have rational arguments about such emotions. The reality is, while Rust may not suit all use-cases - doesn’t mean there isn’t C code that shouldn’t be replaced with memory safe code. Especially for subsystems where you cannot afford to lose state. The tradeoffs may be worth it, depending on what it is that needs doing. See? Now find something else to argue about.

WinAmp’s Disastrous Sources Code Release

We finally know how they whipped the llama’s ass. In what should have been a historic moment - in the legacy of the most famous audio player that ever exisited - it instead ended up like a washed out band being boo’d off stage during their comeback tour.

Winamp’s source code was finally released to the public after a nearly decade long “promise” to make it available to the world. The release was riddled with issues, and hilighted multiple instances of software license and patent violation. A public mockery exploded in the form of fake GitHub Issues and Forks. The license, which prohibits forking (the very essence of contributing requires making a fork) contradicts the rest of the source tree on so many levels, that people are arguing about whether or not it could even be enforced.

We want to remind everyone that this all could have been avoided with some very simple care and effort, especially with a company of this scale. You can get in touch with organizations like the FSF. Don’t let it discourage others from doing the right thing of opening up legacy code.

Already there are a ton of (unlicensed? hah!) forks, so expect the definitive, authentic, cross-platform, port of Winamp to your niche operating system very soon.

ISP Argues For Customers In U.S. Supreme Court

The Internet Service providers in the United States came together recently to… loudly proclaim that they do not like losing paying customers. They must be on our side you guys.

Source: Ars Technica

Misc News

FreeHL2 Updates

Staff members eukara and Xylemon have been hard at work and got something to show for it.

In anticipation of the upcoming 20 Year Anniversary, the progress on FreeHL2 has ramped up significantly thanks to the major refractions in Nuclide taking shape!

YouTube: Rad-Therapy II - September 2024
YouTube: Rad-Therapy II - Sandbox

When the anniversary hits, expect to be able to try it yourself.

Music Industry Gets A Reality Check

Archivists and everyone else should take note as well.

As reported by Ars Technica, a company named Iron Mountain who is handling archival for music record companies, is stating that the 1990s mechanical hard drives that were being used are dying.

This should be a wake up call to anyone who is putting off duplicating their disks.

GPU DOOM

You know what they say, “DOOM runs on everything”, and now your GPU. No, we don’t mean GLDOOM, we mean all of DOOM running on your GPU. Thanks to jhuber6 and hardcode84 for this crazy port!

Frog Protocols Announced for Wayland

Valve developer Misyl announced over at our Fediverse instance that Frog Protocols, a proposal and PR for Wayland that addresses a few glaring problems of the display protocol.

We will no doubt see things show up there that are necessary and/or important for the development of future Steam/Valve hardware devices/software.

Be sure to check out the repo and Misyl’s profile for some interesting behind the scenes.

Round Up!

Here’s the rest we didn’t have too much to say about but felt were still worthwhile stories of the month:

• Flappy Bird creator, Dong Nguyen, disavows Crypto Currency-based ‘Revival’ Entirely done without his consent or knowledge.

• California Gov. Newsom vetoes “AI” Safety Bill

• Arch Linux now collaborating with Valve

• Music Videos by RUSH, Nirvana, Adele, Bob Dylan, Green Day are geoblocked following contractual dispute

• 1,900+ Professional tech worker survey shows majority desire joining a union

• Steam Passes 38 Million Con-Current Users We still remember when Steam had only 38 users! Just kidding… sorta…

• Reddit Making SubReddit Protests Impossible

• Valve’s Deadlock turns cheaters into Frogs Wonder who could have suggested that…

All in All

That was quite a bit, wasn’t it? See you this Halloween!

Happy Fragging

Playback.dem

It is TIME for Playback.dem for August. It is delayed a bit, but we’ve got some hot scoops.

Site News

New Content

A few more game pages have been added. Pages for games such as Doom 3, ETQW, Half-Life 2 and Quake 4 to which we’re adding files soon. We’ve also added a bunch more magazine features! Go dig right in and revisit the past.

We’ve been organizing our archives and had to acquire a 24 TB drive. Stuff sure is expensive.

In other news related to content, staff member Maxwell has been getting the ZDTV/TechTV/G4 archive together over on this Internet Archive page. You can see we integrated some of it into our Quake III Arena page already. Collected from various sources, he stitches these episodes together to get the most complete archive of these shows. Comcast is not interested in doing anything with these, unfortunately. Please reach out if you have any recordings of these shows yourself that you can share. You know where to find us.

Gaming News

The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside

Monica Harrington writes about the early days of Valve from her perspective. Did you know that Sierra just wanted to move on from Half-Life after it shipped? Did you know that there were proposals for Valve to team up with Amazon to create a new online entertainment platform? If this sort of behind-the-scenes interests you, you shouldn’t miss reading this.

Game Releases

Marathon

You can grab Marathon Infinity on Steam, for free now. It includes Workshop support as well! Also make sure to grab Marathon 1 & Marathon 2 if you haven’t yet added them to your account.

Duke Nukem: Alien Armageddon

The over-the-top modification for Duke Nukem 3D titled Duke Nukem: Alien Armageddon has posted Part 1 of their two part update (with Part 2 scheduled to arrive in November). You can download it over here on ModDB!

Catacomb 3-D

John Romero announced plans for a new, proper big-box release for the early id Software game Catacomb 3-D, Blues News reports. There will be 3 differently priced editions available. Something for the collectors!

QuakeCon Doomed Out

QuakeCon was this month and there an update to the Steam version of Doom was released, which turns the Steam app for DOOM (1993) into DOOM + DOOM II. It runs on the proprietary Kex engine, which this time raises the bar to BOOM engine compatibility.
It replaces the version previously built on top of the Unity engine.
Of interest to us in this release is the id1.wad file which contains a new expansion called Legacy of Rust as well as a deathmatch wad with 25 maps. It’s playable with most BOOM compatible source ports.

They announced a new DOOM game that may have been a HeXen reboot at one point in time, or they’re warming up for one. That Activision acquisition took a while, and Xbox boss Phil Spencer is a big fan. Hey, it’s the best guess I got as to why it’s suddenly medieval. We’ll see how it performs.

Deadlock

The page for Valve’s game Deadlock went live on Steam, including not a whole lot of info.
We’ve tried it and have some opinions, but we’ll wait and see.
We do like a lot of things, and wonder about some other. We’ll keep tabs on it!

Mafia: The Old Country

Mafia: The Old Country was also announced, along with a teaser trailer. The developers at Hangar 13 are creating it. We’re sure it’ll be closer to a Mafia 2 than a Mafia (2002) in terms of gameplay, but that’s to be expected. Staff members here remind you that the first game is excellent (according to Marco it is one of the greatest games mankind has ever accomplished), but you need to play it with a music-patch if you buy it from one of the convenient digital marketplace stores.

Half-Life 25th Anniversay Update SDK releases

The updated SDK source code for the much appreciated update Valve released in November of 2023 for Half-Life has been pushed to GitHub, and then sometime after merged with the main repository which you can find all the latest changes at.

Tech News

Google Ruled An Illegal Monopoly

The United States Federal court rules that Google does in-fact hold an illegal monopoly on Internet Search, the Washington Post reports.
Google’s boss of ‘Global Affairs’ Kent Walker concludes right after that:

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine […]”

We just want to offer our counter-perspective by stating that even we’ve stopped using Google as our fallback, because it only shows a handful results now and completely unwanted SEO spam and AI slop.
As always, don’t believe corporate mouthpieces, because the ruling states that “Google has unlawfully used the distribution agreements to thwart competition” which has nothing to do with the quality of their product.

While we’d want them “to do better”, we do recognize that would require having to fire the people in charge. Oops. Guess that can’t happen then.

Intel Struggles

Leading x86-centric chip-maker Intel hasn’t been doing well. No staff member here has bought a product of theirs in a decade or so either so we’re partly to blame. Jokes aside, while we do not want to see them disappear, we do want their products to be better. Reuters reports they might be losing their status on the Dow. A lot of finger-pointing was done elsewhere on the web.
In case anyone at Intel is listening to the crazies over here at Frag-Net.com… put out a sturdy, no junk CPU. Our wishlist contains one without a management engine like yours, and non-buggy silicon - just don’t take any shortcuts this time - thanks!

I fear they may go try to catch the AI bubble and fail miserably. Let’s not take bets at this time.

NVIDIA Troubles

Unlike Intel, leading GPU chip-maker NVIDIA has been doing better than ever. However: they’re under scrutiny by the Unted States Department of Justice, and are facing an anti-trust probe - because they’re charging customers silly money over cables that connect servers, and bully people financially who considered buying chips from AMD.

An unnamed spokesperson replied to the reporting from CNBC:

“This anti-trust probe recognizes that NVIDIA offers the best GPUs […]”

Just kidding. They did say that the company “wins on merit.” which is the exact same PR message the Google boss in the monopoly piece above used. It’s almost like they all got the same playbook or something…

Misc News

FTEQW Updates

After almost a year, FTEQW has seen some updates. At the end of August we finally got a large push of commits we’d been anticipating. It contains some things staff members contributed to, such as assitance on the support for playing the Quake II re-release as a client.

We’re working throughout September to iron out issues and to make some more big announcements shortly. You can see a tease about what will be going down soon right here.

New binaries will be going live soon-ish. There’s more things to be ironed out before the team feels comfortable doing so.

#ShiftingTheBar happened

Over 3,000 players came together to play Half-Life: Blue Shift at the same time in order to break the peak player count on Steam. You can find the promotional website for this event here.

All in All

Wow! Quite a lot going on. September won’t be any less busy, so look forward to that months Playback.dem!

Playback.dem

The Playback.dem for July is here! This one was a bit light compared to the game-release filled month of June - but there’s still important things to address.

Gaming News

Game Releases

You can grab Marathon 2 on Steam and for free if you’re itching to replay Bungie’s classic shooter. All in thanks to the Aleph One Developers in the Marathon community for maintaining these old games. A showcase example of how the community can successfully take ownership of a game and ensure it stays authentic, while being more accessible.

In May they also put the first Marathon on Steam, so if you don’t have that yet, make sure you register it with your account.

Another thing worth mentioning is the port of Fortress Forever, the OG port of Team Fortress to Valve’s Source Engine to Source SDK Base 2013. Fellow frag-net.com IRC members mv and bt told us all about it! This fixes a lot of bugs and technical problems that are difficult to work around in older versions of the engine. Plus you get a Linux port for free, for the very first time. We’ll probably be organizing an event for this in the near future. Check out the 2013 branch of Fortress Forever on Steam.

Last, but not least, we wanted to highlight a very promising looking mod that will appeal to all the fans of the movie Alien (and Aliens), titled Solitary Echoes. They have a new announcement, with an approximate release window and some super sweet, kickass screenshots and video clips that’ll make you want to reinstall Half-Life if it’s somehow not present on your hard disk. CHECK IT OUT NOW!!!

DXVK 2.4 with built-in Direct 3D 8 Support

Soon to be no-doubt integrated with Steam’s Proton compatibility tool, the new release of DXVK integrates D8VK by AlpyneDreams into mainline DXVK. So now more games made in the early 2000s that rely on Direct3D 8 should run much better, out of the box, on Linux and of course: Steam Deck.

Piranha Bytes ‘embraced’ to death

Embracer Group, which spent a lot of money on things they could not afford, has decided to cut their losses by shutting down legendary German developer Piranha Bytes. Björn (whose likeness will be familar to all the Gothic players, no doubt) and Jenny Pankratz will go on to found a new studio named Pithead Studio. We wish them the best!

Hardware News

Have AMD? Want to run programs utilizing CUDA? That one last big feature exclusive to NVIDIA? You can now run CUDA programs, as-is, on AMD chipset based GPUs thanks to SCALE by Spectral Compute. Most gamers probably don’t care about this, but it’s worth mentioning that after this was released, NVIDIA announced about two days later that NVIDIA has finally decided to open up their driver stack on Linux entirely. Ironic, that’s about it.

This was a long time in the making, surely - but also long overdue. In case you need us to explain why, the AMD/Radeon people worked out years ago that the community will happily contribute to the code and help make superior drivers - and the stack in Mesa for Radeon cards has thus been excellent. Just look at Steam Deck. ’Nuff said!

And for you Archivists

Earlier this month the .plan Archive went online. Fellow frag-net.com IRC user erysdren together with id software’s Sponge collaborated on collecting over 8000 .plan files (so far). Check it out to learn about 90s game developer their thoughts, hopes and dreams. A great research base, which we will consult often.

All in All

After last month, which had events such as Summer Games Fest and various video streams by companies in the industry, this one seems a bit light at times. We’ll see you at the end of August for more.

Playback.dem

Welcome to another Summer Edition of Playback.dem, where we try to have a round up of interesting news on the community along with a status report on our gaming network. Just like the news it's been blistering hot, so put on some sunscreen and jump in!

Frag-Net Announcements

New on Frag-Net

While we were mostly on vacation, we did get the previously teased interview mostly ready and approved for publishing! Stay tuned.

One more thing, you may notice this month's playback is different from the last couple as we have ditched the links for Releases, Delays, Interviews, etc. It was becoming too cumbersome and filling up the page with info most weren't gonna utilize. So we gutted it and think it's for the best, and we hope you think so too!

Gaming News

Game Releases

We’ve had DOOM: The Dark Ages announced. Honestly, when I saw the first couple shots during the Summer Games Fest (more on that later) I expected it to be the much anticipated HeXen reboot. That’s something Phil Spencer would have liked, anyway.

We also got an estimate for the release date of GTA 6 (which is in Autumn 2025). I don’t think we need to mention how anticipated this release is.

Valve trademarked Deadlock (not, not that one. We’ve already gotten access to the playtest and are writing down our thoughts for future reference. Stay tuned?

The Year Without a E3

There was no Gaming Santa this summer. We at Frag-Net are still kind of sadden in a way about how there was no E3 this year. We admit that it was often a subject of ridicule, even amongst ourselves and at times we even wished that E3 would just end already. Well, it’s a tale of be careful what you wish for. Being the first real year without even a sliver of hope of there being an E3 just seems odd. Maybe it will come back some day, but probably not.

It would be neat if there was some kind of community oriented celebration and previews of games, similar to Comic-Con (or Fan Fusion) but you still have the official sponsorship etc. E3 just became too corporate for it’s own good, presentations became outrageous over-produced glorified advertisements instead of conferences talking about what the hardware and line-up would actually be. Yes, we get it’s a consumer show focused on selling a product, but it really did become a mockery at the end.

So yeah, we are sad in a nostalgic way that E3 is gone, but E3 wasn’t E3 for a very long time, and deep down we all knew it. A tradition has been lost, but a new one begins.

Summer Games Fest

Speaking of glorified advertisements, the Summer Games Fest kicked off this month trying to fill in the void left by E3.

Other Events for the Non-E3

In addition to the Summer Games Fest, these other events also happened in what is currently known as “Non-E3”:

06/04 OTK Games Expo @ 12:00 PDT, 2024
06/06 Guerrilla Collective @ 10:00 PDT, 2024
06/07 Access-Ability Showcase @ 08:00 PDT, 2024
06/07 Day of the Devs @ 16:00 PDT, 2024
06/07 Devolver Direct @ 17:00 PDT, 2024
06/08 Wholesome Direct @ 09:00 PDT, 2024
06/08 Future Games Show @ 12:00 PDT, 2024
06/09 Xbox Games Showcase @ 09:00 PDT, 2024
06/09 PC Gaming Show @ 13:00 PDT, 2024
06/12 Black Voices in Gaming @ 12:00 PDT, 2024
06/18 Nintendo Direct @ 07:00 PDT, 2024

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Will Require Constant Internet Connection

The official statement:

To deliver the highest-quality visuals while also reducing the game’s overall storage space on your hard drive, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will use texture streaming across all game modes. This means you’ll need a continuous internet connection to play any game mode, including Campaign. If you’re on a console, Campaign can be played without a premium subscription service such as Game Pass Core or PlayStation Plus.

The size of these games is a problem waiting to be solved, but streaming of game assets is a future none of us preservationists want to think about.

Gaming News: Community

And of course we have to highlight what’s been going on in the community!

Errant Signal Releases Children of Doom: 1999

Errant Signal reminisces about 1999s hot first-person games. Of course Quake III Arena too. Go play some.

PandaMonium Releases New Video! Sega Rally Championship

If you’ve got almost 5 hours free-time to spare, go watch this incredible celebration, documentary, review of SEGA Rally Championship and its SEGA Saturn version.

Hardware News

MiSTer Clone Updates

If you’ve read our recent Features then you’d know we’re all-in on FPGA technology for all sorts of hardware replication goodness. Soon you can get your hands on a more affordable clone of the DE-10 Nano and build a more budget friendly MiSTer FPGA system.

Sony PlayStation 5 stops advertising 8K capability

From the get go it seemed a bit optimistic, but Sony scrubbed the 8K support claims off their PS5 boxes. I think people are still fine with 1080p anyway… right?

All in All

That’s pretty much it. See you end of July!