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1 week ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman |Adam Conway
I’d been thinking about switching browsers for a while. The idea popped up every so often — usually after some small frustration — but it never made it to the top of my to-do list. Chrome has been my primary browser, and it mostly worked fine. Firefox and Safari were there on my MacBook when I needed them. On my Windows machines, it was just Chrome and Firefox. I can’t stand Microsoft Edge, so I’ve never seriously considered it. Then, one day, I opened Chrome and was hit with a wall of ads.
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1 week ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
For a brief period in gaming history, video game companies created special limited-edition cartridges specifically for competitions. While many point to the Nintendo World Championship (NWC) cartridge for NES as the first example, I came across another tournament cart that predates it by eight years while sorting through a large lot of Atari games: Atlantis II.
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1 week ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
Innovation keeps racing forward, yet a growing number of people are deliberately stepping back—especially as a constant onslaught of unwanted AI from every angle is being used as a corporate excuse to raise subscription prices for software we can't even own. They're trying to make it so nothing is ours anymore; everything is rented to us, from video games and SaaS to movies and books. Even hardware faces planned obsolescence, forced upgrades, and a long fight for the right to repair.
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1 week ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
It’s not a clone or a bootleg, but it’s also not the original hardware either. In Brazil, the Sega Master System lives on as a licensed, ROM-on-Chip (RoC) console. It's basically like a self-contained emulator—still manufactured and stocked on retail shelves, preloaded with 132 classic games. 40 years after its original release, and 36 years since it made its way to Brazil, the 8-bit system that vanished from shelves elsewhere is alive and well.
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2 weeks ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
Modern gaming doesn’t really have room for the oddball peripheral anymore. I can’t remember the last time I saw an accessory that made me laugh out loud or think, “that actually looks kind of cool.” Retro gaming was different. The further back you go, the stranger it gets. Companies were still experimenting — some things were actually ahead of their time, while others were built to do one very specific thing. That’s the kind of hardware I’ve always found most interesting.
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2 weeks ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
In 1982, Atari tried to leap ahead with the 5200. It had better graphics, analog controls, and a redesigned cartridge slot that made it incompatible with the Atari 2600’s massive game library. That one change cost them. Players weren’t interested in starting over, and without support for older titles, the 5200 struggled to build momentum. Atari eventually released an adapter, but by then it was too late. When the company came back in 1986 with the 7800, it didn’t make the same mistake.
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1 month ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
The internet is not the place we once knew. Every week, millions of people argue with AI bot networks and paid workers at troll farms like the Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization based in St. Petersburg, which became known for state-sponsored online influence campaigns targeting the United States and Europe. At its peak, the IRA had 300–400 employees working in shifts, generating tens of thousands of posts per month with a $1 million per month budget.
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2 months ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
For a whole generation of Brazilian kids, the Nintendo Entertainment System was never called that. It was the Phantom System — a console released by Brazilian electronics company Gradiente in 1989. It came in a shell originally designed for the Atari 7800, used a Sega Mega Drive controller, and played both NES and Famicom cartridges. The motherboard was reverse-engineered in-house and didn’t use any of Nintendo’s proprietary chips. It wasn’t licensed. It wasn’t official. But in Brazil, it was the NES.
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2 months ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
In the mid-1990s, Apple was in a rough place. The company had lost ground to Microsoft and struggled to compete with the growing wave of lower-priced PC clones. Windows machines were cheaper, more compatible with popular software, and quickly became standard. Inside Apple, leadership turnover and shifting strategies made it hard to build momentum. As the company looked for new ways forward, it started branching out, experimenting with digital cameras, PDAs, and even releasing a television.
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2 months ago | 
xda-developers.com | Benjamin Zeman
Everyone knows what a classic NES looks like, down to its iconic controller, but not all Nintendo consoles were stand-alone. Some of the most interesting parts of Nintendo’s hardware history were the things that came later—add-ons and expansions that made those systems do more than they were originally built for. While the expansion port on the bottom of the NES is infamous for never being used, other systems like the Japanese Famicom and Super Famicom did have extension add-ons.
