nazarijo writes "I think by now we're all familiar with viruses and worms. It may have been a term paper diskette chewed up by a virus back in college, a family member's computer infected with the latest worm, or your email inbox clogged with a mass mailer of the week. But how do AV researchers dissect such malware, especially when virus writers have devoted so much time to avoiding detection and perfecting their craft with self-decrypting viruses, polymorphic shellcode, and obfuscated loops. Haven't you wanted a peek into how that's done, and how you would analyze such a monster that landed in your computer? Well, Peter Szor's book The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense (TAOCVRD) has been gaining lots of critical acclaim lately for filling that gap, and rightfully so. (Before we begin, however, I should make one thing perfectly clear: I was a technical reviewer of this book. I enjoyed it when I read it originally, and I'm even more pleased with the final result. And now on to your regularly scheduled review.)" Read on for the rest.

ZiakII writes "Endgadget is reporting that the PSP firmware 1.50 has been broken." From the article: "a group called PsP-Dev have apparently confirmed successful a homebrew bootstrap on 1.50 (no word on 1.51 or 1.52). What's that mean for the indie developer/emulation/warez communities? Well, pretty much the same as before--use your hardware the way you want it. For SNES emulation, that is. Obviously." Tom's Hardware has the story as well.

telstar writes "According to C|Net, Apple has officially decided to drop IBM, and will use Intel processors starting in their '06 line of systems. This change was rumored last month. The announcement is expected Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, at which Chief Executive Steve Jobs is giving the keynote speech." From the article: "Apple successfully navigated a switch in the 1990s from Motorola's 680x0 line of processors to the Power line jointly made by Motorola and IBM. That switch also required software to be revamped to take advantage of the new processors' performance, but emulation software permitted older programs to run on the new machines."

An anonymous reader writes "The PSP is now the ultimate in handheld emulation consoles, already it boasts Full Speed Gameboy Colour Emulation and improving Snes & Master System but added today it also has NeoGeo CD and Sega Genesis emulators added to the impressive list of homebrew releases."

norburym (Mary Norbury-Glaser )writes "Carla Schroder's Linux Cookbook (O'Reilly) is an extremely dense volume packed with valuable information. The author writes with precision and detail and with a conversational style that handles the topic with a wry humor making this book a pleasure to read. The Linux Cookbook is command-line based so some familiarity with a Linux system, the inherent power of using the command-line and the dangers of using root are necessary." Read on for the rest of Norbury-Glaser's review.

Kez writes "HEXUS.net has an article looking at the current state of Linux gaming and the broad number of supported games both natively and through emulation. Included in the article is a chat with the Product Manager of TransGaming - the creators of Cedega (formerly known as WineX.)" From the article: "Well, Linux certainly isn't most peoples' thought for a games-based PC. Especially one being taken to a big tournament LAN party. However, by design or trickery, none of the tournament games at the event were out-of-bounds to my Linux machine, and rousing games of Call of Duty, Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 were shared by the HEXUS.net collective and any other gamers who felt like joining in." We ran a story about a similar article back in February.

webmind writes "As some may know there is an open source firmware for the Archos jukebox and the iriver h1x0 harddisk mp3 players called Rockbox. now for the iriver version there is also a gnuboy port.. no more lugging around loads of gameboy cardridges, just upload and play."

An anonymous reader submits "Zophar's Domain is reporting that the CEO of commerical multi-arcade kit seller UltraCade has applied to trademark the name and logo of the ubiquitous open-source multi-arcade emulator MAME and is planning to sue MAME's authors." Update: 02/21 13:26 GMT by T : UltraCade Technologies CEO David R. Foley contacted Slashdot with an emailed explanation of the filing, reproduced below at his request. Update: 02/21 18:16 GMT by T : Please note that Foley's email specifically states that "There have been no lawsuits filed against any of the M.A.M.E. authors, and there have been no claims towards the open source engine, nor will there be."

An anonymous reader writes "QEMU is a generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation. Its sporting a new module called the 'Accelerator' which can achieve near native speeds, and currently runs on Linux 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels. This means you could theoretically run Windows (or another OS) on a Linux machine at near native speeds without buying a commercial emulator. The catch is that although QEMU is released under various open source licenses, the Accelerator uses a free (as in beer) license because the module is a 'closed source proprietary product.' Fabrice Bellard does mention that he would consider open sourcing the Accelerator under certain conditions."

jvalenzu writes "Matt Matthews is at it again! The venerable owner of curmudgeongamer.com has posted his latest missive, All Emulation is Illegal." From the article: "Now, if this is how we interpret the law, then practically every use of a videogame system emulator is illegal. Even a user who dumps the contents of a videogame cartridge for an Atari 2600 game he owns to a ROM file cannot use that ROM file with an emulator unless the original's loss requires resorting to the archival copy. If true, then even my attempt to stay legal by buying games and only then using an emulator to play them is way out of bounds."

Gamasutra.com is running an article entitled Back to the Classics (no reg. required), discussing the perfection of the emulation used in the recent Atari Anthology. From the article: "In a port, it's easiest to consider a game written in a high-level language like C (though that wasn't at all common in the first half of the '80s or earlier). As the person porting the game, you'd separate the program into two parts. There's the C code that represents the game logic itself, which you try to leave intact, and there's the platform-specific code (for example, a video driver might be considered part of the platform-specific code). Early computers, arcade games and home consoles had video chipsets that bore no resemblance at all to what we have now. So, you'd have to rip out that code and replace it with something that hopefully works the same way on the new platform."

hugo_pt writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.11-RC2. This is the second of three scheduled release candidates. At the moment there are no known severe issues. However the Linux Emulation subsystem (mostly added as a package) has been completely updated based on Red Hat 8.0. We would appreciate people testing the Linux emulation support. In particular testing to see if Linux applications continue to behave correctly if the linux_* packages get installed while using sysinstall(8) during the initial installation of the machine. The package set for disc1 is still being decided on, what is on disc1 for this RC will most likely change before the release."

bshanks writes "Use of a Game Over: Emulation and the Video Game Industry is a paper which examines the business and legal consequences of emulators. The paper makes recommendations to video game companies on how to adapt to and profit from them rather than fight them." From the paper: " A decade ago, video game emulators epitomized the cutting edge of programming technology. Ten years hence, they are the subject of a heated debate over copyrights and the video game industry's future. Emulators, which provide conversion software that enables games to run on personal computers ("PC's") and other systems or platforms for which they were not originally designed, have become a staple among gaming enthusiasts. Several factors have contributed to the robust market for emulation..."

Last week we called for questions for Roger Nygard, the director of Trekkies, and its recently released sequel. He replies today with answers to many of your questions in a riveting interview set to stun. Or some other appropriate trek joke. Read on for the glorious answers (which might include some offensive language in the form of lyrics from a Star Trek themed band)

larsoncc writes "Emulation is a great way to preserve past game systems, but what if you could keep these digital dinosaurs running for decades? Well, you can, and some of us do. It's not easy for me to 'let go' of that vintage (circa 1978) Magnavox Odyssey2, or toss my Atari 7800 in the closet because I don't have a power supply. Here's my article to help you solve common problems with 15 different systems, and general tips for the others. Viva la TI-99/4a!!"

Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."

CherryBS writes "The CherryOS emulator, claiming that it could seamlessly run Mac OS X at 80% the speed of the host computer on standard x86 hardware (covered here previously), has created some controversy about stolen code. It turns out that CherryOS's emulation engine is nothing more than that of PearPC, an open source GPL project to create a PowerPC motheboard emulator." Read on for more details.

wraggster writes "Building on his previous work, Chui has taken another step for the Dreamcast community by releasing the first Amiga 500 emulator for the Dreamcast."

wraggster writes "Tonight has seen the Release of the Worlds first Atari ST Emulator for the Dreamcast by Ron of MadriDC fame & Chui. The emulator is a port of Castaway to the Dreamcast and already runs most games at full speed."

oldskoolar writes "For those of you who find emulation of your favorite Nintendo games disconcerting with a keyboard interface, Joystiq may have just the project you've been looking for. For those of you with more time than most people have ambition; why not couple this hack with an older mod."