Apple has updated the iPhone 15’s battery lifespan. The company said on Tuesday its latest iPhones can retain 80 percent of their original charging capacity after 1,000 cycles — double the company’s previous estimate — without any new hardware or software updates. Not so coincidentally, the change will arrive in time for upcoming EU regulations that will assign an energy grade for phones’ battery longevity.

Before today, Apple’s online support documents quoted iPhone batteries as maintaining 80 percent of their original full charge after 500 cycles. But after the company retested long-term battery health in its 2023 smartphones — iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max — it found they can retain 80 percent capacity after at least 1,000 cycles. The company said its support documents will be updated on Tuesday to reflect the new estimate.

Apple says its testing involved charging and draining the batteries 1,000 times under specific conditions and a suite of tests reflecting common uses. As for how the estimate doubled without any physical or software changes, the company attributes the upgrade to continual improvements to its battery components and iOS power management.

For older (pre-2023) iPhones, the original estimate of retaining 80 percent capacity after 500 charge cycles still stands — at least for now. Apple said it’s looking into whether older models’ estimates need to be updated.

Apple

Starting in June 2025, smartphone and tablet manufacturers doing business in the EU will be assigned a grade (A to G) indicating their energy efficiency, battery longevity, protection from dust and water and resistance to accidental drops. The battery longevity portion of the grade requires at least 800 charging cycles while retaining at least 80 percent of their original capacity, helping explain why Apple began retesting its devices’ long-term health.

For ideal battery longevity, Apple recommends keeping your phone in temperatures between 62 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit when possible. You’ll also want to avoid charging or leaving your handset in hot environments (95 degrees or warmer) while trying to avoid much direct sun exposure. In addition, if you’re storing an old iPhone long-term, it’s best to leave it half-charged.

In addition, Apple will soon move one of your phone’s most essential battery metrics to a different part of iOS settings. Beginning in iOS 17.4, currently in beta, the battery cycle count will move from Settings > General > About to a more logical home under Battery Health (under Settings > Battery). Apple introduced the battery cycle count to its mobile software in iOS 17, which was launched last fall.

Acer unveiled a pair of AMD Ryzen 8040 series laptops on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, given their chips’ dedicated neural processing units (NPU), the company is marketing the 2024 Acer Swift Edge 16 and Swift Go 14 as AI workhorses. The Windows 11 machines support OLED displays, Radeon 780M graphics and 32GB of RAM.

The Ryzen 8040 chip series, revealed in December, has a dedicated AI Engine that AMD claims makes it up to 1.4 times faster than its predecessors in Llama 2 and AI vision model performance. Acer says the Swift Edge 16 and Swift Go 14 will deploy the NPU for AI-related tasks like PurifiedVoice (remove background noise in calls and recordings) and PurifiedView (blurring backgrounds in images and correcting your eyes’ positioning on video calls).

Acer

Like most new Windows machines (including Acer’s models launched at CES 2024), the laptops have a dedicated Microsoft Copilot button on their keyboards for quick ChatGPT-like AI queries. (Copilot taps into Microsoft and OpenAI’s servers through the cloud rather than using the machines’ on-device NPU.)

Both machines’ AMD chips include Microsoft’s Pluton security co-processor. Introduced in 2020 through a partnership with AMD and Intel, it bakes security directly into the processor, helping protect your credentials, encryption keys and personal data from hackers.

Acer Swift Edge 16

Acer

Acer markets the Acer Swift Edge 16 as optimizing performance without sacrificing portability. All device variants have a 16-inch OLED panel with WQXGA (3200 x 2000) resolution and a 120Hz frame rate with less than a 0.2ms response time. It supports 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut and VESA DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification for (what should be) accurate and nuanced visuals.

The laptop’s Ryzen 7 8840U processor is joined by AMD Radeon 780M integrated graphics. The notebook has up to 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD storage. Depending on your configuration, it supports Wi-Fi 7 or Wi-Fi 6E.

The Swift Edge 16 weighs 2.71 lbs and is 12.95mm tall. It’s encased in a magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis and has a 54 Wh battery. It includes two USB-C ports (with USB4 speeds of up to 40Gbps), two USB-A, one HDMI 2.1 and a microSD slot.

Acer Swift Go 14

Acer

The smaller of the pair, the Acer Swift Go 14, has up to an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS octa-core processor with AMD Radeon 780M graphics. (Cheaper configurations will trade that for a Ryzen 7 8845HS or Ryzen 5 8645HS.) The machine maxes out at 32GB LPDDR5X RAM and up to 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

The top-shelf 14-inch variant will have a WQXGA (2880x1800) OLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate. Another version will swap that for a 1920 x 1200 IPS panel with touchscreen capabilities. The device’s hinge can extend to 180 degrees, and its glass trackpad is 44 percent larger than the previous model’s. It supports Wi-Fi 6E.

Thanks to its smaller footprint, Acer markets the Swift Go 14 as the more portable version. However, it’s about seven percent heavier than its 16-inch counterpart — at 2.91 lbs. It ships in configurations with either a 65 or 50 Wh battery.

Both models have 1440p QHD webcams, although only the Swift Go 14 is listed as having a privacy shutter. The smaller model is lighter on ports than the 16-inch model, forgoing the pair of USB-A connections in the larger one. The Swift Go 14 has two USB-C ports (both supporting USB4 speeds), an HDMI 2.1 connector and a microSD slot.

Pricing and availability

The Swift Edge 16 launches in March in North America, starting at $1,300. Meanwhile, the Swift Go 14 follows in April, starting at $700. Apart from their entry-level models, Acer hasn’t yet detailed how pricing will break down across various configurations.

A coalition of 20 tech companies signed an agreement Friday to help prevent AI deepfakes in the critical 2024 elections taking place in more than 40 countries. OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and X are among the businesses joining the pact to prevent and combat AI-generated content that could influence voters. However, the agreement’s vague language and lack of binding enforcement call into question whether it goes far enough.

The list of companies signing the “Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections” includes those that create and distribute AI models, as well as social platforms where the deepfakes are most likely to pop up. The signees are Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Arm, ElevenLabs, Google, IBM, Inflection AI, LinkedIn, McAfee, Meta, Microsoft, Nota, OpenAI, Snap Inc., Stability AI, TikTok, Trend Micro, Truepic and X (formerly Twitter).

The group describes the agreement as “a set of commitments to deploy technology countering harmful AI-generated content meant to deceive voters.” The signees have agreed to the following eight commitments:

• Developing and implementing technology to mitigate risks related to Deceptive AI Election content, including open-source tools where appropriate

• Assessing models in scope of this accord to understand the risks they may present regarding Deceptive AI Election Content

• Seeking to detect the distribution of this content on their platforms

• Seeking to appropriately address this content detected on their platforms

• Fostering cross-industry resilience to deceptive AI election content

• Providing transparency to the public regarding how the company addresses it

• Continuing to engage with a diverse set of global civil society organizations, academics

• Supporting efforts to foster public awareness, media literacy, and all-of-society resilience

The accord will apply to AI-generated audio, video and images. It addresses content that “deceptively fake or alter the appearance, voice, or actions of political candidates, election officials, and other key stakeholders in a democratic election, or that provide false information to voters about when, where, and how they can vote.”

The signees say they will work together to create and share tools to detect and address the online distribution of deepfakes. In addition, they plan to drive educational campaigns and “provide transparency” to users.

FABRICE COFFRINI via Getty Images

OpenAI, one of the signees, already said last month it plans to suppress election-related misinformation worldwide. Images generated with the company’s DALL-E 3 tool will be encoded with a classifier providing a digital watermark to clarify their origin as AI-generated pictures. The ChatGPT maker said it would also work with journalists, researchers and platforms for feedback on its provenance classifier. It also plans to prevent chatbots from impersonating candidates.

“We’re committed to protecting the integrity of elections by enforcing policies that prevent abuse and improving transparency around AI-generated content,” Anna Makanju, Vice President of Global Affairs at OpenAI, wrote in the group’s joint press release. “We look forward to working with industry partners, civil society leaders and governments around the world to help safeguard elections from deceptive AI use.”

Notably absent from the list is Midjourney, the company with an AI image generator (of the same name) that currently produces some of the most convincing fake photos. However, the company said earlier this month it would consider banning political generations altogether during election season. Last year, Midjourney was used to create a viral fake image of Pope Benedict unexpectedly strutting down the street with a puffy white jacket. One of Midjourney’s closest competitors, Stability AI (makers of the open-source Stable Diffusion), did participate. Engadget contacted Midjourney for comment about its absence, and we’ll update this article if we hear back.

Only Apple is absent among Silicon Valley’s “Big Five.” However, that may be explained by the fact that the iPhone maker hasn’t yet launched any generative AI products, nor does it host a social media platform where deepfakes could be distributed. Regardless, we contacted Apple PR for clarification but hadn’t heard back at the time of publication.

Although the general principles the 20 companies agreed to sound like a promising start, it remains to be seen whether a loose set of agreements without binding enforcement will be enough to combat a nightmare scenario where the world’s bad actors use generative AI to sway public opinion and elect aggressively anti-democratic candidates — in the US and elsewhere.

“The language isn’t quite as strong as one might have expected,” Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told The Associated Press on Friday. “I think we should give credit where credit is due, and acknowledge that the companies do have a vested interest in their tools not being used to undermine free and fair elections. That said, it is voluntary, and we’ll be keeping an eye on whether they follow through.”

AI-generated deepfakes have already been used in the US Presidential Election. As early as April 2023, the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran an ad using AI-generated images of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The campaign for Ron DeSantis, who has since dropped out of the GOP primary, followed with AI-generated images of rival and likely nominee Donald Trump in June 2023. Both included easy-to-miss disclaimers that the images were AI-generated.

Anadolu via Getty Images

In January, an AI-generated deepfake of President Biden’s voice was used by two Texas-based companies to robocall New Hampshire voters, urging them not to vote in the state’s primary on January 23. The clip, generated using ElevenLabs’ voice cloning tool, reached up to 25,000 NH voters, according to the state’s attorney general. ElevenLabs is among the pact’s signees.

The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) acted quickly to prevent further abuses of voice-cloning tech in fake campaign calls. Earlier this month, it voted unanimously to ban AI-generated robocalls. The (seemingly eternally deadlocked) US Congress hasn’t passed any AI legislation. In December, the European Union (EU) agreed on an expansive AI Act safety development bill that could influence other nations’ regulatory efforts.

“As society embraces the benefits of AI, we have a responsibility to help ensure these tools don’t become weaponized in elections,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote in a press release. “AI didn’t create election deception, but we must ensure it doesn’t help deception flourish.”

8BitDo’s Nintendo-inspired wireless mechanical keyboard is currently on sale on Amazon for up to 15 percent off. Launched in 2023, the Retro Mechanical Keyboard is an ode to Nintendo’s consoles from the 1980s: the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Nintendo Famicom. Right now, you can order the Fami Edition (Famicom-inspired) keyboard for $85.49 or the N Edition (NES-inspired) model for $90. Both are record-low prices for the popular accessory.

The 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard has colors that match Nintendo’s 8-bit consoles nearly perfectly. The N Edition samples the NES’ familiar off-white, dark gray, black and red color scheme. Meanwhile, the Fami Edition draws from the Famicom’s white and crimson. The latter even honors the Famicom’s regional status with Japanese characters below the keys’ English markings.

The wireless keyboards include a separate “Super Buttons” accessory — two huge red or crimson buttons just begging to be mashed. They connect to the keyboard through its 3.5mm jack and are programmable through 8BitDo’s Ultimate Software.

8BitDo

The keyboard’s power indicator and dials fit the accessory’s old-school motif, and you can even customize the keys using Kailh Box White Switches V2. You can also swap out the Super Buttons, which use Gatreon Green Switches.

The keyboard has 87 keys and works in Bluetooth, 2.4GHz wireless and USB wired modes. Its 2,000mAh battery lasts an estimated 200 hours of use and takes about four hours to charge. Although the accessories are only advertised as working with Windows and Android, 8BitDo told Engadget last year that it works with macOS, too.

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On Thursday, Google unveiled Gemini 1.5 Pro, which the company describes as delivering “dramatically enhanced performance” over the previous model. The company’s AI trajectory — viewed internally as increasingly critical for its future — follows the unveiling of Gemini 1.0 Ultra last week, alongside the rebranding of the Bard chatbot (to Gemini) to align with the new model’s more powerful and versatile capabilities.

In an announcement blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis try to balance assuring their audience about ethical AI safety while touting their models’ rapidly advancing capabilities. “Our teams continue pushing the frontiers of our latest models with safety at the core,” Pichai summarized.

The company needs to emphasize safety for AI skeptics (including one former Google CEO) and government regulators. But it also needs to stress its models’ accelerating performance for AI developers, potential customers and investors concerned the company was too slow to react to OpenAI’s breakout success with ChatGPT.

Pichai and Hassabis say Gemini 1.5 Pro delivers comparable results to Gemini 1.0 Ultra. However, Gemini 1.5 performs at that level more efficiently, with reduced computational requirements. The multimodal capabilities include processing text, images, videos, audio or code. As AI models advance, they’ll continue to offer a more versatile array of capabilities in one prompt box (another recent example was OpenAI integrating DALL-E 3 image generation into ChatGPT).

ALAIN JOCARD via Getty Images

Gemini 1.5 Pro can also handle up to one million tokens, or the units of data AI models can process in a single request. Google says Gemini 1.5 Pro can process over 700,000 words, an hour of video, 11 hours of audio and codebases with over 30,000 lines of code. The company says it’s even “successfully tested” a version that supports up to 10 million tokens.

The company says Gemini 1.5 Pro maintains high accuracy in queries with larger token counts when it has more new data to learn. It says the model impressed in the Needle In a Haystack evaluation. In this test, developers insert a small piece of information inside a long text block to see if the AI model can pick it out. Google said Gemini 1.5 Pro could find the embedded text 99 percent of the time in data blocks as long as one million tokens.

Google says Gemini 1.5 Pro can reason about various details from the 402-page Apollo 11 moon mission transcripts. In addition, it can analyze plot points and events from an uploaded 44-minute silent film starring Buster Keaton. “As 1.5 Pro’s long context window is the first of its kind among large-scale models, we’re continuously developing new evaluations and benchmarks for testing its novel capabilities,” Hassabis wrote.

Google is launching Gemini 1.5 Pro with 128,000-token capabilities, the same number at which OpenAI’s (publicly announced) GPT-4 models max out. Hassabis says Google will eventually introduce new pricing tiers that support up to one million-token queries.

Joy Malone via Getty Images

Gemini 1.5 Pro is also adept at learning new skills from information in long prompts — without additional fine-tuning (“in-context learning”). In a benchmark called Machine Translation from One Book, the model learned a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers globally that it hadn’t previously been trained on. The company says Gemini 1.5 Pro learned to perform at a similar level as a human learning the same content when translating English to Kalamang.

In a piece of the announcement that will catch developers’ attention, Google says Gemini 1.5 Pro can perform problem-solving tasks across longer code blocks. “When given a prompt with more than 100,000 lines of code, it can better reason across examples, suggest helpful modifications and give explanations about how different parts of the code works,” Hassabis wrote.

On the ethics and safety front, Google says it’s taking “the same approach to responsible deployment” it took with Gemini 1.0 models. That includes developing and applying red-teaming techniques, where a group of ethical developers essentially serve as devil’s advocate, testing for “a range of potential harms.” In addition, the company says it heavily scrutinizes areas like content safety and representational harms. The company says it continues to develop new ethical and safety tests for its AI tools.

Google is launching Gemini 1.5 in early access for developers and enterprise customers. The company plans to make it more widely available eventually. Gemini 1.0 is currently available for consumers, alongside a Pro variant that costs $20 monthly.

Sony may shrink the gap between the launches of its PlayStation exclusives and PC ports. Company president Hiroki Totoki suggested in a post-earnings call Q&A session Wednesday (via VGC) that he wants PlayStation to go “aggressive on improving our margin performance,” with “multi-platform” games playing a significant role. He clarified in the talk that, by multi-platform, he meant on PlayStation and PC — not Xbox or Switch.

When asked about Sony’s profits not keeping up with increasing gross income, he said hardware and first-party games were two areas of focus. He noted that hardware cost reduction this console cycle was “difficult to come by,” suggesting we won’t see any permanent console price drops.

“I personally think there are opportunities out there for improvement of margin, so I would like to go aggressive on improving our margin performance,” he continued. Totoki hinted one way to get there is to cash in more on its (often critically acclaimed and commercially successful) PlayStation Studios titles, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and God of War: Ragnarok.

“In the past, we wanted to popularize consoles, and a first-party title’s main purpose was to make the console popular,” Totoki said in the Q&A. “This is true, but there’s a synergy to it, so if you have strong first-party content — not only on our console but also other platforms, like computers — a first-party [game] can be grown with multi-platform, and that can help operating profit to improve, so that’s another one we want to proactively work on.”

Naughty Dog / Sony

That’s a clear shift from PlayStation Studios head Herman Hulst’s thoughts in 2022. He said then that PC gamers would have to wait “at least a year” before seeing first-party PlayStation games (minus live service titles) on their computers. God of War (2018) and the first Marvel’s Spider-Man had about a four-year gap between their PS4 and PC launches. The latter’s Miles Morales spin-off saw about a two-year turnaround.

On February 8, Sony launched Helldivers 2 on PS5 and Windows simultaneously. VGC notes the game led to PlayStation Studios’ highest concurrent Steam player count — beating God of War (2018), The Last of Us Part I and Horizon Zero Dawn. Helldivers 2 was developed by Arrowhead Games with Sony Interactive Entertainment publishing.

It isn’t clear if Totoki meant we can expect future PlayStation tentpoles like the upcoming Wolverine game or the ever-popular Spider-Man, God of War or various Naughty Dog franchises to appear on PC on the same day as console. But a strategy shift is underway regardless, and Totoki will have the leverage to put the plan into action: He takes over for Jim Ryan as interim CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment in April.

Sony said Wednesday it won’t launch any new blockbuster first-party PlayStation exclusives until at least early 2025. “While major projects are currently under development, we do not plan to release any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year like God of War Ragnarök and Marvelʼs Spider-Man,” Sony President Hiroki Totoki wrote (via Polygon) in the company’s Q3 2023 financial results. Sony’s 2024 fiscal year begins on April 1 and ends on March 31, 2025.

The PlayStation division will instead focus on third-party software sales, which Totoki expects to grow gradually. Square Enix’s upcoming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launches as a PS5 exclusive on February 29. Konami’s Silent Hill 2 remake, a console exclusive on the PS5 that will also launch on PC, is scheduled to arrive later this year. Other upcoming third-party tentpoles include Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin.

Meanwhile, the platform’s first-party exclusive Wolverine game may not arrive until 2026 if leaked documents from a hack are any indication.

“We expect third-party software sales to continue to expand gradually due to the expansion of the PS5 installed base and the high level of user engagement,” Totoki wrote. Totoki will replace Jim Ryan as Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO in April.

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO via Getty Images

As for why PlayStation ended up with such a long gap between first-party flagship games — Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launched in October 2023, leaving a roughly 18-month gap or more — VGC reports that Totoki said in an earnings call (through a translator) that the company’s creative teams can can improve their development turnarounds.

“When it comes to the business, I think there is room for improvement,” Totoki said of its first-party studios after complimenting their creativity and vision. “And that’s to do with how to use money, the schedule of development, and how to fulfill one’s accountability towards development — those are my frank impressions. I will continue to engage in dialogue with the people so that we can find the right way to proceed.”

PS5 console sales, which reached 8.2 million units in Q3 2023, missed their target in the quarter. The company has adjusted its fiscal year projections of PS5 sales from 25 million units sold to 21 million. Sony expects a gradual decline to continue. “Regarding the PS5 hardware, which will enter its fifth year since launch, partially due to its entering the latter half of the console cycle, we aim to optimize sales with a greater emphasis on the balance with profits, so we anticipate a gradual decline in unit sales from next fiscal year onwards,” he wrote.

Sarah Silverman’s lawsuit against OpenAI will advance with some of her legal team’s claims dismissed. The comedian sued OpenAI and Meta in July 2023, claiming they trained their AI models on her books and other work without consent. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the unfair competition portion of the lawsuit will proceed. Judge Martínez-Olguín gave the plaintiffs until March 13 to amend the suit.

US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín threw out portions of the complaint from Silverman’s legal team Monday, including negligence, unjust enrichment, DMCA violations and accusations of vicarious infringement. The case’s principal claim remains intact. It alleges OpenAI directly infringed on copyrighted material by training LLMs on millions of books without permission.

OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, filed in August, didn’t tackle the case’s core copyright claims. Although the suit will proceed, the judge suggested the federal Copyright Act may preempt the suit’s remaining claims. “As OpenAI does not raise preemption, the Court does not consider it,” Martínez-Olguín wrote.

The US court system has yet to determine whether training AI large language models on copyrighted work falls under the fair use doctrine. Last month, OpenAI admitted in a court filing that it would be “impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

The result of Silverman’s OpenAI hearing is similar to one in San Francisco in November when Silverman’s claims against Meta were also slashed down to the core copyright infringement claims. In that session, US District Judge Vince Chhabria described some of the plaintiffs’ dismissed claims as “nonsensical.”

Other groups suing OpenAI for alleged copyright-related violations include The New York Times, a collection of nonfiction authors (a group that grew after the initial lawsuit) and The Author’s Guild. The latter filed its claim alongside authors George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) and John Grisham.

Paramount Global said Tuesday it’s laying off some of its “very valued colleagues,” including on its Paramount+ team. Variety reported Tuesday the cuts will affect about 800 employees, an estimated three percent of the media giant’s workforce. “I am confident this is the right decision for our future,” CEO Bob Bakish wrote in a leaked staff memo. Paramount Global’s revenue grew three percent in the third quarter of 2023.

Bakish’s memo says the company will notify terminated staff by the close of business on Tuesday. He added that international offices will be affected, too. “Those notifications will occur over time in line with our local legal obligations in each of the countries where we operate,” the CEO wrote.

Variety claims the layoffs will be spread among all the company’s divisions. These include Paramount+, CBS, Paramount Pictures, Showtime, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and Pluto TV.

The CEO referenced Super Bowl LVIII, which became what the NFL says was the most-watched telecast ever. Bakish chalked that up to the game’s broadcast showcasing “the full power of Paramount.” Some may counter that it instead showcased “the full power” of combining NFL fans with Taylor Swift fans.

Comedy Central / Paramount

Bakish’s memo shouted out Jon Stewart, who returned to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show on Monday. (In the host’s 2024 homecoming, he suggested a new slogan for the 2024 US Presidential election: “What the f#@k are we doing?”) Stewart agreed last month to reclaim his old desk once a week after leaving his Apple TV+ series, The Problem with Jon Stewart, after only two seasons. Apple’s cancellation reportedly came after disagreements with the iPhone maker over episodes criticizing China and AI. Lawmakers later questioned Apple about the fallout.

Paramount’s streaming and film divisions have driven recent growth, but its traditional television offerings continue to struggle. Revenue in that area dropped by eight percent in Q3 2024, with TV advertising dropping by 14 percent. The company’s linear TV struggles have reportedly put it on the block for mergers and acquisitions, including (allegedly stalled) merger talks with Warner Bros. Discovery in December 2023.

Some imaginative and resourceful game preservationists have reverse-engineered a long-lost F-Zero game from the mid-90s. Eurogamer reports that faithful recreations of two BS F-Zero Grand Prix games, broadcast exclusively for Nintendo’s long-defunct Satellaview satellite gaming extension for the Super Famicom, are now available to play for free as add-ons for the original ROMs.

The two BS F-Zero Grand Prix games — which added 10 courses, four new vehicles and a ghosting feature unavailable in the SNES / Super Famicom original — were broadcast exclusively for Nintendo’s Satellaview in 1996 and 1997. Satellaview was the Mario maker’s experimental satellite module for the Super Famicom in Japan. It never launched in the US or anywhere else globally.

Titles for the system had an ephemeral nature. First, players in Japan needed the right equipment, including the Super Famicom console, the Satellaview module (attached to the console’s bottom), a dedicated BS-X recording cartridge, a satellite dish and a receiver. They then had to tune in at specific times and download the games onto their special cartridges.

Although the system didn’t last long (Satellaview had shuttered by 2000), the console’s setup was a rough precursor to the downloaded digital gaming content we’re accustomed to today.

Given those strict requirements, it’s no wonder the sci-fi racers’ original ROMs appear (so far) lost to history. Fortunately, someone with the handle kukun kun, with apparent access to the original games, uploaded BS F-Zero gameplay videos (embedded below) to YouTube in 2018. Using those clips as a blueprint, the team of talented developers / archivists — led by a person with the handle ROMHacker GuyPerfect — reconstructed the BS F-Zero courses with a combination of game analysis software, original F-Zero assets and custom art.

The project used a modified version of Graphite, a tool created by FlibidyDibidy (initially built to analyze Super. Mario Bros. speedruns), which can use a gameplay video to determine precise character positions and button inputs. The adapted version of Graphite helped ROMHacker GuyPerfect and their team reproduce the gameplay from the original F-Zero courses as loyally as possible.

Where possible, the developers used existing F-Zero art assets from the ROMs in the (non-satellite) original game for the Super Nintendo / Famicom console. To fill in the blanks for lost assets exclusive to the satellite broadcasts, artists Porthor and PowerPanda chipped in to recreate them.

The past few months have put the F-Zero series back in the news, as Nintendo launched a battle royale version last fall of the original 16-bit game for Switch Online subscribers (in the same vein as Tetris 99 and Super Mario Bros. 35). As for the long-lost original BS F-Zero Grand Prix ROMs, Redditor u/Porthgeidwad put up a $5,000 bounty two years ago, allegedly up for grabs for anyone with the original cartridges. While waiting for someone to step up, you can visit the team’s project page and take the reverse-engineered games for a spin.