The people working on RPCS3 sure do some amazing work, this PlayStation 3 emulator is truly the stuff of dreams for game preservation and another big title is now playable.

Heavenly Sword was developed by Ninja Theory and released originally in 2007 exclusively for the PlayStation 3, this was due to Sony themselves publishing. Ninja Theory later went onto make more popular titles like DmC: Devil May Cry and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

Writing in the YouTube video description, the team mentioned how multiple major bugs have been fixed over June and July including frequent out of video memory issues and broken shadows. Their new footage of Heavenly Sword is a nice 60FPS, take a look:

Watch video on YouTube.com

They also mentioned that in order to actually run it at 60FPS, you will need to create a custom config for RPCS3. To do so they said to right click the game, and pick the "create custom configuration" option. Once there, "go to the advanced settings tab and change vblank to 120hz". Additionally, by default the game uses the PS3 controller SIXAXIS for projectile aiming but this can be turned off in the settings.

Once again, amazing work coming out of the emulation scene and RPCS3 is open source too. Download it from the official website .

In an announcement , the Libretro / RetroArch mentioned how the Libretro / RetroArch organization on GitHub was attacked by hackers and they managed to do quite a bit of damage.

While restoration is ongoing, some of it is going to be more difficult. In the announcement, they mentioned the scale of the damage that was done comes down to:

• He accessed our buildbot server and crippled the nightly/stable buildbot services, and the netplay lobby service. Right now, the Core Updater won’t work. The websites for these have also been rendered inaccessible for the moment
• He gained access to our Libretro organization on Github impersonating a very trusted member of the team and force-pushed a blank initial commit to a fair percentage of our repositories, effectively wiping them. He managed to do damage to 3 out of 9 pages of repositories. RetroArch and everything preceding it on page 3 has been left intact before his access got curtailed.

GitHub themselves have replied ( source ) to mentioned they can't help, so they're now relying on local backups and Git history from their developers to get it back to where it was online.

Some good news though: for users they said no Cores or RetroArch installs should be considered compromised, as the attacker was too busy with wiping things and being a nuisance. However, thanks to it the Core installer is offline as are the 'Update Assets', 'Update Overlays', 'Update Shaders' functions.

Also mentioned is how they didn't have automated backups of their buildbot, a service which helps to automate building the application and testing. Something that's generally vital for larger projects. They said it's due to funding, as they don't have enough for it with a note about supporting them on Patreon to help.

This is another reminder of: backups, backups—backups! More than that though, it's also an example of why two factor authentication is also vitally important. This little detail was left out of their announcement, but they didn't force 2FA which appears to be how the attacker actually got in. Speaking on Twitter , they mentioned how some developers felt it was "too much of a pain" and they didn't want to lose those contributors. Well, was it worth it? Let's hope proper security will be implemented now.

Enlarge / We're so close to having an emulator that can perfectly recreate every single function of real SNES hardware and software. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

As the lead coder of bsnes , I've been attempting to perfect Super Nintendo emulation for the past 15 years . We are now at a point where that goal is in sight, but there we face one last challenge: accurate cycle timing of the SNES video processors. Getting that final bit of emulation accuracy will require a community effort that I hope some of you can help with. But first, let me recap how far we've come.

Where we are

Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as a light-sensor based golf club , an exercise bike , or a dial-up modem used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable, and no game is known to have any glaring issues.

SNES emulation has gotten so precise that I've even taken to splitting my emulator into two versions: higan , which focuses on absolute accuracy and hardware documentation; and bsnes , which focuses on performance, features, and ease-of-use.

Read 108 remaining paragraphs | Comments