🇬🇧->🇵🇱 Przejdź do pol­skiej wer­sji tego wpisu / Go to pol­ish ver­sion of this post

Just a year ago, I was re­ally deep into the Apple ecosys­tem. It seemed like there was no turn­ing back from the or­chard for me. Phone, lap­top, watch, tablet, video and mu­sic stream­ing, cloud stor­age, and even a key tracker. All from one man­u­fac­turer. Plus shared fam­ily photo al­bums, cal­en­dars, and even shop­ping lists.

However, at some point, I dis­cov­ered Plenti, a com­pany that rents a re­ally wide range of dif­fer­ent de­vices at quite rea­son­able prices. Casually, I threw the phrase “samsung fold” into the search en­gine on their web­site and it turned out that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 could be rented for just 250-300 PLN per month. That was quite an in­ter­est­ing op­tion, as I was in­sanely cu­ri­ous about how it is to live with a fold­able phone, which af­ter un­fold­ing be­comes the equiv­a­lent of a tablet. Plus, I would never dare to buy this type of de­vice, be­cause firstly, their price is as­tro­nom­i­cal, and sec­ondly, I have se­ri­ous doubts about the longevity of the fold­ing screen. I checked the rental con­di­tions from Plenti and noth­ing raised my sus­pi­cions. Renting seemed like a re­ally cool op­tion, so I de­cided to get the Fold 6 for half a year. That’s how I broke out of the or­chard and slightly re­opened the doors to my heart for so­lu­tions with­out the ap­ple logo. I even wrote a post about the whole process - I be­trayed #TeamApple for bro­ken phone. What I’m get­ting at is that this is how Android re­turned to my liv­ing room and I think I started lik­ing it anew.

My ad­ven­ture with Samsung ended af­ter the planned 6 months. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a good phone, and the abil­ity to un­fold it to the size of a tablet is an amaz­ing fea­ture. However, what both­ered me about it was:

pay­ing 300 PLN (~80 USD) for rent is a good short-term so­lu­tion to get some­thing to test, but not in the long run.

All the points above made me give up on ex­tend­ing the rental and start won­der­ing what to do next. Interestingly, I liked Android enough that I did­n’t nec­es­sar­ily want to go back to iOS. Around this time, an ar­ti­cle hit my RSS reader: Creators of the most se­cure ver­sion of Android fear France. Travel ban for the whole team (I think it was this one, but I’m not en­tirely sure, it does­n’t re­ally mat­ter). It talked about how France wants to get its hands on the GrapheneOS sys­tem and thus carry out a very se­ri­ous at­tack on the pri­vacy of its users. I thought then, “Hey! A European coun­try wants to force a back­door into the sys­tem, be­cause it is too well se­cured to sur­veil its users. Either this is ar­ti­fi­cially blow­ing the topic out of pro­por­tion, or there is ac­tu­ally some­thing spe­cial about this sys­tem!”. At that mo­ment, a some­what for­got­ten nerd gene ig­nited in me. I de­cided to aban­don not only iOS, but also main­stream Android, and try a com­pletely al­ter­na­tive sys­tem.

GrapheneOS is a cus­tom, open-source op­er­at­ing sys­tem de­signed with the idea of pro­vid­ing users with the high­est level of pri­vacy and se­cu­rity. It is based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but dif­fers sig­nif­i­cantly from stan­dard soft­ware ver­sions found in smart­phones. Its cre­ators com­pletely elim­i­nated in­te­gra­tion with Google ser­vices at the sys­tem level, which avoids track­ing and data col­lec­tion by cor­po­ra­tions, while of­fer­ing a mod­ern and sta­ble work­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

The sys­tem is dis­tin­guished by ad­vanced “hardening” of the ker­nel and key com­po­nents, which min­i­mizes vul­ner­a­bil­ity to hack­ing at­tacks and ex­ploits. A unique fea­ture of GrapheneOS is the abil­ity to run Google Play Services in an iso­lated en­vi­ron­ment (sandbox), al­low­ing the user to use pop­u­lar ap­pli­ca­tions with­out grant­ing them broad sys­tem per­mis­sions. Currently, the pro­ject fo­cuses on sup­port­ing Google Pixel se­ries phones, uti­liz­ing their ded­i­cated Titan M se­cu­rity chips for full data pro­tec­tion.

When I used to read about GrapheneOS, the list of com­pat­i­ble de­vices in­cluded items from sev­eral dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers. Now it’s only Google Pixel de­vices. This does­n’t mean you can’t run this sys­tem on a Samsung, for ex­am­ple, but the cre­ators sim­ply don’t guar­an­tee it will work prop­erly, and you have to deal with po­ten­tially port­ing the ver­sion your­self. Note that it’s quite funny that a sys­tem freed from Google ser­vices should be run ex­actly on Google de­vices. If any­one wants to read more about why Pixels are the best for GrapheneOS, I rec­om­mend check­ing out the fol­low­ing key­words - Verified Boot, Titan M, IOMMU, MTE.

At the stage of choos­ing a de­vice to test GrapheneOS on, I was­n’t yet sure if such a so­lu­tion would work for me at all and if I’d last with it in the long run. So it would be un­rea­son­able to lay out a sig­nif­i­cant amount of money. Because of this, prob­a­bly the only sen­si­ble choice was the Google Pixel 9a. This was a few months ago, when not enough time had passed since the pre­miere of the 10 se­ries mod­els for them to make it onto the fully sup­ported de­vices list. At that time, the Pixel 9a was the fresh­est de­vice on the list (offering up to 7 YEARS of sup­port!) and on top of that, it was very at­trac­tively priced, as I bought it for around 1600 PLN (~450 USD).

In ret­ro­spect, I still con­sider it a good choice and def­i­nitely rec­om­mend this path to any­one who is cur­rently at the stage of de­cid­ing on what hard­ware to start their GrapheneOS ad­ven­ture. The only thing that both­ers me a bit about the Pixel 9a is the qual­ity of the pho­tos it takes. I switched to it hav­ing pre­vi­ously had the iPhone 15 Pro and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, which are ex­cel­lent in this re­gard, so it’s no won­der I’m a bit spoiled, be­cause I was sim­ply used to a com­pletely dif­fer­ent level of cam­eras. Now I also know that GrapheneOS will stay with me for longer, so it’s pos­si­ble that know­ing then what I know now, I would have opted for some more ex­pen­sive gear. However, this is­n’t im­por­tant to me now, be­cause for the time be­ing I don’t plan to switch to an­other de­vice, and by the time that changes, the mar­ket sit­u­a­tion and the list of avail­able op­tions will cer­tainly have changed too. Besides, I’m pos­i­tively sur­prised by the bat­tery life and over­all per­for­mance of this phone.

A suit­able smart­phone - in my case, it’s a Google Pixel 9a.

A ca­ble to con­nect the phone to a com­puter; it can’t be just any ca­ble, but one that is used not only for charg­ing but also for data trans­mis­sion. It’s best to just use the ca­ble that came with the phone.

A com­puter with a Chromium-based browser (e.g., Google Chrome, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi?). Unfortunately, I must rec­om­mend Windows 10/11 here, be­cause then you don’t have to mess around with any dri­vers; it’s the sim­plest op­tion.

If it’s new, we take it out of the box and turn it on. If it was pre­vi­ously used, we re­store it to fac­tory set­tings (Settings -> System -> Reset op­tions -> Erase all data (factory re­set) -> Erase all data). I think it’s stat­ing the ob­vi­ous, but I’ll write it any­way - a fac­tory re­set re­sults in the dele­tion of all user data from the de­vice, so if you have any­thing im­por­tant on it, you need to back it up.

We must go through the ba­sic setup un­til we see the home screen. We do the ab­solute min­i­mum. Here is a break­down of the steps:

we don’t con­nect to Wi-Fi, so we skip this step too

we don’t need to do any­thing with the war­ranty terms, so just the Next but­ton

there is no need to waste time set­ting up bio­met­rics, so we po­litely de­cline and skip fin­ger­print and face scan

First of all, we need to make sure that our phone’s soft­ware is up­dated to the lat­est avail­able ver­sion. For this pur­pose, we go to Settings -> System -> System up­date. If nec­es­sary, we up­date.

Next, we go to Settings -> About phone -> find the Build num­ber field and tap it 7 times un­til we see the mes­sage You are now a de­vel­oper. In the mean­time, the phone will ask for the PIN we set dur­ing the phone setup.

We go back and now en­ter Settings -> System -> Developer op­tions -> turn on the OEM un­lock­ing op­tion. The phone will ask for the PIN again. After en­ter­ing it, we still have to con­firm that we def­i­nitely want to re­move the lock.

When the screen goes com­pletely dark, we si­mul­ta­ne­ously press and hold the power and vol­ume down but­tons un­til the text-based Fastboot Mode in­ter­face ap­pears. If the phone starts up nor­mally, it means we per­formed one of the ear­lier steps in­cor­rectly.

We go to the com­puter and open the browser (based on the Chromium en­gine) to the ad­dress https://​graphe­neos.org/​in­stall/​web.

A win­dow with a list of de­vices to choose from will pop up in the browser. There should ba­si­cally be only one item on it, and that should be our Pixel. We se­lect it and press the Connect but­ton.

Changes will oc­cur on the phone’s dis­play. A mes­sage will ap­pear ask­ing to con­firm that we ac­tu­ally want to un­lock the boot­loader. To do this, we must press one of the vol­ume but­tons so that in­stead of Do not un­lock the boot­lader, Unlock the boot­lader ap­pears. At this point, we can con­firm by press­ing the power but­ton.

On the GrapheneOS web­site, we scroll down to the Obtaining fac­tory im­ages sec­tion and press the Download re­lease but­ton. If the phone is still con­nected to the com­puter, the web­site will de­cide on its own which sys­tem im­age to down­load.

We wait for the down­load to fin­ish. It is ob­vi­ous that the time needed for this de­pends di­rectly on the speed of the in­ter­net con­nec­tion.

Locking the boot­loader is cru­cial be­cause it en­ables the full op­er­a­tion of the Verified Boot fea­ture. It also pre­vents the use of fast­boot mode to flash, for­mat, or wipe par­ti­tions. Verified Boot de­tects any mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the OS par­ti­tions and blocks the read­ing of any al­tered or cor­rupted data. If changes are de­tected, the sys­tem uses er­ror cor­rec­tion data to at­tempt to re­cover the orig­i­nal data, which is then ver­i­fied again — thanks to this mech­a­nism, the sys­tem is re­silient to ac­ci­den­tal (non-malicious) file cor­rup­tion.

Being in Fastboot Mode, when we see the Start mes­sage, we press the power but­ton, which will cause the sys­tem to start nor­mally. If we don’t see Start at the height of the power but­ton, we have to press the vol­ume but­tons and find this op­tion.

This is a stan­dard pro­ce­dure, so we will only go through it briefly:

I rec­om­mend turn­ing off the lo­ca­tion ser­vice, be­cause it’s bet­ter to con­fig­ure it calmly later by grant­ing per­mis­sions only to apps that re­ally need it

se­cur­ing the phone with a fin­ger­print; I per­son­ally am an ad­vo­cate of this so­lu­tion, so I rec­om­mend us­ing it, GrapheneOS does not (yet) sup­port face un­lock, so fin­ger­print and a stan­dard pass­word are the only meth­ods we have to choose from (of course I re­ject pat­tern un­lock right at the start as a form of screen lock that can­not even in good con­science be called any se­cu­rity)

I as­sume that if you are read­ing this post, you are a graphene fresh­man and you have no backup to re­store, so we just skip this step

We land back in Fastboot Mode. I as­sume the phone was con­nected to the com­puter the whole time (if not, re­con­nect it). We re­turn to the browser on the com­puter. We find the Locking the boot­loader sec­tion and press the Lock boot­loader but­ton.

Again, con­fir­ma­tion of this op­er­a­tion on the phone is re­quired. It looks anal­o­gous to un­lock­ing, ex­cept this time, us­ing the vol­ume but­tons, we have to make the Lock the boot­loader op­tion ac­tive and con­firm it with the power but­ton.

Just like when re­mov­ing the lock, we go to Settings -> About phone -> find the Build num­ber field and tap it 7 times un­til we see the mes­sage You are now a de­vel­oper. In the mean­time, the phone will ask for the PIN we set dur­ing the phone setup.

We go back and now en­ter Settings -> System -> Developer op­tions -> turn off the OEM un­lock­ing op­tion. The phone will ask us to restart to change this set­ting, but for now we can­cel this re­quest, be­cause we still want to com­pletely turn off Developer op­tions, which is done by uncheck­ing the box next to the first op­tion at the very top, Use de­vel­oper op­tions.

Now the real fun be­gins. You’ll hear/​read as many opin­ions on what you should and should­n’t do re­gard­ing GrapheneOS hard­en­ing as there are peo­ple. Some are con­ser­v­a­tive, while oth­ers ap­proach the topic a bit more lib­er­ally. In my opin­ion, there is no one right path, and every­one should dig around, test things out, and de­cide what suits them and fits their se­cu­rity pro­file. You’ll quickly find out that GrapheneOS is re­ally one big com­pro­mise be­tween con­ve­nience and pri­vacy. While this same rule ap­plies to every­thing be­long­ing to the dig­i­tal world, it’s only in this case that you’ll truly no­tice it, be­cause GrapheneOS will show you how many things you can con­trol, which you can’t do us­ing con­ven­tional Android. I don’t in­tend to use this post to pro­mote some “one and only” method of us­ing GrapheneOS. I’ll sim­ply pre­sent how I use this sys­tem. This way, I’ll show the ba­sics to peo­ple fresh to the topic, maybe I’ll man­age to sug­gest an in­ter­est­ing trick they did­n’t know to those who have been users for a while, and on a third note, maybe some ex­pert will show up who, af­ter read­ing my ram­blings, will sug­gest some­thing in­ter­est­ing or point out what I’m do­ing wrong / could do bet­ter. I’m sure that’s the case, since my ad­ven­ture with GrapheneOS has prac­ti­cally only been go­ing on for 3 months. I warn you right away that I’m not sure if I’ll be able to main­tain a log­i­cal train of thought, as I’ll prob­a­bly jump around top­ics a bit. The sub­ject of GrapheneOS is vast and in to­day’s post I’ll only man­age to slightly touch upon it.

One of the first things I did af­ter boot­ing up the freshly in­stalled sys­tem was to cre­ate a sec­ond user pro­file. This is done in Settings -> System -> Multiple users. The idea is for this fea­ture to al­low two (or more) peo­ple to use one phone, each hav­ing a sep­a­rate pro­file with their own set­tings, apps, etc. Who in their right mind does that? While I can imag­ine shar­ing a home tablet, shar­ing a phone com­pletely eludes me. It there­fore seems like a dead fea­ture, but noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

For me, it works like this: on the Owner user, be­cause that’s the name of the main ac­count cre­ated au­to­mat­i­cally with the sys­tem, I in­stalled the Google Play Store along with Google Play ser­vices and GmsCompatConfig. This is done through the App Store ap­pli­ca­tion, which is a com­po­nent of the GrapheneOS sys­tem. Please don’t con­fuse this with Apple’s app store, even though the name is the same. From the Play Store I only in­stalled the fol­low­ing ap­pli­ca­tions:

And that’s it. As you can see, this pro­file serves me only for apps that ab­solutely re­quire in­te­gra­tion with Google ser­vices. In prac­tice, I switch to it only when I want to pay con­tact­lessly in a store, which I ac­tu­ally do rarely lately, be­cause if there’s an op­tion, I pay us­ing BLIK codes. Right af­ter switch­ing from Samsung there were more apps on this pro­file, but one by one I suc­ces­sively gave up on those that made me de­pen­dent on the big G.

It’s on the sec­ond pro­file, which let’s as­sume I called Tommy, that I keep my en­tire dig­i­tal life. What does this give me? For in­stance, the main pro­file can­not be eas­ily deleted, but the ad­di­tional one can. Let’s imag­ine a sit­u­a­tion where I need to quickly wipe my phone, but in a way that its ba­sic func­tions still work, i.e., with­out a full fac­tory re­set. An ex­am­ple could be, say, ar­riv­ing in the USA and un­der­go­ing im­mi­gra­tion con­trol. They want ac­cess to my phone, so I delete the Tommy user, switch to the Owner user, and hand them the phone. It makes calls, sends SMS mes­sages, even has a bank­ing app, so the­o­ret­i­cally it should­n’t arouse sus­pi­cion. However, it lacks all my con­tacts, a browser with my vis­ited pages his­tory, a pass­word man­ager, and mes­sen­gers with chat his­to­ries. This is rather a dras­tic sce­nario, but not re­ally that im­prob­a­ble, as ac­tions like search­ing a phone upon ar­rival in the States are some­thing that hap­pens on a daily ba­sis. Besides, the ba­sic rule of se­cu­rity is not to use an ac­count with ad­min­is­tra­tor priv­i­leges on a daily ba­sis.

On GrapheneOS, Obtainium is my pri­mary ag­gre­ga­tor for ob­tain­ing .apk in­stal­la­tion files and au­tomat­ing app up­dates. It’s like the Google Play Store, but pri­vacy-re­spect­ing and for open-source ap­pli­ca­tions. It would be a sin to use GrapheneOS and not at least try to switch to open-source apps. Below I pre­sent a list of apps that I use. Additionally, I’m toss­ing in links to the source code repos­i­to­ries of each of them.

To un­der­stand how Obtainium works and how to use it, I rec­om­mend check­ing out this video guide.

I have a few apps that are not open-source, but I still need them. In this case, I don’t down­load them from the Google Play Store, but ex­actly from the Aurora Store, which I men­tioned above.

Aurora Store is an open-source client of the Google Play store (I guess you could call it a fron­tend) that al­lows down­load­ing ap­pli­ca­tions from Google servers with­out need­ing Google ser­vices (GMS) on the phone.

* Privacy - you don’t need to log in with a Google ac­count to down­load free apps (you can use built-in anony­mous ac­counts).

With these anony­mous ac­counts, the thing is that some­times they work, and some­times they don’t, due to lim­its that are un­reach­able with a nor­mal ac­count used by one per­son, but when a thou­sand peo­ple down­load apps from one ac­count at once, it starts to get sus­pi­cious, and the lim­its are ex­ceeded quite quickly. Using Aurora Store vi­o­lates the Google Play Store terms of ser­vice, so on the other hand if we use our Google ac­count, it might be tem­porar­ily blocked or per­ma­nently banned. Some op­tion here is to cre­ate a “burner” ac­count just for this, but that takes away some of our pri­vacy, be­cause Google can still in­dex us based on what we down­loaded. Anonymous ac­counts in this case pro­vide al­most com­plete anonymity, be­cause then we are just a drop in the ocean.

When it comes to se­cu­rity, yes, in the­ory we down­load .apk files from a ver­i­fied source, but only un­der the con­di­tion that the Aurora Store cre­ators don’t serve us a Man in the Middle at­tack. The de­ci­sion whether you trust the cre­ators of this app is up to you.

Below I pre­sent a list of ap­pli­ca­tions that I down­loaded from the Aurora Store, checked, and can con­firm that they work with­out GMS (Google Mobile Services).

* My mu­nic­i­pal­i­ty’s app - be­cause I need to know when they’ll col­lect my trash :)

* OpenVPN - I use it as a tun­nel to my home net­work

* Perplexity - I switched to Gemini, but I con­firm it works

* Synology Photos - my home photo gallery on a NAS

* Pocket Casts - pod­casts, I plan to mi­grate to AntennaPod

* TickTick - to-do lists, it’s hard for me to find a sen­si­ble al­ter­na­tive that is mul­ti­plat­form and has all the fea­tures I need

Has any­one ever won­dered if all apps on a phone need Internet ac­cess? Indeed, in the vast ma­jor­ity of cases, a mo­bile app with­out net­work ac­cess is use­less, but you can’t gen­er­al­ize like that, be­cause for ex­am­ple, the pre­vi­ously men­tioned FUTO Voice Input uses a lo­cal LLM to con­vert speech to text, which works of­fline on the de­vice. Why would such an app need Internet ac­cess then? For noth­ing, so it should­n’t have such per­mis­sion. Now let’s take apps like FairScan (document scan­ning), Catima (loyalty card ag­gre­ga­tor), Collabora Office (office suite), or Librera (ebook reader). They too do not need Internet ac­cess!

The sit­u­a­tion looks even more bizarre when you look at which apps ac­tu­ally need ac­cess to all of our de­vice’s sen­sors. If we think about it calmly, we’ll con­clude that in this spe­cific case it’s com­pletely the op­po­site of the pre­vi­ous one, mean­ing prac­ti­cally no app needs this in­for­ma­tion. And I re­mind you that by de­fault on Android with Google ser­vices, all apps have such per­mis­sions.

To man­age a given ap­pli­ca­tion’s per­mis­sions, just tap and hold on its icon, se­lect App info from the pop-up menu, and find the Permissions tab. A list cat­e­go­rized by things like - Allowed, Ask every time, and Not al­lowed will ap­pear. I rec­om­mend re­view­ing this list for each app sep­a­rately right af­ter in­stalling it. This is the foun­da­tion of GrapheneOS hard­en­ing.

A col­lec­tive menu where you can view spe­cific per­mis­sions and which apps have them granted is avail­able in Settings -> Security & pri­vacy -> Privacy -> Permission man­ager. Another in­ter­est­ing place is the Privacy dash­board avail­able in the same lo­ca­tion. It’s a tool that shows not only app per­mis­sions, but also how of­ten a given app reaches for the per­mis­sions granted to it.

In GrapheneOS we don’t only have user pro­files, but each user can also have some­thing called a Private space. I en­coun­tered some­thing sim­i­lar on Samsung, where it was called Secure Folder, so I as­sume this might just be an Android fea­ture im­ple­mented dif­fer­ently by each man­u­fac­turer.

Private space is turned on in Settings -> Security & pri­vacy -> Private space. It acts like a sort of sep­a­rated sand­box that is part of the en­vi­ron­ment you use, but at the same time is iso­lated from it. For me, it’s a place that gives me quick ac­cess to apps that nev­er­the­less re­quire Google ser­vices. You might ask - why then do I keep the mBank and T-Mobile apps on the Owner user if I could keep them here? Well, for rea­sons un­known to me, I’m un­able to con­fig­ure my pri­vate space so that pay­ing with con­tact­less BLIK via NFC works cor­rectly in it. The same goes for Magenta Moments from T-Mobile, which don’t work cor­rectly de­spite GMS be­ing in­stalled in the pri­vate space.

* Google Drive - I use it as a cloud to share files with clients

* mOby­wa­tel - at first I kept this app in the main pro­file as down­loaded from Aurora Store and every­thing some­what worked, but every now and then the app caught a to­tal freeze and stopped re­spond­ing, I think it might be re­lated to the fact that it does send some Google ser­vices-re­lated re­quests in the back­ground and does­n’t re­spond un­til such a re­quest times out, I have this on my list to in­ves­ti­gate

* Play Store - I have to down­load all these apps from some­where, do­ing it via Aurora Store in the pri­vate space would­n’t make sense since I have the whole Google ser­vices pack­age in­stalled here any­way

* XTB - an­other in­vest­ing app… works with­out GMS, but like I said, I keep all fi­nan­cial ones in one place

Oof… I did it again, sorry. I’m just count­ing the char­ac­ters and it comes out to just un­der 35,000… I’ll prob­a­bly break that bar­rier with these next few sen­tences. Well, long again, but purely meaty again, so I don’t think any­one has rea­son to com­plain. As I men­tioned ear­lier, I’ve only touched upon the topic of GrapheneOS, which is ex­ten­sive, and it’s a good thing, be­cause it’s a great sys­tem, and the biggest re­spect goes to the peo­ple be­hind this pro­ject. It’s thanks to them that we even have the op­tion of at least par­tially free­ing our­selves from Google (Android) and Apple (iOS). Therefore, I highly in­vite you to the fi­nal chap­ter of this post.

Finally, I would like to en­cour­age you to sup­port the GrapheneOS pro­ject. The de­vel­op­ers be­hind it are do­ing a re­ally great job and in my opin­ion de­serve to have some money thrown at them. Information on where and how this can be done can be found here.

Flaming Alamos were not vis­i­ble on the out­side of any of the homes, be­cause the prop­er­ties were clad in other ma­te­ri­als. But the team asked Harp to as­sess - by look­ing at their style and ex­te­rior - if these prop­er­ties were likely to have been built dur­ing a pe­riod when Flaming Alamos had been on sale.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is our most ca­pa­ble Sonnet model yet. It’s a full up­grade of the mod­el’s skills across cod­ing, com­puter use, long-con­text rea­son­ing, agent plan­ning, knowl­edge work, and de­sign. Sonnet 4.6 also fea­tures a 1M to­ken con­text win­dow in beta. For those on our Free and Pro plans, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now the de­fault model in claude.ai and Claude Cowork. Pricing re­mains the same as Sonnet 4.5, start­ing at $3/$15 per mil­lion to­kens.Son­net 4.6 brings much-im­proved cod­ing skills to more of our users. Improvements in con­sis­tency, in­struc­tion fol­low­ing, and more have made de­vel­op­ers with early ac­cess pre­fer Sonnet 4.6 to its pre­de­ces­sor by a wide mar­gin. They of­ten even pre­fer it to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5.Performance that would have pre­vi­ously re­quired reach­ing for an Opus-class model—in­clud­ing on real-world, eco­nom­i­cally valu­able of­fice tasks—is now avail­able with Sonnet 4.6. The model also shows a ma­jor im­prove­ment in com­puter use skills com­pared to prior Sonnet mod­els.As with every new Claude model, we’ve run ex­ten­sive safety eval­u­a­tions of Sonnet 4.6, which over­all showed it to be as safe as, or safer than, our other re­cent Claude mod­els. Our safety re­searchers con­cluded that Sonnet 4.6 has “a broadly warm, hon­est, proso­cial, and at times funny char­ac­ter, very strong safety be­hav­iors, and no signs of ma­jor con­cerns around high-stakes forms of mis­align­ment.”Al­most every or­ga­ni­za­tion has soft­ware it can’t eas­ily au­to­mate: spe­cial­ized sys­tems and tools built be­fore mod­ern in­ter­faces like APIs ex­isted. To have AI use such soft­ware, users would pre­vi­ously have had to build be­spoke con­nec­tors. But a model that can use a com­puter the way a per­son does changes that equa­tion.In October 2024, we were the first to in­tro­duce a gen­eral-pur­pose com­puter-us­ing model. At the time, we wrote that it was “still ex­per­i­men­tal—at times cum­ber­some and er­ror-prone,” but we ex­pected rapid im­prove­ment. OSWorld, the stan­dard bench­mark for AI com­puter use, shows how far our mod­els have come. It pre­sents hun­dreds of tasks across real soft­ware (Chrome, LibreOffice, VS Code, and more) run­ning on a sim­u­lated com­puter. There are no spe­cial APIs or pur­pose-built con­nec­tors; the model sees the com­puter and in­ter­acts with it in much the same way a per­son would: click­ing a (virtual) mouse and typ­ing on a (virtual) key­board.Across six­teen months, our Sonnet mod­els have made steady gains on OSWorld. The im­prove­ments can also be seen be­yond bench­marks: early Sonnet 4.6 users are see­ing hu­man-level ca­pa­bil­ity in tasks like nav­i­gat­ing a com­plex spread­sheet or fill­ing out a multi-step web form, be­fore pulling it all to­gether across mul­ti­ple browser tabs.The model cer­tainly still lags be­hind the most skilled hu­mans at us­ing com­put­ers. But the rate of progress is re­mark­able nonethe­less. It means that com­puter use is much more use­ful for a range of work tasks—and that sub­stan­tially more ca­pa­ble mod­els are within reach.Scores prior to Claude Sonnet 4.5 were mea­sured on the orig­i­nal OSWorld; scores from Sonnet 4.5 on­ward use OSWorld-Verified. OSWorld-Verified (released July 2025) is an in-place up­grade of the orig­i­nal OSWorld bench­mark, with up­dates to task qual­ity, eval­u­a­tion grad­ing, and in­fra­struc­ture.At the same time, com­puter use poses risks: ma­li­cious ac­tors can at­tempt to hi­jack the model by hid­ing in­struc­tions on web­sites in what’s known as a prompt in­jec­tion at­tack. We’ve been work­ing to im­prove our mod­els’ re­sis­tance to prompt in­jec­tions—our safety eval­u­a­tions show that Sonnet 4.6 is a ma­jor im­prove­ment com­pared to its pre­de­ces­sor, Sonnet 4.5, and per­forms sim­i­larly to Opus 4.6. You can find out more about how to mit­i­gate prompt in­jec­tions and other safety con­cerns in our API docs.Be­yond com­puter use, Claude Sonnet 4.6 has im­proved on bench­marks across the board. It ap­proaches Opus-level in­tel­li­gence at a price point that makes it more prac­ti­cal for far more tasks. You can find a full dis­cus­sion of Sonnet 4.6’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties and its safety-re­lated be­hav­iors in our sys­tem card; a sum­mary and com­par­i­son to other re­cent mod­els is be­low.In Claude Code, our early test­ing found that users pre­ferred Sonnet 4.6 over Sonnet 4.5 roughly 70% of the time. Users re­ported that it more ef­fec­tively read the con­text be­fore mod­i­fy­ing code and con­sol­i­dated shared logic rather than du­pli­cat­ing it. This made it less frus­trat­ing to use over long ses­sions than ear­lier mod­els.Users even pre­ferred Sonnet 4.6 to Opus 4.5, our fron­tier model from November, 59% of the time. They rated Sonnet 4.6 as sig­nif­i­cantly less prone to ov­erengi­neer­ing and “laziness,” and mean­ing­fully bet­ter at in­struc­tion fol­low­ing. They re­ported fewer false claims of suc­cess, fewer hal­lu­ci­na­tions, and more con­sis­tent fol­low-through on multi-step tasks.Son­net 4.6’s 1M to­ken con­text win­dow is enough to hold en­tire code­bases, lengthy con­tracts, or dozens of re­search pa­pers in a sin­gle re­quest. More im­por­tantly, Sonnet 4.6 rea­sons ef­fec­tively across all that con­text. This can make it much bet­ter at long-hori­zon plan­ning. We saw this par­tic­u­larly clearly in the Vending-Bench Arena eval­u­a­tion, which tests how well a model can run a (simulated) busi­ness over time—and which in­cludes an el­e­ment of com­pe­ti­tion, with dif­fer­ent AI mod­els fac­ing off against each other to make the biggest prof­its.Son­net 4.6 de­vel­oped an in­ter­est­ing new strat­egy: it in­vested heav­ily in ca­pac­ity for the first ten sim­u­lated months, spend­ing sig­nif­i­cantly more than its com­peti­tors, and then piv­oted sharply to fo­cus on prof­itabil­ity in the fi­nal stretch. The tim­ing of this pivot helped it fin­ish well ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion.Son­net 4.6 out­per­forms Sonnet 4.5 on Vending-Bench Arena by in­vest­ing in ca­pac­ity early, then piv­ot­ing to prof­itabil­ity in the fi­nal stretch.Early cus­tomers also re­ported broad im­prove­ments, with fron­tend code and fi­nan­cial analy­sis stand­ing out. Customers in­de­pen­dently de­scribed vi­sual out­puts from Sonnet 4.6 as no­tably more pol­ished, with bet­ter lay­outs, an­i­ma­tions, and de­sign sen­si­bil­ity than those from pre­vi­ous mod­els. Customers also needed fewer rounds of it­er­a­tion to reach pro­duc­tion-qual­ity re­sults.Claude Sonnet 4.6 matches Opus 4.6 per­for­mance on OfficeQA, which mea­sures how well a model can read en­ter­prise doc­u­ments (charts, PDFs, ta­bles), pull the right facts, and rea­son from those facts. It’s a mean­ing­ful up­grade for doc­u­ment com­pre­hen­sion work­loads.The per­for­mance-to-cost ra­tio of Claude Sonnet 4.6 is ex­tra­or­di­nary—it’s hard to over­state how fast Claude mod­els have been evolv­ing in re­cent months. Sonnet 4.6 out­per­forms on our or­ches­tra­tion evals, han­dles our most com­plex agen­tic work­loads, and keeps im­prov­ing the higher you push the ef­fort set­tings.Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a no­table im­prove­ment over Sonnet 4.5 across the board, in­clud­ing long-hori­zon tasks and more dif­fi­cult prob­lems.Out of the gate, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is al­ready ex­celling at com­plex code fixes, es­pe­cially when search­ing across large code­bases is es­sen­tial. For teams run­ning agen­tic cod­ing at scale, we’re see­ing strong res­o­lu­tion rates and the kind of con­sis­tency de­vel­op­ers need.Claude Sonnet 4.6 has mean­ing­fully closed the gap with Opus on bug de­tec­tion, let­ting us run more re­view­ers in par­al­lel, catch a wider va­ri­ety of bugs, and do it all with­out in­creas­ing cost.For the first time, Sonnet brings fron­tier-level rea­son­ing in a smaller and more cost-ef­fec­tive form fac­tor. It pro­vides a vi­able al­ter­na­tive if you are a heavy Opus user.Claude Sonnet 4.6 mean­ing­fully im­proves the an­swer re­trieval be­hind our core prod­uct—we saw a sig­nif­i­cant jump in an­swer match rate com­pared to Sonnet 4.5 in our Financial Services Benchmark, with bet­ter re­call on the spe­cific work­flows our cus­tomers de­pend on.Box eval­u­ated how Claude Sonnet 4.6 per­forms when tested on deep rea­son­ing and com­plex agen­tic tasks across real en­ter­prise doc­u­ments. It demon­strated sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ments, out­per­form­ing Claude Sonnet 4.5 in heavy rea­son­ing Q&A by 15 per­cent­age points.Claude Sonnet 4.6 hit 94% on our in­sur­ance bench­mark, mak­ing it the high­est-per­form­ing model we’ve tested for com­puter use. This kind of ac­cu­racy is mis­sion-crit­i­cal to work­flows like sub­mis­sion in­take and first no­tice of loss.Claude Sonnet 4.6 de­liv­ers fron­tier-level re­sults on com­plex app builds and bug-fix­ing. It’s be­com­ing our go-to for the kind of deep code­base work that used to re­quire more ex­pen­sive mod­els.Claude Sonnet 4.6 pro­duced the best iOS code we’ve tested for Rakuten AI. Better spec com­pli­ance, bet­ter ar­chi­tec­ture, and it reached for mod­ern tool­ing we did­n’t ask for, all in one shot. The re­sults gen­uinely sur­prised us.

Sonnet 4.6 is a sig­nif­i­cant leap for­ward on rea­son­ing through dif­fi­cult tasks. We find it es­pe­cially strong on branched and multi-step tasks like con­tract rout­ing, con­di­tional tem­plate se­lec­tion, and CRM co­or­di­na­tion—ex­actly where our cus­tomers need strong model sense and re­li­a­bil­ity.We’ve been im­pressed by how ac­cu­rately Claude Sonnet 4.6 han­dles com­plex com­puter use. It’s a clear im­prove­ment over any­thing else we’ve tested in our evals.Claude Sonnet 4.6 has per­fect de­sign taste when build­ing fron­tend pages and data re­ports, and it re­quires far less hand-hold­ing to get there than any­thing we’ve tested be­fore.Claude Sonnet 4.6 was ex­cep­tion­ally re­spon­sive to di­rec­tion — de­liv­er­ing pre­cise fig­ures and struc­tured com­par­isons when asked, while also gen­er­at­ing gen­uinely use­ful ideas on trial strat­egy and ex­hibit prepa­ra­tion.On the Claude Developer Platform, Sonnet 4.6 sup­ports both adap­tive think­ing and ex­tended think­ing, as well as con­text com­paction in beta, which au­to­mat­i­cally sum­ma­rizes older con­text as con­ver­sa­tions ap­proach lim­its, in­creas­ing ef­fec­tive con­text length.On our API, Claude’s web search and fetch tools now au­to­mat­i­cally write and ex­e­cute code to fil­ter and process search re­sults, keep­ing only rel­e­vant con­tent in con­text—im­prov­ing both re­sponse qual­ity and to­ken ef­fi­ciency. Additionally, code ex­e­cu­tion, mem­ory, pro­gram­matic tool call­ing, tool search, and tool use ex­am­ples are now gen­er­ally avail­able.Son­net 4.6 of­fers strong per­for­mance at any think­ing ef­fort, even with ex­tended think­ing off. As part of your mi­gra­tion from Sonnet 4.5, we rec­om­mend ex­plor­ing across the spec­trum to find the ideal bal­ance of speed and re­li­able per­for­mance, de­pend­ing on what you’re build­ing.We find that Opus 4.6 re­mains the strongest op­tion for tasks that de­mand the deep­est rea­son­ing, such as code­base refac­tor­ing, co­or­di­nat­ing mul­ti­ple agents in a work­flow, and prob­lems where get­ting it just right is para­mount.For Claude in Excel users, our add-in now sup­ports MCP con­nec­tors, let­ting Claude work with the other tools you use day-to-day, like S&P Global, LSEG, Daloopa, PitchBook, Moody’s, and FactSet. You can ask Claude to pull in con­text from out­side your spread­sheet with­out ever leav­ing Excel. If you’ve al­ready set up MCP con­nec­tors in Claude.ai, those same con­nec­tions will work in Excel au­to­mat­i­cally. This is avail­able on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.How to use Claude Sonnet 4.6Claude Sonnet 4.6 is avail­able now on all Claude plans, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, our API, and all ma­jor cloud plat­forms. We’ve also up­graded our free tier to Sonnet 4.6 by de­fault—it now in­cludes file cre­ation, con­nec­tors, skills, and com­paction.If you’re a de­vel­oper, you can get started quickly by us­ing claude-son­net-4-6 via the Claude API.

During the rapid tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ments of the early 1990s, the video game in­dus­try was on the cusp of a mas­sive ad­di­tion - an­other di­men­sion. With con­sole shenani­gans like the Super FX chip giv­ing play­ers a taste of 3D, hype was at an all-time high. But the games re­leased for home con­soles were noth­ing com­pared to what ar­cade de­vel­op­ers were ca­pa­ble of do­ing. By em­ploy­ing gi­gan­tic bud­gets and cut­ting-edge hard­ware, the ar­cade gave play­ers a chance to see the fu­ture, to­day.

This is filler text to try and hack around a prob­lem on the web­site. You should­n’t be see­ing this. If you are, please re­port this bug.

But the fu­ture even­tu­ally ar­rived with the launch of the 5th gen­er­a­tion of con­soles. All of a sud­den, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary 3D hard­ware fea­tures that were once ex­clu­sive to ar­cades were now avail­able in home con­soles. Without next-gen­er­a­tion hype push­ing play­ers into the ar­cade, pow­er­ful but ex­pen­sive ar­cade ma­chines were no longer sus­tain­able to de­velop. The in­dus­try ad­justed by mov­ing to­ward more cost ef­fec­tive so­lu­tions, with many turn­ing to the in­ex­pen­sive, al­ready proven 3D-capable hard­ware avail­able in 5th gen home con­soles.

Rather than turn­ing around the de­cline of the ar­cade, the cheaper hard­ware may have helped ac­cel­er­ate it. There were fewer unique ex­pe­ri­ences to pull play­ers into the ar­cade, and pre­vi­ous hit ex­clu­sives were now see­ing high qual­ity home con­sole ports that al­lowed them to be en­joyed with­out munch­ing quar­ters. When the 6th gen­er­a­tion ar­rived with the Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2, many ar­cade stal­warts waved the white flag and started to shift their ar­cade di­vi­sions to home con­sole pro­jects, with mixed suc­cess.

Sega was among those hit hard­est by this era. They pro­duced some of the great­est ar­cade thrills of the 1990s and en­joyed mas­sive suc­cess in the home con­sole mar­ket with the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. But a string of mis­takes and mis­cal­cu­la­tions com­bined with the slump­ing ar­cade in­dus­try sent them to the brink of bank­ruptcy. By 2002, the Dreamcast had been soundly de­feated by the launch of the PlayStation 2, and Sega be­gan port­ing some of their hits to their for­mer ri­vals’ hard­ware just to stay afloat.

The home mar­ket was lost, but the lan­guish­ing ar­cade scene pre­sented Sega with an op­por­tu­nity. They still had leg­endary ar­cade de­vel­op­ment teams, and if Sega could lever­age them to pro­duce a wave of ar­cade hits, they would be in a po­si­tion to dom­i­nate a new era of ar­cades when most oth­ers were chang­ing gears. There was just one prob­lem: Sega did­n’t have the re­sources that they once did. If they were go­ing to do this, they needed some help.

And so they did some­thing that would have been con­sid­ered un­think­able just five years prior. Sega teamed up with Nintendo to de­velop a GameCube-based ar­cade plat­form. Bolstering their ranks was Namco, an­other coin-op stal­wart with tons of ar­cade vet­er­ans.

While Triforce was a col­lab­o­ra­tion pro­ject, it still feels like a very Sega coded ar­cade sys­tem. It can even use cer­tain NAOMI style com­po­nents! Along with the Xbox-based Chihiro, the Triforce is some­times con­sid­ered a suc­ces­sor to the NAOMI 2.

Inside of this metal shell is… a GameCube! Quite lit­er­ally, ac­tu­ally.

The Triforce hard­ware is built around a stock GameCube moth­er­board, with two Triforce-specific boards at­tached to it: the AM-Baseboard and AM-Mediaboard. The AM (Amusement Machine) boards are the se­cret sauce of the Triforce and trans­form the stock GameCube into some­thing ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing ar­cade ex­pe­ri­ences.

The early boot process is the same as a re­tail con­sole, but a mod­i­fied GameCube IPL (sometimes re­ferred to as the GameCube BIOS) is used to ini­tial­ize the Triforce hard­ware and load the Triforce equiv­a­lent of a “home menu”, Segaboot.

Segaboot is a spe­cial disc im­age on the Mediaboard that can be loaded by the Triforce at will through spe­cial com­mands. It is re­spon­si­ble for load­ing the ac­tual game and for pro­vid­ing the Service Menu, where the op­er­a­tor can run hard­ware tests and change set­tings on the ma­chine.

By us­ing Picoboot to over­ride the boot process, it is pos­si­ble to load a stan­dard GameCube IPL or home­brew like Swiss. And since all of the pins are still on the main­board, we can also con­nect a stan­dard GameCube front panel and even load full GameCube games from mi­croSD over Serial Port 2!

The Baseboard is pri­mar­ily re­spon­si­ble for in­put and out­put. It han­dles trans­la­tion be­tween JVS I/O de­vices (more on those later) and the GameCube’s SI bus. It also takes the GameCube’s dig­i­tal video out­put and feeds it to two VGA ports on the back of the main unit.

The Mediaboard’s most im­por­tant re­spon­si­bil­ity is stor­ing and serv­ing the game soft­ware to the GameCube. It is also used to han­dle other tasks, such as net­work­ing, through spe­cial com­mands.

The Triforce Baseboard was mostly un­changed through­out the Triforce’s lifes­pan, but the Mediaboard could vary de­pend­ing on the de­vel­oper, game, and when the game was re­leased. In fact, games weren’t guar­an­teed to even come out on the same stor­age medium!

A spin­ning disc and ac­tive laser were not nor­mally con­sid­ered re­li­able enough for an ar­cade en­vi­ron­ment. These ma­chines will be on all day, every day for years, and play­ers were of­ten rough on ma­chines that they did­n’t own. So, the Triforce es­chews the stan­dard GameCube mini-DVD alike for­mat for its own stor­age so­lu­tions.

Most games were de­signed for the DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Module) vari­ant of the Triforce, where game data is shipped on GD-ROM and loaded into RAM on the first boot. GD (Gigabyte Disc) was a for­mat ini­tially de­vised by Sega and Yamaha for use in the Dreamcast. By in­creas­ing the data den­sity of or­di­nary com­pact disc tech­nol­ogy, the 12cm GD-ROM had some­what com­pa­ra­ble ca­pac­ity to the GameCube’s DVD-based 8cm disc (1GiB ver­sus 1.46GiB).

Were GD-ROM dri­ves more re­li­able than early DVD dri­ves? Maybe! By this point, GD-ROM was an es­tab­lished tech­nol­ogy that Sega was al­ready us­ing in ar­cades for years. Perhaps even more im­por­tantly, it was cheaper. Sega de­signed it so they could even reuse GD-ROM dri­ves de­signed for their other ar­cade plat­forms, since they used a generic SCSI-style con­nec­tor.

DIMM vari­ant Triforces came with stick­ers ad­ver­tis­ing the amount of DIMM RAM on the Mediaboard. These stick­ers caused some con­fu­sion in the en­thu­si­ast com­mu­nity, as peo­ple would of­ten mis­take the amount listed as the to­tal RAM ac­ces­si­ble to the game. In re­al­ity, the DIMM RAM was mostly in­tended for use as a read-only RAM drive, rather than for gen­eral pur­pose use. As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, the Triforce hard­ware is based around a stock GameCube moth­er­board, so games can only ac­cess the same 24+16 MiB of RAM that a re­tail GameCube uses.

Once the game was loaded into mem­ory, it was in­tended to stay there. And thanks to a bat­tery backup that main­tained the data even in the event of a power fail­ure, the GD-ROM may only be needed once in the en­tire life­time of the ma­chine. This was their se­cret to­ward mak­ing the Triforce GD-ROM drive re­li­able for the ar­cade. One of the main ex­cep­tions would be if a new disc were in­serted. Many Triforce games saw up­dates, which could be shipped on new GD-ROMs.

Namco’s Triforce games ditched the GD-ROM and DIMM RAM and in­stead used 512MB NAND car­tridges to store game data. The NAND re­tains its con­tents even if the sys­tem loses power and the backup bat­tery runs dry, which elim­i­nates the need for GD-ROMs. These games also saw up­dates through SD card or over the in­ter­net, with up­dates able to di­rectly mod­ify the NAND con­tents.

Both meth­ods of stor­ing Triforce game data have the same goal in the end: de­liver a disc im­age to the in­ter­nal GameCube. In ad­di­tion to the GD-ROM or NAND car­tridge, each game also has a cor­re­spond­ing se­cu­rity key that must be in­serted into the Triforce unit in or­der for the game to run.

There are two vari­ants of Triforce I/O: Type 1 and Type 3. These re­fer to the Sega JVS Type 1 and Sega JVS Type 3. JVS stands for JAMMA Video Standard, a com­mon stan­dard cre­ated by a group of Japanese game com­pa­nies for con­nect­ing var­i­ous ac­ces­sories and con­trollers to ar­cade sys­tems. It’s eas­i­est to think of JVS I/O as the ar­cade equiv­a­lent to USB. Other Sega JVS I/O com­pat­i­ble de­vices can work with the Triforce even if they were orig­i­nally de­signed for other ar­cade plat­forms, but it’s up to the game de­vel­op­ers to ac­tu­ally add sup­port for a par­tic­u­lar piece of hard­ware. Type 3 Triforces also have the ca­pa­bil­ity to sup­port more com­pli­cated ana­log in­put de­vices.

Whether it was Type 1 or Type 3, Sega had a trick that was in­stru­men­tal to their ef­forts to re­vive the ar­cade scene and al­most every Triforce game would use it. It was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary idea that had taken hold in the home con­sole mar­ket but was still rare to see in ar­cades: sav­ing and con­tin­u­ing.

By us­ing cheap cards that could hold a small amount of data, play­ers could buy what amounted to a small mem­ory card di­rectly from the ar­cade ma­chine us­ing a built-in ven­dor. These cards could be bought for as cheap as a sin­gle credit in some cases, and had enough stor­age to save progress, pref­er­ences, and other un­locks. Because the data was­n’t locked to the ma­chine, these cards al­lowed the player to con­tinue their progress from any ar­cade that had the game and a work­ing card slot.

The end goal of this was to get play­ers more in­vested in ar­cade ex­pe­ri­ences by hav­ing them progress and un­lock con­tent. Some Triforce games are full of so many un­lock­ables that it’d be im­pos­si­ble to see every­thing in a sin­gle ses­sion at the ar­cade.

Triforce games can sup­port two types of cards for sav­ing: Magnetic Cards (magcards) and Integrated Circuit (IC) cards. Magcards are cheaper, frag­ile, and can only sur­vive so many writes be­fore fail­ing. They have the added bonus of hav­ing a print­able side, where the game can print a play­er’s achieve­ments and more. IC cards are more like old credit cards with a thicker plas­tic. They weren’t print­able, but were much stur­dier.

A limit of 50 writes was im­posed on mag­cards, likely to re­coup print­ing costs and be­cause the cards would even­tu­ally wear out. This meant that af­ter 50 writes, the player would have to spend more money on a new card in or­der to con­tinue sav­ing their data. If an ar­cade was feel­ing gen­er­ous, the op­er­a­tor could choose to make buy­ing and/​or re­fresh­ing cards free.

Regardless of the card type, if the card were some­how de­stroyed out­side of the ma­chine for any rea­son, the save data would be lost and the player would have to start over with a fresh card.

Outside of the var­i­ous cards and their read­ers, there were plenty of other fairly generic JVS I/O de­vices, such as coin mech­a­nisms, ar­cade sticks, but­tons, steer­ing wheels, and ped­als. Because there were so few Triforce games re­leased, we’ll take a look at unique JVS I/O de­vices on a game-by-game ba­sis when we start spot­light­ing the games.

Hypothetically, let’s say you have a vested in­ter­est in GameCube hard­ware and de­cided to pur­chase a Triforce ar­cade unit with a game to see how it works first-hand and write an ar­ti­cle about it. Without a cab­i­net and all of the ad­di­tional hard­ware that is re­quired to run a game, the core Triforce is just a fancy pa­per­weight, right? Actually, no!

Using a Raspberry Pi, we can con­vert USB con­trollers into JVS de­vices that the games will rec­og­nize thanks to JVS I/O em­u­la­tion! JVS I/O uses a USB-A style con­nec­tor, but arranges the pins dif­fer­ently. Compared to USB, JVS I/O’s dif­fer­en­tial se­r­ial sig­nal is closer to the RS485 stan­dard (aka the last se­r­ial port stan­dard). It’s not ex­actly the same, but by us­ing a RS485 adapter con­nected to through USB-A with D- and D+ hooked up as the dif­fer­en­tial pair and VBUS hooked to the sense line, USB de­vices can com­mu­ni­cate with JVS I/O. Combine that with OpenJVS, and you can have a com­puter in­ter­face with a Triforce to em­u­late JVS I/O de­vices.

In our hy­po­thet­i­cal, we sug­gested that we only pur­chased one Triforce. In re­al­ity, we ended up with four over the past few years: A Type 1 DIMM, a Type 3 DIMM, and two Type 3 NANDs. We also bought a few JVS I/O de­vices that popped up, in­clud­ing a Virtua Striker 4 Card Reader and a Chihiro/Triforce/NAOMI 2 com­pat­i­ble mag­card reader/​printer/​dis­trib­u­tor. However, our real JVS I/O de­vices ended up be­ing pretty use­less due to the fact we were still miss­ing too much hard­ware to hook them up. JVS I/O em­u­la­tion was manda­tory, and was used to fake enough of the de­vices to get the games into a work­ing state. To re­place the Triforce’s JVS power sup­ply, we used an ATX power sup­ply with the 20+4 pin power con­nec­tor care­fully mod­i­fied to match its pinout. Do not at­tempt this at home!

OpenJVS does a well enough job fak­ing de­vices that most Triforce games can be made to run un­der it. More im­por­tantly, it also let us map the var­i­ous in­put de­vices at­tached to the games to a DS4 con­troller. As a bonus, we used some of the ex­tra but­tons on the con­troller to map ac­tions like in­sert­ing coins to make gen­eral play eas­ier.

All of this tin­ker­ing was just enough to let us con­trol and play real Triforce games on real hard­ware.

Now that we could play Triforce games, we had to give it a spin.

Given that Nintendo hard­ware pow­ers the Triforce, one might ex­pect it to have some Nintendo-developed games. But there aren’t any. Despite Nintendo’s pedi­gree for cre­at­ing ap­peal­ing and ac­ces­si­ble games, they had no in­ter­est in mak­ing ar­cade games for the Triforce. Hits like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros were eons ago and the mar­ket had dras­ti­cally changed since then. Instead, Nintendo opted to li­cense out their IPs to the more ex­pe­ri­enced ar­cade de­vel­op­ers at Sega and Namco.

This part­ner­ship re­sulted in a golden op­por­tu­nity for the two com­pa­nies. Their ex­pe­ri­enced ar­cade de­vel­op­ers had ac­cess to some ex­tremely pop­u­lar IPs, and the GameCube base meant they had a pow­er­ful core ma­chine that was also af­ford­able. In the end, though, the Triforce only had nine games re­leased for it and sev­eral of those saw home ports.

With so few ti­tles re­leased for the sys­tem, it af­fords us the rare op­por­tu­nity go through each and every one. The games range from fairly typ­i­cal ar­cade ti­tles to high bud­get mon­strosi­ties that would be the crown jewel of any ar­cade. We’ll be look­ing at ob­scure games, leg­endary games, and every­thing in be­tween while do­ing our best to see how they took ad­van­tage of the Triforce hard­ware. Let’s be­gin.

Did you know that the Triforce has not one, but two Mario Kart games? Mario Kart Arcade GP (2005) and Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 (2007) are of­ten for­got­ten when peo­ple talk about the phe­nom­e­nal Mario Kart se­ries due to their lim­ited re­lease, es­pe­cially in­ter­na­tion­ally. Both games are built off the Mario Kart: Double Dash!! en­gine, but have more of a fo­cus on ar­cade sim­plic­ity and play closer to the style of the orig­i­nal Super Mario Kart.

Those that have played a Mario Kart game know what to ex­pect at the sur­face level. This is an ar­cade kart racer with tons of wacky items, pop­u­lar char­ac­ters, and col­or­ful tracks to race on. This time around, some pop­u­lar char­ac­ters from Namco prop­er­ties join Mario Kart vet­er­ans, such as Pac-Man!

The first game launched with twelve race tracks spread across six cups. Each cup has four stages that use two of the tracks. The sec­ond time you race a track in the cup, it will be remixed slightly. Sometimes this just means some dif­fer­ent vi­su­als or items, but other times it might have some slight al­ter­ations to make dri­ving the track more dif­fi­cult.

Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 has all of the tracks from the first game and four brand new ones spread out be­tween two new cups. If this was a home con­sole game, the amount of reused con­tent would have been very dis­ap­point­ing. In the ar­cade set­ting, it’s not nearly as big of a deal. Most play­ers would­n’t have had a lot of ex­pe­ri­ence on every course, and many might not have played the first game at all! That be­ing said, Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 still feels more like an im­proved ver­sion 2.0 rather than a full fledged se­quel.

On that note, Mario Kart Arcade GP has some very puz­zling omis­sions that were fixed by the se­quel. For in­stance? Only Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 has the iconic 50cc, 100cc, and 150cc dif­fi­culty op­tions avail­able from the start! Both games have the same three game­play modes: Grand Prix, Time Trial, and Versus. Grand Prix has play­ers rac­ing through cups one round at a time. By win­ning a race in a cup, you un­lock the next race. Time Trial should be fa­mil­iar to any­one. Players are given a triple mush­room and a solo run on a course to set the best time pos­si­ble. Versus mode can only hap­pen in mul­ti­cab­i­net se­tups when mul­ti­ple play­ers are around. In this mode, up to four play­ers can race one an­other on any track.

Regardless of mode, races have a time limit to keep peo­ple mov­ing, but they are re­laxed enough that they usu­ally won’t come into play.

In or­der to record progress, Mario Kart Arcade GP and Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 rely on mag­cards. When the game starts, it’ll ask the player to in­sert or cre­ate a li­cense pro­file to save their progress. On some cab­i­nets, a cam­era (known as the “namcam2”) will be pre­sent to take a pic­ture that will be used dur­ing the race. Players’ faces will show up in the heads-up dis­play and with var­i­ous dis­trac­tion items, so mak­ing a goofy face could be an ad­van­tage in mul­ti­player. Note that these fea­tures are op­tional, and a player can al­ways choose to play with­out tak­ing a pic­ture or us­ing a mag­card.

There is one rather egre­gious over­sight that is only pre­sent in the first game. Mario Kart Arcade GP locks a player to a sin­gle char­ac­ter once they’ve cre­ated a li­cense card. That means be­fore the player even gets a chance to play the game, they have to choose a char­ac­ter and are forced to use that char­ac­ter un­less they start over! Characters have dif­fer­ent dri­ving char­ac­ter­is­tics, so this is a rather im­por­tant de­ci­sion!

Regardless, the de­vel­op­ers must have re­al­ized how awk­ward this was and changed it so that swap­ping char­ac­ters is pos­si­ble in Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 even when us­ing a mag­card.

Whether the dri­ving model for a Mario Kart game is good or not mostly comes down to player pref­er­ence. Some play­ers love Mario Kart DS, oth­ers swear by Mario Kart Wii, or even Double Dash. The GP games are def­i­nitely on the slip­pery side of the se­ries, es­pe­cially when us­ing the “difficult” char­ac­ters at higher CCs.

Controls are sim­ple even com­pared to the al­ready ca­sual home Mario Kart games. The game uses a rac­ing wheel, gas and brake ped­als, and an item but­ton. Additionally, there’s a Versus Cancel to opt out of mul­ti­player to fo­cus on win­ning the cups. Despite this, it takes some time to get ac­cli­mated to the ar­cade ex­clu­sives af­ter com­ing from mod­ern Mario Kart games. The harder courses pull no punches and will re­lent­lessly throw tight cor­ners. The Grand Prix mode even has hin­drances added to cer­tain tracks on their re­runs. On Bowser’s Castle, Kamek in­vades and blocks some of the rac­ing lines on the later laps!

To win on harder dif­fi­cul­ties, the player needs every ad­van­tage they can get. Items can be the ad­van­tage that play­ers need. Both games fea­ture over 100 items, but dur­ing a race, each player has ac­cess to a pool of three items. In harder Grand Prix cups (and some­times later stages in ear­lier ones), play­ers get the op­tion to cre­ate their own unique item pool from their un­locked items. Even though a lot of them share prop­er­ties, a sur­pris­ing num­ber of them have their own wrin­kles. For ex­am­ple, drop­ping a ba­nana can cause a spin­out and im­me­di­ate time loss, but drop­ping tacks will cause a kart to pop a tire and lean to one side, mak­ing over­all dri­ving tem­porar­ily more dif­fi­cult for that player. Items aren’t very bal­anced so un­lock­ing pow­er­ful items gives an un­de­ni­able edge.

Throwing items are sim­ple. Aside from the green shell, al­most all for­ward throw­ing items fea­ture a pow­er­ful lock-on ef­fect. Lock-on is au­to­matic and hap­pens af­ter keep­ing an­other dri­ver in front for a cou­ple of sec­onds. Once locked on, that item will head to­ward the tar­get re­gard­less of what they do to avoid it.

In the first game, play­ers must win all four stages of a cup and the minigame that fol­lows. These minigames are short solo chal­lenges that test a play­er’s con­trol over the game in un­usual sit­u­a­tions. Sometimes this means push­ing an ob­ject, get­ting big air over jumps, dri­ving back­wards, hit­ting tons of pedes­tri­ans (they’re Koopa Troopas, that makes it OK), or even fac­ing off with Bowser out­side of his cas­tle. In the se­quel, the bonus games are no longer re­quired for cup com­ple­tion and only award bonus coins.

By win­ning all of the cups, play­ers un­lock a Special mode that varies per game. In GP 1, that is 150cc mode. Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 has 150cc mode un­locked by de­fault, so they went a dif­fer­ent di­rec­tion. Instead, play­ers un­lock new track lay­outs in re­verse mode. Unlike the mir­ror mode pre­sent in other games, re­verse mode sig­nif­i­cantly changes some of the tracks be­yond just ru­in­ing mus­cle mem­ory. Fun fact, re­verse mode was also planned for Mario Kart: Double Dash!! be­fore be­ing cut for mir­ror mode.

To han­dle the plethora of tricky cor­ners and tracks, GP games have a drift­ing me­chanic. By tap­ping the brake, play­ers can ini­ti­ate a hop. By turn­ing in the air be­fore land­ing, play­ers can ini­ti­ate a drift that al­lows sharp cor­ners to be taken at higher speeds. Because of the pow­er­ful lock-on that most items have, drift­ing has been given an ad­di­tional ben­e­fit. During a drift, play­ers will re­flect most items with a shield. An un­ex­pected drift will cost some time, but could be used to block an item at the last mo­ment. Some items also pro­vide a shield, such as the Invincibility Star and Shield items.

Much like the orig­i­nal Super Mario Kart and more re­cent Mario Kart en­tries, the GP games have coins strewn across the track. Collecting coins in­creases a kart’s stop speed, adding a layer of strat­egy as just dri­ving the op­ti­mal lines is­n’t enough. During a race, hold­ing 15 coins pushes a kart to its max­i­mum speed. But dri­ving at that speed can also be dan­ger­ous, as hit­ting walls, bounc­ing off other karts, or be­ing hit by items can cause the player to lose coins.

Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 changes all of the coins on the track to Mario Coins. The first time these coins are col­lected they count as cur­rency to­ward un­locks. If coins are dropped, play­ers don’t lose the Mario Coins and they will respawn as golden coins. Up to 25 Mario Coins can be picked up on the track along with bonuses from race rank­ing and minigames.

Collecting Mario Coins al­lows for un­lock­ing cer­tain karts, items, por­traits, and kart up­grades that will make the vet­eran play­ers much faster than play­ers just start­ing out.

Lastly, Mario Kart Arcade GP 2 also adds one more ma­jor fea­ture: a “live” an­nouncer that gives up­dates through­out the race. This fea­ture is proudly demon­strated dur­ing the at­tract menu, even! As corny as it sounds, it’s rather en­ter­tain­ing to leave on at least a few times. Players that don’t want the an­nouncer can turn it off and their pref­er­ence will be saved to their mag­card.

Overall, both of these games are best as mul­ti­player ar­cade spec­ta­cles. The depth and con­tent of these games don’t quite ri­val con­tem­po­rary home re­leases like Mario Kart Wii. But none of that mat­ters in the ar­cade with friends, where loud and bom­bas­tic mul­ti­player ex­pe­ri­ences re­ally shine.

The Mario Kart Arcade GP se­ries would con­tinue with Mario Kart Arcade GP DX in 2013 and Mario Kart Arcade GP VR in 2017, but those would run on newer and more stan­dard PC-based ar­cade hard­ware.

These Mario Kart ti­tles were the only two games Namco re­leased on the Triforce hard­ware. But they had planned at least one other game.

Announced in 2002 as a dual GameCube and ar­cade re­lease, Star Fox was orig­i­nally planned to launch be­fore ei­ther of the Mario Kart Arcade GP games in 2003. As part of a push for games that could eas­ily be ported be­tween GameCube and ar­cade, Star Fox would have had con­nec­tiv­ity be­tween the two ver­sions through GameCube mem­ory card slots in­cluded on the ma­chines. That way, play­ers could bring their own mem­ory cards to trans­fer progress and/​or un­lock­ables be­tween the home ver­sion and the ar­cade ver­sion of the game.

Considering the ar­cade style ac­tion fea­tured in Star Fox and Star Fox 64, this seemed like a nat­ural choice for an ar­cade hit. Players were al­ready chas­ing high scores in Star Fox 64 and the over­all game de­sign would need lit­tle mod­i­fi­ca­tion to work in an ar­cade. If ru­mors were true, Namco was­n’t plan­ning to skimp on the hard­ware, ei­ther. They were go­ing to use the mas­sively im­pres­sive and in­cred­i­bly ex­pen­sive O. R.B.S. cab­i­net, which was de­signed specif­i­cally for on-rail shoot­ers. Essentially, the player would be locked in a fully im­mer­sive orb that would place them squarely in the cock­pit of an Arwing with a semi-spher­i­cal screen act­ing as a bub­ble canopy. On top of that, the cab­i­net could ro­tate and slide to re­flect what was go­ing on in-game.

Unfortunately, Star Fox Arcade was qui­etly can­celled and the O. R.B.S. cab­i­net it­self would never ac­tu­ally be used for any ar­cade game. The GameCube ver­sion did even­tu­ally see the light of day, how­ever. Released as Star Fox Assault in 2005, the game was heav­ily re­worked and padded out with third per­son on foot sec­tions. Perhaps as a nod to its ori­gins, play­ers can un­lock a port of the ar­cade clas­sic Xevious by col­lect­ing all sil­ver medals.

With that side quest com­plete, we’ve now cov­ered the en­tirety of Namco’s con­tri­bu­tions to the Triforce li­brary. Thankfully, we’re not done yet, as Sega de­vel­oped a va­ri­ety of Triforce ar­cade games.

Gekitou Pro Yakyuu is a rather unique base­ball game that com­bines char­ac­ters from var­i­ous base­ball manga cre­ated by Shinji Mizushima with real-life Japanese pro­fes­sional base­ball play­ers of the era. The game also has a faith­ful home con­sole port, Gekitou Pro Yakyuu, for the GameCube and PlayStation 2.

The main draw of this base­ball game is that it can pro­vide a faith­ful sim­u­la­tion style game be­tween pro­fes­sional play­ers or a zany ar­cade ex­pe­ri­ence with spe­cial pitches, strong bat­ters, and manga cut­aways fea­tur­ing the il­lus­trated char­ac­ters. What makes the game so in­ter­est­ing is that these two things aren’t sep­a­rated - both teams can be filled with a mix of il­lus­trated and pro­fes­sional play­ers, let­ting their con­trast­ing styles clash right on the field.

At its core, Gekitou Pro Yakyuu is a fairly stan­dard late early 2000s base­ball game. Pitchers can roughly place their pitches any­where in and around the strike zone and bat­ters in turn try to guess where the pitch will be to get a solid hit. Pitchers have a va­ri­ety of pitches at their dis­posal that add move­ment to the ball, and bat­ters in turn have mul­ti­ple swing types that can counter pitches. Players with bet­ter stats gen­er­ally have more op­tions at their dis­posal. If the bat­ter guesses the pitch right, their aim­ing ret­i­cle will turn red giv­ing them ad­vanced warn­ing that they guessed cor­rectly.

When play­ing in the ar­cade, both teams are filled with a mix of real play­ers and manga play­ers. This cre­ates the in­ter­est­ing sce­nario where many manga play­ers of­ten feel like su­per­stars that can break the game if not care­fully played around. Most of them have spe­cial quirks and of­ten have ac­cess to spe­cial abil­i­ties. Manga pitch­ers can make the ball dis­ap­pear, zig zag, and con­found the bat­ter. Manga bat­ters can also counter this as they have ac­tive and pas­sive abil­i­ties of their own. One player has his con­tact range and power grow fur­ther out from the cen­ter of the strike zone, mak­ing him in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful if the pitcher is paint­ing the cor­ners.

For those in­ter­ested in play­ing this game with­out a Triforce, there’s good news. The home con­sole port is in­cred­i­bly faith­ful and even adds some ad­di­tional modes and fea­tures for depth. The GameCube con­troller also af­fords play­ers ana­log con­trol, whereas the ar­cade orig­i­nal uses an eight-way gate. Once you get in game, though, it’s very ap­par­ent that this is the same game.

The home port, as far as we could tell, is miss­ing one small thing. The Triforce ver­sion has a scor­ing sys­tem for putting up high scores on the ma­chine. Rather than just try­ing to win base­ball games, play­ers are in­stead chal­lenged to get a high score across a nine-in­ning game. Doing pos­i­tive things like get­ting hits and get­ting the op­po­nent out will give the player points. Big mo­ments like dou­ble plays and grand slams will give even big­ger bonuses, push­ing play­ers to the top of the leader­boards.

Players get two in­nings per credit or can pay 4 cred­its for a full nine-in­ning game. Players aim­ing for a high score need to do that, as those ex­tra in­nings give more op­por­tu­ni­ties for scor­ing points, and there’s a large swath of bonus points for win­ning the base­ball game out­right. After nine-in­nings, win or lose, the game ends. The game also lists high scores for a home run con­test, but we could­n’t fig­ure out how to get to that mode.

This game sug­gests that it has some kind of save card sup­port in the Service Menu, but we weren’t able to find any cards for it to be sure. In all like­li­hood, cards would have been used to save team data and other pref­er­ences for a player. Overall, Gekitou Pro Yakyuu is an ef­fec­tive, if not some­what sim­ple base­ball game that lends it­self well to the pick up and play na­ture of the ar­cade.

While it was de­vel­oped by a dif­fer­ent team within Sega, Virtua Striker 3 ver. 2002 is very sim­i­lar to Gekito Pro Yakyuu in some ways. It is a sim­ple to pick up and easy to play sports game with an in­cred­i­bly faith­ful home port that brings the same ex­pe­ri­ence to con­sole play­ers with modes that add ex­tra depth. Virtua Striker 3 ver. 2002 is a three-but­ton game: short pass (tackle on de­fense), long pass, and shoot. That’s it.

The gooooooal of the game is to win five matches in a row against the AI to se­cure the cham­pi­onship while sur­viv­ing po­ten­tial in­trud­ers jump­ing in from the sec­ond player in stan­dard mode. This is a king of the hill style ar­cade game, so who­ever wins gets to keep play­ing while the loser is knocked out. This re­mains true when play­ing against AI, so a strong player can play up to five games against the AI be­fore reach­ing the cred­its and hav­ing to put in more money.

The game fol­lows the rules of soc­cer closely. There are yel­low cards, red cards, off­sides, cor­ner kicks, penalty kicks, free kicks and in­jury time. As an ar­cade game, it even cap­tures some of the pageantry of the sport with a bom­bas­tic open­ing as the play­ers march onto the field. However, once you’re in game it is a very no frills ex­pe­ri­ence.

The ar­cade op­er­a­tor could ad­just the cab­i­net’s set­tings to make things more or less un­fair to op­ti­mize their prof­its. In ad­di­tion to dif­fi­culty set­tings, Golden Goal (short over­time pe­riod) and Penalty Kicks could be dis­abled to give the play­ers less op­por­tu­ni­ties to break a tie. And this mat­ters a lot, be­cause the AI wins in the event of a tie, forc­ing the player to plunk in more money to con­tinue.

For com­pet­i­tive events and tour­na­ments, there’s an aptly named tour­na­ment mode pre­sent in the set­tings. This mode has both play­ers kicked off the game af­ter match, re­gard­less of who wins. This mode was­n’t (just) added to al­low the op­er­a­tor to max­i­mize prof­its, but rather it was in­tended for hold­ing in-per­son tour­na­ments where play­ers would be swap­ping in and out af­ter every match.

The sim­plic­ity to the con­trols is both the game’s sell­ing point and an an­noy­ance. When on de­fense in par­tic­u­lar, some­times the de­fender will rush to get into a par­tic­u­lar po­si­tion re­gard­less of the di­rec­tion be­ing held on the ar­cade stick. This lack of con­trol is only wors­ened by the fact that there’s no switch player but­ton… on the ar­cade ver­sion, at least. The home port is mostly faith­ful game­play-wise, but it does take ad­van­tage of the ex­tra but­tons on the con­troller to give play­ers the abil­ity to change tac­tics and swap de­fend­ers.

One thing that we should men­tion is that we were play­ing on re­vi­sion 0001 of Virtua Striker 3 ver. 2002. Most games on the Triforce have mul­ti­ple re­vi­sions or up­dates, with some re­vi­sions com­ing with sig­nif­i­cant up­grades. Later re­vi­sions may have ad­dressed prob­lems in this re­vi­sions, es­pe­cially if the sup­posed Type 3 ver­sion ex­ists.

Virtua Striker 3 ver. 2002 was a tad un­der­whelm­ing in our opin­ion. If you’re a huge fan of these games and are seething at our mini-re­view, we’re fully aware that a lot of our frus­tra­tions might sim­ply boil down to a skill is­sue. But since we were fa­mil­iar with the rich his­tory of the vet­er­ans at Amusement Vision and their leg­endary track record of ar­cade games, this one was a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing.

Originally re­leased in 2003, The Key of Avalon: The Wizard Master is a strange and very, very ex­pen­sive ar­cade game. This game was not just ex­pen­sive for the play­ers, but it was also ex­pen­sive for the op­er­a­tor too! This game is pow­ered by five Triforce cab­i­nets: one cen­tral Triforce server for the main game screen, and four ad­di­tional satel­lite Triforce pedestals for the play­ers.

The Key of Avalon: The Wizard Master is an ar­cade trad­ing card board game. The ob­jec­tive of the game is sim­ple - play­ers scan in their decks and see their mon­sters on the big screen while bat­tling up to three other play­ers for su­premacy.

Before play­ing the game, play­ers need to pur­chase a starter deck of 30 ran­dom trad­ing cards. This deck also comes with an IC card so that play­ers can save their progress. Each satel­lite Triforce comes with a deck reader to al­low a player to scan in their deck of cards. But how would you con­trol the game af­ter scan­ning in your cards? Why, a touch­screen, of course! And if that was­n’t enough, the game also came with a sep­a­rate card kiosk specif­i­cally for pur­chas­ing starter decks and booster packs.

There are at least six re­vi­sions of The Key of Avalon. It is im­por­tant to be aware of what re­vi­sion a cab­i­net is, as cards from newer sets will not work with older re­vi­sions. Thankfully, cards are marked with what set they came from, mak­ing it fairly easy to know which re­vi­sions each card is com­pat­i­ble with.

* The Key of Avalon: The Wizard Master - Supports the ini­tial 100 cards. There is a 1.10 re­vi­sion with small ad­just­ments.

* The Key of Avalon 1.20: Summon The New Monsters: This first ma­jor up­date adds sup­port for 52 new cards in the N se­ries. Earlier prints of these cards may have dif­fer­ent stats and are miss­ing some in­for­ma­tion on the back of the card.

* The Key of Avalon 1.30: Chaotic Sabbat: This ver­sion adds sup­port for 35 more cards in the C se­ries. Much like Summon The New Monsters, reprints of these cards have ad­di­tional in­for­ma­tion and may have slightly dif­fer­ent stats.

* The Key of Avalon 2: Eutaxy Commandment: An up­date big enough to be called a se­quel. It has 61 new cards, a sin­gle player mode, and much more. The cards for this re­vi­sion are in the E se­ries. These cards do not ap­pear to have any changes be­tween early and late prints. The up­dated stats for older cards are used by this game.

* The Key of Avalon 2.5: War of the Key: The fi­nal re­vi­sion adds sup­port for 40 new cards in the W se­ries. There are also ad­di­tional Legend cards sep­a­rate from the main cat­a­logue.

In the end, nearly 300 to­tal cards were re­leased spread out over five rar­i­ties: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, and Super Rare. Some cards are un­doubt­edly stronger than oth­ers, and those cards are mostly the rarer ones.

Like other col­lec­table card games, play­ers were ex­pected to buy packs and trade with oth­ers to build the best pos­si­ble deck. To pre­vent some­one from get­ting clever with a printer and sud­denly own­ing all the rare cards, Avalon cards have a bar­code em­bed­ded into their top edge that the game reads the card data from. Though nearly in­vis­i­ble in nor­mal cir­cum­stances, if held up to a light just right, the ma­te­r­ial of the bar­code stands out against the rest of the card.

Cards weren’t all about util­ity, though. These cards were beau­ti­fully il­lus­trated by a myr­iad of artists, and each mon­ster is rep­re­sented by a de­tailed 3D model in game. If some­one was lucky, they might’ve stum­bled upon al­ter­nate art or holo­foil ver­sions of cards. Players could also be re­warded with unique Ex cards that were only dis­trib­uted through events.

Of all of the Triforce games, this was the only one we could­n’t play. Even if we had five Triforces, five GD-ROM dri­ves, and JVS I/O em­u­la­tion for the cards, it still would­n’t be enough. The game can be booted with fewer Triforces, but the touch­screen is a to­tal mys­tery and there was no way to by­pass it with­out hav­ing a work­ing Avalon Satellite Pedestal.

We’ve re­searched the game, bought man­u­als, and ob­tained a ton of cards and un­der­stand the game­flow, but with­out hav­ing played it we can’t re­ally say if it’s fun or not. However, based on ex­ist­ing sales data and the num­ber of up­dates, we know that The Key of Avalon was mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful de­spite its high price. Sega would go on to make more trad­ing card ar­cade games, in­clud­ing a sus­pi­ciously sim­i­lar Chihiro game, Quest of D.

Two years af­ter Virtua Striker 3 ver. 2002, Sega re­leased the next game in the Virtua Striker lineup with Virtua Striker 4. With dra­matic up­grades to the con­trols, sup­port for sav­ing progress, team con­fig­u­ra­tion, rank, and more, this game is of­ten con­sid­ered the best in the se­ries by fans. And it only got bet­ter with Virtua Striker 4 ver.2006, which up­dated the ros­ters and added ad­di­tional on­line events.

Like most Triforce games, the newer Virtua Striker games take ad­van­tage of cards for sav­ing. Virtua Striker 4 uses IC cards to track player progress, sim­i­lar to The Key of Avalon. These cards are nifty, as not only are they more durable than mag­cards, but they also con­tain an ID for log­ging in to Sega ALL. Net. The in­ter­net was enough of a thing at this point that Sega started ex­per­i­ment­ing with it for track­ing player data and progress.

This meant that in­stead of a lo­cal ar­cade leader­board, Virtua Striker 4 could have a global leader­board track­ing play­ers on ALL. Net-connected ma­chines across the world. By play­ing against other play­ers that had reg­is­tered on­line, play­ers could be pro­moted to higher ranks or be de­moted to lower ranks. On the sur­face, this is an up­grade over tra­di­tional mag­cards, but the ob­vi­ous down­side is that these games rely on servers hosted by Sega. Unfortunately, sup­port for these ma­chines ended in 2017, mean­ing that the on­line fea­tures no longer work. Thankfully, these games can still be played of­fline with­out the on­line ser­vices, al­beit with­out the spe­cial fea­tures and events.

Over the week­end Ars Technica re­tracted an ar­ti­cle be­cause the AI a writer used hal­lu­ci­nated quotes from an open source li­brary main­tainer.

The irony here is the main­tainer in ques­tion, Scott Shambaugh, was ha­rassed by some­one’s AI agent over not merg­ing its AI slop code.

It’s likely the bot was run­ning through some­one’s lo­cal ‘agentic AI’ in­stance (likely us­ing OpenClaw). The guy who built OpenClaw was just hired by OpenAI to “work on bring­ing agents to every­one.” You’ll have to for­give me if I’m not en­thusas­tic about that.

This blog post is a lightly-edited tran­script of the video I pub­lished to YouTube to­day. Scroll past the video em­bed if you’re like me, and you’d rather read the text :)

Last month, even be­fore OpenClaw’s re­lease, curl main­tainer Daniel Stenberg dropped bug boun­ties be­cause AI slop re­sulted in ac­tual use­ful vul­ner­a­bil­ity re­ports go­ing from 15% of all sub­mis­sions down to 5%.

And that’s not the worst of it—the au­thors of these bug re­ports seem to have a more en­ti­tled at­ti­tude:

These “helpers” try too hard to twist what­ever they find into some­thing hor­ri­bly bad and a crit­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­ity, but they rarely ac­tively con­tribute to ac­tu­ally im­prove curl. They can go to ex­treme ef­forts to ar­gue and in­sist on their spe­cific cur­rent find­ing, but not to write a fix or work with the team on im­prov­ing curl long-term etc. I don’t think we need more of that.

These agen­tic AI users don’t care about curl. They don’t care about Daniel or other open source main­tain­ers. They just want to grab quick cash boun­ties us­ing their pri­vate AI army.

I man­age over 300 open source pro­jects, and while many are more niche than curl or mat­plotlib, I’ve seen my own in­crease in AI slop PRs.

It’s got­ten so bad, GitHub added a fea­ture to dis­able Pull Requests en­tirely. Pull Requests are the fun­da­men­tal thing that made GitHub pop­u­lar. And now we’ll see that fea­ture closed off in more and more re­pos.

AI slop gen­er­a­tion is get­ting eas­ier, but it’s not get­ting smarter. From what I’ve seen, mod­els have hit a plateau where code gen­er­a­tion is pretty good…

But it’s not im­prov­ing like it did the past few years. The prob­lem is the hu­mans who re­view the code—who are re­spon­si­ble for the use­ful soft­ware that keeps our sys­tems go­ing—don’t have in­fi­nite re­sources (unlike AI com­pa­nies).

Some peo­ple sug­gest AI could take over code re­view too, but that’s not the an­swer.

If you’re run­ning a per­sonal weather dash­board or build­ing a toy server for your Homelab, fine. But I would­n’t run my pro­duc­tion apps—that ac­tu­ally make money or could cause harm if they break—on un­re­viewed AI code.

If this was a prob­lem al­ready, OpenClaw’s re­lease, and this hir­ing by OpenAI to de­moc­ra­tize agen­tic AI fur­ther, will only make it worse. Right now the AI craze feels the same as the crypto and NFT boom, with the same signs of in­sane be­hav­ior and reck­less op­ti­mism.

The dif­fer­ence is there’s more use­ful pur­poses for LLMs and ma­chine learn­ing, so scam­mers can point to those uses as they bring down every­thing good in the name of their AI god.

Since my video The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All in December, we have hard dri­ves as the next loom­ing AI-related short­age, as Western Digital just an­nounced they’re al­ready sold through their in­ven­tory for 2026.

Some be­lieve the AI bub­ble is­n’t a bub­ble, but those peo­ple are mis­guided, just like the AI that hal­lu­ci­nated the quotes in that Ars Technica ar­ti­cle.

And they say “this time it’s dif­fer­ent”, but it’s not. The same signs are there from other crashes. The big ques­tion I have is, how many other things will AI com­pa­nies de­stroy be­fore they have to pay their dues.

“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert said CBS did not air his Monday in­ter­view with Texas state Rep. James Talarico out of fear of the Federal Communications Commission.

Colbert kicked off Monday night’s show by al­most im­me­di­ately men­tion­ing Talarico’s ab­sence.

“He was sup­posed to be here, but we were told in no un­cer­tain terms by our net­work’s lawyers, who called us di­rectly, that we could not have him on the broad­cast,” Colbert said. “Then, then I was told in some un­cer­tain terms that not only could I not have him on, I could not men­tion me not hav­ing him on. And be­cause my net­work clearly does­n’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”

“The Late Show” pub­lished the un­aired in­ter­view with Talarico on YouTube. In the in­ter­view, Colbert and Talarico, who is run­ning for the U. S. Senate, dis­cuss the FCC crack­down, in­clud­ing open­ing a probe into ABC’s “The View,” af­ter Talarico ap­peared on the show.

“I think that Donald Trump is wor­ried that we’re about to flip Texas,” Talarico said, which was met with au­di­ence ap­plause. “This is the party that ran against can­cel cul­ture, and now they’re try­ing to con­trol what we watch, what we say, what we read. And this is the most dan­ger­ous kind of can­cel cul­ture, the kind that comes from the top.”

Talarico ac­cused the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion of “selling out the First Amendment to curry fa­vor with cor­rupt politi­cians.”

“A threat to any of our First Amendment rights is a threat to all of our First Amendment rights.”

In an emailed state­ment, CBS said: “THE LATE SHOW was not pro­hib­ited by CBS from broad­cast­ing the in­ter­view with Rep. James Talarico. The show was pro­vided le­gal guid­ance that the broad­cast could trig­ger the FCC equal-time rule for two other can­di­dates, in­clud­ing Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and pre­sented op­tions for how the equal time for other can­di­dates could be ful­filled. THE LATE SHOW de­cided to pre­sent the in­ter­view through its YouTube chan­nel with on-air pro­mo­tion on the broad­cast rather than po­ten­tially pro­vid­ing the equal-time op­tions.”

Talarico’s ri­val in the Texas Senate Democratic pri­mary, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, ap­peared on Colbert’s show in May 2025.

CBS’ move to not air the seg­ment comes as the FCC, the gov­ern­men­t’s me­dia reg­u­la­tor, and most no­tably its chair­man, Brendan Carr, have been par­tic­u­larly com­bat­ive with net­works that have drawn the ire of the pres­i­dent.

Trump has for months sug­gested the FCC could re­voke the li­censes of tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ers. More re­cently, Carr, who was ap­pointed by Trump to lead the FCC, has said that day­time and late-night TV talk shows must com­ply with the equal time rule re­gard­ing po­lit­i­cal can­di­dates.

The FCC’s equal time rule pro­hibits ra­dio and broad­cast chan­nels from host­ing po­lit­i­cal can­di­dates dur­ing an elec­tion with­out giv­ing air­time to their op­po­nents. During his show Monday, Colbert high­lighted that news in­ter­views and talk show in­ter­views with politi­cians are ex­cep­tions.

On Jan. 21, Carr re­leased a let­ter warn­ing net­works about the rule, say­ing that he is con­sid­er­ing elim­i­nat­ing ex­cep­tions due to the net­works’ po­ten­tial par­ti­san mo­ti­va­tions.

Colbert fired back at Carr on Monday, ac­cus­ing the chair­man of be­ing mo­ti­vated by par­ti­san pur­poses.

“Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s ad­min­is­tra­tion wants to si­lence any­one who says any­thing bad about Trump on TV be­cause all Trump does is watch TV,” Colbert joked.

In a state­ment, FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez called Monday’s in­ci­dent “another trou­bling ex­am­ple of cor­po­rate ca­pit­u­la­tion in the face of this Administration’s broader cam­paign to cen­sor and con­trol speech.”

“The FCC has no law­ful au­thor­ity to pres­sure broad­cast­ers for po­lit­i­cal pur­poses or to cre­ate a cli­mate that chills free ex­pres­sion,” Gomez, the lone Democratic com­mis­sioner, said in the state­ment. “CBS is fully pro­tected un­der the First Amendment to de­ter­mine what in­ter­views it airs, which makes its de­ci­sion to yield to po­lit­i­cal pres­sure all the more dis­ap­point­ing.”

This comes months af­ter ABC pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air “indefinitely” af­ter Carr crit­i­cized com­ments the host made about the as­sas­si­nated con­ser­v­a­tive ac­tivist Charlie Kirk.

Kimmel ac­cused “the MAGA Gang” of try­ing to “score po­lit­i­cal points” by char­ac­ter­iz­ing the sus­pect “as any­thing other than one of them.”

Kimmel’s show was pulled a cou­ple of days later and re­turned to the air af­ter about a week.

← Back

A few days ago I posted to Show HN. I had good fun build­ing that use­less lit­tle in­ter­net ex­pe­ri­ence. The post quickly dis­ap­peared from Show HN’s first page, amongst the rest of the vibecoded pulp. And to be clear, I’m fine with that.

The be­hav­ior on Show HN was in­ter­est­ing to see though. So I pulled the data.

Show HN of course is­n’t dead. You could even say it’s more alive than ever. What has changed is the vol­ume of posts and en­gage­ment per post. It’s only nat­ural when more pro­jects are be­ing built in a sin­gle week­end. There’s less “Proof of Work”.

From the busi­ness side of this, Johan Halse re­cently called this the Sideprocalypse: the end of the small in­die de­vel­op­er’s dream. Every idea has been built, mar­keted bet­ter, and SEO’d into obliv­ion by some­one with more money.

Some cool pro­jects aren’t get­ting through this noise, which is a pity. Here are a few I thought were in­ter­est­ing:

Now, let’s look at some data.

Show HN started out bet­ter than reg­u­lar sub­mis­sions. Now it’s sig­nif­i­cantly worse.

How long does a Show HN post stay on page 1 be­fore be­ing pushed off? During peak hours (US day­time):

No. There’s just more noise, and less op­por­tu­nity to get at­ten­tion and have a dis­cus­sion with other folks on HN about your pro­ject. Some gems go com­pletely un­no­ticed. Maybe some­thing for HN to think about: how do these sub­jec­tive “gems” get more spot­light? How does HN re­main the coolest place to talk about the coolest tech?

I found this gem on Hacker News the other day. User soneil posted to a four col­umn ver­sion of the ASCII table that blew my mind. I just wanted to re­post this here so it is eas­ier to dis­cover.

Here’s an ex­cerpt from the com­ment:

I al­ways thought it was a shame the ascii table is rarely shown in columns (or rows) of 32, as it makes a lot of this quite ob­vi­ous. eg, http://​paste­bin.com/​cda­ga5i1

It be­comes im­me­di­ately ob­vi­ous why, eg, ^[ be­comes es­cape. Or that the al­pha­bet is just 40h + the or­di­nal po­si­tion of the let­ter (or 60h for lower-case). Or that we shift be­tween up­per & lower-case with a sin­gle bit.

You know in ASCII there are 32 char­ac­ters at the be­gin­ning of the table that don’t rep­re­sent a writ­ten sym­bol. Backspace, new­line, es­cape - that sort of thing. These are called con­trol char­ac­ters.

In the ter­mi­nal you can type these con­trol char­ac­ters by hold­ing the CTRL (control char­ac­ters, get it?) key in com­bi­na­tion with an­other key. For ex­am­ple, as many ex­pe­ri­enced vim users know press­ing CTRL+[ in the ter­mi­nal (which is ^[ in caret no­ta­tion) is the same as press­ing the ESC key. But why is the es­cape key trig­gered by the [ char­ac­ter? Why not an­other char­ac­ter? This is the in­sight soneil shares with us.

Remember that ASCII is a 7 bit en­cod­ing. Let’s say the fol­low­ing:

* The first two bits de­note the group of the char­ac­ter (2^2 so 4 pos­si­ble val­ues)

* The re­main­ing five bits de­scribe a char­ac­ter (2^5 so 32 pos­si­ble val­ues)

In the linked table, which I re­pro­duce be­low, the four groups are rep­re­sented by the columns and the rows rep­re­sent the val­ues.

Now in this table, look for ESC. It’s in the first group, fifth from the bot­tom. It’s in the first col­umn so its group has bits ‘00’, the row has bits ‘11011’. Now look on the same line, what else is there? Yep, the ‘[’ char­ac­ter is there, be it in a dif­fer­ent col­umn:

So when we you type CTRL+[ for ESC, you’re ask­ing for the equiv­a­lent of the char­ac­ter 11011 ([) out of the con­trol set. Pressing CTRL sim­ply sets all bits but the last 5 to zero in the char­ac­ter that you typed. You can imag­ine it as a bit­wise AND.

10 11011 ([)

& 00 11111 (CTRL)

= 00 11011 (ESC)

This is why ^J types a new­line, ^H types a back­space and ^I types a tab. This is why if you cat -A a Windows text file, it has ^M printed all over (meaning CR, be­cause new­lines are CR+LF on Windows).

Free and open source al­ter­na­tive to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue.

I like the con­cept of apps like Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue that use AI to add ac­cu­rate and easy-to-use tran­scrip­tion to your com­puter, but they all charge fees of ~$10/month when the un­der­ly­ing AI mod­els are free to use or cost pen­nies.

So over the week­end I vibe-coded my own free ver­sion!

It’s called FreeFlow. Here’s how it works:

Download the app from above or click here

Press and hold Fn any­time to start record­ing and have what­ever you say pasted into the cur­rent text field

One of the cool fea­tures is that it’s con­text aware. If you’re re­ply­ing to an email, it’ll read the names of the peo­ple you’re re­ply­ing to and make sure to spell their names cor­rectly. Same with if you’re dic­tat­ing into a ter­mi­nal or an­other app. This is the same thing as Monologue’s “Deep Context” fea­ture.

An added bonus is that there’s no FreeFlow server, so no data is stored or re­tained - mak­ing it more pri­vacy friendly than the SaaS apps. The only in­for­ma­tion that leaves your com­puter are the API calls to Groq’s tran­scrip­tion and LLM API (LLM is for post-pro­cess­ing the tran­scrip­tion to adapt to con­text).

Why does this use Groq in­stead of a lo­cal tran­scrip­tion model?

I love this idea, and orig­i­nally planned to build FreeFlow us­ing lo­cal mod­els, but to have post-pro­cess­ing (that’s where you get cor­rectly spelled names when re­ply­ing to emails / etc), you need to have a lo­cal LLM too.

If you do that, the to­tal pipeline takes too long for the UX to be good (5-10 sec­onds per tran­scrip­tion in­stead of