Month: October 2024

MissMikkaa, the streamer who defeated the Elden Ring uber-boss Malenia using a level one character and a dance pad, has yet another bizarre boss kill to her repertoire: This time, she’s taken down Margit, the Fell Omen, with an acoustic guitar.

See for yourself:

You’ll notice that MissMikkaa is using a real acoustic guitar here, and not some kind of Guitar Hero-style controller. You might then naturally wonder how it works. The answer, she said in another tweet, is a program called Abject Audio Inputs, which binds audio frequencies to keyboard inputs. Basically, you can use any sound to control your keyboard, recorded or live, “as long as you are able to keep a certain consistency in your tone.”

“My guitar is connected via an XLR cable to my gaming PC,” MissMikkaa explained while demonstrating the setup during a recent livestream. “Basically how the software works is that it has these frequencies that it looks for, for this specific [in-game] action, which is W. So when it hits that frequency, for example when I do a G [chord]—you saw that it hit it—that means it does a W [keypress] for four seconds. Now if I want to attack, I have it assigned to th…

Intel and AMD didn’t have much to show us at Computex, but there were one or two interesting side shows. How  about 16 Intel Performance cores humming along at 7.2GHz?

Of course, you can’t get more than eight Performance cores in a current consumer CPU from Intel. But you can get 16 Performance in one of Intel’s new Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs. 

That’s exactly what Level1Techs managed to achieve at the Computex show with help from ASRock’s performance team. Running a 16-core version of Intel’s latest Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPU in an ASRock W790 motherboard, they started out running the chip at 6.1GHz and achieved a massive Cinebench R23 score of around 46,000.

Note, all 16 cores in the Xeon chip are Performance cores based on the same Golden Cove spec as the big P-cores in a 12th Gen Alder Lake desktop CPU. It doesn’t have any Efficient cores. Also, for context, a stock-clocked Intel Core i9 13900K scores around 38,000 in the same test.

They managed to get the chip running as high as 7.2GHz, which is awfully impressive for a huge CPU with 16 of Intel’s biggest and most powerful cores. But the system wasn’t stable enough to complete any benchmark run…

One of the few things that’s ever tempted me to get a VR headset is the idea of having an old favorite transformed by the tech—projects like the VR versions of the O.G. Resident Evil 4 or its recent remake. I still don’t have a headset, but modder elsuperaguas’ first person project for the RE4 Remake (as reported by DSOGaming) looks to offer a similarly immersive transformation with no VR required.

This video by YouTube channel Residence of Evil gives you a good impression of how it works in action. The mod shifts the camera to the first person, but otherwise leaves Leon’s body model and animations intact, leading to a slower-paced sort of FPS with a real grounding in the world⁠—pretty similar to RE7 and Village’s gameplay, all things considered. I could see the reduced situational awareness making the game much more stressful and difficult, but isn’t that part of the fun?

Elsuperaguas’ project has a number of dependent mods⁠—amusingly, you have to make Leon’s head invisible in order to make room for the new first person camera. Still, it surprises me how few tweaks it takes to turn RE4 into a functional FPS. Just a few years ago, Capcom…