Enlarge / Its creator calls the "Short Stack" the world's smallest scale model replica of the Nintendo Wii (bottom). (credit: James Smith )

The miniaturization of retro tech has always been a major obsession for modders, from the person who fit an original NES into a Game Boy-sized portable to the person who made a mini-er version of Apple's Mac mini .

One mod in this storied genre that caught our eye this week is the "Short Stack," a scale model of the Nintendo Wii that packs the 2006 console's internal hardware into a 3D-printed enclosure roughly the size of a deck of playing cards.

"You could fit 13.5 of these inside an original Wii," writes James Smith (aka loopj), the person behind the project. All the design details, custom boards, and other information about recreating the mod are available on GitHub .

Enlarge / Kudos to the designer of this umbrella-shaded rooftop terrace at Colossal Order, perhaps the only worker who can imagine a place that isn't overwhelmed by Steam reviewers. (credit: Paradox Interactive)

Under the very unassuming name of patch 1.1.0f1 , Cities: Skylines 2 is getting something quite big. The sequel now has the modding, map editing, and code modding support that made its predecessor such a sprawling success.

Only time will tell if community energy can help restore some of the energy that has been dispersed by the fraught launch of Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2) . The project of relatively small developer Colossal Order arrived in October 2023 with performance issues and a lack of content compared to its predecessor. Some of that content perception stemmed from the game's lack of modding support, which had contributed to entire aspects of the original game not yet available in the sequel.

When Ars interviewed Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen in December, she said that modding support was the thing she was most looking forward to arriving. Modding support was intended to be available at launch, but the challenges of building the new game's technical base, amid many other technical issues , pushed it back, along with console releases.

Enlarge / Nexus Mods says it wants nothing to do with this kind of Palworld content. (credit: ToastedShoes / X )

Palworld 's viral success has already drawn a lot of obvious "Pokémon with guns" comparisons . But when it comes to mods that might add actual Pokémon to the game, at least one major online clearinghouse is preemptively and proactively avoiding anything that could draw Nintendo's legal ire.

Nexus Mods, a mod distribution site with tens of millions of registered users, said in a posted statement that it won't take the legal risk of distributing any Pokémon-themed Palworld mods. “We do think that adding Pokemon content to Palworld is a very cool idea and we understand why people would want such a thing," the statement reads. "However, we’re not comfortable hosting this content."

Nexus Mods goes on to cite Nintendo's "consistent record of mercilessly submitting legal challenges, DMCAs, and takedowns against fan-made content" as the main reason behind their hesitation. "Given Palworld’s similarity to the Pokémon franchise as a base game, hosting content that adds copyrighted characters or assets into the game is almost certainly going to put us at risk of legal action. Palworld content that is uploaded to Nexus Mods and is considered to have Pokémon-derived characters or assets will be taken down. Our normal moderation policies will apply."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For most PC gamers, the ability to update their game with a wide variety of mods is a huge benefit they can claim over most ( but not all ) console players. But Japanese publisher Capcom ( Resident Evil , Street Fighter ) says it sees unauthorized modding of PC games as a problem akin to cheating, bringing with it the risk of headaches for the company's reputation and support costs. That's according to a 50-minute presentation covering "anti-cheat and anti-piracy measures in PC gaming" that was posted to the Capcom R&D YouTube channel last week (and noticed recently by GamesRadar ).

The presentation describes modding as an "inseparable part of PC gaming" and a reflection of a PC platform that lets you "do anything you want compared to the game console." At the same time, these facts make the PC a place "that allows you to create freely, but [where] people are also free to tamper with the game."

“No different than cheating”

One obviously bad form of PC game tampering, according to Capcom, is piracy. If anti-piracy tools are not used for PC titles, Capcom says, "pirated copies appear in less than a day [and] paid content such as DLC will be made free," leading to what the company calls "an immediate loss of profit." Then again, Capcom does admit that the size of this profit loss is "unobservable" because there is no suitable control case to compare it to. "We can only speculate on the cost of cheats and piracy," Capcom says, "but it's clear that if we don't do anything, the damage will surely be greater."

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  The "TinyTendo" project, which fits a real NES into a Game Boy-sized enclosure, isn't for the faint of heart. [credit: Redherring32/Twitter ]

If you want a portable console that can play old Nintendo Entertainment System games, the easiest option is software emulation, whether you're using Nintendo's official Switch app, a portable PC, or some cheap knockoff emulator handheld. For those who want better accuracy than software emulation can provide, there's always the Analogue Pocket , which can ( with current firmware ) re-create the NES in hardware using its FPGA chip .

But some purists are unsatisfied with anything other than original hardware—that's the only possible explanation for projects like the TinyTendo , which goes to extraordinary lengths to squeeze an entire NES into a portable package roughly the size and weight of the old gray monochrome Game Boy. The project is the creation of hardware modder Redherring32, who eventually plans to open-source the project.

For miniaturization projects like this, you often see chopped-up or fully custom-printed circuit boards used with the original chips to contort the hardware into a new shape. This landscape orientation mod for the original Game Boy or the original Analogue NT are both good examples. But more drastic measures were needed to squeeze an entire NES into a handheld console, most notably the removal of bulky pins and ceramic that the original chips all use.

Enlarge / Look, we had to see this shot from a Sims 4 "male pregnancy" mod while researching this story, so now you do, too!

Last month, EA published an update formalizing its policy that mods for The Sims 4 "cannot be sold, licensed, or rented for a fee." But the publisher tells Ars that there is still one important exception that should ensure many Sims modders can continue to make significant income from their game-expanding creations.

EA's new modding policy, first published July 21 , is pretty direct in saying that Sims 4 mods "must be non-commercial and distributed free-of-charge" and that they can't "contain features that would support monetary transactions of any type." According to the published policy, those who want to monetize their Sims modding work are limited to indirect methods like "passive advertisements and requests for donations" on their own websites (but not within the mods themselves).

Despite this recent formalization, this policy isn't entirely new. In late 2017, former EA Community Manager Amanda Drake wrote on the game's forums that mod creators "cannot lock content they make using our game behind a paywall." But that post also carved out a specific loophole for creators who wanted to offer an incentive to encourage donations via sites like Patreon:

How to fix the Lenovo external USB keyboard?

Most computer users I know, are users of Lenovo Thinkpad. It is almost a kind of monocropping when I go to a free software event: Almost everybody uses Lenovo Thinkpad, frequently models that are many years old. So do I.

Thinkpad keyboards are not bad, but have a funny genetic defect: Where normal computers have the left control key, on the very outside lower left corner, Thinkpads have the function key. Fortunately, Lenovo detected this bug and they provide a workaround in the BIOS. Users can swap the control and function key to their correct position, which all users do (well, minus one or two).

Lenovo also makes an external compact USB keyboard, which is not too bad. It only has one terrible defect: It shares the wrong position of control and function with the builtin Thinkpad keyboards, but one can fix this by means of BIOS. Not even mighty setxkbmap nor xmodmap where able to solve the problem. Thanks to Lenovo forum user blackdot54 from Canada, there is a way to salvation. One needs to dismantle the keyboard:

Now one has to pull apart the three layers of the keyboard membrane:

With a sharp knife, adhesive tape, a fine brush and some conductive silver paint one can re-route the connections for both wrongly placed keys on the lower side:

And also on the upper side:

If you like to do this, please check blackdot54s original post, which is much more comprehensive than my summary and contains more helpful photos. I post this to say thank you to blackdot54 and to say that their instructions worked well for me!

(The photos are taken from blackdot54s post without any permission under the assumption that this post is fair use.)

#modding #keyboard #lenovo #thinkpad