# NVIDIA & Microsoft Implode, BBC Auction Haul, Claude vs Pokemon, DOOM & More - Ramble 177

> In this episode I talk about my BBC Maida Vale Studios auction haul, Jensen Huang's resignation as NVIDIA CEO, how Sega once saved NVIDIA, Microsoft's massive cloud outage, DOOM on the Spectrum Next, the Atari 8-bit, a power bank & an IBM mainframe, id Software's next game, Wolfenstein 3, the ex-id studio Hidden Horses, Claude refusing to recreate existing games, AI clones of GTA VI, Humble Bundle dropping 2FA, the oldest app that still runs on Windows 11 & more!

- Canonical URL: https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2026-11-13-nvidia-microsoft-implode-bbc-auction-haul-claude-vs-pokemon-doom-more-ramble-177.html
- Published: 2026-11-13
- Last updated: 2026-11-14
- Author: Rees (ctrl-alt-rees)
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y (1:03:54)
- Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 UK (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/), unless stated otherwise below

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y

In this episode I talk about my BBC Maida Vale Studios auction haul, Jensen Huang's resignation as NVIDIA CEO, how Sega once saved NVIDIA, Microsoft's massive cloud outage, DOOM on the Spectrum Next, the Atari 8-bit, a power bank & an IBM mainframe, id Software's next game, Wolfenstein 3, the ex-id studio Hidden Horses, Claude refusing to recreate existing games, AI clones of GTA VI, Humble Bundle dropping 2FA, the oldest app that still runs on Windows 11 & more!

## Chapters
* [00:00:00 – What Have I Bought Now!?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=0s)
* [00:10:29 – PCBWay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=629s)
* [00:11:09 – NVidia Implodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=669s)
* [00:17:41 – Microsoft Also Implodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=1061s)
* [00:23:35 – The DOOM Shrine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=1415s)
* [00:38:39 – Anthropic's Retro AI Slop Stop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=2319s)
* [00:49:40 – Videos Of The Week](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=2980s)
* [01:00:35 – ...And Finally](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=3635s)

## Transcript

### [What Have I Bought Now!?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=0s)

Hello there, my lovely little ramblers, and welcome to a rather subdued edition of Rees Rambles, my weekly podcast all about the latest comings and goings, movings and shakings, and indeed all the rest of it from the worlds of vintage and retro computing, gaming and technology. Now, to address the elephant in the room right off the bat, why am I feeling subdued this week? Well, if you cast your mind back two weeks to my previously released ramble, towards the end I was getting a bit sore, a bit hoarse, I was starting to feel very much under the weather, and unfortunately, over the course of the evening, that developed into a full-blown cold, coughing, sneezing, spluttering, sore throat, runny nose, the whole lot. It was horrible, and I was actually away that weekend, had a rather nice long weekend in Wales, and I just had the fuzzy-headedness and the temperature and the shakes, and it did spoil what was otherwise a very nice weekend.

Anyway, last week I was still very much in the midst of all of that. I did all my ramble prep in the morning, knowing full well that I probably wouldn't be feeling up to recording. I came into the studio and I just could not stop coughing, so I decided to scrap last week's ramble, and I'm still not fully over it this week. I still keep waking up in the night, coughing my guts up, and it is not pleasant at all. So I will try my best not to cough and splutter and sneeze in your ears this week. I'm sure you'll all appreciate that. But of course, the show must go on. So much has happened over the past couple of weeks that I really want to talk about, and to be honest, on a more personal note, I have been feeling very down about the whole lack of YouTube stuff, and stuff that's just outside of my control that's been kind of holding me back from making all these videos that I want to work on.

So this is kind of my safe space, my last bastion of YouTube hope. So that's why I'm here today. Now, speaking of the show going on, let's go with that. Yesterday, I went on a bit of a road trip up to Lincolnshire, and I went to collect some auction winnings. Now, I'm not talking about eBay. I'm talking about a specialist auction that I'd actually been bidding on and was lucky enough to win quite a few interesting items. But to go back to the beginning of this story, let's first talk about BBC Maida Vale Studios. That's right. So it was announced that the studio was going to be closing back in 2018. And if you're not familiar with the story of this place, it was built in 1909, apparently as the home of the Maida Vale Roller Skating Palace and Club, this huge open arena.

And then in the 1930s, 1933, apparently, the BBC took it over. And ever since they have used it as a recording studio specifically for music. So it was home of the BBC Symphony Orchestra at first. And then during World War Two, they actually broadcasted news and stuff from Maida Vale. Of course, it survived the war. And more recently, we've seen all of these amazing session recordings from Maida Vale. And basically any band you could possibly name: the Beatles, you know, all sorts of huge names over the years have recorded sessions at these studios.

And I think perhaps, you know, John Peel with his Radio 1 sessions, absolutely legendary back in the day. John Peel, a huge icon of British broadcasting, of course. May he rest in peace. But now the studio itself is closed. It was structurally unsound. It was full of asbestos and all sorts of stuff. And the BBC have now moved all of their operations from that studio to a much new and improved one up north, apparently. And that meant that there was getting on for 100 years' worth of broadcasting history in this building that had to be disposed of. And a very good friend of mine, Phil, clued me into this auction. Now, this is actually phase four. There have been multiple phases.

I don't know if there are any more planned, but there's a huge amount of stuff that they need to offload. And this was with a company called Peaker Pattinson. And we can see the brochure here if you are watching this on YouTube. So some of the items that they have in here, they've got these really impressive looking speakers. We've got these old wooden organ things probably played by who knows over the years. I mean, they're probably what, 1960s, 1970s, something like that. They went for thousands. We've got these big floor toms. We've got the BBC sound effects library on vinyl. That went for quite a lot of money as well. All these vinyl records with sound effects that they use for radio shows and stuff and like incidental music and things.

As you can see, test equipment, rack mount studio equipment, anything you could possibly name to do with a recording studio. There are even some nice PVM monitors as well, which went for a fair amount of money, although they looked very battered. So I didn't want to chance those. And of course, I do already own far too many CRTs, but absolutely fascinating to go and pick through all of this stuff and bid on it. And to cut a long story short, I won a few quite interesting items.

So I'm going to show those to you now, but I'm going to make a main channel video about these as well, and one item in particular. So first up, we'll start with the least interesting. You can see this tray here. PP Auctions, Peaker Pattinson Auctioneers Limited, lot number 243. And we have a MacMan Macintosh MIDI interface, which I know nothing about and wasn't particularly interested in, but I suppose as an Atari ST guy, that is quite interesting. But the real reason I bid on this lot was this other item in here, which is a StarTech video scaler. So this takes S-Video, composite video inputs. Is it component as well? Like RGB. And it upscales them and converts them to DVI, which of course will be very useful for me here in the studio for capturing, you know, video output from consoles and things.

I only own a few of these devices, but this is the first of this particular type, the VID2DVIDTV. Over £300 brand new, this thing cost. And I paid, let's just have a look, £15 for both of these items. So I thought that was a bit of a bargain. It is all complete in there with all the cables and power supply and accessories and stuff. So, you know, I'd stuck in some cheeky bids on quite a few different things. And that's basically how I came to own all of this stuff. But it gets much more interesting from here because the next item that I have for you is this, which is, I think it's galvanised steel. It's a very solid little box.

It's got this rather cool leather strap slash handle on it. It has feet on this side and also on that side, although two of the feet are missing. And it also has a BBC logo on the top here. "Warning: positively identifiable equipment." So it's obviously security marked in some way. And it is an ME12/7/128 programme meter. And I bought this, not because I thought it would be useful in the studio, but because it looked really cool. So if we just open this up, we have knobs and gauges. I mean, how can you not love knobs and gauges? Oh, look at that toggle switch as well. Oh, listen to that. Oh, that's lovely. And I'm not really sure what this is.

It's some kind of volume meter thing. It's got outputs. It's got listen, normal and high level. It's got a battery test button, which doesn't seem to be working. Although there is a label that says the battery was replaced in 2007. But I just thought that would look really cool on the shelf, either as part of my studio backdrop or maybe just around the house somewhere. Of course, the glass here is cracked and it was cracked in the photos as well. But I could find a new bit of glass for that or maybe just keep it as part of this thing's history. But yeah, as used in BBC Maida Vale Studios. I mean, it makes you wonder, you know, which legendary artists have had their live recordings piped through this unit over the years.

I mean, there's no way of knowing, of course, but I think that is a real piece of history. And it's also a very cool looking thing for anyone who is interested in old stuff. Which I most certainly am. And I'm sure many of you out there are as well. Now, my third and final item, and I did bid on quite a lot more than this, but these were the three that I won, may be of particular interest to the retro computing enthusiasts out there, because it's a Shuttle PC. I actually had one of these back in the day and I've kind of been keeping an eye on them. I mean, these sell for, I think the last Shuttle case, and I think it was actually empty that I saw on eBay, was about £80, something like that.

I mean, people actually pay good money for these. These are ITX cases, and they were kind of one of the first kind of enthusiast ITX cases that were kind of massively popular, kind of Windows Vista type era. Someone's probably going to correct me on that, but I don't really care. And this was actually listed as "DVD floppy disk shuttle". That was it. That was the entirety of the description. It has a DVD writer, it has a floppy drive, it's a black one. It's the XPC Glamour model, apparently, with this rather nice brushed metal finish. And yeah, as to whether it has a hard drive in it, you'll just have to wait and see. Like I said, I am going to feature this on the main channel when things are back up and running.

But what I can tell you is that it is a Core 2 Duo system, and it has a GPU in it as well. They've also upgraded this by sticking a later GPU in there. And it does work. So that's very interesting. Now, what did this cost me? £37 for a Core 2 Duo PC, complete in a rather nice Shuttle case. I was quite pleased with that. Not quite sure what I'm going to do with it, other than taking it apart for the channel. But, you know, always useful things to have. I'll just pop that back down on the floor. Anyway, I think we're actually off to a reasonably good start for this week's ramble. So, with that in mind, let's get on with the actual news stories for this week.

### [PCBWay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=629s)

But not, of course, without first taking a very quick moment to say thank you to our sponsor, PCBWay.com. Now, you may be familiar with PCBWay thanks to their 12-plus years of experience in the PCB fabrication business. However, they have asked me today in this episode to let you know about their additional offerings. Offerings including, but not limited to, CNC machining, 3D printing, sheet metal fabrication, and more. So, if any of those are of interest to you for your next project, please do check out the link down in the description to PCBWay.com. And once more, a big thank you to PCBWay for all of your support for ctrl-alt-rees and Rees Rambles.

### [NVidia Implodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=669s)

So, the big tech story from this week, if we exclude Microsoft's rather large, rather alarming, and rather ongoing outage from this morning, which still appears to have no end in sight, is this story all about NVIDIA. Of course, a company founded all the way back in 1993 by a chap called Jensen Huang, who was, of course, CEO up until yesterday, as at the time of recording. And this is very much an ongoing story, and all sorts of interesting and surprising things are coming out of the woodwork around this. And I'm sure this isn't the last that we're going to hear of it. But just to sum things up so far, here's the story over on Tom's Hardware. So, "NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang resigns in the wake of multiple affairs, Chinese spy allegations", and Colette Kress has been appointed interim CEO. The board are conducting a search for a permanent replacement. So, if you fancy the job as NVIDIA CEO, why not get your CV in now? Anyway, yeah, "NVIDIA's board of directors has confirmed today that Jensen Huang has resigned as the company's CEO. The news follows revelations that Huang had been involved in not one, but two extramarital affairs, one with a suspected Chinese intelligence asset, and another with his direct report, NVIDIA's VP of healthcare, Kimberly Powell." And this just goes on to explain the story in a bit more detail. But yeah, as mentioned, this is an ongoing thing at the moment. And the latest, if we just pop over to the BBC website, there they are again, my good friends at the BBC.

He has agreed to appear before Congress in the US, because of course this involves US tech secrets being leaked to China, which is a very big deal indeed. And as mentioned, he was the founder of the company 33 years ago. He has been CEO since the very beginning. He is one of the last, or was one of the last surviving tech founders. And I'm sure we're all very familiar with their graphics cards. And more recently, their massive success due to the explosion of AI and LLM stuff, which of course is heavily dependent upon GPU technology. Really surprising stuff going on here. So yeah, the latest here is that he is going to appear before Congress "to discuss whether US national security was compromised, following a major scandal at one of the most valuable companies in the world."

"Huang resigned as the CEO of NVIDIA, the enormously successful AI chip company, after it was reported he had two affairs." Of course, we've just covered that. "The company's stocks plummeted as the US markets opened shortly after Huang's resignation. And while it recovered some ground, it closed more than 4% down." I would say that 4% is actually not too bad. It was down by over 30% at one point, I think. "With the firm shedding more than half a trillion in market value." This is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Or at least it was. "He has now been replaced by the company's chief financial officer, Colette Kress, who will look to steady the ship at the company." He was dubbed "the Taylor Swift of tech", apparently.

Who by? What a strange link. Anyway, "Huang transformed NVIDIA from a video game chip business to develop semiconductors critical for developing AI. Access to advanced computer chips has become a key battleground between Beijing and Washington, writes our China correspondent. NVIDIA's powerful B200 and B300 chips cannot be legally exported to China. Beijing has called allegations of spying a 'smear'." And apparently this is at the end of the BBC's live coverage. But I've been following along with this. Of course, Trump's had to weigh in with his opinions on that as well. And yeah, it's crazy all of this stuff. Not confirmed, of course, whether Alice Huang, with which he had the affair. No relation, apparently. Just a very common surname in China. No confirmation as to whether she was actually a spy or not.

But apparently the suspicions are strong enough for him to have resigned his position and to now be appearing before Congress, which is crazy, crazy stuff. But yeah, of course, this has been discussed over on my Discord server over the past couple of days. And my good friend, Matteusbeus, pointed out a rather interesting historical story, which I believe I have talked about in the past. But I thought this was a good opportunity to bring this up again because there is a retro gaming angle to this outside of the PC gaming angle that you might expect. Because another story from Tom's Hardware all the way back in May 2024 talks about how NVIDIA nearly went out of business in 1996 trying to make the Sega Dreamcast GPU.

And Sega of America's CEO actually offered NVIDIA a $5 million lifeline, which actually saved the company from the brink of bankruptcy. And yeah, indeed, if it wasn't for Sega and the Dreamcast, NVIDIA might not be around today. Although, of course, if it wasn't for Sega and the Dreamcast, perhaps the company wouldn't have been in the financial trouble that it was at the time to begin with. But we'll gloss over that. It is, after all, an interesting chapter in NVIDIA's history. So yeah, I will link to this as well down below if you want to go and read about that. But yeah, of course, we know the history of the Sega Dreamcast: cancelled, sadly, in its prime, cut off, and something that I would never personally forgive Sega for.

But that's not what we're talking about today, of course. We are talking about Jensen Huang and the absolutely outrageous and high-profile implosion at the top of NVIDIA over the past few days. And he is now officially gone. Founder of the company back in 1993. He's survived the past 33 years. And yeah, we'll have to see what comes of these spying allegations and all the rest of it. But of course, this AI technology, these GPUs and powering this AI boom absolutely worth, well, trillions at the moment. So, doesn't surprise me, doesn't surprise me that this kind of stuff is allegedly going on.

### [Microsoft Also Implodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=1061s)

And of course, the other huge, outrageous and unprecedented tech outage currently going on at the moment, as alluded to at the beginning of my previous story, is this big Microsoft outage, which started at about 6pm UK time yesterday. And as at the time of recording, we're at midday on Friday, the 13th of November, still isn't fixed. And Microsoft have announced that they're still not quite sure how they're going to fix it, which doesn't bode well at all. But they have kind of indicated that this isn't the result of any kind of cyber attack or anything like that. It's just a good old-fashioned mismanagement and misconfiguration internally. Now, as we know, and as I have been reporting here on Rees Rambles, Microsoft did lay off, I think it was about a third of their global workforce a year ago to streamline and replace people with AI.

I'm not quite sure if that's related, and I'm not quite sure whether they would ever actually admit to that being the cause. But it does make you wonder, doesn't it? Anyway, let's head over to The Register and see what is known about this, as at the time of recording, ongoing issue. "Microsoft struggling to fix a massive cloud outage that's taken down email and Intune."

Story here by Simon Sharwood. "Actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief." "Microsoft is struggling to restore many of its cloud services after a core process running on some servers became overwhelmed." I'm sure we all know that feeling. "And its attempts to fix the problem failed. The incident started at around 1800 hours UTC on November the 12th and meant services including Exchange Online, Teams, Copilot 365 and Defender for Office 365 became unavailable. Admins trying to figure out what was wrong couldn't access tools like Intune or the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center. They went down too. On its X feed, Microsoft blamed a problem that's causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable. The company said it hasn't spotted any changes to its systems that might have sparked the incident, but its early investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health."

So automated health checks failing as a result of a component that's responsible for processing server health. And that has brought down all of their cloud services worldwide. It's just crazy, isn't it? Yeah, there's an update here which was from 10 o'clock last night. Basically saying, "Microsoft said it found and validated an alternative service health check method, which allowed a subset of affected servers to successfully return to service. 'We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process,' the company wrote. But those efforts may not be working. 'We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,' the status page advises."

"Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss." Anyway, yeah, there was an update just after midnight last night from Microsoft saying that they had managed to bring some stuff back online, but this is still a very big, very widespread outage. I mean, as you probably know, I, in my day job, work as a contractor for a mail order business that is owned by a friend of mine and indeed this building belongs to him. I popped into the office this morning because their IT guy is actually off this week, enjoying himself in the Caribbean, so I'm kind of somewhat responsible for their IT as well.

And as you might imagine, I had quite a few questions from people about why they had arrived to work and hadn't had any emails and couldn't send any emails. And we've got, you know, members of management in the warehouse picking orders and stuff because they can't do anything else, even now at midday on Friday, because all of their stuff is 365-based. So there we go. It has been a cause of ongoing problems and I'm sure will continue to be. But yeah, as of today, thankfully, the business can still function to some extent. They can still take orders from customers and still get those orders dispatched. But stuff like ordering new stock from suppliers and communicating with customers, customer service queries, that kind of thing, it's all down and still down.

And as the news has been reporting today, it's affecting health services. It's affecting literally everything. So quite disastrous. And perhaps an important lesson. I have seen some people on social media being quite smug about this. I'm not going to go down that route because, after all, you know, people pay good money for these services and they expect them to work. And I think when they don't work, it is quite an important reminder and perhaps a moment to consider just how reliant we are on these cloud services, particularly with these kind of huge and high-profile, you know, hacks and outages and things that apparently seem to be becoming more common in recent times. So stay safe out there. Perhaps enjoy your day off. You know, if you don't have access to email and you're unable to do your job, you know, go back and watch some of my old YouTube videos or something.

I don't know. Anyway, I'm sure you'll find something to keep you occupied. We'll see. I guess there'll be a bit of a post-mortem on this and we can talk a bit more about this next week. But as of now, still ongoing, still absolutely huge and affecting all sorts of Microsoft-related services all over the world.

### [The DOOM Shrine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=1415s)

And so with that rather depressing modern stuff well and truly behind us, let's return to business as usual. And I think it's about time we paid another visit to the DOOM Shrine, my own personal homage to the greatest game of all time, id Software's first-person shooter DOOM from 1993. My collection of releases and paraphernalia, starting with the original shareware version that we got with our first PC back in 1994, covering various PC and console releases, floppy releases, CD releases. We've got the original boxed copy that you had to send off for to id Software back in the day. We got some stuff signed by the original development team and some modern DOOM representation with 2016, Eternal and The Dark Ages as well. And as usual, you're going to have to imagine it.

Now, I imagine you guys out there who listen to this on the podcast platforms are probably getting quite good at this because you probably never got to see what the DOOM Shrine looked like in the first place. But I promise you, it is coming back. And I do have a bumper crop of DOOM-related stories for you this week. So I'm probably going to regret committing to recording such a long-winded segment with my cough situation being what it is. And this is take two. So we'll see how we get on. But without further ado, let's just dive into this. So first up, we have a demonstration of DOOM running on the ZX Spectrum Next. Of course, the highly successful and very well-regarded reboot of the Spectrum brand from a few years back, this FPGA-based system, compatible with the old Spectrum games and things, but of course adding some quite exciting new graphics and sound capabilities.

As we can see, this is recognisably DOOM. It runs quite smoothly indeed. Well, I say quite smoothly indeed. I mean, this is a Spectrum after all, but it's playable. It looks playable anyway. And yeah, it's the latest in a long line of rather technically impressive DOOM ports. Couldn't find any information on whether you could download this and try it out for yourself, but I'm sure if you hang out in the right Spectrum Next communities and places, you're probably already familiar with this. I thought that was quite interesting. So there we go. And it was posted on the SpecNext Limited official YouTube channel as well. So I guess that's an official thing.

Next up, talking about ports of DOOM to interesting old systems, we have DOOM on the Atari 8-bit range of computers. As you can see, this is quite wireframe-y, as you might expect. We've not got shaded textures and shaded polygons and stuff like that, but it's recognisably a first-person shooter and arguably recognisably DOOM. Of course, massively simplified levels and the enemies are all stick figures. But we've got the iconic DOOM shotgun here. And this actually runs at quite a respectable pace as well, considering what it is and what it's actually running on. And now for this one, I could actually find a download. And this is based on the author's previous port of Quake, apparently. Not quite sure why you would start with Quake and then make your way to DOOM.

But there we go. So yeah, it's starting with the Atari 8-bit, but apparently it is also coming to other 8-bit machines. And of course, I should also point out that there is an AI disclosure on this. It is an AI-assisted port, which is increasingly becoming the case here. But, you know, some quite interesting screenshots and things showing how the DOOM enemies were converted into wireframes and also some of the thinking behind the levels and their reworkings to simplify those as well. So quite an interesting project. Next up, we have the return of our good friend who ported DOOM to a vape. This is Aaron Christophel, which I featured a few weeks back. He has now ported DOOM to a power bank, which is running on a very similar architecture, apparently, which has facilitated this.

Of course, we had it running on a, I think it was a clamp meter as well, some kind of electrical testing device. And if you have one of these Anker Prime 27650 power banks, you can now run DOOM on that as well. It has a little colour screen. Just a bit of an intro here. Let's skip ahead and see some of the gameplay. Of course, it has buttons on the side or at least a button on the side and you can use that to go through and actually start a game, which doesn't really seem to do much. But hold the button down and you move or you press the button to shoot. Very much limited on the input options here. But still, it runs quite well.

It looks nice enough and it is recognisably DOOM. So, it belongs in the DOOM Shrine. The next DOOM port that I have for you for this week is DOOM in WND. This is the WND Terminal, which is actually running on an IBM mainframe, apparently. This is an ASCII interpretation of DOOM. I've just fired it up here. Apparently, you get five minutes of playtime on this. I can't really see what's going on at all, but there you go. But it does very much work and yeah, I don't really know much what else to say about this. We'll read the description. It's running on a real terminal connection to an IBM Z mainframe and over the WND Terminal. "The emulator uses VT/xterm over SSH, and the WND Terminal connects over SSH, draws the game using coloured text just as it displays on other mainframe applications."

Not a huge amount of information here, but I wanted to show this off because, I mean, look at it. It's ASCII DOOM. I know there have been ASCII renderers for DOOM in the past and I believe this is probably based on the exact same thing, but yeah, the fact that it's running on an IBM mainframe just adds to the intrigue and it's always cool being able to connect to this old hardware over the internet as it is, without the inclusion of DOOM as well as the proverbial cherry on the icing on the cake. Next up we have, I'm losing track of what we have here, oh, Jeremy's Retro Bar. Of course, I love Jeremy. Jeremy, incidentally, sent me a very, very kind message a couple of weeks ago and I know that you're listening.

I know that you are a regular listener, so a big shout out to you, Jeremy. I loved his channel a couple of years ago and I was really into it in a really big way and he unfortunately had to have some time away from making YouTube videos and I must confess, I wasn't actually aware of the fact that he was back and making videos again. Funnily enough, a bit too much information, I guess, about my personal life, but I have been looking at some houses recently with a view to buying a house and there was one with a bar in the garden which would have potentially been quite useful as a YouTube space as well. And it reminded me of Jeremy's old videos where he used to make a cocktail for each machine that he featured and it was like a themed cocktail for each machine that he featured on his channel.

And I actually said to him in our recent chat that that was kind of the aspect of his channel that I enjoyed the most and perhaps his unique selling point. So, unfortunately, he doesn't have the time to do that in his recent videos, but he is considering bringing it back now. So, yeah. Oh, there we go. First cough of the ramble. Anyway, I do apologise. Had to take a bit of a pause there to have a bit of a coughing fit, but I'm back and I will continue. Yeah. After our little chat, he has mentioned that he might consider bringing it back at some point in the near future. So, when you do go and check out this video from Jeremy, perhaps leave a comment telling him how much you enjoyed the cocktails.

Anyway, to get to the point and why this is DOOM related, this is the Limited Run Games DOOM box that they released that you can actually play DOOM on. I reported on this at the time. And yeah, I really would like to pick one of these up for myself because it is a very cool thing indeed. But yeah, this is the Limited Run Games boxed release of DOOM, which incorporates a screen and controls and you can actually play DOOM on the box itself, adding to, of course, the ever-growing collection of interesting devices and whatnots, upon which you can enjoy the greatest game of all time. Now, of course, Jeremy does go on to continue to unbox this and show off all of the various bits and pieces that you get with this rather fine collector's edition.

Look at that. That is wonderful. That levitating cacodemon. But yeah, please do go and check this out. The triumphant return of Jeremy. Like I say, I didn't realise. My YouTube algorithm has failed me and not surfaced any of his videos to me. So I'm very glad indeed that this came up on my radar and it was very nice to get a message from you, Jeremy, as well. So do go check out his channel. He's very, very good at what he does. And he's a big DOOM fan as well. What's not to like? Anyway, a few more DOOM stories for you. id Software, of course, we had some rather unfortunate news about them a few weeks back being restructured and losing a load of people, projects being cancelled, that kind of thing.

Of course, Microsoft's ongoing restructuring, replacing everybody with AI. And we can now see from today's news just how well that's going. But yeah, id Software has announced that they are working on a new game, but we're not quite sure what it is. And it'll be some time before it's ready to reveal anything, in their own words. So yeah, this was first announced by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who's been making a few posts on X today, marking the looming 25th anniversary of the original Xbox console. "Few studios have shaped the first-person shooter genre as much as id Software," Sharma wrote. "Slaughter Mode comes to DOOM: The Dark Ages – Revelations on Monday, and the team is already working on its next game." Oh yeah, there's a new expansion, Slaughter Mode, for The Dark Ages, which I haven't actually played still.

I really do need to get on that. Anyway, in related news, there is a Wolfenstein game in development, Wolfenstein 3, at MachineGames. And this has again been announced as part of the Xbox 25th anniversary celebration. MachineGames, of course, released the previous few modern Wolfenstein games. Excellent, excellent games that I enjoyed very, very much, and very critically acclaimed. So hopefully this one is up to the same standard. This one is apparently Wolfenstein 3. Not much of a surprise as far as the industry is concerned, but hey, it has been officially announced now. And apparently it is also being turned into a TV series by Amazon. So yeah, I guess we've got that to look forward to as well. We've got some people here in motion capture suits.

I don't know what that's all about, but nice to see another Wolfenstein game coming out. And I guess we'll see what comes about with that series as well. We have some former id Software devs. I talked about that restructure a moment ago. They have founded a new studio and they are working on a new game already, which they have announced. It is based on Smash TV, if you remember that from back in the day. A very, very cool 16-bit computer game, or at least that's how I remember it. "After being laid off by Microsoft, former DOOM devs found new Smash TV-influenced FPS studio that isn't 'subject to investor demands'." And yeah, their game is called Danger Pay, and apparently they have professed their love for Smash TV and how it is an inspiration for their new game, Danger Pay.

So very much looking forward to seeing what that is going to be about. Yeah, also inspired by "dystopian movies such as deadly gameshow fable The Running Man, itself an influence on Smash TV". Great movie that. I haven't seen that in a very long time. The studio is called Hidden Horses and they have "20 id Software alumni on the books, including former lead VFX artist Todd Boyce, principal engine programmer Dustin Land, senior AI and gameplay engineer Daniel Young, producer Andrew Willis, and senior technical designer Jordan Turner", Tim Locke, we've got Allison Dombek, we've got all sorts of big names from id Software as part of this Hidden Horses studio. I think they're going to do great things. A bit of an announcement here, some news about how the company is structured and how it came about, and of course, their plans for the future over on Rock Paper Shotgun.

And of course, that will be linked down below. A couple more things for the DOOM Shrine. I told you it was a bumper offering this week. We have Romero Games, and again, part of this whole shake-up, this whole Microsoft culling thing that's been going on. They lost their publishing contract for an Xbox game that they were working on, and basically, they've had to cut down their 110-person team to 16.

Yeah, I mean, this is, of course, John Romero's studio, one of the co-creators of DOOM, and reportedly, by all accounts, a thoroughly nice chap. DOOM Guy is the name of his book. He has a very interesting autobiography, if you want to go and give that a read. When I was going through my London Marathon training a couple of years ago, I was listening to that as an audiobook. Always reminds me of those runs. Anyway, yeah, there is an interview with VGC, apparently here, as reported on pcgamer.com. Actually, let's just link directly to the VGC story and get rid of that. There we go. Video Games Chronicle. He has a new publisher for his axed Xbox game, and he has also rehired some of his staff that were, sadly, victims of that cull.

Although, of course, he has a much smaller operation than the Xbox operation as a whole, and unfortunately couldn't bring them all back on board. But very interesting interview with Romero, one of the legendary names in the industry, very much and very thoroughly DOOM-related as well, of course, being one of the creators of the game. Finally, speaking of John Romero, this video also came across my radar this week. This is John Romero's Head from fragglet. It's a four-minute, 42-second-long video all about John Romero's head, and how it was featured as the final boss in DOOM II, how they modelled it in clay, and basically the story behind that. So you can go and check that out as well in the links down below.

But I'm about to cough my guts up yet again. I can feel it coming. So that wraps up my DOOM Shrine, DOOM-related stories for this week. As mentioned, a bumper offering. Plenty of stuff for us to get our claws into.

### [Anthropic's Retro AI Slop Stop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=2319s)

The hot topic in the retro gaming world in recent months has, of course, been that of AI-assisted development. We're talking ports of games to other systems. For example, I don't know, Mario on the Master System or what have you. Systems upon which those games were, of course, never imagined or envisaged or intended to have been released in the first place. And once upon a time, having run this podcast for quite a few years now, I was quite excited to read about these new ports, about people's, you know, real efforts to overcome technical hurdles to get games running on systems that they were never intended to run on in the first place. And nowadays, I will say in recent months, there's just been an absolute glut of these ports.

And when I start to dig into them and look at some of the news stories around them, a lot of them leave a lot to be desired, I will say. You know, very low-effort porting efforts from people who don't really understand what they're doing, who just want to get something out there, get their 15 minutes of fame, move on to the next thing and put something out into the world that's kind of broken and had no real thought or love or care or attention put into it. I'm not saying they're all like that. I have specifically reported on a few that have actually ended up being rather good. And in the right hands, these tools can actually assist people to streamline their workflow and perhaps make their life a little bit easier.

I say that as a developer who has dabbled in these things myself, although I'm not a game developer, although that said, I have been working on my own personal reverse engineering project using Ghidra and a little sprinkle of Claude as well to assist in that process, learn a bit more about decompilation and recompilation. And also personally, on a more personal note, to bring back a game that I loved from the 90s that doesn't run well under emulation and that doesn't have any kind of modern engine or remake or support at all. But I'll talk about that a bit more in the future. I just wanted to be fully transparent on that. And I will say that this next story doesn't seem to have affected my project either.

But like I say, it's more of an exploration and a poking around reverse engineering type thing. Anyway, getting to the point. This story over on Engadget.com talks about Anthropic and how they have updated Claude to stop it from recreating existing video games. A story here by Jackson Chen. "Claude will no longer allow its users to make AI recreations of their favourite video games. As first discovered by an X user, Anthropic updated Claude with some new lines of code that read: 'Do build original games, games in a genre and games from the user's own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original.' The changes were confirmed by Addy Osmani, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, on X, who said the company wants to 'steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game' because 'using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy.'"

"Osmani clarified that any original game, genre game or games that are made with a user's own designs and assets should be unaffected, adding that Anthropic will 'continue to iterate to ensure we're striking the right balance.'" And it does talk a little bit about Anthropic's IPO and stuff as well, and a class action lawsuit, apparently. But you can go and read about that over on the Engadget story. Because I also came across, I believe this was posted on my Discord, I don't know, I'm starting to lose track of everything at the moment, but this story over on Retro Dodo by a chap with a glorious name, Brandon Saltalamacchia. I do love that name. "Claude's AI starts refusing to assist with Pokémon ROM hack and fan game development."

And this story talks about some specific projects from the Pokémon fan community, of course, really huge community to do with ROM hacks of existing games and also some new games that are in development. And of course, this is absolutely huge, of course, the Pokémon fan homebrew community. So yeah, the author here, Brandon, goes on to say that... Where am I? "One of the first creatives to be affected is Big Kid Nation, who you may know for developing an upcoming Pokémon game called Pokémon Arena 2D, a real-time battle game inspired by the pixelated sprites of Pokémon. The developer has been open about the use of AI, more specifically using Claude, and even stated he's pumped thousands of dollars and countless hours into creating the Pokémon game of his dreams."

"But as of today, stated on social media that 'Anthropic has cracked down and Claude models are starting to refuse work on Pokémon fan projects. All that money spent, never took a cent. I'll live on the street and work for free. If it helps, our game is still set for December.'" And there's a video here showing what this game is all about. Brandon went on to query Claude, who gave a list of three bullet points. So what Claude won't do is "recreate a specific Pokémon game, even renamed or called original, draw or use Pikachu or any other Pokémon character, or copy their designs in code, SVG or sprites, or use Pokémon-branded names, logos or mascots." And when queried further, Claude couldn't give an answer as to why or when that rule changed.

But of course, we now know that this is an official policy. People have dug into Claude Code and found the new rules and things. And Brandon does go on to conclude that actually, in his own words, "I believe it's a good thing. To be honest, there are a lot of people taking advantage of other people's work for financial gain, and the fact that many are reverse engineering games and software to create competitive products that end up damaging the very projects that we all love means rules like this need to be put into place. I say this a lot in our ROM hack coverage. Still to this day, the very best ROM hacks and fan games on the market that I love playing are all human-made, and even if this AI swarm of projects continue, I still think that's going to be the case, even if some of them are enjoyable to play for a small period of time."

"I'll keep you all updated on this story. It's an interesting one." So yeah, do go and follow the coverage of that over on Retro Dodo. Now, of course, there is quite a big game launch coming in the next week. What was the name of that game? I can't remember what it was. Oh yeah, it's GTA 6. And Ars Technica have speculated that the PC version of GTA 6, which of course hasn't been announced, we don't know if there's going to be a PC version. As someone who doesn't own a current-gen PlayStation or Xbox, I would very much like a PC version. Please, Rockstar, if you could get on with it. Thank you. Don't forget your roots.

But yeah, Ars Technica are now speculating that potential AI clones of GTA 6 might actually force Rockstar to come out with an official PC port quicker. "A former Rockstar tech director thinks the developer is facing new time pressures." A story here by Kyle Orland. "Yesterday, when reporting on emerging efforts to pipe the console version of GTA 6 through a PC's DLSS-powered NVIDIA GPU, we mentioned in passing that PC players could instead just wait for the AI-assisted decompilation port that will no doubt be coming in short order. Now, a former Rockstar tech director says he thinks that exact threat could cause the developer to work faster on the official PC version of its soon-to-release crime/lifestyle simulator." This is Obbe Vermeij – I believe "Vermeij" you pronounce his name – "hasn't worked at Rockstar since 2009, but in a new interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, he recalled how artists for the PC version of the original top-down Grand Theft Auto were incensed when the console version squashed the game's 256-colour textures down to 16 colours for the PS1 release."

So, it always has been that sort of awkward relationship between PC and console. So, in those days it was like PC first and then console second, even though that didn't really make much sense for the sales because the PlayStation versions sold way better. Anyway, there's a lot more detail in here about this, but yeah, people speculating that the PS5 release of GTA 6 may well be reverse-engineered, decompiled, ported to the PC, recompiled in short order with the help of some of these AI-assisted tools. I'm not sure I see it myself actually, to be honest, due to the sheer scale and complexity of this game. We have seen some PS5 emulators for the PC that are looking very promising. I think emulation is probably the better route to go down, maybe with some kind of translation layer.

I suppose that could be AI-assisted, but a full-blown AI decompilation and recompilation of such a complex and modern game? I don't know. It seems quite far-fetched, but hey, anything is possible, it seems. As to what the quality of any of the potential effort might be, I guess that also remains to be seen. But an interesting angle again to this story. And it seems that perhaps Claude might actually refuse to assist with this based on these new rules. Anyway, one more thing that is kind of related to this entire thing, and that I think is worth pointing out, because this does also have a retro angle to it, is this Humble Bundle website redesign. Now, I must admit, I had a bit of a falling out with Humble Bundle quite recently.

I loved the original concept of Humble Bundle, with all of these indie developers coming together to offer their games, and you could basically pay what you want, and all of the money went to the original developers. And it was just a really nice, cosy thing when it first launched. It was like 20 years ago. And in recent years, it's just become just yet another online marketplace for games, I have to say, and not one that I really talk about all that much. But apparently their website has had a vibe-coded redesign, relaunch. They have removed two-factor authentication from the website as a result of this, dramatically weakening account security, as reported here by PC Gamer. And people started advising on social media to log in and remove your payment details, just in case your account does get hacked.

And then other users pointed out that they had attempted to do that. And there's also no way to remove your saved payment details. I don't know if that has been fixed now, but all in all, does not bode well for Humble Bundle. Here is the new website. But yeah, if you are a user of that website, if you have an account on there, perhaps that is something to take into consideration.

### [Videos Of The Week](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=2980s)

And that, my dearest Ramblers, brings us around rather neatly to a rather subdued edition of our regular Videos of the Week feature. Wherein I feature a video, or indeed multiple videos, that I have seen here on the old YouTubes in the past week, that have entertained, educated, enlightened, or otherwise just distracted me from my ongoing illness in some small way.

Some of them are retro and vintage computing, tech and gaming related. Some of them aren't. Some of them I've seen. And some of them, admittedly, I haven't actually gotten around to watching yet. But either way, I thought you'd find them interesting. And as always, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can find them linked down below in the description in the Videos of the Week section. If you're listening to this on your podcast platform of choice, you'll find them in the show notes. Or indeed, you can also find them listed on ctrl-alt-rees.com, which, for some reason, I always neglect to mention. Anyway, I've got five videos for you this week, so let's jump straight into these. Now, this first one is from Artful Bytes, and it's called "I rebuilt the inside of a microcontroller".

Now, if you're of a computer science background, you've probably tinkered with stuff like this at university or whatever as a bit of a learning aid. But, you know, this is nonetheless a very well-presented and very well-considered, laid-out, thought-out and designed project in that vein. So what Artful Bytes has done here is he has taken the 6502 CPU, of course, that's a classic CPU behind all those wonderful old computers, and basically distilled it down to a collection of electronic components on a board and basically added LEDs and things so you can see which components are communicating with other components in real time. And unlike a 6502 inside a computer, which is clocked by a crystal, constantly refreshing that CPU, this actually uses a button.

So you can see individual CPU cycles as he presses the button and you can see where the data is going and all the rest of it. And I think it is a really good visual representation of a CPU and how it all works internally. And this is a very well put together video that just describes the design of all of that and what's happening and, you know, the reasoning behind it and how it all came about. There's also this external GPIO module that he designs and adds to the card. Really nice, neat little bit of a PCB design there, of course, and shows some data kind of flowing in and out externally to, you know, interfacing with other devices. So, you know what, if you want to learn a bit about CPUs and how they work internally, there's some wonderful on-screen stuff there.

You would, you know, you could certainly do a lot worse than going and watching this video over on Artful Bytes. It is 19 minutes and 46 seconds, a nice little 20-minute video for you to watch on your tea break at work, or perhaps while you wait for your email to come back up today. Anyway, my second video of the week for you this week is Omores, which is a channel I have featured quite a bit in the past. He's always doing interesting stuff with old computers and this is no exception. This is "Windows 3.1 Unlocked: USB 3.0, HD Audio, Blu-ray and More". And this is a combination of different drivers and projects and things for Windows 3.1 that have all come together to allow it to run on modern hardware with, as mentioned, USB 3 support.

We've got a Windows 3.1 port of Quake running on here, we've got DVD playback, we've got modern audio chipsets supported, and it is quite the technical tour de force. This is really pushing the limits of what's possible with Windows 3.1 with all of these modern add-ons and drivers and things. So I've actually kind of had in mind doing something similar to this. It's something that's popped up a few times over the years, but well, now I don't have to because someone else has actually gone ahead and done it and shown what it's all about. So yeah, if you perhaps want to have a go at running Windows 3.1 on your modern PC, why not? And using it to do modern tasks, this is a very good indication as to what is possible.

So 11 minutes, 43 seconds there by Omores, "Windows 3.1 Unlocked". My third video of the week for you this week is this one, James Channel. Lamenting the death of physical media, of course. Sony announcing that they are now discontinuing physical disc production by checking out the first console with physical media, I guess. Physical cartridges. No, it's not the Atari 2600 as is quite widely believed, but the Fairchild Channel F, which actually predates that console by a whole year, although wasn't perhaps the, well, wasn't indeed the huge commercial success that the Atari 2600 was, but a very, very important console in the history of console gaming. And James Channel, of course, as you know, a bit of irreverent, a bit of adult humour, some bad language, but still a lot of love and a lot of knowledge for these old machines.

And a really interesting video, 47 minutes and two seconds. It is a very thorough exploration of the console. And, you know, some good old Aussie humour thrown in there as well. Proper teardown and all the rest of it. And, you know, I like to stick this kind of thing on my TV while I'm cleaning the house or whatever and, you know, have it on in the background. Doesn't mean that, you know, it's not worth sitting down and watching intently properly and, you know, really paying attention to. But yeah, I don't know what I'm getting at. I'm getting a bit delirious with the man flu. It's a great video. You should go and watch it. 47 minutes and two seconds long. "Physical Games Turn 50 and Sony Announces Their Death" by James Channel.

Video number four is "How Old Movies are Upscaled without Computers", using... This is from Adam Savage's Tested, by the way. And this is using optical techniques. So scanning the original film, the original optical film, of course, which a lot of these older movies were recorded on. In this case, taking a look at 70 millimetre IMAX film in particular, which, of course, is becoming a bit of a dying technology. And yeah, of course, you know, you can take a digital video and you can upscale it, so to speak, using various techniques. You know, I don't really want to mention AI again, but there you go. That's kind of the cool technology of the moment. Here we go. Here's the inside of this contraption. But back in the day, this was achieved by going back to the original films, the original prints, as they called them, and actually optically enlarging them onto bigger formats.

And this is a bit of an exploration from a real working lab as to how that process actually worked. "How Old Movies are Upscaled without Computers" by Adam Savage's Tested, featuring FotoKem. And it is eight minutes and 41 seconds long. So a nice little tea break watch for you there. Adam Savage, of course, of MythBusters fame, but someone I have featured quite a lot in my Videos of the Week because he makes some very interesting videos about very interesting things. And fifthly, and finally, just wanted to give this project a bit of a spotlight. This has been posted on my Discord server in the past couple of weeks and discussed a bit. This is a project to port Tomb Raider to the Sega Saturn, and a massive milestone in that project.

They're basically basing this on the OpenLara open-source Tomb Raider engine. But they have built a huge amount of their own technology around this, and their own kind of renderer and stuff as well. And they now have it running at 30 FPS. So previously, the best they could squeeze out of this hardware was 12 FPS. But yeah, they've actually got it running at 30 FPS, which is quite the technical achievement and a huge leap for them. So well done. Fantastic little project. Of course, I've always been fascinated by the Sega Saturn, as you probably know. But the thing I really liked about this was just how much technical detail it goes into. Just explaining the whole graphics pipeline, the rendering pipeline of the Sega Saturn, and how they've used various...

I don't want to say tricks, but very clever programming techniques and things to really squeeze the absolute best performance out of this old hardware. And I absolutely love stuff like that. I know that you guys do too. So I wanted to draw your attention to this. Also, a very cool project. If you are lucky enough to own an original Sega Saturn, perhaps with an optical drive emulator of some sort, or you just want to check this out in an emulator, or on your MiSTer, or whatever, then that is very, you know, it is very worthwhile, very worth taking a look at. Really cool project.

"Saturn Homebrew Devlog: Tomb Raider from 12 to 30 FPS". "Tomb Raider at 30 FPS on a real Sega Saturn, up from 12 FPS when our new engine first ran at our test spot. This video walks through how we won back each millisecond: the drawing chip, both CPUs, the DSP, a rewrite of the renderer, and the Cistern, the game's hardest scene." Really interesting stuff. So they are my five videos of the week for you this week. We have, number one, "I rebuilt the inside of a microcontroller", showing how the 6502 CPU works in great graphical detail by Artful Bytes. We have "Windows 3.1 Unlocked: USB 3.0, HD Audio, Blu-ray and More" from Omores, just showing off what is possible with Windows 3.1 these days. We have that video from James Channel, all about the Fairchild Channel F, a bit of a more kind of laid-back, unscripted kind of exploration. Always very entertaining videos, and a very important bit of history.

Of course, a very important lesson, a very important and quite poignant message, I guess, about the death of physical media. We have "How Old Movies are Upscaled without Computers" from Adam Savage and FotoKem, showing that wonderful film scanning and enlarging process. And finally, we have "Sega Saturn Homebrew Devlog: Tomb Raider from 12 to 30 FPS", looking at that wonderful homebrew Tomb Raider port to the Sega Saturn, and a bit more of a technical in-depth investigation of how the Saturn hardware actually works.

### [...And Finally](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOP-gLRvJ4Y&t=3635s)

And that, as they say, my dearest Ramblers, is that. So thank you ever so much for joining me. Rees Rambles goes out every week, or at least most weeks, on a Friday night at two minutes to midnight UK time, on both my second YouTube channel, youtube.com/reesrambles, and also the podcast platforms. A big part of this production, of course, is my Discord community, who provide some or all or none of the stories every single week for Rees Rambles. So a big shout out to all of you wonderful people, including, but not limited to, Mike C, Steve Cooper from Steve'sTechShed, Analogue Sheep, Mx Autumn of PhotoGabble fame, AmigaPete, mumboking, James from NCoT Technology, Bard, OtherRetroMatt, Wintermute of CoF, LifeSizeTeddyBear, TechNick, Gary Scholz, dbk, Catriona, Pillock and Sozzled, Garoninja, gravitone, and of course our good friend mnemo, who has popped back in to see us.

Welcome back, mnemo. And just before we sign off for this week, we'll just have one more thing, shall we? Because I don't know about you, but I have often pondered, what is the oldest official Windows application that still runs under the latest release of Windows 11? Well, we can ponder no more thanks to tomshardware.com. "Tech sleuth claims to have found the oldest GUI application that still works with Windows 11. 34-year-old CDPLAYER.EXE from Windows NT in November 1992 wins the prize." Story here by Mark Tyson.

So yeah, this is a story about a technology enthusiast, a blogger called Enlyth, who has been testing all sorts of old Windows applications under Windows 11, and indeed the original release of CDPLAYER.EXE, as bundled with Windows NT back in 1992, runs natively under Windows 11. A bit more of a story here about various other games and things that run: FreeCell. Of course, I never could work out how to play FreeCell. And you can also make 16-bit applications work as well by installing something called otvdm, which I know absolutely nothing about. It's based on the winevdm project and it basically looks like it's some kind of translation layer for older Windows apps. But personally, I think that's cheating. But it does mean that you can run REVERSI.EXE from Windows 1.01 in 1985, which is 41 years old.

So there we go. That answers that question. Thank you once again for joining me. If you're interested in anything that I have featured at all in this week's ramble, as always, you'll find the links down below in the description if you're watching this on youtube.com/reesrambles, or in the show notes if you're listening to this on your podcast platform. Or if you want to check them out later, you can check out my website, ctrl-alt-rees.com. That's all I have for you for this week. Thank you ever so much once more for joining me. Hopefully, I'm feeling better next week, but at least I've managed to make it through this ramble in this freezing cold studio. Feels good. See ya!

## Original Video Links
Episode Links:
BBC Maida Vale Studios: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44367396](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44367396)
Jensen Huang Resigns: [https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-confirms-jensen-huang-has-resigned-as-ceo-colette-kress-executive-vice-president-and-chief-financial-officer-appointed-interim-ceo](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-confirms-jensen-huang-has-resigned-as-ceo-colette-kress-executive-vice-president-and-chief-financial-officer-appointed-interim-ceo)
Huang To Appear Before Congress: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c6zjry11v8w1t](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c6zjry11v8w1t)
How Sega Saved NVIDIA: [https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-nearly-went-out-of-business-in-1996-trying-to-make-segas-dreamcast-gpu-instead-sega-americas-ceo-offered-the-company-a-dollar5-million-lifeline](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/nvidia-nearly-went-out-of-business-in-1996-trying-to-make-segas-dreamcast-gpu-instead-sega-americas-ceo-offered-the-company-a-dollar5-million-lifeline)
Microsoft Cloud Outage: [https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/11/12/microsoft-struggling-to-fix-massive-cloud-outage-thats-taken-down-email-and-intune/5309531](https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/11/12/microsoft-struggling-to-fix-massive-cloud-outage-thats-taken-down-email-and-intune/5309531)
Outage Live Coverage (BBC): [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq5y10ge3dp3t](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq5y10ge3dp3t)
DOOM On The Spectrum Next: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzObWFTUFh0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzObWFTUFh0)
DOOM On Atari 8-bit: [https://x.com/Kweepa/status/2119126034960240685](https://x.com/Kweepa/status/2119126034960240685)
Download Of The Above: [https://kweepa.itch.io/doom6502](https://kweepa.itch.io/doom6502)
DOOM On A Power Bank: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb_BR02aldo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb_BR02aldo)
DOOM On An IBM Mainframe: [https://wndsoftware.com/doom](https://wndsoftware.com/doom)
Jeremy's Retro Bar DOOM Box: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enkXeXbqHw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enkXeXbqHw8)
id Software's Next Game: [https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/doom-studio-id-software-confirms-its-working-on-a-new-game/](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/doom-studio-id-software-confirms-its-working-on-a-new-game/)
Wolfenstein 3 Confirmed: [https://www.ign.com/articles/wolfenstein-3-confirmed-to-be-in-development-at-machinegames](https://www.ign.com/articles/wolfenstein-3-confirmed-to-be-in-development-at-machinegames)
Hidden Horses: [https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/after-being-laid-off-by-microsoft-former-doom-devs-found-new-smash-tv-influenced-fps-studio-that-isnt-subject-to-investor-demands](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/after-being-laid-off-by-microsoft-former-doom-devs-found-new-smash-tv-influenced-fps-studio-that-isnt-subject-to-investor-demands)
Romero Games' New Publisher: [https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/john-romero-confirms-his-axed-xbox-game-has-a-new-publisher-and-hes-rehired-some-staff/](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/john-romero-confirms-his-axed-xbox-game-has-a-new-publisher-and-hes-rehired-some-staff/)
John Romero's Head: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sznmfmtebf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sznmfmtebf4)
Claude Stops Game Recreations: [https://www.engadget.com/2303469/anthropic-updates-claude-to-stop-it-from-recreating-existing-video-games/](https://www.engadget.com/2303469/anthropic-updates-claude-to-stop-it-from-recreating-existing-video-games/)
Claude Vs Pokemon Fan Games: [https://retrododo.com/claudes-ai-starts-refusing-to-assist-with-pokemon-rom-hack-fan-game-development/](https://retrododo.com/claudes-ai-starts-refusing-to-assist-with-pokemon-rom-hack-fan-game-development/)
AI Clones Of GTA VI: [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/11/could-potential-ai-clones-of-gta-vi-force-a-quicker-official-port/](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/11/could-potential-ai-clones-of-gta-vi-force-a-quicker-official-port/)
Humble Bundle Drops 2FA: [https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/humble-bundles-new-redesign-inexplicably-removes-2-factor-authentication-dramatically-weakening-account-security/](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/humble-bundles-new-redesign-inexplicably-removes-2-factor-authentication-dramatically-weakening-account-security/)
Humble Bundle: [https://www.humblebundle.com/](https://www.humblebundle.com/)
Oldest Windows 11 App: [https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/tech-sleuth-claims-to-have-found-the-oldest-gui-application-that-still-works-with-windows-11-cdplayer-exe-from-windows-nt-in-november-1992-wins-the-prize](https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/tech-sleuth-claims-to-have-found-the-oldest-gui-application-that-still-works-with-windows-11-cdplayer-exe-from-windows-nt-in-november-1992-wins-the-prize)
Video Of The Week 1 (Artful Bytes Microcontroller): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNy8R3f58Ms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNy8R3f58Ms)
Video Of The Week 2 (Omores Windows 3.1 Unlocked): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53q9CnBqbSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53q9CnBqbSI)
Video Of The Week 3 (James Channel Physical Games 50): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHFqt8fRBws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHFqt8fRBws)
Video Of The Week 4 (Tested Old Movie Upscaling): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vutGHN0ux5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vutGHN0ux5k)
Video Of The Week 5 (AJBats Saturn Tomb Raider): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIRVa_ZVdvY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIRVa_ZVdvY)