Hackaday Links: June 14, 2026
Times are tough out there, and many are starting to feel the pressure at the grocery store checkout line or the gas pump. But whenever you start to worry about affording life’s necessities, take comfort in the knowledge that somebody is so flush with cash that on Friday they decided to treat themselves and spend $3 million for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Although we’re not going to say it necessarily justifies the insane price — a new record for the most ever paid for a video game, incidentally — Heritage Auctions does note in their press release that this is an exceptionally rare version of what’s admittedly one of the most iconic pieces of software ever produced. This is only one of three copies of this particular variant known to exist, which Nintendo apparently distributed to test markets in the United States ahead of the game’s official 1985 release.
In slightly more modern gaming news, Asha Sharma, the new head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, has been making some big swings to try and get Microsoft’s gaming division back on track after years of declining sales. As part of that effort, she recently penned an article detailing some of the challenges the company is facing, which includes some interesting hardware details.
According to the blog post, she claims that in February, the cost of memory and storage components for the Xbox console had doubled compared to the previous year. But those numbers have jumped again, and by the time the holidays roll around, she expects they’ll be paying five times what they did in 2024. That’s bad news for anyone looking to put an Xbox under the tree come Christmas, but even worse news as the company works on the console’s successor. Considering that today’s hardware from Sony and Microsoft can already set you back $700 USD depending on which version you get, it seems like we’re approaching a point where gaming consoles could price themselves out of the market.
Those thinking of mowing some lawns this summer to save up for their $1K next-generation consoles may be interested to hear that the Food and Drug Administration has put its stamp of approval on the first new sunscreen ingredient in the US in more than two decades. Bemotrizinol is a broad-spectrum UV absorber that knocks out 310 and 340 nm, and while Uncle Sam has taken his sweet time to give it the OK, the European Union has been slathering it on since 2000. The first company authorized to sell it in the US will be marketing it under the name Parsol Shield later this year, with other manufacturers set to follow in 2027.
While it seems the world has agreed on adding bemotrizinol to their sunscreens, many people are decidedly less enthusiastic about AI code in their open-source projects. One of those people is Drew DeVault, which is why he decided to fork Vim once he found out its maintainers were merging in code written by large language models (LLMs). Rather than break off at the last version untainted by clankers, Drew decided to divert from the upstream project at version 8.2.x. This means that some newer plugins may have compatibility issues, although security fixes and other selected updates from the 9.x branch have been back-ported to the newly coined Vim Classic. If you give it a shot, let us know in the comments.
Finally, if a non-AI fork of Vim is still too mainstream to scratch that itch for you, Phoronix is reporting that ReactOS can now run Half Life. If this were any other website, we might devote the next paragraph to explaining the significance of a nearly 30-year-old PC game being run on a free and open-source operating system designed to provide binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows. But it’s Sunday evening, and you’re reading Hackaday, so just take the win.
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.