Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
High End Vienna 2026 had no shortage of ambitious loudspeakers, six-figure electronics, and systems designed to remind everyone that “affordable high-end” is still a phrase the industry says with a straight face, but is sometimes subject to interpretation. But the ESD Acoustic Super Dragon was operating in its own category. This was not a large horn system. This was a room-dominating, field-coil sporting, Class A powered, carbon fiber, multi-way monument to what happens when subtlety is escorted from the building, dumped on Bruno-Kreisky-Platz, and told to take the U-Bahn home. “Fahrscheine, bitte!”
We had a chance to experience the Super Dragon system for our first time at the show, where ESD Acoustic staged one of the most technically extreme demonstrations at High End Vienna. The company also held an official “Super Dragon Technical Exchange + Deep Dive” press event during the show, which was appropriate, because this was not the kind of system one explains with a brochure. You need measurements, diagrams, floor reinforcement, and possibly a municipal permit.

The Super Dragon is built around a field-coil horn architecture using ten field-coil driver units, large carbon-fiber horns, Truextent beryllium diaphragms for the midrange, tweeter, and super tweeter sections, and titanium sandwich diaphragms for bass, sub-bass, and subwoofer duties. It is not a conventional passive loudspeaker blown up to absurd scale. It is a five-plus-one-way active horn system using an analog active crossover, allowing dedicated Class A amplifiers to drive individual sections directly (amps are included with purchase).
That design choice matters. The Super Dragon’s drama is not only visual, although ignoring the visual part would require a better pair of glasses. The system’s frequency response range is specified from 18 Hz to 52 kHz, with 112 dB sensitivity and crossover points at 100 Hz, 500 Hz, 2 kHz, and 8 kHz. In terms of weight, the main speaker enclosure alone is listed at 1,190 kg (2,623.5 pounds), with the subwoofer section at 442 kg (974 pounds) and the sub-bass section at 990 kg (2182.6 pounds). So yeah, that’s over 5,700 pounds of speaker gear. Apartment dwellers need not apply.
You may need to ask a few friends and the dealer to spend the day setting this up at home. You know… In your auditorium.
The Super Dragon’s driver layout includes a massive subwoofer horn covering the lowest frequencies, a low-range carbon-fiber horn, midrange and high-frequency horn sections, and a dedicated tweeter/super tweeter array. ESD uses carbon fiber extensively in the horn assemblies to reduce resonance and control mass, while the powered field-coil motor system gives the company greater control over magnetic behavior than conventional permanent-magnet designs. If “field coil” rings a bell, it may be because that’s the design used by speaker designer extraordinaire Mr. Andrew Jones himself, in his recently introduced Troubadour speakers. But let’s get back to these horns.
The supporting equipment stack was also ESD’s own, rather than a random pile of trophy electronics dragged into the room for branding purposes. The published system configuration includes the CDT-1B CD transport, DA-1B DAC, DPA-1B preamplifier, DX-1B active analog crossover, D100W-1B monoblock amplifiers, DPC-1 center power supply, Kunlun equipment supports, and ESD’s Lion-series AES, balanced, speaker, and power cables.

The electronics are not afterthoughts. The CDT-1B transport uses a Philips CD-Pro2M mechanism and a separate power supply. The DA-1B DAC supports PCM up to 768 kHz/32-bit and DSD512. The DPA-1B preamp is fully balanced with a separate power supply, while the DX-1B active crossover uses interchangeable crossover cards and provides six balanced outputs per channel. The D100W-1B monoblock is a single-ended pure Class A amplifier rated at 20 watts peak (10 watts nominal) into 8 ohms. You get one amps of these per horn, so you won’t need to go amplifier shopping too.
Pricing is where things get both fascinating, if not slightly unhinged. ESD’s standard Dragon speaker package has been listed at roughly $1.05 million, with the full Dragon System listed as starting at around $1.53 million. The special Super Dragon configuration shown at High End Vienna 2026 with its custom lacquer finish was reported to cost more than $3.6 million. That’s quite a paint job.

But how did it sound? In a word: breathtaking. The system had no trouble filling the huge ballroom with powerful dynamic sound. The demo clips we heard were mostly orchestral pieces, and the system really did capture the dynamics of a live orchestra performance, from delicate oboe soloes to powerful strikes of the bass drum and tympanis. Soundstage was huge and dynamics were without parallel. These horns were made for playing music. And that’s just what they did.
Start rubbing that Powerball ticket on your friendly neighborhood leprechaun. And in the meantime, make sure there are no cracks in your foundation.

The ESD Acoustic Super Dragon was one of the most outrageous rooms at High End Vienna 2026, but not because it was merely expensive. Expensive is easy in high-end audio. The Super Dragon was outrageous because it was unapologetically engineered as a complete ecosystem, from source to crossover to amplification to horn-loaded transducers. It was massive, excessive, impractical, and impossible to ignore.
So yes, the price is ridiculous. The size is ridiculous. The logistics are ridiculous. But the system itself was no joke. It was ESD Acoustic making a very loud argument that extreme horn loudspeaker design still has room to evolve and they’re the ones who will push it forward.
Just make sure your listening room has its own zip code.
For once, SpaceX is ahead of schedule: Elon Musk’s space and AI conglomerate officially confirmed that it has raised $75 billion from the sale of its shares to its underwriters, who are set to begin marketing the company on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday.
SpaceX priced its 555.6 million shares at $135 each, the company said in an update on its website. That makes SpaceX officially the largest IPO in history, easily eclipsing the $24.9 billion in funds raised by Saudi Aramco during its 2019 public markets debut. At this price, the deal also looks set to make Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
The company, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., will trade under the SPCX ticker symbol.
While IPO pricing typically works itself out as markets open, SpaceX took an unusual approach in setting the price well in advance. The company was testing its $135 share target with investors before its official roadshow started, the Financial Times reported. And that offering, which eschewed traditional IPO pricing practices, attracted four times the available shares, per Bloomberg.
As active trading gets underway tomorrow, SpaceX’s share price may sink or rise. But anecdotal reports suggest that big institutional investors and individual buyers are lining up to purchase shares in the 24-year-old technology company.
If the sale is as oversubscribed as the talkative bankers make it out to be, they have an option to bring an additional 83.3 million shares to market, which would raise another $11 billion at the company’s opening price.
Hyperliquid, a crypto betting market that attempts to offer synthetic exposure to SpaceX stock, currently prices the shares at $167, suggesting that market participants expect a classic 20% IPO pop on the first day of trading.
In the longer term, there are big open questions about how SpaceX will be able to justify its eye-popping valuation. The company’s outstanding engineering projects, from the world’s largest reusable rocket to a new American chip fab, fill up a daunting to-do list.
The biggest beneficiary of the offering is Musk himself. He owns just under 850 million Class A shares entitled to 1 vote per share. He is also entitled to another 5.6 billion Class B shares, which comes with 10 votes per share and includes the billion shares contingent on a long-shot bet that a million people will end up living in a SpaceX colony on Mars.
The listing will deliver Antonio Gracias, founder and CEO of Valor Management, 503.4 million shares, putting the value of his position at nearly $68 billion at the IPO price. Other major shareholders poised to gain from the historic offering include SpaceX board member and investor Luke Nosek, who owns 33 million shares, and COO Gwynne Shotwell, who holds nearly 12.6 million shares.
The IPO will also deliver significant windfalls to many of the roughly 400 venture capitalists who backed the company during its two decades as a private entity, a period in which it raised about $40 billion in private capital.
Additionally, a massive pool of smaller investors who backed SpaceX via special purpose vehicles (SPVs) are also set to see their initial capital multiply. However, due to the complexities of these vehicles, some may not know the exact magnitude of their gains for months after SpaceX make its public market debut.
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Prometheus, the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit, announced it raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation.
The new funds came from Bezos himself, as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others.
This is the second fundraise round for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial raise of $6.2 billion, according to CNBC.
Prometheus is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer” — software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds.
The ambition is sweeping: replace large swaths of engineering work with AI. Although the startup will automate many aspects of an engineer’s job, Bezos told CNBC that the productivity gains AI delivers will lead to what he calls “labor scarcity” — his term for a world where demand for human workers outpaces supply.
That puts him at odds with a number of prominent voices in tech. While some AI leaders predict widespread job losses, Bezos sees it differently.
“Significant productivity in the economy is going to raise the standard of living,” he said. “People who today have two-earner households, they’ll become one-earner households. Maybe some people who are working overtime will stop working overtime.”
The company, which currently has 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich, is keeping the specifics of what it has already built under wraps.
Bezos indicated that a large portion of the capital will go toward the company’s large compute needs.
Bezos knows something about labor at scale. Amazon — where he serves as executive chairman and is the largest individual shareholder — employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide and over the past year, under CEO Andy Jassy, has laid off tens of thousands of people as the company has accelerated its own automation push.
At $41 billion, Prometheus is one of the most richly valued AI startups ever funded, and one of the largest single bets on the physical AI sector. But it isn’t the only company attracting massive investor interest. In recent months, venture capitalists have increasingly poured capital into physical AI, a booming sector that investors and founders argue is inherently more defensible than pure software — because the physical world creates moats that code alone cannot.
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In a nutshell: On the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft addresses the overall security of its many software products. The Patch Tuesday tradition has continued for more than 20 years, but the number of vulnerabilities addressed in monthly updates is now truly skyrocketing.
Microsoft recently released its latest batch of monthly security fixes for vulnerabilities found in Windows, Office, and other products sold by the company. This month’s Patch Tuesday stands out for a record number of CVE-tracked flaws, with 200 individual bugs and 33 “critical” vulnerabilities that could have serious consequences for Microsoft customers.
The June updates address a wide range of security issues. The most common categories include elevation of privilege vulnerabilities (65), remote code execution bugs (55), and information disclosure issues (30), among others. The Patch Tuesday release does not include flaws discovered in the Chromium-based Edge browser, which saw 360 issues fixed this month alone.
The updates also addressed five zero-day vulnerabilities, which are publicly disclosed bugs that are already being actively exploited by cybercriminals. The zero-day flaws include CVE-2026-45586, an elevation of privilege vulnerability; CVE-2026-49160, a denial-of-service vulnerability in Http.sys; and CVE-2026-42897, a server spoofing vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange.
The CVE-2026-45586 patch targets a vulnerability previously known as GreenPlasma. The flaw was discovered by a security researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse, who has been in a dispute with Microsoft over alleged attempts to damage his reputation.

This month’s Patch Tuesday also addresses a security flaw discovered by Nightmare-Eclipse. Known as “YellowKey,” the bug was described as a potential attempt to introduce a stealth backdoor in Microsoft’s BitLocker full-volume encryption feature. Tracked as CVE-2026-45585, the issue should now be fully patched. However, Microsoft has not publicly acknowledged Nightmare-Eclipse’s contribution.
Speaking of, the researcher also released another exploit dubbed “RoguePlanet.” The proof-of-concept code could potentially be abused to open a command prompt with full “SYSTEM” privileges. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will quietly address the issue without crediting its original discoverer.
Security experts warn that the number of software bugs addressed through Patch Tuesday and other periodic patching programs is likely to continue increasing. Microsoft noted that both security professionals and threat actors are now using advanced AI models to discover new vulnerabilities. The result is a rapidly expanding attack surface, with software vendors expected to spend increasing time fixing issues uncovered through automated discovery methods.
Editor’s take: Much like the Call of Duty series and pornography, generative AI is one of those things that’s incredibly popular despite a lot of people claiming to dislike it. ChatGPT, for example, has just reached one billion monthly app users, just 3.5 years after it launched in November 2022.
Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower reports that ChatGPT has become the fastest app ever to reach one billion monthly app users (MAUs), beating the previous record holder, Google Maps, which took around five years after launch to hit the same number.
ChatGPT isn’t the only AI app experiencing immense popularity right now. The monthly number of Claude and Meta AI users increased by 640% and 973% year-on-year. ChatGPT was up by a mere 62%, though it remains the clear leader.
Abe Yousef, Sensor Tower’s senior insights analyst, told CNBC that model improvements and more positive market sentiment have pushed the growth of ChatGPT’s rivals.
Earlier this year, OpenAI was one of several companies to sign deals with the Pentagon. It led to a huge consumer backlash, prompting CEO Sam Altman to promise additional safeguards to prevent government use of the technology for surveillance of US citizens – while leaving several obvious loopholes in place, of course.
Sensor Tower found that ChatGPT uninstalls surged around 295% day-over-day on February 28, the day after OpenAI announced the Pentagon agreement. It also led to Anthropic’s Claude becoming the top free app on the iPhone.

Anthropic has refused to let the government use its models for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, leading to a bitter dispute and the company’s blacklisting over claims that it posed a national security risk. But it was recently reported that the NSA is using Claude Mythos for offensive cyber operations.
Paradoxically, the use of generative AI tools is growing as public opinion toward the technology worsens. In addition to the tens of thousands of job losses being caused, which some now say never really happened, the anger toward new data center builds is growing.
On that note, an OpenAI report this week claimed that Chinese ChatGPT users were trying to encourage anti-data center feelings in the US. The company admitted that their efforts had little effect – it’s not like people don’t hate the facilities already – but the report might encourage some people to soften their opposition simply because they don’t want to be thought of as “influenced” by China.
Humanoids aren’t quite ready to replace factory workers, but the industry can’t wait. Faced with labor shortages, manufacturers have shown growing interest in startups that promise faster automation without the usual tradeoffs.
That’s the bet behind Theker, an AI robotics startup that aims to go beyond robots trained for a single task. “If you always have to put the same cookie in the same box, that works perfectly, but most processes aren’t like that,” co-founder Carla Gómez Cano told TechCrunch.
Theker is designed for that messier reality. Unlike humanoid robots designed around a fixed form — think Boston Dynamics — Theker’s machines are built to be reconfigured. Their hands, arms, and overall form can be swapped out or resized depending on the task, whether that’s sorting packages, packing clothing, or handling bottles and cans in a warehouse.
That Inditex, Zara’s parent company, signed on as an early backer is a signal of where Theker’s ambitions start, not where they end. The company’s broader goal is to move beyond retail into heavier industrial settings like manufacturing, where the complexity and scale of manual tasks is even greater.
This generalist ambition has helped cement Theker’s status as one of Europe’s hot startups to watch — and raise capital accordingly. The Barcelona-based startup has just raised $85 million in what it’s calling “Europe’s largest ever robotics Series A.” (We haven’t found a larger one in our records, either.)
Less than a year after a record seed round, this Series A was led by American VC firm CRV and backed by a mix of traditional and strategic investors, including Samsung and Aglaé Ventures, the investment vehicle tied to LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault.
Gómez Cano said Samsung is not a client yet but that the two are in advanced discussions. Theker would welcome having the Korean company as a customer, supplier, and investor simultaneously — a trifecta that would give the startup both revenue and credibility in manufacturing at scale.
She also noted that she and co-founder Jiaqiang Ye Zhu “didn’t build Theker to run pilots,” so the team skips innovation departments entirely and goes straight to logistics or operations, where deals are real and timelines are shorter.
To demonstrate that the company can actually deliver on that, Theker has a showroom in central Barcelona, and plans to open others as it expands across Europe, the U.S. and Asia. It will also grow its headcount across tech, deployment, and sales.
“We already received 15,000 job applications and have to filter like crazy,” Gómez Cano said. She estimated that the team could grow from dozens to up to 120 people by the end of the year, then caught herself: “I am saying that, but I also said that we’d raise $30 or $40 million!”
That Theker managed to raise twice its target also reinforces the startup’s conviction in keeping its HQ in Barcelona, a growing robotics hub, and in Europe’s tech ecosystem more broadly. “It has never been a barrier to acceleration for us, so we are making the most of it,” Gómez Cano said.
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Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest producer of insulin, disclosed a data breach affecting patient information from some clinical trials.
Founded in 1923, Novo Nordisk now employs around 67,900 people across 80 offices worldwide and is the maker of viral GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs Wegovy and Ozempic.
The company revealed on Thursday that attackers gained access to its internal IT systems and data related to patients participating in some clinical trials, including their patient IDs (random alphanumeric strings) and information on trial participation, sex, year of birth, biomarkers, health/immunogenicity data, and lifestyle factors (e.g., smoking, alcohol use, BMI).
However, Novo Nordisk said that this data was pseudonymized and that the attackers can’t use it to identify any affected patients by name.
“While our investigation and response are ongoing, we have discovered that certain non-public data, including personal data, was copied externally without authorisation. We are informing the impacted parties as appropriate,” the company said.
“This information is not directly linked to any patients by name or other direct identifiers. Information about identity would therefore require access to underlying information, identifying patients by name etc. This information was not exposed. We therefore do not consider the incident to enable any third party to identify participants in our clinical trials.”
The data breach also affects an undisclosed number of healthcare professionals (HCPs), whose names, registration numbers, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, WhatsApp details, and office locations have been exposed.
Novo Nordisk warned affected HCPs to be wary of unexpected messages or calls, as they may be targeted in phishing attacks via e-mail, phone, WhatsApp, or fraudulent messages impersonating their colleagues.
The company has taken the compromised internal IT systems offline but noted that its core business operations were not impacted. Novo Nordisk is now investigating the incident with the help of external cybersecurity experts to assess the full impact and scope of the breach.
“We are working to bring the affected systems back online in a controlled and safe manner; however, we acknowledge this process takes time. Our core business operations are not impacted and remain up and running,” Novo Nordisk added.
Novo Nordisk has yet to disclose when the breach was detected and how many individuals had their personal and patient data exposed.
A Novo Nordisk spokesperson was not immediately available for comment when BleepingComputer reached out for more details on the attack.
Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
Our recently concluded event in Europe saw the return of the Hackaday Communicator badge — a stylish handheld gadget with a QWERTY keyboard, a LoRa radio, and an ESP32. It came complete with a simple messaging app built into it’s MicroPython firmware, and by all accounts it was a great success.
But there was certainly room for improvement, which is where [Giovi321]’s new firmware for the badge comes in. It brings support for Meshtastic proper, as well as longer battery life support for GPS module. To install this firmware you will need to have the ESP-IDF but fortunately there are very comprehensive instructions provided to help you. Under the hood it’s running FreeRTOS.
It’s something which is so often missing with an event badge, any sense of how it might have a life after the event rather than becoming a piece of e-waste. The Communicator badge is such a nice physical design that it obviously has potential, so this firmware unlocks it and gives the badge a use out in the real world. We really like it for this, and we’ll be flashing a few of our badges over to give it a shot shorlty.
If you’re looking to upgrade the hardware on your Communicator, check out the custom RGB keyboard we covered last week.
Samsung is finally adding one of Android’s most basic quality-of-life features to Galaxy phones.
With One UI 9, Galaxy users can now display their internet speed directly in the status bar. This makes it easier to keep an eye on network performance without opening a separate app or digging through settings.
It’s a feature that has long been available on many Android devices from brands such as Xiaomi, OnePlus and Realme, making its absence on Samsung phones all the more surprising. Now, it looks like Samsung is finally closing that gap.
The feature arrives through an updated version of Samsung’s QuickStar module within the Good Lock customisation suite. Once enabled, a small indicator appears in the status bar showing real-time network speeds while you browse, stream or download content.
While it may seem like a minor addition, it’s one that power users have been requesting for years. A live network speed indicator can be particularly useful when troubleshooting slow connections. It is also useful when checking download activity or simply confirming that your mobile data is actually doing what it should.
The update appears to include another notable change, too. Samsung has added a new toggle that lets users disable the Now Bar. The Now Bar is the company’s live activity-style feature that surfaces information such as timers, voice recordings and ongoing calls on the lock screen.
These additions form part of the wider One UI 9 update, which is currently being tested on Galaxy S26 devices. Samsung is also preparing to bring the software to older Galaxy flagships, but a broader rollout timeline has yet to be confirmed.
Beyond the new status bar indicator, One UI 9 is expected to introduce several other upgrades. These include a redesigned call log, more customisation options for the Quick Panel and further improvements to Samsung DeX.
The network speed indicator might not be the flashiest feature in One UI 9. However, for many Galaxy owners, it could end up being one of the most useful.
For Open Call 2026, IMR will be joined by a new delivery partner, the South Eastern Applied Materials Research Centre at South East Technological University.
Irish Manufacturing Research (IMR) has today (12 June) announced the next European Space Agency Phi-Lab Ireland Open Call, which invites Irish companies to better position themselves in the global space economy and as Europe’s hub for the development and manufacturing of next-generation space-bound hardware.
ESA Phi-Lab Ireland funds research in advanced materials and manufacturing, across the entire life-cycle of space-optimised hardware and for Open Call 2026, will be joined by a new delivery partner, the South Eastern Applied Materials (SEAM) Research Centre at South East Technological University.
Last year, Open Call 2025 drew involvement from a range of organisations across the Irish industrial base, with companies such as Mbryonics and Ubotica successfully incubated within the Irish Phi-Lab building.
Open Call 2026 will offer ESA innovation seed funding of up to €400,000 for projects less than two-years, alongside expert mentorship, training, access to state-of-the-art research infrastructure and comprehensive networking opportunities. Key research areas supported by Open Call 2026 will include advanced materials research, additive manufacturing, structural analysis and simulation and integration of smart materials.
Commenting on the launch of Open Call 2026, Dr Ken Horan, the director of technology innovation and entrepreneurship at IMR and head of ESA Phi-Lab Ireland, said: “Ireland already has world-class manufacturing and materials capabilities, what has been missing is a dedicated front door into the space sector.
“That is exactly what ESA Phi-Lab Ireland provides and as the national platform for space technology development, it sits at the very centre of our national effort to support companies seeking a role in the global space economy. Open Call 2026 is an open invitation to ambitious Irish companies, whether or not they have ever worked in space before, to build the products and the expertise that will define the next decade of this industry in Europe”.
Evelyn Kerschbaumer, the commercial officer at the European Space Agency, said: “The space economy is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, and Europe’s future competitiveness depends on a strong base of innovative companies in every Member State.
“Through ESA Phi-LabNET we are building that base region by region and Ireland’s focus on space-optimised hardware brings a distinctive strength to the network. We look forward to seeing Irish companies turn Open Call 2026 into real technologies with genuine global reach”.
In February of 2026, Ireland launched the first European Space Agency Phi-Lab at IMR in Mullingar, Co Westmeath. The Irish Government has committed to investing €170m into the ESA over the next five years and the six-year-long ESA Phi-Lab programme is a flagship element of that wider national commitment. The consortium is co-funded by the ESA and Enterprise Ireland.
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GameCube hardware already delivers strong value for fans of its original game library. Loaders such as Swiss open the door to region-free play, disc backups from SD cards or USB drives, and emulators that reach back to earlier Nintendo systems and beyond. Homebrew keeps the console active long after its commercial peak. A separate project now layers something unexpected onto that foundation by bringing a full PowerPC build of Windows NT to the same machine.
The architecture similarities between the console and early PowerPC-based PCs make this port much easier than you think. The GameCube is powered by a Gekko CPU, which was mostly derived from the PowerPC 750 series and obtained official support in the first versions of Windows NT. That shared basis is a huge advantage for developers since it allows them to avoid full emulation and instead write specialized drivers and a hardware abstraction layer that interfaces directly with the Flipper chipset.
Wack0 runs the entii-for-workcubes project, which is a GitHub repository containing all of the components required to run Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0 on a GameCube, Wii, or even some vWii systems. They’ve created a unique ARC firmware bootloader (which loads homebrew software), a custom HAL (hardware abstraction layer), and a few drivers for video, input, and storage via the external interface bus.

The ARC firmware is the important first stage, running from a homebrew application, displaying a simple menu on screen, and allowing the user to carve up a disk image stored on an SD card or an EXI-IDE device. The Windows NT installation is then run immediately from an ISO file that is saved in the same location as the original disk image. During setup, the user can choose a custom GameCube or Wii hardware profile and install the necessary drivers for video, controller ports, and mass storage.

To get started, the user must prep an SD card with the release files, a Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0 ISO, and a blank raw disk image of the appropriate size. For a GameCube, this means purchasing a serial-port converter or an SD Gecko for more reliable access. They’ll also need a homebrew loader, such as Swiss, to get started. Once that’s done, the ARC menu will guide you through partitioning and installing NT, even letting you choose your keyboard layout and pointing device. The entire scenario takes place on real hardware, with no emulation layers between the operating system and console components.

Once the OS is installed, you can expect some basic work tools to be available. Notepad, Solitaire, ancient backgrounds, and even an early version of Internet Explorer should all operate smoothly. Input is supported via mapped GameCube controllers or an ASCII keyboard controller plugged into a port, which is useful for typing.

The original hardware limits keep everything in check. The GameCube only has 24MB of accessible RAM, which limits the number of programs you can run at once and forces you to carefully select your drivers. You’re also out of luck if you want fast storage, because accessing it through the GameCube’s external interface is significantly slower than using an internal drive, so expect to spend some time waiting for installation to finish, especially when compared to what you could do on a PC at the time. The graphics driver merely copies and pastes bitmaps rather than utilizing advanced optimized pathways, which is inefficient for a smooth desktop experience. To make matters worse, neither the GameCube nor the Wii versions include working sound. Your GameCube may occasionally stall during a reboot, requiring you to manually turn it off and back on.
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