Communick News

Well, well, well...

Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed.

That is changing because Asahi Linux is tired of code laundering. They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only.

This is because people were taking in-development code straight out of their personal forks, publishing it without credit, or rewriting it with AI to hide its origin for "replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon."

What is code laundering?

Code laundering (also called license laundering) is the practice of taking someone else's code and passing it through a process that hides where it came from, so you can use it without honoring the original license or crediting the author.

Before AI, this usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original.

LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course.

The MIT license only asks you to keep the original copyright notice. It doesn't require you to share your changes or keep your version open. That's what makes it popular, and it's also what made things problematic for Asahi here.

Learning from history

The move has come after the Asahi team was made aware "some time ago" of multiple attempts to exploit its permissive licensing to hijack its work.

In the most extreme cases, feature code that was still under development was lifted from developers' personal forks before it was even publicly released. The report points out that the MIT license "explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors."

Asahi didn't name anyone in the report. It also didn't spell out how existing contributions will be relicensed or whether every past contributor agreed to it.

Asahi draws parallels with WINE's situation two decades ago. WINE, the compatibility layer that lets you run Windows apps on Linux, was originally MIT-licensed too. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, companies took the code, built proprietary forks on top of it, and sold them commercially. So, in 2002, the WINE team relicensed to the LGPL to discourage proprietary forks and push companies to contribute upstream.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Asahi has been upset lately

Asahi didn't name anyone so we are left with guesswork on who they are targeting with this license move.

There have been at least two public forks of Asahi's work in recent months, both tied to AI-assisted development. In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution.

The first is Aurora Silicon and its Vulkan driver, Borealis. Borealis is a fork of Asahi's HoneyKrisp, the Vulkan driver for Apple GPUs. Aurora Silicon submitted a pull request to register its own Vulkan driver ID with Khronos (VK_DRIVER_ID_AURORA_BOREALIS), says the driver runs on M1 to M5 and the A18 Pro, and keeps it in its own Mesa fork rather than upstream.

The second is Gravity Linux, a Fedora-based distro for Apple Silicon. It was forked from Asahi over the disagreement about LLM use.

To be fair to Gravity, it is open source, it isn't selling anything, and it credits its AI use openly. It even says it plans to sunset the distro once its driver work lands upstream.

It isn't the kind of bad actor the progress report describes. But it does represent the "permissive fork that embraces AI" approach that Asahi has consistently pushed back against.

For clarification, Asahi's progress report does not mention Aurora Silicon or Gravity Linux by name. I have provided their conflict with Asahi as context.

Why this license change matters

As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI.

I wouldn't be surprised if more hardware enablement and reverse-engineering projects follow. Making the first changes takes a lot of time and effort but they are easier to "rewrite" once someone has done the hard part.

Will the GPL actually help?

If the problem is people who already ignore the MIT license, why would they respect the GPL? After all, GPL cannot stop a determined bad actor. Nothing does, actually.

Stripping attribution from MIT code already breaks the MIT license, since keeping the copyright notice is its one real condition.

What the GPL changes is the commercial benefit. Under MIT, someone can take Asahi's code, close it up, and sell a product, and that's perfectly legal as long as the notice stays in.

Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can't legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product's source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot. Not everyone is happy

The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.

OpenBSD developer Bryan Steele wrote on X:

"Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason.. relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of "defending against AI bad actors", seems entirely disingenuous and misguided."

Wrapping up

Asahi is betting that copyleft license provides a better defense in this changed world where anyone can launder code with a prompt.

It may not stop the bad actors from rewriting its code, but at least it reduces the chances of a closed commercial fork.

It would be interesting to see whether the BSD community finds a way to keep working with Asahi under the new terms.

A covert Russian network sought to exploit last month's riots in France by using social media to blame the unrest on uncontrolled immigration and portray authorities as having lost control of the situation, according to an internal European Union (EU) assessment seen by Reuters.

A separate internal assessment by the French Foreign Ministry ... found that social media accounts linked to Israel and the US MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement were also spreading "hostile narratives" about the riots, linking them to radical Islamism and migration.

Taken together, these assessments provide insight into how external actors have attempted to exploit internal unrest in France to further their own political goals, according to an analysis by European disinformation experts.

An EU analysis found that a covert Russian network known as "Operation Overload" was spreading videos falsely posing as Western media content, targeting French audiences. Some of them falsely claimed that migrants were raping protesters or that terrorist attacks were imminent.

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The EU analysis, covering the period from October 7 to 21, found that Russia sought to "portray the French leadership as weak and increasingly authoritarian."

"Such events provide an opportunity to undermine national governments, incite fear and division, and shape public perceptions ahead of elections," said the EU document with limited distribution, prepared by disinformation experts in the Union's diplomatic service.

The analysis found no evidence that Moscow or other actors incited the protests or contributed to their escalation, but described their activities as "opportunistic exploitation of the unrest."

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An estimate by the French Foreign Ministry showed that the ten most viewed posts on the X network about the unrest, originating from "pro-Russian circles", generated 2,8 million views from October 16 to 18.

However, those numbers were significantly lower than the number of views of posts about the riots spread by accounts associated with the MAGA movement, as well as Israeli officials and influencers.

The ten most viewed posts about the unrest in France, posted on X by officials, media outlets and influencers linked to the MAGA movement, generated more than 49 million views from October 16 to 18, according to a report by the French ministry.

The ten most viewed posts by Israeli officials, government accounts, media outlets and influencers generated more than 35 million views in the same period, according to the French report.

...

The EU report states that "Operation Overload", active since September 2023, is directed against Western "public figures, institutions and media", with the aim of "discrediting these actors and their support for Ukraine, while promoting content aligned with Russian interests".

The network's activities "also aimed to undermine European support for Ukraine by claiming that European governments were prioritizing Ukraine over domestic problems," the report said.

...

The French counter-disinformation agency Viginum published a detailed report in 2024 on "Operation Overload" and similar Russian operations, and French officials have stated that they are reactivated during protests, elections, or other occasions that can serve to discredit France.

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Archived

Slax developer Tomas Matejicek has announced Slax 2026.11, a new version of the lightweight, portable Linux distribution designed to run from a USB drive. Based on Debian 13 and powered by the Linux kernel 6.12, the release features a redesigned desktop, a built-in AI assistant, Secure Boot support, and a graphical installer, all packed into a 512 MiB ISO image.

The desktop has been overhauled with Alt+Tab window previews, live taskbar thumbnails, and four virtual workspaces. Users can view all workspaces simultaneously with Alt+F3 or switch between them using Ctrl+F1 through F4.

The desktop also supports files and folders, and the taskbar includes keyboard layout switching and volume controls. Application interfaces have been adjusted for a more consistent appearance across older and newer programs.

The application launcher has been improved as well. Optional applications are marked with a download icon, letting users install and launch them from the menu. Traditional package management through APT remains available.

One of the most notable additions is the Slax AI Assistant, which allows users to troubleshoot problems, inspect their systems, and execute commands using natural-language instructions. It helps identify disk space usage, investigate system issues, and perform administrative tasks. The assistant requires an internet connection and user sign-in.

Slax 2026.11 also includes a graphical installer for Windows and Linux. Users can create bootable USB drives or install Slax alongside an existing operating system on supported configurations. Additionally, UEFI Secure Boot is now supported through a signed bootloader and kernel, eliminating the need to disable Secure Boot on compatible machines.

Another improvement concerns persistent sessions. A single USB drive can store multiple named sessions, each retaining its own applications, files, and settings. Users can select a session at startup, duplicate it using F4, or rename it with F6, as these sessions can be carried between computers.

For disk maintenance and recovery, Slax includes a graphical partition manager that supports creating, resizing, and formatting partitions. Additional utilities support LVM, LUKS encryption, and filesystems such as XFS. VirtualBox, VMware, and SPICE integration is also included for virtual machine environments.

However, users depending on Slax’s modular system should note an important change. The distribution now uses OverlayFS instead of AUFS, so the slax activate and slax deactivate commands can no longer dynamically load or unload .sb modules during a running session.

Modules can still be included before boot, while installing software through APT and preserving changes in persistent sessions remain supported.

For more information, see the announcement.

Say the name "Chromium" out loud in Linux circles, and you will soon see what a mob looks like. Many people don't like how much of the web rests on one engine led by Google, and they prefer to keep it away from their systems.

Now we have Domicile, a new Rust-based Wayland compositor that uses a patched build of Chromium to draw the entire desktop as a web page.

Apps still run natively, and each Wayland window goes straight into Chromium's rendering system and shows up inside that page as an element. A window and a website can then sit side by side and be arranged the same way.

Domicile: Overview

Domicile is not a drop-in desktop like GNOME or KDE Plasma. It leaves the bar, the window layout, and the look to a shell, and that shell itself is a web page you have to write yourself.

Native app windows and websites both sit on that page, and because CSS decides where each one goes, layouts like tiling or floating take only a few lines of styling.

You can even swap the shell without closing a single window because loading a new one resets only the state held in the shell's own page. A single page can span every monitor, and shells are built from packages that anyone can publish on npm, whether it is a whole desktop, a bar, or a launcher.

The compositor still handles the lock screen, tray icons, notifications, and screen sharing, while the shell decides how they look. The built-in browser runs Manifest V3 Chrome extensions, but some of them behave differently than they do in Chrome.

Apps need Wayland support to run. Electron, SDL, and Qt apps start in Wayland mode, but X11-only ones will not run. Xwayland, the compatibility layer that lets X11 apps work on Wayland desktops, is something Domicile does not include.

The project is provided under the MIT license, and the Chromium files it modifies stick to Chromium's licenses. One more thing, and this could be a dealbreaker for some of you, the project is AI-assisted.

Manganese, the element?

Not quite. Manganese is the ready-made shell that comes with Domicile, and it works as a complete tiling desktop out of the box. Its keybindings follow Sway's on the Super key, and you get ten workspaces along with tabs, stacks, splits, floating windows, and a scratchpad.

Websites open as windows too, sitting next to native apps in the same layout, while extensions from the Chrome Web Store show up as buttons in the top bar.

It comes with a Settings app, clipboard history, launcher, screenshots tool, notifications, and a lock screen. Since every part of it is its own package, you can add a new item to the bar or replace the launcher while the rest stays as it is.

Getting started

Packages exist for Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux, plus an AUR package for Arch users. For NixOS, or Nix on any distro, you can use the project's flake.

It runs only on x86_64, and the project has no ARM builds.

A monolithic package carries Manganese, the login session, the domicile command, and the React packages that shells build against. After installing, you point a config file at the shell you want, then log out and pick "Domicile" on the login screen.

On the evening of November 7, police carried out a mass roundup in Moscow’s Kitai-Gorod neighborhood. By the most widely cited estimates, 150 to 200 people were detained in total (though some reports put the number at 300), most of them young people, including minors. It was a planned raid: around 8 p.m., 10 police vans pulled up to Gorka Park on Bolshoi Spasoglinishchevsky Lane, and police loaded young people into them. Eyewitnesses said police were rounding up “anyone and everyone.”

...

Those detained were taken to police stations and held for several hours. Detainees said they were not allowed to drink water or use the bathroom while in the police vans. One person who used an e-cigarette was beaten. Another detainee’s parents said he was hit in the stomach several times, and there were other reports of police brutality as well. There were no reports of any detainees being held at a police station overnight.

Police refused to let parents in to see the detainees, and by late that night a crowd had gathered outside the Tagansky district police station. Parents tried to get inside as police officers held them back. “We pay your salaries! Freeloaders!” some in the crowd said. Yet it was the police themselves who had summoned parents to the station: minors were being released to their legal guardians.

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The Russian Interior Ministry called the raid a “preventive measure.” In a video, the mother of one detainee said she was told at the police station that children are not allowed in central Moscow at all, especially on weekends. “Because of the situation in the country,” she added.

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Archived

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/55079678

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3dxw10rjn9no

Nvidia founder lover was a chinese spy

Yes, this is a dad joke. If anything, it's a meta dad joke about the literal meaning of the community name. 😁

The aerynOS team has published its latest unstable stream update, introducing Linux kernel 7.2.15, which marks the final release in the 7.2 series. The team is preparing to move to version 7.3, expected to arrive in the volatile repository soon.

The update also includes Linux LTS 6.18.62, along with newer versions of several system components, including systemd 261.5, LLVM 23.1.5, and glibc 2.44 development snapshots.

On the package management side, Moss now displays help when users enter the older moss install and moss remove commands or their aliases. Boulder and Ent have also been updated to use a new versioning format for packages built from Git commits.

Desktop updates include KDE Gear 26.08.3, Hyprland 0.57.1, Dux suite 2.1 (formerly Dank Material Shell), Waybar 0.16, and Mir 2.31, accompanied by a rebuild of Miracle WM.

KWin receives a fix for crashes involving DisplayLink docking stations when running fullscreen applications. Additional upstream NVIDIA fixes address graphical glitches, flickering, and buffer allocation problems.

COSMIC Player receives missing GStreamer dependencies, restoring audio and video playback. Meanwhile, both Ghostty and Kitty have fixes for Bash shell startup integration.

Other notable package updates include GStreamer 1.28.9, Poppler 26.11, Zed 1.27, Signal Desktop 8.34, and PowerStation 0.9. The Poppler update includes printing fixes, while additional character maps required by Ghostscript have been added.

Moreover, Rsync now includes daemon service units and the rrsync restricted helper. Zulip Desktop also gets a fix for flashing when using dark mode, along with a new application theme selector.

Finally, several new packages have been added to the repositories, including the terminal-based bandwidth monitor bandwhich, the disk usage utility duf, Gitea’s official command-line client, GNU Stow, and openfortivpn.

KDE’s KeepSecret password manager and the JetBrains Mono typeface are also newly available.

For more information, see the announcement.

Even before the Linux v7.4 merge window was over, there were already two pull requests of drm-misc-next material targeting for what will be Linux 7.5. This week already saw the third drm-misc-next pull request of more feature patches targeting this next kernel version.

This week's drm-misc-next pull brings Rockchip RK3568 support to the Rockchip DRM display driver. The RK3568 is a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 SoC with a Mali-G52 2EE GPU and a small NPU and VPU too. The RK3568 is found in some industrial/embedded PCs, some NAS devices, and single board computers. Nice seeing the continued work on improving mainline kernel support for Rockchip SoCs.

Separately there are also a number of additional display panels now supported by the mainline kernel including the DCLTek 300249 5.5", DLCTek 300248 10.5", Novetake NT37705, xiaomi-lavender, Tianma TL063FVMC43-02, Tianma TL063FVMCA01-00, Tianma TL060FVXS16-00, TXD TXDI600YANPA-43V3, AUO B101UAN01, Truly NT36850 WQHD, Novatek NT36850, Samsung AMS644VK04, Hitachi TX10D07VM0BAA, LG LH400WV3-SD04, and Mingjun MJ070BI30IA2.

AMD Ryzen AI

The AMDXDNA accelerator driver for Ryzen AI NPus meanwhile saw support added for a new 6.0 firmware release, adding NPU3 classic device support, get/set power mode handling for new AIE4 hardware, and other AIE4 enabling like suspend and resume, clock / DPM frequency / resource information queries, AIE4 command submission, and other important additions. Over the course of this year and the past few kernel versions there's been a lot of enablement work around the AIE4 hardware that presumably is the next-gen Ryzen AI NPU to be found with the upcoming Zen 6 based client platforms launching in the new year. Hopefully with Linux 7.5 the AIE4 hardware support will be in good standing.

The full list of drm-misc-next feature patches for the week via this pull request.

Linus Torvalds just released the second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.4 with some notable bug fixes and other changes routed in past the merge window. It's another big one in the AI era.

This week brought some adjustments to the AMD PerfOpt feature for helping Radeon iGPU performance, fixing faulty BHI mitigation selection for some kernel configurations, a big improvement for FAT32 especially with synchronous mounts, AMDGPU driver fixes for HDMI 2.2 FRL, and numerous fixes for "nasty long standing bugs" in the core memory management code. Plus the usual assortment of bug fixes as well as the seemingly never-ending flow of AI/LLM generated patches and bug reports.

Linux 7.4-rc2 Git tag

Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote in the 7.4-rc2 announcement:

"Ok, a big -rc2 to go with the largest ever -rc1. But the diffstat looks fairly benign, and is dominated by some automated coccinelle updates that I got for the merge window but left for rc2 because I didn't want to deal with them when I was on the road (and had a hard time finding the motivation to deal with them afterwards too, to be honest).

That said, the scripted updates are largely just one- and two-liners, and they [really] are very straightforward so they "dominate" the diffstat only in the sense that they are very spread out and do add a lot of noise.

When masking that noise out from the diffstat, the shape of it changes - not spread out over thousands of files any more. But it does not look unusual: a third is drivers (gpu, networking and sound account for most of it, but there's a bit of everything), another third is networking and bpf, and the final third is "the rest" (mostly filesystems, mm, arch updates).

And yes, much of this was driven by various AI fixes. I think I'll stop repeating that, and we can just take it for granted. But this time around Alexei claims that on the bpf side at least the fixes are now coming in faster than the new reports, and that sounds lovely if true.

I think most other areas haven't reached that point yet, but it's at least a sign that we _may_ be starting to see the tide starting to turn.

Don't hold your breath, but maybe cross your fingers we'll be getting there in the not entirely distant future.

In the meantime, please keep testing,"

See our Linux 7.4 feature overview for a look at all the changes coming to this kernel aiming for a stable release around the end of December.

Moldova has gained economic leverage over the breakaway region on the left bank of the Dniester as Russian-backed economic support weakens, creating new opportunities for the country's reintegration, an IDIS Viitorul study (in Romanian) says.

...

Transnistria faces a deepening economic crisis that shifts the balance of economic dependence between the two banks of the Dniester river in favour of Moldova and the European Union, the researchers say.

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According to the research, the region's gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 19.4% in 2025, while industrial output declined by 20%.

External sales dropped by 39.7%, from $722.8 million to $435.9 million (€389.9 million, approximately 7.87 billion MDL). The figure includes exports to other countries and sales to Moldova's right bank, according to the study.

The researchers say that approximately 77% of the region's exports are destined for the European Union (EU), highlighting its growing dependence on European markets.

The region's registered population fell to approximately 460,000 in 2025, while an estimated 165,000 people were living abroad, according to figures cited in the research.

Salaries and pensions on the left bank are currently around half the levels recorded on the right bank, the authors say.

...

The traditional economic model, based on Russian natural gas supplied without immediate payment, subsidies, smuggling and political patronage, can no longer sustain the separatist administration, according to the researchers.

Internal reforms are unlikely because expressions of criticism are suppressed, said Liubomir Chiriac, executive director of IDIS Viitorul.

Moldova's European integration and territorial reintegration must advance simultaneously, he said, adding that the authorities should carefully examine the study's recommendations.

"Both Moldova's integration process and the reintegration of the left-bank region must proceed in parallel," Chiriac said.

...

One of the study's main findings is that the economic balance between the two banks of the Dniester has shifted in Moldova's favour.

More than 86% of the region's external sales depend on Moldova's customs services, certificates of origin and legislation. Meanwhile, 77% of its exports are directed towards EU markets, according to the study.

Official Moldovan government figures provide additional evidence of this commercial reorientation. In 2025, 71% of the region's overall trade activity was directed towards the EU, according to data supplied by the Customs Service. The corresponding share reached 76.9% in the first half of 2026.

Romania, Poland and Italy were among the main destinations for exports in 2025.

...

The researchers say Chisinau has strengthened its position through measures including its refusal to return to the 5+2 negotiation format and the introduction of tax obligations for businesses operating in the region.

Russia, meanwhile, no longer has the resources to maintain its previous system of economic support. The Russian military presence and repressive mechanisms remain the main instruments of control available to the separatist administration, according to the study.

This shift gives Chisinau a stronger position in the reintegration process, said Igor Munteanu, one of the study's authors.

"The asymmetry has been reversed: Chisinau now dominates in terms of will, strategy and resources, while Tiraspol is merely surviving. The regime still has fear and Russian military pressure, but a model without resources cannot survive indefinitely," Munteanu said.

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The study identifies three levels of security risks: military, hybrid and societal.

The military component includes the Operational Group of Russian Forces (OGRF), estimated at between 1,500 and 2,500 troops, as well as local forces.

The hybrid dimension includes 11 unauthorized checkpoints in the Security Zone, while the societal component includes militarization activities involving more than 74,000 children and young people, according to figures cited in the research and human rights monitoring reports.

The authors argue that reintegration should not be conditional on the complete demilitarization of the region before the process begins. However, they say that a verifiable reduction in each category of security risk is essential.

The study also examines proposals by Moldova's Reintegration Policy Bureau to withdraw Russian forces and military equipment under international monitoring, replace the current trilateral peacekeeping mission with an International Civilian Mission, and establish a Provisional International Administration.

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Archived

This part gripes me when they travel to "less fortunate" or "poor" countries where eating out is $0.50-2.00 but the same or similar thing is $30-500 in the US, however: people earn different levels of income. Like in that "third world" country, people may only live with $10 a day while Americans live with either $7.25 / $15 per hour in minimum wage, so it's not comparable as to why the prices are seen as "cheap" for Americans.

Now, put it this way: if an average joe were to earn the FEDERAL mandated minimum wage of $7.25, is buying a whole weeks worth of groceries affordable with that alone (excluding rent, utilities, insurance, etc)? Do you consider a $200 semi-fancy dinner at a restaurant (not over the top luxurious, but formal & fine dining) with family or friends "cheap" in the US whilst earning $15 per hour in minimum wage?

Source

Blame it on the hot summer... Lots of other staple crops had a disappointing harvest for me this year.

(Among other things) Made some Orangeat, tastes incredible:

Lemons lagging a bit behind. Also lots of fruit (and larger than usual, but not ripening yet. Wondering if I can just pluck them and let them ripen inside, in the warmth?

And lastly, this little fig came to us this year as a quite small seedling, and somehow already managed to produce some ripe fruit (albeit, not very sweet):

As the federal Liberals unveil their second budget, there is no guarantee that health care transfer funding increases will remain stable after 2028.

The games were pirated, but the joy wasn’t

I’m 27 years old, and I grew up in a small town in China. When I was a kid, information didn’t travel very fast. By the time kids in big cities were already playing PS2 or even PS3, I hadn’t even heard of those consoles.

Back then, China had a ban on game consoles, so official consoles were hard to come by. Most players could only get their hands on gray-market imports or clone machines. Many parents also worried that gaming would hurt their kids’ studies. That’s partly why devices like the 小霸王学习机 / Subor Learning Machine became so popular: they were sold as “learning machines” to reassure parents, even though many kids mainly used them to play games. My parents were relatively open-minded, though—they even played with me sometimes. In a way, I was lucky.

The story starts with a repaired clone FC console.

(Image from the internet. Copyright belongs to the original author.)

A Clone FC Console Made Me Popular in My Class

When I was in primary school, my older brother’s clone FC console broke. My dad fixed it and brought it home. The games were in color, and I could swap cartridges to play different titles. That felt amazing to me. My dad was into audio and video gear, so he also had a VCD player and a DVD player. Some of them could even run FC games.

There was a VCD disc that wasn’t an official Nintendo product. We called it “VCD 300 in 1.” I learned about it from a female classmate. Her family had one, and for a while, she became quite popular in class because of it. Later, I asked my dad to buy one too. If I remember correctly, it cost less than 50 CNY, or about 7 USD, and came with two controllers. The games on it were mostly mediocre.

To become the most popular kid in class, I used my pocket money to buy some pirated FC cartridges. It worked. My friends started coming to my house to play. Even if kids in the city were already playing PS3, our old machine still brought everyone together.

That female classmate often came over to play with me too. She had a console at home, but she still played very nervously.

Some Shared Memories

There was something called the “Subor Learning Machine.” It was basically an FC clone with a keyboard attached. It was a product of the 1990s. By that time, the FC was already near the end of its life, and Nintendo found it very hard to fight cross-border lawsuits, so this kind of device existed because of China’s special market situation. The advertising was everywhere. Duan Yongping hired Jackie Chan as the spokesperson, and the ads ran on CCTV. The slogan was “learning machine.” Parents saw it and thought, “Jackie Chan endorses it, it’s on national TV, it must be good.” After they bought it home, the kids used it to play Contra, while the parents thought they were learning programming.

To be fair, some players really did learn basic coding from the BASIC programming feature built into these learning machines. Later, when they got computers, they naturally moved toward programming careers. Accidental success.

We played a lot of “4-in-1” and “99-in-1” cartridges. The 4-in-1 ones usually had good games. The 99-in-1 ones had many repeated titles and some low-quality filler. I was definitely fooled by those as a kid. They were pirated anyway, usually no more than 10 CNY, or about 1.40 USD, each. The cartridges were yellow, not gray, and they had no manuals or proper boxes. Many things that overseas players took for granted as basic game knowledge, we only learned online after growing up. We had plenty of misunderstandings and got scammed more than once.

Back then, we didn’t have the chance to play complete versions, and we didn’t even know what the official releases looked like.

I’m not very knowledgeable about hardware, so the following is based on online explanations:

When we opened cartridges as kids, some had a neat square black chip block inside, while others had an irregular blob of black epoxy. The square block was a separate SOP/DIP chip with pins. It could be soldered and replaced, so broken cartridges could sometimes be repaired. The black blob was a COB “chip-on-board” package. The bare chip die was directly bonded to the circuit board and covered with black epoxy resin. It was cheaper and smaller, but sensitive to moisture, heat, and vibration. Once it broke, it basically couldn’t be repaired by replacing a single chip.

Pirate publishers loved riding on the fame of Contra and Super Mario Bros. the most.

Contra was so popular that as long as a game had characters with guns and supported two players, pirate publishers would label it as Contra. A game set on water became “Water Contra.” One set in the sky became “Air Contra.” A sci-fi themed one became “Star Contra.” Sometimes the same game just started at a different stage and got labeled “Contra 7” or “Contra 8.” When I grew up, I learned that those so-called Contra sequels were actually different games. The water one was The Last Mission, the sky one was Final Mission, and the sci-fi one was Raf World. They had nothing to do with the real Contra.

The pirate publishers were even more ridiculous with Super Mario Bros. A game where the character shot energy waves was called “Mario 10.” A platformer where the hero carried a staff was “Mario 14.” A game that started with riding a dragon and receiving items was “Mario 11.” Even a racing game got reskinned into Mario riding a motorcycle. Later I learned the real titles were Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu, Ganbare Goemon Gaiden 3, Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima III, and Top Racer. None of them had anything to do with the plumber.

I thought I would get to play many different Contra games, but in the end I only really had one.

There was a pirated cartridge that claimed to contain many “Contra” games. In reality, it only had Contra 1 or Contra 2 for the FC. The rest just changed stages, bullets, and the number of lives. It cost about the same as a 4-in-1 cartridge, sometimes a bit more. Some versions even cut content, removing Stage 2 and Stage 4 from Contra 1. I guess it was to save costs. That kind of thing was common on cheaper cartridges.

Contra 1’s “Underwater Eight Stages.”

This was a well-known urban legend among Chinese players. Some people said that in Stage 6, if you jumped into an enemy that looked like a frog’s mouth, you could enter a hidden area. Others said that falling down in Stage 7 wouldn’t kill you, but would instead send you into a blue ocean stage. The internet wasn’t widespread back then, so many kids firmly believed it was real. In truth, it was mostly a graphical glitch or bug, not an actual hidden stage.

In 2016, a Chinese video creator found that the closest thing to this “Underwater Eight Stages” was actually the MSX2 version of Contra. It had 19 stages, and after defeating the Stage 8 boss, you entered an underground or underwater area. But that was not part of the FC version.

Looking back, I treat it as a simple childhood memory. I don’t regret trying to find a stage that didn’t exist. Later, Konami recreated the “Underwater Eight Stages” map in the mobile game Contra: Return, and some fans also made their own ROM hacks based on what they imagined the underwater stages would be like. It turned into a pretty interesting story.

The Rise and Fall of Foreign Technology

During the FC era, there were very few Chinese-made games. Foreign Technology was like an enlightenment for many Chinese players. It wasn’t Nintendo, and it wasn’t a console maker like Subor. It was more like a strange presence in China’s 1990s FC Chinese-game market.

It made locally themed games such as Tunnel Warfare, Lin Zexu’s Opium Ban, and Legend of the Twin Moons. It also made rarer types like Chu-Han Contention and Jia-A Chinese Football Club Manager. But most of the time, it modified existing games: turning Contra into Super War Soul, shrinking Phantasy Star IV into Alien Warrior, and even trying to cram PC games like Resident Evil, Commandos, and Heroes of Might and Magic into the FC.

As kids, we didn’t really understand copyright. The cartridge covers just looked impressive. Later I realized it once called itself “China’s Nintendo,” but never became Nintendo. Many of its games were rough, yet they still brought many children into stories and adventures. Due to copyright issues and market changes, Foreign Technology, which once had real strength, eventually shifted to other fields. It’s a bit regrettable.

When the Arcade Hit King of Fighters Met Pirated FC Publishers

During the arcade era, King of Fighters was a major IP. I couldn’t remember the inputs as a kid, so I just mashed buttons. One day, I saw a very “special” pirated FC cartridge with King of Fighters characters on the label. I thought I could finally play a game at that level at home, but the result shocked me in a different way.

The character sprites were poor, often using only one color. The saturation looked off. The controls felt bad, and the game had no depth. My opponent and I moved in exaggerated ways, and it became visually tiring. Street Fighter also got pirated, but those versions were better than the fake King of Fighters. At least they could be played as actual games, even if the sound effects were terrible.

There are still many more pirated FC stories, such as pirated arcade machines, the Xin Tian Li VCD, and how I later encountered official consoles. I’ll continue writing later.

Did you buy any especially bad or memorable game cartridges as a kid? Were there any game rumors you firmly believed as a child, only to realize later they were misunderstandings? Feel free to share.

While writing this, I looked up some information and found an interesting contrast: the pirated FC cartridges that felt cheap, rough,