Latest news with #PalmerLuckey
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
Palmer Luckey's Anduril leads second quarter surge for venture capital in greater L.A.
Venture capital investments in the Greater Los Angeles region more than doubled to $5.8 billion in the second quarter, compared to a year ago, as investors poured money into the area's defense tech and aerospace companies amid escalating geopolitical tensions. Costa Mesa-based defense tech company Anduril received the most venture capital in the region last quarter, raising a $2.5-billion funding round, according to research firm CB Insights. The company, co-founded by entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, said it would use the money to invest in scaling up its production, hiring, taking big swings on products and capabilities and other efforts such as its mergers and acquisitions strategy. Anduril, which manufactures autonomous weapons systems, was recently awarded a $99.6-million contract to build a next generation command and control prototype for the U.S. Army that it says will help modernize communications on the battlefield. Anduril employs more than 6,000 people and has a valuation of $30.5 billion. Venture capital firm Founders Fund led the recent round with a $1-billion investment, marking the firm's largest check to date, said Founders Fund partner and Anduril executive chairman Trae Stephens in a Bloomberg TV interview in June. The company's recent fundraising round is an example of strong investor interest in defense tech and aerospace, which venture firms believe is ripe for disruption, with startups taking market share from incumbents such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Globally, venture capital investments in defense tech is on the rise. Already, the funding in this category has outpaced last year, according to CB Insights. For the first half of 2025, investors allocated $11.1 billion in venture capital to defense tech companies, compared to $8.2 billion in the full year of 2024, CB Insights said. Investors are eager to jump on an area of growth that has a lot of support from the government, as the U.S. enters a period in which defense and the geopolitical arena is at the forefront, analysts said. The world is being rocked by multiple international conflicts, including Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine and Israel's battle against Hamas in Gaza. 'We're entering an administration, a regulatory period, and a broader geopolitical arena where defense is at the forefront of everyone's minds,' said Jason Saltzman, head of insights at CB Insights. 'We're starting to see a lot of support from the government in particular, with an increasing number of investors hopping on the defense tech train.' Southern California, long an aerospace and defense tech hub, is benefiting from the investor interest, with the area's companies representing nine of the top 30 private businesses globally in defense tech that have received the most venture capital financing, according to CB Insights. Local companies said they were attracted to Southern California because of its strong talent pool, with nearby universities like Caltech and USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Going back to World War II and the Cold War period, key defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and Hughes were built in the South Bay area, making the region a crucial locale for the defense and aerospace industries, said Professor Dan Wadhwani, director of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School of Business. As startups build new technologies, they will need to integrate them with other existing systems, he added. 'The proximity to key players within the defense industry makes L.A. a prime place for capitalizing on the growing trends towards defense spending,' he said. Last quarter, defense tech and aerospace companies represented the top four businesses receiving venture capital, according to CB Insights. Anduril led the way, followed by Redondo Beach-based Impulse Space, which raised $300 million, Hawthorne-based Chaos Industries that had a $275-million funding round and L.A.-based spacecraft manufacturer Apex, which raised $200 million in the second quarter, CB Insights said. Chaos Industries makes sensors and radars that provide warning and tracking against unmanned aerial systems, missiles and aircraft. The company, which has more than 100 employees, raised a total of $490 million since it was founded in 2022. The funding will go toward hiring and increasing the company's manufacturing capabilities, said Chief Strategy Officer Will Hurd. Hurd said he remembers when he worked at an investment bank in 2021 and no investors were interested in funding companies where the government was their client because there was a fear or lack of understanding of how that process worked. Now, that's changed and evolved, with a wave of defense tech and aerospace companies, including Chaos Industries. 'Now the adversaries have gotten more sophisticated, and we have to match that,' Hurd said. Impulse Space, which makes space vehicles, said there has been surging customer demand. The company said it has more than 30 signed government and commercial contracts worth nearly $200 million in value and the additional venture capital funding will go toward hiring, scaling production and accelerating its research and development. 'We've proven that we can build fast and fly successfully,' said CEO and founder Tom Mueller in a statement. 'Now, the market is demanding more.'
Gizmodo
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
The People Behind the Most Accurate Game Boy Recreation Are Making an N64
No other company makes the retro gaming scene more onerous than ModRetro. The company behind the ModRetro Chromatic—fronted by the CEO of military contractor Anduril, Palmer Luckey—is at it again, announcing an enticing recreation of the Nintendo 64 meant to hook up to your TV and play all your old cartridges as if it were 1996 all over again. Drooling over this still unrevealed recreation console also requires you to put aside any inhibitions over Luckey's deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex and surveillance state. ModRetro's first big hit, the Chromatic, was an FPGA emulation device capable of playing Game Boy and Game Boy Advance cartridges. FPGA stands for field-programmable gate array, which, in layman's terms, means the programmable chip can copy the chip logic of the original device to play these games as accurately as possible. An FPGA Game Boy is far less complex than a console with 3D graphics like the N64. Luckey promoted ModRetro's M64, which will offer 'the best and most authentic way to play your favorite N64 games.' The Anduril founder said the device will cost as much as the Nintendo 64 did at launch—$200. ModRetro's newest product is M64. The best and most authentic way to play your favorite N64 games, bar none. Prepare your wallet and brace your mind. Launches at the same price as the original Nintendo 64. Inflation isn't nostalgic. — Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) July 24, 2025There's a good reason so many retro enthusiasts are enticed by an FPGA Nintendo 64 recreation. Nintendo designed the N64 architecture in such a way that it's more difficult to replicate through software emulation compared to most other gaming consoles. This results in awkward texture mapping in some games, among other graphical glitches that mar the experience. Luckey, always the capitalist, picked up on that demand after Analogue promoted its $250 Analogue3D, another Nintendo 64 FPGA console. That device promises to upscale games to 4K resolution from the N64's native 480×360. It also introduces a full '3Dos,' which will act as a backend to support in-game screenshots, save states, and more. Analogue delayed its device multiple times, most recently pushing the ship date to August. The company blamed Trump tariffs for the shipping issues, although the device still remains sold out anyway. Luckey doesn't actually have a console to show anyone yet. He wrote on X that what was displayed of the M64 was 'real gameplay on real hardware using our real core.' It's unclear if the device is still in the prototyping phase or if the company had to wait for 'final legal checks' before it could show off its recreation hardware. He cheekily referenced AMD in his post, implying the M64 will be using an FPGA chip from the company. The Analogue 3D, instead, bases its design on an Intel 220K LE Altera Cyclone 10GX FPGA. At least Luckey confirmed in a response to The Shortcut's Matt Swider that the M64 will have several different color options, and it will support the original triple-handed N64 controllers as well as a new 'M64 controller.' Like the Analogue3D, the M64 will support 4K resolution. However, the Anduril and ModRetro founder said, 'Upscale is the wrong word for what we're doing.' As with the ModRetro Chromatic, the bigger issue than how well the hardware recreates your favorite childhood moments is how much you want to support a man who unapologetically makes weapon-mounted drones, missiles, and now AR headsets for the U.S. military. Reports from Business Insider and Reuters indicated Luckey plans to get into digital banking, something that may be related to crypto. Let's just imagine a future where, after washing his hands of Oculus and Meta, Luckey instead started making Game Boys instead of weaponized drones.
Gizmodo
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
How to Play Your Retro Games as Authentically as Possible
It's more than mere nostalgia. Old games still look better on older screens. As much as you may love playing that past favorite from your childhood, the games you're emulating on your LCD or OLED displays don't look anything like they did back in the day. No, it's not that your high-contrast HDR display is somehow not good enough for 16-bit pixel art; it's down to a combination of screen technology, system emulation, and the forward march of display resolution sizes. There are a few expensive ways to bring back the old-school feel, but fear not. There are more than a few affordable solutions to relive your games the way they were meant to be experienced. Before we get started, let's take a moment to mention the collection of modern systems that do a great job of making your games feel true to the original, but on modern systems. There's a growing number of emulation devices that can play older cartridges without any need for conversion cables. Ignoring the fact that handhelds are much easier to get into than the bigger consoles, there are numerous Game Boy-like devices that cost less than $100. We've enjoyed models like the TrimUI Brick and Anbernic RG34XXSP, but despite their pedigree, the most fine-tuned Game Boy Color recreation is currently the ModRetro Chromatic with its pixel-perfect screen. However, if you don't want to deal with ModRetro lead Palmer Luckey's other job as an arms dealer, you could check out the Analogue Pocket. Beyond handhelds, there are many controller options that recreate the feel of older systems, from Nintendo's own GameCube controller exclusive to Switch 2, to Gulikit's Sega Genesis-like Elves 2 Pro device, to 8BitDo's mod kits for the Nintendo 64 controller that lets you play them on modern systems. You don't have to look too hard to find something that emulates the feel of retro content. Strange as it sounds, acquiring the gaming hardware and software is the easy part. The true test of your retro chops is how far you'd go for a quality screen. The olden days of gaming were built for big, boxy cathode-ray tube televisions. These screens sat in front of an array of vacuum tubes capable of shooting electrons to display images on a phosphorescent screen. Those color images you see on your childhood TV were created by controlling three separate beams representing the three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Recreating that effect on a flatscreen isn't easy, even with official console remakes. The Atari 7800+ lets you play both Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 cartridges from any TV, though it won't offer picture-perfect visuals. There are future systems like the upcoming Analogue 3D that can play your N64 cartridges on a 4K display with 'CRT reference quality' even on a flatscreen. Unfortunately the system was delayed until next month, with the console maker citing tariffs for its ongoing shipping issues. Soon we'll even have a Commodore 64 emulation machine, but the problem will continue to be sourcing a screen that will display these games accurately to how they appeared at the time. When you get up close and personal to a CRT TV, you'll start to see a collection of phosphor dots generating each of the colors you see on the screen. Game developers of the time understood this technology and built their games around it. Pixel art of today looks blocky—and while that has its own charm—a game present on a CRT TV with scanlines muddled these individual pixels together, akin to how an oil painter blends colors on a canvas. It created an image that would look like actual art, rather than a blocky approximation of an image. Today's larger screens with higher resolutions only exacerbate the problem. The old 8-bit titles of the NES days ran on screens showing 256 x 240 pixels. A 4K panel displays images at 3,840 x 2,160. The picture has to upscale by 15 times to display fully on a modern television, and that will simply look piss-poor compared to what you're used to. Some systems produce better visuals for old-school games. The NES Classic emulated some of Nintendo's most-touted games with better fidelity than most third-party emulators. However, the reason games looked the way they did is not only a result of the limitations of the consoles themselves but also of the screens. For a full explanation, check out this video from YouTuber Displaced Gamers, which breaks down how CRT standards—all those that remained unchanged for decades—helped inform how game developers created games with and for CRT televisions. Which brings us to the problem with emulating games today. LCD technology does not present scanlines natively, which means every time you play Street Fighter II on today's flat panels, it will look blocky and unappealing. Not only that, but games were built with the squared, 4:3 screens of yesteryear. That matters for more than just resolution. Super Mario Bros. was a platformer innovator because it kept the screen moving in line with Mario from screen to screen, though it also allowed players to traipse backwards up to the screen edge. Few games up through the GameCube and PlayStation 2 era accounted for widescreens. Out of all the retro games Nintendo has made for Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers, only Super Mario Strikers supports the 16:9 aspect ratio natively. You can simply buy a CRT TV or monitor secondhand, hook up a retro console to its old ports, and play away. But those of us who aren't collectors or don't have the space for even more screens have to be far more choosy. As far as old monitors go, you won't have much difficulty finding a CRT device on eBay or through other resellers. As retro gaming has become more popular, prices on older tech have gotten untenable. If you're shopping around, you also should get to know the terminology. You'll see some old CRT monitors claim they are 'NTSC'. That acornym denoted the U.S. standard for analog TVs throughout the 20th century before the popularization of digital displays. You should look for one of these TVs if you're trying to accurately depict the scanlines of games from your childhood. Meanwhile, PVM TVs were professional-grade monitors that could produce clearer images though they won't be as accurate as what the average 1980s console owner would expect. If you don't plan on transforming your basement into a recreation of your gaming den, you're better off with a monitor. For example, the Commodore 1702 color video CRT monitor from 1984 is compact enough to fit on most desks, plus they fit the time period. They also go for well over $200 on eBay, not accounting for delivery. Sony Trinitron monitors and TVs from back in the day could easily cost than $300. If you can't find one cheap online, you're better off searching your local thrift stores for a piece of TV history rather than paying exorbitant prices to ship your heavy TV across the country. In today's retro-fueled environment, it is easier to connect an old console to a modern TV. Upscaling devices like the RetroTINK-5X Pro can take old-school consoles and their limited resolution up to 1080p. With a few extra HDMI converstion cables, you would be good to go. The big problem is your games won't look accurate on a modern TV. If you want to see the old-school pixel art in its prime, modern conversions are on the wrong tack. What if you don't have an old-school console but happen to have an ancient CRT TV lying around? With enough time, patience, and money, you could potentially hook up a modern system to a CRT TV. At the very least, you'll need an HDMI-to-AV adapter, but it's often more complicated. Depending on the system you're emulating, you may need to convert an image to a lower resolution, in which case you'll need a separate transcoder or downscaler. Most people are better off finding modern ways to recreate the look of retro titles using software. What if you can't acquire a CRT TV and you instead want to play official retro recreations or use definitely not-official emulators? Nintendo's own gallery of retro titles includes the option for a scanline filter applied over the game image. However, this is more of an aesthetic choice than anything. The scanlines effectively break up an image so you're not seeing every individual pixel, but they're not introducing the blur needed to fully merge pixels into a more seamless image. The best virtual recreation you can achieve is through third-party emulators and shaders. These are a separate instance of visuals on top of whatever game your system is rendering. With some visual trickery, modders have managed to craft visuals so close to CRT, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless you looked at each frame pixel by pixel. First, let's briefly discuss what emulation is. Essentially, independent creators recreate the hardware of a console, whether it's a Commodore 64 or a Nintendo Wii U, as software. The more powerful the system, the more complicated and demanding the emulation. This means you can play any number of homebrewed games built for these systems, but most players use them to play games ripped from their cartridges or discs, collectively known as ROMs. The emulators are, for the most part, legal to download, but ROMs exist in a much more tenuous state. We can't tell you how or where to get ROMs, and if you emulate ROMs you should know the legalities of it in your region (typically boiling down to only playing ROMs for which you own a legal copy of). Gizmodo doesn't condone piracy. But you can feel safe dealing with the emulators or the front-ends to emulators, namely Retroarch. Thankfully, the active scene of retro emulation offers us great options for emulating games and old-school visuals alike. Emulation platform RetroArch is open to a host of shaders that can offer an image as close to CRT as possible. Of course, you'll still lack those wavy lines and the static-fueled glow that was emblematic of old-school play. There are a legion of independent developers creating CRT shaders, all of which have different flavors that try to maximize the accuracy of the on-screen image. Shader packs like Mega Bezel go as far as to include options that simulate the curvature of non-flat CRT TVs. Others may add a green filter or a 'VHS effect' to introduce more visual distortion to an image. For the sake of actually playing your games, simpler is better. The issue with this is, depending on your shaders, you could introduce stuttering or frame rate dips, depending on how capable your system is. Shaders are very CPU dependent, and if you device isn't up to the task you may need to hold off on some more intensive shaders in favor of others. RetroArch's shader library is extensive, and anybody starting out will likely be confused out of their gourd. To enable a shader in RetroArch, you need to be in a game then access the 'Quick Menu' (by default F1 on keyboard) then go to 'Shaders' and turn them on. From there, you'll see a laundry list of shader presets to enable, and it's not easy to find you're looking for. Mega Bezel, for instance, is found under 'shaders_slang, bezel, Mega_Bezel.' Even then, you'll find so many to choose from, and you can even create your own preset. CyberLab on Libretro forums created some of my favorite preset shader settings, though you need to install them into the correct folder yourself. You don't necessarily want to use the same shader for every game, either. A Game Boy look won't be anywhere near the same as what you should see on CRT. RetroArch is compatible with most systems you can think of, including hacked consoles. The issue is, by itself, it can be a complicated piece of software to use, especially on PC. YouTuber Russ Crandall on his channel Retro Game Corps has a great starter guide for the software. Simplicity is paramount, which is why my personal favorite emulation device is the Steam Deck, and it's what I recommend to most people who want to play games up through the PSP and still use some intense shaders. For ease, I prefer EmuDeck, which is a larger collection of emulators that install all in one batch, making it easy to plug in your various ROMs without much fuss. It also installs RetroArch, which makes things easy. Installing new shaders you find online can be complicated, since the Steam Deck hides some folders in desktop mode, but YouTube channel Retro Crisis has some videos to help you navigate the file path. The next thing you need to think about is the size of your native display compared to the game you're playing. If the emulated content was made for a screen at 240p or even 480p, then you may not get the correct look if you let it upscale naturally. For games that used to run on handhelds like the Game Boy, it's better to adjust for integer scaling. This ensures the game upscales by a whole number rather than any decimals. Now, when you're playing your game, you won't have a blown-up ultra-wide image that matches the device's native widescreen. If you're more focused on console emulation, then different shaders may require you to input different settings into RetroArch. For instance, Mega Bezel asks users to disable integer scaling and allow for its custom TV framing. There are so many dials you can turn to achieve some extra fidelity with your retro games, no matter the size and resolution of your screen. As hard as you work to fine-tune each shader, emulation and shaders will never offer anything as evocative as a static-filled CRT screen. But we can get close, and for the sake of playing some great games with modern amendities, close is more than good enough.
Times
22-07-2025
- Business
- Times
Tech bros are backing Donald Trump's ‘Made in America' revival
W ould you buy a 'Made in America' computer if it cost 20 per cent more than a Chinese-manufactured alternative from Apple? Palmer Luckey, chief executive of Anduril, a Silicon Valley defence technology firm, is asking his social media followers that question, as he considers whether to fill the gap in the market. While some computers, including Apple's Mac Pro, are assembled in US factories, it is not presently possible to buy a laptop or desktop computer that is made entirely in the US. Luckey's proposal is the latest evidence of techno-nationalist sentiment sweeping through Silicon Valley, as company founders get behind the Trump administration's ambition to reindustrialise America. 'I actually think Anduril could build computers in the United States,' Luckey, 32, told the Reindustrialise Summit in Detroit last week, where he addressed the audience virtually while being represented physically on stage by a humanoid robot.
Time of India
19-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
US military hardware maker Anduril's founder Palmer Luckey on possibility of American-made PCs: ‘I think there's a chance…'
Image credit: X (Twitter) US military hardware maker Anduril 's founder, Palmer Luckey , has recently teased the possibility of the company producing American-made PCs . This week, while talking at the 'Reindustrialize Summit' in Detroit, US, Luckey said, 'I think there's a chance that it's going to be Anduril.' He also noted that conversations about this PC-making initiative began years ago. He added that Anduril has engaged with 'everyone you would need to have to do that,' including individuals "on the chip side, on the assembly side, on the manufacturing side." Despite these discussions, Luckey is not entirely committed to the effort as he also told the audience that "there are some things Anduril has to do," while "there are other things we'd rather have other people do. This is something I'd rather have other people do." However, he didn't share a potential name for the computer but suggested that it would be "pro-American, and also a gambling reference." It's important to note that the concept of American-made computers is not new. For example, PC manufacturer Dell operated several manufacturing plants across the US before closing its North Carolina plant in 2009 and shifting to an international manufacturing partner in Poland. Anduril will not build its own humanoid robot: Palmer Luckey by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Doctors Beg: Take These 4 Ingredients Before Bed to Burn Fat The Healthy Way Learn More Undo At the event, Luckey spoke to the audience both virtually and through a humanoid robot developed by a company named Foundation. Sharing a post on X, he wrote: "I finally pulled off my long-standing goal of speaking at a conference via VR telerobotics! Thousands of miles of travel saved, and no chance of Luigi." He clarified that Anduril does not plan to create its own humanoid robot as well: 'We're going to partner with other companies where it makes sense.' Founded by Luckey in 2017, Anduril develops US military hardware such as drones, underwater submersibles, and an AI-driven software platform called Lattice. The company is also collaborating with Meta on extended reality headsets and other wearable devices for military use—a partnership which was announced in May. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
