It's October in the Midwest, which means it's time for the pinball world to descend on a convention center in Chicagoland for the annual Pinball Expo. Once thought to be an entertainment sector slowly bleeding out, pinball has come back in a big way in recent years. I visited one of Chicago's last old-school manufacturers before heading down the road to see what's new in the silver-ball universe.

Behind the silver ball

Hundreds gathered on a brisk fall Friday morning outside Stern Pinball's headquarters in Elk Grove, Illinois, waiting to enter a Wonka-like wonder factory where piles of raw parts become licensed creations from Jaws to the brand-new Fallout. Stern invited me to tour its offices and factory floor before heading off to the convention in nearby Schaumburg, Illinois.

An early-morning line begins to form outside of Stern HQ as buses of Pinball Expo attendees arrive for tours.

As I stood with my tour group in Stern Pinball's HQ lobby, mouth agape at the dozens of machines lining the walls, we were greeted by the man himself, Gary Stern, who gave us some background on the company's 40-year history. After a stop at Gary's podium, we were ushered to the factory floor entrance, where Stern employee and legendary game designer George Gomez briefed us on the tour rules and answered questions. According to Gomez, "at any given time, Stern controls 90 percent of the current pinball market, and everybody else splits the rest."

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OpenBSD 8.0 is here, marking the project's 61st release and continuing its schedule of semiannual releases dating back to 1996. What started more than 30 years ago as a fork of NetBSD has grown into one of the most security-conscious operating systems in active development. In a post to the project's announcements mailing list, OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt highlights a host of improvements included with the latest version and writes that the project remains "proud of OpenBSD's record of more than thirty years with only two remote holes in the default install."

The latest OpenBSD version brings new features and improvements across the board. These changes, particularly the new Intel Arc support and expanded virtual address space, should improve compatibility with modern graphics cards and allow the system to map more than 4GB of VRAM. Some of the major updates noted in the release newsletter are as follows:

• Added support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards.
• 512GB kernel virtual address space on AMD64, up from 4GB, allowing VRAM mapping above 4GB.
• Added hibernation support for ARM64 systems.
• A new RPKI-to-router daemon: rtrd(8).
• RISC-V improvements including kernel support for the 'V' vector extension and support for Advanced Interrupt Architecture.
• Wireless network driver additions and improvements, including 802.11n and 40 MHz channels for the qwx(4) wireless driver.
• Added support for up to 64 virtual CPUs per guest virtual machine.
• Security and internal improvements for LibreSSL 4.4.0 and OpenSSH 10.6.
• Improvements to the vmm/vmd virtualization stack.

The new OpenBSD also retires support for Loongson architecture after the port stopped working with the Clang 22 compiler. If you're interested in reading over all the changes that come with the new OpenBSD 8.0, you can take a look at the release announcement.

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