After seven years of development, Super Mario Bros. has been ported from the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to the Commodore 64. According to developer ZeroPaige, they have been working on this implementation for seven years and have been able to create an almost perfect C64 port Super Mario Bros. as it appeared for the NES in 1985. "This is a Commodore 64 port of the 1985 game SUPER MARIO BROS. for the Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System,' stated in a post to the Lemon64 forum. "It contains the original version that was released in Japan and United States, as well as the European version. It also detects and supports a handful of turbo functionalities, and has 2 SID support." ZeroPaige has released the port as a C64 disk image file that can be used directly on the Commodore 64 console or through C64 emulators.  Below is a picture of the Super Mario Bros. port being played using the VICE C64 emulator. While most users have stated that the game is an almost perfect reproduction, some issues have been reported such as minor lag at times, music running a faster than the game, fireballs not traversing screens, or jumping suddenly no longer working. ZeroPaige explains what causes each of these bugs and that some of them may be tied to the emulator or joystick being used. BleepingComputer has reached out to ZeroPaige to find out if they have been contacted by Nintendo regarding this release, but we have not had a reply at the time of this publication. Follow this and more on OUR FORUM.

Some Microsoft employees are openly questioning whether diversity is important, in a lengthy discussion on an internal online messaging board meant for communicating with CEO Satya Nadella. Two posts on the board criticizing Microsoft diversity initiatives as “discriminatory hiring” and suggesting that women are less suited for engineering roles have elicited more than 800 comments, both affirming and criticizing the viewpoints, multiple Microsoft employees have told Quartz. The posts were written by a female Microsoft program manager. Quartz reached out to her directly for comment and isn’t making her name public at this point, pending her response. “Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft. The employee commented consistently throughout the thread, making similar arguments. Quartz reviewed lengthy sections of the internal discussion provided by Microsoft employees. “I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male. This is unacceptable,” the program manager wrote in a comment later. The Microsoft employees who spoke to Quartz said they weren’t aware of any action by the company in response, despite the comments being reported to Microsoft’s human resources department. Full details posted on OUR FORUM.