1.
History of video games
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The history of video games goes as far back as the early 1950s, when academic computer scientists began designing simple games and simulations as part of their research. Since the 1980s, video gaming has become a form of entertainment. One of the games was Spacewar. Which was developed by computer scientists, early arcade video games developed from 1972 to 1978. During the 1970s, the first generation of consoles emerged, including the popular game Pong. The 1970s was also the era of computer games. The golden age of video games was from 1978 to 1982. During the 1980s, gaming computers, early online gaming and handheld LCD games emerged, from 1976 to 1992, the second generation of video consoles emerged. The third generation of consoles, which were 8-bit units, emerged from 1983 to 1995, the fourth generation of consoles, which were 16-bit models, emerged from 1987 to 1999. The 1990s saw the resurgence and decline of arcades, the transition to 3D video games, improved handheld games, the fifth generation of consoles, which were 32 and 64-bit units, was from 1993 to 2006. During this era, mobile phone gaming emerged, during the 2000s, the sixth generation of consoles emerged. During this period, online gaming and mobile games became important, the seventh generation of consoles was from 2005 to 2012. In 2013, the generation of consoles emerged, including Nintendos Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, Microsofts Xbox One. PC gaming has been holding a market share in Asia. The term video game has evolved over the decades from a technical definition to a general concept defining a new class of interactive entertainment. Technically, for a product to be a game, there must be a video signal transmitted to a cathode ray tube that creates a rasterized image on a screen. From a technical standpoint, these would more properly be called games or computer games. Today, however, the video game has completely shed its purely technical definition
2.
Early history of video games
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The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering a long period of invention and changes. Video gaming would not reach popularity until the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, video gaming has become a form of entertainment. Initially created as technology demonstrations, such as the Bertie the Brain and Nimrod computers in 1950 and 1951, a series of games, generally simulating real-world board games, were created at various research institutions to explore programming, human–computer interaction, and computer algorithms. These include OXO and Christopher Stracheys draughts program in 1952, the first software-based games to incorporate a CRT display, possibly the first video game created simply for entertainment was 1958s Tennis for Two, featuring moving graphics on an oscilloscope. Throughout the rest of the 1960s, digital computer games were created by increasingly numerous programmers, the term video game has evolved over the decades from a purely technical definition to a general concept defining a new class of interactive entertainment. Technically, for a product to be a game, there must be a video signal transmitted to a cathode ray tube that creates a rasterized image on a screen. From a technical standpoint, these would more properly be called games or computer games. Today, however, the video game has completely shed its purely technical definition. The ancestors to these include the cathode-ray tube amusement device. The player simulates an artillery shell trajectory on a CRT screen connected to an oscilloscope, with a set of knobs, the device uses purely analog electronics and does not use any digital computer or memory device or execute a program. It was patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and this, along with the lack of electronic logic circuits, keeps the device from being considered the first video game. Turing tested the code in a game in 1952 where he mimicked the operation of the code in a chess game against an opponent. The first publicly demonstrated electronic game was created in 1950, Bertie the Brain was an arcade game of tic-tac-toe, built by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. To showcase his new miniature vacuum tube, the tube, he designed a specialized computer to use it. The game was a success at the exhibition, with attendees lining up to play it as Kates adjusted the difficulty up. After the exhibition, Bertie was dismantled, and largely forgotten as a novelty, Kates has said that he was working on so many projects at the same time that he had no energy to spare for preserving it, despite its significance. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of Nim, Nimrod could play either the traditional or reverse form of the game
3.
Golden age of arcade video games
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The golden age of arcade video games was the era of greatest popularity and technological innovation for arcade video games. The exact time period is a matter of debate, but key moments include the release of Space Invaders in 1978, the golden age lasted until the early-1980s, when home video game consoles like the NES were introduced. Although the exact years differ, all timelines overlap in the early 1980s, technology journalist Jason Whittaker, in The Cyberspace Handbook, places the beginning of the golden age in 1978, with the release of Space Invaders. Video game journalist Steven L. Kent, in his book The Ultimate History of Video Games, places it at 1979 to 1983, however,1983 was the period that began a fairly steady decline in the coin-operated video game business and when many arcades started disappearing. The game brought forth with it the power of the microprocessor, following Space Invaders, Ataris Asteroids and Namcos Pac-Man further solidified the strength of the Golden Age. The golden age of arcade games largely coincided with, and partly fueled, the generation of game consoles. The golden age was a time of great technical and design creativity in arcade games, the era saw the rapid spread of video arcades across North America, Europe, and Asia. The number of game arcades in North America, for example. Beginning with Space Invaders, video games also started to appear in supermarkets, restaurants, liquor stores, gas stations. By 1982, there were 24,000 full arcades,400,000 arcade street locations and 1.5 million arcade machines active in North America, the market was very competitive, the average life span of an arcade game was four to six months. Some games like Robby Roto failed because they were too complex to learn quickly, qix was briefly very popular but, Taitos Keith Egging later said, too mystifying for gamers. Impossible to master and when the novelty wore off, the game faded, at around this time, the home video game industry emerged as an outgrowth of the widespread success of video arcades at the time. In 1980, the U. S. arcade video game industrys revenue generated from quarters tripled to $2.8 billion. The total revenue for the U. S. arcade video game industry in 1981 was estimated at more than $7 billion though some estimated the real amount may have been much higher. By 1982, video games accounted for 87% of the $8.9 billion in commercial sales in the United States. In 1982, the video game industrys revenue in quarters was estimated at $8 billion surpassing the annual gross revenue of both pop music and Hollywood films combined that year. In comparison, the U. S. video game industry in 2011 generated total revenues between $16.3 billion and $16.6 billion, prior to the golden age, pinball machines were more popular than video games. The pinball industry reached a peak of 200,000 machine sales and $2.3 billion revenue in 1979, which had declined to 33,000 machines and $464 million in 1982
4.
Video game crash of 1983
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The North American video game crash of 1983 was a massive recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985. Revenues had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, the crash was a serious event that brought an abrupt end to what is retrospectively considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America. The crash almost destroyed the industry, and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers. Analysts of the time expressed doubts about the viability of video game consoles. The crash had several causes, including the saturation of the market, the full effects of the industry crash would not be felt until 1985. The North American video game crash of 1983 was caused by a combination of factors. At the time of the North American crash, there were many consoles on the market, including the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Odyssey 2 and the Fairchild II. Each of these consoles had its own library of games produced by the console maker, the first microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and Apple I were marketed to a niche of electronics hobbyists as most required assembly from a kit. In 1977, pre-assembled machines with BASIC in ROM became available, including the Trio of 77, the Apple II, Commodore PET, the latter two retailed for under $1,000, but lacked game joysticks and high-resolution color video. Third-party developers created games for all of these platforms, the TRS-80 benefited from Radio Shacks retail stores, which displayed computers and accessories locally in an era where many personal computers were mail-ordered from manufacturers. In 1979, Atari unveiled the Atari 400 and 800 computers, built around a chipset originally meant for use in a console. In 1981, IBM introduced the IBM5150 PC with a $1,565 base price, by 1982, new desktop computer designs were commonly providing better color graphics and sound than game consoles and personal computer sales were booming. The TI 99/4A and the Atari 400 were both at $349, Radio Shacks Color Computer sold at $379, and Commodore International had just reduced the price of the VIC-20 to $199, by 1983 consumers found that most predicted uses of home computers were unrealistic, except for games. Children used most home computers—Coleco planned to market its Adam home computer to boys age 8 to 16, the two groups that really fuel computer purchases—so games dominated home computers software libraries. A1984 compendium of reviews of Atari 8-bit software used 198 pages for games compared to 167 for all other software types, because computers generally had more memory and faster processors than a console, they permitted more sophisticated games. They could also be used for such as word processing. Games were easier to duplicate, since they could be packaged as floppy disks or cassette tapes instead of ROM modules and this opened the field to a cottage industry of third-party software developers. Writeable storage media allowed players to save games in progress, a feature for increasingly complex games which was not available on the consoles of the era
5.
Video game console
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A video game console is an electronic, digital or computer device that outputs a video signal or visual image to display a video game that one or more people can play. The term video game console is used to distinguish a console machine primarily designed for consumers to use for playing video games. An arcade machine consists of a video game computer, display, game controller, a home computer is a personal computer designed for home use for a variety of purposes, such as bookkeeping, accessing the Internet and playing video games. There are various types of game consoles, including home video game consoles, handheld game consoles, microconsoles. Although Ralph Baer had built working game consoles by 1966, it was nearly a decade before the Pong game made them commonplace in regular peoples living rooms. Through evolution over the 1990s and 2000s, game consoles have expanded to additional functions such as CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray disc players, web browsers, set-top boxes. The first video appeared in the 1960s. They were played on massive computers connected to vector displays, not analog televisions, Ralph H. Baer conceived the idea of a home video game in 1951. In the late 1960s, while working for Sanders Associates, Baer created a series of game console designs. In 1972, Magnavox released the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home game console which could be connected to a TV set. Magnavox replaced the switch design with separate cartridges for each game, by autumn 1975, Magnavox, bowing to the popularity of Pong, cancelled the Odyssey and released a scaled-down version that played only Pong and hockey, the Odyssey 100. A second, higher end console, the Odyssey 200, was released with the 100 and added on-screen scoring, up to four players, almost simultaneously released with Ataris own home Pong console through Sears, these consoles jump-started the consumer market. All three of the new consoles used simpler designs than the original Odyssey did with no board game pieces or extra cartridges, in the years that followed, the market saw many companies rushing similar consoles to market. Most of the consoles from this era were dedicated consoles playing only the games came with the console. These video game consoles were often just called video games, because there was reason to distinguish the two yet. While a few companies like Atari, Magnavox, and newcomer Coleco pushed the envelope, Fairchild released the Fairchild Video Entertainment System in 1976. The VES, however, contained a programmable microprocessor so its cartridges only needed a single ROM chip to store microprocessor instructions, RCA and Atari soon released their own cartridge-based consoles, the RCA Studio II and the Atari 2600, respectively. The first handheld console with interchangeable cartridges was the Microvision designed by Smith Engineering
6.
Second generation of video game consoles
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The second generation of computer and video games began in 1976 with the release of the Fairchild Channel F and Radofin Electronics 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System. It coincided with and was fuelled by the golden age of arcade video games. The early period saw the launch of several consoles as various companies decided to enter the market, the Atari 2600 was the dominant console for much of the second generation, with other consoles such as Intellivision, the Odyssey², and ColecoVision also enjoying market share. The second generation had a mixed legacy affected by the game crash of 1983. The Atari 2600 was discontinued on January 1,1992, ending the second generation, the duration between the start of the 2nd generation in 1976 and the start of the 3rd generation in 1983 was seven years. Due to the lifespan of the Atari 2600, which was available from 1977 to 1992. Some features that distinguished second generation consoles from first generation consoles include, AI simulation of computer-based opponents, allowing for single-player gaming. ROM cartridges for storing games, allowing any number of different games to be played on one console, Game playfields able to span multiple flip-screen areas. Blocky and simplistic-looking sprites, with a resolution of around 160 ×192 pixels. Basic color graphics, generally between 2-color and 16-color, lacked features of third generation consoles, such as scrolling tile-based playfields. The earliest console, the Magnavox Odyssey, uses removable cartridges that are merely jumpers housed in cartridges, that activate the games already wired into the console. This method was replaced during the move to Pong consoles, where the logic for one or more games was hard-coded into microchips using discrete logic. By the mid-1970s, cartridges returned with the move to CPU-based consoles, with games now consisting of microprocessor-based code, these games were burned onto ROM chips mounted inside plastic cartridge casings that could be plugged into slots on the console. When the cartridges were plugged in, the general-purpose microprocessors in the read the cartridge memory. Rather than being confined to a selection of games included in the box. The Fairchild VES was the worlds first CPU-based video game console and it was released by Fairchild Semiconductor in November 1976. When Atari released their VCS the next year, Fairchild quickly renamed it to the Fairchild Channel F, the RCA Studio II is a video game console made by RCA that debuted in January 1977. The graphics of Studio II games were black and white and resembled those of earlier Pong consoles, the Studio II also did not have joysticks or similar game controllers but instead used two ten button keypads that were built into the console itself
7.
Third generation of video game consoles
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In the history of computer and video games, the third generation began on July 15,1983, with the Japanese release of both the Family Computer and SG-1000. The best-selling console of this generation was the NES/Famicom, followed by the Master System, although the previous generation of consoles had also used 8-bit processors, it was at the end of this generation that home consoles were first labeled by their bits. This also came into fashion as 16-bit systems like the Mega Drive/Genesis were marketed to differentiate between the generations of consoles, in Japan and North America, this generation of gaming was primarily dominated by the Famicom/NES, while the Master System dominated the European and Brazilian markets. The end of the 3rd generation of video games comes as 8-bit consoles become obsolete in graphics, some features that distinguished third generation consoles from most second generation consoles include, D-pad game controllers. Screen modes with resolutions up to 256×240 or 320×200, 25–32 colors on screen, from a palette of 53–256 colors. Tile-based playfields with smooth multi-directional hardware scrolling, advanced hardware scrolling, including multi-directional scrolling, diagonal scrolling, and line-scrolling. 64–100 sprites on screen, each with 4–16 colors and 8×8 to 16×16 pixel sizes, up to five channel mono PSG audio. The Family Computer became very popular in Japan during this era, the Famicoms Western counterpart, the Nintendo Entertainment System, dominated the gaming market in North America, thanks in part to its restrictive licensing agreements with developers. The company had an estimated 65% of 1987 hardware sales in the market, Atari Corporation had 24%, Sega had 8%. Nintendo sold seven million NES systems in 1988, almost as many as the number of Commodore 64s sold in its first five years, as Computer Gaming World reported in 1992, No matter how fast your 486 is, you still cant play Super Mario XVII on it. The kids who dont have access to videogames are as culturally isolated as the kids in our own generation whose parents refused to buy a TV, Nintendos market domination, while overwhelming in sheer number of units sold, was not global. Although the NES dominated the market in Japan and North America, Segas Master System made large inroads in Europe, Oceania and Brazil, the Atari 7800 also had a fairly successful life in the United States. Sega was Nintendos main competitor during the era in terms of market share for console units sold, in the following generation, Nintendo would also introduce the Game Boy, which almost single-handedly solidified and then proceeded to dominate the previously scattered handheld market for 15 years. Since the Game Boys release, Nintendo had dominated the handheld market, additionally two popular 8-bit computers, the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, were repackaged as the Commodore 64 Games System and Amstrad GX4000 respectively, for entry into the console market. This era contributed many influential aspects to the history of the development of video games, the third generation saw the release of many of the first console role-playing video games. Editing and censorship of video games was used in localizing Japanese games to North America. During this era, many of the most famous video game franchises of all time were founded that outlived the third generation, some examples are Super Mario Bros. Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Metroid, Mega Man, Metal Gear, Castlevania, Phantasy Star, Megami Tensei, Ninja Gaiden, the third generation also saw the dawn of the childrens educational console market
8.
Fourth generation of video game consoles
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In the history of computer and video games, the fourth generation of games consoles began on October 30,1987 with the Japanese release of NEC Home Electronics PC Engine. This generation saw strong console wars, Nintendo was able to capitalize on its previous success in the third generation and managed to win the largest worldwide market share in the fourth generation as well. Sega was extremely successful in this generation and began a new franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog, several other companies released consoles in this generation, but none of them were widely successful. Nevertheless, several companies started to take notice of the maturing video game industry. This generation ended with the discontinuation of the Neo Geo in 2004 and it launched in North America during August 1989, under the name TurboGrafx-16. Initially, the PC Engine was quite successful in Japan, partly due to titles available on the then-new CD-ROM format, NEC released a CD add-on in 1990 and by 1992 had released a combination TurboGrafx and CD-ROM system known as the TurboDuo. In the United States, NEC used Bonk, a caveman, as their mascot. The TurboGrafx-16 failed to maintain its sales momentum or to make an impact in North America. The TurboGrafx-16 and its CD combination system, the Turbo Duo, ceased manufacturing in North America by 1994, though a small amount of software continued to trickle out for the platform. In Japan, a number of adult titles were also available for the PC Engine, such as a variety of strip mahjong games. The Mega Drive was released in Japan on October 29,1988, the console was released in New York City and Los Angeles on August 14,1989 under the name Sega Genesis, and in the rest of North America later that year. It was launched in Europe and Australia on November 30,1990 under its original name and their advertising was often directly adversarial, leading to commercials such as Genesis does what Nintendont and the SEGA. scream. Segas version of Mortal Kombat received generally favorable reviews in the gaming press. With the new ESRB rating system in place, Nintendo reconsidered its position for the release of Mortal Kombat II, the Toy Retail Sales Tracking Service reported that during the key shopping month of November 1994, 63% of all 16-bit video game consoles sold were Sega systems. The console was never popular in Japan, but still managed to sell 40 million units worldwide, by late 1995, Sega was supporting five different consoles and two add-ons, and Sega Enterprises chose to discontinue the Mega Drive in Japan to concentrate on the new Sega Saturn. Nintendos fourth-generation console, the Super Famicom, was released in Japan on November 21,1990, the machine reached North America as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System on August 23,1991, and Europe and Australia in April 1992. Later titles such as Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country would keep the Super Famicom/SNES relevant well into the fifth generation era of 32-, the CD-i format was announced in the late 80s, with the first machines compatible with the format being released in 1991. The Phillips CD-i main selling point was that it was more than a game machine, due to an agreement between Nintendo in Philips about an abortive CD add-on for the SNES, Philips also had rights to use some of Nintendo franchises
9.
Fifth generation of video game consoles
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The fifth-generation era refers to computer and video games, video game consoles and video game handhelds from approximately 1993 to 2001. For home consoles, the console was the PlayStation by a wide margin, followed by the Nintendo 64. Both were discontinued before the other made their debut. The Neo Geo Pocket was released in 1998, but was dropped by SNK in favor of the fully backwards compatible Neo Geo Pocket Color just a year later, Nintendos Game Boy Color was the winner in handhelds by a large margin. There were also two updated versions of the original Game Boy, Game Boy Light and Game Boy Pocket, there was considerable overlap between this and the sixth generation of consoles, which began with the launch of the Dreamcast in Japan on November 27,1998. The fifth generation officially ended with the discontinuation of the PlayStation in March 2006, early efforts from then-industry leaders Sega and Nintendo saw the introduction of the 32X and Super FX, which provided rudimentary 3D capabilities to the 16-bit Genesis and Super NES. Prime examples of this trend include Virtua Fighter 2 on the Saturn, Tomb Raider on the PlayStation and Saturn, Tekken and Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation, and Super Mario 64 on the N64. Their 3D environments were widely marketed and they steered the industrys focus away from side-scrolling and rail-style titles, as well as opening doors to more complex games and genres. 3D became the focus in this era as well as a slow decline of cartridges in favor of CDs, due to the ability to produce games less expensively. Publicly, Nintendo defended this decision on the grounds that it would give games shorter load times than a compact disc, however, it also had the dubious benefit of allowing Nintendo to charge higher licensing fees, as cartridge production was considerably more expensive than CD production. Many third-party developers like EA Sports viewed this as an attempt to raise more money for Nintendo. Nintendos decision to use a cartridge based system sparked a small scale war among gamers as to which was better, a Nintendo magazine ad placed a Space Shuttle next to a snail and dared consumers to decide which one was better. Almost every other system used the new CD-ROM technology. Consequent to the storage and cost advantages of the CD-ROM format, there was much confusion over which console was superior to the others. Also, console makers routinely boasted theoretical maximum limits of each systems 3D polygon rendering without accounting for real world in-game performance, the FM Towns Marty is considered the worlds first 32-bit console, being released in February 20,1993 by Japanese electronic company Fujitsu. Never released outside Japan, it was marketed as a console version of the FM Towns home computer. It failed to make an impact in the due to its expense relative to other consoles. While using a 32-bit word length, however, the Intel 80386SX CPU only supports 16-bit bus addressing, despite massive third party support and an unprecedented amount of hype for a first-time entrant into the industry, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayers $700 price tag hindered its success
10.
Sixth generation of video game consoles
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Platforms of the sixth generation include the Sega Dreamcast, Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Microsoft Xbox. This era began on November 27,1998 with the Japanese release of the Dreamcast, and it was joined by the PlayStation 2 in March 2000, the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001, the GameCube in 2007, Xbox in 2009 and PlayStation 2 in 2013. Bit ratings for consoles largely fell by the wayside during this era, with the exceptions being the Dreamcast. The number of bits cited in console names referred to the CPU word size and had used by hardware marketers as a show of power for many years. The last official Dreamcast games were released in 2002 and 2007, the last GameCube games were released in 2006 and 2007. The last Xbox games were released in 2007 and 2008, Pro Evolution Soccer 2014 was the last game released for PlayStation 2. Due to the lifespan of the PlayStation 2, which was available for 13 years. The Sony PlayStation 2 achieved sales dominance in this generation, becoming the best-selling console in history, the Microsoft Xbox had sold over 24 million units as of May 2006, and the Nintendo GameCube had sold 22 million units as of September 2010. The Sega Dreamcast, which arrived prior to all of the others and was discontinued in 2001, the sixth generation began to end when the Xbox was succeeded by the Xbox 360 in late 2005. GameCube hardware was still being produced when the Wii was released in late 2006, PlayStation 2 sales continued to be strong into November 2010, due to the systems large software library, continuing software support, and affordable price. In February 2008, the PlayStation 2 outsold both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the United States, Games were still being produced for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube as of 2008, while Dreamcast games were officially discontinued in 2003. There were still a few games being produced for the Dreamcast in 2004, the PlayStation 2 was still being produced after the launch of Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3, making the sixth generation the second longest generation of all time. Although consoles had these features before, the Dreamcast brought them to millions of homes and it was also the first home console to always display full SD resolution. The console helped to restore Segas reputation, which had been damaged by the failures of the Sega Saturn, Sega 32X. Despite this, the Dreamcast was discontinued due to numerous factors. Segas decision to implement a GD-ROM for storage medium did save costs, Sega was either unable or unwilling to spend the advertising money necessary to compete with Sony, which themselves took massive losses on the PlayStation 2 to gain market-share. With the announcements of the Xbox and GameCube in late 2000, Sega also announced it would shut down SegaNet, an online gaming community that supported online-capable Dreamcast titles. Due to user outcry over the decision, Sega delayed the closure by an additional 6 months
11.
Seventh generation of video game consoles
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In the history of video games, the seventh generation includes consoles released since late 2005 by Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony Computer Entertainment. The eighth generation began in November 2012, each new console introduced a new type of breakthrough in technology. Some of the Wii controllers could be moved about to control in-game actions, Video game consoles had become an important part of the global IT infrastructure. It is estimated that video game consoles represented 25% of the worlds general-purpose computational power in the year 2007, joining Nintendo in the motion market, Sony Computer Entertainment released the PlayStation Move in September 2010. The PlayStation Move features motion sensing gaming, similar to that of the Wii, Microsoft joined the scene in November 2010, with its Kinect. Unlike the other two systems, Kinect does not use controllers of any sort and makes the users the controller, having sold 8 million units in its first 60 days on the market, Kinect has claimed the Guinness World Record of being the fastest selling consumer electronics device. While the Xbox 360 offers wired as well as wireless controllers as a product, all PlayStation 3 controllers can be used in wired. The Nintendo DS features a screen and built-in microphone. Additionally, the version of the NDS, the Nintendo DSi. The PlayStation Portable released later the year on December 12,2004. It became the first handheld game console to use an optical disc format, Universal Media Disc. Sony also gave the PSP robust multi-media capability, connectivity with the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, other PSPs, as well as Internet connectivity. The Nintendo DS likewise had connectivity to the internet through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and Nintendo DS Browser, as well as wireless connectivity to other DS systems, a crowdfunded console, the Ouya, received $8.5 million in pre-orders, launching in 2013. Post-launch sales were poor, and the device was a commercial failure, the business was wound down due to financial problems and sold to Razer Inc. Razer discontinued the Ouya in July 2015, the first discontinued seventh generation console was the Wii, which Nintendo announced it would be discontinuing production of on October 2013. Microsoft also announced in 2016 that they would discontinue the Xbox 360 at the end of April that year, once this happens, the seventh generation of video game consoles will end. Nintendo entered this generation with a new approach embodied by its Wii and this approach was previously implemented in the portable market with the Nintendo DS. This strategy paid off, with demand for the Wii outstripping supply throughout 2007. Since Nintendo profited on each console right from the start unlike its competitors, as in previous generations, Nintendo provided strong support for its new console with popular first-party franchises like Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokémon, among others
12.
Eighth generation of video game consoles
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In the history of video games, the seventh generation includes consoles released since late 2005 by Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony Computer Entertainment. The eighth generation began in November 2012, each new console introduced a new type of breakthrough in technology. Some of the Wii controllers could be moved about to control in-game actions, Video game consoles had become an important part of the global IT infrastructure. It is estimated that video game consoles represented 25% of the worlds general-purpose computational power in the year 2007, joining Nintendo in the motion market, Sony Computer Entertainment released the PlayStation Move in September 2010. The PlayStation Move features motion sensing gaming, similar to that of the Wii, Microsoft joined the scene in November 2010, with its Kinect. Unlike the other two systems, Kinect does not use controllers of any sort and makes the users the controller, having sold 8 million units in its first 60 days on the market, Kinect has claimed the Guinness World Record of being the fastest selling consumer electronics device. While the Xbox 360 offers wired as well as wireless controllers as a product, all PlayStation 3 controllers can be used in wired. The Nintendo DS features a screen and built-in microphone. Additionally, the version of the NDS, the Nintendo DSi. The PlayStation Portable released later the year on December 12,2004. It became the first handheld game console to use an optical disc format, Universal Media Disc. Sony also gave the PSP robust multi-media capability, connectivity with the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, other PSPs, as well as Internet connectivity. The Nintendo DS likewise had connectivity to the internet through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and Nintendo DS Browser, as well as wireless connectivity to other DS systems, a crowdfunded console, the Ouya, received $8.5 million in pre-orders, launching in 2013. Post-launch sales were poor, and the device was a commercial failure, the business was wound down due to financial problems and sold to Razer Inc. Razer discontinued the Ouya in July 2015, the first discontinued seventh generation console was the Wii, which Nintendo announced it would be discontinuing production of on October 2013. Microsoft also announced in 2016 that they would discontinue the Xbox 360 at the end of April that year, once this happens, the seventh generation of video game consoles will end. Nintendo entered this generation with a new approach embodied by its Wii and this approach was previously implemented in the portable market with the Nintendo DS. This strategy paid off, with demand for the Wii outstripping supply throughout 2007. Since Nintendo profited on each console right from the start unlike its competitors, as in previous generations, Nintendo provided strong support for its new console with popular first-party franchises like Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokémon, among others
13.
History of Eastern role-playing video games
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Eastern role-playing video games are role-playing video games developed in East Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and, to a lesser extent, China. The countrys computer market was very fragmented at first, Lode Runner, for example, the market eventually became dominated by the NEC PC-8801 & PC-9801, though with some competition from the Sharp X1 & X68000, FM-7 & FM Towns, and MSX & MSX2. A key difference between Western and Japanese systems at the time was the latters higher display resolutions in order to accommodate Japanese text which in turn influenced game design. Due to hardware differences, only a portion of Japanese computer games were released in North America. The Wizardry series became popular and influential in Japan, even more so than at home, early Japanese RPGs were also influenced by visual novel adventure games, which were developed by companies such as Enix, Square, Nihon Falcom and Koei before they moved onto developing RPGs. Japans earliest RPGs were released in 1982, the earliest was Koeis Underground Exploration, released in March 1982. It was followed by Pony Canyons Spy Daisakusen, released in April 1982, based on the Mission, Impossible franchise and it was then followed by Koeis The Dragon and Princess for the PC-8001 in 1982, it featured adventure game elements and revolved around rescuing a kidnapped princess. Following a random encounter, the transitions from a text adventure interface to a separate, graphical, overhead battle screen. Also in 1982, Koei released another early Japanese RPG, Danchizuma no Yuwaku, in June 1983, Koei released Sword & Sorcery for the PC-8001, and it also revolved around rescuing a princess in addition to killing a wizard. That same year, Koei released Secrets of Khufu, a dungeon crawl RPG that revolved around a search for the treasure of Khufu, ASCII released its own RPG that year called Arfgaldt, an FM-7 title also featuring adventure game elements. An important early Japanese RPG was Bokosuka Wars, originally released for the Sharp X1 computer in 1983, the game is also considered to be an early example of a real-time, action RPG. Another important title released that year was Koeis Nobunagas Ambition for Japanese computers in 1983. It was an attempt at combining role-playing, turn-based grand strategy and management simulation elements. This trend continued with its sequels and other Koei games such as 1989s Bandit Kings of Ancient China as well as the Capcom game Destiny of an Emperor released that same year, also in 1983, Nihon Falcom released Panorama Toh for the PC-88. It was developed by Yoshio Kiya, who would go on to create the Dragon Slayer, the trend of combining role-playing elements with arcade-style action mechanics was popularized by The Tower of Druaga, an arcade game released by Namco in June 1984. A rivalry developed between the three games, with Dragon Slayer and Hydlide continuing their rivalry through subsequent sequels, Nihon Falcoms Dragon Slayer, released in 1984, is a historically significant title that helped lay the foundations for the Japanese role-playing game industry. It was a real-time hack & slash dungeon crawler that is considered the first action role-playing game, Hydlide, an action RPG released for the PC-8801 in 1984 and the Famicom in 1986, was an early open world game, rewarding exploration in an open world environment. The Tower of Druaga, Dragon Slayer and Hydlide were influential in Japan, also in 1984, The Black Onyx, developed by Bullet-Proof Software, led by Henk Rogers, was released on the PC-8801 in Japan
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History of Western role-playing video games
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Western role-playing video games are role-playing video games developed in the Western world, including The Americas and Europe. A later series of isometric role-playing games, published by Interplay Productions and Blizzard Entertainment, was developed over a time period. Computer role-playing games are once again popular, subgenres include action role-playing games, roguelikes and tactical role-playing games. The earliest role-playing video games were created in the mid-to-late 1970s, as offshoots of early university mainframe text-based RPGs that were played on PDP-10, PLATO and these included Dungeon, written in 1975 or 1976, pedit5, created in 1975, and dnd, also from 1975. These early games were inspired by pen-and-paper role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, which was published in 1974, and J. R. R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings trilogy. PLATO was a system that supported multiple users and allowed them to play simultaneously. Games of this era were influenced by text adventures such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork, early MUDs, tabletop wargames such as Chainmail. The popular dungeon crawler Rogue was developed in 1980, for Unix-based systems and it used ASCII graphics, and featured a deep system of gameplay and a multitude of randomly generated items and locations. Later examples of roguelikes include Angband, Ancient Domains of Mystery, the keyboard was frequently the only input supported by these games, and their graphics were simple and often monochromatic. Some titles, like Rogue, represented objects through text characters, such as @ for the main character, the early Ultima and Wizardry were definitive games which began to build the genre. These ideas included the use of tiled graphics and party-based combat, a mix of fantasy and science-fiction elements, the games written narrative was an innovative feature that allowed it to convey a larger story than was found in the minimal plots common at the time. Most games, including Garriotts own Akalabeth, focused primarily on basic gameplay mechanics like combat, Ultima III is considered by many to have been the first modern CRPG. It was originally published for the Apple II, but was ported to other platforms and influenced the development of later titles, including such console RPGs as Excalibur. Garriott introduced a system of chivalry and code of conduct in Ultima IV, the players Avatar tackles such problems as fundamentalism, racism and xenophobia, and based on his or her actions is tested periodically in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unseen. This code of conduct was in part a response to the efforts among some Christian groups to mitigate the rising popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, continuing until Ultima IX, Ascension, it covered a range of virtues that included compassion, justice, humility and honor. This system of morals and ethics was unique at the time, as video games allowed players to be lauded as heroes by the game worlds denizens. In Ultima IV, on the hand, players were forced to consider the moral consequences of their actions. According to Garriott, Ultima was now more than a mere fantasy escape and it provided a world with a framework of deeper meaning a level of detail diversity of interaction that is rarely attempted
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History of massively multiplayer online games
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The history of massively multiplayer online games spans over thirty years and hundreds of massively multiplayer online games titles. The origin and influence on MMO games stems from MUDs, Dungeons & Dragons, in 1974, Mazewar introduced the first graphic virtual world, providing a first-person perspective view of a maze in which players roamed around shooting at each other. It was also the first networked game, in which players at different computers could visually interact in a virtual space, Adventure, created in 1975 by Will Crowther on a DEC PDP-10 computer, was the first widely played adventure game. The game was expanded in 1976 by Don Woods. Adventure contained many D&D features and references, including a computer controlled dungeon master, inspired by Adventure, a group of students at MIT, in the summer of 1977 wrote a game called Zork for the PDP-10. It became quite popular on the ARPANET, Zork was ported under the name Dungeon to FORTRAN by a programmer working at DEC in 1978. In 1978 Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK and he named the game MUD, in tribute to the Dungeon variant of Zork, which Trubshaw had greatly enjoyed playing. Trubshaw converted MUD to BCPL, before handing over development to Richard Bartle, MUD, better known as Essex MUD and MUD1 in later years, ran on the Essex University network until late 1987. During this time it was said that MUD stands for Multi Undergraduate Destroyer due to their popularity among college students. In 1987, Nihon Falcoms Yoshio Kiya, creator of the Dragon Slayer action role-playing games, for example, despite it being a sword and sorcery world, the hero decides to do nothing and just quietly enjoy his life as a local baker in town. If everyone could take up different roles in some kind of computer networked game, in 1989, Yehuda Simmons published Avalon, The Legend Lives which has seen continued development and support ever since. Avalons mission statement was to be the first fully developed roleplaying world - a life within a life using real-world systems to fully immerse players into the lives of the characters they created, the history of MMORPGs grows directly out of the history of MUDs. Meanwhile, the PLATO system, a computer system based on mainframe computers with graphical terminals, was pioneering many areas of multiuser computer systems. By the middle of 1974, there were graphical multiplayer games such as Spasim, a battle game which could support 32 users. Oubliette, written by Jim Schwaiger, and published on the PLATO system predated MUD1 by about a year and it was so difficult that one could not play it alone, in order for players to survive, they had to run in groups. While Oubliette was a game, there was no persistence to the game world. Following it, also on PLATO, was a game called Moria written in 1977, again, players could run in parties but in this game it was also possible to effectively play while only running one character. This 2. 5-D game was running on 512x512 plasma panels of the PLATO system and these games were graphical in nature and very advanced for their time, but were proprietary programs that were unable to spread beyond PLATO
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Magnavox Odyssey
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The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. It was developed by a team led by Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates and released by Magnavox in the United States in September 1972. The Odyssey consists of a white, black, and brown box which connects to a television set and two rectangular controllers attached by wires. It is capable of displaying three square dots on the screen in black and white, with differing behavior for the dots depending on the game played. The idea for a game console was thought up by Baer in August 1966. The seventh, known as the Brown Box, was shown to several manufacturers before Magnavox agreed to produce it in January 1971, the console spawned the Magnavox Odyssey series of dedicated consoles, as well as the 1978 Magnavox Odyssey². One of the 28 games made for the system, a ping pong game, was an inspiration for Ataris successful Pong arcade game, in turn driving sales of the console. The release of the Odyssey marked the end of the history of video games. The Odyssey consists of a black, white, and brown oblong box connected by wires to two rectangular controllers. The reset button does not reset the game, but instead is used by different games to reset individual elements, the system can be powered by six C batteries, which were included. An optional AC power supply was sold separately, the Odyssey lacks sound capability and can only display monochrome white shapes on a blank black screen. Internally, the Odyssey architecture is composed of digital computing parts, the circuitry is implemented in diode–transistor logic using discrete transistors and diodes, rather than the newly emerging transistor–transistor logic integrated circuits, due to cost concerns. The games themselves do not use cartridges like later consoles, and these cards modify the internal circuitry like a set of switches or jumpers, causing the Odyssey to display different components and react to inputs differently. Multiple games use the cards, with different instructions given to the player to change the style of game. The Odyssey is capable of displaying three square dots and a line on the screen. Two of the dots are controlled by the two players, and the third by the system itself, the main console has two dials, one of which moves the vertical line across the screen, and one which adjusts the speed of the computer-controlled dot. Different games direct the player to adjust the dials to different positions, the games include plastic overlays which stick to the television via static cling, to create visuals for the game. Different games that use the game card can have different overlays, which can change a game with the same controls from, for example
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Ralph H. Baer
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Born in Germany, he and his family fled to the United States before the outbreak of World War II, where he changed his name and later served the American war effort. Afterwards, he pursued work in electronics, in 1951, while working at Loral, he was asked to build the best television set in the world. He proposed the idea of playing games on television screens, later in 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, his 1951 idea came back to his mind, and he would go on to develop eight hardware prototypes. The last two would become the first home game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. He would contribute to the development of other consoles and consumer game units, Baer was born in 1922 to Lotte and Leo Baer, a Jewish family living in Germany, and was originally named Rudolf Heinrich Baer. At age 14, he was expelled from school because of his ancestry and had to go to an all-Jewish school and his father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens at the time. Baers family, fearing increasing persecution, moved from Germany to New York City in 1938 two months prior to Kristallnacht while Baer was a teenager, Baer would later become a naturalized United States citizen. He graduated from the National Radio Institute as a service technician in 1940. In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II, with his secondary education funded by the G. I. Bill, Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949. In 1951, Baer went to work as an engineer for Loral Electronics in Bronx, New York. From 1952 to 1956, he worked at Transitron, Inc. in New York City as a engineer and later as vice president. He started his own company before joining defense contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1956, Baers primary responsibility at Sanders was overseeing about 500 engineers in the development of electronic systems for military applications. As he approached retirement, Baer partnered with Bob Pelovitz of Acsiom, LLC, Baer was a Life Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His son, Mark, helped lead the process to elevate him to become an IEEE Life Fellow. Baer married Dena Whinston in 1952, she died in 2006 and they had three children during their marriage, and at the time of Baers death, he had four grandchildren. Baer died at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 6,2014, according to family, Baer is considered to have been the inventor of video games, specifically of the concept of the home video game console. In 1966, while an employee at Sanders Associates, Baer started to explore the possibility of playing games on television screens and he first got the idea while working at Loral in 1951, another electronics company, however, they wanted nothing to do with it at the time
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Pong
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Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games and the first sports arcade video game. It is a tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics. While other arcade games such as Computer Space came before it. The game was manufactured by Atari, which released it in 1972. Allan Alcorn created Pong as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Bushnell based the idea on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, which later resulted in a lawsuit against Atari. Surprised by the quality of Alcorns work, Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney decided to manufacture the game, soon after its release, several companies began producing games that copied Pongs gameplay, and eventually released new types of games. As a result, Atari encouraged its staff to more innovative games. The company released several sequels that built upon the gameplay by adding new features. During the 1975 Christmas season, Atari released a version of Pong exclusively through Sears retail stores. It was also a success and led to numerous copies. The game has been remade on numerous home and portable platforms following its release, Pong has been referenced and parodied in multiple television shows and video games, and has been a part of several video game and cultural exhibitions. Pong is a sports game that simulates table tennis. Players use the paddles to hit a back and forth. The aim is for player to reach eleven points before the opponent. Pong was the first game developed by Atari, after producing Computer Space, Bushnell decided to form a company to produce more games by licensing ideas to other companies. The first contract was with Bally Manufacturing Corporation for a driving game, soon after the founding, Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn because of his experience with electrical engineering and computer science, Bushnell and Dabney also had previously worked with him at Ampex. Prior to working at Atari, Alcorn had no experience with video games, to acclimate Alcorn to creating games, Bushnell gave him a project secretly meant to be a warm-up exercise. Bushnell told Alcorn that he had a contract with General Electric for a product, in 2011, Bushnell stated that the game was inspired by previous versions of electronic tennis he had played before, Bushnell played a version on a PDP-1 computer in 1964 while attending college
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Microprocessor
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A microprocessor is a computer processor which incorporates the functions of a computers central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic, Microprocessors operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary numeral system. The integration of a whole CPU onto a chip or on a few chips greatly reduced the cost of processing power. Integrated circuit processors are produced in numbers by highly automated processes resulting in a low per unit cost. Single-chip processors increase reliability as there are many electrical connections to fail. As microprocessor designs get better, the cost of manufacturing a chip generally stays the same, before microprocessors, small computers had been built using racks of circuit boards with many medium- and small-scale integrated circuits. Microprocessors combined this into one or a few large-scale ICs, the internal arrangement of a microprocessor varies depending on the age of the design and the intended purposes of the microprocessor. Advancing technology makes more complex and powerful chips feasible to manufacture, a minimal hypothetical microprocessor might only include an arithmetic logic unit and a control logic section. The ALU performs operations such as addition, subtraction, and operations such as AND or OR, each operation of the ALU sets one or more flags in a status register, which indicate the results of the last operation. The control logic retrieves instruction codes from memory and initiates the sequence of operations required for the ALU to carry out the instruction, a single operation code might affect many individual data paths, registers, and other elements of the processor. As integrated circuit technology advanced, it was feasible to manufacture more and more complex processors on a single chip, the size of data objects became larger, allowing more transistors on a chip allowed word sizes to increase from 4- and 8-bit words up to todays 64-bit words. Additional features were added to the architecture, more on-chip registers sped up programs. Floating-point arithmetic, for example, was not available on 8-bit microprocessors. Integration of the point unit first as a separate integrated circuit and then as part of the same microprocessor chip. Occasionally, physical limitations of integrated circuits made such practices as a bit slice approach necessary, instead of processing all of a long word on one integrated circuit, multiple circuits in parallel processed subsets of each data word. With the ability to put large numbers of transistors on one chip and this CPU cache has the advantage of faster access than off-chip memory, and increases the processing speed of the system for many applications. Processor clock frequency has increased more rapidly than external memory speed, except in the recent past, a microprocessor is a general purpose system. Several specialized processing devices have followed from the technology, A digital signal processor is specialized for signal processing, graphics processing units are processors designed primarily for realtime rendering of 3D images
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Color TV-Game
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Color TV-Game is a series of five home dedicated consoles, created by Nintendo and released in Japan only. The Color TV-Game series has the highest sales figures of the first generation of game consoles. The systems could run off of C batteries and all came with an AC adapter. The series debuted on June 1,1977 with the Color TV-Game 6, the Color TV-Game 6 was jointly developed with Mitsubishi Electronics. It contains six variations of Light Tennis including Tennis, Hockey and Volleyball, the players control their paddles with dials attached directly to the machine. Additionally, as an alternative to the version, a white-colored C battery powered model of the Color TV-Game 6 was introduced. These white colored consoles had a run of only a few hundred units. On June 8,1977, just a week after the TV Game 6, with the two controllers now on cables and 15 slightly different versions of Light Tennis, the CTG15 yielded sales of more than one million units. Two models of the CTG15 were released, differing only by a color tint change. It appears as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS, the Color TV Game 15 included two variations of Hockey, Volleyball and Tennis, and two Ping Pong style games. Each game could be played in singles or doubles mode, the extra game was “penalty shootout” where the object is to shoot the ball past a constantly moving target. Also, the controls were now extended apart from the console. The console came in two shades of orange, the orange one is much more uncommon. Nintendo sold over one million Color TV-Game 15 consoles, on June 8,1978, Nintendo released the Color TV-Game Racing 112, a birds-eye-view racing game that implements a steering wheel and gearshift. Alternatively, two smaller controllers can be used for multiplayer, the gameplay features a car from a bird-eye view driving on a track and avoiding other cars on the road. It was possible to play in two player mode as well with controls that could attach on the back of the console and this was Shigeru Miyamoto’s first project working for Nintendo, he was only a junior employee at the time. The Color TV-Game Block Breaker was released on April 23,1979, like the Color TV-Game 6, the in-game paddle was controlled by a dial attached to the system and there are switches to play variations of the same game. The systems external design was one of Shigeru Miyamotos first video-game projects after joining Nintendo in 1977, the final console in the series is the Computer TV-Game, released in 1980, it was sold and produced in limited quantities
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Electronic circuit
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In an integrated circuit or IC, the components and interconnections are formed on the same substrate, typically a semiconductor such as silicon or gallium arsenide. An electronic circuit can usually be categorized as an analog circuit, breadboards, perfboards, and stripboards are common for testing new designs. They allow the designer to make changes to the circuit during development. Analog electronic circuits are those in current or voltage may vary continuously with time to correspond to the information being represented. Analog circuitry is constructed from two building blocks, series and parallel circuits. In a series circuit, the current passes through a series of components. A string of Christmas lights is an example of a series circuit, if one goes out. In a parallel circuit, all the components are connected to the voltage. The basic components of analog circuits are wires, resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, analog circuits are very commonly represented in schematic diagrams, in which wires are shown as lines, and each component has a unique symbol. Analog circuit analysis employs Kirchhoffs circuit laws, all the currents at a node, wires are usually treated as ideal zero-voltage interconnections, any resistance or reactance is captured by explicitly adding a parasitic element, such as a discrete resistor or inductor. When the circuit size is comparable to a wavelength of the relevant signal frequency, wires are treated as transmission lines, with constant characteristic impedance, and the impedances at the start and end determine transmitted and reflected waves on the line. These values represent the information that is being processed, in the vast majority of cases, binary encoding is used, one voltage represents a binary 1 and another voltage represents a binary 0. Digital circuits make extensive use of transistors, interconnected to create gates that provide the functions of Boolean logic, AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR. Digital circuits therefore can provide both logic and memory, enabling them to perform arbitrary computational functions, the design process for digital circuits is fundamentally different from the process for analog circuits. Each logic gate regenerates the binary signal, so the designer need not account for distortion, gain control, offset voltages, as a consequence, extremely complex digital circuits, with billions of logic elements integrated on a single silicon chip, can be fabricated at low cost. Such digital integrated circuits are ubiquitous in electronic devices, such as calculators, mobile phone handsets. Digital circuitry is used to general purpose computing chips, such as microprocessors. Field-programmable gate arrays, chips with logic circuitry whose configuration can be modified after fabrication, are widely used in prototyping
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Logic gate
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Depending on the context, the term may refer to an ideal logic gate, one that has for instance zero rise time and unlimited fan-out, or it may refer to a non-ideal physical device. In modern practice, most gates are made from field-effect transistors, compound logic gates AND-OR-Invert and OR-AND-Invert are often employed in circuit design because their construction using MOSFETs is simpler and more efficient than the sum of the individual gates. In reversible logic, Toffoli gates are used, to build a functionally complete logic system, relays, valves, or transistors can be used. The simplest family of logic gates using bipolar transistors is called resistor-transistor logic, unlike simple diode logic gates, RTL gates can be cascaded indefinitely to produce more complex logic functions. RTL gates were used in integrated circuits. For higher speed and better density, the used in RTL were replaced by diodes resulting in diode-transistor logic. As integrated circuits became more complex, bipolar transistors were replaced with smaller field-effect transistors, to reduce power consumption still further, most contemporary chip implementations of digital systems now use CMOS logic. CMOS uses complementary MOSFET devices to achieve a high speed with low power dissipation, increasingly, these fixed-function logic gates are being replaced by programmable logic devices, which allow designers to pack a large number of mixed logic gates into a single integrated circuit. Other types of logic gates include, but are not limited to Electronic logic gates differ significantly from their relay-and-switch equivalents and they are much faster, consume much less power, and are much smaller. Also, there is a structural difference. The switch circuit creates a continuous path for current to flow between its input and its output. The semiconductor logic gate, on the hand, acts as a high-gain voltage amplifier. It is not possible for current to flow between the output and the input of a logic gate. Another important advantage of standardized integrated circuit logic families, such as the 7400 and 4000 families, is that they can be cascaded and this means that the output of one gate can be wired to the inputs of one or several other gates, and so on. The output of one gate can drive a finite number of inputs to other gates. Also, there is always a delay, called the propagation delay, when gates are cascaded, the total propagation delay is approximately the sum of the individual delays, an effect which can become a problem in high-speed circuits. The binary number system was refined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and he established that by using the binary system. In an 1886 letter, Charles Sanders Peirce described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, eventually, vacuum tubes replaced relays for logic operations
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ROM cartridge
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ROM cartridges can be used to load software such as video games or other application programs. The cartridge slot could also be used for additions, for example speech synthesis. Some cartridges had battery-backed static random-access memory, allowing a user to save data such as game progress or scores between uses, an advantage for the manufacturer was the relative security of the software in cartridge form, which was difficult for end users to replicate. However, cartridges were expensive to manufacture compared to making a floppy disk or CD-ROM, as disk drives became more common and software expanded beyond the practical limits of ROM size, cartridge slots disappeared from later game consoles and personal computers. Cartridges are still used today with handheld gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, due to its widespread usage for video gaming, ROM cartridges were often colloquially referred to as a game cartridge. ROM cartridges were popularized by early home computers which featured a special bus port for the insertion of cartridges containing software in ROM. Notable computers using cartridges in addition to magnetic media were the Commodore VIC-20 and 64, MSX standard, the Atari 8-bit family, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, some arcade system boards, such as Capcoms CP System and SNKs Neo Geo, also used ROM cartridges. The modern take on game cartridges was invented by Jerry Lawson as part of the Fairchild Channel F home console in 1976, the cartridge approach gained more popularity with the Atari 2600 released the following year. From the late 1970s to mid-1990s, the majority of video game systems were cartridge-based. As compact disc technology came to be used widely for data storage, Nintendo remained the lone hold-out, using cartridges for their Nintendo 64 system, the company did not transition to optical media until 2001s GameCube. SNK still released games on the cartridge based Neo Geo until 2004, ROM cartridges can not only carry software, but additional hardware expansion as well. Examples include the Super FX coprocessor chip in some Super NES game paks, micro Machines 2 on the Genesis/Mega Drive used a custom J-Cart cartridge design by Codemasters which incorporated two additional gamepad ports. This allowed players to have up to four gamepads connected to the console without the need for an additional multi-controller adapter, the ROM cartridge slot principle continues in various mobile devices, thanks to the development of high density low-cost flash memory. For example, a GPS navigation device might allow user updates of maps by inserting a memory chip into an expansion slot. An E-book reader can store the text of several books on a flash chip. Personal computers may allow the user to boot and install a system off a USB flash drive instead of CD ROM or floppy disks. Digital cameras with flash drive slots allow users to exchange cards when full. Storing software on ROM cartridges has a number of advantages over other methods of storage like floppy disks, software run directly from ROM typically uses less RAM, leaving memory free for other processes
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Glossary of video game terms
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This glossary of video game terms lists the general video game industry terms as commonly used in Wikipedia articles. 1-up In games where players have a number of lives to complete a game or level, 1v1 Abbreviation of 1 versus 1, which means two players battling against each other. 8-bit A descriptor for hardware or software that arose during the generation of video game consoles. 16-bit A descriptor for hardware or software that arose during the generation of video game consoles. 2D graphics The game features 2-dimensional objects,2. 5D graphics A game consisting of 3D graphics set in a 2D plane of movement, where objects outside of this 2D plane can have an effect on the gameplay. 32-bit A descriptor for hardware or software that arose during the generation of video game consoles. 4X A genre of video games, short for explore, expand, exploit. 64-bit A descriptor for hardware or software that arose during the generation of video game consoles. AAA A high-budget game with a development team, or game studios that make them. AAA games are usually multiplatform, have multimillion dollar marketing budgets, abandonware The idea of a game being forgotten about, or abandoned by the developers for multiple different reasons, one being copyright issues. Act See Level Action point A subunit of a players turn, for example, during each turn, a player can take a set number of actions, each costing a point. Action role-playing game A genre of role-playing video games where battle actions are performed in real-time instead of a turn-based mechanic. Actions per minute The total number of actions the player can perform in a minute, ADS Aiming Down Sights, or, Aim Down Sights. Refers to the alternate method of firing a gun in an FPS game. AFK Abbreviation of Away From Keyboard, generally said through a chat function in online multiplayer games when a player intends to be temporarily unavailable. Often used in gaming to grind, sometimes facetiously used in reference to irritated bystanders. Aimbot A first-person shooter cheat that lets players shoot other player-characters without aiming, in most cases, the reticle locks on to a target within the players line of sight and the player only has to pull the trigger. Aimbots are one of the most popular cheats in multiplayer FPS, alpha release An initial, incomplete version of a game, alpha versions are usually released early in the development process to test a games most critical functionality and prototype design concepts
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Sprite (computer graphics)
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In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional bitmap that is integrated into a larger scene. Originally sprites referred to independent objects that are composited together, by hardware and this occurs as each scan line is prepared for the video output device, such as a CRT, without involvement of the main CPU and without the need for a full-screen frame buffer. Sprites can be positioned or altered by setting attributes used during the composition process. Examples of systems with hardware sprites include the Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, the act of creating sprites is a form of pixel art. It is sometimes referred to as spriting, especially in the hobbyist community, the use of sprites originated with arcade games. The first video game to represent player characters as human player images was Taitos Basketball, Signetics devised the first video/graphics processors capable of generating sprite graphics for home systems. The Signetics 2636 video processors were first used in the 1976 Radofin 1292 Advanced Programmable Video System, the Atari VCS, released in 1977, features a hardware sprite implementation where five graphical objects can be moved independently of the game playfield. The term sprite was not in use at the time, the VCSs sprites are called movable objects in the programming manual, further identified as two players, two missiles, and one ball. These each consist of a row of pixels that are displayed on a scan line. To produce a shape, the sprites single-row bitmap is altered by software from one scanline to the next. Each is the height of the display—a long, thin strip. DMA from a table in memory automatically sets the graphics pattern registers for each scan line, hardware registers control the horizontal position of each player and missile. Vertical motion is achieved by moving the data within a player or missiles strip. The feature was called player/missile graphics by Atari, the Namco Galaxian arcade system board, for the 1979 arcade game Galaxian, featured animated, multi-colored sprites. According to Steve Golson from General Computer Corporation, the stamp was used instead of sprite at the time. The Elektor TV Games Computer was a microcomputer capable of generating sprite graphics. The term sprite was first used in the sense by one of the definers of the Texas Instruments 9918 video display processor. By this time, sprites had advanced to the point where complete two-dimensional shapes could be moved around the screen horizontally and vertically with minimal software overhead, the CPU would instruct the external chips to fetch source images and integrate them into the main screen using direct memory access channels
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Television
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Television or TV is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome, or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a set, a television program. Television is a medium for entertainment, education, news, politics, gossip. Television became available in experimental forms in the late 1920s. After World War II, a form of black-and-white TV broadcasting became popular in the United States and Britain, and television sets became commonplace in homes, businesses. During the 1950s, television was the medium for influencing public opinion. In the mid-1960s, color broadcasting was introduced in the US, for many reasons, the storage of television and video programming now occurs on the cloud. At the end of the first decade of the 2000s, digital television transmissions greatly increased in popularity, another development was the move from standard-definition television to high-definition television, which provides a resolution that is substantially higher. HDTV may be transmitted in various formats, 1080p, 1080i, in 2013, 79% of the worlds households owned a television set. Most TV sets sold in the 2000s were flat-panel, mainly LEDs, major manufacturers announced the discontinuation of CRT, DLP, plasma, and even fluorescent-backlit LCDs by the mid-2010s. In the near future, LEDs are gradually expected to be replaced by OLEDs, also, major manufacturers have announced that they will increasingly produce smart TVs in the mid-2010s. Smart TVs with integrated Internet and Web 2.0 functions became the dominant form of television by the late 2010s, Television signals were initially distributed only as terrestrial television using high-powered radio-frequency transmitters to broadcast the signal to individual television receivers. Alternatively television signals are distributed by cable or optical fiber, satellite systems and. Until the early 2000s, these were transmitted as analog signals, a standard television set is composed of multiple internal electronic circuits, including a tuner for receiving and decoding broadcast signals. A visual display device which lacks a tuner is correctly called a video monitor rather than a television, the word television comes from Ancient Greek τῆλε, meaning far, and Latin visio, meaning sight. The Anglicised version of the term is first attested in 1907 and it was. formed in English or borrowed from French télévision. In the 19th century and early 20th century, other. proposals for the name of a technology for sending pictures over distance were telephote. The abbreviation TV is from 1948, the use of the term to mean a television set dates from 1941
27.
Interactive television
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Interactive television is a form of media convergence, adding data services to traditional television technology. Throughout its history, these have included delivery of content, as well as new uses such as online shopping, banking. Interactive TV is an example of how new information technology can be integrated vertically rather than laterally. Interactive television represents a continuum from low to moderate interactivity and high interactivity in which, for example, the most obvious example of this would be any kind of real-time voting on the screen, in which audience votes create decisions that are reflected in how the show continues. A return path to the provider is not necessary to have an interactive program experience. Once a movie is downloaded for example, controls may all be local, the link was needed to download the program, but texts and software which can be executed locally at the set-top box or IRD may occur automatically, once the viewer enters the channel. The first patent of interactive connected TV was registered in 1994 and it clearly expose this new interactive technology with content feeding and feedback through global networking. User identification allows interacting and purchasing, the viewer must be able to alter the viewing experience, or return information to the broadcaster. This return path, return channel or back channel can be by telephone, mobile SMS, radio, cable TV viewers receive their programs via a cable, and in the integrated cable return path enabled platforms, they use the same cable as a return path. Satellite viewers return information to the broadcaster via their regular telephone lines and they are charged for this service on their regular telephone bill. An Internet connection via ADSL, or other, data communications technology, is also being increasingly used, Interactive TV can also be delivered via a terrestrial aerial. In this case, there is no return path as such - so data cannot be sent back to the broadcaster. However, interactivity is still possible as there is still the opportunity to interact with an application which is broadcast, increasingly the return path is becoming a broadband IP connection, and some hybrid receivers are now capable of displaying video from either the IP connection or from traditional tuners. Some devices are now dedicated to displaying video only from the IP channel, the rise of the broadband return path has given new relevance to Interactive TV, as it opens up the need to interact with Video on Demand servers, advertisers, and web site operators. The term interactive television is used to refer to a variety of different kinds of interactivity. It does not change any content or its inherent linearity, only how users control the viewing of that content, dVRs allow users to time shift content in a way that is impractical with VHS. In the not too distant future, the questioning of what is real interaction with the TV will be difficult, Panasonic already has face recognition technology implemented its prototype Panasonic Life Wall. The Life Wall is literally a wall in house that doubles as a screen
28.
The Bronx
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The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City, within the U. S. state of New York. Since 1914, the Bronx has had the boundaries as Bronx County, a county of New York. The Bronx is divided by the Bronx River into a section in the west, closer to Manhattan. East and west street addresses are divided by Jerome Avenue—the continuation of Manhattans Fifth Avenue, the West Bronx was annexed to New York City in 1874, and the areas east of the Bronx River in 1895. Bronx County was separated from New York County in 1914, about a quarter of the Bronxs area is open space, including Woodlawn Cemetery, Van Cortlandt Park, Pelham Bay Park, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Bronx Zoo in the boroughs north and center. These open spaces are situated primarily on land reserved in the late 19th century as urban development progressed north. The name Bronx originated with Jonas Bronck, who established the first settlement in the area as part of the New Netherland colony in 1639, the native Lenape were displaced after 1643 by settlers. This cultural mix has made the Bronx a wellspring of both Latin music and hip hop. The Bronx, particularly the South Bronx, saw a decline in population, livable housing, and the quality of life in the late 1960s. Since then the communities have shown significant redevelopment starting in the late 1980s before picking up pace from the 1990s until today, the Bronx was called Rananchqua by the native Siwanoy band of Lenape, while other Native Americans knew the Bronx as Keskeskeck. It was divided by the Aquahung River, the origin of Jonas Bronck is contested. Some sources claim he was a Swedish born emigrant from Komstad, Norra Ljunga parish in Småland, Sweden, who arrived in New Netherland during the spring of 1639. Bronck became the first recorded European settler in the now known as the Bronx and built a farm named Emmanus close to what today is the corner of Willis Avenue. He leased land from the Dutch West India Company on the neck of the mainland north of the Dutch settlement in Harlem. He eventually accumulated 500 acres between the Harlem River and the Aquahung, which known as Broncks River or the Bronx. Dutch and English settlers referred to the area as Broncks Land, the American poet William Bronk was a descendant of Pieter Bronck, either Jonas Broncks son or his younger brother. More recent research indicates that Pieter was probably Jonas nephew or cousin, the Bronx is referred to with the definite article as The Bronx, both legally and colloquially. The region was named after the Bronx River and first appeared in the Annexed District of The Bronx created in 1874 out of part of Westchester County
29.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
30.
Sanders Associates
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Sanders Associates was a defense contractor in Nashua, New Hampshire, United States, from 1951 until it was sold in 1986. It is now part of BAE Systems Electronics & Integrated Solutions and it concentrated on developing and manufacturing electronic systems, notably aircraft self-protection systems, and tactical surveillance and intelligence systems. Other business areas included microwave, missile and space electronics, infrared imaging, the company was founded in Waltham, Massachusetts in July 1951, formed by eleven engineers and scientists from Raytheon. It was named for Royden C, Sanders, Jr. one of the original eleven associates. Sanders Associates was one of the premier flexible printed circuit manufacturers during the 1960s and 1970s and it specialized in complex flexible circuit assemblies and specialized printed wiring boards for both the U. S. military and space programs including the Saturn V and Lunar Excursion Module. Sanders also produced flexible circuity for most other applications including medical equipment. Sanders Flexprint division was involved with producing printed wiring boards and flex circuitry for all branches of the military, the Flexprint division was sold in the late seventies or early eighties. Most divisions of Sanders Associates competed in the government marketplace, one division marketed intelligent terminals to the commercial marketplace. These intelligent terminals competed against IBM3270 terminals, Honeywell terminals, Univac Uniscope terminals, terminals provided data entry capability into mainframes as well as light pen pointing and selection before the mouse was in use. The last Sanders Intelligent terminal system marketed was the 814 terminal controller that supported up to eight terminals and that division was acquired by Harris Corporation in the late 1970s and integrated with their Data Communications Division. For a short time, the Nashua plant facilities were shared between Sanders and Harris, eventually the Harris division was moved to a new facility in Dallas, Texas, in 1986, Sanders Associates was bought by Lockheed Corporation and became Sanders, A Lockheed Company. Following the Lockheed/Martin Marietta merger in 1995, Sanders was merged into Lockheed Martin Aerospace Electronic Systems, in July 2000 Lockheed announced the sale of this group to BAE Systems for $1.67 billion. The company became BAE Systems Information & Electronic Warfare Systems, in 2005 this was merged into the newly created BAE Systems Electronics & Integrated Solutions. The first home game console was developed at Sanders by a team headed by Ralph Baer in 1966. The Dot Eaters entry on Sanders, Baer and the Odyssey home videogame console
31.
Light gun
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A light gun is a pointing device for computers and a control device for arcade and video games, typically shaped to resemble a pistol. Modern screen-based light guns work by building an optical sensor into the gun, the first device of this type, the light pen, was used on the MIT Whirlwind computer. The first light guns appeared in the 1930s, following the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes and it was not long before the technology began appearing in arcade shooting games, beginning with the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite in 1936. These early light gun games, like laser tag, used small targets onto which a light-sensing tube was mounted. If the beam struck the target, a hit was scored and these games evolved throughout subsequent decades, culminating in Segas Periscope, the companys first successful game released in 1966, which required the player to target cardboard ships. Periscope was an early game, and the first arcade game to cost a quarter per play. Nintendo released the Beam Gun in 1970 and the Laser Clay Shooting System in 1973, followed in 1974 by the arcade game Wild Gunman, in 1975, Sega released the early co-operative light gun shooters Balloon Gun and Bullet Mark. The video game light gun is modeled on a ballistic weapon and is used for targeting objects on a video screen. With force feedback, the gun can also simulate the recoil of the weapon. The first gun for a console was in fact a big rifle, the Magnavox Odysseys Shooting Gallery. Many home Pong systems of the 1970s included a pistol or gun for shooting simple targets on screen, Nintendos NES Zapper for the NES, is the most popular example of the light gun, and Duck Hunt its most popular game. Traditional light guns cannot be used on the newer LCD and plasma screens, there are also light guns for Sega Saturn, Playstation and several other console and arcade systems. Recent light gun video games include Resident Evil, The Umbrella Chronicles, Time Crisis 4, Virtua Cop 3, and The House of the Dead, Overkill. In 2007, Nintendo released the Wii Zapper for the Wii, while it does not contain any traditional light gun technology, the peripheral makes use of the Wii Remotes built-in infrared tracking system to shoot targets that correspond on-screen. Its name is a reference to the classic NES Zapper for the Nintendo Entertainment System, sony have also released attachments that house the PlayStation Move motion controller in the form of a pistol and rifle, the latter named the Sharp Shooter. Namcos GunCon 3 also uses an optical sensor system similar to the Wii Remote. The light gun is named because it uses light as its method of detecting where on screen the user is targeting. The name leads one to believe that the gun itself emits a beam of light, all or part of the screen is painted white in a way that allows the computer to judge where the gun is pointing, based on when the diode detects light
32.
Table tennis
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Table tennis, also known as ping pong, is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight ball back and forth across a table using a small bat. The game takes place on a hard table divided by a net, a point is scored when a player fails to return the ball within the rules. Play is fast and demands quick reactions, spinning the ball alters its trajectory and limits an opponents options, giving the hitter a great advantage. Table tennis is governed by the worldwide organization International Table Tennis Federation, ITTF currently includes 220 member associations. The table tennis rules are specified in the ITTF handbook. Table tennis has been an Olympic sport since 1988, with several event categories, from 1988 until 2004, these were mens singles, womens singles, mens doubles and womens doubles. Since 2008, an event has been played instead of the doubles. The sport originated in Victorian England, where it was played among the upper-class as a parlour game. It has been suggested that makeshift versions of the game were developed by British military officers in India in around 1860s or 1870s, who brought it back with them. A row of books stood up along the center of the table as a net and it had several different names, including whiff-whaff. The name ping-pong was in use before British manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd trademarked it in 1901. The name ping-pong then came to describe the game played using the rather expensive Jaquess equipment, a similar situation arose in the United States, where Jaques sold the rights to the ping-pong name to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers then enforced its trademark for the term in the 1920s making the various associations change their names to table tennis instead of the more common, but trademarked, term. The next major innovation was by James W. Gibb, a British enthusiast of table tennis, who discovered novelty celluloid balls on a trip to the US in 1901 and found them to be ideal for the game. This was followed by E. C. Goode who, in 1901, invented the modern version of the racket by fixing a sheet of pimpled, or stippled, rubber to the wooden blade. Table tennis was growing in popularity by 1901 to the extent that tournaments were being organized, books being written on the subject, in 1921, the Table Tennis Association was founded in Britain, and the International Table Tennis Federation followed in 1926. London hosted the first official World Championships in 1926, in 1933, the United States Table Tennis Association, now called USA Table Tennis, was formed. In the 1930s, Edgar Snow commented in Red Star Over China that the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War had a passion for the English game of table tennis which he found bizarre
33.
Cable television
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This contrasts with broadcast television, in which the television signal is transmitted over the air by radio waves and received by a television antenna attached to the television. FM radio programming, high-speed Internet, telephone services, and similar non-television services may also be provided through these cables, analog television was standard in the 20th century, but since the 2000s, cable systems have been upgraded to digital cable operation. A cable channel is a television network available via cable television, alternative terms include non-broadcast channel or programming service, the latter being mainly used in legal contexts. Examples of cable/satellite channels/cable networks available in many countries are HBO, MTV, Cartoon Network, E. Eurosport, the abbreviation CATV is often used for cable television. It originally stood for Community Access Television or Community Antenna Television, in areas where over-the-air TV reception was limited by distance from transmitters or mountainous terrain, large community antennas were constructed, and cable was run from them to individual homes. The origins of cable broadcasting for radio are even older as radio programming was distributed by cable in some European cities as far back as 1924, Cable television has gone through a series of steps of evolution in the United States and Canada. Particularly in Canada, communities with their own signals were fertile cable markets, as viewers wanted to receive American signals. Early systems carried only a maximum of seven channels, using 2,4,5 or 6,7,9,11 and 13, as the equipment was unable to confine the signal discreetly within the assigned channel bandwidth. The reason 4 and 5 along with 6 and 7 could be used together was because of the 4 MHz gap between 4 and 5 and the nearly 90 MHz gap between 6 and 7. Even though eight channels are listed, in systems that maximized 7 channels. As equipment improved, all channels could be utilized, except where a local VHF television station broadcast. Local broadcast channels were not usable for signals deemed to be priority, later, the cable operators began to carry FM radio stations, and encouraged subscribers to connect their FM stereo sets to cable. Before stereo and bilingual TV sound became common, Pay-TV channel sound was added to the FM stereo cable line-ups, about this time, operators expanded beyond the 12-channel dial to use the midband and superband VHF channels adjacent to the high band 7-13 of North American television frequencies. Some operators as in Cornwall, Ontario, used a dual distribution network with Channels 2-13 on each of the two cables, during the 1980s, United States regulations not unlike public, educational, and government access created the beginning of cable-originated live television programming. These stations evolved partially into todays over-the-air digital subchannels, where a main broadcast TV station e. g, many live local programs with local interests were subsequently created all over the United States in most major television markets in the early 1980s. This evolved into todays many cable-only broadcasts of diverse programming, including cable-only produced television movies and miniseries, Cable specialty channels, starting with channels oriented to show movies and large sporting or performance events, diversified further, and narrowcasting became common. By the late 1980s, cable-only signals outnumbered broadcast signals on cable systems, by the mid-1980s in Canada, cable operators were allowed by the regulator to enter into distribution contracts with cable networks on their own. By the 1990s, tiers became common, with customers able to subscribe to different tiers to obtain different selections of additional channels above the basic selection, by subscribing to additional tiers, customers could get specialty channels, movie channels, and foreign channels
34.
Hubert Schlafly
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Hubert Joseph Hub Schlafly Jr. was an American electrical engineer who co-invented the teleprompter. Schlafly is also credited with spearheading the movement towards satellite television within the industry, Schlafly was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 14,1919. He often moved as a child as his father moved around as a wildcatter and he graduated from St. Louis University High School and later earned a bachelors degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1941. During the 1950s, Schlafly invented the teleprompter, which scrolls text to on-camera talent, Schlafly unveiled the teleprompter on the set of the CBS soap opera, The First Hundred Years, in 1950. Schlafly and Irving B. Kahn also co-founded the TelePrompTer Corporation and they later sold the company to Westinghouse. In addition to the teleprompter, Schlafly is also credited with helping to promote the broadcasting of television signals via a satellite feed, Schlafly and Sidney Topol, who worked for Scientific Atlanta, jointly constructed a portable satellite receiver to obtain satellite signals specifically for television. C. Schlafly later called the Albert speech via a satellite feed as his greatest contribution to the cable industry, in a 1956 article in Amazing Stories Magazine he predicted for the turn of the century, Systematic information storage will be in a form instantly available for response to remote inquiries. Communications, both personal and group communications will be highly refined without the encumbrance of any wires to or between terminal devices, in 2008, Schlafly was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame. His speech at the ceremony marked the first time that Schlafly used the teleprompter. Schlafly was also honored with two Emmy Awards for his contributions to television technology. Schlafly died at a hospital in Stamford, Connecticut, on April 20,2011 and his wife, Leona Martin Schlafly, predeceased him in 2003 after fifty-nine years of marriage. The Cable Center press release Hubert Schlafly, Inventor of the autocue who also helped originate pay-per-view television
35.
Magnavox
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Magnavox, is an American electronics company founded in the United States. Today it is a subsidiary of electronics corporation Philips, six decades later, Magnavox produced the Odyssey, the worlds first home video game console toy. Magnavox is the brand name worn by a line of products made by Funai under license from trademark owner Philips. Jensen and Pridham founded the Commercial Wireless and Development Company in 1911, moved from Napa to San Francisco then Oakland in 1916, Jensen moved on to the Jensen Radio Manufacturing Company, Chicago, in the late 1920s. Pridham stayed on with Magnavox, which moved manufacturing to Fort Wayne by the 1940s, the term Commercial Wireless had a different meaning in the early days of radio and telephone. Magnavox manufactured radios, TVs, and record players, in the 1960s Magnavox manufactured the first plasma panels for the military and for computer applications. In 1972, Magnavox introduced the Odyssey, which was the worlds first home game console toy. The introduction of the toy triggered the beginning of the video game toys market. In the late 1970s, Philips developed LaserDisc technology, producing an optically read,12 inch disc that would contain recorded video material, in the early 1980s, Philips worked with Sony to invent a standard for optical audio discs, using the technology developed for the LaserDisc. Philips acquired Magnavoxs consumer electronics division in 1974, to nationwide distribution for their VLP Videodisc technology. During the late 1970s the company released the Odyssey², also known as the Philips Videopac, in the early 1980s, Philips merged Sylvania, Philco and Magnavox into one division headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a manufacturing plant in Greeneville, Tennessee. The Sylvania plant in Batavia, New York was closed and all moved to Greeneville. Philips also abandoned the Sylvania trademark which is owned by Osram, in the late 1980s, Magnavox sold the Magnavox/Philips VideoWriter with some success. Released in 1985, the VideoWriter was a standalone word processing machine. Starting in the early 1990s, some Philips electronics were marketed under the brand name Philips Magnavox, the three areas of business of the MESC operation during the late 1980s and early 1990s were C-Cubed, Electronic Warfare, and sonobuoys. When Hughes Electronics sold its aerospace and defense operations to Raytheon, shortly thereafter, Raytheon spun off the sonobuoy operation to form Under Sea Systems Inc, in Columbia City, Indiana. In 1998, Raytheon sold USSI to a British defense consortium named Ultra Electronics, the company is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ultra, manufacturing water and acoustic sensing and communications devices for military and civil defense. The brand also has worked with Funai with their televisions after the Philips Magnavox name was popular
36.
Nintendo 64
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The Nintendo 64, stylized as the NINTENDO64 and often referred to as the N64, is Nintendos third home video game console for the international market. It was the last major home console to use the cartridge as its primary storage format until Nintendos seventh console, while the Nintendo 64 was succeeded by Nintendos MiniDVD-based GameCube in September 2001, the consoles remained available until the system was retired in late 2003. Codenamed Project Reality, the the N64 design was complete by mid-1995, but its launch was delayed until 1996. It launched with three games, Super Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64, released worldwide, and Saikyō Habu Shōgi, as part of the fifth generation of gaming, the system competed primarily with the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn. The suggested retail price at its United States launch was US$199.99, the console was released in a range of colors and designs over its lifetime. In 2015, IGN named it the 9th greatest video game console of all time, as of 2016, the system remains a popular retro console in North America. At the beginning of the 1990s, Nintendo led the game industry with its Nintendo Entertainment System. Although the NES follow-up console, the Super NES, was successful, competition from long-time rival Sega, and relative newcomer Sony, emphasized Nintendos need to develop a successor for the SNES, or risk losing market dominance to its competitors. Further complicating matters, Nintendo also faced a backlash from third-party developers unhappy with Nintendos strict licensing policies, the company created a design proposal for a video game system, seeking an already well established partner in that market. James H. Clark, founder of SGI, initially offered the proposal to Tom Kalinske, the historical details of these preliminary negotiations were controversial between the two competing suitors. Tom Kalinske said that he and Joe Miller of Sega of America were quite impressed with SGIs prototype, the engineers from Sega Enterprises claimed that their evaluation of the early prototype had uncovered several unresolved hardware issues and deficiencies. Those were subsequently resolved, but Sega had already decided against SGIs design, Nintendo resisted that summary conclusion, arguing that the reason for SGIs ultimate choice of partner is due to Nintendo having been a more appealing business partner than Sega. While Sega demanded exclusive rights to the chip, Nintendo was willing to license the technology on a non-exclusive basis, michael Slater, publisher of Microprocessor Report said, The mere fact of a business relationship there is significant because of Nintendos phenomenal ability to drive volume. If it works at all, it could bring MIPS to levels of volume never dreamed of, james Clark met with Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi in early 1993, thus initiating Project Reality. This announcement coincided with Nintendos August 1993 Shoshinkai trade show, as with most of the computing industry, Nintendo had limited experience with 3D graphics, and worked with several outside companies to develop the technology comprising the console. Some chip technology was provided by NEC, Toshiba, and Sharp, SGI had recently acquired MIPS Computer Systems, and the two worked together toward a low-cost realtime 3D graphics hardware system. SGI and its subsidiary MIPS Technologies were responsible for the R4300i microprocessor and that software-based console prototype platform was later supplanted by a workstation-hosted console simulation board, representing the finalized console hardware. SGIs performance estimates based upon their RealityEngine supercomputing platform were ultimately reported to be accurate to the final consumer console product
37.
Analog computer
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An analog computer is a form of computer that uses the continuously changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities symbolically, as their values change. As an analog computer does not use values, but rather continuous values, processes cannot be reliably repeated with exact equivalence. Unlike digital signal processing, analog computers do not suffer from the quantization noise, Analog computers were widely used in scientific and industrial applications where digital computers of the time lacked sufficient performance. Analog computers can have a wide range of complexity. Slide rules and nomographs are the simplest, while naval gunfire control computers, systems for process control and protective relays used analog computation to perform control and protective functions. More complex applications, such as synthetic aperture radar, remained the domain of analog computing well into the 1980s, setting up an analog computer required scale factors to be chosen, along with initial conditions—that is, starting values. Another essential was creating the network of interconnections between computing elements. Sometimes it was necessary to re-think the structure of the problem so that the computer would function satisfactorily, no variables could be allowed to exceed the computers limits, and differentiation was to be avoided, typically by rearranging the network of interconnects, using integrators in a different sense. Running an electronic computer, assuming a satisfactory setup, started with the computer held with some variables fixed at their initial values. Moving a switch released the holds and permitted the problem to run, in some instances, the computer could, after a certain running time interval, repeatedly return to the initial-conditions state to reset the problem, and run it again. This is a list of examples of early computation devices which are considered to be precursors of the modern computers, some of them may even have been dubbed as computers by the press, although they may fail to fit the modern definitions. The south-pointing chariot can be considered the earliest analog computer and it was a mechanical-geared wheeled vehicle used for to discern the southern cardinal direction. The Antikythera mechanism was an orrery and is claimed to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer. It was designed to calculate astronomical positions and it was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to circa 100 BC. Devices of a level of complexity comparable to that of the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until a thousand years later, many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī in the early 11th century, the astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BC and is often attributed to Hipparchus. A combination of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy
38.
Transistor
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A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power. It is composed of semiconductor material usually with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit, a voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistors terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled power can be higher than the controlling power, today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits. The transistor is the building block of modern electronic devices. Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented a field-effect transistor in 1926 but it was not possible to construct a working device at that time. The first practically implemented device was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things. The transistor is on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and Bardeen, Brattain, the thermionic triode, a vacuum tube invented in 1907, enabled amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony. The triode, however, was a device that consumed a substantial amount of power. Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a transistor in Canada in 1925. Lilienfeld also filed patents in the United States in 1926 and 1928. However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any examples of a working prototype. In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a device in Europe. Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, the term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term transresistance. Instead, what Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley invented in 1947 was the first point-contact transistor, Mataré had previous experience in developing crystal rectifiers from silicon and germanium in the German radar effort during World War II. Using this knowledge, he began researching the phenomenon of interference in 1947, realizing that Bell Labs scientists had already invented the transistor before them, the company rushed to get its transistron into production for amplified use in Frances telephone network. The first bipolar junction transistors were invented by Bell labs William Shockley, on April 12,1950, Bell Labs chemists Gordon Teal and Morgan Sparks had successfully produced a working bipolar NPN junction amplifying germanium transistor. Bell Labs had made this new sandwich transistor discovery announcement, in a release on July 4,1951. The first high-frequency transistor was the surface-barrier germanium transistor developed by Philco in 1953 and these were made by etching depressions into an N-type germanium base from both sides with jets of Indium sulfate until it was a few ten-thousandths of an inch thick
39.
Diode
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In electronics, a diode is a two-terminal electronic component that conducts primarily in one direction, it has low resistance to the current in one direction, and high resistance in the other. A semiconductor diode, the most common today, is a crystalline piece of semiconductor material with a p–n junction connected to two electrical terminals. A vacuum tube diode has two electrodes, a plate and a heated cathode, semiconductor diodes were the first semiconductor electronic devices. The discovery of crystals rectifying abilities was made by German physicist Ferdinand Braun in 1874, the first semiconductor diodes, called cats whisker diodes, developed around 1906, were made of mineral crystals such as galena. Today, most diodes are made of silicon, but other such as selenium and germanium are sometimes used. The most common function of a diode is to allow a current to pass in one direction. Thus, the diode can be viewed as a version of a check valve. However, diodes can have complicated behavior than this simple on–off action. Semiconductor diodes begin conducting electricity only if a threshold voltage or cut-in voltage is present in the forward direction. The voltage drop across a forward-biased diode varies only a little with the current, and is a function of temperature, a semiconductor diodes current–voltage characteristic can be tailored by selecting the semiconductor materials and the doping impurities introduced into the materials during manufacture. These techniques are used to create special-purpose diodes that perform different functions. Tunnel, Gunn and IMPATT diodes exhibit negative resistance, which is useful in microwave, Diodes, both vacuum and semiconductor, can be used as shot-noise generators. Thermionic diodes and solid state diodes were developed separately, at approximately the time, in the early 1900s. Until the 1950s vacuum tube diodes were used frequently in radios because the early point-contact type semiconductor diodes were less stable. In 1873, Frederick Guthrie discovered the principle of operation of thermionic diodes. Guthrie discovered that a positively charged electroscope could be discharged by bringing a piece of white-hot metal close to it. The same did not apply to a negatively charged electroscope, indicating that the current flow was possible in one direction. Thomas Edison independently rediscovered the principle on February 13,1880, at the time, Edison was investigating why the filaments of his carbon-filament light bulbs nearly always burned out at the positive-connected end
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History of Nintendo
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The history of Nintendo traces back to 1889, when it was founded to produce handmade hanafuda cards. Nintendo Co. Ltd. is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics company headquartered in Kyoto and it eventually became one of the most prominent figures in todays video game industry, being the worlds largest video game company by revenue. Nintendo started out as a small Japanese company, founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi on September 23,1889, based in Kyoto, Japan, the business produced and marketed Hanafuda cards. The name Nintendo is commonly assumed to mean leave luck to heaven, the cards, which were all handmade, soon began to gain in popularity, and Yamauchi had to hire assistants to mass-produce cards to keep up with the demand. Fusajiro Yamauchi did not have a son to take over the family business, following common Japanese tradition, he adopted his son-in-law, Sekiryo Yamauchi. In 1929, Yamauchi retired from the company and allowed Sekiryo Yamauchi to take over the company as president, in 1933, Sekiryo Yamauchi established a joint venture with another company and renamed the company Yamauchi Nintendo & Co. In 1947, Sekiryo established a company, Marufuku Co. Ltd. to distribute the Hanafuda cards. Sekiryo Yamauchi also had daughters, so again his son-in-law was adopted into the family. Shikanojo never became president because he abandoned his family, subsequently, his son Hiroshi was brought up by his grandparents. He later took over the company instead of his father, in 1949, Hiroshi Yamauchi was attending Waseda University in Tokyo, however, after his grandfather died he left to take office as the president of Nintendo. In 1951, he renamed Marufuku Co. Ltd. to Nintendo Playing Card Co. Ltd, in 1953, Nintendo became the first company in Japan to produce playing cards from plastic. In 1956, Yamauchi visited the U. S. to engage in talks with the United States Playing Card Company and he was shocked to find that the worlds biggest company in his business was relegated to using a small office. This was a point for Yamauchi, who then realized the limitations of the playing card business. In 1959, Nintendo struck a deal with Disney to have them allow Nintendo to use Disneys characters on Nintendos playing cards, previously, Western playing cards were regarded as something similar to hanafuda and mahjong, a device for gambling. By tying playing cards to Disney and selling books explaining the different games one could play with the cards, the tie-in was a success and the company sold at least 600,000 card packs in a single year. Due to this success, in 1962, Yamauchi took Nintendo public, following the aforementioned success, in 1963 Nintendo Playing Card Co. Ltd. was renamed to Nintendo by Yamauchi. Nintendo now began to experiment in other areas of business using the newly injected capital, during the period of time between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo set up a taxi company, love hotel chain, food company and several other things. All these ventures failed, except toymaking, where they had some earlier experience from selling playing cards
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Nintendo
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Nintendo Co. Ltd. is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. Nintendo is one of the worlds largest video game companies by market capitalization, founded on 23 September 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it originally produced handmade hanafuda playing cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small businesses, such as cab services. The word Nintendo can be translated from Japanese to English as leave luck to heaven. From 1992 until 2016, Nintendo was also the majority shareholder of Major League Baseballs Seattle Mariners, as of 31 March 2014, Nintendo has cumulative sales of over 670.43 million hardware units and 4.23 billion software units. The company has created and released some of the best-known and top-selling video game franchises, such as Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo was founded as a card company in late 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi. Based in Kyoto, Japan, the produced and marketed a playing card game called Hanafuda. The handmade cards soon became popular, and Yamauchi hired assistants to mass-produce cards to satisfy demand, in 1949, the company adopted the name Nintendo Karuta Co. Ltd. doing business as The Nintendo Playing Card Co. outside Japan. Nintendo continues to manufacture playing cards in Japan and organizes its own contract bridge tournament called the Nintendo Cup. In 1956, Hiroshi Yamauchi, grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi, visited the U. S. to talk with the United States Playing Card Company and he found that the biggest playing card company in the world was using only a small office. Yamauchis realization that the card business had limited potential was a turning point. He then acquired the license to use Disney characters on playing cards to drive sales, in 1963, Yamauchi renamed Nintendo Playing Card Co. Ltd. to Nintendo Co. Ltd. The company then began to experiment in other areas of business using newly injected capital during the period of time between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo set up a taxi company called Daiya. However, Nintendo was forced to sell it because problems with the unions were making it too expensive to run the service. It also set up a hotel chain, a TV network. All of these ventures failed, and after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, playing card sales dropped. In 1966, Nintendo moved into the Japanese toy industry with the Ultra Hand, Yokoi was moved from maintenance to the new Nintendo Games department as a product developer. Nintendo continued to produce toys, including the Ultra Machine, Love Tester
