1.
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
2.
Game Boy line
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The Game Boy line is a line of handheld game consoles developed, manufactured, and marketed by Nintendo. The product line has sold 200 million units worldwide, the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color combined sold 118.69 million units worldwide. All versions of the Game Boy Advance combined have sold 81.51 million units, all Game Boy systems combined have sold 200.20 million units worldwide. The Game Boy line was succeeded by the Nintendo DS line, a number of Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games have been rereleased digitally through the Virtual Console service for the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. Nintendos Game Boy handheld was first released in 1989, yokoi was also responsible for the Game & Watch series of handhelds when Nintendo made the move from toys to video games. By following this simple mantra, the Game Boy line managed to gain a vast following despite technically superior alternatives which would have color graphics instead and this is also apparent in the name, which connotes a smaller sidekick companion to Nintendos consoles. Game Boy continues its success to this day and many at Nintendo have dedicated the handheld in Yokois memory, Game Boy celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2004, which nearly coincided with the 20-year anniversary of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. To celebrate, Nintendo released the Classic NES Series and an NES controller-themed color scheme for the Game Boy Advance SP, in 2006, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said on the rumored demise of the Game Boy brand, No, its not true after all. What we are saying is that for whichever platform, we are always conducting research and development for the new system, be it the Game Boy. Perhaps they misunderstood a part of story, but as far as the handheld market is concerned we really want to focus on more sales of the DS. The original gray Game Boy was first released in Japan on April 21,1989 and it plays games from ROM-based media contained in small plastic detachable units called cartridges. The game that pushed the Game Boy into the reaches of success was Tetris. Tetris was widely popular, and on the format could be played anywhere. It came packaged with the Game Boy, and broadened its reach, adults, releasing Tetris on the Game Boy was selected as #4 on GameSpys 25 Smartest Moments in Gaming. The original Game Boy was one of the first cartridge-based systems that more than four players at one time. In fact, it has shown that the system could support 16 simultaneous players. However, this feature was supported in Faceball 2000. In 1995, the Play it Loud version of the original Game Boy was released in five different colors such as red, yellow, green, black, the Game Boy Pocket is a redesigned version of the original Game Boy having the same features released in 1996
3.
Handheld game console
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A handheld game console is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls, and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video consoles and contain the console, screen, speakers. In 1976, Mattel introduced the first handheld game with the release of Auto Race. Later, several companies—including Coleco and Milton Bradley—made their own single-game, the oldest true handheld game console with interchangeable cartridges is the Milton Bradley Microvision in 1979. Nintendo is credited with popularizing the handheld console concept with the release of the Game Boy in 1989, the origins of handheld game consoles are found in handheld and tabletop electronic game devices of the 1970s and early 1980s. These electronic devices are capable of playing only a game, they fit in the palm of the hand or on a tabletop. In 1978, handheld games were described by Popular Electronics magazine as nonvideo electronic games. This synthesis happened in 1976, when Mattel began work on a line of calculator-sized sports games that became the worlds first handheld electronic games. The project began when Michael Katz, Mattels new product category marketing director, told the engineers in the group to design a game the size of a calculator. Our big success was something that I conceptualized—the first handheld game, I asked the design group to see if they could come up with a game that was electronic that was the same size as a calculator. —Michael Katz, former marketing director, Mattel Toys, the result was the 1976 release of Auto Race. Followed by Football later in 1977, the two games were so successful that according to Katz, these simple electronic handheld games turned into a $400 million category, Mattel would later win the honor of being recognized by the industry for innovation in handheld game device displays. Soon, other manufacturers including Coleco, Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley, Entex, in 1979 the LCD-based Microvision, designed by Smith Engineering and distributed by Milton-Bradley, became the first handheld game console and the first to use interchangeable game cartridges. In 1979, Gunpei Yokoi, traveling on a bullet train, Yokoi then thought of an idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time. Starting in 1980, Nintendo began to release a series of games designed by Yokoi called the Game & Watch games. For later, more complicated Game & Watch games, Yokoi invented a cross shaped directional pad or D-pad for control of on-screen characters, the result was the Nintendo Game Boy. In 1982, the Bandai LCD Solarpower was the first solar-powered gaming device, some of its games, such as the horror-themed game Terror House, features two LCD panels, one stacked on the other, for an early 3D effect. In 1983, Takara Tomys Tomytronic 3D simulates 3D by having two LED panels that were lit by light through a window on top of the device
4.
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
5.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
6.
North America
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North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere. It can also be considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea. North America covers an area of about 24,709,000 square kilometers, about 16. 5% of the land area. North America is the third largest continent by area, following Asia and Africa, and the fourth by population after Asia, Africa, and Europe. In 2013, its population was estimated at nearly 565 million people in 23 independent states, or about 7. 5% of the worlds population, North America was reached by its first human populations during the last glacial period, via crossing the Bering land bridge. The so-called Paleo-Indian period is taken to have lasted until about 10,000 years ago, the Classic stage spans roughly the 6th to 13th centuries. The Pre-Columbian era ended with the migrations and the arrival of European settlers during the Age of Discovery. Present-day cultural and ethnic patterns reflect different kind of interactions between European colonists, indigenous peoples, African slaves and their descendants, European influences are strongest in the northern parts of the continent while indigenous and African influences are relatively stronger in the south. Because of the history of colonialism, most North Americans speak English, Spanish or French, the Americas are usually accepted as having been named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci by the German cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. Vespucci, who explored South America between 1497 and 1502, was the first European to suggest that the Americas were not the East Indies, but a different landmass previously unknown by Europeans. In 1507, Waldseemüller produced a map, in which he placed the word America on the continent of South America. He explained the rationale for the name in the accompanying book Cosmographiae Introductio, for Waldseemüller, no one should object to the naming of the land after its discoverer. He used the Latinized version of Vespuccis name, but in its feminine form America, following the examples of Europa, Asia and Africa. Later, other mapmakers extended the name America to the continent, In 1538. Some argue that the convention is to use the surname for naming discoveries except in the case of royalty, a minutely explored belief that has been advanced is that America was named for a Spanish sailor bearing the ancient Visigothic name of Amairick. Another is that the name is rooted in a Native American language, the term North America maintains various definitions in accordance with location and context. In Canadian English, North America may be used to refer to the United States, alternatively, usage sometimes includes Greenland and Mexico, as well as offshore islands
7.
PAL region
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The PAL region is a television publication territory that covers most of Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and Oceania. It is so named because of the PAL television standard used in those regions, as opposed to the NTSC standard traditionally used in Japan. Most video games designated as part of the region will not play on NTSC-U/C or NTSC-J region consoles because of regional lockout, while this is the most common occurrence, some Xbox and Xbox 360 games are region-free encoded, since Microsofts policy is for publishers to decide. Sony has a policy for the PlayStation Portable, but most publishers choose not to encode a region on their UMD games. With the exception of Persona 4 Arena, PlayStation 3 Blu-ray Disc games are region-free, all Nintendo home consoles except for the Nintendo Switch have region locking either by software encoding or physical differences in media and consoles. Australia uses PAL version games only for the Wii, PlayStation 3, as most hand-held consoles use their own proprietary display system, incompatibilities of differing TV systems are not relevant. However, the regions often exist for localisation and distribution purposes. The scope of the PAL region varies with systems and publishers, the following countries and areas are normally included in a PAL region release, Along with other Middle Eastern, African, and European countries. Beginning with the Dreamcast and continuing through the generation of consoles. Games ported to PAL have historically been known for having game speed and this was especially prevalent during previous generations when 2D graphics were used almost exclusively. The gameplay of many games with an emphasis on speed, such as the original Sonic The Hedgehog for the Mega Drive, suffered in their PAL incarnations. Despite the possibility and popularity of 60 Hz PAL games, many games, particularly for the PS. Square Enix have long been criticised by PAL gamers for their poor PAL conversions, final Fantasy X runs in 50 Hz mode only, and 16. 7% slower and bordered that while prevalent in previous generations was considered inexcusable at the time of release. In stark contrast, the Dreamcast was the first system to feature PAL60, the Xbox too featured a system-wide PAL60 option in the Dashboard, with almost every game supporting PAL60. Seventh generation PAL consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Wii also feature system-wide 60 Hz support, nintendos Virtual Console service has been criticized due to PAL games running in 50 Hz only, despite the ability to run in 60 Hz mode. In recent years, few PAL releases have lacked the standard PAL mode and offered 60 Hz only, notably Metroid Prime 2, Echoes and Geist for the Nintendo GameCube, PAL NTSC Advanced Television Systems Committee standards SECAM Regional lockout
8.
Australasia
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Australasia, a region of Oceania, comprises Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. Charles de Brosses coined the term in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes and he derived it from the Latin for south of Asia and differentiated the area from Polynesia and the southeast Pacific. The bulk of Australasia sits on the Indo-Australian Plate, together with India, physiographically, Australasia includes New Zealand, Australia, and Melanesia, New Guinea and neighbouring islands north and east of Australia in the Pacific Ocean. The designation is applied to all the lands and islands of the Pacific Ocean lying between the equator and latitude 47° south. Most of Australasia lies on the portion of the Indo-Australian Plate, flanked by the Indian Ocean to the west. Sometimes the term encompasses the island of New Guinea. Many organisations whose names include the prefix Australasian Society of, limit their scope of operation to just Australia and New Zealand. In the past, Australasia has been used as a name for combined Australia/New Zealand sporting teams, examples include tennis between 1905 and 1915, when New Zealand and Australia combined to compete in the Davis Cup international tournament, and at the Olympic Games of 1908 and 1912. From an ecological perspective the Australasia ecozone forms a region with a common geologic and evolutionary history. In this context, Australasia is limited to Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, New Caledonia, the Wallace Line marks the biological divide from the Indomalaya ecozone of tropical Asia – Borneo and Bali lie on the western, Asian side. These three land masses have been separated from other continents, and from one another, for millions of years, all of Australasia shares the Antarctic flora, although the northern, tropical islands also share many plants with Southeast Asia. Mainland Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania are separated from one another by shallow continental shelves and they share a similar fauna which includes marsupial and monotreme mammals and ratite birds. Eucalypts are the predominant trees in much of Australia and New Guinea, New Zealand has no extant native land mammals aside from bats, but also had ratite birds, including the kiwi and the extinct moa. Media related to Australasia at Wikimedia Commons
9.
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
10.
Central processing unit
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The computer industry has used the term central processing unit at least since the early 1960s. The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed over the course of their history, most modern CPUs are microprocessors, meaning they are contained on a single integrated circuit chip. An IC that contains a CPU may also contain memory, peripheral interfaces, some computers employ a multi-core processor, which is a single chip containing two or more CPUs called cores, in that context, one can speak of such single chips as sockets. Array processors or vector processors have multiple processors that operate in parallel, there also exists the concept of virtual CPUs which are an abstraction of dynamical aggregated computational resources. Early computers such as the ENIAC had to be rewired to perform different tasks. Since the term CPU is generally defined as a device for software execution, the idea of a stored-program computer was already present in the design of J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchlys ENIAC, but was initially omitted so that it could be finished sooner. On June 30,1945, before ENIAC was made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and it was the outline of a stored-program computer that would eventually be completed in August 1949. EDVAC was designed to perform a number of instructions of various types. Significantly, the programs written for EDVAC were to be stored in high-speed computer memory rather than specified by the wiring of the computer. This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, which was the considerable time, with von Neumanns design, the program that EDVAC ran could be changed simply by changing the contents of the memory. Early CPUs were custom designs used as part of a larger, however, this method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of multi-purpose processors produced in large quantities. This standardization began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit. The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers, both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in electronic devices ranging from automobiles to cellphones, the so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, which was completed before EDVAC, also utilized a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory. Relays and vacuum tubes were used as switching elements, a useful computer requires thousands or tens of thousands of switching devices. The overall speed of a system is dependent on the speed of the switches, tube computers like EDVAC tended to average eight hours between failures, whereas relay computers like the Harvard Mark I failed very rarely. In the end, tube-based CPUs became dominant because the significant speed advantages afforded generally outweighed the reliability problems, most of these early synchronous CPUs ran at low clock rates compared to modern microelectronic designs. Clock signal frequencies ranging from 100 kHz to 4 MHz were very common at this time, the design complexity of CPUs increased as various technologies facilitated building smaller and more reliable electronic devices
