Home video game console
A home video game console, or home console, is a video game device, used for home gamers, as opposed to in arcades or some other commercial establishment. Home consoles are one type of video game consoles, in contrast to the handheld game consoles which are smaller and portable, allowing people to carry them and play them at any time or place, along with microconsoles and dedicated consoles. Below is a timeline of each generation with the top three home video consoles of each generation based on worldwide sales. For a complete list of home video consoles released in each generation please see the respective article of each generation. Legend – Unit with the highest sales of its generation. – Unit with the second highest sales of its generation. – Unit with the third highest sales of its generation. -- Manufacturer did not sell the most units. – – Manufacturer didn't release a home video game console during this generation. † – Indicates the current generation consoles on the market. Although the first video games appeared in the 1950s, 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 he created a series of video game console designs. One of these designs, which gained the nickname of the "Brown Box", featured changeable game modes and was demonstrated to several TV manufactures leading to an agreement between Sanders Associates and Magnavox. In 1972 Magnavox released the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a TV set. Ralph Baer's initial design had called for a huge row of switches that would allow gamers to turn on and off certain components of the console to create different games like tennis, volleyball and chase. Magnavox replaced the switch design with separate cartridges for each game. Although Baer had sketched up ideas for cartridges that could include new components for new games, the carts released by Magnavox all served the same function as the switches and allowed gamers to choose from the Odyssey's built-in games.
The Odyssey only sold about 100,000 units, making it moderately successful, it was not until Atari's arcade game Pong popularized video games, that the public began to take more notice of the emerging industry. By autumn 1975, 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, a third game—Smash. Released with Atari's 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 with no board game pieces or extra cartridges. In the years that followed, the market saw many companies rushing similar consoles to market. After General Instrument released their inexpensive microchips, each containing a complete console on a single chip, many small developers began releasing consoles that looked different externally, but internally were playing the same games.
Most of the consoles from this era were dedicated consoles only playing the games that came with the console. These video game consoles were just called video games, because there was little reason to distinguish the two yet. While a few companies like Atari and newcomer Coleco pushed the envelope, the market became flooded with simple, similar video games. Fairchild released the Fairchild Video Entertainment System in 1976. While there had been previous game consoles that used cartridges, either the cartridges had no information and served the same function as flipping switches or the console itself was empty and the cartridge contained all of the game components; the VES, 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. Both Bally and Magnavox brought their own programmable cartridge-based consoles to the market.
However, it was not until Atari released a conversion of the golden age arcade hit Space Invaders in 1980 for the Atari 2600 that the home console industry took off. Many consumers bought an Atari console. Space Invaders' unprecedented success started the trend of console manufacturers trying to get exclusive rights to arcade titles and the trend of advertisements for game consoles claiming to bring the arcade experience home. Throughout the early 1980s, other companies released video game consoles of their own. Many of the video game systems were technically superior to the Atari 2600, marketed as improvements over the Atari 2600, but Atari dominated the console market in the early 1980s. However, a severe crash occurred in 1983 in the video game business. In 1983, Nintendo released the Family Computer in Japan; the Famicom supported high-resolution sprites, larger color palettes, tiled backgrounds. This allowed Famicom games to have more detailed graphics. Nintendo began attempts to bring their Famicom to the U.
S. after the video game market had crashed. In the U. S. video games were seen as a fad that had passed. To distinguish its product from older game consoles, Nintendo released the
Educational entertainment
Educational entertainment is media designed to educate through entertainment. Most it includes content intended to teach but has incidental entertainment value, it has been used by academia, corporations and other entities in various countries to disseminate information in classrooms and/or via television and other media to influence viewers' opinions and behaviors. Edutaining is an art and a process of making some special attempts to educate the children with interesting and joyful manner, so that free and fearless childhood may be ensured and maximum output of learning may be assured with accelerated learning speed; this article is an attempt to scrutinize and present meaning of edutainment and edutaining and need of edutaining, objectives and procedure of edutaining the children and various other issues concerning edutaining the children. Interest in combining education with entertainment in order to make learning more enjoyable, has existed for hundreds of years, with the Renaissance and Enlightenment being movements in which this combination was presented to students.
Komenský in particular is affiliated with the “school as play” concept, which proposes pedagogy with dramatic or delightful elements. Poor Richard’s Almanack demonstrates early implementation of edutainment, with Benjamin Franklin combining entertaining and educational content, such as puzzles and rules of conduct, into an instructional entity for colonists. Development of the concept of edutainment can be tied to Walt Disney, with his first educational short film, Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, being commissioned and shot in 1922 for the Deneer Dental Institute; the entry of the U. S. into World War II had a major impact on the popularity of educational entertainment, as a relationship between Disney and the U. S. government formed. In the transcript of an interview with Alexander P. de Seversky from The Walt Disney Archives, of which its date and interviewer is unknown, the following quotation is found:It is a new kind of entertainment that goes far beyond "amusing" its audience. This picture is vital entertainment--it treats on a subject that directly affects every man and child, in America.
With dramatic action it exposes the basic ideas that will rid the mind of confusion and clarify the war thinking of the public. Since the 1970s, various groups in the United States, the United Kingdom, Latin America have used edutainment to address health and social issues such as substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, cancer. Initiatives in major universities, such as Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, NGOs such as PCI-Media Impact, government agencies such as the U. S. Centers for Disease Control have produced edutainment content. Modern forms of edutainment include television productions, museum exhibits, computer software which use entertainment to attract and maintain an audience, while incorporating deliberate educational content or messages, it is apparent that educational elements are becoming implemented into traditionally recreational realms, such as vacations and games. The term edutainment was used as early as 1954 by Walt Disney to describe the True Life Adventures series.
The noun edutainment is a neologistic portmanteau used by Robert Heyman in 1973 while producing documentaries for the National Geographic Society. It was used by Dr. Chris Daniels in 1975 to encapsulate the theme of his Millennium Project; this project became known as The Elysian World Project. The terms “edutainment” were used in 2001 to explain how the CRUMPET project, on context-aware and personalised Tourism, refers to people travelling for adventure yet who travel for education and business and who do not perceive themselves as classical “tourists”; the offshoot word "Edutainer" has been used by Craig Sim Webb since before the turn of the millennium to describe an individual who offers edutainment presentations and performances. Schoolhouse Rock, Sesame Street, Bill Nye the Science Guy are examples of shows that use music and video to teach topics like math and history. Using music to aid memory dates back to the passing of ancient oral traditions, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. Much of what edutainment can offer through audio and video is accessible over the internet on platforms such as YouTube, with such channels as Vsauce, CGP Grey, MinutePhysics, Meet Arnold and Crash Course.
Public Service Broadcasting is a band that incorporates audio and footage from the British Film Institute into their music and performances, this partnership helps the British Film Institute showcase its material. Motion pictures with educational content appeared as early as 1943, such as Private Snafu, can still be seen in films such as An Inconvenient Truth. After World War II, educational entertainment shifted towards television. Television programs can be divided into three main categories: those with educational intentions, those with a high degree of both education and entertainment, entertainment shows with incidental or occasional educational value. Mexican TV producer Miguel Sabido pioneered in the 1970s a form of edutainment via telenovelas, "soap operas for social change"; the "Sabido method" has been adopted in many other countri
Central processing unit
A central processing unit called a central processor or main processor, is the electronic circuitry within a computer that carries out the instructions of a computer program by performing the basic arithmetic, logic and input/output operations specified by the instructions. The computer industry has used the term "central processing unit" at least since the early 1960s. Traditionally, the term "CPU" refers to a processor, more to its processing unit and control unit, distinguishing these core elements of a computer from external components such as main memory and I/O circuitry; the form and implementation of CPUs have changed over the course of their history, but their fundamental operation remains unchanged. Principal components of a CPU include the arithmetic logic unit that performs arithmetic and logic operations, processor registers that supply operands to the ALU and store the results of ALU operations and a control unit that orchestrates the fetching and execution of instructions by directing the coordinated operations of the ALU, registers and other components.
Most modern CPUs are microprocessors, meaning they are contained on a single integrated circuit chip. An IC that contains a CPU may contain memory, peripheral interfaces, other components of a computer; some computers employ a multi-core processor, a single chip containing two or more CPUs called "cores". Array processors or vector processors have multiple processors that operate in parallel, with no unit considered central. There exists the concept of virtual CPUs which are an abstraction of dynamical aggregated computational resources. Early computers such as the ENIAC had to be physically rewired to perform different tasks, which caused these machines to be called "fixed-program computers". Since the term "CPU" is defined as a device for software execution, the earliest devices that could rightly be called CPUs came with the advent of the stored-program computer; the idea of a stored-program computer had been present in the design of J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly's ENIAC, but was 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. It was the outline of a stored-program computer that would be completed in August 1949. EDVAC was designed to perform a certain number of instructions of various types; the programs written for EDVAC were to be stored in high-speed computer memory rather than specified by the physical wiring of the computer. This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, the considerable time and effort required to reconfigure the computer to perform a new task. With von Neumann's design, the program that EDVAC ran could be changed by changing the contents of the memory. EDVAC, was not the first stored-program computer. Early CPUs were custom designs used as part of a sometimes distinctive computer. However, this method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has 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 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, sometimes in toys. While von Neumann is most credited with the design of the stored-program computer because of his design of EDVAC, the design became known as the von Neumann architecture, others before him, such as Konrad Zuse, had suggested and implemented similar ideas; the so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, completed before EDVAC used a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory. The key difference between the von Neumann and Harvard architectures is that the latter separates the storage and treatment of CPU instructions and data, while the former uses the same memory space for both.
Most modern CPUs are von Neumann in design, but CPUs with the Harvard architecture are seen as well in embedded applications. Relays and vacuum tubes were used as switching elements; 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 rarely. In the end, tube-based CPUs became dominant because the significant speed advantages afforded 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 common at this time, limited by the speed of the switching de
Anpanman
Anpanman is a Japanese children superhero picture book series written by Takashi Yanase, running from 1973 until the author's death in 2013. The series has been adapted into an anime entitled Soreike! Anpanman, one of the most popular anime series among young children in Japan; the series follows the adventures of Anpanman, a superhero with an anpan for a head, who protects the world from an evil anthropomorphic germ named Baikinman. Merchandised, the Anpanman characters appear on every imaginable children's product in Japan, ranging from clothes and video games to toys and snack foods; the series spawned a short-lived spin-off show featuring one of the popular recurring characters on the show, Omusubiman. Anpanman overtook Hello Kitty as Japan's top-grossing character in 2002 and remained the country's top-grossing character as of 2013. Anpanman has sold over 80 million books as of February 2019, the franchise generated ¥4.5 trillion in total retail sales revenue by 2013. Works inspired by Anpanman include the manga and anime series One-Punch Man, the K-pop song "Anpanman" by BTS.
During the Second World War, Takashi Yanase faced starvation countless times, which made him dream about eating anpan. This inspired the creation of Anpanman. In each episode, Anpanman saves people, he goes on daily patrols around the house of Uncle Jam. He is a symbol of justice, fighting for good every day. Anpanman has a long history and new characters are introduced, keeping the series fresh. In 2009, Anpanman was verified as a Guinness World Record Holder for the highest number of characters in an animated franchise, with a total of 1,768 characters appearing in the first 980 episodes of the TV series and the first 20 films. Anpanman Voiced by: Keiko Toda The main character of the anime, whose head is a bun made by Uncle Jam, his name comes from his being a man whose head is made of bread, filled with red bean paste called an anpan. When translated into English, Anpanman means "Bean Bun Man." He doesn't need to eat or drink to sustain himself and has never been seen eating, as it is believed the bean jam in his head allows him to sustain himself in this manner.
His weaknesses are anything else that makes his head dirty. In order to prevent his head from getting wet when underwater or wet weather, he wears a bubble-like helmet to protect it, he regains his strength when Uncle Jam bakes him a new head and replaces the old head. Anpanman's damaged head, with his eyes turning into X's, flies off his shoulders once a new baked head replaces it. Anpanman was born. Anpanman has two special attacks; when Anpanman comes across a starving creature or person, he lets them eat a part of his head. This can make him weaker and causes him to replace his head to regain his strength, he has super hearing, which allows him to respond to anyone who calls his name out in distress, anywhere in the world. Uncle Jam Voiced by: Hiroshi Masuoka The creator of Anpanman and a kind baker, he is a skilled cook with knowledge of nearly everything in the world. Batako-san Voiced by: Rei Sakuma Assistant to Uncle Jam, she is prone to forgetting things. Her name translates to, "Butter Girl."
She makes and mends the capes of Anpanman and the other heroes appears in the story. Cheese Voiced by: Kōichi Yamadera A dog. In the manga, he became Anpanman's loyal friend. In the anime, a young Anpanman finds Cheese starving during his first patrol, gives a part of his head to eat. Cheese tends to be an effective sidekick. Currypanman Voiced by: Michiyo Yanagisawa Another of Anpanman's friends, his head is made from a pastry filled with red-hot curry. He is quick tempered and hot-headed on the surface, but gives way to a kind and sentimental interior. Tends to be the strongman of the trio. Wields the Curry-punch and Curry-kick, which are similar to the fighting techniques of Anpanman's other sidekicks. However, he can use the hot curry concealed in his head as a weapon, using it to burn villains, he first appeared in episode 2b. Shokupanman Voiced by: Sumi Shimamoto A friend of Anpanman, his head is made from sliced white bread. He is narcissistic. Tends to be the thinker of the trio, his job when not helping Anpanman is serving lunch to the schoolchildren.
Dokin-chan has a crush on him. Wields the Shoku-punch and Shoku-kick, which are similar to Anpanman's fighting techniques, he has a multi-functional delivery van known as the Shokupanman-go with many implements to help avoid trouble. He first appeared in episode 3b. Melonpanna Voiced by: Mika Kanai Anpanman's friend, her head is made from melon bread. She is softhearted, being caring and sensitive, is sometimes clever; when she's in trouble, she needs Anpanman or somebody else to save her, or if there is no one available, she calls out for her sister, Rollpanna. Sometimes she likes hanging out with Cheese, her special attack, the Melo-Melo Punch, makes bad guys woozy with affection or awakens others from deep sleep. She first appeared in episode 200. Rollpanna Voiced by: Miina Tominaga Melonpanna's older sister who has two hearts: A red one of goodness, thanks to Baikinman, a blue one of evil; the sight of Anpanman can trigger her evil heart
Weekly Shōnen Jump
Weekly Shōnen Jump is a weekly shōnen manga anthology published in Japan by Shueisha under the Jump line of magazines. It is the best-selling manga magazine, as well as one of the longest-running; the manga series within the magazine target young male readers and tend to consist of a large number of action scenes and a fair amount of comedy. The chapters of series that run in Weekly Shōnen Jump are collected and published in tankōbon volumes under the "Jump Comics" imprint every two to three months; the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s represents the era when the magazine's circulation was at its highest, 6.53 million copies per week. As of early 2017, it had a weekly circulation of 1.9 million copies. The magazine sold over 7.5 billion copies since 1968, making it the best-selling comic/manga magazine. Many of the best-selling manga originate from Weekly Shōnen Jump. Shōnen Jump spawned the Jump magazine line as well as the Jump Comics imprint label for publishing tankōbon. Weekly Shōnen Jump has two sister magazines called Jump SQ, created after the fall of Monthly Shōnen Jump, Saikyō Jump.
The magazine has had several international counterparts, including the current North American Weekly Shonen Jump. It spawned a crossover media franchise including anime and video games which bring together various Shōnen Jump characters. Weekly Shōnen Jump was launched by Shueisha on July 2, 1968, to compete with the already-successful Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Weekly Shōnen Sunday. Weekly Shōnen Jump's sister publication was a manga magazine called Shōnen Book, a male version of the short-lived shōjo manga anthology Shōjo Book. Prior to issue 20, Weekly Shōnen Jump was called Shōnen Jump as it was a bi-weekly magazine. In 1969, Shōnen Book ceased publication at which time Shōnen Jump became a weekly magazine and a new monthly magazine called Bessatsu Shōnen Jump was made to take Shōnen Book's place; this magazine was rebranded as Monthly Shōnen Jump before being discontinued and replaced by Jump SQ. Due to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the shipment of the 15th issue of 2011 was delayed in some areas of Japan.
In response, Shueisha published the series included in that issue for free on its website from March 23 to April 27. On July 11, 2013, the Namco Bandai Group opened an amusement park themed around Weekly Shōnen Jump series. Titled J-World Tokyo, it is located on the third floor of the Sunshine City World Import Mart Building in Ikebukuro and is 1.52 acres. In celebration of the magazine's 45th anniversary in 2013, Shueisha began a contest where anyone can submit manga in three different languages, Japanese and Chinese. Judged by the magazine's editorial department, four awards will be given, a grand prize and one for each language, each including 500,000 yen and guaranteed publication in either Jump, its special editions, North American edition, China's OK! Comic, or Taiwan's Formosa Youth. A mobile phone app titled "Jump Live" was launched in August 2013, it features exclusive content from the artists whose series run in Weekly Shōnen Jump. Famicom Jump: Hero Retsuden, released in 1988 for the Family Computer was produced to commemorate the magazine's 20th anniversary.
It was followed by a sequel: Famicom Jump II: Saikyō no Shichinin in 1991 for the Family Computer. In 2000, two more games were created for the purpose of commemorating the magazine's anniversaries. A crossover fighting game titled Jump Super Stars was released for the Nintendo DS in 2005, it was followed by Jump Ultimate Stars in 2006. A new crossover game, J-Stars Victory Vs. was released in 2014 for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita to commemorate Jump's 45 anniversary. In June 2018, a limited 50th Anniversary Shōnen Jump Edition of the Famicom Mini game console was released in Japan, it sold 110,000 units in two days. Weekly Shōnen Jump, in association with parent company Shueisha, holds annual competitions for new or up and coming manga artists to create one-shot stories; the best are put to a panel of judges where the best are given a special award for the best of these new series. The Tezuka Award, named for manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, is given for all different styles of stories; the Akatsuka Award, named for gag manga pioneer Fujio Akatsuka, is a similar competition for comedy and gag manga.
Many Weekly Shōnen Jump manga artists have gotten their start either winning or being acknowledged by these competitions. WSJ is the center of the Shueisha's branding of its main manga products due to the popularity and recognition of the series and characters published in it. Although the manga are published both in the main magazine as well as in the Jump Comics imprint line of tankōbon, they are republished in various other editions such as kanzenban and "Remixes" of the original work publishing series older or established series; the Jump brand is used on the tankōbon released of their manga series, related drama CDs, at "Jump Festa", a festival showing off the people and products behind the Weekly Shōnen Jump manga titles. On September 22, 2014, the free Shōnen Jump+ mobile app and website was launched in Japan, it sells digital versions of the Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine, simultaneous with its print release, tankōbon volumes of individual Jump series past and present. However, it has large samples of the manga that can be read for free.
There are series that are serialized on the app which, unlike Jump, may be aimed at adults or women. Those series exclusive on th
Fifth generation of video game consoles
The fifth-generation era refers to computer and video games, video game consoles, handheld gaming consoles dating from 1993 to 2002. For home consoles, the best-selling console was the PlayStation by a wide margin, followed by the Nintendo 64, the Sega Saturn; the PlayStation had a redesigned version, the PSOne, launched in July 2000. For handhelds, this era was characterized by significant fragmentation, because the first handheld of the generation, the Sega Nomad, had a lifespan of just two years, the Nintendo Virtual Boy had a lifespan of less than one. Both of them were discontinued; the Neo Geo Pocket was released in 1998, but was dropped by SNK in favor of the backwards-compatible Neo Geo Pocket Color just a year later. Nintendo's Game Boy Color was the winner in handhelds by a large margin. There were two updated versions of the original Game Boy: Game Boy Light and Game Boy Pocket; some features that distinguished fifth generation consoles from previous fourth generation consoles include: 3D polygon graphics with texture mapping 3D graphics capabilities – lighting, Gouraud shading, anti-aliasing and texture filtering Optical disc game storage, allowing much larger storage space than ROM cartridges CD quality audio recordings – PCM audio with 16-bit depth and 44.1 kHz sampling rate Wide adoption of full motion video, displaying pre-rendered computer animation or live action footage Analog controllers Display resolutions from 480i to 576i Color depth up to 16,777,216 colors This era is known for its pivotal role in the video game industry's leap from 2D to 3D computer graphics, as well as the shift from home console games being stored on ROM cartridges to optical discs.
The development of the Internet made it possible to store and download tape and ROM images of older games leading 7th generation consoles to make many older games available for purchase or download, such as popular games from this generation. There was considerable time overlap between this generation and the next, the sixth generation of consoles, which began with the launch of the Dreamcast in Japan on November 27, 1998; the fifth generation ended with the discontinuation of the PlayStation in late 2006, a year after the launch of the seventh generation. The 32-bit/64-bit era is most noted for the rise of 3D polygon games. While there were games prior that had used three-dimensional polygon environments, such as Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter in the arcades and Star Fox on the Super NES, it was in this era that many game designers began to move traditionally 2D and pseudo-3D genres into 3D on video game consoles. 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.
Starting in 1996, 3D video games began to take off with releases such as Virtua Fighter 2 on the Saturn, Tomb Raider on the PlayStation and Saturn, Tekken 2 and Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation, Super Mario 64 on the N64. Their 3D environments were marketed and they steered the industry's focus away from side-scrolling and rail-style titles, as well as opening doors to more complex games and genres. 3D became the main 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 and the media's high storage capabilities. After allowing Sony to develop a CD-based prototype console for them and a similar failed partnership with Philips, Nintendo decided to make the Nintendo 64 a cartridge-based system like its predecessors. Publicly, Nintendo defended this decision on the grounds that it would give games shorter load times than a compact disc. However, it had the dubious benefit of allowing Nintendo to charge higher licensing fees, as cartridge production was more expensive than CD production.
Many third-party developers like EA Sports viewed this as an underhanded attempt to raise more money for Nintendo and many of them became more reluctant to release games on the N64. Nintendo's decision to use a cartridge based system sparked a small scale war among gamers as to, better; the chief advantages of the CD-ROM format were larger storage capacity, allowing for a much greater amount of game content lower manufacturing costs, making them much less risky for game publishers, lower retail prices due to the reduced need to compensate for manufacturing costs. Its disadvantages compared to cartridge were considerable load times, their inability to load data "on the fly", making them reliant on the console RAM, the greater manufacturing costs of CD-ROM drives compared to cartridge slots, resulting in higher retail prices for CD-based consoles. A Nintendo magazine ad placed a Space Shuttle next to a snail and dared consumers to decide "which one was better"; every other contemporary system used the new CD-ROM technology.
Consequent to the storage and cost advantages of the CD-ROM format, many game developers shifted their support away from the Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation. One of the most influential game franchises to change consoles during this era was the Final Fantasy series, beginning with Final Fantasy VII, being developed for the N64 but due to storage capacity issues w
LaserActive
The LaserActive is a converged device and fourth-generation home video game console capable of playing Laserdiscs, Compact Discs, console games, LD-G karaoke discs. It was released by Pioneer Corporation in 1993. In addition to LaserActive games, separately sold add-on modules accept Mega Drive/Genesis and PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16 ROM cartridges and CD-ROMs. Pioneer released the LaserActive model CLD-A100 in Japan on August 20, 1993 at a cost of ¥89,800, in the United States on September 13, 1993 at a cost of $970. An NEC-branded version of the LaserActive player known as the LD-ROM² System, or model PCE-LD1, was released on December 1993, priced identically to the original system and accepted Pioneer's PAC modules; the LaserActive has no regional lockout, allowing software from any region to be played on any system. However, it is considered a commercial failure. In the headings below, the Japanese model number occurs first, followed by the North American model number. Mega LD PAC Pioneer Electronics and Sega Enterprises released this module that allows users to play 8-inch and 12-inch LaserActive Mega LD discs, in addition to standard Sega CD discs and Genesis cartridges, as well as CD+G discs.
It was the most popular add-on bought by the greater part of the LaserActive owners, costing US $600. It comes with a LaserActive-branded version of Sega's 6-button control pad. LD-ROM² PAC Pioneer Electronics and NEC Home Electronics released this module that allows users to play 8-inch and 12-inch LaserActive LD-ROM² discs, as well as CD-ROM² and Super CD-ROM² discs, HuCards and CD+G discs; the Japanese version of the PAC can run Arcade CD-ROM² discs through the use of an Arcade Card Duo. The retail price was US $600, it came with a LaserActive-branded version of NEC's Turbo Pad. An NEC branded version of the LD-ROM² PAC known as the PC Engine PAC was released. Due to the unpopularity of the TurboGrafx-16 in North America few PAC-N10 units were produced, resulting in their scarcity compared to its Sega counterpart. Karaoke PAC This PAC allows the CLD-A100 to use all NTSC LaserKaraoke titles; the front panel has two microphone inputs with separated volume controls, as well as tone control. The retail price was US $350.
Computer Interface PAC The Computer Interface PAC has an RS-232 port, enabling the CLD-A100 to be controlled by a custom software developed for a home computer. The PAC came with a 33-button infrared remote control providing more functionality than the 24-button remote included with the CLD-A100, it included a computer program called LaserActive Program Editor on floppy disk for DOS and classic Mac OS. The floppy disks had some sample programs created with the editor for use with the first five LaserDiscs in the Tenchi Muyo! anime series. The LaserActive 3-D Goggles employ an active shutter 3D system compatible with at least four 3D-ready LD-ROM software titles: 3-D Museum, Vajra 2, Virtual Cameraman 2, 3D Virtual Australia. 3D Virtual Australia was the last software title published for the LaserActive. The goggles are compatible with the Sega Master System, are interchangeable with the SegaScope 3-D Glasses, they can be used to view 3-D images from autostereograms. A goggle adapter and sold separately from the 3-D Goggles, enables the user to connect one or two pairs of goggles to the CLD-A100.
The standard LaserActive games were on Laserdisc encoded as an LD-ROM. An LD-ROM had a capacity of 540 MB with 60 minutes of analog video. In the early 1990s, a number of consumer electronics manufacturers designed converged devices around CD-ROM technology. At the time, CD-ROM systems were expensive; the LaserActive was one of several multipurpose, multi-format, upmarket home entertainment systems with software stored on optical discs. These systems were premised on early conceptions of multimedia entertainment; some comparable systems are the Commodore CDTV, Philips CD-i, 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Tandy Video Information System. Computer Gaming World in January 1994 stated that although LaserActive was "a better product in many ways" than 3DO, it lacked software and the NEC and Sega control packs were too expensive. LD-ROM Edutainment Multimedia PC Pioneer LaserActive at Computer Closet Pioneer LaserActive at laserdiscarchive.co.uk LaserActive Preservation Project
