‘Wolfenstein 3D’ ported to Game Boy Color on turbocharged cart
Yes, that’s a Game Boy Color cartridge sporting the Wolfenstein 3D logo. It’s not just cosmetic, because a modder named Anders Granlund has built a playable version of the classic FPS for the ancient handheld console. To give you an idea of the degree of difficulty, Granlund designed and built a custom ARM-powered board to power the graphics, and built it into the cartridge. The final result is playable on any Game Boy Color.
Wolfenstein 3D and its ’90s brethren Doom, have been modded for a number of unlikely devices, including a TI calculator and Canon printer. And in fact, Wolfenstein 3D was actually ported to the Game Boy Advance directly from the MS-DOS version.
However, this mod is on another level. Granlund used a breadboard to program the EEprom himself, then ordered a custom board, complete with pinouts. Using those, he added an NXP graphics processor, equipped with an ARM Cortex-M0 running at 48MHz. That chip is obviously more powerful than the Intel 386 CPU that originally ran Wolfestein on MS-DOS.
Once all that worked, Granlund ordered another custom board combining his original design and the NXP processor. After more tweaks, he ordered and received the final Rev. C cartridge, saying “everything works as expected and … I didn’t need any bodge wires this time around.” The whole thing is, of course, powered strictly with the Game Boy Color’s batteries.
The result is a game that plays amazingly smoothly on the 160 x 144 pixel screen, as you can see in the video above. A Reddit user perhaps sums it up best: “This is hella impressive. I mean, I’m absolutely in awe of the technical skill required to do this.”
Via: Reddit
Source: Anders Granlund
2016: The year in winners and losers
2016 was an interesting one, that’s for sure. To celebrate its quickly approaching end, we’re going to spend the next two weeks looking back at the most important story lines of the year — starting with the biggest winners of 2016. (Don’t worry, next week we’ll be taking shots at the biggest losers.)
Over the next six days Engadget will take stock of who is entering 2017 in a much better position than in 2016. Facebook for one, has started to really pull away its social media competitors, despite its struggles with fake news. And, after years of being promised that VR or AR would go mainstream, 2016 finally seems to have delivered. Oh, and we also saw emoji evolve from a bunch of silly pictures to a full-fledged language of its own — one that represents the diversity of our society.
So stay tuned through December 31st as we run down the biggest winners and losers of 2016.
Check out all of Engadget’s year-in-review coverage right here.
The new Razer Blade Pro trades gimmicks for 4K gaming power
When Razer made its first laptop, it was a company best known for selling third-party gamepads and high-performance gaming mice. Premium gimmicks were the name of the game. The company routinely released products with 17 buttons, adjustable tension analog sticks or retractable parts. This flair for novelty carried over to Razer’s first gaming notebook, which featured a set of 10 customizable keyboard buttons that each housed its own tiny LED display. It was neat, but the flagship laptop was soon overshadowed by a smaller, more powerful model. Now, the company is finally giving its original notebook the upgrades it deserves: a screaming new processor, the latest in graphics technology and a keyboard without the hindrance of the original’s silly “Switchblade” interface. This is the new Razer Blade Pro.
Design
At first blush, the new Blade Pro looks just like Razer’s other CNC-milled aluminum notebooks: It has a matte-black, unibody chassis with textured details on the lid. Indeed, this is the same design language we’ve seen in every laptop Razer’s ever made — it’s just bigger. Indeed, the Blade is the largest machine the company has built to date, stretching 16.7 inches across at its widest point and measuring 0.88 inches tall with the lid closed. It’s technically “thin and light” for a gaming laptop of its class, but at 7.8 pounds, it’s not exactly portable.
The Blade Pro may have been too big to fit in my usual work backpack, but its large frame at least offers plenty of connectivity. In all, the Pro’s chassis is host to three USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI-out, a single USB Type-C socket, Ethernet and a 3.5mm audio jack. I was delighted to find an SD card reader too — something I’ve missed on every Razer Blade notebook until now.
Keyboard and trackpad
At a glance, the Blade Pro’s keys looks like any other laptop keyboard, but touch them and you’ll find something completely different. Each key falls with a satisfying click and releases with a nearly identical pop — the hallmark tactility of a mechanical switch. It’s weird and slightly wonderful, at least for keyboard snobs like myself who extol the merits of mechanical keyboards. The Razer Blade Pro is the first laptop to ship with the company’s new ultra-low-profile mechanical key switches, a new typing technology that crams the feeling of full-sized mechanical actuation and reset into a laptop form factor.
If that sounds like a lot of buzzwords, don’t worry: All you need to know is that the Blade Pro’s new keyboard is excellent. After a firm click and a soft landing, its keys spring back with a delightful push. It was an odd sensation at first, and clashed with the muscle memory I’d built up from years of typing on traditional keys. Still, the longer I used the keyboard, the more I came love it. Its 1.6mm of key travel is still a little shallow compared to the cherry-mx switches I’m used to on my desktop machine, but the Blade Pro’s keys nonetheless feel like a minor revolution in mobile typing.
The Blade Pro’s trackpad is far less revelatory, but it still defies tradition. Most laptop mousing surfaces are positioned below the keyboard, but the Blade Pro’s trackpad is placed to the right of the notebook’s keys instead. This is odd, but not necessarily bad. After some adjustment, it feels completely natural, mirroring the position one might hold a mouse relative to a desktop PC. Although I grew to appreciate the starboard pad, I still couldn’t shake old habits. I pawed at the empty space below the keyboard at least half as often as the touchpad itself. It’s hard to unlearn years of laptop use.
The Blade Pro’s keys feel like a minor revolution in mobile typing.
That odd placement aside, the trackpad itself is excellent. Razer perfected the Windows touchpad the moment it got rid of the buttons on its Stealth Ultrabook. The Pro’s trackpad area is little more than a larger version of that touch surface, and that’s perfectly fine.
The Blade Pro also has one feature I’ve never seen on a laptop before: a scroll wheel. By default, the wheel merely adjusts the laptop’s volume, but pressing the holding the Fn key will let it scroll through pages and documents. Like everything on the keyboard, you can tweak its functions through Razer’s built-in Synapse software, which also controls keyboard macros, key assignments and Chroma backlight profiles.
Display and sound
Laptop speakers are typically good but never great. The chassis of a notebook simply can’t compete with the acoustics of a home stereo or even just a decent pair of headphones. The Blade Pro, however, makes a fine effort anyway. In addition to gifting the Pro with bigger, amplified speakers than its predecessors, Razer has cut “dual firing” slots into each side of the laptop’s frame. Basically, there are two acoustic holes in the chassis that help push sound away from the machine and out into the room. The result is loud, clear and well-separated audio that can easily fill an entire room. It still doesn’t beat my stereo or headphones, but it’s enough to push the Blade Pro’s sound from “good” to “better.”
Razer laptop displays have a habit of exhausting my vocabulary — there are only so many synonyms for stunning, vibrant and beautiful. The Blade Pro’s 17.3-inch IGZO 3,840 x 2,160 touchscreen is no exception. Between its wide viewing angles, deep blacks, bright colors, 100-percent Adobe RGB colorspace and NVIDIA’s existing G-Sync screen-tear prevention tech, the machine’s display is simply excellent. Games, videos and photos all look wonderful on it.
This year, though, the Blade has earned a new adjective: necessary. The Razer Blade Pro is the first gaming laptop I’ve ever used that isn’t hamstrung by an ultra-high resolution panel. This machine is actually powerful enough to play modern games in 4K.
Performance
| Razer Blade Pro (2016 (2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ, NVIDIA GTX 1080) | 6,884 | 6,995 | E18,231 / P16,346 | 27,034 | 2.75 GB/s / 1.1 GB/s |
| ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS (2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ , NVIDIA GTX 1070) | 5,132 | 6,757 | E15,335 / P13,985 | 25,976 | 2.14 GB/s / 1.2 GB/s |
| HP Spectre x360 (2016, 2.7GHz Core i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,515 | 4,354 | E2,656 / P1,720 / X444 | 3,743 | 1.76 GB/s / 579 MB/s |
| Lenovo Yoga 910 (2.7GHz Core i7-7500U, 8GB, Intel HD 620) | 5,822 | 4,108 |
E2,927 / P1,651 / X438 |
3,869 | 1.59 GB/s / 313 MB/s |
| Razer Blade (Fall 2016) (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,462 | 3,889 | E3,022 / P1,768 | 4,008 | 1.05 GB/s / 281 MB/s |
| Razer Blade (Fall 2016) + Razer Core (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, NVIDIA GTX 1080) | 5,415 | 4,335 | E11,513 / P11,490 | 16,763 | 1.05 GB/s / 281 MB/s |
| ASUS ZenBook 3 (2.7GHz Intel Core-i7-7500U, Intel HD 620) | 5,448 | 3,911 | E2,791 / P1,560 | 3,013 | 1.67 GB/s / 1.44 GB/s |
| HP Spectre 13 (2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, Intel HD 520) | 5,046 | 3,747 | E2,790 / P1,630 / X375 | 3,810 | 1.61 GB/s / 307 MB/s |
| Dell XPS 13 (2.3GHz Core i5-6200U, Intel Graphics 520) | 4,954 | 3,499 | E2,610 / P1,531 | 3,335 | 1.6GB/s / 307 MB/s |
| Razer Blade Stealth (2.5GHz Intel Core i7-6500U, Intel HD 520) | 5,131 | 3,445 | E2,788 / P1,599 / X426 | 3,442 | 1.5 GB/s / 307 MB/s |
For years, Razer’s “Blade Pro” lingered in obsolescence, two full generations behind the bleeding-edge processors and graphics technology the company put in its other laptops. Not anymore. With a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU beating at its heart, 32GB of RAM and NVIDIA’s latest GTX 1080 GPU, the new Razer Blade Pro absolutely lives up to its moniker. This is the most powerful laptop Razer has ever built and the first gaming laptop to cross my desk that can run circles around my game library at ultra-high resolutions.
The Blade Pro chewed through Titanfall 2 and Overwatch at its native 3,840 x 2,160 resolution on their maximum settings, running consistently running each game at 60 frames per second or higher. Games like Just Cause 3, Battlefield 1 and Hitman all stayed above 45 fps on their best configuration at the same resolution. Only two games in my library balked at the Blade Pro’s GPU: the Witcher 3 and Watch Dogs 2. These titles fell just short of a 30-fps average on their maximum settings in 4K, forcing me to pull them back to medium graphics settings or dial the resolution down to 1080p.
That’s not just good performance — it’s paradigm-shifting performance. I’ve lambasted the last two generations of Razer laptops (as well as other gaming notebooks) for having screens that outpaced the capability of their GPUs, forcing players to choose between ugly, non-native resolution or ugly, low-fidelity graphic settings. Now, people don’t have to choose anymore. That’s fantastic.
Oh, and were you thinking about picking up a virtual reality headset? Go ahead: The Blade Pro scored 6,908 in VRMark’s Orange Room test and 1,992 in the more intensive Blue Room benchmark. That’s good enough to comfortably run most anything in today’s VR marketplace. The Blade Pro handled everything in my VR library with aplomb and only stuttered when I used Raw Data’s resolution multiplier feature. Not bad at all.
Battery life
Razer Blade Pro (2016)
3:48
Surface Book with Performance Base (2016)
16:15
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, no Touch Bar)
11:42
HP Spectre x360 (13-inch, 2015)
11:34
Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display (13-inch, 2015)
11:23
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (15-inch)
11:00
iPad Pro (12.9-inch, 2015)
10:47
HP Spectre x360 15t
10:17
Apple MacBook Pro 2016 (13-inch, Touch Bar)
9:55
ASUS ZenBook 3
9:45
Apple MacBook (2016)
8:45
Samsung Notebook 9
8:16
Microsoft Surface Pro 4
7:15
HP Spectre 13
7:07
Razer Blade Stealth (Spring 2016)
5:48
Razer Blade Stealth (Fall 2016)
5:36
Dell XPS 15 (2016)
5:25 (7:40 with the mobile charger)
ASUS ROG Strix GL502VS
3:03
Razer didn’t tack that “Pro” qualifier on this laptop for professional gamers. Rather, the Blade is intended to double as a work machine. To that end, the Blade Pro ran the gamut of my normal workflow as if it were a light jog, shrugging off my standard mess of browser windows, chat programs and video editing software. Unfortunately, it couldn’t do it for very long. Despite housing a huge 99Wh battery (the largest allowed on airlines, according to Razer), the 17-inch workhorse lasted just shy of four hours on battery. Sadly, that’s kind of normal for oversized gaming laptops with 4K screens, but it’s still disappointing.
Configuration options and the competition
The Blade Pro comes in just three flavors: a $3,699 model with 512GB of solid-state storage; a $3,999 build with 1TB of space; or a staggeringly expensive $4,499 machine with a 1TB SSD. Apart from disk size, all three configurations are identical, with 32GB of RAM, a 2.6GHz Intel Core i-6700HQ processor (3.5GHz with Turbo Boost), NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 GPU (with 8GB GDDR5X VRAM) and the striking 17.3-inch IGZO 4K G-Sync enabled touchscreen. If those aren’t the exact specs you had in mind, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
If you’re willing to compromise on size, power and screen resolution, there are definitely cheaper 17-inch laptops out there. The super-sized version of ASUS ROG Strix sports the same processor and allotment of RAM for only $1,300, but it only has a full HD display and a GTX 1060 GPU. MSI’s GT73VR Titan Pro can be had with same processor and GPU as Razer’s top build for $3,399, but it’s also more than twice as thick as the Blade Pro. On the other hand, if you were really concerned about size, you probably wouldn’t be looking at 17-inch laptops in the first place.
Wrap-up
For the past few years, Razer’s “Blade Pro” laptop was paradoxically its least advanced machine, but the latest model finally lives up to its name. With enough power to handle high-resolution video editing, 4K PC games and even virtual reality, it’s the most powerful system Razer has ever built. This is a premium laptop with a top-notch display, excellent build quality and quite possibly the best notebook keyboard I’ve ever used.
That said, the new Blade Pro is also the largest and most expensive PC Razer has ever built. There’s a lot of value to be had in its $3,699 price tag, but also some compromise. Its enormous frame makes it hard to lug around, and it fails to overcome the Achilles’ heel of its category: short battery life. If you can live with those drawbacks, though, Razer’s flagship laptop is waiting for you.
‘Street Fighter V’ will publicly humiliate rage quitters
When Capcom said it was planning tougher penalties for rage quitters in Street Fighter V, it wasn’t joking around. NeoGAF users have discovered that a briefly available PC test release of the game includes a badge that will identify users who are more likely to quit matches in mid-play — as Polygon observes, it’s basically a scarlet letter for fighting games. You’d get another icon if you always stay through the end of a match, too, so you would have an easier time finding players who are just as trustworthy as you are.
It’s not certain when the finished update will arrive, so don’t count on identifying hot-tempered gamers in the immediate future. Combined with gradually increasing penalties, though, this could make it harder for quitters to escape consequences for their actions. That, in turn, could encourage them to honorably accept their defeats instead of jumping ship the moment it’s clear that they’ll lose.
Via: Polygon
Source: NeoGAF
‘Gears of War 4’ marks the holidays with snowball fights
Destiny and Overwatch don’t have a lock on over-the-top holiday gaming modes. Gears of War 4 just got a 99-cent Gearsmas Pack that adds some cheer to a mostly grim and dark game. The centerpiece is a special multiplayer event, Snowball Fight, where you have to fling snowballs at rivals using a custom Snowshot weapon. Akin to a real fight, you can’t just reload — you have to scoop up more snow ammo once you’ve run out of what little you have. There are also three ugly sweater-clad characters (JD, Kait and a Swarm Drone) and 24 holiday-themed weapon skins. Gearsmas lasts until January 4th, so you’ll want to act soon if you’re going to show off.
Microsoft and The Coalition are sweetening the pot, too. They’re currently running a sale on GoW4 that slashes 35 percent off the game ($39 in the US) through December 28th, and there’s a UIR Gear Pack coming later in the month. You should see an Easter Egg in the game on Christmas Day, as well. This isn’t as thorough as what you get in a title like Overwatch (where there’s a snowball fight and 100-plus cosmetic add-ons), but it’s bound to make the game feel festive.
Source: Xbox Wire, Microsoft Store
The Morning After: Weekend Edition
Letter from the Editor
Christmas is right around the corner, but Santa’s not the only one dropping from the sky with presents this holiday season. Amazon’s Prime Air officially began service this week, when a drone made the service’s first delivery in Cambridge, England. So the future of shipping has arrived … for a handful of people in the English countryside.
Many, many more Amazonians will be getting served, however, by Prime Video, now that the company has spun it out into a standalone service. At an introductory rate that’s a third the cost of Netflix, the move creates serious competition for viewing dollars around the world — though it only brings Amazon’s original programming. Still, if critical acclaim is any indicator, you’re getting good value: Both of the two streaming services have shows up for multiple Golden Globes.
One competitor Amazon isn’t (and shouldn’t be) preoccupied with is a new virtual assistant from Japan. It’s a female anime character in a jar. It costs $2,500. It will not lift the crushing weight of loneliness that pervades your every waking hour. Oh, and if you’re thinking it’d make a swell Christmas gift, think 2017 — the company’s taking preorders now, but it won’t arrive for a year.
Elon Musk: Supercharger spots are meant for charging, not parkingTesla will tax owners who idle at the Supercharger
More Teslas on the road also means there might be long lines at the local Supercharger. After complaints about owners who leave their car hooked up beyond the time needed for a full charge, Elon Musk & Co. have a fix: idle fees. If you don’t collect your EV within five minutes of it reaching full charge (you’ll get a notification on your phone), then expect a 40 cent per minute charge to sit in that spot.
Here’s what it will cost when you lose oneApple’s AirPods are now on sale
Online pre-orders are now stretching into 2017, but you can order a pair of Apple’s new EarBuds. The wireless buds go perfectly with a headphone jack-deficient iPhone 7, whose owners are most likely to lay down $160 for the pair + charger. A side effect of the AirPods’ tangle free lifestyle is that you might end up losing one, however, and if you do, the replacement will cost $69.
Not to be confused with “The O.C.”Netflix’s weird surprise show ‘The OA’ is now streaming
Last weekend Netflix surprised us by teasing a new miniseries about a mysterious young woman. The trailer left much to the imagination, but the main plot centers on a young woman who was blind before being abducted, and returns to her family seven years later able to see. Its eight-episode length had some hoping for another “Stranger Things” experience. We don’t know if it’s that good, but it’s a perfect choice if you can’t make it out to “Rogue One” this weekend.
League of $$$$“League of Legends” developer signs a $300 million streaming deal
eSports looks poised to make a big leap, and BAMTech, a streaming company part-owned by the MLB, the NHL and Disney (read: ESPN) is ready to buy in. It struck a deal with “League of Legends” maker Riot Games that’s worth over $300 million, and it will build an app next year to stream competitions on phones, PCs and other devices.
Looks like someone read “Ender’s Game”DARPA’s OFFSET program will use gamers to playtest drone swarm control
Stop us if this sounds familiar: A government agency is trying to help the military control groups of flying robots, and one of the ways it will learn is by offering a “physics-based, swarm tactics game.” The idea is to let playtesters swap strategies on how to best control a swarm of drone robots, then apply that knowledge to the real thing.
The final stops are at PAX and SXSWNintendo’s Switch console is going on tour
Can’t wait until March to see the Switch? No problem, because Nintendo just announced it’s taking the console on a “Preview Tour” of major cities starting in January.
But wait, there’s more…
- Meet Waymo: Google’s new (old) self-driving car business
- Nokia returns with a dumb phone from its new owner
- The Engadget Podcast Episode 18: In which Terrence drops F-bombs while talking about Yahoo
- Review: HP Spectre x360 (2016)
- Dwarf planet Ceres is ‘oozing’ with water
Samsung is working on a new Gear VR and AR tech
If you’re waiting on Samsung to unveil a new version of its Gear VR headset, you might get your wish soon enough. At the Virtual Reality Summit in San Diego this week, Samsung vice president Sung-Hoon Hong revealed that the company is not only working on a new virtual reality headset, but that it has plans for an augmented reality device as well. Hong explained that Samsung plans to improve upon existing tech like Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap when it comes to AR.
The next version of the Gear VR “will be presented in a short time” according to Hong, so we may see that headset debut at Mobile World Congress in February. Samsung typically makes some big announcements at that show. The company just refreshed the Gear VR in August and Hong didn’t offer any details as to what we can expect from the upcoming model.
One thing we do know about the company’s plains for Barcelona is that it’s planning to show off its AR work. Hong said the team at Samsung is developing a “light field engine” that makes for more realistic holograms.
“Samsung’s hologram technology is really, really realistic,” he said. “It looks really touchable.”
Hong also explained that Samsung’s augmented reality aspirations are more focused on businesses than consumers. HoloLens is priced at $3,000, after all. Samsung is also looking for possible collaborators for the project, including a potential tie-up with Magic Leap. Just last week, a report from The Information reported that Magic Leap is having trouble getting its plans for mixed reality off the ground, including issues making its technology mobile.
Via: The Verge
Source: Wearable Zone
Gear VR gets social with Oculus Rooms and Parties
A few months ago at Oculus’ annual developer conference, the company announced a couple of social VR features known simply as Parties and Rooms. Parties is basically built-in voice chat, while Rooms is a virtual hangout space. Today, those features are finally live, at least for the Gear VR; Rift users will have to wait until 2017. Combined, Parties and Rooms are part of Oculus’ continued efforts to prove that virtual reality can be used not just to play games, but also to connect people from around the world.
I had the opportunity to try out both features earlier this week in a short demo in San Francisco. Once I put the headset on and launched into the Oculus Home screen, the Parties interface appeared on the right. It looks very much like any other social chat app; you can see a list of your friends as well as who’s online at the time. You can also see the title of the game they’re playing, if any. To start chatting, tap on the Party tab, choose who you want to add and then hit “Start a Party.” If you’re invited to a party, joining it is also as simple as tapping a button. “Think of it like a phone call,” said Madhu Muthukumar, a product manager for Oculus. Right now you’re only able to chat with up to four people, though Oculus might increase that number in the future.
But while Parties is like making a phone call, Rooms is akin to inviting your buddies over. Once you have your Party all set up, maybe you want to “see” and interact with your friends instead of just hearing their voices. If that’s the case, you can join a Room right from the Parties interface. I was invited to a Room by Mike LeBeau, a product manager for Oculus who was in London at the time. As soon as I accepted, I was transported to a virtual living room of sorts. Before I knew it, I was hanging out with virtual avatars for both LeBeau and Muthukumar, and I, too, was an avatar.
The virtual Room is separated into a few different areas. In one you can change the appearance of your avatars; in another space you can watch videos together; the tabletop area is where you play simple board or card games; and there’s yet another space dedicated to just sitting around and chatting. In front of each avatar is a floating tablet of sorts, which essentially acts as your controls. You can also teleport from one area to another by selecting it with your gaze and tapping the headset’s touchpad.
What I found particularly interesting is that the virtual avatars moved around as they spoke. They would look directly at me as they were speaking to me, and their mouths moved in sync to what they were saying. LeBeau tells me that the avatar movement mimics what you’re doing with your own head, thanks to the accelerometers and gyroscopes in the phone. Similarly, the mouth movement is synced to the sound the software picks up from the microphone. It seems odd to say this, but just those simple head and mouth movements made me feel like we were right there in the room together, even though we were in completely separate locations.
Oculus has experimented with social experiences before, like Oculus Video where you can watch movies together. But Rooms and Parties is the next step. “We want you to feel like being in VR is sort of the same as being in real life,” said Muthukumar. “You can hang out, watch videos together, play games and talk with your friends.” Additionally, if you get tired of the virtual avatars, you can also have the entire Party leap into a multiplayer game together, as long as the title supports it.
Right now, Oculus’ social efforts are completely separate from the social VR experience we saw from Facebook, where you could “travel” to locations together and take virtual selfies with your pals. Still, that’s where Oculus also wants to be. “That’s the aspirational push-the-envelope of VR. It’s what we all hope it can be,” said Muthukumar. “We both [Facebook and Oculus] believe that VR will be best when people connect human experiences.” But in order to get there you have to take baby steps, which is what Rooms and Parties represent.
“It’s cool to ‘meet’ someone who’s literally all the way from somewhere else in the world,” he said. “We’re excited about it. We think there’s some early magic here.”
Nintendo will take the Switch on a ‘Preview Tour’ next month
Nintendo’s next console launches in March, and the company wants everyone to know about it. Following its showcase on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the Mario maker has confirmed a global tour for the Switch. It’ll be shown off first in New York this January (13-15), followed by Toronto (27-29) and Pax South in San Antonio (27-29). It’ll then head to Washington for three days in February (10-12), before making its way through Chicago (17-19) and San Francisco (24-26). The tour wraps up in March with stops in Los Angeles (3-5th), Pax East (16-18) and SXSW (16-18).
In each major city, the first two days will be an invite-only event. The third and final day will be open to everyone, however, so that curious fans can try the hardware for themselves. The PAX and SXSW showings will be a little different, allowing full access to the general public. While the new system has already been unveiled, we know little about its power, capabilities and software library. Nintendo has promised a “Switch Presentation” on January 12th, however, which should reveal more and lead nicely into its world tour. As much as I love The Legend of Zelda, it would be nice to see and play a few games that aren’t Breath of the Wild.
Source: Nintendo (Press Release)
Most Firefox users are running Windows 7 on dated PCs
Mozilla is helping developers figure out if their game or app will run well for average and not just hardcore users. The Firefox Hardware Report, using data from its anonymized Telemetry app, shows what OS and hardware folks are using, along with popular screen resolutions and other information. “Existing hardware reports (such as those from Valve and Unity) are excellent, but represent a different group of hardware users than the majority of people who use the web,” the organization says.
The results are about what you’d expect, given dwindling PC sales — most folks can’t be bothered to upgrade because they’ve switched to mobile for their primary device. Firefox reports that 45 percent of people are still running Windows 7 with less than 4GB of RAM and a large majority have Intel CPUs with two or less cores. Few care about pixel density, as the most common display resolution is 1,366 x 768, driven by on-board Intel graphics, not NVIDIA or AMD discreet GPUs.
Top selling PC games, including League of Legends and Overwatch, can already run on low-spec PCs, so developers are likely well aware of the (terrible) average configuration. As Firefox points out though, there’s much less information on WebGL, Flash (ugh) and other web-based gaming engines. Mozilla may want to heed its own report, as users often complain about browsers like Chrome and even Firefox itself slowing down their computers. If you’re concerned about the privacy aspect of the report or want the raw data, Mozilla has a detailed Medium post on how it collected the data and where you can go to find it.
Source: Firefox
AIVAnet 