Today Dell is offering its popular Alienware M15 R1 gaming laptop with over $1,000 knocked off the retail price. This system is equipped with a top-notch Intel Core i7 processor and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU, which make it an ideal system for gaming.
If you want a fast notebook with plenty of performance for running the latest games, you may want to consider Dell’s Alienware M15 R1. This system was literally built for gaming and it features a fast six-core processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU, and a high-quality 1080p 144Hz IPS display. You can get this system from Dell marked down from $2,218.98 to $1,199.99.
Dell’s S2721HGF gaming monitor was built with an ultra fast 144hz 1080p display panel that provides for a highly responsive gaming experience. The monitor is also curved, which helps to make games feel more immersive. Currently Dell is selling these monitors marked down from $279.99 to $209.99.
Acer builds this laptop with one of AMD’s new Ryzen 3 3200U processors. This efficient chip has two SMT-enabled cores that can operate at speeds up to 3.5GHz. The 3200U also has a small integrated GPU with 192 streaming processors. This GPU is too weak to play modern games, but it is able to run many games from the Windows 7 era with acceptable frame rates. Other key features of Acer’s Aspire 5 Slim laptop include an LED-backlit keyboard and a 1080p IPS display. Currently, you can get this notebook from Amazon marked down from $439.99 to $349.99.
The Ring Fit Adventure is Nintendo’s newest entry in its long-running series of games that promote physical activity and exercise. In addition to the game itself, this kit also comes with a leg strap and a Ring-Con that is essential to playing and enjoying the game. After being sold out for weeks, you can now order the Ring Fit Adventure from Amazon marked down from $79.99 to $69.88.
An Amazon Kindle subscription gives you access to over a million titles for you to peruse and read at your leisure. Amazon is currently offering this service with a free 30-day trial, and if you want to keep the subscription for longer Amazon is also offering a 6-month subscription half off the regular retail price that makes it just $29.97.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
Google is the latest company to move its annual product launch online — the company just unveiled all its long-rumored 2020 products including two new phones, a smart speaker, and a new Chromecast. The speaker and Chromecast have gotten much more powerful, but the phones are a modest follow-up to last year’s flagship Pixel phones.
Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G
The nest Pixel phones are also Google’s first-ever 5G devices — only sub-6GHz 5G for the 4a, though. Faster but less stable mmWave is only supported on the Pixel 5. The Pixel 4a 5G is the more affordable of the two, clocking in at $499. The Pixel 5 is a bit more expensive at $699, and there is no Pixel 5 XL this year. In both cases, these phones are much less expensive than past Pixel phones.
Despite having different numerical branding, the Pixel 5 and 4a 5G are very similar devices. Both run on the Snapdragon 765G chip with built-in 5G and have a dual-camera setup on the back. Sadly, Google ditched the zoom camera from last year, opting instead for a regular wide-angle sensor (12MP) and an ultrawide (16MP). Google says it has enhanced image processing, particularly when it comes to portrait mode photography. Video recording, which has long been a weakness of Pixels, is getting a new Cinematic Pan feature to smooth out motion.
The 4a 5G has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage like the cheaper Pixel 4a, but it has a larger 6.2-inch 1080p OLED panel. It retains the headphone jack from its cheaper sibling, but the Pixel 5 does not. However, the Pixel 5 adds water resistance, wireless charging, 8GB of RAM, and a slightly larger battery. The Pixel 5 has a slightly smaller screen than the 4a 5G at 6-inches—it has a 90Hz refresh, but it’s the same 1080p resolution.
The new Pixels come with an “extreme battery saver mode” that lets you turn off all but a few apps to extend your battery life by two days when you need it. Assistant can also wait on hold for you on the new Pixels with a feature called Hold For Me. Just tap the button, set the phone down, and Assistant will let you know when a person is back on the line. These features will come to older Pixel phones in an update at some point soon-ish.
The Pixel 5 loses some features that made the Pixel 4 stand out, for better or worse. There’s no Soli radar module, so Motion Sense gestures are out. Google has also gone back to the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. There’s no fancy IR face unlock on the new Pixels. The 4a 5G has the same setup, but we didn’t expect those fancy sensors on an A-series Pixel.
Like all Pixel phones, they come with three years of guaranteed software updates. The Pixel 5 will launch toward the end of next month unlocked and on Verizon. The Pixel 4a won’t launch until November 19th in the US.
Nest Audio
The phones aren’t all that’s new in Google-land. There’s a new smart speaker that fully embraced the Nest branding. Of course, it still has Assistant inside, allowing you to access account data like your calendar and control smart home devices by voice. It also has enhanced on-device AI like the Nest Mini, which should make Assistant about twice as fast to respond compared with the original Home.
The new Nest Audio costs $99 and comes in five different colors to better match your style. Google also notes the enclosure is 70 percent recycled plastic. Packing a 75mm subwoofer and a 19mm tweeter, Google says the Nest Audio has 75 percent more volume and 50 percent more bass compared with the original Google Home. It also has the room adaptation features from the more expensive Home Max. So, your music should sound much better if you replace an OG Home.
The Nest Audio ship from the Google Store in the next few days, but the official launch date is October 5th. It will be available from other retailers on October 15th.
Chromecast with Google TV
The Chromecast is one of Google’s most successful products, and there’s a new version today. The branding is a bit confusing, though. The “Chromecast with Google TV” is a new 4K-capable Chromecast, but it’s only $50. That’s $20 less than the now-obsolete Chromecast Ultra. Google TV is a whole different can of worms, though.
This device works like a Chromecast — you find video on your phone and cast it to the device. There’s a remote, finally, that lets you control playback without using your phone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted from a new Chromecast, but this dongle has much more with Google TV. This is not the same Google TV we had years ago — it’s based on Android, but Google says it’s distinct from Android TV. Google TV will be Google’s TV platform going forward, but for now, it’s limited to the Chromecast.
Google TV plugs into all your streaming apps to surface content on its redesigned home screen. The “For You” section only shows you things you can watch without paying extra (via your subscribed apps), but the other tabs offer a wider selection that includes purchases and rentals. There’s also live TV integration, but that’s limited to YouTube TV for now. If you don’t have a YouTube TV subscription, the “Live” tab won’t show up. Bizarrely, Stadia game streaming won’t work on the new Chromecast at all until early next year.
This rounds out Google’s product lineup for 2020. Everything mentioned here is available for pre-order or waitlisting on the Google Store.
Late last year, Kevin Ng was 29 years old and a veteran flight attendant who’d spent six years serving drinks and answering questions for antsy air travelers. But after feeling deepening concern about the state of his future, Ng decided it was time to make a radical life pivot.
Following 12 weeks of intensive training, Ng landed a job as a software engineer during the COVID pandemic and is now working with bankers to develop risk analysis tools using Java.
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The collection brings together training in seven specific areas featuring over 40 hours of must-know information for anyone interested in tackling the building and development of new apps, networking systems, games, and more.
If you’re thinking you’d like to try your hand at app development, the Java Certification Training offers a firm understanding of the most commonly used programming language in the software industry. If you’re interested in smart technology and connectivity, the Introduction to Internet of Things (IoT) can give you a look at how IoT tech is infiltrating everything from household appliances to home security and alarm systems to raising and lowering your window shades via an intelligent app.
There’s coursework here in understanding Angular to build mobile and desktop web apps; and MongoDB for knowing database creation and management.
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One of the frustrating things about trying to sort out the RTX instability issues from last week’s launch has been the relative paucity of comments from vendors. Now, however, they’ve collectively broken their silence — and they’re all saying pretty much the same thing: Update your video drivers.
Zotac: “A new GeForce driver version 456.55 has been released and we urge all to re-install your graphics card drivers as we believe it should improve stability…Our graphics cards have undergone stringent testing and quality controls in design and manufacturing to ensure safety and great performance.”
Gigabyte: “It is false that POSCAP capacitors independently could cause a hardware crash. Whether a graphics card is stable or not requires a comprehensive evaluation of the overall circuit and power delivery design…GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3080/3090 GAMING OC and EAGLE OC series graphics cards use high-quality, low-ESR 470uF SP-CAP capacitors, which meet the specifications set by NVIDIA and provide a total capacity of 2820u in terms of GPU core power, higher than the industry’s average. The cost of SP-CAP capacitors is not lower than that of MLCCs.” (Gigabyte also goes on to recommend updating to 456.55, but I wanted to quote other parts of their statement.)
MSI: “MSI stands behind its design decisions for its GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards catalog which consists of GAMING models and VENTUS models. MSI utilizes a mixed capacitor grouping in its designs to benefit from the strengths of both SP-Caps and MLCCs.” (MSI also notes that all GPUs shipped to customers used the PCB configurations shown in its updated photos, and that folks should update to 456.55).
Nvidia RTX 3080, Founders Edition
Finally, Nvidia has released its own statement: “Nvidia posted a driver this morning that improves stability. Regarding partner board designs, our partners regularly customize their designs and we work closely with them in the process. The appropriate number of POSCAP vs. MLCC groupings can vary depending on the design and is not necessarily indicative of quality.”
Does Independent Investigation Back This Up?
Overclocker der8auer, otherwise known as “Person who does things I don’t have the guts to try,” decided to replace two of Gigabyte’s stock 470u CP-CAP capacitors with twenty 47u MLCC capacitors (this works out to the same power capacity for both setups). His maximum stable overclock went up 2 percent as a result, or about 30MHz.
Der8auer’s results do show that power rail hardware can make a small difference, but it’s not enough to really move the needle one way or the other. Instead, the problem really does appear to have been driver-related.
This may appear to be contradictory. How can a problem be driver-related when the problematic and less-problematic GPUs appeared to come from different vendors and have different power circuitry? Here’s a simple, hypothetical example: Imagine that Nvidia’s clock specification states that the GPU clock can change up to 5x per second. A GPU that uses straight POSCAPs, in our hypothetical example, can handle up to eight switches per second on average. An MLCC can handle up to 10 switches per second, on average. Both of these parts are within Nvidia spec.
The first driver Nvidia ships, unfortunately, has a flaw. It allows the GPU clock to change up to 12x per second. Because this is an “up to” number, some GPUs only encounter it occasionally depending on the games the owner plays. Other GPUs don’t encounter it at all. Furthermore, some GPUs — those with above-average MLCCs or POSCAPs — can actually handle the 12x per-second switching. Because the 12x rate is closer to the maximum typical for MLCCs, more MLCCs are capable of handling the shift. This makes MLCCs appear to be more stable than POSCAPs under these conditions — because they are.
But the problem, in this case, isn’t with MLCCs or POSCAPs. It’s with the fact that Nvidia’s driver is allowing the GPU clock to shift too often. The fact that the problem appears resolvable with different hardware doesn’t mean the hardware is the problem.
The example above is hypothetical; we don’t know what Nvidia adjusted in its driver to improve stability, and while there have been reports of clock drops, there have also been reports of clock improvements.
I’ve been following this story since it broke and I’ve written a number of updates to illustrate how quickly something can evolve — and how early reports, even when they accurately identify a problem, can incorrectly identify the cause. Until and unless new evidence emerges showing the problem is still somehow linked to the POSCAP / MLCC question, the Nvidia 455.56 driver appears to resolve the extant problems. If they stay resolved, they’ll be remembered as a hiccup on the way to a successful overall launch.
One of the best gifts you can give is a book or album of family photos. First, you have to organize and select your best images. Most of your family’s history is going to be slides, prints, and negatives going back as much as 150 years – all photos you have to scan, once you organize and identify the people, places, and dates.
You can do some or even much of the scanning yourself. You’ll need the right equipment, lots of time, and the gumption to stick with a project that could take several months and quite possibly several years. Sorry, that’s reality. If you’re reading this for tips on how to put together a photobook in time for Christmas 2020, or the parents’ anniversary early 2021, you can do that. Then when you’ve got those initial photos processed, catch your breath, get back to more scanning, and do a follow-on book or online album on a different topic. Wash, rinse, repeat.
10 Rules for Organizing, Prepping, Scanning
Here are the basics. This list is based on work with almost a dozen flatbed, sheet-fed, and film scanners, and more than a thousand hours of prep work and scanning over a decade.
1. Sort and organize your old photos. Make a stab at identifying who, where, when, and what event. Your memory won’t get better 10 years from now. Vigorously prune back 20 similar photos from a generation ago. And do you really need photos of flowers from the 1980s?
2. Prints are easiest to scan, then color slides, then color negatives, and lastly black-and-white negatives.
3. The best scans are from film — slides and negatives — not prints.
4. Scan prints at 300 dpi, important prints at 600 dpi, and slides or film at 3000 dpi.
5. Scan at highest quality JPG (most images). In some cases use TIFF, despite larger file sizes. Hard disk storage is cheap.
6. Scan all prints in color, even black-and-white prints (to capture the yellowing of old prints). You can always turn them back to black & white.
7. Get a sheet-fed scanner that scans batches of prints, front and back, 1-10 seconds per print. Scan most every print you have except obviously horrible images.
8. Almost any flatbed scanner is good enough, $100 to $1,000 (see our sister site PCMag’s Best Scanners for top picks). A tabloid-size (11 x 17 inches) is fabulous for scanning kids’ artwork, diplomas, and photo albums with ticket stubs page-by-page before pulling individual photos out for scanning. Not cheap, but you can buy one used and then sell it later.
9. A dedicated film scanner for slides and negatives does a better job than the flatbed scanners with negative/slide capabilities. More realistically: Send negatives and slides out for professional scanning. Just the good ones. Figure 25-35 cents per image.
10. When you’re done, once your digital images are stored in two places, toss the photo-processor prints, but keep the negatives and slides. Put them in long-life negative sleeves or archival boxes to save space. Save at least one copy of your family’s photo history offsite (safe deposit box) or online.
Work with lintless cotton or here nylon gloves from Archival Methods.
Preparation Is the Underwater Part of the Iceberg
Getting scans that are both high quality — particularly no dust showing up on the scans — and usefully organized are the bulk of the work. Kodak has estimated that prep work is 8x more time-consuming than the actual scanning.
You’ve probably got shoeboxes of photos in several places. You may have negatives separated from the prints. Siblings may have some of your parents’ photos and you have some.
To keep from getting depressed on day one, have a small-in-scope project in mind that you can do this week or this month – say a photobook of your parents from their first years married, or you and siblings at home as kids – and find photos that support that photobook. Book No. 1 doesn’t have to exhaustively inclusive. It just has to be under the Christmas tree or nicely wrapped for an anniversary.
Hunt down all the photos you can easily lay your hands on. If they’re in photo-processor envelopes, keep each envelope’s prints and negatives together (because later you may want to scan the negatives). Copy down, photograph, or scan information from each photo envelope or slide box. With prints, write that info on the back of the first photo, or use a 4×6 index card with the info that scans before the first print from each roll of film. Use a permanent marker on prints (back side) and wait a couple of seconds for the print to dry, to avoid smudges. Remember that good sheet-fed photo scanners do both sides at once, with no extra work on your part.
You may want to create a spreadsheet of each roll of film: date, subject, location, prints or slides, do the prints have negatives. There will be a lot of question marks about the year, sometimes the decade, and where the photos were shot. That’s normal.
Clean off dust and dirt from the prints. (See below.)
Decide which prints to a) scan, b) don’t scan now but save for later just in case, and b) discard. Try to be brutally honest.
Scan 50 to 100 photos to give you enough for a photobook. Put a light letter S on the back to indicated a print was scanned. Allow about two weeks’ turnaround to get the book back in your hands. The appreciation you get from the recipient will spur you on to spend another hundred, possibly thousand hours sorting and scanning on the rest of your family photos.
What Scanning Resolution: 300 dpi, 600, More?
You can scan at a resolution that allows you later to make prints and enlargements that are at least 300 dots per inch, so if you have a 4 x 6 print and you want to make a decent 8 x 12 enlargement, you’d want to scan at 600 dpi. Photo buffs can argue all day about scan resolutions and the best digital image format.
Here’s what you should consider, says Frank Cost, professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts & Sciences. “The recommendation to scan a print at 300 dpi by default and double to 600 for prints that may be enlarged when reproduced is a good rule of thumb,” Cost says. “Any print made in an enlarger is unlikely to contain any more information than can be scanned at 600 dpi. I have never scanned a print higher than 600, except in the case of scanning contact sheets,” which Cost captures at the scanner’s highest optical resolution, around 2400 dpi.
As for JPG versus TIFF, Cost says, “I routinely scan and photograph using JPEG at the highest quality setting. This compresses the image size considerably, and will result in no visible loss of detail to the human eye in the reproduction. This is assuming the same scan resolution. So, if I scan a print at 300 dpi and save it as an uncompressed TIFF, and also as a highest-quality JPEG, I will see no difference in the resulting reproduction.” Cost also had others look at JPG (no compression) versus TIFF images and test subjects typically saw no difference.
If you scan slides or negatives, you want to scan at 3000 dpi, possibly 4000 dpi for your most important images. A 35mm image (24 x 36 mm or 1 x 1.5 inches) at 3000 dpi produces a file about 3000 x 4500 dpi.
Archival quality 2400-slide storage box from Archival Methods. High quality, not cheap.
The Supporting Accessories You Need
To scan photos, you need stuff to sort, identify, clean, and then store.
To clean film and prints, buy cans of compressed gas (also called compressed air dusters), at $3-$5 a can. You can also use an anti-static film brush, about $20, up to about $100 for a Staticmaster brush using polonium, a radioactive metal (so read the directions carefully).
For prints, start with a microfiber cloth, and if needed, a dash of water to remove dirt. If it’s still there, the next pass is using a film/print cleaner such as Photographic Solutions‘s PEC-12 or Edwal Anti-Stat Film Cleaner, applied with lint-free photo wipes while wearing lint-free cotton or nylon gloves. With film and slides, rub several times gently, not one time hard.
To view slides and negatives and pick favorites, you need a light table or light box, a frame around translucent white plastic or glass with LED bulbs underneath, $25-$100 for a 9×12 viewing surface.
You’ll want a magnifying loupe, $10-$250, to view a slide or negative, which is typically 1 x 1.5 inches (24 x 36 mm), and tell apart a series of images that look almost the same.
When you’re done, you’ll want to store negatives and slides in compact form. Either store the negatives in their original envelopes, without the prints (which were digitized and then tossed), or get archival negative page sleeves or storage sheets from a vendor such as Print File, and put them in an archival box. ID each sheet (date, subject, place) before storing them away.
For slides, I use the Archival Methods 35mm Slide Storage Kit 2400, 96 tray bins inside 12 slides boxes inside one acid-free outer box, $160. I also use a metal Smith Victor / Logan Electric Slide File #200, $60, that holds 750 slides.
You can get away using any box that fits the slides knowing that it’s not acid-free. This might be a solution if you want to keep the slides for another 10-15 years after you’ve scanned the keepers and at that point, you decide you’re never going to rescan them. Acid-free boxes are what you want for the original of your grandparents’ wedding portrait.
Epson FF-680W duplex photo scanner scans as fast as one photo per second at 300 dpi. It can scan the back side in the same pass if there’s writing or a datestamp.
What Kind of Scanner?
To scan prints, most flatbed scanners work fine; the Canon CanoScan LLiDE 400 is less than $100, but you can also pay $1,000-plus for a letter-size scanner such as the Epson V850 Pro. (Some will scan slides and film but not as well as scanning service.) You’ll get fine results, too, from the scanner/copier component of an all-in-one (multifunction) printer.
Three scanners stand out to me. The Epson FastFoto FF-680W, $600, can scan one snapshot-size photo per second, front and back. The software lets you date the photo batch (exact date or estimated by year or decade), scan the back (but only if there’s medium-to-dark printing), crop-straighten-color correct-redeye remove, and save both a regular and corrected version (never save just the corrected version). If you have several thousand photos to scan, the time savings pays for itself. It’s also a very good document scanner. An earlier version, the Epson FF-640, works almost as well and also scans thick plastic such as credit cards or souvenir convention badges, but it’s not as good with text; it makes sense if you can find it for $400.
The Epson Expression 12000XL-GA, $3,300, scans up to 17.2 x 12.2 inches at 2400 dpi. This is the scanner graphics professionals use, once they find desk space for a 26 x 18-inch, 32-pound beast. Multiple small photos can be batched and then automatically cropped and saved as separate files. Too rich for your blood? Previous versions 10000XL and 11000XL sell used for $1,000-$1,500. Still too rich? Epson makes all-in-one tabloid / A3 printer-scanners for less than $500. The $1,500 Epson DS-50000 is cheaper (not cheap) but better suited to tabloid-size documents than photos. For occasional oversize scans, scan in segments on a letter-size scanner, then stitch with photo editing software.
The third scanner I like is the Nikon Coolscan 5000, a dedicated film and slide scanner. I bought mine used nearly a decade ago along with an automatic slide feeder and a negative film-strip holder, which makes the work go much faster. It has Digital ICE, a groundbreaking (in the 1990s) method of using infrared light to identify and remove (from the final scan) dust on the film. With the optional slide feeder, I can take a box of 36 slides, put them in the stacker, go away, and a half-hour later the slides are all scanned. It’s off the market but you can find the Coolscan 5000 online, and you’ll be able to resell it for about what you paid.
Plustek makes a large format flatbed scanner, the OS 1180 (not tested) for less than $400, and a film/slide scanner, the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i Ai Film Scanner, for $500. The only film scanners worth your time use infrared light to spot and digitally remove dust specks from the image. The dust removal process doesn’t work with most black & white film. Don’t bother with any $149 film or slide scanners.
If you have lots of slides or negatives to scan, look for a Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED, off the market but available on eBay and other auction sites. Get the auto slide feeder, too, to save time.
Using a Scanning Lab
The pain – all that time spent – of scanning slides or negatives one-by-one is very real. You may quickly decide a scanning lab is worthwhile. Most work well. Some are US operations with scanning done in Asia. Basically, you’re paying someone who makes less money than you to do work you find repetitive and boring. Some people want their photos processed onshore out of the fear (unfounded) all their memories will be lost by sloppy handling. They won’t.
To scan a 36-exposure roll of film, it might cost $9-$15, and that adds up quickly: 100 rolls of film could set you back as much as $1,500. So do this:
Only send the filmstrips (usually 4-5 images) where at least one of the photos is worth scanning.
With slides, only send the slides you want scanned.
Look for specials. Just about everybody discounts.
Verify that the lab cleans the film/slides before scanning. They should.
Some labs let you reject (and not pay for), say, one of every five images. You won’t get those scans back.
Some scanning labs will do simple retouching as part of the per-image fee. They can also (for fees) remove telephone wires or a long-gone boyfriend from the beach photo. Most of all, they can restore a cracked photo, even photos with chunks missing. My go-to lab is ScanCafe, but there are plenty of choices.
In addition to per image scanning, labs offer one-price boxes: everything you stuff in will be scanned for a fixed price.
Digitizing Home Movies
If you have home movies using 8mm or Super8 film stock, there’s no easy home solution other than – lots of people try this – finding a movie projector to borrow, projecting on a movie screen or ironed white bedsheet, and filming it with a video camera. It works, well, just okay.
A lab might charge 30 cents a foot to process movie film. Translation: Your grandfather’s reel of film that ran 3-4 minutes will cost you $15.
Digitizing videotape movies is easier. You can send it out to a lab, or digitize it on a PC with an analog video-in jack.
What to Do When You’re Done
When you’ve finished all your scanning, or at least reached a plateau where you pause, you’ll want to add metadata information to the photos: location, dates, subject, people. If you have thousands of photos, the go-to software is Adobe Photoshop Elements ($150), which includes pretty good facial recognition. I add lots of keywords, including the names of people in the photos and the occasions (vacations, Hawaii, Christmas, youth soccer, church, kayaking). Because I may not be sure of dates, I use the date feature to set a guesstimated date but also have keywords 1970s, 1980s, etcetera, which at least gives me a ballpark age of the image. (If you can ID the youngest person in the photo, you can set the date within a year or two.) Type in a town or stadium name and Lightroom adds the GPS location.
You also want to share the photos with family and friends, online and through photo books. Relatives seeing photos online may help ID people and places you didn’t. Make some prints and frame them; one hallway wall of our bedroom wing is our family history in photos. Fewer prints big is better than many 3×5 prints.
Your final steps: Be merciless in tossing prints you don’t need now that you’ve got them digitized. Store one copy of all the digital images online and another on a removable hard drive at home. A portable 5TB USB hard drive fits in a safe deposit box and holds a million 4×6 photo scans. Amazon Prime membership currently includes unlimited free storage of digital images. Backblaze sells unlimited cloud storage for $60 a year.
We’ve covered the reports of instability across the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 product families, even cards from different manufacturers. An early theory, coined by Igor of Igor’s Lab, is that the issue could be caused by sub-par power circuitry, especially since there seemed to be evidence that the problems were concentrated in certain specific GPU families much more so than others.
Nvidia and vendors have remained very quiet about the issue to-date, but MSI has released a statement recently. It says:
MSI became aware of reports from customers, reviewers, and system integrators that there may be instability when GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards core clocks exceeded a certain amount. The latest GeForce driver (456.55) includes fixes for the issue. As such, MSI recommends owners of GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards update to the latest driver release which can be downloaded from the NVIDIA GeForce website.
MSI stands behind its design decisions for its GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards catalog which consists of GAMING models and VENTUS models. MSI utilizes a mixed capacitor grouping in its designs to benefit from the strengths of both SP-Caps and MLCCs. All MSI GeForce RTX 30 Series cards that have shipped out since the beginning of production, which include media review samples, feature the PCB configurations as shown in the updated images below.
MSI also released an image of the backs of its GPUs to prove the designs haven’t changed.
Here’s the truth of the situation as we know it today:
Nvidia launched Ampere. A lot of customers had problems with Ampere. A logical theory based on the quality of the power rail circuitry was advanced and endorsed as plausible.
Meanwhile, people discovered that lowering your GPU boost clock by ~100MHz or locking your GPU clock to a high, fixed frequency both produced more stability. This was not in tension with the first theory — a circuit that can’t quite keep up with the demand places on it at 2.1GHz might be perfectly at ease at 1.9GHz. Similarly, repeatedly switching a GPUs clock speed up and down requires much more complex power distribution compared with running things at a static clock.
After several days of speculation, Nvidia has released a new driver, 456.55, that seems to have dramatically improved the situation for most players. Games that were previously unstable at low clocks now run rock-solid at higher frequencies. There are some people still having problems after the update, but it appears to have worked for the majority of people.
We’re still going to keep an eye on this solution as it evolves, but Nvidia’s latest driver appears to resolve the issue quite effectively.
Mars from Hubble: Astronomers took advantage of a rare close approach by Mars in 2001. When the Red Planet was just 43 million miles away, Hubble snapped this picture with the WFPC2. It has a surface resolution of just 10 miles. This is the best image we’ve gotten of Mars that didn’t involve sending a robot there.
In 2018, scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express project reported Mars may have a liquid water reservoir under its barren surface. The evidence was interesting but not completely convincing. Now, Mars Express has confirmed the detection of that original underground lake and discovered three more. Naturally, this has scientists excited about the possibility for life.
Mars Express reached the red planet way back in 2003. After entering a stable orbit, Mars Express deployed the Beagle 2 lander, which sadly did not survive to reach the surface. It was rediscovered in 2015, though. Mars Express has gone on to make up for that early failure by reliably studying the planet in the intervening 17 years. The possible discovery of liquid water hiding under the southern polar ice cap is just the capstone for an already stellar mission.
Scientists made this detection using radar data from the orbiting spacecraft’s Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS). This instrument allows researchers on Earth to peer into the layers of material under the frigid surface. The way the signal bounces back denotes what kind of material reflected it. The team detected several areas of very high reflectivity that likely point to lakes more than a kilometer below the polar ice sheet.
The three bodies of water identified so far are spread over about 46,600 square miles (75,000 square kilometers), just a little smaller than the state of New York. The largest of the three lakes is in the middle, measuring roughly 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) across. The other three bodies of water surround that lake, but each is just a few miles wide. The team is confident its conclusions will be more convincing this time around — it incorporates data from 134 observations between 2012 and 2019. The previous announcement only used data from 29 radar passes. It’s up to other teams to verify these observations, but that could take time. A 2021 Chinese mission called Tianwen-1 might be able to confirm or refute the discovery.
We can only guess at the nature of these lakes right now, but the team says it’s likely the water is an extremely salty brine. That would explain how it has remained liquid even at the low temperatures on (and inside) Mars. Liquid water is believed to be necessary for the development of life as we know it, so these lakes will probably be a target of intense research in the future. Determining the salt content of the lakes will be vital in assessing their ability to support life. A high salt environment will kill most plants and animals on Earth, but there are some extremophile organisms that can thrive in up to 30 percent salt content. Maybe Mars is home to alien creatures that evolved to tolerate those salty conditions.
If you’re looking for a PC to run the latest games on then you should consider Dell’s new G5 gaming desktop. This system has an Intel Core i5 processor along with an Nvidia GTX 1650 Super GPU that gives it sufficient power to run most games at 1080p resolutions with ease. The system’s also on sale and can be picked up for just $599.99.
Dell G5 Intel i5-10400F 6-core Gaming Desktop w/ GTX 1650 Super GPU, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 1TB HDD for $599.99 from Dell with promo code G5DTAFF25 (Regularly $884.98)
Insignia 50DF710NA21 50-inch 4K UHD HDR Fire TV Edition Smart TV for $249.99 from Amazon (Regularly $349.99)
Dell Vostro 14 5401 Intel Core i7-1065G7 14-Inch 1080p Laptop w/ Nvidia GeForce MX330 GPU, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB NVMe SSD for $737.09 from Dell with promo code STAND4SMALL (Regularly $1,498.57)
ASUS VivoBook 15 AMD Ryzen 5 3500U Quad-Core 15.6″ 1080p Laptop for $499.99 at Best Buy (list price $599.99)
Dell built this gaming desktop with an Intel Core i5-10400F and a GeForce GTX 1650 Super graphics processor. Together, this hardware can run games with high settings at 1080p resolution. The system also has a unique front panel that looks cool and edgy, and with promo code G5DTAFF25 you can get it now marked down from $884.98 to just $599.99 from Dell.
Insignia’s 50-inch 4K TV features HDR support and Amazon’s Fire TV software. This allows the TV to stream content from various sources, and it enables you to control your TV with voice commands using an included voice remote with Alexa support. Normally this model would cost $349.99, but right now you can get it for $249.99 from Amazon.
Dell’s Vostro 14 5401 is currently an exceptional deal as Dell has heavily discounted the system from $1,212.86 to just $679.00. For this price, you get a capable PC with an Intel Core i5-1035G1 processor and an Nvidia GeForce MX330 GPU. This processor offers exceptional performance for everyday tasks, whereas the GPU is less powerful but it should work work well for a little light gaming.
Equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 5 3500U processor, this system is capable of competently running both office applications and games. The system also has 8GB of RAM, a 1080p display, and a fast 512GB NVMe SSD. Best Buy is currently selling these systems marked down from $599.99 to just $499.99.
This bundle includes a copy of Microsoft’s Office product suite including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In short, giving you everything you need to do homework assignments, write reports, and prepare for presentations. The bundle also comes with a copy of Norton 360 Standard to help keep your PC safe from viruses. Sold separately these programs would typically cost you a total of $219.98, but for a limited time you can now get them together from Newegg for just $79.99.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
In 2019, several vendors — most notably Samsung — boldly launched the first wave of foldable phones. In theory, the concept sounds amazing, allowing a phone to expand out to tablet-size for watching content, then shrink down to handset size for talking or texting. First-generation devices were generally abysmal, but impressions of the second-generation designs have been more positive. Our own Ryan Whitwam wrote a glowing review of the Galaxy Z Fold2.
Now, Lenovo is bringing the concept of a foldable display to the PC market. Meet the X1 Fold:
The idea of the X1 Fold is that it, well, folds. It can be used as a large tablet, propped up horizontally to be used as a conventional laptop, or oriented like a book for reading. It has an optional detachable keyboard and an easel stand. It ships with a Core i5-L16G7 processor (1.4GHz base, 3GHz Turbo Boost) with five cores and five threads. You can read more about Lakefield here if you aren’t familiar with Intel’s latest low-power GPU.
The display is a 2048×1536 OLED with 95 percent of the DCI-P3 gamut, and a 300 nit display. There’s also 8GB of LPDDRX-4267 in the system and an expected battery life of 8.5 to 10 hours depending on the workload. It has up to 1TB of storage and two USB-C ports. 5G support will be available and the whole system weighs just 2.2 pounds.
None of the early coverage gives much of an opinion on what the device is like to use. I’m intrigued by the idea of a foldable computer display could offer, but it needs to be more than just a straightforward screen expansion — we need good software hooks, too. The ability to display application data on different screens opens up interesting collaborative possibilities. On the negative side of things, there are always questions about hinge strength and longevity. OLEDs are not the strongest of devices, and any material that works its way into a hinge is going to wreak havoc in short order.
I’m not sold on foldable phones or foldable devices, mostly because I don’t think the advantage of a slightly larger screen offsets the current laundry list of problems these devices have had. I think it’s perfectly possible that the technology will continue to improve, possibly even to the point that having a dual-screen device is completely normal. For now, I’m happy to sit on the sidelines, check out Lakefield’s performance, and watch this new type of smartphone design evolve.
Technology will beat the average human every time. And unfortunately, we unfit bags of meat are barely competition for the robots on many fronts these days.
Case in point — a computer can now make more than 100 billion password guesses per second. Against that kind of onslaught, what chance do you think your “123456” or “qwerty” will have standing up to that?
The only chance we feeble flesh and bone creatures have is to put up the best form of protection we can muster. To do that, you need a service like Enpass Password Manager to craft the biggest, beefiest, toughest to crack passwords imaginable, then remember ‘em all when you need them. Right now, you can get a lifetime of Enpass protection at almost 60 percent off, just $24.99.
Enpass is a smart, easy, yet completely secure way of protecting all of your precious passwords and accounts from falling prey to everything from hackers to your own faulty memory.
Just give Enpass a chance to identify all of your weak, duplicate, and compromised passwords, then set it loose to create ultra-tight, multi-character, unique passwords for every single one of your accounts and logins. You only have to remember your master password for access to Enpass, where all your data resides safe and secure.
And just in case you’re worried (and you should be), Enpass lives only on your local devices. No data is ever stored on Enpass’ own servers, so your information is restricted to only you and you alone.
We say information because Enpass is more than a password storage system. It also houses all of your other vital data, including credit card information, bank account numbers, licenses, files, documents, or anything else you need to fill in all those online forms. Just like your passwords, that information gets automatically prompted and filled in when you have to pass along your details while opening an account or making a purchase online.
You can also sync your Enpass account across all your devices regardless of the platform through your own online cloud services like Dropbox, GoogleDrive, OneDrive, or others.
A lifetime of Enpass Password Manager protection is usually $59, but with the current deal, you can take nearly $35 off that price, cutting your total down to just $24.99.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
The RTX 3090 is the only GPU that now supports Nvidia’s NVLink/SLI technology, and there are probably some buyers of these cards that would love to use them in tandem. Finding a power supply capable of driving two different GPUs with a 350W TDP, however, is something of a tall order. Silverstone has one, however: Meet the DA1650.
Tell us about the DA1650, Bob!
The DA1650 is an 80Plus Gold Power Supply with industrial design lines and a classy, matte black finish. It’s fully modular, allowing any cable to be replaced, and it uses a 135mm FBA fan. Operating noise is reportedly below 36dBA.
Thanks, Bob. [Talking to ourselves again, Joel? -Ed.]
Amusingly, the DA1650 is listed as having a power density of 711W per liter. The DA1650 is therefore a 2.3L power supply. Do with this what you will.
This unit offers a single rail, which is a design trait I’ve always liked. There’s no chance of destabilizing or outright frying a GPU by hooking it to rails that couldn’t provide sufficient voltage. (I have seen this happen to a colleague of mine).
The unit carries a five-year warranty, and is fairly expensive, at $330. If you’re the kind of person who truly needs this power supply, however, you’re probably performing enough serious work in computing that a price tag like that won’t phase you. Gamers generally don’t have to worry about this sort of thing; there’s no evidence we’ll need 1kW power supplies for gaming any time soon.
When it comes to buying big power supplies, it’s always smart to pay attention to the exact manufacturer requirements. It’s possible for a 1kW power supply to be absolutely “1kW”, but to have a great many 12V rails — so many, that the maximum amperage each rail can deliver is relatively small compared with the total amount of amperage available across the card.
With one single, monstrous rail, this PSU won’t have that problem. We’re not sure why anybody needs two RTX 3090s, but if you need ’em, this power supply unit can certainly push them. As for power efficiency ratings, there are two ways to think about this question. This PSU is Gold rated, which means it guarantees a maximum of 87 percent efficiency at 20 percent load, 90 percent at 50 percent load, and 87 percent at 100 percent load. Step up from that to Titanium, and you get 92 percent efficiency at 20 percent load, 94 percent at 50 percent load, and 90 percent at full load. The Titanium is above the Gold unit by between 3-5 percent.
We explore how much these differences matter in the “Is it Worth Investing in a High-Efficiency Power Supply?” Short answer: Definitely maybe. Hat-tip to our sister site, PCMag, for spotting this story.
Digital health wearables were already big news at CES 2020, but interest has accelerated with the advent of COVID-19 and people’s interest in learning whether they might be getting sick. Unfortunately, the pandemic also delayed a lot of the promised devices. Finally, though, they are starting to roll out. But it’s an open question about whether they’ll really tell you what their makers are hinting they can.
We’ll take a look at what’s possible with some of the new devices, the issues and drawbacks they still have, and also give you the results of some hands-on testing with Zepp’s new E smartwatch ($249 direct) and Amazfit’s new Band 5 ($49 at Amazon).
What You Can Track
From reading the datasheets and product brochures on the steadily-increasing array of health-oriented fitness wearables, you’d think that they had a few dozen different kinds of sensors. In reality, the actual data collection mostly revolves around just a few. The most common is an optical Heart Rate (HR) sensor. If the sensor and software are good enough, it can be used to also estimate Heart Rate Variability (HRV), pulse-oxygen (SpO2), and VO2 Max.
However, devices have struggled to get accurate enough at any of the above to be truly useful. They typically also can’t give you a continuous reading on most of them while you are awake and moving around, as it introduces too much noise into the HR sensor to do the calculations necessary with decent accuracy. With many devices, you can only get a VO2 Max reading if you hike or run, as they rely on GPS plus heart rate. So many sports and workouts won’t get you one.
I find that my Fitbit Versa 2 does a good job of automatically detecting exercise and sports, as well as logging and displaying HR and Zones.
Measuring SpO2 Does Not Make a Wearable a Pulse-Oximeter
In theory, though, the devices can make up for some of the difficulties of measuring from your wrist by evaluating you over the course of a night, or if you stay still long enough. However, comparing the overnight SpO2 readings on my Garmin Vivosmart 4 and Fitbit Versa 2 with a medical-grade pulse oximeter doesn’t show either of them to be very accurate. Other reviewers have found the same problem with readings from the new Apple Watch 6 and Fitbit Sense.
A really terrible reading would at least be a reason to do more testing or get evaluated for sleep apnea, which is at least a potential benefit. Given all the recent interest in low SpO2 as a possible symptom of COVID-19, though, many device makers have started touting their ability to take daytime readings. This is potentially at best a cause for false alarms, and at worst it raises the possibility of a false sense of security. If you really need to know your SpO2, do yourself a favor and get a real finger-based pulse-oximeter. If you want one you can wear overnight, the one I sometimes use is the Wellue O2Ring ($179 at Amazon).
About all Those COVID-19 Wearable Headlines
Of course, what I said above hasn’t stopped health-oriented wearable vendors from charging headlong into the potential market for early detection of COVID-19 (and other diseases, of course). We wrote about the UCSF/Oura study that started this spring, but aside from filling out a questionnaire every day for the past six months, I haven’t seen any results. The NBA and WNBA are using the rings (pro golf is using a competing product), but they are deployed in conjunction with a daily symptom survey. Several other large studies that were started for general disease prediction have added COVID-19 detection as a goal. While various device makers have impressive anecdotes about wearers noticing troublesome trends and going to see a doctor, there haven’t been any large-scale results reported yet.
Pick Your Magic Metric
In addition to the basic health data collected by this latest crop of wearables, each vendor has at least one proprietary metric that it hopes will be helpful in keeping you fit and healthy. Garmin has Body Battery — a measure of how ready you are for exertion. Oura has a Readiness score — based on how well your body recovered while you slept. Amazfit/Zepp has PAI — based on correlating your activity level with your age and other factors to see if you’re getting enough exercise.
In my experience, none of those metrics are incredibly consistent, and they often disagree entirely with each other. I can wake up in the morning with a gold crown on my Oura Readiness score telling me up for the challenges of the day while getting a pathetically-low Body Battery reading. Overall, though, both measures do a reasonable job of trying to tell you what you might already know–how you feel when you wake up.
Zepp’s PAI takes a different approach. It uses a metric, based on some University research, that tells you whether you are getting enough activity. It worked pretty well on the Zepp E watch and seemed to track nicely with my hikes and sports. But with the Amazfit Band 5, I could exercise for an hour or two and hardly get any credit. It also always seems to be a day behind. However, I do have a pre-release band with early firmware, so hopefully, those issues will be addressed.
Stress level measurement typically starts with HRV, which is tricky to measure with an optical sensor.
Field Testing Huami’s New Zepp E Smartwatch and Amazfit Band 5
Amazfit and Zepp aren’t well-known brands in the US, but its parent company Huami may make more wearables than any other firm worldwide. Above all else, Huami is known for delivering a lot of features at a low price. Recently Huami restructured the offerings from its two brands, Amazfit and Zepp, unifying their hardware devices on the Zepp software platform. I’ve been able to test an early version of both Zepp’s new smartwatch, the Zepp E, and Amazfit’s new band, the Band 5. Both provide sleep tracking, heart-rate monitoring, and a full suite of fitness tracking capabilities.
The first thing you’ll notice about both devices is the large, gorgeous screens. The Band makes my Vivosmart 4 look like a toy (in more ways than one, as it is also much larger), and the Zepp E watch is much brighter than my Versa 2. So if you have trouble reading your wearable display in bright light, Zepp may be an appealing option.
The Zepp platform isn’t really a full smartwatch-capable ecosystem. It doesn’t support many apps out of the box, and you can’t add any. So it is best to think of even the Zepp E smartwatch as a high-end fitness tracker with a large display. Given that limitation, in my testing, the Zepp E did an excellent job of tracking my vitals and exercise, similar to that of the Garmin and Fitbit devices I wore on either side of it. However, for the price ($249 direct), a lot of users will miss that it doesn’t have either GPS or contactless payment. On the plus side, battery life is amazing, nearly as long as a lot of simpler bands.
Other than having a unified software platform, my experiences with the Zepp E smartwatch and Amazfit Band 5 were very different. In addition to accurate tracking, I found the Zepp E’s calculation of Zepp’s proprietary PAI (Personal Activity Index) to be helpful in keeping me on track for some combination of walking & structured exercise. In contrast, the Band 5 simply didn’t accurately read my heart rate when exercising, so all the resulting metrics were way off. I tried it on various places on my wrist, with and without wearing other trackers, and haven’t been able to get it to work well. Now, my unit is a review unit that was shipped out early, so I hope Amazfit can get the issue sorted out, as the device’s low price ($49 at Amazon) and bright screen make it a great value given its integrated sleep tracking and other health metrics.
As with other devices, sleep tracking is kind of hit or miss; if I track my sleep with 5 devices, I get 5 different answers in the morning. The Zepp E doesn’t seem much better or worse than other wrist-based wearables in this category, but the Band 5’s inaccurate HR readings made its sleep numbers pretty far off. One annoying feature of the Zepp platform is that the app doesn’t show a scale next to the HR graph, which seems like a really odd omission. Hopefully, that will be fixed. As befits health-tracking devices, the Zepp app has lots of screens where you can enter your other health data (like BMI, hydration, etc.) I’m not zealous enough to use any of that, but it’s there if you want it. Like the other wearables from Chinese companies that I’ve tested, there doesn’t seem to be a way to get detailed analytics on the web or download your data. However, Zepp does connect with Google Fit.
Picking a Device to Get Started With Digital Health
If you want a simple and unobtrusive device that keeps an eye on your overall wellness, the Oura Ring 2 ($299 direct) is still a great choice. In addition to baseline health stats, it gives you a loose idea of whether you’re active enough, how well-rested you are, and offers a variety of different breathing and meditation exercises. Your data is available through a very nice web interface and for download.
If instead, you’re looking for something with more exercise features that also has a full suite of health metrics, both Garmin and Fitbit offer a range of devices that tie into a powerful ecosystem. My overall favorite is my Versa 2, or the very similar Versa 3. While the Sense adds some additional features, you have to stop and use them explicitly, which makes me question whether they are worth the extra $100. And it probably goes without saying that if you want the most powerful and flexible smartwatch, the Apple Watch 6 is the popular favorite.
A new book by ExtremeTech editor-in-chief Jamie Lendino shows how for the first 25 years of the video game industry, arcade coin-ops set the standards all console and computer games aspired to–and that in some ways have yet to be matched.
Arcade fans remember the Golden Age of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the heyday of coin-op video games spanned more than 20 years–from the very beginning of the industry through the renaissance of the early 1990s. If you were there, you know these were incredible moments in time unlike any other. But eventually, arcades mostly just disappeared. Some are still around even today, but coin-ops no longer lead the industry.
The obvious reason was that video games came home; as consoles and computers became more capable, there was little reason to play arcade coin-ops. But there was much more to the story, and I really wanted to write a book about it. The result of 15 months of hard work, Attract Mode: The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games covers more than 130 coin-ops in detail, from 1971’s Computer Space to 1994’s Ridge Racer. It includes notes and context throughout on the greater coin-op industry, plus additional details on some 200 more machines.
It’s not easy to understand in an emulator what vector or cockpit cabinets were really like, so I wanted to convey the real experience as clearly as possible–not to dissuade anyone from emulation (far from it!), but to show how the actual code and chips that made up each game were only part of the experience. The book covers not just the games, but the control layouts, hardware, artwork, and CRT displays. It traces the move from electromechanical to discrete logic and microprocessor-based games, and details the rise of key technologies such as overlays and black lights, vector graphics, RGB color, stereo sound, environmental cabinets, spinners and trackballs, laserdisc, rendered polygons, and texture mapping.
Attract Mode: The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games is available now from Amazon in paperback and on Kindle. Here’s a free book excerpt; I hope you enjoy it.
——–
Video arcade games attracted a sophisticated and intellectual clientele to bars and restaurants, boosting their image. But many establishment owners were still reluctant. In 1978, RePlay magazine surveyed operators about what they referred to as “TV games,” and learned that the primary concerns were that they needed to be moved and repaired frequently.[1]Pinball emerged as the clear preference for reliability, thanks to the new solid-state machines, and for revenue collection.[2] This ran counter to what was expected, as arcade games were mechanically simpler. But most operators at the time were still more familiar with pinball machines.
It didn’t matter. Aside from some occasional newer hits such as Breakout and Night Driver, no new video games were sticking. Would they just be a fad after all? Soon, all concerns within the industry were put to rest. One new game ignited the Golden Age of arcades, and it made just about every existing coin-op from the Bronze Age look old. It came from a company still best known for its Pachinko machines. Considering its impact, it may as well have come from outer space.
Space Invaders (Taito/Midway, 1978)
With moviegoers captivated by blockbusters such as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, space aliens were on everyone’s mind—including that of one Tomohiro Nishikado, a Taito engineer who worked on some earlier games for the company’s home market in Japan. Nishikado was also inspired by H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. With this backdrop, he designed a new space shoot-’em-up game where the aliens returned fire and there was no time limit. He did everything by himself—the concept, programming code, graphics, sound, and hardware. He built his own microcomputer with new chips from the United States: an Intel 8080 microprocessor, a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound processor, and 16 Intel 2708 RAM chips.[3] The hardware still lacked sprites, so the code had to draw and erase sprites in frame buffer RAM using bitmaps.[4]
Taito launched Nishikado’s creation, Space Invaders, in Japan in July 1978. Within months, the country’s largest competing Pachinko manufacturer shut down from the sudden loss of business. By the end of the first year, Taito had already sold 100,000 Space Invaders machines for $600 million.[5] The Bank of Japan reportedly had to triple its production of 100-yen coins for addicted gamers, although an oft-told story that the government declared a shortage of those coins on account of Space Invaders is probably not true.[6] Nonetheless, within a matter of months, you could find entire arcades populated only with Space Invaders cabinets. Still, Taito thought the game wouldn’t do well overseas because it was so different. Taito of America disagreed, and approached Bally’s Midway division.[7] Midway licensed Space Invaders for U.S. distribution and began selling it in America in October 1978. The aliens invaded not just Earth but American pop culture.
The object of the game, if it somehow still needs explaining, was to blast apart wave after wave of approaching aliens using a laser turret that moved back and forth across the bottom of the screen—all while dodging the aliens’ missiles. If one hit you, or if the alien armada managed to land, you’d lose a life. Clear all 55 aliens on the screen and you’d progress to the next, more difficult wave.
The control panel contained five buttons: two to move your laser base left or right and one to fire, and then two more to start either a one- or two-player game. Today we play emulated games with joysticks and gamepads, so it’s important to note just how different it felt in an arcade to move your ship using buttons instead of a stick. The black-and-white graphics consisted of 256 horizontal lines and 224 blocks per line in a vertical orientation—nothing special, but some visual tricks boosted the presentation. A yellow moon and dark blue sky sat behind the graphics; this was accomplished by lighting a plastic overlay with a black light bulb. Additional color strips allowed for red UFOs to fly over and green bunkers along the bottom of the screen. The layered effect was thanks to a mirror that reflected the screen upwards.
Aliens descended on Japan and America in Space Invaders, the coin-op that ignited the Golden Age of arcade video games. Credit: Joe Lyons
Not only was there no time limit, but there was also no artificial end to the game, such as the two walls in Breakout or the maximum number of buses to jump in Stunt Cycle. The better you became at Space Invaders, the longer you could play—a mechanic that would soon become standard in arcade coin-op design. You received anywhere from three to six lives, and as an extra way to draw you in, you would win one bonus life at either 1,000 or 1,500 points depending on how the game was configured. The three main alien types were worth 10, 20, and 30 points, respectively. Every 25 seconds, a UFO flew across the top of the screen; if you nabbed it, you’d earn a random amount of bonus points. As you blasted the aliens, the remaining ones would begin to speed up—another mechanic Nishikado discovered quite by accident, as it turned out the Intel 8080 processor could render frames faster when there were fewer aliens on screen.[8]
The audio consisted of sound effects for your laser cannon, blasting the aliens, and the laserlike warble of the UFO flying overhead. But the most significant sound, and possibly the most memorable thing about the game, was the steady, repeating bass pattern in the background. It signaled the relentless onslaught as the aliens moved across the screen and made their way toward your laser base. You felt the low end in your chest as it shook the cabinet, adding to the tension. As the aliens descended further and you blasted more of them, the four-note loop would speed up until it became a continuous machine-gun-fire rumble. However simple it was, Space Invaders was the first video game to have continuous background music.[9]
Space Invaders also had the distinction of popularizing the high score concept previously seen in Sea Wolf and the sit-down Night Driver. Tracking and displaying the high score was all it did—entering initials would come later, and it would reset whenever the machine was powered down or unplugged. But players noticed whenever their handiwork was preserved for the next player to try and beat. Achieving a high score in Space Invaders meant staying alive as long as possible, in stark contrast to all the timed or limited-length games that came before it. High scores soon became local competitions for bragging rights and respect among your peers. In the arcades, your score would soon become paramount, and you were only as good as your last attempt.
Those attempts kept coming. Space Invaders was not just challenging, but addictive—the hypnotic march of the aliens across the screen, which sped up as each board progressed, captivated players. You could sweat while playing it. Gamers popped in quarter after quarter to try to reach the next wave; it never mattered that it was impossible to finish as long as you could get a higher score than before. You’d begin to learn the game’s quirks and develop strategies. For example, although the lone remaining alien was always the fastest, it moved faster in one direction than in the other. Or you learned you could vaporize alien missiles if you hit them just right and happened to have a shot in reserve.
Within one year, Midway sold 40,000 machines in the U.S.[10] The cabinet graphics depicted monsters instead of alien spaceships; Nishikado said he believes this was because the artist based the design on the original concept, which was a new video game in the vein of Taito’s 1972 electromechanical Space Monsters, instead of the resulting alien invasion.[11] The attract mode did some fun things to draw in gamers, such as sending out an alien to fix an upside-down Y in “Play Space Invaders,” or to shoot away an extra C in “Insert Coin” on screen. In addition to the upright model, Midway also made a 19-inch cocktail table where one or two people could play while seated. A joystick replaced the move buttons, but this model didn’t have the room necessary to generate the backlit yellow moon backdrop.
Space Invaders laid down the template for the fixed shooter. By April 1979, it had created demand never seen before and was the “world’s hottest game.”[12] One year later, Taito introduced a 64-page, $1.95 book called How to Play Space Invaders: Secrets From an Expert, anonymously written and believed to be the first-ever arcade video game strategy guide.[13] Establishments that were used to carrying one or two coin-ops found themselves needing multiple Space Invaders machines next to each other, and the game rewarded skilled players with longer durations. Midway’s parent company Bally made a pinball table based on the game. In short order, Space Invaders took over both Japan and America, with some 300,000 cabinets sold in Japan and 60,000 in America by 1980.[14] It kept going. By 1982, the game had grossed $2 billion and $450 million in net profit—much more than the highest grossing film of the time, Star Wars, which had brought in a paltry $486 million gross revenue and $175 million profit.[15] The game’s success led to a large number of knockoffs and bootleg versions, often with slight tweaks to the name or gameplay, as others rushed to cash in on the craze.
Even more than Computer Space and Pong, Space Invaders broke coin-op games out of dive bars. After Space Invaders, “video games would never again be thought of as filler games or relegated to the back corners of game rooms.”[16] Soon, you could find versions of the game not just as cartridges for home consoles, but as handhelds, tabletop games, computer games, and even watches and pocket calculators. Electronic Games magazine awarded the game a place in its hall of fame in 1983. It said Space Invaders had “penetrated the fabric of our society.”[17]
Star Fire (Exidy, 1978)
Exidy’s Star Fire wasn’t the first sit-down video game—that distinction went to Atari’s 1975 release Hi-Way, which offered a seat as part of a red fiberglass cabinet to go with its steering wheel and pedals, and Night Driver also came in a sit-down model. But Star Fire was the first “environmental” or cockpit game. These were sit-down models that were enclosed, perfect for flight simulators and driving games, or any game where the designers wanted to convey a sense of total immersion. The trade-off was that they needed a certain amount of floor space, something many retail shops and small venues couldn’t afford to sacrifice.
Exidy’s Star Fire introduced the environmental cabinet to arcades and brought Star Wars to the video game five years before Atari did—and without an official license.
Star Fire put you in control of a space fighter ship; you had to destroy as many enemies as possible in dogfights before the clock ran out. The entire game resembled Star Wars on purpose; Exidy hoped to pick up the license, but could change some of the game elements to avoid being sued if that didn’t happen.[18] This began with the attract screen, which displayed the title in a design that mimicked the Star Wars logo.
The control panel consisted of a two-handed flight yoke with a Fire button on the top left. A red Game Start button sat to the left, while a metal handle on the right controlled thrust. The screen displayed a crosshair gunsight at the center, floating over a background star field. The first-person view meant as you piloted the ship, the crosshairs stayed in the center; the yoke let you climb, descend, and bank left or right. A long-range scanner let you view the positions of enemy ships in the sector. The game displayed the current speed and direction, along with the score and fuel remaining. Enemy ships could be seen flying around in the view out; most looked like TIE fighters, and your own ship was basically an X-wing. The game would display when you were locked on target and ready to fire the laser cannon, which triggered an array of four beams that converged in an X pattern. Fire it too much and it would overheat for a few moments. Shoot an enemy fighter and it would explode into many pieces; the resulting shockwave would temporarily slow down your ship. You could also avoid the explosion by throwing the thrusters into reverse. Sometimes you’d come across a large, sleek mothership with “Exidy” inscribed on the tail; it resembled an Imperial light cruiser. This ship was worth a lot of points, and the game prevented you from locking your laser system onto it. The enemy base, which you couldn’t attack, resembled the Death Star.
Star Fire was programmed by David Rolfe, and the impressive graphics, which were in full color without the use of overlays, were by Ted Michon and Sun Ogg. The animation was smooth enough for a realistic dogfight feel. Each time you exceeded a certain score, you’d earn bonus time. But, if you were willing, you also could pop in additional quarters to extend your time. Star Fire was notable for being the first game to let you enter your initials for a high score, instead of just displaying the score itself. It kept track of the top 10 scores and displayed them in a table. Soon, every game would do this. The deliberate pace of the game—lasers would take a few seconds to reach their target, for example—led to a more cerebral feeling than most action games provided. Rick Pearl, writing for Electronic Games,said Star Fire was a “closet classic…deserving of a better fate,” and that it was “ahead of its time and unable to find a market.”[19] Exidy also released a smaller (60-inch-tall) upright that it positioned as “ideal for street locations.” The expected Star Wars license never materialized. Neither did a lawsuit.
Warrior (Vectorbeam, 1979)
Warrior depicted a top-down battle between two armored fighters with swords in a medieval dungeon. The arena contained several staircases you could force the opposing player up or down and pits you could push them into. Warrior was designed by Tim Skelly, and was his only game marketed under the Vectorbeam brand before Cinematronics acquired and dissolved the company. The cabinet had white sides and a black front panel and included fantasy artwork by Frank Brunner. Bat-handle joysticks controlled the two warriors, and each had a small black button on top. Pushing the joystick in a direction without the button depressed moved the warrior around; pushing and holding the button while moving the stick aimed the sword in the same direction.
The game successfully modeled swordfighting, with forward and backhand swings all the way around and the clash of two swords hitting each other (albeit without much of a “clank” sound effect). You could score points either by hitting your opponent’s center with the tip of your sword or by forcing him into one of the pits. Each player’s two-digit score was displayed on top. The timer at the bottom of the screen slowly counted down; a quarter was good for 10 time units, which meant anywhere from 30 to 120 seconds as per the operator’s choice. Destroy the other player and he would disintegrate into a cloud of sparkles to the sound of an explosion. Whoever had the higher score at the end of the game won, and that person’s score pulsed in brightness.
Warrior was an early video game with one-on-one fighting—in this case, via two medieval knights with swords.
The 19-inch black-and-white X-Y monitor included a detailed overlay of the fixed-screen playfield, complete with a beautifully drawn stone floor and curved staircases. The monitor was mounted below, facing up, and the image reflected off of a silver mirror lit by a backlight.[20] The combination looked as if the vector graphics and the overlay were sharing the same surface.[21] The attract mode showed the two warriors appear in their safe zones, walk up the stairway toward the center of the screen, and fight until one disintegrated, at which point the other would fall into one of the pits.
Warrior wasn’t the first one-on-one fighting game, though it was the first one many people played. Sega’s Heavyweight Boxing and Project Support Engineering’s Knights in Armor both preceded it, though aside from a 1987 remake, the former does not survive, and the latter is difficult to find. It’s doubtful Vectorbeam employees had seen either game when designing Warrior. “Brilliant vector graphics and [an] incredibly beautiful backdrop and internal cabinet artwork made the game enthralling to watch, producing more complex images than Atari’s vector hardware was capable of,” said The Electronics Conservatory’s Videotopia. “Unfortunately, the Cinematronics vector system was also far less reliable. Most Cinematronics vector games are rare, and Warrior is rare among them.”[22]
This excerpt was adapted from Chapter 3.
Notes:
[1] Newman, Michael Z. Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 39.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Burnham, Van, ed. Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 162.
[4] Hugg, Steven. Making 8-Bit Arcade Games in C (Self-published, 2017), 75.
[6] Smith, Keith, “Video Game Myth Busters – The Space Invaders Yen Shortage,” The Golden Age Arcade Historian, Nov. 13, 2013. http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2013/11/video-game-myth-busters-space-invaders.html
[7] Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 116-117.
[9] Collins, Karen, Mark J. P. Wolf, ed. Before the Crash: Early Video Game History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 131.
[10] Kurtz, Bill, The Encyclopedia of Arcade Video Games (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2004), 47.
[11]“Classic GI: Space Invaders,” Game Informer, January 2008, 108–109.
[12] Newman, 40.
[13] Smith, Keith, “A Literary History of the Golden Age of Video Games – Golden Age Video Game Books Part 8,” The Golden Age Arcade Historian, Oct. 18, 2014. http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-literary-history-of-golden-age-of_18.html
[14] Kohler, Chris, Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2016), 17.
[15] “Space Invaders vs. Star Wars“, Executive, Vol. 24, Southam Business Publications, 1982, 9.
[16] Wolf, Mark J. P., ed, The Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, Volume 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2012), 68
[17] “Hall of Fame,” Electronic Games, March 1983, 22.
[18] https://www.mamedev.org/roms/starfire/
[19] Pearl, Rich, “Closet Classics,” Electronic Games, June 1983, 82.
[20] Rousse, Thomas H. “Reconstructing Warrior: Vectorbeams, Natural Magick & Business Intrigue.” Kinephanos, June 2015. https://www.kinephanos.ca/2015/reconstructing-warrior/
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