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Nintendo: BA for Life

The NES was the first console to move away from the joysticks of the
Atari generation, opting instead for what would become an iconic design
in gamepads. Despite my previous complaint, note that A is indeed
mapped to the right of B. D’oh!

Following their ancestor’s example, nearly every Nintendo console is
mapped this way. This includes the SNES, Virtual Boy, Gamecube, every
iteration of the Game Boy, DS and Wii Classic Controller. The only
dissenters are the Nintendo 64 (bottom right picture), which also
experimented with a 4 way C button and a Z button on the back, and the
Wiimote, which maps A and B on different surfaces entirely.

Sega & Microsoft Love AB

In the early days, Sega was hot on Nintendo’s heels. The NES had A
and B buttons, so the Genesis added a C *. When the SNES added the X
and Y buttons, Sega one-upped them by adding a Z to the Saturn. The
Dreamcast controller was more minimal, perhaps inspired by Sony’s
popular newcomer, the Playstation. The one element that all Sega
controllers share is the AB orientation (the Game Gear labelled them 1
and 2, but arranged them in the same way.)

* It’s worth noting that the short-lived Atari Jaguar had A, B and C
buttons oriented the opposite way. It also featured a full numeric pad,
for a grand total of 17 individual buttons!

The first iteration of the Xbox controller, nicknamed “Duke”, was
bulky and unpleasant to hold. The four main buttons were on a strange
slant, putting the B almost directly above A. Fortunately, Microsoft
quickly responded to public criticism and began packaging the
Japan-exclusive “S” controller with their system. The new gamepad was
smaller and straightened out the button layout, a mapping they largely
reused for the Xbox 360.

Sony Goes Both Ways

The main buttons on the Playstation gamepad don’t use letters, but are instead labelled , , and .
The original Playstation saw three types of controllers over its
lifetime, adding dual analog sticks in 1997 and rumble in 1999. In
recent years the DualShock line has seen slow incremental improvements,
but they haven’t strayed far from the original design (mercifully they
abandoned the boomerang concept.)

In North America and Europe, games commonly use to confirm (the role of A) and to cancel (the role of B.) In Japan, however, the symbol is commonly associated with maru (right) while is identified with batsu (wrong.) Therefore the roles are reversed, confirms and
cancels. While the controls of most games are localized with this in
mind, games such as Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid were left
with their original mapping (to the general confusion of Western
players.)

I hope this has been an enlightening trip down memory lane. With all
the variety in gamepad mapping, it should come as no surprise that even
veteran gamers can be betrayed by their muscle memory sometimes.

Big retro gamer? Emulators no fun? The wife upset because you have 8 consoles hooked up to the family TV? Well then the Super Genintari is just right for you. The Super Genintari combines 4 classic arcade systems into one unit. An Atari 2600, NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis are rolled into one package.

You can have all 4 system cartridges plugged in at once and it only requires a single AV cable, which makes switching between Sonic and Super Mario Brothers a breeze.

The whole box measures about 14″x10″x5″ and is made entirely of transparent bronze acrylic, formed and shaped on a homemade strip heater. All of the openings for the buttons, cartridges and controller ports were carefully cut with a cordless Dremel. The face buttons are clear acrylic domes with each system’s logo epoxy glued in place and back-lit with orange LEDs when pressed. The entire system is incredibly easy to hook up, consisting of only one standard power cord and one A/V cable. It’s a little on the large size considering the room needed for all the boards, cartridge connectors and built-in transformer, and there’s also the fact that I refused to use clone systems since I wanted 100% compatibility and faithful reproduction. (No Yobos, Super Joys, etc.)

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YouTube said it will begin showing full-length television programs in addition to its shorter video offerings to generate ad revenue. The Google Inc.-owned Web site said the new program is to begin with shows from CBS Corp., including “The Young and the Restless,” “90210,” “Dexter” and “Californication.” YouTube said it is in discussions with other media partners, but declined to elaborate. The Web site plans to start selling commercial slots for advertisements that are to run before, during and after full-length videos. The content provider—CBS, initially—has the option sell the ads and YouTube will take a cut of the revenue.

YouTube previously resisted selling this ad format because the Web site feared turning off viewers of its shorter clips. But marketers have been slow to warm to advertising adjacent to the usual user-created videos that make up a majority of the videos on YouTube; some larger advertisers say they would prefer to run their ads alongside more-predictable online video content. Web sites that show full-length videos—such as ABC.com, owned by Walt Disney Co., and Hulu, a joint venture between News Corp.’s Fox and General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal—can charge high rates for their ads and frequently sell out their available inventory.

Those who don’t have an unlimited Internet connection has to keep
track of their bandwidth to prevent over usage. A lot of people use
desktop bandwidth monitoring softwares, but as you might have already
found out, they are far from accurate. So you always have to rely on
the data provided by your ISP. For Firefox users here are two useful
addons that will enable you to keep track of your Internet usage from
within Firefox.

The first one is Net Usage Item
that fetches usage statistics from the web page provided by the ISP and
displays a handy progress bar showing your usage in Firefox’s toolbar.
This addon is mainly targeted towards Australian ISPs. However, this
meter can be adapted for any country’s ISP who provides the data usage
in an XML feed - but that requires some knowledge on JavaScript.

Net
Usage Item supports 38 Australian ISPs and additional ISP packs are
available that adds support for a couple of ISPs from Belgium, New
Zealand, Canada, Ukraine and Indian (Reliance).

For Indian BSNL Dataone and MTNL TriBand users, there is another addon - DataFox.
DataFox fetches net usage information from the respective ISP’s web
pages and displays it as a small bar in Firefox’s status bar.
Additional information is available in the tooltip. Statusbar and
tooltip strings are completely customizable.

The
progress bar gives you an idea of the amount of bandwidth from your
monthly limit already consumed. Different color codes will alert you
whenever you over-limit for a particular day. This will help keep your
bandwidth usage in check.