Sega Is Prepping a Mega Drive Mini, but Who’s Building It?

Sega announced this weekend that it’s prepping a new Mega Drive Mini to take advantage of the recent craze for retro hardware. The question of who is building it, however, is somewhat less clear — and that matters, given how the company handled its last micro console.

Last year, AT Games, a business partner of Sega’s and longtime manufacturer of Sega retro consoles announced its Sega Genesis Flashback. The “console” — I use the term loosely — was panned by virtually every single reviewer. Kotaku called it “hot garbage,” while Polygon concluded, “The sad thing about the Sega Genesis Flashback is that, while it may be enough to satisfy the under-the-tree urge in the absence of alternatives, every unit purchased represents a lost future customer for a good Genesis throwback console.” (emphasis original).

「メガドライブ」誕生30周年記念！
『メガドライブ ミニ』（仮称）2018年発売決定！

思い出の名作ゲームの数々が、これ1台で楽しめます！#セガフェス #メガドライブ #メガドライブ30周年https://t.co/HWj6NFL96y pic.twitter.com/0C9QH1l5Mr

— セガ公式アカウント (@SEGA_OFFICIAL) April 14, 2018

Sega’s Mega Drive Mini was announced without any hint of a manufacturer until ATGames announced it would be doing the manufacturing… only to delete the announcement shortly thereafter. Whether this means that the company jumped the gun on the announcement or somehow factually announced the wrong thing is unclear. The Mega Drive Mini is being launched to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the console, so hopefully Sega will put some effort behind it this time.

What is clear is that ATGames is going to have improve its game substantially if it wants to hit the quality bar Nintendo has been setting in this field. The NES Classic and SNES Classic may not be perfect, and plenty of people will prefer to roll their own emulator around something like a Raspberry Pi, but the games Nintendo ships work flawlessly out of the box. The ATGames Sega Genesis, in contrast, was hammered for poor wireless controllers, frame rate drops, audio issues (though this was still much improved from previous ATGames consoles), and mostly shipping a dumpster worth of games as opposed to focusing on a smaller number of high quality titles.

Sega, meanwhile, isn’t betting solely on newfound consumer appreciation for 1990s hardware. The company is also bringing a range of its games to the Switch, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Phantasy Star, and Thunder Force 4. Studio M2 is behind the work, which is good news given generally positive reactions to the company’s previous ports of 8-bit and 16-bit titles. Sega has also launched a new retro game push into smartphones, with a new Sega Forever app for iOS and Android. Polygon has the details there, for the curious.

On the whole, it’s not surprising to see Sega mining its back catalog for hits to bring to new platforms — the Switch is certainly popular and we can understand grabbing a few retro titles for quick game sessions or to introduce kids to the way we gamed when we were their age (cue: “My first monitor was actually a rock, and I was glad to get one! Rocks were expensive back then!”). But if Sega actually cares about this new console, it needs to put it the hands of a company that’ll do a better job than ATGames — or require its partner to build a console worth buying in the first place.

Apple’s New eGPU Support: Promising, With Major Caveats

Laptops make tradeoffs by definition, but one of the largest has always been in graphics. Physics simply doesn’t allow for a high-end desktop GPU in a svelte, laptop-friendly form factor. And the lighter and thinner you make the portable, the less room you’ve got for an aggressive, power-hogging GPU. The promise of an external graphics dock is that you can eat your laptop steak and have it too, thanks to a second enclosure that handles the GPU, provides power to it, and in some cases includes additional features and capabilities not found in the laptop itself.

Apple recently added support for eGPUs to macOS 10.13.4, which has caused its own problems based on how the support was implemented. Such headaches might be worth it, if they yield huge performance improvements — but Ars Technica’s findings suggest professional users will want to pay attention to the list of situations where an eGPU either doesn’t work, or works less well than you’d expect.

Note: There are informal solutions and workarounds for some of the headaches Ars identifies, but in some cases they’re rather difficult to pull off and require a high level of expertise. Formal support is limited to Thunderbolt 3-equipped devices, Nvidia GPUs aren’t supported, and Boot Camp isn’t supported (getting the eGPU to work in Windows is possible, but Ars describes this as an “absolute nightmare.”). You can’t power the built-in display with an eGPU, so you’d better have an external monitor handy. Some applications, like Final Cut Pro, refuse to do any work on the external graphics solution. Other games, like Hitman, apparently crash at launch when you attempt to run them on the external graphics card.

Now, the good news is that when it works, the eGPU can deliver substantial performance improvements:

Performance improvements tend to be excellent, as one would expect when replacing an RX 460 laptop GPU with a full-fledged RX 580 desktop part. With that said, the gains will tend to accrue to titles that push the GPU in the first place — Civilization VI saw much smaller improvements, for example. This has generally been the case in 3D gaming, however — some titles always see larger improvements than others — so it’s not a knock on the external GPU idea, as such.

Overall, the caveats to Apple’s support for eGPUs seem higher than they truly need to be. It makes sense that some applications might need updates to take advantage of the capability. But the lack of support for Windows Boot Camp, the non-support for Nvidia GPUs, and the Thunderbolt 3 requirements mean the feature is accessible to only a fraction of Mac owners. Some of these issues can be bypassed relatively easily, but others can’t. The benefits are very real, but make certain you’re going to see them before pulling the trigger on this kind of upgrade.

God of War Might Be the Best-Looking PS4 Game to Date

When the original God of War came out in 2005, it was arguably the most attractive game on the PS2. Thirteen years later, Sony Santa Monica is still capable of blowing us away. This new heartfelt interpretation of God of War on the PS4 stands alongside Uncharted 4 and Horizon as the most visually impressive games on both the vanilla model and the PS4 Pro.

After the massive shrug that was 2013’s God of War: Ascension, a complete redesign was absolutely necessary. As such, every aspect of the series has been rethought for this impressive comeback. We’re dealing with a different pantheon, more methodical combat, a close-up camera that never cuts away, and a palette of emotions that actually extends beyond pure rage.

At our sister site IGN, God of War has earned a perfect score. Jonathan Dornbush wrote up the review, and he praises everything from the single-shot camerawork to the Nordic backdrop to the emotional development of Kratos. And whether he was playing on a standard PS4 or a PS4 Pro, the visuals were delightful throughout:

Similarly, Metacritic has this installment sitting at 95/100 based on 86 scored reviews – the highest metascore in the series. There are plenty of perfect and near perfect scores, but some outlets like The Daily Dot and Twinfinite went as low as 4/5. There are some criticisms of the puzzle design and some repetition in certain battles, but even the lowest-scoring reviews still gush about the game’s high points. It’s clear that this game will be a real contender when we reach GOTY season.

DigitalFoundry has analyzed God of War, and the results are impressive across the board. With silky smooth animations, top-notch dynamic lighting, a very reactive environment, loads of GPU-accelerated particles, and best-in-class checkerboard rendering, this is one of the best looking games of the generation.

On the standard PS4, it’s no surprise to see a 1080p resolution and a 30fps target. The frame rate is mostly stable, and the anti-aliasing being applied here is undeniably attractive. Even if you’re playing on a 4K screen, the original model or the Slim deliver exemplary results – especially if you have an HDR-capable display.

But if you have a PS4 Pro, you get to choose between two modes: Performance and High Resolution. In Performance mode, the resolution stays at the 1080p we see in the base model, but the 30fps cap is removed. At the game’s most peaceful, you can see the frame rate rise to a wondrous 60fps, but you should expect to hover between 40fps and 50fps during most scenes. It’s a nice option to have, but that kind of fluctuation isn’t to everyone’s taste.

Toggle on the High Resolution mode, and we’re given a checkerboarded 2160p image capped at 30fps. While it suffers from occasional dropped frames just like the base version, it’s not anywhere close to ruinous. Given some time, it’s even possible that a patch could smooth out the handful of situations that cause dips to 29 or 28fps. And as for the visual trickery on display, DF’s John Linneman calls it “one of the finest implementations of checkerboard rendering we’ve seen,” so we need not worry about the fidelity here. It’ll definitely give your 4K TV a workout.

5 Major Differences Between A Blog And Website

Differences between a blog and a website are highly searched in today's online arena. Blogging/blog terms are so intensely used around the net, that many newbies get stuck on the point here. So i thought why not to mention the basic differences between the two ways by which we can publish our content online.

 

To summarize, blog is a type of a website (Web log= Blog). Website is a general term. (site on web=website). You might have heard about those static sites and dynamic sites.

 

 

That idea supports the Blog vs Website theory. There are few technical differences, as to how the data is presented to the readers. We would also discuss couple of reasons due to which blogs are highly considered now days, to present data online.

 

As the saying goes:

‘All apples are fruits but not all fruits are apples.’

Similarly,

‘All blogs are websites but not all websites are blogs.’

However, what some of you might not be aware of is the major difference between the two and how these two make a difference to the global world with their presence. Let me put some light to the major differences between a blog and a website.

And yea, if you are wondering about the eBook series, its not finished yet. In fact we are onto the interesting part. So stay tuned for it in the coming days. Its always better to change some taste. Isn't it?

Blog vs Website - Characteristics Match up

According to Wikipedia, a blog is as follows:
 

A blog (a blend of the term web log) is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time

Examples of blogs are famous news magazines such as buzzfeed, techCrunch, Lifehacker or news sites such as The New York Times, CNN, BCCetc. that publish stories on daily basis. Or even sites ran by individuals on a specific niche such as this blog!

While a website:

A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server.

Examples of websites is everything that exists on ! Because a website is the mother term given to all sites that you browse online including the blogs. Whether it may be social media networks like Facebook/Twitter or Ecommerce sites such as eBay, amazon, Alibaba or community forums such as stackoverflow, Google forums or Quora.

 

Blogs are generally more informally presented to the visitors. The language used is often much simpler than on websites. (though its not necessary as many webmasters now have started to use simpler language, to make their view point clear to a wider range of people, around the globe.)

In blogs, there is a feature called "posts", as what you are reading now. Every post have its own page (as the url suggests), but the main page (homepage) of the blog is dedicated to the
series of latest posts in reverse-chronological (latest to oldest) order.

Bloggers often prefer to show around 8-12 recent posts on their blogs main (home) page. Where as there is nothing such in a static website. Even if a website is about tutorials (like Lisa Arby's popular website, 2createawebsite.com). The website was launched years ago, when the blogging wasn't quite into the online world.

She did a pretty neat job with the sequence of the content. Interlinking was perfect. You could take a look to that site, in order to get to know the feel of a static website.

The major difference between the two types, blog and a static website is about the content refreshment. The major content of website remains the same. Though the webmaster could add additional pages to the website to increase the content, but the order by which the information is presented could not be later changed. (isn't changed).

That's where blog have started to gain popularity. Have you ever thought about the way you search internet now days? You either follow a specific blog right away (through bookmarks) or in most cases, you search search engines.

Search engines help you to get to a specific question (like how to add bla bla to blogger). It would take you to the static page, with the best information of the particular topic, either it comes from blog or website. So the content is basically searched the same way as before (through search engines), but blogs provide a different dimension to the way information is presented.

Another huge aspect of blogs due to which people have adopted them, are their ability to get crawled by search engines frequently. As the posts are updated on daily basis (sometimes many times in a day), so search engines crawl blogs many times a day in order to fetch new content. 

Blog Vs. Website: What's The Difference?

These are five ways you can identify a 'Blog' when compared to any website found online.

1. A Blog provides a Commenting System
2. A Blog offers a subscription system to send free email newsletters to readers.
3. Articles inside a Blog are organized through categories and tags.
4. Articles in a Blog appear in reverse-chronological order, latest to oldest.
5. A Blog is managed by an individual author or a team of authors often called the editorial board.

1. A Blog Contains a Comment Form

If you see a comment form at the bottom of a webpage, know that you are reading a blog. Blog comment forms are a great way to interact with the author and share your insights or ask him queries regarding the blog post.

These comment forms could be simple text boxes with fields for Name, Website/Email, Message. Or it can be a third-party comment plugin powered by Disqus, Facebook or Google+.

2. You Can Subscribe To a Blog Updates

Blogs are more like newspapers. Covering a vast variety of topics and publishing several articles each day or each month. Visitors to blogs who want to stay updated with latest blog posts, subscribe to the email newsletter.

Blog administrators use difference email delivery systems such as Feedburner, Awber or mailchimp to send email updates to their readers.

3. Blog Articles are Organized By Categories & Tags

Blogs provide great navigation to its visitors thanks to the use of Categories and tags. Categories classify the blog topics into different groups and tags classify them into sub-groups. Users can then read their topics of interest with the help of these category pages.

If you observe our blog menu at the top, you will find that, we have organized our content into different labels/categories. This helps you to better navigate our site.

4. Blog Content is always Displayed In reverse-chronological  order

A blog will always display its newest blog posts at top and oldest at bottom. This sequence is adopted for both blog posts and comments, so that the readers could reach newly published articles on homepage easily.

5. Unlike a Website, a Blog Can Be Managed by a Single Author!

You don't need a big team to manage a blog. This is one reason why blogs have become the best source of online earning for enthusiastic people who love to share their knowledge with the rest of the world. I started this blog all alone and I am running it for over 8 years without a big team.

You can surely increase the number of authors on a blog to publish content more frequently. Large corporate blogs have no more than 10-15 bloggers on its editorial board, who publish content regularly.

You can

create a free blog on Blogger, Tumblr or even Wordpress. Unlike building a website, you don't need to have advanced technical skills such as web development or knowledge of web hosting or FTP to start a blog. Thanks to free blogging platforms like Blogger, you can start your blog without worrying about the coding part! 

Dark Souls 3 Has a Jaw-Dropping Opening Cinematic

The opening cinematic of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s third installment in the Dark Souls franchise has recently been released by Bandai Namco. Showcasing various creatures and notable characters with whom players will interact and cross paths, the video was able to haul fans out of the fogginess, shedding some light on the topic of environment, where the upcoming game is set.

To be released on PlayStation, Windows PC and Xbox One 4 on April 12, 2016, developers From Software announced the game to be the last in the franchise, promising spectacular adventures rendered with thrilling RPG content.

Postcredits: gamesources

How To Use SocialPilot For Promoting Your Content on Social Media?

Do you want to promote your content to all social network with a single click? Let’s check out one of the popular tools for content promotion.

Posting your blog’s latest content on social networks is a great way to gain more readers. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are excellent tools for blog promotion, especially when you have many friends or followers. It allows your content to get shared among your network and beyond, giving your blog the exposure and traffic you are aiming for.

Keeping a regular posting schedule on these networks can be a tedious and time-consuming task, and you may not always have the time to do so on a daily basis. You may find that logging in and post it to social networks every other hour is simply not the best use of your time.

This is where automated posting apps like SocialPilot can help you. SocialPilot lets you set up your social network accounts and allows you to schedule posts in advance. At the moment, it lets you connect to Facebook, Google plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Available as a web app and a Chrome extension, SocialPilot can be accessed from any browser. You can utilize their free plan to connect with five social media profile or connect more profile by upgrading to pro accounts.

Here’s how this tool can easily set your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn posts on autopilot.

How To use SocialPilot Dashboard?

After logging in to your SocialPilot account, the first thing you need to do is to connect your social profiles. To do this, click on “Connect Account” on the left panel under Social Accounts.

Here, you can add unlimited profiles for Twitter, Google plus (Page, Profile & collection) Facebook (profile or page) and LinkedIn (profile, page or group).

Setting post schedules

After you’ve connected a profile, you should now be able to set a schedule for your posts. Note that the default time zone is for the US, so change this if you need to. Click on the “Edit” button and select your desired time zone on the next page.

To go back to setting a schedule, click Manage Accounts on the left pane. Click on “Edit” for that account. Now you’re ready to add a schedule for your social profile.

Under “Select Time”, you can specify a time to add to the posting schedule. You can then choose which days of the week you want the schedule to be running. Once done, click on the button that says “Add Time”. You may do this for other social profiles you may have connected.

The schedule will now take effect every time you create a post for each social profile. Note that schedules are set separately for each social account, but you can set the same exact one for all of them if you want your content posted at the same time.

To start adding posts into your schedule, click on “Create Post” on the left pane. You may then start composing your post and adding links. As you can see from the example below, I shared a link to an article that I want to appear in my Twitter profile. Note that my Twitter profile is checked on the right-hand side, while my LinkedIn account remains unchecked.

If you don’t like manually adding links and typing text to create a post, you can install SocialPilot’s extension for Chrome. This way, you can simply click on the SocialPilot icon to share the page you’re currently on.

Once done with a post, you have three options from the drop-down menu: Add to Queue, Share Now and Share Next. Add to Queue will add that post to the schedule queue. If you want to share the content right then and there, click on Share Now.

Find shareable content:

Out of the content ideas? You can use SocialPilot content discovery to discover interesting stories to share on your network. This way, you will always have something interesting to share on your social media channel.

How is SocialPilot different than other social media tools?

SocialPilot is not the only posting service out there. In fact, there are many others that have been around longer than it has. Buffer and Hootsuite, for example, are another popular apps for this purpose. So what makes SocialPilot different or even better? All three services offer premium plans, but SocialPilot’s price of $4.99/month is minimal compared to Buffer’s $10/month and Hootsuite’s $9.99/month.

As someone who has used both Buffer and Hootsuite, I must say that SocialPilot’s focus on three social networks only, its low monthly cost and user-friendly dashboard appealed to me. SocialPilot Android & iOS app is also available, which is of great help.

If you want to build a social media presence in the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with minimal spending, then SocialPilot is a great tool to start with. It’s easy to set up and use, and it allows you to focus on three major social networks that really matter for blog owners and online entrepreneurs.

 Create SocialPilot Account

Conclusion

If you’re new to social networks, then there is one thing you should know: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are three of the major networks for businesses and bloggers alike. This is where most interactions happen, and where your content is more likely to get noticed. You don’t have to be on every platform there is — just the ones that bring you the best exposure. So for this purpose, SocialPilot is not only a great tool — it’s a must have.

Postcredits: shoutmeloud

Which is Better, iOS or Android? (Advantages and disadvantages of Both)

While shopping for phones, most people are torn between two main platforms; iOS and Android. However, Android does take the bigger share of the market since most phone makers tend to make use of it. In terms of how often the two platforms make an entrance in the market; Android seems to release a new phone almost every other day while iOS takes its time with the phones released into the market (at least once a year).

Over the years, both platforms have made improvements and filled gaps that needed filling.

Let’s have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of both platforms:

Advantages of Android

• You get plenty of functional apps with it. This is great news considering that there are so many apps on the market and a need for so many of them.
• You don’t get to part with an arm and a leg in order to own an Android phone since they are relatively inexpensive. iOS on the other hand requires you to pay a premium fee in order to own one. You can find a number of competitively priced android phones on the market with plenty of near-high-end features to comfortably compete with the iOS platform.

• You get plenty of innovative hardware features with the android platform.

• You get to enjoy deeper customization with Android phones. There are plenty of ways one can customize their Android device to suit their needs from manipulating the home screen to changing the default fonts plus a lot more in between!
• You don’t have to worry about carrying your charger everywhere you go since most Android phones get to enjoy the benefit of using a universal charging port.

Disadvantages of Android

• There is limited memory available for storage on a number of these phones. Much as you may add a memory card to the phone, the actual system storage tends to be small. This limits the fun you might have enjoyed with using the phone since you can’t enjoy playing large games for example.
• It can be frustrating to enjoy large apps or games on some phones since just as you are beginning to enjoy yourself, you get an ‘error force’ message.
• Thanks to so many background processes on those phones, data connection can be a pain since plenty of it gets to be chewed up. This means that if you are not using an unlimited data plan, you get to spend lots of money to remain connected.
• Another problem that tends to arise as a result of so many background activities is battery drainage in mobile phones. Battery performance tends to slow down with the increase in the usage of RAM.
• You get to deal with malware from the Google play store when you own it. This means that a lot of care has to be taken as you download apps from the store.

Advantages of iOS

• You get to enjoy timely OS updates with the Apple platform. Even with older devices, you still get to enjoy the latest update which is not the case with Android phones.
• You get to enjoy cross-device synching that cannot be matched by other platforms. For example, in case you were reading an article on your phone, you don’t have to scroll through the page looking for where you left off when you pick up the reading on your tablet!
• With iOS, you get to enjoy consistent hardware upgrade cycles
• There are plenty of high-quality and creative apps on the iOS platform for your enjoyment
• Compared to the Android platform, there are fewer malware problems for you to worry about.

Disadvantages of iOS

• You can’t enjoy flexibility with iOS since it only supports these devices
• The platform is not open source
• The apps are costly and mainly have no widget support present
• It will cost you an arm and a leg to get an iOS device
• Compared to other mobile platforms, applications tend to be quite large
• You only get to utilize one SIM with the iOS platform unlike the dual SIM usage that can be enjoyed with most Android phones.

These are some advantages and disadvantages of both the platforms. So, if you are going to buy a new smartphone then you should first have a look at this. May be it can help you in making the right decision.

Postcredits: thetechmogul