The Game Boy Advance is a major leap for the Game Boy line. It is the first to have a horizontal alignment, and it is 17 times faster than the Game Boy Color, which was released in 1998. Read this edition of HowStuffWorks to find out what’s under the hood of the Game Boy Advance […]
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Joysticks pull off a really neat trick. They take something entirely physical — the movement of your hand — and translate it into something entirely mathematical — a string of ones and zeros (the language of computers). With a good joystick, the translation is so flawless that you completely forget about it. When you’re really
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Inside the capacitor, the terminals connect to two metal plates separated by a non-conducting substance, or dielectric. You can easily make a capacitor from two pieces of aluminum foil and a piece of paper. It won’t be a particularly good capacitor in terms of its storage capacity, but it will work. In theory, the dielectric
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Cell-phone Frequencies In the dark ages before cell phones, people who really needed mobile-communications ability installed radio telephones in their cars. In the radio-telephone system, there was one central antenna tower per city, and perhaps 25 channels available on that tower. This central antenna meant that the phone in your car needed a powerful transmitter
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Video glasses aren’t a new idea in the high-tech world, in which they’ve been known as a kind of head-mounted display (HMD). They’re also called personal media viewers. No matter what you prefer to dub them, you can’t deny that HMD technology has improved tremendously in the past couple decades. When first widely introduced to
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Why Test? Alcohol intoxication is legally defined by the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level. However, taking a blood sample in the field for later analysis in the laboratory is not practical or efficient for detaining drivers suspected of driving while impaired (DWI) or driving under the influence (DUI). Urine tests for alcohol proved to be
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Augmented-reality applications — software that overlays a level of digital information on top of the physical world around us — have brought us more data. With an augmented-reality app on your smartphone, you might be able to hold your phone’s camera up to capture the image of a city street. Looking at the screen, you
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Since the 1980s, computer scientists have been trying to answer these questions. Their field is a specialized subset of haptics known as computer haptics. Over the next few pages, we’ll cover how haptic technology works by: relating computer haptics to related fields of haptics research characterizing the types of haptic feedback required for realistic virtual
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ere’s a question: What happens when one of the world’s largest electronics companies makes a move to edge its competition out of the top spot in the portable gaming industry? If you’re Nintendo, and Sony has made it clear that it wants to crush you with its new PlayStation Portable, you throw a curve ball
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The company was TiVo, the pioneer in commercially-available digital video recorders (DVR). In its 10-year history, TiVo has sold millions of DVRs and service subscriptions. In this article, we’ll look at how the typical set works and the services TiVo provides. Several manufacturers make TiVo sets, including TiVo itself, but they all have one thing
