The Next Generation Gaming Platforms

The next round of game-platform redesigns may still be four to five years out, but chip and software designers in the areas of wireless, microeletromechanical systems, displays, miniature cameras, sensors, actuators and storage have an opportunity to be part of those multi-100-million shipments as platforms respond faster to user demands by focusing on interactivity, connectivity and information display.

Indeed, this may push gaming platforms from peripheral to the center of the home-entertainment system and replace the set-top box with broadband and cable/satellite capability, complemented by fully digital or optical audio and video inputs and outputs and PVR storage.

Ever since the latest crop of game platforms began rolling out late last year, improvements and upgrades were already in the works. The Xbox 360 Elite's big improvements over the Xbox 360 were a bigger hard drive and a HDMI connection.

Sony also is about to release a PS3 with an 80-Gbyte hard drive, up from 60 Gbytesand will kill the 20-Gbyte option. The move to online gaming and the ability to download content has been a huge driver of local storage.

Nintendo's Wii came with Wi-Fi capability out-of-the-box and while the others support Wi-Fi as a peripheral, SI expects them to have it out of the box soon. With the runaway success of Wii's 6-axis controller technology, MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) is expected to be an increasing part of controller design, as well as for PDAs and other handsets. For wireless, 802.11n is hot.

Features that will be common in the next generation of video games include force feedback and rumble capability, motion sensing, vision feedback and high-definition using either Blu-ray or HD-dvd.

Also in the future, storage size or hard drive size will increase from Gigabytes to Terabytes. Once the debate on Blu Ray and HD-dvd settles down, video games will be released on one of these mediums instead of the current dvd technology.

The quality of video game graphics will also improve as more powerful graphic processors and game engines come out and will allow 100% realism in gaming experience.

For displays, super-high-definition systems that are now emerging will come down in time for next-generation boxes, while at the same time gaming and entertainment will converge on one box with dvd, Internet/broadband, storage, set-top box capability and video/audio.

Video gaming is helping drive technology and will continue to do so in the future. Log in to my blog after 4 years and see how many of my next gen console predictions come out to be true.

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Configuring Wireless Networks

Configuring a wireless network involves setting up a wireless router or access point and installing wireless adapters on the networked computers. The wireless router must be placed in a central location because the computers closer to the router or access point obtain faster network speeds. The wireless router needs to be connected to a power source and a source of Internet connectivity so that all computers on the network are provided Internet access.

A wireless router is not mandatory for setting up a wireless network. Almost any computer with a wireless adapter and a wired connection to the Internet can be used as an access point. Next, the wireless network must be provided a name. This is usually referred to as SSID. All the computers on a WLAN must share the same SSID.

Each computer connected to the wireless network should have a wireless LAN card (also know as Wi-Fi adapter) installed. Wi-Fi adapters can be configured after installation of TCP/IP based networking on the individual computers. On computers using Microsoft Windows operating system, adapters usually have their own graphic user interface accessible from the taskbar after the wireless networking hardware is installed. This allows a user to enter the SSID and enable the WEP. For a WLAN to function accurately, all the adapters must use same parameter settings.

One can also opt for automatic wireless configuration that supports the IEEE-802.11 standard for wireless networks. This minimizes the configuration that is required to access the wireless network. Once you enable automatic wireless network configuration on your computer, you can move across various networks without reconfiguring your network connection settings. As you move from one place to another, automatic wireless networking searches for a network that is available and notifies you about the same. You can select the network that you want to connect to and the network configuration wizard updates your wireless network adapter to match the setting of the access point of the new network.

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