Hardware technology for games platforms (P2)

Introduction:

There are many different types of hardware technology for games platforms, all of it important to making a functional and marketable console,

Interface devices: These allows users to interact with the machine, there are many types of controllers you could use with a game, including steering wheels, which contain rotation sensors to turn in the corresponding direction when they are tilted, cameras such as the eye-toy and Kinect, which observe an area and recognise movement to respond accordingly, and joysticks which would originally consist of the handle with a 4 pronged metal plate underneath which relied on electrical contacts, which was an unreliable, unresponsive, easy to break and utterly cheap system, they quickly changed to using 4 pressure sensitive micro-switches to alert the computer which direction the stick is in, which are slightly more costly, but are more reliable, responsive and durable. Controller developers are always considering ergonomics, because a more comfortable controller is more popular and sells more, for example, most arcade sticks would be symmetrical, so that they could be used by either left or right handed users.

The R.A.T computer mouse series is designed to be fully customisable, from spacing of the grips, to changing the weights to how sensitive the control wheel is and what sort of textures are on the individual panels for maximum comfort, as well as being available in either left or right handed models.

Not everyone puts practicality ahead of potential innovation, in particular Nintendo, with examples such as the largely unresponsive, rectangular easy to lose grip of Wii remote and the ridiculously useless power glove. The power glove was supposed to use a series of sensors that would be strapped onto a TV and register movements and actions made with the glove, it also came fully equipped with a keypad and D-pad so it was possible to play games by using it as a normal controller, albeit with great difficulty. Unfortunately the sensor would barely fit on any TVs, even if you could get it on then the controller would not transmit anything anyway.


CPU: The central processing unit is the brain of the computer, it takes all of the information being sent to it and interprets the data as something we could make sense of, by directing the commands it creates to display and audio peripherals.