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Creating Prince of Persia in 1989 with fluid animations before the days of motion-capture

TechSpot News | April 2, 2020, 2:42 a.m. | Original

Ars Technica as part of its ongoing War Stories series recently highlighted the fascinating development of Prince of Persia.

Creator Jordan Mechner started working on what would become Prince of Persia in 1985, shortly after graduating from Yale University. With one game – Karateka – already under his belt, distributor Brøderbund gave him their blessing to develop an original title.

Those familiar with Prince of Persia often comment on how lifelike the game’s character animations are. They have a certain fluidity to them that simply hadn’

Razer unveils new Blade 15: eight-core CPU, RTX 2070/2080 Super, and 300Hz display

TechSpot News | April 2, 2020, 1:45 a.m. | Original

Something to look forward to: Razer’s Blade laptops have long been known for their gaming prowess. Now, the company has refreshed the Blade 15 with new hardware from Intel and Nvidia, including an 8-core CPU and the new RTX Super cards.

The “Advanced” model of the Blade 15 comes with Intel’s new 10th-gen Comet Lake Core i7-108750H, which has a base clock of 2.3GHz and a turbo speed

Moto G family gets two new variants for 2020, now up for pre-order

TechSpot News | April 2, 2020, 1:07 a.m. | Original

In a nutshell: In celebration of 100 million sales for the Moto G series back in February, Motorola added the G Power and G Stylus to its low-end lineup and has now made these phones available for pre-order.

Motorola doesn't seem to have cut too many corners with the G Power and G Stylus, both of which are powered by Snapdragon's mid-range 665 SoC, 4GB of RAM, feature gigantic 6.4-inch 2300 x

Phone sales predicted to hit ten-year low, but 5G will spearhead recovery in 2021

TechSpot News | April 1, 2020, 11:18 p.m. | Original

Forward-looking: Like so many industries, disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic is having a devastating effect on the phone market. But while mobile sales for 2020 are predicted to hit their lowest level in a decade, there is reason to be optimistic for a 2021 recovery.

Analysts at CCS Insight believe that global demand for mobile phones in 2020 will be almost a quarter of a billion units lower than in 2019, representing a 13 percent YoY

Asus reveals the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, a dual-screen gaming laptop

TechSpot News | April 1, 2020, 10:20 p.m. | Original

Something to look forward to: Dual-screen laptops aren’t a new phenomenon; Asus already has products in this category with its ZenBook Pro Duo machines. Now, the company has revealed what it calls the first gaming laptop with two displays: the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15.

While we quite liked the ZenBook Pro 14 , the small, second display didn’t add much to the overall experience. Asus revamped the design with the ZenBook Pro Duo , which increased the size and resolution of the second screen

Nvidia goes Super with new GeForce RTX GPUs for gaming laptops

TechSpot News | April 1, 2020, 7:01 p.m. | Original

Forward-looking: When we first heard Nvidia was launching new RTX Super GPUs for laptops, we assumed we’d be getting a boring small bump. Well, it turns out that they've prepared some cool new technologies for this generation. Yes, the small bump is still there, but we're getting new tech and price cuts which makes for a compelling new generation of gaming laptops.

First, let’s just look at the line-up and specifications to get that out the way. There

Intel

Intel launches 10th-gen Comet Lake H-series CPUs for high-end gaming laptops and productivity

TechSpot News | April 1, 2020, 7 p.m. | Original

The big picture: Intel is launching today the Core 10th-gen Comet Lake H-series CPUs for high-performance productivity and gaming laptops. We think this is going to be a particularly interesting launch because AMD have aggressively targeted the same segment with Ryzen Mobile 4000 . We have already tested one of AMD’s H-series mobile CPUs and know what they’re capable of, so now it’s Intel’s turn to respond.

We’ve already seen Comet Lake U

Comcast may consider killing data caps, ISPs could learn from present experience

TechSpot News | April 1, 2020, 1:10 p.m. | Original

Why it matters: Comcast says it's seen a surge in internet traffic from people stuck at home using messaging and conferencing apps, downloading games, and streaming video -- especially now that it waived data caps. And since that didn't exactly strain its network, the company could use this experiment to decide if data caps even make sense any more.

With more and more people being bunkered down in their homes to curb the spread of the coronavirus, internet service providers have seen their networks capacities tested more than

Cloudflare's high-speed 'WARP' VPN is coming to macOS and Windows this year

TechSpot News | April 1, 2020, 11:29 a.m. | Original

In brief: On April 1 of last year, Cloudflare unveiled "WARP" to the world, a high-speed VPN that came as a free add-on to the company's 1.1.1.1 mobile DNS app. Now, precisely a year later, Cloudflare is using April Fool's Day to announce more WARP news: the VPN is officially coming to macOS and Windows as a public beta.

The high-speed VPN will offer the same functionality on desktop that it does on mobile

Royalties to Borderlands 3 talent are reported dismal despite game's success

TechSpot News | April 1, 2020, 10:46 a.m. | Original

A hot potato: Gearbox developers got an unpleasant surprise on Tuesday when they were informed that their royalty bonuses for Borderlands 3 would be far lower than expected. Apparently, the game cost the company more to make than anticipated and so the bonuses are reflecting that.

Gearbox Software employees have the opportunity to participate in profit sharing with the company. The current royalty split is 60-40, with 60 percent going back to the company and 40 percent split among employees based on tenure with the studio. These

Something to look forward to: Razer’s Blade laptops have long been known for their gaming prowess. Now, the company has refreshed the Blade 15 with new hardware from Intel and Nvidia, including an 8-core CPU and the new RTX Super cards.

In a nutshell: In celebration of 100 million sales for the Moto G series back in February, Motorola added the G Power and G Stylus to its low-end lineup and has now made these phones available for pre-order.

Forward-looking: Like so many industries, disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic is having a devastating effect on the phone market. But while mobile sales for 2020 are predicted to hit their lowest level in a decade, there is reason to be optimistic for a 2021 recovery.

Something to look forward to: Dual-screen laptops aren’t a new phenomenon; Asus already has products in this category with its ZenBook Pro Duo machines. Now, the company has revealed what it calls the first gaming laptop with two displays: the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15.

A hot potato: Gearbox developers got an unpleasant surprise on Tuesday when they were informed that their royalty bonuses for Borderlands 3 would be far lower than expected. Apparently, the game cost the company more to make than anticipated and so the bonuses are reflecting that.

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