Web Design Don'ts: 13 Website Features That Can Ruin The User Experience

Your website’s appearance can make or break a transaction. If it isn’t attractive, up-to-date or user-friendly, consumers will be quick to look elsewhere. You need your site to both make a great impression on potential customers and provide an easy and satisfying user experience (UX).

Modern websites can feature a lot of flashy visual features designed to dazzle visitors. While it may be tempting to implement a slew of these “bells and whistles,” these extraneous features may intimidate consumers or make it difficult for them to navigate your site. Below, 13 Forbes Technology Council members list some website features they recommend companies avoid.

1. Autoplay Video

Autoplay video just annoying. It’s the modern day pop-up. If you make a compelling video and market to it, people will play it. I never find myself saying, “Hey, thanks for starting that video for me—I would have never thought to play it.” Video is such a powerful tool—don’t force feed it to your visitors and potential customers. - Tom Altman, Leverage, powered by Clickstop

2. Intrusive Pop-Ups

It’s helpful to have pop-ups, especially to let visitors know they can talk to someone or ask a question, but when it keeps appearing on every page or with every scroll, visitors start to get frustrated, especially when using a mobile site. Try to limit these and find another way to let them know you are there for them. - Chalmers Brown, Due

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3. Homepage Video Backgrounds

A few years back, a couple of prominent websites like LinkedIn decided it would be a good idea to have video autoplaying in the background of their site. Unfortunately, due to evolution, humans notice movement in peripheral vision and are easily distracted by it. As such, it’s incredibly distracting and takes people away from your call to action. Just don’t do it. - David Isaac Murray, Doctor.com

4. Dropdown Menus

Dropdown menus with a menu that disappears are the worst. If you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of highlighting your search term and then scrolling over to the other menu, but moving off of it and it disappears, then you know what I mean. Instead, keep the dropdowns in the sidebar so customers always know where they are in the website and won’t have that frustrating experience. - Arnie Gordon, Arlyn Scales

5. Large, Slow-Loading Images

While appropriate images are important for a professional website, you need to be sure to avoid large-file-size images and, sometimes, sliding images. A slow-loading site may cause visitors to quickly click away. - Anne Bisagno, Xantrion

6. ‘Surprise’ Interactions

You start reading or scrolling, and then you’re hit with an advertisement, graphic, video or mailing list sign-up form. Not only do these interactions disrupt users, but they also feel pushy and borderline scammy. While driving conversions and engagement is a key goal of many websites, interrupting users with automatically triggered content and surprises is a major point of UX friction. - Ayo Jimoh, Visibly

7. Autostart Audio

Having the sound on with any video content or pop-ups can create a horrible user experience. Imagine opening up a site not knowing your sound is on full blast and having someone blare a message that your family, friends or co-workers hear. With 85% of online videos consumed without sound, it’s vital to avoid disrupting your user’s experience and implement subtitles and sound off by default. - Marc Fischer, Dogtown Media LLC

8. Continuous Scroll

Avoid continuous scrolling on websites. This feature is on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook: As you scroll down the feed, new content appears at the bottom of the page automatically. While this feature is good for social media, in other cases, long/continuous scrolling leaves people frustrated that they’ll never reach the end of the page or may miss something that they can’t see down below. - Dmitry Dragilev, JustReachOut.io

7. Features That Attempt To ‘Outsmart’ Users

Websites that attempt to “outsmart” their users with features like overriding the standard scrolling behavior of the browser, blocking the right mouse button or clipboard actions, or modifying the browser history can lead to an extremely frustrating user experience. Your site may be unique, but forcing your user to “relearn” how to use your site just causes abandonment and loss of conversions. - Jason Gill, The HOTH

8. Aggressive Chatbot Messages

Chatbots have lots of applications—many of them good ones. But be careful in how you use them. What you think may help your website seem more intuitive, helpful and personal may leave your visitors unhappy and feeling over-pitched on a cluttered website with messages that are painfully robotic. - Artem Petrov, Reinvently

9. Too Many Calls To Action

When your site has too many calls to action, customers get confused on where they need to click next. Instead of being persuaded to click on your buttons, many will simply become overwhelmed and leave. One tip is to have one big call to action per visible screen. This means that you can have another call to action button below that as the user scrolls and the first one disappears. - Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

10. Desktop-Centric Design

Try avoiding the creation of too many pages and too much content per page. “Concise” is the keyword when it comes to professional websites. For most companies, mobile traffic has already taken over desktop traffic, with the mobile traffic percentage still growing. If you are just starting a new website, you should make it for mobile devices primarily and try keeping it desktop-friendly as well. - Vikram Joshi, pulsd

11. Too Much Text

Websites don’t need paragraphs of flowery language. Websites are a tool. Get to the point, keep it simple, avoid industry jargon and buzzwords, and let us know what you do, why we should care and how to get more details if wanted. - Brian Contos, Verodin Inc.

Read More>> https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/01/28/web-design-donts-13-website-features-that-can-ruin-the-user-experience/

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Is Firefox Quantum Really Any Good?

This week, Mozilla launched Firefox 57—aka Quantum—the biggest update to the browser in its 13 year history.

75% of Firefox’s code has been rewritten for Quantum, 5,000,000 lines of code in total. 700 developers, including 80 volunteers, have contributed to the codebase since August. It is, in effect, a brand new browser.

Firefox has always been a cool browser. Open-source credentials and a confirmed underdog status make it the first choice for those who prefer not to use their OS’ default. The latest stats put Firefox’s global share to around 6%, compared to Safari’s (combined MacOS and iOS versions) 15%, and Chrome’s 55%.

Despite much affection for Firefox, there hasn’t been a compelling reason to make the switch, until Firefox Quantum.

QUANTUM SPEED

I don’t recall when a new version of a browser was met with so much excitement, and it’s almost entirely down to one thing, Firefox Quantum goes like a rocket.

Firefox Quantum goes like a rocket

Every browser makes the claim to have improved render speed, usually by a single-digit percentage. Firefox Quantum is twice as fast as the previous version of Firefox. However, that feels like an understatement; Firefox Quantum is perceptibly faster than any other browser on my machine, notably it’s substantially faster than Chrome. Browsing in Firefox Quantum feels like the whole web has been pre-cached.

Mozilla’s own tests found that the beta release of Firefox Quantum was at least as fast as Chrome, but wasn’t substantially faster. They feel they closed the gap on Chrome, without exceeding it. They’re being modest. Anecdotally, my experience in the last couple of days is that Firefox Quantum is substantially faster across the board; it’s possible that I’m simply browsing sites that favor Firefox’s approach, like Google Search for example.

What’s undeniable is that Firefox’s new found speed delivers an enjoyable browsing experience.

QUANTUM EFFICIENCY

One of the ways Mozilla turbo-charged Firefox Quantum is changing the way it makes use of modern hardware.

Complex software makes use of multiple processor cores by allocating different tasks to different cores to speed up processes. Developing in this way is complex, because if two cores are working on related tasks, one can easily override the other, introducing bugs to the system. This complexity is often solved by ring-fencing tasks, for example, allocating a CSS engine to a single core; less efficient, but more stable.

Firefox Quantum has taken a leap forward by leveraging multiple cores for single tasks, or rather by subdividing tasks into smaller bite-sized chunks so that they can be distributed to more cores.

One of the key components of Firefox Quantum’s speed is the new CSS rendering engine, Stylo. Stylo extends the multi-core approach by allocating different parts of the DOM rendering to different cores.

According to Mozilla, Firefox Quantum uses 30% less memory than “the competition” (aka Chrome) on Windows. Digg’s testing found that Chrome used 40% more RAM and three times more processes than Firefox Quantum.

What’s cool about Firefox Quantum is that the more cores you have, the faster it renders

What’s cool about Firefox Quantum is that the more cores you have, the faster it renders. Firefox is fast now, and it will only get faster in future.

To make Quantum so efficient, Mozilla studied how people actually use the web. As a result, Firefox Quantum prioritizes tasks, for example a button interaction takes priority over something like caching, or garbage collection. This is a direction Mozilla intend to focus on in future releases.

One of the most obvious benefits of prioritizing tasks is tabbing. Firefox Quantum uses less memory for multiple tabs than Chrome. Conducting research, with multiple tabs open, makes Firefox a no-brainer for me.

In Quantum, your active tab is prioritzed over all other tabs, making the best use of resources. Which makes me wonder: Why weren’t browsers doing this before? It’s so obvious.

MOZILLA PHOTON

Firefox Quantum’s UI will probably look a little different to you, especially if you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Firefox. Mozilla have taken a leaf out of Google’s book and developed their own design system for their Products, named Photon. While there’s no suggestion of Mozilla pushing Photon as a cookie-cutter approach to all design problems—as Google have with Material Design—it’s a pleasingly coherent approach that Mozilla previously lacked.

Photon, in Mozilla’s own words, aims to be adaptable, quick, aware, approachable, supportive, and whimsical. Firefox Quantum’s UI ticks all of those boxes.

There’s a greater attention to detail than we’ve seen in earlier versions of Firefox. For example, the nice subtle hover animation on inactive tabs. It all combines to be an enjoyable experience that is happy to fade into the background—which is precisely what a browser should be.

There’s a couple of let-downs. I’m not thrilled that the blank tab has three separate search options: the browser location field, the search field, and the blank page search field. These are minor gripes in an otherwise great product.

THE VERDICT

There’s no question that Firefox Quantum is going to pick up market share. By this time next year it will have 15% of the market, still less than a third of Chrome’s user-base, but numbers that Opera would kill for.

By any reasonable criteria Firefox Quantum is the best browser currently available

I switched to Firefox Quantum out of curiosity, fully expecting to switch back to Chrome in a few days; Chrome is now gone from my dock, and Firefox is set as my default browser.

Admittedly Firefox Quantum has some extension compatibility issues, but that’s the case for any new browser and developers are already catching up. And I felt an unexpected pang of remorse when I finally bit the bullet and removed Firebug.

By any reasonable criteria Firefox Quantum is the best browser currently available. Whether it remains so depends on the competition, and future Firefox enhancements—all indications are that Mozilla are determined to keep pushing the envelope.

Firefox Quantum is a fast, resource-friendly, intelligently designed product. Browsing in Firefox is simply a more enjoyable experience, what more could you ask?

 By Paddi MacDonnell - Orginal Post: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2017/11/is-firefox-quantum-really-any-good/

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5 Ways to Design for Customers and Search Engines

Business owners and web designers are pulled in many different directions when determining what features and content they should add to their website. Variables like site colors, button designs, animations, copy and messaging, user flow, search engine optimization, fonts, photos and video, page performance and more all play a role in how an overall design and user experience come together.

Of the variables mentioned—and there are certainly some that were left out—SEO is probably the most heavily weighted as most businesses want to be at the top of search results for their industry.
…by designing your site for Google, and not for your customers, you are actually hurting your rankings, not helping them.
However, designing for search engines can mean sacrificing too much of the user experience for the sake of appeasing the robots that crawl your site and determine ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This, in turn, will cause visitors to spend less time on your site, or to leave the site before performing an action such as submitting a lead form.

Ironically enough, search engines like Google then factor in metrics like session duration, bounce rate, and average pages per session to determine whether your website is worth ranking. In other words, by designing your site for Google, and not for your customers, you are actually hurting your rankings, not helping them.

You should, instead, design your website with your customer in mind.

1. START WITH USER EXPERIENCE

Start by asking yourself a couple of questions regarding the user experience (UX). For example, why do I want customers to visit my site? Am I trying to sell them something directly on my website, or am I trying to entice them to contact my business or sign up for a newsletter? Do I want them to visit various webpages on my site in a certain order (i.e. the home page, about page, services page and contact page) or am I simply wanting readers to visit blog articles?
How you answer these questions will determine how you create your user flow. You want to start with the first page in the user’s journey (i.e. the Home page), then connect pages within the user experience that ultimately lead a visitor to the final goal (i.e. submitting a contact form or making a purchase).
Once you have determined how visitors flow throughout your site, you’ll want to make sure that the copy, or site text, contains subject matter that is concise and informative, with keywords your visitors are searching for prior to landing on your site.

Do not keyword stuff, as readers will find this sort of copy very annoying and search engines will penalize you for such a style of writing.

You’ll also want to make sure that your copy uses proper grammar, and is easily readable (i.e. doesn’t use super long sentences or big words).

Finally, you want titles that describe the main points of the text so that visitors can skim through the copy to find what they are looking for.

2. ALWAYS PROPERLY MANAGE IMAGES ON YOUR SITE

Within the various paragraphs of text, you’ll want to link users to the next page or product that is a continuation of the copy. And, you’ll want the link—which is the next step in the user flow—to be as obvious as possible, such as a nice big button right under the last paragraph of text.

For example, if you write a paragraph talking about how great your organic men’s t-shirts are, link that paragraph to your Men’s Organic T’s products so that customers are taken to the next stage in the purchase funnel. In this scenario, it may be helpful to have the button read “Click Here to Buy Organic Tees” or to just have a picture of the product and a button within the picture (sort of like the format for a Google Display ad).

It also helps to include images alongside your paragraphs that represent the subject matter within the corresponding text, even if the images aren’t linked (though they should be). Just be sure to compress and/or resize your images beforehand in a photo editing software like Photoshop or GIMP to maintain faster page loading speeds. Larger images slow down your site as they are larger in file size.

Plus, be sure to add a title to your image so that the Google crawl bots know what is in the image. Google’s bots can’t see images but Google loves recommending images to people in search results, so Titles and Meta-tags with relative keywords are the way they can “see” what’s in your image.

Finally, be sure to look up how to save your images in “Progressive” format, as this helps speed up the loading process of larger images on your site. Proper management of images on your site appeases both website visitors and search engines alike.

3. MAKE SURE YOUR WEBSITE FOCUSES ON A NICHE

Make sure that everything important on your site is accessible within 3 clicks.

The key thing to remember at all stages of your web design is that people are looking for something specific when landing on your site, and are wanting to obtain that specific thing as fast as they can without having to be on your site too long or having to visit too many sites.

Your site should be centered around a specific thing or niche so that customers or visitors will know they have landed on the right site immediately. In other words, you are attracting a very specific type of site visitor with a higher chance of performing an action when they land on your site.

Once they have recognized that your site has what they want, you must make it easier for visitors to obtain the item they came for. This means not making your visitors navigate to 5 different pages to finally land where they were wanting to land or find what they were after. In other words don’t bury the lead! This keeps visitors from getting frustrated and giving up, thus exiting your site and increasing your bounce rates or exit percentages.
 
4. KEEP YOUR SITE SECURE

People usually rate security as one of the most important factors when visiting someone’s site and deciding on a service. If your site is extremely slow, looks outdated, and doesn’t have any indication that it is secure, it will turn away visitors faster than the pages can load.
However, if your site uses an SSL Certificate to secure the transfer of information between customers and the site, you’ll immediately make visitors feel more secure and thus increase your chances of a conversion.

Some websites go so far as to add a logo of the type of security certificates or software they use to add more security to something like, for example, a checkout page on an eCommerce site.

Surprisingly, this has been proven to comfort customers during the checkout process.

It should be noted that you should only add the logo of the security programs you are implementing, as adding a logo of a program you don’t use to create the illusion of security is highly illegal.

5. OFFER WHAT VISITORS WANT

In the end, it comes down to whether or not your site has something to offer its visitors. This is why so many marketing companies talk about the importance of good and consistent content. Think of content in a variety of ways – it can be blogs, videos, new products, or new images.

These things should be continuously added or enhanced throughout your site. Your website and web design should consistently be getting better each day.

Additionally, good content should be matched with a high-performance, easy-to-navigate site that delivers what they need fast and in an aesthetically pleasing way. Add to that the comfort of security, and you’ve got yourself a site that will not only perform well for visitors, but also for search engines.

By Mike Davies - Orginal Post: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2017/11/5-ways-to-design-for-customers-and-search-engines/

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Bettter Understanding About The Dark Web

The Dark Web - Better Understanding

In today’s modern world we can’t think a single moment without the power of Internet. It is a kind of blessing for modern world. The power of the world biggest network started its journey in 1989 by an English scientist Tim Berners-Lee. From that time being, it is known the World Wide Web, that in short WWW.

Internet is the vast network system. A huge number of information stored on Internet. Everyday millions of people access millions of information. Generally, what we the general user access the general content of internet but this is not the complete version of internet technology. A lots of amount content, even 400-500 times more content on the internet hidden from the general users. That cannot be accessed directly or through search engine. This part of internet known as Dark Web.

What is Dark Web:

Dark web is a kind of World Wide Web content that actually hidden in darkness or exists on darknets. Though it also can be access by public internet but for accessing this, people need to an additional or specific software or configuration. Another important thing is, these web contents are not indexing by search engines. So, general user can’t get authorization to access it directly from their browsers.

How Data Hidden in Dark Web:

Every search engine creates an index, that helps for searching specific data what are stored on websites or other online resources. But the search engines are not stored the data that stored on the Dark Web. Because it can’t be seen by the search engine AI. Those AI has some bindings or incompatibilities and technical hurdles to completing such kind of indexing.

Purpose of Dark Web:

Actually, the main purpose of the Dark Web is not positive. It is used for the Darknet marketplace. This marketplace is so much popular to the criminal and other terrorist organizations. They use Dark Web to communicate with other terrorist or criminal group over the internet by sitting different location on earth.

The most successful anonymous marketplace on Dark Web is Silk Road. It is also the first successful anonymous marketplace. It is founded in 2011. It an online buy sell platform like Amazon/Ebay for criminal to buy and sell illegal goods (like Guns, Drugs) with the use of bitcoin. A bitcoin is a digital currency that is untraceable.

Currently this site is down. It was shut down in 2013. After shutting down an exciting information break out on the FBI news portal about this site.

According to the FBI, “Silk Road, the market place had accumulated 1,400 vendors and 957,079 registered users. It had brokered more than 1.2 million transaction worth $214 million.”

How to Access the Dark Web:

To access the Dark Web is not a difficult process. Different types of software can make it possible to access the Dark Web. One of the most popular software is Tor. It’s a web browser Bundle. Go to www.torproject.com and download the browser bundle and install on your PC to access the Dark Web.

Please noted that, you need to be careful while browsing the Dark Web. It is believed that, you were being monitored while you are browsing the Dark Web. Besides, it also recommends to place a tape over your webcam for prevent you from monitoring.

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What is Cloud Hosting? Cloud Hosting Principals with Details

What is Cloud Hosting? Cloud Hosting Principals with Details

The world is running. It is running faster than we think. It is going to be run as fast as possible. The whole thing depends on the innovative technologies those have already exist or going to be happened in near future.

Cloud hosting is one of the most innovative technology based on Cloud computing. It is a technology where the unlimited number of computer or machines perform as one computer system. Besides Cloud hosting, there are others hosting solution which have already exist. One hosting solution is shared and other is dedicated. But those solutions are depending on only one machine. So, it is a safer and guaranteed security from the cloud hosting as it run by many servers.

A Little Bit History:

The whole cloud hosting is divided into numerous number of steps or phases. It includes the computing grid and utility criteria, ASP(Application Service Provision), and SaaS(Software as a Service).

The total idea was first introduced in the sixties by J.C.R. Licklider. He was one of the person who worked the development of ARPANET(Advance Research Project Agency Network).

He thought that, we need a network that can make an interconnected relation to everyone and also be authorized programs and data from any website, from anywhere. In technically, it is a globally interconnected system.

About the vision of Licklider, the product marketing director at AMD Margaret Lewis said that, “It is a vision that sounds a lot like what we are calling cloud computing.”

How It Works:

To know the work process of the cloud hosting, the best example in today’s world would be point to the mighty Google. Google is the world giant search engine who has billions of resources that distributed over thousands of cloud servers. It will be more clear that, a user never face that the downtime of Google in the past decade.

The power of cloud server that helps to perform very specific tasks eventually any server in cloud is down or stop working. When it really happens, the other servers are ready to provide the backup service and deliver the user results that user really want to know.

Cloud Vs Internet:

Actually, these two terms have a lot of difference. The whole network thing we called it Internet whereas cloud is a very tiny piece of the internet. Here internet works as one macroscopic cloud system by the help it a user can see the cloud hosting idea more precisely.

But the on similarity is that, both of the Internet and cloud hosting are invented for the grown out of an essential connection between all humans over the world from the different places.

It is not so far that, people from the different location can control the data flow to and from the cloud more easily and time consuming process. It helps the global internet hierarchy that connect and share data, thoughts, stories, idea and discussion more broaden angle.

Cloud Hosting, what you actually need to know:

In the web, there are thousands of cloud hosting providers. Each of the provider serves their best service to their customers. Digital Ocean, Host Gators are the most popular and common in cloud hosting services. But besides these, there are also others service providers.

Before take a service of cloud hosting, a user must need to know some key features, that helps himself to take a right decision what a user really want for his/her business or personal use.

Instant deployment

A healthy amount of memory

Flexible controlling with cPanel, root access, and SSH logins

Performance faster as like SSD speed booster system

Managed cloud hosting features

Above all of the things you must know and be conscious before take a service of cloud hosting platform. Besides all of these, you should be aware of the costing system.

Basically, the cloud hosting service starting price from $15 up to $100+ from reputed hosting service providers.

Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting:

On the above discussion,there only talking about the benefit and other things of cloud hosting service. It is common that, everything that has some advantages also has some disadvantages. Cloud hosting is not the out of this circumstances. It has several disadvantages too. The most three disadvantages are discussing below.

Overpriced:Basically, cloud hosting service is an overpriced thing. A user need to pay a little bit higher price that another hosting platform like shared or dedicated. Users need to pay higher because its own VPS options and the terms of resources and reliability.

Security Issue:It is really tough to feel that, the data a user provided is really kept in private? You shared your data in cloud space with other customers. It concern is mitigated. Because sometimes user don’t opt for a multi-tenant cloud servers than a single-tenant cloud hosting.

Management Control:Cloud hosting management is not so easy. You need to be an expertise about the manual data management system. So, if you are not that expertise, you will be running up by the unnecessary costs.

Actually, it is not the negative or totally disadvantage side of the cloud hosting. Because the user of database controlling already know that, managing a network is really like a pain, that pain feel like somebody hurt the butt so rudely.

Types of Cloud Hosting Services:

Web hosting services are divided into shared, VPS and dedicated options. But cloud hosting service is divided the following generalized categories.

Private Cloud:

Private cloud is mainly the data underlying that services are kept in private. Like, hardware information, storage, and network. All of these are allotted in a single tenant system under a client or a company.

Public Cloud:

This cloud service is works like an open source system. Here the data are open for all. All of the information under this cloud platform authorized publicly. Google Cloud platform, Amazon EC2 are the most powerful example of public cloud service.

Hybrid Cloud:

Hybrid cloud is a hosting option that mix up the public and private hosting environments. It is a powerful cloud system the is being good security system but access the public authorization. So, this cloud perform is more capitalizing on the economic benefit of public cloud resources.

VPS Cloud:

A VPS is still subject to hardware failure, whereas a cloud web server will just transfer data to another machine without the owner experiencing downtime or data loss.

Key Benefit of Cloud Servers:

Cloud hosting server is more flexible and scalable which have an extra resource that is accessed as when we needed. Besides, it is also cost effective if you are really expertise in data management system. Because, in cloud service client only pay what actually they used and when they want to use.

But most important key benefit of cloud server is reliability. For the huge number of available server user can shift their resources if some of the servers are down or stopped. This shifting also control to prevent uncertain outside affects like data loss or data redundancy.

At the End:

In today’s world cloud hosting is become more popular day by day for the primary alternative for business or individuals performs. Besides it is also more economical, safe and resourceful that can optimize users need in efficient and convenient way. That the main rule of productivity. So, in a word, it can be said that, cloud hosting will hold the future.

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Sega Mega Drive Console for High Quality Games

Mega Drive Console for High Quality Games

Who doesn’t love gaming? It is hard to find anyone who really doesn’t like to play game. So, it is the hottest topic in current era.

After the invention of personal computer, gaming becomes so popular that is near to a person. People who have a personal computer, he/she easily can buy a game on online store or physical store and can play game on his/her personal computer.

Though playing game of personal computer is fun but the real gamers are really freak. Most of them are not happy to playing game on personal computer only. Because playing game on personal computer sometime becomes irritated. So, they are looking for a gaming console to play their desire games.

For the gamers, in marketplace there are some companies whom are producing gaming console.Like, Xbox from Microsoft, Play Station from Sony, Nintendo Wii U. All of them are really popular in present situation.

Besides all of those console Mega Drive is also gaming console. It was so much popular in worldwide at the time it first come to the market and became much more popular on the regions those are the outside of North America.

History Behind Mega Drive:

Actually, the Mega Drive is called Sega Mega Drive. But in North America it called Sega Genesis as well as Super Game Boy also. The Super Game Boy named come from the later Super Aladdin Boy in South Korea. In 1988 the Super Aladdin Boy gaming console was developed by Sega. It was a cartridge based video game console.

Mega Drive is the third gaming home console from the Sega. After the SG-1000 which includes SG-1000 II and Mark III (also called the Sega Master System). In the development process the Mega Drive was also called the Sega Mark V, which was the codenamed of Mega Drive. But now it is become a part of fourth generation video gaming consoles.

Sega Drive had a software library system. For these, more than thousands of games released for this gaming system and store on software library. So, on that time, gamers didn’t buy game from market. The Mega Drive had built game compatibility at its time being.

The main competitors for Mega Drive was Nintendo’s Famicom (NES) and following on Super Famicom (SNES). Besides this, NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 (a personal computer engine in Japan), SNK’s Neo Geo, Atari Jaguar and other numerous number of home consoles and computers is always the biggest console wars of all the time.

Hardware Configuration:

Mega Drive also known as Sega Genesis is mainly a 16-bit home video game console. This gaming console builds on the technology that found in the Master System with adaptors and backwards compatible. Besides, it is upping its technical specifications that’s demanding more on gameplay, sound system and graphical interfaceso that, a number of numerous changes happened on the design of consoles that still continue.

The output Mega Drive sounds is in stereo mode and it can produce some clearer graphical views. All the Mega Drives have a top loading design like the cumbersome VCR-style cartridge loading from the Western NES that helps to removable controllers. From the day one of the console, the console can allow hardware expansions that is help for expand the configuration of the hardware system for revision versions.

In the time being of 1988, the time of its release it was the most powerful gaming console that surpassing the personal computer engine TurboGrafx-16. But the power optimization system was not surpassed until the 1990 when the Neo Geo was come in the gaming console marketplace.

Like to compare with the other home computer on that time, it was not that kind of powerful like the Sharp X6800 as know the Japan Exclusive Computer that released in 1987 or FM Towns which released later on 1989. But the Mega Drive was more powerful than other Western home computers in the late of 80s including the Amiga.

Technical Specifications:

The system master clock rate is 53.70 MHz in NTSC and 59.21MHz in PAL. The frame rate per cycle of master clock is 896,040 in NTSC and 1,067,040 in PAL, where per scanline in master clock is 3420.

Processor:

Main CPU:Motorola 68000

Clock rate: 7.670453 MHz (NTSC), 7.600489 MHz (PAL)

Instruction set: 16‑bit and 32‑bit CISC instructions

Data bus width: 32-bit internal, 16‑bit external

External data bus clock rate: 5 MHz (5 MB/s external data access bandwidth)

Arithmetic logic units: 16-bit data ALU, 32-bit address ALU (2x 16-bit ALU)

Sound CPU: Zilog Z80

Clock rate: 3.579545 MHz (NTSC), 3.546894 MHz (PAL)

Data bus width: 8‑bit

CPU instruction performance: 1.861363 MIPS (NTSC), 1.844386 MIPS (PAL)

68000 performance: 1.342329 MIPS (NTSC), 1.330086 MIPS (PAL)

Z80 performance: 0.519034 MIPS (NTSC), 0.5143 MIPS (PAL)

Sound:

FM sound chip: Yamaha YM2612, clocked at the 68000, clock speed (7.670453 MHz in NTSC, 7.600489 MHz in PAL)

PCM sampling quality: 8‑bit depth, 8–22 kHz sampling rate

IRQ interrupt capabilities: IRQ2 sound interrupt

PSG sound chip: Sega PSG (SN76496), clocked at the Z80 clock speed (3.579545 MHz in NTSC, 3.546894 MHz in PAL) and built into the VDP

Four audio channels: Three channels of pure square wave tones, and one noise channel

Graphics:

GPU: Sega 315‑5313 VDP (Yamaha YM7101)

Clock rate: 13.423294 MHz (NTSC), 13.300856 MHz (PAL)

Pixel clock rate: 6.711647 MHz (NTSC), 6.650428 MHz (PAL)

Internal data bus: 16-bit

External data buses: 16-bit CPU bus, 8/16-bit VRAM bus (Dual Port VRAM, 16-bit RAM/SAM, 8-bit RAM)

IRQ interrupt capabilities: IRQ6 VBlank interrupt, IRQ4 H‑Int (Horizontal Interrupt) scanline interrupt

Video Encoder DAC: Sony CXA1145 (NTSC/PAL)/ Fujitsu MB3514 (PAL)

Color burst clock frequency: 3.579545 MHz (NTSC), 4.433618 MHz (PAL)

Refresh rate: 59.92274 Hz (NTSC), 49.701459 Hz (PAL)

Progressive scan resolutions:

NTSC: 320×224, 256×224

PAL: 320×224, 256×224, 320×240, 256×240

Interlaced resolutions:

NTSC: 320×448, 256×448

PAL: 320×448, 256×448, 320×480, 256×480

Memory:

System RAM: 136 KB

Main RAM: 64 KB

VRAM: 64 KB

FPM DRAM: 64 KB

SAM buffer cache: 256 bytes

Audio RAM: 8 KB

VDP internal cache: 232 bytes

Sprite cache: 80 bytes

Cartridge memory: 512–8224 KB

ROM: 512 KB to 8 MB

SRAM: 8 KB to 32 KB

Bandwidth:

Main RAM: 10.526314 MB/s (16-bit, 5.263157 MHz)

VRAM: 8–11.764705 MB/s (NTSC), 8–8.333333 MB/s (PAL)

Audio RAM: 3.030303 MB/s (8-bit, 3.030303 MHz)

Cartridge ROM bandwidth: 10 MB/s

Models:

Mega Drive:

The main Mega Drive measures 28cm x 21.2cm x 7cm. Its top unit divided into two parts or components. One is a circular emboss which carries the cartridge slot and other one is tagline. But in the later improvise version the tagline was omitted. There also a control panel, which containing the power and reset options and for the headphones jack there is a volume slider. Though the headphone jack was used for stereo sound the audio output system in the original model was mono using A/V port. So, the A/V port convert the sound system slightly.

But in different country there is a little bit differences in model. Like in Asian, Japanese and South Korean models there is cartridge locking system that prevents cartridges for being removed while the power button is on. In the improvise version the TradeMark security system is added also. This security ensured that, Mega Drive became an intellectual property globally.

Mega Drive 2:

But in later 1993 the Mega Drive 2 was released. This one was the most cost reduced design from the very first one. It measurement was 22cm x 21.2cm x 5.9 cm.

In this model the stereo headphone jacks were being removed. Instead of, there was a favor of output through a redesigned A/V port which includes 9 pins.

But a major problem of Mega Drive 2 was lacks a Z80, actually Zilog Z80. Z80 was the most important chip on this time for the Mega Drive 2. Because the lacking of this chip many games that would run on Mega Drive 2 was no sound at all. But in the later revision versions, Z80 integrated into a custom ASIC that incorporated with major chip components.

Genesis 3:

In 1998 a small version of Mega Drive released only for American market. This time it was called the Genesis 3. This version of Mega Drive is released by Majesco. In this version, all kind of bugs including memory controller bugs were being fixed like unplayable some games and the Sega CD as well as 32X unusable rendering problems.

Some Popular Games of Mega Drive:

There were very popular games which ran on Mega Drive at time of it was released. Some of are, Phantasy Star IV, Shining Force II, Gunstar Heroes, The Revenge of Shinobi, Ghouls 'n Ghosts.

It is hardly that the Mega Drive was the most successful video gaming console on its time era. This gaming console was sold over 40 million of unit internationally including United States, Japan, Western Europe and Brazil. Though Mega Drive was an analogue machine type console but it is not totally ancient or nostalgic or dead. It will be still fun to play the most popular games of Mega Drive with friends and family with this console. It costs also exciting and demanding experience that really remembering.

See full specifications and price here: https://ebgames.com.au/loot-220618-Sega-Mega-Drive-Classic-Console-Loot

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