Page 12 - Technology Facts

There was a Nintendo 64 accessory never released in the U.S. that let you play games online! What was it?

The accessory for the Nintendo 64 was known as the Nintendo 64DD, and was a disk drive that would attach to the bottom of your console and allow you to use a variety of different services. You were able to surf the Internet, listen to music, play unreleased games, and play online with people around the world!

That’s right; you could play a game such as Pokémon Stadium with someone who lived on the other side of the planet, something that was groundbreaking technology for a console in the 90’s! Why wasn’t this around when you were a kid? Read the source to find out all the details!

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A New Kind of Velcro has been Invented, and it’s 8 Times as Strong as the Original!

Anyone else have a love-hate relationship with Velcro? Sure, it’s great to hold stuff together. But, it’s noisy to pull apart, it pulls at your clothes, and it falls apart easily. That’s why Leonard Duffy, a 66 year old architect, decided to reinvent the original.

He describes his new version of Velcro as a “sliding engaging fastener” that he says is made up of “islands with undercut edges that self-align then slide into interlocked positions, resisting shear and uplift.” Sounds complicated, but basically it’s just a newer version of Velcro’s “hook and loop” connectors. This invention is 8 times as strong as the original Velcro and much more durable.

It took Duffy 8 years and $40,000 to develop his new version of Velcro, and it’s currently being used by prosthetic companies in the development of new, waterproof casts.

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There is a new type of bulletproof armor that can withstand a grenade at point blank range!

The vest is made up of silicon carbide ceramic matrices and laminates, in other words, a very strong material. You may be thinking to yourself that it is impossible for something to withstand a grenade explosion at point blank range, well you would be wrong.

The armor is designed with two-inch-wide circular discs that overlap. These multiple overlapping discs absorb any sort of damage evenly. To prove how strong Dragon Skin was, many television shows on the History Channel have used it in demonstrations through a variety of tests. Some of these tests include firing multiple assault rifles at the armor, even with steel piercing rounds! Although the vest was slightly damage, no bullets were able to penetrate the armor!

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A video game controller won an Emmy! Which one?

Allow me to add to the Xbox vs. PS3 debate by providing you with some information about a controller that won an Emmy! The controller that won the Emmy was the Ps3 DualShock controller, on January 8th, 2007.

The award was given to Sony for ‘Peripheral Development and Technological Impact of Video Game Controllers’, whatever that means. What’s funny about this instance is that when the award was given to Sony, they accidentally said that it was awarded to Sixaxis (their old controller), however they soon corrected their mistake.

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Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were blatantly traced for numerous 80s and 90s videogames!

When artwork in video games seems to look too realistic to be actually drawn by the artist, then it actually might be too realistic, as many vintage games have stolen images from movies, album covers, paintings and even other games. The subjects here aren't simply inspired designs or characters and this happened pretty often in the 1980s and 1990s. Crunch time would leave game producers in a pinch and without a character outline. So, they’d tell their illustrators to get creative from Schwartzenegger and Stallone movies, and they’d end up exact replicas basically.

Maybe, they didn’t tell their illustrators that and they just blatantly used their images to sell their video games. Either way, it happened all too often in those two decades. Had the original artists ever seen what the illustrators had done, they would have been up a creek without a paddle. There would be litigations and lawsuits happening everywhere and the gaming industry would have been hit hard.

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