Counter Strike 1.6 – SteelSeries

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In 1983, Nintendo released the Family Computer (or Famicom) in Japan. The Famicom supported high-resolution sprites, larger color palettes, and tiled backgrounds. This allowed Famicom games to be longer and have more detailed graphics. Nintendo began attempts to bring their Famicom to the U.S. after the video game market had crashed. In the U.S., video games were seen as a fad that had already passed. To distinguish its product from older game consoles, Nintendo released their Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) which used a front-loading cartridge port similar to a VCR, included a plastic “robot” (R.O.B.), and was initially advertised as a toy. The NES was the highest selling console in the history of North America and revitalized the video game market. Mario of Super Mario Bros. became a global icon starting with his NES games. Nintendo took an unusual stance with third-party developers for its console. Nintendo contractually restricted third-party developers to three NES titles per year and forbade them from developing for other video game consoles. The practice ensured Nintendo’s market dominance and prevented the flood of trash titles that had helped kill the Atari, but was ruled illegal late in the console’s life cycle.

Sega’s Master System was intended to compete with the NES, but never gained any significant market share in the US or Japan and was barely profitable. It fared notably better in PAL territories. In Europe and South America, the Master System competed with the NES and saw new game releases even after Sega’s next-generation Mega Drive was released. In Brazil where strict importation laws and rampant piracy kept out competitors, the Master System outsold the NES by a massive margin and remained popular into the 1990s.[4] Jack Tramiel, after buying Atari, downsizing its staff, and settling its legal disputes, attempted to bring Atari back into the home console market. Atari released a smaller, sleeker, cheaper version of their popular Atari 2600. They also released the Atari 7800, a console technologically comparable with the NES and backwards compatible with the 2600. Finally Atari repackaged its 8-bit XE home computer as the XEGS game console. The new consoles helped Atari claw its way out of debt, but failed to gain much market share from Nintendo. Atari’s lack of funds meant that its consoles saw fewer releases, lower production values (both the manuals and the game labels were frequently black and white), and limited distribution.

In the later part of the third generation, Nintendo also introduced the Game Boy, which almost single-handedly solidified and then proceeded to dominate the previously scattered handheld market for 15 years. While the Game Boy product line was incrementally updated every few years, until the Game Boy Micro and Nintendo DS, and partially the Game Boy Color, all Game Boy products were backwards compatible with the original released in 1989. Since the Game Boy’s release, Nintendo had dominated the handheld market. Additionally two popular 8-bit computers, the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, were repackaged as the Commodore 64 Games System and Amstrad GX4000 respectively, for entry into the console market.

NEC brought the first fourth-generation console to market with their PC Engine (or TurboGrafx16) when Hudson Soft approached them with an advanced graphics chip. Hudson had previously approached Nintendo, only to be rebuffed by a company still raking in the profits of the NES. The TurboGrafx used the unusual HuCard format to store games. The small size of these proprietary cards allowed NEC to re-release the console as a handheld game console. The PC Engine enjoyed brisk sales in Japan, but its North American counterpart, the TurboGrafx, lagged behind the competition. The console never saw an official release in Europe, but clones and North American imports were available in some markets starting in 1990. NEC advertised their console as “16-bit” to highlight its advances over the NES. This started the trend of all subsequent fourth generations consoles being advertised as 16 bit. Many people still refer to this generation as the 16-bit generation, and often refer to the third generation as “8-bit”.

Sega scaled down and adapted their Sega System 16 (used to power arcade hits like Altered Beast and Shinobi) into the Mega Drive (sold as the Genesis in North America) and released it with a near arcade-perfect port of Altered Beast. Sega’s console met lukewarm sales in Japan, but skyrocketed to first place in PAL markets, and made major inroads in North America. Propelled by its effective “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” marketing campaign, Sega capitalized on the Genesis’s technological superiority over the NES, faithful ports of popular arcade games, and competitive pricing. The arcade gaming company SNK developed the high end Neo Geo MVS arcade system which used interchangeable cartridges similar to home consoles. Building on the success of the MVS, SNK repackaged the NeoGeo as the Neo Geo AES home console. Though technologically superior to the other fourth-generation consoles, the AES and its games were prohibitively expensive, which kept sales low and prevented it from expanding outside its niche market and into serious competition with Nintendo and Sega. The AES did, however, amass a dedicated cult following, allowing it to see new releases into the 2000s. Fourth generation graphics chips allowed these consoles to reproduce the art styles that were becoming popular in arcades and on home computers. These games often featured lavish background scenery, huge characters, broader color pallettes, and increased emphasis on dithering and texture. Games written specifically for the NES, like Megaman, Shatterhand, and Super Mario Bros. 3 were able to work cleverly within its limitations. Ports of the increasingly detailed arcade and home computer games came up with various solutions. For example, when Capcom released Strider in the arcade they created an entirely separate Strider game for the NES that only incorporated themes and characters from the arcade.

In 1990 Nintendo finally brought their Super Famicom to market and brought it to the US as the Super NES (SNES) a year later. Its release marginalized the TurboGrafx and the Neo Geo, but came late enough for Sega to sell several million consoles in North America and gain a strong foothold. The same year the SNES was released Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog, which spiked Genesis sales, similar to Space Invaders on the Atari. Also, by 1992 the first fully licensed NFL Football game was released: NFL Sports Talk Football ’93, which was available only on the Genesis. This impact on Genesis sales, and the overall interest of realistic sports games, would start the trend of licensed sports games being viewed as necessary for the success of a console in the US. While Nintendo enjoyed dominance in Japan, and Sega in Europe, the competition between the two was particularly fierce and close in North America. Ultimately, the SNES outsold the Genesis, but only after Sega discontinued the Genesis to focus on the next generation of consoles.

One trait that remains peculiar to the fourth generation is the huge number of exclusive games. Both Sega and Nintendo were very successful and their consoles developed massive libraries of games. Both consoles had to be programmed in assembly to get the most out of them. A game optimized for the Genesis could take advantage of its faster CPU and sound chip. A game optimized for the SNES could take advantage of its graphics and its flexible, clean sound chip. Some game series, like Castlevania, saw separate system exclusive releases rather than an attempt to port one game to disparate platforms. When compact disc (CD) technology became available midway through the fourth generation, each company attempted to integrate it into their existing consoles in different ways. NEC and Sega released CD add-ons to their consoles in the form of the TurboGrafx-CD and Sega CD, but both were only moderately successful. NEC also released the TurboDuo which combined the TurboGrafx-16 and its TurboGrafx-CD add-on (along with the RAM and BIOS upgrade from the Super System Card) into one unit. SNK released a third version of the NeoGeo, the Neo Geo CD, allowing the company to release its games on a cheaper medium than the AES’s expensive cartridges, but it reached the market after Nintendo and Sega had already sold tens of millions of consoles each. Nintendo partnered with Sony to work on a CD add-on for the SNES, but the deal fell apart when they realized how much control Sony wanted. Sony would use their work with Nintendo as the basis for their PlayStation game console. While CDs became an increasingly visible part of the market, CD-reading technology was still expensive in the 1990s, limiting NEC’s and Sega’s add-ons’ sales.

The Sun is composed primarily of the chemical elements hydrogen and helium; they account for 74.9% and 23.8% of the mass of the Sun in the photosphere, respectively.[53] All heavier elements, called metals in astronomy, account for less than 2% of the mass, with oxygen (roughly 1% of the Sun’s mass), carbon (0.3%), neon (0.2%), and iron (0.2%) being the most abundant.[54]

The Sun inherited its chemical composition from the interstellar medium out of which it formed. The hydrogen and helium in the Sun were produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and the heavier elements were produced by stellar nucleosynthesis in generations of stars that completed their stellar evolution and returned their material to the interstellar medium before the formation of the Sun.[55] The chemical composition of the photosphere is normally considered representative of the composition of the primordial Solar System.[56] However, since the Sun formed, some of the helium and heavy elements have gravitationally settled from the photosphere. Therefore, in today’s photosphere the helium fraction is reduced, and the metallicity is only 84% of what it was in the protostellar phase (before nuclear fusion in the core started). The protostellar Sun’s composition is believed to have been 71.1% hydrogen, 27.4% helium, and 1.5% heavier elements.[53]

Today, nuclear fusion in the Sun’s core has modified the composition by converting hydrogen into helium, so the innermost portion of the Sun is now roughly 60% helium, with the abundance of heavier elements unchanged. Because heat is transferred from the Sun’s core by radiation rather than by convection (see Radiative zone below), none of the fusion products from the core have risen to the photosphere.[57]

The reactive core zone of “hydrogen burning”, where hydrogen is converted into helium, is starting to surround an inner core of “helium ash”. This development will continue and will eventually cause the Sun to leave the main sequence, to become a red giant.[58]

The solar heavy-element abundances described above are typically measured both using spectroscopy of the Sun’s photosphere and by measuring abundances in meteorites that have never been heated to melting temperatures. These meteorites are thought to retain the composition of the protostellar Sun and are thus not affected by settling of heavy elements. The two methods generally agree well.[17]
Singly ionized iron-group elements

In the 1970s, much research focused on the abundances of iron-group elements in the Sun.[59][60] Although significant research was done, until 1978 it was difficult to determine the abundances of some iron-group elements (e.g. cobalt and manganese) via spectrography because of their hyperfine structures.[59]

The first largely complete set of oscillator strengths of singly ionized iron-group elements were made available in the 1960s,[61] and these were subsequently improved.[62] In 1978, the abundances of singly ionized elements of the iron group were derived.[59]
Isotopic composition

Various authors have considered the existence of a gradient in the isotopic compositions of solar and planetary noble gases,[63] e.g. correlations between isotopic compositions of neon and xenon in the Sun and on the planets.[64]

Prior to 1983, it was thought that the whole Sun has the same composition as the solar atmosphere.[65] In 1983, it was claimed that it was fractionation in the Sun itself that caused the isotopic-composition relationship between the planetary and solar-wind-implanted noble gases.
The core of the Sun extends from the center to about 20–25% of the solar radius.[66] It has a density of up to 150 g/cm3[67][68] (about 150 times the density of water) and a temperature of close to 15.7 million kelvins (K).[68] By contrast, the Sun’s surface temperature is approximately 5,800 K. Recent analysis of SOHO mission data favors a faster rotation rate in the core than in the radiative zone above.[66] Through most of the Sun’s life, energy is produced by nuclear fusion in the core region through a series of steps called the p–p (proton–proton) chain; this process converts hydrogen into helium.[69] Only 0.8% of the energy generated in the Sun comes from the CNO cycle, though this proportion is expected to increase as the Sun becomes older.[70]

The core is the only region in the Sun that produces an appreciable amount of thermal energy through fusion; 99% of the power is generated within 24% of the Sun’s radius, and by 30% of the radius, fusion has stopped nearly entirely. The remainder of the Sun is heated by this energy as it is transferred outwards through many successive layers, finally to the solar photosphere where it escapes into space as sunlight or the kinetic energy of particles.[51][71]

The proton–proton chain occurs around 9.2×1037 times each second in the core, converting about 3.7×1038 protons into alpha particles (helium nuclei) every second (out of a total of ~8.9×1056 free protons in the Sun), or about 6.2×1011 kg/s.[51] Fusing four free protons (hydrogen nuclei) into a single alpha particle (helium nuclei) releases around 0.7% of the fused mass as energy,[72] so the Sun releases energy at the mass–energy conversion rate of 4.26 million metric tons per second, for 384.6 yottawatts (3.846×1026 W),[1] or 9.192×1010 megatons of TNT per second. Theoretical models of the Sun’s interior indicate a power density of approximately 276.5 W/m3,[73] a value that more nearly approximates reptile metabolism than a thermonuclear bomb.[e]

The fusion rate in the core is in a self-correcting equilibrium: a slightly higher rate of fusion would cause the core to heat up more and expand slightly against the weight of the outer layers, reducing the density and hence the fusion rate and correcting the perturbation; and a slightly lower rate would cause the core to cool and shrink slightly, increasing the density and increasing the fusion rate and again reverting it to its present rate.

From the core out to about 0.7 solar radii, thermal radiation is the primary means of energy transfer.[76] The transfer of energy through this zone is by radiation not by thermal convection. The temperature drops from approximately 7 million to 2 million kelvins with increasing distance from the core.[68] This temperature gradient is less than the value of the adiabatic lapse rate and hence cannot drive convection, hence, energy is transferred by radiation.[68] Ions of hydrogen and helium emit photons, which travel only a brief distance before being reabsorbed by other ions.[76] The density drops a hundredfold (from 20 g/cm3 to only 0.2 g/cm3) from 0.25 solar radii to the 0.7 radii, the top of the radiative zone.[76]
Tachocline
Main article: Tachocline

The radiative zone and the convective zone are separated by a transition layer, the tachocline. This is a region where the sharp regime change between the uniform rotation of the radiative zone and the differential rotation of the convection zone results in a large shear between the two—a condition where successive horizontal layers slide past one another.[77] The fluid motion of the convection zone above, slowly disappears from the top of this layer to its bottom where it matches that of the radiative zone. Presently, it is hypothesized (see Solar dynamo) that a magnetic dynamo within this layer generates the Sun’s magnetic field.[68]
Convective zone
Main article: Convection zone

The Sun’s convection zone extends from 0.7 solar radii (200,000 km) to near the surface. In this layer, the temperature is lower than in the radiative zone and heavier atoms are not fully ionized. As a result, radiative heat transport is less effective and convection moves the Sun’s energy outward through this layer. The density of the plasma is low enough to allow convective currents to develop. Material heated at the tachocline picks up heat and expands, thereby reducing its density and allowing it to rise. As a result, an orderly motion of the mass develops into thermal cells that carry the majority of the heat outward to the Sun’s photosphere above. Once the material diffusively and radiatively cools just beneath the photospheric surface, its density increases, and it sinks to the base of the convection zone, where it again picks up heat from the top of the radiative zone and the convective cycle continues. At the photosphere, the temperature has dropped to 5,700 K and the density to only 0.2 g/m3 (about 1/6,000 the density of air at sea level).[68]

The thermal columns of the convection zone form an imprint on the surface of the Sun giving it a granular appearance called the solar granulation at the smallest scale and supergranulation at larger scales. Turbulent convection in this outer part of the solar interior sustains “small-scale” dynamo action over the near-surface volume of the Sun.[68] The Sun’s thermal columns are Bénard cells and take the shape of hexagonal prisms