TechEBlog -

SEGA Game Gear Turns 36 With a Color Screen That Drank Batteries

By Bill Smith October 6, 2026

SEGA shipped its first handheld in Japan on October 6, 1990, priced at ¥19,800 ($320 today) and built under the internal name Project Mercury. Hayao Nakayama had pushed the company to answer the Game Boy, which Nintendo had put on shelves the year before. Engineers reused the Master System’s Zilog Z80 running at about 3.5 MHz and the same Texas Instruments sound chip, then widened the color palette from 64 shades to 4,096. A 3.2-inch backlit screen, 160 by 144 pixels and able to show 32 colors at once, sat between grips shaped like a shrunken Genesis pad. Six AA batteries fed a cold-cathode fluorescent lamp behind the glass. Playtime landed between three and five hours. A Game Boy on four AAs could run past thirty.

256GB Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra for $980 and 5 More October Prime Day Tech Deals (Part 1)

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra, priced at $979.99 for Prime Day (was $1,400), still carries the flat sides and a tucked-away S Pen, now inside a body that measures 163.6 by 78.1 by 7.9 millimeters and weighs 214 grams. Outdoor glare has less room to win on the 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED panel, which shifts between 1Hz and 120Hz, resolves 3120 by 1440, and is rated to a peak of 2600 nits, with an anti-reflective coat and a privacy setting that narrows the viewing angle so a neighbor on the train sees less of the screen. Four cameras sit in the rear island: a 200-megapixel main sensor opened to f/1.4, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, a 10-megapixel lens at 3x, and a 50-megapixel periscope at 5x opened to f/2.9, covering stills out to a claimed 100x digital reach and 8K video from the main sensor, with a 12-megapixel camera up front. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, built on a 3-nanometer process, pairs with 12GB of memory. A 5,000mAh cell refills at 60 watts on a cable and 25 watts on a Qi2 wireless pad, and the phone carries an IP68 rating for dust and a short dip in water.

Curiosity Marks Five Thousand Martian Days With a Postcard From Chocolatal

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

NASA’s Curiosity has spent so long inside Gale Crater that a round number now feels less like a party than a quiet check of the odometer. On August 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time, the rover reached its 5,000th sol, a Martian day that runs about 39 minutes longer than one on Earth. Parked on a sandy ridge the team calls Chocolatal, in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, it turned its black-and-white navigation cameras on the slope below and took the first half of what NASA later released as a postcard.

DOOM on the Vectrex Draws a Glowing Hell on a Forty Year Old Screen

By Bill Smith October 6, 2026

Milton Bradley shipped the Vectrex in 1982 as a complete arcade cabinet small enough for a coffee table. A screen, a speaker, a joystick, and a cartridge slot arrived in one case. Games showed up as bright strokes rather than blocks of color. Mine Storm, the pack-in, looked related to Asteroids because both were drawn the same way: an electron beam steered across phosphor, switched on for a line, switched off for the jump to the next point. Forty-four years later, footage of DOOM running on that same tube has been passing around, and the corridors of the first episode are still recognizable once the walls become thin glowing strokes.

Billet Labs Built a Fanless Gaming PC Until One Fan Made It Work

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

Felix at Billet Labs set out to park a real gaming PC in a living room and leave the fans off. A Ryzen 9 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 share a Gigabyte AORUS Pro B850 board, fed by a 600 watt Flex ATX supply, and the pair can pull well past 500 watts once a demanding game settles in. Air coolers handle that load by moving a lot of air. Moving a lot of air makes noise. An earlier attempt had hung the same idea on a cast iron radiator and ended near 100 kilograms, so this version started over on a hand-worked aluminum block that brings the finished machine down to about 15.7 kilograms once the loop holds roughly two liters of water.