Sunday, March 31, 2019

Apple : March Madness live stream: how to watch the 2019 Elite Eight games online from anywhere

Apple : March Madness live stream: how to watch the 2019 Elite Eight games online from anywhere

March Madness live stream: how to watch the 2019 Elite Eight games online from anywhere

Posted: 31 Mar 2019 10:00 AM PDT

Things are getting very tense indeed as we go in to the Elite Eight round of the 2019 March Madness, which continues to build towards the National Championship game on Monday, April 8. And with TechRadar’s handy guide, you can make sure you get a 2019 March Madness live stream from wherever in the world you are.

How have your brackets for the 2019 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament held up so far? 68 teams entered and now only 8 remain - we sure hope you didn’t pick any First Four teams!

Duke and Michigan State won their Sweet Sixteen games in the East division to move onto the Elite Eight while Virginia and Purdue did the same in the South division. In the West division, Gonzaga and Texas Tech easily triumphed in their latest March Madness games to move onto the Elite Eight while Auburn and Kentucky walked away victorious from their close  games in the Midwest division.

March Madness 2019 has reached its final stages as the Elite Eight are set to battle it out for a place in the Final Four. During the third and final week of the tournament, each region’s winners will compete for a place in the National Championship to see who will be this year’s NCAA champion.

Whether you’re a student trying to watch your college’s team play, an alumni rooting for your alma mater or just a fan of the sport of basketball, we’ll show you how to live stream March Madness 2019 online from anywhere in the world.

How to live stream March Madness 2019 from outside your country

If you live in the US and want to know how to catch all of the games, then keep scrolling and we’ll tell you your best 2019 March Madness live stream and viewing options. There's even a service for you if you live elsewhere in the world.

But if you discover that your chosen broadcaster from your home country is geo-blocked then we can suggest a clever alternative (and no, it doesn’t involve finding some dodgy feed on Reddit). Using a VPN - or Virtual Private Network - you can change the IP address to one in a different state or country which does have the stream so that you can live stream March Madness 2019 from anywhere in the world. The process is very straightforward… 

How to watch March Madness 2019 in the US

If you live in the US and want to watch all 67 games in the NCAA tournament, then you’re in luck as there are plenty of ways to watch.

While you could watch the games on television, you can also do so from the NCAA’s own March Madness Live app. The app and accompanying website will show all 67 tournament games with a 3-hour free preview that will let you watch games airing on TBS, TNT and truTV. However, once the time limit is up, you’ll have to login using the credentials from your cable provider. One thing to note is that any games shown on CBS, which is free over-the-air, won’t count against the 3-hour time limit.

If you have a cable subscription and would prefer to watch March Madness on your TV, truTV will show all of the games in the First Four, CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV will show the first and second rounds, CBS and TBS will show the regional semifinals and finals and CBS will show the Final Four as well as the national championship.

Don’t want to pay for a premium cable subscription to watch March Madness? Don’t worry as there are a number of streaming services that give you access to CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV. To make things easier for you, we’ve listed some of our favorite options below.

And don't forget about our handy little VPN trick if you're outside the US when you try to watch and find that your preferred broadcaster's coverage is geo-blocked.

Your options to live stream March Madness 2019 online

One streaming service worth considering to watch this year's tournament is Sling TV. The company is currently running a promotion where new users can get 40% off its Sling Orange and Sling Blue packages for the first three months. Basically this means you can watch March Madness 2019 on Sling TV for as little as $15 per month during the tournament. Don't want Sling? Then these other options are worth a look, too.

PlayStation Vue $44.99 per month - PlayStation Vue's  basic Access package offers over 45 channels including ABC, TNT, ESPN and ESPN2. A 5-day trial to Playstation Vue is also available to help you get started.

DIRECTV NOW $50 per month - DIRECTV NOW gives users all the channels needed to watch the NBA and loads of other sporting events. Use DIRECTV NOW’s 7-day trial to test out the platform for yourself. 

YouTubeTV $40 per month - YouTubeTV gives you access to TNT, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN.

Hulu with Live TV $40 per month - Hulu with Live TV includes ABC, TNT, CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN.

Worldwide March Madness live stream with ESPN Player

March Madness is a phenomenon that doesn't necessarily translate that well globally. But if you want to know what all the fuss is about or you're a US expat wanting to catch the college basketball, then ESPN Player has you covered.

It's available in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia and comes at a cost of £9.99/€11.99 for the next month (or £69.99/€79.99 for a whole year to get additional content from ESPN).

That gets you live and on-demand coverage of every game from the 2019 March Madness, available on desktop and mobile devices.

March Madness: what is it and how does it work?

We can't imagine you will have landed on this page if you don't already know the answer to these questions. But just in case...

Over the course of three weeks, college basketball teams from across the US will play 67 games in total to decide which team will be crowned champion. The tradition dates all the way back to 1939 when there were just eight teams participating in the competition.

March Madness begins with Selection Sunday where 32 teams will gain automatic entry as a result of winning their respective conferences and the remaining teams will be picked by a selection committee. Besides learning which teams will play in the tournament, Sunday will also be the first day the bracket will be officially released to the public. The eight teams are divided into four regions and they are then seeded from one to 16 with the top team from each region earning the top seed. 

The NCAA tournament then enters the first round where the number one seed will face the number 16 team and the rest of the teams will be matched accordingly with low seed teams facing off against high seed teams. During the second week, the remaining teams will advance to the Sweet Sixteen and then the Elite Eight. Each region’s winners will then head to the Final Four during the third and final week of the tournament where they’ll compete for a place in the national championship to see who will be this year’s winner.

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Star spangled glamour: the mission to make space travel cooler than ever before

Posted: 31 Mar 2019 10:00 AM PDT

In all of human history, never have the faraway wonders of the galaxy felt closer to us than they do today, thanks to the ongoing advances in spacefaring technologies that science continues to make. Why, then, should there be any need to make space travel cool and sexy? 

First, let’s be clear about what we mean by sexy. Simply put: sexy sells. Whether it’s soft drinks, skateboards, or hair straighteners, being able to make the idea of something in some way attractive is what makes people want to buy into it. 

So when we talk about the prospect of space exploration, that’s clearly something you can’t go and pick up from the supermarket, or order through an online store. 

For the majority of the public, space doesn’t matter much beyond being a romantic backdrop for a kiss under the stars. So why should space matter to them? 

We saw this recently with Elon Musk's reveal of the official SpaceX spacesuit. It's nothing like the bulky suits of the past but a cool, slick-looking design that wouldn't look out of place in a movie. In fact, it looks achingly close to the suits worn in Pacific Rim. 

In an Instagram post, Musk summed up the trials of making space sexy, noting that it "was incredibly hard to balance esthetics and function. [It's] easy to do either separately."

Getting this balance right, though, is essential to the future of space travel - it's not just about function anymore but something much bigger, and for good reason.

Why space matters

As consumers of a news culture that’s almost perpetually dominated by the strife and strains of a world that seems hell-bent on self destruction, be it economically, politically, or literally, it would be easy to give up on the possibilities of space travel and focus instead on solving the problems that surround us. 

But if we don’t continue our efforts to venture into space, experts believe we’re in trouble. Stephen Hawking said it himself, we need to colonise another planet within 100 years or we’re doomed. 

Considering that we are living through a time when the US government has cut significant funds from NASA’s budget, it may never be more important than it is right now to stoke the fires of the public’s imagination when it comes to venturing into space. 

The right stories can inspire the next generation of astronauts, spacecraft designers, scientists and astrophysicists to take up the responsibility of space exploration. And with NASA’s bold new plan to get people to Mars by 2030, along with commercially-owned space companies promising to take space tourists to the moon within the next decade, there really is more reason to be excited than ever. 

An illustration of what NASA's Mars 2020 rover would look like, set to be launched in 2020. Its mission is to seek signs of habitable conditions on Mars (Image credit: NASA)

The challenge is in proving to people they need to learn more about space - whether to inspire them to one day work at NASA or to consider buying a ticket to the ionosphere from Elon Musk or Richard Branson. But how do we drum up interest when it seems so out of reach? With science-fiction, of course.

The role of science fiction

Science fiction itself is a vast genre that incorporates many forms of speculative fiction, from space travel, to time travel, making it a difficult subject to pin down for focused discussion.

More often than not, it offers fiction that’s grounded in science-based fact or emerging theory. There remains plenty of room for creative licence when it comes to speculating about the science and technology of the future – that’s why some stories straddle the line between science-fiction and fantasy, and why you’ll hear some people talking about ‘hard sci-fi’, which is a sub-genre characterised by a rigorous attention to scientific detail, rather than indulging in too many flights of speculative fancy.

The Fifth Element blended science fiction with fantasy (Image credit: Sony Pictures)

Science fiction has an important role to play in igniting interest in space because it can make it seem not only possible, but appealing, stylish and sexy, and this presents endlessly fruitful opportunities for the creative industries to explore ideas about what the future may hold for the human race, especially with regard to our relationship with space. 

I often start with what's new now and then create my own interpolations of what that technology will look like in the future.

Dave Dorman

We spoke to science fiction and fantasy illustrator Dave Dorman, whose work can be found in the pages of Star Wars and Alien comics, about the role sci-fi creators can play. 

“I find it helpful to use reference photos and articles/news stories about the latest technologies quite a bit," he told us. “The science fiction imagery I create often reflects current technology, machines, computers, robotics and other technical advances,” he explained. 

“I often start with what’s new now and then create my own interpolations of what that technology will look like in the future.

“I hope the fans who are seeing my work, as well as the amazing images created by other illustrators, painters, computer effects wizards and the rest, will be inspired to be the scientists, technicians and visionaries for our collective future, much like Bradbury, Asimov, Sturgeon and Heinlein were for the generation that were influential in running the space race in the middle of the 20th century.”

Living the high life on Mars

The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s hit novel, became a box office hit in 2015, raking in more than $663 million worldwide and moving up the ranks as one of the highest grossing sci-fi movies ever made. But it wasn’t just popular among mainstream movie audiences. It was also screened for the astronauts aboard the ISS as a special treat, because of its accuracy. That comes as no surprise considering Ridley Scott partnered up with NASA to make the scenes, science and tech look as real as possible.

What The Martian did so well was retain scientific integrity (naturally, the science it presents still met with some criticism) throughout a narrative journey that was able to hold the interests of an audience hungry for entertainment. With Matt Damon in the lead role, it didn’t just make speculative space sexy, it made (mostly) real space exciting – which is an even greater artistic feat. 

Matt Damon is stranded on Mars in The Martian (Image credit: Fox Movies)

The Martian isn’t even a rarity at the box office either. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a film in a very similar vein and although some of the science it presents isn’t entirely accurate, it still offers an experience of space that feels grounded in the real world, with two glamorous leads in Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar followed a similar path, and before that came Moon, Apollo 13, and so on, going all the way back to 2001: A Space Odyssey and beyond.

What these films prove is that it’s possible to combine authentic science with a little artistic license and still make space travel exciting and relevant to contemporary audiences. 

As with The Martian, perhaps the reason these films were hits with audiences is partially because their creators involved real world experts in the field. Kubrick famously shipped in a few dozen minds from the heart of NASA during the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Christopher Nolan worked with astrophysicist Kip Thorne when he was developing Interstellar.

In space, everyone wants to know who you wear

And yet sci-fi isn’t beholden to science when it wants to make space the place to be. 

The Fifth Element presents an inspiring vision of the near-future that's catwalk sexy and riven with real-world foibles.

Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element is a stellar example of a visually-stunning space opera that skews toward fantasy, but still retains an earth-bound sensibility, with its cab-driving protagonist winning contest tickets for a cruise ship holiday –in space. And who knows, maybe Branson’s sexy hotels will look like Fhloston Paradise 50 years down the line.

With superstar fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier crafting the look and the feel of the movie's characters, The Fifth Element presents an inspiring vision of the near-future that’s catwalk sexy and riven with real-world foibles.

Jean Paul Gaultier designed the costumes for Luc Besson's space opera The Fifth Element (Image credit: Sony Pictures)

More recently, the surprise hit and game-changer for Marvel Studios, Guardians of the Galaxy, exploded onto cinema screens with an extremely stylized look, grounded in the story of an orphan boy from Earth growing up on the criminal fringes of the cosmos.

Speaking about the creative process behind Guardians, writer-director James Gunn’s has said that his movie is "more about yellow and blue and teal and orange. But I also really wanted to up the ante with the pulp elements.” 

“So we hearken back a lot to 1950s/60s pulp novel colors and that look of Flash Gordon – both the 1980s version and the earlier comics. Really grabbing onto this pulp feeling and bringing it alive in a bright, big, colorful way was important." 

A still from Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Image credit: STX Entertainment)

Guardians 2 picked up the same ball and ran even further with it back in April and now Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has arrived in cinemas, oozing sci-fi chic with star-studded style (yep, Rihanna is in it) and an eye-popping palette of otherworldly sights and sounds.

Street cred in space

As superficial as it might sound, if we’ve learned anything from the success of sci-fi blockbusters, it’s that style certainly sells. 

Branson is tapping into the commercial appeal of a fashion brand to normalise the idea of buying a ticket to the moon.

The fly-on-the-wall footage of space travel from NASA that the public sees via YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat is dominated by bulky spacesuits and big dials on bland spaceships. 

It makes sense, then, that style-conscious Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic have enlisted Y-3 (the decade-long collaboration between designer Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas) to design and make the “flight-suits for our future astronauts and pilots [...] garments worn by our operations and maintenance teams as well as our hosting staff.” 

Branson is clearly tapping into the commercial appeal of a fashion name brand to normalise the idea of buying a ticket to the moon by aligning it with high-street fashion. It’s even got fashion bible GQ talking about it. Outer space meets inner city – and vice versa.

Although it’s not just commercial enterprises that are taking cues from the worlds of sci-fi and fashion to define what space travel and exploration will look like in the future. Potentially aware it has an image problem, NASA has recently teamed up with Reebok to create the Floatride Space Boot SB-01 that would look more at home in The Fifth Element than it would on the ISS. 

Reebok has reworked Sigourney Weaver's classic hi-top sneakers from Aliens (Image credit: Reebok)

This signals an interesting move for NASA, as well as Reebok. The sports design brand who isn’t new to space design having created the Alien Stompers to replicate the shoes Sigourney 'Ellen Ripley' Weaver wears in Aliens. But now moving from sci-fi space design to actual space design could open the floodgates for many other brands to put speculative, concept designs to good use.

Another great example of this marriage of real world and sci-fi design is the way car manufacturer Lexus was recently called upon to help with concepts for what transportation of the future might look like by Luc Besson for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. 

Inspiration for the Skyjet was mainly taken from nature. Dolphins, whales and sharks inspired aerodynamic design (Image credit: Lexus)

Using what the brand already implements into its vehicles, like artificial intelligence and an HMI (human machine interface), they helped Besson’s design team to dream up the Skyjet (pictured above, and at the top of this article), a single-seater spacecraft that was used throughout the movie. 

Feeding sci-fi with reality

Dorman sees a sci-fi as a vital source of inspiration for future-gazing engineers. 

“I believe the marriage of technology and science fiction right now (aided by current visual effects technology and artistry) helps make things once thought to be complete fantasy now seem more believable," he said. 

"I also think part of the job of the sci-fi artist is to foreshadow how things will be in the future.”

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has long been applauded for its accurate portrayal of future tech. (Image credit: MGM)

A similar sentiment was shared by science fiction writer Robert J Sawyer. He told us: “A third of my work time each year is spent on research, on attending – and speaking at – science conferences, on talking with working scientists and technologists, and on visiting universities, laboratories, and corporate and government facilities.

“But this is a two-way street. The reason I, and other science-fiction writers, have access to these places is that the working scientists recognise the symbiosis: they learn as much from our speculative responses to their breakthroughs as we learn from them.

“I’ve been an advisor to NASA, DARPA, Google, XPRIZE, the Canadian Federal Government, and many other organisations – as have many of my peers.”

Dreaming up a better future

So the crossover between imaginary and actual is well recognised as being rich and fertile ground for all, with the active cross-pollination of ideas occurring more readily than we might think. 

A concept drawing of Virgin Orbit's second stage rocket as it makes its way to orbit. Credit: Virgin

We may now be only a few years away from the reality of space tourism, with NASA’s Journey to Mars set to put human astronauts on Martian soil by 2030, and companies such as Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Blue Origin constantly grabbing headlines due to their ambitious plans to do similar. 

There will always be a trade-off in sci-fi between what’s scientifically accurate and what’s dramatically satisfying. But these movies are inspiring people to look again into the night sky and wonder what our destiny out there could be.

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Space Week

Welcome to TechRadar's Space Week – a celebration of space exploration, throughout our solar system and beyond. Visit our Space Week hub to stay up to date with all the latest news and features.

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Facebook looking to restrict livestreams, open to more regulation

Posted: 31 Mar 2019 06:30 AM PDT

It's not been an easy couple of years for Facebook in terms of user privacy and data security and everything else, but the giant social network seems determined to start sorting out at least some of its problems.

TechCrunch reports on an open letter published by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, in which she says the platform is "exploring restrictions" for limiting who can launch livestreams.

The letter comes in response to the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was streamed live over Facebook by the perpetrators.

Facebook is ready to support the grieving community in New Zealand, Sandberg says, and will be taking further steps to address hate speech on its platform – although she didn't go into too much detail about what that would involve.

Increased regulation

In a separate op-ed in the Washington Post, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg says governments and regulators should take on more of a role in policing social networks.

Zuckerberg is calling for new laws in four separate areas, reports the BBC: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

"Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree," Zuckerberg writes, saying that the responsibility of restricting hate speech is too much of a challenge for individual sites and apps to tackle alone.

Zuckerberg wants to see a code of conduct that all social media networks must abide by, tighter restrictions on how political parties can campaign online, and new rules for protecting the privacy of users as they move their data between services.

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Best document scanning apps of 2019

Posted: 31 Mar 2019 04:54 AM PDT

Despite the fact that we live in an increasingly digital world, many organizations still print out important documents on paper - whether it be a letter, contract, bank statement, invoice, receipt or educational handout.

Some people still rely heavily on paper, too, because they don’t have access to the internet. But this is only a minority of folks, with estimates suggesting that just 10% of British homes and 11% of American homes aren’t connected to the internet.

At any rate, there is still a lot of paper around, and managing it all can be challenging. Most of us end up misplacing important physical documents at one time or another. 

But technology, as it often does, can save the day in the form of document scanning apps. With these, it’s possible to scan paper-based items such as letters, receipts and contracts using the camera of your mobile device.

You can then keep them safe and stored on the cloud for future use. The other benefit of this sort of software is that it lets you send documents quickly. Here are the best document scanning solutions out there right now.

Image Credit: Adobe

When it comes to scanning documents for digital file storage, chances are you are going to want to save in a portable document format-a PDF file. Adobe Scan is a dedicated scanning app from Adobe, the creators of the PDF file, so expectations are high that this should deliver on most user needs.

Adobe Scan runs as an app on your mobile device, whether it is running Android or iOS, and uses your camera to catch a copy of a document to convert into a PDF file. There is a preview option to optimize the file dimensions, and you can rotate, crop, and edit the colour as required.

The biggest advantage of using Adobe Scan is probably its close integration with Adobe's other apps, not least Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Fill & Sign. This means you can not only scan into PDF document format, but also edit, annotate, sign and work collaboratively with the documents that you do scan. 

Even better, Adobe Scan is a free app to download and use, though there is an in-app subscription available if you want additional features. Cost for this is a monthly subscription of $9.99 per month or $89.99 a year

Image Credit: Abby 

If you’re looking for something a little more advanced, it’s worth checking out Abbyy’s FineScanner. The software uses optical character recognition to scan text in 193 languages.    

Compatible with Android and iOS, the app lets you scan both printed and handwritten text with your mobile device. FineScanner works with 12 file formats, including DOCX, PDF and TXT. The great thing about the app is that it preserves the original document formatting.   

What’s more, you can access a set of easy-to-use annotation tools to add signatures and notes to text. And the iOS version of the software sports a feature called BookScan, which lets you digitize books with ease. It turns facing book pages into separate images, removing any defects. 

Once you’ve conducted a scan, you can share it with anyone over email or save it to cloud storage lockers such as Dropbox, Evernote and iCloud Drive. Currently, FineScanner is free to download on Android and iOS devices, but it offers in-app purchases if you’d like to get more storage and capabilities.   

Image Credit: The Grizzly Labs

Genius Scan is yet another popular mobile scanning app, with its developers claiming that the software has digitized more than half a billion documents to date. Described as a “scanner in your pocket”, it lets you turn paper-based documents into JPG and PDF files.   

Headline features include smart page detection, perspective correction and image enhancement. And with patch scanning, you can create digital copies of dozens of pages within seconds. The app also enhances the legibility of documents, ensuring they’re readable, and you can keep your files organized with titles, tags and a search function. 

Just like FineScanner, you can upload scanned documents to a range of cloud storage platforms, including Dropbox, Evernote, Expensify, Facebook, Google Drive, OneDrive (and OneDrive for Business), OneNote, FTP, SugarSync and WebDAV.

If you’re scanning sensitive documents, you can protect them with built-in encryption and passwords (or Touch ID on iOS). It’s free to download on Android and iOS, but offers in-app purchases.   

The app is free and comes with a lot of features. For the more advanced integrations and security and MDM settings, there's a one-time fee of $7.99. For unlimited cloud storage, plus synchronization and web access through Genius Cloud, there's a monthly fee of $2.99 per month.

Image Credit: Scanbot

Scanbot is positioned as an easy and fast way to create high-quality scans on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. According to the developer behind the app, it is capable of making “hundreds of decisions to capture the document perfectly”. 

With the software, you can scan documents, receipts, sketches, whiteboards, business cards, labels, QR codes and barcodes. Once you’ve scanned an item, you can choose from five color modes to make it look perfect. There are also tools to crop and optimize scanned documents, all of which are automatically captured in 200+ dpi.   

You’re able to save documents as PDF or JPG files, and you can upload these to a range of major cloud services. The software supports iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon Drive, Slack, Todolist, OneDrive, OneNote and Box.

If you plan on using Scanbot for business purposes, you can easily fax documents directly from your mobile device in 50 supported countries. As is the case with most of these apps, Scanbot is free to download on Android and iOS, with the option of in-app purchases. 

Image Credit: CamScanner

As the name suggests, CamScanner is an app that turns the camera of your mobile device into a document scanner. With it, you’re able to scan a range of documents, from invoices to receipts. The software turns scanned documents into PDF files, which are automatically uploaded to cloud services such as Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and OneDrive.

Targeted specifically at business users, the app lets you invite colleagues to view and comment on scans. However, they must have a user account to do so. There’s also an advanced editing feature, which lets you add annotations and watermarks to documents, making them look more professional. For improved security, you can add passcodes to documents.   

The app is free to download on Android and iOS, but you can upgrade to a premium plan to get 10GB of storage, send document links with password protection, batch download documents, and more besides. 

For the Premium Account you have the option to pay either $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. For the business version, which provides better options for team collaboration, it costs $6.99 per user per month, or $69.99 a year.

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The Sega Genesis Mini gets a release date and a price

Posted: 31 Mar 2019 02:30 AM PDT

We've known for some time now that Sega was planning on releasing a Genesis Mini retro console, but up until now details have been thin on the ground. We do now finally have a release date for the box: September 19.

Kotaku reports that the announcement was made on stage at Sega Fes 2019. The Sega Genesis Mini will hit stores in the US for $79.99 – that's roughly £60 or AU$115, though we don't have the official international pricing yet.

The US version of the console is going to differ from the device sold in Japan, which will be take the Mega Drive name like the original console (Genesis was a rebadging done for the US market).

Apparently the US version of the retro gaming box will come with three-button controllers that connect via USB. The Japanese version is set to ship with six-button controllers. Again, there's no news on which version will hit Europe or the rest of the world.

Games, games, games

We know some of the 40 games that'll be bundled with the box too: Altered Beast, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Comix Zone, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Ecco the Dolphin, Gunstar Heroes, Shining Force, Sonic The Hedgehog, Space Harrier II and ToeJam & Earl will be included in the US.

In Japan the line-up includes Sonic 2, Puyo Puyo 2, Shining Force, Castlevania Bloodlines, Powerball, Gunstar Heroes, Comix Zone, Rent-a-Hero, Space Harrier II and Madou Monogatari Ichi (some of which were originally Japanese exclusives).

Finally, Sega did say that the M2 studio behind some of its retro game reboots would be taking care of software development on the Genesis Mini.

Sega follows both Nintendo and Sony in releasing a retro version of one of its classic consoles, but we'll have to wait until September to see if there's enough built up nostalgia for the launch of the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini to be a hit.

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