Straight Jacket Type Fun
12/31/2003
Another old fart pointed me to this emulator for the T199/4A. My very first PC. Had a whopping 16KB of RAM but it's native programming language was BASIC so it was a very good thing. My 2nd PC was an IBM PCjr which one author labeled one of the worst technology inventions of the past twenty years. I sorta disagree since it played Police Quest with full 16 EGA color and some decent sound. Plus the infared keyboard was pretty slick.
As a follow up the P4 overclocked to 5Ghz, why didn't they run some benchmarks? Let's see exactly how many frames per second Wolfenstein gets at that speed.
If you're out drinking tonight, be safe!
12/30/2003
Nitrogen cooled P4 up to 5GHZ? Sure! Why not!
Bye Bye BIOS? I hope so. Not for any practical or technical reason but I wouldn't mind other ways to install an OS besides a disk or CD or network boot. Maybe off a USB keychain?
Watching Rome: Total War info very closely. Here's more.
12/29/2003
Man oh man, I'm so tempted to buy this game just to see how bad it is. You have to do that I think every once in a while just to purge the palette and make you realize how good some games are and how much time and effort it takes to make a really good game.
Knights of Old Republic expansion might be confirmed? Oh man, please please yes Jeebus!!
12/28/2003
They're kidding right?
12/26/2003
Good Holiday everyone? Me too. 12V Cordless drill, Simpsons Season 2 on DVD, and a nifty palm sized radio to strap onto my arm while running. Sweet swag.
12/23/2003
That HomeWorld 2 patch is here. Meh...
More hardware news. Compare all them systems. The Athlon64 3000+ is looking more and more appealing
12/22/2003
Ah, it's the holidays which means reporters are desperate for cash and short of selling themselves on the corner, they instead provide more news to read and enjoy.
First up, new AMD Athlon64 3000+ already benchmarked here. Here's the meaty part:
Based on Gaming Performance, the 3000+
rating of the new 512k Cache Athlon64 is very conservative. The 3200+ 1Mb
cache version is faster in our standard game benchmarks, but by a very small
margin. Compare the game benchmarks for the 3000+ to the
So, cache might not be as important as thought? Interesting to know. Prices:
Athlon64 FX-51 - $733
Athlon64 3200+ - $417
Athlon64 3000+ - $218
Online gamer wins theft suit. Oddity of the story: it's in China.
Li asked the company, Beijing Arctic Ice Technology Development Co Ltd, to identify the player who stole his virtual property, but it declined, saying it could not give out a player's private details, it said.
Police also gave Li no satisfaction, so he took his case to court, demanding 10,000 yuan in compensation, Xinhua said.
"I exchanged the equipment with my labor, time, wisdom and money, and of course they are my belongings," it quoted him as saying of the virtual property he collected online.
I don't quite buy his argument since it is a game. If the games are hosted on your own server then sure the stuff is technically yours but he's paying for this service. To that end, if someone claimed their stuff on The Sims Online, would that make people your property for a while?
I think it's ridiculous to try to claim property rights in a virtual world since the entire world could be wiped out due to a power outage. But the court ruled for this person due to security negligence. In the country with the most widespread piracy.
I know that the Matrix has been surpassed in hype by some movie dealing with hobbits but here's a never before seen Matrix trailer. And the rest of them have been redone as well
12/21/2003
Ok, so a bud of mine purchased Lords of Everquest for me since I do sometimes like to partake in an RTS romp. And they have some information about how to get signed up for the EverCrack 2 beta. Ok, I have a Sony online account from the Galaxies Beta. But when I try to go to SOEGames.net, the page is simply blank. What kinda beta is that? Nice job SOE.
Now, it's been a while since I said anything about Homeworld 2. Great game and ran fine right out of the box. But now there's plans for more patches. And it appears that they've folded to all the whiners who complained about the mission difficulty.
General
i. Players unit caps will no longer be lowered when they load a game from the
in-game menu.
ii. The shipyard is no longer listed as having two sensor spots.
iii. The Vaygr laser corvette now displays badges correctly.
iv. The Hiigaran Sensors Array textures are no longer inverted.
v. Vgr Refinery badges now display properly.
b. Mission 2
i. Bonus corvettes and bombers are now delivered 100% of the time.
c. Mission 4
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
ii. Destroying the station before destroying inhibitors no longer results in a
lock up.
d. Mission 6
i. The Derelict Mover is no longer targetable by your ships.
e. Mission 8
i. Scuttling Dreadnaught will now cause the mission to fail.
f. Mission 13
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
g. Mission 14
i. The difficulty level has been reduced.
h. Mission 15
i. Ships can no longer be led out of the area of play in pursuit of the planet
killer missiles.
As you can see, they've lowered the difficulty on just about everything. Now it was difficult but not exceedingly so, especially considering that some people posted complete walk throughs on the game.
ATi Revenues up 40%. Good for them. I hope their next chipsets don't stumble.
Finally, Real Networks is suing Microsoft. Same old song and dance as before? I don't think so:
Although RealNetworks is claiming damages
for a historical period, it argues that the case is more about the future than
the past.
The case has "implications far beyond the PC", according to the
suit: on to set top boxes, handhelds and phones.
"Microsoft's conduct threatens to dominate the creation, delivery and
playback of media ... Regardless of the device used for delivery or
playback."
"Microsoft's plan is to use its monopoly power in PC operating systems to
dominate the market for digital media systems. If Microsoft achieves that
dominance now, while the PC still plays a critical role in digital media
systems, it can keep and expand that dominance if and when digital media moves
beyond the PC."
Excellent point and finally lawyers are catching up to
the difference between how economies of scale work in digital media compared
to something like the auto industry. While Windows Media Player is
pretty darn good, that doesn't give them the right to squash competitors
unfairly.
12/19/2003
Fight Club, the game? Whatever. It's too stupid to ponder. Just, go away. Go here or something.
News.com is way slow with this bit of news. Still, they're neat toys.
Just awesome.
Freedom Tower is to rise 70 floors and be topped by wind-harvesting turbines that designers predict will provide 20 percent of the building's energy. The tower's height of 1,776 feet, symbolic for the year of American independence, includes a 276-foot spire.
I can only assume the R420 is the next step beyond the 9700/9800. Twice as fast as the 9800? Even more tech details here.
And here's an oddity about the newest ATi drivers. I ran a demo on ET using both the 3.7 Catalyst and then the 3.10 Catalyst. With the 3.10 drivers the performance was off from 58.7 with the 3.7 down to 49.7 with the 3.10 (low low details). Plus I had some oddities with the settings that I finally fixed. But I didn't test it with the 3.10 drivers again after fixing these questions I had. Maybe another time. For now, I still use 3.7 and they work. Why bother anyway?
12/18/2003
I looked and looked for an interesting article today but only found this. But it's fake so what's that tell ya?
This is vaguely interesting, if completely irrelevant.
12/17/2003
Wow, lots of news today. I guess the web journalists finally came out of the holiday depression benders and sobered up enough to write.
First up, Gamespot talks about retailers with actual physical stores discussing PC sales.
The company reported just seven percent of its total sales were PC games, compared to 64 percent of revenues coming from console games.
Now, consoles are ok for some games but there are three things that put me off about them:
1. The controllers suck. The are simply a continuation of the Atari 2600 with it's one controller stick and one button, making shooters (to name one genre) very tedious to play. One thread on games.slashdot says though that it "doesn't look good" to have a keyboard next to the TV. To which I reply, I bet people felt the same way about a phone back in the kitchen back in the 1900's
2. Poor resolution. TVs today only can go up to 640x480, right? My monitor can do 1600x1200. No brainer for me. Until HDTV or some other digital TV system takes over, there's not much of a way around this. Now you could buy a converter for your PC and then hook your console into the PC I suppose.
3. No upgrades. Basically, you can use it for a while and then you're screwed. Not much in the way of backwards compatibility either.
Ok, so what's worse? Domestically cornering the OS market or selling computers to known military enemies? I say they're both equally evil.
Anti-spam bill that apparently won't stop much and states laws were actually tougher.
Next up, the continuation of my research regarding a new PC next year.
AMD's public roadmap features a chip due to
ship sometime in the first six months of 2004, codenamed 'Newcastle'. Internal
roadmaps suggest it's a 512KB L2 part, with 400MHz DDR support. Consequently,
it's hard not to conclude that the new 3000+ is the first Newcastle part to
ship.
Finally, Levelord is hosting a party. If you're in Dallas, drop by. I should be there! Find me.
12/16/2003
This is my favorite story of the year. Screw you racist half wits!
12/15/2003
So capturing Saddam might hurt Dean and the Democrats? Brilliant deduction MSNBC! Just like smoking might cause cancer. The Dems could cure Reagan's Alzheimer's and reprogram his brain to make him a little more left and they still couldn't win in 2004.
Wal-Mart talks out of all three sides of their mouth apparently since they will sell Vice City but not some CDs. "Oh, it makes money. Well, that's ok." Not that making money is bad, just can you all treat things consistently.
HALF-LIFE 2 Screenshots. Ho hum.
12/14/2003
Pwned
While there's already an Athlon64 3200+, now AMD's also going to release a 3000 series. Vast difference in price for a small drop in performance. Maybe the 3200 will come down too.
12/13/2003
New Zealand has officially banned the game Manhunt. Which of course means that whoever can smuggle it into that country will be that country's software czar on the level of Escobar. Viva la revoluccion!
Gamespy has a nice write up regarding Call of Cthulhu, a first person adventure (not necessarily a shooter) that eschews such things as a HUD or other standard first person amenities. Lots of information except one minor point: When's it coming out!?!?!
Companies and users still have machines running Windows 95 and Windows 98. Heck, that's nothing. I still have some systems running Novell 3.1.2! Yar!!!
12/11/2003
Holy Hell yeah!! Painkiller in-game demo Quicktime stuff. It's like Serious Sam but with more blood and violence and all the good little things that make a game killographiclicious!
Here's an excellent article regarding DDR-400 memory and whether buying high performance memory is worth it, especially in regards to if you don't plan to overclock.
And so now we get this stupidity regarding the RavenShield 1.5 patch
It turns out that Ubisoft implemented code into the RVS 1.5 patch which checks PCs for ANY clone or virtual drive programs and then fails to launch the game if such devices or programs are found.
Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Started the price watching for the system I want next year. Here's the price list that I've found after looking on newegg.com:
Athlon 64 3200+ $418
Serial ATA 80GB $86
Giga-byte GA-K8NNXP Mobo $180
Memory (DDR400) -- ? (not showing up at Crucial.com for this motherboard).
Probably could do better if I froogle.google'd
it but that's a start.. But more motherboard/CPU options for the 64 will
probably become available by next year.
12/10/2003
Ok, patch your system. Wait, don't
do it. Heck, I'm confused. No patches for December is what
they're saying, know why? I don't either but my theory is simple.
It's the holidays and if they start issuing patches it will hack off
administrators even more so they don't want to do it since they already have a
lot of mud in their eye.
More gaming news. First, the chances of a
Fallout 3 have been greatly diminished.
Second, even more bad news. More Black & White 2 news. Ugh.
Ok, hi. Back up and going. Installed FrontPage since my Dreamweaver broke. Yuk. But it's enough.
I know the dudes at Penny probably aren't reading this site but I'm glad to see something I said on Blues is being echoed by them regarding the Counter-Strike gun incident.
nVidia drivers out if you really feel the need for an extra 5% increase in performance or whatever.
After getting a taste of some RPG lovin' in Knights of Old Republic, I'm thinking I like it and want to try it some more. Oh wait. The Warhammer 40,000 is RTS. D'oh!
Killographic? Why not just call it umm.. violent?
RavenShield patch.
Painkiller movie up and about. Check it out. Tagline of "Hitman from heaven?" Sweet!
12/9/2003
KotOR patch out.
Fixes a few things. Read about it here.
Remember Netscape? Sure ya do. Find out what their founder has been up to here
Personally, I don’t use SETI @ Home all that much. I
use the folding project a bit more
since I just had an aunt fight off cancer so it’s a more pertinent to me.
Plus I guess trying to run both at same time on the same machine wouldn’t
work. Regardless, SETI is going back over the possible candidates and have
some info regarding the most possible ones here.
My copy of Dreamweaver has f’ed up so I
can’t do much editing. Not that
what I’m doing is requiring a lot of HTML skillz anyway. So we’re on the backup mode of using
Word to edit. Hopefully it won’t
break too bad. I think I should be more careful from now on when cleaning off
the hard drive.
12/8/2003
OSP is an add on for a lot of Q3 Based engine games. I know it's a well known feature to the vets out there but if you're new to the Q3 type games (Quake3, Enemy Territory, RtCW, etc) then you should know about it. While they aren't directly credited in Enemy Territory, their system was incorporated into that game. One of the neat features is multiview as a spectator which I finally figured out thanks to a teammate. It allowed me to watch all my teammates play at once but at a severe hit to performance on on my 9700 Pro. Take a look. That's me watching seven of my teammates in a window and the 8th is in the background. Slick.
12/7/2003
A change in the way e-mail could work in confirming the origination point?
Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a message header. The receiving system would check the Internet's Domain Name System for the public key registered to the sending domain.
Not a bad idea but how would a smaller company with it's own domain address update and do this themselves easily. Particularly if they have their own email server?
12/6/2003
What the hell is Atari doing? They change the name of Driver to Driv3r. Any game with l337 speak in it should immediately be thrown into the bargain bin or thrown to the warez hounds. Yeah yeah it's the third one in the series but that's stupid.
Space Invaders to return? I'd only be interested if they re-released Track & Field.
12/5/2003
Freedom Force 2 interview and concept art. Fighting Nazis? Comic book silliness? I'm there!
And dear sweet Jeebus! I want Total War: Rome now!! Screw Doom3 and Half-Life 2!! Look at that!
I stumbled across this thread regarding Deux Ex: IW while trolling Bluesnews (as is my routine). I'm officially not buying this game now.
More Doom3 stuff. Trailer, screeshots, desktop, etc.
12/4/2003
Emulator port fo the N-Gage? But what about original content?
Oh dear. All the evil is being pooled together. Now it will be Gamespy's streamlined, admittedly well designed website with IGN's.. um.. well they have shit. Hey people, if you want shitty content with a streamlined website, keep coming here.
I don't know about other industries, but we have enough government regulation in banking. FDIC, state, and internal audits each and every year leads to the complete deforestation of a small grove each time due to all the paperwork. Yeesh
12/3/2003
Well, I wanted to get T3: War of the Machines since there's probably the neat factor of getting to play as the Machines, but apparently it is bad. While that hasn't stopped me in the past from buying a bad game (usually learning how bad it is after the I buy it) but holidays prevent it right now. Maybe I can start buying more games next year
Also up for next year is a system upgrade from my existing Athlon 1600 XP. Hopefully an Athlon 64 754 socket since the 960 socket is just too dang expensive. I've already started researching stuff. Here's the differences between the Opteron, 754, and 960. Biggest point:
The Athlon 64 is the cheapest and least powerful of the three desktop AMD64 processor designs, but it still uses the same instruction set and architecture. The Athlon 64 does not support multi-CPU configurations, ECC RAM, and it has a 64-bit wide memory controller on-die instead of a 128-bit wide controller like the others; this means that the theoretical memory bandwidth is half (3.2 GB/sec) of what the Opteron and Athlon 64-FX can do (6.4 GB/sec). The pin count stands at 754, which means that the Athlon 64 is not compatible with Opteron/Athlon 64-FX motherboards. Looking at the specs and the support of the rest of the industry as it is now, I can't help but think that the Athlon 64 will be the Socket 423 of the AMD world (Socket 423 was a quickly abandoned initial Pentium4 design, having been replaced soon after it's launch with a faster and incompatible Socket 478 Pentium4 design).
Of course, don't forget the chipset which is just as important. Here's a comparison between the SiS (demo board only), Via, and and nVidia. Quick summary: the SiS chipsets are the fastest? That's a bit of a surprise.
12/2/2003
Knights of Old Republic Review up today.
Other big news today:
Punkbuster to be integrated into BattleField 1942. Only took them two years to get a clue. Guess that means the hordes of immature 12 year olds will now go back to Counter-Strike when their daddy's aren't downloading Britney Spears doctored nude pictures.
Ars updated their buyer's guide for getting a new rig. Just in time for the holidays.
And now for a sign of the times: PCGamer and AMD have started sponsoring a Counter-Strike team:
The Counter-Strike team was handpicked from hundreds of applications to PC Gamer and came through recent interviews to claim their places in the TAG clan. Already widely regarded as one of the top Counter-Strike teams in the UK, they will now have the opportunity to fulfil their potential on the UK and international stage with the backing of AMD and PC Gamer.
In less than a year other online magazines and tech companies will do the same. In five years there will start to be free agents with arbitration and in six years there will be a player strike. You heard it here first kids.
And for a history lesson in tech. The divergent paths of the two men who were the driving force behind the Hayes modem.
12/1/2003
Knights of Old Republic has provided two weeks of hard earned fun and I finished it finally but the one thing missing from the game is an effective way to take screenshots. After doing some searching, I found a program called GrabClipSave that overrides the PrintScreen button in Windows and remaps it to take a screenshot and save it to another directory. Very handy and hopefully I'll start adding more screenshots to games I play and review.
