Logo by Tom Purves

5:15 PM
NT 4.0 Stealth II support
I updated the Diamond Stealth II review with a link to reference drivers from Rendition that are supposed to provide OpenGL support under NT.  Definitely worth checking out if you have one of these cards.

2:47 AM
Deschutes processors
Those of you who keep current on all the CPU info probably already know this, but I thought I ought to mention it here.  The new P2-333 that has made it out onto the market already somehow and is slated for an official release near the end of January is part of the new Deschutes line of processors from Intel.  What this means is that, unlike the P2-300 and below, the P2-333 is manufactured with a 0.25 micron process, as opposed to 0.35 micron for the other P2's.  As a result, the chip runs faster and cooler.  I've already read of this chip being clocked up to 417 MHz on TweakIt, which is just nuts!

2:47 AM
Software DVD
I only know of two products that can decode DVD streams in software...DVDExpress from Mediamatics and SoftDVD from Zoran.  Neither is free.  Where the heck do you get software to playback MPEG-2 streams?!?

Both programs need MMX to run also...one of the very few things MMX is good for.

12:28 AM
Air in your Pentium?
Sounds weird, but it makes sense.  Air is a better insulator than silicon, and when you put interconnects on your chip, having better insulation allows you to place the interconnects closer together.  Well, you can't really use air, obviously, but you can use a substance called aerogel.  This substance is so porous in nature that it's actually more air than it is material.

ZDNet's story

11:24 PM
Is it the end for Microsoft?
Seems like people are saying now that Microsoft is acting like they've already lost the case...that's why they are antagonizing the judge.  However, apparently the panel of judges which will be presiding over the appeal set for April is looking more favorable towards Microsoft.  These judges are supposedly known for their anti-regulatory stances.

Infoworld's story

4:17 PM
MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION
I just love seeing that at the top of a nice fresh NT blue screen, don't you?  Why, the last time I saw one was...well, it was back when I tried to overclock to 233 the last time.  Back to 210, this time for good.

3:39 PM
So...
How do you like the new sidebar graphics?  I tried to keep them simple but nice.  I'm not a big fan of huge complex pictures and imagemaps.

3:04 PM
WinAMP 1.666 released
And yes, it does remind me of Doom!  http://winamp.lh.net is currently down, but maybe it'll go back up later.

ftp://op3dfx.com/pub/other/winamp/winamp1666.exe
http://winamp.lh.net/download/winamp1666.exe

MAX2 beta signup
Aren't we getting a little worn out on RTS games?  Anyhow, you can still sign up for the MAX2 beta, due on the 15th.  The first MAX looked cool but I never played it after the first mission or two.

http://www.interplay.com/max2/beta.html

LSX vs. Xing
I've discovered something else really bad about the Xing encoder.   Color fidelity appears to be very poor.  Several of the scenes in a scene from the Rock that I've encoded appear to have a greenish tint to them that definitely isn't present with LSX or in the original.  On the other hand, I'm trying to figure out exactly how to create a stream in LSX with identical parameters to a Video CD stream created by Xing.

7:14 PM
Message board active!
I've just added a message board to the site...you should see a link to it in the sidebar under reviews.  Hopefully this is just a hint of things to come...I'm planning on giving the site a little overhaul.  Please give the board a try with any questions or comments you might have!

5:25 PM
Microsoft vs the judge
Read this dialogue between Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson and Microsoft's representative:

"It was absolutely clear I entered an order that required you to distribute a product that would not work? Is that what you're telling me?" Jackson asked Cole.

"In plain English, yes," Cole said. "We followed the order.   It wasn't my place to consider the consequences of that."

Can you believe this?

TechWeb's story

3:01 PM
New Rendition MiniGL drivers
A new driver from Rendition now fixes the problems that Rendition based cards were having with particle and transparency effects in the more recent patch releases of Quake 2.  Get it here.

10:10 PM
ASUS 3DexPlorer 3000
My friend has had this card in his system now for a while and I'm going to try to benchmark and review it.  Combined with the 3Dfx this ought to give a complete rundown of the major 3D chipsets on the market right now, I think.  I wasn't really interested in doing the 3Dfx but I probably ought to for the sake of completeness.

4:21 PM
NT DMA mode support
I just enabled DMA mode support on my own system, and wow, what a difference in the benchmarks!  I still keep my swap file on the IDE drive, so this means a nice performance boost.

2:45 AM
LSX MPEG Encoder
Now that I'm back here I should have an opportunity to try out this encoder further, especially with my newly overclocked Dual PPro's.  I've heard a couple of people say that LSX is better.  My biggest problems with LSX are the lack of pre-filtering and the lack of preset stream settings, and my problems with Xing Encoder are the problems with transitions and the lack of SMP support.

Oh, and thanks to my friend, I was able to add some nice snapshots of the UltraStar 2XP to its review.

10:39 PM
Xing MPEG Encoder 2.1c
This version is out, along with a set of profiles for encoding MP3's.   I'd be more excited if I knew what the upgrade did.  I do remember e-mailing them earlier about how poorly the Xing Encoder performs with fades and transitions.   Now there's a note in the readme about how the Xing Encoder doesn't do well with fades and transitions.  Silly me, and I was hoping for a fix!

Xing Technologies

9:49 PM
Ultra DMA driver article up
I just finished off the results of the testing and wrote it up.  The article is entitled Enabling Ultra DMA support in Windows NT - How to do it and is there really a difference?  Check it out, I think you'll find it interesting!  I'm definitely going to be installing these on my system next.

8:10 PM
Ultra DMA driver performance
I just tested the driver performance of these new Ultra DMA drivers in NT and the performance difference is shocking.  I'll try to get an article with results up by tonight.  I would dearly love to be able to redo the results of the Deskstar 8 review as a result but I'm not sure if I can convince my friend to do this for me in Houston.

5:34 PM
Bonk fix out
I can now feel safe against my wacky friend since the new fix for Bonk/modified Teardrop winnuke programs is out.  Phew!

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/nt40/hotfixes-postSP3/teardrop2-fix/tearfixi.exe

4:05 PM
Hard drive review stuff
I think there might have been some procedural issues with the way I benchmarked the drives...not sure yet but I'm going to take a closer look.

4:53 AM
Enabling DMA in Windows NT
I just read a tip from ever-vigilant hard drive guru Ron Reaugh about enabling busmastering support in Windows NT.  According to http://www.bmdrivers.com, DMA mode support is built into Windows NT SP2 and SP3, but must be enabled with a utility called DMACHECK.EXE.   Additionally, a supposed hotfix to enable Ultra DMA support can be downloaded.   Here is DMACHECK.EXE and here the the hotfix, BMNT4.ZIP.

I'll benchmark this stuff tomorrow to see if it really makes a difference or not.

Hard drive reviews
I sent up the reviews for the UltraStar 2XP and the DeskStar 8.  I also revised the Stealth II review a little.

8:30 PM
SB16 out/233 MHz in
I left WinAMP on repeat overnight and woke up to a bluescreen.  It crashed about an hour later after that.  Enough to prove to me the CL drivers still aren't happy on my system.

So I put the trusty old non-PNP card back in.  Also, remember the problems I was having with my CD-R before break?  Well, now it's really screwed up.  Only seems to mount green and pressed discs.  Gold's don't mount.  Weird, huh?

That really got me down, so I decided to do something I'd been thinking about for a while.  Overclocking my PPro's to 233 MHz!  Back when I had just gotten this computer, I had tried it with one chip at 3.4V, but it was just slightly unstable and had heat problems to boot.  So now I've rigged up both CPU's at 3.5V and mounted a case fan (I'll take a picture of it) to blow straight over both CPU's.  I had to find a whole bunch of jumper blocks to set the VRM's on the motherboard to 3.5V, but I finally got a hold of them.

The airflow provided by the case fan is making a tremendous difference.  The temperature of the CPU's seems to be hovering around 37 degrees Celsius max.  So far so good...I still have to wait it out a couple of days to make sure things are stable.   Plus the case cover has to go on...which will raise the ambient temperature of air inside the case.

6:11 AM
Sound Blaster 16 - ViBRA chipset
I spent a very long time tonight trying to install a new SB16 in my computer.  SB16's are cheap nowadays and we happened to have a recent model sitting around my house back in Houston.  New SB16's are based on a ViBRA chipset which puts most of the parts of the original SB16 on a single chip.  Supposedly there's less noise and interference as a result.

So I decided to bring the sucker with me to Penn and switch it out with my older version of the SB16.  One problem, though.  The new card is Plug and Play.   It's pretty hard to get some Plug-and-Play hardware working in NT.

I followed all the instructions.  I installed pnpisa.sys, the Plug-and-Play manager for ISA devices in NT.  It detected the ViBRA 16 and attempted to install drivers for it, whereupon I pointed it to the appropriate drivers on the CD.

For some reason, the drivers refused to operate properly.  First of all, I couldn't pick any DMA's above 3, and second of all, I couldn't change the device resources like you ought to be able to with Plug-and-Play devices.  I ended up trying to match the device settings I thought were being assigned to the card.  That really only halfway worked.  The only way I could get it to work was to assign both high and low DMA's for the Sound Blaster to the same DMA.  I thought this was working for a while, until I realized that the Sound Blaster couldn't play any 16-bit sounds...they were all carrying over to my Videum AV.  I verified this by targeting the Sound Blaster playback device specifically with WinAMP.

Well, it took a couple of hours but what I eventually decided to do was to install the drivers from Creative Labs' website.  I've been understandably reluctant to do this because I'm 100% sure these drivers were unstable on my system before. The default Microsoft drivers aren't full-duplex, but they are stable.  The only way these drivers will work is if having the new card in there somehow removes the incompatibility which causes my computer to blue-screen.  Meanwhile, the card appears to be operating properly, but I'm refraining from doing any serious tweaking until I see whether or not my computer crashes with these drivers installed.  Meanwhile, I've proceeded to digitize some music and fool around with some other hardware.

More reviews
I'm still going through and refining some of the video reviews and adding pictures.  You might have noticed that a preliminary review of the Stealth II is up.  Conclusions and comparisons aren't done, but the raw data is there if you are up to sifting through it.  I'm now taking still shots with my video camera, since my friend's digital camera stayed with him back in Houston.  The image quality is clearly worse, but it will have to do until I can obtain a better alternative.