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9:37 PM
Cool moves
In anticipation of Tekken 3's upcoming release on the Playstation, I'm
posting a short clip of Hwoarang and Nina fighting each other. Here you should be
able to see him strut some of his stuff. Hwoarang definitely does the coolest moves
in Tekken 3, and that 5-hit side throw is the most amazing move I've ever seen in any
fighting game.
Hwoarang's 3
throws - 2.93 MB
4:51 PM
Fixing Playstations
How many of these things break down, anyway? My friends have had
theirs go bad twice and mine wasn't doing so hot itself. Anyhow, their drive just
suddenly stopped spinning...wouldn't even spin to boot up. I managed to check a
bunch of "pots" on the board and tweak it back to where the drive will spin and
read most original games. Still a little iffy, though.
3:26 PM
The Replacement Killers
Well, we went to see this movie yesterday...got there at 7:10 and the
movie was sold out, so we ended up eating and going to an arcade/laser tag place and
hanging out for a bit before catching the 10:10 showing. Overall, the moive was
quite generic...nothing special. Good action, but a lot of "too lucky"
stuff and questionable motivation on the part of the hero. My friends hated it more
than I did...but I'd give it 1 1/2 or 2 stars out of 4.
12:36 PM
EarthSiege 3 Alpha Technical Release available
The brand name and the "mech" design don't quite do it for me,
but it certainly is another big fighting robots game, so if you liked MechWarrior, you
might like this too. I once read (way back when) that the programmers were going to
multithread the 3D engine, making it capable of taking advantage of multiprocessor systems
on NT. I wonder if that made it in?
Download
from GameCenter - 15.3 MB
7:44 PM
Wow
That's all I have to say...who would have thought that these new drivers
from nVidia could make such a remarkable difference in the Riva 128's performance.
It's too bad they don't have a newer revision for NT yet, but I guess they are
coming. Meanwhile, a new CPU dependence curve is on the January
1998 Video Roundup...I've had to redo my conclusions accordingly, since the Riva 128
is now clearly besting most of the other cards in 3D performance. A before and after
chart showing the performance gains attained by the new drivers is in the ASUS
3DexPlorer 3000 review.
Note that the screenshots are still out of date and will be redone. Well, they
aren't really out of date, since GL Quake 2 in NT still looks like that, but I'm going to
assume from the 95 drivers that Riva 128 users have something better to look forward to.
Tekken 3
Reserved my copy from NCS today.
Tekken 3 is just one of those games you have to get...and no, I can't wait a month for the
American version. Reservations stop February 14th, although NCS is ordering as many
as they can because they will sell out on March 26th no matter how many they order.
11:34 PM
New Riva 128 drivers available
Unfortunately, these drivers are only for Windows 95. They'll be
ported to NT "when it's done." However, they do promise enhanced quality
and speed, so give them your best shot if you have a Riva 128 based card. I'll
benchmark the drivers shortly.
Download link
1:30 PM
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold review up
I went ahead and put this one up. I don't feel like it's really
finished, but I guess they never really are. Here's a link to
the review.
Bill Gates gets creamed
I'm sure some of you are going to get a kick out of this. Some
people hit Bill Gates in the face with some cream pie while he was visiting some
government officials in Brussels. One guy distracted him while the others threw the
goods. Click below for the complete story.
CNN's story
12:24 PM
Names and impressions
I've been told a couple of times that the name of this page just somehow
doesn't quite seem to fit. Consequently, I'm thinking about changing the name to
something more appropriate. Any suggestions would help...I'm just looking for a
catchy name. I like the word "edge," if that means anything to you.
:-)
7:14 PM
New Riva OpenGL ICD drivers coming
The full OpenGL ICD for Riva 128 based cards is coming, with some
supposedly new and drastic improvements in image quality and performance. It could
seriously change the decisions of a lot of buyers if these drivers turn out to be all they
are hyped up to be. Read down in Brian Hook's .plan for some
observations.
Chip cloning is back
It looks like with the combined cross-licensing patents of Cyrix and
National Semiconductor with Intel, Cyrix will be able to reverse engineer the Pentium II
and the technology behind it for use in their own chips without fear of legal reprisal.
This doesn't mean that Intel has to hand over technology to Cyrix. But
if and when Cyrix comes up with a chip like Intel's after studying the Pentium II, Intel
can't do anything about it.
News.com's article
2:31 PM
Appeals court suspends Lessig's involvement in the Microsoft case
An appeals court has agreed to suspend Lessig as the "special
master" assistant to Judge Thomas Jackson in the antitrust case against Microsoft.
The suspension is only in effect until oral arguments from each side are heard in
April. Microsoft had argued that the appointment of Lessig as a special master was a
procedural violation and further alleged that he was biased against Microsoft (although,
quite frankly, that isn't too uncommon nowadays).
Basically, Judge Jackson is going to have to do more work on his own to collect
evidence and understand the issues involved in the case.
2:35 AM
Gameboy Light
I can't believe the Gameboy is still selling, but it is, and quite well at
that. The next revision of the Gameboy will have a backlighting feature (or, as many
of us like to call it, that Indiglo thingy). It would be nice if Nintendo could
release a new portable successor. And the Virtual Boy doesn't count.
Next Generation's story
3:31 PM
MPEG-4 audio encoder/decoder
For my senior design project (last thing left!), I'm working on porting
some of the MPEG-4 audio standard reference software to Win32 and adding some features.
MPEG-4 encapsulates the MPEG-2 AAC standard, which is the part most of us are
interested in. I've already ported the source to Win32 and have a working
command-line executable encoder and decoder. Quite frankly, however, the source code
is still a little broken (it started out like that) and the encoder's quality is terrible.
3:11 PM
Microsoft facing action at the state level
Microsoft has been having a lot of trouble at the federal level, but now
the next blow comes in the form of subpoenas from 11 states for information regarding
Windows 98. The purpose is the same...to investigate and assess whether or not
Microsoft is improperly leveraging its influence in the operating systems market to gain
dominance in other areas.
ZDNet's Story
Apple moving to CompUSA
As reported earlier, Computer City has gone ahead and dropped the Apple
line along with other major retailers like Best Buy. Apple now says that they will
be focusing heavily on CompUSA as their major retailing front. This really is their
last stand in retailing...it had better work.
CRC errors with IDE disk access in NT
I'm not absolutely sure if this problem is specfic to multiprocessor
systems running Windows NT, but I do strongly suspect it. The issue is, IDE disk
access in NT under these kinds of systems causes your modem to stop responding until the
disk access is over and done with. Anyhow, enabling the DMA support in NT makes this
go away. Most of you probably don't have this problem, but maybe a few of you do.
2:21 PM
Tekken 3 release date!!!
Word is that Tekken 3 will be released on March 26 in Japan. I had
heard the date had slipped to sometime mid-summer, but I guess Namco is sticking to their
traditional March release dates for Tekken. I can't wait! Too bad none of my
friends can take the punishment I dish out. :-)
6:15 PM
Voodoo2 info
Seems like Tom got a hold of a Monster 3D 2 at a little party in France
the other day. Benchmarks are available at his site - http://www.tomshardware.com.
5:31 PM
Disk/Network processor affinity tool for WinNT
Only for multprocessor users under NT...this unsupported tool lets you set
the affinity of disk I/O and network I/O interrupts to a specific processor.
Balancing the load correctly will help improve performance and having all interrupts for,
say, disk I/O on a single processor can improve processor performance by increasing the
processor cache hit rate.
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/tools/affinity
1:47 AM
The Replacement Killers trailer uploaded
Click below or on the Files/Videos section to check it out. This
movie is going to kick some butt!
The_Replacement_Killers_LSX_HQ.mpg
- 22.7 MB
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