Logo by Tom Purves

9:20 PM
Lots of stuff on EE Times
There were several interesting articles on the EE Times yesterday.   The first article concerns a new technology for manufacturing RAM using ferroelectric technology.  This new technology promises to supersede the charateristics of volatile and non-volatile RAM's in every category...speed, power consumption, rewritability and price.  The second article addresses Intel's plans for maintaining x86 instruction set compatibility with their forthcoming transition to Merced.  The third article talks about how Intel's is warning third-party chipset makers about violating Intel patents on the P6 bus architecture.  Intel already has a de-facto grip on the chipset market anyway...how long will it be before they are making your whole computer?  Microsoft has a bad image, but this move by Intel certainly doesn't sound very healthy for the PC industry.

Flat TV
I saw an ad the other day for a flat TV from Philips.  It's basically a huge plasma 42" widescreen aspect TV that's only 4" thick and can hang on your wall.  One interesting thing about it is that it's got two TV tuners in it so you can watch two shows on the TV at the same time.  Sounds really cool, and I'd love to have one, but it's got to cost an arm and a leg. I doubt the two tuners feature was even a big relative factor in the cost.

They've got a website at http://www.flat-tv.com.   Note the absence of a price anywhere on that page!  Must be just one of those brand-name awareness type ads.

Rainbow Runner decompression issues
On rec.video.desktop comes a revelation from Denis Kondakov that something has changed in the new Rainbow Runner V2.00 drivers which has rather dramatically degraded decompressed image quality.  Apparently nobody has really noticed until now (myself included), but a couple of generational passes confirm the loss.  The Paradigm Matrix codec is clearly the best performer...even after 5 passes it hardly looks any different from the original.  The V1.52 drivers are worse, but still usable.  The V2.00 leave red streaks and junk all over the place, which is totally unacceptable.  I wonder what changed?

Click here to see the images.

I'm just glad the Paradigm Matrix codec exists.  It's quite a blessing and makes the Rainbow Runner about 10 times more useful to me.

1:50 PM
MPEG-2 AAC chips
An interesting article about the acceptance of the MPEG-2 AAC standard and a need for chips to decode the standard was posted yesterday on the EE Times.  Check it out.

EE Times's story

6:20 PM
Software M-JPEG codec for Rainbow runner: Part 4
Well, we figured out the problem...the header information wasn't being written correctly.  I've got an experimental version now that actually works correctly...very cool.

One strange thing that was going on is that for some reason the little movie I was rendering was coming out a little screwed up.  It looked like the field order would get reversed in mid movie and the image would look wacky all of a sudden, then it would switch back, etc.  I thought it was a problem with the codec at first until I rendered a similar transition in Premiere, which looked great and played back perfectly.   I'm still trying to figure out if it's a problem with Media Studio itself or the Paradigm Matrix M-JPEG codec.  I did render the same clip in 95 with the RR drivers, which worked perfectly.  That would appear to rule out Media Studio being the problem...but, oh well, I'm just going to have to play around some more.

Lower earnings for Intel
Intel recently announced that it expected 1st quarter earnings for 1998 to be 10% lower than 4th quarter 1997, which was a change from a previous expectation of flat earnings.  It sent Intel's stock plummeting nearly $10 last I checked today.

Intel is, of course, partly to blame for this, having made aggressive price cuts on their own processors in order to move the market forward.  But that's what you call long-term strategy.  It guarantees their continued market dominance and weakens their already weakened competitors even further.

Infoworld's story

2:01 AM
Software M-JPEG codec for Rainbow runner: Part 3
Haven't been able to get the Paradigm Matrix compressed files to play back correctly from the Rainbow Runner, even with the registry tweak.  According to the author, it might be a field order issue, so I'm still trying out different combinations hoping to find one that works.

Low-cost Intel processors get a name
Those two low-cost processors from Intel that I was telling you about, Covington and Mendocino, have gotten their own official name today...Celeron.   Covington has a P6-based core with no L2 cache, while Mendocino will have 128KB of cache on the chip itself.  Kind of a weird name, if you ask me.  I wonder if the microprocessor industry is going to start naming processors like the car industry names cars?

Infoworld's story

Tekken 3 FMV screenshots
Wow, the artists over at Namco just keep getting better and better.   Check out these latest screenshots from some of the FMV sequences in the game.

Next Generation's story

12:17 PM
Software M-JPEG codec for Rainbow runner: Part 2
I was lucky enough to have the developer of the Paradigm Matrix M-JPEG codec e-mail me and let me know how to configure the codec to output "dmb1" AVI files, which is the weird format that Matrox was using.  By default, the codec will open dmb1 files for you, but if you try to compress or create files, it will default to creating "MJPG" tagged files.  The "dmb1" output capability is untested, but I'm trying it right now, so we'll know in a couple of hours.  Yes, it's actually going that slowly...I do have all the quality options maxed out though.   It's times like this that I love my dual processor machine...it's not seizing up on me like a single processor machine would.

Playback seems to work perfectly in NT, although since I don't have MMX it's about 3 times slower than it would be otherwise.  And I thought I'd never need MMX!   Even if I don't get the "dmb1" compression working in NT, at least I'll be able to compress MPEG's straight from the source, rather than having to waste disk space and time outputting to RAW format first so I can mess with it in NT.

2:01 AM
Software M-JPEG codec for Rainbow runner
Holy crap!  Does this codec really work?  I'm downloading it now!  NT editing, baby!

http://www.pmatrix.com/goodies.htm

6:48 PM
New 3Dfx Direct 3D drivers released: V2.15
You can get them here.

http://www.3dfx.com/software/download_vgd3d.html

Intel740 on the way
I'll be receiving a Real3D Starfighter to review within a couple of weeks.   Expect a comprehensive review!

Quake 2 V3.14 released
Hmm...a lot of patches for this game lately.  Here's a link to the patch for Intel machines. (534 KB)

Also, CTF 1.02 was released along with this version.  The full download is at ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake2/ctf/q2ctf102.zip. (5.4 MB)

10:41 AM
Busmastering weirdness
If you recall, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that tweaking the NT 4.0 SP3 drivers to enable busmastering also fixed an interesting problem that caused my modems to seize up and get lots of errors any time my IDE drive was being accessed.  Well, something weird happened today...I installed a hotfix from Microsoft which replaces the ATAPI.SYS and ATDISK.SYS drivers and the problem came back!  I just switched back to the old drivers, obviously.

10:24 PM
Tekken 3: Force Mode
In an interesting twist, Namco has added a side scrolling adventure to Tekken 3 much like the old style favorites from a few years back, like Final Fight and Streets of Rage.  Hope they didn't sacrifice any features like Practice Mode to get this little gem in.  It's not like they would even need this to sell the game anyway!

Next Generation's story

2:30 PM
Desktop TV editing benchmark
Miro has an interesting little benchmark for measuring the DTV data rate requirements that your hard drive can handle.  Should be fun to try out.

ftp://ftp.miro.com/PUB/miro/driver/video/miroxp32.exe

1:30 AM
Apple kills the Newton
In their continuing efforts to streamline their business, Apple has officially sunk the Newton.  I remember buying the Newton 120 and selling it about 4 months later for a Pilot.  I liked the idea of the Newton, but quite frankly the problem was that it was too damn big and I felt stupid carrying the thing around in its little dayplanner thing.  I like my Pilot, which fits in my jeans pocket.

Then again, my friend doesn't seem to have a problem with carrying around his MobilePro in the same kind of case I used to use for my Newton.  But our Windows CE machines only cost $69, so I guess for that price you can do what you want.