|
7:48 PM
Starcraft is gold!
This time, for real. It's about time, Blizzard. Everybody I
know has pretty much lost interest, although they'll probably still buy the game since
they liked War2 so much. I suppose you can check their website for details.
2:34 PM
Computer trouble
Yeah, uh...this one is a doozy. My computer has become increasingly
flaky over the past few weeks and yesterday I decided to do something about it. I
screwed around with it all day, reinstalling software and pulling parts in and out...until
I removed one CPU and everything was OK. That either means the slot on my
motherboard is screwed or the CPU is. Really bad news. I'm operating with one
CPU right now and didn't really expect it to be worse but it really feels like molasses.
It's just not responsive like the dual processor setup was (you do have to keep in
mind that I'm often constantly compressing files or videos in the background.).
1:23 PM
High quality Tekken 3 intro available
Just check the recent A/V clips at the top for the link. A couple of
notes...the aspect ratio is a little off, because that actually the way the video was when
I ripped it with PSX Video. I could stretch it out, I guess, but you can do that
too, so... The other thing is that I probably could have compressed it better with
Indeo 5.0 since the clips are only 20 fps, but I just did it in MPEG because that's what
I'm used to.
A full review with screenshots and more clips will be coming soon.
12:58 PM
Tekken 3 clips
Since Gaming Age's server seems to not work very well, I went ahead and
put two of the clips up locally. You can grab the clip of Jin fighting Law (5.4 MB) and the new Tekken 3 rendered intro (10 MB).
10:54 AM
Tekken 3 is out!
In Japan, anyway. I still have to wait a couple of days to get my
copy. In the meantime, check out the Tekken 3 report from Gaming Age.
It's got clips of gameplay and the intro!
5:02 PM
Netmeeting 2.1 SP1 released
A new version of Netmeeting has been released. If you like the idea
of being able to talk to your friends long distance for free, you should try Netmeeting
out. Here are the changes according to Bryan Chee at Microsoft.
NetMeeting 2.1 SP1 has released to the web and is available for download.
http://www.microsoft.com/netmeeting
The setup file should be
version - 4.3.2203
size - 2.06MB (2,168,960 bytes)
filename - NM21.EXE
Many of the issues addressed were for the NM SDK, however, these are some
that may affect your NetMeeting conference.
- improved video frame rate throughput for higher bandwidth. will allow
~30fps
- fixed audio "skipping" problem
- updated capture driver list and settings
--
Regards
Bryan Chee
NetMeeting Team
msnetmtg@microsoft.com
3:56 PM
New Matrox 2D/3D card
It looks like Matrox is finally trying to get its act together on the 3D
scene with their new G200 series. It's really been quite a while since Matrox
released a brand new card, so this should be an interesting one to keep an eye out for.
Bootnet has the scoop.
1:56 PM
New results up for Starfighter AGP
The updated results for the Starfighter AGP in GL Quake 2 using the real
OpenGL MCD in Windows NT have been added. There is supposed to be a new ICD in a
couple of weeks which will improve performance even more. As always, you can check
back here for the latest results.
In other news, I'm feeling a little under the weather. Ack!
If you really enjoy this page...
Go out and tell people about it! This site needs your support as
much as it needs me here running it. Link from your own pages and if you see other
sites with similiar content, ask them to link here. Thanks!
2:37 PM
New software
A couple of things you ought to download today. Number one is
Microsoft's e-mail client Outlook 98 final release, because it's free and it works well
and it fixes bugs in Outlook 97. Number two is ICQ 98a V1.11. It should fix
some bugs, I hope. I can't believe how unreliable ICQ is when it comes to chat or
messaging.
Microsoft's Outlook 98
site
ICQ
98a V1.11 US download
7:20 PM
Media Studio 5.02 update
Hey, I don't know if you guys use Media Studio or not, but if you do, the
5.02 update is available from the Media Stuidio Users
Group in the Downloads section.
Just released today! Updates are available for the full as well as VE
version.
New NT defragger
A new Windows NT defragmenter called O&O Defrag has been released.
It looks pretty nice. The website is
all in German, though. You can download the defragger directly from here.
5:45 PM
New figures for the Real3D Starfighter
Well, the day is just about over and I have new figures for the
Starfighter/Intel 740 with a real OpenGL MCD under Windows NT. The performance boost
is about 5-10% in most cases. Figures and charts should be up and revised in the
review by tomorrow.
nVidia announces the Riva TNT
NVIDIA's next generation processor is supposed to be able to process two
pixels per clock cycle for single-pass multitexturing capabilities and will contain nearly
7 million transistors. Figures given by NVIDIA say that the chip has a fill-rate of
250 million pixels/second! Hmm...well, as always, we'll have to wait and see.
nVidia Riva TNT press
release
10:00 AM
Real3D Starfighter AGP review up
I'm happy to present you with a first look at the production release of
the Real3D Starfighter AGP, utilizing the much talked about Intel740 chipset. Please
note that I had to use a GL to D3D wrapper, provided by Real3D, to obtain the Quake 2
screenshots. Real3D says they will be providing me with an OpenGL MCD/ICD very soon,
at which time the benchmarks and screenshots will be updated to reflect any increase in
performance or visual quality. I invite you to check back over the next few days for
those results as well as answers to some of the outstanding questions I hope to have
answered about the Starfighter.
With that said, you can see the review here.
11:15 PM
BeOS sucks!
Well, not really. I'm just frustrated, since I managed to locate a
copy of BeOS and tried to install it on my system...and failed miserably. There's
just something about my system that stops the kernel from even booting. I even went
so far as to take my hard drive and video card over to my friend's computer, get it
installed on there, and bring it back. It still didn't work. Really, this is
too much...I've never had a compatibility problem with this computer. Man, and I
wanted to try BeOS so badly. Hopefully Be will patch the kernel or something to fix
whatever is screwing up. Do they do that? I really hope I don't have to wait
for Release 4.
3:34 PM
BeOS anticipation
I just looked at the BeOS
for Intel FAQ and nearly all the hardware in my system is supported, which is
extremely fortunate, since the list of supported hardware is rather short. The one
big thing that I'm looking at is that it DOESN'T support SCSI. Ack! What am I
going to do about that?
One interesting thing is that BeOS includes a special version of Partition Magic from
PowerQuest to manage the boot process. I still have to clear off space on my IDE
drive if I'm going to get this thing up and running. They do make quite a big
hullabaloo about the pervasive threading that goes on in BeOS, so I'll be able to fool
with that first hand, since I have a multiprocessor system.
4:35 AM
Starcraft or Tekken 3?
I prefer to have awesome games spread out in time between releases so that
I always have something to do. But now, Blizzard has decided to close the Starcraft
beta...which means that the final release must be close, if not here. You can read
the announcement here.
Guessing that it takes about a week for the game to get pressed and shipped...it
should be coming out, oh, roughly the same day as Tekken 3. Great. Haha!
| 