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More complaints about F1 seem to be surfacing...apparently relating to occasional breaks in frame rate which disrupt the illusion of smoothness. I have had a chance to try a copy of the game on a P120, however, and there are no serious problems that I can see. Just set the detail level to medium, which is not that much different from the MAX or NINJA settings, and it runs quite smoothly. Formula 1 isn't everybody's cup of tea, of course (it certainly isn't mine) but the attention to detail in the tracks is incredible and I think the game was quite well done.
As a side note, you should follow Nick Pandher's (of 3Dfx) directions
to avoid any potential problems.
Install the Glide 2.3 runtime drivers.
Then delete the glide2x.dll file from your F1 directory (or rename it). Finally,
make sure you are running the correct executable, f1win.exe.
Hmm...well on a hunch I tried this, and guess what? I can get to the build screen now! IF you weren't trying to play MOO2 under NT before, then you probably don't know that every time you tried to use the build screen, the game bombed. Obviously this does not come anywhere close to extensive testing on my part, but maybe we actually have a shot now. If you are an avid MOO2 player with NT 4.0, give it a shot and let me know how it goes! 5:10 PM According to Gary Tarolli of 3DFX and Shane Creamer, a Microsoft NT programmer, it is. There's a good technical explanation at AGN. 2:09 PM Turns out the K6 FPU may not really be slow, just that today's programs are optimized heavily for the Pentium...a situation that can likely be rectified in the future. A post on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video from Jay Lee reveals the following:
Got this reply from Lance Smith, one of the orginal Nexgeners now with
AMD.
Jay, Remember all those Nintendo games you used to play? The ones that were so awesome that you couldn't wait to get the latest ones and couldn't afford to buy all of them because $10 was a lot of money back then? Remember trading games with your friends so you could try other cool games? Well, try out some of these emulators! They run on your computer today, they use ROM images from those old games (which is technically probably a little questionable legally)...but anyhow they are so cool, you can play all those old games now, especially the cool ones that you just never got to play for one reason or another. There are great emulators for the NES, SMS and PC-Engine/TG16. SNES needs a little more work but is still operational. Go to Archaic Ruins for more links and info. They might be down, so try Node 99 if the other link doesn't work. BTW, 10 years later and Castlevania is still as damn F****** hard as I remember it. If you run Windows NT, you probably often wonder why NT thinks you need 20MB of file cache when you only have 32MB of RAM. Finally, a utility from NT Internals seems to solve that little problem. Run this program, check Aggressive Trimming and watch your cache size plummet to a more reasonable size of 8MB or so! I don't use this one much now that I have 80MB of RAM, but it's a good one to know about.
It's out. More bugs or less? I'm downloading it now...you can decide for yourself. I think the standard version is at ftp://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/4.0b4/windows/n32e40b4.exe As far as I know there's no Professional version yet. 3:27 PM Man, I just keep adding more and more stuff to this page. I never realized I was keeping track of so much computer stuff. Anyways, go to Mirabilis, the makers of ICQ, and download it. In case you don't know, ICQ is a program that allows you to know when your friends are online, and it has a whole bunch of features that make chatting with them, sending them files, and generally keeping in touch SO EASY. I highly recommend it. Can you believe they are up to around 1,100,000 in users? Incredible! Wonder what'll happen if people have to pay, though? NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 is out! Get it at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/nt40/ussp3/. I'm betting it fixes a whole lot of stuff, including that damn OOB WinNuke security bug. That's a funny one to pull on your friends, though...it makes them think you are a hardcore hacker who can take them out anytime. HAHA! BTW, if you want to know more about WinNuke/the OOB security problem, look at NTShop Security or MyDesktop. IF you actually want WinNuke, DO NOT ASK ME FOR IT. Look on IRC for it or something. For a quick summary, it basically allows you to crash any Windows-based machine on the
Internet. That's a pretty big deal. Somebody used it to shutdown Microsoft's FTP server
for the entire weekend. So why isn't the media making a big hullabaloo about it like the
IE bug (which I think is trivial compared to this). And why doesn't Microsoft post the
fix straight up on the front page of their website? (well, OK, I can answer that one)
Good news for us NT-using 3DFX card owners! GLQuake for NT is out. It's available via HTTP or FTP. There are initial reports from Italy (where the game was apparently released first) that the 3DFX version is sometimes slow and choppy. I think a lot of people are really hoping for this one to be a showcase for the 3DFX. However, at this point the problem seems like it may just be a driver issue, so no cause for excessive alarm! :-) From AGN 3D, a press release was issued regarding a new force feedback wheel in development. I don't know about you, but I'm excited about this thing. When racing games start using force feedback, we're all going to be in for a totally different gaming experience! I mean, really, using a force feedback joystick for a racing games is just stupid. I bought a camcorder at Ritz Camera for only $299. Minolta makes it, it's called the Minolta Master 8-862. I don't think this deal is available on their website but it is in the store I went to. I'm hoping this is a good deal, but I quite frankly haven't been doing a lot of research into camcorders lately. It's got Electronic Image Stabilization, 12x power zoom to 36x digital zoom, good color and lighting (from what little I've done so far) and it's 8mm. Only things missing that I would like are an external mike jack and an S-video output. I'm planning on using this thing for Netmeeting
as well as making videos. I'll be using it with my Media Vision Pro Movie Studio
capture card (an oldie, but a goodie). BTW, if you are looking for a cheap capture card,
WinNov seems to have a good deal going on theirs
for only $99! | |||||||||
