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Assembly 'XX is a big convention every year wher the baddest of the bad master coders get together and compete to code the most awesome demonstrations of graphical and programming prowess into the smallest size possible. The scene seems to have slowed down a bit but the latest convention, Assembly '97, has taken place and you should check out the results to truly appreciate their talent.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/demos/incoming/ASM97/ Man, I just got so sleepy yesterday I couldn't update. Anyways, Netscape 4.02 is released, will it fix the constant crashing problems and the "replace the new mail sound with chord.wav" bug that 4.01 didn't. Knowing Netscape, I wouldn't bet money on it. Not that important but what the hell, eh? The page is mostly fixed now. You can go take a look at it. Maybe I should add some graphs or something.
I added a bunch of links to the documents from which I obtained the data. It's very interesting reading if you want to learn more, I highly recommend it. -- Update - ignore that, the file seems to be corrupt. I'll upload a fixed one tomorrow. You might think I had totally forgot about this, but trust me, I haven't. Thanks to Jimmy from the Hi-Fi Gaming page, I have the entire Dracula X original game soundtrack digitally ripped and encoded. I'll be replacing the current samples as well as uploading the new ones. Yes! 9:11 PM According to Zanshin, he's been sued and can't release the driver or anything. Now, I haven't said anything before because I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt. If Zanshin had released a working OpenGL driver it would have been a great thing for the Quake community. However, I also suspected that this might be just a big hoax. What better way to get people's attention than by promising something (free speed) for nothing? However, I think this latest "turn" is highly suspicious. The fact is, we have nothing other than his word to go on, no working code, no sample code, no demonstrated expertise. I think Zanshin had better do something soon to prove he's got what it takes. BTW, if you look at various snippets from 3Dfx employees, you'll see they were skeptical too, but not critical...take a look at the latest news on Operation 3Dfx. I'm sure somebody's going to get down on me for saying this but I had to say it. Let's just hope Zanshin does it. I tried something a little different with my case. My Enlight case has a secondary fan in the bottom front of the case mounted in a bracket. The fan ends up being flush with the case. There are holes in the case where the fan goes, but quite frankly it isn't nearly enough. I tried placing the fan flush with the case and about an inch off and the difference was absolutely tremendous. The fan was actually blowing air...a lot of it! Well, I didn't really want to cut a big hole in the front of the case (don't get me wrong, I'm the kind of guy who would actually do that, but I don't feel like disassembling my computer), so I tied the fan on the opposite side of the bracket with some wire instead. Before I said the max temp of my CPU reached 65.5...now the max seems to be 60.5-61.5. Quite a difference. The only problem is that with the fan more inside the case more air is recirculating instead of getting pulled in. I'm gonna think more about this later.
Although a consortium of 10 top manufacturers has agreed on a final standard (2.6 GB), it seems that Sony and 2 other major players, Philips and Hewlett-Packard, will be going out on their own with a standard which has 15% more capacity (3.0GB) and supposedly better compatibility with pressed DVD formats. You'll note that neither of these formats comes close to the 4.7GB on current DVD's. How the hell are you supposed to copy discs? Man, that sucks. :-) Canopus will apparently be releasing a 3Dfx card, the Pure3D, similar to the Righteous 3D and Monster 3D in that it will be an add-on card using pass-through to display the image, but different in that it will have 6MB total memory, 4MB for texture storage and 2MB for frame-buffer. I can tell you right now, if games need anything, texture storage is pretty up there. The card will also have S-video and composite out so you can play your 3Dfx games on the TV in all their glory. I only have two misgivings about this card...first of all it seems like faster alternatives are really on the horizon and second, everybody with a 3Dfx card has 2MB of texture memory, so I wonder just how many developers will take advantage of 4MB. On the other hand, 3Dfx cards have very strong native support right now, so that's a plus for buying the 3Dfx card. Anyhow, if you are going to get a 3Dfx card anyway, you might as well get this one, because it's supposedly only going to cost $179 direct from Canopus. Not like you haven't read this before, but Infoworld has some good articles today on the future of Intel's processor technology, including the development of 100 MHz bus chipsets and Slot 2, which will be targeted toward server applications. Slot 2 processors are expected to run faster than 333 MHz when introduced and feature ECC cache as well as full speed L2 cache. The current Pentium II is pretty weak as a server processor because of its half-speed cache and its inability to cache more than 512MB of memory. In the meantime, before Slot 2's introduction in mid-1998, Intel will be releasing a 1MB cache version of the 200 MHz Pentium Pro to bolster its server offerings.
Article on Intel's roadmap for the future Hercules announced this new card today, which will be based on Rendition's upcoming V2200 chipset, an integrated 2D/3D solution which should be faster than the current 3Dfx offerings. Pricing seems reasonable...SRP's of $179 and $249 for the 4MB and 8MB models, respectively. Both cards will be available as PCI or AGP models. A lot of Stingray 128/3D owners are not taking these new product announcements from Hercules very favorably, considering their current card has crap driver support.
The word on the street is that this card is actually based on the PCX2 PowerVR chipset. If this is true, it would help explain how Matrox managed to pull this card out of the blue. Another source says an announcement will be made August 15th. Well, we'll see. 9:27 PM That's supposed to be the code for murder, huh? Anyway, I thought it sounded pretty funny, some guy assassinated Lord British even though he was supposed to be invincible. Ultima Online Scorched has some great screenshots and stuff, I don't know who from. My friend is going to be sending me his beta CD since he's gonna be out of the country for a little bit, so maybe I'll get to play! If you recall a couple of weeks back I was on a "cool my system down" kick. I'm still looking into it but the easiest solution so far has been "leave the case off". For the hell of it I tried measuring the temperature of the chip with the case on and it got up to around 65.5º max. That a lot higher than the 52º I saw with the case off. I really need some extra case fans. Some guy posted that the Intel website says that these will be available in 300 & 333 MHz varieties. Of course, I can't find where on the website. Anyways, that's not quite as fast as I had hoped...400 MHz would be worth looking into.
Oh yeah, Intel countersued Digital today for patent infringement. Like we didn't see that one coming, haha.
There's a minor debate raging over in comp.os.linux.hardware about some strange problems being encountered with the K6 when more than 32MB of memory is in the system. Two people I've seen so far have reported it and in both cases replacing the chip with a Pentium fixed it. One guy tried four different motherboards and five different sets of RAM and couldn't fix the problem short of switching to a Pentium! He's set up a web page here cataloging problems with the K6. 8:22 PM Man, I hope the strike doesn't last too long. If it gets ugly I'll be completely screwed when I need to ship my computer to school in a couple of weeks. I heard that the government ordered UPS to resume negotiations again. I'm not sure whose side I'm on right now. I tweaked all the hardware pages a little here and there. Because my parents seem to want a scanner now, I've done some research and have a recommendation for a scanner on my Perfect System page, the Microtek ScanMaker E6. I'm going to be ordering it from NECX, probably. I wonder how the shipping will get handled? For all you cheapos who are so tight with your money that you can't lay out $20 to buy Kali, you might want to give Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone a try. :-) It's free and it's supposed to work with Warcraft II and, indeed, most MS-DOS based IPX network games, as well as old-style board games like chess and checkers, etc. Hopefully this will get you addicted enough so that you decide to go buy a copy of Kali and play some real players! You MUST have IE 3.0 or IE 4.0b2 to use IGZ, which is, quite frankly, just weird. Internet Telephony is one of the coolest things you can do with your computer today. It's free long distance calls, man, how can you beat that? Well, the only problem is that you need a decent computer setup on both ends and usually you need to arrange a calling time or something. Net2Phone helps in this problematic area a lot. It allows you to call a real phone from your computer. Although it's not free (about 10 cents/min), it still beats the hell out of paying a dollar or two a minute for international rates.
Because I don't want to spend any money whatsoever, my own personal preference is to call friends with Microsoft Netmeeting 2.0 via ICQ. In fact, it's way easier to use ICQ to launch Netmeeting to call a friend rather than manually starting Netmeeting and placing a call. The only thing that sucks is that I have to go to 95 to get the full feature set. My capture card currently has no NT drivers and my SB16 has no full-duplex drivers in NT. Believe me, having full-duplex on both ends is a god-send and is way beyond half-duplex. Without it, you have to talk like CB operators "blahblahblah, OVER."
Awesome...the new clients have been released and most notably have the 8-bit texture compression which reduces the nasty texture trashing that used to occur. Less lag for GL Quakers!
QuakeWorld 2.0 (w/new GL QuakeWorld) Goodbye Libretto, hello, Prius! Everything I worried about in the Libretto has been added in this new sub-sub-notebook from Hitachi. Weighing in at only 2.3 lbs., it boasts a Pentium 120 running an 8.4" TFT screen and a roomy 9.3" keyboard. Not only that, but it has the mic input that the Libretto 50 was so sorely lacking and it has 3, count 'em, THREE, PC card slots. To top it all off, the computer has all ports built in, not on a breakout box, and has built-in stereo speakers too. WOW, I want it! Currently, the only place I can find any info on the Prius is Japan Palmtop Direct; however, their prices seem unusually high on all their products. I expect cheaper sources to surface.
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