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It's the weekend, but damn there's a lot of stuff going on. Yes, the beta is now wide open to anybody, but you will need a copy of the CD to play. If you have a friend with a CD-R and the beta CD, you're in luck. Go to http://ultima-registration.com/server/socket/create for the universal registration code. In other news, I asked an Activision rep if Dark Reign would run on NT, and he said yes, but Activision will not support it, because of "a few weird restrictions."
3:57 PM Intel disclosed the presence of a performance enhancement to the Pentium II MMX implementation on Friday...real physical MMX registers. The context switching penalty involved when switching between FPU and MMX instructions has made the use of MMX less than attractive. In the current implementation, FPU and MMX instructions share the same registers. Although programmers still cannot physically access the MMX registers in a Pentium II, the presence of the registers does cut the context switching time dramatically. Other speculation points to the MMX2 instruction set allowing for multiple-issue floating point instructions, meaning you might be able to get several results in a single cycle. This would be especially useful in geometry processing.
And this is especially interesting...an audio-processing company called Waves Inc. has designed a way to produce the illusion of bass or low frequency response from normal midrange speakers. Apparently, the brain can be fooled into believing that a fundamental frequency (e.g. a nice bassy signal) is being heard if certain harmonics of that fundamental frequency are heard. Obviously, generic speakers like the ones for your computer probably don't handle bass very well but they are capable of generating the higher frequency harmonics that induce this psychoacoustic phenomenon (i.e. the illusion of bass). http://techweb.cmp.com/eet/news/97/970news/al.html
12:13 PM According to the guys at Activision, Dark Reign went to manufacturing and should be in stores around the 23rd of Sept. or so. Maybe this game will be good enough to tide me over until Starcraft comes out. :-)
10:07 PM Kali is on version 1.1W. That means they only have 3 letters left in the alphabet left. Back at around 1.1K, I was thinking "Man, what if this just kept going and they ran out of letters?" Then I thought, "Nah, no way!!!" Well, looks like I might be wrong, hehe. Any bets as to what they are going to do for new versions or if they'll even make it that far?
I've updated the page mainly to reflect some new pricing (Check out those PPro 180's!) as well as the UMAX Astra 300P $99 deal. I still can't believe how cheap the Mystique+Rainbow Runner is.
The G-Police demo from Psygnosis is out. I think this one has been in the works for a while (wasn't it supposed to be on Playstation?). Well, it supports 3D cards and everything, but quite frankly it didn't really do anything for me. It seems to be a very generic "fly around and shoot stuff" kind of game. If you liked Terminal Velocity or Fury3 or Hellbender, you might like this game. Direct Download for G-Police demo - 15MB
It seems as if Apple's recent moves to shut down the clone market may have played serious havoc with Be's plans for its fledgling operating system. The absence of Mac clones does not bode well for an alternative OS which only runs on PowerPC machines (basically, Mac's). Be's president, Jean Louis-Gassee, said, "How do we spell relief? I-N-T-E-L." I'd love to see Be's operating system on the PC and perhaps this means we PC users may get a taste of it sooner than expected.
3:54 PM After a year of waiting, the drivers finally work in full-duplex in NT! Very cool. I'm not sure what was causing the crashes before, but I suspect that it might have something to do with the fact that NT seems to have trouble removing the SB16 drivers when you tell it to. I've had the problem before, so it might be possible that I had two drivers somehow trying to load or operate at the same time. All I need is my Rainbow Runner drivers in NT and there will be one less reason to reboot to 95.
New features include a fire analyzer (you just have to see it) and a nice doublesize mode for those of us with high resolutions but small screens. http://winamp.lh.net/winamp14.exe
4:52 PM These appear to be the same drivers released a week or two ago, but now Creative has officially stamped them full-duplex capable on their website. These drivers appear to be the same ones that were causing some pretty serious blue screen action when I installed them a week ago. Nevertheless, because I really want f/d capability, I'm going to give another shot. I'm linking to them in case you want to try them, but be warned! http://www.creaf.com/creative/drivers/sb16awe/awent40.exe
I kept feeling like I was running low on hard drive space. Man, it was weird. Then the other day I found out that I had this 500MB file that I had forgotten about sitting on my hard drive. I think I'm one of the few people I know who could have a 500MB file sitting on his hard drive taking up space and not know something was immediately wrong!
I haven't had a chance to stress test these new drivers yet, but off-hand they seem to fix the weird problems Premiere had with them and I haven't had any weird crashes during MPEG or MJPEG accelerated playback (which I had been getting quite a lot of before). I also found out from a friendly Rainbow Runner-using soul why I was dropping about 20% of frames at any resolution. Seems that if you don't enable video overlay (allowing you to watch the video on the screen) during capture, the frame drops will occur. Kind of a weird problem, and it certainly doesn't make much sense, but since I can't think of any reason why having the overlay on would be worse (but I can think of a ton of reasons why it's better), I can deal with it.
Yes! I"m hoping these drivers will fix the funky problems I've been having with this card. BTW, at $180 the Rainbow Runner is a steal. I'm gonna try the drivers out now, here's a link to the English drivers, see ya! ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/rainbow/rr150eng.zip
5:39 PM I just found out NECX Direct is selling the Matrox Mystique 220 4MB for $119 and the Rainbow Runner add-on for $180 now. Man, did I take the shaft or what?
The driver of her car had a blood alcohol level that was three times over the legal limit and the speedometer of the car was stuck at 120 mph. Um, maybe that's why they crashed.
I guess in an effort to take back some of the market and licensing deals they handed out, Apple has bought out Power Computing, their primary competitor in the Mac market, for $100 million. I wonder where this is going?
Because Sega apparently broke a contract with 3Dfx to design Sega's next-generation console, 3Dfx has finally decided to sue. Read the details here. Apparently Sega's entire design team (the 3Dfx based design was code named Black Belt) at Sega of America resigned over the issue.
I made it back, WITH my computer, and I'm back up and running. Everything went pretty smoothly, except for one point where I thought the monitor box wasn't going to fit in the car. It's real nice to be back, Ethernet is always a pleasant surprise after using the modem. Only thing that sucks is that there's no air conditioning in my room...sleeping isn't going to be pleasant (or clean). Referring back to those crazy Labor Day deals, I headed down to Best Buy Sunday morning with three other people and bought a total of about 80 CD's for essentially free. They were all gone in about an hour. Anyhow, CompUSA is also having a little free bonanza involving little things like keyboards, touchpads, air dusters, toolkits, power centers, surge protectors...just little things you might need once in a while. It's cool!
Dude, that is pretty screwed up. It's almost like the president dying or something (just in terms of shock value). I'm sure you'll be able to find up-to-date details on it at CNN Interactive or The Nando Times. They were driving apparently trying to get away from some paparazzi and I guess the driver screwed up or something. Well that dude ain't getting his paycheck (actually it doesn't matter because he's dead too).
Oh yeah. It's getting close to flight time to Philly but the deals just keep rolling in. Today I bought myself a UMAX 300P parallel port scanner. It's 300x600 dpi. I don't really know if it's mine acutally, because I don't really need it and I'm probably not gonna bring it to Penn, so I may just leave it with my parents. OK, here's the deal, I got it for $99. OH YEAH. A new Comp USA was opening here in Houston and one of the deals was that they were cutting $20 off the normal price of $149 for the first 50 people who bought one, plus there's a $30 mail in rebate. Damn, that's a good deal. I tried it out, it's pretty nice. Today, Best Buy is going to have a sale on CDR discs from Plasmon. A 10-pack is 24.99. And you get a $25 rebate. OK, do the math. I'm going down there with a bunch of my friends at 11:00 AM tomorrow (or today, this morning) and we are going to clear that store of CD-R discs. This comes at a pretty opportune time since I'm fresh out of discs.
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