|
2:18 PM
MageSlayer demo released
This 9MB download continues in the style of Gauntlet with a top-down dungeon exploration
style view. BUT, (and that's a big "but") with 3D acceleration. Recommended.
MageSlayer
demo
12:05 PM
NetMeeting 2.1 beta 2 released
Woohoo! I've been waiting for this one. Supposedly it has better video quality and less
sound latency (although that doesn't really concern me that much).
Link
to NM 2.1 beta 2 download page
8:51 PM
Must See TV
Tonight is a very big night for TV watchers. Seinfeld, Friends and the live season
premiere of ER all on one night. I don't watch TV much at school but this is a little too
much to pass up.
Repartitioning
Originally I had set up my new 9.1GB drive as one NTFS partition and two 2GB FAT
partitions. However, that was looking like a little bit too much trouble after a while, so
what I finally decided to do was go with just one big 9.1GB partition. This seems to be
working out pretty well so far. I basically moved all the data off the FAT partitions and
resized the NTFS partition using Partition Magic (which, by the way, is a great program).
So now I'm booting off my IDE drive and going straight to the SCSI (the IDE drive is there
for Win95 stuff like video capture and games). I'm in NT about 95% of the time so this
really is probably the best way for me to go. The ASUS SC875 Ultra-Wide SCSI controller I
got is really great too. It's been absolutely painless to work with and fast too. In
short, you barely even know it's there, which is a good measure of how good the hardware
is. The drive itself is mega-fast, as you might expect. I'm loving it.
10:44 PM
Dural developers begin work on PC first
Details on Sega's next-generation platform, Dural, are that it will be using PowerVR
technology and a Microsoft OS. Now today word comes that developers are to begin work with
the PC before even receiving Dural hardware and are assured that it will be compatible. Is
this the convergence between console and PC that many have been expecting?
Next Generation's story
3:02 PM
New goodies
Not a whole lot of time to fart around so let's just cut to the good stuff, shall we?
Rainbow Runner V1.52 drivers were released last night...the most notable fix is that they
seem to have solved the blue line problem, which I personally never had but which others
did. Incoming 3Dfx demo was released, get it here. Also, the NFS2 SE demo with 3Dfx
support was released, get it here.
NT 5.0 Beta 1 released
Microsoft released NT 5.0 Beta 1 at the Professional Developers Conference yesterday. It's
got a lot of new stuff in there but nothing terribly ground-breaking for the end user.
Probably the two best things are FAT32 support, which means you can trash those 2GB
partitions once and for all and still use Win95, and faster NTFS performance (whatever
that means).
Windows Sources
article
CacheSet for NT 4.0
For those of you who only have around 32-48MB of memory and are running NT, you may find
it frustrating that NT sometimes seems to run amok with its use of the disk cache,
sometimes using almost half your memory (i.e. way too much). NT Internals comes to the rescue with a great new
utility similar to their old utility CacheMan which trims and monitors the size of the
cache for you. The best thing about this new utility is that, unlike its predecessor, it
has a command line interface, which means you can run it on startup for painless cache
management.
http://www.ntinternals.com/cachesrc.zip
- CacheSet with program and source
3:47 AM
Big news for Voodoo Rush owners...
Hoo boy, it's late! This is really big news, I just had to post this before I went to bed.
3Dfx is offering a complete exchange program for initial owners of the Voodoo Rush. All
you have to do is email customer_service@3dfx.com
and you can exchange the 3Dfx daughterboard on your card for a Voodoo Graphics card.
Details are still to be worked out as to the logistics of the whole thing but it is
offically a go. More details can be found on the 3Dfx news server at news.3dfx.com.
2:56 AM
Vinyl idiots
Ever heard of the backlash against CD's? There are a lot of people out there who think
that LP's/Vinyl records actually sound better than CD's. They say that the analog nature
of LP's reproduces the music more faithfully than the digital and cold nature of CD's.
Those people are complete idiots and totally wrong. The music may sound better to them
but it definitely is not because the music is being reproduced more faithfully. There is a
technical explanation for why CD's are definitively better, but I don't think I need to go
into that.
1:26 AM
The new Quantum 3D card
Yes, supposedly Quantum 3D will be releasing a new Obsidian card that will double the
framerate of GL Quake. A lot of people said that the card would be based on Voodoo2
technology and were corrected by Quantum 3D. My question is, where was there ever mystery
in this? GL Quake was always fill rate limited and the addition of an extra texelfx chip
would double the fill rate and thus, duh, double the frame rate. Wasn't this pretty
obvious from the beginning? There seem to be people out there who think is current info
but I think it's just common sense.
Final Fantasy VII
I've heard too much about this game, I'm going to start playing it. That Knights of the
Round spell is just stupid! With a capital "S"! I'm gonna video capture it so
you guys can see it if you haven't yet.
Perfect System update
It looks like it's about that time to update that page, things have changed significantly
in the last month or so. I'll try to get around to it some time this week.
8:48 PM
Intel develops new flash technology
This is pretty interesting...Intel has discovered some way to utilize multilevel sense
technology in their flash memories. Which basically means that in each memory cell,
instead of storing a 0 or a 1 (a bit), you can store 2 bits (4 levels). It's basically a
doubling of the memory density for close to free.
Did you know...
After reading an editorial on Infoworld's website about running out of IRQ's, I just
wanted to see...did you know that your system actually has more than 15 IRQ's? Well, it
does. The PCI bus has a whole lot (I don't actually know how many but trust me, they are
there). The reason they typically don't get used is a compatibility issue with DOS/Win95,
which can't see the higher IRQ's, not a problem with the hardware. Use a new OS like NT or
possibly Linux and you will see your cards getting IRQ's like 48 or 56! That's what I see
on my system.
UO beta ends tomorrow
The free ride is ending tomorrow...I wonder how many people are actually going to
pay/play. To be honest, I never got into playing the game because I just couldn't find the
point. I mean, there wasn't any purpose. If that somehow changes with the release, I may
play. I hope the laggy feel of the game got fixed too.
3:10 PM
Starcraft beta is official
Blizzard has finally made an announcement on their Starcraft FAQ page that there
will be a beta test consisting of 1000 people who are randomly picked from the people who
sign up during the appropriate period.
|
