Logo by Tom Purves

11:07 PM
PlayStation's Tekken 3 keeping 3D backgrounds
Well, this is important because if the development team was having any problems, the 3D backgrounds would definitely be the first to go. The backgrounds aren't a very critical part of the game and they suck up CPU power. Hopefully this is an indication of things to come!

Next Generation's story

3:14 PM
New STB Velocity 128 drivers released
This brand new card badly needed some new video drivers, and last night it got them.

http://www.stb.com/drivers/velocity/vl128.html

WinAMP 1.54 released
This revision addresses some stability problems. Nothing special, but it's a small download as usual, so go ahead and get it.

http://winamp.lh.net/winamp154.exe

ACDSee32 2.2 released
Aha! I recently switched to ACDSee from LView Pro 1.D as my primary "quickie" graphics viewing program, and I guess it's been a good switch for the most part. One thing that was really bugging me was the fact that ACDSee had the gall to install its own right click context menu without asking me first. Thankfully, that has been fixed in this latest revision.

ftp://ftp.acdsystems.com/pub/acdsee32/acdc3222.exe

Age of Empires demo released
Remember, this is a Microsoft published game, not actually made by Microsoft! :-) Anyways, out of the three RTS games released within the last couple of weeks or so, AOE looks to be the best. So if you haven't tried it out yet, here's your chance...it's about a 23MB download, so be patient.

ftp://ftp.download.com/pub/win95/games/MSAoE.exe

11:18 PM
Case fans
I finally got my case fans in yesterday and had quite a hell of a time getting them in. The first thing I did was to put one of the new fans inside the fan cage. The old fan made a very nasty sound whenever it was mounted in my case. With the new fan, I don't have the problem any more. I took the old fan and rigged it up to blow over my drive by wiring it up with some paper clips so that it's mounted in the center front of two drive bays. Surprisingly enough, this seems like a pretty secure mounting strategy, even though it looks ugly. Since the fan isn't up against the case anymore, it's not making a nasty noise at all and is usable for this purpose. I'll post a pic of it if that didn't make any since. Finally, I took the last new fan and mounted it in the back as an extra exhaust. I didn't have screws to mount that either so I just tied it to the holes with some string, which also seems to be working out so far.

Meanwhile, my friend got his two smart case fans along with mine, so we stuck those in, Actually, we only stuck in one, inside the lower front portion of his case, where there is a dedicated fan cage (exhaust). We tried to mount the other smart fan as an intake near the top rear just under the power supply by tying it down with some string, but that didn't work very well...it made a pretty annoying and loud sound so we had to shut that one off. It's clear that that space is supposed to have a fan cage but it didn't come with the case, so we aren't sure yet where we can get one.

Oddly enough, Tom Mosher of SDS Mark II warned me that my fans might be rather loud because they are high CFM (Cubic Feet of air per Minute) fans. He asked if I wanted quiet, sort of quiet with good air flow, or not quiet with high air flow, and I said "High air flow!" Actually, I've found them to be quite quiet. My friend's smart fans are louder.

Jedi Knight demo released
A somewhat unremarkable game, I think, although definitely not bad. I still need to give multiplayer a shot.

Direct download: Jedi Knight - 20 MB

11:18 PM
Daytona PCI
This new card from Turtle Beach (they make great sound cards) has me pretty interested. First of all, it's a PCI card, not an ISA card. Second, it's a full duplex card with Windows NT 4.0 support. Third, it's supposedly DirectSound accelerated (I'm not entirely sure what this means yet, but it could mean that the card supports multiple digital channels, which would be cool). Among the other interesting things to mention: it has the standard MPU-401 breakout via the joystick port and also supports wavetable audio using up to 10MB of system RAM as sample storage. I guess this is possible because of the PCI bus.

I'm mostly interested in the NT 4.0 support and full-duplex operation. The wavetable seems the weirdest part about the card to me, but to be frank, I could care less about the wavetable. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention one of the best parts, the card is only supposed to cost $89.95 from NECX. It may be a good replacement for the SB16 I currently have.

Sound Blaster compatibility
Which brings me to my next point. It used to be that SB compatibility was a difficult thing to achieve, and my personal opinion was that saving a few bucks on purchasing a clone card wasn't worth the inevitable hassles that were bound to crop up. However, it seems to be that the era of SB's proprietary dominance has finally come to the end of its lifetime, at least from a technical standpoint. Let's face it, all games that are coming out right now are Windows 95/NT games, not DOS. It matters in DOS whether your sound card is an SB or not, but to Windows, a sound card is a sound card. I don't think I would have a problem recommending a non-SB card to people now, like the AudioPCI from Ensoniq or the Daytona PCI from Turtle Beach, unless they were dead set on playing a bunch of older DOS games.

Now about the issue of replacing my SB16. You'll recall that the recent NT 4.0 full-duplex drivers released by Creative Labs cause the occasional blue screen on my NT box. My other friends don't seem to be having the same problem. I haven't tried to use the full-duplex since I reinstalled last week, so I may give them one more shot and see if I get lucky. Otherwise, I may just end up having to get that Daytona PCI sound card.

Problem is, I'm out of slots again. I don't actually have any free PCI slots at all, so even if I chucked the SB16 and replaced it with the Daytona PCI, I couldn't stick the card in. Now, I actually do have a free PCI slot, but it's being used by my old SCSI controller. Why do I still have it in there? Well, apparently a lot of SCSI people feel that it is a good idea to stick slow SCSI devices on their own separate channel and to keep the fast I/O devices like hard drives on their own channel. In theory, slow devices should not slow down the entire chain, but of course, theory and practice are two different beasts. However, this may be all just extreme paranoia on my part...I probably ought to put all the devices on the Ultra-Wide card just to see how things work themselves out. I'm not really using or needing the PCI slot it's occupying now, though, so I guess it's OK for the momemt.

More Ultima Online observations
Definitely slow going, but pretty fun, I guess. We're pretty much done with getting decent equipment, but now we need to build our stats. I'm amazed at the number of evil dickheads in the world. I admit I kind of wanted to be evil, but I just couldn't do it. Those evil guys piss me off. We did our fair share slaughtering pkillers today though. I'll type more after I wake up.

11:18 PM
It's tonight...
And IE 4.0 is finally out! Unfortunately there's no good way to tell you to download it, since a small 400 KB program handles the setup and download for you. Just go to http://www.microsoft.com/ie and get started.

Bought Ultima Online
It's really not as bad as I thought, although it is still rather slow going. The cooperative effort between all my friends here is what is making the game fun. I'd have to say that if I were playing on my own over a modem, I probably wouldn't be enjoying it at all. I'm lucky to be here at Penn with people I know on Ethernet.

3:48 PM
IE 4.0 not out until tonight
For some strange reason, Microsoft is not going to be releasing Internet Explorer 4.0 until sometime tonight. I don't understand why they are waiting until tonight to release it, and I REALLY don't understand why they didn't just tell people ahead of time what time of the day it was going to come out.

10:48 AM
Ultima Online: Is it worth it?
Three of my friends went out and bought the game today, and it looks like my other friends are going to be getting it too. Actually, one of my roommates already has it, it's just going to his house and he's got to pick it up. I may be forced into buying this game out of sheer mass peer pressure. I still can't get over how slow the game seems to be, but I dunno, maybe that will change. So here comes the question, good or evil? I think I'm gonna be evil for a change, hehe! Look out!

IE 4.0 due out tomorrow
Yep, the long awaited release of Internet Explorer 4.0 has finally arrived (well, almost). I'm not entirely sure whether it's going to be released at midnight or sometime during the day tomorrow. Watch for for it.

Bookstore shopping
I'm trying to get a hold of this book for my TCOM 500 class that costs $80 at the bookstore. I found out in class that the book only costs $40! from Barnes & Noble online. So I'm going to be ordering from them, but meanwhile, I have no book, and I have homework due tomorrow. Oh well, time to beg!

Bidding wars
I was trying to bid again at Onsale for a computer (PPro 200 from HP) but the bidding got too heavy. Actually, it got even worse on this 21" MAG Innovision MX21F I was trying to get for my parents. The price was still great but too much for me, I thought. My roommate however, got his for the same price I had bid ($784) but he got his because he had entered his bid in earlier. Considering he was going to be paying more for a 19", I think he's pretty happy. Meanwhile, I'm continuing my quest for a 21" for my parents. Woof!

Gateway lays off at least 500
Rather surprising, but this round of layoffs seems to be a way to cut the fat from the company. It seems like more of a preemptive thing than a desperation measure, since Gateway's results have been quite good up to now, but I'm sure the third quarter results will be somewhat below expectations.

ZDNet's story

3:13 AM
Perfect PC and BomberCop pages updated
I made some revisions to the Perfect System page to reflect some new trends in the PC industry and I also changed up the BomberCop page (ego boost!).

1:27 AM
Onsale
My friends and I have been having something of a shopping party at Onsale. First of all, we got those Fast-Wide SCSI-II UltraStar 2XP's...man, that deal was definitely sweet, and now they are only going for $629? Get out! That's by far the best deal we've cashed in on, but my friends have bought some more stuff, like a pair of Righteous 3D's for $95 a piece and 4 QuickCams for $94 a piece. Not bad at all. I can finally videoconference with my friends and it won't be a one-way street!

More RTS opinions
We got a chance to fool around with some of the newer RTS games being released. First off was Total Annihilation. The game seems pretty nice at first. I really like the use of 3D for the units; other games should definitely take a hint, this is the future. The game supposedly requires DirectX 5 but it works just fine on my NT4 SP3 setup (although it gives a warning about potential problems). Anyhow, the presentation of the game and the effects are pretty cool, but we had two major problems. One, the units don't really look all that different, so it's hard to differentiate between them. Two, it seems impossible to conduct any decent long-range attacks. Defenses are a lot more powerful than offenses so you can't really run in and kick somebody's ass. The only unit really worth a damn was this thing called the Can. Strong and does a good amount of damage, but moves slower than molasses. It was impossible to attack with these things, it took 5 minutes just to walk over to the other guy with them. Basically we both reached nukes and then it was a big nukefest (not exciting).

AOE. on the other hand, looks much more promising. We'll have to see how that turns out for multiplayer but it looks like a Civ-style War2. Some guy across the hall got his Ultima Online charter edition today and my roommate should be picking his up from home on Monday. I still don't see anything exciting about the game; I hope something good about it turns up. Many of my friends are VERY excited about it but I really don't see the point of playing yet.

What I've been doing...
Yep, meanwhile I've been playing FF7. To be honest, I'm not really into the game. I kinda feel like I'm just going through the motions, so to speak. I've just finished dealing with Cosmo Canyon and I got a couple of summoning spells, like Ifrit and Ramuh. Knights of the Round is presumably a ways off, hehe. Meanwhile, my friends have been playing Final Fantasy Tactics. The combat is much like Vandal Hearts, but the overall graphics, story and gameplay is much better and polished, as you might expect from a Square game. The art is weird, though...nobody has any noses. I have trouble telling the guys from the girls.

Actually, while the TV in our room was in use, I was playing the PlayStation using the video in of my Rainbow Runner. It works great. For some reason, the dual field mode (60 field/sec vs. 30 frames/sec: very important for smoothness of motion) only seems to work in 16-bit color at 800x600 or 1024x768. Strangely enough, 640x480 doesn't work with the dual-field mode (there's no error either, you have to eyeball it). Also, the TV window is never full-screen, even when I drop it to 640x480. Another weird problem, the computer locks up while I'm using the full-screen TV window after a while. However, the TV mode continues to work, so I don't really notice until I'm done playing and try to close the TV window. I ended up having to install DirectX 5 again, so this may have whacked the RR drivers again like I suspect DirectX 5 is prone to do.

WinAMP 1.51 and 1.52.666 beta released
No major feature updates. Get it here.

Quake TC Zerstorer released
A giant Quake TC called Zerstorer was released today. Download link is below

ftp://24.92.11.33/c/inetpub/ftproot/zer.zip