|
|
In order to stress test my computer I'm actually going to offer the Ultima Online beta (which is now free) for download from my computer. The total download is about 181 MB and you will need even more space to install it, so be warned! Also please note that this is my personal computer, so it may go down for about an hour or so occasionally while I need to do things in Win95, like video capture. The computer is usually up so if you get disconnected just come back in a couple of hours and finish up. And please don't use your browser to FTP! That's just stupid. Now: go to hrsa046.resnet.upenn.edu to download.
Among the improvements for these releases (V2.13 for D3D and V2.42 for Glide) are DirectX 5.0 compliance and some improvements for Voodoo Rush, the bastard child of Voodoo Graphics. Direct 3D V2.13 drivers - http://www.3dfx.com/software/download_vgd3d.html Glide 2.42 runtime drivers - http://www.3dfx.com/software/download_glidert.html
It's something of a surprise move, but LucasArts seems to have released the Direct 3D acceleration patch with little to no warning. Well, now you've been warned! Go grab it! http://www.lucasarts.com/static/xvt/xvtdirect3d.htm
1:44 AM Not a game demo, but a real demo demo. Check it out. http://www.voodooextreme.com/files/demos/vgonatur.zip
1:13 AM Looks like 300 MHz Pentium II's are coming into the market now. I'm seeing them around for about $1100-1200. A real ripoff right now, but some people buy them anyway (and I'm not talking about server people).
PC Magazine did a video capture roundup of several capture cards. The Rainbow Runner won the entry level Editors Choice and the miroVideo DC30+ got the midlevel award. Unfortunately there are no screen shots or final videos to download to look at. Still a good read. http://www8.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/vidcap/_open.htm
Threadmark is a hard disk benchmark program from Adaptec. It measures CPU utilization and raw sustained throughput. I'm about to run it just to see how my hard drives hold up. That Fast-Wide drive still hasn't turned up, although narrow versions have. It better come up this weekend! ftp://ftp.adaptec.com/pub/BBS/adaptec/thrdmk20.exe
The video is very poorly compressed because it unpacks to 23 megs! But the download is only 6.x megs. Anyhow, here's the first taste of the sequel to one of the hottest games of the year. My friends and I went crazy on Diablo for about a week and a half and then it died out fast. But I have to say that that week and a half was pure unadulterated video gaming fun! Definitely intense. http://download.news.gamespot.com/pub/gsnews/97_09/10_diabmovie/diablo2.zip
I found an excellent utility today called Net Vampire. It's very cool...basically what it does is it takes FTP or HTTP URL's and queue's them up for downloading. If for any reason downloads are interrupted or timeout, Net Vampire will continue to retry until it gets the file. This isn't really all that important for me since I'm on Ethernet right now, but it's damn useful for modem users. It also creates a small icon which you can put anywhere; you can drag and drop file links to this icon and Net Vampire will take care of the rest. It also logs your file transfers. It's just cool. Get it! BTW, I'm somewhat shocked by the fact that every FTP program I've tried so far is unable to accept a URL as a means of specifying what or where to download something. That's pretty damn stupid if you ask me. I found Net Vampire while trying to solve that little problem, although it seems Net Vampire happens to solve a few more problems than that (which is good!). http://www.kulichki.com/~vampire/software/nvamp24.zip
Yep, I'm afraid there's not much going on today. I uninstalled those full-duplex drivers. One of my friends ordered a bunch of junk for a new computer from various places...he's building a PII-266. Or actually, I guess I'll be helping him build it. I don't think he wanted to build a system, actually, but the alternative was a month-and-a-half lead time from Gateway and Dell. Another friend and I were playing Gradius Gaiden today for the Playstation. It's cool, but the end boss was really lame! The dude didn't even seem to put up a fight. It was kind of disappointing. Maybe I'll capture some of the game later. I think I'm going to buy that 9GB Fast Wide drive, but I missed it the first time around so I'm going to have to wait until it shows up again. I don't think it will take too long. Meanwhile, my parents exchanged the UMAX Astra 300P I bought for them for the 600P, which was $70 more. Apparently they thought that the 600P meant it was 600dpi, which it most certainly is not. They said that it makes the text clearer, which also confuses me. Sigh. I'm not there to see it, so I don't really know. Meanwhile, the Microtek E6 which I ordered from NECX seems to have been lost in the fray from the UPS strike. We haven't gotten it and it's been nearly a month.
Just for fun, I decided to put up a picture of the hole I cut/tore in my case.
7:57 PM Unfortunately, today I got another bluescreen. I'm almost positive now that this is somehow related to the NT 4.0 full duplex drivers. Which is a damn shame, because I really like having full duplex drivers. Oh well. I'll probably just live with half-duplex until another driver revision comes out.
I was playing around with Matrox's included PC-VCR remote and it turns out this is actually some decent software. The first cool thing it has is a high quality screenshot capture option. What this does is it takes 5 consecutive screenshot captures and it averages them out. This pretty much eliminates most of the random noise from still captures and helps clean up screenshots tremendously. However, obviously this technique doesn't work too well where motion is involved. The other thing is that whenever I looked at the video input on the screen it only looked like it was going at 30 fps. If you know anything about TV, you know that TV displays at 60 fields/sec, interlaced, which helps with the fluidity of motion. Well, as it turns out, you can set the Rainbow Runner to display in this 60 fields/sec mode in full screen. Believe me, it looks (or feels) much better. I'm a little more impressed with this card after finding these two little details out. However, I'm still having a couple of problems capturing with this card. If I try to capture at the maximum data rate and quality setting, for some reason the software or the card simply stops capturing altogether very early into the capture. After turning down the quality a notch, everything seemed to work ok (although it took a while to figure that one out). I am positive my HD can keep up so it's a little puzzling.
Iomega is adding to their somewhat limited but extremely popular line-up with a new video capture/Ultra narrow SCSI card called the Buz. It has some very cool contemporary styling and the SCSI card seems nice. The video capture is what interests me the most but I cannot find any details whatsoever about its capture capabilities on Iomega's site. I have heard it's supposed to be capable of 640x480 but I have no way of confirming it. It also appears to be lacking output to tape capabilities. They also have some tips and online videos about video editing on the site. What they need is a tip on "How to compress your video so that it doesn't look like ass". Ha!
Both are pretty minor updates, but I like keeping the latest versions around.
Direct download for Navigator 4.03
1:52 PM One of the cardinal rules I've observed in auctions is that you can only get good deals on stuff that the mass market public (i.e. the idiots) has never heard of. For the rest of the junk you see bids going up or beyond market price. Which is just stupid and amazes every time I see it. Anyhow, I see on Onsale, the original online auction house, that they have 9.1 Fast-Wide SCSI II IBM 7200 RPM drives from IBM for $689. With a quantity of 119 available, it looks like a real steal (for SCSI, anyway). I'm seriously considering getting one, but I'm gonna have to decide fast.
| |||||||||||||||||||||
