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September 2000
| Tuesday, September 26, 2000 |
GeForce Ultra
Cage
@ 13:49
The Guru 3D has a few interesting stories on their news page. After following the link from Hard OCP I found a nice new pic of Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra. The Guru 3D also has a rumor from "legit" sources about the NVidia NV20's release plans and performance. I don't know if it's true, but it's an interesting read.
MW 4 Test
Cage
@ 5:05
No sooner do I add Gamer's Depot this week to my list of top sites when they come through big. According to the news a 69 MB "Test" release of Microsoft's Mech Warrior 4 is available for download for a limited time through IGN PC. Sweet. Here's the link. Just click on the download button at the end of the article.
Free DOA
Cage
@ 4:11
I got this tidbit via iE in my mail just now: "iEntertainment is planing a FREE week of Dawn of Aces -- our award winning World War I flight simulation game. The FREE Dawn of Aces Thanksgiving week is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 21 -- Monday, Nov. 27. All you need to participate is an email address. " Well there you go. Now is the perfect time to give DoA a whirl for free.
Windows Me
Cage
@ 4:09
My copy of Windows Me and Windows 2000 are now happily living together on my newly partitioned hard drive. My friend was not so lucky. He had installed Windows Me over a previous installation of Windows 98. Not to surprisingly he had some problems. His system's network behavior became quite flaky with network clients appearing and disappearing in his "Network Places." He went ahead and re-formatted his hard drive, and did a fresh install of Windows Me. After that things worked much better. Of course we tested it out by playing a round of Age of Empires II: Conquerors. You know, just to make sure it was working. A few hours later his system was pronounced fit, and he was on his way home around 2 a.m. Testing is hard work, you know.
MS FF 2
Cage
@ 4:00
The new Microsoft Force Feedback 2 has hit the stores. I got to see one of these tonight for the first time. Unfortunately the reason I got a look at it was that one of my friends had just picked one up from the local CompUSA, and was having problems with it. After going through the obvious motions of making sure the USB port was working and the software was loaded correctly I took a look around on Deja News Usenet. Sure enough, I found the following post there: "Okay. The latest update from Microsoft is that the FF2 may not work on VIA chipset motherboards with anything faster than a 500mhz CPU. They've had several people call in today with this problem, and they're still trying to determine if the issue is with the VIA drivers or the Sidewinder device drivers. A solution is pending, but they are working on it. Keep your fingers crossed!" - Sanford
I tested it on my Abit VA6 (VIA based motherboard) and had the same problem. It would show up in the Windows Me Control Panel as being "ok", but it wouldn't respond to any input.
| Friday, September 22, 2000 |
Iomega HipZip
Cage
@ 7:43
Here's another interesting MP3 player. C|Net has a story about the just announced Iomega HipZip portable MP3 player. It uses 40MB removable storage Clik disks, and can be used as a PocketZip drive. Very cool. One of these little wonders will set you back $299.
| Thursday, September 21, 2000 |
Compaq iPAQ HOT!
Cage
@ 7:42
The Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC continues to be a hot item. This C|Net story says: "The Houston-based computer manufacturer aims to produce 50,000 iPaq handhelds per month by December and 100,000 per month sometime during the first quarter,..." Wow!
I sure like my Pocket PC. I must confess I don't use it quite as much as I expected. Application development is lagging a bit behind my expectation so far. Still, I find it very handy for notes, task lists, and reference. I'm also starting to push the limits of the base 32 MB of RAM that comes with the unit.
| Wednesday, September 20, 2000 |
Crimson Skies
Cage
@ 9:57
One of the reaons I was a bit tardy in getting around to installing Windows 2000 is that I just picked up a copy of Microsoft's Crimson Skies. I was pleasantly surprised with this one, especially since I'd played around with it a little at this years E3 computer games show.
The terrain was nicely detailed. There is full 3D or "Rolling Terrain" with mountains and canyons. The trees are very nicely done, and give a nice sense of speed as you fly around them. The enemy AI likes to get down in the weeds just as much as you do, and it's loads of fun chasing them up and down through the valleys and hills.
My system (PIII 500e Over-Clocked to 750 MHz w/Voodoo 3-3000 video card) noticed a pause or two as a map loaded up. I'm going to have to hunt around and see if there is a Frames Per Second indicator that you can turn out to see how I'm doing. I ran it at 1024x768 with most details on, but ended up dropping it to 800x600. I know it's time for me to upgrade my cpu and video card soon. Just another month before the GeForce 256 Ultra and V5-6000 come out. Plus there should be another round of CPU price drops in October.
Windows 2000
Cage
@ 9:49
I'm just finishing up my Windows 2000 Professional installation. All that is left now is to install Win2K drivers for my video card and sound card. It looks like I'll need to set up the network settings so that I can access the Internet via Windows 2000 as well.
I elected to go with a dual boot Windows Millenium Edition/Windows 2000 Professional. My IBM 22GB Hard Drive is partitioned into 14 GB for Windows Me, and 8 GB for Windows 2000.
The only serious problem I ran into was that the Win2K install program would not copy the setup files to my HD. First of all I tried setting the PIO mode in my BIOS to 3, and then 2. When that didn't work I tried setting my BIOS to boot from my CD-ROM drive. Doing so worked, but there still was a file that initially failed to copy at around the 98% done mark. I just held down the Enter key (to Retry copying the file) and it worked after a few attempts.
Incidentally, my CD-ROM drive is a Pioneer 103S DVD drive. My HD is set up on IDE 0, and my CD-ROM drive is set up on IDE-1. I may need to upgrade my DVD/CD-ROM drive in the future, since this is not the first time I've had problems. It's also a little bit slow when playing intro movies and loading level cut-scenes.
I need to work tonight, so I'm probably going to go grab some sleep shortly.
| Friday, September 15, 2000 |
Update
Cage
@ 13:38
I've been a bit behind in the updates once again. I've been looking at a couple of different options for doing a database backend for the site. I decided that I needed to install Windows 2000 for development reasons, and of course that led to re-partitioning my hard drive and doing a fresh install of Windows. I then did an upgrade to Windows Me, which has been fairly painless so far.
I had hoped to wait until I did my next system upgrade, but some problems with my Time Warner RoadRunner service prompted me to do it earlier. After re-formatting my HD and installing Windows 98 the problems persisted.
I did some looking around the 'net, and I still didn't find a solution. I did come across a nifty program mentioned in the alt.fan.roadrunner newsgroup called Visual Route that helps troubleshoot network problems. I called up RoadRunner tech support, and they got things fixed in less then a day. I'm still not sure what they did, but everything is running great now. I suspect it was a neighborhood network problem.
I'm working this weekend, so it will be a few days before I can do much more in the way of updates. Another problem I'm looking at is how to do decent photos of hardware that I review here. My older Olympus digital camera just isn't cutting it. I think what I need is some kind of basic studio setup with quality lighting and backgrounds. You may have to put up with some rather amateur shots until I get that one figured out.
| Sunday, September 10, 2000 |
Unreal Tech Movie
Cage
@ 2:32
Unreal Universe has a new Unreal Tech movie on their site. The movie is a 42 MB mpg. Simply stunning. Not only is there far more detail and skeletal animation, but the outside terrain engine has grown by leaps and bounds. For the first time while viewing a Unreal demo I got the feeling of huge wide open spaces like Tribes. Very nice.
Of special interest to me is mention that Unreal Tech is being optimized for cards that support hardware transform and lighting. That might cause me to look a little closer at the GeForce 256 Ultra versus the Voodoo 5-6000.
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