Tuesday, January 25, 2000

Benchmark-Fest -- 1:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ace's Hardware has posted the mother of (or at least the nephew of) all benchmarking articles with 14 video cards on five processors running seven games. Whew! Thanks Riva 3D (which just got a new facelift, coincidentally).

SoF First Look -- 1:02 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I set my modem to download the Soldier of Fortune demo as I slept last night (it took about six hours at 4.7K/sec). I installed it this morning. The graphics are pretty slick and the EAX sounds are nice. The realistic settings really draw you in. The violence is close to being a little too real for my tastes (exit wounds, etc.) but that can turned down or off altogether. I like how you have to be stealthy at times and have good aim (breaking out the shotgun against a thug holding someone hostage is a bad idea). Definitely worth the download if you have the patience.

Running Red Hat -- 10:26 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Fortunately, I talked to my good pal and Haus-contributor, Qbe, before I fdisked my new hard drive. I divided it up into three drives 6.7G, 6.7G, and 3G. The 3G drive will be used for (drum roll) Red Hat Linux! Now that The Haus is Linux-powered, I figure I'd better bone up on it, in case The Master gets involved in an accident involving a rotory mower and some whipped topping or something. Qbe is actually going to be at my house on Friday to help me with the install. Cool beans.

The Master comments: I don't even want to know what the heck I'd be doing with a rotary mower and whipped topping. Don't wanna go there. Nope. HOWEVER, I moved all my old data off my 2gb drive, and intend to make that a RH 6.1 partition, so I can have seperated drives (and don't have to deal with drive letters. Ick.)

Windows Roadmap -- 10:22 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Paul Thurrott over at WinInfo has put up an article on the future of Windows, especially concerning the recent revelation that M$ will once again be attemting to bring the "business" (WinNT) and "home user" (Win98) versions of Windows together on the Win2K codebase. The much-ballyhooed update to Win98 due to come out this summer (possibly to be called Windows 98 Millennium edition *barf*) will be along the same lines as Win98 SE was.

Shogo Anti-Lag Rez -- 10:06 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Ghost has created an anti-lag rez for Shogo. According to some of his tests, this rez improves pings on slower connections between 10-30%. Now that I have the hard drive real estate, I may just reinstall Shogo and give it a spin. Thanks PlanetShogo.

Monday, January 24, 2000

Requiem Interview -- 11:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

QuakeHelp has posted an interview with Demon]0[Spawn, a member of the team working on the Requiem mod for Quake III Arena. The Master and I played lots and lots of Requiem for Quake I. If the Q3A version is everything they want it to be, we may end up playing lots of that too.

NHL 2000 Review -- 11:15 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Operation Sports has slapped up a review of EA Sports' NHL 2000. I share many of the author's thoughts. It's nice to play a game like this to step away from first-person shooters for a while.

SoF Demo Out -- 9:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sorry I'm so late on this . . . I've been trying to get all my stuff reinstalled. Ravensoft's Kenn Hoekstra updated his .plan with news of the release of the Soldier of Fortune demo. Here's some links for you, snagged from his .plan: GameSpot, Stomped, 3D Gamers, 3D Unlimited, 3D Downloads, File Planet, Adrenaline Vault, Evil Avatar, and GameFan Preview And Mirror Site. It's a hefty one at 95M, so pack a lunch and maybe a light snack too. The Master comments: and a six pack of beer, and a case of Pepsi, and . . .

Also, Ravensoft's Rick Johnson updated his .plan with some information on a bug that some people have been running into:

If you play SoF on 3dfx hardware, you may experience a few driver bugs. On the DX7 Beta drivers, when the screen flashes to indicate you are hit, you may get random colors. Other cards / drivers may experience complete texturing problems (though SoF should disable those features in Gl which cause these problems). NOTE that these bugs are within the 3dfx GL drivers themselves, and are NOT SoF bugs! 3dfx is aware of these bugs, but I'm not sure when they will be able to address them.

3dfx OpenGL drivers are buggy? Really? :) hehehehehehehe

New Zoom 2919 Firmware -- 11:47 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I was amazed to find on Saturday that Zoom had released a new firmware upgrade for their 2919 modem. The last upgrade came out in October of 1998! Since I flashed my modem, I've been connecting flawlessly to my ISP at 56K speeds. Before I had a really hard time connecting (it would usually take two or three tries). If you have a Rockwell-chipset-based Zoom 2919, get this firmware!

Stupid Hun Tricks -- 10:02 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Sorry about not updating at all yesterday. To make a long story short, I managed to bork my system BIOS while flashing it to support my spanking new Western Digital 17.2G drive. Doh! Thus I spent the better part of yesterday getting my system to boot again and reinstalling Windows 98. I've got my "mission critical" apps reinstalled, now I just have to put my games back!

Special thanks go out to Crawl at EZ-Net for helping me through my stupidity--and I called him at home, no less! Just further proof that if you live in Oconto or Marinette counties in Northeast Wisconsin and you don't use EZ-Net for your ISP, you need a lobotomy. Tell 'em A.T. sent you!

The Master comments: Hehe :-) I may be following in your footsteps tonight, if I can get my hands on one of those HD's

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