Saturday, July 1, 2000

UT 422 Patch Info -- 4:54 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

It seems that Epic decided to go skipping merrily past the proposed 421 patch and moved on to 422. Unreality has a list of the fixes. Thanks Stomped.

Rechargeable Batteries -- 2:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I'm in the process of looking into rechargeable batteries for my Visor. I'm going through Duracell AAAs at an alarming rate, which should be even more alarming if I would register Void. Right now I'm debating between Rayovac Renewals (rechargeable alkaline) or NiMHs. I'm leaning more toward the Renewals. Even though they can't be reused nearly as much, they can keep a full charge up to five years in storage (don't want to be in the middle of an important trade in Void only to have to wait six hours for a battery recharge!), and they "act" like regular alkalines (start at 1.5v and gradually drain to .9, as opposed to NiMHs which start at 1.2v but hold that voltage until is suddenly drops off at the end of its charge). Any words of wisdom would be appreciated.

8M Visor Test -- 11:38 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I confirmed with Handspring tech support that some 8M Visor Deluxes shipped between January 2000 and June 2000, like their Palm counterparts (story). Handspring has a little 3K test program Visor Deluxe users can download to determine if their PDA has the faulty chip. See this page for more information. Unfortunately, it seems that my Visor Deluxe has one of the defective chips. Like Palm, Handspring is working on a software patch to solve the problem.

I will say this: a lot of people gave Handspring grief for their slow tech support. They responded to my request well within the promised 24 hours, even though it is Independence Day weekend here in the States.

UPDATE! According to Handspring, only Visor Deluxes with all the memory filled (or nearly filled) are susceptible to problems. I have 3198K free on mine, but I guess the test program caused me to get the memory error. I had to do a hard reset. Thankfully, the Palm software does an excellent job of recovering from this problem and so most of my apps and all of my data were completely restored when I HotSynced (following the instructions for HotSyncing after a hard reset).

Deus Ex Advanced Options -- 10:02 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Voodoo Extreme posted instructions for bringing up the "Advanced Options" (a la Unreal/Unreal Tournament) menu in Deus Ex. Here's the word:

Wondering how to get to the Advanced options menu in Deus Ex (demo & retail)? Well, here's how.

Open the User.ini in the DeusExSystem folder. Add/Edit the following 2 lines.
t=talk
T=talk
when in the game press the T key to bring up "Say", delete the "say" & any other text that appears & type in preferences & hit Enter.

This'll bring up the Advanced options menu ala Unreal/Unreal Tournament, as a result you can follow the UT tweaking guide on 3DS already to find out how to tweak those settings (as they do the same thing). Although the actually Deus Ex guide itself will be posted on Monday most likely so theres not too long to wait to "fix" the game now :)

Cracking Dreamcast -- 9:55 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

It was just a matter of time, but a group of crackers figured out how to crack the Dreamcast's security measures. Sega claims to have patched their system to eliminate this "loophole", but all currently available games are vulnerable. Thanks Blue's News.

I must confess that I cannot understand why someone would waste their time downloading up to about 1G of information just so you can play a game without all of its original content. I'm as poor as the next guy (even more so, actually) but by time you figure in your bandwidth, media costs, time, and effort, I'm guessing you easily exceed the cost of the game. Doesn't make sense.

Friday, June 30, 2000

Overclocking the GeForce2 MX -- 8:00 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

RIVA 3D slapped up a brief article detailing their results from overclocking the GeForce2 MX from its default chip speed of 175Mhz to 220 and the memory speed of 166 to 210. Naturally, they added a heatsink/fan combo. The results will impress you. Even more impressive is that it has been running for a day with no lockups and no graphical glitches at all.

Obi-Wan Preview -- 7:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Yet another Obi-Wan preview (YAOWP), this time from the folks at Gamespot UK. They talk a bit about the new lightsaber control system, which should be interesting (too say the least). Thanks Blue.

Palm Memory Problem -- 9:52 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Palm Computing has identified a problem with the 8M DRAM chips on some of their Palm IIIc, IIIxe, and Vx products. According to other sources, similar products (like my Handspring Visor Deluxe) may also be affected. Palm has released a software patch that supposedly "provides a complete fix." I must wonder right along with the Slashdot folks (thanks for the link, guys!) how a software patch fixes a hardware problem.

Detonator Comparison -- 9:44 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Riva Station has posted a comparison of the recent 5.xx Detonator drivers from NVIDIA. They pit the 5.16, 5.22, and new 5.30 in a battle royale. In most cases, all three versions are within a few tenths of a fps of each other. The 5.30 give significant speedups in 3DMark's full-scene anti-aliasing tests (31% with 2x AA, 68% with 4x AA). So if you are into the whole FSAA thing on the GeForce (especially the GTS), 5.30 is the way to go. Thanks Shugashack.

Microsoft C#? -- 9:27 am CST, Update by The Master

There's a Yahoo! News article online entitled "C#: Yet Another Programming Language?", which is a commentary on Microsoft's new C# (Pronounced C Sharp), which supposedly is NOT an attempt to derail Java, even though it "does everything Java does, but isn't Java". Umm, okay.

Thanks to Dave for this one.

J.t.Qbe comments: I was just reading some interesting discussion about this on comp.lang.lisp and found a reference to this article at The Register. It's worth a read if you have a few minutes, especially for its discovery of C#'s relation to M$'s "Cool" project (anyone remember that one?).

Past Two Days' News

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