Friday, November 17, 2000

Shogo Mac and Linux Gold! -- 10:04 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

That's what I get for not reading my mail closely enough! Hyperion's Ben Hermans informed me yesterday that Monolith has given their approval to the Mac and Linux ports of Shogo: Mobile Armor division. Expect them to be available before Christmas. If you are so inclined, you can pre-order a copy of the Linux version from Tux Games. (No affiliation, yadda, yadda. I just saw them mention it in the comments on Linux Games.)

Shogo Walkthrough: Two More Levels! -- 8:21 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

What's this? New content? On The Haus of Shogo?!? 'Tis true! With the Amiga, Linux, and Mac ports of Shogo coming out soon, I decided to get back to my Shogo walkthrough. Today I added level 05_LZ_Minotaur: "The Storm" and 06_Entrance: "Approach". I hope to get this walkthrough finally finished relatively soon. It doesn't help when you put it down for, oh, a year and a half. Enjoy!

Baldur's Gate II Demo -- 6:59 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've been playing a bit more of the monstrously large Baldur's Gate II demo. I've only scratched the surface of the game, but now that I'm more familiar with how it works, the gameplay is much more enjoyable. I can't understand, though, why I have slowdowns in the game, especially since it's all scrolling 2D. Some of the worst slowdowns are on the inventory screen, which should be the fastest, since there's nothing really going on.

The demo has proven to me that I would like to play one of these games all the way through. The only problem with BGII is that it really is a sequel to BG. Your characters all start at around 7th level, so there's a big learning curve to use their skills properly. The advantage, of course, is that it's harder to kill off a 7th level character, as opposed to starting at 1st level where you are dying left and right. I might look into Icewind Dale too.

How I Spent My Day Off -- 3:36 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I think most men (and even some women) in this part of the state took today off to begin the grand tradition of deer hunting. I'm not a hunter, but I have nothing against it (there's almost one deer for every person living in Wisconsin).

I have today off too so what did I do?

1. Watched the kids while my wife went shopping
2. Reinstalled Mandrake 7.2

I decided on the reinstall when I realized I had WAY too much stuff I didn't need plugging up my hard drive. This time I installed in "Expert" mode and hand-chose all the packages to install. I probably installed too many devel packages, but better safe than sorry. I also found that in Expert mode Mandrake 7.2 installs XFree86 4.0.1 correctly, provided that you hand-choose to install the 4.0.1 server RPM.

Now I just have to figure out how to get my sound card drivers to compile because the ALSA ones that came with Mandrake aren't very good.

Thursday, November 16, 2000

Brandon Reinhart .plan Update -- 11:08 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

3D Realms' Brandon Reinhart updated his .plan with a vitally important political message.

The Master comments: Okay, I'm going to make my one comment on this whole mess. #1: Mrs. Florida SecState is a Republican. #2: She gets to decide if the recount stands. #3: That's exquisite BS.

Personally I prefer some of Bush's policies, but I don't like his environmental stance. Both of these men are a horse apiece. But this whole election has gone so stupidly into the can that I feel sorry for whichever one of these people ends up in the White House. One mistake, get burnt at the stake, which would be political suicide. No thank you, I would be begging the other guy to take the job at this point.

Shogo Linux Fix -- 4:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've been in email contact with a gentleman working with Hyperion Software on the Linux and Amiga (and, as I recently found out, Mac) ports of Monolith's Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. He said that in their talks with NVIDIA, the problem seems to be a bug specifically with the NVIDIA Linux drivers and the TNT2/TNT2 Ultra. He said that the bug should be fixed in the next release of the drivers "in a few weeks." I'll believe it when I see it, since I've heard "in a few weeks" from NVIDIA for a while now :)

Special thanks Ben Hermans (Hyperion's managing partner) for contacting me on his own to help with this problem. If only all game companies were so helpful . . .

3dfx Clarification -- 4:17 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Register, among other places, got clarification from 3dfx that the statement that are ceasing making boards is not entirely true. They are selling their board manufacturing plant, but they are going to get third parties to make the boards for them. They will be sold as 3dfx cards. The long and short of it are still the same, it's just that they won't be looking to Creative or others to make cards for them (as if Creative would).

New Winamp 2.7 -- 10:33 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I'm rather surprised that The Master didn't get this one. There's a new version (2.70) of most everyone's favorite MP3 player, Winamp, available for download. This new version contains lots o' bug fixes.

Now that I think about it . . . since I have this new 128K pipe, I should check out a few Shoutcast servers. Hmm.

The Master comments: Actually, I've downloaded and installed this already. Just slacked on the update last night. My bad. The new revision is pretty nice-it includes a sweet tag editor which has been very handy for me.

A.T. Hun comments: Actually, I just downloaded and installed it. As soon as I try to play an MP3, it GPFs. Oh well. Back to 2.64 for me.

What Went Wrong with 3dfx? -- 9:58 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

GlideUnderground posted an article taking a look back at history to see what happened to 3dfx. It's an interesting article and does a relatively good job of covering the main things that put 3dfx in the situation they are in today. One thing that they didn't mention is any board from Rendition. Back in the day, Rendition's Verite chipsets were the only ones giving 3dfx any real competition (a little VQuake anyone?). Thanks Shugashack.

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