Wednesday, July 30, 2003

The Gamer’s PDA? -- 8:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Now THIS is a cool idea. CNNFN has the scoop on the Tapwave Zodiac, a PalmOS-based PDA geared towards gamers. Popular Mechanics has some information too, including a picture. The specs and the price are pretty impressive too. For $299 you get a 480x320x16bit screen, 32M memory, 200 Mhz Motorola ARM9 CPU, dual SD slots, ATI Imageon video, Yamaha audio, Bluetooth networking, two lithium ion batteries, and "rumble" features. For $399 you get 128M memory and a VGA digital camera. The whole thing's supposed to weigh 6 oz. It will play all PalmOS games, plus they have people porting games to it (including Neverwinter Nights and Doom II). Naturally, it will play MP3s too. Tapwave's website doesn't have much on it now. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Operating Systems Used -- 1:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Slashdot has kind of an interesting poll asking how many OSes you've used for at least an hour. Let's see, not counting revisions, my list would look like this:

1. VIC-20 OS (whatever that is)
2. Commodore PET OS (ditto)
3. Commodore 128 OS (ditto)
4. CP/M (on the aforementioned Commodore 128)
5. MS/PC/DR-DOS (2.x-6.x)
6. Windows (286-98)
7. OS/2
8. PalmOS
9. Linux (kernel 2.2.x and 2.4.x)

Of course, that doesn't count whatever would qualify as an OS on my cellphone. I've fiddled around with various Apple and Atari computers over the years too. I also didn't distinguish between Linux distros that I've used, including Red Hat 5.x-8, Mandrake 7.x-9.x, SuSE 8.2, and currently Slackware 9.0.

The Master comments: Here's my list:

1. Apple DOS 3.3
2. Apple ProDOS 1.x/2.x/8/16
3. VIC-20 OS (actually, I think this is juat a ROM BASIC, but anyway)
4. AMIGA OS
5. VAX VMS (not sure of version)
6. IBM/Ms/etc DOS (2.x-6.x)
7. UniSys UNIX v5.4
8. Windows (3.1,3.11,95,98,ME,2000)
9. UnixWare 2.x-7.x
10. Red Hat Linux 6-7.x

J.t.Qbe comments: This could be fun:

1. Timex-Sinclair ZX81 (may just have been ROM BASIC)
2. Commodore PET and CBM(don't remember much about them)
3. PC/MS DOS 2.x - 7
4. Windows 3.1/95/98/NT4/2K
5. OS/2
6. Minix
7. SCO OpenWhatever
8. Unixware
9. QNX
10. BSD (Free, Net, Open)
11. Linux (Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Caldera, Storm)
12. Solaris 2.5 - 8
13. VMS
14. PalmOS
15. BeOS

Wait, did I say "fun", or "pathetic?"

Half-Life 2 Delayed? -- 10:35 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Reports are circulating that one of the most anticipated games of the year, Half-Life 2, might be delayed to the holiday season. Gamespot has some details from Vivendi, the game's publisher. I guess we'll see what happens with this. Release dates are notoriously hard to nail down.

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Welcome to the New Haus Box! -- 1:33 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Moments ago, The Haus has switched over to its new home. This box is a P3-550 running a heavily modified version of Red Hat Linux 7.3. We make full use of LAMP technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). There's a few minor bugs that need to be ironed out. The next big step after that will be moving our articles over to a database from the current static page setup. Stay tuned!

Special thanks go to Crawl at EZ-Net for getting everything switched on their end of it. Thanks also go to Jeff and Dave at EZ-Net for letting our little corner of the Internet live on their server rack.

The Master comments: Now that this puppy is actually running live, I get to find all the stupid things I forgot to rebuild/reconfigure before having A.T. pick it up and haul it to EZ. Thankfully I think we're all set now.

NVIDIA 1.0-4496 Drivers Released -- 1:29 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA has released their 1.0-4496 binary drivers for Linux. I installed them via the slick nvidia-installer --update command that came with the previous drivers. I haven't had the chance to try them out with any games yet. The big fixes seem to be GeForce FX 5900 support and inital APM support.

NWN 1.31 Beta 2 Linux Patch -- 9:44 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Bioware has released beta 2 of the Neverwinter Nights 1.31 patch for Linux. This is a beta, so use at your own risk. No support is provided. 1.30 is basically working fine for me, so I'm going to wait until 1.31 is no longer beta. Thanks Blue.

J.t.Qbe comments: After a rocky start with 1.30 yesterday, I finally have it working and had some fun with the Penultima modules last night. I'm definitely not touching any betas, though.

Past Two Days' News

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