Friday, December 10, 2004

Pondering the Imponderable -- 11:47 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Here's an update on my attempts to run Half-Life 2 under Cedega in Linux. The game installed very smoothy when I used the -monitor-cdrom-eject argument with Cedega (otherwise the game holds the CD so you can't unmount it to put in the next one). I was able to set up a Steam account with no problems. Right now I have to use the DirectX 7 renderer because otherwise the flashlight won't always work. My framerate definitely leaves something to be desired. There are some stability problems (e.g. don't try to change video settings without preparing for the worst).

Having said all that, the game is definitely fun. You have to figure things out as you go; there's very little direct exposition. The facial animation system is quite amazing. It's the first game that comes close to capturing real emotions and expressions. DOOM3's is pretty good, but HL2's is spectacular. If only I could run the game with better graphics settings so I could get the full effect. I can only take comfort that people with far better systems than mine have been making similar complaints.

Wednesday, December 8, 2004

Pondering the Imponderable -- 10:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, my copy of Half-Life 2 came in the mail today. Steam and the game itself installed pretty easily. My problem has been finding settings that will allow me to play the game with > 10 fps. I'm quite tired of messing with settings, especially since it takes so long for the game to start and fiddling with video settings can cause Cedega to barf. We'll see what I can figure out. I hope this doesn't end up being a waste of money.

PalmOS for Linux in the Works -- 9:24 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I read on the pilot-link mailing list that PalmSouce is working on a version of PalmOS that will run on Linux. Here's a snip from the press release, which is kind of short on details:

PalmSource will continue to offer both Palm OS® Garnet and Palm OS® Cobalt to support a broad range of mobile devices including smartphones. PalmSource also plans to implement Palm OS on top of Linux, bringing the benefits of Palm OS to the Linux community, including the award winning user interface, software frameworks based on the best of Palm OS and BeOS®, a large base of professional and consumer applications, and an enthusiastic community of more than 25 million users and over 360,000 registered developers. PalmSource intends to work as a partner within the Linux community to help Linux grow rapidly in the consumer and enterprise mobile markets.

What I hope this means is that there will be an official version of Palm desktop for Linux. I'm not sure if that's what they intend or if they are just talking about running PalmOS on top of Linux on a handheld. Either way, it's going to be interesting. We shall see.

Update! Newsforge HTMLified PalmOS's open letter to the Linux community. It appear that they are just talking about running PalmOS on top of Linux on a mobile device. Having said that, the letter doesn't exclude the other option either.

NVIDIA GPU in PS3! -- 9:16 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I saw this yesterday but did not have an opportunity to post anything about it. Sony and NVIDIA are jointly developing the new GPU for the PS3! You can check out the press release here. I guess that's why NVIDIA wasn't so heartbroken after being jilted by Microsoft for the Xbox 2.

No Old News

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