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Sorry, no.

His idea is wrong and worse.

I can't tell you the number of people I know who've given up on PC gaming. Most have jumped to consoles; the few that remain are only playing things like World of Warcrack or Evercrack or City of Heroin (hey, if it's an MMO, it's made to be addictive) or something else that you can't GET on consoles, or they're still playing older titles that are installed with a no-CD crack anyways.

The problem is, these "security" systems are STUPID. Every time they break somebody's game, that person calls up their tech-savvy friend (me) to fix it. Then they want to know why it happened... so I get to tell them it's because of the security stuff.

And what's REALLY fucked up? You can't even return the game to the store when it doesn't fucking work. Even if you can PROVE it doesn't work, even if you try the install in one of their PC's at the store and show it fucking up there too, even if you show them a huge fucking crack in the disc or something, they WILL NOT take it back. You just got raped for $60 on a product that doesn't even work.

One of two things happens shortly after the third or fourth round of this. Either they switch to console completely (hey, it's more comfortable to play sitting on the couch in the living room anyways) or they decide that, since the companies are screwing with them anyways and I always wind up downloading a "patch" for the game from some site... they can get the whole game from the site.

Yeah. DRM actually ENCOURAGES piracy. It's pretty damn simple. This guy put it perfectly. The more you train people to use pirate stuff, the more they will trust the pirates. And there's actually less risk of the pirated copy being infected with shit that'll mess up your computer than the genuine copy which you KNOW is infected with SecuROM, or Starforce, or some other "security" virus that they stuck on the disc in the name of "stopping piracy."

there were two that were ultimates.

The Hammerhead FX (second revision with USB, the first had a D-pad that was way to ridged and tight) gave you everything you needed, for any game; D-pad, two analogs, six face buttons (GREAT for six-button arcade fighting titles), two shoulder buttons and two back triggers. It was my gaming pad for 90% of the MAME library as well as for NES, Genesis, SNES, N64, and PSX emulation.

For something that needs a flight controller, you can't go better than the Airstik from the sadly-deceased VrStandard corporation. Light as a feather, didn't have tons of buttons but had enough, on-the-fly switch between 3 sensitivity modes, and will actually still plug in to the default Vista drivers and run flawlessly. How many top-of-the-line sticks do you know that can run on any system's default drivers and run flawlessly?

Sadly, both of the companies are dead. VRStandard killed themselves trying to push 3D glasses and went under during the switch to Windows 2000 when the Win3D company (who'd been their outsource partners for 2000 drivers) went under. Good luck finding drivers for the VRJoy headsets these days - even the independent guys haven't bothered to update them and nobody seems to have archived the older ones.

Interact got bought out by MadCatz (well, the Gameshark stuff anyways) and the rest of the old product lines got dumped completely.

Super Contra of course.... R-Type... etc etc etc...

For once Katz doesn't sound like he is going out on a limb for an article. I am sure we all could comment on the great "good ol' days" of the NES and Genesis.

Games are one of the things that truly pushes the consumer PC market. Why do we need cards like the GeForce 2 Ultra? Because id made Q3...

Games have been a way of life for many people, and have also been many people's introduction to computers. Want some more hardcore oldschool goodness? Check out this review of the Pentium 200 at Glide Underground.

The chips all work in parallel, rendering strips of the frame, so the fillrate will scale on any app. They're emphasizing the pixels per clock partly because nVidia are touting their QuadEngine(tm) that does 4 pixels/clock, and partly because their rendering pipeline has changed.

There is a difference between the V2/V3 and V4/V5. When rendering single-textured pixels, one texture unit on the older cards sat idle, and they didn't really come into their own until the app did multitexturing. The new chips have switched to a dual pixel pipeline, similar to the TNT/TNT2, which allows two single textured pixels or (presumably) one dual textured pixel per clock. (Note that "fully-featured" does not mean "dual-textured", though they seem to want to imply that.) So their performance will halve when dual-texturing.

Unfortunately (and no-one seems to have considered this), the memory is split between the chips too. This means the highly expensive V5 6000 with 128MB of RAM can really only use 32MB of RAM, and the V5 5000 can only use 16MB, which will certainly restrict its performance.

Something else no-one has talked about anywhere is how seriously the anti-aliasing will slow things down. 3dfx have said there will be a performance drop, but skirted around how much. The fact is, it'll slash your fillrate by 75%! So your $300 V5 5500, with two chips and 64MB of RAM will perform at less than the speed of a 1998 TNT when you flick that switch. Sure, it'd look nicer, but I'd rather run faster at a higher resolution without AA - the edges look less jagged and you get more detail as well.

As for the V4.. it will offer the same performance & features as a TNT2 Ultra does, only a year later and for over $50 more. I can't see anyone buying that at all.

3dfx may regain the performance crown (for a month, until/if the Glaze3D comes out), but they're still 2 years behind in rendering quality. A year from now, hardware T&L will be the norm on all current chips, except 3dfx's. Glad I'm not a 3dfx shareholder (did you know their stock dipped $5 on the day they announced their new line? Ouch.)

Namarrgon
(P.S. Seen this ad for a Voodoo6 8000?)