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Dreadnought Demos Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the shiny-bits-of-distraction dept.

John Callaham writes to tell us that Gamecloud is heralding the latest release from Torc Interactive and AMD. The latest demos for the upcoming FPS, Dreadnought, have been released. The first is strictly a gameplay movie while the other gives a comparison between the game running on a 64 bit processor (which it was ultimately designed for) and a 32 bit processor.

2 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Explain by kushboy · · Score: 0, Troll

    Ahh, why don't I care? How is this important?

  2. Dell Keylogger? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    The other day, I opened up my almost brand new Dell 600m laptop, to replace a broken PCMCIA slot riser on the motherboard. As soon as I got the keyboard off, I noticed a small cable running from the keyboard connection underneath a piece of metal protecting the motherboard. I don't really think too much of it. I'm not intimately familiar with laptop hardware configurations and so I assume that it serves some purpose and that it's best not to mess with it. I continue to disassemble the laptop, and after popping the metal panels protecting the motherboard off, I notice that the mystery wire had a large bulge covered in heat-shrink tubing. I don't really think too much about it at first, and I continue with the task at hand.

    As I was reassembling the laptop after replacing the slot riser, I was having trouble getting the metal panels back into place. That bulky thing sheathed in heat-shrink tubing just didn't seem to want to stay in the little corner I tried to tuck it into. It was getting late and I was getting tired so I figure "screw it, I'll finish it in the morning". That night, I talked to my wife about the situation. She isn't exactly the most tech-savvy person, but she is interested in the projects I do (probably because of all the junk that is scattered around the garage. I guess it's difficult to do the laundry with an oscilloscope on the washer!). So we were in bed, and I had just finished explaining the situation to her, not exactly focusing on the mystery component. Then, she asks me what I think is inside the shrink-wrap tubing. To be honest, I hadn't really put too much thought into it. Being an EE by trade, ideas of what the thing is start flying through my head. Mentally, I go over the dimensions of the bulge, properties of the wire, how and where it's connected, and anything else that I can remember. I resolve to get to the bottom of the mystery the next day, since it was a Sunday and I didn't have anything else planned (my wife and I decided to stop attending church about a year after our youngest moved out).

    I wake up with the project on my mind, and after my normal weekend morning routine, I went back to my laptop. I cut the heat-shrink tubing with an x-acto knife and find a little circuit board. One one side, there was an Atmel AT45D041A four megabit Flash memory chip. On the other side, there was a Microchip Technology PIC16F876 Programmable Interrupt Controller, along with a little Fairchild Semiconductor CD4066BCM quad bilateral switch. The whole setup was connected to the integrated ethernet board.

    This was very strange, because it appeared to be a hardware keylogger.