So what happens in Autum when Sky Player comes to Xbox Live and the Xbox Live / Zune HD movie service starts offering 1080p streaming movies? Last time I checked a 1080p movie was a minimum of 9GB.... BT seem to think that 30GB/month is "normal" usage, while MS want to sell you a movie which uses 1/3 of that bandwidth in under 2 hours (most likely within the 6pm-12am "peak" period). There is a massive wake up call on its way.
A member of our crew (guild) in The Matrix Online discovered a way to clip out of the world by getting hit by a car and knocked inside part of the world geometry. Once you were outside the world geometry you could walk around in the greyspace until you found odd little places like the interogation room from the original film, a loading construct that was all white with a couple of chairs, and the "Hall of doors" from the 2nd and 3rd films.
Shame that the game was such a letdown in terms of the monthly content updates and events that were prommised.
Tried gamestracker? I know that for the uk it lists prices with shipping included, so you can see exactly who is the cheapest. It should be the same for the US as far as I'm aware.
The majority of new titles will drop bellow the £15 mark at some point with in the 1st 3 months of release. Stores get overstocks or put them up as loss leaders, it's just a matter of checking gamestracker and hotukdeals (I'm sure you have an equivalant) on a regular basis. I've seen games suddenly spring up in 2 for £25 deals while they're still going for £25 used on amazon...
Deals on pysical media are and always will be out there if you know where to look for them, unlike downloadables, where the value is whatever the content provider dictates it to be, instead of its value being driven by market forces.
Seen this tactic before. Download old games at new prices. So while the game is available for £10 at retail brand new, you can download it for £30 saving you the trouble of dealing with things like pysical media, packaging and resale value.
Steam is frankly just as bad though. When I wanted to buy Frontlines it was £35 on Steam, or £10 delivered from play.com with the T-shirt, Art book and Dogtags. Market tollerance is a terrible thing.
Once Sony buy it, they'll fuck it up so badly that your friend will get bored and quit, or possibly go on a murderous rampage at the SOE offices. Either way he's off the computer, which is what you were trying to accomplish.
I'm so happy. Cause today I found my friends. They're in my head. I'm so ugly. But that's ok. 'Cause so are you. We've broke our mirrors. Sunday morning. Is everyday for all I care. And I'm not scared. Light my candles. In a daze cause I've found god.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah.....
I'm so lonely. And that's ok. I shaved my head. And I'm not sad, and just maybe I'm to blame for all I've heard. And I'm not sure. I'm so excited. I can't wait to meet you there. And I don't care. I'm so horny. But that's ok. My will is good.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.....
(Chorus) I like it. I'm not gonna crack. I miss you. I'm not gonna crack. I love you.I'm not gonna crack. I kill you. I'm not gonna crack. (x2)
I'm so happy. Cause today I found my friends. They're in my head. I'm so ugly. But that's ok. 'Cause so are you. We've broke our mirrors. Sunday morning. Is everyday for all I care. And I'm not scared. Light my candles. In a daze cause I've found god.
Mine are set up in ASUS P2-M2A690G Barebones, as at the time they were the only acceptable looking AMD compatable systems with HDMI out. There may be better ones out there now, so go take a look and see what's about. Inside it's running AMD Athlon X2 4800+ / 2x1GB PC6400 / 80GB Seagate Baracuda. It handles the decoding of 720P video just fine through XBMC Windows. The ram and hdd are probably overkill, but halfing the quantities would only have saved me £10, and you never know what things you might want to use a system for in the future.
I mostly use the MCE Remote for input, as it's cheap, good quality and well supported. I've got the basic MS Wireless desktop KB/M combo as well, but they don't work well beyond about 1.5m range and fall off very quickly if not in line of sight. You probably want to look at a good quality Logitech wireless desktop set if you want more range.
On the other box I don't run a keyboard at all, just the Logitech MX-Air, which is awsome but very expensive for a mouse. In the rare cases that I do need to type on it, I use the on-screen keyboard from accessability options.
While these boxes will serve as general purpose PC's if required, I'd try and keep them as clean as possible so that you can have better startup times and less chance of TSRs and services suddenly trying to do somthing while you're watching a show and causing stuttering or hitching in the playback.
I don't know any specifics about the subscription service that you'd want to use, but most likely it's either fully web plugin based, or uses a propriatory player. Either way it's doubtfull that you could access it directly from XBMC, although there are python scripts that will let you run external programs from inside XBMC which you could make use of.
It all falls down when you move to HD unfortunately. The original Xbox lacks a digital video output and unfortunately it's poor little 733mhz cpu can't decode H.264/VC1.
I've been migrating all my old Xboxen to small form factor pc's running XBMC for Windows as each of the CRT's in the house has been replaced with a new LCD.
Do these Japanese games companies have plans on releasing their DJ game in other teritories anytime soon? on somthing newer than a PS2? With local hardware manufacturing so that the cost isn't through the roof? Will it be using licensed music tracks that westerners will actually know?
I'd say that the answer to most, if not all, of those questions is a big fat NO. As such it may as well not exist outside of Japan because it's not doing anything for anyone outside of Japan.
Handily enough my local plant is a PWR with ~1.1GW net output. 2 additional nuclear plants are planned for the same location as well, so I should be fine by the time these supercaps make it to the main-stream.
I was thinking along the lines of X2 6000+ / 8GB / 4870. Which is do-able for under £500.
I certainly wouldn't buy nVidia hardware at the moment due to all the noise about high fail rates.
PS3 also wouldn't be my 1st choice of console. There's only 2 platform exclusive games that look to be worth playing on it, compared to about 12 on the 360 and over 25 on the Wii.
In fact you could get a 360 AND a Wii for the price of a PS3... I'd even recomend that combination over a PC if you were just looking for somthing to only play games on.
Basically, don't open weird files that you find on the internet.
Any chance you could get that printed up on a mousemat or somthing? I'd certainly buy a few to send out to relatives and family friends as Xmas presents....
It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately. It also needs you to upgrade to the latest Games For Windows release, which doesn't support Vista64 at the moment. So that's all the hardcore gamers with 4GB+ of ram out of the picture.
Only cost them $200k to inconvenience players to such a high degree.... I hope everyone who's having problems returns it to the store. High levels of returns make the distributer very uneasy, which in turn should send a message to the publisher.
5 of my friends have bought GTA IV PC at retail...
on
Valve's Gabe Newell On DRM
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... 3 of them can't play for more than 5-10 minutes without securom bombing and forcing the game to close instantly. The other 2 can't even get it to start up.
Aparently it only cost Rockstar $200k to cause this much inconvenience to their legitimate users.
Am waiting to see how long it takes for a fully functional crack to come out. Been just over 48 hours so far and it appears to be harder to crack cleanly than your average copy protection. Rockstar are claiming that it's "Uncrackable", which may not have been their best choice of words when the scene crackers are motivated primarily by having the bragging rights of being the 1st to bypass the most difficult DRM.
So are you saying that you can take full control of a 360 and run unsigned code using this chip?
Having just been onto the 360 section of Xbins, there is a distinct lack of homebrew, alternate dashes and any of the other things that you would expect to find if it were possible to run unsigned code.
The only time I've seen unsigned code being run on the 360 is via the now closed king kong exploit.
You're perfectly right, I don't make my living from installing console mods. I do however follow the console homebrew scenes closely enough to know that there still isn't one for 360.
I'd say that your kids learning not to lend expensive items out to their destructive, idiot frineds is one of the more valuable life skills, and worth keeping them deprived of a few games for.
As for Final Fantasy 7, My best mate has 5 of them for sale on amazon at the moment, should be no problem to pick one up, as long as you don't mind paying heavily for your does of nostalgia.
But there's no chip available for the 360 that lets you "just tool around" with it. Aside from a now close exploit, there is no way to gain full control of or run unsigned code on a 360. The chips and drive flash mods only allow one thing: Backup games to be loaded. That's it. Piracy is the only reason for chipping/flashing a 360.
Since shoplifting doesn't count as a lost sale to either the publisher or distributer, I fail to see why they would be interested in stopping it.
What I can see them being interested in is preventing retailers from breaking the agreed streetdate for a title, by not allowing them to activate the products until day of release.
Last time I looked at the Catalyst/Avivo hardware transcoding software it was somwhat less usable than I hoped. The thing that killed it for me was the lack of batching or cl options. It actually turned out to be less time consuming for me to use a software transcoder with batching and leave it on overnight and while I was at work than it did to go back over to the pc after every finished run to setup the next file for transcoding on the vid card. The quality of the video that was transcoded in hardware was a bit on the patchy side as well.
Somthing that I would be interested in is integrating support into burning software to speed up the transcoding side of DVD video burning. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it's happening any time soon. I think the problem is that by the time technology has matured enough to make it viable, the increase in CPU speed will have made it redundant.
Not content with simply not RTFA, slashdotters have given up on commenting on the article, prefering instead to comment on the grammar and wording of the headline.
I'm sure that someone will point out the irony of me commenting about people not commenting on TFA any second now.
I thought that MGS played too much on it's 8-bit heratige. Things like firing the radio controlled rockets down the twisty coridors just felt too contrived for the game that it was trying to be. Essentially it's just a top down shooter with puzzle elements, like the original. It may have added the stealth element, which at the time was a relatively new concept, but it's mechanic was still very similar. As for this comparison being like comparing 80's arcade starwars to SWG, I think that MG and MGS share enough similarities in gameplay mechanic for the comparison to be viable.
The comparison of 80's SW to SWG on the other hand would be ridiculus, since you'd be skipping huge numbers of games that came between them, like the X-wing series which if compared to the 80's arcade SW would share some considerable core gameplay mechanics and likewise shares elements with the JTL portion of SWG. For the most part though MMO's only share a core gameplay mechanic with other MMO's.
Looking at the recent release of Bionic Commando Re-armed, I'd say that there is still a market for 8-bit gameplay (with seriously updated graphics in this case). However, the question of whether it's just nostalgia, or if it's truely good gameplay that's driving them back is somthing we'll have to wait and see because I don't think anyone can really tell at the moment.
For the record, I thought Operation Logic Bomb was superior to Metal Gear anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
So what happens in Autum when Sky Player comes to Xbox Live and the Xbox Live / Zune HD movie service starts offering 1080p streaming movies? Last time I checked a 1080p movie was a minimum of 9GB.... BT seem to think that 30GB/month is "normal" usage, while MS want to sell you a movie which uses 1/3 of that bandwidth in under 2 hours (most likely within the 6pm-12am "peak" period). There is a massive wake up call on its way.
A member of our crew (guild) in The Matrix Online discovered a way to clip out of the world by getting hit by a car and knocked inside part of the world geometry. Once you were outside the world geometry you could walk around in the greyspace until you found odd little places like the interogation room from the original film, a loading construct that was all white with a couple of chairs, and the "Hall of doors" from the 2nd and 3rd films.
Shame that the game was such a letdown in terms of the monthly content updates and events that were prommised.
Tried gamestracker? I know that for the uk it lists prices with shipping included, so you can see exactly who is the cheapest. It should be the same for the US as far as I'm aware.
The majority of new titles will drop bellow the £15 mark at some point with in the 1st 3 months of release. Stores get overstocks or put them up as loss leaders, it's just a matter of checking gamestracker and hotukdeals (I'm sure you have an equivalant) on a regular basis. I've seen games suddenly spring up in 2 for £25 deals while they're still going for £25 used on amazon...
Deals on pysical media are and always will be out there if you know where to look for them, unlike downloadables, where the value is whatever the content provider dictates it to be, instead of its value being driven by market forces.
Seen this tactic before. Download old games at new prices. So while the game is available for £10 at retail brand new, you can download it for £30 saving you the trouble of dealing with things like pysical media, packaging and resale value.
Steam is frankly just as bad though. When I wanted to buy Frontlines it was £35 on Steam, or £10 delivered from play.com with the T-shirt, Art book and Dogtags. Market tollerance is a terrible thing.
Once Sony buy it, they'll fuck it up so badly that your friend will get bored and quit, or possibly go on a murderous rampage at the SOE offices. Either way he's off the computer, which is what you were trying to accomplish.
I'm so happy. Cause today I found my friends.
They're in my head. I'm so ugly. But that's ok.
'Cause so are you. We've broke our mirrors.
Sunday morning. Is everyday for all I care.
And I'm not scared. Light my candles. In a daze cause I've found god.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah.....
I'm so lonely. And that's ok.
I shaved my head. And I'm not sad, and just maybe
I'm to blame for all I've heard. And I'm not sure.
I'm so excited. I can't wait to meet you there.
And I don't care. I'm so horny. But that's ok. My will is good.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.....
(Chorus)
I like it. I'm not gonna crack.
I miss you. I'm not gonna crack.
I love you.I'm not gonna crack.
I kill you. I'm not gonna crack. (x2)
I'm so happy. Cause today I found my friends.
They're in my head. I'm so ugly. But that's ok.
'Cause so are you. We've broke our mirrors.
Sunday morning. Is everyday for all I care.
And I'm not scared. Light my candles.
In a daze cause I've found god.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah.....
(Chorus)..
Mine are set up in ASUS P2-M2A690G Barebones, as at the time they were the only acceptable looking AMD compatable systems with HDMI out. There may be better ones out there now, so go take a look and see what's about. Inside it's running AMD Athlon X2 4800+ / 2x1GB PC6400 / 80GB Seagate Baracuda. It handles the decoding of 720P video just fine through XBMC Windows. The ram and hdd are probably overkill, but halfing the quantities would only have saved me £10, and you never know what things you might want to use a system for in the future.
I mostly use the MCE Remote for input, as it's cheap, good quality and well supported. I've got the basic MS Wireless desktop KB/M combo as well, but they don't work well beyond about 1.5m range and fall off very quickly if not in line of sight. You probably want to look at a good quality Logitech wireless desktop set if you want more range.
On the other box I don't run a keyboard at all, just the Logitech MX-Air, which is awsome but very expensive for a mouse. In the rare cases that I do need to type on it, I use the on-screen keyboard from accessability options.
While these boxes will serve as general purpose PC's if required, I'd try and keep them as clean as possible so that you can have better startup times and less chance of TSRs and services suddenly trying to do somthing while you're watching a show and causing stuttering or hitching in the playback.
I don't know any specifics about the subscription service that you'd want to use, but most likely it's either fully web plugin based, or uses a propriatory player. Either way it's doubtfull that you could access it directly from XBMC, although there are python scripts that will let you run external programs from inside XBMC which you could make use of.
Hope that helps.
It all falls down when you move to HD unfortunately. The original Xbox lacks a digital video output and unfortunately it's poor little 733mhz cpu can't decode H.264/VC1.
I've been migrating all my old Xboxen to small form factor pc's running XBMC for Windows as each of the CRT's in the house has been replaced with a new LCD.
Do these Japanese games companies have plans on releasing their DJ game in other teritories anytime soon? on somthing newer than a PS2? With local hardware manufacturing so that the cost isn't through the roof? Will it be using licensed music tracks that westerners will actually know?
I'd say that the answer to most, if not all, of those questions is a big fat NO. As such it may as well not exist outside of Japan because it's not doing anything for anyone outside of Japan.
Handily enough my local plant is a PWR with ~1.1GW net output. 2 additional nuclear plants are planned for the same location as well, so I should be fine by the time these supercaps make it to the main-stream.
I was thinking along the lines of X2 6000+ / 8GB / 4870. Which is do-able for under £500.
I certainly wouldn't buy nVidia hardware at the moment due to all the noise about high fail rates.
PS3 also wouldn't be my 1st choice of console. There's only 2 platform exclusive games that look to be worth playing on it, compared to about 12 on the 360 and over 25 on the Wii.
In fact you could get a 360 AND a Wii for the price of a PS3... I'd even recomend that combination over a PC if you were just looking for somthing to only play games on.
Euro 1500? Are you getting it gold plated or somthing?
Presuming that you current kb, mouse, monitor, etc are fine you can build a new box powerfull enough to play GTA4 with good settings for under £500.
Basically, don't open weird files that you find on the internet.
Any chance you could get that printed up on a mousemat or somthing? I'd certainly buy a few to send out to relatives and family friends as Xmas presents....
It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately. It also needs you to upgrade to the latest Games For Windows release, which doesn't support Vista64 at the moment. So that's all the hardcore gamers with 4GB+ of ram out of the picture.
Only cost them $200k to inconvenience players to such a high degree.... I hope everyone who's having problems returns it to the store. High levels of returns make the distributer very uneasy, which in turn should send a message to the publisher.
... 3 of them can't play for more than 5-10 minutes without securom bombing and forcing the game to close instantly. The other 2 can't even get it to start up.
Aparently it only cost Rockstar $200k to cause this much inconvenience to their legitimate users.
Am waiting to see how long it takes for a fully functional crack to come out. Been just over 48 hours so far and it appears to be harder to crack cleanly than your average copy protection. Rockstar are claiming that it's "Uncrackable", which may not have been their best choice of words when the scene crackers are motivated primarily by having the bragging rights of being the 1st to bypass the most difficult DRM.
So are you saying that you can take full control of a 360 and run unsigned code using this chip?
Having just been onto the 360 section of Xbins, there is a distinct lack of homebrew, alternate dashes and any of the other things that you would expect to find if it were possible to run unsigned code.
The only time I've seen unsigned code being run on the 360 is via the now closed king kong exploit.
You're perfectly right, I don't make my living from installing console mods. I do however follow the console homebrew scenes closely enough to know that there still isn't one for 360.
I'd say that your kids learning not to lend expensive items out to their destructive, idiot frineds is one of the more valuable life skills, and worth keeping them deprived of a few games for.
As for Final Fantasy 7, My best mate has 5 of them for sale on amazon at the moment, should be no problem to pick one up, as long as you don't mind paying heavily for your does of nostalgia.
But there's no chip available for the 360 that lets you "just tool around" with it. Aside from a now close exploit, there is no way to gain full control of or run unsigned code on a 360. The chips and drive flash mods only allow one thing: Backup games to be loaded. That's it. Piracy is the only reason for chipping/flashing a 360.
Since shoplifting doesn't count as a lost sale to either the publisher or distributer, I fail to see why they would be interested in stopping it.
What I can see them being interested in is preventing retailers from breaking the agreed streetdate for a title, by not allowing them to activate the products until day of release.
Yes I did.
Thanks you.
Storage on an expansion card is nothing new, my Amstrad 1512 had a 40mb hdd on an ide card.
Last time I looked at the Catalyst/Avivo hardware transcoding software it was somwhat less usable than I hoped. The thing that killed it for me was the lack of batching or cl options. It actually turned out to be less time consuming for me to use a software transcoder with batching and leave it on overnight and while I was at work than it did to go back over to the pc after every finished run to setup the next file for transcoding on the vid card. The quality of the video that was transcoded in hardware was a bit on the patchy side as well.
Somthing that I would be interested in is integrating support into burning software to speed up the transcoding side of DVD video burning. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it's happening any time soon. I think the problem is that by the time technology has matured enough to make it viable, the increase in CPU speed will have made it redundant.
Not content with simply not RTFA, slashdotters have given up on commenting on the article, prefering instead to comment on the grammar and wording of the headline.
I'm sure that someone will point out the irony of me commenting about people not commenting on TFA any second now.
Ask the 10M-ish WoW players....
I thought that MGS played too much on it's 8-bit heratige. Things like firing the radio controlled rockets down the twisty coridors just felt too contrived for the game that it was trying to be. Essentially it's just a top down shooter with puzzle elements, like the original. It may have added the stealth element, which at the time was a relatively new concept, but it's mechanic was still very similar. As for this comparison being like comparing 80's arcade starwars to SWG, I think that MG and MGS share enough similarities in gameplay mechanic for the comparison to be viable.
The comparison of 80's SW to SWG on the other hand would be ridiculus, since you'd be skipping huge numbers of games that came between them, like the X-wing series which if compared to the 80's arcade SW would share some considerable core gameplay mechanics and likewise shares elements with the JTL portion of SWG. For the most part though MMO's only share a core gameplay mechanic with other MMO's.
Looking at the recent release of Bionic Commando Re-armed, I'd say that there is still a market for 8-bit gameplay (with seriously updated graphics in this case). However, the question of whether it's just nostalgia, or if it's truely good gameplay that's driving them back is somthing we'll have to wait and see because I don't think anyone can really tell at the moment.
For the record, I thought Operation Logic Bomb was superior to Metal Gear anyway.