The ideas of the X-Files were derivative of many things, but they hadn't been on TV (recently).
Note that I carefully chose my wording. I mentioned that the ideas had to be "fresh," not "new." There is very little "new" on TV, but if you let old ides lie long enough, they become "fresh" once again. This is one of the reasons TNG was so successful, and also a reason why every trek series since hasn't come close.
I think B&Bs' one saving grace this season is that they're trying to make Star Trek "fresh" again. They're throwing away the entire known history of the UFP and building it from scratch, distancing themselves as much as possible from the "known" Star Trek universe. It's risky, and I seriously think they could fuck up completely by taking it too far or not distancing themselves enough, but it takes a gamble like that to save a series.
I know a lot of people consider Friday night to be the kiss of death, but consider this:
The X Files originally aired in the Friday night timeslot, and is one of the few shows to thrive under such conditions. As a show with fresh ideas and excellent presentation, people stayed in to watch.
While I have enjoyed some of the episodes of Enterprise this season, if it's not creative and gripping enough to survive on a Friday night, it's not worth saving. Let's see how it performs next season.
IIRC, SRAM is much faster, much more expensive and takes more power.
In terms of power, I would think it depends entirely on the duty cycle. In terms of switching power, SRAM has a higher switching cost due to having more transistors. On the other hand, DRAM leaks power constantly AND has to have data restored on every read while SRAM has very low leakage.
Non-volatile ram is a different concept, you'll probably want to steer clear for the purposes of this discussion.
You're probably thinking of SRAM, in which a single bit cell requires 6 transistors. The advantages of SRAM:
- Data remains resident as long as the cell remains powered.
- With the exception of leakage, the only power required is for switching, making SRAM good for low-power applications.
That said, a single DRAM bit is about as simple as you can get. It consists of a single transistor and a capacitor to hold the data. The disadvantages of DRAM:
- Data degrades over time, requiring periodic refresh.
- The data contained by the capacitor is also destroyed on read, requiring it to be re-written.
- Due to their design, DRAM cells have inherently slower performance (although there are tricks to improve this).
This issues make your memory interface more complex and power-hungry, but the space savings is often worthwhile to go with embedded DRAM over SRAM.
Half-Life brought us many new things that came together to make an excellent game:
1. EXCELLENT AI for the time. I remember getting freaked when the marine squads actually managed to cooperate to encircle me and attack me from unexpected places. This was such a change from your typical Quake, where enemies either come straight for you, or romp around in pseudo-random fashion.
2. Skeletal Animation. There's just nothing like natural movements for your models.
3. Immersive sound. HL was one of the first games to include both EAX and A3D, and it used these technologies to great lengths to produce immersion.
4. Huge Levels Did you forget those huge continuous maps that were designed with fast load waypoints to produce bigger levels than any PC was capable of handling at the time? They managed to implement this sectionized loading without perceptibly hurting gameplay. This was much better than say, the Quake way of doing things, where each short level came to a close before you loaded the next.
5. Did I mention the Great Story?
As for Counter-Strike:
The reason CS did so well is the same reason QuakeWorld TF did so well: they adopted existing concepts and meshed them with new ones, packaged them in a professional, well-tweaked mod with decent, mod-specific maps, and gave it all away for free.
In the case of TF, they took the already existing CTF concept and added a class system. New and innovative weapons and equipment rounded out the improvements.
In the case of CS they adapted most concepts from Rainbow Six. The idea of realism in equipment and the concept of "dead until the round is over" were adapted, but made more fun. The key here is that the original Rainbow Six wasn't all that popular on the PC, mainly because it was too slow and realistic. CS managed to find a balance, and popularized both concepts.
CS did add one innovative feature: the concept of BUYING your weapons based on earned cash was previously only a concept in RTS games.
I'm just going to say this: all you people who even think for a second that the insurance companies are going to lower insurance rates and highway speeds will increase are hopeless optimists. At least...not in your lifetimes.
The insurance companies have a racket they're not about to lose. They set the price for your right to drive, and nobody really actively regulates this. Since the markets have stable growth, you won't find insurance providers suddenly "dumping" excess inventory like say, in the DRAM market. The insurance industry is more like the music industry in terms of stability...and if the RIAA's failed promise to lower prices on CDs is any example, we're never going to see a red cent.
As for highway speeds, they're only beginning to reflect what they were before the federally-mandated 55mph speed limits were introduced 30 years ago. Maybe we can dance for joy when the states finally approve speed limits over 70mph 30 years from now for roads that can easily handle 90mph NOW.
Funny that, I always thought the A6 was TWICE the car the A4 was, and the A8 was THREE TIMES the car the A4 was.
At least, that's the impression you got from the sticker price. YOWZA!
But once you get a good look at them, you realize that 1.46 * A4 = A6, and 2.68 * A4 = A8. You crazy Europeans always have such inconsistent conversion factors!
Well, since this is a standard VIA Eden platform, I'd say a Savage Pro 4 processor. The sparse specs listed in the PR (200mp/s, no mention of hardware T&L or shaders) would tend to agree.
and the controller specs.
Probably nothing more outlandish than a USB joystick. Funny though, a lot of people have been speculating that the USB ports are not masters, but if this thing uses a USB interface for the joystick, then it has a master controller that's accessible.
And no, I'm not referring to SLI, which was specifically designed to pair two Voodoo 2s together.
I'm talking about technology that can bridge any two cards together. This is nothing more than the complex bridging involved in say Metabyte's TNT 'SLI' solution that consisted of a PCI bridge and software to split the framebuffers. It was never released for two reasons
1. GeForce 256 released shortly after this was announced.
2. PCI bridge required both the AGP and the PCI card to operate in PCI DMA mode. Unfortunately, there never was such a thing as an "AGP bridge".
In any case, other companies have now successfully implemented a simple framebuffer splitting concept on-card, where the bandwidth is more plentiful. The ATI Rage Fury MAXX and the 3dfx VSA-100 come to mind, these chips simply split the framebuffer rendering according to complexity. Beyond that, NOTHING was shared - triangle and texture data were replicated for each chip.
The key to this: on the software side in 3D mode their software automatically splits two framebuffers between the two cards. As for the "special" chipset, whatever scene data is sent to one video card, the same data is sent to the other video card. I can't imagine it being any more complex than this.
Hey, don't diss the 5 mile commute. It may cause your gas mileage to go down, but it reduces your overall fuel usage.
I used to have a 20 mile commute with about 3 miles stop and go. Even though I floor it on the highway, I was averaging 33mpg with my Saturn SC2.
Now I have a commute at around 6 miles, and it's all stop and go. My average has plummetted to 25mpg, but even with that significant drop in efficiency I am still using LESS THAN HALF AS MUCH fuel as I used to.
Remember, there are TWO ways you can conserve fuel. You can increase the efficiency of your vehicle, or you can decrease the distance traveled. If you have to increase the distance traveled, use as many freeways as possible; but for shorter distances it doesn't matter because the returns are tiny...it's just common sense.
Rygar for the NES was an incredibly long game but lacked the ability to save your progress. The shortest duration I've seen it beaten is somewhere in the 24-36 hour range.
The game I had in mind while reading thsi thread was Castlevania. Sure, you could continue as many times as you wanted, but the bosses were DAMN HARD.
* The Mummy Men were very difficult until you figured out to use fire or a boomerang. This required patience and stamina from a player, since you could only get fire at the start of the level, and the boomerang midway. If you died past these points, you couldn't go back to get them.
* Frankenstein was the same deal, only two weapons worked well, and you had to hold on to em.
* The Grim Reaper didn't require you to hold on to a particular weapon (the boomerang, which was most effective, was available near the end of the level), but he was just insanely hard.
* Count Dracula was an incredibly tough enemy. You had to have observed two aspects of the game by that point, or you were toast:
- You could make candles re-appear by leaving a screen through stairs. - You could use a special weapon on targets to get double and triple shot.
You had to collect tons of hearts and triple shot before each go at Count Dracula. If you were persistent enough to get EIGHTEEN hits on his head as he teleported and shot fireballs, he would morph into his second form. Then, if you had enough life and triple shot boomerang, you might have time to kill him.
I spent a good 3 months on that game (a whole month stuck at Dracula) before I decided it was unbeatable. I picked it back up a year later, and beat Dracula. I was so happy:P
I have only beaten that game on my NES maybe a half-dozen times, it's so hard. You folks with your emulators and save states got it easy.
But there's not much to get into. There's a particular threshold voltage required to activate a CMOS gate (after you take leakage and impedence into account), and this is the limiting factor in your voltage.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons power usage in processors has skyrocketed in recent years. Only 10 years ago were were throwing 5v Vcc into chips. Each successive die shrink brought us down (3.3v, 2.8v, 2.0v, 1.6v), reducing power required by the square. This meant we could increase processing capability (adding both parallelism and clock speed) without a huge power usage increase.
Now, when was the last time you saw Vcc go down with a new die shrink? It's been a long time. We can only push the threshold voltage so low and still have a product that works and is profitable.
Sounds like you need to learn to plan ahead, or buy a little more power at a time. I find I only need to upgrade every 3 years or so to stay powerful, and I plan my upgrades to be "upgradable" whenever possible.
Let's look at your list:
My first PC was a 386-40
You went cheap by buying the AMD 386 rather than a low-end 486. If you had invested in the 486, you could have done the DX2-66 upgrade without a motherboard change.
Next up was a Pentium 166 (new motherboard again), then a K6-233 (new motherboard for EDO ram)
Whose fault is that? You certainly didn't see monsterous performance improvements going from FPM to EDO, and you probably could have reused the P166 board. Don't blame your own thirst for performance on the industry, you had a choice.
dual celeron, and after that a p3. New motherboards for each.
You've got to be kidding me. Most BX boards could be upgraded to Coppermines (including the very popular BP6 dual Celeron board). If it couldn't support the low voltages, you could always pick up the Socket 370 PGA to FCPGA adapter from Powerleap. You just bought a new board because you were lazy, and now you're whining about it here. Hell, even my BH6 Revision 1.0 could run Coppermine processors (even though Abit officially said it could not), saved me a ton on upgrade costs.
a top of the line Athlon thunderbird 1 gig on a top of the line motherboard. A motherboard which only supports chips up to 1.4 GHz. And whose top-of-the-line clock makes at 200 MHz
Yes, but assuming you're not full of shit when you claim this system to have been "top of the line" at time of purchase (circa 2000), I'll bet you've liked not having to upgrade for over four years. Face it, you finally got your money's worth out of a system, and you're still whining.
My current system is an Athlon XP 1600+, and at the time it was nearly top-of-the-line, and for that investment I have had over three years of good performance. I expect to upgrade soon, and I do expect to have to buy a new motherboard...but I will expect this next upgrade to last me 3-4 years as well.
The point is this: I have used incremental upgrades (no motherboard change) and complete upgrades (new motherboard) to my advantage. Both paths have their benefits, but if you plan ahead and, research your options come upgrade time, you should be happy with either.
But hey, can you blame 'em? Dragon Warrior (Quest) III was the best game in the series, IMHO:P
Fully configurable parties, plus as soon as you get your ship, the linear portion ends and you're cut loose into the world. It's one of the longest and most non-linear RPGs you'll find.
The easiest way to find out if your card is Cardbus:
Every Cardbus card I've ever encountered has a metal strip at the contact end that runs parallel to the edge of the card. It's usually made of gold, and you really can't miss it. I have never seen anything like it on a PCMCIA card.
Here are a couple pictures if you need a visual cue. Note the large gold strip on the end.
This sounds like the argument "Well, our tires do tend to blow-out at high speeds but why should we be held responsible?"
If by "tires" you mean H-rated radials, and by "high speed" you mean over 130MPH, then that's all your fault. Most passenger cars ship with H-rated radials, and most car makers try to pervent such situations by providing 130MPH or less spedometers (the psychological barrier), or installing 130MPH speed governors (the physical barrier).
Still, with all this, you could potentially push your car over 130MPH and have a blowout, and it would most certainly be your fault. Now, if you had a blowout at 125MPH on the other hand...
Just want to say this: a 3x improvement in thoroughput does not make this a closed issue. USB2 implementations cost more than their USB1.1 counterparts. Also, the faster chips certainly cost more, and that price differential most certainly increases with density.
Let's just look at the memory alone. Let's say wholesale you can cut that price differential in half ($3), and it stays linear with capacity (which it won't, in reality it will be even higher). That's minimum $24 extra you have to pay for 512MB high-speed ram, plus whatever extra for the USB2 chip. that's hard to swallow, since this player is competing with hard drive-based and other flash players at around the $200 mark.
Just because you can get a solution that can write at 5MB/s doesn't mean it's the right feature for this device. These folks are trying hard to balance price, capacity and features.
And on another note entirely, I might mention this:
When Grand Prix Legends was released, it only supported RRedline and Glide APIs (Rendition and 3DFX cards) for hardware acceleration. I should know, I played Grand Prix Legends on my Hercules Thriller 3D, and it was outstanding.
Three years after release, Papyrus released an unofficial Direct3D "beta" patch. I would not be surprised at all if this was only tested on a small segment of hardware, and possibly uses extensions or tricks proprietary to nVidia cards, as they were "the" card company without peer when this patch was released. Times have since changed.
Don't blame ATI for an unsupported patch for a game released 6 years ago. That's just wishful thinking. Do you expect your ATI card to magically run Glide games as well?
Let me give you an example of something you COULD rightfully get pissed off at ATI about. Let's say your ATI card couldn't play GLQuake, which was designed to be card-agnostic, so long as the card supported OpenGL properly. That would be unforgivable, even if it was some almost completely abandoned extension that Quake required...because it's a STANDARD, and the GL Quake renderer was well designed.
Unfortunately, you won't get an opportunity to rip on ATI's drivers in that case. My Radeon 8500 still playes GLQuake fine with zero glitches, 8 years after it was originally released. This is something that Matrox certainly couldn't do. Now THAT's what you expect from good drivers.
The AMD 760 is designed for single processors as well. I have an Abit KG7 with said chipset, and have also pointed friends toward this chipset (in it's time), and have had nothing but good experiences.
On the other hand, I also have seen good experiences with nVidia's nForce.
I have to ask this: if you think that nVivia can do no more wrong than Intel (that is, you consider them BOTH to be exceptional in quality and stability, and thus worthy of your patronage), then why don't you consider the Athlon a viable and stable platform?
All you want is a stable, high-performance chipset right? Well, nVidia's nForce is absolutely stable and powerful. It basically destroys your whole argument about not buying AMD. Who cares who makes it, if it works? Remember, Intel wasn't always the leader in x86 chipsets.
The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel.
You know, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (say, a little over a decade ago), Intel was not a chipset house. Yes, I know you find it hard to believe, but Intel chips ran perfectly stable on non-Intel chipsets for quite some time. The only reason Intel started getting serious with their chipset marketing was because they had the momentum, and saw the opportunity for growth. They banked on selling "reliability," and made a killing.
As for AMD, I suppose you didn't notice that they released TWO chipsets for their Athlon line? There was the AMD 750 "Irongate," the first chipset available for the Athlon. There was also the AMD 760, which besides being rock-solid, was also one of the earliest DDR platforms available for the Athlon, and supported dual processors.
There's only one thing wrong with AMD making chipsets: unlike Intel in the mid 90s, they lack the momentum to maintain both businesses. AMD only made the 750 and 760 lines to give their new platform legitimacy, and to attract other chipset makers.
To keep the 3rd-party chipset makers on board, they have ceased to compete (to avoid, say, the 3rd-party discontent like that seen on the Nintendo Gamecube). AMD's CPU market is so much smaller than Intel's that, if they made a serious effort to compete in chipsets, they would drive away competitors...and that is not good for AMD's long-term.
As for The Athlon 64, what's wrong with VIA and NVidia? Just as the release of the K7 brought legitimacy to AMD, time has brought legitimacy to VIA. And as for NVidia, if their chipsets aren't stable enough for you, then nothing is. The NForce series is rock-solid, and high-performance.
Ahh, yes, I forgot the labels could be 2 characters long. You'll excuse me, the last time I programmed on my beloved TI-82 was 7 years ago.
I replaced it with an 89 in college, but I never quite got into programming it on the level I did with the 82. I since donated the 82 to a worthwhile cause:P
They practically invented the "Action Game With Cutscenes" concept.
Golgo 13 had wonderful cutscenes every time a major plot element was being discussed, Bionic Commando built a story entirely on communications cutscenes and who could forget those excellent, fast-paced cutscenes between chapters from Ninja Gaiden?
These games have already been remade a thousand times with a thousand names...when was the last time you saw an action game with any real story tell the story line any other way?
:Lbl x:Disp "Except that classic TI Basic doesn't have line numbers,":Disp "only these annoying colons separate statements":Goto x:Disp "Not to mention, there are only 27 vars and 37 labels..."
As a daily witness to the horrors of modern acronym overload, I am personally astounded that this one in particular has eluded the "mandatory cleverness" that is required of all recent acronyms.
If the people at my company had come up with this, they would have called it "MaRCH" or something equally cute. Not that I want to give any of you executives any ideas...
I used my credit card, just because I checked up on the certificates of the company tha handles all their credit transactions, and it seemed satisfactory. I figured that the worst that could happen was I'd be out 50 bucks, and get a new card issued.
My card actually failed to work because, due to the international nature of the purchase, my bank automatically declined the charge and gave me a call to confirm that it was legitimate. After that was cleared up, it worked fine, and I've since seen nothing suspicious on my bill.
Slashdot Mirror
The ideas of the X-Files were derivative of many things, but they hadn't been on TV (recently).
Note that I carefully chose my wording. I mentioned that the ideas had to be "fresh," not "new." There is very little "new" on TV, but if you let old ides lie long enough, they become "fresh" once again. This is one of the reasons TNG was so successful, and also a reason why every trek series since hasn't come close.
I think B&Bs' one saving grace this season is that they're trying to make Star Trek "fresh" again. They're throwing away the entire known history of the UFP and building it from scratch, distancing themselves as much as possible from the "known" Star Trek universe. It's risky, and I seriously think they could fuck up completely by taking it too far or not distancing themselves enough, but it takes a gamble like that to save a series.
I know a lot of people consider Friday night to be the kiss of death, but consider this:
The X Files originally aired in the Friday night timeslot, and is one of the few shows to thrive under such conditions. As a show with fresh ideas and excellent presentation, people stayed in to watch.
While I have enjoyed some of the episodes of Enterprise this season, if it's not creative and gripping enough to survive on a Friday night, it's not worth saving. Let's see how it performs next season.
IIRC, SRAM is much faster, much more expensive and takes more power.
In terms of power, I would think it depends entirely on the duty cycle. In terms of switching power, SRAM has a higher switching cost due to having more transistors. On the other hand, DRAM leaks power constantly AND has to have data restored on every read while SRAM has very low leakage.
Non-volatile ram is a different concept, you'll probably want to steer clear for the purposes of this discussion.
You're probably thinking of SRAM, in which a single bit cell requires 6 transistors. The advantages of SRAM:
- Data remains resident as long as the cell remains powered.
- With the exception of leakage, the only power required is for switching, making SRAM good for low-power applications.
That said, a single DRAM bit is about as simple as you can get. It consists of a single transistor and a capacitor to hold the data. The disadvantages of DRAM:
- Data degrades over time, requiring periodic refresh.
- The data contained by the capacitor is also destroyed on read, requiring it to be re-written.
- Due to their design, DRAM cells have inherently slower performance (although there are tricks to improve this).
This issues make your memory interface more complex and power-hungry, but the space savings is often worthwhile to go with embedded DRAM over SRAM.
Huh?
Half-Life brought us many new things that came together to make an excellent game:
1. EXCELLENT AI for the time.
I remember getting freaked when the marine squads actually managed to cooperate to encircle me and attack me from unexpected places. This was such a change from your typical Quake, where enemies either come straight for you, or romp around in pseudo-random fashion.
2. Skeletal Animation.
There's just nothing like natural movements for your models.
3. Immersive sound.
HL was one of the first games to include both EAX and A3D, and it used these technologies to great lengths to produce immersion.
4. Huge Levels
Did you forget those huge continuous maps that were designed with fast load waypoints to produce bigger levels than any PC was capable of handling at the time? They managed to implement this sectionized loading without perceptibly hurting gameplay. This was much better than say, the Quake way of doing things, where each short level came to a close before you loaded the next.
5. Did I mention the Great Story?
As for Counter-Strike:
The reason CS did so well is the same reason QuakeWorld TF did so well: they adopted existing concepts and meshed them with new ones, packaged them in a professional, well-tweaked mod with decent, mod-specific maps, and gave it all away for free.
In the case of TF, they took the already existing CTF concept and added a class system. New and innovative weapons and equipment rounded out the improvements.
In the case of CS they adapted most concepts from Rainbow Six. The idea of realism in equipment and the concept of "dead until the round is over" were adapted, but made more fun. The key here is that the original Rainbow Six wasn't all that popular on the PC, mainly because it was too slow and realistic. CS managed to find a balance, and popularized both concepts.
CS did add one innovative feature: the concept of BUYING your weapons based on earned cash was previously only a concept in RTS games.
I'm just going to say this: all you people who even think for a second that the insurance companies are going to lower insurance rates and highway speeds will increase are hopeless optimists. At least...not in your lifetimes.
The insurance companies have a racket they're not about to lose. They set the price for your right to drive, and nobody really actively regulates this. Since the markets have stable growth, you won't find insurance providers suddenly "dumping" excess inventory like say, in the DRAM market. The insurance industry is more like the music industry in terms of stability...and if the RIAA's failed promise to lower prices on CDs is any example, we're never going to see a red cent.
As for highway speeds, they're only beginning to reflect what they were before the federally-mandated 55mph speed limits were introduced 30 years ago. Maybe we can dance for joy when the states finally approve speed limits over 70mph 30 years from now for roads that can easily handle 90mph NOW.
Funny that, I always thought the A6 was TWICE the car the A4 was, and the A8 was THREE TIMES the car the A4 was.
At least, that's the impression you got from the sticker price. YOWZA!
But once you get a good look at them, you realize that 1.46 * A4 = A6, and 2.68 * A4 = A8. You crazy Europeans always have such inconsistent conversion factors!
I wonder what the video hardware is
Well, since this is a standard VIA Eden platform, I'd say a Savage Pro 4 processor. The sparse specs listed in the PR (200mp/s, no mention of hardware T&L or shaders) would tend to agree.
and the controller specs.
Probably nothing more outlandish than a USB joystick. Funny though, a lot of people have been speculating that the USB ports are not masters, but if this thing uses a USB interface for the joystick, then it has a master controller that's accessible.
And no, I'm not referring to SLI, which was specifically designed to pair two Voodoo 2s together. I'm talking about technology that can bridge any two cards together. This is nothing more than the complex bridging involved in say Metabyte's TNT 'SLI' solution that consisted of a PCI bridge and software to split the framebuffers. It was never released for two reasons
1. GeForce 256 released shortly after this was announced.
2. PCI bridge required both the AGP and the PCI card to operate in PCI DMA mode. Unfortunately, there never was such a thing as an "AGP bridge".
In any case, other companies have now successfully implemented a simple framebuffer splitting concept on-card, where the bandwidth is more plentiful. The ATI Rage Fury MAXX and the 3dfx VSA-100 come to mind, these chips simply split the framebuffer rendering according to complexity. Beyond that, NOTHING was shared - triangle and texture data were replicated for each chip.
The key to this: on the software side in 3D mode their software automatically splits two framebuffers between the two cards. As for the "special" chipset, whatever scene data is sent to one video card, the same data is sent to the other video card. I can't imagine it being any more complex than this.
Hey, don't diss the 5 mile commute. It may cause your gas mileage to go down, but it reduces your overall fuel usage.
I used to have a 20 mile commute with about 3 miles stop and go. Even though I floor it on the highway, I was averaging 33mpg with my Saturn SC2.
Now I have a commute at around 6 miles, and it's all stop and go. My average has plummetted to 25mpg, but even with that significant drop in efficiency I am still using LESS THAN HALF AS MUCH fuel as I used to.
Remember, there are TWO ways you can conserve fuel. You can increase the efficiency of your vehicle, or you can decrease the distance traveled. If you have to increase the distance traveled, use as many freeways as possible; but for shorter distances it doesn't matter because the returns are tiny...it's just common sense.
Rygar for the NES was an incredibly long game but lacked the ability to save your progress. The shortest duration I've seen it beaten is somewhere in the 24-36 hour range.
:P
The game I had in mind while reading thsi thread was Castlevania. Sure, you could continue as many times as you wanted, but the bosses were DAMN HARD.
* The Mummy Men were very difficult until you figured out to use fire or a boomerang. This required patience and stamina from a player, since you could only get fire at the start of the level, and the boomerang midway. If you died past these points, you couldn't go back to get them.
* Frankenstein was the same deal, only two weapons worked well, and you had to hold on to em.
* The Grim Reaper didn't require you to hold on to a particular weapon (the boomerang, which was most effective, was available near the end of the level), but he was just insanely hard.
* Count Dracula was an incredibly tough enemy. You had to have observed two aspects of the game by that point, or you were toast:
- You could make candles re-appear by leaving a screen through stairs.
- You could use a special weapon on targets to get double and triple shot.
You had to collect tons of hearts and triple shot before each go at Count Dracula. If you were persistent enough to get EIGHTEEN hits on his head as he teleported and shot fireballs, he would morph into his second form. Then, if you had enough life and triple shot boomerang, you might have time to kill him.
I spent a good 3 months on that game (a whole month stuck at Dracula) before I decided it was unbeatable. I picked it back up a year later, and beat Dracula. I was so happy
I have only beaten that game on my NES maybe a half-dozen times, it's so hard. You folks with your emulators and save states got it easy.
But there's not much to get into. There's a particular threshold voltage required to activate a CMOS gate (after you take leakage and impedence into account), and this is the limiting factor in your voltage.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons power usage in processors has skyrocketed in recent years. Only 10 years ago were were throwing 5v Vcc into chips. Each successive die shrink brought us down (3.3v, 2.8v, 2.0v, 1.6v), reducing power required by the square. This meant we could increase processing capability (adding both parallelism and clock speed) without a huge power usage increase.
Now, when was the last time you saw Vcc go down with a new die shrink? It's been a long time. We can only push the threshold voltage so low and still have a product that works and is profitable.
Sounds like you need to learn to plan ahead, or buy a little more power at a time. I find I only need to upgrade every 3 years or so to stay powerful, and I plan my upgrades to be "upgradable" whenever possible.
Let's look at your list:
My first PC was a 386-40
You went cheap by buying the AMD 386 rather than a low-end 486. If you had invested in the 486, you could have done the DX2-66 upgrade without a motherboard change.
Next up was a Pentium 166 (new motherboard again), then a K6-233 (new motherboard for EDO ram)
Whose fault is that? You certainly didn't see monsterous performance improvements going from FPM to EDO, and you probably could have reused the P166 board. Don't blame your own thirst for performance on the industry, you had a choice.
dual celeron, and after that a p3. New motherboards for each.
You've got to be kidding me. Most BX boards could be upgraded to Coppermines (including the very popular BP6 dual Celeron board). If it couldn't support the low voltages, you could always pick up the Socket 370 PGA to FCPGA adapter from Powerleap. You just bought a new board because you were lazy, and now you're whining about it here. Hell, even my BH6 Revision 1.0 could run Coppermine processors (even though Abit officially said it could not), saved me a ton on upgrade costs.
a top of the line Athlon thunderbird 1 gig on a top of the line motherboard. A motherboard which only supports chips up to 1.4 GHz. And whose top-of-the-line clock makes at 200 MHz
Yes, but assuming you're not full of shit when you claim this system to have been "top of the line" at time of purchase (circa 2000), I'll bet you've liked not having to upgrade for over four years. Face it, you finally got your money's worth out of a system, and you're still whining.
My current system is an Athlon XP 1600+, and at the time it was nearly top-of-the-line, and for that investment I have had over three years of good performance. I expect to upgrade soon, and I do expect to have to buy a new motherboard...but I will expect this next upgrade to last me 3-4 years as well.
The point is this: I have used incremental upgrades (no motherboard change) and complete upgrades (new motherboard) to my advantage. Both paths have their benefits, but if you plan ahead and, research your options come upgrade time, you should be happy with either.
But hey, can you blame 'em? Dragon Warrior (Quest) III was the best game in the series, IMHO :P
Fully configurable parties, plus as soon as you get your ship, the linear portion ends and you're cut loose into the world. It's one of the longest and most non-linear RPGs you'll find.
The easiest way to find out if your card is Cardbus:
Every Cardbus card I've ever encountered has a metal strip at the contact end that runs parallel to the edge of the card. It's usually made of gold, and you really can't miss it. I have never seen anything like it on a PCMCIA card.
Here are a couple pictures if you need a visual cue. Note the large gold strip on the end.
example 1
example 2
This sounds like the argument "Well, our tires do tend to blow-out at high speeds but why should we be held responsible?"
If by "tires" you mean H-rated radials, and by "high speed" you mean over 130MPH, then that's all your fault. Most passenger cars ship with H-rated radials, and most car makers try to pervent such situations by providing 130MPH or less spedometers (the psychological barrier), or installing 130MPH speed governors (the physical barrier).
Still, with all this, you could potentially push your car over 130MPH and have a blowout, and it would most certainly be your fault. Now, if you had a blowout at 125MPH on the other hand...
Just want to say this: a 3x improvement in thoroughput does not make this a closed issue. USB2 implementations cost more than their USB1.1 counterparts. Also, the faster chips certainly cost more, and that price differential most certainly increases with density.
Let's just look at the memory alone. Let's say wholesale you can cut that price differential in half ($3), and it stays linear with capacity (which it won't, in reality it will be even higher). That's minimum $24 extra you have to pay for 512MB high-speed ram, plus whatever extra for the USB2 chip. that's hard to swallow, since this player is competing with hard drive-based and other flash players at around the $200 mark.
Just because you can get a solution that can write at 5MB/s doesn't mean it's the right feature for this device. These folks are trying hard to balance price, capacity and features.
And on another note entirely, I might mention this:
When Grand Prix Legends was released, it only supported RRedline and Glide APIs (Rendition and 3DFX cards) for hardware acceleration. I should know, I played Grand Prix Legends on my Hercules Thriller 3D, and it was outstanding.
Three years after release, Papyrus released an unofficial Direct3D "beta" patch. I would not be surprised at all if this was only tested on a small segment of hardware, and possibly uses extensions or tricks proprietary to nVidia cards, as they were "the" card company without peer when this patch was released. Times have since changed.
Don't blame ATI for an unsupported patch for a game released 6 years ago. That's just wishful thinking. Do you expect your ATI card to magically run Glide games as well?
Let me give you an example of something you COULD rightfully get pissed off at ATI about. Let's say your ATI card couldn't play GLQuake, which was designed to be card-agnostic, so long as the card supported OpenGL properly. That would be unforgivable, even if it was some almost completely abandoned extension that Quake required...because it's a STANDARD, and the GL Quake renderer was well designed.
Unfortunately, you won't get an opportunity to rip on ATI's drivers in that case. My Radeon 8500 still playes GLQuake fine with zero glitches, 8 years after it was originally released. This is something that Matrox certainly couldn't do. Now THAT's what you expect from good drivers.
Thought I just might mention this in response:
The AMD 760 is designed for single processors as well. I have an Abit KG7 with said chipset, and have also pointed friends toward this chipset (in it's time), and have had nothing but good experiences.
On the other hand, I also have seen good experiences with nVidia's nForce.
I have to ask this: if you think that nVivia can do no more wrong than Intel (that is, you consider them BOTH to be exceptional in quality and stability, and thus worthy of your patronage), then why don't you consider the Athlon a viable and stable platform?
All you want is a stable, high-performance chipset right? Well, nVidia's nForce is absolutely stable and powerful. It basically destroys your whole argument about not buying AMD. Who cares who makes it, if it works? Remember, Intel wasn't always the leader in x86 chipsets.
The day AMD decides to enter the chipset business and proves that they can deliver a rock solid solution is the day I'll consider their CPU, until then I'll take the $ penalty and buy Intel.
You know, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (say, a little over a decade ago), Intel was not a chipset house. Yes, I know you find it hard to believe, but Intel chips ran perfectly stable on non-Intel chipsets for quite some time. The only reason Intel started getting serious with their chipset marketing was because they had the momentum, and saw the opportunity for growth. They banked on selling "reliability," and made a killing.
As for AMD, I suppose you didn't notice that they released TWO chipsets for their Athlon line? There was the AMD 750 "Irongate," the first chipset available for the Athlon. There was also the AMD 760, which besides being rock-solid, was also one of the earliest DDR platforms available for the Athlon, and supported dual processors.
There's only one thing wrong with AMD making chipsets: unlike Intel in the mid 90s, they lack the momentum to maintain both businesses. AMD only made the 750 and 760 lines to give their new platform legitimacy, and to attract other chipset makers.
To keep the 3rd-party chipset makers on board, they have ceased to compete (to avoid, say, the 3rd-party discontent like that seen on the Nintendo Gamecube). AMD's CPU market is so much smaller than Intel's that, if they made a serious effort to compete in chipsets, they would drive away competitors...and that is not good for AMD's long-term.
As for The Athlon 64, what's wrong with VIA and NVidia? Just as the release of the K7 brought legitimacy to AMD, time has brought legitimacy to VIA. And as for NVidia, if their chipsets aren't stable enough for you, then nothing is. The NForce series is rock-solid, and high-performance.
Ahh, yes, I forgot the labels could be 2 characters long. You'll excuse me, the last time I programmed on my beloved TI-82 was 7 years ago.
:P
I replaced it with an 89 in college, but I never quite got into programming it on the level I did with the 82. I since donated the 82 to a worthwhile cause
What do all these games have in common?
They practically invented the "Action Game With Cutscenes" concept.
Golgo 13 had wonderful cutscenes every time a major plot element was being discussed, Bionic Commando built a story entirely on communications cutscenes and who could forget those excellent, fast-paced cutscenes between chapters from Ninja Gaiden?
These games have already been remade a thousand times with a thousand names...when was the last time you saw an action game with any real story tell the story line any other way?
:Lbl x :Disp "Except that classic TI Basic doesn't have line numbers," :Disp "only these annoying colons separate statements" :Goto x :Disp "Not to mention, there are only 27 vars and 37 labels..."
MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware)
As a daily witness to the horrors of modern acronym overload, I am personally astounded that this one in particular has eluded the "mandatory cleverness" that is required of all recent acronyms.
If the people at my company had come up with this, they would have called it "MaRCH" or something equally cute. Not that I want to give any of you executives any ideas...
I used my credit card, just because I checked up on the certificates of the company tha handles all their credit transactions, and it seemed satisfactory. I figured that the worst that could happen was I'd be out 50 bucks, and get a new card issued.
My card actually failed to work because, due to the international nature of the purchase, my bank automatically declined the charge and gave me a call to confirm that it was legitimate. After that was cleared up, it worked fine, and I've since seen nothing suspicious on my bill.