>> Isn't the current standard of CD-Burners kind of going to die when Mount Rainier takes off anyway?
Why? Mount ranier is just for drag-n-drop packetwriting to a CD-RW, I dont see how it will affect burning real filesystems on CD-Rs at all. Every packetwriting software I've tried (DirectCD, abCD, blahblaCD) has been slow and crappy.
OS-level support and faster burners will help, but CD-RWs still deteriorate pretty quickly when rewritten. This is the problem with all packetwriting software, the first 100 or so megs is where all the action takes place, and will wear out. Imagine a HDD that has sectors that go bad when they're rewritten only a few dozen times. This is what delayed standards, IMO; it's a stupid idea.
I wouldnt send software to a client on a MtR disk any sooner than I'd send it on a stack of floppies.
I agree with you mostly, it was pretty much a gimmick.
The only thing I thought it would be useful for would be a business like the one I'm in. We routinely burn disks with 50 megs on them for customers and for demo purposes, and it would have been 'neat' to put a slick tattoo of our logo on them, and invest in a nice cd-printer to do the label sides. Be something slick to hand out at trade shows.
For home, I'd be more interested in a cheap, effective cd printer. Though I did have an old plotter that I jerry rigged to hold sharpies. It made some funky doodles on my unbranded CDs. Too bad it broke.
Pitfall 3D is pretty good. People expected it to be tombraider, which it wasnt. But as far as 3rd person action games go, it's pretty good.
The voiceover work was done by Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead, Xena, Brisco County) and has his usual sarcastic attitude. The game's enjoyable for that alone.
The game isn't all that bad, BTW. Worth fishing out of a clearance bin should you find it. Typical 3rd person platform-adventure with enough oldschool charm to get by.
IMO, video game reviews 'arent worth it'. I never agree with them, they're generally either fanboy crap or paid advertisements, and quite frankly I dont need to be told what I like.
Can/. maybe devote a new section to articles about reviews of 6 month old video games? I got a cool icon of the retarted kid from South Park you can use for it.
I've found MAME tends to run its fastest under DOS. Gasp! (It doesn't have to be MS-DOS, DR-DOS will work fine) It likes a realtime singleuser environment. ArcadeOS makes a great dos-based front-end for a dedicated mame cab.
Personally I prefer it under Win32 with a card with some decent opengl support, as it just looks much better stretched fullscreen with opengl. Of course if you output to a TV or Arcade monitor, this isnt an issue.
Does the X11 port of mame support opengl based hardware boosts as well? X is just not something I assosciate with "good 2D performance"
I've also found that although MAME is CPU dependant, it doesnt miss the extra cache that a pentium has over a Celeron. Celeron 1ghz tualatin-based procs are like 40 bucks, and run pretty much everything fullspeed.
>> there is a high demand for used DVD mechanisms taken out of broken XBoxes
This is largely because kids who mod their xboxes believe a bunch of mumbo jumbo about different makes of DVDS (xbox uses models from phillips, samsung and thomson) play CD-R/DVD-R better than others. The scuttlebut is Samsung is the best, then Phillips, then Thomson. I've seen no difference personally.
If you're pretty sure your xbox works and its just the drive, sell it on eBay. You should get a few bucks. Someone like me would buy it, mod it, replace the XDVD with a regular PC DVD and go off running copied^H^H^H^H linux on it. You could do this yourself (mod xbox, replace old DVD with PC DVD), but it wont play original xbox games anymore.
Anyhow, on topic. I'm not convinced that Xbox or PS2 fail any more than the old NES's did. If your NES died back in the day you didn't have the ability to go online and see how many others did. Global community and all that. In NES days you knew only about the other NES's in your community. But you can hear ever Xbox story worldwide.
Frankly 99.9% of the 'broken xbox' stories involve a 13 year old, no common sense, and traces lifted off the motherboard while installing a modchip.
>> top-loading NES's aren't something you're going to pick up at a garage sale
Funny, I did just that. 10 bucks. You'd be surprised what you can pick up at a garage sale.
I have 3 of the oldschool models. One is vintage to the year of release. They all work flawlessly. The reason is I never blew on them or the carts. If a game doesn't work, I clean the edge connectors with some rubbing alcohol and q-tips.
Frankly I'm not impressed with the way they ruined that NES by hacking a big old hole in the back. Even with a bad connector you can restore it to original in a half hour or so for less than 5 bucks (you can get replacements).
I wonder too. Perhaps they license something from NCR, but not necessarily the patents in the article. NCR no doubt holds some more legitimate patents as well.
>> There are STILL mods coming out for half life, 6 years after the game came out. The engine is the least creative part of the game. The music, art, story line, maps, etc ARE the creative part.
And it's all closed, if not by liscense, by closed-minded 'sceners' who dont want to share.
There are a ton of people out there with technical expertise to add features to OS'd game engines, say new pixel shading routines or cool special effects.
There are also a ton of people out there who could come up with cool story lines, and put it all together. But some of them just cant draw for shit, that's where a sharing of pre-made models would be useful. Right now the flow of information is completely one-sided.
Yeah every time I go boarding I launch myself 20 feet in the air and do a 720 backflip. And then I launch over a 300 foot vertical drop and hit the ground running without being phased.
"Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data."
3D engines really aren't the time-consuming part of creating a game. It would be nice to see some 'open sourced' player models, motion captures, sound effects, musics, etc, etc..
I know there are a ton of people versed in 3D modelling out there. Perhaps they can offer up some of their 3D 'doodles' to the OSS community for use in games. Maybe a sort of BSD/GPL liscense for artwork/data?
But adapting the terrain is childs play, basically a:
if frameratethreshold
render(smaller_mesh) else
render(bigger_mesh) end if
but there's no BSP-tree type ways to clip everything outside of the viewport. It processes every triangle in the 'world' for each frame, whether it's onscreen or not.
That is to say, it says:
draw(everything)
instead of
figure_out_whats_onscreen
draw(whats_onscreen)
My point is that this is just engine just draws a bunch of polygons. No cool special particle effects, no nifty vertex shaders or pixel shaders. No bumpmapping, environment mapping. No nothing. Just a bunch of triangles. As far as something to base a real game on, it's behind even the Quake engine.
Anyways, it's still good to see people willing to give up their source, even if it's value is nil.
Open Source game engines are all fine and good with me, but have a good hard look at the game before you go praising it.
I'm pretty big on snowboarding games, and this isn't a very good one. A terrible one, to be more precise. One of those cheesy OpenGL "render the entire gameworld as polygons and let the video cards horsepower deliver the framerates because its way easier than only rendering on-screen action"
I'm sorry, but those screenshots look like ass. Even by first-gen voodoo graphics standards. The game engine might be a good learning tool, but I doubt it will spawn the killer-gaming-app-for-linux.
Sometimes when I need to log into an anonymous ftp that requires e-mail as password (and checks) or supply it to a website to download something free, I make up an e-mail.
Usually they check domains, so my made-up emails are generally of the form fakjsdhfk@hotmail.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone who wants actual customers to talk about the products is just a big fat copier!
COPIER!
quit copying me!
Whiney mac owning elitist idiots.
another video card roundup.
Anything we haven't heard a bajillion times?
and the ATI vs nVidia fanboy flamewar rages on...
YHBT /. likes to inject stuff like this to start big US vs Euro flamewars
Except that the 'fossilized microbes' on the martian meteor can be completely dismissed by natural (non-organic) processes.
I dont know enough about blingblongology to elaborate, I can merely regurgitate what I've learned watching 'UFO week' on the history channel.
(Rant: WTF do UFOs, Loch Ness monster, bigfoot or Ghosthunting have to do with history?!)
>> Isn't the current standard of CD-Burners kind of going to die when Mount Rainier takes off anyway?
Why? Mount ranier is just for drag-n-drop packetwriting to a CD-RW, I dont see how it will affect burning real filesystems on CD-Rs at all. Every packetwriting software I've tried (DirectCD, abCD, blahblaCD) has been slow and crappy.
OS-level support and faster burners will help, but CD-RWs still deteriorate pretty quickly when rewritten. This is the problem with all packetwriting software, the first 100 or so megs is where all the action takes place, and will wear out. Imagine a HDD that has sectors that go bad when they're rewritten only a few dozen times. This is what delayed standards, IMO; it's a stupid idea.
I wouldnt send software to a client on a MtR disk any sooner than I'd send it on a stack of floppies.
I agree with you mostly, it was pretty much a gimmick.
The only thing I thought it would be useful for would be a business like the one I'm in. We routinely burn disks with 50 megs on them for customers and for demo purposes, and it would have been 'neat' to put a slick tattoo of our logo on them, and invest in a nice cd-printer to do the label sides. Be something slick to hand out at trade shows.
For home, I'd be more interested in a cheap, effective cd printer. Though I did have an old plotter that I jerry rigged to hold sharpies. It made some funky doodles on my unbranded CDs. Too bad it broke.
Yeah they said 100mhz was as fast as a CPU could ever be clocked too.
I dont see why they couldnt have 2 lasers burning the front and back half of the disc simultaneosly, jumping up to 120x burning.
Thing is, if its burned in 2.5 minutes, is there really a market for 1.25 minute burning?
>> Any drive can do this..
No. Drives 'burn' in one continuous run, modulating the laser to make the pits and gaps. T@2 actually shut the laser off and on as the disc spun.
Pitfall 3D is pretty good. People expected it to be tombraider, which it wasnt. But as far as 3rd person action games go, it's pretty good.
The voiceover work was done by Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead, Xena, Brisco County) and has his usual sarcastic attitude. The game's enjoyable for that alone.
Dont trust reviews. Think for yourself.
The game isn't all that bad, BTW. Worth fishing out of a clearance bin should you find it. Typical 3rd person platform-adventure with enough oldschool charm to get by.
/. maybe devote a new section to articles about reviews of 6 month old video games? I got a cool icon of the retarted kid from South Park you can use for it.
IMO, video game reviews 'arent worth it'. I never agree with them, they're generally either fanboy crap or paid advertisements, and quite frankly I dont need to be told what I like.
Can
I've found MAME tends to run its fastest under DOS. Gasp! (It doesn't have to be MS-DOS, DR-DOS will work fine) It likes a realtime singleuser environment. ArcadeOS makes a great dos-based front-end for a dedicated mame cab.
Personally I prefer it under Win32 with a card with some decent opengl support, as it just looks much better stretched fullscreen with opengl. Of course if you output to a TV or Arcade monitor, this isnt an issue.
Does the X11 port of mame support opengl based hardware boosts as well? X is just not something I assosciate with "good 2D performance"
I've also found that although MAME is CPU dependant, it doesnt miss the extra cache that a pentium has over a Celeron. Celeron 1ghz tualatin-based procs are like 40 bucks, and run pretty much everything fullspeed.
Is pachinko the "Lucky Hit" stand that I had to operate for hours on end in Shenmue II?
...
Because on The Price is Right, that game is called "Plinko" which sounds like pachinko and
Anyways, if it is, I hate it.
"Wanna try lucky hit?"
"How about a game of lucky hit?"
>> there is a high demand for used DVD mechanisms taken out of broken XBoxes
This is largely because kids who mod their xboxes believe a bunch of mumbo jumbo about different makes of DVDS (xbox uses models from phillips, samsung and thomson) play CD-R/DVD-R better than others. The scuttlebut is Samsung is the best, then Phillips, then Thomson. I've seen no difference personally.
If you're pretty sure your xbox works and its just the drive, sell it on eBay. You should get a few bucks. Someone like me would buy it, mod it, replace the XDVD with a regular PC DVD and go off running copied^H^H^H^H linux on it. You could do this yourself (mod xbox, replace old DVD with PC DVD), but it wont play original xbox games anymore.
Anyhow, on topic. I'm not convinced that Xbox or PS2 fail any more than the old NES's did. If your NES died back in the day you didn't have the ability to go online and see how many others did. Global community and all that. In NES days you knew only about the other NES's in your community. But you can hear ever Xbox story worldwide.
Frankly 99.9% of the 'broken xbox' stories involve a 13 year old, no common sense, and traces lifted off the motherboard while installing a modchip.
Why is this on slashdot, or arstechnica?
>> top-loading NES's aren't something you're going to pick up at a garage sale
Funny, I did just that. 10 bucks. You'd be surprised what you can pick up at a garage sale.
I have 3 of the oldschool models. One is vintage to the year of release. They all work flawlessly. The reason is I never blew on them or the carts. If a game doesn't work, I clean the edge connectors with some rubbing alcohol and q-tips.
Frankly I'm not impressed with the way they ruined that NES by hacking a big old hole in the back. Even with a bad connector you can restore it to original in a half hour or so for less than 5 bucks (you can get replacements).
I haven't found an emu yet that plays Cobra Triangle perfectly.
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out is buggy on most of them as well.
Only on /. is this "flamebait".
Good code knows no platform.
What?
Why?
Who?
Where?
When?
I wonder too. Perhaps they license something from NCR, but not necessarily the patents in the article. NCR no doubt holds some more legitimate patents as well.
>> There are STILL mods coming out for half life, 6 years after the game came out. The engine is the least creative part of the game. The music, art, story line, maps, etc ARE the creative part.
And it's all closed, if not by liscense, by closed-minded 'sceners' who dont want to share.
There are a ton of people out there with technical expertise to add features to OS'd game engines, say new pixel shading routines or cool special effects.
There are also a ton of people out there who could come up with cool story lines, and put it all together. But some of them just cant draw for shit, that's where a sharing of pre-made models would be useful. Right now the flow of information is completely one-sided.
No, I didnt bother to do any real 'research'. The game looks and performs like brute forcing of polygons.
So I might be wrong, but if he's doing quadtree or any other type of BSP-based culling, it sure doesn't show.
It uses a 'real physics model', huh?
Yeah every time I go boarding I launch myself 20 feet in the air and do a 720 backflip. And then I launch over a 300 foot vertical drop and hit the ground running without being phased.
Real physics? On one of Mars' moons maybe.
"Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data."
3D engines really aren't the time-consuming part of creating a game. It would be nice to see some 'open sourced' player models, motion captures, sound effects, musics, etc, etc..
I know there are a ton of people versed in 3D modelling out there. Perhaps they can offer up some of their 3D 'doodles' to the OSS community for use in games. Maybe a sort of BSD/GPL liscense for artwork/data?
But adapting the terrain is childs play, basically a:
if frameratethreshold
render(smaller_mesh)
else
render(bigger_mesh)
end if
but there's no BSP-tree type ways to clip everything outside of the viewport. It processes every triangle in the 'world' for each frame, whether it's onscreen or not.
That is to say, it says:
draw(everything)
instead of
figure_out_whats_onscreen
draw(whats_onscreen)
My point is that this is just engine just draws a bunch of polygons. No cool special particle effects, no nifty vertex shaders or pixel shaders. No bumpmapping, environment mapping. No nothing. Just a bunch of triangles. As far as something to base a real game on, it's behind even the Quake engine.
Anyways, it's still good to see people willing to give up their source, even if it's value is nil.
Open Source game engines are all fine and good with me, but have a good hard look at the game before you go praising it.
I'm pretty big on snowboarding games, and this isn't a very good one. A terrible one, to be more precise. One of those cheesy OpenGL "render the entire gameworld as polygons and let the video cards horsepower deliver the framerates because its way easier than only rendering on-screen action"
I'm sorry, but those screenshots look like ass. Even by first-gen voodoo graphics standards. The game engine might be a good learning tool, but I doubt it will spawn the killer-gaming-app-for-linux.
Sometimes when I need to log into an anonymous ftp that requires e-mail as password (and checks) or supply it to a website to download something free, I make up an e-mail.
Usually they check domains, so my made-up emails are generally of the form fakjsdhfk@hotmail.com.
So if thats your email address, sucks to be you.