Since, on my system, it doesn't do what you say it does on your system... my guess is that theres something wrong with your hardware or something. Steam doesn't ever unexpectedly use large amounts of CPU on this.
It sickens me to see all the people complaining about steam. "OMG GEORGE ORWELL 1984 BLAH BLAH BLAH THEY IS GONNA SPY ON ME."
How about people actually TRY it and see that it works excellently. Now instead of a game being tied to the physical media or being tied to a single computer, the game is tied to YOU (your account). You can go to a friends house with the cache on a DVD or just spend the time downloading it and bam now you can play it there too. The only catch is that if you want to play it offline, you have to save your username and password on that computer, thus making sure people don't just install it on like 20 different computers and select "play offline."
Nothing like going to work and playing TFC on my lunch break with about a 20 minute download beforehand.
Tying the media to you instead of to a disc that can break means you can play the game on any system anywhere as long as its not playing on more than one system at once. I'd say thats a win-win situation for us and valve.
I tolerated ignorant complaints about steam before they rolled it out, but now there is really no excuse to complain about a system that works quite well.
And I'm sure if valve ever went out of business and you wanted to play their games, they'd probably just release one last patch to steam that eliminates the internet check. Not that valve is gonna be disappearing any time soon.
"Really old sets" doing "790(i/p)" only? First off, 1080i and 720p are the standard HD resolutions. Interlacing is a trick only avaliable on CRT sets, so most current tvs are not "at least" 1080i, but rather they ARE 720p. The native resolution of the LCD/DLP/whatever panel is usually either 1280x720 or 1366x768, except for on the not-quite-yet widespread 1080p sets.
And, composite video is for low quality 480i. Component video allows 1080i/720p, but of course only on a high definition set. There are plenty of TVs out there with component video that only handle 480i.
Because, barring a recent update or something, virtual dub has always been VFW-only, which requires the windows WDM->VFW wrapper which only captures half of all the video fields. Now maybe they've fixed it in like the past year or something, but barring that, virtualVCR IS in fact the best capture program.
Except that its not true. If this were a discussion on laserdisc, you'd be 100% right. However, VHS DOES NOT record composite video, and outputting it as such requires one more conversion than it would for s-video.
I don't even recall where I read it, but I read a fairly technical explanation as to what "blast processing" boiled down to.
It was actually the ability to load background images into memory quickly enough that you can run across many background screens worth of data without it having to wait up for the next screen to load. Moving an individual sprite around a static screen means moving him a larger distance in 1/60th of a second, and both SNES and Genesis can do this with no problem. The issue is, the SNES takes a longer time to load a whole background's worth of data, which is required for the illusion of a character running quickly.
After all, in the sonic games when you are moving quickly, the sprite is actually not moving at all relative to the screen but the backgrounds are flying by rapidly, which is the hard part. While I wouldn't go as far as to say SNES couldn't run a Sonic game, I think certain effects would have been impossible. Remember when you were invincible AND had the speed shoes AND were running through tunnels at the same time, how fast the screen could move? I don't think SNES could have done that at full speed, even if the rest of the game was quite possible. Uniracers on SNES moves "quickly" but also has repetetive backgrounds and just a single track in the foreground. Maybe, on Genesis, uniracers could have supported more detailed backgrounds.
In short, blast processing wasn't a sham and there IS a limit to how quickly you can load up concurrent background images, but SNES could still deal with "fast" games. The extent to which its limited, I do not know, but the fact remains that there was a limit to how fast SNES could display concurrent background images.
Heh, Secret of Mana is the second game in the series. Either "Seiken Densetsu 3" or "Secret of Mana 3" would be more apt names, but nothing involving a 2.
I don't know, all those REALLY early games from like 1985/1986 might be 48KB, but most of the NES games i actually play are 256KB, 384KB, or 512KB. Mega Man 2 was 256, 3 was 384, and 4-5-6 were 512KB. SMB3 was 384, Castlevania 2 was 256, 3 was 512. Even Metroid, Zelda, and Contra were 128KB and these games have relatively simple graphics. I'd call the average more like 256 based on the fact that about half of the roms I have are 256, and theres definitely plenty of 512KB games to make up for the ones that are smaller than 256KB.
To put even more "law-sounding," any scaling whether to a bigger or a smaller resolution ALWAYS degrades the image. The best upscalers degrade the image minimally but you can NEVER improve the image by upscaling it.
BUT, DVDs always have to be upscaled when you're watching it on a 720p/1080p/whatever fixed pixel display like LCD. It is occasionally the case that a tv may have an awful scaler and your DVD player has a good scaler, but that is a matter of which is degrading the signal less, not that an upconverting DVD player is "improving" the signal.
The same can be said for any a/v component that claims to improve the signal by way of modifying it unnecessarily.
Thats called "white balance." If the color of your digital photograph varies from what you'd "expect" its because you didn't adjust the camera to know what color of light was illuminating the image. I don't shoot film so this is approximate/a guess, but I'm pretty sure film is balanced for about 4500K or so.
All you have to do is hold up anything that you know is white in front of the camera, use the "set white balance" function, and continue shooting. The color will always come out correct.
If this is not news to you, I am not aware what your color reproduction problems are.
THX is not a sound format. Its merely a stamp of approval you get when you pay George Lucas enough money to approve it. The THX requirements for PC speakers are so lax that really ANYTHING could get the approval if they paid the brand name licensing fee.
THX is a marketing bullet, not something that needs to be "configured." Having "All THX components" may actually be worse than purchasing better quality components from companies that can't be bothered to pay the certification fee.
As an aside, the speakers I use were built by Tom Holman, the guy who came up with the THX idea. He, of course, knows what he's talking about when it comes to perfecting audio but I've corresponded with him in e-mails and he agrees that THX has been warped to be meaningless today. While the idea of standardization was his, the exact specs that got rolled out for home equipment ended up being far more liberal than he originally intended.
As true as that is in general, you'd probably be surprised to know that they actually made the American Zelda 2 harder, by way of not letting you choose what you level up. The screen that comes up when you level up seems like it should let you pick life, magic, or attack, but only lets you select a predetermined trait or "cancel." In the Japanese version, you actually CAN pick whatever, and if you level up life and attack before magic (because its mostly useless in the beginning of the game) it's a LOT easier.
Oh yes, I was aware of that after I did the math, though it is interesting that 1080p is really "plenty" for video. I realize that while I calculated the detail we can discern to be about 1.3 arcminutes, I think the actual number is more like.3 (as in about a third of an arcminute, not a little more than one)
Well, resolution of the human eye would be detected in angles (degrees/minutes/seconds), not area, but nonetheless I think I can give the approximate answer you're looking for based on some general rules for selecting screen size for high definition. For a 720p screen, you generally want the screen size to be about half as wide as the distance you're sitting from it, such that a 1280x720 image is considered more or less fully resolved about 10' away from a 60" (width, not diagonal as TVs are usually quoted) screen, or 5' away from a 30" screen, or any combination you wanna calculate.
I guess to turn that into angles, the width of a pixel in a 1280 line wide image on a 60" wide screen is about.047". If you're sitting 120 inches away from a.047" pixel, the angular width of that pixel is arctan(.047/120) or about 1.3 arc minutes (1.3 sixtieths of a degree).
To establish an upper limit for overall resolution, figure that viewers tend to find distance to width ratios of less than 1.3 or so for movies uncomfortable. So, to establish an upper limit on useful resolution for movie watching (not that anyone has yet implied that movies were involved) you can pretty much multiply 720 by 1.5 and, astoundingly, come to the conclusion that fully sharp 1080p is all you really need for the optimum movie experience. Going to resolutions beyond that would be a waste for video.
Nonetheless, most of that is just a hypothetical excercise as the REAL point of sensors that high in resolution (as others have pointed out) are things like satellite imaging and other scientific uses.
This is something I've pondered myself for extended periods of time. The conclusion I've come to is that, within reason, you're better off leaving it at "full res" even if its starved for bitrate. For example, if I had to limit the video bitrate to 1000 kbits per second, I think it would be better to leave it at 640x480 than to scale to 320x240 (for the same bitrate.) While, unscaled, the 320x240 will have fewer artifacts by virtue of having 1/4 the data to start off with, the reality is that modern compression codecs like xvid and h.264 and whatever are better off being fed as MUCH data as possible and letting them figure out what is redundant. Consider a solid blue sky... whether its at 320x240 or 640x480, its still relatively easy to compress because by increasing the resolution you're also increasing the number of similiar pixels. So the bottom line is that for any bitrate, you should use the highest resolution that is feasible rather than scaling down to decrease the amount of uncompressed data.
It is the same reason that even HDV (I've personally used a Sony HDR-HC1), which is the same bitrate as miniDV but runs at 1440x1080 resolution, blows the doors off of regular miniDV. In that exact camera in low light, you will have more noise than a three 1/3" CCD DV cam, but with enough light I'd take that camera over a Canon XL1 or a Sony VX2000 any day of the week.
Taking minidv footage and putting it on a DVD looks kinda crappy, but taking HDV footage (which starts at the same bitrate and higher resolution and thus more compression) and downscaling it to 720x480 for DVD comes out looking great.
I've always said that nuclear is the way to go... while there are implications in the extreme long term as far as what you do with the wastes, there are no blaring short term problems like running out of coal and oil or spewing waste directly into the air.
Slashdot Mirror
Since, on my system, it doesn't do what you say it does on your system... my guess is that theres something wrong with your hardware or something. Steam doesn't ever unexpectedly use large amounts of CPU on this.
It sickens me to see all the people complaining about steam. "OMG GEORGE ORWELL 1984 BLAH BLAH BLAH THEY IS GONNA SPY ON ME."
How about people actually TRY it and see that it works excellently. Now instead of a game being tied to the physical media or being tied to a single computer, the game is tied to YOU (your account). You can go to a friends house with the cache on a DVD or just spend the time downloading it and bam now you can play it there too. The only catch is that if you want to play it offline, you have to save your username and password on that computer, thus making sure people don't just install it on like 20 different computers and select "play offline."
Nothing like going to work and playing TFC on my lunch break with about a 20 minute download beforehand.
Tying the media to you instead of to a disc that can break means you can play the game on any system anywhere as long as its not playing on more than one system at once. I'd say thats a win-win situation for us and valve.
I tolerated ignorant complaints about steam before they rolled it out, but now there is really no excuse to complain about a system that works quite well.
And I'm sure if valve ever went out of business and you wanted to play their games, they'd probably just release one last patch to steam that eliminates the internet check. Not that valve is gonna be disappearing any time soon.
However previously I lived next to a large pubic park, Please tell me more about this "pubic" park. Are the trees all thick and curly?
Yes, but is this card available in ISA format?
No, its going to be VLB only.
"Really old sets" doing "790(i/p)" only? First off, 1080i and 720p are the standard HD resolutions. Interlacing is a trick only avaliable on CRT sets, so most current tvs are not "at least" 1080i, but rather they ARE 720p. The native resolution of the LCD/DLP/whatever panel is usually either 1280x720 or 1366x768, except for on the not-quite-yet widespread 1080p sets.
And, composite video is for low quality 480i. Component video allows 1080i/720p, but of course only on a high definition set. There are plenty of TVs out there with component video that only handle 480i.
Because, barring a recent update or something, virtual dub has always been VFW-only, which requires the windows WDM->VFW wrapper which only captures half of all the video fields. Now maybe they've fixed it in like the past year or something, but barring that, virtualVCR IS in fact the best capture program.
Except that its not true. If this were a discussion on laserdisc, you'd be 100% right. However, VHS DOES NOT record composite video, and outputting it as such requires one more conversion than it would for s-video.
Well, one vertical white line is still better than having 30 horizontal white lines like with any other inkjet ever made.
Never mind that if the nozzle array is more than one deep (Or maybe 4 deep, for CMYK) then you still won't see a big vertical line.
http://www.fu-fme.com/
Problem solved!
I don't even recall where I read it, but I read a fairly technical explanation as to what "blast processing" boiled down to. It was actually the ability to load background images into memory quickly enough that you can run across many background screens worth of data without it having to wait up for the next screen to load. Moving an individual sprite around a static screen means moving him a larger distance in 1/60th of a second, and both SNES and Genesis can do this with no problem. The issue is, the SNES takes a longer time to load a whole background's worth of data, which is required for the illusion of a character running quickly. After all, in the sonic games when you are moving quickly, the sprite is actually not moving at all relative to the screen but the backgrounds are flying by rapidly, which is the hard part. While I wouldn't go as far as to say SNES couldn't run a Sonic game, I think certain effects would have been impossible. Remember when you were invincible AND had the speed shoes AND were running through tunnels at the same time, how fast the screen could move? I don't think SNES could have done that at full speed, even if the rest of the game was quite possible. Uniracers on SNES moves "quickly" but also has repetetive backgrounds and just a single track in the foreground. Maybe, on Genesis, uniracers could have supported more detailed backgrounds. In short, blast processing wasn't a sham and there IS a limit to how quickly you can load up concurrent background images, but SNES could still deal with "fast" games. The extent to which its limited, I do not know, but the fact remains that there was a limit to how fast SNES could display concurrent background images.
Heh, Secret of Mana is the second game in the series. Either "Seiken Densetsu 3" or "Secret of Mana 3" would be more apt names, but nothing involving a 2.
I don't know, all those REALLY early games from like 1985/1986 might be 48KB, but most of the NES games i actually play are 256KB, 384KB, or 512KB. Mega Man 2 was 256, 3 was 384, and 4-5-6 were 512KB. SMB3 was 384, Castlevania 2 was 256, 3 was 512. Even Metroid, Zelda, and Contra were 128KB and these games have relatively simple graphics. I'd call the average more like 256 based on the fact that about half of the roms I have are 256, and theres definitely plenty of 512KB games to make up for the ones that are smaller than 256KB.
To put even more "law-sounding," any scaling whether to a bigger or a smaller resolution ALWAYS degrades the image. The best upscalers degrade the image minimally but you can NEVER improve the image by upscaling it.
BUT, DVDs always have to be upscaled when you're watching it on a 720p/1080p/whatever fixed pixel display like LCD. It is occasionally the case that a tv may have an awful scaler and your DVD player has a good scaler, but that is a matter of which is degrading the signal less, not that an upconverting DVD player is "improving" the signal.
The same can be said for any a/v component that claims to improve the signal by way of modifying it unnecessarily.
Thats called "white balance." If the color of your digital photograph varies from what you'd "expect" its because you didn't adjust the camera to know what color of light was illuminating the image. I don't shoot film so this is approximate/a guess, but I'm pretty sure film is balanced for about 4500K or so. All you have to do is hold up anything that you know is white in front of the camera, use the "set white balance" function, and continue shooting. The color will always come out correct. If this is not news to you, I am not aware what your color reproduction problems are.
Circuit City beat you to that idea. It was called "Divx." It failed.
I hope companies look to Divx to realize why restrictive playback is unprofitable.
Midnight unapproved Meig's field destruction. QED.
THX is not a sound format. Its merely a stamp of approval you get when you pay George Lucas enough money to approve it. The THX requirements for PC speakers are so lax that really ANYTHING could get the approval if they paid the brand name licensing fee.
THX is a marketing bullet, not something that needs to be "configured." Having "All THX components" may actually be worse than purchasing better quality components from companies that can't be bothered to pay the certification fee.
As an aside, the speakers I use were built by Tom Holman, the guy who came up with the THX idea. He, of course, knows what he's talking about when it comes to perfecting audio but I've corresponded with him in e-mails and he agrees that THX has been warped to be meaningless today. While the idea of standardization was his, the exact specs that got rolled out for home equipment ended up being far more liberal than he originally intended.
As true as that is in general, you'd probably be surprised to know that they actually made the American Zelda 2 harder, by way of not letting you choose what you level up. The screen that comes up when you level up seems like it should let you pick life, magic, or attack, but only lets you select a predetermined trait or "cancel." In the Japanese version, you actually CAN pick whatever, and if you level up life and attack before magic (because its mostly useless in the beginning of the game) it's a LOT easier.
Oh yes, I was aware of that after I did the math, though it is interesting that 1080p is really "plenty" for video. I realize that while I calculated the detail we can discern to be about 1.3 arcminutes, I think the actual number is more like .3 (as in about a third of an arcminute, not a little more than one)
Well, resolution of the human eye would be detected in angles (degrees/minutes/seconds), not area, but nonetheless I think I can give the approximate answer you're looking for based on some general rules for selecting screen size for high definition. For a 720p screen, you generally want the screen size to be about half as wide as the distance you're sitting from it, such that a 1280x720 image is considered more or less fully resolved about 10' away from a 60" (width, not diagonal as TVs are usually quoted) screen, or 5' away from a 30" screen, or any combination you wanna calculate.
.047". If you're sitting 120 inches away from a .047" pixel, the angular width of that pixel is arctan(.047/120) or about 1.3 arc minutes (1.3 sixtieths of a degree).
I guess to turn that into angles, the width of a pixel in a 1280 line wide image on a 60" wide screen is about
To establish an upper limit for overall resolution, figure that viewers tend to find distance to width ratios of less than 1.3 or so for movies uncomfortable. So, to establish an upper limit on useful resolution for movie watching (not that anyone has yet implied that movies were involved) you can pretty much multiply 720 by 1.5 and, astoundingly, come to the conclusion that fully sharp 1080p is all you really need for the optimum movie experience. Going to resolutions beyond that would be a waste for video.
Nonetheless, most of that is just a hypothetical excercise as the REAL point of sensors that high in resolution (as others have pointed out) are things like satellite imaging and other scientific uses.
Well sure sounds like that'll BLOW AWAY 35mm film and definitely be about comprable to 4x5 film.
This is something I've pondered myself for extended periods of time. The conclusion I've come to is that, within reason, you're better off leaving it at "full res" even if its starved for bitrate. For example, if I had to limit the video bitrate to 1000 kbits per second, I think it would be better to leave it at 640x480 than to scale to 320x240 (for the same bitrate.) While, unscaled, the 320x240 will have fewer artifacts by virtue of having 1/4 the data to start off with, the reality is that modern compression codecs like xvid and h.264 and whatever are better off being fed as MUCH data as possible and letting them figure out what is redundant. Consider a solid blue sky... whether its at 320x240 or 640x480, its still relatively easy to compress because by increasing the resolution you're also increasing the number of similiar pixels. So the bottom line is that for any bitrate, you should use the highest resolution that is feasible rather than scaling down to decrease the amount of uncompressed data. It is the same reason that even HDV (I've personally used a Sony HDR-HC1), which is the same bitrate as miniDV but runs at 1440x1080 resolution, blows the doors off of regular miniDV. In that exact camera in low light, you will have more noise than a three 1/3" CCD DV cam, but with enough light I'd take that camera over a Canon XL1 or a Sony VX2000 any day of the week. Taking minidv footage and putting it on a DVD looks kinda crappy, but taking HDV footage (which starts at the same bitrate and higher resolution and thus more compression) and downscaling it to 720x480 for DVD comes out looking great.
I've always said that nuclear is the way to go... while there are implications in the extreme long term as far as what you do with the wastes, there are no blaring short term problems like running out of coal and oil or spewing waste directly into the air.
But I'm not buying either format if they can't put out a player for $300 or less. If PS3 is that "$300 Bluray player" then so be it, I'll get a PS3.
Nah, they missed the most important test.
Does it run Flight Simulator 1.0?