I don't see what's amazing about Macintosh classic when 1 year later Amiga came with colorful graphics(up to 4096 colors), a real preemptive multitask OS and all the hot stuff. You could actualy format a disk drive while printing and doing some other stuff while on Mac you had to wait in front of a black & white screen.
Yeah I remember that. Amiga owners were always bragging about multitasking, which to them meant formatting floppies while doing something else. I guess some people just kept several floppies by their machine and formatted them over and over and over again when they got bored, to make them feel better about the superiority of their machine.
Some people prefer to use an OS that just supports almost all printers, instead of one where printer drivers are scarce, and where support depends on whether the developer happens to own that printer, of whether a manufacturer or model is deemed to be 'cool' and supported, or 'evil' and deliberately not supported.
Nothing new in 2005 no, SATA arrived in 2004 (or was it even 2003) ? Going from 2MB cache to 8 MB cache was in 2002 or 2003.
Now that SATA is here, there are no real changes expected for 2005, except small price drops and slightly larger drives.
You'd think that they could innovate with their $65 billion in cash. Instead, we get a grand total of - not one, not two - but THREE color schemes for Windows XP. It is arrogance like this that will eventually displace Microsoft. Not that color schemes matter, but the company hasn't come up with anything original in a long time. This is just a good example.
Sure, if you ignore everything and just use something irrelevant as an example. Ever since Visual Studio 6 from 1999 the developer products seemed stuck, but they have been revived the last 2 years. C# has arrived. The command line compilers are now a free download. The whole.NET platform is innovative and a lot of work, and you talk about a color scheme in XP ? That just proved you're a mouse clicking monkey instead of someone who really uses software.
Its user downloadable content.
It changes details of the game mechanics.
Those maybe wanted or not (perhaps people WANT a coffee machine that satisfies all theirs sims needs), but is it a hacK?
Then making a single player quake level without healthpacks and lots of big monsters would be a hack, too....
Of course ! If I download a house someone created, I expect it to be just a house, and nothing more.
To work with your analogy, suppose you download a fanmade quake level, play it for a few minutes, delete it, then discover that just opening the level has removed the rocket launcher, made all health and armor 200% and enabled zero gravity everywhere, even in single player (if you mean quake 1) and all your other multiplayer levels.
Yes, when I bought a 1700+ a few years ago. I assume that it's a 133 MHz bus chip since it's a 2200+. The motherboard has a 100/133 jumper, factory default is 100 to avoid blowing up a Duron/Thunderbird with a 100 MHz bus.
So it runs at 75% of its intended speed until you move that jumper to the 133 position. Then it'll run at its normal clock rate and report as a 2200+.
These days one person goes into the theater and copies the movie and distributes it in DVD or VCD format so all their friends can watch it from the comfort of their own couches. Which are much nicer than those cramped movie theater seats, don't you think?
The idea that people record the movie using a camcorder in the USA for friends is just naive. Piracy is rampant in asia, where movies are pirated using camcorders and then sold on streetcorners in VCD format.
These VCD's end up on Internet, but internet piracy is a byproduct of real piracy. This is also the reason cam movies are in 2 or 3 parts, because of their VCD origin. It's not like people sneak into theaters and film a movie just for the fun of releasing it on Internet. That would be insane.
Pirate copies of screeners (copies of VHS/DVD movies sent to journalists who don't want to go to the movies to review a movie), those are mostly USA-originated.
If the MPAA wants to stop internet piracy, they should stop releasing movies in Asia at the same time as in the USA. A month delay would do it. But for them the quick bucks are more important than internet piracy.
I finished Half-Life 2 on my XP 1700+ (1.43 GHz) with a radeon 8500. That's good enough to play reasonably smooth and it looks pretty enough.
CPU wise you're ok. The 8500 is old but the 9000/9200 cards are essentially the same chip, only faster and those can be had for $30-$40. Spend a little more for something like a 9550 or 9600SE and you're in business.
Can someone that downloaded this seed a torrent of it, because the site is feeding this in at about 8KB/s.:? C'mon, help avoid a slashdotting!
It's a free open-source game, hosted on Sourceforge, they use Linux to develop, and they don't even offer the download in Bittorrent format ?
Why should a user have to do the downloading and seeding while it would make much more sense if the Planeshift guys did that themselves ? They should take down the 200 MB direct download file, start a tracker and a seeding client and offer it as a torrent only !!
Well that's no news. This phenomenon happens almost everywhere. So it's strange that the title mentions open source. I guess it's even more common in hardware.
Take for example 3D videocards. When they were new, fanboys promoted their new Voodoo cards. Then nVidia came along with their TNT card, and 3Dlabs was a big company so the fanboys started praising nVidia for being a small company that challenged the big company with a superior product.
Nowadays the fanboys blast nVidia for being big even though they became big just by making decent products, and ATI is their new hero, even though it's also a big company.
The pathetic thing is really that people waste time on this, usually anonymously, to praise one product and badmouth the competitor. I guess it's because when you're young any feeling you have becomes an intense emotion. 20 years ago those people would have been on the barricades with a political belief, nowadays they only care about commercial products. Even when it's open source, that's out of anticommercial feelings. They just want Linux to win because it's against a capitalist company. Those fanboys cannot even write a 3-line shell script to save their lives, all they do is click around in KDE, and then they reboot back to windows after an hour for the rest of the day.
What do you mean, requiring ? Only the first time, then you can check 'remember username and password' in Steam. After that you can set Steam to not start up with Windows, close it, then if you play Half-Life 2 it will happily run in offline mode. This is clearly explained on the leaflet that's in the retail package. You're just spreading misinformation, you probably don't even have HL2, you just come here to flame away.
I totally disagree. When I BUY a game, I want to OWN it. I don't want a temporary copy on a particular hard drive, I want CDs or DVDs. Hard media I can loan to a gaming buddy, install on my next new PC, or re-install after WinXP crashes again or if my HD crashes. Can I do that with downloaded Steam software? News to me if I can.
If you bought it online through Steam, you can have it create cd images and burn those to CD. That's been mentioned here and in other articles dozens of time. If you ignore that and then use 'that's news to me' as an argument, sorry, ignorance is no excuse. Also, say you suddenly lose everything because of a nasty HD crash and forgot to burn those CD's. Then you can just reinstall Steam after installing Windows, log in, it'll tell you your games are Half-Life 2 and CS:source. Select 'play' and it'll download it again. The only thing you need is your steam username+password.
Here its just one DVD disk... which is of course a problem since it requires you keep it inserted, so if one were to make an image to keep on the harddrive we are pusing 9GB for a stupid game
Just like a CD image a DVD image file would be as big as its contents, just over 3 GB, not 9.
There's something just plain wrong with getting rid of people who will spend money on your products at the deals you offer.
Did you read the article ? They want to get rid of the people that buy items and then return them, forcing them to sell it as used goods.
If something's broken it's your right to return it. Buying something, opening the box, then returning it just to be able to buy it as 'used', that's abusing the system. This drives costs up and of course any extra cost gets paid by the ordinary customers who just want to buy something. Thanks to those rogues we have to pay slightly more, so it benefits the customers too if they kick those losers out.
Sometimes someone has an idea, and other games use it. Then it gets forgotten again.
Colin McRae rally 3 had you drive some tests to get a rally licence before you could start championships. But CMR4 doesn't have it anymore.
Maybe this is a good thing, because I remember Driver, and its insanely difficult test in the parking garage that you had to pass before you could actually start the real game.
Your whole post is ridiculous, but "It's a fricken game for crying out loud. It should not require that much power." is the stupidest thing I've heard all day. Ok, all week. What do you think drives high-end computer hardware? Games.
That's what everyone says, but in the past it's not always been true
Sure, Quake 1 ran only on a pentium, forcing many 486 owners to consider upgrading. When the Voodoo 2/TNT cards were new, people upgraded to play the latest games.
This stalled a bit after Quake 3 arena was released. I think between 2000 and 2003 there was no real reason to upgrade further once you had something that was good enough. Many games have used the Q3A engine (with extensions) or similar limited engines. Take for example Call of Duty. Fine game, but very smooth on my 3 year old Athlon system with ATI 8500 card.
In fact up until now, with Far Cry and Doom 3 finally raising the bar, there was no real need to upgrade once you had something that was good enough. All Q3 based games, Splinter cell, Colin McRae 4, etc. all run fine, and a 8500/Geforce 3 can be picked up second hand for $10 or less.
Shader this, shader that, shader the latest smells and bells. Yet another shader is like improving the aerodynamics of a race car that still uses a Model T Ford engine. Vertex manipulation has been negelcted since the dawn of time. Roll on OpenGL 2 with programmable vertex manipulation as a standard part of the render pipe.
DirectX 8.x and 9 offer both vertex and pixel shaders. A vertex shader takes 3D coordinates (and constants) as input and gives screen coordinates and other vars as output. Although usually it transforms 3D to 2D with the standard multiplications with the world/view/projection matrices, you can easily use some constants to do vertex manipulation.
In fact, skeletal animation is very simple with vertex shaders. You just need one model and the vertex shader does all the animation.
Why wait for OpenGL when DX8 gave it to you in 2001 ?
A colleague of mine has a kensington key that can open any lock. He claims to have bought it in Asia. But it works, he opened my laptop lock plus the lock on the LCD monitor on the desk with his key. The laptop key was in my pocket and the LCD lock keys are locked in a managers office. I have no doubts it'll work on any lock.
After all, it's not a really secure lock like a cylinder, the number of combinations of the impressions on the rim of a key is limited so I guess there are only a few different lock combinations. Anyone could buy a Kensington and get one with the same key as yours.
Funny you should mention that. Lately, when I try to watch DVDs on my TV with Win98SE using the S-video port on the Radeon 7500, the Win98SE desktop shows up fine but the DVD region shows up black on the TV even though it's displayed fine on the monitor. PowerDVD help says it's driver related. ATIs WinDVD makes vague allusions to mis-mapped memory registers. Whatever...>
Instead of 'whatever' you could also solve the problem. Go to the desktop properties, advanced, displays. You will see pictures of a monitor and a tv set. One of them is primary and the other one is secondary. Switch them, and the DVD will show on the TV, but asa black area on the monitor.
There is no doubt that DOOM 3's minimum system specifications can easily deliver a good gaming experience. We found it simply incredible that a system this old could run DOOM 3 at all, much less run it well. It may be hard to believe, but we can honestly recommend spending $50 on DOOM 3 if you have a system comparable to this. You can still have a very worthy DOOM 3 experience with it.
I know some of you are thinking that it would be tough to call gaming at 640x480 a good gaming experience, but the environments in DOOM 3 are very forgiving in terms of resolution as discussed in our IQ section. Do we suggest you use a higher resolution to place yourself in an even more immersive environment? Without a doubt, but it is hardly a requirement to really feel a part of the DOOM 3 story.
As mentioned in our id Software's Official DOOM3 Benchmarks article, id Software has resourced hundreds of man hours in order to optimize DOOM 3 for a wide install base. It is truly amazing that so many people will be able to enjoy DOOM 3, possibly even those that have not upgraded their computer for years.
This is certainly good news. For years we've heard the lamers whine that you only can play on a new 3 GHz system, that people will need to spend $1000 on the top Ultra videocards, but any PC that's not more than 3 years old will do. Great achievement by ID.
Slashdot Mirror
Atari History Recap
1971 Nolan Bushnell designed the first commercial arcade video game called "Computer Space", but it was not a big success.
1972 Atari Inc. was founded by Nolan Bushnell from a $250 investment. Pong arcade game becomes a smash hit.
1976 Atari Inc. was sold by Bushnell to Warner Inc. for $28 million.
1980 Atari Inc. posted record sales, $2 billion profits annually. Atari occupied 80 offices in Sunnyvale, California.
1983 Decline of video games and irresponsible spending by Atari Inc. resulted in record losses ($536 million, up to $2 million daily).
1984 Warner divided Atari Inc. to Atari Games (arcade games), and Atari Corporation (Home division). Atari Corp. was sold to Jack Tramiel.
1985 Atari Corp. released Atari ST home computer.
1989 Atari Corp. released Atari Lynx, the world's first color hand-held video game system.
1993 Atari Games became Time-Warner Interactive.
1993 Atari Corp. released Atari Jaguar, the world's first 64-bit home video game system.
1996 Time-Warner Interactive (Atari Games) was sold to WMS.
1996 Atari Corp. merged with JTS Corporation.
1998 Atari Corp. software and hardware rights were sold to Hasbro Inc. for only 5 million dollars.
I don't see what's amazing about Macintosh classic when 1 year later Amiga came with colorful graphics(up to 4096 colors), a real preemptive multitask OS and all the hot stuff. You could actualy format a disk drive while printing and doing some other stuff while on Mac you had to wait in front of a black & white screen. Yeah I remember that. Amiga owners were always bragging about multitasking, which to them meant formatting floppies while doing something else. I guess some people just kept several floppies by their machine and formatted them over and over and over again when they got bored, to make them feel better about the superiority of their machine.
Some people prefer to use an OS that just supports almost all printers, instead of one where printer drivers are scarce, and where support depends on whether the developer happens to own that printer, of whether a manufacturer or model is deemed to be 'cool' and supported, or 'evil' and deliberately not supported.
Nothing new in 2005 no, SATA arrived in 2004 (or was it even 2003) ? Going from 2MB cache to 8 MB cache was in 2002 or 2003. Now that SATA is here, there are no real changes expected for 2005, except small price drops and slightly larger drives.
Sure, if you ignore everything and just use something irrelevant as an example. Ever since Visual Studio 6 from 1999 the developer products seemed stuck, but they have been revived the last 2 years. C# has arrived. The command line compilers are now a free download. The whole .NET platform is innovative and a lot of work, and you talk about a color scheme in XP ?
That just proved you're a mouse clicking monkey instead of someone who really uses software.
Of course ! If I download a house someone created, I expect it to be just a house, and nothing more.
To work with your analogy, suppose you download a fanmade quake level, play it for a few minutes, delete it, then discover that just opening the level has removed the rocket launcher, made all health and armor 200% and enabled zero gravity everywhere, even in single player (if you mean quake 1) and all your other multiplayer levels.
So it runs at 75% of its intended speed until you move that jumper to the 133 position. Then it'll run at its normal clock rate and report as a 2200+.
The idea that people record the movie using a camcorder in the USA for friends is just naive. Piracy is rampant in asia, where movies are pirated using camcorders and then sold on streetcorners in VCD format.
These VCD's end up on Internet, but internet piracy is a byproduct of real piracy. This is also the reason cam movies are in 2 or 3 parts, because of their VCD origin. It's not like people sneak into theaters and film a movie just for the fun of releasing it on Internet. That would be insane.
Pirate copies of screeners (copies of VHS/DVD movies sent to journalists who don't want to go to the movies to review a movie), those are mostly USA-originated.
If the MPAA wants to stop internet piracy, they should stop releasing movies in Asia at the same time as in the USA. A month delay would do it. But for them the quick bucks are more important than internet piracy.
CPU wise you're ok. The 8500 is old but the 9000/9200 cards are essentially the same chip, only faster and those can be had for $30-$40. Spend a little more for something like a 9550 or 9600SE and you're in business.
It's a free open-source game, hosted on Sourceforge, they use Linux to develop, and they don't even offer the download in Bittorrent format ?
Why should a user have to do the downloading and seeding while it would make much more sense if the Planeshift guys did that themselves ? They should take down the 200 MB direct download file, start a tracker and a seeding client and offer it as a torrent only !!
Well that's no news. This phenomenon happens almost everywhere. So it's strange that the title mentions open source. I guess it's even more common in hardware. Take for example 3D videocards. When they were new, fanboys promoted their new Voodoo cards. Then nVidia came along with their TNT card, and 3Dlabs was a big company so the fanboys started praising nVidia for being a small company that challenged the big company with a superior product. Nowadays the fanboys blast nVidia for being big even though they became big just by making decent products, and ATI is their new hero, even though it's also a big company. The pathetic thing is really that people waste time on this, usually anonymously, to praise one product and badmouth the competitor. I guess it's because when you're young any feeling you have becomes an intense emotion. 20 years ago those people would have been on the barricades with a political belief, nowadays they only care about commercial products. Even when it's open source, that's out of anticommercial feelings. They just want Linux to win because it's against a capitalist company. Those fanboys cannot even write a 3-line shell script to save their lives, all they do is click around in KDE, and then they reboot back to windows after an hour for the rest of the day.
What do you mean, requiring ? Only the first time, then you can check 'remember username and password' in Steam. After that you can set Steam to not start up with Windows, close it, then if you play Half-Life 2 it will happily run in offline mode. This is clearly explained on the leaflet that's in the retail package. You're just spreading misinformation, you probably don't even have HL2, you just come here to flame away.
If you bought it online through Steam, you can have it create cd images and burn those to CD. That's been mentioned here and in other articles dozens of time. If you ignore that and then use 'that's news to me' as an argument, sorry, ignorance is no excuse.
Also, say you suddenly lose everything because of a nasty HD crash and forgot to burn those CD's.
Then you can just reinstall Steam after installing Windows, log in, it'll tell you your games are Half-Life 2 and CS:source. Select 'play' and it'll download it again. The only thing you need is your steam username+password.
See this article, billg@microsoft.com did exist and in 1993 you could email him and get a reply, but even back then it wasn't Bill Gates.
Just like a CD image a DVD image file would be as big as its contents, just over 3 GB, not 9.
Agreed, only on slashdot is 'always hangs on irc' a positive comment. Not something anyone would put on their resume I guess.
Did you read the article ? They want to get rid of the people that buy items and then return them, forcing them to sell it as used goods. If something's broken it's your right to return it. Buying something, opening the box, then returning it just to be able to buy it as 'used', that's abusing the system. This drives costs up and of course any extra cost gets paid by the ordinary customers who just want to buy something.
Thanks to those rogues we have to pay slightly more, so it benefits the customers too if they kick those losers out.
A DX9 video card usually means one that supports new features of DX9 that were not in DX8. In other words, vertex shader 2.0 and pixel shader 2.0/3.0
What a load of bullshit. Those guys take themselves much too serious. "will help reshape society in the next two decades" ? Yeah, right ...
Colin McRae rally 3 had you drive some tests to get a rally licence before you could start championships. But CMR4 doesn't have it anymore.
Maybe this is a good thing, because I remember Driver, and its insanely difficult test in the parking garage that you had to pass before you could actually start the real game.
That's what everyone says, but in the past it's not always been true
Sure, Quake 1 ran only on a pentium, forcing many 486 owners to consider upgrading. When the Voodoo 2/TNT cards were new, people upgraded to play the latest games.
This stalled a bit after Quake 3 arena was released. I think between 2000 and 2003 there was no real reason to upgrade further once you had something that was good enough. Many games have used the Q3A engine (with extensions) or similar limited engines. Take for example Call of Duty. Fine game, but very smooth on my 3 year old Athlon system with ATI 8500 card.
In fact up until now, with Far Cry and Doom 3 finally raising the bar, there was no real need to upgrade once you had something that was good enough. All Q3 based games, Splinter cell, Colin McRae 4, etc. all run fine, and a 8500/Geforce 3 can be picked up second hand for $10 or less.
DirectX 8.x and 9 offer both vertex and pixel shaders. A vertex shader takes 3D coordinates (and constants) as input and gives screen coordinates and other vars as output. Although usually it transforms 3D to 2D with the standard multiplications with the world/view/projection matrices, you can easily use some constants to do vertex manipulation.
In fact, skeletal animation is very simple with vertex shaders. You just need one model and the vertex shader does all the animation.
Why wait for OpenGL when DX8 gave it to you in 2001 ?
After all, it's not a really secure lock like a cylinder, the number of combinations of the impressions on the rim of a key is limited so I guess there are only a few different lock combinations. Anyone could buy a Kensington and get one with the same key as yours.
Instead of 'whatever' you could also solve the problem. Go to the desktop properties, advanced, displays. You will see pictures of a monitor and a tv set. One of them is primary and the other one is secondary. Switch them, and the DVD will show on the TV, but asa black area on the monitor.
There is no doubt that DOOM 3's minimum system specifications can easily deliver a good gaming experience. We found it simply incredible that a system this old could run DOOM 3 at all, much less run it well. It may be hard to believe, but we can honestly recommend spending $50 on DOOM 3 if you have a system comparable to this. You can still have a very worthy DOOM 3 experience with it.
I know some of you are thinking that it would be tough to call gaming at 640x480 a good gaming experience, but the environments in DOOM 3 are very forgiving in terms of resolution as discussed in our IQ section. Do we suggest you use a higher resolution to place yourself in an even more immersive environment? Without a doubt, but it is hardly a requirement to really feel a part of the DOOM 3 story.
As mentioned in our id Software's Official DOOM3 Benchmarks article, id Software has resourced hundreds of man hours in order to optimize DOOM 3 for a wide install base. It is truly amazing that so many people will be able to enjoy DOOM 3, possibly even those that have not upgraded their computer for years.
This is certainly good news. For years we've heard the lamers whine that you only can play on a new 3 GHz system, that people will need to spend $1000 on the top Ultra videocards, but any PC that's not more than 3 years old will do. Great achievement by ID.