Thursday, October 28, 1999

And Then the End Shall Come -- 9:34 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just saw on Voodoo Extreme that the Gathering of Developers will be making a game based on the Blair Witch Project. I have no other information on it except that it will use the Nocturne engine. Just what we need--a game with crappy graphics and a lot of profanity. Actually, the game could be cool, if you could play the witch and disembowel the intrepid adventurers.

Ultima IX: Ascension Demo -- 3:11 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

3DFiles has posted the Ultima IX: Ascension demo which was included on the CD-ROM with Computer Gaming World's December issue. It's a monster, weighing in a 295M. If you are really interested, you would be better off snagging a copy of CGW or waiting for the forthcoming Internet demo, which should be at least somewhat smaller. Thanks Blue's News.

Mark Rein Interview, Part II -- 12:04 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Inside Mac Games has posted part two of its interesting interview with Epic's Mark Rein about Unreal Tournament. They go into some details of what it would take to make the Mac a viable gaming platform. Thanks Blue (actually, Frans).

NVIDIA Chat -- 10:07 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Riva3D is hosting a chat with NVIDIA's head of Developer Relations, Chris Donahue. They will also be giving away a GeForce card! The chat will begin at 5:00 PM CST (23:00 GMT) and will be held here.

Savage 2K Specs -- 9:34 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

In the "stop me if you've heard this before" department, Billy W. pointed to a news blurb on Savage 2000.com.

We have confirmed with several S3 employees that the FINAL clock speed of Savage2000 will be 125MHz core and 155MHz memory. This configuration will result in fill rate of 500 MT/s. The original specs stated 700 MT/s. We also have preview benchmarks results on hand from P3 600 (133) and K7 600. Stay tuned for more information and side by side comparison to GeForce 256 DDR.

I can just see the folks in marketing now. "Oops, we over stated the fill rate by 40%. Our bad!" It just proves that spec sheets on pre-release silicon are nearly utterly worthless (Hello, BitBoys!). Add to this the news that the Savage 2K drivers will not have built-in overclocking support.

Don't get me wrong, 500 megatexels/sec is still very, very fast. But it's not going to blow away the GeForce's 480 megatexels/sec. (See Thresh's GeForce DDR review for a computation of the GeForce's megatexel/sec rating).

The Master adds: No, the prerelease specs ARE worthless in the performance department. Across all the cards. And don't you just LOVE the lower clockspeeds on these 4th gen cards?

Happy Birthdays -- 8:25 am CST, Update by The Master

To John Romero and Bill Gates. Wow. I fear that coincidence.

A.T. adds: Three words--birthday cage match! It might make enough pay-per-view $$ to make Ion Storm solvent!

The Master: BwAAAAHAHAHAhahahahahahahaha ahahahah ahahaha *cough* *gasp* :-)

Wednesday, October 27, 1999

Special Thanks . . . -- 11:22 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

. . . go out to the Yankees for making sure that I won't have to think about baseball again until April (and maybe not even then).

As far as the Pete Rose interview bruhaha goes I just have to say this: Pete, you bet on your own $#% ^&%$ team at least 50 times. Please go back to your lucrative career as a casino greeter and kindly stay there forever. And forget the martyr/innocent victim crap. I, for one, am not buying it.

NHL 2000 Patch Released! -- 10:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just saw on NHL 2000 Online that the patch for EA Sports' NHL 2000 has been released! You can read up on all the changes on EA Sports' site here and download the patch itself here. If you prefer, you can get the same stuff at NHL 2000 Online.

Microsoft NT security -- 8:41 pm CST, Update by The Master

For those of you running NT websites, I HIGHLY recommend checking out the Microsoft Security Advisor Program website. Since the NT coders were so careful to violate damn near every tenent their O/S is based on, this site is an invaluable reference to fixing all of the stupid newbie bugs in the NT O/S so you can hopefully keep your servers secure. And, just for the record, here's a couple of sites that proves it ain't all that easy: Rootshell and attrition.org

MAME WIP Page -- 8:38 pm CST, Update by The Master

I haven't talked about emulation much here, since it's a very controversial subject and seems to raise a lot of hackles in the game company world, BUT... MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is an AWESOME freeware emulator for the old coin-op game systems. If you have any interest (or nostalgic notions) for the old coin-ops, check it out :-)

NT 4 SP6 released (Return of the SP?) -- 8:29 pm CST, Update by The Master

Well, Micro$oft has released yet another service pack for NT 4, this one being SP6. The SP5 service pack was a definite must-have, since it fixed a LOT of memory leaks, but SP6 appears to be some stress-crash, Y2K, security, and other bug fixes. Here's the download locations (courtesy of The Shack):

SP6 Contents/Details
SP6 Docs
SP6 Download Locations

Network Problems -- 10:58 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Something is still flaky between Green Bay and Milwaukee. Time Warner Telecom (EZ-Net's upstream provider) is looking into the problem. Right now it only means about 1-3% packet loss (fine for surfing, terrible for online gaming/streaming media for me). Hopefully there won't be anymore extended down time.

Mark Rein Interview -- 10:32 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Inside Mac Games has an interesting interview with Epic's Mark Rein about Unreal Tournament. The first half is posted today, look for the second half tomorrow. Thanks Blue.

Atmospheric Shipset Screenshots -- 9:17 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

On Saturday XWing Alliance.net posted a couple of new screenshots from the forthcoming Atmospheric Shipset. They include shots of an AT-AT, a probe droid, and a snowspeeder. Cool stuff! The shots are also available on the Atmospheric Shipset website, but XWA.net is much faster.

Interstate '82 Interview -- 9:10 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamesmania has an interview with Zack Norman, "the man behind Interstate '82". I82 is Activision's long-awaited (like Daikatana-long) follow-up to Interstate '76. I've been looking forward to this game for some time. It looks like it should go gold soon and be in stores by Thanksgiving (insert standard disclaimer here).

SiN 2? -- 8:59 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I've seen a blurb on a couple of news sites mentioning the possibility of there being a SiN 2. I guess the old saying is right: If something isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing twice!

Past Two Days' News

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