Wednesday, July 5, 2000

Daikatana Patch News -- 10:16 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Voodoo Extreme got word from John Romero on the status of the Daikatana patch:

The patch is in testing right now and we've fixed everything that we know about and we've added a lot of cool features as well. We're hoping to release the patch by late Friday, but it might be held until Monday if we find any problems.

No word on whether or not there will be an "unsuck" option or the "make the %$^& frogs go away" option.

More Infogrames and Eidos -- 12:25 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Yahoo News quotes more "sources" saying that Infogrames is looking at buying Eidos. Once again, the sources of the rumors seem to be getting more reliable. We'll have to wait and see what happens. Thanks Evil Avatar.

As an aside, Old Man Murray has an article on their real news page of why Eidos REALLY is in financial trouble. It's not the $30 million sink-hole that is ION Storm (although it looks like Deus Ex should help them get back some of that investment), but an ill-timed $55 million investment in the parent company of the Gamefan Network whose stock value did a violent nose-dive. If it's true, it explains an awful lot.

Tuesday, July 4, 2000

ITU Adopts V.92, V.44 -- 8:12 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The International Telecommunications Union has adopted two important new modem standards. The first, V.92 improves the current V.90 standard (aka 56K standard) in three ways:

• 48K uploads, as opposed to 33.6K with V.90
• Quicker connection times
• Allowing the modem to go "on hold" when an incoming call is detected.

V.44 is a new compression protocol which should provide 25% better compression than the current V.42bis standard. If everything goes well, these standards will be formally adopted this November. Good news for those of us on dial-ups! Thanks Slashdot.

NASA Hack Doubtful -- 4:36 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Shugashack linked to this ABC News article that seriously questions the validity of the report on British television that a NASA shuttle mission had been cracked (story). I thought it seemed more than a little wierd that NASA would have such a vital system connected to a public network.

Installing UT in Linux -- 2:31 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well folks, it's time for more original content from The Haus! Inspired by my success installing Quake III Arena in Linux, I decided to try my hand at a more difficult challenge, installing Unreal Tournament in Linux. Unfortunately, UT isn't as Linux-friendly as Q3A is, but I did get it to run respectably on my system. Check it out!

Happy Independence Day! -- 11:20 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A great big happy Fourth of July to all our readers from the United States! Go find someone with a British accent and point out the obvious genetic problems in the royal family! I'm celebrating by exercising one of my most cherished freedoms: the freedom to brew beer! I'm making a nice oatmeal stout which should be ready to go in a couple of weeks. Cheers!

Infogrames and Eidos After All? -- 11:14 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well-Rounded Entertainment quotes the Wall Street Journal that the Paris stock market is assuming that a hostile takeover is imminent. Shares of Eidos are up 12% and Infogrames has dropped almost 6%. Officially, Infogrames has denied that it is interested. Remember, stock markets have jumped at far less reputable rumors than this. Thus the market freaking out is not necessarily a sign that anything is going to happen.

Reverend on the GeForce2 GTS -- 11:05 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The Reverend has finally posted his review of the GeForce2 GTS, NVIDIA's latest 3D graphics chip. Unlike to many reviews, the Reverend's goes into great detail on what really makes this chip tick. Good stuff.

Abrash on the XBox -- 10:52 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Maarten pointed out this article on Dr. Dobb's Journal where Michael Abrash (formerly of id, now of Microsoft's XBox division) gives a glimpse at the XBox' graphics. One of the most interesting comments is this:

The bottom line is that Xbox is a well-balanced graphics system that will generally be capable of approaching the specs being claimed for it. "Capable" is not the same as "easy" -- this level of performance will require exemplary programming, taking full advantage of the fact that Xbox is a fixed platform to which code can be carefully tuned. Microsoft will encourage this by providing plenty of sample code and documentation showing how to push the hardware to its limits, via a version of DirectX 8 optimized and extended to support every feature of Xbox. For those who prefer OpenGL, NVIDIA will provide a fully Xbox-enhanced version.

Good to know there will be an OpenGL option so DX8 won't be rammed down developers' throats. I also can't help thinking that games that will be developed on the XBox and then ported to Windows should run rather nicely on NVIDIA graphics cards . . .

Abrash also adds this article which goes into more depth on the subject of the XBox' memory bandwidth. In that article he verifies that the 64M of memory in the XBox will be 200Mhz DDR SDRAM. Just a warning, both articles are very technical and may cause your brain to cave in.

Past Two Days' News

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