2000-04-02

If you'd like the religious version of this site, Ask Jesus about lewman.com.

In other news, z went crazy and purchased Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed and everyone's favorite violent game, Soldier of Fortune. The new Need for Speed is very well done. The graphics while not photoquality, are damn close. The environment in which you drive is amazingly lifelike. However, I don't have any screenshots yet, and the official site is pure Flash, so I can't really link to anything either.

For the first time in over a year or so, I think I've hit the limit on my computer. I have the always cool Abit BP6, the dual Celeron board. I have two Celeron 300A's overclocked to 450Mhz (from 300Mhz, hence the 300 in 300A). I mainly have them overclocked to get the 100MHz front site bus speed, which helps speed up graphics and memory transfers. SoF appears to overload the system. Win98 only uses 1 of the 2 CPUs because it isn't SMP aware. Win2000, which ran most games but not all, takes advantage of both CPUs, and the SoF demo didn't show any of these problems. FreeBSD, linux, and almost every other OS I could run takes full advantage of both CPUs. If everything would run under W2K, I'd stick with it. However, most games appear to take advantage of DirectX features available only under Win98.

This raises a whole other issue, the fact that DirectX is supposed to be one interface for games to talk to, regardless of platform. However, as is typical of Microsoft (Mickeysoft), they customize a "standard" interface to different platforms. Their goal is to provide a better experience for the user, while providing zero incentive for gaming companies to stick to the standard interface. I hate how Microsoft dictates what I, the user, want for a gaming experience. I want all DirectX games to run, and work well, on both W2K and Win98. I'll gladly give up the extra few frames per second Win98 may give me for the ability to play the game in W2K. Yes, all of this to satisfy what is probably 15% of the gaming market with SMP capable machines. Since MS doesn't appear to subscribe to the Vulcan philosophy of, "The needs of the many outwiegh the needs of the few", then they should be catering to me.