Gamasutra has an article about Zork that is almost a month old, but I couldn’t resist posting it. Zork and I have a history, starting with Activision’s Zork: Grand Inquisitor. You can blame my sister and her taste in games. I also played Return to Zork. I still have the Zork Collector’s Set she gave me, along with Myst. The gaming world needs more of these kinds of games.
Archive for July, 2007
PC World has an article on spyware that knows if it’s being run in a virtual environment…pretty scary. That’s why you should always have a crappy cheapo box around if the spyware refuses to run in VMWare or some other virtualization product to really know what it’s up to. I remember the most nasty piece of spyware had me running BartPE on a machine because it would hide itself when Windows was run, due to it modifying the registry so much that Windows couldn’t read it normally.
I’m now back in Cherry Hill. We ended up getting out of FIEA a lot earlier and got an earlier flight out of FL and came back home.
From Gamasutra:
…some copies of the game use the U.S. translation of the game, which features the word “spastic” in the game text.
The use of the word is quite different in the UK, compared to the U.S., where it and its many derivatives are a common schoolyard insult implying a mental or physical disability - particularly relating to the symptoms of cerebral palsy.
I just think the UK’s use of the word spastic is weird. Secondly, why in the world would a Mario Party game ever use the word spastic? I mean it’s a party game sure, but….
This article this great. I’m glad the teacher knows what the hell he’s doing. His setup in the classroom sounds sweet. NJIT has nothing like this.
I found a tiny, standalone ISO burning program that can burn ISO images to CD as well as DVD, and a bunch of other CD/DVD formats. Best of all, it’s FREE and it has command line options to work with scripting programs! Check out Active ISO Burner. Download the middle link. That’s just the exe, and that’s all you need. Here’s the info on the command line options. Major kudos to the author.
Today, I got a brand new TV tuner card. My previous card, the Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP Expert refused to work in Vista if I used anything but its crappy software. No thanks. Plus since it did not have a digital (ATSC) tuner, the card would be crap in a matter of a year or two when all TV broadcasts will switch over to digital. Since no one has a review on this product yet, let me do a review on the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800.
White box, no frills…just how I like it! Not even instructions!
I really can’t get a good shot of the back of the card, because the flash reflects too much, so I’ll just tell you the layout on the back. If you have the motherboard on a flat surface like a table, and you’re putting the card in that way from top to bottom the connections are: FM In, TV In, Antenna In, S-Video In, Left Audio In, Right Audio In.
Also note that this card is a PCIx1 card, and is NOT LOW-PROFILE! This is perfect, as I have an unused PCIx1 slot right above my video card, which would probably never be used. Time to fill it in! I’ll be back, as I’m going to reboot and put this card in.
Windows wasn’t able to find drivers online — surprise, surprise. I went to the Hauppauge website, and I came across this page. Very important for anyone that has Vista.
As I was cleaning up the area, I found this. Looks like I missed it:
It’s an S-video to composite connector. Good bonus with the card.
As for TV quality, I’m still messing with the different applications. I’ve only tried the card out with Windows Media Center in Vista. For the record, I’m using Vista 64bit, and this card works fine with it. No worries here.
I tried the Hauppauge software. No thanks. The only thing that it’s good for right now is picking up QAM channels, which Comcast doesn’t offer.
Using Windows Media Center for TV produces about 2-3 seconds of delay from live TV, due to the fact that it’s using the card’s built-in MPEG2 hardware encoder (or the fact that Windows Media Center has a built-in timeshifting feature that you can’t turn off…). I have yet to test the composite/S-video input. It’s a shame that DScaler doesn’t work yet, since I have 64bit *sigh* although people are working on 64bit drivers. Best of luck to the DScaler team.
If you’re looking for a great action flick, go see Transformers NOW!
PS3 price cut: Now $500 instead of $600. How much money are they losing per console now?