Wat stuff over RollerCoaster Tycoon die ik vond op Coolinfo

If you're looking for a game where the only terror involved is that which you strike into the hearts of riders of that double-looping, under-water, into-the-dark killer roller coaster you're going to design, well, then, you've come to the right place. You've already paid the entrance fee to this preview, so step right up and take a look with us at MicroProse's upcoming RollerCoaster Tycoon (please, though—no weak stomachs).

Dat word een koel spelletje lijkt me zo!

3DGaming.net heeft een review van Falcon 4.0 in elkaar gepoot. Het spelletje is zo realistisch dat het valt te betwijfelen of er nog wat gameplay te bespeuren valt. De graphics doen het in ieder geval niet slecht:

First and foremost, your Falcon looks great. In flight, all of the control surfaces move. When you pull G's, vapor streams off of the wings. The jet flares as you go to afterburners, the airbrakes pop out, and weapons come off the proper racks when fired. Your Falcon does not show true damage or battle scars as textures, but the different components of the aircraft will behave realistically if damaged. For example, jammed gear is clearly jammed and damaged hydraulics will leave your control surfaces fluttering in the wind. On one instance, after jamming the gear and then taking the Falcon to 600 knots (that's what you do once you've jammed your gear, right?) you could clearly see the landing gear doors break away from the wind resistance.

Opinionated heeft z'n mening uitgepoept over de Intel PIII. Best wel grappig. Hier heb je een stuk:

The truth about the Pentium III is that it is a souped-up Pentium II, which itself is just the grown-up version of the Pentium Pro from 1779. What's new is higher clock speeds, a few minor improvements to the CPU core and the addition of instructions to speed up the calculation of floating point operations significant for 3D geometry calculations via SIMD (single instruction multiple data).

Sounds familiar? Yep. Sounds like the AMD K6-2, right?

But .. the K6-2 was last year's news. So, it seems, is the Pentium III. True, it is a really fast and hence desireable chip. But where's the beef? Where's the additional value that justifies a premium price?

...en de rest vinden wij hier

Seagate heeft een nieuwe technologie in elkaar geknutseld waarmee ze verwachten binnen 2 jaar een schijf van 100Gig te kunnen produceren. Ook lekker om te horen is de transfer rate: 700MBit/s. De rotatiesnelheden gaan intussen richting de 15.000rpm.

Hier heb je wat info van Techweb over die geile schijven van Seagate:

 Technology News

New Technology From Seagate Boosts Storage

(02/10/99, 2:52 p.m. ET)

By Andy Patrizio, TechWeb

The constant problem of disk space could be solved, at least for a little while, thanks to new drive technology from Seagate Technology that will let the company deliver 100-gigabyte drives within two years.

Seagate recently announced a pair of new drive technologies, a GMR head and magnetic thin-film, low-noise, ultra-smooth cobalt alloy media for increased areal density. The new media in conjunction with the new drive head allows for much more data to be squeezed into the same area as before.

This year, the company will introduce drives with a 6-gigabit-per-inch capacity -- double the 3-gigabit capacity of current drives, which use anisotropic magneto resistance. This will translate to 9 gigabytes per platter, or drives starting at 36 GB of storage, according to Nigel Macleod, vice president of the advanced concepts lab at Seagate.

Drives with the 16 gigabits per inch will appear at the end of the year 2000, which will allow for 22 GB per platter. This will allow for drives with 80 to 100 GB of storage.

Increasing the areal density is useless without the new GMR head, said Macleod. The new GMR heads have an increase in sensitivity by a factor of four, so it can detect the same signal that's one-quarter as thick as previous tracks. This lets Seagate pack more tracks on the drive.

GA-Source heeft een first look van Star Trek New Worlds. Hier heb je wat info over de bedoeling van dit spel:

Introduction

Star Trek: New Worlds, a 3D Real Time Strategy game, is set in 2292. In the Neutral Zone -- a quiet area of space situated equidistant between Federation, Romulan, and Klingon Territories -- where a spatial anomaly has created a clutch of fresh new worlds.

The Story

The game starts out with a Romulan experiment that goes wrong on a stellar scale. Somehow this mysterious experiment accidentally shifted many new worlds into the Neutral Zone. While the Federation is motivated by science to investigate the phenomenon behind these new planets, everyone else is interested in the wealth the new worlds offer.

Aureal heeft nieuwe A3D drivers gereleased die wat vautjes fixen in Half-Life en de CPU load bij A3D 2.0 spellen verlagen. De drivers kun je hier downen (224Kb).

Intel heeft twee nieuwe patenten geregistreerd die de architectuur van de 64-bits Intel Merced wat ontwazigen. EETimes heeft er een artikel over:

Two newly issued patents appear to provide the deepest insight yet available into the inner workings of Intel Corp.'s upcoming Merced microprocessor.

[...]he first patent probably sheds more light on how Merced actually implements predication while processing multiple instruction streams.

[...]atent 5,860,017 details how multiple instruction streams can be speculatively executed, which is the tough task faced by Merced. Speculative execution on its own is difficult; speculatively executing more than one instruction stream is much, much tougher.

Als je zin hebt in een zooi heftige technische info moet je ff dat nieuwsbericht van EETimes gaan lezen...

Ik zag op Tweak3D wat info over een Glide emulator waarmee je Glide spellen onder D3D kunt draaien.

Okay there seems to be a lot of issues with XGlide 0.12a I hear. Some people get it working on a TNT, other simply can't. Certain people get it working on a G200, others don't. We really have to figure this stuff out.

Tweak3D heeft ook wat screenshots van Mario64 met de UltraHLE emulator op een TNT (waar dus de Glide wrapper tussen zit, UltraHLE doet alleen Glide). Meer info vind je bij Glide Underground.