Ξ July 30th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
So, I managed to get some testing of my digital component cable for my Gamecube yesterday on a few HDTVs and a Dell 24″ TFT. To put it bluntly, the experience was not a good one.
First off, I tested it on a Viewsonic 32″ HDTV, which, admittedly was given a very poor review to start with and it then became evident to see why. I had running; Resident Evil 4, because it’s arguably the best looking game on the Gamecube. The experience was unsavoury: colour banding everywhere, poor picture scaling, poor colour representation and seriously heavy aliasing.
I quickly whipped the orange cube out of there and plugged it into a 24″ Dell widescreen TFT, again through the medium of component.
The colours were completely wrong.
The screen is a native 1900×1200 which is a massive stretch from the 480(p?) the GC was outputting via digital, but no matter how much I tried fiddling and making sure the connections were correct, the red was oversaturated and the screen was very dark. In comparison, a normal windows desktop looked perfect in DVI.
Finally I tried a 23″… something-or-other and got the best result. Despite the fact the TV didn’t upscale to fill the whole screen, just leaving big black bars around the edges of a central picture, the colour vibrantly correct but, alas, there was still really awful alising and isotropy problems with objects in the distance.
In all, this experience perturbs my once solid emotions towards the Wii. Since this product is meant to be an evolution of the GC and will not be capable of HD output, what happens in 2/3/4/5 years when more people invest in HDTVs, HD media and also a PS3/Xbox 360 (since the promoters in Nintendo have admitted that they are happy for the Wii to be a second console), and then plug in a Wii to those screens? I really, really hope the Wii has some antialiasing capability and some decent anisotropy included in the extra hardware otherwise it’s going to be graphically dwarfed by the other consoles. I know, I know!! “Graphics don’t make gameplay” and some of the Wii games will also be Cell Shaded which scales better, but still, some wont (like Zelda: Twilight Princess) and to be honest it destroyed any RE4 playability because it looked so bad in HD, because you get used to things looking better from other gaming sources, and I don’t want that to happen to Zelda and future Wii titles.
Audio-Visually, as for Wii outputs, I’m also praying to the deities at Nintendo to include VGA or DVI out and optical or coaxial S/PDIF. I suppose it must include HDMI, which is convertable to DVI, so that’s some saving grace. However, lets be honest: the Gamecube outputs sucked. I hope they will provide better A/V connectivity than composite and a couple of coax cables for audio.
Ξ July 30th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
Ah man, we spent a whole weekend testing it and I’ve spent most of the last week writing it up then Thursday (20th) Tim gets a call saying the board we have isn’t retail spec and they immediently sent over a new one. Basically the first one we got was “pre production” V1.0 and the one we tested again was V1.1 “retail”. The worrying thing is that people on Bit forums have mentioned being able to buy V1.0 K9Ns, which are effectively un-upgradable via software so they are stuck. If you want to be an early adopter the only ONLY board I’d ever suggest buying as soon as it’s released are Intel’s own brand of boards, for obviously, Intel processors though.
It’s a fast board mind, but only if you plan to not overclock. I’d still splash out on a 590 SLI though simply because the MCP extras are worth the money.
Ξ July 22nd, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
I’ve put a few more into the array. One might not be to everyone’s tastes (the badger), so if you see it and don’t like it (hit F5), just remember it’s a fact of live and as horrible as some might consider it, it’s also just something that happens. That IS natural selection at work. And I documented it. Noone would remember it and think about it if you hadn’t had seen it.
For the record, it was covered with a white sheet and flowers were placed over it the next day, and the day after it was removed completely. (Neither, however, by me).
The sadder part is that there are road kill all around our area and it takes something the size of a badger for people to feel sorry for it. Had it been a bird, fox, rat, hedgehog or cat noone would have given it a second thought, just driven past, perhaps glancing at the crows pecking at what’s left.
Just to remind: All photos are my own, except the animations which are all Production IG. Either Ghost in the Shell, Windy Tales or FLCL. My flickr link is on the edge:
Ξ July 21st, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
Jeeez, talk about unintuitive. Of all the 15 minutes of play, I’ve spent most of the time trying to get her to run in a straight line. Turning quickly in a direction you want is neigh on impossible and shooting straight… well, she might as well be blind with an inner ear problem.
I refuse to play the PS2 version, mostly because I don’t own one but they never made it for the Xbox which is a real shame because 2, but more notably 4, looked pretty damn good on it. I just don’t really care so much about her either, not like James or Henry. I mean, I lost hair and house mates playing SH2. “MARY!! No.. MARIEA RUUUUNNN!!” I did never finish 4 either, not being able to kill ghosts and dragging that dead weight woman around with just wore far too thin. “Get in the god damn wheelchair and I’ll push you! What?? No, I don’t give a shit that it’s moving on it’s own, get in, there’s a fucking babies face coming after us!!”
Only positive I can take away from 15 minutes of Silent Hill 3? Great music. But then, I already own the DVD of Silent Hill music 
As much as I love it, it’s still no Resident Evil.
Ξ July 19th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
Decent board, but I could still design a better one. For the price, which is good, I still wouldn’t buy one though. If I wanted Crossfire, 975x is the only way to go. Writing interesting motherboard reviews is like encouraging a stone to roll. Up hill. You can shout at it ’til you’re blue in the face but it ain’t gonna happen.
We will be back at NBS at some point this week but it seems the summer heat has made people lethargic. That and the need for a net connection, and a PC, and some free time, and something to talk about. To certain degrees we each lack the former.
I’ve just seen Portal which is being developed by Valve to sell alongside Episode 2. Three letters describe the video experience, two of them are W and one of them is O. I can see it being used as a measure of intelligence; whereby instead of your usual run around and shoot, you have to think about the opening/closing/dropping/moving in all five (normal) dimensions to outwit your enemy. For a change it’s not just how fast your net connection it, how many frames you can render and exactly how high on caffeine are you to get a responsive twitch like that.
This month I have mostly been watching ask a ninja on youTube. It’s comedy genius: like a spiritual reading of all of life’s essential questions but with more violence. So, in fact, perfectly suited to humanity.
Ξ July 12th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
I forgot about this.
It’s strange that Asus change a siginificant feature of the boards layout (PCI versus PCIe) slot between the Wifi and non-Wifi versions. What makes it stranger is that the box even has “Wifi edition” on it, yet, it was void of wireless additions. I hate it when companies say in their manual “you can buy this separately” whether it’s a dongle they’ve included a propriatory port for or an S/PDIF bracket etc. Tell me where you can buy one because I’ve never seen one in any online or local shop.
I’m currently writing the ECS KA3 MVP board up atm after testing it on the w/e with Tim (Smalley from Bit). We got chatting and decided to try and do this one differently this time with more punch and less faf. Hopefully it’ll work out better cause it’s easier to write that way, but takes longer to edit the big pics.
This all has put NBS on hold for a couple of weeks. We had an unsucessful run a few Sundays ago, then last week everyone was either ill or doing their own thing. To be honest, it’s been a little slow with the old news that’s interesting enough to talk about. That inspires us to want to rant about. Without inspiration it just turns out flat and boring which is not what we want to publish and waste peoples time. We had something called NBS Thoughts in the idea stage, and tried it, but it didn’t work out as expected so we dumped it. It was more suitable to a videocast than an audio only thing.
I also got into listening Ricky Gervais podcast that he did back at the beginning of the year. I’ve never liked the office and didn’t bother watching extra’s but the (free) series is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time. I can see why it was the worlds most downloaded podcast and would definately recommend to go grab it.
Ξ July 1st, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
I honestly don’t know what I did without a 7200rpm drive in my laptop. The performance over a 4200rpm is phenominal for no notiable audio or irradiation difference. I haven’t tested battery life yet, but the disk reads merely needing 0.1A over the old Travelstar, so I doubt it’ll impact that much either.
Now having bought it I don’t honestly know why I put it off for so long. The Hitachi Travelstar that used to be in it was probably the best harddisk I’ve ever owned with regards to reliability, despite its speed, so the new Travelstar in it should hopefully be even better. I honestly can’t fathom a concept as to why people complained about the excessive noise or heat output from 7200 drives in laptops they claim to have experienced. I can only hypothesise that it is merely medium specific.
