Archived News:
The tech news just keeps on rollin' in, don't it?
AMD - News Release #9980 gives the
official announcement of the eagerly anticipated shipments of their Athlon processor (the
CPU formerly known as the K7), calling it the WORLD'S FASTEST x86
MICROPROCESSOR. Thanks Superfly. Additionally, an Athlon Frequently Asked Questions page
is online with all the K7 skinny. Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
SUNNYVALE, CA--JUNE 23, 1999--AMD today announced that it has commenced
shipments of its new seventh-generation microprocessor, the AMD Athlon™ processor, to
computer manufacturers. Formerly code-named the AMD-K7 processor, the AMD Athlon processor
is initially available in speed grades of 600, 550, and 500 MHz.
"For the first time in the history of the computer industry, AMD leads the
competition in delivering an entirely new generation of processors that offers not just
higher clock speeds, but higher performance and processing capabilities clock-for-clock
based on a more advanced architectural design," said W.J. Sanders III, chairman and
chief executive officer of AMD. "This announcement is truly a watershed for AMD and
the entire industry because it heralds new choices based on superior processor technology
for system platforms in the enterprise space."
The announcement goes on to describe pricing and availablity:
AMD Athlon™ Processor Pricing and Availability
The 600-MHz AMD Athlon processor is priced at $699, the 550-MHz AMD Athlon is priced at
$479, and the 500-MHz AMD Athlon is priced at $324, each in 1,000-unit quantities.
End-user systems based on the AMD Athlon processor are planned to be available in Q3.
PC Gamer Online previews Half-Life:
Opposing Force looking at Gearbox Software's official add-on for Half-Life, currently
under construction. The article gives a good rundown on what to expect from OpFor, and
offers up some new screenshots, as well.
The ION Storm website has word of a new Designer
Diary from Tom Hall up on Anachronox.com, giving
the madman at the helm of the game a chance to talk about progress on this upcoming Quake
II-engine RPG.
Gamers Central's
Reborn First Look gives an early impression of this upcoming first-person shooter from
Nerve Lab Software in a preview featuring a handful of screenshots.
PCGamer Online has posted
a preview of Red Storm's sequel to Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear, complete with a
number of screenshots of people getting shot.
GameSpot has
previewed Sinistar Unleashed, the 3D remake of the old arcade shooter, with a handful of new screenshots to boot (thanks Billy " archaic"
Wilson).
AVault
has contacted Aureal's Bob Safir to comment on the S3/Diamond Multimedia merger,
and the company says that things are "business as usual." He also
hinted at something else by saying, "while we hope the merger with S3 does
well for Diamond, it does not affect plans already in motion to provide Vortex2
to new outlets."AVault is taking this (and other comments) to suggest a
possible retail move for Aureal, similar to what 3dfx did with their acquisition
of STB.
Oh boy! It's time for this week's Mail
Bag. In this week's roundup: my stupidity, more on antidisestablishmentarianism,
KDE, wacky Mac dealers, id's secretary, and of course...more. So hop
over and check it out.
GA-Source's
System Shock 2 Contest Winner Screenshot shows how the winning entry in Looking Glass Studios' recent "Get Killed by Shodan" contest is portrayed. The winner, Brian
Norris of St. Louis, MO, gets to help advance the plot in Looking Glass' upcoming System Shock 2 as his name and likeness will represent a dead crewman (a.k.a. Ensign
Redshirt).
The Adrenaline
Vault News has posted "The Day After: S3 Incorporated Interview" with more
post-mortem about S3's announced acquisition of Diamond Multimedia ( story).
AVault
has interviewed Paul Crossley, PR manager at S3 about their recent acquisition
of Diamond Multimedia ( story). Amongst the questions answered is this key one that has
been on everyone's mind since the announcement: Will this purchase
affect Diamond's current line of graphics accelerators? Specifically, will Diamond
continue to sell and support cards based on other companies' chipsets, such
as NVIDIA?
This will not affect Diamond's current line of graphics accelerators as
we look to sustain an ongoing relationship with suppliers such as NVIDIA. If
you analyze at Diamond's selection of graphics products, they chose NVIDIA for
the high-end mainstream and S3 for the volume mainstream. Currently, both lines
are doing quite well in their respective segments.
- Part one of the Ars
Technica Report from PC Expo '99 is online.
- I've gotten enough emails saying these Diamond Multimedia
Viper V770 drivers are new, in spite of being dated 6/3/99 to believe they in fact,
are. Thanks RyanF, and all the others who've clued me in on this.
- P3D has posted some links for the latest and
greatest version v3.02.02 Canopus Spectra series drivers from the Canopus Japanese site if
you're feeling cutting edge.
- Entech Taiwan has posted a new version 2.51 of the PowerStrip uber-video card/monitor control
utility. Thanks GameDev.net.
- Also new from Entech Taiwan is an EnergySaver
for Windows NT. Thanks again GameDev.net.
- RIVA Station has a couple of
different posts up with information to help you tell the difference between TNT2 and a
TNT2-Ultra based accelerators (besides the box label, of course).
- Speedy 3D's texture
resolution article talks about its impact on visual quality, saying "Texture
resolution in my opinion is a far more noticeable feature, then say 32bit color is over
16bit color."
- HardOCP has posted a review of an air-cooled (no
water needed) Peltier cooler for CPU refrigeration.
The "first"
Screenshots From OverDrive on GA-Source give a look at OverDrive (working title), an
auto combat game that they say is best "described as Carmageddon meets Quake with a
touch of the Godfather."
Gamers'
Crypt interviews John Heinecke of Nihilistic Software talking about Nihilistic's
upcoming action/role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, based on the pen-and-paper
horror RPG from White Wolf.
The inevitable follow-up SWAT 3 Screenshot
is up on GA-Source, on the heels of GA-Source's
SWAT 3 interview from the other day (which has a bunch of screenshots as well),
talking with Producer Rod Fung and AI Programmer John Anderson about this upcoming
tactical simulation.
A test demo of Longbow Digital Arts' 3D tank deathmatch game Tread Marks has been released, and is available for download over on 3DFiles.
This is just a test demo, so bear in mind that everything is subject to change.
There are four new
Starlancer screenshots on Before It's Done showing off action from Microsoft/Digital
Anvil's upcoming space shooter.
The official Amen The Awakening FAQ has been updated, the only change is the release date has been added ("early 2000, or when it's done"). Also, a few Qs and their corresponding As have been added to the official Activision Heavy Gear II FAQ. Finally, rounding out all this FAQing fun, the unofficial Requiem FAQ has been updated as well, jumping all the way from version 0.666 to version 0.779. Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers for all of those.
Despite the fact that it's still without a publisher, the soon-to-be-released
(hopefully) title Mortyr apparently has a few follow-up projects in the works.
Mortyr.net is reporting that
work is being started on Mortyr++ (an expansion pack), Mortyr 2 (which reportedly
will have curved surfaces, bump mapping and other technological feats), and
yes...even Mortyr for the GameBoy Color.
Yep, it's yet another Starsiege: TRIBES Q&A. This time it's on PlanetStarsiege,
and it's with Tim "Slacker" Gift. Part one of the Q&A (part two
will be posted tomorrow) talks about their E3 reception, and some cool stuff
about TRIBES 2. Here's an excerpt: No, didn't see anything that made
me re-think the direction we're taking with our engine (our new interior code
may include what might be considered portals, but it won't be a "Portal"
engine). I think we already have a lot of interesting technology, which we'll
continue to develop, what we don't have is an ear catching name for it :) We
will also be including the basic stuff to keep up with hardware, so there will
be 32 bit color, higher poly counts, environment & bump mapping, higher
res textures, etc.
PC.IGN.COM interviews Scott
"CornBoy!" Youngblood talking about progress on Starsiege TRIBES 2. The
following question and answer give a feel for what improvements are planned for those
times when you haven't got multiple players available for multiplayer:
IGNPC: Are you going to be adding any more single player features to the
sequel?
SY: We will be providing more robust single player training missions with the release of
Tribes 2. In addition we are putting extensive work into 'bot' AI to allow players to
experience the 'team' aspect of Tribes offline. Our goal with the AI is to allow a player
to play with a team AI players against an entire team of opposing Ai players. We have two
full time programmers who are focusing solely on the AI aspect of the game. It is coming
along quite nicely.
A
Rick Overman .plan update gives word from the Director and Lead Programmer of Starsiege
about progress on OpenGL support for both Starsiege TRIBES and Starsiege, as well as a
mention of a little known telnet feature in both games: Thanks Datumplane::Starsiege. Here's the poop:
As a secondary project we have been working on additional OpenGL engine changes
for Starsiege and Tribes. The rendering pipeline is fairly optimal as of Starsiege patch
v1.002 but we are still not seeing the FPS we should be because of poorly written drivers.
The only option remaining to us is to take as much texture management responsibilities
from the driver as possible. This is a good and bad thing. The good is that it looks like
we'll get a generous FPS boost by micro-managing textures. The bad is there is no reason
we should have to do this. Most the hardware available today can handle many times over
the textures we typically download but the drivers just cannot keep up. It's sad, there is
a lot of great silicon out there that will never live up to it's potential. So
micro-managing textures will compensate for driver inadequacies but will eliminate the
possibility of ever really being able to push the cards to their limit.
So why all this rambling about drivers all of a sudden? Because I'm thinking of holding
onto patch v1.004 for another week or so and rolling in the OpenGL engine changes now
rather than doing yet another patch. v1.003 seems very solid and adding the OpenGL changes
to v1.004 will make it a nice package for everyone to look forward to.
Starsiege Telnet! So there is a little undocumented feature in Starsiege (and Tribes) that
many of you may be very interested in. Starsiege supports remote telnet sessions. To
enable telnet just add the following lines to your autoexec.cs it's that simple.
$telnetPort = 15000; // port number
$telnetPassword = mypass; // password
You can use this for a variety of things: Remote Administration, write your own ladder
monitoring tools or even extend Starsiege in ways I've never considered. Have fun if you
come up with a unique application send me some mail and let me know.
More Linux and Windows drivers from Creative Labs and more follow-up on S3 & Diamond
kick off this morning's tech bits:
Thresh's FiringSquad previews
System Shock 2 looking at the sequel to this classic sci-fi RP, describing what to
expect from the gameplay and environments, and touching on multiplayer, which will be
included, albeit cooperative (though I've never seen a co-op game yet that we couldn't
turn into a deathmatch ![=]](/miscimages/smiley4.gif) ).
Next-Generation Online's
Masquerade Multiplay talks with Nihilistic's Ray Gresko about how multiplayer play
will be handled in Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, quoting Ray as saying:
"Since we are introducing an entirely new way of playing multiplayer RPGs, we spend a
lot of time making sure this mode of play has all the functionality and expandability that
it needs." Word in the article is that the game is 60% complete.
Speaking of RPG's GamePen
previews Darkstone looking ahead at this action/RPG saying "Darkstone is a game
that is obviously influenced by Diablo and that is not a bad thing." Thanks Frans at 3D Action Gamers.
The
Adrenaline Vault Previews Shadow Man looking at this Voodoo-inspired third-person
action game in the works from Acclaim Entertainment based on the comic of the same name.
The RealCTF page has build 50 of
RealCTF 1.0, the capture the flag mod for Unreal. The new release offers new player
prediction tweaks for the Tractor Beam (Grapple) and various other fixes.
The talk about The Pirates of Silicon Valley inspired quite a few readers (as
well as loony) to bring up the Triumph
of the Nerds The Transcripts which provide the words from a PBS documentary on the
same subject (the early days of PC development) that offered a more realistic portrayal of
those events. The transcripts can provide an interesting insight into which portions of
the TNT movie were rooted in reality, which parts were exaggerations or adaptations of
actual events, as well as more about the other characters involved. BTW, PC Magazine's Pirates of Silicon
Valley write-up is by John C. Dvorak (thanks Brett) with some interesting theories
about the motivation behind this movie.
Holy cow! Bawls Bottle Road Trip is a
tour of the world's largest Bawls bottle, at 22 feet long (of course, a 12 oz. bottle
would also qualify as world's biggest, since the normal 10 oz Bawls bottles look like they should
be served on airlines). Thanks Jeff. Next stop is right here in the Big Apple! Whee!
Link of the Day: Things that
geeks should know about the Real World.
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