Clete’s Blog

Today, I whipped out my camcorder, Playstation 3, and VCR and decided to record a gameplay video. I ended up playing for a little over 20 minutes.

I hooked my PS3 up to the VCR, as well as the camcorder and TV so that I could play and record at the same time. I used the camcorder as a pass-through to my DV firewire cable. I played around with some pictures that I put on there and then jumped straight into Blast Factor and Resistance: Fall of Man. One thing that I must say, however, is that 1080p blows 480i (my current setup) out of the water.

Without further ado, here it is (Google Video). To download a higher quality video, click here (Windows Media Video). If you want an even higher quality video, e-mail me.

Merry Christmas! (Well… Eve..) I won’t be posting tomorrow. I have a couple of posts coming up. So far, Christmas Eve has gone well. I got a lot of cool stuff. I’ll post more later. Enjoy the holidays!

I have a PS3 post coming up and an article entitled “Programming Inefficiency in Gaming.” I’ll get pictures of all the cool stuff that I received later.

One last note is that I’ll be leaving from December 28th to January 3rd. I’ll be in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Engadget is reporting that a Wii game, Red Steel, has been dumped to an ISO. That didn’t take too long.

Everyone already knows that Xbox360 games are being released, but now PS3 ISOs are beginning to come out. If you know where to look, (think: torrents) a quick search finds Resistance: Fall of Man (~16GB), Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom (~8GB), Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (~8GB), and Madden 2007 (~6GB). Blu-Ray discs can hold 25GB on one layer and 50GB on a double-layer disc. There is work being done to fit more layers on the discs. The sizes on the discs may not even be maxed out, as it is a new format. They have not even tested maximum capacity, from what I read on the Blu-Ray website. (basically, 50GB is a rough estimate) To be honest, though, I don’t think more than 50GB will ever be fit on the discs.

Wow. I’m downloading a NFO file for Resistance to see exactly what it is. I wonder if someone has made a hack to download the file structure, send it to your PS3, and play it…

Something else to note is that Sony has recently stated that the current games are using less than half of the system’s resources. Wow.. I expected as much. I can’t wait to see what they will come out with in a year or so once more titles are released.

Also, I can’t wait for Mercenaries 2. It’ll be released in March. I hope I can either keep my Playstation 3 (it didn’t sell; I put it up too high) or get one by March. I loved Mercenaries for Xbox. It was an amazing game. I hope that 2 won’t disappoint.

Yes, I have a 60GB PS3. (the one on the left belongs to a friend, who also bought one today)
Click

Also, if anyone needs a TI-83 Plus, click here. It’s at $30 (retails at $150 I think).

Firefox 3 has been released to alpha. The sources have been available for a while, but work has now begun on it. This preview is supposed to be for testing and development purposes only.
Firefox will be using the Cairo layer, which adds support for 2D rendering. (Think: XGL & Compiz-Quinnstorm/Beril) I can’t wait to see what will become of it.

The only thing I’m hoping for is that they will switch over to using QT. I hate GTK themes.

Check it out!

I don’t know if I’m just late in hearing this, but it appears that 16GB flash drives have come on the market. Surprisingly, Corsair’s 16GB flash drive only costs $299! Compare that to a 1GB SD card for $60! Sounds like a fairly good deal to me. Who wants to buy me one?

The other item that I would like to note is Intel’s “Core 2 Duo Extreme QX6700 Kentsfield Processor.” This processor is the first that Intel has produced that has 4 cores in it. This thing will be amazing for compiling programs, playing games, music, and burning those Blu-Ray discs at the same time. =) The only problem with having more than one core right now is that most games will not take advantage of the extra cores. Even if the process’s affinity is set to run on all 4 cores, it still won’t use them to their maximum potential. Anyways, this processor is 4×2.66GHz and has 2 x 4MB L2 Cache. Nice. And yes, it is a true 4-core processor. It doesn’t use Hyper Threading. AMD’s quad core line will debut some time in 2007. I’d like to get a 64-bit quad core CPU if they ever come out.
Donations may be sent to my PayPal address.

By the way, I have lost the link, but Intel is planning to go well beyond just 4 cores. Stay tuned. I’ll try to find the article later.

Recently, a friend sent me a link to what appears to be a real life lightsaber. It shoots out a pretty violet beam. It appears to be quite simply, a tweaked blu-ray laser-type kind of thing. It looks pretty cool. Check it out!