It's been common videophile wisdom that if you own an HDTV that has a native resolution of 720p, you will achieve the best picture quality if you feed it 720p signals. The rationale is that outboard video scalers are generally more capable than internal scalers.
This is absolutely not the case with 720p-native Samsung HL-Rxx67W [samsunghlr4667wservicemenu, samsunghlr4667w, samsunghlr4667wsettings] series DLP sets (mine is the HL-R4667W). The internal scaler, based on the ATI Xillion chip set, is the best video scaler I've seen. There is no comparison to the internal 720p scaler in my Comcast HD cable box - the Samsung scaler absolutely blows it away. If you have an outboard HDTV receiver, like a cable or satellite box, set it to output 1080i or pass through a native signal. The picture quality difference is outstanding.
Combined with the wobulated diagonal pixel pattern, the ATI scaler gives 1080i a much better picture quality than on my old 1080i-native CRT HD. On the Sammy HD, 1080i simply looks far better than 720p.
Say goodbye to the old 720p rule-of-thumb. With this new generation of HDTV's, feed your Sammy the highest picture resolution possible. You'll love what you see.
In my effort to find great, short games to play during long data builds at work, I downloaded and played Oasis, an award winner from the 2004 Independent Games Festival. Where Strange Adventures in Infinite Space could be called a five-minute version of Masters of Orion, Oasis could be called a five-minute version of Civilization.
Oasis is a level-based game where the player has a limited number of turns to reveal a map of cities. After the last turn, a hoard of Barbarians launches an attack, and the player's score and level progression is based on the survival of the cities. There's a ton of ingenious depth to each level, including the ability to mine mountains for technology, reveal a complete desert oasis to unlock bonus rounds, discover nomads to add to your population, and explore each city to enable stronger defenses. Since each decision costs the player a turn, many strategies emerge during each level, allowing for plenty of replay value. I always wish for just one more turn before the Barbarians attack.
The production quality of this shareware game is so polished that I wondered if some experienced game creators were behind it. Sure enough, the credits list the highly respected designer/programmer/lecturer Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc as the designer and lead engineer.
The free downloadable demo allows for an hour of gameplay, and I recommend playing through the tutorial levels during that hour. Afterwords, you'll easily be able to justify the bargain price of $19.95 for the full version.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw visited Alabama over the weekend, and CNN reports that my former neighbors in Dixie had a little trouble with the concept of "England". I think these are the same people who, when I mentioned I was from Northern California, asked if I'd ever seen any movie stars.
While I was getting a haircut this weekend, the woman cutting my hair mentioned that she was "totally addicted to computer games" right now. When I asked what game she was playing, her answer was Texas Hold 'Em Poker. Intrigued, I asked her several more questions about games, and found her thoughts interesting:
I'm willing to bet she is a very typical casual game customer. She got hooked on a game that required almost no learning of the rules (poker), and wanted to play other games. Disappointed in all of the Bejeweled clones on game sites, she went to Best Buy. She managed to find and buy something familiar (CSI), get it installed on her computer (wow!), and play it enough to be disappointed. And now she's stuck, wondering how to choose her next game.
I suggested she try Grand Theft Auto ![[B0009IX7K8]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
I have tons of old games for a variety of systems that I never got around to playing. In search of something I could play while waiting for data builds at work, I reached in to my pile of old games and pulled out Ascendancy, an epic space strategy game circa 1995. Unfortunately, my laptop isn't capable of playing it. Why?
Ascendancy runs in MS-DOS, not Windows XP.
Luckily, someone at work pointed me to an open source app called DOSBox. DOSBox is a full DOS system emulator that effectively creates a virtual 486 on your desktop. Do the terms Tseng ET4000, Gravis UltraSound, and EMS sound familiar? They're all emulated in DOSBox. Ascendancy and other classic DOS games I've tried are fully playable.
Although the official 0.63 release of DOSBox works fine, there are several updates and bug fixes in CVS that make downloading an unofficial CVS build worthwhile. (Get it here: http://ykhwong.x-y.net/page.htm) In particular, the CVS version of DOSBox supports DirectX PixelShaders for some very nice graphics scaling.
Time to dig more of those DOS classics out of the closet and get gaming!
Starting tomorrow, subscribers of Comcast High Speed Internet [superbowlcomcastdvr, comcastdvrwar, comcastdvrdst, comcastspeedblast, newcomcastdvr, comcastdvrdead, comcastdvrdelete, comcastdvravsforum, comcasthdcompression, comcastdvrcodes, comcastinternationalchannels] will be able to watch live and archived NHL games streamed over the Internet this season. The press release tells us everything but the important detail: what's the video resolution? If it ends up somewhere north of 640×480, the net stream will likely look much better than the local standard definition broadcast carried by Comcast's Cable TV.
Caught on Ars Technica
File this one in "news of the obvious," but the new Nintendo GameBoy Micro really is tiny, almost too tiny. It's only a hair larger than my Sony T637 cel phone. Although the color screen is easily the best screen I've ever seen on any gaming device, it does cause me to squint a little. In general, the overall size of the Micro causes all of the buttons to be closer together, which forces you to uncomfortably bend your fingers and thumbs much more than on the older GameBoys.
There is also only one speaker, so stereo sound can only be heard with headphones. The speaker itself is just below the A and B buttons, and my adult-sized thumb tends to cover it during gaming. Unlike the GameBoy Advance SP , however, there is an included headphone jack. The digital volume control is excellent and much improved over the awful manual slider on the GBA SP and Nintendo DS .
If you're looking for comfortable GameBoy gaming with big buttons and a large-ish screen, the Nintendo DS is easily the system to buy. But if you want something less bulky so you can have gaming access at any time, the Micro fits the bill perfectly. And if you are a total gadget geek like me, well, get both!
Hey Nintendo, when do we get more GameBoy Micro faceplates?
I'm really hooked on the game Strange Adventures in Infinite Space by Digital Eel. The best way to describe it is to say that it's a cross between Spaceward Ho! and the classic Super Star Trek, but… enhanced... so that the entire play experience takes only 15 minutes. This is a great game to play while you're waiting for a download, boiling water, watching paint dry, etc.
You play for a literal high score, which is something you don't often see in modern games. To get the best score, you must explore a game space that is filled with lots of discoverable ship upgrades and loot that you must return to your home planet. But since there is no reference guide of any kind included with the game, you might want to have a notepad handy so you can remember which ship upgrades and loot are the best to keep.
Ernest Adams has a more detailed review where he calls SAIS a "perfect short game." For a mere $15, I'd tend to agree. Now I can't wait for the sequel, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, which should be released this month.
Update: In a way, SAIS does include a reference guide of all items in the game. All of the data for the game is stored in simple text files in the installed gamedata directory. Of course, reading it is a little like cheating, and does take away from some of the discovery. The data is so easy to modify that Digital Eel even includes a mod guide and a graphics packing tool. I sure am impressed with the elegance of both the game design and its architecture. Inspiring stuff for old game hackers like me.
