http://www.thetechlounge.com Recent News: Software en-us Fri, 5 Sep 2008 01:09:03 -0500 Fri, 5 Sep 2008 01:09:03 -0500 Software news Copyright 2008, TheTechLounge, Inc. 60 http://www.thetechlounge.com/templates/thetechlounge/images/88x31_ttl.png http://www.thetechlounge.com 88 31 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13242/Command-Conquer-100-Digital-Free/ "Electronic Arts has announced that they're now giving away the original Command & Conquer: Red Alert as a free download in celebration of the 13th anniversary of the series (and a reminder that Red Alert 3 is totally coming out soon). While the game is free, the actual process of playing it isn't without a little complication. You can head over to EA's official page to download both the Allies and Soviets discs (each disc contained the single-player campaign for its respective faction), but the files are actual ISO images of the CDs themselves. That means that in ...]]> Thu, 4 Sep 2008 10:31:18 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13242/Command-Conquer-100-Digital-Free/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13231/How-Full-Throttle-Never-Was/ "Playing Full Throttle is like tasting a rich bowl of roadhouse chili filled to the rim with biker gangs, chick mechanics (covered in engine grease too), and truckers with badass tattoos. An action packed, comical (albeit short), animated graphical adventure set in the backdrop of an apocalyptic future, Full Throttle touches on the subculture of motorcycle gangs and their steel horses. It is also a story about Ben, a renegade biker who lives and dies by his own rules. Ben’s voice (played by the late Roy Conrad) is every bit as gravelly as the Old Mine Road where he does battle. In...]]> Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:52:28 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13231/How-Full-Throttle-Never-Was/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13229/Using-a-Wiimote-with-Windows-Media-Center/ "Nintendo doesn't exactly advertise it, but the remotes for the Wii gaming console—including the balance board that comes with Wii Fit—have Bluetooth capabilities. That means you can connect your Wii peripherals to your computer to operate the media center hooked up to your TV, play emulated games with a Nunchuk, Classic Controller, or even a Balance Board, and pretty much have them do anything you can do with a keyboard. Let's walk through linking up your Wii peripherals and putting them in control of your Mac, PC, or Linux box. To give you an idea of what you can ...]]> Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:34:21 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13229/Using-a-Wiimote-with-Windows-Media-Center/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13227/Mythbusters-Explains-ParallelProcessing/ "Even though Nvidia’s Nvision tradeshow did not achieve its goal of 10,000 visitors, more than a thousand gathered at the Center for Performing Arts to witness the ending of the event. The duo behind the popular Mythbusters showed the results of six months of work, demonstrating the difference between a CPU and a GPU, following the conventional wisdom of parallel computing. Dubbed Smiley and Mona Lisa, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman presented two robots that represented the difference between a CPU and a GPU. Smiley was given a task to draw a smiley using conventional CPU techni...]]> Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:19:23 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13227/Mythbusters-Explains-ParallelProcessing/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13225/Light-at-the-End-of-the-Microstutter/ "Since micro-stuttering is an issue for some people I thought it would be interesting to see if there's a way to solve it. Personally I'm not bothered by it and haven't actually been able to even see it, but I can prove it's happening with Fraps on my 3870x2. So I spent a couple of hours to implement a simple waiting mechanism to feed the GPUs at a more balanced rate. For best stability you want the second GPU to start working only once the first GPU is in mid-frame (assuming 2 GPUs). Now, since I'm not able to see the micro-stuttering in the first place...]]> Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:09:12 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13225/Light-at-the-End-of-the-Microstutter/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13224/Ghost-Recon-Predicted-Russias-Invasion-of-Georgia/ "I've had serious discussions in the past about whether nor not video games constitute an art form. I hold very strongly that they do--the act of playing a game can be as engrossing as the best novel, and the act of creating a game can be much more involved than the creation of a film. The video game industry has suprassed the film industry in monetary terms, and seems now to equal to television and cinema in regards to pop-cultural awareness. There are, of course, detractors. They're wrong. Anyway, I've had this phrase in my head all year--"The year is 2008"...]]> Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:18:46 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13224/Ghost-Recon-Predicted-Russias-Invasion-of-Georgia/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13220/The-Wiz-the-NextGen-OpenSource-Handheld-for-Preorder/ "Though sales of the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable are strong, there are many who use the devices exclusively for homebrew applications. While some of these homebrew devices or homebrew-enabling schemes are looked upon less than favorably by the big manufacturers, such as the infamous R4 flash cart for the DS, there are some companies who see the value in releasing devices capable of homebrew software. Enter the Wiz, a new open-source handheld gaming unit from GamePark Holdings. Homebrew and open-source applications often offer utility unrivaled by the more ma...]]> Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:28:13 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13220/The-Wiz-the-NextGen-OpenSource-Handheld-for-Preorder/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13199/iPhone-Gamepad/ "TouchArcade has found evidence of two upcoming iPhone control pads that add, at the very least, an SNES amount of buttons to the iPhone. iControl pad is the first, and has four face buttons, a D pad, Start/Select and an LED to show when it's in use. It may be ugly now, but it's just a prototype. Another game pad design (below) was received anonymously and looks like a patent application. It has an analog stick instead of a D pad, and places the Start/Select buttons over on the left. Both seem incredibly useful for games that require precise control—something the tilt...]]> Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:42:22 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13199/iPhone-Gamepad/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13197/Kotaku-Gropes-uh-The-Zerg/ "Having spent considerable time with the Terran and Protoss at BlizzCon last year -- and no access to the Zerg at Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational -- I thought it might be fun to take out my old favorite class for a spin. As you might expect, there was a wait, one that gave me ample opportunity to watch the Zerg in action. Most noticeable was the lovely look of the Creep, the purplish goo that the hivemind race builds upon. It has a constant visual pulse to it, not something that distracts when one actually gets one's hands on the keyboard and mouse. That said, the ...]]> Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:33:32 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13197/Kotaku-Gropes-uh-The-Zerg/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13161/Carmack-Rage-Id-Tech-5-Multithreading/ "While the demo was playing, Carmack spent some time talking about multi-threaded aspects of id Tech 5, where the entire rendering system is offloaded onto one core. he said this was a “natural progression” from the multi-core support it had included in previous generation titles. “That balances pretty nicely for most games, where you can run your game logic and simulation in one thread, and your rendering system in another thread,” he explained. He explained that there was much more than just this going on in id Tech 5 though. He said that there’s a separate thread devoted entir...]]> Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:54:52 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13161/Carmack-Rage-Id-Tech-5-Multithreading/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13149/Futuremark-Makers-Make-Future-Game/ "The premise of the game is that you have to battle for survival among millions of asteroids in space, following a dramatic Moon mining disaster near the Earth, which has spewed billions of tons of rocks into the arena. The battlefield will include remains of the International Space Station, as well as the asteroids. Futuremark promises that the game will feature simple controls, as well as complete freedom of movement. The company also says that gamers will be rewarded for using tactics appropriate to the zero-gravity setting, which would be otherwise impossible. Lead game desig...]]> Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:23:12 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13149/Futuremark-Makers-Make-Future-Game/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13144/3-minutes-of-new-Mirrors-Edge-footage/ "After seeing the same few minutes of Mirror's Edge footage ad nauseam, EA has seen fit to release three minutes of new parkour goodness from the game for Leipzig. In the newly released video found after the break, Faith works her traceur magic and attempts to escape from snipers inside some kind of warehouse/hydroelectric plant. Yup, we're still excited about this game and we can't wait to play it again." I've started taking classes in parkour. To move is to pain. My feet look and feel like I took hammers to them, and there's less...]]> Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:42:23 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13144/3-minutes-of-new-Mirrors-Edge-footage/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13130/Rockstar-on-Casual-Gaming/ "Does the success of GTA IV goes to show that you don’t need to make games for ‘casual’ audiences in order to reach the mass-market? "The division doesn’t make sense to us; good games will usually sell and be popular, bad games will struggle – of any type or genre or style. But we still believe big, high impact games will help the industry evolve and further surpass the movie industry as the next mass-market story telling medium. ... "We always tried to make games that anyone could pick up and play. They may, over time, reveal a lot of structural and mechanical comple...]]> Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:15:44 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13130/Rockstar-on-Casual-Gaming/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13127/ExtremeTech-Extolling-The-Best-Keyboard-Shortcuts/ "Windows is like a real-time strategy game. You can do everything with the mouse, but you'll be so much better at it if you learn the keyboard shortcuts. We all know the basic keyboard shortcut for Windows. It's often referred to as the three-fingered-salute, and it's supposed to have some sort of positive effect when a program hangs. It's the combination of CTRL+ALT+DEL, and it rarely does anything useful. Invoke it when all is well, however, and it gives you a bunch of options. In Vista, it lets you start the Task Manager, lock the computer, log off, chan...]]> Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:38:26 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13127/ExtremeTech-Extolling-The-Best-Keyboard-Shortcuts/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13117/Tom-Chick-Doesnt-Like-Braid/ "Braid is an absolutely brilliant game and quite possibly a work of genius. I don't like it one bit. First, a disclaimer: I haven't finished Braid, and I have no intention of doing so. I ambled through to the end of the fifth world, and along the way, I grabbed some of the puzzle pieces you need to finish the game. I've gone back and worked through a few more of the puzzle pieces, and I've talked to others about the solutions to even more. Perhaps most importantly, I've heard developer Jonathan Blow give a talk in which he explained the ending, which is o...]]> Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:25:50 -0500 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13117/Tom-Chick-Doesnt-Like-Braid/