Burn your Sound Blaster 16! Take To The Streets!

Me? Doing a spot of internet bandwagon-jumping? Surely not…

However, in this case, as is often true with internet nerds, this one’s hard to ignore. I’m sure pretty much everyone has heard about the whole CREATIVE Labs thing by now, but if not, here’s a little explanation. You see, the well-known manufacturers are one of, if not the biggest when it comes to sales of PC sound cards.

Trouble is, Vista was released, Microsoft changed the sound architecture of the Windows operating system, and as a result CREATIVE released some really crappy drivers for their cards, missing important features like Dolby Digital support, and generally being unstable and rubbish. Pretty much everyone accepted the fact that this was the march of progress, and resigned themselves to buying new sound cards.

Trouble is, a member of CREATIVE’s forums, known as Daniel_K, decided to take matter into his own hands and prove them wrong. He released some excellent drivers for Vista which he’d written by reverse engineering CREATIVE’s own efforts, and they left him to it, that is, until he started accepting donations for his time. That’s when the legal heavies got involved.

Here’s the infamous forum post where it all kicked off.

Fast forward to today, and the internet at large is now calling for a boycott of all things CREATIVE. I have to agree with the cause too - this guy’s using his own skills and valuable time to write drivers that they refuse to, and then sharing the fruits of his work with others in the same shitty situation. Obviously his work also proves that CREATIVE are lying about Vista’s driver model being the cause of the problems - the issue here is that they want people to go out and buy new sound cards, and they’re doing it by deceiving people.

There’s a massive internet storm brewing, and it’s heading in their direction.

So, are you going to boycott CREATIVE, or do you think it’s all a bit silly? I wasn’t thinking of buying any new hardware in a long time anyway, so I’d be lying if I said I was deliberately boycotting them, but I can’t help but agree with this cause.

Any comments?

As regulars to TTB will have gathered, me and Mr Geekboy had the pleasure of going to the Call of Duty 4 Boot Camp event in London on Friday afternoon to play the new maps that will be released on April 4th. So I thought to round off our coverage of the event I would give you a walkthrough of what to expect when the maps hit the wild.

Killhouse

Loosely based on the training mission at the start of the single player mode, Killhouse is quite a small map based in a decrepit warehouse with large chunks of it’s roof missing. All of the structures on this map are made of plywood, so they offer no protection from your enemy if they know you are there, making games on this map quite frenzied and fast paced. The roof offers some shelter from helicopters and air strikes, but not much, making it very messy when somebody gets one. My only real gripe with this map was that as it is so small it makes ‘grenade spamming‘ (the art of randomly throwing a stun grenade followed by a frag grenade and hoping you get a kill) quite a successful tactic. I only got to pay this map on free-for-all, but I think it could be really good for domination, as there is no real hiding places, and very few sniper spots!

Read the rest of this entry »

The Eee PC, Small And Geeky

In yet more Eee PC related news, Asus have released the Software Development Kit for the Eee PC’s Xandros Linux distribution.

The SDK itself works with the development environment Eclipse and includes TrollTech’s Qt interface design package. Asus are also supplying some rather handy VMWare-compatible code to allow us awesome Developer types to create a virtual Eee on a more beefy bit of hardware and allow dev’s to compile and test their code before deploying it on one of the sub-notebooks.

The documentation for the SDK also refers to the EP20, Asus’ tiny Linux running Desktop PC (not the one we mentioned earlier, or at least I don’t think so).

Asus’ ADK supports coding in both C and C++ and a bundled guide takes newbie developers (like Mr. Geekboy) through creating dialogues, writing code for said dialogues and even creating an icon to go with it. There’s a handy reference for API routines and some nifty advice on packaging the app.

Those curious enough and own an Eee PC can download the SDK from here.

Again, I find myself bored this Sunday evening and prepping for a whole new week of Gadget, Tech and Gaming News. In the time I’ve taken out from finding stuff to blog about, I came across this mightily amusing video. So, from one Transformers fan to another, here’s the video.

Unofficial Pictures

Although the picture above doesn’t reveal much about the size of the Desktop version of the Eee PC (one can speculate to something along the lines of a Mac Mini), it is a nice thing to look at. Unlike Mr. Geekboy, I don’t hold much love for the orginal Eee PC for many a reason, although, this Wii-esque incarnation of it seems to draw me to it for some reason, I’m not entirely sure why yet though.

With the pictures, there’s a distinct lack of technical specifications for the Desktop, only the slogan for the Eee PC - “Easy to Learn, Easy to Work, Easy to Play.”. Maybe it’ll come with a pre-installed version of Hardy Heron?

Coming Soon?

Dutch Site, Nintendo Only, has stumbled across some vaguely interesting information about a potential 3 new DS colours coming to Europe. According to their supposed “reliable sources”, we can expect to see the new colours out and about in the wild from May 1st. The colours themselves are reported as being Green, Red and Ice Blue (pictured above).

Plenty of people outside of Japan have been waiting to get their hands on something other than Black, White or Pink.

It is however, a shame that all 3 of us at TTB have got a DS already.

Check out these pictures of a hacked version of Valhalla, the popular multiplayer map from Halo 3. Plucky NeoGAF member Ajemsuhgao managed to get a hold of these pictures of a Snowbound / Avalanche inspired mod, supposedly done on a dev console, which I think looks really, really well done.

Looks a lot like the Assault On The Control Room mission from the Halo:CE single player campaign, actually. It kinda makes me wonder how cool it would be if Bungie had gone with realistic weather effects, much in the same vein as PGR4… Maybe for Halo 4, eh?

My God. This, this is possibly the most incredible thing I have ever seen. The team behind the unofficial Black Mesa mod are aiming to recreate the whole of the original Half-Life game, only using the incredibly sexy Source engine from HL2. And unlike Valve’s own effort, Half-Life: Source, this one is completely rebuilt from the ground up, with new sounds, new sprites, new everything based on those from the original Half-Life.

Please Valve, if you know what’s good for you, give these guys a job and release this as part of whatever box HL2:Ep3 is going to be part of, along with the sequel to Portal. If you can crack it out this year that’ll be two years in a row when you’ve really made my life complete.

Did I mention how much I love everything Half-Life?

Also, their web site is totally sweet. Check out this image browser! Plus, you really, really, really need to watch this video to understand what I’m talking about.

So, I pick up my fellow teabagger OwningXylophone from his house on Tuesday night for some hardcore gaming, as I often do, and he’s all excited about something. He says he can win some VIP tickets to a Call of Duty promotional thing in London through Aceybongos, but that he’d need me to be able to get Friday afternoon off.

Thankfully, I have an understanding boss who is also a massive CoD fan, so he let me go. And so it was that, on an otherwise relatively normal Friday afternoon, I find myself on a train down to London. Half an hour or so of standing around outside a gay cinema in Soho, and we’re lured in to what looks like an NCP car park with promises of gaming.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately this has nothing to do with our very own Evoroth (as you’d expect from the title), but it is incredibly funny.

Hold out for the big LOLs @ 0:45.