FastEddie Blogs!

I’m avoiding Vista for as long as I have to.  I’ve come up with a page that lists all the reasons.

Reasons to not buy Vista

http://www.surface-tension.net/

Love it.  Want one.

The casual game market is not getting any love from Vista’s Parental Control feature.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12314

Apparently, games that are unrated by the ESRB will be blocked by default.  Well, the many casual / shareware games out there don’t have the resources to get each one of their little games rated.  Why are they being unfairly punished?  So far, there hasn’t been a whole lot of feedback from Microsoft regarding this problem.

Yes, Laserdisc Support is Coming

Mame is going to (officially) have laserdisc support in the near future.  Look at what Aaron is proposing.  With that video format, a 30 minute laserdisc game is going to be 30gigs.  Sheesh!  Hard disk space is cheap, but this is huge.

But we have to remember Mame is an archival project, not an entertainment project (or they keep trying to tell us).  And if they include support for my favorite Laserdisc game (Cliffhanger), I’ll be happy.

Whiteboard stop motion

This is great.  Right up DeWeese’s alley.  In fact, the little bird that keeps making a recurring appearence in this movie reminds me exactly of a pic he sent me a couple weeks ago.  Just have to post it:

Vista will support EAX in games after all

Misleading title, and it takes a bit of reading to find out the news… But it appears that Creative is going to be doing a bit of dll wrapping inside of their driver.

Take the DirectSound3D calls, which are crippled in Vista, and then re-route them to appropriate OpenAL calls which remain EAX-enabled.  Nice.

Hmm…  Ramy knows someone at Creative who has very good experience with dll wrapping the OpenAL API…   I wonder if he has some hand in this. 
 

New release of this middleware supposedly creates paths without requiring any markup.  Might be neat to try it out.

PathEngine SDK Adds ‘Polygon Soup’ Content Process

Thousands of Doritos Washed Up on North Carolina Beach
Next, we’ll probably see a picture of birds with all of that cheezy stuff stuck to them.

Zamzar is a site that will do online file conversion.  You upload the file, and it emails you the converted file.  Could be useful if don’t want to mess around installing 3rd party utilities.

Oh wow!  I’ve been waiting for Keytraino ever since I read about it.  In fact, when I initially read it, I immediately google’d it and found no hits.  It was a cruel joke to recommend such a nifty utility that didn’t even exist.

But apparently it does and Coding Horror has found it.  This might just be the thing that convinces me to upgrade completely to VS2005:
KeyTraino for Visual Studio 2005