lylo

That unfortunately is correct, and since the only problem is with .wmv files it does seem like a bit of a carry on. I suppose its up to you which you prefer, but I just thought that might come in handy for some.

Aww cool!

Hmm if its just a general purpose rig then I'd say go for the 512mb. I also have PC2100 ram, and when I first got this system it only had 256mb, and I even intended to play games on it as much as I could. After increasing to 512mb there was a huge performance jump and so I would recommend more RAM. I now have 768mb and there was still quite a small boost in the performance I got. I'd say to anybody now that 512mb should be a strict minimum for computers today heh. So yes, if the memory would be fully compatible (I have no idea about mixing different speeds when it comes to memory), throw it in there

Ok folks, been a while since I posted in here, so I'm hoping this one will help alot of people out. It's not a permanant solution but for me this has worked a charm: I recently discovered a Firefox extenstion which, when configured correctly will open up ANY type of media stream (including WMV), in your default media player (Which can easily be configured). I went to big-boys.com with this plugin enabled and normally, you'd just be left there with a blank page or a box saying 'download plugin' even with the WMLite packages (or at least in my experience), but with this new extension, the page will load up, and you'll have a black box with a couple of controls, and if you set it up right during installation, your media player will automatically load up and stream the video. Sure it isn't embedded into the page, but hey, youre actually getting the media this time around eh? I feel this is a very convenient little package and I recommend you all to try it out if you're having streaming problems under Firefox : Anyway, you can find the extension at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=446

Yes, I'm yet to be convinced by the PSP, its uncomfortable (or at least I thought it was), the analog stick is simply retarded and Sony have made no effort to at least TRY and resolve the dead pixel problems which alot of people are having. The console is overpriced and the only ways to get the BEST out of them are completely illegal anyway, so unless you wanna crack into one, don't bother. The DS is innovative, great fun to play, and the wireless multiplayer with only ONE copy of the game needed simply cannot be beaten. And Nintendogs is just the cutest thing ever to grace a handheld!

I have tried Dreamcast emulation before actually Chankast does actually seem to be quite stable, I managed to get Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure and Metropolis Street Racer (God I LOVE that game!), working fine on my system.... Well I say fine, although my system definitely wasn't powerful enough to have them running at least 50 fps which sucked, but yes they did seem to be fine, and I'd love to try them on a nice fast rig

PS1 emulation is near perfect Jeremy, and PS2 emulation is making great progress. It simply cannot be denied that as technology advances, so will people's knowledge of how to use it, get around it, and work it into whatever. There was one point where NES emulation was near impossible. There was once a point when SNES, Mega Drive, Playstation, N64 emulation was impossible. There was once a time when PS2, X-Box and GC emulation was impossible but its all coming along now. In maybe even a years time or so (It's quite likely), I think at least PS2 games will be completely playable on powerful enough systems.

Heh, that certainly wasnt your tone a few posts ago But never mind eh!

Final Fantasy X has made great progress with that emulator I think http://www.ngemu.com/index.php?action=post&id=1887

Thank you Jason, I was getting a lil annoyed there but you said it all for me heh. I am admittedly a Nintendo fanboy at heart since I've grown up with them all my life, but I at least have an open mind about things so I can see whats going on and comment about it. I'd just like to ask Blam-O what his favourite games are that Sony have developed. What games have Sony developed that you or the mass PS2 audience absolutely love? Sony rely on 3rd Party developers to bring the best software out for their consoles. Granted, Nintendo doesn't have a great deal of 3rd party support, because they dont really need it as bad as Sony when the quality of their own brand games outshines alot of stuff out there today. Yes they use the same franchises over and over again but no way at all do they make the same games over and over. Also, any of the 3rd party support Nintendo does have, is working brilliantly for them as it is, Capcom and Squaresoft should be the only allies Nintendo need! Hmm... throw Konami in that mix too! Call this a crazed fanboy's opinion but I do think the following is solid fact: Nintendo suck at advertising, of course they do, the european and western markets are scared of innovation where as the east lap it up. If Nintendo got their act together and showed the Gamecube and Revolution for what it really is, they would blow Sony and Microsoft into the dust.

All you need to do is keep close eyes on www.ngemu.com for all your current/next generation emulation needs As for X-Box, you'd be lucky mate :/ The only X-Box emulator that is showing any real progress can play 2 games, Turok and Halo, and neither of them play that well anyway. There hasnt been much news on the X-Box emu scene lately anyway, so I'm afraid to say it will be along time before youre playing your XB titles on your PC, which is gonna have to be a powerful rig anyway to get them going.

Unfortunately it IS a brand computer that was bought at some crap retail outlet over 2 years ago now. Gotta wub e-Machines eh?

I appreciate you clearing that matter up for me Marthax, but take for example the final link on my original post, we BOTH have the same CPU's, Intel Celerons, with mine being about 300mhz or so faster than his/hers. We both have the same graphics cards, the FX5200, both with 128mb memory. I have 768mb ram where they have 512. And yet this person scores the highest marks out of all the links I posted. Physically and down on paper, my system should out perform that one right? EDIT: BTW Metzen, I just reformatted my system today lol, I've thrown Windows 2K on there, just out of curiousity really plus it was about time my rig could have done with a clean out. MSConfig doesn't work on 2K, although if I remember right there is an equivalent command for it. I'm gonna install 3DMark 2001 on here later tonight and hopefully my results may show an improvement. Heres hopeing!

Like I said before, the reason I find it worrying is because there are actually less powerful systems out there than mine (In terms of the amount of RAM installed and the CPU speed) that manage to score nearly double what I did using the same benchmark tests. That can only suggest to me that something is wrong

Ok, first of all let me start of by saying that I don't have the greatest computer in the world and I realise this, here are my specs: Intel Celeron 1.8 Ghz. 768MB Ram (PC2100), GeForce FX5200 (128MB, PCI) Onboard AC97 Sound I know little about hardware in computers (I'm more of a software techie than anything), but my motherboard is a IM845GL (Built by Trigem I think), with PhoenixBios. My family bought this computer nearly 3 years ago and this is our first computer, ever since I've used it myself for gaming and have always yearned for more performance. This has gone to adding extra hardware (Ram and the video card) and ripping the guts out of the operating systems I use, which I do feel have brought results. However, today for the first time I ran 3DMark2001 SE through the recommendation of a friend, and the results were a very worrying find. The full results can be found at http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8625827 I only received 3305 points from the benchmarking tests! Like I said I'm no hardware expert but a mate who knows much more about the hardware side of things than I said those results aren't even funny and that I should be extremely worried about anything that may be going wrong with my system. He further backed this up with other user's results as well as his own which can be found at http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=2426058 http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=5100148 The CPU speed in these are slightly less than mine, although other areas, ram and video memory are much lower and yet the results of them came 500 points or so less than mine! http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=6706063 This is the one though that got me feeling bad. In nearly every area this system is the same as mine, and is clearly less powerful than mine physically, a 1.4 Celeron to mine, a 1.8. 512MB to 768, and yet this guy scored nearly twice as many points as I did! I know my system sucks but I know now for a fact that I should be gaining much more performance than I am, I'm also worried by one certain factor on there that I dont understand, every page but mine, the results show an FSB page of at least 100mhz or whatever, I have a FSB speed of 0mhz! What the hell does this mean?! Whats strange to me is that for the two years or so I've played on this system I've always thought its been fine, I've had average to medium performance from modern games and good performance from older titles which I'd expect. But to find out there are less powerful rigs that are outperforming me by miles just.... I don't know what to think of it! If anyone has any suggestions that do NOT involve buying new hardware (Because simply, I cant afford so and don't need the hassle right now), that may help me squeeze out more points from my system, please help me out. Surely what I'm getting from this can't be right... ...Surely?

The setup I've used for months now with very little hassle is made up of 2 players. the latest Winamp for all my music/audio needs (Just make sure you set that as your default audio file player), and Media Player Classic for the video side of things, its playlist capabilities do suck but on the other hand it is one of the lightest players out there while still being one of the most functional. Install the Quicktime and Realplayer alternatives alongside it, and youll have a fully working video media player that plays nearly all types straight off A very solid and lightweight setup

Yeah its for real, to you guys who dont know much about Derren Brown, please do check him out and find as much as you can about him. The guy is just awesome. He has such a knowledge about the way the human mind works he can do pretty much anything he wants with people, I suppose you could refer to him as a hypnotist in one sense but he can do so much more beyond that. One thing you guys should definitely try to find is footage of this guy playing Russian Roulette. He had to pick one person out of a group of hundreds from all over the country through auditions etc, to be the second person to help him out. They weren't going to actually play it with him, what the second person did is load the gun for him, spin the chamber etc (The revolver was specially designed so that there was no way anyone could see what chamber held a bullet after the gun was loaded.) and then hand the gun to Derren. He had to 'read' the other persons mind (for lack of a better bunch of words), to find out which chamber held the bullet. If he believed that the current chamber didn't hold the bullet he'd point the gun to his own head and pull the trigger thinking he was safe. When he'd come to what he thought was the chamber with the bullet, he'd point the gun away and shoot. This was broadcast live over the UK and it was absolutely fantastic, it got especially tense when he discovered that the chamber he thought had the bullet didn't actually fire at all, and so from this he had kinda got it wrong (He'd already gone through about 2 chambers before), and after that it was so tense as he was actually stuck! Luckily he didn't blow his head off lol

I get a few problems with the sound as well. I do get those snaps and clicks occasionally and slight jumps in the music (even though i installed the game and the music to my hard drive). The annoying one that gets me though is in story sequences when characters are speaking, I sometimes find that I lose the sound in one channel and that it might from time to time switch to left from right/vice versa. Sometimes I lose volume on the voices and it suddenly goes from loud to quiet/vice versa! I'm loving the game so far although there are a few minor niggles with it though. Rockstar will very likely produce a patch for the game sooner or later.

Thanks for the tips DigitalFrost and Aegis, I think I'll leave this for now but I'm gonna keep a very close eye on this Also Aegis, when you do get back into working on this, what are your next few aims or objectives to reach for the project. I don't know a whole lot about ripping crap out of windows (up to now I've just been following guides and doing everything step by step), but if you want somebody to test what you come out with, I'd be more than happy to try out whatever you come up with.

Is this right?! # I'm positive I pulled this whole thing off right lol, and apart from losing 16/32 bit colour as well as being unable to change my screen properties, I haven't actually gained a huge amount of free space from this. The screenshot shows VMWare with the fresh installation of XP Pro SP2 after its rebooted (and gone through the deletion and minilogon) and I've still got well over a GB used up, that said, I think XP installs to around 1.8GB. I don't wanna sound as if I'm p***ed or anything so I'll apologise if I'm giving that impression, but its just that I thought this was going for a minimalist kinda thing. untitled.bmp

Hmm, I appreciate that Aegis must be a bit sick of seeing posts relating to this lol, but I have encountered a slight problem I wonder if anyone can help me with. I downloaded the reg file and the batch file to copy the required system32 files to the mininstall folder. That worked out ok and I had the folder ready with those files backed up. Because of this I thought that I could now simply delete every file in system32 (and just replace the ones deleted of course) so I highlited them all and hit the delete, but there were alot of files that weren't even on the required list that were denied for deletion so I couldn't touch them at all. Might I add that this was a fresh installation of Windows XP Pro SP2 on VMWare. If anyone knows how I can get those files deleted easily, I'd very much appreciate it. *EDIT* Never mind, I'm gonna try out Digital Frosts method, but I've been on this for a good couple of hours or so now so I'm gonna leave it and do it tomorrow lol Also digifrost, just a couple of questions: 1. What is CAD_Trap that comes with the package and is it at all nessecary for what is intended with this thread? 2. Will just whacking the OEM folder in my XP cd (Like I would a normal unattended cd) also do all of the minilogon stuff for me. Maybe I overlooked the files and what they do but I didn't quite catch if the minilogon reg is also applied. Thanks

Don't worry about it! I've been keeping a very close eye on this thread and although initially confused I feel now after going over it a few more times I can take this on and pull it off. So for just that alone I'll thank you for the huge effort you have made! And it sounds like you deserve a 'break' as you so put it lol, enjoy it! Chill out B)

Once I got into nLite I was reformatting my computer at least twice a week at one point, I got so hooked on my own idea of 'the perfect' XP disc I stopped at nothing to create it! After a new nLite release I'd probably be reformatting again so on. However though I'm glad to say that phase has kinda died out, my current XP install I've had running since March 12th, I think I made it with nLite 0.98 beta 8 or something (cant quite remember) but up to now I've had no problems at all However with that 1.0 release drawing ever nearer I think I might have to be making one last 'perfect' cd lol. It's running brilliantly, and I will NEVER go back to an XP installation ever again that hasn't been ripped to shreds by my own hand lol. PS. Sonu27, for a user friendly Linux distro, I recommend Fedora Core 3 Technically its not the best distrobution to show off the true power of the penguin but its a great start with a good learning curve so beginners can get around it and enjoy it at the same time. Of course you could try a LiveCD; Knoppix (recommended), Ubuntu, Debian (I think they do Live discs)

Not exactly. An example of this is Starcraft and Warcraft. Both games are pretty much the most played RTS games of all times. Every other RTS game out there pretty much copy how those two games are played. If you were to introduce a new way to play a specific genre, it won't be readily accepted by the gaming community, if at all. That's mostly why many developers don't stray too far from the standards, it's just too risky to their business. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You're absolutely right there, but that is the reason why I gave up on PS2 and XBox, I can admit I am a Nintendo Fanboy, but I will also add that I'm one of those guys who can keep a pretty open mind on everything. I'm 18 years old and have been gaming since I was 4 or 5, very young anyway. So I've grown up with pretty much every mainstream console there has been and have seen how alot of the developers work. The first of the 128-bit consoles I had was a PS2, now I loved this don't get me wrong, games such as FF-X, Kingdom Hearts, Devil May Cry and of course the GTA's kept me pretty hooked to it. It suddenly dawned upon me though that I was getting bored of it. EA were churning out the same rubbish everyday in sequel form, Gran Turismo had just gotten boring (GT2 will always rule all heh), and I was now able to get the GTA's on the PC which play a whole lot better. I sold my PS2 and got a Gamecube with that, and I've always been happy with Nintendo's reputation as a fun first party developer and they didn't let me down here either. Sure they may use the same FRANCHISES over and over again, but they constantly persist to make the game around those franchises different and original and most importantly, fun! Mario Kart Double Dash is one of the best multiplayer experiences you'll ever play. Pikmin will first have you thinking 'WTF!' then you'll grow very quickly to love it. Animal Crossing might just destroy your social life. Wario Ware is also a fantastic MP experience, and of course theres Zelda which needs no explanation. Keeping to a safe formula is ok, but can you not say you get bored every now and then when the seemingly same games always get released? Nintendo I feel are still able to come up with new formulas and make them work, they've admitted they're not going for technology but for innovation with the Revolution, and that is why they have my vote. For all you PS2 and XBox owners, pick up a gamecube please and pick up one of Nintendo's own titles with it. Considering how cheap they are now they'll be MORE than worth it. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE forget this stupid idea that alot of PS2 and XBox owners have that Gamecube is for kids, they couldn't be more wrong. Gamecube is for gamers. And what is gaming all about in the first place? Fun. Oh, and don't forget, back-compatible with EVERY nintendo, wireless Wi-Fi play that if it follows the same line as the DS, WILL BE FREE! HAH!

LMAO, lets just say I'm one of those guys with WAY too much spare time and a will to waste it somehow! 2166.34 huh? Beat 8539.64 A mate of mine linked me to a picture of one guy who had a score of 14000+ which is what I want to beat... I then got shown a picture of a guy who had well over 40000..... and then another of someone with 96000+ That kinda pooped on my parade!