JB0

Correct, though by that time, the "winner" will already be established. I'm guessing here-HDMI and DVI are identical, save for the fact that HDMI carries audio signals, where DVI only carries video. Video cards would only have a DVI port because they handle nothing but video signals. I assume that some televisions only have a DVI port because their audio signals are relegated to some other device... 359066[/snapback] Yup, though HDMI can carry up to 12 bit video signals and DVI is maxxed at 8bit. Not that most people know the difference anyways. It's very safe to say that if you buy a new HDTV, make sure it has HDMI instead of DVI...though some people say you can just get an adapter, check any of the AV forums...people everywhere are finding the HDCP handshake screwing them whether it be an upconverting player, or set top HD cable box. 359082[/snapback] So DVI -> HDMI = guaranteed, but HDMI -> DVI = not necessarily? I know copy-protection on DVI is a lot spottier than on HDMI. * Didn't know about the max bittage diffrence. *I still say get an HDCP-stripping box. We did it with Macrovision, we can do it now.

That was exactly my point. I understand that the Pioneer ones are high end, but the other players are still over the 1K mark. They're ALL marketed as high-end. The PS3 will be THE mass-market BluRay player if it comes in at a game system cost and can actually play BluRay movies. A fair bit of that's duplication of effort. The stand-alone players have to have a LOT of horsepower to do that. "Just a player" is a MASSIVE understatement for a device that has to decode 1080p H.264 content in real-time. How much? Apple says : For 1920x1080 (1080p) video at 24 frames per second: * 3.0 Ghz Intel Pentium D (dual-core) or faster processor * At least 1GB of RAM * 64MB or greater video card * Windows 2000 or XP While this is a multitasking PC situation and not directly comparable, it bears contemplation. Think about how much less it takes to watch a DVD on your PC(720*480 MPEG2@60FPS). A 600MHz P3 should do it nicely if I recall. The Cell(it was always 1*) and nVidia graphics chip(custom) presumably have enough power between them to decode an H.264 stream(nVidia's recently made driver changes that allow their GPUs to assist in the H.264 decoding process), though that's yet to be demonstrated. *There's some confusion about the Cell architecture. There's 1 processor. Only one. It has 7 math coprocessors("vector processing units") attached to it, but it's still just 1 processor. I think they downgraded the PS3 to 5 active coprocessors due to yield issues. They're still making the 7-coproc chips, but this way 2 of them can have defects without the chip failing. Was easier than redesigning the chip to actually remove 2 VPUs.

Keep in mind those are stand-alone players, not bare drives. Furthermore, they're players targeted at the AV-phile market. That's a market where a CD player can cost 600 and a DVD player can cost 3 grand. But if HD-DVD can make it to mass-market first, they stand a real chance of winning. They already have backwards-compatibility out of the box. No extra parts required(BluRay needs a IR laser diode). They can make hybrid disks with a HD layer AND a regular DVD layer. That gives them the ability to sell a single disk to both markets. If they can win the wallets of the public early too, they can win. This depends in part on the PS3's price, as well as it's ability to play BluRay movies. As of this moment it's yet to prove it has the horsepower to decode H.264, and the fact that Sony showed it running MPEG2 video off a BluRay disk is making me wonder if it can do it, which I had taken as a given until today. http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2666&p=2 I didn't know that, and that totally sucks. HDMI cables are expensive, plus I only have one HDMI input, and I'm using it for my PC! I wonder how this affects Microsoft's planned HD-DVD attachment for the 360, since the 360 doesn't have an HDMI output? 2 options. 1. A passthrough cable. Connect the 360 to the HD-DVD, and the HD-DVD to the TV. 2. A new video cable. The 360 may be able to pass digital video and they just haven't released a cable yet. Didn't you know? Both formats use an "undefeatable" copy-protection scheme. </sarcasm>I'd bet there'll be a slew of players that can do it if you enter the secret code on the remote, similar to modern-day Macrovision-dodging DVD players. Especially since there's not a lot of sets out that support the copy-protection protocol even when they DO have HDMI ports. Anyways, HDMI cables will come down in price. And once they do, you can feed them into your PC and use someone's homebrew software to make perfect 1:1 copies without the encoding and degradation of the analog component cables, as the HDCP copy-protect scheme used on HDMI is already full of known flaws and easily cracked. Hmm, where have we heard that before?. Or just drop an external decoder like this one in the line. The MPAA will LOVE that.

Ooh, sorry bro, but me and the 360 are kinda... exclusive. I'm thinking about popping the question. You know she's been cheating on oyu, right?

It's not just us. Everyone in the japanese audio track says Mack-ross too. Even the guy doing the title song. Yes. So repeat performances are inherently inferior? Several people had issues with the disks splitting from the hub. There's not really a known cause. I don't think there's been a consistent pattern that anyone's noticed regarding purchase date, viewing frequency, or anything else. My best guess would be some of the disks got damaged during production just enough to start a crack later. Of course, with Animeigo's license expired, I don't see good odds for an exchange program. Could try hitting HG up for an exchange if your's start splitting.

Although it's possible, I haven't seen dvd audio getting any real support, so I doubt it will happen anytime soon. 358826[/snapback] CD can't have anything other than stereo. Redbook standard specifies 2 PCM channels, each one being 16-bit 44.1 KHz. DVD Audio and SACD are new standards, with new specs. Both have several copy protection mechanisms, and SACD includs an explicit banning of digital out in the players. And DTSES doesn't mean 8 channels. You can have 8 channels of raw PCM. DTS ES specifies a whole suite of things, including compression scheme and quality requirements. Essentially, DTS is Dolby Digital Plus. And many DVDAudio disks are in stereo. Almost all include a stereo soundtrack, simply because so many audiophiles have stereo setups. Anyways, DVDA and SACD are audiophile-exclusive, and likely to remain so. The mass market A. doesn't really hear the benefit and B. is moving towards an iTunes-style distribution scheme anyways.

We lack a ROFL smiley. This is unacceptable.

Most DVD drives today aren't CLV anymore. "Officially" and what is out there now are two different things. 358655[/snapback] I thought we were speaking in terms of game consoles. PS2 is CLV, and XBox is PROBABLY the same. 358772[/snapback] I thought the question about the drives were about the new ones(360 and PS3). So we were... I guess I got lost somewhere... M'kay. I'm still waiting for holographic storage. Drop-in plastic cubes with a terrabyte of space... *drools*

Most DVD drives today aren't CLV anymore. "Officially" and what is out there now are two different things. 358655[/snapback] I thought we were speaking in terms of game consoles. PS2 is CLV, and XBox is PROBABLY the same.

The CAV/CLV is a bit misleading, too. Aside from you got them reversed(DVD is officially CLV), speed is a variable term here. CLV is designed so that the data transfer rate is constant. If you view the CD as a single really long ribbon of 1s and 0s, the last bit is just as long as the first. CAV is designed so that the disk speed is constant. This means that data on the inside goes by faster than data on the outside. There's interesting side effects of both technologies. In CAV, a track on the outside of a disk reads far faster than one on the inside. In CLV, all areas of the disk have the same data transfer rate, but your rotational speed varies signifigantly. This is why hard drives are CAV, since you'd lose too much time to disk spin-up/spin-down. All modern disk designs(CD included) put more sectors in outer revolutions than inner ones, because it's a grotesque waste of space to put the same # of bits in the vastly larger outer tracks area as the tiny inner ones. Past about 12x, CD-ROM drives reverted from the CLV spec'ed by the original CD standard to CAV, because they couldn't actually spin the disk faster. If you spin a disk at 52x CLV, when you get to the inside of the disk, it'll be spinning fast enough that it literally explodes. Even if the disk is reinforced with kevlar, it still tears apart. High-speed DVD drives also transitioned from the original CLV spec to CAV. The PS2 uses a 4X DVD, which was the high end for CLV. It should have a constant data rate. XBox is being listed as 2-5x DVD, presumably due to the fact that MS has changed DVD-ROM models several times during the XBox' life. Logically, the XBox drive should read all games at the same rate to avoid compatibility issues, but logic rarely enters into hardware design. If it's reading games at 5x, I think it's reading them in CAV mode for at least part of the disk. Speaking of which, it would be nice if game designers actually worked to REDUCE loading speed with this new generation. Nothing like playing a game designed for the Gamecube with nearly undetectable load times, and then hopping over to a PS2 game and being forced to sit through ridiculous loading. 358604[/snapback] Some do. Ikaruga, as an example, is completely full to the brim on the Dreamcast. BUT it's almost all empty space. There's a huge dummy file to get the data away from the small inner tracks to the large outer ones, which minimizes load time because you can fit more data on the outside, so there's far less seek time. If the data had landed on the hub at the beginning of the disk, teh laser head would do a lot of dancing back and forth as it loaded data. If I recall, they did the same thing on the 'Cube version. Even with a full disk, there's ways to exploit the disk layout. If you're creative, you can stick the most commonly accessed data towards the outside, so that there's minimal tracking, and the less frequently used data on the inside since the performance hit for a 1-shot FMV is far less than a set of textures that's loaded every time you go through a door.

You forgot definition 2. 2. something not found on the internet

HG says he didn't, and won't, and the fans need to get over it because having him cap that zentradi in cold blood was too mean.

But will there be rioting fans wearking t-shirts that say "Hikaru shot first!" after the platinum edition but before the Diamond one?

Have yet to kill anybody, but have spent a lot of time over the years training quite extensively with knives, guns, swords, sticks and bare-hand for the day I may have to. Homeless people don't bother me, It's queue jumpers and people that talk in the cinema that really piss me off. Graham 358417[/snapback] Removing line-cutters and theater talkers is a very worthy cause, and we all support you in this endevour, even if it comes at the cost of MW.

Sony can eat a loss for a while. Also, there's no indicator of how much of a BluRay player is the actual drive, whcih is all PS3 needs. Why is 1x too slow? Remember, 1x on BluRay isn't the same as 1x on DVD or 1x on CD(both of which are diffrent speeds). Telling what sort of load times you'll get is fairly difficult without knowing actual data transfer rates.

Of course, ePSXe and PSXeven provide graphical boosts too. AND let you save. Actually, the DC doesn't emu the SNES very well. Tends to have trouble keeping up. Genesis was about the max that could be pulled off without someone expending the effort to create a new DC-optimized emu instead of porting an existing emu. Which in the SNES' case was the sluggish SNES9x(development seemed to have been going in this direction, but all 4 emus stalled out before they got there). And with all the DC SNES stuff dead, the improvements being made to SNES emus NOW(SNES emulation is a LOT worse than it looks at first glance) aren't being integrated.

I think once sales start to slump, we'll see the Macross Criterion edition, with 8-channel DTS ES and CG special effects edited in.

Teh bracelets are good. The 300HP bonus may not seem like much, but it adds up after a few levels. Especially for hard mode, where you can get it from level 1. I just passed one around and slapped it on whoever was closest to level up, though. Don't need to keep a lot of 'em. The emerald necklace is good too. 100 extra CP at levelup. Basically, every time someone approaches level up, you should slap both of those on 'em. Though you have to be careful when draining the XP orb for a new character. It's VERY easy to max their CP with an emerald necklace. Won't kill you or anything, but it slows skill growth down a bit.

Riiiiiight.

Good priority. Also, it's a good idea to see what items can transmute to before you use them. Several transmute into a much better item, especially with skill books.

I'll be glad to bitch and moan at A1 if he gets the post. Regardless of if he updates or not... he'll slip... oh yes he will... 358361[/snapback] I already said that my goal is an online wasteland (like a post-apochalyptic feel)... Nothing but insults for having opinions and the least fair modding possible. We will all be intoxicated with the howls of laughter and glory as we see the innocent suffer! (Basically, if you are a pussy, you will be punished) AAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!!! 358369[/snapback] Translation: The death of the forums.

Could try gAIM. It's a pretty functional alternative AIM client, in my experience. Sounds like as good a reason as any.

There's no way to permanently alter the CP gauge in any way. It's all based on what weapon you're using. The XP orb is your friend. I suspec tthe "better" is because it lets you allocate all the capacity points they would gain through level ups(be careful, it's REALLY easy to run that up to 999 while doling out XP orb points). ... How dare they have 2 diffrent and unrelated CPs? Charge points and capacity points makes it easy to get confused when using acronyms. Like I said, CP gems are good too. But only in some situations, while XP gems are ALWAYS good. ... Item drops are also governed by the XP gem rules. So every time you're knocking XP gems out, you've got a chance of getting an item instead of an XP gem. Taht's always good too.

And it's missing a left arm.

If there IS a proper PS1 emulator for the Dreamcast, it sucks super monkey balls and isn't worth teh time it takes to download. The DC just doesn't have enough power to run a general-purpose PS emulator.