Tim Smalley’s weblog

We talk about a lot of things in the office to help pass the time by - a lot of these topics focus around general industry trends because, after all, when you get a bunch of geeks together in a small space, they tend to talk about all things geeky. One topic that has really stuck out in my mind recently was one that Joe recently wrote a column about.

He asked what was the game that turned you into a hardcore gamer. There’s already an interesting discussion going on in the article comments and I’m really surprised by some of the responses.

The game that led me down the path of no return was Asteroids on the Atari 2600. I don’t know whether that’s me showing my age, or just me developing at an early point in my life, but I couldn’t get enough of that game. What’s great then is that an updated version was released on the Xbox Live Arcade.

I purchased it in an instant… without thinking twice. I knew I could go back to my childhood, playing a game that I used to play almost religiously… or at least when my parents didn’t tell me it was time to do some homework, or because Coronation Street was on. Yeah, I hated that show - it got between me and my game and I never liked anything coming between me and my game.

The game that really got me into PC gaming was probably Civilization - I used to play that game during my lunchtime at school. We had to break into the school network to get it installed, but that effort was well worth it. We then followed up with Civ2 when that came out in 1996, as it added multiplayer support over the network (well, technically it was introduced with CivNet in 1995, but we were quite content with Civ at the time)… but damn, that game sucked up a lot of my time.

I could go on and on about the games that I’ve been crazy about… but nothing comes close to Asteroids and Civ for me. Anyway, we’re interested to hear as many different angles as possible on this - please share your own experiences with us in the comment thread.

Ever since Nvidia launched its GeForce 9600 GT, I’ve been pondering a number of things - the biggest one being ‘why now?’. There are many cards in the performance mainstream market, and I think the problem boiled down to the fact that Nvidia was caught off guard by the Radeon HD 3850.

The result was a slew of cards from the green team that didn’t really compete with ATI’s excellent mid-range offering and just served to confuse the market. So what we’ve ended up with is The Sea of Grey, as I’ve coined it.

The problem is that because there are so many good-to-great products, the consumer doesn’t know where to start. Is the 9600 GT better value than the 8800 GT? What about the 8800 GS? And where do ATI’s cards fit into the picture?

Well, I hope that this article goes some way to answering the questions - I’d stick to the GeForce 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3850 512MB cards… and if you need something that’s in between the two (in terms of price), look at the GeForce 9600 GT.

A few weeks back now, me and Geoff landed on quite an awesome deal to upgrade our home cinema setup. Not only did it include a 50″ Samsung DLP HDTV, a 5.1 Dolby/DTS amp, DVD player and speaker set, but more importantly an Xbox 360.

I’ve been looking to get an Xbox 360 for a while, but I couldn’t justify buying one brand new - I’m not an avid console gamer, but I certainly enjoy playing some games on consoles in front of the TV. For example, I went out and bought a PS2 to play GT3, and then sold it once I’d completed the game. I then went and bought a PS2 slim to play GT4.

One game that I’ve really got into was Gears of War - normally that wouldn’t surprise anyone, because it is a truly awesome game, but it surprised quite a few of the guys in the office because they know I’m a usually in the “FPS games belong on the PC” mindset. While Gears isn’t first person, it’s still a shooter - a bloody good one at that.

I also really enjoyed Bioshock on the Xbox 360 too, arguably more than I enjoyed it on the PC when I had the chance to play an early build of both versions at 2K Games’ offices in July. That game, in particular, has left me in a bit of a sticky situation - I want to play the PC version because that’s my heritage when it comes to first person shooters, but I found myself really enjoying the 360 version too… so much so, that I think I might have to buy both versions of the game.

Anyway, the real point of this post was that I finally signed up to an Xbox Live Gold account yesterday, so if you fancy handing my ass to me in Gears (I’m not particularly good, yet…), I’ll see you online - my gamertag is “mitmitmit“.

It’s been coming for a while, but today I can finally say that I’m the Editor of bit-tech.net. Over the last few months, I’ve been running bit-tech but I’ve not had the title to go with the job - instead, I’ve been on a trial period to prove that I was up to the task.

I didn’t doubt for a minute that I wouldn’t be able to handle the job though, as I announced that I would be taking over the Editorial Reins at bit-tech in April. Since that announcement though I have had a few very tough months in my personal life and without the help of the other guys that work with me on bit-tech, I don’t know where I would be today. One thing is for sure though: the site wouldn’t have continued to progress in the way it has.

Things are moving along like a well-oiled machine at the moment with everyone pulling in the same direction. The changes we’ve made to the site have generally gone down pretty well in the community and there are some more community-orientated changes to follow in the future. I’ve always been a very community focused guy when it comes to bit-tech, because becoming a member of bit-tech’s truly awesome community was ultimately how I ended up getting a job working for the site… and look where that has got me today.

I received an email this morning from Michal Brichacek, a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan who is cycling from Alaska to Panama - over 12,000km - in order to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

I wouldn’t call myself an avid charitable donor, but this is something that is extremely close to my heart, as earlier this year my fiancée was diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer. I can’t begin to describe what a horrible disease cancer is - it has been a truly devastating experience for everyone that is close to me and Kai, but one thing that it has done is bought both of our families much closer together in order to collectively fight the disease.

On my recent trip to Taiwan for this year’s Computex trade show, I decided to read Lance Armstrong’s book, It’s Not About The Bike, instead of watching the in-flight entertainment. It’s a quite simply legendary story where Armstrong tells all in his fight against cancer. It’s a must-read for anyone that is looking for some inspiration.

Having seen both the effects of cancer (and the treatment) first hand, and read Lance Armstrong’s story, this was an ideal opportunity for me to donate.

Michal is currently in San Francisco and has already covered almost 5,300km in his first 45 days on the road. You can follow his progress on his website, Cycling For A Cause and, no matter how big or small, please support his amazing journey - he’s attempting to raise $1 USD for every kilometre he covers!

MySpace has said that it is launching a news aggregation service under called MySpace News in the second quarter of this year. It will rely on both algorithms and user rating (basically a combination of Google News and Digg).

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It’s surprising that the venerable JPEG image compression standard, which dates back to 1986, is still the best we can do for photographic image compression. There’s a sequel of sorts to JPEG known as JPEG 2000 and it’s the logical heir to the JPEG throne. JPEG 2000 promises higher image quality in conjunction with much smaller file sizes.

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Here’s an interesting article that talks about the costs of leaving your PC on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ll be surprised how much it uses, even when its sitting idle. To some extent, I disagree with the author’s comments about not using high-end kit. Providing you’re responsible when it comes to turning your PC off when it isn’t being used, I don’t see a problem with enjoying the marvels of high-end CPUs and graphics cards. Leaving a PC sitting idle isn’t good for the environment, no matter how energy efficient you think it is.

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BFG Tech’s GeForce 8800 GTX Watercooled Edition…

It took me a while to get the thing up and running because BFG Tech supplied me with the wrong hose clamps. I ended up driving around Camberley looking for some suitable hose clamps to keep the hose from my Corsair Nautilus 500 secure. I finally ended up at a rather small plumbing supplies store, where they charged me 80 pence for a pair of 12-18mm screw-down hose clips. So far they’ve worked awesomely.

I bought my Dell 30″ Orgasmatron™ home from work so that I could test the card in an enclosed enviroment, since most of my testing at work is done on an open test bed. I wanted to record some temperature readings inside a real chassis, as end users looking to buy the card aren’t going to install it in an open test bed. I’ll probably bring an air-cooled GeForce 8800 GTX home later in the week, too.

I’ll let you know how it goes - I’m hoping to have a decent gaming session this evening.

After years of slow moving, it seems the whole industry went into a tizzy in July. Has this world lost its mind? The author of this article doesn’t think so, and he thinks he’s found the key that makes it all come together. Could Raytracing be the future, and will it be with us sooner than we think? Really insightful read.

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