XBOX Elite

Microsoft’s never going to give up :-) The console war continues & the newest solider to enter is the latest version of the XBOX, the XBOX Elite which was confirmed by Microsoft. It’s planned to hit the Shelves by the 29th of April 2007.

So what’s new with the XBOX Elite???

Looks wise the XBOX Elite is awesome. The sleek black, give’s the Nintendo’s Wii a run for it’s money. I kind of feel that the XBOX Elite now looks more like a PS3? How many of you folks agree on that? Still gotta give it to Microsoft for the look it’s given the XBOX Elite.

The next important feature is the 120 Gig Hard disk. [This is the reason for the high cost of the Elite]. So that’s something that Sony had not anticipated, with the PS3 having a max of 60 Gigs to offer. So thumbs up Microsoft. :-) The 120 Gig Hard disk was also available to use with the XBOX 360, as a saperate accessory. Buying that along with the XBOX 360, costed as much as the XBOX Elite.


The third aspect is the introduction of the wireless controllers. The same as in an PS3.Can’t these console manufactures come up with something more innovative? Huh !!!

The 4th addition, a HDMI [ High Definition Multimedia Interface] output. At last it’s sunk into the heads of the makers of the XBOX Elite that people have started using HDTV’s.

So what is Microsoft actually targeting at? Nintendo’s Wii has been selling a lot more units than the PS3 or XBOX, doesn’t this really worry Sony or Microsoft. Well the Wii is targeted more towards being a Family oriented console & spokesperson’s from Microsoft say that once a Wii user turns 14 , he would be looking for something more & that some thing more is the XBOX Elite!!!! I have no clue how do they come up with these kind of statistics.

So how much does the XBOX Elite cost. 400 US$ that’s what been out in the news papers today morning. The Wii costs 1 quarter of that, no wonder they’re selling like hot cakes :-)

A survey conducted suggested that only 45 % - 50% of the users of the XBOX use it for gaming. The rest use it more for other media related activities. Sony’s PS3 & Microsoft’s XBOX Elite have been built, to suit the profile of a Media Hub, rather than a Gaming console. It’s like many companies trying to get out set top boxes, where everything in your house is connected to it & it’s behaves like the centralized Hub.


Overall the XBOX Elite looks like it’s going to have a big market, I seem to notice that Microsoft’s finally delivering what Hardcore Gamer wants, his console to have the looks, the style & of course better technology.

But there's this one thing that I cant understand is, Why is Microsoft trying to release the XBOX Elite, without adding the functionality of a HD-DVD player ??

So lets see what the XBOX Elite can really deliver, once we get our Hands on it :-)

Check out this blog, for more awesome images links of the Elite. http://metalmods.info/blog

Copyright © Dennis D Maliekal
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Blu-Ray Vs HD-DVD… The War Continues….

In Jan 2007, Korean Electronic Giant LG decided to go for it, the Dual player that plays both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. So where does this really lead to? The end of the war, where the consumer finally is happy with something that supports both?

Well I see that this kind of a player will only help a small segment of undecided buyers. Most others have decided on what they really want, but since the new generation players a burn in the pocket, the consumer himself is playing a wait & watch game.

The dual players are again a lot more expensive? So how long are these players going to survive? Well the answer lies with what Movie studios & game developers decide. The final format that they think is the best one to support. The reason behind this is the huge storage needed now, is only for better quality movies & high graphics games. If it is for any other purpose, a DVD should really suffice when it comes to storage.

So when it comes to the wait & watch policy, who are the other electronic giants doing it? HP & Samsung seems to be the only other companies that have openly agreed to support both the formats. Ruling out HP as a "player" manufacture, but as only a Drive manufacturer, Samsung seems to be the next in the lead to make a dual player.

Are they going to make it? Well they are looking at LG’s success as a benchmark & would go on with it only if LG succeeds. So what the big deal with having both the formats on a single player? Nothing much for a consumer, except that you have a choice of buying what format you feel like.

How is it different for a retailer? Warner Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer stated in a press release that "The retailer wants to sell hardware and doesn't want to be forced into stocking two formats for everything". So what does Warner come up with a Dual Format Disc, which has Blu-Ray on one side and HD-DVD on the other. So all that the consumer has to do is pick up what he needs and play it on whatever kind of player he has at home.

Doesn’t all of these seem a unnecessary? Why cant we just have one format and get on with it? Well all I could think of with this is that Corporations have gotta make money & how best to do that? Force more on to the consumer. It’s us who finally pays :-|

I have no clue as to how long is this war's going to go. If Pioneer has their way with the UV Disc ( See my previous post). The Blu-ray & the HD-DVD both gotta did their grave.

Copyright © Dennis D Maliekal
Look at the main page of the blog for more on Optical Media & Other Cool Stuff, the link to main page is THIS

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Ultra Violet Disc (UVD), The next Generation of Optical Storage.

The Blu-ray Disc’s just out & it seems to be obsolete already???? Talk of the town, with the community who’s crazy with optical storage is the way Pioneer come out with their new disc called the Ultra Violet Disc.

So what’s so special about this circular chap, who stores data? Nothing much, all that it can do is store around 510 GB ;-) !!!!!!!

Yup, you read it right, FIVE HUNDRED AND TEN Giga Bytes of raw storage!!!!

The way that this is done is by using an Ultra Violet beam to read and write to the Disc, which basically can let you have pits & lands 20 times closer than what they are in a Blu-ray disc. The distance between the pits is around 70 nanometer, which is like a single hair split a thousand times. Boy that sure is small.

When is this dude hitting the markets? Well pioneer as of now says that this is available only in there labs in Japan. They are themselves not sure as to when it could be commercially possible for this to come out. This was a lot similar to the press statements in 2002 – 2003, when the Blu-ray was to be out too. So I guess another 2 -3 years from now… we have a 12 cm disc that store half a Tera Byte.

I actually vaguely remember reading about this disc in How stuff works (I was working on a technical presentation on the Blu-ray disc for my College Project), but they then were themselves (i.e. How Stuff Works) not sure of the technology.

Well anyways, let’s see what the futures got in store!! Till then, way to go guys who’re making it technology like this possible :-)

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PSP : Wallpaper With Waves

Ever wondered how cool would you PSP look with custom wallpaper and with waves on it. As you see in the above pic, its my XMB(Home Screen) with wallpaper made by me. Now how do I have a wallpaper with waves ?
Its very simple, all you have to do is just make any of your favorite picture in a 480x272 size. You can use photoshop for doing this, its simplest in it. Now save the file with name '01-12.bmp' (without quotes). Now you are done with you wallpaper, lets flash it to the PSP then.

For 3.03Oe-C
Enter the recovery mode of you psp by holding R at startup. Go to advanced and then select toggle USB (flash 0). Now on you computer you should see the new device. Open up the drive which your computer assigns to your PSP (e.g. E:). Here you will see some folders, click on folder 'vsh'. Again you see some folders, click on the folder resource. Just copy the wallpaper you just made on this screen. Make sure the name of the file is '01-12.bmp'. Just make a back-up of your original file from psp and copy your custom wallpaper here. And that's it, you have a wallpaper with waves.

MY NEW BLOG

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Free up your flash0

Most you of you owning a PSP would have always wanted to modify the look of your XMB. Yes it is a very cool thing but if you are n00b, you would not be able to tweak your XMB completely. Reason is that $ony left only left around 200kb for you to play with. Now the actual capacity you can have to tweak is 2.5 MB!
That means almost everything to tweak.

Procedure of freeing up space in flash0:
All you have to do just the download the homebrew FlashAgent F4, and copy the folders according to your firmware. The first time you will run FlashAgent, it will automatically detect your free space and will ask you if you have to free up space in flash0. Just accept that and Voila! You have 2.5MB for tweaking.

Look at the main page of the blog for more on the PSP & Other Cool Stuff, the link to main page is THIS

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Games & Gaming: The Past, The Present & The Future.

The first video games that I used to play as a kid were on an 8 bit console by a Chinese manufacturer called the Dendy. The console had games where I could shoot aliens & it made all these jazzy sounds like a ping, pong, boom, and various other sounds, which mobiles in the early 90’s used to make. Games like BomberMan, Contra & Mario were my all time favorites. In fact the first time that I could finish Mario was a day of celebration. My friends were all there to cheer me, when I rescued the princess in the final level.
So what’s the difference between the games of then and that of today? And what will be the difference between the games of today & that of games released 7 – 10 years from now???

The biggest difference between the games that I play on my 6th & 7th Generation consoles vs. the 8bit console is the Graphics that are rendered in the game. The princess that I saved in Mario was more like a white patch on the screen with an orange tuft on the top portion of the white patch (the head & the body). Both the color patches put together looked vaguely like a character which was supposed to resemble a human. Compare it to the graphics that is delivered by the XBOX, PS3 or the Wii. This Comparison is like trying to compare the horseless carriages of 18th century & the Ferrari.

Game developers then avoided humans in their games. Designing human like characters required a lot of work & extreme programming skills. Game engines were science fiction then. That’s the reason game developers satisfied themselves with aliens as the villains and space ships that could shoot the aliens.

John Carmack, the developer of Doom, came up with the Doom Game Engine. This triggered a revolution. Id software’s Doom was a phenomenal success with it being a simply awesome first person shooter in that era of game development.Time flew by with game developers getting better at their programming skills & with better game engines coming into the pictures. Games in this stage of evolution had the PC as the primary market. Ken Kutaragi persuaded Sony to fund his research of the Super NES CD, which evolved into the PlayStation. This was a revolution in the hardware that was needed to play games. The release of the PlayStation in the Mid 90’s triggered a fierce competition between Sony, Nintendo & Atari, each trying to prove that their gaming hardware was better.

With dedicated gaming consoles where the graphics rendering capability was increased several folds further evolved the face of the gaming industry. Human characters were the central focus in the games being developed. It was times when we had a human hero fighting of battles against evil alien invaders & finally protecting dear old earth.

Gamers loved what these games had to offer, but want for more resulted in another breathtaking feature in the world of gaming. Quake was one the first FPS game to incorporate this feature. Games of today have this as an integral part of their structure. What are we talking about? The Multiplayer feature.
The multiplayer option is like a narcotic. Game’s which incorporate multiplayer option has always sold more & better than games which do not incorporate multiplayer. This is an addiction that game developers use to keep people hooked to their games. Why multiplayer? The simple reason, you’re competing against intelligence in the game, a human; unlike a CPU fighting against you. The fun’s so much different when playing against a human. Modern day game engines like Renderware, RAGE have great AI capabilities, but they still do not come anywhere close to what a fellow human offers. Games like Quake & Halo have not just followers, but cults which portray what the game means to them.

Microsoft sensing opportunity decided to enter this space. With the Japanese ruling the game market the entry of the American corporation was a relaxing break. With the XBOX, being backed by the mighty financial power of Microsoft, it was just a matter of time before it rose to really high pedestal of fame.

With the advancement in the Hardware for games, how have the games evolved? The games got more and more complex, no matter how advanced the hardware got, the game always needed more computing power. This was a boom for companies like Nvidia, AMD (ATI) they made & are making huge revenue selling graphic cards to the PC based game populace.

Today there are awesome games. Games that take you into a completely new world, where things look so real, that the gamer is so much in unity with the game which he or she is playing. But the question is, are the games “Really that Real”?
I would say definitely NO. So do the big folks form EA, Ubisoft, RockStar and all the other big gaming giants. So why is it not so real? The graphics look so real, the skin tones of the character is amazing, so much like mine. The clothes that the character put on are also so strikingly real.

So what then is the problem here?

There is nothing called a realistic emotion on the Characters face. The problem is something that everyone knows and it’s only a matter of time before the solution is out.

The lack of emotions makes game characters look so plastic, so zombie like. The Holy Grail that all game developers are looking at now is to introduce true emotion in the characters. Emotions just like what a human would exhibit. That’s what would be the Future. That’s what the next generation games & game developers are expected to deliver. This would be the next huge chunk of development in the next generation game engines, where emotions would of central focus.

There is an industry that’s already perfected this art of portraying realistic emotions on artificial animated characters. The industry is the Animation & Cartoon industry. Companies like Disney & Dreamworks.

The presumption as to why they can do it is because they have such huge computing power & memory to spare when developing these cartoons. Since they are pre rendered & does not require processing hardware at the display end it’s a easy task transmitting them (Processing as in computing & rendering the graphics). This of course is quite different with games. The rendering power that a developer has is the rendering power that the console has. This results in Console manufacturer researching and finding out how best they can incorporate the mechanisms that the animation industry is using into their hardware.

The next big thing that games in the future would have is involving a lot of the real world into the virtual world. This would involve game characters being able to shop on the net in game. This would be something like connecting to e-commerce sites to probably buy music or movies that can be watched or listened to as in game movies or music. The other use would be using VOIP or Internet Telephony within the game (Skype, Yahoo messenger), such that the character within the game can talk to another character in the same game on a different console within a network.

What we have been seeing now with consoles is the same thing that was implemented in the past but better. Look at the PS3 or the XBOX 360, they just do what their predecessors did better. Only the Wii seems to be different. Developers have to be innovative & come out with something new, not just the same thing better.
We traveled through how games have made it through time & what would possibly be in store for the future. But for now happy gaming with the what’s in the present :-).

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Hello

Hello All,
Well this just an introduction for me. So here I go.
My Name is Bhrigu, I am a 15 year old living in delhi. Currently in class X. I am currently owning a 3.03 OE-C psp. I will try to feed as much info. as possible.

Cheers,
Bhrigu

I would like to Welcome MAX Bhrigu to Anything & Everything. Bhrighu would contirubte towards more extended knowledge on the PSP. It would be tricks, Hacks, loads of stuff that you could do with the PSP.

Welcome Bhrigu, Happy Posting :-)

Dennis D Maliekal

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Windows Vista

Microsoft’s done it again!!! The latest & the newest version of windows is out…. Windows Vista :)

So what’s new in it? Do I need to switch from XP to Vista??? Well knowing Microsoft’s style of correcting bugs, security issues, and all kinds of problems, only much latter down the line after they release their OS to the market. I guess I’ll just wait for a while before I switch to this new OS from Microsoft.

I’ll try writing about a brief overview about Vista & also listing what’s new in the OS.

Well Windows Vista definitely Microsoft's latest Graphical Operating system. [How can we ever forget DOS :)] When Microsoft first decided to come out with this OS, they made their codename for the OS, [Longhorn] really popular on the web. I at times actually thought that they would eventually name the OS as Longhorn, cos it’s seldom that Companies make their code name public.

So why Vista anyways??? Microsoft definitely has to make money, that why ;-) But then again in their press comments, they say they wanted to go ahead and fix a lot of security issues. Win XP was criticized beyond measure for the security flaws in it!!!!

So Microsoft finally did the unveiling on the 30th of Jan 2007, with it being available for worldwide release from then.



Microsoft claims that loads & loads of new features have been added into Vista. The claim seems to be close to 150 new features. Well then again, I’ve don’t really have the patience to go ahead and check whether they really have introduced so many features.

But I found a few prominent ones and they are as follows

1. Their GUI nicknames Windows AERO, this is definitely going to the universal selling point of vista, with the GUI being so much more nicer & more pleasing to view & deal with. Icons, thumbnails all being animated, instead of the traditionally still ones. You’re also able to control the transparency too!!!!

2. The Windows Sidebar, which is basically a transparent bar on the side of the screen where users can place something know as desktop gadgets, where these gadgets are nothing but applets used to show the user info about things like the weather, time form different time zones etc.

3. The Internet Explorer 7, well so typical Microsoft, they come out with a new browser, release a beta version of it for their current OS, then finally incorporate it as standard feature in their new OS. IE 7 is something that I have been using for a long long time on XP, I don’t really know why they bother calling it a new feature, huh!!!! The great thing’s about IE 7is, they’ve just very nicely mimicked FireFox, Ha ha ha :-D Tabbed browsing, more security fixes!!! Nothing more. Oops or is it, Of course not, they have a new look & feel too, but nothing out of the ordinary.

4. Windows Mail, this basically a replacement for Outlook express, with a few additional features & a better GUI. This sure is a relaxing break for Outlook users. [Not that anything was wrong with Outlook Express!!!!, it’s just that you need a change once in a while right :-) ]

5. Media Player 11. Once again very much like IE 7, where they release it out for XP & now integrating it as a standard feature in Vista. WMP 11, definitely has a better UI. It also incorporates support for a lot more codec’s , so basically can play more formats, without going through the pain of downloading codec’s on the net. I personally felt that the processing of the audio is better, with better Bass, treble & a great focus on the Midrange too :-)

6. Games & Game Explorer. This is a feature that has been put in to show what the Vista is really capable of delivering. Better Graphics!!! A new Games Explorer special folder will also hold shortcuts and information to all games on the user's computer.



There are also may other features that interests me, like the enhanced speech recognition software, Hard drive partition utility, system performance assessment etc. Me writing about all of these would unnecessarily make the post really long. The other reason, I’m writing about them is because, these are features that all of us have used via a third party software at some point of time.

Microsoft is definitely doing a great job on advertising Windows Vista in India. There’s a demo or a ad of the OS in most places where people hang out [Like malls, theatres, coffee shops, blah blah blah ….] I’m wondering how is it in most other countries??? Sharing it via replies would definitely be welcome.

Overall I think that the Vista is a great OS, but would definitely recommend you to wait a little longer before getting a copy of it, cos we want to make sure that Microsoft’s done their home work on fixing some amount of the bugs that is surely incorporated in it.

Look at the main page of the blog for more on Operating Systems, Technology, Gaming Consoles & Other Cool Stuff, the link to main page is THIS

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ISO to CSO conversion. A complete Guide.

I have UMD’s, but then again it’s a pain carrying them at all times. There are times when the stupid plastic jacket around them snaps & I’ve got to go through the pain of gluing it together again. :-(

The problem, I want my games to run of my memory stick. The second part of the problem, I want these games to be small. The solution, convert your legal games into ISO’s and further compress these ISO’s into CSO.


Now how do I do that ???? Not to worry :) There’s a great tool called the UMD Gen

The picture shows you how it looks.





Now lets say you have a ISO of a legal copy of the UMD you own, you’ve to convert it. I have described the steps, as how to do it with illustrations.
[Please do not Pirate Games, gaming companies will then stop making them for us ]

1. Extract the ISO using Winrar. You would get a folder called PSP_GAME & a file called UMD_DATA.bin.



2. Now open the the PSP_GAME Folder. You would find a 2 directories & a few file.

3. One of the directories present would be named SYSDIR.

4. Open it.

5. You would find a directory called as UPDATE & 2 files called BOOT.bin & EBOOT.bin

6. Delete the UPDATE Directory & the BOOT.bin file ( look at the Images below)



7. DO NOT DELETE EBOOT.bin

8. Traverse back to the directory where you extracted the ISO.

9. Now drag & drop the PSP_GAME folder & the file UMD_DATA.bin into the UMD Gen tool. ( look at the Image below)



10. Click on the save button & select the CSO option. ( look at the Image below)



11. Chose the path where you want to save the CSO file & name the file whatever you want to.

12. On clicking save you will get a Window as show. Don’t change any of the value & leave the compression value as 9 for the best possible compression.

13. Click on Continue

14. You would see a progress bar. ( Look at the image below)



15. Once the progress bar disappears. Go to the saved location & Viola your CSO is ready :-)



I emphasize again , please do not make copies of the UMD’s that you do not own.

The value used for the compression, 9 is the highest compression level. If your game jerks after compression , reduce the value & make a CSO, usually 5 is a good bet !!!

If you are a High Def freak and want to calculate the video bitrate of your video file, have a look at this Blog. It's Really cool

Look at the main page of the blog for more on the PSP & Other Cool Stuff, the link to main page is THIS

10 July 2007:

Well there a certain searches on Google that are like figuring out how to change a CSO into a ISO & they land up here. The first thing is I am wondering why they would want to do this. The probable reason is that, they have downloaded a CSO & it looks like the game’s jerking & they figure out the compression level is very high. So probably make it back into a ISO and play the game or probably re-compress the ISO back to a CSO with lesser compression level.

So to convert a CSO to an ISO, the change in the above mentioned steps (i.e more specifically in step 10) would be to save the resulting file as an ISO & that would give you an ISO, which would run smooth on your PSP.

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