Dead technology.. but still alive!

July 25, 2007

 The market these days is flooded with various portable MP3 players from many different manufactures. There is probably very few people that never heard about Apple iPod, Creative Zen, iRiver and many more. The players come in different colors, shapes, and more or less usable features and functions. Some manufacturers bet on design and marketing (Apple), others on size or price. But after all, they have one thing in common, and that is playing MP3 music. Although many can play other formats as well, still MP3 is the most common. And no matter how advanced and great your player is, it cannot do miracles if you feed it with 128kbps MP3s.

There is one almost forgotten technology developed by Sony that surpasses the MP3 format in any way. The player is not as small as the MP3 sisters, since it plays optical disks 2.7×2.2 inches, but the sound quality is excellent. One disc can hold up to 80 minutes of high quality music that beats even the highest MP3 quality (320kbps), or you can choose from two Long Play modes for twice or four times more playtime - LP2 equals to 192kbps MP3, LP4 is recommended only for voice since the compression is too high for music.

And the design is simply beautiful. Long live Sony MiniDisc!

 

 

Playing PS2 games on PC?

July 19, 2007

Although Playstation 2 is now couple of years old and recently released Playstation 3 is in the centre of attraction, the older sister still has plenty to offer. It is however more and more hard to purchase it in stores around here, since most of them concentrate on the new (and much more expensive) PS3.

There is however possibility to play your PS2 games on PC hardware, thanks to the one and only emulator that is capable of doing it - PCSX2. The current version 0.9.2 is pretty stable and allows you to play many popular games.

Those that have seen some of the gems like Final Fantasy X probably guess that the hardware requirements will be high, but that is the same with all the emulators. Here we are talking about Core 2 Duo E6550, 1GB RAM and native Pixel Shader 2.0 graphic card (GF7+).

http://www.pcsx2.net/image.php?id=1147789651j02

The only thing that doesn't work in this emulator and does in the original PS2 hardware is support for Playstation 1 games. But if you need emulator for PS1, there are quite few out there, and they will work well and smooth on any PC purchased in the past 2 years.

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1

July 1, 2007

Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 is here! It includes lots of improvement and new functionalities, to mention few:
- support for Intel-VT and AMD-T virtualization technology included in new Core2 and Athlon CPU's
- support for non-Microsoft operating systems (RedHat and SUSE Linux), including Virtual Machine Additions
- virtual host clustering
- iSCSI support
- native x64 support (guest virtual machines can be only 32-bit)
- enhanced PXE booting

Enterprise Edition of Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 supporting up to 64 CPU's is freely available download from Microsoft website