The problem with modern consoles

Do you remember a time when you used to be able to put a game into your console and just play it? Remember the PS2/Dreamcat/Gamecube and every console before them? Well those times are gone. Now every time I want to play the latest game I have to update the fucking system. This is a pain in the arse and wholly unnecessary.

So when the Xbox 360 came out I was really hyped for it. I got the console and at first everything was great. Then I got to the updating. Back then I had really poor internet connection so downloading an update could sometimes take over 2 hours. When I got a PS3 I suffered the same problem. It was so slow that I used to go over to my friends house and play on his Xbox until mine had finished updating.

Well here we are in 2014 and the problem just seems to be getting worse. So tonight I decided to try and hook up my PS Vita using remote play to my PS3 so I could play vita games on the big TV. This meant that first of all I had to update my Vita software. Then I had to update my PS3 software. Then My PS3 demanded that it was connected to the internet via ethernet. Why? I don’t know.

After that I still couldn’t get the two to connect. The reason for this being that my PS3 had logged out of PSN. Why do I need to be logged into the PSN just to link the consoles?

But this got me thinking about bigger things happening with consoles recently. As far as I’m concerned a games console should be just that. A console to play games on. So why is it that every console nowadays has to have features like Netflix? I’ve already got half a dozen other devices in my house that can do this.

Also I know I’m ranting here, but why does every console have to have some sort of gimmick nowadays? What’s wrong with a basic controller? Why do I need 6 axis control, touch screens, touch pads, kinect, motion control etc?

All I want is a console where I put a game in and play the game. Is that really asking too much?

EDIT: Well now I feel like a idiot. Turns out remote play works the opposite way around to what I imagined.

Possible PC build

One of the things I enjoy doing is specing up and building new PCs. Unfortunately due to a lack of funds on my part I rarely get to do the later. However when I get the necessary money I intend on building a PC that I’ve specked up. This will probably be around November time. The main use I’ll have for the PC will be video playback and acting as a small home server. Anyway for those of you looking to build a small budget PC I thought I’d share what I’m looking at.

CPU

First of all the CPU. The CPU I was looking at using in the build was an AMD Athlon 5350 2.05GHz AM1 Quad Core. This is a 64bit processor with APU abilities allowing it to output 4k resolution. From what I can gather it is able to run lite games and stream video. The main reason I was looking at this CPU is to do with these abilities coupled with the fact that it only costs £41 and only needs 25W power to run. 

Motherboard

The mobo I was looking at was a ASRock AM1B-ITX. This mobo has HDMI and VGA output that I require incorporates the integrated graphics. It allows up to 16GB of DDR3 Ram and is ITX form factor. This means that I can keep the size to a minimum. The only real downside of this board is there is only 2 Sata ports. However at a cost of £22 it seems ideal.

RAM

For what I’m needing a 4GB ram chip seems plenty and the Kingston ValueRam of 4GB with 1600MHz speed is perfect for the price of £30.

HDD/SSD

The hard drive that I’m intending to run will be the most expensive part of the build. I already have a spare 64GB SSD that will be ideal for the OS but the HDD will have to be purchased. As I said before I want the build to act as a home server of sorts but I want to keep the power usage down. Therefore I’m opting for a WD Green Desktop 4TB SATA 6Gb/s 3.5″ HDD. This costs £111 but if you want to keep your costs down I suggest using a much cheaper 2TB HDD.

Case

You may be thinking that I’ve missed the PSU but I haven’t. The case I’m looking at is a Powercool Q5 Black ITX Case. This case is tiny but has enough drive space to allow me to fit my drives. It also comes with a built in 180W PSU that is 80+ rated. It also only costs £40.

Final cost

When all this comes together the final cost of the build is £246. If you opted for a smaller HDD you could probably bring this down to less than £200. That’s pretty sweet for a PC with those specs and such a small size.

Sega Dreamcast. Why it was the best and why it failed.

OK so I’m going to talk about the Dreamcast here, Segas last ever proper console release.

Now the Dreamcast was an impressive piece of kit for the time. Not only were the graphics superior to all other consoles, with the PS2 and Gamecube not yet released, but it also had internet connection. The Dreamcast was the first console to support online gaming from the box and developed a rich community in games like Phantasy Star Online. There was also an internet browser included that allowed the Dreamcast to be used like a PC. Sega also thought ahead and made a space in the consoles Mobo for a VGA output to be added allowing 480p gaming. You could also buy microphones, keyboards and other peripherals as extra add ons. There was also a TV combo pack that effectively turned the console into a PC.

As well as all this hardware there were the VMUs which acted as a display screen in the pad as well as a memory card. You could also download software from game titles and use VMUs as a portable console.

The Dreamcast also had some outstanding games released for the system. Chu Chu Rocket, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue and Resident Evil Code Veronica (the best Resi game ever made) as well as lots of other releases.

So why did the Dreamcast fail?

The Dreamcast was released in 1999 (or 1998 for the Japanese market). A time when people were growing bored of Alt Rock and Rap started its steady decline. A time when for some unknown reason people thought that all the computers in the world would crash and airplanes would drop from the sky due to Y2K. It was also 4 years after the Sega Saturn was released (something I’ll touch on later).

Now when the Dreamcast was released in the west things all looked promising for Sega. They sold more consoles in the first 2 weeks in North America than ever recorded before, over 500,000. There was also over 100,000 machines sold in Europe. Unfortunately the Japanese release wasn’t as successful due to a lack of titles and the Sega Saturn still performing well.

Now it’s worth pointing out that the Dreamcast used GD-R discs not CD-R. A GD-R disc held 800mb of data as opposed to the 700mb on a standard CD. GD-Rs are also unreadable on PCs, or so Sega hoped. However it wasn’t long before people discovered a way of ripping GDs and uploading a CDI image on the net to share with people. Now once you have a CDI image you can simply burn the file to a standard CD pop it into the Dreamcast and it will work like the original game. This meant that piracy on the console was rampant. Not to mention the fact that the PS2 was released a year later using DVDs and acting as a DVD player.

Now Sega pumped some serious money into this machine and not just on the console development. As an example just look at Shenmue. When Shenmue was released it was the most expensive game ever made. If every person who bought a Dreamcast purchased the game then the title would still have made a loss.

Throwing all of this money into a machine when a company is facing financial difficulties was a bad idea. This wasn’t helped by how much piracy was affecting the sales of titles and 3rd party developers began loosing interest. This caused the Dreamcast to go out of production only a year and a half after its release and is ultimately why it failed.

Why the lack of funds though?

I’m not finished yet. The Dreamcast in my opinion would have been a huge success for the company in the long run if they had been able to keep up production. As I said above production halted due to a lack of money and this was down to Segas previous bad decisions.

Lets go all the way back to the Mega Drive, or Genesis as it’s known in America. The Mega Drive was a big success for the company but when Sega decided to release the Mega CD they started loosing money. This was their own fault due to them not shortly afterwards releasing the 32x, which effectively allowed the Mega Drive to act as a 32bit system. Sales for the 32x were poor though due to a lack of game development and the impending release of the Saturn. The Saturn was released just 6 months after the 32x and pissed off a lot of Sega fans. The Saturn also struggled due to the release of the superior PS1. Now you may say that there was little Sega could do about the PS1 but it’s worth pointing out that the PS1 was originally being developed by Sega until they decided to bin the idea in favour of there inferior consoles. This ultimately led to the company loosing market share for years. Less market share means less profits and less money to ensure the future of the company and ultimately destroyed them.

How to use a PS3 controller on PC without motion joy

My PC pad broke today so I decided that I’d try to use my PS3 one instead. After doing a bit of googling I came across a program called motion joy. Not only did this program look horrendous but it also didn’t work on my PC. Then I came across something called LibUSB which works perfectly. Here’s a quick guide on how to use it.

First thing you want to do is plug your PS3 controller into your PC via the USB cable. At this point windows will then install some drivers that don’t work.

Then download LibUSB from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb-win32/files/

Extract the program wherever you like and go into the bin folder and run inf-wizard.exe.

Select the PS3 game pad from the device list and make a note of the vendor identification and the product identification numbers.

Once installed go to control panel, devices and printers, and right click the PS3 pad.

Click properties and go to the hardware tab. Click properties again and select the driver tab.

Then select uninstall drivers. This will remove the drivers that windows automatically installs that don’t work.

Unplug your controller and replug it in.

Then go to the amd64 folder (if you have a 64bit system) or the x86 (If you have a 32bit system) in LibUSB and run the install-filter-win.exe

Select to install a filter and select your device using the vid (vendor identification) and pid (product identification) to identify your device.

Congratulations your device is now ready to use.

If you want to use your pad in PCSX2 then in the controller plugin settings select DualShock 3 native mode. Then run a game or homebrew and hold the PS button until the red light at number 1 on the pad remains constant. You can then map all the buttons as normal.

Intel vs AMD

So allot of people constantly go on about Intel vs AMD. Now this isn’t a clear cut argument. Both manufacturers offer various CPUs at various price ranges. Now I personally run a AMD FX-8350. However some people, mainly those who don’t know much about PCs, believe that no matter what intel is better. When I tell people that I run a AMD they instantly seem to think that I’m running some 15 year old machine that can barely run anything. The fact that my PC is probably far more powerful than theirs doesn’t seem to occur to them.

What people think a AMD machine is like.

So when choosing a CPU what should you look for? Well there’s the obvious clock speed, cahce, and number of cores, but there’s also the price and benchmarks to look at. For example I’ll compare 2 CPUs at the £200 price range.

First of all Intel

Intel Core i7-4770 3.4GHz Socket 1150 Quad Core

• Processor Speed – 3.4GHz
• Quad Core (8 Threads)
• 8MB Cache
• Power Usage 84W (TDP)
• Intel HD 4600

Price £227.72

Benchmark score 9967

Then AMD

AMD FX-9590 4.7GHz Socket AM3+ Octo Core

• Processor Speed – 4.7GHz
• Octo Core (8 Threads)
• 16MB Cache
• Power Usage 220W (TDP)
• *No Cooler Included

Price £232.44

Benchmark score 10390

So you see that AMD performs better than the intel equivalent. However it should be noted that the power consumption is far greater.

My point? Do some research before writing off AMD and build a PC suitable for your needs.

The woes of Crossfiring

OK so about 1 month ago I decided to get a new GPU. So after a bit of research I purchased a R9 270x 4GB. This GPU was fine and ran all my games at decent FPS when using 3 monitors, but I decided that I wanted a bit more power. So armed with a wallet full of cash I headed off to the local computer store and bought a second card, and a new PSU, so I could crossfire.

Crossfiring sounds simple right? You just plug in the extra card and run a bridge connector between the 2. However it doesn’t really work like that. You see I plugged in the extra card only to find that my system didn’t recognise it. All the plugs were checked everything was seated correctly. So I updated all the drivers and did a restart. For some reason this caused windows to stop registering my keyboard and mouse. So after much fucking around I managed to get them working again only to find that the extra card still didn’t show up in device manager on CCC. After a bit of swearing I decided to completely remove all drivers and start from scratch. This meant another system reboot and another bout of windows refusing to acknowledge the existence of my keyboard and mouse.

Eventually after solving that issue again and installing new drivers and doing yet another reboot I finally succeeded in crossfiring. 4 and a half hours after I’d started. Longer than it took me to build my entire PC.

My advice to you, only do it if you’re willing to piss around for hours trying to get it to work.