The EU VS Microsoft has been in the news a lot latley, as some of you might have read Europe has had versions of Windows since XP that have features removed such as Windows Media Player because the EU consider it a violation of European antitrust law. Microsoft originally wanted to call the version of XP Windows XP: Reduced Media Edition however it ended up been called Windows XP N Edition, the same with Vista we have Vista Home Premium and Business “N” Editions which basically just have Media Player stripped out. Until now it’s not really bothered me as the normal editions of Windows the rest of the world get have always been on sale over here and no one has really bothered with the “N” versions of Windows anyway. However if you read the CNET article published yesterday it appears we are only going to get reduced versions of Windows, either with Media Player and Internet Explorer ripped out or just Internet Explorer ripped out. I’m sure some people will be quite happy about this, however I think shipping an OS without a web browser in this day and age is just stupid, say you didn’t have Google…
Datel have announced an unofficial memory card for the Xbox 360, this memory card is 4gb in size, i think it would be perfect for me. I could have all my saves on the memory card along with any DLC / Arcade games, making it easy to move my content between various Xbox 360 consoles. My 64mb memory card at the moment is full with just a couple of profiles on at (almost 10mb each!) Maybe Datel have found a way to allow any size Sata hard drive to be used in the Xbox 360 too.. we can hope! I plan to purchase one when its out in the UK!
Indie the Xbox 360 is quite compact, this afternoon I decided to clean my 360 out as it sounds like a jumbo jet, even after giving it a good clean it still sounded horrible. I then realised it was the fans on the back, I guess the bearings in them have gone as when I powered the 360 on and stopped the fans from spinning it was practically silent. I’ve been looking in to replacing the fans and came across some pretty nice custom cases for the 360 – XCM 360 Crystal case I’m thinking about maybe getting a custom case and a replacement fan at some point if I can get them for a good price, the cases appear to be £40+ which is almost half the cost of a new 360 these days. .. I’ve attached some pics of the insides of the 360, all you need to open it is a paper clip, screwdriver and a bit of time. I was on a bit of a go slow, it took me 15 mins to open it and less than 5 mins to put it back together.
In the Xbox Version of Xbox Media Centre (XBMC) DVR-MS playback worked perfectly in the builds compiled around May 2007, however after that I’m guessing the mplayer.dll was updated. In later XBMC builds when fast forwarding or skipping through a video it just skipped to the end of the video. DVR-MS playback is a nice addition in XBMC for myself as i can playback TV recorded on my PC with Windows Media Center. Luckily this can easily be fixed by replacing the mplayer.dll in XBMC/system/players/mplayer/ with the one included in this post. That’s it, the fix is as simple as that, I can confirm this works perfect on the XBMC for XBOX 8.10 codenamed Atlantis build (T3CH XBMC 2008-11-13 8.10 PROPER) If you want to help try get this fixed in future builds reply to my topic on the XBMC Forums and to this bug report here, hopefully one of the developers will take note and working DVR-MS playback can be implemented in later builds. The working mplayer.dll can be downloaded from Digiex.
Gaming History, The Beginning Compared to other people my age I was a late starter when it comes to gaming, the first computer we owned was an Amiga 500 which I think we got that in the Summer of 1994. Before that a few of my friends in School owned a Sega MegaDrive and I used to love playing Sonic, Sonic 2 and Golden Axe on the MegaDrive. The Amiga 500 (With 1MB of Ram) This is where my gaming history really started The Amiga we got was from my cousin, It came with two massive disk box’s fill of games, I enjoyed so many of them I was still finding games I hadn’t played a year after we got the Amiga. I remember the day I discovered The Chaos Engine, I don’t know what it was about that game but I really was addicted to it. I remember coming home from school, doing my homework then my friend who lived down the road use to come up and we would spend hours playing a co-op game on it. We eventually after many games we made it to the 4th and final world where we were gutted to find out…