Respect Sakura

Oh hay.. this site’s still here. I guess I’d better actually post some crap in the unlikely event I actually receive viewers.

So.. what’s been going on since the past two months I’ve posted here? Well, the Conroe came, saw, and kicked some ass. ePenis forum posters rejoiced as they tweaked like mad to get the best overclock they could out of their expensive hardware. Everyone else rejoiced, because if these morons weren’t selling their existing shit for a fraction of the original cost, then the price reductions on AMD’s line was enough to satisfy. All in all, a good month for upgrades.

Naturally, I now possess a new beast. A Core 2 Duo 6400 based system, with a Gigabyte 965P-DS4 motherboard. It wasn’t quite the match made in heaven that I’d hope it’d be, but some BIOS updates and patience resolved my initial teething issues. She’s housed in a new case, but aside from the board, CPU and PSU, she’s basically got the same hardware as Heracles did (which is currently in pieces, and awaiting re-construction as a workstation). The temporary name for this machine is “Freedom” (of the Gundam SEED variety, not the “lets go git us sum ay-rabs” variety), and the initial performance is very very nice indeed.

Also, I’m sorry to say that Omega G5 has departed from these lands. In fact, Iota G4 also left a long while ago, to allow NegativeZero a chance to detest OS X 10.4. This leaves me with the slightly modified Arturia mini, and the need for a whole lotta hard drive space. Anyone got any suggestions/recommendations on Mac mini-esque firewire drive enclosures? Do they come in SATA versions yet?

I’m tempted to start saving for a Mac Pro. Very tempted. Oh, sweet Jesus do I want one. However.. considering my chosen future path, getting such a beast is not The Right Thing(tm). True, I would find such a behemoth workstation handy.. but I’d be booting into Windows all the time for what I’d plan to do with it, and for some bizarre reason.. that just feels wrong. Besides, it makes much more sense to just rebuild Heracles, and use both it and “Freedom” for my purposes, and stick with Arturia mini for the everything else factor.

Which leads me to the last awesome, awesome thing. The XNA Game Studio Express beta has been released! In case you’ve been living under a rock, or don’t give a fuck about DirectX based technologies, game development, or the Xbox 360, it’s essentially a framework and plugin for Visual C# Express, which allows you to write games based off the XNA framework (the spiritual successor to managed DirectX), with the idea that you have a somewhat portable codebase, even if you still need to compile it for specific platforms.

But that’s not what’s cool about XNA Studio.. the really cool thing, is once the final version comes out, you can opt to pay :99bux: a year, and obtain the capability to test and run your creation on your own Xbox 360. Basically, $99 a year for homebrew capabilities. Words cannot convey the awesomeness of this.. as pretty much anyone can now make their own dream console game, or at the very least, do stuff like an XNA version of XBMC (or maybe Media Portal, as they’re already C# based), to fill the gap left in the Xbox 360’s shortcomings as a media solution. In any case, it’s cool as all hell, and the XNA guys are already aware of the shortcomings that the initial version of this has, and aim to resolve them as best they can. Community support is imperative for them to succeed, so please don’t be a cock, and go “Oh fuck that, it won’t do feature Y out of the box. WORST ANYTHING EVAR!!!1112″.

So.. that’s pretty much what’s been going on since I last took a sh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hupdated this wonderful, wonderful site. Jesus, I need to find more topics to discuss, here.