Mapnotes

Apparently, MapNotes is no more.  Trying to find an addon that will import my many years of notes that I’ve made with this addon.  (It’s seriously been one of the most helpful for questing with alts.)

I have a long history with this addon — for the longest time, I used it WAY back in the day, and then with the release of TBC, it stopped working.  Thankfully, there was “Metamap,” which imported MapNotes map points just fine. (Metamap doesn’t even have a Curse page — I used to have to download it directly from the author’s website.)

However, it in turn stopped working with version 3.0 of WoW, but MapNotes came back with a fan update!  (A fan update is where a fan of a defunct addon is able to get in contact with the original addon maintainer, and gets them to give them control over it.)  But, now MapNotes no longer works anymore, either, and I’m stuck trying to find a replacement.  Looking at HandyNotes for now — apparently there’s some way to get it to import MapNotes points.

SellValue and SellFish

Long live SellValue!  I used this addon for the LONGEST time, and it was an absolute lifesaver.

Out questing and need to know if that stack of gray shit you’ve been collecting is worth it to keep?  SellValue would tell you how much it was worth (dependent upon prices you had seen before).  This addon worked for the longest time, even though it hadn’t been updated since forever.

Even though it was still working wit version 3.0, I started using an updated addon called “SellFish” — however, as you can see, WoW integrated this functionality into the core game with version 3.2, so there’s no need for either addon anymore!

AnnoyRP

AnnoyRP was a neat little plugin everyone started using back in my heavy guild-RP days (god, that sounds so dorky). It had amazing functionality — based upon certain events in the game that you set it to notice, i.e. mounting up, casting a certain spell, it would /s certain things.

For instance, you could set it to say “Hi Ho, Silver, Away!” every time you mounted up (or a certain random amount of times, or even a certain random choice out of a group of phrases).  As you can imagine, it was LOADS of fun.

It stopped working some time ago, but the author made Chatterbox to make up for it.  Did the same thing, worked great.  However, now the author has left WoW (back in July over the whole RealID thing, which sadly enough didn’t even happen!), so who knows?  It seems to work fine for now, but that could stop at any minute with version 4.0.2 of WoW.

This is what I do in my spare time.

Used it for years — loved the waypoint lines that it would make on your map (tracking routes from one quest to another), and the waypoint arrow at the top of the screen.  Now built-in to WoW, and there’s no need for it anymore.  Even the dev is leaving it.

CloseUp

Also built-in to WoW now, although the implementation isn’t as good as the addon’s — you can’t look at someone else and zoom into them, for instance.  This was one of those addons that, while being a mild modification to the game UI, you still found yourself using it nearly every single time you logged on.

Hopefully, there won’t be more to come!

Update!

One more: PerformanceFu. Hasn’t updated in about 2 years.  Liked it because it would let you see some cool stats right from your FuBar –  I’ve noticed that his seems to be built-in to the standard WoW button menu now.  So long!

I guess I’ll mention my favories from the days of the Sony Playstation (the “One,” or original), since those days are freshest in my mind.

The Sony Playstation Years

Image via Wikipedia

First would have to be the Gran Turismo series.  There’s so much to say about it.  My brother and sister and I played this game almost religiously.  My current lifelong infatuation with cars is largely because of it.

And to think, we only grew fond of the game because of that little sample disc of mini-games that you got for free from Sony when you bought your Playstation — you know the one I’m talking about;  it had mini-levels of:

• Wipeout (a game I loved but have never, ever, played again for inexplicable reasons)
• Spider (a game that was crazily fun and that we finally bought nearly 10 years later off of Ebay)
• And Gran Turismo, of course.

1) Gran Turismo

Image via Wikipedia

The sample version of Gran Turismo that was included on the sample CD with a new Playstation only had one race track on it — The short Clubman Course — and two cars, the 95′ Corvette and a standard Honda NSX.  But with these two cars and this one track we probably got months of enjoyment, because, you see, this game was hard (and it wasn’t even released yet — we had to wait until May of ’98!).

The computer AI on the trail version was not adjustable, and was probably set to its highest settings.  This was compounded by the fact that — and this is even more noticable if your only history with racing games have been those of the “fun” or “arcade” type — Grand Turismo’s controls are very, very realistic. If you just mash down on the gas, you don’t shoot forward like a bat outta hell, you just sit there and spin, like you would in a real car with 400+ horsepower.   If you try to take a turn at full throttle like a moron, you don’t just veer to the outside — you oversteer and spin out.

Just playing this trial version with my siblings enabled us to really get a feel for the game — after a few weeks, we were able to beat the computer in the trial version of the game almost every time, and this is no small feat, since in the trial version there was no placing and you always started at the back, not to mention the fact that Clubman is a very small course, and there’s little time to move up in the ranks.  And did I mention the fact that all of the computers are driving the same car as you?  (edit:  I just remembered that they weren’t, but they were still very, very similar cars.)

Every dream we had about playing more of this wonderful game came true when we finally got our own copy — the game was nearly perfect.  The graphics were amazing for the time (they were actually better than the graphics in the sequel, Gran Turismo 2), there were hundreds of cars to choose from and dozens of tracks, and then there was “Simulation Mode.”

Simulation mode was a surprise to us — we hadn’t expected something like it. In it, you actually exist in a simulated world where you start out with $10k and the opportunity to enter a few races and earn some money on simulated circuits. Then you fix up the car you own (make it faster, lighter, quicker, etc.), earn enough money to buy another car, and then start again, eventually entering realms where you’re racing million-dollar Super GT racers at 200 miles an hour.

But then again, that’s the beauty of the game — you don’t have to race multi-million dollar sports cars if you don’t want to.  You can race regular, run of the mill cars: four door sedans, four cylinder economy cars — whatever you want. You can race cars that could probably actually buy in real life one day, and it adds a definite sort of fun realism to the game.

We played this game nearly to death — raced every car, every track, even the grueling 3-hour-long endurance races. The sequels have been okay, but no game has quite matched up to the fun of the first Gran Turismo.

GT2 was a bit of a letdown — it had about 5 times as many cars, including some cool vintage muscle cars, but the graphics were strangely a step back, and the game was buggy due to the fact that it had been rushed out for the christmas season.

I don’t remember much of GT3, other than the game was changed around a slight bit (nothing drastic), and the number of cars was drastically reduced (from 600 in GT2 to around 150). However, this was the first release for the PS2, and the new graphics made up for it.

Of the latest release, GT4, I’ve actually played it quite a bit — it’s the closest that any sequel comes to the fun of the original, that’s for sure. It’s got nearly 700 cars from all over the world (including Jay Leno’s “Tank Car” — a steam-powered 1000 ft./lbs. torque monster), and loads more tracks, including the famous German Nurburgring.

*-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-*

And wow — that’s just one game!  More to come as soon as I have time to write it.

Once you load the Moblog object, it gets kind of screwy, but I’m working on it.

In other news, I’m installing WoW on my gaming PC as I speak! I finally got it up and running, thanks to the honest-to-goodness 256 MB Low-Density SDRAM chip that I got from “StarMicro.net”:http://starmicro.net — in case your wondering what the hell that is (and you probably are), it’s a special type of RAM that’s not even made any more that’s required if you want to use larger chips (such as 256 MB ones) in a select few older motherboards (like the one I’m currently building with). They’re hard as hell to track down, and when you do, they’re usually found with sky-high prices, so I really, really lucked out when I found this one for only $22.

Although, I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting the system running stable at anything above a 100 Mhz FSB (the “FSB” is the “highway” that all your little computer bips and bops on the motherboard communicate to each other with). My brother, “Thomas the Mighty”:http://gardens.tmanime.com, had success running this motherboard as high as 124 Mhz, so I’m still at a loss as to what I’m doing wrong… but, there’s lots of variables that are different in my case: different RAM, different CPU, different GPU, you name it.

Well, even with its Tualatin CPU running at 1300 Mhz, it’s still a bit faster than my laptop, so off I go to play!

Asus A8S-X Socket 939 Barebone Kit / AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 OEM / CPU Fan / ATX Mid-Tower Case / 500 Watt Power Supply

All that for $399! I haven’t taken the prices apart and seen just how good a deal it is, but at first glance it seems amazing. That chip alone is worth almost $400. All you’d need is your own memory and hard drive (and video card), and you’d be set — but then you’ve probably already got those things lying around in other computers, like me, right?!

This definitely isn’t for someone who’s making their first computer — it doesn’t have half the shit you need to start out with, so unless you like to tinker with computers like me, don’t bother buying it.

So, what’s been going on in my life, eh?

Well, I’ve been working on this site a little, and programming at work a lot.

I’ve gotten all my tax information, and am currently trying to find every single deduction I can so that I don’t owe Uncle Sam a damn cent.

I’m still trying to put myself together a gaming PC so that I can wipe my hard drive on my laptop and start running “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com on it (since I only have windows on it anymore because of gaming).

I’m shooting for a system running a Tualatin Celeron running at about 1600mhz (overclocked quite a bit) and _at least_ 512 MB of RAM. That’s bare minimum RAM to run “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com, thought I’m hoping because it’s a desktop system it’ll be passable — PC133 and PC100 RAM is getting kinda pricey these days, because it’s almost descended into that dreaded computer world of _obsoleteness_…

This, combined with my trusty old ATI 9200 SE (X!) that I’ve custom tuned to run some 60% overclocked above normal, should be enough. “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com is made so that it doesn’t require the latest graphics hardware to run (a genius marketing move on the side of the company), and it’ll be a damn
sight faster than the GeForce 2 Go chip that’s in my laptop (which just so happens to be the _very_ lowest chip that’s compatible with the game!).

I should have it running by next weekend, at least. Wish me luck!

Well, my friend’s motherboard is an oldie but a goodie — the venerable “ASUS A7V8X-X”:http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A7V8X-X for the AMD Socket A chipset. The chip I helped him pick out (nearly five years ago now!) was an Athlon XP 2600 — it’s still fast as hell today, and plays just about any game you can think of.

That knowledge in hand, I know it’s a good motherboard. So, I hook up the new drive (and a new power supply — his old ones keep burning out), and the board recognizes it immediately. Even sees that it’s a 250GB drive; that’s pretty neat, because I’m pretty sure even _the technology_ involved for this didn’t exist five years ago.

However, when I put in his Windows XP install CD (and old one without SP2), the damn thing only recognizes it as being about 137GB or so.

Well, at first I’m like, “Oh Shit — the hardware’s not compatible.” (I usually think of the worst things first — a small character flaw.) I go to the Seagate site on this drive, thinking that this must be a pretty common problem (incorrect initial hard drive sizes usually are). Of course, it is, and I find a handy dandy little “help topic page”:http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=127_GB_-_137_GB_Limitation&vgnextoid=186b5b1142aec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD about it.

It says that your motherboard needs to support “48 bit LBA addressing,” and of course I’m thinking, _OH NOES, we’re not even going to be able to use this new drive to its full potentional_.

But then I remember that the motherboard’s BIOS was able to see the 250GB limit, and the answer was clear — it wasn’t the board, it was just a limitation in this version of Windows XP (the first of many, as you know). I downloaded Seagate’s DiskWizard’s starter ISO, burned a CD of it, and formatted the drive.

The good point of using the special burning software from the company like this — it actually lets you format your partitions in FAT32, instead of just NTSF!

(By the way, as I’m writing this, it’s just completed a full installation of Windows XP in only 7 minutes — damn, this drive is _fast_ as well as big!)

Unfortunately, the added case fans I got for my friend can’t go in his case (he’s been having a bit of heat problem in his case) — there’s only one extra fan connector on the “ASUS A7V8X-X”:http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A7V8X-X, and I’ve already got an additional exhaust fan at the back of the case taking it up. Luckily, the CPU fan upgrade I got _did_ fit, however the old screws aren’t big enough and it didn’t come with any new ones! Arghh!

Either way, it’s now got a super big drive, _and_ it’s running cooler. Plus, the new parts are able to be carried over to his new system whenever he upgrades. I say it’s been a success.