Xbox 360 Controller Now Works With Microsoft Windows PC
Friday, June 23rd, 2006
With the war between the major video game companies (Microsoft, Sony,and Nintendo) beginning to start, Microsoft has begun Plan B of its continual domination by adding a USB wireless adapter for the Microsoft Xbox 360 controller to be used by Microsoft Windows PCs. Almost immediately loading up driver installation on many computers, the Xbox 360 controller will revamp the computer gaming industry, allowing gamers to play games that are only PC-compatible with the feel of playing them on an Xbox. Another benefit of the wireless Xbox 360 controller’s compatibility to the PC is that you will also be available to use your wireless headset and microphone as well, all you need to do is just plug them in and driver installation will load up just as quickly. This will give gamers an added boost of happiness and give Microsoft a few extra dollars.
Rockstar’s controversial Grand Theft Auto franchise was in news again but not because of its comprehensiveness, graphics or game play. This time, GTA was victim of the allegations imposed on it. The players were so influenced by this game that they started playing it in real life. Many stories in this regard came up. A year ago, man named Tyrone McMillan was taken into custody after a 55 minute car chase on the roads of Albany, New York. Initially, officers wanted him to pull over for the parole violation, but McMillan assumed he can outrun the cops because he has done it so many times on his PS2 playing GTA. With the experience of navigating the illusory San Andreas and Vice City in hand, he thought that he can easily out smart the cops. He even had his girlfriend’s daughter and her cousin in the backseat. After slamming into two cars, he was finally caught. In his statement to the police, he blamed GTA for what ever happened. No Attorney could help him now, as a court judge slapped him with two concurrent seven-year jail terms. After serving time, he will be on parole for 10 years.
Several weeks ago, ATI took new stand by claiming that their ABI partners were free to overclock any GPU in the ATI X1000 series. Last year, a similar statement about the X1800 cards came up from ATI. This is the first official open authorization from ATI to overclock any current generation board. An interesting claim came forward in the documentation that ATI partners are not allowed to underclock ASICs. It’s a drawback for those who want to be creative. With passive cooling, they still have to underclock on their own. Also, ATI claims that thermal damage will not be covered by RMA. The blown internal fuses in the GPU will notify RMA teams if the GPU has been stressed too hard. NVIDIA, on the other hand has an open policy on manufacturer overclocks. They are also are allowed to push clocks as far as they want. Many other companies have been selling overclocked cards for many ages now. This news was well received by the fans of ATI. Some joked about it that like they were waiting for permission from ATI that they can test their cards beyond specifications. Referring to thermal damage not being covered by RMA, many people claimed that this was a good business plan. They state that ATI intentionally wants them to break their cards by testing the overclock. So eventually what ATI is doing is:
At the current stage of development the emulators for Nintendo DS running on PC are not mature enough to run every ROM available, like VisualBoy Advance is for GBA ROMs, but you can find a few games running in decent conditions to test the emulators. The emulators currently available are more appropriate for trying some home-brew games and applications. Generally an emulator duplicates the functions of one system on a different secondary system, so that the second system appears to have the exact characteristics as the first system. Usually some differences regarding booth quality and frame rate may appear. The following versions are currently available:
If you want to play old classic games designed for MS-DOS on your new computer running Windows, BeOS, Linux or MacOS X you can use an open-source emulator called DOSBox. It uses the SDL-library, which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. Because of its open-source status DOSBox is totally free of charge and available for download at SourceForge. The gamers are convinced that a dynamic recompilation core should be created and released afterwards because the need to speed things up is important. Also several disadvantages appear when a game is emulated: the loss of quality is usually accompanied with other deteriorations affecting the sound track or even the frame rate, which can be sometimes lower compared to the original game. Although this is likely to happen (depending on the computer you have and on the resources needed for the game you want to play; keep in mind that to emulate a game you need a computer 10-20 times more powerful than the original platform for which the game was initially designed), the new platform is much cherished by gamers from all around the world. Not long ago DOSBox received an important update, the first one in over two years.