The ScooterBlog

So unlike the last time I posted about a house that we’re getting, this time it’s for real, as in, closing in exactly five and a half hours!

This time, it’s still on the West side of Columbus in the older section of Hilliard. 1,500 square feet (more than the last one I posted here), nice sized fenced in yard, and most importantly for blog readers, I’ll even have a game room! Needless to say, I’m nervous because it’s a lot of money, but it’s a great buy and a great place to be.

And then, the fun begins …. if you’re not busy on October 13th and 14th, I’m sure that I can find some very important lifting and moving that you can do, esepcially for the stuff we gotta get from Kentucky!

(It’s not quite free … but it might as well be.)

Here in Columbus and in my old stomping grounds of Cincinnati, there exists a very comprehensive computer store called Micro Center. Previously, they’ve dabbled in the gaming business but now they’re in it full bore, and as of a couple of months ago, they are also now taking in used games and getting into that business, much like many larger brick and mortar stores are starting to do.

So, in their efforts to build up a nice large used game stock, they’re offering a whale of a deal right now on trade-ins. If you trade in nine games, you get a coupon for $25 off of your next game purchase (can only use one per transaction). Now on the surface, this may not be impressive if you go by, say, the EB way of doing trade-ins (no sports before 07, must be a newer system, many exclusions). The beauty of this setup at Micro Center is two-fold:

• NO exclusions (Madden 03 is just fine!)
• ANY system from the Nintendo 8-Bit up to the present is welcomed! Now, the Atari Jaguar might not be a hit, but mainstream stuff is all okay.

So, if you have a bunch of games that really lack value, like old sports games or old Playstation / SNES / Genesis games that lack the case, this is a perfect way to take them in and convert it to a newer game or accessory you might need that has value in the current day. I actually did this with about 20 games to get two coupons, and used one of the coupons and the trade-in credit towards Halo 3 Limited Edition (yeah, mine has minor scratches … more soon). My final cost? $15! Getting the game all my friends are playing for that price, three days before a house closing is an absolutely cool thing!

So, go trade in your stuff and tell us about your trade-in deal in the comments. Let us know what your trade-in prices were too for comparison purposes. Myself? I had one new game in the mix, my NCAA Football 07 for 360, and it for $5.50, which really positively surprised me considering that you can’t sell it for that much on Half.com.

UPDATE: The Picture Album for the Pictures I took is now LIVE! It’s HERE.

Sometimes, the best thing a promotion or company can do is simply to do as it advertises. If a store says that they have 50 of an item in stock and you’re late to the party (or way back in line), that’s fine, you knew what you were in for. If the store is open from 10 am to 9 pm and you get there at 9:01, sure, you’d love some mercy for them to let you make the quick purchase, but they don’t have do by any means.

BUT, when a promotion does not do as it advertises, it leads to the customer being a bit ticked, as I was on Sunday with the Rock Band Tour promotion.

I didn’t rush myself to get down to this on Sunday. The web site said that the time was between 1 pm and 8 pm, and that the RV would be parked at Nationwide Arena for the pre-season hockey game that night (it looked rather sparsely attended … I was able to park free at a meter!). So, after I got my normal routine done with the wife, I took off to go check it out. I ended up getting down to the arena at about 5:45 pm, figuring on a sparse crowd, giving me a chance to try out this game that looks absolutely sensational!

However, to my dismay, I saw no displays turned on, I saw members of the “tour crew” as their shirts said, walking from the exhibit. They were closing it down and shutting up shop! I asked one of the guys there about the time difference, asking him why it wasn’t open until 8 pm, to which he replied it was just until “the start of the game”. (The hockey game had started at 5 pm). Needless to say, as someone wanting to see what this game was all about, and NOT meeting the demographic that MTV’s craptastic programming caters to (college aged and dumb), this Sunday was my chance to see the game, and I feel like I got shafted.

I will be posting pictures of the teardown this evening since they are on my home camera, but it goes without saying that the failure of this promotion to do as it advertised has left a very sour taste in my mouth to the point where I likely will not buy the game, at least for a while, and at least not new (let a good independent store make a few bucks, not some conglomerate). I don’t have $250 of dispensable income very often, just starting into home ownership will do that to you, so promotions like this really need to at least do as they say to give me an opportunity to find out if it’s worth my gaming collar, or if I should spend it on four other games.

Let me know if you went to see the tour in Nationwide, and if you tried to go there and had a similar experience, or if I was the only person who just sought this out, just for Rock Band.

(If that’s the case, then it’s a bad sign for their sales)!

Chalk this up as another utility that could be useful at certain times … like with DOSBox.

When would one need the use anymore for a floppy drive? Maybe for an old driver disk that only “extracts to a floppy disk”, or maybe for that old decrepit game otherwise known as abandonware that’s still worth playing! Anyways, most computer don’t come with a floppy drive anymore, nor should they. CD Writers and USB Flash Drives are the new de-facto way to move your stuff around, as wel they should be.

BUT, should you have a program that at least wants to act like a floppy drive is there for compatibility reasons, or if you want to make a image file for one of those old emulators. Go HERE. It’s a link to VMBack, a virtual floppy drive program so you can manipulate floppy disk images as if it was a disk in the drive. It’s Daemon Tools for the 3-1/2″ world.

Something we’ve toyed around with at work is the idea of taking our highest-end Precision Workstations and converting them to 64-bit. The idea being that our renderfarm for our 3D Visualization guys would benefit greatly from being 64-bit (especially since the systems in question all have 4 gigs of RAM, whicih 32-bit doesn’t fully use), but end users may still need some of the compatibility and driver support that 32-bit lends itself to, which I have discovered greatly in the process of even trying to go 64-bit in the office here.

The article HERE goes through how to do this dual-boot. Quite honesty, it doesn’t seem too much difficult than any other dual-boot setup, but it’s good to know this can be done should you have needs to use the horsepower that your Xeon (or Core 2 Duo) processor lends you!

Recently, our office did make the jump to Adobe Creative Suite 3. It certainly hasn’t been without its bumps in the road, some very important, some annoying. This falls into the latter of the two.

For seemingly no reason, after installing CS3, the Number Lock key would come on at the Windows Login screen for users. This isn’t a problem for a desktop user with a full keyboard, but really annoying to someone with a laptop screen who thinks they are typing in letters, but in reality are sketching numbers, and thus a non working password.

Thankfully, this thread HERE does a good job of showing where both the individual user options for the NumLock keys are set, as well as the Default User options (which dictate how it is at login). If you’ve run into this, post a comment!

Chalk this one up to things I want to try in the very near future. One of my favorite old PC games was Wing Commander: Privateer. Long before it was cool to be a “sandbox” game, this game let you have the freedom to build your ship, ally with whomever you wanted, as well as complete and execute mission based combat, all within the classic Wing Commander space combat engine. It was a well done, easy to play but very challenging game. They did even eventually port this to Windows XP, although the original DOS port is what I grew up on and loved.

So, now with dual core processors measured in speeds a hundred times higher, how do you play a game without speed throttling? With Dosbox, the DOS Game emulator! The Wing Commander News site has posted directions on how to configure Dosbox to let you play the entire Wing Commander Series on modern machines in their initial glory.

Not only that, but there’s a nice looking remake out there which runs the original story and code in a new OpenGL way, which can through this Slashdot article from way back yonder (and hopefully it works with Vista). I’ll give a full report on it when I give it a shot.