The ScooterBlog

This past weekend, I had the chance to meet up with my friend Stephen for him to get his DSi at 11:45 PM, their version of a midnight launch. While I’ve read about how lame most of them were (this one was dead too), Stephen got into some “interesting” discussions with the manager regarding such things as differences between credit card policy in-store and the actual cardholder and merchant agreements. It’s good to have a friend who has a lawyer wife and experience in video game stores, you get to find out just how much they try and get over, where when you know your rights, that just doesn’t happen.

The current thought out there revolves around Gamestop’s checkout system and their practice (which among video game stores is common) of opening a title for a display box and still selling it as new. This GameDaily article mostly works on the concept of the game being checked out and still sold as new. I can vouch that this was indeed the case when I worked at the chain, so it comes as no shock to me. Back in 2000, I could see this as being alright, although I agree with the article that it should get some sort of shop worn discount, even if it’s like 5 percent. But, with some technologies more prevalent, I do not believe there’s as many excuses for needing to open up a copy of the game, or even check it out, outside of one. I’ll mention that in a moment.

• We’re at a point in printing where color copies and inserts cost next to nothing. I understand that it creates a slighty higher burden to make sure that you do not have a box on the floor for a sold out game, but I think Gamestop can plunge for some computer upgrades to inform the employees of this, and an hour’s worth of pay for a part time dude to do the checking. This would not be costly to do now.
• High speed internet allows for information about games to be transmitted through computers and stations allowing a customer to get more detailed information about a game than what would have ever been available before. I’m surprised that more retail stores have not gone to more of a interactive kiosk approach to offering product information that’s more customizeable. High definition video reviews and previews are now normal fare, and that allows even a small business to provide an advantage over the big box retailer. Oh yeah, that connection? $50/month, very doable.
• Some level of digital distribution would allow this problem to take care of itself. If a retail store employee c ould download a time limited version of a game (this totally offers an idea for a new post) This would require more interactivity between the content provider and the big box stores, provided companies like Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo want these stores to be around in ten years’ time. That, I’m not so sure of.  Not to mention, any kind of digital system leaves a door open to piracy, although Sony and Microsoft must be doing something right. The PS3 remains mostly hack free, and the 360’s arcade service is intact.

So what’s the advantage? The ability to demo games in-store. When I worked at Game Junkie while they existed, this was something I was very happy they did, we pushed it pretty hard too, especially since no competitive advantages were ever expected for a one-off store offering nifty features. What about our tournaments? Store copies were permamently reserved for the games, and/or used games were used most of the time, and nowadays I’d expect that to be the norm, not the exception.

So long story short? I totally get where this was needed a long time ago. I worked for stores, I enjoyed this, and I do get the customer’s concern too. But, has technology simply led this to be an unneeded thing? Tell me in the comments.

What do you get when you combine a ridiculously good processor deal, a refurb HP computer that was even a good deal when I got it, and a complete lack of documentation or other efforts to try something on the Internet, anywhere, ever?!

Why, you get a fun project for me to try of course. This time, it was a CPU upgrade.

The A6442P HP Pavilion desktop wasn’t a slouch when I got it. It had 4GB of RAM, a 500GB Hard Drive, DVD Burner, onboard graphics (which got upgraded to a Quadro card real quick), and USB ports all over the place for $400. The weak link as it turned out? The nice, but not overly zippy E2200 processor. It’s 64-bit capable, and has “Core Duo” type architecture, but still gets the lame yet appropriate title of “Pentium Dual Core”. If you ever look as PassMark results, you’ll know why. It scores around 1,100. So,  for what you get in the package, and the fact it’s x64 out of the box, it was a nice find. But, it had room for upgrade.

Documentation on this sucker is hard to come by, but with a little bit of work, you can find system specs, and information about the motherboard. My initial research showed one very positive thing: this board supports far more than it’s outfitted with from the factory, including up to 8GB in RAM, and processors up to Core 2 Quad’s. However, they show support for Q9xxx processors, but not necessarily Q8xxx processors. So when Micro Center had a deal for a Q8200 processor for $100, I was intrigued. It’s not “officially” supported, but the specs match up to the ones that are supported, except for a slightly smaller L2 cache. I gave in, went and got it, and gave it a shot.

The installation as pretty easy, far easier than the last time I tried processor upgrading or modding (this was back in the Pentium 2 days). I ended up needing to use the old stock fan though, the Intel fan’s plastic snaps didn’t work well in the small form factor. But, considering this chip’s reputation for running cool (it’s very overclockable, but I didn’t want that), this didn’t worry me. Sure enough, it was instantly detected by the BIOS (I had v5.22). Just to be safe, I bumped up the BIOS version to v5.35, and it detected great, didn’t even require a re-activation.

How much of a jump is it? The average PassMark benchmark is 3,161. That’s a 2.87x performance boost, and it instantly took my Vista processor ranking from 5.1 (respectable) to 5.9, likely well off the chart. It also took my memory from 5.4 to 5.9 due to it not being a bottleneck. My system is now clocking in at 5.4, only because of the graphics card, and it’s still pretty darn good!

If you are toting around a system with a E2200 processor, I can’t recommend this enough if your motherboard supports it. The ability to improve your PC by multiples for a low price is hard to ignore, and it’s even pretty good at NewEgg’s current price ($165).

This is a private gripe, but one I feel like I need to get out there. Maybe once you read it, it’ll make sense to you as well.

The iPhone App Store has become a breeding ground for some wonderful games, and both big and small companies are realizing that a way they can get people to buy their game is through offering  a demo version, or as it’s always referred to in the App Store world, a lite version. This is fine to do. In fact, I enjoy that they do.

The problem arises from how the rankings system works. Because these are free downloads, they get dumped in with all of the other free downloads, and thus are viewed as strictly free, they take up almost all of the spots for the free downloads! Demo and lite versions really are different than truly free!

So, in the next iteration of the stop especially with the 3.0 OS, I would love to see a differentiation somewhere. Ideally, I would love a demo section, but would settle for breaking out “free apps” and “free games” as two separate entities. I think it would allow people who are genuinely making a free app, or a gateway to their web service (like Evernote) more recognized, as they should be, compared to the demo of the game they want you to pay for.

I recently came across a couple of excellent deals, one through Woot, and one through Amazon. The first was a GE cordless phone with a 7″ picture frame for $40. It was an awesome price and finally a point where I was willing to get into the whole digital picture frame market, and it had a nice quality cordless phone to go with it.

There’s just one problem with this setup: I don’t own a landline! So, I needed to find a way to make this work with some sort of service. Seeing as I didn’t really feel like buying something new like Magicjack when I already own a perfectly good Skype account with cheap outgoing calls ($3/month), I went on the hunt for a phone adapter. I found the D-Link DPH-50U USB telephone adapter.

After ordering from Amazon for the excellent price of $19.99, I discovered a sad reality: it’s not designed to work with anything 64-bit. But, there’s not much out there like it at that price point, so it’s worth it to try and hack something together to make it work.

The logic behind how to do it was solid. The implementation, sadly, not as smooth.

The idea was simple. Use Virtualbox to make a 32-bit VM, install XP and Skype, use the USB support to wrap the device into the VM, and then use it like normal through the VM. The XP install was smooth, and with a little bit of elbow grease, Virtualbos was able to wrap up the “unknown device” tbat x64 could do nothing with and bring it into a 32-bit VM. I sense this will be more and more useful in the future, the ability to do this really is pretty nifty.

The problem? Skype crashed every time I tried to load it up. There is a nice forum thread on it HERE. The two possible answers suggested were to downgrade Skype to 3.5 or enable hardware virtualization. Sadly, my cheapie E2200 CPU does not support that, so the downgrade was the option that I had to go with. Unfortuntely, Skype ate up a ton of CPU, did not run smoothly and thus did not work as expected. I successfully made it work in principle and the beginnings of it in practice, but my home PC limited my options.

So, what did I do? Found an old x86 laptop, plugged it in, and it worked great. Fell back to physical compatibility, not just virtual compatibility. Still, it’s good to learn how Virtualbox’s USB support works and that it’s able to grab and passthru any “unknown device” that is only x86 compatible. In a bind, that could prove quite helpful.

Feel free and command if you’ve tried this device out in x64, and if you had similar luck in your attempts to hack it together.