Author Archives: Loogie

In Snake‘s absence (grounded from Net for interim History grades 😛 ), I have completed the project he started… the Win98 Tweak Guide column.

There are 17 tweaks in it, plus some other assorted boom features. Read it here, or via the Columns index 8) .

I learned a couple of boom tricks for CS today and yesterday… actually, they’re the same trick, just in different maps.

Due to Half-Life’s amazingly old and unfixed engine, sometimes when a roof is too thin, you can jump through it. This is the case in parts of cs_assault, cs_italy, and de_aztec, and it can be very useful for popping up to unsuspecting llamas above and goin 1337 on em. All you have to do is get someone else to crouch, you duck-jump on them, and then they stand up. Look at the SSs of them below, and be sure to read the alt text and info for the enlarged pic to see where the areas are in the map.

And plz notice that I have another news post below this 8) .

I hain’t posted in a while… so, what has been going on aside from video game character personality tests?

For one, Snake finally fixed the links section. Before, links clicked opened in the same frame; now, they open in a new window so as to not take you away from s–l 😛 . Also, more categories, and sub-cats, have been made, as well as a couple of interface changes. There are 51 links currently 8) .

Yes, I did get a GF4… it’s an MX 420… and, however much of a little upgrade I thought it would be, it really isn’t. I can now do decent 4x AA, there’s double the RAM, and w/ NVMax, tweaking is really easy. I’ve fixed all problems I’ve had w/ it, including a blinking problem in CS (probably due to VSync frames rendered ahead). As w/ all GF4s, it has a boom S-Video out… I’ll probably find something else to say about it later.

A couple new versions of things are out: MBM and nVidia Detonator drivers.

MBM v5.107
Win98 & XP Dets v28.23
I noticed three things w/ the new MBM: a thing called “SysLog”, an option to “enable RD2Pro support”, and the ability to resize the dashboard’s “meter size” from 44-68… but strangely, my FTP uploads of my temp for the topframe don’t work anymore (this may or may not be cause of the new version). Look @ nVidia’s site for the full specs on the dets, but one major thing they did for me and my GF4 was fixing a toolbar-resizing problem when alt-tabbing out of CS.

Watching TechTV today caused me to go searching for a new tweak tool. I found a program called Exit Killer that supposedly eliminates all IE popups, but I… can’t obtain it 😕 . There is a program, though, that I think is THE BEST non-bare-registry-hacking Windows tweaking tool there is. It combines everything I’ve found from TweakUI, TweakI, and more. It’s called Xteq’s X-Setup. Get it here. The most useful features are changing the background color of Explorer toolbars, making files w/ unknown extensions all open w/ the same program, changing MSN’s BG color, changing the BG and text colors of BSODs, and adding right-click options of “move to folder” and “copy to folder” for all files… quite int indeed.

I guess that’s it… oh… AZs, update ur CTTs 😡 .

Earlier today, I went through and fixed the individual download description pages… they were quite outdated, and the backgrounds were even linked to the old S&L @ geocities! 😮 Also, I added my latest work, Loogie‘s Cyber RS Revision. Look for it by clicking “Downloads” on the nav to the left, of course.

Also, I would like to bring to your attention 2 things in gaming: there’s a new 7-map Rats CS pack out @ Planet Half-Life; also, Threewave is pretty cool. Snake bitched about me getting it all week… well, I haven’t played it much but I saw it @ his house. I like the menu system, and Coral CTF’s a great-looking map. And while I’m on the topic of tech news, Intel announced that it will no longer be using RDRAM (RAMBUS) in their motherboards. DDR all the way now 8) .

Finally… in the past couple of months or so, Snake and I have been getting songs w/ Audiogalaxy instead of Aimster, and here’s the main groups we (or either of us) get(s) now:

BT | Future Sound of London | Enigma | Adam F.
Tourach | NIN | Metallica

A funny thing happened to me the other day… my nearly new Visiontek GeForce2 GTS died! I’ve been having problems w/ this for a while now, but it is now officially dead. Here’s the story: about 3 weeks ago, while I was playin CS, I started getting artifacts everywhere. Closing and reopening Half-Life didn’t fix this, nor underclocking. Here’s what then happened, it’s quite funny:

So after that, things were fine, but yesterday, I started to get the same problem, in Windows. I restarted, then I was in standard display mode. Removed GF2, applied new paste, put back in, still standard display mode… then I hear the “BEEP, BEEP BEEP BEEP” when I turn on my rig… in other words, it’s dead. I thought there was a problem w/ my AGP slot, but anyway… now I’m using Snake‘s old Viper II (read his article on Viper II and VT6X4 tweaking here, or our article about our first video card upgrades here). I got the 9007 drivers, and I love it. I had some problems at first, but aside from the cursor, I think it’s just as good as my GF2, and it should do for a little while. [Chief’s Note: LOL, have fun with that POS! 😛 ]

Secondly and lastly, I trashed my IE HotBar, and got the Google Toolbar. It’s very useful for quick searching, rating pages, highlighting, and searching the site u’re on. Here’s an SS of it:

I just reviewed my second demo review in the past year or so… StarTopia. Yeh, u may remember Snake reviewing that at one time… well, we lost that review, so I redid it. Read it here.

Also, I added 3 quotes to the topframe. Find em by double-clicking the text over and over… and over 😛 .