Rogue Leader

Man it's been awhile since I've been here... For those of you who don't know me, my name is Chris and I used to be an article writer/forum admin here at CNCNZ for a few years. Due to unfortunate events in my personal life, I kinda disappeared from the online world about a year ago. But life has once again figured itself out, and I'm back online and better than ever. While I probsbly will not be doing much in the C&C community anymore, it's nice to see that it is still active and thriving. I'm looking forward to Empire at War, and talking strategy with everyone. It's awesome to see some familiar faces still around: Sonic, C&C King,and Area. I hope everyone is doing well, and I look forward to getting to know some of the new fans joining in the fun around here. If anyone needs to get ahold of me by e-mail for any reason, send me a private message and I'll give you my new address. Take Care, and Happy Gaming Rogue Leader Chris Styles

Thanks guys, it's nice to be back. I like the EaW site, when I heard about the game and who was making it I was sure that CNCNZ would be leading the way with a fansite.

My job right now is Theatre Operations Manager. It's actually alot of fun, meeting lots of people, playing with projectors, getting to see movies early I actually get to see Spiderman 2 tomorrow morning, so the job has lots of perks

In all honesty I'll be very suprised if we see a Tiberian Twilight. I think the C&C franchise as we knew and loved it is now dead, to be replaced with posers like Generals, Battle for Middle Earth, and so on. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Generals, and I'm sure BfME will be good, but it just isn't C&C. Only time will tell if there is any life in the C&C franchise anymore.

Awesome. Nvidia and ATi write different drivers for different operating systems, even different Windows. The drivers for ME are different from the ones for XP, so if your computer had no problems with the old ME drivers, the XP ones may have problems unless you update them.

I use WinXP Pro and haven't had any problems. This sounds more like a driver issue than a Windows problem. Or it could potentially be a virus.

Create another administrator-class account under a different name and see if it works.

You may have to open specific ports on the Router's firewall to be able to play. I'm not familiar with the D-Link's configuration software, but you should be able to set a range of ports that will allow traffic through, and then tell Generals which ones those are so it can use them.

Spain was a nice country, and lots of beautiful women populate it

I'm assuming you use high-speed internet (I thought you had said sometime that you had DSL). The best route is to use a 4-port router from Linksys and Windows XP can do the rest for you. I prefer Linksys because it is reliable and user-friendly, but you can really use any router for the job. The reason for the router is mainly security - the NAT firewall is great protection against hackers, better than software firewalls for sure. It also handles DHCP, which makes sure all your computers get an IP address and can communicate with each other. Once you set up the router and have both computers plugged in, you can use Windows XP network setup wizard to guide you through the process of configuring the system to communicate through the router and with the other computer. Once you have completed setup on that machine, you can create a floppy disk which will automatically configure the Windows 98 PC, which is an awesome tool. Home networking is painfully simple these days, just follow that instructions and you can't go wrong. I don't recommend using Wireless networking if you have a business computer unless you are comfortable working with the security options. You wouldn't want any valuable information left out in the open, so be careful if you do choose the wireless route.

It really depends on which operating system is on C: partition. If it is Windows XP, then you can just format the D: and there will be no problems. If Windows 98 is on the C:, then things will be trickier. If Windows 98 is on the C:, the first thing you need to do is back up anything you want to keep from the Windows 98 drive onto the Windows XP drive. Once you are satisfied you have everything, you can format the C:, erasing all data on that partition. Insert the Windows XP CD in your computer, and boot from it. You will install it on the primary partition (C: drive). Once you have installed Windows, you can transfer the files from the D: drive to the C:, and then format the D: drive to clear out all data. It takes some time, but it is really the only option.

Your MSN nickname is, and I quote: "David & Emma Pender (6th November!!). I kinda figured it must have something to do with marriage

Although I don't like Starcraft or Warcraft, Blizzard does produce highly-polished, well-made games. They wait until they feel their games are ready to be released, rather than just throwing them out the door to meet a deadline.

You have to find out which ports on the firewall are open from your brother. Those are the ones you want Generals to communicate through if you are planning on playing online.

I'm not that familiar with Serial ATA, but your hard drives all contain what is called the master boot record which controls what drive your computer boots from, and which it thinks is the primary drive and any secondary. There shouldn't be an issue, as long as both hard drives aren't competing to boot an operating system.

DirectX 8.1 is still a powerful force. My Geforce 4 Ti4600 still plays new games at 1024x768 at high detail. Granted, HL2 and Doom 3 would rape my card, but I've had it for two and a half years and until recently was still considered high-end.

The processor is hyper-threaded, so it fools Windows into thinking there is two processors instead of one. It hasn't seen much benefit on the game side, aside from Star Wars: Galaxies which uses a multi-threaded rendering system, but office apps like Photoshop, Premiere, 3DS Max all have greater performance.

Sapphire makes a good product for ATi, although as Phreakly mentioned ATi's own board has slightly better performance. As for Nvidia builders, Asus is considered to be one of the best although they cost usually $10-20 more than the competition. Gainward has taken some good steps with the Golden Sample line of cards, although they too are more expensive than the competition.

The Geforce II was bare minimum, and because Generals is in full 3D it would have a major impact on performance. If I put a Geforce 2 into my Athlon XP 3000+ with 1024 MB of RAM, it wouldn't perform much better.

Have you ever been to a LAN Party? They are a blast, being able to trash talk each other across the table or across the room - and you don't have to share your screen with everyone else.

That's a problem my computer also had, it has something to do with Direct Memory Addressing (DMA) on your Hard Drive. Right click on the shortcut for Emperor, and select properties. Under the Shortcut tab, in the target field, add " +w" without the quotes to the field. It should read something like this: "C:WestwoodEmperoremperor.exe +w" Since I don't have Emperor anymore, I can't remember the install directory or the EXE name, but adding the +w switch forces the game to load the movies into RAM before playing them. It takes a little longer, but you don't get the skipping.

Here's the link to the latest set of Catalyst drivers for the Radeon family running in Windows XP: http://www2.ati.com/drivers/wxp-w2k-cataly...24m-013831c.exe If you have another OS, go to this page and select you Operating System from the list: http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html

It's hard to come up with original ideas these days - look at Hollywood. Most of the money-making movies coming out this are sequels, remakes, or based on some historical event. There is only so much you can do before you start running out of ideas, and I think games are coming to the same point.

They don't have plans to release the source code, but I think there are enough EnB fans that would be interested in starting their own servers and creating their own content that they should release it. What else are they going to do with it?

I've heard good things about Zalman, mainly in the noise area. I haven't had a chance to see their products myself, but a few people I know that have the VGA cooler really like them.