Tag: windows

Adobe Premiere Pro, SLI and the 310.70 nvidia drivers

Update: This also appears to be true for the new 310.90 WHQL drivers.

With the latest (at this time) nvidia WHQL drivers 310.70 and running in SLI mode, Adobe Premiere Pro does not display the video preview when the Mercury Playback Engine is set to GPU Acceleration (CUDA) mode, instead the display is blank, changing to software mode, reverting the driver or turning off SLI mode completely fixes this but it’s not an ideal solution.

However I have figured out how to fix the problem and keep the acceleration and driver version. The nvidia control panel in Windows allows you to determine which GPU is used for CUDA for a specific application, by default it is always set to auto, this appears to be why it is failing, as it appears that the GPU it is choosing is either incorrect or Premiere Pro doesn’t support it.

At first I tried manually setting GPU 1, but the display was still blank, then I set GPU 2 and it worked as it had in the previous drivers with no further tweaking required.

If you have trouble with the setting I have made a screenshot of the setting below.

Premiere Pro CUDA Fix
Premiere Pro CUDA Fix

Mafia 2 Review

Mafia 2 is the long awaited sequel to the 2002 Illusion Softworks (now 2k Czech) classic Mafia. The version I will be reviewing is the PC version, released on the 26th of August 2010.

My Mafia 2 Demo review has already covered many things that haven’t changed in the finished game, so I’ll try not to repeat too much.

Introduction

The PC version of this game is a Steam exclusive, though you can buy a physical copy that contains the Steam files. Installation was smooth and there were no issues with the PhysX runtime like there were with the demo.

You play as Vito Scaletta and follow his rise through organised crime in the fictional city of Empire Bay during the 1940s and 1950s. This is an open world game, though the storyline quite linear for a game of this type, not unlike Mafia.

Continue reading Mafia 2 Review

Dead Space Review

Dead Space is a 2008 survivor horror third person game from Electronic Arts, released on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC. The version I will be reviewing is the PC version.

First Impressions

The game places you in the shoes of Isaac Clarke, a ship specialist who you will immediately notice is in a full body armored space suit and stays in it for the duration of the game. The year is 2414 and shortly after the beginning of the game you find yourself inside the seemingly empty USG Ishimura, a “Planet Cracker” starship that is sending out a distress signal and isn’t responding to radio messages.

This game is primarily horror, along the lines of Doom 3, however it includes many puzzles to stop things getting too boring.

Continue reading Dead Space Review

Mafia 2 Demo Review

This is a review of the demo of Mafia 2, released on the 10th of August on Steam for the PC.

First Impressions

Mafia 2 is the long awaited sequel to the 2002 Illusion Softworks (now 2k Czech) classic Mafia. It was first announced in August 2007 touting “benchmark-setting visual quality and action that you expect to see only in Hollywood movies”, since then it has had a few delays and some features have reportedly been removed.

The PC version of the game is a Steam exclusive, as is the demo that I will be reviewing, installation was fairly easy however the installation of the latest PhysX runtime caused an issue with PhysX on the target machine that I will explain later.

The demo takes place during a mission in the 50s where you must take out a mobster known as “The Fat Man”, you start out in a safe house answering a call detailing the mission and what you must do, once you leave the house you get to explore a small section of the city for 10 minutes (12:30 minutes if you die at least twice it seems) while heading to the warehouse.

Continue reading Mafia 2 Demo Review

D-Link DIR-655 Firmware 1.34b03 Beta

D-Link has released the 1.34b03 Beta firmware for the DIR-655 router.

Changelog:

Disabling the SecureSpot feature, the router will not query Bsecure when the feature is disabled
Statistics will not clear under “Status>Statistics”

The first fix was available in the previous firmware 1.34b02, I have found it stops connections that people have noticed the router give to the Bsecure servers when SecureSpot is not running. The second fix addresses a bug that appeared in that firmware causing the statistics page to report ridiculously high stats.

Using this firmware is at your own risk and will most likely void your warranty if something goes wrong.

Download:

D-Link DIR-655 1.34b03 Beta Firmware
or download from D-Link
MD5: 15644CB5660A27E7DC3EAF2CEA785CC7

D-Link DIR-655 Firmware 1.34b02 Beta and SharePort 3.0

Update 22-04-2010: D-Link have released the 1.34b03 firmware that fixes an issue with the statistics page for this firmware. Get it here.

D-Link has released the 1.34b02 Beta firmware for the DIR-655 router.

Changelog:

This code addresses disabling the SecureSpot feature.
The router will not query Bsecure when the feature is disabled.

Using this firmware is at your own risk and will most likely void your warranty if something goes wrong.

Download:

D-Link DIR-655 1.34b02 Beta Firmware
or download from D-Link
MD5: DBE6A2D2628894B3253024111307735E

D-Link has also released SharePort version 3.0 for Mac OSX and Windows.

There doesn’t appear to be a changelog but I will add one if it appears.
Add a comment below with any results you have regarding these.

Download:

SharePort 3.0 Windows
or download from D-Link
MD5: D42166F5E46E6AAA845BDC4B42EFAE32

SharePort 3.0 Mac OSX
or download from D-Link
MD5: 30B1B71D1CADC69B5C5EB4D39247F38D

The Saboteur Review

This review took a little longer than it should have.

First Impressions

At first I wasn’t too excited about the game, it looked interesting and the style was something different but I wasn’t expecting this game to really change much when it comes to a sandbox game. I only saw 2 reviews about this game before buying it and they were generally positive, they were reviewing the PS3 version however this is the PC version, I was expecting to have the usual PC issues but not as many as I eventually did.

This game seems polished at first, the animations are smooth and it has great atmosphere, the controls are easy enough to handle and the story starts off as expected, a little cheesy, but bearable.

Continue reading The Saboteur Review

Age Of Empires 2 in VMWare

Ever since I ran Hidden & Dangerous Deluxe in a VMWare Windows XP machine in order to get around Windows 7 and Vista incompatibilities I have wondered what other games this would work with and how to get it working a little easier.

I haven’t played Age Of Empires 2 or the Conquerors expansion in a while so I was surprised when after installing it and starting my first game I ended up with strange colour issues, eg, red grass and purple water, the game would also crash occasionally when trying out different compatibility modes. So I tried my Windows Vista laptop, but the same thing happened with it, I tried using Wine on my linux laptop but 9 times out of 10 it causes x.org to crash and other times it just ran too slowly.

I had since deleted my VMWare virtual machine, so I looked for a quicker option and came across this to quickly convert an XP mode virtual machine to a working VMware image usable in the free VMWare Player, in total it took about 15 minutes to get up and running and at no cost other than a Windows 7 license that can use XP Mode.

The game works fine out of the box, here’s an example:


That example was for the expansion pack but it also works fine without.

D-Link SharePort Update

Update: D-Link has released a new firmware for the DIR-655 here, it contains a version of SharePort that is newer than SX Virtual Link.

I haven’t been following D-Link’s SharePort fiasco since the first few months of my previous blog posting about it here. This is due to the fact that as many users have experienced since the original release it appears to have gained more and more bugs in each new version and we only occasionally see them being fixed.

A forum post in the official D-Link forums about the Apple OSX users of the software pointed me to the fact that the drivers and software used to connect to the router appears to have been made by a company called Silex Technology.

I searched around and found SX-Virtual Link, the original name of the D-Link SharePort Utility, upon downloading and installing the latest version 3.2.3 I found that the application was the same as the SharePort Utility except for the branding and the version. D-Link’s latest SharePort Utility has the date 2009/01/06 and theirs is 2009/02/02, there is also a major version difference, the specific version number for the utility/drivers with SharePort is version 4.9.5 and SX-Virtual Link is up to version 5.3.0.

Upon using the utility I had no problems at all connecting to my D-Link DIR-655’s device, I used a wireless mouse to test the functionality and it worked flawlessly for some time, so I am encouraging users who currently have issues with SharePort to uninstall it and install SX-Virtual Link and see if it fixes any of the issues you are currently having with your devices.

For OSX users I have not been able to test out the OSX version and I am unaware of any changes you might need to make to get it working but I will provide a link below for those users to test if they so wish.

You can get the latest version of SX-Virtual Link just below:

These are updated versions (3.4.0) 31/12/2009

SX Virtual Link 3.4.0 Windows
SX Virtual Link 3.3.0 Mac OSX

Please comment below with your experiences.