The Hotdog Laserhouse

Benefit of re-installing Windows: What I previously thought to be just a crappy graphics card throwing a fit has turned out to possibly be some kind of weird driver incompatibility. My old Windows install lasted from August or September 2007 all the way up to July 2012. In those five years, I upgraded literally every single component in my system without re-installing Windows. I’ve heard conflicting reports on whether or not re-installing the OS is necessary in that scenario - but since Windows was not throwing up BSODs over the difference in hardware, I figured I was in the clear.

I even switched video card brands - from nVidia’s GeForce to an ATi/AMD Radeon. Since switching brands, I’ve had all kinds of minor, annoying problems with this Radeon HD5670, even though I made sure to run Driver Cleaner Pro in order to clean out all traces of the nVidia stuff. Something must’ve stuck around, because now that I’ve re-installed Windows, it looks like the games that were giving me issues have been more or less fixed.

Case in point: above is a Half-Life 1 horror mod called “Cry of Fear”. Cry of Fear uses a lot of rendering tricks to get pixel shaders working on the old HL1 engine, and as you can see, on my old install (left images) it looked weird and broken. Now that I’ve re-installed, it’s finally rendering correctly (right images). Minecraft seems a lot more stable now, too.

I still have to comb through other games to see if they’re “fixed”, but maybe my graphics card isn’t as broken as I thought it was. Maybe I just needed to clean out whatever was mucking stuff up.

Dario FF over at Sonic Retro has been working with some other folks to port Sonic Unleashed levels over to Sonic Generations. He recently figured out why some of the lighting effects in the level weren’t displaying properly, and took these screens to show off his progress.

It may be a bit blasphemous, but I think I like some of the levels from Unleashed better than what’s in Sonic Generations. The Unleashed levels are more like race car tracks; they lend themselves more to replayability because it’s more about stuff like proper cornering technique and such.

I am so hype to have a PC version of Sonic Unleashed that runs 60fps. Apparently it’s super super easy to port all of the control bindings over from Unleashed, too - there’s a Control Config file that you literally just copy from Unleashed and paste in to Generations and it makes the game work exactly like Unleashed does (the same works in reverse, too, if you happen to have a hacked Xbox and want Unleashed to control like Generations does).

Begs the question as to why Sega hasn’t released any DLC for Generations, though. I understand they’re currently in a bad money situation, but this seems like the kind of game ripe for DLC level packs. I mean, where’s Spring Yard, or the REAL Casino Night, or Ice Cap, Windy Valley, Metal Harbor, Egg Fleet, Kingdom Valley, or Sweet Mountain? So many possibilities! All of them being ignored! Bah!