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If like me you were an early adopter of Core 2 Duo then you probably still have that old E6400 or E6600 rotting on your 975X, P35 or X38 chipset. And, truth be told, there isn’t anything shabby about this what so ever. There’s really very little you can’t do with these processors even now about 1-2 years after hitting the mainstream.

But your friends are now sporting 1333MHz or quad-core CPUs and getting a lot better performance in modern games based on UT3 or Crysis or CoD4. Physics is getting heavier and heavier in every game released and this still needs a beefy CPU for performance even if you have an 8800 GPU of some sort.

If you can stand to wait a little longer than the Q9450 is the answer for you. This is a Yorkfield core with 2×6M L2 cache (for a total of 12M), an 8x multiplier on a 1333MHz bus, and four 45nm cores running at 2666MHz each. I’m not currently sure what price it will fetch but it will run in the $300-$500 range. So finally an affordable version of the Intel top end processors which also support 12M L2 and 1333MHz FSB.

Is it absolutely worth upgrading from an E6600 or Q6600 or E3450 to this processor? That really depends on the rest of your system. I have the Asus Maximus Formula, an X38 board, some good RAM, and an 8800 Ultra. I’ve been playing the newer games and notice that CPU does start lacking sometimes so it seems like the next upgrade I’d need to make. If you need to upgrade your board or RAM to take full advantage of the Q9450 then you might want to wait until DDR3 becomes a bit more affordable before jumping in to a new processor. And certainly if you have an older video card then that should be your first upgrade since it’d yield the best gaming results for you. GPUs are always the most important for gaming.

Of course if you don’t do any serious PC gaming then you really don’t need any of this stuff. Even five year old hardware is fast enough to do anything else you need.

The highlight of my recent trip to Vegas was certainly the Pinball Hall of Fame.  I first learned of this place after getting Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection for the PS2 a couple years ago.  Some of the games from that game I got to play for real like the Black Hole.  Others I got to play were a bit more rare and crazy like Orbiter1 and Pinball Circus.

One game I found surprisingly simple and fun was the 1968 Williams game called Space Pilot.  It only cost 25 cents to play and I managed to get a best score of 3500 on it.  The reason I mention it is because I’m really thinking hard about building a replica.  Not a true replica because I’m really only after the root game functionality.  A small counterweighted ’ship’ on a central pivot point with two fans, and four rods with contacts at various heights, a timer and a scoring mechanism.

Could be a fun project.  But I really just want my own Pinball Museum here in Boston.

Several months ago I bought my first Sony PSP. I had wanted one for a while but decided to wait for the newer version with TV out and various other ‘enhancements’. I haven’t had much chance to use it until this past week. I was lucky enough to land a free trip to Las Vegas though work, complete with over 40 hours of travel time back and forth. I brought my DS and the PSP to help drive away the boredom.

Turns out that I really like the PSP a lot better. It does have fewer, and face it, less original games. The battery life is poor and it uses fragile optical media. It sorely needs a right analog control and it also costs quite a bit. But it does two important things that the DS doesn’t: I can see what I’m doing and it’s comfortable to play.

The stylus is a fun interface from time to time but I just can’t use it for extended play. My hand starts hurting very quick. Holding the weight of the DS in the left hand alone hurts and holding the tiny stylus hurts my right even more. Maybe I just don’t have the hands of a twelve year old. The PSP screen is gorgeous and the dual DS screens don’t make up for that awesome viewable real estate.

I never appreciated the fact that the PSP can play video UMDs but after watching the free Family Guy UMD that came with mine on the plane for a couple hours I’ve totally changed my opinion. It’s nice to have the ability to just go buy a quick movie for a flight especially when you’re tired and don’t have the energy for another game.

No, I have not explored hacking the PSP for my own emulation purposes but I did buy a gigantic memory stick for a try in the future.

Nintendo used to say that the DS was not a replacement for the GameBoy. They changed their story on that now and given the DS success. I’d certainly like to see them come out with another GameBoy, something with a bigger screen and analog controls. Something for us older folks that’s a lot more comfortable to use.

I got a notice from Xbox Live the other day letting me know that my card would be charged automatically for $50 in January. I purchased a couple months worth of Live back a year ago to play Gears of War. I haven’t used Live since. It looks like I must have actually paid for an entire year of service. What I didn’t sign on for was automatic renewal.

I despise automatic billing. I know some of you like it. You probably have loads of money in your bank accounts to buffer random charges. I don’t have that luxury so a forgotten $50 charge might mean I don’t eat so well for a few days.

This is why I got rid of IGN / Fileplanet. It’s why I never used Vonage. And now it’s why I won’t use Xbox Live.

It’d be perfectly acceptable for these companies to offer one time billing options. But I know the little dirty secret: they make lots of money off of subscription billing because not everyone keeps track of these things. I know another dirty little secret: the harder they make it for you to cancel an account, the more money they make.

Welcome to shady land.

I worked for an ISP once that forced people to deal with calling customer service for an average of 30-40 minutes before getting their service turned off. This was done on purpose. Most people would rather hang up and pay another $9 than deal with the situation. They actually made substantial money from accounts that customers didn’t want or know about. I left that job in under four months due to the attitudes of the management.

It was extremely brazen too. If customer service people answered cancel line calls before 10-15 minutes they were actually in trouble for it. Even when a customer was lucky enough to speak to someone, they were put through as many questions and guilt trips as possible (Are you sure there isn’t someone else in your family who uses it? Would you like to keep just your email for $2.95?). And after that? If you couldn’t remember the exact phone number or credit card you used to create the account, on a whim it might be decided that you weren’t ‘authorized’ to cancel the account. Sometimes it’s easier just to call the credit card company and dispute the charges. The companies that pull this crap don’t care if they loose $10 after a tough fight, but you might care about your money getting tied up in this process month after month.

There are companies like the As Seen On TV guys that make a living on wrongfully entering people in to service agreements, recurring charges, etc. Hercules Hooks is a good example.  Spend $10 on a set of hooks on your walls and be surprised when it costs you $200 in the end with ridiculous handling charges and the hook-of-the-month club.

Xbox Live did end up canceling my account but only after sitting on the phone for half an hour with some CSR asking me if I was sure and to verify the phone number, zip code, mothers maiden name, and next of kin I supposedly gave them to sign up.

Still not as bad as the poor guy who tried to cancel an AOL account.

My free time lately has been pouring in to World of Warcraft yet again. I got bored with the game last time after hitting level 41 and putting a couple hundred hours in to get there. I didn’t see the point to keep doing the same kind of missions over and over. WoW really has no end goal which tends to make it ultimately pointless. But the fun is in the doing and after my many month hiatus, I picked it back up again.

I rolled a paladin this time instead of a warlock. The upside to this is the fact that paladins can use mail armor and eventually plate and can take a lot of punishment. The warlock is a fragile class and really took some effort to stay alive, especially while soloing instances.

If you didn’t understand any of that it’s because people who play WoW have their own language.  I think I started playing WoW just so I could understand the people around me when they started talking about their previous night’s raids.

If you haven’t at least tried WoW, you should.  It might be as addictive for you as it is for me.  And I really HATE the concept of paying monthly for a game.  WoW might be changing my mind on that.  Just a little.

I play on Frostmane as Horde for anyone interested.   For the Horde!

Some guys at work decided it might be fun to hold a little Robocode competition so I’ve started work on CakeBot. It’s been seven years or so since I wrote my last little robot and it’s a good thing I couldn’t find the old source. It really sucked. Not being a Java expert then hurt and still not being one now will hurt as well. But it will be a good experience.

Robocode is about developing the AI to control little tanks so that they can defeat other little AI controlled tanks. The API is relatively simple but a lot of clever things can and need to be done. Primarily you need to move the tank back and forth, turn the turret and shoot at other tanks, and adjust the radar so you can ’see’ around you. You get points for ramming people, loose points for being rammed or hitting a wall. You also can control the damage done by the shot by sacrificing rate of fire. Stuff like that.

Frankly, the more complex I make my bots, the worse they perform in competition. I’ll be trying my old method of developing several ‘moves’ and using ‘emotions’ to control which moves are performed when. For example, if my bot gets hit a lot it might get ’scared’ and go hide in a corner. Or it might get ‘mad’ and single one bot out and try to demolish it. I think this technique can probably work okay once a balance is reached. A lot of trial runs will be needed to balance out the ‘hormones’ in any meaningful way. Should the bot start out more scared or more mad, how long do those effects last, what moves are more effective.

This all assumes I can get moves right. Avoiding walls, ramming bots, aiming at moving targets, etc can all be very challenging by themselves. Still, I’m sure to have better success than some of my home built mechanical robots used to do. Sure, some people can throw some IR optics and a couple OP amps on a RC car and get a decent wall following robot out of it. My attempts all committed suicide in one way or another.