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What's going on with Voodoo? Founder Rahul Sood Gives an Update

Ryan Whitwam — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:37:46 -0500

After HP acquired high-end PC maker Voodoo, everyone expected to see a lot of their products coming out of HP. That didn’t happen. Dell has kept the Alienware brand highly visible, and they were acquired around the same time. Voodoo’s Rahul Sood has posted an update to his blog to tell everyone just what happened to the venerable maker of really expensive PCs.

According to Sood, Voodoo still exists, and the long silence was something of a transitional period to get the company completely integrated with HP. “Voodoo, as you all know, was to be integrated into the larger business units so we could take some of our ideas and products to a much larger audience,” Sood wrote in his blog.

Indeed, the HP Envy 13 and 15 are good examples of the effects Voodoo has had on HP. Sood explained that the “Voodoo DNA” branding was removed from the laptops because Voodoo didn’t technically design them, HP did. He pointed out that HPs designs have changed dramatically in the last 3 years largely because of Voodoo. The Voodoo founder said the company was changing from a manufacturer, into “something beyond”. The take away seems to be that you’ll probably see some Voodoo branding in the future, but their main goal is to advance HP products as a whole.

Burnout Paradise

Evan Lahti — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:00:00 -0500

An open-world arcade racing experiment in Detroit debris

Don’t tell Newton: Ramming your hot rod full-speed into a concrete block, idling minivan, or in-game ad billboard in Burnout Paradise doesn’t really slow you down. The game is a steady, fuel-injected dose of momentum from spark plug to finish line. Pushing over Paradise City’s 20 square miles of pavement for just an hour means accumulating new cars, completing events, knocking over barriers to find shortcuts or spontaneous jumps, earning license upgrades, setting street-specific high scores, or just streaking a newfound scenic route with rubber.

The game combines the feel of impulsive, mission-based sandbox titles like Grand Theft Auto and Tony Hawk with loose, forgiving, driving mechanics—making for disposable, whimsical racing with a persistent career and surprisingly good online mode. Every major intersection in the city is a gateway to a racing event. Spin your wheels at a stoplight and you’ll activate a point-to-point race or one of four other variations on the standard sprint: Road-rage events have you side-swiping a set number of opponents within a time limit, stunt runs are all about racking up points with long drifts and high jumps, and in our favorite, “marked man,” you’ll try to escape a set of ominous black sedans before they can smear you into the median. There are vehicle-specific challenges, too, and as you spend more time in Paradise City, you can earn the keys to rival cars roaming the streets by pushing them off the road.

Some cars earn a boost from stunts, others from banging against other vehicles and objects in the environment, and still another type gains it by just maintaining a high speed.

When you understeer a turn (Burnout’s sluggish map-guidance interface is one of its only shortcomings), you’re treated to a slo-mo sequence of your coupe compressing into a steel accordion. You’ll never see a pre-rendered animation—plow into a passenger van, pole, or unlucky bus near top speed, and the game catches each frame of your chassis’s crunch from a cinematic angle. These scenic crashes don’t affect your car’s performance, and they’re an anchor for the game’s forgiving, unfrustrating design.

Seamless presentation is one of Burnout Paradise’s best qualities. Criterion keeps the experience accessible: Loading screens are a rarity, the player’s stats and best times are all recorded alongside an excellent in-menu city map, and hopping online is a matter of two keystrokes, where you can roll through events or “freeburn” with up to seven other players. The PC release bundles all the updates the console version has seen in the last year: a night-day cycle and dynamic weather, new online game modes, and a handful of motorcycles to hop on when you get tired of four wheels.

Bikes! No, you can't whip chains at passers-by like in Road Rash, but the choppers are a good wheelie-popping diversion when four-wheeling gets old.

Burnout Paradise is a memorable arcade racing experience. What holds it back an rpm or two are the relatively predictable events—after you’ve won 20 or so challenges, the lack of more dynamic content (police, racing factions, tournaments, or multi-race events) makes the single-player seem tedious. Once you’ve explored the city enough to get a feel for it, Paradise loses some of its charm—busting over a dirt ramp and power-sliding through oncoming traffic as you round a blind corner into a telephone pole is spontaneous only the first few dozen times.

How To: Run Windows Games on Linux

Jean-Paul Connock — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:00:00 -0600

Tired of the lackluster gaming opportunities on your alternative OS? Playing your favorite PC titles in Linux is easier than you think!

Time: 37 Min

What You Need

GNU/Linux installation with recent kernel (2.6x)
Free, www.ubuntu.com
Wine
Free, installed via Linux or winehq.org
A PC game

It’s OK, Linux users. We understand your pain. Gaming on your open-source platform is, for the most part, restricted to similarly open-source or freeware titles from independent developers. You don’t often receive the same love that Windows users enjoy from triple-A game developers. But your time spent in the dark can now end: We’re going to show you how to play the latest PC-only titles on your Linux distribution of choice.

We’re using a program called Wine to simplify the process of running Windows-based games on a Linux platform. Unlike virtualization applications such as VMware, Wine is not an emulator. An emulator is a wrapper that allows one operating system to run within another. This wrapper hides the primary OS from its windowed love child, creating a software bubble for the second OS to play in. Since emulators run a complete OS within this virtualized bubble, the performance hit can be staggering and hinders gaming on all but the most powerful PCs.

Wine avoids this problem by implementing a set of routines (or APIs) used by applications to communicate with Windows. Rather than emulate them, Wine uses a compatibility layer that translates system calls from Windows to Linux and vice versa. If you’re still confused, relax. You don’t need to understand how it works. You just need to know that Wine is free and easy to configure and will have you up and gaming in no time!

1. Install Wine the Easy Way

Installing new software for Linux has become much easier since the advent of package management software. If you’re using a modern Linux distribution, you’ve probably utilized some kind of package manager. The most common are Synaptic/Aptitude (used by Debian and Ubuntu), Portage (Gentoo), and RPM (RedHat).

A software package comes bundled with the necessary software dependencies required by the application. Since these dependencies often overlap between applications, a package manager will ensure that your system installs only the dependencies that are missing. If you already have what you need, the package manager links the dependencies that have previously been installed to the new application.

Installing Wine on a package-managed system is as easy as telling the package manager to go ahead and install the program. One quick preface: All of our instructions are based on our experience with Ubuntu. Your Linux variety may vary, but the overall gist of our instructions should remain the same.

To get Wine onto your system, first launch the Synaptic Package Manager by opening the Applications menu on the title bar at the top of your screen and clicking Add/Remove. Click the Binocular icon and type wine , but be sure to select the “Show All Available Applications” option before you commence your search. As you can see in the above screenshot, your results will include an application called Wine, version 1.0.0.

Finish the job by clicking on the box to the left of Wine to select it and then click the green check mark labeled Apply. Confirm the installation of any additional packages to ensure that your installation doesn’t choke when it fails to find its dependencies.

2. Configure Wine’s Graphics and Audio

Open a terminal window in Ubuntu and type winecfg to launch Wine’s configuration screen. Start by clicking the Drives tab and set Wine to autodetect your drives, as shown in the upper image. The application will create a file structure that mimics Windows: It will establish your base directory as a C:\ drive and map your optical drive to D:\.

Next, click the Graphics tab to adjust your DirectX settings. We recommend using the settings displayed in the lower image: Check only the second and fourth options under Window Settings. The last option is especially critical, as it’ll make your Wine games stay windowed. That way, if your game crashes, you’ll still have access to your Linux desktop. Don’t forget to set your gaming resolution: You’ll do that underneath the Emulate a Virtual Desktop option.

Finally, click the Audio tab and then click the Test Sound button. If you can’t hear anything coming from your speakers by default, select each of the provided drivers—one at a time—until you have sound. It’s a crude solution, but it will take the least amount of time to get your speakers rockin’.

3. Check Game Compatibility

Before you rush to your local game store and spend the hard-earned money you saved by using a free operating system instead of Windows, read this step. It’s mission critical.

Linux comes in many varieties. Because of this, certain games tend to run better on certain distributions. And more often than not, specific titles will flat-out not work with the specific distribution—or any distribution—you’re running.
You should know a title’s compatibility issues before you plunk down $50 for a game. For that, you can turn to Wine’s official application database at appdb.winehq.org. This giant user-driven database provides ratings of and recommendations for running more than 10,000 applications and games in Wine.

The games and applications are broken down into specific test results, which the site presents based on combinations of tested distributions and Wine versions. Each listed entry tells you whether the program was able to either run or install correctly and assigns an overall usability rating to the experience.

Even if your game of choice appears to be broken on all Linux varieties, be sure to read the user comments appended at the bottom of each game’s results page. You might discover information about a new workaround or patch that has yet to be reflected in the game’s overall ratings.

4. Install your game

The installation process for applications under Wine is generally the same as it is in Windows because Wine uses the same installer. We’re going to focus on installing our game of choice, Sins of a Solar Empire, but you can use the same process to install a variety of other titles. Start by opening a Linux terminal and typing winefile. This pulls up the application’s Windows Explorer-like interface.

Navigate to your optical device by clicking the appropriate icon at the top of the window—it should look like a CD going into a drive. From there, double-click your game’s installation file (setup.exe, for example) and let the installer do its thing.
Follow the instructions as you would for any game being installed in Windows but pay attention to any errors or glitches that you see. Chances are good that you’ll notice fonts sizes are off and, in some cases, the fonts won’t display at all. We’ll come back to that later.

Once you’ve installed the game, you’ll want to make it easy to launch. You can do this by finding the executable file and linking it to a launcher—the Linux version of a Windows shortcut. By default, Wine hides its fake Windows partition in your
/home/[user name] directory. So you’ll want to right-click your Linux desktop and select the Launcher creation option. Name the Launcher whatever you want, but start the command as follows: wine “/home/[user name]/.wine/drive_c/”. After the “drive_c” section, type out the path where you installed your program.

If you can’t get a launcher to work, don’t worry. Some games end up working only by double-clicking the executable within the Winefile application.

5. Troubleshooting

Although we’ve been able to install and run Microsoft Office, Guild Wars, and NHL 08 without any problems, Sins of a Solar Empire was trickier. This gives us a perfect transition to Wine’s biggest headache: troubleshooting.

In our case, the fonts for our game were the wrong size and, in some cases, completely nonexistent (see above). If this happens to you, there’s a quick workaround. From a Windows installation, copy the fonts out of the C:\Windows\Fonts folder. You’ll then want to launch Winefile and copy the fonts back into Wine’s simulated Windows installation, same C:\Windows\Fonts folder.

If your chosen application gives you compatibility problems, it’s time to return to the Winecfg configuration tool. If the application was developed for a specific instance of Windows, try using the Applications tab to force Wine to use a suitable compatibility layer for the program. Click Add Application, choose your executable file, and choose the appropriate version of Windows.

The configuration tool also lets you change graphics and audio options as mentioned earlier. Disabling hardware support can keep games from crashing but sacrifices game performance in doing so. When in doubt, turn settings to minimum and bring them up slowly as you attempt to troubleshoot the best configuration for your game.

6. Work in the Wine Library

When you are configuring a new application, it’s wise to launch it from a terminal until you have the kinks ironed out. Doing so allows you to read the error messages that stream down the screen as the application runs. Bear in mind that many of these messages are not errors; they are used by developers to tune Wine. This makes them useful sources of information, particularly when they spit out .dll (dynamically linked library) errors.

A dynamically linked library is a fancy term from Microsoft that refers to a library of software used by various applications. These libraries are “linked” to applications as they are needed. If this reminds you of the package-managed dependencies mentioned at the beginning of the article, hand yourself a gold star. These libraries are what Wine replaces when it runs your MS-based applications.

Sometimes, the libraries are missing or incomplete. In this case, the .dll errors mentioned earlier will give you the name of the specific files that are causing problems. Replacement .dll files can be found in your Windows install or in a regular Windows install of your application. To fix errors, you can use the Library tab in Wine’s configuration tool to replace Wine’s .dll with the authentic .dll.

Wine Vs. Cedega

Not everyone has the time or patience to wrangle Wine into submission, and TransGaming Technologies (www.transgaming.com) is hoping to bank on this fact. The company has produced a “commercial re-implementation of the Windows API for Linux with a focus on gaming.” Sound like Wine? It should. Transgaming’s product, Cedega, is based in part on the free Wine source code. Many in the open-source community view this as an outrage, but Transgaming insists it violates no licenses. For a small fee, it offers “Wine that works” with a list of games guaranteed to run with it.

No BS Podcast #73 The Red, White & Blue Edition

Tom Edwards — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:45:42 -0500

Tom, Dave, Norm, and Andy get together to bring you a dose of tech news to listen to as you head out to celebrate the 4th of July. This week, Dave dresses up as Uncle Sam and discusses Microsoft's PC gaming strategy while Norm steps away from the Maximum PC pie-eating contest to discuss the upcoming iPhone launch.

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Just need to get something off your chest? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337--operators are standing by.

Ready to feel the wrath of Clan [FU] in Team Fortress 2? Join our Steam group. Feel like stalking us? Check out our Facebook Page.

Modders and modding aficionados, head on over to Mod Shop! Check out all the hottest mods and stay tuned for some special announcements.

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Game Theory: Hangin' out at the Quad Core

Thomas McDonald — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:22:20 -0600

I’ve been gaming on a jury-rigged desktop frankencomputer for long enough to begin feeling those ol’ tech-lag blues, so when VoodooPC offered to loan me an Envy H:171 gaming laptop, I jumped at the chance. Quad-core processing, complete with a 17-inch screen and a pair of GeForce 7950 GPUs, all at less than 12 lbs and portable? Sign me up, baby.

The first thing I did was fulfill a long-standing dream of mine to play PC games on my TV. (Hey, I dream small.) I only recently got a decent HDTV, and dismantling the desktop machine and hooking it up in the family room was never really an option. The Envy made it much easier, and I got down to work playing Enemy Territory, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. (It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it.)

All of them looked spectacular, of course. The frame rates were better and I could finally crank all the graphic settings up to 11. This is gaming at the bleeding edge. More to the point, the quadruple fans and the case design kept the unit cool even through several hours of heavy use, erasing any doubts I had about the practicality of quad cores in high-end gamer laptops.

But I play action games on consoles all the time, and after a hefty chunk of Halo 3, Gears of War, and BioShock on 360, would the experience be that different? In a word, yes—but only in ways a hardcore PC gamer would notice. BioShock looked great on 360, but a powerful PC provides deeper colors, better textures, and more convincing fog effects. This was all obvious in a side-by-side comparison, but it wasn’t something that struck me when I simply played BioShock on the console, which leads to the $5,200 question: Does a $5,600 PC outperform a $400 Xbox enough to warrant the massive added expense?

For the true hobbyist, no question. The clincher was Medieval 2, a game that gives my current desktop the yips. Once I cranked the graphics up to the max and saw hundreds of detailed units clashing in complex and realistic battles, I remembered what makes PC gaming so special. And if that’s your passion, who can put a price on it?

So, does that mean when my loaner period is up, I’ll buy one?

Hell no!

Who has that kind of money?

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

I don’t need TruSkill to tell me that I’m an FPS badass

Norman Chan — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:25:06 -0500

Shadowrun is the first Windows LIVE game that enables cross-platform gaming. I’ve been playing it for the past week on both my Vista gaming machine and on the Xbox 360, and while I’m not quite ready to give it a full review, I need to get a few initial impressions off my chest. First off, the game definitely doesn’t fall into the 60% range that some early reviewers would lead you to believe. Multi-hour gaming sessions for the past several nights with editors from Maximum PC, PC Gamer, Official Xbox Magazine, and GamesRadar is evidence enough that I’m not alone in having a lot of fun with the game. The unique balance of old-school shooter skills and magic/tech ability management makes for a refreshing teamplay experience. That said, here are ten things (in no particular order) I wish were different in Shadowrun. Again, don’t take this as a verdict of any sort – you’ll get my full review in the Sept issue of MaxPC.

More game modes – The game ships with 3 game modes: Raid, Extraction, and Attrition. All three center around capturing, holding, and escaping alive with an artifact (flag). What about Team Deathmatch or plain Deathmatch? Even if these vanilla modes aren’t as fun as the flag-centric ones, they wouldn’t be difficult to implement. Variety is good.
Switch sides in Raid rounds – My current favorite game mode, Raid, sets up one team on defense to prevent the other team from capturing the artifact. As fun as it is, being locked on one side for the entire match is a bit frustrating. I’d like to see sides swapped every round to mix things up.
More context-sensitive team commands – With a gamepad, the directional thumb pad offers three commands to let teammates know that areas or clear or to call support. On the keyboard, these callouts are activated using the Z,X, and C key. It’s useful for the headset impaired, but really, only three commands? A Battlefield-esque context sensitive communication menu would be much more functional. Or, how about a...
Text chat box – I’m outraged that this staple multiplayer feature was omitted from Shadowrun. How else am I going to let the other team know “gg no re” or“omg hax?”
More death camera options – One cool teamplay feature in Shadowrun is the ability for you to voice-chat with teammates even after you’re killed. This way, you can let them know where your body is and call for a resurrection. It’s too bad that the only death-cam is a third-person tracking view. An additional first-person view wouldn’t unbalance the game, and an option to turn free-cam on would help newbies learn the levels.
TruSkill stats – The in-game matchmaking system uses Truskill: tracking your gameplay stats to pair you with comparable players for evenly balanced rounds. It’s too bad you have no idea what your skill level is, nor can you browse through your global stats. The game rewards you with an achievement for killing a hundred enemies of each class – I’d like to know how close I am to securing those Gamerscore points.
Random game settings – Aside from full gameplay modes, I’d like a random settings mode to randomize player classes, starting weapons, and magic/tech abilities. A “Summon” ability only match would be so fun to play!
Global rankings – Not only is Shadowrun’s TruSkill system hidden in the background, there’s also no way to see how you’re stacked up against the rest of players in LIVE. Part of what keeps me playing multiplayer shooters is the promise that with persistent play, I’ll be able to move up some ranking ladder to show off to my buddies. It’d be fascinating to see how Vista gamers stack up over time against 360 players. In fact, there’s no way in-game to tell what platform members of a server are using.
Better party system – The party system keeps groups of friends together between match and server changes, but aside from a plain lobby, party members have no indication that the leader is searching for games. The invite system integrated into the LIVE guide is cool, but I’ve experienced many occasions where party members were randomly dropped or restricted from joining open parties mid-match.
Single player campaign – I guess it’s a little unfair to demand that Shadowrun have a single-player component since the game was built from the ground up as a multiplayer shooter. But every time I use the teleport ability or summon a minion, I can’t help but imagine how awesome these abilities would be in a fleshed out single player campaign. I’d like to think that someone on the dev team had the same thoughts and that it’s in the works. Pretty please?

If some of the features mentioned above sound familiar, it’s because they’re already either in most PC multiplayer shooters like Unreal Tournament or on 360 games like Gears of War. In fact, the other game I’ve been playing a lot of recently is the Halo 3 multiplayer beta, which has interface and gameplay features so robust that it should be the standard for all LIVE multiplayer games to come. It’s a little disconcerting to realize that the beta of the multiplayer component to a completely separate single player game has in many ways more to offer than the full priced Shadowrun. It’s just too bad that Microsoft has no plans to let PC gamers in on that fun.

Lost Planet DX9 vs DX10

Norman Chan — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:32:59 -0500

We’re back with a more thorough analysis of the Lost Planet demo just released today. This time around, we’re comparing screenshots and framerates between maxed out DX10 and DX9 settings. We’re also throwing in screens and numbers for more playable DX10 settings.

Again, the game is being played on a system powered by a FX60 dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM, an 8800GTX, and running Windows Vista.

In scenario 1, we’ve run the game benchmark with all video options maxed out, running at 1920x1200 with 8xAA and 16xAF. These settings give an average 10 frames per second in the outdoor portion of the demo, and 14FPS in the second “cave” portion.

With effects set to medium when avaiable, resolution scaled down to 1280x720 (the resolution X-Box 360’s run the game in HD), and AA/AF turned off, the game chuned out a much more playable average of 70FPS outdoors and 33FPS indoors.

The numbers for the DX9 benchmark dropped down to 22 outdoors and 30 indoors, with settings again maxed out at 1920x1200.

The screenshots below illustrate various scenes from the demo in each of the three test scenarios. Keep in mind that the screens from the game at higher settings look a little fuzzy because of motion blur. This doesn't accomodate great screenshots, but makes a big difference when you see the game in action.

DX10 1920x1200

DX9 1920x1200

DX10 1280x720

DX10 1920x1200

DX9 1920x1200

DX10 1280x720

DX10 1920x1200

DX9 1920x1200

DX10 1280x720

DX10 1920x1200 settings

DX10 1280x720 settings

DX10 1920x1200

DX10 1280x720

A couple take-aways from the demo and benchmark:

- The demo is the same single-player sample that X-Box 360 owners got a year ago over X-Box Live Marketplace.

- The benchmark isn’t completely scripted. The bugs spawn and act a little differently each time you run the demo. The benchmark is more of a scripted flyby of the level with invincibility and “noclip” turned on, with the bugs relying on game AI to direct their reactions. This means the benchmark won’t make a perfect comparison between different hardware setups, even with identical game settings.

- The DX 9 version doesn’t look that much different from the DX10 game, especially in motion. You can pick out more shader effects in screenshots, but these aren’t particularly noticable when you’re in game and in combat.

Dear lord that’s a lot of snow

Norman Chan — Tue, 15 May 2007 04:03:44 -0500

It’s here! Today marks the release of the first real playable DX10 gaming software. Granted, it’s just a demo of the the upcoming PC port of X-Box 360’s Lost Planet, but it’s also a heavily modified port sporting fancy smancy DirectX 10 effects. Early adopters of nVidia’s 8800 DX10 video cards and Windows Vista finally have something other than tech demos to utilize their hefty investment. Life sure is looking grand!

Capcom was courteous enough to include a benchmark with the Lost Planet demo, which actually comes in two varieties – a DX9 vanilla version and suped-up DX10 counterpart. Both weigh in at around 350mb, so the DX10 demo here doesn’t seem to have the extra large textures promised in their original announcement. What it does feature, however, is full Shader 4.0 support and advanced geometry shader effects, as demonstrated by a massive serving of particles in the form of snowflakes.

Running the demo on an dual-core FX60 and 8800GTX with 2Gb of RAM, my system was only able to churn out framerates in the mid-teens with game settings maxed out at 1920x1200. A few screenshots from the benchmark are included below, including the images from the video settings menu to show in-game options. Note the red X-Box style “back” button on the bottom left hand corner of the menu – either someone forgot to swap out a menu graphic or Capcom really wants you to play the game with a gamepad.

Full resolution screens are linked as well, and I’ll be posting some DX9 comparisons shortly. Stay tuned!