Monthly Archives: February 1999
Carrera – Cygnus 500
You’ll have heard the hype, read the previews, seen the television adverts and probably got totally fed up with the entire business. Pentium III, I mean, Intel’s latest evolution of its chunky processor range. You’ve heard what it’s supposed to do, with its many new SIMD instructions, now here’s what it actually does, courtesy of…
Arowana – Airboard
PCs used in the home are sometimes connected to television sets, rather than monitors. It’s not a trend that’s taken off particularly quickly in the UK, but with many new graphics cards having built-in TV output connectors, that could soon change. In such a situation, the last thing you want is a nest of cables…
Zoom – PC Card 56K Dualmode
One of the big problems with any technological change from one standard to another is that there’s a cross-over period in which neither standard is standard enough. This sort of thing happens quite often in the PC industry, but its most recent incarnation is the transition from the two ‘not quite standard’ 56Kbps algorithms –…
Teac – CD-R56S
CD-R drives are now available at cheap-’n’-cheerful prices, particularly drives with EIDE interfaces that don’t require SCSI adapters. But such drives are not exactly swift. They’re fine for the occasional user who wants to make backups (for want of a better euphemism) of their CDROMs, but for duplicating houses or limited distribution runs, something a…
Pace – 3D Edge
3Dfx built up quite a reputation with the Voodoo and Voodoo2 3D graphics chipsets, and this card from Pace features the latest in that range; a single-chip Voodoo Banshee processor. This 128-bit chip gets so hot that it has to be fitted with a heat-sink. Unlike previous Voodoo processors, this one can handle both 2D…
Sierra – Half-Life
I’ve had this game since before Christmas, but tearing myself away from it to write these words has been something of a problem. Half-life is, you see, not your average run-of-the-mill 3D action shoot-em-up. Not by a long chalk. Here’s why; it’s got a real plot. Not just a convenient scene-setting story added after the…