Archive for November, 2007

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Code 8192 AC3 Audio Codec

November 26, 2007

Ever tried to watch a .AVI movie on your PC and been left in total silence, and nothing but a strange error saying something about an AC3 codec and code 8192?

Ive recently found this to crop up when trying to use DivX to watch a film on my laptop but was also left with picture but no audio.

The solution is pretty simple, all you need is an install of the AC3 filter which you can find at Free Codecs, in fact heres a link…

Free Codecs AC3 Link

Or you can get a copy from the following MediaFire link, although this hosted version is v1.46 it may be worth your while to check Free Codecs first incase a new version has come out and i havnt had chance to update it. 

MediaFire Download

Download that and install, you may need a restart, but you should now have sound with your .AVI file :-D

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Aldwych at night.

November 25, 2007

During a recent session on Hellgate London i have come across a problem regarding one of the first quest’s when you start Act 3.

The quest is namely at Aldwych of which one of the portals is named and you will find the destination to be pitch black!

What you should have received, are some ‘laser goggles’ from the NPC who also sets you the quest, so the first thing to do is of course, equip them.

Now if your experiencing the same problem as me… as soon as you enter Aldwych you will find no difference, pitch black with Imps and other nastys running at you, even with the laser goggles equipped. In which case you should have a ‘beam’ of light like a torch, partially illuminating everything.

This problem should only be apparent if you are using Vista as it appears that it is a DirectX10 problem, and the way to work around it is to run the game in dx9.

What you will find is with using Vista and the necessary hardware, dx10 will automatically be used, although i think you have the option of selecting to use dx9 in the HG:L’s options?

Anyway, you can use this method as a work around, go to the following folder…
(note MP_64 = Mulitplayer 64bit, if you want 32bit then choose MP_32 or replace for SP_xx if you are playing single player)

C:\Program Files\Flagship Studios\Hellgate London\MP_x64

In the folder you should find 2 .exe start files named as if you are to use dx9 and dx10, and of course to get round the problem, fire up the game from the dx9 version, job done, you should now be able to use the laser goggles :-)

Although I’ve just been dumped from the server about 3 times in the last 30minutes so I’m going to give it a rest!

While I’m on this thought, i cant believe how much of a difference dx10 is over dx9! Most ‘new’ games i have played as of late have been using dx10, and after reading all the sceptics usual guff of ‘it makes no difference’, playing HG:L in dx9 seems to make a whopping difference on my system!

The 3D rendering when using dx10 looks superb compared to playing it with dx9 which tends to make everything look a little bit flat! So I’m impressed there :-D in which case when i built my current rig i was concerned at the expense i had thrown at it with it being so early in the dx10 time, but its all becoming worth it! :-D

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Looking Good!

November 23, 2007

Well after yesterdays little outburst i can announce today i am a little calmer! Although theres now over 700 ads on eBay for tickets going for nearly 250quid for a pair!

Although tickets for the Foos gig sold out in something like 10minutes this morning, another date was announced :-D and it looks like we have been lucky enough to get some this time :-D

Also while im here Crysis does indeed run like a bag of crap! I am only managing about 10FPS while trying to play, which is just rubbish! Although i could do with trying to run it in dx9 mode to see if it makes any difference?

Having said that, im still enjoying HG:L which has recently been patched to v0.5 and alot of the initial problems seem to have been ironed out nicely :-)

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Ticket Tout Scum…

November 22, 2007

If your of a nervous dispostion i suggest you dont read this post! Serious rant mode! 

You know who you are…

Your the slimey little shite who doesnt even deserve to dwell your insignificant worthless life on the sole of my shoe! I dont care if you can make a ‘few quid’ from the person who is a genuine fan and would like to attend the gig!

If your lost at this point allow me to elaborate!

Early this week Radio 1 announced a major live concert at the new Wembley Stadium featuring the one and only Foo Fighters and if you read a week back youll know we attended the gig at Nottingham Arena and loved every second of it. So its only natural that this goes down on the hitlist for next years To Do list!

Now we had a stroke of luck where my girlfriend had the pass to purchase tickets early, which went through seemingly well, only for the website to then decline her card several hours later :-( although all is not lost as tickets are also available tomorrow!

However i decided to see what would be happening on the likes of eBay where the usual inbred-cave-dwelling-retards tend to peddle their warez.

Low and behold if you do a search you get a list of around 170 adverts on eBay from various smacktards selling their hard-to-come-by tickets.

Why cant you bunch of spiteful wankers just fuck off back under the rock you came from! And let geniune fans get tickets with ease for the CORRECT PRICE and thus enjoy the concert!!

Think i dont like these people? Well… if you are a tout, a) i wouldnt piss on you if you were on fire… b) i hope you die a painful death… c) i hope your next shit is a hedgehog… d) i hope eBay and other sites have the decency to fuck you over!

And for the ones who buy ‘extra’ to sell on to cover YOUR expenses… well i hope you loose YOUR tickets… fuckers!*
*ill give you the benefit of the doubt if you cant make it for other reasons but sell tickets for face value!

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Touts! EPIC FAIL!

Sorry about that, but this really winds me up and i feel sorry for the genuine people who miss out due to some people!

I promise my next post will be a little less blue!

Foo Fighters FTW!

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Crysis Crisis!

November 20, 2007

A slow start to getting Crysis going! I had it installed last night but upon great faliure! Didnt seem to want to run at all and mostly caused me to hit CTRL+ALT+DEL to find it had already crashed itself!

I came to the conclusion that this is something to do with a 64bit version of the game starting up, when i went for a hunt round the games file folders, in which you will find a ‘Bin64′ and ‘Bin32′ folder…

As i said, it seems the .exe in the Bin64 folder is the one trying to get going. The odd thing is, there are two exe files in there(?) one with a file version of 1.0.0.1 and the other named as Crysis64 but with a version of 1.1.1.5767?

Either of these seem to fail and crash with seconds of trying to get it going.

Failing that another shortcut can be found in the Bin32 folder which has the same 1.1.1.5767 version, yet this seems to fire up nicely and the game gets going, would appear then, the 64bit version is a bit buggy at the moment! Shame, but pretty typical!

Then when i got the game up and running i found that my screen had gone very strange, namely i could only move the pointer around in the bottom right 3/4’s of the screen and although the icons were lighting up (as if i were passing over them) the pointer was actually several inches away.

Obviously a problem with screen resolution, but there is no easy means of trying to change anything while in this state! Unless you manage to guess the pointer position and eventually get to the resolution controls!

Fear not though as help is at hand! (You will have to CTRL+ALT+DEL and dump the game at this point)

Go to the following folder - C:\Users\*your user name*\Documents\My Games\Crysis\

You will find a file called ‘game.cfg’

COPY THE FILE FIRST AND BACK IT UP, JUST IN CASE! :-)

Find the following two values…

r_Height =
r_Width =

They will most likely be different from your wanted screen resoltuion, so manually change them to whatever you use for gaming,. If your not sure, go to Display Properties and have a look what it is set at, i had to change mine to the following as i use a 1680×1050 20″ wide screen…

r_Height = 1050
r_Width = 1680

Restart the game and you shouldnt have any crazy pointer madness when it goes to the initial menu :-)

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Crysis

November 17, 2007

A brown padded envelope on the door mat when i get home on a Friday evening normally means only one thing, a game has arrived!

Low and behold my pre-order of Crysis was to be found inside :-D

To be quite frank ive not even had chance to get it installed yet! As i was tired last night, stayed in bed all day and will be getting set to go out for some beers and then a game of Airsoft at Manchester tomorrow, so i mite get a dabble sometime in the week! :-D and will report back here with my thoughts.

 Not very ‘hardcore gamer’ i know!

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Foo Fighters LIVE 2007 Nottingham Arena!

November 15, 2007

Well, me and my lovelly lady went off to the Nottingham Internation Ice Arena last night to see the Foo’s live in concert, and to put it bluntly…

It was the most awesome-superb-mega-brilliant-fantastic-incredible gig i have EVER been too!

The Foo Fighters do have some awesome tunes but nothing prepares you properly for hearing them play live, the atmosphere was incredible, coupled with an acoustic set on a small suprise stage that lowered itself from the roof, right upto the faster tracks like Monkey Wrench, including a superb improv section in the middle. Not to mention the solo duel by Grohl and and Shiflett followed up by a drum solo from Hawkins which actually caused me to feel a bit emotional! :-D

If theres one band your going to see live before you die make sure its them! Ill be definately there for future tours!

I did try to get a pic or two but unfortunately the light levels surpassed the quality of my camera, so heres a rough one! Grohl is stood on the ‘catwalk’ entertaining everyone with his skills! :-D

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Code 39!!1!

November 13, 2007

A random one for this evening!

Placing a DVD into the respective drive on my machine, hoping to enjoy watching the feature. Ive noticed that nothing has actually happened after a minute or so, from when i inserted the disc? No autoplay, no Media Player opening… nothing?

So im thinking possibly, theres no autoplay on the DVD itself so open Explorer to go and give it a kick to get going, but to my suprise i have no D:\ or E:\ drives showing up in the folder list!

Obviously confused, i checked out the Device Manager and came across the following discovery…

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Both DVD drives are shown with the yellow marker notifying that something has gone wrong(!) so i try right clicking and checking the properties where it should explain the problem. In which case im told the device has been disabled due to the drivers being corrupt and in brackets telling me its a (Code 39).

First of all i tried the ‘Update Driver’ button but to no avail. Followed by doing an ‘Uninstall’ and rebooting the machine and allowing Vista to sort them out on the way in… agin, fail!

Stumped! I refer to the Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) and hunt down an answer and according to article 314060 this problem is mostly caused by removing DVD or CD software which then leave some of the registry in a state and cause the optic drives to loose the plot! However, personally, i havnt recently removed any such software! This seems to have been a random occurance?

If you follow the guid from MS on the following link…

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/en-us

This will explain how to mod the registry and hopefully sort the problem out, just to let you know it worked a treat on mine! After deleting the Registry Keys and rebooting, both my drives appeared in the folder list!

As said, this involves modding the system registry, and as the KB article says BACK UP THE REGISTRY BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING! So if you make a mess you can reinsate it!

 On a slightly different note, ive recently pulled down the 163.79 NVIDIA drivers to check them out and also the 169.04 BETA if i can be bothered. As mentioned a few posts ago i was going to check out 163.71 BETA but as the WHQL version had been pretty damn stable i didnt bother wasting anytime, although 163.69 did bomb to nvlddmkm a couple of times, also a new version of nTune at 5.05.54 to go with it.

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Hellgate London Release

November 4, 2007

I took delivery of Hellgate London on Friday afternoon and have probably spent a good 10-12 hours playing it over the weekend.

After enjoying the BETA prior to it release, this has so far lived upto expectations and has been a fun ride so far.

I was a little dubious with how easy the initial levels appeared to be, but so far so good, things are starting to hot up a little bit! With the beauty of the multiplayer being exactly that, i dont think it will be long before it will be a struggle to go on quests alone.

Ive not had any offers of a team based assault on the demons so if you see ‘Jaxxx’ roaming around (as an Engineer) anywhere, give me a shout :-D

The game has ran very well so far, but does seem to begin to lag and slow down heavily after a certian time, although i dont expect it to be perfect at the moment!

As for STALKER from 2 posts ago, even though i mentioned a few tips to try and help it play, ive had very little luck what-so-ever! I can only play 10 minutes into the game, to the point where you fight over the ‘car park’ i think it is, and thats about it, the game will lock up and CTD! :-(

Although reading the net does point towards furthar patches coming out in future. I sure hope so, as im quite pleased with the very limited experience ive had so far! The atmosphere in the game is superb and very gritty, plus im kind of facinated with the whole Chernobyl disaster and what happened with Prypiat etc… OK so some fictional additions are added in, but the FPS element and the story line point it towards something ill like a lot! If it would work correct!

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Vista Service Pack 1 Overview

November 1, 2007

If you didint know, MS have posted on their website an overview for the first Vista Service Pack. You can find it at THIS LINK!

 Looks like well be needing some hefty space to cope with it in some cases! But then again, a SMALL hardrive these days is 80gig!