endperform.org

I broke down over the weekend and bought a subscription for Cedega, after hearing about how well Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike:Source play in it, and I must say, I’m impressed. Installation in Gentoo was simple. I registered, downloaded the .tgz file to /usr/portage/distfiles, and pulled off an emerge cedega and it was installed.

I’m running KDE, and there was an entry placed in the menu for it. I fired it up, and configured it to match what Matt had set up and was ready to go. Installation of games in Cedega couldn’t be simpler. Plop in your CD or DVD, click on the mount button on the Cedega gui, then click Install. You’ll be presented with a dialog box which includes a button marked ‘Detect Game’. If your game is recognized, it will populate the fields and off you go. I first installed HL2 which installed Steam and CS:S. Afterwards, the games showed up in my game list. Playing a game couldn’t be simpler, either. Select the game, and click on the Play button and it fires up.

As far as gameplay / performance goes, both HL2 and CS:S run just fine. I have them running at 1024×768 and the detail is set to high. Also for kicks last night I installed Warcraft 3 and it too plays just fine as well. It looks like I may not need Wine now, and I’ll be moving my original HL / CS install over to Cedega as a result.

Over the past weekend I broke down and picked up a Nintendo DS Lite. I did not own a regular DS, os I can’t really review vs. that. Anyway, I picked mine up as part of a deal over at Toys R Us. I got the DS Lite, Big Brain Academy, Brain Age, a case and some extra styluses (styli?). I also picked up another game, Magnetica. I brought it home and took it out of the box. It fits my big hands pretty nicely which is a plus. Anyway, I played around with it a bit and was hooked. It got more playtime than my PSP ever saw, so the PSP ended up getting traded in and I got a couple more DS games… Mario Kart, Tetris DS, New Super Mario Brothers to name a few. The wifi in the DS works really well. Once I set it up with my wireless connection, I was online playing Tetris DS within minutes. Mario Kart DS also has wifi play, too, but I have yet to try that out. The screens on the DS Lite are nice and bright, and all of the games I have so far make decent use of both screens. It also has stereo speakers built in, and the sound from them isn’t too bad at all. Overall, I’m happy with my DS Lite and in retrospect I probably should have just held out for tha tin the first place

The fun with Wine continues. I also picked up a copy of Diablo 2 (finally) and rather than install it in Windows, I decided I was going to install it in Wine. The install itself went smoothly. I did, however, have to install a Glide to OpenGL wrapper for the graphics, which again, went without an issue. All I had to do was configure the wrapper and fire up the game, and off and running I went. Unfortunately I need to find a No CD patch since having to load the CD sucks just to play, but, it does play without any lag or issues so I’m happy about that. I still need to find a copy of the original Half Life and get it installed and ready to go for the next game night. I searched all over the place over the weekend and could not locate a copy. I’ll have an install guide for that.

Also, congrats to my bud Mello, as he tied the ole knot on July 1.