MChief climbs on MChief

Head on Head match: Click to enlarge.

Controllers for sale

Look at my house turned into a controller showroom..LOL
Click to enlarge pictures.

Halo 2 Frag fest - Stats updated (Scroll below)

I remember those days, over a year ago, when we all meet up at one of the many in the gang's apartment , bring multiple televisions in, along with xbox (regular) consoles for a frag festival. Halo and Halo2 were our all time system link based favourites. Since last one year..all my buddies have been busy and career focused (including myself)..that we have never been able to find time to get together and get fragged..

I am glad somebody brought this up on our Friday night dinner party at Melting pot about setting up a Halo2 lan party on Saturday. I dont remember who brought up the idea, was too drunk myself...

Again the venue for the event was decided to be at my house, now that i have a 50 inch plasma tv + a 27 inch tv which could be used for a second xbox console. I decided to borrow a projector from ma office which could help connect a third xbox console. So all together I could setup 3 xbox consoles on the lan on three different tv's, to accomodate up to 12 players. The audience included 10 people (7 men, 3 women). We had two long sessions of gaming from 2.00 pm to 8.00 pm in the night on Saturday) and then from 12.00 am on Sunday morning to 6.00 am. (God i couldnt believe that we stayed up all night playing Capture the flag) and slept almost half the day on Sunday morning. At the time of writing, I m feeling sleepy, so I am Parding your Beggon!! (I ll give ya 5 bucks if you can guess what that is!!)

The second session had only 5 people, the women walked away from the gaming session for da night to take care of their own discussions (you know what they talk when they meet up). We split ourselves into teams of two (with no choice), a team of two (myself and vinod) and a team of three. (aslam, ibu and partha). Ibu was supposed to be a football between the two teams..viz..he was supposed to alternate between the two, which betrayingly he didnt...(sucker)

Here are the gamer profile mappings.

Sankar - cciesucker (Blue team)

Vinod - lynx (Blue team)

Aslam - coolchic (Red team)

Partha - Aslam (Red team) (not sure why he chose Aslam)

Ibu - Jaggesh (Red team)

We selected Coagulation (which is one of the biggest levels in Halo2) to play CTF and this game went on for ever with no result at 6.00 am in the morning, when every bodys hands and shoulders were numb with 6 hours of non-stop fragging. i m still having my elbow and fingers paining, coz of last nights play. We played about 25-30 rounds of this CTF in Coagulation with a final result of 1-1 (Red vs Blue)

Click on pictures below to enlarge them:

My PC needs a heck of an upgrade

It was and still is a good rig...at the time when this was built.
P4 - 520 - 3.4 ghz running at 3.8 ghz
PQI turbo DDR memory - 1 gig - 2- 2-2-5 timing
250gb hdd - 2 ata133 HDD
ATI Radeon AGP X850XT - Platinum Edition with 256MB ram.
DVDRW +- 16X
Gigabyte 3dCooler Pro with adjustable fan speed
2 80mm fans
1 120 mm fan
Custom case with 400 W PSU

Keep your medics and techs safe, as they heal you through out the game

Unlike most FPS games where you go shoot baam shoot and kill all that comes to your front..and use health packs that unusually lie around the entire game world. You would think how the hell did a health pack fall on the floor ? In Quake 4 there are health packs still lying around, but there is something more that is unique..You get 2 or 3 team mates in certain missions. One guy will be a medic while the other one being a technician. Keep your Techs and Medics safe from enemies as they will keep your health and ammo maxed out, all the time. You can just walk to them and ask them for a refill.

Prey for Xbox 360

One of the hottest titles that is available today. I got the collectors edition from my friend as a gift on my birthday. Prey uses Doom 3 engine. (same as Quake4). A piece of advice, the game has so much 3d built into it that if you have vertigo problems, this game is not for you. As you walk through the world, walls become floors, floors become walls, mirrors become passageways so on and so forth.

The Collectors edition also comes with two metallic character set of Tommy (the hero) and the alien

Quake 4 on Xbox 360

Look at how crisp the armor has been rendered by Xbox 360

xbox360 dashboard

Finally bought an Xbox360

Been waiting for months to get one of these. Stores were out of 360's that each unit was getting sold at over 700 $ in ebay. After 5 months of release, the demand has saturated a little bit, now that most stores are having good numbers in stock. Got this one 11th april 2006.

Cute Creative Speakers

Got this one for 30$$ for listening to music at office. Never ended up using it at office, as I am never in the office.

ATI Radeon AGP - X850XT Platinum Edition

Got this one for 360$ from newegg.com. Pretty nice deal and the card screamz..... on HalfLife 2 and Doom 3.

Xbox on Plasma TV

Bought a HD TV connector for the Xbox for 10 bucks on Ebay. Took some shots of Forza Motorsport as well as Xbox Dashboard on the Plasma.. check it out.

HD - 50 Inch Plasma TV

Its about 4 or 5 months since I bought this TV..well its not a TV but a panel which means it has no built in tuner in it. Whats the big deal any way as you will any way pay for a cable box or satellite reciever which itself is the tuner. This model Panasonic (Panny) 7UY (now replaced by 8UK) was bought for 3700$ plus shipping which looked like a nice deal at that time, now most TV prices has slashed drastically. The panel has no speakers either. This will let you choose your own surround sound system, rather than relying on built in speakers on the TV. The stand cost me around 600$ - a 170 pound all metal Bello stand with built in clamps to hold the TV. I have a good 9 feet viewing distance in my apartment. Also the Pannys have moudlar slots for each inp utcards. Comes with a built in VGA port, a component input and a composite input. One of the slots is empty where you can add a HDMI or DVI card and get digital HD input from a DVD player or cable box that has DVI or HDMI out.

Nice value for the money you spend, its the best viewing expereience i have ever had in my life.

Insides of my Xbox

This post is a replica of the same in many of my other blogs. So bear with me..coz my Xbox (now fully modded) is one of my beloved gadgetz...

After 3 yrs of owning an Xbox 1.0 (newly released versions have reached version 1.6). The Xbox is nothing but a P3 733 Mhz processor with 64 Mb ram and 8 gb hard disk and a DVD rom drive. The GPU is from Nvidia with 32 MB of VRAM ( i think) and DRAM is also built on board. Approximate cost of the project = 70 - 80 $.Some caveats, if you have recently bought the Xbox, and is still under warranty from Microsoft or a retail shop, dont mod it as you will lose warranty. You have to remove two hidden screws underneath the warranty and disclaimer sticker to open the xbox. The Xbox uses a special screw called Torx bit screw, which have a Star shape on the surface of the screw. You cannot use regular screw drivers to unscrew them, so I had to get a Torx screw driver for 10 $ from a local Home Depot store. I also bought a Xenium SP ICE chip for 62 + shipping online. Got the chip 2 days after I ordered it and after 2 days of reading various documents on the Internet , on how to mod an Xbox with Xenium chip...I still couldnt figure out where the Xenium chip goes into the motherboard of my Xbox. All this was because most documents on the Internet talks about installing Xenium chip on V 1.6 Xboxes. My version was a 1.0. Microsoft obviously used different chips for each versions on the mobo and hence all this confusion...I finally realised that some of the components that shipped with the Xenium SP ICE chip is not required for my Xbox (v 1.0's). Started this project on a Friday evening, and finally by Monday evening, I successfully installed my first mod chip on my Xbox. Also ugraded the stock hard drive on the Xbox (which is a 8 gb) to a massive 200 gb Ultra ATA disk from Seagate. Note that you have to buy a Hard drive that canbe locked and unlocked. Upgraded the hard disk to the new one and copied all the old hard drive contents (my save files, game profiles etc) from Old disk to New disk. At this point my modded xbox was ready to be installed with a new dashboard so that I can load applications, rip games to hard disc, rip dvds to hard disks etc....The next part is the hard part...trying to find a dashboard (like Evolution X or Avalaunch) which are pirated versions of Microsoft original Xbox code. So its illegal to distribute such code. You got to rely on bit torrent files to download this software. After a day of searching I was finally able to locate the software which could be burned into a CDRW or DVD (no CDRs as Xbox doesnt read from most CDRs)...and all you got to do is boot the Xbox from this disc. Rest if piece of Cake.My Modded Xbox can,a. Now run two dashboards - EvoX and Avalaunch as well as the original Microsoft dashboardb. Rip games to local HDDc. Rip DVD movies to local HDDd. Massive 200 gb storagee. XBMP - Xbox media player - playes mpeg video as well as audio - mp3f. XBMC - Xbox media center - streams video from a Media center edition XP PC with a tv tuner card built in...g. Take backup copies of games that you own to a DVD (blank disc)h. Has built in emulators that can play old Nintendo, Sega, Mame, Atari rom based video gamesi. Downloadable skinsand lots more.....

12-in-1 memory card reader for 5 bucks - Cant beat that

Labor day sales at a local Frys Electronics store. Walk in at 9.30 am in the morning, see an ad for 4.99 $ - a 12-in-1 memory card reader. Reader will read CF, SD, MMC, Sony memory stick (rest are useless). This card reader for 4.99 - Cant beat that any where. Its like giving it to you for free.

Nokia Ngage - v1

This is a fairly old gadget that I bought the first month with in which it came out. The Nokia Ngage is a veriy innovative invention, though it needs a lot of improvement. First things first, its a Cell phone, a FM Radio, a MP3 player, Video player and not but least, it can play games in 3D. There are tonnes of game developers who make games for Ngage. The games come in a MMC disk 8 MB to 16 MB in size. Some of the games to name - Prince of Persia - Sands of Time, Sonic3D, Red Faction, Splinter Cell, etc. I can atleast think of a 100 games that have so far come out. To add to the action, if you have two Ngage phones and if the game supports multiplayer action, you can play head to head using the integrated Bluetooth adapter on the phone. Nokia also offers a online multiplayer service called Ngage Arena for 10 bucks a month, where you can play head to head against different Ngage users around the world.

Caveats - Tonnes of them. A bunch of these were rectified in Ngage QD the 2nd gen version of the phone. The games come in MMC card like i said before. You can also use an emty MMC card (upto 512 MB or 1 G) to store files, apps, music on the Ngage. To remove and insert a new MMC card you have to pop open the back of the Ngage and then remove the battery (kills power to phone) and insert the MMC card (which sucks). This has been fixed in Ngage QD where there is a hotswappable slot onthe side of the phone for the memory cards.

The phone - the way you talk on the phone is "Sideways". Some people call this "holding a Taco phone". Ngage is popularly known as Taco phone. This has again been fixed in QD.

I love this phone, because I can use it as a portable video game player as well as a cell phone, mp3 player, fm radio as well as a video player (Real player and Mpeg). It can also be paired with a bluetooth adapter on your laptop and that will let you use it as a modem for dialup to a service provider and also as a Fax modem (14.4kbps) to send receive fax.

Ngage - Nothing but a multi-purpose Toy.

SanDisk USB Memory Card Reader

This is one of the smallest memory card reader (5 in 1) that I have seen in the market. It reads SD and MMC (primary use is to read Camera mem. cards). It also reads Memory sticks from Sony, RS-MMC and TF. Now I dont know what RS-MMC and TF is, but this product is of great use to transfer photos or files from a SD or MMC card in your phone, pda or camera to your PC. Considering the small form factor and price - 20$, I would give a full rating of 10/10 to this one.

Casio Exilim 5.0 Mega Pixel Camera

Yet another add on to my gadget collection - a Casio 5.0 MP, Exilim camera - almost as thin as 10 credit cards stuck together. The performance of the camera is excellent, can take pictures at resolutions as high as 2568 * 1920 with movies at 640*480 MPEG. A 1 gig memory card can give storage space for movies upto 1 hour long. Good thing abt the memory cards is that it will take either SD or MMC, unlike Sony who makes good cameras, but have to rely on using Sony proprietary memory cards (Memory sticks). Check out some of the pictures below.

This camera is an excellent choice for the money you pay less than 400 $...Slim, compact and still use point and shoot with 3x optical and 4x digital zoom. Also has a built in Anti shake DSP which prevents shaky/blurry images. Bought this camera from Norman Camera in Michigan - an excellent store to buy your cameras online. Shipping was cheap and was right on time.

IOGEAR Print server

An excellent purchase - I would say, worth the money you pay! Compact and cute - I always like products from IOGEAR. A print server adapter helps to print to any printer with a USB port (1.1 standard) over the network. This eliminates the need for a PC to be kept on all the time (especially in a home network with a shared printer) to print documents from other PCs or Laptops. Having 2 PCs and 2 laptops at home (used by me and my wife), it was annoying to have a PC share a printer and having to turn the PC on, all the time to print.

The print server has one USB port and one 10/100 port (USB goes to printer and Ethernet goes to your network). The product also comes with a software driver and Print Server monitor that helps discover the print server and assign it a static IP address. Here is a snapshot of the PSMonitor software. (Click on the picture below to view a bigger snapshot )

Dedicated to my Gadgets

You can call me a gadget freak..this blog will be dedicated to posts and pictures related to my inventory ..err..collection of gadgets..