ucosty:io

Red Alert 2 over UDP patch

Posted Aug 18, 2008 under
At a recent LAN I went to I had the urge to play some Red Alert 2. The only problem is that it’s netcode is based on the IPX protocol which has been phased out of Vista. A little bit of google searching later and I found a patch that lets you play Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun over UDP rather than IPX. You can get the patch on ModdbAll you need to do is extract the files from the archive and place the wsock32. Read more

Media centre fun

Posted Sep 16, 2006

Owing to the large collection of movies and other assorted video files completely legitimate Linux ISOs that fill my hard drives, my next obvious move was to utilise our LCD TV for media purposes.

Read more

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Posted Jun 10, 2006

As the title so subtly suggests, this is about the (fairly) recently released expansion for Half-Life 2. It is one of several planned expansions, originally called ‘Half-Life 2: Aftermath’. Purchasing it of steam was easy and before I knew it I had it installing away.

Because it is a small expansion, it is only a few chapters long but still quite fun with all the usual HL2 style killing, moving stuff, and then back to more killing. The story continues directly from the end of Half-Life 2 with a small uninteractive component, much lighter in weight than many that valve has put in games before.

As far as expansions go, it is also cheap. Ordinarily expansions retail at half the original game’s retail cost, but it is only ~$30. This isnt cheap for the meagre amount of gameplay you get, however, it is very fun and action packed. My only gripe with the whole game is this one section where there are lots of zombies and NO LIGHT. If you thought Doom3 was bad… ! (actually, I thought doom 3 rocked but this was just unbelievably hard). I think the people should make proper batteries, the kind that last more than 5 seconds powering a single light.

Anyways, another convenient and fun addition to the Half-Life 2 game store.

Old news, Laptop ordered

Posted Jun 7, 2006

I know this is old news, but I never got around to posting about it (new theme wasn’t even made at the time). I ordered a “laptop” from an Australian company called P4Laptops to replace my desktop computer for lanning. This means it would have to be beefy with as much power as I can afford with no regard for ‘laptop’ type portability or battery life. I settled for this behemoth, the Metabox 735.

Read more

My iPod has died

Posted Aug 10, 2005

Well my 20gig 3G iPod has died. The HDD now fails all diagnostic tests and the damn thing doesn’t even boot now. Bugger. It had been becoming more and more faulty - often not playing songs and freezing. So now I am the proud owner of a brand new 20gig iPod