Multimedia, AV Archive

From Tom's Hardware: "Creative Labs is bringing out a new range of sound cards based on a new DSP by E-Mu assisted by 24-bit converters. Linked with a new games library, the Advanced HD, the Audigy card is aimed at both game players and musicians who will benefit from the ASIO drivers. And as a bonus, Creative provides a FireWire port. Here is the low-down on a multimedia card that approaches professional standards. The article is great, and apart from the good price for the OEM basic model ($80 street price) it also comes with the notion to kill the ancient protocol of the Joystick port (the Joystick port on the Audigy only comes as an add-on card). Firstly because the USB Joysticks are the future, second because the actual joystick-port protocol is an extremely old, legacy problem and third because use of a joystick with most of the new PCI sound cards kill the overall OS latency. And this is exactly why the newer linux kernels do not turn on by default the joystick on the SBLive driver module and also why the BeOS (an extremely low latency/multimedia OS) never managed to properly support joysticks on the SBLive! driver.

Here`s an interview with one of the members of Maturefurk, the winners of the largest demo-party ever! A record breaking figure of 5,000 people attended this year`s Assembly party and they voted the Lapsuus demo (DivX video) for the Amiga as the best of all. This is quite remarkable since they only used a 50 mhz 68k Amiga with an AGA chipset (released in 1992) for this demo. It`s a great demonstration of the 3D capabilities which existed on Amigas since a decade ago. Read more for more information regarding the origin of the Demo Scene and other relating info written by Mike Bouma, a long standing Amiga user.