4.01 M33 Custom Firmware

Team M33 has done it again, With some additional features, anybody can also test out this firmware.

The bare requirements is that you need to have the last iteration of the M33 CFW and you can easily upgrade to this version.




Instructions: Copy UPDATE folder /PSP/GAME/ and run.
Put the 4.01 sony update as 401.PBP in same folder, or let the program download it for you using a wifi connection.

Changes:
- Bug fix: vshmenu didn't let change camera mode due to camera_plugin using select button.
Fixed, now vsh menu will not be loaded when using the camera.

- Recovery can now be translated, See how below. Translation to spanish is autoincluded.
- Updated the M33 SDK with a new function and sample, and released the psp-packer tool to
compress prx's and PBP's in the ~PSP format.

- The folder of 4.01 and higher homebrew will be GAME4XX so it won't need change on update.

Easy Installation

For a Worry-Free Installation, you should have 3.90m33-3 Custom Firmware first

1.Download the Needed Files, if you don't have Winrar, you should Download it HERE.

2.Extract only the Update Folder, Put it onto your Memory Stick.















3.Rename the Sony Official Firmware to 4.01.PBP, Place it inside the UPDATE folder, otherwise the installation won't work.













4.Exit the USB mode and run the update on Memory Stick>Game, it will take you to an official SONY updater and follow the simple procedures onscreen.

OPTIONAL: (this will prevent future troubles if there are incompatibilites with the new firmware from your old one.)

5.Rest Default Features on Settings>System Settings> Restore Default Settings within the XMB. Also format the memory stick (backup your Saved Data and Games first) on Settings>System Settings>Format Memory Stick.

You can get the custom firmware and the needed firmware here...

Download: 4.01 M33 and 4.01 Official Firmware (needed)


Sources:

Via QJ.Net, Playstation.Com

Gaming Computers: Best value for your money

When it comes to gaming computers, there is really something to decide upon, whether to buy a computer gaming rig or just simply opt for a console-based gaming. Here are some of the highlights of where you can decide if it will suit your needs.

Gaming computers are worth buying if:

• You have lots of money. It will cost you; this can be higher compared to the cost of a console. There is really a point where all your pc components must be equal or higher to that of games' ideal requirements.
• You want to maximize having a desktop for surfing and gaming
• You are a hardcore gamer. Whether any format, if you can't still get enough, you might want to try to build your own gaming computer.

Here is some of the computer component that is just above the desired requirements of any games to date. Keep in mind, don't fantasize yet on doing 60fps on Crysis, you will likely need to get a quad 9800gx2 for that.

Video Card

A video card will get you off to $200 for an 8800gt of any brand. This card has the best price to performance ratio. This has proved to be the best seller of late 2007; I give this card merit for opening gaming for mainstream gaming with great performance. The baby will get you nice frame rates on your 19' or 22' monitors. Here are some of the most basic or mainstream components needed for a good gaming machine.

Monitor

The monitor you will need can also be crucial. With most games are only enjoyable through a wide aspect ratio LCD Monitor such as 16:9 or 16:10. You can always use a 19 inch wide monitor. It will set you back for $250-$300

Processor

Upon the release of the 45nanometer processors; you can easily get a value processor. You can get an e4500 above to get some gaming going. The aforementioned processor is not yet of a 45nm fabrication process. I only recommended this for mainstream computing.

DDR or Ram Sticks

the industry standards for today's computing is focused on DDR2. By far, this can have the best price to performance ratio pc parts to date. Compared to a DDR1 module, DDR2 is significantly faster and cheaper. You can get 2 gigs of ddr800 ram for as low $50 on most retail shops.

Motherboard

basically, if you are just gaming in the mainstream market, you can go for the basic requirements; a PCI-Express Graphics Card slot, DDR2 800 MHz ram slots and the rest is up to your preference.

Hard Disk Drive

You don't need to buy expensive gears for this. A Sata-2 HDD will take care of your gaming. I would recommend 160gb to be the minimum for archiving your games. this will cost your $50 on average brands.

Power Supply Unit

Although this is one of the most unimportant part on your gaming computer, you can get a great PSU for as low as $50. Rule of the thumb is you need to make sure it is heavy. Next do you need only 450 watts for this recommended setup? As you may know, higher wattages don’t mean they need more power to run it. A power supply gets only the needed current and won't eat up your electricity. With that said, you can opt to a 550 or 600 watter PSU's of your choice.

Also, power supplies are rated not on their wattage. Keep attention to the amperage ratings on the side of the PSU. With the aforementioned setup, you need at least 24 amps on the 12v rails. Amps are the method of knowing how much power is supplied thru the line and having less of this can lead to restarts and Blue screens of death.

Other than that, I would just recommend buying an Intel Dual core processor. This is important because as of now, they have significantly better performances compared to their AMD counterparts. All you need now is a CPU case. Whatever your cheapest choices may be, you will need $30-$50 for this. With all the cost of the parts, it is clearly more expensive than console gaming. But there are some great advantages to it as well.

Article Source: http://articleeater.blogspot.com/2008/06/gaming-computers-best-value-for-your.html

A take on today’s PC gaming

From most part of my life, I have been gaming. I just started playing super Mario when I was just 3 years old. It was great and then on, I always had a passion for gaming.

3 years ago, the PC gaming scene I knew was great, everything is all balanced out from console to pc gaming. Lately there has been a decline on most games that are out on the market. Triple A titles are nowhere to be seen. Here is my take on maybe how pc gaming went sour lately.

Vista

• The OS made by Microsoft was really a leap ahead of technology; give away great eye candies and making a more secure environment. All these great stuff choked systems, especially machines built for XP. But still, even if you have Uber great hardware, Vista is still a problem.
  My take on this is hardware that are optimized for vista will be there in a year for casual gaming rigs. It may take a while but everybody will move along the same way as windows98 to XP transition.

Graphics Cards

• For the past year, video cards have been churning out day in day out. Most of the time, usually when you buy a next generation of cards would let you enjoy more than 2 times its predecessors’ power. But in this case, it doesn't deliver. The 8800gt is hands down the best bang for the buck gaming card. But look at the 9 series of video cards can't even double its performance. Nvidia now resorted back to using dual chips on a single PCB and yet came short. These cards are way pricey mind you.
• The next line of graphics cards on the horizon is still suffering as the GTX 280 is still rumored to have bad price to performance ratio. It will have improvements but i still doubt a casual gamer can afford to buy a video card that can run Crysis at a solid 60 frames per second.

Game Devs

• Lately, Crysis has been one of the cheesiest titles that hit the pc. It had a game engine that grinds the newest video cards to its already bleeding knees. Ubisoft has done a great job but they forgot one thing, it was only a tech demo. Let me explain first, it is a complete game but nothing can run it well on the day it was released. Only rich kids can play it great. I have seen tests that even quad 9800gx2 can't even play 60 well on the highest resolution, that’s 800 bucks times four, equaling 3.2 grand of solid waste of money.
  
  The future of PC gaming is still great. But lately, it has been just nothing. As hardware getting only fabrication process changes like 65 to 45 nanometer chips, yet nothing was revolutionary up to this point. I'm looking forward to new technology for hardware that can revive the murky waters of pc gaming.

For now, the best alternative is to play on consoles. They currently have almost all the latest hits that came from the pc from Half-life 2 episodic content, Bioshock, Command and Conquer 3, Call of Duty series, Battlefield series and so on...

The pc may have been sick as of now; it can also be rescued eventually. But with the way developers are going multiplatform, the pc will get stuck with no exclusives and nobody seems to mind.

Need for speed most wanted

Need for speed most wanted

This is the latest installment of EA game’s street arcade driving style Need for speed. As far as I want to tell you, this is the best of the bunch, it combines the thrill of being chased by cops and modding your ride to your heart’s content. Let’s get down to business. You are yourself, along with Mia (Josie Maran), Rog and Razor (the cheating bastard that made his way through the ranks sabotaging cars with his pals.

Graphics:

In a weird way, the game runs on a sepia colored environment, I don’t know what the hell are they thinking but it looks great IMO. I have been playing thing game since last year and all I can say is this game rules as of the moment. EA never gone to use High Dynamic Range in this game (HDR SM 3.0), but they made something up called overbright (SM 2.0) which mimics the HDR effect. The framerate is usually 30 when measured thru fraps but feels more like 60 fps.

The cars are are ok here, ranging from European and Asian imports and a hefty lineup of American cars. This includes of course the BMW GTR which is being used as its model car and the coveted car in the game itself.

Gameplay:

This time around the word is blacklist; this is status quo of the most notorious racers in Rockport. There are 15 blacklist racers, you start in the last of course, and you can make your way through each by completing certain amount of chosen races and some notorious points, and these points are measured in bounties and milestone events. Once having enough won races, and both these notorious points you can race a certain blacklist racer and take him on.

Sound

This is by far the best lineup with all the underground series to date. From Styles of beyond to Avenged Sevenfold, Prodigy, Static-x and compositions from Paul Linford in the soundtrack while racing and on bounty mode where you are being chased by police cops all over.

After running them over literally, you can choose some nice rewards but you can only get them randomly, there are 3 question mark icons for getting out of jail, money, impound strikes and a pink slip (opponents ride is yours) and 3 for unique body parts, performance parts, and visual upgrades.

Rants:

The thing is, there is a noticeable pause on certain areas, much like loading something and ruins the game, I have a 6600gt and a 2 gigs AMD processor, it’s more than the desired system requirements but It wont deliver, there are a lot of people complaining about this stuff, although some older systems with a Geforce 4 card seems to run ok. Even at the lowest settings or safe mode, the game still have some hiccups here and there, till now, with the latest patch, I don’t see anything improved yet. And guess what, EA officially announced that they had stopped any improvements since the 1.3 patch so this game is stuck on its knees begging to be improved.

Technical Details

Genre: Racing

Production date: November 2005

Platform: PC (also available in PS2, XBOX and 360, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS)

Cars:

• Aston Martin DB9
• Audi A3 3.2 quattro
• Audi A4 3.2 FSI quattro
• Audi TT 3.2 quattro
• BMW M3 GTR (E46)
• Cadillac CTS
• Chevrolet Camaro SS (1967 model)
• Chevrolet Corvette C6
• Chevrolet Corvette C6R
• Chevrolet Cobalt SS
• Dodge Viper SRT-10
• Fiat Punto (Mark 3)
• Ford GT
• Ford Mustang GT (S-197)
• Lamborghini Gallardo
• Lamborghini Murciélago
• Lexus IS 300
• Lotus Elise (Series 2)
• Mazda RX-7
• Mazda RX-8
• Mercedes-Benz CLK 500
• Mercedes-Benz SL 500
• Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG
• Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren
• Mitsubishi Eclipse GT (2006/fourth generation model)
• Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VIII
• Pontiac GTO (2004 revived model)
• Porsche 911 Carrera S (Type 997)
• Porsche 911 GT2
• Porsche 911 Turbo S (Type 996)
• Porsche Carrera GT
• Porsche Cayman S
• Renault Clio V6 (Clio III)
• Subaru Impreza WRX STi (GD)
• Toyota Supra (Mk IV)
• Vauxhall Monaro VXR
• Volkswagen Golf GTI (Mk V)]

Links:

Most wanted Blog:

http://need-for-speed-most-wanted.blogspot.com/

Gaming Addiction

Gaming Addiction

Here's my first blog about videogames. Since i was young, i was hooked into addiction. Video games are the best way to entertain and relax yourself.

Before i went to kindergarten, my mom gave me a Nes or we used to call it "family computer"... i was so amazed at it that i had a passion for it. at that time, we only had mario and a submarine game called "sqoon" ...

I had a somewhat strict family, but i managed to get a lot of playtime.

After that, i had been hanging out at videogames station. In our country, people don't have a lot of money to buy a console, they just simply go to these stations and simply enjoy themselves.

after graduating elementary, pops bought me a sega genesis, which then rocked.. i had a lot of memories playing mortal kombat 3 way back at 1995..

Two years later, my uncle bought me a playstation. I only had been sure of one thing that games will always look better as time goes on. My high school life will never be the same again. While i played videogames like there's no tomorrow, i actually excelled on my studies. Back then, it was an incentive for me to earn good grades, it did. In our school, if you have good grades on the first to the third grading period, you would get a reward, the school offers the tests for the last grading period in advance for studs with good grades.. on the second week of february, you can have your test and worry about what you like to do on the next month. i had the best gaming time when i was on that ps1 era.


Time went by, as i entered college, my aunt gave me a 133 mhz pentium 1 processor with 1 megabyte video ram. it was early 2000, it was sort of prehistoric, but in our country, that was still a good spec pc system. hehe. I never complained,..

as my last year was inevitable, my pops bought me a new rig (thank god) after four years... then, i knew this would get better... i had a athlon xp with a geforce2 graphics card. considering the year was 2004, still, i never complained about it since personal computers here do cost a fortune.


then time went by, i had finished all my units in college. I had freelance jobs, and a home-based job as of now. I constantly improve my specs just to get games to run good on my system.


I earned my video card just for selling online MMORPG money, Ragnarok online was my ticket. I scored a 6600gt and a gig of ram for it.

currently, i'm playing age of empires 3, far cry, and CS: source. Of course, i could only play during my free time. oops, i got to install yet again Battlefield 2 due to reformats. how about you, what game would you like to play today ?