Mat "MSN" Noguchi, tools programmer at Bungie, posted a blog entry on performance issues in PC Halo. That, and the comments following, are definitely worth reading, along with this forum thread at HBO that prompted him to write the blog.

UPDATE: There's a second part to this piece up now.

Nvidia has put out a new, non-beta, version of drivers for some of their GeForce cards called ForceWare. Sounds like a Windows product.

oddworld18 pointed out an article on ars technica concerning the Xbox; comments and flames galore regarding Bungie, Microsoft, Gearbox and Halo are in the thread. Go have a look.

[image:4307 left hspace=5 vspace=5 border=0]Microsoft has announced 22 new broadband partners for Xbox live, including OptusNet and Telstra, TeliaSonera, and many others in the eight new Xbox Live countries (Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Korea, Norway and Switzerland). The total number of providers is now over 70. Thanks GameSpot.

We've added a few more minor features to Rampancy today. The first is the Amazon shop, which we've already mentioned. Clicking that link automatically pulls Halo-related items in the computer & videogames categories from Amazon's database, and if you buy an item using one of those links, Rampancy gets a 5% commission. We also plan on using that as a way to select special Rampancy readers to reward somehow in the future... more on that later.

Louis Wu at HBO pointed out a BBC article wherein is mentioned some show-stopping bugs in PC Halo that apparently are causing BSODs in Windows XP, which they claim is a rare occurrence. Interesting.

HA|aD Monkey has created a Windows XP/2000 app that allows you to connect to Halo servers using a halo://server.name address. You can find it at the Junkyard. Thanks Louis.

Xbox2 News, a site dedicated to the as-yet-unannounced successor to Microsoft's first foray into console gaming, the Xbox, recently interviewed ATI's Public Relations Manager for Consumer Products regarding the announcement earlier this summer that ATI wouild produce "future Xbox technologies" for Microsoft, fueling speculation that Nvidia, which made the GPU for the first iteration of the Xbox, was be

We've added a new feature to Rampancy (one of many in the past few weeks) that allow for UBB-style user profiles. New users who register will see some new items on the form, allowing all kinds of information to be entered. (Some, like email address, are not made public; we don't want to make Rampancy a place spammers go to find addresses.) All of the new fields are optional; you won't have to enter them to register an account.

The admins at The Maw, who have been nice enough to mention our recent site upgrade, had problems with our newsfeed awhile back, problems that have since been fixed, which they've mentioned on their site as well.

Just a note, guys: There aren't any email addresses ANYWHERE on your site-- we could have communicated about the newsfeed issue before. Send me an email.

According to Xbox365, ATI Technologies announced yesterday that they have an agreement with Microsoft to develop new technologies for future Xbox products. It looks very much like this means that the Xbox 2's graphics processor will be done by Nvidia's biggest rival, possibly a result of ongoing disagreements between MS and Nvidia over costs of the original Xbox's graphics processor.

UPDATE: There's a much more detailed analysis of this situation including some rampant speculation, over at News.com.