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New versions of these popular virtual machines (also known as emulators) have recently come about. In our old comparison we took a look at 4 games, and we do the same again here. Last time, VMWare Fusion was the winner. This time… it’s Parallels. You’ll see why as you read ahead.

VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels 5 were tested, using a Windows 7 Professional 32-bit virtual machine. Windows 7 was chosen because both Fusion and Parallels now support it, and with XP being continually phased out (and Vista being bloated), it’s the operating system that most people are likely to choose.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the 4 games chosen this time around. I’ve packed the screenshots at the front with a tiny explanation, and if you scroll down a bit further (about 1/2 way through the article, you’ll see the actual writeup.

Mass Effect (click to see full size):

Both actually had the error message you see on the right. After playing with the Windows Compatibility mode stuff, I managed to get to the error message on the left.

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Halo CE (click to see full size)

The left side (Parallels) was nice and fast – the 59 FPS you see was the lowest it got, and that was just for the screenshot. Not so on the right side (Fusion) – it looks like snow in the right image. It’s just missing textures. At a whopping 2 fps.

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Knights of the Old Republic 2 (click to see full size):

Both were very playable, but Parallels offered a perfectly smooth experience. Fusion played quite well, but crashed in the “Advanced Video” option menu.

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Cities XL (click to see full size)

Just Parallels is shown, because Fusion only lasted about 5 seconds – not enough time for a screenshot.

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Now for a little detail… We’ll start with a disappointment, and then cheer everyone up a little with Read more…

I believed in you. I thought you had potential. But apparantly I was wrong. May whatever God you believe in… have mercy on your soul…. This court stands adjourned.

Q – “All Good Things…” – Star Trek: The Next Generation

DMOZ was arguably once a strong, vibrant, quality directory. But my, how things have changed. It’s about time that Google re-evaluated their usage of dmoz.org as a weighted directory.

Three years back, I submitted one of my sites to the DMOZ. The site in question is listed in the side-bar, and has been mentioned by USA Today, the New York Times, and WKYC (an NBC company), amongst many other places. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a fairly popular resource.

If you haven’t picked up on it already, the site is called EyeglassRetailerReviews.com . Whether it should or shouldn’t be listed isn’t the question, but I mention it to show that I have a good idea what I’m talking about below in regards to the problems I noticed with a certain category in the Open Directory Project (ODP) below… Read more…

I’ve been hooked on Kaspersky for a while now. Periodically we’d have something that slipped by some of the free anti-virus programs, and since Kaspersky and NOD32 were the only strongly recommended ones out there that were low on bloat, I tried them both and settled on Kaspersky.

This year, we grabbed a 5 user license for Kaspersky Internet Security. Some of the family’s been switching to Mac’s, so we only needed 4 licenses for the remaining PC’s. It was a bit pricey for the license from the Kaspersky website (buying a couple 3-user packs from Future Shop, Best Buy, or London Drugs when they go on sale would have been cheaper). In any case, we still had 1 left over.

You might imagine my surprise when today I found this message on one of our machines though: Read more…

I’m a huge casual Sim City fan. By that I mean I’ll play it for a few days at a time, then take a break for a few months, then come back to it. The Sim City franchise has been great – I could go into details about the joys of everything from Sim City for SNES all the way up to Sim City 4, but I’ll spare the details.

Unfortunately, Sim City 4 is effectively where the franchise died. It’s odd because usually a franchise dies after a horrible game, not after an amazing one. And SC4 was definitely an epic success. EA tried to play off of the name with Sim City Societies, but everyone knows that Societies was never a true Sim City successor.

Years went by, and rumors of “the next Sim City” came and went. Finally, a real competitor came about, and was finally released earlier this month: Cities XL.

So, without further ado, let’s compare Cities XL and  Sim City 4.

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The short version first:

Sim City 4 has Read more…

While looking for a way to convert MP4 to FLV, I came across a couple free programs. Since I had problems finding free programs to convert videos to flash in the past, I’ll list them here. While both are free, neither are open-source (if anyone knows of an open source converter feel free to leave a comment).

That said, both of these do work well for the simple task of converting to flash video.

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Any Video Converter Read more…

I wrote this up quite a while ago, and it’s been sitting as a draft since. I pulled information on each setting from a few different websites, and while I don’t have any “final results” to show you (and the write-up wasn’t quite completed), hopefully the information’s useful in helping you to better determine what each setting does (and how it will affect encode time and quality), and to come up with your own settings.

I’ve used Handbrake in the past to encode movies and various TV series from DVD source. Recently, I grabbed the latest version (0.9.3), and decided to encode a TV series from DVD.

In short, here’s what I’m looking to get from my encode:
-High quality, even if it takes a while to encode.
-File size of between 250-400mb for each 1-hour episde (about 42-44 mins).

Of course, the best way to see how well you’ve done is to find something to compare it to. Therefore, I grabbed a torrent of the same TV show, and aimed to create a better quality encode at a smaller file size.

Before dumping into the x264 settings, it’s worth noting that I used a 2-pass encode, and mixed the audio down to a 160kbps Dolby Surround encode.

Here’s a list of the x264 settings I chose in Handbrake, and why:

Reference Frames: 6
Normally, I’d go much higher here. However if you go too high, both hardware and *some* software players can choke. Unfortunately, reference frames are subject to diminishing returns. According to a document at mplayerhq.hu , while going from a setting of 1 to 2 would improve the signal-to-noise by 0.15dB, going from 6 to 12 would typically improve the signal-to-noise ratio by only 0.02dB but result in a 15-20% longer encoding time. Really high diminishing returns for something you probably won’t notice, and something that might cause issues if you ever try to play your video in a hardware player. That said, go crazy if you want and try 16. Just make sure your video plays fine afterwards.

Mixed References: Yes
You get some quality at the cost of some speed. I’ve never seen anyone give a good reason to turn it off. Read more…

If you’re using VLC for Mac OS X and playing files over the network, you might be noticing some stutter, lag, delay, freezing, etc every so often. Basically your video’s happily playing along, and the screen will freeze for 2 or 4 seconds, then play again. You may also find that Quicktime DOESN’T stutter or freeze. Of course it doesn’t help if Quicktime won’t play your video and VLC will.

Sound like the issue you’re having? Here’s the fix… Read more…

At the same time that I bought the Garmin, I grabbed a TomTom XL 330S as well. It’s funny, you’d think one would completely win over the other.

It just doesn’t work that way though. They’ve each got pros and cons which I’ll be getting to in another post. In any case, a site has been created for the TomTom as well. Content’s done, but it’ll be slowly added to the site over the next while (just like the Garmin which is also done but pages will be added over time).

A quick list of some pros and cons: Read more…

I recently bought a Garmin Nüvi 255W GPS. It’s a pretty impressive unit – it almost reminds me of a Mac in it’s ease of use. I’ve already used it a bit, and plan to do some testing with it over the next few days. I’ll sum things up with a few pros and cons: Read more…

A small shocker using Maya on a Quad-Core Intel processor was that CPU usage by default was about 50%. Yes that’s right FIFTY PERCENT. It looked similar to this:

Maya using only 50% CPU usage.

This was a little disappointing – Maya 2009 basically caused another dual-core machine to grind to a halt, and was only using about half the potential of the Quad-Core.

This was my first time actually using/seeing Maya (I was helping out someone else who needed some rendering distributed), so I searched around. It took forever, but I finally came across the fix.

If you’re using the default Maya Software renderer, there’s an option in the Render Settings menu, but I wont go into that here. The individual I was helping needed MENTAL RAY to be used (instead of Maya Software Renderer), and there wasn’t an equivilent option in that menu.

If you’re using Mental Ray, this is where you make the change: Read more…