Gerhard Potgieter

Last year’s recall of overheating Xbox 360s was caused by Microsoft trying to bypass  ATi and going straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to save cash, according to analyst outfit Gartner.

Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, said that the overheating problem in the Xbox 360s was caused by Microsoft trying to avoid using ATi.  It designed the graphics chip on its own, cut ATi out and took it to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to make.

However the chip overheated and in the end Microsoft had to go back to ATi  to redesign the chip so that it worked. Lewis that if Microsoft left the graphics processor design to ATi in the first place it could have designed a graphics processor that dissipates much less power.

It cost Microsoft $1 billion to conduct the recall.

For all you die hard Call Of Duty fans out there, seems like Nvidia released the 1.6 Patch 2 days earlier to their SLI Club Members.

If you are interested in getting the patch before the rest you can download it here.

Just a word of warning, you won’t be able to play on your usual servers if you install this until the server runs 1.6 aswell. This patch adds the new killcam (follows grenades/RPG rounds/noobtoob rounds),  more maps (four I think),  bug fixes (not sure what bugs).

Nadeo recently launched TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF), the successor of their previous free racing game TrackMania Nations (TMN).

Being part of CTWUG we have a few avid gamers on the network and one of the games we played allot was TrackMania Nations (TMN). So with the new TrackMania Nations Forever (TMNF) I thought I would give it a go and set up a server, and as with every game on the network users prefer a stats page aswell. So after searching high and low on the web I couldn’t find a stats solutions for TMNF that produced stats based on real time results, the closest I got was TMOS - TrackMania Offline Server, so the obvious thing to do was write my own solution.

Running a dedicated TMNF server required ASECO, Automatic Server Control, to generate statistics in realtime to a online database or local database. It took me about 2 days of programming to get a stable running bug free site. I called it AsecoStats cause it is based on the Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF.

The index page displays live server stats like how many players are currently online, current track, list all player names and best times that are currently online aswell as the Author records aswell as the best time for the track.

The Players page displays all the current players that ever played on the server aswell as their total wins and total time played on the server.

When you click on the player name you will be transfered to a page detailing all the tracks the player has ever raced aswell as their best time for each track and poll position

On the Tracks page is a list of all the challenges (tracks) ever played on the server with their author, best time and what player achieved this time.

When you click on the track name you will be transfered to a page that details all the players that ever played that track aswell as their poll position and their time.

This is all I did for now as this is the first beta version (v. 0.9b), and what the users wanted to see for now. The pages is written in php and utilizes Aseco 2.1.4 for TMNF’s mysql database. I haven’t decided on a license for it yet but if interest is big enough I will possibly release this under GNU.

For the next release I’m looking into a point system so users can get a overall server position and not just per track. Please leave your comments as to what you guys think of this and any suggestions is also welcome.

Monday Nintedo went head on with Microsoft and Sony when it launched WiiWare, its new online repository of downloadable games.

From appearance a service where Wii gamers will be able to shop for new, independant games. WiiWare seems to be Nintendo’s answer to Microsoft’s XBox Live Arcade and its XNA Studio, and to Sony’s Playstion Store.

WiiWare launched with six games: Square Enix’s Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, Frontier Development’s LostWinds, XGen Studios’ Defend your Castle, Nnooo’s Pop, High Voltage Software’s V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack, and Gameloft’s TV Show King.

Nintendo said that they would add new games to WiiWare each Monday, as there are currently more that 100 WiiWare titles in development.

And while many gamers would like to see more games in the system at launch, the fact that there are so many in the pipeline already means that Nintendo will likely not have to worry about populating the service with new weekly titles for some time.

For independent developers, the service also provides a new avenue for getting their work in front of gamers, and on a new platform. Microsoft has been very aggressive with using its XNA platform as a way of bringing independently created games to the Xbox community, and now Nintendo will be able to compete for some of those developers’ time.

Yesterday on Microsoft’s marketing-team-operated GamerScoreBlog, the publisher dished on the stats breakdown for the 6 million copies of the game sold in its first week at market.

According to retailers, more than 60 percent of all GTA IV games sold during the first week was sold to XBox 360 owners. Sony had not responded to queries for comment on this claim as of press time. According to Microsoft’s most recent numbers, the global installed base for the XBox 360 currently stands at 19 million as to the mere 13 million of the PS3.

Microsoft also said that the release of GTA IV caused a spike in the sales of its consoles to 54 percent week-over-week and that retailers’ data indicate that GTA IV is attached to new console purchases at a rate of 40 percent. GTA IV has also proven to be a hit at online gamers as the publisher noted earlier this week that the game had overtook Call of Duty 4 as the top XBox Live title for the week.

If you haven’t got GTA IV yet, I suggest you go out and buy it. As with all previous versions of the game the developers really put in allot of effort, and you can see it. If you are a PC gamer you’ll have to wait and see if this title will hit your market anytime soon.