There are few things that I dread more than moving. Transporting a household from one location to another is miserable enough, but throw the Benchmarking Sweatshop and its back catalog of old hardware into the mix, and the job becomes even more daunting. So I did a little pruning before my latest move, discarding the antiquated remnants of past reviews that simply aren't worth the closet space they consumed or the effort involved in trucking them to a new closet across town.
Years of reviewing a seemingly endless stream of PC hardware have generally dulled any sentimental attachment to components that have been gathering dust on my shelves since the last move, and yet there were a few bits and pieces I couldn't bring myself to leave at the mercy of my scavenging friends. None of these preserved relics have much in the way of true vintage credibility or actual value. However, each is special, if only to me.
We'll kick off this tour of the cardboard box that has become my old hardware museum with the elder statesman of the collection: a SpaceOrb 360. This novel attempt at designing a game controller explicitly for 3D environments never caught on, but it was a superb idea. Instead of a 2D directional pad or thumbstick, the controller employs a large plastic, er, orb that users can twist, push, and otherwise manipulate through six degrees of freedom. The SpaceOrb was easily the best way to control Descent, and while it worked reasonably well with more traditional first-person shooters, it couldn't compete with the ubiquitous keyboard and mouse.
I've kept the SpaceOrb for years now, perhaps in the faint hope that I'll be able to break it out for a new Descent game one of these days. Or, with user interfaces moving toward the third dimension, perhaps it will come in handy for something completely unrelated to gaming. Either way, I can't help but preserve this ingenious and innovative throwback.
The next relic of note is my 3dfx Voodoo 2. Back in the day, 3dfx changed the face of gaming forever with dedicated 3D accelerators that plugged in alongside a system's primary graphics card. The Voodoo 2 was the performance king of its day, and more than a bit prophetic. For example, rather than featuring a single graphics processor, it packed three GPUs. The Voodoo 2 also ushered in SLI—you could pair up two cards for even more Glide goodness.
While there are rarer, older, and more interesting 3dfx cards than the Voodoo 2, this Diamond card will always hold a special place in my heart. She was not only my first 3D accelerator, but the first PC component I purchased explicitly to play games.
The graphics card world has given us countless interesting products over the years, but Nvidia's GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is arguably the most notorious among them for being such a complete and utter disaster. First, the card was plagued by delays, causing it to hit the market well after ATI made a big splash with its Radeon 9700 Pro. Nvidia also made numerous architectural choices with the FX 5800's NV30 graphics processor that ultimately hamstrung the chip's performance in games designed for DirectX 9.
An even more serious problem afflicted the NV30 GPU and the then-advanced 130nm fabrication process used to build the chip. Yields were poor, and the silicon that did make the grade ran so hot that Nvidia was forced to resort to an incredibly loud dual-slot cooler that became known not-so-affectionately as the Dustbuster. Rumor has it that Nvidia actually cribbed the cooler design from Abit, which had strapped a similar dual-slot contraption to a factory overclocked GeForce Ti 4200.
Ultimately ill-equipped to compete with the dominating Radeon 9700 Pro, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra never hit the market in any kind of volume, which I suppose makes it a bit of a rarity. To this day, it's also the loudest graphics card I've ever tested—a distinction I hope it never loses.
Once upon a time, even after 3dfx was swallowed up by Nvidia, there was a viable third option in the graphics card world: Matrox. Best known for its multimonitor pioneering and excellent analog output quality at a time when that sort of thing was a big deal, 3D performance was never Matrox's bread and butter. With the Parhelia-512, however, Matrox looked like it might just have something capable of taking on the high end of ATI's and Nvidia's respective lineups.
Unfortunately, despite oodles of transistors, gobs of memory bandwidth, and numerous unique features, the Parhelia-512 failed to impress in games, where it couldn't keep up with its competition. The card was simply too expensive for the performance that it offered, and while features like 10-bit/channel color and Surround Gaming were certainly impressive, their appeal didn't make up the performance gap for most folks. Matrox would eventually give up on gamers and enthusiasts altogether, choosing instead to settle into smaller niche markets like medical imaging. My Parhelia-512 remains as a decadent reminder that, once upon a time, there were alternatives to GeForces and Radeons.
For a very long time, motherboards weren't much to look at. They'd come on printed circuit boards colored inconspiuously in green or brown, and they'd be buried inside a case where no one was going to see them. And then there was color. Lots of it. Too much of it. Or at least too many clashing, brightly-colored neons competing for attention on motherboards that looked like they were designed midway through an acid trip.
Sapphire's PI-A9RX480 is a child of the multicolored motherboard era, and while its stark white PCB is certainly striking, the board's designers showed some restraint when selecting the rest of the palette, to great effect. I still think this is one of the best-looking motherboards ever, although it wasn't all that competitive in its day. A high price tag and problematic peripheral performance tanked what might otherwise have been a popular product. But the A9RX480 still looks good today, and that's why it's the only board I've bothered to keep around past its prime.
The Raptor WD360GD is a perfect example of enthusiasts defying carefully-crafted product positioning and adopting enterprise-class hardware for their own desktops and gaming rigs. For years, the spindle speed for desktop hard drives was stuck at 7,200 RPM. 10,000 RPM was for SCSI drives only, putting it out of reach of the vast majority of enthusiasts. Then Western Digital went and built the Raptor, which combined a 10k-RPM spindle speed with a standard Serial ATA interface that plugged into common desktop motherboards. The drive only offered 36GB of capacity, which wasn't much even for the time, but performance-obsessed enthusiasts flocked in droves to the Raptor and its successors.
Western Digital eventually grew hip to the Raptor's broader appeal, and the company even developed a special windowed version dubbed the Raptor X that specifically targeted enthusiasts. Of course, most enthusiasts probably opted for the windowless version of the Raptor X, the WD1500ADFD, which cost $50 less. What can I say? We're a practical bunch, and while hard drive windows are very slick, they just don't match the smug satisfaction that comes from plugging server-class hardware into a standard desktop system.
That about does it for reminiscing today. As I look around the mess of boxes that still litter my new office, I can't help but wonder what I'll cull from this collection of more recent hardware. Perhaps the original X-Fi will merit a spot in my little museum as what may be the last 3D audio processor. Zalman's Reserator will surely have a place, if only because it's still by far the most phallic PC accessory around. And surely, there will be room for an erratum-afflicted B2-stepping Phenom processor, because never have fanboys so vociferously made excuses for a broken product. Ahhh, the memories.
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Last by yuhong at 2:12 AM on 03/07/09
It's interesting how gaming habits change. I used to be pretty hardcore, complete with mad skillz and everything. First-person shooters were my thing back in the day, and I mostly plied my trade at LAN parties and on dormitory networks. After university, my TR test lab—essentially the entirety of my basement suite at the time—played host to weekly Battlefield sessions that would run until three of four in the morning. Then our group started dabbling in consoles, trading office chairs for comfortable couches, and shifting genres away from shooters to more varied fare suitable for analog thumbsticks.
At some point over the last few years, we started to get old. Or maybe we just found better ways to spend our evenings. Our nearly all-night sessions soon petered out at one or two in the morning. Sometimes, we'd even call it quits before midnight. We've stopped playing as often, too. What was once a weekly ritual has become a more occasional indulgence.
I'm playing games a lot more on my own these days. After years enjoying the camaraderie and trash talk of LAN parties and local multiplayer sessions, I can't get too excited about venturing online, so I've been enjoying single-player campaigns on both the PC and my Xbox 360. Unfortunately, I rarely have enough time to properly immerse myself in the latest AAA titles. Rather than losing myself inside alternate worlds for hours at a time, I'm playing in smaller bursts—20 minutes here and half an hour there. Recently, that time has been devoted exclusively to Audiosurf.
Perhaps best described as a blend of Wipeout and Guitar Hero fed through a Winamp visualization plug-in, Audiosurf offers a unique spin on arcadey, rhythm-based racing. I'm not usually a fan of the rhythm genre, perhaps because as a white computer geek, I lack rhythm in general. But I do have a rather large collection of meticulously ripped, high-bitrate MP3s culled from a collection of CDs I've been building since long before I had good taste in music. Those tracks are what fuels Audiosurf, providing the foundation for each track, er, level.
Audiosurf encourages you to "ride your music," effectively putting players directly onto each track. The tracks are treated almost like roadways, complete with multiple lanes of traffic to dodge or collect. Nearly everything, from the slope and direction of the track to the level of traffic congestion and even the colors, is defined by the music. Load up some death metal or hardcore drum and bass, and you're in for a wild ride. Or, if you prefer a more relaxing experience, try easy listening. I've played the game with everything from KMDFM to Tom Waits, and while faster tempos present considerably greater challenges, even slower songs provide ample entertainment.
The tight integration of soundtrack, gameplay, and visuals makes for a surprisingly immersive experience. I'm used to getting pulled in by realistic graphics, but Audiosurf's visuals are pedestrian at best. Instead, it's the direct link between music and the pace of gameplay that draws me in and keeps me hooked. Online leaderboards for each song help to keep things interesting, and they've inspired me to play with more obscure songs, if only to better my chances of a high score, even if it's the only one.
Bound only by the breadth and depth of your music collection, Audiosurf offers a practically endless supply tracks to run through. There are multiple gameplay modes, too, each with different rules about which traffic blocks to collect and which to avoid. These modes also give your ship different capabilities, including the ability to destroy blocks, jump over them, or shuffle the ones you've collected so far. Heck, there's even a two-player mode. Add in three difficulty levels and a special Ironman mode, and it's easy to tailor the game to suit not only your skill level, but also your mood.
Audiosurf is currently available exclusively through Steam, where it costs just $10. I think it's worth every penny, especially because a recent update added a low-detail mode designed to run well on netbooks with crappy Intel integrated graphics, like my Eee PC 1000HA. Needless to say, you don't need high-end hardware for this game to run smoothly. You might not even need a PC for long, either. The game's creator is on record as saying that a console would be a "natural fit," and it seems like a great candidate for the Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network.
As much as I've been loving Audiosurf, there are limits to its appeal. The puzzle modes aren't all that cerebral, for example, and there isn't much in the way of complexity to explore. I can't see the game sustaining me for an entire evening, either, or at least not without the help of a generous serving of mind-altering substances. But that's not really a problem, because these days, short bursts of time are all I have, and I can't think of a better way to spend them than riding Audiosurf's Technicolor rollercoaster.
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Last by DrDillyBar at 5:01 PM on 02/25/09
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor is no stranger to releasing goodies on the Internet. Last March, he one-upped Radiohead's In Rainbows release with an album of his own, distributed in both digital and physical formats with numerous options for those who desired higher quality MP3s, lossless formats, or even 24-bit/96kHz HD audio. In May, Reznor struck again with The Slip, an entirely free album available in a selection of compressed, lossless, and HD formats.
In addition to offering albums online, Reznor also launched a remix site that provides fans and budding producers with multi-track audio files for Nine Inch Nails' albums. Users are free to manipulate, mash up, and otherwise remix these tracks to roll their own songs, which can then be uploaded to the site and ranked by users. This rather novel approach to engaging and empowering fans to create their own remixes has yielded impressive results. I'm currently streaming remix.nin.com's highest-rated fan remixes, and they're really quite good, which makes me even more eager to see what fans do with Reznor's latest salvo of free content.
Last week, and with little fanfare, Reznor posted the following message on the NIN website:
The internet is full of surprises these days.
I was contacted by a mysterious, shadowy group of subversives who SOMEHOW managed to film a substantial amount (over 400 GB!) of raw, unedited HD footage from three separate complete shows of our Lights in the Sky tour. Security must have been lacking at these shows because the quality of the footage is excellent.If any of you could find a LINK to that footage I'll bet some enterprising fans could assemble something pretty cool.
Oh yeah, you didn't hear this from me.
400GB would easily blow my bandwidth cap, and I don't have the time to wade through hours of footage. Still, I can't help but be impressed with Reznor's willingness to seed his fans with raw footage, and eager to see what they do with it.
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Last by Tarx at 11:15 PM on 01/19/09
Why are MP3 players so hard to get right? A few months ago, my year-and-a-half-old and largely babied iPod 5.5G gave up the ghost. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised; after all, Steve Jobs thinks we should all be buying iPods "at least once a year," ostensibly to stay on top of Apple's latest innovations. Uhuh.
So I switched to a poo-brown Zune 30 that I had sitting around. I'm not a huge Zune fan—it's too big for my tastes, and the battery life is quite poor. However, the latest firmware update improved the device's already excellent interface, and for a few months at least, all was well. That is, until this morning, when the Zune refused to boot up. I tried to reset the device, but that didn't help. Neither did plugging it into my PC. And I'm not alone.
It turns out that an epidemic of failures is cascading across the Zune 30 landscape. Rumor has it that the failures are tied to the hardware clock inside the device, which supposedly didn't deal well with the lead up to the new year. Microsoft has at least acknowledged the issue, posting the following on its official Zune support site:
Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We’re aware of the problem and are working to correct it. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!
There are a few resurrection tips floating around, including warranty-voiding battery removal. Resetting your PC's clock and disabling the Windows Time Service and all Zune-related services and applications apparently helps, too, but I'm in no mood to experiment. I shouldn't have to.
So now I'm down to my Sansa Clip, which is mercifully working. For now.
Update — It appears that Microsoft has isolated the issue. A driver bug is apparently jacking with the Zune's internal clock, which will automatically reset itself by noon tomorrow, GMT. And then, like magic, Zune 30s should rise from the dead.
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Last by potatochobit at 12:42 PM on 01/04/09
Mirror's Edge was by far one of my most anticipated games of the bumper crop of holiday titles that have sprouted up over the last couple of months. I've long been a fan of free running—otherwise known as parkour—and quite enjoyed its basic implementation in Assassin's Creed. Mirror's Edge promised an entire game build around the concept, and with a unique look and feel, to boot. Be still my beating heart.
I've spent the last few weeks making my way through Mirror's Edge's single-player campaign, and it's been quite a journey. The first thing that grabbed me was the game's distinct sense of style. There's an overexposed starkness to the world, with dramatic splashes of color giving an artsy feel to what otherwise feel like artificially sterile environments. Everything has an air of almost hipster coolness. Fixed gear bicycles (that you sadly can't ride) dot the outdoor levels; most of the admittedly thin story is told through artsy animated cut scenes; and you play Faith, a female protagonist with edgy hair, tattoos, camel-toed ninja sneakers, and a remarkably uninflated chest.
As a new intellectual property, Mirror's Edge essentially started with a blank slate. The developers certainly took full advantage of the freedom that affords, crafting a beautifully distinctive take on an oppressive near future. You get an unencumbered view of this world, too, through an essentially HUD-less first-person perspective interrupted only by an optional crosshair to prevent dizziness.
DICE's decision to make Mirror's Edge a first-person affair was a controversial one given the game's focus on precise acrobatics and high-speed environmental interaction. However, the speed of the game really does lend itself to the first-person perspective, which becomes all the more immersive as you accelerate. Free running's mantra is to always move forward, and Mirror's Edge rewards those who maintain their momentum. You spend most of your time bounding across rooftops and through open indoor environments littered with opportunities to run across walls, vault over obstacles or slide under them, and even ride the odd zip line. This all feels great at speed, and the game nicely highlights potential routes and launch points when you're moving at full gallop, making it a little easier to keep your flow going from one daring stunt to the next. Building up speed also unlocks bullet time runner vision, which lets you slow the action to plan your next move.
Fluid free-running in Mirror's Edge requires perfectly-timed jumps, slides, and 180° turns, which is a pretty basic set of actions, all things considered. On the Xbox 360, these moves are tied to the triggers and shoulder buttons. Maybe it's because every other game puts jump on the thumbpad, but this shoulder-based control scheme just doesn't work for me. The game does serve up a few alternative configuration options. However, these options simply shuffle the function of the shoulder buttons and triggers without actually moving any of them to the thumbpad.
Fortunately, the upcoming (and PhysX-eye-candy-infused) PC version of Mirror's Edge should provide more flexibility on the key binding front. Hopefully this port dials in the mouse controls properly, too. Mirror's Edge rewards precision and timing, both of which should be easier with a keyboard and mouse.
The penalty for failing to perfectly execute acrobatics varies from a merely inconvenient—but still quite frustrating—loss of speed to a fatal plummet to the pavement with your cargo pants flapping loudly in the wind. It's hard enough to link together acrobatic moves to get you from one end of a level to the next, and then the game throws armed guards, snipers, and hail-of-death-bringing helicopters into the mix. Initially armed only with your fists, you have to rely on melee attacks and carefully-timed disarming moves to subdue those you can't sprint past. The ability to take weapons from your opponents does give you a fighting chance, but the game doesn't play well as a shooter, and you have to drop any acquired weapons to run.
Combat is what really breaks Mirror's Edge for me. I found it quite difficult to switch gears mentally between route finding and dodging bullets, and it doesn't help that melee skirmishes generally feel awkward from the first-person view. A third-person perspective would have made Faith's arsenal of momentum-fueled attacks much easier to use effectively, and it might've made the combat engaging rather than an annoying distraction. One can apparently finish the game without firing a single shot, but more often than not, the only way I could get through combat sequences was to pick off enemies methodically one at a time—a tedious process for a game that otherwise encourages speed.
I'm sure my old-man reflexes and lack of first-person thumbstick mastery made the combat in Mirror's Edge all the more difficult, but there are other areas where the game slows down for no apparent reason. While some indoor environments are open enough to pick up speed, others are almost claustrophobic in comparison and entirely devoid of opportunities to accelerate. What's worse, you're even sent slowly crawling across ducting and through vents; this might work for Splinter Cell, but in a game that doesn't reward stealth, it's hard to see the point.
Mirror's Edge truly shines when you're sprinting across open environments, stringing together daring feats of urban gymnastics. The single-player campaign has entirely too many distractions from the game's otherwise intoxicating free-running mechanics, but once you've cleared levels, you can revisit them in time trial and race modes that drop combat in favor of a purer parkour experience. Routes become much easier to master without bullets flying through the air, and while these modes remain quite challenging, I've yet to find them frustrating.
Based on the reviews and forum chatter I've seen online, most Mirror's Edge players seem to prefer these alternate modes. The game's developers appear to be listening, too. DICE has already released a trailer for an upcoming time trial level pack that takes free-running into an entirely abstract new world rich with acrobatic opportunities.
Part of me worried that free running would be too gimmicky to carry a game, let alone a potential franchise. As it turns out, I think the reverse is true—the best shot Mirror's Edge has at becoming more than a blip on the radar is to focus on its unique parkour perspective and fresh visual style. Mirror's Edge may not be the game I hoped for, but it looks like the franchise is moving in the right direction, and I'm eagerly awaiting the next chapter.
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Last by indeego at 2:15 PM on 01/10/09
It's rare that I finish a game, whether it's on the PC or my Xbox 360. The last one I completed was Call of Duty 4, and before that, Portal. Neither represented much of a commitment, though, since I only needed about six hours to polish off the former and just three for the latter. Given this history, I'm somewhat surprised to have just completed Dead Space—a 12-hour ordeal that tore me away from hurling rebels and Storm Troopers in Force Unleashed.
I hadn't read much about Dead Space before its release, but a string of high scores on Metacritic convinced me to give it a shot. Within an hour, I was hooked. Deep. The game starts predictably enough, with a crash landing that quickly throws you into a hostile environment. All alone... and vulnerable.
This sense of vulnerability is what makes the game really shine for me. An over-the-shoulder perspective provides a viewpoint much like Gears of War, which is for some reason less offensive to my keyboard-and-mouse preferences than a straight first-person perspective. The pseudo-third-person view also gives you a better sense of your character, the flimsy armor he wears, and the brutality inflicted by enemies who largely rely on melee attacks.
Some have called Dead Space a survival horror game, while others have pegged it as an action title. It's somewhere between the two, I think, trending one way or the other depending on just how good you are. The game certainly isn't a run-and-gun affair—you're not nearly invincible enough for reckless abandon, nor are your weapons powerful enough, nor ammunition plentiful enough. Tactical strategy is key to conserving ammunition and other resources, and to keeping your character alive. Unlike some console shooters, you won't find egregious amounts of auto-aim here. Dead Space encourages you to surgically shoot off limbs, crippling (and slowing, which is useful when you're facing a large horde) enemies before finally finishing them off with a brutal foot stomp. Or you can clumsily blast away at the center of mass and waste rounds. The choice is yours.
Running out of ammunition doesn't leave you completely defenseless; each weapon has a melee attack. But you won't last long without a full clip, especially later in the game. Fortunately, save points are distributed liberally throughout the levels. In Dead Space, stressful tension comes from the environment itself, rather than your fear of having to repeat large stretches of the game upon death.
Dead Space's story plays out nicely through in-game cinematics. The narrative is a linear affair, leading you back and forth through the bowels of a mining ship, and beyond. This world is worth exploring as much as you can, not only to take in the atmosphere and eye candy, which is plentiful, but to stock up on in-game items and cash. Goods can be bought, sold, and stored at glorified vending machines found throughout the levels.
Shopping is a vital component of the game, since it provides access to suit upgrades, new weapons, ammo, health, power nodes, and other useful items. The weapons are surprisingly original, without a rehashed rocket launcher or shotgun cliché in the mix. The game also gives you access to work benches, which with the help of power nodes, can be used to upgrade weapons, increasing their damage, reload speed, capacity, and more. Work benches can also be used to upgrade your suit's hit points, oxygen supply, and the game's take on bullet time and a gravity gun. Bullet time is employed through stasis modules that don't slow down the entire world, but specifically-targeted objects within it, making for some beautifully gory slow-motion combat sequences.
Even with slo-mo at your disposal, combat in Dead Space is often sudden, frantic, and full of sphincter-tightening moments. The game tends to spring multiple enemies on you at once, but this rarely happens without warning, even it's just an audible cue that something nasty lurks around the next corner. These warnings keep the action from feeling arbitrary or artificial—you won't find Doom 3 monster closets here—and they make you pay a lot more attention to the subtleties of the environment. Sound is used particularly effectively, with in-game music often giving way to long stretches of silence that had my heart skipping a beat at every ambient noise.
A reference to Captain Carmack in one of the text logs you find in the game hints that the development team clearly had Doom on its mind. But Dead Space easily outdoes its inspiration, and the goodness doesn't end when you finish the game. An animated Dead Space: Downfall prequel movie has been released, and while it's only about an hour long, it nicely fills in the game's back story, expanding a mythology that will apparently live on in a sequel. I can't wait.
Dead Space certainly isn't for everyone. It's a challenging, stressful, and tension-filled ride that demands your attention and may leave you more tired than relaxed. And yet I admire the game's hold over my heart rate and its ability to inspire real dread about what's making that slithering sound around the next corner. In completing the game, I felt relieved, not because I was finished, but because I had survived.
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Last by mbutrovich at 6:31 PM on 12/03/08
Not too long ago, I got in on the netbook revolution and picked up an Eee PC 1000HA. It's a great little system, particularly for those with larger hands who might feel a little cramped on the Aspire One's smaller keyboard. The Eee's keyboard isn't perfect, though; in an attempt to preserve the traditional inverted-T directional pad, Asus put the up arrow key where the right shift key is supposed to be. That might not seem like a big deal, but whenever I'm touch-typing at speed, I invariably hit the up arrow when reaching for right shift. This isn't the sort of typo that lends itself to easy recovery, which makes it all the more frustrating. Fortunately, there's a solution: swap the keys. And it's easier than you might think.
The first step in the process is the physical key swap, which brings us to a requisite disclaimer. TR is in no way responsible for any damange your netbook might incur should you attempt to emulate this little hack. Right, now back to the keyboard.
Removing the key caps is easy enough—I've seen forum posts suggest using a putty knife or screwdriver to pry the keys off from their left edge, but I found that gently lifting the top-left corner of the keys works best. Once the offending key caps have been removed, you can rearrange them as you see fit. Popping them back into place is a snap, too, provided you secure the left edge first.
As you can see, I've actually moved four keys around. In addition to swapping the up arrow with the right shift, I also attempted to give my directional keys some semblance of a logical layout by switching the left and down arrows. But thus far we've just juggled key caps, and that does't change what they actually do in Windows. Enter AutoHotkey, a free keyboard programming tool that neatly takes care of remapping. AutoHotkey relies on scripting to remap key functions, and with the following code I had my Eee PC's new keys behaving as they should in Windows.
Up::RShift
RShift::Up
Right::Down
Down::Right
^RShift::Send {PgUp}
^Right::Send {PgUp}
The first four lines take care of remapping basic key functions. However, the Eee's up and down arrows also perform page up and page down functions when combined with the netbook's Fn modifier key. Page up and page down are handy to have when you're dealing with only 600 vertical pixels, so that's not something I wanted to lose. AutoHotkey won't let you easily bind commands to Fn key combinations, but it will let you define Ctrl key combos, which is what I've used here. Once your script is complete, it can be compiled to an executable that sits in your startup folder. And you're finished.
It only took me about 15 minutes to swap keys and hack up my little AutoHotkey script, and already, I'm having a much easier time writing on the Eee. The revised directional layout will no doubt take some getting used to, but it's a trade-off I'm more than happy to make.
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Last by crose at 10:04 AM on 11/15/08
