Need for speed (2015) review

Well well well so its all true then. What "they" have been saying. Mixed feelings it is then. Don't get your coffee, this is going to be a really short review.

Why, the new Need for Speed game, of course.
Reading about the cut scenes people were talking about in forums felt like may be people were exaggerating a little and that it cant be that bad. After all, people do tend to....exaggerate about games.
But after loading it up and having a couple of hours with it I can say without reservation, "WHAT THE HELL WERE EA THINKING?"
Yawn, seriously! Its just UN-INTERESTING cut scene and drift fest. I tend to give games the benefit of the doubt, I always have ever since I have been gaming, but I cannot give this thing any benefits from the doubts it has. 
I liked that the police were in the background and not really interfering as much. So they did do some things right, I'll give them that. At this point, i'll go with the critics and say I have mixed feeling about this. You can't hate it, but you can't like it either.

It looks like EA tried to bolt on the best parts of all previous games into one game, except the problem there is that those best parts worked for the themes those games were made for. In this NFS it feels like an interior decorator kept forgetting what theme is meant to be implemented. 

Here is what made the original great:
A no fuss thrill ride. Cops there but not interfering excessively (Hence it made it fun to grossly outrun them with super cars -hah catch me if you can!). Digressing a bit, the first Need for speed Most wanted game is the best cop chase game ever so lets keep cop chases as a separate NFS franchise. Back to what made the original great; the videos were about CARS, about what made them special, about its history. There were videos of the real versions driving on actual tracks.  I loved watching those videos in the original road and track version. Use real cars, make it fun, turn it into a THRILL RIDE again EA.

Playstation four (ps4) Experience.

I took advantage of the boxing day sales to get some smashing discounts on stuff but my main focus for battling the lines was the PS4. Cars were parked on grass, and in places you wouldn't have thought could be used as car parks. Vehicles were circling car parks like vultures out to feed. Among that chaos was I, who drove in and got a park straight away! Talk about lucky!

I waited before posting this blog to discuss what my experience with PS4 is like versus the ps3 I still have. The short answer is that I don't see anything significant in it that I did not experience in my ps3. There are some new stuff that poped out which I will discuss further. That aside from comparing hardware because for obvious reasons the PS4 has better hardware and since it is a console, it is right to say that the ps4 is better hardware.

One of the great things I do like about the PS4 is that its power features are configurable. My favorite so far is setting the rest mode to 3 hours. This means when I tell the Ps4 to turn off, it will remain in rest mode for three hours and supply power to the USB port before shutting down. I like this because it means after playing, I can plug my controller into it and it is ready and charged for me next time with out having to worry about power usage by the PS4. With the PS3 I had to leave it on to charge controllers -and no I think external chargers are a waste of money, a USB cable is so much cheaper -and the PS3 has two USB sockets as does the PS4. I also like that Sony has kept the interface simple. In comparison to the Xbox one, I found the Sony PS4 interface just as capable with much better usability.

The controller feels the same as the PS3 Dual Shock 3 but it is nice to have a mouse-pad and extra buttons on there. My most loved feature of the Dual Shock 4 controller is the ability to connect a set of headphones with mic on it. I have an awesome pair, the Sony MDR-ZX660 headphone and mic, plugged into it and the audio quality is great!


The question then is why did I buy the PS4. Well it's simple, I bought the PS3 too late and it was near its end of life. I also needed a separate blu-ray player for my lounge. The main reason, however, is that newer games either support PS3 and PS4 or just PS4 which made the decision easier. The PS3 is now being used as something to continue playing my old favorites, as well as acting as a blu-ray player and media device for my lounge tv.

So should you buy the PS4, yes you should since newer games will either support both or just PS4. I would strongly encourage being patient and waiting for specials in your area before getting one, however. The new controller it comes with makes for a nicer private game playing thanks to the headphone and mic socket on the controller. Overall experience with the PS4 has been positive.

Western Digital Elements drive, One TB, Pull-apart insides

Last night I pulled apart the Western Digital Elements portable 2.5" External hard drive.
This drive is quite light and easy to carry around. My new favorite in portability and relatively cheap.
I remember hauling a box full of floppies mid to late nineties, this elements drive is so much better!

Prying open the case was not too bad. Simple unplug the cable, gently expand one of the edges with a jewelers screwdriver flat head and then insert a larger flat head in the cavity and pry gently all around. Do not start at the cable end but on the side middle. Once the cover is poped on all sides, simple slide the cover up at the cable input and it should gently lift out with no damage.

I will discuss further after the images, but here they are(Click to enlarge):

Cover off. Drive still in bottom casing.

Drive out of bottom casing.

Cable end of the drive. You can see the Drive form factor for a 2.5 in is retained but is bonded to the disk controller that has a USB interface built into it.

Better view of the drive controller and USB interface circuit board at the bottom of the drive.

Put back together. The screwdriver is the smallest one I have and it is 13 cm in length.

The drive controller circuit board that is normally present on all Hard Disk Drives to control and communicate between the host and the drive mechanics also has a usb interface. It does not appear like you can simply purchase a 2.5" drive and put it in this casing. However at the low costs these things are, why would you want to! The drive is from their Western Digital Blue range.

The drive mounting screws have rubber around them that slides freely into the bottom half of the casing. This provides some cushion against shock and likely helps reduce vibrations from the drive filtering onto the surface the unit is in contact with. Other than that, the inside is fairly unremarkable.

This is an awesome drive and it is currently plugged into my NetGear R8000 Nighthawk wireless router so I can share files on any devices on my wireless network. I mostly put backup files on it however.

Enjoy, and remember, I pulled this apart so you don't have to!

How to get old games working under windows 10 using VMWare Player

Hi gamer guys and gamer girls!

Last time I showed you how to get Need for Speed Carbon working under windows 10 and mentioned that this could be used to run other games relying on safedisc.

I have been continuing to experiment with better ways to enjoy Need for Speed Carbon and found yet another way that works surprisingly well without the compromise to system security.

The answer is simply to use VMWare Player
It is free for personal use, and of course running a video game is pretty much personal use.

I wont go into detail on how to set up the player because VMWare Player is quite intuitive when you use it.  Just click "Create a Virtual Machine" and follow the on-screen instructions. When you get to the screen below, click the button called "Customize Hardware" :


Note: Unlike the hard drive mentioned in the screen shot (5 GB), you should use at least 40 GB. The above screenshot is a mistake as I was trying to create a VM just to take a screen shot for this blog. I was going to type 50GB. So please be sure to use at least 40, or 50 GB as your virtual HDD size! Also the Memory should be what ever your game needs + 1 GB. For Need for Speed Carbon, I used a VM with 2 GB Ram allocation.

In the Customize Hardware screen, select "Display" then at the top right, CHECK the box called "Acclerate 3D Graphics"

You are done! You now just have to install the OS

The gotchas:
1) You need a legitimate OS that is windows XP or higher original install disk and key so you can install it inside the virtual machine.
2) You need OS installation experience.

However, it is a Virtual machine and anything you do inside it wont harm your computer, so experiment away!

Once you have setup your virtual machine and set up an OS that is Windows XP(service pack three) or higher, then you need to install need for speed carbon.
First tho, you MAY need to connect your CD/DVD to your VM if it isn't already set up for it. To do this, simply click on Player drop down then click on "Removable devices" and then select CD/DVD option. Now you should be able to pop in the NFS Carbon (or any other game) DVD in and install the game. Once done, it should run fine.

Performance:

• Slight jitter but quite playable.
• A few settings can be pushed to high.

How does VMWare compare to Hyper-V Manager? No comparison because VMWare is, hands down, far superior.
VMWare ran the Guest OS at 32 bits, 1080p (without going through RDP), and virtualised 3D hardware. Hyper-V manager did none of that and only ran 1080p via RDP but still no 32 bit colour mode.
After checking out the features of VMWare player pro, versus the free version, I am convinced I need to purchase this amazing piece of virtualisation software especially when half the available features of pro is something I will use.

Ehm, back to the games at hand...

The performance I got in Need for speed carbon outlined above is on a system running VMWare Player 12 with hardware:
INTeL I7- 2600, 12 GB Ram, and an nVidia (EVGA brand) GTX560Ti card. The VM is stored on a RAID drive using Software RAID in "Stripping" mode. HOST OS is on an SSD (Samsung Evo 850). VMWare player is installed on a 2 TB Seagate Hybrid hard drive (8GB SSD Cache coupled Mechanical drive).

I have no idea how it will perform on other systems but it is a safe bet it will perform as mine did on at least a system with the mentioned hardware or better.

Happy Gaming Everyone!

How to get Need For Speed Carbon Working Under Windows 10.

Hi Gamer guys and Gamer girls!

Today I will show you  how to get Need for Speed Carbon working under Windows 10. This same process can be used for other games as well.

UPDATE: The instruction that is present at the bottom half of this post need only be performed once. See the very bottom for the rest of this update.

I have plenty of video games I have bought and never sold. I still have their original packaging, receipts, and you will be lucky to see any scratches on my CD's or DVD's. As the years went by and new versions of Microsoft OS's came out, I am always nervous whether my old games will work or not. That is because I sometimes still play them(at least the ones I can still get working).

This then brings me to Need for Speed Carbon. It would not work so rather than re-invent the wheel, the first thing I did was scan the Internet to see if somebody has found a way to make it work. I could not find any where that showed how to make it work other than NoCd cracks(which you must never get).

The symptoms are:
-The game installs fine but:
-You try to run NFSC.exe and it asks for Admin privileges.
-You launch it with admin privileges but nothing happens, the CD does not get accessed, no process is created.
-You try compatibility modes but  nothing works.

Read on!

The most interesting thing abut NFSC is that it uses the same game engine as Need For Speed Most Wanted, and need for Speed Most Wanted works perfectly fine under Windows 10. So the first trick was to see if I can get the need for speed most wanted exe to launch Carbon, or at least do something enough to give me some clues. It fired ok and asked for the CD even though the NFSC CD was still in the drive. I popped in the NFSMW disk and the game started to launch, the NFS Carbon splash screen came up and then the game crashed. This would give me a clue later on, just not immediately.

I attached a dis-assembler(ollydbg) and walked through it to see what was breaking. It failed after making a call to ntdll. There were a whole bunch of other external files it had jumps to. I was getting a little suspicious, it did not want to read the CD.

Long story short, as it turns out, the NFSC executable is infact a Safe Disc decrypter by Macrovision. Worse still, Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will not support Macrovisions DRM driver secdrv due to security issues. I personally fully support this decision, however it is clear that nfsc is not the only game that is going to be affected. After much research, I found that if you can get hold of secdrv.sys, you can get older games to run, so the question I asked myself was 'can I get NFSC to run'? It is not that straight forward as simply copying secdrv.sys into the right folder and the popular "deso" tool does not work for Windows 10.
I will explain how to get it to work.

How to get Need for Speed Carbon Working Under Windows 10 - THE INSTRUCTIONS

The trick is to sign the driver your self. See this link for signing the driver your self:
Test Signing a Driver

Step 1:
Get secdrv.sys either from an older windows version or download it from the internet. Microsoft no longer supplies this driver in Windows 10. But you must get this driver for the correct architecture. Hence you cannot load a 32 bit driver in a 64 bit system and vice versa. Place the file in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\
Step 2:
Open command console using elevated privileges (Admin command prompt: right click Windows start icon, choose "Command Prompt (Admin)")
Step 3:
You will need a tool called SignTool. If you do not have it, download it as a part of the windows 10  SDK. If your environment settings are not automatically added after installing the SDK, you can find it(assuming default install) in : C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\x64 (for 64 bits) and C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\x86  (for 32 bits). Alternatively you can temporarily add it to your path by typing  at the command prompt:

path=%PATH%;C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\x64 

(or change x64 to x86 if for 32 bits).
Step 4:
You need to create your own certificate store. For simplicity I will call my store "MyCertStore" and I will call the certificate file "MyCertStore.cer" And call the Certificate name OLDGAMESCERT
Firstly you create the certificate with the following command:

MakeCert -r -pe -ss MyCertStore -n "CN=OLDGAMESCERT" MyCertStore.cer

Step 5:
Sign the secdrv driver by issuing the following command:

SignTool sign /v /s "MyCertStore" /n OLDGAMESCERT /t http://timestamp.verisign.com/scripts/timstamp.dll C:\Windows\system32\drivers\secdrv.sys

Step 6:
You will need to install the certificate to Trusted Root Certificates with the following command:

CertMgr /add MyCertStore.cer /s /r localMachine root

After that command it should say that CertMgr completed successfully. If it does not and instead launches the certificate manager (Image below) then you need to do something different.


You may see something like the screenshot above.

In that case look for the store name you created, in this example it is "MyCertStore" and expand that branch on the left pane. You should see another branch called "Certificates". Click on that and on the right hand pane you will see the certificate with the name you called it (OLDGAMESCERT). Right click and select Copy. Then expand the branch on the left hand pane called "Trusted Root Certificate Authorities" and then then click on "Certificates" branch under that. Right click in the right hand pane and select "Paste". It will display a message asking if you want to install the certificate here --of course you do!
Step 7:
Once the certificate is installed, close certmgr (unless your certmgr did not open and yours worked fine from the command prompt -in that case continue on to step 8).
Step 8:
You should still have the admin command prompt open. If not, open it again. Issue the following command:

bcdedit -set testsigning on

WARNING: THIS IS A DANGEROUS COMMAND, READ THE FOLLOWING BEFORE DOING IT:
The above command will switch on test mode for loading unsigned drivers. This is a serious security risk and will open your system to virus and malware attacks. It should only be used for developers to test drivers they are developing by signing unverified certificates.
Why I am showing you this is for those people who want to run NFSC without using any of the options that will come at the end of this article, and also it is a proof of concept that this game CAN run under windows 10.
Step 9:
Reboot your system. Once rebooted and you have logged in, you will see a test mode watermark on the lower right corner of you screen. This should not appear in your game and there are ways to remove it, however, I recommend that you do not disable this watermark. This watermark serves as a reminder that you need to switch off the test signing after you are done playing the game.
Step 10:
Launch your game with your original CD in the drive and Need for Speed Carbon should launch.

The next step is pretty easy.... PLAY HARD!!! --But it isn't over yet, there is just one more thing to do...

Step 11:
DISABLE TEST SIGNING MODE:
Open the admin command prompt again and issue the command:

bcdedit -set testsigning off

Then reboot your computer. Confirm that the test mode water mark is gone.

Why I recommend the following options instead of the above:
As mentioned above under the RED headings', it is very dangerous as you are crippling your systems security. If you are really desperate and do not have any other older copy of Windows, then this will get you playing again.

I Recommend the following options instead:
1) Purchase a version of the game that does not use Safe disc anymore such as from Valve's Steam
2) Install an older version of windows as a multi boot and install your old games on that.
3) Revert back your Windows 10 upgrade (don't do this, Windows 10 is awesome, please keep it!)

NEVER use noCD crack (even though Microsoft appears to be advocating its use under windows 10 for old games!).
NoCD Cracks have a high chance of containing malware that is probably more dangerous than switching your system TEMPORARILY to Test signing mode.

*** UPDATE ***
You only need to perform the instructions provided ONCE. After that you just need to switch the testsigning instruction ONLY. Hence: Switch on testsigning, reboot computer, play game, switch off testsigning, reboot computer.


Happy Gaming everybody!

Moving your firefox profile after a clean install of Windows 10

After the awesome flawless upgrade to Windows 10, and knowing that I can now do a clean install and still have windows 10 activate afforded the re-install.

However an excellent question to ask is 'moving your firefox profile after a clean install of Windows 10'. You want all your extensions, bookmarks etc to come over, not just your bookmarks.

Hunting on the internet didn't yield much. Most options revolved around exporting the JSON file for your book marks. This information probably does exist somewhere but here it is anyway.

First go to the drive your windows is sitting on (Windows 7 and up). Head to <your windows system drive>:\Users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
You will see a cryptic looking folder inside looking something like z8h0c3kh.default
Make a backup of that folder. The cryptic looking name will be important later on.

Perform a clean install of Windows 10, then install Mozilla Firefox. Run Firefox at least once and exit.

Go to the same folder as above: <your windows system drive>:\Users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

Copy the backup you made earlier into that folder.

Now go back one level so you are at: <your windows system drive>:\Users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\
Edit the file "profiles.ini" in that folder.
It should look like :

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/d9jf63k8.default
Default=1

 Change the line "Path=Profiles/d9jf63k8.default" to "Path=Profiles/z8h0c3kh.default"
In the above example, replace the cryptic looking name I have here with the one on your folder from earlier.

Now if you load Firefox everything should be there. Your bookmarks AND extensions, plugins, themes.

It will be as if Firefox was never un-installed, all the while enjoying your CLEAN install of Windows 10!

Windows done right

Ahhhh, local account on Windows 10, Finally!

I didn't like windows 8 and 8.x's idea of "logging to the netz" method of logging to get full benefit. You could create a local account there though but windows 10 has a lot less restrictions, and apps downloaded will work without signing in. I now have two accounts. One local for most of my stuff, and one connected for the "rest of the stuff". I like this harmony and it works for me; I will use my local more than the connected.

I digress now, my windows digression.

Also after much study on how my windows systems behaved from windows 7 on wards and with prior experience with Windows XP and down, I found something interesting.

I am a gamer, yes I am, I love games, I love the artistic expressions in games, I love the technology and the intrigue. I LOVE DEVELOPING THEM.

So I am naturally going to look for the best gaming experience and I have done so since 1995. In the "good ol' DOS" days I created a config.sys and autoexec.bat combination with menu to select which "mode" I wanted the computer to boot in. Windows 3.1 would load in the "normal" option where as games would load in a different mode and of course would not launch windows 3.1. Wow back in those days it was inconceivable to run big games from windows 3.1.

Transporting to windows 95 and "boot into dos" was used, along with its hardware profile settings for windows based games. Come windows 2k (eew 98, eeww ME, never got those!) it was time for dual booting. So the dual boot menu selected from Linux, Windows Main and Windows Game. Windows XP pro, same thing. Windows 7 pro Same thing (eeww Vista! never got past the technical preview). However in windows 7 pro I noticed something different. Previously I had to re-install windows to get it stable after using it for some time, and to make it work quicker. Windows 7 suffered less so of this problem. Infact after a while I began installing games on Windows 7 Main and comparing it to the Game boot version. No matter how much I used windows 7 main and installed stuff, I was not getting a frame hit difference. It seemed to be much better behaved than previous versions.

Ultimately windows 7 professional became the last windows OS to have multiple copies installed on the same computer, which could be used only one at a time. With windows 10, there will be one instance, and as always, on a separate drive dedicated for OS's only. Finally I can say, going from windows 3.1 up, that you can run games in windows proper. I do not envision needing a reformat, or another boot just for games in windows 10. Too early to say "Windows done right"? Perhaps, but given my experience with OS's for over 20 years from old BBC computers, Amiga's, Linux, DOS, Windows, I am confident that this time, it is going to be how I think it is going to be...Windows done right.