Bill’s Mind

March 29th, 2008

For those just tuning in, Creative Inc, the company that sells the Sound Blaster brand of sound cards, has been giving a driver hacker a very hard time. The issue involves Vista driver support. I don’t know the full details, as I don’t own a Sound Blaster anymore, but the gist of it is that many features do not work in Vista, that used to work in XP due to architectural differences in the OS.

In other words, all those neat features they listed on the box, which people foolishly paid for, well those features do not work under Vista, Microsoft’s latest mainstream operating system.

Let’s think about that for a moment: it’s a sound card. It takes digital sound, converts it to analog and shoves it down a pair of wires to the speaker. Actually it doesn’t even drive the speakers, you still need amplifiers (which are built into most computer speakers). As far as add-on devices go, this is about as simple as it gets. Here’s an example of a basic home-made sound circuit that hooks up via USB.

Anyway, Daniel K is a smart fella who hacked the drivers in order to bring those missing features back in Vista, and he has shared his work online for others to enjoy. He’s basically giving away for free what should have been Creative’s responsibility from the beginning, giving Sound Blaster owners what they want and paid for, and he’s being punished and threatened by the company as a direct result of these actions.

If you want to find out more about this despicable company, hit up Google and read all about how they once tried to charge money for Audigy device drivers, or how they drop support for their products after 2-3 years only to re-release near-identical hardware for more money (see “X-Fi Xtreme Audio”).

I invite everyone to boycott these bastards. Today’s Sound Blasters have nothing in common with the products we all fell in love with 20 years ago.

Here’s the forum thread concerning Daniel K. Many people have signed up to the forum purely to leave angry comments, I invite you to take a few minutes to do the same. Tell this company exactly how much they suck. They will never change, but the more people post, the more attention this story will get and hopefully others will stop buying this overpriced garbage so we can all watch the company die!

Message to Daniel_K - Sound Blaster - Creative Labs

August 27th, 2007

Bioshock.

It’s supposed to be gaming bliss. It’s from the same guys who brought us System Shock 1 and 2. It’s going to give Halo 3 a run for the money. I haven’t even played it yet and I’m already convinced it’s a fantastic game.

I haven’t played it, because the developers, like many others, made the foolish decision to use SecuROM copy protection, from the friendly sacks of shit at Sony. SecuROM is really good at copy protection, so good in fact, that it makes it rather difficult for legitimate owners to play the games… Read the rest of this entry »

June 11th, 2007

Church of England upset over cathedral’s depiction in Sony game

Ah yes, the Church of England, brainchild of King Henry VIII, one of history’s most outrageously shameful crackheads, right up there with Rasputin and Jerry Falwell.

I’ll keep it quick, so someone please explain to me what the difference is between a gunfight in a church, and a gunfight in any other building ? The way I see it, a cathedral is a place considered holy by only those people who either adhere to the faith or acknowledge its existence. To everyone else, it’s a… Read the rest of this entry »

May 20th, 2007

Hey it’s Sunday. Sundays suck! Anyone who knows me, knows at least three things about me:

1. I’m a big geek
2. I bash everyone and everything
3. My PC is big and fast, and I use every last bit of its power

Well the geek in me decided to kill time on this boring Sunday by putting together a retro PC, just for fun, so I could relive the great games of the DOS era…. Read the rest of this entry »

May 19th, 2007

For those of you who are too young to remember Starcraft, GET OFF MY INTERTUBES! Er, actually you can read up about the bestselling 1998 game, maybe google it real quick. Starcraft is huge, even 9 years after its release it is still played by millions of people worldwide… Read the rest of this entry »