Jared0×90

Holy crap this car is a hoss. It hops in third and fourth gear during spray with supersofts to an 8.9 quarter mile. The TS020 is the only car I have that runs a faster pass with an 8.8.

When I first heard about the B Spec mode in Gran Turismo 4 I thought it was going to be a horrible addition that the game didnt need. Who wants to sit there and manage a race team right? Actually it is pretty cool. I thought originally it was a whole seperate mini game you would play or series of races. Nope a lot of the races in the game can be won both ways. A spec (driving) or B spec (managing your AI driver during the race). B spec is actually very useful. For example I won a 700+ hp RWD car early in the game. So when I go to do the beginner RWD cup I can set it on B spec, fast forward the race 3x tell my driver to go at a steady pace but attempt to over take and go make myself a sandwhich. Start the next race in the same method and start eating my sandwhich. The next race, eat some more, etc etc etc. Talk about a relief. Instead of wasting 20-25 minutes doing races that would have been no challenge for little reward I got myself a bit of pocket change, a prize car and sat down to eat all while the game played itself under my direction. Bad ass.

This game is still consuming most of my free time and is only getting better. My 770hp turbo 350z race car, 790hp cuda and 730hp R34 sure are fun to drive. The first rally stage is pretty cool, reminds me of a car chase in a foreign country. Very tight streets and alleyways, not many places to pass and oh yeah penalties.

After purchasing what I expected to be the best driving simulator of all time and playing it for several hours my conclusion thus far is it is just that. This is the best driving simulator of all time. It was amazing from the time I turned it on until I had to shut it off as reality that I do have a job and that job requires me there at a decent time set in. To start off with you can import winnings and licenses from GT3 if you had a save file on the same memory card… BAD ASS! First thing I did was import 100,000 credits and my A and B license exams. So.. I have all this cash and 2 licenses and I have not even touched pavement yet. I think it is time to buy a car. If you cant call this a HUGE dealer selection I dont know what is. I finally decided to purchase one of my favorites. The Nissan Skyline GT-R R34. I immediately took it to the 1/4 to see what kind of time it would pull. 13.3xx not bad. A quick race on a beginner track led me to the realization that the driving aids and realism has been upgraded. So as in GT3 I turned the aids off and tried again. Pretty interesting but I will get into that more in a bit. So I have all this extra cash left over what to do next. How about stage 3 turbo, racing IC, race intake, computer, 3 plate clutch, race flywheel…..hmm oh yeah and a bottle of that there nitrous .. So I get in back in my skyline turn the nitrous spray to full blast (it is adjustable) and have at it again. With just 557HP (not counting the power from the nitrous) she managed a 10.7 while spraying and 11.5 off the bottle. So I wonder if this thing can turn since it has stock suspension, tires, and brakes. So I go to a half way difficult course and realize - my lord they have completely redone the handling physics. Driving seems to be more realistic and there is more danger in some of the more exotic stunts and recoveries you may have thought were easy to attempt in the previous game. I eventually decided to put TCS back up to the 2 setting while I got used to the new controls. So Ive got a somewhat monster engine in an AWD king time to try e-brake, power over, Scandinavian flicks, etc. Well one thing is for sure if you intend to get really crossed up dont expect to just counter steer your way out of it by holding the joystick in another direction - at least not with all of your stability management systems off. More than one time I found myself flung around the other direction in an uncontrollable spin when attempting to recover using that method. A more fine touch is definitely required. Another thing I noticed is I will absolutely have to buy suspension next. For example - At one of the later races in the night I was pulling about 210MPH down a straight and had to get down to 2nd for a turn. I think that used to mean full brakes and wait for the turn to come to you. Not anymore. I laid into the brakes and the car nose dived as I lost control of the vehicle momentarily. Most of the time I was able to keep it straight but there is definitely a lot more depth to handling characteristics in this game. In cornering you can see and sense the car rolling. Even when you are just sitting at the starting line at the drag strip you can see the car and screen vibrate as you bounce off rev limiter waiting for the lights to go green. There is just so much detail in this game it cannot be described here. The sound is amazing. While you are sitting at the drag strip revving your R34 you can really get a sense of how much the engine sounds have improved. The 34 sounds angry - the kind of angry where it wants to pin you to your seat and toss you around like a rag doll until you beg for mercy. As you take off the tires bark at you from the bottom of the 34 pleading with you to stop your unrelenting massacre of there contact patch. You finally get through first tires howling shift into second. Queue blow off valve. Begin nitrous feed. Second chirps after being shifted into and squeals as you over spin your tires to 75mph of rotation while your car is still sitting at 50 leaning backwards trying to catch up. Third comes and goes nearly as quick as any gear prior. Fourth is a good quick pull and as you start getting into fifth nearly 10 seconds have gone by and you have to slow. What a disappointment. I will have to take the car to the 10km oval tonight and see what it will max out at. This game is definitely a step above anything I have ever seen. I can only hope that reaching 100% in this game and playing with all the cars I so desire will take me til Gran Turismo 5 hits store shelves. At the rate I am going I dont doubt it. This will be the game I play most out of any game in my collection for years to come just as the previous version was. May the driving gods have mercy on our souls.

Well I started writing some of the routines to dump SCI data out of the serial port on the GG Meter. It was a pretty easy task. I through together a little log file to test out its speed. At 19,200bps I was acheiving about 142 samples per second almost as fast as my Analog to Digital converter was running. After bumping the speed up to 115,200 I can see litteraly every sample my Analog converter is running at as the data can be transmissited out of SCI before the next sample is ready roughly 188 samples per second. Granted this was with a single channel only but there was an extrodinary amount of fluff. I was using 4 bytes to transmit one 12 bit number out in hexidecimal text format. I could easily fit 2 12 bit numbers in 4 bytes (actually in 3 if I was really cool).

I made the JX90 XML feed RFC822 compliant today. The publish dates on yahoo syndication and in any news browser you use should now show up properly. You may need to empty your messages and download them again.

Got myself a new monitor. Staples is having like an unadvertised sale on 19 inch lcds. Do a google seach for proview 19 inch staples. Should take you right to the page. It lasts til the 26th I believe. Anyhow the monitor looked good other than text on the factory settings but a little bit of tweaks and it looked a lot better.

SWEET! -6.34 and 6.63. If only my car could pull those kinds of Gs! (I was shaking it pretty hard you should have seen the electrical cord from my phone flying everywhere.. )

Unfortunately there is no outkast here. I did happen to shake it rather vigorously to see what kind of G readings I could pick up though!

The GMeter picked up the vibration of the cutting board as noted in its maximum positve and negative Gs at the bottoms. yL is the lowest value that it sampled (-0.45). yH is the highest value that it sampled (0.31).