Tag Archives: Playstation 3

Who is Stephanie Raven?

If you’ve played Little Big Planet recently you’ll have come across the name “Stephanie Raven” numerous times. Somehow she gets her levels on the first of the “Cool Levels” planet all the time.

I first figured out that something was wrong when I played a level that looked eerily familiar but didn’t have the familiar face on it to denote I finished it. She’s not the only one. This thread was near the top of a search for her name and pointed at this one about Clay_20_November, another LBP spammer.

It’s a pretty sad way to spend your time if you have to copy LBP levels and post them as your own for validation in this life.

These days I skip forward a few pages to find newer levels and that helps. There are some stunning levels hidden in there!

Good news on the cable front! The Xbox 3…

Good news on the cable front! The Xbox 360 HDMI cable and Playstation 3 component cable arrived today!

Despite my misgivings after earlier testing I plugged the Xbox cable in first. The cable comes in two parts. A bog standard HDMI cable and a short “audio” cable with digital and phono connections.
Microsoft made it impossible to use the standard component cable with a HDMI cable because the connector on the Xbox side is so huge. This connector is thinner though. Profiteering?

Anyway, I plugged everything in, HDMI cable into the DVI-D converter and switched on. The screen looked dull like last time so I went fiddling with the colour controls. Instead of “Normal Preset sRGB” I jumped down to “user preset” and bumped up each of the green, blue and red channels and everything looked much better! A little more fiddling with the game brightness in Bad Company 2 and it looked perfect!
I even played a short game of Rush on Arica Harbour and kicked ass as an attacker. We lost eventually on the third base but I took Bravo on the second, and Alpha on the third! I think I was the highest scoring player on my team too! 🙂

The Playstation 3 component cables worked as advertised. I booted it up but didn’t play anything and all that distracting interference is gone! Woohoo!

Looks like the colour settings are saved per monitor input. When I switched to component or back to VGA it had bounced back to sRGB. Nice.

The only downside now is that the Xbox plays in 1920×1080 while the PS3 plays in 720p.

Xbox 360 through HDMI to DVI

My female HDMI to male DVI-D connector arrived this morning. I’m still waiting on the Xbox HDMI cable and the PS3 component cables. The seller must have felt guilty about charging me so much for shipping that he gave me 3 plugs!

I grabbed a HDMI cable from downstairs and plugged the Xbox 360 into it, and the other end into the DVI-D port on my Dell 2405 LCD monitor. It reset to 640×480 resolution first, but I quickly bumped that up to 1920×1080. Picture quality is ok but nothing to write home about. The screen is a little dark which I had read about on forums. Brightening the screen helped as did setting the brightness in Battlefield Bad Company 2 but it still looked rather dull. It’s impossible to change the contrast which would certainly have helped.

I fired up BC2, and lo and behold, the screen stayed in 1920×1080! I’ve attached a gallery of shots from the game below. Unfortunately the camera lies and brightened up the screen. The dashboard shot is more representative of what it looks like and that was darkened by 2 stops!

I tried the PS3 through the HDMI to DVI-D connector too, but all I got was a black screen with a slightly less black square in the middle. Thanks HDCP in action there. The PS3 won’t even show the desktop or games without it and of course my monitor doesn’t have it. I really need to just get a new one with a HDMI port don’t I? Any recommendations? It has to be used as a PC monitor too.

As a bonus, do you know who this character is? You’ll really be showing your retro credentials if you recognise him!
Who is this fire breathing creature?

I added this 24 inch monitor to my Amazon wishlist. You never know, some kindly soul who uses my plugins may decide to treat me! 🙂

Watch out for Amazon reseller shipping charges

When you see a nice cheap product on Amazon or any other online retailer beware of the shipping and handling charges. This HDMI to DVI-D converter goes for a paltry £2.59 but then attracts a hefty £11.08 from the reseller. I can’t pretend that I didn’t notice it on the order page but at the time I wanted to get the order done and dusted so I didn’t quibble. The box it comes in better be lined with velvet and the address better be hand written and signed with the artist’s name…

I had enough trouble with console AV cables and certain retailers in the last few weeks I wanted the whole sorry episode over and done with.

iMP 4 in 1 Multi Component AV Cable Xbox360/Wii/PS2/PS3 Review

The postman called this morning with a very welcome package. The iMP 4 in 1 Multi Component AV Cable Xbox360/Wii/PS2/PS3 I ordered last week finally arrived. After spending weeks trying to get a similar cable from Play Asia and Devineo I hurriedly plugged everything in.

This cable allows you to hook up 3 consoles to one set of component connections on a tv or monitor. I’m using it with my Xbox 360 and PS3.

The first thing I noticed about this is that there’s no switch to select which console to display. I didn’t try turning on both machines at the same time. Maybe later.

When I had everything hooked up I fired up the PS3 and changed the display settings to component cable, upped the resolution to 720p and confirmed the change. The Playstation 3 home screen displayed perfectly. All the text looked fine, the background swishing thing was ok. I fired up Bad Company 2 and in-game graphics were crisp and looked great!

I tried the Xbox 360 next and Bad Company 2 again. In game graphics were good, not quite as good as with the dedicated component cable from Microsoft but close.

Now for the downsides:

  1. On the PS3 there’s no such thing as a black screen. I noticed thick horizontal flickring lines. They were barely visible but they were there. Text in-game was oddly sharpened too much, but not enough to be annoying.
  2. The Xbox 360 dashboard displays an odd shadow behind all text. It makes it hard to read stuff but I’ll get over it as the game graphics looked perfectly fine.

Xbox 360 through iMP cable

Would I recommend the iMP 4 in 1 component cable? It’s cheap and cheerful and as long as you understand that it won’t be quite anywhere near as good as dedicated cables you’ll be happy with it. I would say the PS3 display was slightly better overall than the Xbox 360.

Final score: 3/5 1/5

Update! After playing for a few hours tonight on the PS3, I’m really not happy with it. The picture quality is too bad, that horizontal interference is too annoying. The monitor I have is a Dell 2405, an old 24″ monitor. It doesn’t support HDCP apparently so I won’t be able to play Bluray movies on it but thankfully games don’t enforce that, I think.

So, I need to spend more money and go searching again. I’m going to buy a DVI-D to HDMI connector and a HDMI cable to go along with it. Maplins have such a beast so I’m going to ring up my local store in the morning to check availability. I could probably get one cheaper elsewhere online but at this stage I’m sick of dealing with online retailers. Fingers crossed they have it.

Update 2! So, it’s interference from my surround sound headphones that’s causing most of the problem. I can either have great sound and crap picture or good picture and ordinary sound. Here’s what the interference looks like on the Playstation 3. Something similar happens on the Xbox 360:

iMP interference on the Playstation 3

iMP 4 in 1 Multi Component AV Cable Xbox360/Wii/PS2/PS3

My quest for a component switcher cable continues. Play-asia were totally unresponsive and then so were Divineo.co.uk so I’ve ordered the iMP 4 in 1 Multi Component AV Cable Xbox360/Wii/PS2/PS3 from an Amazon.co.uk reseller. It’s almost half the price again of the XCM cable I had ordered from Divineo.

Needless to say I have cancelled my Divineo order.

All I want to do is play my PS3 in HD, is that so bad? *sob* (sound of violins, fade to black, roll credits)

OK, it’s after midnight, I’ll be up ea…

OK, it’s after midnight, I’ll be up early, this is a quick post about the great couple of Bad Company 2 rounds I played with David tonight. Some of the rounds were evenly matched but others were totally lopsided. Both for us and against us. We both got lots of practice in various tanks and helicopters and played really well as a team.

I also played a few rounds with Dutch452 on Xbox earlier, and we did rather well. I leveled up to 10, and improved my win/loss ratio.

On the PS3 it was rough going for quite a while as I decided to level up the assault class. I eventually unlocked the ammo box, but I’m still stuck with the AEK-971. My KDR went up by 0.02. Woo.

More tomorrow (err, tonight) when I’ll hook the PS3 up to the TV and get HD again. Standard resolution is really doing my head in and no sign of the switcher cable from Devineo yet.

PS3 text chat to communicate with your team in Bad Company2

OK, so the Xbox has a handy private voice chat feature. You can use that feature to communicate with your entire team in Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the Xbox.

The PS3 has a voice/video chat feature but it doesn’t work when you’re in a game. It does have a private text chat feature however. If you’re playing with friends on your team, and they’re not on the same squad, invite them all to a private text chat session. If you have something to say hit the Playstation button on your controller and type. When someone writes something that text will appear as a notification in the corner of your screen. This will also work if your friends are on the opposite team and might make getting them all on your team that little bit easier.

Needless to say, you need a keyboard to do this effectively.

Thank you Geoff for the inspiration for this post.

Update! Geoff pointed out Ventrilo Server. It’s surround sound VOIP software. You could use it on a dedicated server (I have two) and have all your team connect their clients to it but they’d need to have PCs running Windows or Linux or a Mac next to their gaming rig.

Come to think of it, you could use Skype and set up a conference call. Might be problematic hearing other voices if you’ve got gaming headphones on though.

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