By popular demand, I'm looking into options for running Battlegroup 42 maps on the TPU server. I may just pick a day or two per week to run them, or I may mix them in with the other maps. Anyone out there who plays on TPU and hasn't installed BG42, I suggest you do so, because a) it totally rocks, and b) TPU may start kicking you off the server because you don't have the next map. Part of this depends on whether the stats system will handle the BG42 maps, which I have yet to determine. Obviously we want the stats if possible. Stay tuned.

I finally noticed that the server wasn't running the Axis version every six hours the way it used to. Apparently the BFSM scheduler has a problem when the year rolls over. The result was that the most recently started version of the server just kept running all the time, never switching between Axis and Allied as intended.

I made the necessary adjustments and now the server should switch between Axis and Allies every six hours like it did before January.

Sorry about that.

Since they are getting harder to find, I've posted the excellent Battlefield 1942 Server Manager (BFSM) files here. BFSM was created by Kevin Lockitt of Black Bag Ops.

I use BFSM to manage the TPU server and would hate to have it any other way. Thanks, Kevin!

While I'm at it, I'd like to say to Kevin: these utilities are indispensable. Please please please do one of the following: continue development, including creating a version for Battlefield 2, pass the source on to another developer (pick me!) or open source it.

Download the BFSM files here.

I'll admit it: my initial reactions to Assassin's Creed 2 were negative. Faces look weird: Lucy doesn't even look like Lucy any more, and everyone appears to be slightly cross-eyed. Items seem to hover. The Italian accents of the voice actors are uniformly terrible. Gone is the cool interface of the first game, replaced by something lame. Too many in-your-face confirmation messages: do you really really really want to buy this thing? Also gone are the well-integrated tutorials with the ethereal female voice; instead, you are thrown into combat with some fleeting advice in the form of text.

Last night we experienced a series of power failures due to heavy lightning. The TPU server was down until this morning as a result.

My first XBox 360 - the one I just recently resurrected from the Red Ring of Death - died again. After several weeks of use, the graphics and sound started getting corrupted after a few minutes of play, then finally just gave me the RRoD on startup. But I brought it back to life once more!

Several people have asked how I modded my server to increase the numbers of tanks and planes, how I added extra planes to carriers, how I changed the types of units spawned and how I was able to do all that without creating new maps that need to be downloaded. Well, read on for the gory details.

Trying to join a BF1942 server and getting an "invalid CD key" error? This message pops up at the most inconvenient times, but is easily resolved in most cases. At LAN parties, it's often possible to get a game running on a PC where it was not previously installed by just copying the game folder, but there are usually one or two pieces of data from the registry that are also needed. For Battlefield games, that's the CD keys.

The TPU server IP changed in the last 24 hours or so, from 24.87.160.136 to 174.6.245.193. TPU shows up with the new IP address in the BF42 in-game server browser, but you may have to perform an UPDATE to see it. If you have marked the server as a FAVORITE in BF42, you will have to re-do that. I will re-submit TPU with the new IP to Game-Monitor today. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Now that I have two functioning XBox 360s, I was thinking that at long last I would be able to play certain games cooperatively. You know, games that have co-op modes but only when you're playing on-line or with multiple 360s on a LAN. Co-op gameplay on a single console is usually limited to games that support splitscreen, but also includes many sports games and some fantasy-type games such as Gauntlet and its ilk, where all the characters are visible at the same time on one screen.

My hope was that games with online-only co-op modes would now be mine to explore. As it turns out, this hope can be fulfilled, for a price. That's the price of a second copy of every game I want to play cooperatively. Yes indeed, for another sixty bucks I can play the game in a way that should have been included to begin with. Oh, I tried starting the game on one console, then running it on the other, but as soon as I ejected the disc from the first console, the game exited back to the dashboard. Even installing the game to the hard drive made no difference. Ah, the joys of copy protection.

So now I'm thinking that since my first 360 is already in warranty-voided-land, I might as well finish the job and hack it so I can run copies of games. There's no frigging way I'm going to buy second copies of a bunch of games.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE 2009-11-12: Apparently Microsoft just killed XBox Live network access for a huge number of modded 360s and the owners are now unloading them on Craigslist (http://gaming.icrontic.com/news/craig...-xbox-360s). Maybe I'll hold off on that modding notion.