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MAY 26, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 20 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK
Flash From Macau With Love You may know Stanley Ho as a balding, 79-year-old businessman who has made himself a tidy few billion runningMacau's gambling industry. But Web surfers from here to Las Vegas are about to discover him as Dr. Ho, Casino Tycoon. Fulfiller of wishes, battler of pirates and, er, highly skilled ballroom dancer, Dr. Ho is a larger-than-life high roller straight out of a James Bond movie. Starting this summer, you'll be able to join him in his exciting world of luxurious excess (scantily-clad dancing girls apparently included) at DrHo.com, a virtual casino where you can gamble in real time and with real money - local laws permitting. A flesh-and-blood croupier, constantly monitored by a video camera, appears in a corner of your PC screen, spinning the roulette wheel or passing cards through a scanner as she deals them. The results are then played out by the croupier's 3-D animated avatar, who will accept your bets and (hopefully) hand over your winnings. It's just like the real Macau, though thankfully without the triad violence. Games Building a Better PlayStation On show at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week, a machine that plays Sony PlayStation games, only better. No, not the PlayStation 2 (although that was also there). The console in question was Sega's Dreamcast machine running bleem!, a software "emulator" that enables it to run PlayStation games. A Dreamcast equipped with the $20 program renders graphics at twice the resolution of the PlayStation or PS2 (which plays old games but doesn't improve their animation). The doctored Dreamcast could be a legal nightmare for Sony, which is already trying to kick bleem! off the PC. From The Web Get Behind the Camera Cinephiles at the Cannes film festival are used to auteurs, movie directors who control every last detail of their production. But at this year's festival they're being treated to a four-minute film where the director doesn't even get to decide which way the camera is pointing. Amy Talkington's The New Arrival is a made-for-Net short that got its real-world premiere at Cannes and is now showing at AtomFilms.com. The story, about a new admission at a retirement home with a difference, was shot using a special 360° camera that lets you play cinematographer. With the aid of mouse and keyboard, viewers can direct the camera up, down, all around - and even operate the zoom. Ready for your close up? Gadgets Music and Movement Getting digital music off your PC and onto a Walkman-like portable player is pretty groovy. But what if you want to take your MP3s on the road? You could join the ranks of the home electronics hobbyists, who have taken to welding hard drives onto their car stereos. Or you could try Aiwa's CDC-MP3. The player, the first of its kind from a major manufacturer, looks and works just like a regular car stereo, except it can read recordable CD-R and CD-RW discs as well as regular CDs. Just one of the discs can hold around 10 hours of tunes copied from your PC. The player is due out this summer, priced around $350. e-mail: stuart_whitmore@asiaweek.com Write to Asiaweek at mail@web.asiaweek.com
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