Installing games to the Xbox360 hard drive

Matthew Oakley — Sat, 22 May 2010 12:06:15 +0000

There’s a lot of excitement at present surrounding the new Rockstar Games release, Read Dead Redemption, not least amongst my friends at V4 Technical! Having received my copy through from Amazon yesterday, I learned an interesting little tid-bit from Alex Gisby that I cannot quite believe I did not know already.

Apparently, you can install a game to the Xbox360 hard drive, thus speeding up gameplay and most interestingly, the noisy fans and optical disc drives don’t spin constantly so the machine runs almost silently!

How do I install my games?

Well, assuming that you have a fairly decent sized hard drive (i.e. not the original 8GB or the Arcade Edition) then it’s simple and I’d strongly recommend it. All you need to do is insert the game disc into the console and boot up to the Xbox dashboard. Navigate to the game and instead of pressing ‘A’ to load the game, press ‘Y’ instead, this opens the game info screen. Inside of this menu you will see an option to install the game. Obviously, the installation takes a few minutes (Red Dead Redemption probably took around 4 minutes to install) but afterwards you’ll be able to play the game with much quicker loading and without the console fans drowning out the audio entertainment!

P.S. You’ll still need the disc in order to play the game, so this won’t help you to pirate copies of games!

Truncated files using MacFuse

Matthew Oakley — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:37:16 +0000

I use TextMate do write code on my iMac at work and I’ve noticed an intermittent issue whereby some files appear to be truncated when opening code from a remote source that I’ve mounted as a local volume. I first noticed the issue a while ago whilst using MacFusion to mount external disks as a local volume so that I can open projects and work on them as if they existed locally in TextMate. At first, I couldn’t quite understand why the files had been truncated, only ever seeming to chop off the last 2.5 lines or so, and only on certain files. Further investigation showed that the actual files had not been truncated, it was just appearing that way when opening them across the MacFusion connection (be it in any text editor).

I stopped using MacFusion for a while and have recently started using Transmit 4 by Panic as this also allows me to mount external disks as local volumes, thus cutting out the need to FTP files back and forth! However, I have found that the truncating problem also seems to crop up using the new software!

A fix?

It became apparent that both MacFusion and Transmit 4 utilise another piece of software in order to mount external volumes, MacFuse. So, I downloaded installed the latest version of the MacFuse software and (fingers crossed) this does seem to have resolved the issue with truncated files!

I hope that this helps others that are experiencing the issue, please feel free to drop me a comment.