Sonic Adventure 2 Pc Slowdown Fix

[Tabita Knezevic]

Oneof the hallmark Kirby abilities is to absorb powers that enemies have though swallowing them. This is the first adventure that gifted this power to Kirby! This was a major addition that set a precedent for all Kirby games to come! I am not entirely sure of the total number of powers, there must be at least 10 or 15 ranging from fire, ice, fireball, tornado, sword, umbrella, et cetera. My favourite is actually the flying saucer as Kirby has an excellent weapon and amazing mobility.

There are seven worlds total, with a large handful of stages in each and a boss battle at the end. These worlds range from beach areas, to forests, to later on incorporating space and even giant rotating towers! The game really feels like an adventure given all the different places Kirby travels too. The introduction of hidden areas and secret exists were another really cool addition that can actually unlock bonus levels. This addition really made the game feel larger and made each level worth fully exploring to unlock everything. The percentage complete at the title screen really motivates you to get that 100%!

In terms of controls, the game is super easy to play. One button jumps while the other sucks up enemies or uses their power (if you have already taken their power). You can also do a a cool slide move with down and jump. If you hold up on the control pad, you can fly. Select allows you to spit out your current power. The game feels really tight too with Kirby feeling quite responsive to the controls. The only issue I had was when too much was going on on the screen and slowdown was experienced.

Graphically this is one of the best looking NES games and could e mistaken for an early SNES game. Each world is very vibrant and fun to look at. Kirby looks hilariously cute and the enemies and bosses all look great (especially the last boss!). The music of the game is also super with its fun-loving and happy-go-lucky attitude. Sound effects also are also great and really complement the gameplay.

In this AV column we will have a look at the DUMAND project, a new $10 milliondetector funded by the US Department of Energy for the detection of ultra-highenergy neutrinos. DUMAND stands for Deep Underwater MuonAnd Neutrino Detector. It is now under construction inHawaii and will come into operation in 1993-94. It is to be placed almost 3miles deep on a level stretch of Pacific Ocean bottom about 18 miles west ofKeahole Point on the Island of Hawaii. Floats anchored to the ocean bottomabout 40 meters apart and arranged in an octagon around a central junctionpoint will support nine long vertical strings of sensitive light detectors.DUMAND will be connected to its land-based laboratory by bundles of fiberoptics cables. AT&T will lay the cables to shore, and the US Navy's manneddeep submersible DSV Sea Cliff will be used to connect, service, and repair theparts of the detector. But before getting into the details of construction, let's focus on the primaryquestion: "What is DUMAND for?" Briefly, it's for the creation of the newscience of high-energy neutrino astronomy, for looking where no one has lookedbefore, for finding the spots in the sky where the most energetic processes inthe universe are taking place. Our universe contain a small number of very special "objects" that deliver toour upper atmosphere a "rain" of very high energy particles: protons, heaviernuclei, electrons, photons, and neutrinos. These high energy particles fromspace are called cosmic rays. The details of the processes that produce cosmicrays are not well understood, but we are coming to realize that these very highenergies are ultimately the result of the direct conversion of mass to energynear the event horizons of black holes. We would like to map the sky for the sources of cosmic rays, to learn wherethey and what they are. Of the cosmic ray particles listed above, only theelectrically neutral photons and neutrinos are useful for "back-tracking" totheir sources. The other particles, protons, nuclei, and electrons, haveelectrical charges that cause them to be deflected in random ways as they passthrough the magnetic fields of the galaxy, the solar system and the earth.This scrambles their incoming direction so that it cannot be related to thedirection of the source. To locate the cosmic hot spots, therefore, photons orneutrinos must be used. Photons, of course, are the mainstay of conventional astronomy. Photons in themicrowave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, and x-ray regions of theelectromagnetic spectrum have been used by astronomers to map the universe.There have also been studies of the sky with gamma rays, photons with energiesof about 0.5 MeV or higher. But as the photon energy rises, detection becomesmore difficult and direction information more elusive. Gamma rays interact toomuch with Earth's atmosphere, so all studies of cosmic gamma rays must be donein space or using high altitude balloons. The sizes for gamma rays detectorsalso depend on the gamma ray energy, with very high energy gamma rays requiringextremely large detectors. These constraints have, up to now, severelylimited gamma ray astronomy. But if detecting gamma rays from space is difficult, detecting neutrinos iseven more difficult because the interaction with matter of neutrinos is about10-7 times weaker than the interactions of gamma rays. If gammarays interact too much with the atmosphere, neutrinos interact far too little.Typically neutrino detectors must be placed deep underground, where neutrinoscan easily reach the detector but other particles are blocked by the shieldingof the earth itself. Neutrinos have only been directly detected in a fewexperiments, all of which have required large quantities of matter andelaborate detection schemes. For example the underground solar neutrinodetector located deep underground in the Homestake gold mine, where 15-18 MeVneutrinos from the sun were first detected, used about 380 tons ofper-chloro-ethylene cleaning fluid as its detection medium. [See my columnsabout neutrino detection in the 05/86 and 09/92 issues of Analog]. The DUMAND detector is designed to detect cosmic ray mu-neutrinos with energiesin excess of 1 TeV (1012 electron-volts of energy) as they passthrough sea water. Although a neutrino has zero rest mass (or perhaps nearlyzero), a 1 TeV neutrino has a mass due to its energy that is greater than themass of 1000 hydrogen atoms. When such a mu-neutrino (electric charge=0) has ahard collision with a down quark (charge=-1/3) in a nucleus there is someprobability that the neutrino and quark will exchange a W boson, with theresult that the electric charge of the neutrino drops by one unit while thecharge of the quark increases by one unit. The mu-neutrino thus becomes a muon(a mu lepton with electric charge = -1) and the down quark becomes an up quark(charge=+2/3). The newly created muon keeps essentially all of the energy ofits parent neutrino, but it is now electrically charged. It will have a gammafactor (or mass-increase factor) of about 10,000 and a velocity only 6 parts in109 less than the velocity of light in vacuum. But in sea watervisible light travels only about 3/4 of its speed in vacuum. Therefore, the 1TeV muon, newly made from the cosmic ray neutrino, will be traveling about 33%faster than the speed of visible light in water. When an airplane exceeds the speed of sound in air (breaks the sound barrier),it makes a shock wave that is popularly known as a "sonic boom". Similarly,when an electrically charged particle exceeds the speed of light in atransparent medium like water, it makes an electromagnetic shock wave. Thisshock wave is called Crenkov radiation, a wave front of blue light thatspreads out in a cone from the track of the superluminal charged particle. Thecone of Crenkov light has a characteristic direction that can beanalyzed to determine the direction of the incoming muon (and hence theincoming mu-neutrino) to a directional accuracy of about 1o. In a conventional high energy physics experiment, a Crenkov detectormight be made from a slab of transparent plastic optically coupled to aphotomultiplier tube. In DUMAND the plastic slab is replaced by 2,000,000tons of sea water optically coupled to 216 hemispherical 15" diameterphotomultiplier tubes, each housed in a 16" spherical pressure vessel that cansustain the water pressure of 100 atmospheres present in the ocean depths wherethe detector is located. About half of DUMAND's funding, about $4.8 million, comes from the USDepartment of Energy. The other half, in the form of the photomultiplier tubes(PMTs) and fast electronics, key components of the detector, will be thecontributions of Japanese and European collaborators. About half of the PMTswill be made by the Hamamatsu Corporation of Japan and will be conventional"venetian blind" photomultipliers custom made for DUMAND to achieve therequired specifications of sensitivity and timing. The European half of thePMTs will be made by the Phillips Corporation. The Phillips PMT uses aninnovative 2 component design, a large image intensifier coupled to a small 2"photomultiplier. Each of the PMT types has some advantages, and a mix of thetwo types in the detector brings additional benefits. A light sensitive detector like DUMAND must be placed in a dark environment,because ambient light is a source of background. Fortunately, essentially nodaylight can penetrate the ocean to a depth of 3 miles, where the DUMAND arrayis located, and the principal light sources will be from bioluminescence andfrom Crenkov light from 40K radioactive decays in the seawater. Neither of these is a problem, as demonstrated in November, 1987, whena small DUMAND prototype string of PMTs and associated hardware was tested inthe ocean near Hawaii at depths down to 4 km. One significant problem of DUMAND is the position calibration of the detectorstrings, which hang above the ocean bottom on float-supported cables. Currentsin the ocean depths can cause significant movement of the cables that could, ifnot taken into account, lead to significant errors in interpreting theCrenkov light from energetic muons. The DUMAND experimenters solve thisproblem by surrounding the detector with sonar broadcasters producing chirpingpulses of sound that are picked up by microphones placed along the detectorstrings. This locates each microphone on each string to an accuracy of a fewcentimeters and eliminates potential errors from the motion of the strings. Another source of background in DUMAND comes from muons produced in the upperatmosphere by cosmic ray protons, nuclei, electrons, and gamma rays. Some ofthese muons have enormous energies and can, with some probability, penetratethe ocean even to a depth of 3 miles. These high energy particles may beinteresting in their own right, but they are not predominately produced byneutrinos, the particles of primary interest. Fortunately, there is anexcellent way of distinguishing neutrino-generated muons from other cosmic-raygenerated muons. If the muons are observed to pass upwards or sideways throughthe detector, they can only come from neutrinos that have passed through thebulk of the earth as neutral particles before being converted to a muon in acollision with a quark. A muon traveling on the same path would have beenabsorbed by the earth. The muons from the upper atmosphere, on the other hand,must travel downward through the detector. All upward going muons must be theproduct of neutrino events. What cosmic cataclysms can produce neutrinos with such enormous energies? Thisis a subject of some speculation in the astrophysics community. Recentcalculations have predicted that active galactic nuclei, the power source forquasars and other high energy phenomena, can produce enough primary neutrinosto make thousands of ultra-high energy neutrino events per year in the DUMANDdetector. Even using more conservative estimates of the cosmic neutrino flux,the DUMAND collaboration expects about 80 neutrino events per year at energiesabove 10 TeV and 300 events per year at energies above 100 GeV, which is aboutthe threshold of sensitivity for the detector. DUMAND is a delightful scientific adventure, an initiative that will show us anew aspect of nature, a technological foray that combines the forefronttechniques of electro- optics, microelectronics, communications, high energyphysics, and oceanography. And, from the point of view of the experimenters,the shores of Hawaii will be a wonderful spot from which to explore themysteries of the universe.

John G. Cramer's 2016 nonfiction book (Amazon gives it 5 stars) describing his transactionalinterpretation of quantum mechanics, The Quantum Handshake -Entanglement, Nonlocality, and Transactions, (Springer, January-2016) isavailable online as a hardcover or eBook at:

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