I Can Has Typewriter!?
Mal and Weasel’s Tech Crap

(Or, the continuing adventures of Zoey the Laptop.)

I’ve mentioned my HP laptop in the past – a Pavilion N5170 that was phased out of production ten years ago. Its age shows, pretty plainly, but a few extra attachments later and somehow I’ve got it playing more games than it has before. It’s becoming my old-games machine more than anything else.

I was at first disheartened that Half-Life somehow dropped to 2 seconds per frame when running in hardware-accelerated mode. But I wasn’t upset. After all, Zoey’s performance in software rendering was quite good, given its Pentium 3 processor clocked at 600 MHz.

Lately, though, I’ve been experimenting with games that can actually put the onboard S3 Savage/IX graphics chip to use, all the while discovering new limitations on what the laptop can do. I’m amazed at how relatively locked-down the hardware is; there are some things that the drivers refuse to let it do, and I know of no way to allocate additional memory to the graphics chipset. (Though that’s only become a problem in one large instance.)

The first game I tested recently was Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, the game that turned me into a gun nut. I wasn’t impressed with how it completely failed to display the in-game graphics, but then, I had assumed that it needed to run in Software mode. Upon (begrudgingly) setting the renderer to the S3 chip, though, not only did the game display graphics, but it actually looked just like the game used to on the Pentium 2 that I first played it on – right down to the texture filtering!

Then I remembered, I had some old discs for games that didn’t work on Francis (the Dell XPS gaming rig), among them being Star Wars: Jedi Knight. I remembered this game coming out at the precise moment that 3D accelerator cards were coming into fashion, and figured that if my S3 didn’t run it, then I wouldn’t bother with the thing again. To my amazement, it worked at a perfect 60 frames per second – even despite the game running from an ISO (which tends to negatively affect poor Zoey’s hard drive performance).

Here, though, is where I discovered the major limitation. The S3 Savage/IX does not have enough onboard memory to run at any higher than 800×600 with 16-bit color. Any higher, and the game will usually complain about it and revert to a “safe” video mode.

Zoey’s also played host to games that Francis suddenly decided to dislike, such as Links Extreme (with its Demolition Driving Range), Balls of Steel (with its Duke Nukem table), and a couple others that escape me at the moment. Ah, backward compatibility…even though I dislike it sometimes, I enjoy the fact that I don’t need to rely on it!

About this time last month, we had our Verizon-provided router die on us. Well, maybe the router itself didn’t die, but I had noticed that the power cable (a standard “wall wart” type) appeared to have warped a bit. Lacking money, I called Verizon to get them to ship me a new router.

That router showed up after a week. Took ‘em long enough, I thought, hooking up the replacement router (while first checking to see if the power cable would fit in the old one…it didn’t). This router somehow completely failed to connect to the internet, after three hours of it attempting to ping the ISP. So another router showed up in two days. This third router succeeded in getting the family back online, at least enough to browse websites and play World of Warcraft (which is really all my parents seem to care about, ‘Net-wise).

Unfortunately, this router being a slightly different model from the previous one, has quite a different web interface than before. It looks similar, and in fact the instruction guides are almost identical, but there are little things that prevent it from being as friendly as the old one.

Little things like, well, port forwarding. This router has absolutely failed to allow me to forward ports for things like serving files outside the LAN, hosting games on Skulltag or Half-Life, and seeding for BitTorrents. In some cases I can’t even join other peoples’ game servers. Even wireless support seems to be dropping the ball, with my XBox 360 being, at times, unable to connect to the Internet at all. This was not the case with the other router. Setting up port forwarding through the front-end proved to be a frustrating experience, even for Malachai, who does this sort of thing for a living. After three hours of fiddling about with it, neither of us were capable of getting my Linux server (Ferretcage) to have any presence outside of the LAN. There goes one of the main reasons why I set the thing up.

I am most displeased with this router, and I am not sure I trust Verizon to provide more. I might as well quit while I’m ahead, though, considering that if I were to get another router, there might be a chance that it’ll have an even more frustrating front-end than this one. Malachai continues to recommend that I buy the same model of router that he uses; that might actually be an option, but I’d need to keep this router around, assuming his model doesn’t have an Ethernet Coax port with which to serve Verizon’s FiOS TV channel guide and on-demand programming. (No idea why the cable boxes aren’t hooked up with Cat5 ethernet or similar.)

Those of us that run our computers with multiple displays have long known that Windows’ multiple display support is…well, somewhat lackluster. To run a game in fullscreen mode is to dedicate your “primary” display to the game, and nothing but the game, usually with no choice as to which screen is considered primary (except through some video card driver settings, which are not the easiest things to get to sometimes). Running a fullscreen game at anything less than your desktop resolution makes the other monitor scale and malform itself, moving any windows you might have had open. And if a game isn’t smart about not letting your mouse cursor “escape” from the game screen, a mis-aimed click could accidentally minimize your game, potentially killing you.

All this time, I thought that was the worst it could get. Then I played SWAT 4.

SWAT 4 is, presently, the last game in Sierra’s heralded police action game. It was released in 2003 by Irrational Games, better known for System Shock 2, and runs on the Unreal 2 engine. Unreal 2’s engine was pretty far ahead of its time, but there’s the problem – the developers assumed that, even though it performed slowly on the hardware of the day, that the load times and such would just speed up as time went on. Problem is, it doesn’t. Having a faster computer with a speedier hard drive and four times the RAM doesn’t affect load times one bit; the game still requires upwards of two minutes to load each level, and should you fail a mission, it has to reload the entire level.

I’m getting a bit off the point though…

SWAT 4, running on the Unreal engine, ought to be friendly towards the people that want to run their games in a window – that is, the people that run dual-monitor setups. Unfortunately, the game has a complete fit if you attempt to run it while a second monitor is active. When attempting to play the corporate logos, the game begins changing screen resolutions repeatedly, assumedly fighting with my NVIDIA drivers over whether or not there is a second monitor active. The game changes screen resolutions ad infinitum, while I can almost hear the music of Sierra’s logo video. This only stops when I press Control-Alt-Delete to open Windows 7’s “panic” menu. From there, I either have to terminate the Swat4.exe process, or wait for it to crash, with a claim that it cannot set its screen resolution.

After three such attempts to run the game, I finally checked to see if my multi-monitor setup was the cause of such issues. After waiting about three minutes for the game to start again (unsure of what it’s doing outside of showing a splash screen and wasting my CPU cycles), the intro videos play perfectly and I’m in the menus. Hmph.

The game seems to run just about perfectly outside of that; well, insane load times notwithstanding…I have no idea why the game is so hateful of extra displays, but I’m pretty sure this is the only Unreal 2 engine game that does this. (Feel free to correct me, though.)

What really sucks, though, is that since this game is over five years old and Activision has already bought out Vivendi Universal (the owners of the Sierra label that published SWAT 4), it is extremely unlikely that an official patch will be made that corrects this. Let it be known, though, in case someone in the future has issues with it: SWAT 4 doesn’t like multiple monitors!

Well, fellow geeks, I have discovered my new favorite thing. Google Wave. I just received an Invite from a friend of mine (House, as he is known on the Blaugh.) It’s like a combination of Google Mail, Google Talk, Twitter, and Facebook. So far rather amazing.

As Wave moves from preview to beta to release, I’ll be following it’s progress here, so be sure to check back here for updates on it’s evolution.

Malachai informed me tonight that he finally fixed the weird-ass Dashboard styling glitches that made the Wordpress interface so difficult to use for several months, which makes it much less painful for me to post random (tangentially tech-related) crap once again. Yes, we can has more typewriter. =P

I’m finally attempting to put this old Macintosh to use, kind of…well, there’s really nothing that the poor thing can do that my laptop can’t do better. The Mac, referred to as “WeasyMac”, is a 350 MHz G3 (the Blue and White tower), with 512 MB of RAM, what I assume is an ATI graphics card (not a 3D card though, I think it’s a Rage Pro or something), and a couple of undersized hard drives.

As inspired by this XKCD comic, I figured out how to use the Say command through a terminal to make the built-in speech synthesizer say rude things. Then I went and figured out how to set up SSH, which apparently is as easy as running Apple Software Update and enabling Remote Login from the Sharing control panel.

Now, I have no idea if this thing will be accessible from outside the network, but if I ever need to severely creep out my parents, I can just crank the thing up to max volume (manually, as I don’t know the terminal command to change the volume), and commence rambling through an SSH terminal from the living room, via my laptop or something.

This is almost as funny as when Malachai figured out I had my laptop’s Windows Messenger service still enabled, logged into my desktop via SSH, connected to the laptop via Samba, and NET SENDed silly things to the laptop through administrative notices. Heh. Hell, even if I can’t access the Mac directly from an outside network, I could always bounce the connection inside – SSH into the desktop, then SSH from there to the Mac.

The poor old Mac doesn’t get much use outside of that…well, I was thinking of redesignating my computers to match those of the cast of Left 4 Dead. The ordering of them would be as follows:

Francis (my gaming rig)
Francis is easily the biggest, most intimidating of L4D’s survivors, so it’d make sense that he be the most powerful machine in my possession.

Bill (my old DOS machine)
Bill is a Vietnam vet, a relic of his time. Much like MS-DOS.

Zoey (the laptop)
I would rather name the Mac after Zoey (since the Mac is the girliest machine I own, no offense to you Mac users), but Mal insists that the laptop be Zoey, as it is the smallest.

Louis (the Mac)
While I’d rather assign Louis as the laptop (as the laptop is more “business” oriented and Louis is a businessman himself), Mal prefers that Louis be the Mac, after the inside joke we have of Louis being the resident druggie (as our L4D group consists of Mal, my brother, and myself, with my brother playing Louis exclusively and hogging all the pills – again, no offense to you Mac users).

I probably won’t bother putting this into action until I get really bored.

I’ve just had my first experience programming in PHP. What was it, you ask? Well, about six months or so ago, I created a World of Warcraft Private Server on my computer, using a piece of software called MaNGOS. The “Massive Network Game Object Server.” MaNGOS uses MySQL to store all of it’s data.

One problem. The only way to create/delete accounts, or to change the passwords, is to either directly manipulate the SQL using something like SQLYog, or to use the server window to issue Admin-level commands to the server. That was unacceptable. There are also no good PHP frontends for MaNGOS, to do this for you. So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided that I would create my own. I created a HTML/PHP/MySQL script that, when used correctly, is able to create/delete/ and change the passwords of accounts.

Eventually, I will set it up to sanitize the database inputs, so that malicious code can’t be run using it, and then I will post it up here, so that anyone else who cares to create a MaNGOS server won’t have to deal with all the crap that I have.

My poor old HP Pavilion has sure been through a lot lately, having had its OS replaced approximately 8 times, the hard drive formatted for 5 of those. It originally shipped with Windows Millenium Edition (puke), its previous owner mercifully replacing it with Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I, however, found performance under Windows XP to be less than optimal, and many of the programs (i.e. games) that I wished to run on it simply wouldn’t agree with XP, or would otherwise choke at the system’s lack of video acceleration and/or DirectX 9.0 support. (Game Maker, I’m looking at you.)

So the first thing I did was stick Windows 2000 Professional on it. Performance was actually somewhat better than before, all my drivers still worked, and, most importantly, Slam Tilt Pinball worked (finally). Though as time went on, I found that Windows 2000 still didn’t suit my needs, and wondered if there was a flavor of Linux that would agree with it. So I ran down the list. Condensed version of my various attempts and findings below.

Xubuntu 8.10
I found that Xubuntu didn’t have enough memory to even install, and upon using the Alternative installer, had several read errors and eventually screwed up my boot sector (see Boot Loaders Suck).

Puppy Linux 4.2.1
Puppy actually ran from its LiveCD surprisingly well. I was highly pleased with it – until I learned that it was next to impossible to install to hard drive. (I realize that Puppy isn’t supposed to be installed to a hard drive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Damn Small Linux
DSL installed quite comfortably and even ran pretty well, but this was when I first became acquainted with the ridiculous things one needs to do to get a wireless card working in Linux. I hate you, ndiswrapper. Also, the package manager didn’t work for some reason, so I couldn’t get apps that I needed.

Debris 1.0.4
This one looked promising, until I learned that APT was connected to a very old Ubuntu database that no longer existed, and I unfortunately was unable to figure out how to set it to multiverse. Then, well, more ndiswrapper nonsense.

Fluxbuntu 7.10
Not only did APT actually work on this one, the installer acknowledged the existence of, but still didn’t know how to use, my Linksys WPC54G wireless card. More ndiswrapper nonsense later (and with heavy assistance from Malachai), I realized that ndiswrapper wasn’t even treating my wireless card as wlan0 like it was supposed to, but rather eth1, rendering it essentially useless. Default desktop settings were very pretty, though.

Tiring of all this open source stuff, I opted to just nuke the hard drive again and load up Windows 98 SE. This is an OS that I am extremely, intimately familiar with, having learned just about all of its quirks and tricks. Plus, Linksys’ driver CD supports 98, I can get mass storage drivers working very nicely, and basically I wonder why I didn’t just load Win98 on it in the first place. Since, well, that’s essentially what the darned thing came with to start with!

By “popular” request, we’ve opted to run some benchmarks on this paper-thin pugilist. DoomRater posted in the comments that he was interested in three specific benchmarks (thankfully none of which included running Crysis): ZSNES running Contra 3, Project64 running Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Soldat running a botmatch.

The first test, naturally, went off with no hitches: ZSNES, being written for x86 assembly and optimized for Pentium 2, proved no difficulty whatsoever for the Mini 12. Contra 3: The Alien Wars ran at a perfect 60/60, showing no faltering and almost no tearing (and no tearing whatsoever once I remembered to turn VSync on). Default settings were proving to be no issue at all. So I stepped it up, beefing the screen resolution up to 1280×800 fullscreen and turning on the HQ3x filter. Still no performance loss whatsoever. I even threw the more complicated games at it – Super Pinball: Behind The Mask, a game making heavy use of the SA-1 coprocessor, also displayed no issues.

Project64 was where the first hiccups began. As the Mini 12 does not have proper video hardware acceleration, the Intel Graphics chip was all we could make do with. Set to the default settings, the introduction of Ocarina of Time ran at roughly half the intended speed, with the sound making horrible stutters all the way. I didn’t check to see if there was a software-only renderer included; I doubt this computer could handle that sort of thing, if it can’t handle it even with an onboard graphics accelerator.

Soldat sounded significantly easier, yet still presented a headache. Upon setting the game up, the program displayed an error that it could not initialize DirectX video and promptly peed itself over the available memory. By the time I could get to its process in Task Manager, it had racked up about 64 MB and was still increasing. Conclusion: Soldat doesn’t work.

So, the Dell Mini 12: too much gaming muscle? Well, it really depends on what kind of game you want to run. If it needs video hardware…you’re basically screwed.

(All tests were performed at default settings unless otherwise noted; testing OS was Windows 7 Ultimate Release Candidate, with a system rated at performance index of 1.9.)

Mal already got down to the nitty gritty of the Dell Mini 12, something of an in-between as far as laptops go: it’s not quite large or powerful enough to be a full-on desktop replacement, but it’s not exactly small enough to be considered a netbook or ultra-mobile PC. The thing is less than half an inch thick, weighs less than a paperback novel, and actually performs better than my current laptop, an HP Pavilion N5170.

The Mini 12 isn’t really considered a gaming machine, yet it holds its own on more than a few applications. This particular Mini came loaded with Ubuntu Linux, evidently quickly replaced with the Windows 7 RC, which as predicted, runs significantly better than my ill-fated and ill-advised attempt at emulating it via Virtual PC (which, admittedly, would probably have gone better if I’d used VirtualBox or VMWare). Malachai mentions to me that the OS will probably also get replaced with Win XP or such. The Mini 12, jack of all OS’es, master of…some? Wonder if you could put Windows 2000, BeOS 5, OS/2 Warp 4, or most of all, Hackintosh the thing and make it run OS X Leopard?

I’m pretty satisfied with this thing and kind of want one of my own. (psst, give me some money, Adecco, so I might buy something!)