Mal and Weasel’s Tech Crap

IIIITY bitty living space.

Malachai’s got a new rig.

For those of you that may be interested, I’ve gotten some new gaming muscle. As some may know, I have a habit of playing the newest, most graphically intensive games possible. The old machine (a modest AMD Athlon64 X2 at 2.67GHz. I’ll post the other stats below.) had previously been enough beefcake to handle everything I could throw at it. However, about the time Orange Box came out, it had ceased being beefcake, and had dropped to the category of boca burger. Thus after having beaten Left 4 Dead, which played horribly, as well as the new Wolfenstein, and some other rather graphics-intensive games, I decided to throw together a new one. The new machine, a not-so-modest AMD PhenomII X4 965 Black Edition, raises the bar back to ‘Beefcake Dominator’. (Alright, enough with the burger bun… I mean, puns.)

The Old:

AMD Athlon64 X2, 2.67GHz
Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA
2Gb OCZ Fatal1ty PC2-8500 (1066MHz)
Asus M2N-MX SE MicroATX
Apevia XCruiser-Black Midtower
EVGA nVidia GeForce 8600GTX 512Mb
Creative SB5.1d Sound

The New:

AMD PhenomII x4 965 Black, 3.4GHz
Western Digital Caviar Black 1024Gb SATA
Hitachi Deskstar 1024Gb SATA
Western Digital Caviar 320Gb SATA
Hitachi Deskstar 80Gb SATA
MSI NF750-G55 ATX
Ultra M923 ATX Fulltower
EVGA nVidia GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked 768Mb

Thanks to TigerDirect, I was able to put this all together, (plus some) with under $1100 including shipping.

As my good friend Weasel (who’s right next to me right now) says, “It eats green berets for breakfast, and right now, it’s hungry.”

Images

(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!

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!

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.)

The Silver Machine lives again.

It took me all of half an hour to return Silvermachine, my deliberately-aged DOS rig, to a glory not seen since 1996. I had previously tried to install Windows 95 on it (chronicled in my last post, more or less) and basically totally blew it up.

Today, all it took was a freshly-burned copy of FreeDOS 1.0, a quick backup of the C drive (just moved all its contents to D, really), and then a nuke-and-reload. FreeDOS 1.0, with Windows 95 Service Pack 1. An easy-as-pie dual boot system.

“That’s it?” I asked myself. Well, I did have a system that could run Slam Tilt Pinball at 100% without any issues – but my more recent laptop can accomplish much the same feat. So I took it one step further, and rifled through Dad’s stash of old PC hardware. (He regrets hanging on to all that old stuff, but it’s saved my ass on several occasions now.)

The treasure was found: a Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2, the same video card that got me through the days of Quake 2, Jedi Knight, and Tomb Raider.

It took virtually no effort to plug the thing in, alongside the Diamond Stealth 64 Video. Voodoo cards can’t render everything by themselves; they only render 3D. Everything else needs to be handled by a 2D card. The two cards are connected by a VGA crossover cable. It’s also possible to daisy-chain a second Voodoo 2 with another crossover cable, and enable a special driver setting for Scan-Line Interleave (SLI, before NVidia made it popular). Unfortunately for me, this requires me to have two identical 3Dfx Voodoo 2 cards (same brand and everything), which I don’t have. Admittedly, there are third-party drivers available that enable SLI to work between two different kinds of Voodoo 2 cards, but I didn’t feel like digging for a second card or messing with said drivers.

The card installed and the drivers in diagnostically working order, I needed something to test it with. The first thing I pulled out of my ever-increasing stack of “CD’s That Will Run On Silvermachine” was Tomb Raider 2.

I’ll go on record to state that I didn’t really like the Tomb Raider games back in the day. The more recent ones by Crystal Dynamics aren’t too bad, but I didn’t much like the originals. Though I was willing to forgive control issues and the fact that I got mauled by a tiger in the first level, over the sheer awesomeness that is Voodoo. (And the fact that TR2 only takes up a meg of disk space, as the whole thing is run off the CD-ROM. Since space is at a premium with only two 500 MB hard drives, this is a godsend.)

So, yeah – Silvermachine is rocking again, and do not mock the Voodoo.

Recently I decided what my newest project would be. And then I decided on something else. And then something else. And so on… And so on… And so on. I’ve finally decided what I’m going to do. Am doing. Whatever. I recently acquired a portable DVD player from a friend of mine from work. 10″ screen, AV- in and out, everything. Only one problem. The thing had been dropped one too many times, and the backlight had quit working completely. I took it home, under the pretense that I’d fix it and give it back, and found that the backlight was made from a glass cold-cathode tube. Stupid? So, instead of just fixing the darned thing, I’ve instead decided to remove the DVD drive, and pack all of the required electronics into the top of the screen. This should allow me to use the little screen to play games on an XBox, Wii, or PS2. Maybe. (Truthfully doubtful, though.)