I’m once again spending the weekend at Malachai’s place, this time with my PS3 in tow (which, by the way, this post was composed on – lol postin from mah ps3!). PS3, of course, has an internet browser built in. So I surfed my way to Youtube, intending to watch some old videos from my Favorites. I came upon a Top Gear clip of Richard Hammond and James May playing “car darts” – but lo and behold, the following error appears.

This video is not available on your device.

Apparently Youtube is now capable of singling out what platforms can and cannot play a specific video. Presumably this is at the behest of the BBC, but this is a very bad precedent. Those of us that want to have a full-featured media center in our living rooms now have just one more obstacle; this effectively means that a media center can only be a PC running Windows (because who knows, maybe some video site somewhere has blocked Linux and Mac OS X users as well!).

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

The programs thus far:

YAHM (Yet Another Hack Manager)
-This program allows me to ‘beam’ OS hacks back and forth between generations of device.

HackMaster
-This is the actual OS Hack manager I use. Works flawlessly, and is fast as hell.

Marbles^2
-The best damn timewaster puzzle game ever.

eReader
-Good ebook reader for palm. Supports the old OS 3.1 that’s on the IIIx, and has full grayscale support for the Zire 21. All-in-all quite good. Also has a DropBook windows client, and supports the PML markup language for creating your own ebooks from html and txt sources.

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!

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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.