Tuesday, February 12, 2002

Just Plain Ludicrous! -- 7:52 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, after bragging about the speed of my new computer, the mobo went wonky on me. I rebooted and it told me I had a CMOS checksum error. No amount of clearing the BIOS would help, nor would it let me flash the BIOS again. I took it to EZ-Net and the only solution they could come up with is to RMA the board. ARGH! So I had to put together my old computer and reinstall Windows 98. Thankfully, my old 32x CD-ROM that had gotten flaky held out long enough to install everything. Barf. Oh well, at least I can get work done. Thankfully, EZ-Net's webmail interface is VERY slick (nice job, Crawl!) so I don't have to worry about an email client for the time being.

Ludicrous Speed! -- 1:27 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, my computer is now officially assembled. I got a few screws and nuts to attach my extra case fan. Now I've got six fans whirring away. I also took advantage of a Best Buy 10% off coupon and $50 rebate to get a Visiontek Xtasy 6564 (GeForce3 Ti200). After all of that, the total price will be $129. Quite a deal.

I did notice a couple of problems with the card, though, which were quickly remedied. One was in Windows 98 with Diablo II. After being in the game for a little bit, my mouse would lock up. I'm not sure what the problem was, but going back to the 21.83 WHQL drivers from the 23.11 ones did the trick. I also had a problem with flickering textures and other weirdness on the terrain maps in Quake III: Team Arena. On the Quake 3 World forums, someone quoted the GeForce FAQ saying to type these commands at the console:

r_ext_compiled_vertex_array 0
vid_restart

That did the trick, but at a bit of a performance hit. Running the "four" demo, I got 118.1 fps before adding that command and 103 after it. Of course, this is at 1024x768 with all the graphics options cranked up. Quite a sight to behold.

BTW, to use the old "four" demo with the 1.31 patch, use WinZip or something similar to extract four.dm_66 from pak6.pk3. Create a directory under baseq3 called demos. Rename four.dm_66 to four.dm_67 and place it in the new demos directory. It's that easy.

Monday, February 11, 2002

Carmack .plan update -- 6:33 pm CST, Update by The Master

John Carmack updated his .plan for the first time in quite a while, summarizing his experiences getting the new Radeon chipsets working with Doom 3. It's huge, it's techie. Go read it :-)

Update! Carmack has updated his .plan again with a snippet indicating an update on the status of the NVIDIA graphics drivers.

Upgrade Saga -- 9:22 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I just thought I'd give you a few "highlights" of my upgrading process so far.

• With the original BIOS on my Iwill XP333 mobo, the computer would turn itself off for about three seconds and then turn itself back on every time I'd reboot. I feared I was going to kill my hard drive. A BIOS flash fixed that.
• No matter how sure you are that you are doing the Right Thing, BIOS flashes are still nerve-wracking, especially if you've messed one up before.
• I had forgotten how annoying the endless cycle of rebooting is when trying to reinstall Win98 and some apps. Linux has really spoiled me in that regard.
• I was surprised that when I put everything together, the only thing I messed up was that I had the floppy cable backwards. Amazing.
• The on-board CMedia sound chip sounds decent, but it really holds the system back. I was playing a Quicktime movie using the Crossover plugin in Linux and the sound was about three seconds behind the video. Once I popped my SoundBlaster Live! Value back in, it worked great.
• Speaking of the CMedia, Red Hat 7.2 detected it and installed drivers for it so it worked right off the bat. Getting the drivers to work in Win98 was a nightmare. The driver setup doesn't do any error checking so if the installation doesn't work, it just asks for a reboot as if everything is swell. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get DirectSound to work with it. Thus, my SBLive is back.
• I'm amazed at how much better games play (especially Q3A engine games) with the Athlon XP 1800+ even though I'm still using my TNT2 Ultra. I can play Q3:TA with a bunch of bots with no problems. Very cool.
• I now have five fans in my box (CPU cooler, video card cooler, north bridge cooler, power supply, and front case). I plan on adding one to the back if I can figure out a good way to do it. I want to make sure the 1800+ stays nice and cool. Of course, that makes this box quite a bit noisier than my old one. I'll take it.

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