Wednesday, February 13, 2002

Printing PITA -- 11:43 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, I finally figured out what my problem was with printing in Linux. Apparently the latest versions of Red Hat's printconf and printconf-gui don't like me. Going back to printconf-0.3.52-1 and printconf-gui-0.3.52-1 did the trick. Grumble. At least it works now. I really need my printer if I'm going to get any work done.

Check out this Red Hat Bugzilla entry for more details.

Q3A "Crusher" -- 9:11 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The UpsetChaps clan has released (probably some time ago, I just found it today) new timedemos a la the famous "Crusher" demo for Quake II. They also include an updated (or perhaps just renamed) version of id's "four" demo. On the UCGuideDemo2 I get 69.8 fps and that's a MAJOR bot-fest on Q3DM17. Torture city. Ahh, violence.

nForce Linux Drivers -- 12:38 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA has released Linux drivers for their nForce chipset. It provides support for the on-board sound and ethernet. The standard Linux drivers will work for USB and IDE. Now if only we could convince Creative to support Linux like this! Thanks Linux Games.

YESH! -- 10:14 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, everything is all better with my new computer today. The problem with flashing the BIOS was that I kept getting an "Insufficient memory" error from Award's flashing utility. After perusing Google Groups I found a solution to the memory problem (I also discovered that it seems that just about every motherboard type has had this BIOS problem happen at one time or another). I also. I had to add the /tiny switch to the command line. After doing that, Doug K. at EZ-Net got the BIOS to flash. We're back in business!

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.

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