Gaming.

So my newly upgraded PC has led me astray from LotRO and into other games that I didn't think I'd realistically be able to run... in my lifetime. My PC budget is basically $zero, so I was lucky to pick up our friend Haley's old PC for $150, which is more than $zero, but still a good buy. This PC killed not one, not two, but three hard drives, so I'm expecting a crash at any time, but I can live with that.

I actually gutted that computer, along with my old one and the lovely Jenny's, and used all the bits to cobble together two new computers. I'm now running an Intel Quad-core at 2.5GHz with, somehow, 3.25GB RAM and my ATI HD 4870. Jenny is now running, in a different case, basically what was my old rig. An AMD 4000+ with a Gig of RAM and the NVIDIA whatever-it-was video card from Haley's comp. I'm no good with NVIDIA. Dunno what it was, but it was a massive step up from the ATI 1350 she had before, as is the RAM and CPU.

So now I can finally run games like Assassin's Creed II and GTA IV, and she can finally play games like Spore and The Sims 3, and can max out LotRO. And let me tell you: Assassin's Creed II alone was worth the upgrade. Seriously, that game is fucking amazing. I'm pretty much done with it now, in that all that's left to 100% completion is finishing all the annoying races, and I'm thinking about starting a new game to play it all over again. I've been playing GTA IV at the same time, but fuck that game. So far, it's not as fun as GTA San Andreas. Massive disappointment. I mean, it's good, but nowhere near as good as I expected. Instead of diving into it after finishing AC2 before returning to LotRO, I'm probably going to go back to LotRO and keep playing GTA on the side. I miss my Champion...

New mouse. This is big news.

About a month ago my mouse died. I loved that mouse. I even blogged about it. I bought it on my birthday, three years ago. Since its untimely death I've been using this cast-off, HP-branded piece of shit I dug out of a bin full of old computer cables. I hate it. I mean, it works, but its DPI is incredibly low, it's uncomfortable, it's ugly, and its cable is too short. Well, today is a new day.

I bought this thing tonight at Kmart. At $20, it's clearly the cheapest laser mouse you can possibly buy at retail. But it was there, so I bought it. And it ain't half bad. I mean, it's slightly too small for my hand, and somehow the DPI toggle button below the wheel keeps getting hit even when I don't actually click it, but I've had far worse mice. It's relatively comfortable, looks sharp, and the nicely clicky scroll-wheel glows red all the time. They had a purple one, but I went with red, because that's how I roll, motherfuckers.

You see, this is what Twitter has done to my blog. I'm on Twitter constantly now, so there's not much left to blog about. Twitter.com/Maladhros, for the record.

I got some new stuff.

Mostly a new phone. It's a Sony Ericsson W760a, which I selected after approximately 10 minutes of research (wandering aimlessly around the AT&T store). It looks like this:

Only mine isn't usually floating in a black void, and there's only one of it. It's much better than my old bargain-basement-four-years-ago phone. I thought about going balls-out and getting something completely crazy that I don't need, like an iPhone, but I thought, meh. I'll probably just break it, job like mine and all. This one feels like it can take a few drops. Unfortunately, I'll have to go out of my way to buy some specific accessories: a USB cable, headphones, and Sony's proprietary M2 memory card.

What else? Oh, a camera. Ian left this little Fuji A360 digicam when he moved out. Turns out it kinda sucks, though it is small and light. The non-adjustable shutter speed is so high that it's virtually impossible to take a picture at any marginally close range without blurring. It uses a lame media card format that I thought was proprietary to Olympus: xD. Even worse, it has no on-board memory, and the xD card it came with is just 16MB. Since it's a 4.1 megapixel camera, and you can't adjust the picture size, that equals roughly four pictures. Awesome. I found exactly two xD cards at Newegg: 1GB for $11 and 2GB for $15.

That's enought random babbling for tonight. I'm jumping off to let Jenny watch TV on my computer.

Geek gear incoming.

I ordered one of these tonight:

It's a Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 1GB video card. It's a ridiculous beast of a card that grossly outclasses everything else in my PC. And I don't care. I want it.

I'm slowly rebuilding my once mighty PC into a modern gaming rig. When I put it together in early 2006, it wasn't a world-conquering monster, but it was still pretty menacing, and would beat the hell out of just about any game I wanted to play. But over time the upgrades slowed down and finally stopped. I haven't been able to play any new games that I actually want in nearly two years (aside from Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Call of Duty 4, due to their versatile game engines). I've filled the time with older games that I can run well, but that will only take you so far.

So in the last few months I started upgrading again. I bought a new case, a monolithic all-aluminum Rocketfish based on this Lian Li box. Then last week I installed a new 36" rounded EIDE cable for my hard drives (due to the size of the new case and for better cooling) and a very decent Apevia 680W power supply, which jumped from $80 when I bought it to $110 today, so I got lucky there. Now I'm adding a mid-to-high-range vidcard for an absurdly reasonable $150.

That leaves the RAM, which is still just 1GB PC3200, and my processor, a single-core AMD64 4000+. Both are still very usable, and I can upgrade them. The socket 939 is old, but can take a dual-core CPU. But the new vidcard will be downward-compated (so to speak) since I don't have PCI-e 2.0. So the next step really should be to upgrade the motherboard, CPU, and RAM all at once. That can't happen right now, or even in the foreseeable future.

That's why I bought the 4870. It will run anything I throw at it, and should make up for the CPU and RAM for a while. It opens up two to three years worth of games to me (Bioshock, Saint's Row 2, CoD: World at War, Oblivion, Fallout 3), and will make many of the games I already have much, much more enjoyable (S.T.A.L.K.E.R., CoD 4, Ghost Recon: AW, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and more).

Oh, and I bought a Shane Battier Grizzlies replica jersey, the old 2001-2003 style. I've wanted one for eight years. It's in pristine condition and I paid less than four bucks for it. I'm wearing it right now. Pics will follow, because I think of all the stuff I bought today, this one makes me the happiest.

Starting over. Again.

I reinstalled Windows this weekend. It has been an ordeal. I'm not happy about it. Here's why:*

I never actually got around to blogging about this, but a couple months ago I bought a new case, gutted my PC, and performed transplant surgery. The procedure was only moderately successful. Due to the sheer size of the new box, I've needed a new power supply unit and a new EIDE cable ever since. It works, but until I buy the afforementioned replacement parts, I can only run one hard drive and one optical drive, and my current PSU is hanging off the motherboard instead of being solidly attached to the bottom of the box as it should be.

Meanwhile, my OS has been getting more and more unstable. I haven't reinstalled in two years, and even before that, I had severe boot issues that were never resolved. Last Thursday my video card started overheating, which, on top of everything else, was just... just super. I discovered that its fan was no longer turning properly. I can't tell if the bearings are wearing or if it's just out of lubricant, but it doesn't matter because I disassembled the entire thing and I can't fix it.

This is the point where I said, "Fuck it." Using Jenny's computer, I pulled everything I wanted to save off of my primary, 250GB hard drive and my secondary, 100GB drive (that I haven't been able to use lately), burned it to disc, installed the 100 gigger back into my PC as the main drive, and put a clean install of XP Pro on it (that I luckily happened to have lying around).

Without a proper video card, I'm back to running on my mobo's Xpress 200 chipset, but at least everything is working. I can even boot normally, which means I was right in my long-held theory that there's a bad sector somewhere on my 250 gigger that caused the boot problems that survived the system restore two years ago.

So now, after two days of updating drivers, rebooting, updating Windows, rebooting, reinstalling critical software, rebooting, updating Windows again, rebooting, and updating Windows again, all I have to do is buy and install a new 20"+ EIDE cable, a new video card, and a new ATX PSU with at least 7 auxilliary connectors. And hope that my 250GB HD isn't a piece of shit.

So, yeah. Fun three-day weekend.

*you don't care why, but I'm posting it anyway

Getting l33ter every day. People still say "l33t," right?

So Jenny's old PC finally died a couple weeks ago. It was a slow, agonizing death, and we're all just glad it isn't suffering anymore. This weekend we bought Haley's old computer, and we're busy setting it up for The Lovely. Anyway, it's a little mini-ATX tower, and there's no longer any room on top of Jen's rig for the little 15" LCD monitor. Therefore:


Behold! My first multi-monitor set-up ever. And I'm already addicted to it. Forget the gaming applications, I just need the extra desktop space, and this is definitely the best way to get around a monitor with a max res of just 1280x1024. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to geek out for a while.

UPDATE: Two screens! For one computer! What is this, the future?!

Mice need attention, too.

The importance of dpi. Also, I feel old.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to buying a new mouse this afternoon. This is riveting stuff here, I know, so hold on to your ass. Anyway, I've been using a cheap IBM optical mouse for at least two years, and I never liked it, but have never been able to bring myself to either compromise and buy a cheap mouse that's marginally better or spend a ton of money (for me) on a nice six-button programmable dual-laser mouse with built-in cruise control and stun setting. But today is my birthday, so I thought, "Fuck it, I hate this thing," and bought a new mouse. It's a nice, affordable little Logitech 1000dpi tilt-wheel deal. Not a barn-burner, it's sort of a Toyota Celica of a mouse; sporty enough, but it won't blow your panties off. It's narrower than what I'm used to, but smooth and quick and has a little more weight to it than most mice, which I like. My first mouse was a very light little Logitech two-buttoner -- this was before wheel mice existed -- but when I replaced it with a much heftier Microsoft number, my Quake scores went up dramatically. End of discussion.

On Monday I'll have finished my first round of tests since returning to college after ten years, and it hasn't been too difficult. I'm taking things more seriously this time around, and was better prepared for my exams than I was before. That's how it seemed, at least, as twice in one day I easily finished my exam, double-checked every answer, and was still the first to finish by a wide margin. Most of the people in my classes are a decade younger than me, right out of high school, with one or two others my age or older. The kids (yes, I'm calling them kids) are like me when I was attending the U of M; they just don't know how important a single test can be when you get to college. When you only have four, they all matter. This ain't high school.

I'm really enjoying the programming (1002) and basic HTML (2010) courses. In 2010 we're about to start CSS, which is where I left off in writing my own HTML years ago. In 1002, we've passed the basics -- which has already been all new to me -- and are about to start actual programming in Perl. Considering I've just gone from having only the most rudimentary understanding of binary to being able to do binary-to-decimal-to-hex conversions in my head, I'm somewhat confident, although I know the real memorization and formatting slog is coming up.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, being an unapologetic homer*, I also treated myself to a sweet birthday official Tennessee Titans baseball cap. So now I have my Titans cap, two awesome University of Memphis caps from my dad, and my retro-2001-style official Memphis Grizzlies cap I found brand new at, inexplicably, a gas station for four bucks. I'm all geared up and ready, head-wise, for the upcoming seasons.

*A "homer", one who roots exclusively or disproportionately for athletic teams from one's home town or area. -- Wikipedia

Starting over.

Aka, what the fuck?
by AC - permalink

I woke up this morning (okay, afternoon) to an insurmountable drive error that ended up with me being forced to perform a full system recovery. For whatever reason, the sector on my primary hard drive containing all the boot data was irreparably corrupted. So after hours of fruitless troubleshooting and more hours of reinstallation, here I am again, with a clean Windows XP install and all my 120+ GB of whatever-I-had-that-took-up-all-that-space gone. It's actually not as bad as it could have been. At first, I thought my 200GB primary drive was fried, leaving me with my backup 100GB drive. If I'd been forced to reinstall Windows to that drive, not only would my total drive space have been cut by two-thirds, I would have lost all my backup data I was using it for in the first place.

Still, it's going to take me days to restore everything, and a lot of data has been lost forever. The timing is just fucking perfect, as I'm in the middle of the readmission process. I'm trying to get back into college full time, and I'm going to need my PC. The last thing I need is a driver error that wipes out a damned thesis and all my research. So I'm concentrating on getting all my drivers and software updates reinstalled and working together.

The stock-level system restore has brought to my attention all the gradual updates I've made to this rig, and how difficult it was getting everything to work. Since I bought this PC last January, I've added a second hard drive and a new video card, yanked the modem, and replaced the power supply unit, CPU, main cooling fan, and heatsink. On top of the 76 updates I've already downloaded from Microsoft, I still have to re-up the sound and video drivers, find all the Media Center and Media Player updates, and rip my entire CD library again.

Just to get ready for all the re-installations I had to spend an hour uninstalling all the prepackaged software I never wanted in the first place. My favorite moment has to be when my PC suddenly crashed and rebooted during the removal of the AOL software. Now I'll need TweakUI just to remove the defunct AOL entry in the add/remove programs list. But that's the tip of an iceberg, I have Gigs worth of utilities to reinstall, everything from Open Office to Ad-Aware.

Okay, I'm going to microwave some leftovers and start combing through all my backup discs now. 'Night all.

Living with a working PC.

Shouldn't something be going horribly wrong?
by AC - permalink

A week after installing my new CPU, its cooler, and my new power supply, I'm adjusting to life with a PC I don't have to constantly monitor and mollycoddle. I've been watching my CPU, GPU, and ambient temps closely, and finally felt comfortable enough to run closed-boxed for several hours this morning. I'm still popping the case open and employing the desk fan when running games, as it still lowers the GPU temp by a good 10 to 20C under load, and my vidcard, running solely of the PCI-e slot's power, doesn't have much of a fan. The good news, though, is that the new AMD 4000+ CPU has made for some noticable improvements in some of my games over the old 3500+ chip.

I've seen the most gains with GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2. They both hover right around 60fps at high resolutions now with all the bells 'n whistles on, which means annoying drops to 45 and 30fps with v-sync on. My cheap monitor can only handle 60Hz at 1280x1024, but a sudden brainwave led me to try running them at 1152x864 with a forced 75Hz with no v-sync, and they look fantastic. This doesn't work for slower-paced games, like Doom 3, when the tearing is much more pronounced, but with my new CPU it's even more rock-solid over 60fps, so it still looks badass.


Going back to GTA, though, I did a little more research into the LOD issue I was having with Vice City, and eventually I came across this thread at PlanetGTA, which pointed to this thread at the DriverHeaven.net forums. And as unlikely as it seems, altering the shortcut to run in Win98 compatibility mode worked perfectly. Unfortunately, while I'm in love with Vice City for its ambiance and music, San Andreas makes the control scheme and mission layout feel frustrating and limited. But whatever, I only paid ten bucks for it.

Not to digress completely, but I want to mention the new Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero, which I bought last week. It's fucking awesome. If you've heard With Teeth, it's sort of like that, only much more awesome. And it... well, it's hard to say this about a NIN disc, but it's got a groove to it. Not a groove on par with something like Definitive Swim, but it's definitely the most accessible NIN album since Broken. I still think The Fragile is the best NIN LP ever, but Year Zero is now easily third behind The Downward Spiral.

Up and running.

So far, so good.
by AC - permalink

All the parts I ordered from Newegg showed up at 5:30pm on Wednesday, almost exactly 48 hours after I placed the order. They shipped out that morning at 8:30, but I was the UPS guy's last delivery of the day. Which wouldn't have sucked quite so hard if I hadn't gotten up at 8:30 and seen that my shit had just left and was "in transit for delivery," giving me a good nine hours to wonder where the hell that stupid brown truck was, already. But at least everything was in one piece. I was disappointed in the packaging, though. My new AMD 64 4000+ CPU came from the OEM and not retail, which meant it was in a tiny plastic square sandwiched between a couple of quarter-inch pieces of foam. It worked, but it was slightly disconcerting. And nothing I ordered, including the cooler and PSU, came with any documentation of any kind, not even a registration card. If I wasn't moderately familiar with how to put a PC together I wouldn't have had even the slightest idea where to start.

Everything plugged in and seems to be working fine, except the Kingwin CPU cooler. Apparently it wasn't designed with my particular motherboard in mind, as there's no way to attach it. The clips sort-of fit across the old cooler's base, but only enough to keep it from sliding around. Which means that until I can jury rig it all together somehow, I'll have to keep my tower on its side indefinitely; if I stand it back up, the whole thing will pop off the CPU and crash down on top of my video card. So... yeah.

In any case, the CPU and power supply are working, and my rig hasn't crashed, so I guess one or the other was the problem -- probably the CPU. It's a good thing I'm not pushing the PSU anywhere close to its limits, because it unexpectedly has a big, fat fan built into the top of it. My case doesn't have a gaping hole back there, so I had to mount it with the fan pointing down, where its air-flow clips the back edge of my CPU's new cooler. As far as I can tell, though, it's only been running on its lowest setting, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Anyway, with my vid card seemingly cleared of being the cause of my overheating issues, and my new CPU holding a steady idle temperature of around 40C whether the case is open or not, I looked a bit more into what the acceptable temps are for a Radeon X800 XL. With the case shut up, mine hovers around 38C, which is apparently decent considering my case's layout and cooling setup. The GPU is on the far side of the single case fan, which I helped a little by digging up some tin-snips in the garage and using them to cut away the unnecessarily dense stamped-out grill that was covering it. It's still running hotter than I would like under load, but for the most part I'm finally comfortable with shutting up my case again, and it's nice not having that ridiculously loud desk fan blowing into it three feet from my head all the time.

I'll keep toying around with things, and update as needed. I also picked up the new Nine Inch Nails disc today, so I'll be posting about that after I've gotten a feel for it. And, I think I've finally got GTA Vice City working again, and I want to write about some crazy performance improvements I've gotten out of GTA San Andreas and Call of Duty 2.

Blogged with Flock

Beyond troubleshooting.

Is ten minutes of uptime too much to ask for?
by AC - permalink

So my PC has basically become unusable now. I've been relegated to using this old Duron-based rig again for pretty much everything while I use the odd ten-minute window to try to troubleshoot my main rig. And I think I've finally narrowed the problem down to either a bad CPU (most likely), a bad power supply (much less likely), or some random bad component on my mobo (god I hope not). As a last-ditch cheap effort I scraped off what was left of the old thermal paste from my CPU and heatsink -- which had turned the consistency of clay -- and replaced it with some cheap Arctic grease, but it didn't work.

So today I finally gave up and decided on some part-swapping. I ordered a new processor, CPU cooler, power supply, and some Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste from newegg.com. While it was tempting to do some real upgrading with a dual-core CPU, I decided it wouldn't be worth the hassle of switching back and forth from dual- to single-core for my older games and just went with a cheaper AMD 64 4000+ 2.4 chip, which is still a nontrivial upgrade from my apparently fubar'd 3500+ 2.2 CPU. The other essential upgrade is the cheap-but-still-better 500W PSU to replace my stock 300W unit that may or may not be itself the cause of the problems I've been having. I threw in the new cooler because it can't possibly be worse than the weak little fan and aluminum piece of shit I have now, and the Silver 5 is something I should have invested in a long time ago. The best part is with a lot of research and careful part selection, the whole lot came in at just a hundred and one bucks, plus tax and shipping. That's $101 for a brand new OEM AMD 4000+ and a 500W power supply and a copper cooler/fan assembly. The only question now is, can I put it all together and still get the goddamned rig to boot?

Something I'd like to mention about using this old Duron box is that I've enjoyed browsing with the new Opera release on it. I had chance to play with Opera 9.2 on my main rig before it went kaput, and I remembered that Opera works well with old hardware, so I installed it on this old box. It's a really impressive piece of programming. In fact, I'd say that it's a tweak or two away from being every bit as good as Firefox 2.

I first tried 9.2 to have a look at the new "speed dial" feature. It's kind of redundant to the favorites list, but looks cool and it's fairly convenient. But the killer feature in my opinion is the Block Content option in the context menu. Basically, it works like Adblock in Firefox, Flock, or Avant. It's a quick way to wild-card-block ads from any given site, and plugs up a huge hole in the reasons-not-to-adopt Opera list. It's still fast, feature-complete, highly customizable, and well-supported. Unfortunately, Java-based applets, like the games at Pogo, still don't seem to work at all when launched through Opera, and when I tried to write this post, I was inexplicably unable to type anything in the big fat blog text box. But for everyday browsing, especially on an older PC, Opera has closed the gap considerably on Firefox, and has nearly caught Flock, at least in my experience.

Not so good with the shooting.

At least, not anymore.
by AC - permalink

I'm not sure what the intangible It is that I've apparently lost when it comes to online shooters, but whatever It is, I've lost it. Ten years ago, I used to dominate in the only online shooter anyone was playing, Quake. But now... I dunno. In the FPS's I can find a decent amount of players in -- Call of Duty 2, Halo, Quake III mainly -- I'm holding my own, but I'm getting fragged way too much. If we were talking about obscure, overly complicated gamemodes like Onslaught or whatnot it would be different, but I'm playing mostly team deathmatch, and I'm getting sniped left, right, and center, and it's getting depressing. I'm still kicking all kinds of bot ass offline, so I don't think I'm necessarily out of practice... It's like there's been some sort of fundamental, intangible shift in how to win online in these kinds of games that I've missed the boat on since I was last playing a lot around six years ago.

Whatever the case, at least I'm not crashing so much anymore. After the RAM slot-swap, I've only crashed once. I've got my box open and on its side, with a desk fan pointed into it. I think the problem was from my motherboard's orientation. The vidcard was stuck upside-down, with the fan/heatsink pointed down and with very little room for the hot air to escape upwards. Over time, I think the GPU has been damaged and can take less and less exposure to high temperatures. I would have been looking out for this, but I've never had a little mini-tower like this eMachines case before. Anyway, now not only can it vent upwards, I'm forcing the air out of the case with the fan. I haven't tried the Psychonauts demo again, but I've been able to play a lot of CoD2, as well as the F.E.A.R. demo a couple of times without a spontaneous reboot. It's progress anyway.

Back online for the first time again.

It's fast, then it's gone.
by AC - permalink

So I've finally rejoined the broadband world. We ordered the fancypants wireless network package, which meant a box full of hardware with no instructions. Luckily I used to do this sort of thing for a living, and I was able to get the whole setup humming along online without installing all the stupid proprietary software. The downside is that my PC has gone from occasionally crashing due to what seemed like overheating issues to crashing at random almost constantly for no apparent reason at all.

I've been troubleshooting this problem for months, and I finally ran out of ideas today. As a last-ditch effort I pulled out the dual 512MB PC3200 DIMMs, cleaned them off, and re-seated them in the unoccupied slots. And incredibly, it seems to be working. My PC shut itself down unexpectedly four times yesterday, but today I've been able to putter around online, do some gaming, and successfully shut down thrice. That includes an hour-long Call of Duty 2 online deathmatch session, and full-on 3D gaming has generally been a death sentence for my box lately. In fact, one of the first things I did after getting the DSL goodness going was to update my Steam client and download the Psychonauts demo. The game ran great, but twice my PC crashed after ten minutes of it. So long sessions of CoD2, CoD1, Quake III, Quake IV, Halo, and UT 2004 online are good signs.

Overreaching.

Try before you buy.
by AC - permalink

So I bought Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter last week. I dunno why. I knew it wouldn't run very well on my PC, but I guess I was thinking optimistically. I mean, I figured I could always turn the specs way down to get a good framerate, and the gameplay wouldn't be affected. I was wrong.

First off, I'm a huge fan of the original Ghost Recon. I think it's an all-time classic PC game. It took the tactical elements of Rainbow Six and added a streamlined, real-time control system, then took the whole show outdoors and set it in a military environment. When you consider Ghost Recon and its two official expansion packs, Desert Siege and Island Thunder, as a whole, you've got a good hundred hours of solid single-player tactical FPS gameplay. And the game holds up to this day, five years after its release.

When I first picked up Ghost Recon, it was with an underpowered PC that just met its system requirements. But I was able to play and enjoy the game with a small amount of in-game tweaking. Unfortunately, Advanced Warfighter doesn't scale so well. My PC meets or exceeds the quoted recommended requirements, but to be blunt, it runs like stagnant mule shit. Even after tweaking Advanced Warfighter to get as much out of my hardware as possible, the game just is not playable enough to be enjoyable. It's a game based on precision and reflexes, and jerky, stuttering framerates and jagged, blurry textures are somewhat counterproductive.

I knew in advance that this game's engine, inexplicably, does not support any anti-aliasing whatsoever. The problem is, unlike the Doom 3 engine, this is one that really needs it, especially at low resolutions. And on a system-heavy game like this, you have to run at a low res to get a good framerate. So it pretty much just has to look like shit, HDR or no.

Still, I don't necessarily consider it a bad buy. Eventually I'll upgrade my video card or CPU or whatever, and the game will run like a champ. What's disappointing is that this game was released with visuals so demanding that they virtually eliminate 90% of all PC owners from even being able to play the game at all. I mean, according to the back of the damned box, my PC should crush this game, but in reality it's so hard to find a compromise between framerate and sharp visuals that I've actually uninstalled and shelved it.

By the way, I realize that there's an official patch for Advanced Warfighter that addresses a few performance issues, including the one where the game assigns itself a high CPU priority, making itself unplayable (way to play-test that one, guys). But it's 273MB, so I'll have to borrow my neighbors' bandwidth for that and burn it onto a CD. I'll try the game again once I have it, but I really don't think it's going to make a significant difference.

Next week on One Hundred Horseless Carriages: I buy F.E.A.R. and then uninstall and shelve it.

Optimizing Quake 4 for an X800.

Radeons aren't just for Half-Life.
by AC - permalink

I did a little more tweaking to Quake 4 recently and found a nice little sweet spot for my hardware. It's the best combination of high frame rate (45 to 60+ fps 90% of the time) and high-quality visuals I can come up with. This is basically a distillation of all the performance tweaks from the TweakGuides.com Quake 4 tweak guide, hand-picked and tested for this hardware:

• AMD 64 3500+
  
• 1024MB DDR 3200 SDRAM
• ATi Radeon X800 XL PCI-e 256MB
• Win XP Media Center, SP2
• KDS 17" CRT
  

If your hardware differs slightly, you can guesstimate up or down accordingly. Here's my in-game setup:

As a baseline, I set the game to medium graphic quality. This sets up a good value for texture compression in addition to a number of settings (like AA, AF, etc.) that I overrode. Under Settings > Game Options, I disabled Show Decals, and under Settings > System > Advanced Settings, I enabled everything but anti-aliasing. After that, I opened the Quake4Config.cfg (by default, found under C:\Program Files\id Software\Quake 4\q4base) and made only five changes. You'll find three of them together:

seta image_useCache "0"
seta image_cacheMegs "100"
seta image_cacheMinK "30"

I changed these three strings to:

seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "196"
seta image_cacheMinK "3072"

I also located 'seta r_multiSamples' and made sure the value was set to 0. It's a little counter-intuitive, but you really don't need any anti-aliasing in the Doom 3 engine at any resolution over 1024x768. Unlike any other game engine I have, you just won't notice the difference between 2X and none at all, aside from the significant framerate boost. The last change was finding 'seta image_anisotropy' and setting it at 4. This is a good compromise value at 1152x864, keeping fps high without the floors and walls looking like shit in the distance.

Everything else I implemented in an autoexec.cfg, which you should place in the same folder. Here's my entire autoexec:

seta com_allowconsole 1
seta com_videoRam 256
seta com_systemRAM 1024
seta g_brassTime 0
seta image_preload 1
seta r_orderIndexes 1
seta r_useShadowCulling 1
seta r_useStateCaching 1
seta r_useVertexBuffers 1
seta r_useCachedDynamicModels 1
seta r_useTwoSidedStencil 1
seta r_useTurboShadow 1
seta r_useOptimizedShadows 1

I'm running Catalyst driver set v. 6.8, controlled by ATi Tray Tools. I don't even have Catalyst Control Center installed anymore. I'm not using Tray Tools to change anything other than forcing vertical sync. With this setup, I'm running Quake 4 at 1152 with barely a hitch or stutter. The game stays at 60+ fps almost all the time, the only exceptions being some indoor areas with a lot of dynamic lights trying to interact with each other. The best part is that I'm making almost no sacrifices in visual quality.

Anyway, this is what works for me. Your mileage may vary.

Give and take.

The game gods giveth, the game gods taketh away.
by AC - permalink

I got some good news and some bad news on the PC gaming front this week. First, I tried to run Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for the first time since installing Catalyst driver set 6.8, and it won't launch. Mohaa.exe runs for a moment, then goes away. No game, no nothing. I've reinstalled the game, "repaired" the game (which is basically a reinstall), tried all sorts of vidcard settings, but it won't launch. I'd hate to revert to an earlier driver set, because overall, these work really well.

The good news is that Quake II will load properly on my old Duron PC. The only reason I paid extra for the DVD edition of Quake IV was because it came with Quake II and both Quake II mission packs. I had them years ago when I was running Windows 2000 Workstation on another box and loved 'em, so I was looking forward to that as much as Quake IV, if not more. But on this PC, Quake II saves won't load. Turns out it's a really common problem with Windows XP, and there's no fix for it. Some source ports are supposed to fix it, but not for me.

This box is running XP Media Center, SP2. My old PC has XP Pro SP2, and for some reason Quake II runs just fine on it. It's a Duron 800 with 192MB and just a 32MB ATi Rage Pro vidcard, but that's more than enough to get a game that old to hit 60fps at 1024x768.

Back on this box, Far Cry is running again, but it's still crashing every 45 minutes or so. Again, I can't figure out why, but to be honest I haven't tried too hard. I can bypass the waypoint save system with the 'save_game x' console command, and I'm not getting any visual glitches like those weird rainbow shadows, even with all detail settings maxed. And like Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and San Andreas, I can run it smoothly at 1280x960.

I think that's really why, for me anyway, it's worth putting up with the problems of PC gaming. In the end, you can get a game like San Andreas or HL2 to run at double the resolution and double the frame-rate of its console cousin. That goes for most of my other games as well, including Quake IV, Doom 3, Halo, Ghost Recon, Unreal Tournament 2004, and so on, and on.

Consoles are catching up, of course. There's no question that Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 is much smoother than it would be on my PC, and some five-star PC-only games, like Half-Life 2: Episode One, are coming to consoles soon. But then again, I can use a mouse with CoD 2, and Episode One won't be out on consoles until sometime next year, and I've had it since the first week it was released. I dunno. It's an old debate, and I think the only way to win it is to be able to afford both a new PC and all the major consoles. I'll just have to stick with a new PC and a few old (very old) consoles. Good enough for me.

In search of higher framerates.

Don't bother updating. Unless it works. Then update.
by AC - permalink

Lucy the wunderhund is sitting here, staring at me and wagging her tail in a tentative, attention-seeking way like I owe her something. But it's 1AM, and she's been fed, and she has plenty of water, and I just walked her an hour ago. Shit, she even has a brand new toy and Maggie the destructo-rott hasn't even ripped it to pieces yet. If I ignore her long enough, I'm hoping she'll get bored and go to sleep.

Anyway. I decided to try the new ATi Catalyst drivers, but I'm so goddamn sick of the Control Center that I grabbed a 24MB package containing the new drivers with Control Panel instead from NGOHQ.com. It turns out Control Panel hasn't changed much since the version that came with the Radeon 7200 drivers I installed in my old box to get an old 32MB Rage 32 running, so I combined the new (ver. 6.8) Catalyst drivers with the third-party ATi Tray Tools, and so far things are running pretty well.

I'm still running into that "blurry" bug in a few D3D games (GTA San Andreas and Halo, so far), but I've tracked it down. It's caused by enabling "alternate pixel centers." This kinda sucks, because this is a setting meant to get rid of flashing pixels around texture borders, something that happens a lot in San Andreas, particularly in the water. But you can't have everything.

I just installed the new drivers last night, but so far I've seen a noticable improvement in San Andreas, and Half-Life 2 has failed to crash in one or two areas where the obscenely old drivers I'd been forced to use because of other games used to throw me back to the desktop.

The only other games I've tried with this driver set are Quake III Arena and the Q3-based Call of Duty, both of which ran flawlessly with virtually all hardware and in-game settings maxed out. With this monitor, I'm forced to v-sync cap my games at 60fps at 1280x1024, but Q3 engine games generally run double that uncapped (Quake III runs on my PC at over 300fps) so that's no loss. I haven't run any other OpenGL trials yet, but I'm eager to see how Quake IV fairs. I haven't played QuakeIV since realizing that Doom 3 somehow looks abnormally good at high resolutions with no anti-aliasing whatsoever, and I'm looking forward to finding out what sort of frame-rate boost I can get from Quake IV with AA disabled.

Other than that, there's one big fat question mark to be answered by these drivers and it's hovering in the air over Far Cry. I reverted to my vidcard's original drivers for a number of reasons, but one of them wasn't for random crashes and color-inversions in Far Cry. But that's what I got. If it continues, ATi Tray Tools will probably give me enough control to nail down the problem. I hope so, because it's one of my favorite shooters ever. I'll let you know.

And I'll never know what Lucy wanted, because she wandered off to the next room and went to sleep on an old recliner. Oh, well.

Carmack should just run everything.

Why not? He's got the cash.
by AC - permalink

I've got problems here. I'm getting more and more graphics glitches and crashes in more and more games. In just the last few weeks I've had issues with Far Cry, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, GTA Vice City, MoH Pacific Assault, and even Half-Life 1. I've eliminated the overheating issue that gave me some problems in GTA San Andreas and all I'm left with is video drivers and/or software. To solve that, I've tried the last three sets of ATi Radeon drivers with their corresponding CCC's (Catalyst Control Centers) but nothing is working. In fact things are getting worse. I've only had this PC since January, and that's just not enough time for WinXP to become so corrupted that a reinstall is necessary. Especially considering how well I look after my PC. I mean, this isn't fucking Windows 98 we're talking about.

But nonetheless I've started backing up installers and config files to my secondary hard drive. I could install WinXP Pro, or use my PC's factory restore disc, and I'd prefer that because it came with WinXP MCE. I don't want to go through all that shit, but I can't think of anything else to try. I've got games that ran flawlessly for months (like Far Cry and HL2) that are suddenly acting like pre-alphas. Tonight I even reverted to the drivers and software that came with my vidcard, but no, crash after crash.

What's interesting about all this, to me anyway, is that Doom 3 has been one game I've had no problems with whatsoever. In fact, I can't remember it ever crashing or having any issue of any kind. Quake IV, yes, at one point some intense lighting in one map created a weird but inconsequential anomaly, but Doom 3, in its unpatched retail form has been rock solid. That's bleeding edge tech, but you'd never know it. I installed the 1.3 patch just for the hell of it, and again, no problem.

But these other games... Far Cry, for instance. The only problem I've ever had was a weird issue where certain shadows were rainbow-colored when cast onto complex geometry that was also casting a shadow. That went away with a driver update. But then the entire game was suddenly being drawn with the colors inverted. That happened twice, then stopped for no reason I could discover. Now the game is crashing almost immediately after a level finishes loading. Again, I have no goddamn idea why. HL2 Episode 1 is doing the same thing, but I'm convinced it's because of one of those mandatory patches Valve pushed on me via Steam. Which one I don't know, because there are so damn many.

The only troubleshooting step left that I can think of is one I just can't afford: yank out my ATi vidcard and try one from NVIDIA. I have a deep, dark, depressing feeling that I could spend hours reinstalling Windows to end up with exactly the same problems I'm having now. But that's probably a better option that spending three hundred wing-wangs on a brand new NVIDIA card and still not getting any improvement.

Shit. Does anyone have an Xbox 360 they'd like to sell me?

Desktop expansion.

Or re-expansion, I guess.
by AC - permalink

I finally got around to buying a new monitor this afternoon. It's not a particularly good one, but it was cheap, and it was there, so no shipping charges. It's a 17-inch KDS flat-screen CRT. I've been using an old borrowed 15-inch CRT with a max res of just 1024, so even though this one can't go past 1280, it's still like being able to breath again. Now that I have the extra desktop space, I'm finally getting around to playing with Hammer and the rest of the Source SDK. There were some tempting LCDs, including a very nice widescreen 19-incher for just $250, but I need the resolution flexibility for gaming.

Case in point: I decided my next "I'm playing only this til I'm done" game is Quake IV, and I like to run that game at 1152. I think it's a slightly underrated game. It gets repetitive over the last third or so, and it's disappointing that getting Stroggified doesn't really change the gameplay in any way (other than the other marines telling you how much they'd like to kill you). But it's a solid shooter. There's a fantastic level just before the tank mission that slowly builds up the tension level as the building your guys have established as a base is taken over by the Strogg. And the actual Stroggification is pretty sweet, in a gruesome kind of way.

Oh, something about Doom 3 I forgot to mention. Pull down the console at the start of the game and type "g_PlayerShadow 1." You'll cast a shadow wherever you go, and it really adds to the immersion level. It works so well that I figure it was only disabled for performance reasons. The only downside is when it shows you "floating" up ladders. But it's worth that when exploding imp blasts you've dodged cast your shadow on your cover. For whatever reason, it doesn't work so well in Quake IV. It just tends to get in the way. But it's not a big deal, because Quake IV is less about atmosphere and more about killing.

And one last note. iTunes lost a cool point or two with how it handles randomizing playlists. On three occasions I started the same playlist with random turned on, and three times it put the tracks in the same order. That's not actually random, it's just a new playlist. That earns musikCube a free plug.

Computers are complicated.

I can type fast. Doesn't really help me, though.
by AC - permalink

Turns out if you look hard enough, you can still find a decent CRT for a decent price, but you're going to have to mail-order it. I think I've settled on this ViewSonic 19-incher for $220 plus shipping. I realize that if they'd had this thing during the Great War they would have used it as a runway for Sopwith Camels, but it does 1600x1200 at 77Hz, and the user reviews beat any other sub-20-inch CRT on Newegg. You can get a 19-inch, 8ms LCD for less than $300 now, but I want to be able to push as high as 1600 and as low as 1152 for various games, and you can't do that without a CRT. Plus, I can get a .21mm dot-pitch instead of .296, which is about as good as a mid-range LCD gets.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck forcing the brightness up to max in all my games so I can actually see what's going on with this damned second-hand NEC monitor. Tomorrow I'm going to drop some cash into checking, then I'm ordering that ViewSonic, or another, similar CRT. I've got to do something about this.

I'm thinking my next hardware upgrade will likely be a new vidcard. I just got this Radeon X800 XL, and I love it; it's significantly faster than the newer-generation X1600 cards. But at some point I guess I'll need a new one that's DirectX 10-compliant. That's probably about a year down the road, though. Before that I might want to swap out my CPU (AMD64 3500+) with either a 4000+ or an X2 (dual-core). The 939 socket is insanely diverse, which is one of the reasons I bought this PC in the first place.

Oh, and I need an add-on sound board, because the popping I'm getting from the onboard RealTek is absolutely maddening. And at some point I still have to get a gamepad for the flying missions in San Andreas and all the emulated 16-bit games I have. But that's it. Really. That's all I need.

Or I could sell everything and get two or three consoles and a dozen great games for 'em.

Nah. I'm off to play some Pogo games now, looping my entire CD collection in the background with musikCube. Try that on your precious PS2. For that matter, try updating your blog with your Xbox.

Update 4:26pm: By the way, when did PC game demo downloads get so completely out of hand? I remember when a demo was just over five megs. You know, because it's just a demo. The Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter demo is out now, and it's just under five hundred megs. Half a Gigabyte? For a demo? Jesus Christ, I just keep feeling older and older.