Arx Fatalis and Libertatis

Posted on 2014-04-02, 23:16

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by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

So I completed Arx Fatalis on the open source Arx Libertatis engine and it was a pretty solid experience. It runs super smooth, never crashed or corrupted saves. There were a few glitches, the most notable being that the end boss didn't attack! :) I reloaded my save and that fixed it. I also got …

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Re: Has anyone used modern VIA CPUs?

Posted on 2014-04-01, 19:46

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by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

There must have been something about Nano that was uninteresting to OEMs that prevented it from coming in during the original Atom era. Either it wasn't quite up to what the spec sheet bragged about, or there were supply issues. Once AMD brought out their Bobcat CPU, Nano's window of opportunity was …

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Re: Replacing or refurbishing little chipset fans

Posted on 2014-04-01, 19:36

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I usually just pull the fan off and see if the chipset is cool enough without it. Sometimes the CPU fan moves air through the chipset heatsink too.

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GeForce FAQ Gold (AGP troubleshooting, etc)

Posted on 2014-04-01, 17:47

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

GeForce FAQ Gold Additional AGP reference. All about AGP chipset & card compatibility. http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

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Re: Matrox G400 + Win 98 = Shutdown VXD error

Posted on 2014-04-01, 17:08

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

While not about BSODs specifically, I ran into an old post about G400 locking up on shutdown. In addition to making sure you have the Win98 shutdown supplement installed, a solution was to use the Matrox Powerdesk Uninstaller to be sure you don't have any old driver files floating around and then to …

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Re: FX5200 vs 9800

Posted on 2014-03-31, 18:35

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

5200 became the ubiquitous cheapo video card for motherboards without onboard video. Those 64bit 5200s that are useless for 3D still make a perfectly adequate GUI and DVD accelerator for XP. I think the DVI is slightly lower spec though as it has problems at around 1680x1050 IIRC. That's not …

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Re: FX5200 vs 9800

Posted on 2014-03-31, 04:41

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I agree that the FX series is a great choice for D3D 7 and various OpenGL games of the time. Particularly OpenGL, since some games used NVIDIA proprietary extensions (see Bioware). You also get fog table and palettized texture support for old D3D5 games. When games start pushing a lot of pixel …

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Re: FX5200 vs 9800

Posted on 2014-03-30, 19:51

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Halo is D3D 7-9. It requires 9 to run all of the effects but has D3D 8.1, 8.0 and 7 fallback modes. Xbox is somewhat more flexible than D3D 8.1. UT2003/2004 are mostly D3D 7. If D3D 8 hardware is present they use pixel shaders on the terrain rendering for a small efficiency gain, I believe.

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Re: Good board for P3 866 w/ ISA and ideally AGP?

Posted on 2014-03-28, 18:07

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Tualatin can be used on boards with ISA slots. That is extremely uncommon for 478. With a Slot 1 setup one can also swap a Tualatin Celeron 1400 on a Slotket for a PII 233 in about a minute. Some PII CPUs can run down to 133 MHz. Disable caches and you have a 386. A very flexible setup.

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Re: Joyticks options for Tie Fighter, Wing Commander...

Posted on 2014-03-27, 22:02

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by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

I have a Flightstick and Flightstick Pro too. Used them for '90s space games. However, I've actually found that I like dual stick gamepads for these games. You get great control with two separate sticks instead of having to press and hold a button to roll and such. Plus they tend to have many more …

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Re: Sharing my benchmark results on a AMD k6-2 with various AGP cards

Posted on 2014-03-27, 21:14

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

LunarG wrote: I think that's the norm for Matrox cards. They need a lot of CPU power to come to their full potential. They are a little less efficient yes, but if you compare cards on a P3 500 or so the GPU chart will look right. With the K6-2 the results are entirely CPU bound.

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Re: Sharing my benchmark results on a AMD k6-2 with various AGP cards

Posted on 2014-03-27, 20:33

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

gerwin wrote: I found using "MOHAA.exe" (Medal of Honour - Allied Assault) works well for Call of Duty 1 on XP. One has to remember these things... Or just buy a NVIDIA card. I run a 560 Ti and a 6950 and really you want NVIDIA if you're gonna play any OpenGL game (old or new).

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Re: vista 64 not so bad?

Posted on 2014-03-27, 20:23

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by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

Vista SP2 is fine. It's still on several machines at my work. Recent hardware runs it a lot better than what it usually shipped on in 2007. Vista's Explorer actually has some nice advantages over Windows 7 and 8... MS removed some features.

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Re: Sharing my benchmark results on a AMD k6-2 with various AGP cards

Posted on 2014-03-27, 20:12

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

G400 Max is faster than Voodoo3 3500 and TNT2 Ultra with enough CPU behind it (say a P3 600). It's entertaining to see Voodoo2 beating it. Good work, AMD K6-2. if you use r_primitives 2. I've discovered recently that Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is running slow on my Radeon HD 5770 without this …

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Re: ISA sound card with windows games

Posted on 2014-03-27, 19:54

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How well would an ISA sound card work with later windows games? I'm having trouble with my PCI sound card running doom and dark forces which are dos games. If I got an ISA card, say an AWE64, would it work well with my newer games like mech warrior 2? I would like one card that does both dos and …

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Re: Matrox Parnella?

Posted on 2014-03-22, 20:54

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Parhelia isn't dissipating that much power. Note that it doesn't need auxiliary power. It's just that the super cheap heatsink they used has minimal surface area. The heatsink isn't much bigger than that on a G400 Max but the fan must be running around 6000 RPM. I have a few Chinese knockoffs of the …

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Re: Matrox Parnella?

Posted on 2014-03-22, 19:26

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

LunarG wrote: rodimus80 - Is your card unbearably loud? Mine is extremely whiny, so much so, that I'm going to have to custom build quiet cooling for it. My Parhelia is. It's not uncommon for video cards from that time though.

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Re: FX5200 vs 9800

Posted on 2014-03-22, 19:09

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

But the 6800s support pixel shader 3.0, x800 only supports PS 2.0b max. NV4x has very poor shader model 3 performance. G7x is a little better but still weak. SM3 wasn't heavily used until these cards were obsolete anyway. NV3x actually has more shader model 2 flexibility than R4x0. Compare PS2.0a …

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Re: FX5200 vs 9800

Posted on 2014-03-22, 19:08

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by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Unknown_K wrote: 5200 is a budget office card. Eh the somewhat uncommon 5200 Ultra is not entirely useless.

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Re: Hardware mixed module player for Windows?

Posted on 2014-03-18, 21:47

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by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

Doing it in software is the approach you want for the most flexibility and quality. I don't know of any players that tried to use DirectSound or OpenAL for the actual rendering of the songs.

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