Entries Tagged 'Gaming' ↓

Well, I don’t know about that, but they’re definitely good ones from my youth.

I guess I’ll mention my favories from the days of the Sony Playstation (the “One,” or original), since those days are freshest in my mind.

The Sony Playstation Years

Image via Wikipedia

First would have to be the Gran Turismo series.  There’s so much to say about it.  My brother and sister and I played this game almost religiously.  My current lifelong infatuation with cars is largely because of it.

And to think, we only grew fond of the game because of that little sample disc of mini-games that you got for free from Sony when you bought your Playstation — you know the one I’m talking about;  it had mini-levels of:

• Wipeout (a game I loved but have never, ever, played again for inexplicable reasons)
• Spider (a game that was crazily fun and that we finally bought nearly 10 years later off of Ebay)
• And Gran Turismo, of course.

Continue reading →

If you’ve got a sec, check out my little accordian-type interface for the shit to the right — took me a freakin’ day to code that crap, so you better have fun with it!

Once you load the Moblog object, it gets kind of screwy, but I’m working on it.

In other news, I’m installing WoW on my gaming PC as I speak! I finally got it up and running, thanks to the honest-to-goodness 256 MB Low-Density SDRAM chip that I got from “StarMicro.net”:http://starmicro.net — in case your wondering what the hell that is (and you probably are), it’s a special type of RAM that’s not even made any more that’s required if you want to use larger chips (such as 256 MB ones) in a select few older motherboards (like the one I’m currently building with). They’re hard as hell to track down, and when you do, they’re usually found with sky-high prices, so I really, really lucked out when I found this one for only $22.

Although, I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting the system running stable at anything above a 100 Mhz FSB (the “FSB” is the “highway” that all your little computer bips and bops on the motherboard communicate to each other with). My brother, “Thomas the Mighty”:http://gardens.tmanime.com, had success running this motherboard as high as 124 Mhz, so I’m still at a loss as to what I’m doing wrong… but, there’s lots of variables that are different in my case: different RAM, different CPU, different GPU, you name it.

Well, even with its Tualatin CPU running at 1300 Mhz, it’s still a bit faster than my laptop, so off I go to play!

Just a little something I found whilst perusing some parts sites…

Asus A8S-X Socket 939 Barebone Kit / AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 OEM / CPU Fan / ATX Mid-Tower Case / 500 Watt Power Supply

All that for $399! I haven’t taken the prices apart and seen just how good a deal it is, but at first glance it seems amazing. That chip alone is worth almost $400. All you’d need is your own memory and hard drive (and video card), and you’d be set — but then you’ve probably already got those things lying around in other computers, like me, right?!

This definitely isn’t for someone who’s making their first computer — it doesn’t have half the shit you need to start out with, so unless you like to tinker with computers like me, don’t bother buying it.

So, what’s been going on in my life, eh?

Well, I’ve been working on this site a little, and programming at work a lot.

I’ve gotten all my tax information, and am currently trying to find every single deduction I can so that I don’t owe Uncle Sam a damn cent.

I’m still trying to put myself together a gaming PC so that I can wipe my hard drive on my laptop and start running “Ubuntu”:http://www.ubuntu.com on it (since I only have windows on it anymore because of gaming).

I’m shooting for a system running a Tualatin Celeron running at about 1600mhz (overclocked quite a bit) and _at least_ 512 MB of RAM. That’s bare minimum RAM to run “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com, thought I’m hoping because it’s a desktop system it’ll be passable — PC133 and PC100 RAM is getting kinda pricey these days, because it’s almost descended into that dreaded computer world of _obsoleteness_…

This, combined with my trusty old ATI 9200 SE (X!) that I’ve custom tuned to run some 60% overclocked above normal, should be enough. “WoW”:http://worldofwarcraft.com is made so that it doesn’t require the latest graphics hardware to run (a genius marketing move on the side of the company), and it’ll be a damn
sight faster than the GeForce 2 Go chip that’s in my laptop (which just so happens to be the _very_ lowest chip that’s compatible with the game!).

I should have it running by next weekend, at least. Wish me luck!

Well, I’m helping out a friend of mine by setting up a new hard drive in his computer (a “Seagate Barracuda 250-GB”:http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/desktops/barracuda_hard_drives/barracuda_7200.10), and I just got it in today. I do jobs like this for friends and family, free of charge — it’s kind of a hobby. I also help fix cars and provide free legal advice.
Well, my friend’s motherboard is an oldie but a goodie — the venerable “ASUS A7V8X-X”:http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A7V8X-X for the AMD Socket A chipset. The chip I helped him pick out (nearly five years ago now!) was an Athlon XP 2600 — it’s still fast as hell today, and plays just about any game you can think of.

That knowledge in hand, I know it’s a good motherboard. So, I hook up the new drive (and a new power supply — his old ones keep burning out), and the board recognizes it immediately. Even sees that it’s a 250GB drive; that’s pretty neat, because I’m pretty sure even _the technology_ involved for this didn’t exist five years ago.

However, when I put in his Windows XP install CD (and old one without SP2), the damn thing only recognizes it as being about 137GB or so.

Well, at first I’m like, “Oh Shit — the hardware’s not compatible.” (I usually think of the worst things first — a small character flaw.) I go to the Seagate site on this drive, thinking that this must be a pretty common problem (incorrect initial hard drive sizes usually are). Of course, it is, and I find a handy dandy little “help topic page”:http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=127_GB_-_137_GB_Limitation&vgnextoid=186b5b1142aec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD about it.

It says that your motherboard needs to support “48 bit LBA addressing,” and of course I’m thinking, _OH NOES, we’re not even going to be able to use this new drive to its full potentional_.

But then I remember that the motherboard’s BIOS was able to see the 250GB limit, and the answer was clear — it wasn’t the board, it was just a limitation in this version of Windows XP (the first of many, as you know). I downloaded Seagate’s DiskWizard’s starter ISO, burned a CD of it, and formatted the drive.

The good point of using the special burning software from the company like this — it actually lets you format your partitions in FAT32, instead of just NTSF!

(By the way, as I’m writing this, it’s just completed a full installation of Windows XP in only 7 minutes — damn, this drive is _fast_ as well as big!)

Unfortunately, the added case fans I got for my friend can’t go in his case (he’s been having a bit of heat problem in his case) — there’s only one extra fan connector on the “ASUS A7V8X-X”:http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=A7V8X-X, and I’ve already got an additional exhaust fan at the back of the case taking it up. Luckily, the CPU fan upgrade I got _did_ fit, however the old screws aren’t big enough and it didn’t come with any new ones! Arghh!

Either way, it’s now got a super big drive, _and_ it’s running cooler. Plus, the new parts are able to be carried over to his new system whenever he upgrades. I say it’s been a success.