So, this weekend's MUFH is yours truly.
Yes, indeed the computer geeks (cough, cough) can be morons in their own right - and this weekend,
well and truly, am I annoyed with myself.
I like playing computer games, I just don't very often. Many moons ago my grandfather bought a new
PC and, strangely enough, the computer shop that sold it to him had installed a whole heap of pirated
games - such as Sim City and Wolfenstein 3D.
I had never seen any game like Wolfenstein before. I was absolutely amazed, gobsmacked if you will,
and was addicted completely.
For those of you out there who don't play computer games, Wolfenstein 3D was really the beginning of
the entire 'First Person Shooter' genre - a computer game where you wandered through a 3 dimensional
world laid out as if you were really in the game, able to look around, and explore. The object of
the game was to kill the Nazi's and escape from Castle Wolfenstein. iD software, who created Wolfenstein 3D,
later continued and expanded the FPS arena with the Dooms and Quakes. After many years of them being
arguably the finest producer of FPS games, they decided to return to their roots with their absolute
classic game, Wolfenstein, and rework it to take advantage of todays incredibly sophisticated and powerful
game engines (An expanded Quake3 engine, as the case is) to make it even more realistic and exciting.
This is where I come in.
My primary computer is a 366mHz K6 machine running Linux with a Mach64 PCI video card. Playing a game
like Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW) is out of the question. My wifes computer, however, is something
I put together that had more guts, although by todays standards it's already long in the tooth - my
own PC is simply vintage.
Winbox has a 1GHz Athlon with a highly embedded PC Chips mainboard covered with an SiS chipset, carrying
an "onboard AGP 3D accelerated video card". SiS onboard video card? RtCW? Yeah, right.
A friend gave me a 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 AGP graphics card with 32MB onboard - a guaranteed winner, not
as fast as what is available these days - but certainly capable.
Here begins the saga of making this computer work with the Voodoo4 card.
To begin with, installing the card was painful. The processor heatsink is a giant Zalman flower, which
is a copper sink with fanned out fins. The heatsink has no fan attached to it, but instead one that
is screwed down to the cardcage screwplate using a bracket, and blows over the top of the heatsink.
No problems. Except the case Winbox is in is some cheap piece of junk that tried to be clever, and
instead of having a screwplate, uses some clip-on thing. So how did I attach the required fan?
I drilled holes in the side of the case and screwed a wooden block down and mounted the fan bracket
to that. No problems.
Except, thats PRECISELY above the AGP card slot. Which means I have to take it off - a pain in my rear -
and then get it back on after the card in inserted - even MORE of a pain in my rear.
The block of wood rests on the AGP card. Disturbing, but probably not harmful.
I fire up Windows, and it goes 'Gee, look! A new video card! Allow me to start up in 640x480 in
16 colours so that everything is so freakin' huge you'll need to stand 4' away from the monitor to
navigate, and the colours are so cac-handed you'll go blind if you use me for too long!'.
3dfx no longer exists. They were bought by nVidia and scrapped, so you have to go to various driver
sites to get drivers for the cards. These sites also list "3rd Party" drivers - which are drivers
that have been modified by various individuals and groups unrelated to 3dfx, after the companies demise.
So. First you find a set of drivers that look right. You download them. You extract the zip, and
install them. Windows restarts. Windows comes up, loads the video drivers, and then the video
dies and the machine locks up. Oops. I guess these drivers don't work.
You hard reboot, get Windows into Safe Mode. Safe Mode takes FOREVER to load. You uninstall the
drivers. You reboot into Windows, Normal mode. You discover Windows, being a good Microsoft product,
is naturally convinced it's smarter than you, and reinstalls the drivers you just uninstalled, and
locks up again. You reboot, again, and put the system into Safe Mode. Wait another three days for
Safe Mode to come in. You Disable the freakin' video card and reboot into Normal mode.
You MANUALLY find the 3dfx driver DLLs and remove them.
Go back to the drivers site, find a new driver that looks more reliable, and repeat.
This whole process of testing out a new driver, finding out its sodded, and then getting it out again,
takes roughly 30 to 45 minutes. I kid you not.
I'm a patient kind of guy. I figure, one of the drivers must be good. Must be just hardware
conflicts and bad drivers. One of them will work.
One of them my butt.
After six hours, on and off, of trying and failing different drivers I give in. I know the card works,
the friend had it working in his Windows 2000 machine. I guess my PC Chips embedded SiS controlled
mainboard just sucks.
I'm upset, as you can imagine. I've already gotten a copy of RtCW. I'm desperate to play it.
And this machine just WILL NOT work. I was tearing my hair out and screaming obscenities by the
time I quit, finally.
I pull the Voodoo4 out, after my wife complains about icons so large they stick out of the screen
and scare the pets. Everything returns to normal. Life is good for a couple hours.
Then I decide to work out if the RtCW CD I have actually installs (Don't ask), so I start the
installation process. I figure, what the hey, I might as well start the game, just for grins, to
watch it complain about my sucky GL-less SiS embedded card.
I fully expect the warning message "<Ding> I'm sorry, but your onboard video is simply too crap for
this game to run. We are currently laughing at you."
But, thats not what happens. Instead, the game starts. I'll admit, its slow, jerky, and the audio
gets funny when it gets hard and rendering... but the game plays.
Suddenly, I remember that you can change the AGP apeture size - the amount of system memory that is
released to an AGP video card. The default is 8MB. I change this to 64MB, the maximum allowable by
the BIOS.
And Return to Castle Wolfenstein plays. Not only does it play, but its slick. It's smooth. The audio
is perfect. The rendering awesome.
I play.
I play for three hours straight, in the dark, with the speakers cranked up. I get chills down my spine
and leap a foot above the chair each time a shot rings out and I don't expect it to.
I guess those SiS embedded onboard AGP 3D accelerated cards don't suck so bad after all. Who knew?