Cool, thanks Brutus, I’m tempted to check it out.
Here’s what seems to be a decent review over at Tom’s Hardware
Good review, and I totally agree with the summary: Awe-inspiring technology, but not-so-great game.
Y’know, I’m glad I saw this discussion of drivers. My brother has a fairly tricked-out P4 2.2GHz system that oughtta fly through everything. Me, I got a lousy overclocked deCeleron system I built myself (managed to squeeze 1GHz out of a 800MHz chip using a cheap Mobo with no way to change core voltage), which collects dust, and a 800MHz DP Powermac G4 (Quicksilver, 2001). Against all advice, I picked up Halo for Mac. If I tone down some of the eye candy, it’s surprisingly playable. My bro, he gets Halo for PC, and it brought his system to its knees. I don’t think Halo has any MP code to take advantage of my dual G4, plus I’ve got an old and crap video card in it, so his P4 oughtta run multiple circles around my Mac without breaking a sweat. Yet it doesn’t. He can’t play me online, because a few other M.C.'s run up and he gets framerates of like 0.5 per sec.; hence we pound his flipbooking ass. There’s no explanation for it. Except maybe he needs to update drivers?
I laugh at all of you. Best game program ever: MAME. I play all the old classic games (and some not-so-old games) with absolutely perfect emulation on a four-year-old computer, and what does it cost me? Bupkis. Squat. Nothing. And I get nothing but enjoyment from it. No anger, no frustration, no disgustingly high upgrade bills. Just 128 different ways of attaining gaming bliss. And counting.
No anger? No frustration? You obviously don’t have the Elevator Action rom.
I do now. Let’s see if that does it.
Oh, and CCS64 and Virtual Colecovision as well as an original Atari 2600 (nee VCS) with a bunch of games round out my collection. The only new games I own (new being within the last ten years) are Flight Sim 2002 Pro, Age of Empires II (with the Conquerors expansion) and Age of Mythology.
I’m an old gamer at heart. Can’t you tell?
Ha! Elevator Action was my very favourite early-eighties arcade game, and that ROM has caused a fair amount of cursing.
It’ll work someday.
Hmmm…
Aside from being totally and utterly incomprehensible it wasn’t too bad. It was vaguely like Keystone Kapers for the 2600, although much less enjoyable. I made it to the bottom just fine, but I don’t exactly know what I was supposed to do because it sent me right back to the top. Did I miss something?
OK, on review, that doesn’t necessarily say quite what I wanted to convey… :smack:
“We defeat him handily due to his system’s poor framerate performance” is what I mean. So stop snickering.
Halo for the PC has a lovely little problem with anti-aliasing. I forget what the reason behind it is, something with the coding. Either way, if he downloads the latest updates and turns off AA, I’ll bet it runs just fine and he can start pounding your ass. 
Luxury.
True enough, and for that I am grateful. Another nice thing too is that the more powerful stuff gets, the cheaper it tends to get as well. When my family first got a 486 DX, it was a coupoe of thou. For the same price today I could get an unbelieveably awsome machine.
Problem is, I’m but a poor college student, and I can’t seem to stay ahead of the curve all that long once I get there. Not a problem, until you you figure in that I am hopelessly addicted to computer games :). I figure once I’m flipping burgers with my Biology Degree, I should be able to afford a pretty kick ass system.
Update: There were several things wrong with my computer. While my card drivers were up-to-date, they were downloaded from nvidia. I downloaded the same drivers from Asus. The difference is dramatic. Obviously my card needs the manufacturer drivers to work properly. Then, I downloaded Asus SmartDoctor, a little program that automatically overclocks the card when load increases. I don’t think it makes much of a difference though.
Finally, I realised that my virtual memory settings were screwed. I have split my hard drive into two partitions, C and D. I was always under the impression that Windows would automaticaly make swap files in both drives. I was wrong. It makes swap file only in the main drive. The free space in C is about 1.8GB. The swap file was using all that space. When I set Windows to use drive D as well, the size of the swap file jumped to 2.7GB :eek: My computer needed 1GB of extra swap space. How stupid of me :smack:
Now I can run Doom3 at 800x600, High Quality and everything else enabled, except AA and Shadows. I will play around with the settings until I find the optimal Graphics/Performance combination.
Amen! (Although I’m more of a console emulation person. It’s ZSNES for me baby!)
I’ll pass this info along. I honestly don’t know what all his settings are, but this sounds like a lead. Thanks!
Not a problem. If you ever need anyone to host a server, let me know… I haven’t played in a while, and I think I ran out of people that play.
And Dog80 that’s crazy, a 2.7 gig swap file. Kinda funny, in a geek sort of way, though. Cool that you have it worked out. I never played any of the other doom games, so I didn’t mind the story line like some others. It did get a bit predictable after a while, but I’m a sucker for graphics, so all was ok with me. I only had one major problem, but that means spoiling part of the game, so when you finish, we can come back to it. Enjoy!
Don’t put swap files on two different partitions if you can avoid it. (IOW, make one big swap file on D). If swap is on two different partitions, then the two swap files won’t be physically contiguous on the drive itself, and there’s a little read head inside your hard drive. So if Doom is requiring stuff from both swap files, the little read head is going to be spending a lot of time running back and forth between the two files, and that’s time it could be spending reading the data it needed in the first place.
-lv
Just an FYI: The size that Windows sets your swapfile at is just some generic figure; Something like RAM x (some number[1.5?]). I shut mine off after I put a gig of memory in, and have experienced no problems whatsoever. If you are just doing typical home-user/gamer stuff, and have a gig of RAM, give the swap file the boot.
But if you don’t feel comfortable without it:
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Pick a drive you want to put your 512mb or so swapfile on.
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Remove all existing swapfiles (select ‘no paging file’)
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Reboot
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Defrag. Yep, takes a long time.
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Create your 512mb file. Don’t let windows dick around with the size.
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Profit!
Geeks! The Board is full of geeks!
The horror! The horror!
Brutus, my old linux manual was explicitly saying that no matter how much memory you have, you still need a swap file. I don’t know if this applies to Windows though. In linux you need a whole partition dedicated as swap space. I rechecked my swap file and now it is a little more than 3 gigs. More specifically:
Minimum allowed: 2 MB
Recomended: 1533 MB
Currently Allocated: 3068 MB
I guess that Windows actually needs this space.