Anthology of Interest

WINE is not an emulator. It actually loads and executes native windows code. So things should execute at about the same speed as they do on windows. And indeed they seem to.

In an absurd quest to get GTA III to work, I've been mucking with wine again.

1. Use cabextract to get some critical dll's from BASE4.CAB on a win98 CD.
2. Configure wine with winesetup
3. Copy dlls into ~/.wine/c_drive/window/system32
4. Groan in frustration about stupid install shield error.
5. Attempt to install some registry defaults so OLE actually works.
6. Install GTA III????
7. Play???

Well!!! The Neverwinter Nights demo is currently installing, so this gives me high hopes for GTA!!

Update:

Got GTA to work. Had to create a "My Documents" directory for save games, but everything seems good. Runs great at 640x480, going to try higher resolutions...

Although we have UT2003 working on Linux ages ago, in the form of a Gentoo LiveCD, I just got the demo working on my own Linux box. This may have been a mistake, because I think I've spent about 3 hours playing it tonight, when I should have been working on other stuff. Oh well.

I've been playing bomber run, which is lots of fun. I can beat the default bots pretty easilly now, so I guess I'll have to bump up the intellegence a bit and see what happens. It would be nice to play online too, but the demo doesn't see to work. Perhaps it's my firewall. When we played at the university last year it worked fine.

I got half life working again too. The OpenGL rendering messes with some of the textures, but it turns out that my machine is more than fast enough to play it at 1024x768 with software rendering.

So in short, this new mobo is pretty sweet. If I could play GTA III in Linux, I would be very happy. I don't think I even have enough HD space to install in though. According to transgaming, it works, so maybe I should give it a shot.

We got almost all of our thankyou notes from our wedding done in September. But of course we procrastinated until the last minute to get the last few done. We finally put the whole lot in the mailbox on Thursday. Yay!

Dave and Brenda gave us a waffle maker as a wedding present. We've used it a few times, and today we took a picture to show how much we like it!

New mobo arrived today, shortly after I left for work. I had stuff to do at work, and judging by how long it took me to get everything running nicely, I would have stayed at home all day.

The only troubles I had were with getting the mobo to use my 1800+, and the fact that the power supply was missing the 12V leads. Older ATX motherboards don't need those I guess. I put Nibbler's Athlon 1 GHz and power supply in, and it worked fine. A bios update fixed it, and now the 1800+ works just dandy.

Had to read the manual to figure out how to get dual channel DDR to work, but it works, so w00t! The TV output is recognized by nvtv, a program for dealing with nVidia TV outputs in Linux. I can't find my long ass RCA cable though, so I don't know if it actually works very well or not. Now, to toy with the overclocking features...

Much to my annoyance, my motherboard recently started acting up. My computer was locking up every so often, especially when under heavy IO load, such as playing sound or video, or moving big files around. I first suspected the hard drive. Ryan had the same motherboard, which we both bought at about the same time, and had the same problem. He recommended replacing the motherboard immediatly and not even turning the machine on, due to data loss concerns. I didn't loose any data, but was able to use my machine for a few more weeks, as long as I didn't play music/video.

The lockups have been getting more frequent though, so I finally ordered a new motherboard from NCIX. It shipped friday and is sitting in a warehouse somewhere, but it should be here tomorrow. In the mean time, I've swapped my disks into another machine which wasn't seeing much use, and am back up and running. I took the motherboard out, and found that some of the capacitors were bulging and spitting electrolyte out the top (click the image above for a closeup). This is likely the problem. Tamara's power supply suffered from bad caps recently as well. Must have been cheap caps with the pirated electrolyte formula that was talked about last year. Grrr.

The machine and mobo I'm using now is actually older and slower (by about 500 MHz) than the one that failed, but feels faster. Hopefully the CPU and memory weren't damaged by the decaying caps...