Computer Necromancy

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 7, 2012

My desktop system died, quite suddenly early Monday morning. Bummer.

After a few repairs and a new Windows install (on a new hard drive), I’m now back in business. Fortunately, nothing was lost on the game development front (I had backups even if my data drive had died – which it hadn’t – so there wasn’t undo concern, though I did get a little bit of panic trying to remember where all my backups of the Frayed Knights 1 source data could be found…) — except time. I’m still getting back to speed, reinstalling tools – in some cases, getting back up to speed on new versions that I hadn’t upgraded in a couple of years. And then there’s trying to remember all my passwords on various sites which are no longer cached.

So it has been a nuisance of a delay, but not terribly so.

And I’ve taken the opportunity to give my old system a little bit of an upgrade. A new hard drive and a new video card. Woot! Borderlands 2 runs better than ever. Hopefully it’ll prove less flaky – I was getting a lot of crashes before (though I don’t *think* this was related to the system dying).

One thing that amuses me is that I now have about 3 terrabytes of hard drive storage (between two drives). In the late 1980s, my mother landed a multimillion dollar contract as a salesperson delivering this kind of storage to a government agency (no, it wasn’t to the CIA – that we know of). This still boggles my mind. As a guy who started out on a one-kilobyte system where it was faster to re-type a program in by hand than to take the time trying to save it and reload it on tape, there’s still a tiny bit of the twelve-year-old in me who marvels at what we can do now. Of course, he’s still saying things like “WOW, you could have a REALLY HUGE TEXT ADVENTURE with that much memory! Why haven’t you done that yet?”

Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 12 Comments to Read

Califer said,

A 3TB text adventure? O.o
TW said,

Just curious – what else is in your desktop, specs-wise?
Rampant Coyote said,

It’s an older system – dual-core Intel CPU. Only 2 or 3 gig of RAM, though that might be the next thing to be upgraded. And now, an NVidia 570 GTX card.
Albert1 said,

The title of this post deserves accolade in its own right.
Greg Squire said,

Sorry to hear about the crash, but glad to hear your hard work is still intact. A good reminder about doing backups. Do you just backup to a local hard drive or do you do backups to the cloud or a remote server as well? I only have backups to a local external drive, but I keep getting that nagging feeling to do some offsite backups too (in case of fire, flood, ufo crash, etc.)
Albert1 said,

@Greg Squire: ufo crash… don’t be silly: resistance is futile! 😉
Rampant Coyote said,

I had the FK2 stuff backed up – well, the code and current data, not source media – off-site. FK1 backups are all currently on-site, so that’s in danger should my house burn down.
Acrin1 said,

I spent a long time looking at getting a low profile graphics card upgrade for a 5/6 year old PC for my son and went for a Radeon HD 6670. Games likes the Old Republic (which he was playing at the time), Shogan Total War and Fallout 3 were totally transformed – he seems to be able to play just about anything these days.

With all the resources, languages, game systems and information we have now it’s sometimes hard to look back and re-capture some of that 12 year old’s vision and enthusiasm – as you say saving your code was sometimes a challenge in itserlf – simpler times.
Maklak said,

In my experience the graphic card doesn’t matter much. The amount of RAM is what extends the life of a computer the most. In 2010 I bought 1 GB of RAM for my old Pentium 4 from 2003 and it was quite usable for a while longer. In summer 2012 I finally upgraded it to Sandy Bridge G540 with 8 GB RAM. It costed me less than 300$ for all the parts and it is somewhat faster than my Core 2 Duo machine. One downside to my new computer is that compared to Gnome 2, Cinnamon is a byatch who likes bananas.
Albert1 said,

@Maklak: What you write is quite interesting – sometimes I happen to wonder whether GPUs, these days, aren’t really “decelerators”, as they were called in the first days of 3D accelerators. I often think about doing rendering entirely on CPU cores.
Maklak said,

Maybe I should write something longer and post it on the forum, then. Anyway, the old Pentium 4 computer had a 200$ Radeon 9700 Pro (R300) which was an overkill for its time and lasted for the entire life of that machine. It had 512 MB RAM, which used to be a lot, but eventually turned out to not be enough, weather for Windows XP or Linux Mint 9. With 1 GB the web browser could have many tabs open, though that still wasn’t enough for using GIMP and browser at the same time. It also helped that the R300 GPU drivers had Open CL which accelerated Opera 12 very nicely.

My Core 2 Duo was bought in 2008 with 2 GB RAM and a 120$ Geforce 8600. The memory was sufficient for years and games were quite playable on it. BTW, from my perspective the best thing about gaming consoles is that they seldom update their hardware and thus hold back the graphics on PCs, so that older computers are good for longer. I upgraded the RAM to 4 GB there and the CPU to a better Core 2 Duo, but that wasn’t a good decision, given the costs. I considered replacing the graphics card with either Geforce GTS 450 or Radeon 6600 or 6700, but didn’t so far.

My Sandy Bridge computer was meant as a replacement for Pentium 4 and I didn’t want to spend too much money on it. I bought a cheap chassis (which was a bad decision; for just a bit more I could have got a much better one), reused a power supply and a hard drive and bought these parts:
* G540 Celeron CPU, a cheap dual-core with integrated graphics, meant to be replaced eventually with i7 3770K.
* 8 GB RAM, very similar to what I have in yet another computer. It in only 1333 MHz and meant to be replaced eventually, thus giving a “free” upgrade to that other computer.
* MSI Z77A-G43 mainboard. It is rather good for its price and supports Ivy Bridge, overclocking, SATA 3, USB 3 and PCIe 3
I didn’t get a graphics card, though I may, eventually. For the time being I get by with the integrated one. Besides, Intel’s drivers are considered to be quite OK, despite the lack on OpenGL 4 and OpenCL support.
I went for Linux Mint 13 OS for several reasons. Mostly that it is free and usable and I dislike Windows 7 UI. It has some downsides, of course, mostly that some programs and games don’t work and I may end up setting a Windows virtual machine on it.
Albert1 said,

I really miss the access to hardware you had on old PCs:

unsigned char far *screen_buffer = 0x0A0000000L;

__asm {
mov ax, 0x13
int 0x10
}

Ah, nostalgia.