Something Random

[Mercutio]

Bethesda has always been the Fallout-Ruining Bugfest Nightmare Reason to Hate All Gamepads and Consoles to me but Nadia has spent about 6% of her entire waking life in Bethesda games. She actually pointed out that she has even more time than her Xbox numbers since she also played on her dad's Steam and Xbox accounts and on Nintendo Switch.

For what it's worth, I also hate Blizzard ("We copy Games Designer's Workshop products, but poorly!"), Valve and any company that thinks I need another specialized launcher to play single player games. At least GoG makes their bullshit optional. Oh wait. I also hate Nintendo. Fuck Nintendo, whose best device has all the CPU horsepower of the best SoC nVidia had available in 2014, yet won't make their bullshit legally available for anything that doesn't have their logo on it. And also the company that has displayed genuine innovation in actively making gamepads even worse than all the other pieces of shit that make gamepads. It's basically like winning the award for molesting the most children. Definitely not a contest anyone should be trying to win.

Basically all of Gaming sucks unless it's a Baldur's Gate game or something Microprose made in 1995. I'm just enjoying the fact that my partner is actually agreeing with me about that for once.

 

[LunarMist]

Yeah, Bethesda as we knew and loved them is dead.

I've not been there in many years, but it was a nice area though expensive.

 

[Mercutio]

The video game ruining assholes of that name do their video game ruining in that very place. I am in fact sure that this is the process by which Bethesda makes games, only very slowly and with some kind of extra metrics awarding the most bugs and/or child molestations.

For what it's worth, I love the DC area. My father would go through stretches when he had obligations there when he was in the Navy. My family spent some summers around Richmond.

 

[sedrosken]

Merc, I will say that I don't have the virulent hatred that you do. I think it's that I'm just too young to really remember these studios back when they weren't primarily motivated by being able to sell 2387432194873209847 copies on launch day simply because there wasn't that many people in the market full-stop. I do more or less share your opinions but on a relatively recent scale and for different reasons.

Blizzard have been chasing the dollar since they got their first taste of WoW subscriptions and I honestly think they wanted to make Diablo a subscription game as well back with Diablo III with how monotonous it is. I loved Diablo and Diablo II, and they completely shat on the people who made their company what it is with that hunk of garbage. Bethesda hasn't learned how to use a different engine for their mainline products in over twenty years now, though I will say it's ironic that they handle id properties better than their own. The last time it was acceptable to use a NetImmerse derivative would have probably been 2008, maybe 2010. That their corporate culture is toxic isn't especially surprising to me, though it is a special sort of sickening. Activision would have you pay 60 dollars for a COD game that came out 10 years ago, so they suck too.

Valve I won't say that I flat-out hate simply because they've come closer to make gaming on Linux a reasonable proposition than anyone else with their refinement and packaging of WINE and DXVK, but Steam is a far cry from perfect, that's for sure. Their recent pivot to leveraging a steamwebhelper task to do everything is ridiculous and annoying and makes it a gigantic hog on anything made before ~2018, not to even get into how much of a security nightmare it is. All it should be doing is downloading games, showing a list of games associated with my account, and launching games. Handling the DRM if it needs to, which frankly needs to be a lot more rare than it is presently. I will however say their curious aversion to the number three and making their own games anymore is interesting. I guess the sirens call of being a middleman and making money for essentially nothing was too delicious to ignore. The Steam Deck is a neat piece of hardware but it's vastly overpriced even if it's single-handedly driving adoption of Linux gaming.

GoG also frustrates me because it has to be easy to just distribute an ISO for the original release of a game, though for some I'm sure there are legal problems. I don't mind having the repackaged game for modern systems, but give me a copy of the original for the platform it was meant to be on, too! The patches often literally make the games impossible to run on their original platform by dragging and dropping, though DOS games usually come out unscathed given their judicious use of DOSBox. I find the new icons really tacky and I think they should be optional in the installer, meaning you use the originals if you opt-out. Which I would. Every time.

Nintendo would likely have a lot fewer people calling for their heads if they stopped trying to make emulation illegal except for when they do it. They'd have to make money hand over fist if they, you know, sold ROMs on their website and let you run them in an emulator of your choosing. Figure out a way to authenticate which ROMs you own, if you must, but this current bullshit of buying a game in Virtual Console one generation, being completely unable to transfer the same game to a newer generation console, and then being copyright claimed for uploading gameplay footage and giving Nintendo free advertising needs to stop.

I'm not a fan of their hardware, and I'm even less of a fan of how they turn around and make money hand over fist for hardware that was current about ten years ago, no price drops at all (do you remember when the Game Boy was, like, 50 bucks? New?) but nothing holds a candle to how pissed I am about having replaced the left analog in my Switch Lite that I bought three years ago for one game, three times. I already loathed them but I was willing to give them one more chance since my sister had a game she wanted to play with me on there. I had maybe 20 hours total in the game and all of a sudden after 5 hours in it was stick drifting back when Nintendo was refusing to acknowledge that was a problem. If I'd had a normal Switch I'd have docked, bought a Pro Controller, and live and let live, but they in their infinite wisdom refused to allow the lites to dock. So after opening the console and replacing the stick three times in as many months, with the final time serving as the death knell for one of the speakers, I abandoned the platform. I would still rather pirate a game of theirs and run it in Yuzu than ever hand them another red cent.

I don't think their controllers pre-Wii U were even all that bad -- built Tonka tough if the amount of people putting Wiimotes through their televisions was high enough that they had to provide straps. The GameCube controller was ergonomic and interesting in a way that nothing else has managed to touch since. The Nintendo 64 is a creaky plastic nightmare but it was the first consumer console to give you an analog stick so one could say they were trying. The SNES controller is considered the pinnacle of 2D console designs for a reason.

 

[sedrosken]

Well, the Athlon XP build has kind of evolved into its final form: I found a reasonably-priced example of the Geode NX 1750, or in other words, a heavily, heavily binned Thoroughbred AXP nominally clocked at 1400MHz at 1.25v for a TDP of 14W. It came from Germany and arrived quite a bit before it said it would, ten or so days early actually.

This build has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I actually thought you guys might have been right to trash ECS at first, when I was fighting some wicked instability -- it wouldn't even boot into Windows XP setup half the time, much less complete a memtest run. But I thought about it, and the last rig I put together with that power supply also had issues... That was powering my Katmai PIII build, actually, and I had strange instability problems there too. But I couldn't figure out what the problem was... voltage rails looked fine, but like clockwork the ECS board would be fine on the test bench (with a different supply, natch) and fail when mounted in the case.

This is the first time I've ever had a Seasonic power supply fail on me, I guess, and it's the most modern part of the build, being a mid-2010 SS-350ET. The limits of this build are actually shaped around that power supply, a newer one with lower current ratings on the +5v rail, so if I wanted, I could actually swap in a much more powerful CPU now. But I find the whole "performance per watt" angle of this build to be very interesting, so now I'm massively underutilizing an era-appropriate 350W Antec unit with much, much more juice on +5v and even some on -5v, which I'm told for an ATX supply is practically unheard of since no one implements it and even less runs on it anymore.

This board is a little strange, but it's got the spirit. Not much in the way of overclocking options other than forcing a front-side bus frequency, even with a third-party modded BIOS flashed that unlocked more options than just 100/100 and 133/133. Said modded BIOS also let me cinch down the timings on my RAM, which is helpful since it's 400MHz RAM that can run very tight timings at 266. No voltage selection, no multiplier forcing. Trying to use the software control with CrystalCPUID is funny -- it can clock down, but not up. Insert sad music bite here. It does indeed only take up to 1GB of RAM -- using 1GB modules shows as 1GB total and it fails a memtest run. An interesting limit, but XP does fine on a gig of RAM, so whatever.

I actually have much more granular control over my FSB frequency in software, since SetFSB does support the clock generator my board's using, but I find the 143/143 setting in the BIOS to perform better while still being rock-stable. This overclocks the CPU by about 7% to ~1500MHz, which is fine, since every single mobile CPU gets overvolted on this board. The 1.4/1.45v chips all get 1.6 which is notably less than stock for the desktop parts, so it's not just feeding it desktop voltage. The 1.25v chip I'm using now gets 1.44. It's strange. It also thinks the Geode is another mobile Athlon XP, which, it essentially is, but at stock it completely mangles the PR rating, while overclocked it signs on as an 1800+. For a frightening moment after a BIOS reset, it thought it was a mobile Athlon 4, because it was clocked at 100/100 for safety and the CPU was at 1050MHz at that frequency.

My Ti4200, thanks to my cooling mods (big 120mm fan bracket in front, copper heatsinks on the VRAM), takes Ti4400 clocks and asks for more, though the CPU can't really feed it -- even the mobile 2200+ I was using at first bottlenecks this card, even when overclocked to 150/150 for ~2GHz. I vastly underestimated the Ti4200, but I'm not about to build an Athlon 64 rig just for it -- this'll do fine. It spanks Tualatin and costs less than half as much as it would have, so as far as I'm concerned the build does its job.