February 28, 2008

I've had my Mac Pro for nearly a year now. What a great workstation, chock full of 3GHz Xeon goodness -- four cores worth. It's run Mac OS X exclusively, with the exception of brief forays into old school OPENSTEP goodness via Parallels. I had never installed Windows under Parallels or Boot Camp as I never had the particular desire to shell out several hundred dollars for a Microsoft operating system for which I had no need. But, as I've been doing lots of console gaming of late, I've kept my eye on the gaming scene in general and confess that the phenomenal looking Crysis for Windows caught my attention. Crysis demands more from the host hardware than likely any game ever made, and it occurred to me that my quad Xeon box with its ATI X1900 XT could probably deliver a half-decent Crysis experience, even if the high-end graphics card is getting a little old to be on the absolute bleeding edge of gaming. When I found from my employer that I qualified for a license to install XP Pro at home, I decided to Boot Camp my Mac Pro.

The setup experience was not a horribly smooth one.

My first step was to swap a larger Seagate (500GB) into one of the Mac Pro's drive bays. I then began the Boot Camp process, allocating 100GB of that disc to Windows. Partway through the install, I was faced with the first Blue Screen of Death my trusty Mac Pro had ever been forced to share with me.

Oy. A little googling revealed that installing Windows XP via Boot Camp requires the use of an install disc containing Windows XP SP2. Likely the disc I had been given was an earlier version. What to do?

I found that I could generate an SP2 install disc from what I had been given by way of a process known as "slipstreaming." It requires that one have a Windows PC on hand (which I do) and involves copying the contents of the XP install CD to a directory, downloading the Windows XP SP2 update installer to that PC, merging the contents of the installer with the XP install files, and writing out a bootable Windows XP install CD that contains Windows XP SP2. I found a solid guide which helped me along. (How it pains me to admit that I found anything generated by Paul Thurrott to be helpful to me -- what an asshat that guy is.) I was glad to find that Nero Burning ROM v8 (at the time of this writing) has a time-limited trial download available.

With the new disc in hand the install was a breeze. I got XP SP2 up and running, installed Apple's Mac Pro XP drivers, grabbed the latest version of DirectX 9, installed Crysis and I was all set. And what a great looking game it is. I've not had but so much time to fiddle with various setup configs, but it seems that I can run the game with most settings on "HIGH" at a resolution of 1280x800 for a nice, smooth game session on my 30-inch ACD. I look forward to spending more time playing Crysis and tweaking its config for optimum visuals / performance. [ UPDATE: I found an excellent guide to tweaking out the Crysis config files to achieve the visuals / performance sweet spot. ]

Now if I could only figure out how to get XP and the ATI video drivers to properly rotate the image on my secondary, portrait display....

February 17, 2008

Any regular readers here know that I've owned a lot of machines in my time. It was 1993 when I called an Amiga 1200 my main machine and when JPEG images started appearing on BBSs across the land. You know, JPEGs. They're the most commonly used image format on the net, but at one time they were a new curiosity.

JPEGs were fun on the Amiga because they support "true color" -- 24 bits per pixel of it (16.7 million colors in all) and the Amiga 1200 supports a near-true color mode with it's HAM8 graphics mode. I recall downloading, with much excitement, various JPEG images I would find on BBS's here and there for viewing as a means to "show off" what the Amiga 1200 could do. These images were scarce, and every one I downloaded I uploaded to the local Amiga BBS, known as "The Board" (Hampton, VA area). I was trying to make The Board a repository for these great, new sort of images. JPEGs were so rare, it seemed a noble effort. (Some names I recall from The Board: Myron Sothcott (sysop), Pat Birkmeyer, Norm Goswick -- all part of our local Amiga user group at the time, A.L.F.A. or Amigoid Life Form Association. And yes, I hope Google brings them here and inspires a comment or two; I've not heard form these folks in 15 years.)

The JPEG viewers I had for my Amiga 1200 would render the images in HAM8 mode at 640x480 pixels. Back then was a pretty high resolution. I recall it took about two minutes to fully render the JPEG to the screen using its 14.3MHz Motorola 68EC020 processor. That's pretty amazing when you consider that modern machines can decode a JPEG in about the same time it takes to decode an uncompressed .BMP or .TIFF image -- that is: instantly.

Did my efforts help make JPEG a standard in today's web world? Unlikely. But standard it is, and it's interesting to recall a time when it was so strange and new a thing.

The Board is long gone now, but my computer room again contains an Amiga 1200 and an Amiga 2000, and the latter has a 56Kbps modem attached to its ASDG Zorro II dual serial board. Just to help me search for a modern-day BBS even remotely resembling The Board. An unlikely find, I must say. One can always hope, however....

::: Digg this story! :::

February 13, 2008

Back in '03 I grabbed an SGI O2 system on eBay. I always wanted an SGI to play with (used them in the lab back in college for a bit) and it seemed the O2 was the best bang for the buck. To go with it I grabbed an almost-new SGI 1600SW widescreen, flat-panel display. 17.3-inches diagonal, 1600x1024 native resolution at 110dpi and an industrial design that's won awards. [ Informative PDF here. ] A lovely display. The thing is, I really don't use the O2 very often -- glad to have it, but it sits idle most of the time. But that screen. What a screen....

The best and most versatile is the SGI Multilink, an external box -- but it's costly. $400 on eBay is not an uncommon thing to see. As such, I've gone with a cheaper alternative: the GFX-1600SW Multilink adapter alternative. It sits in a PCI slot (it just draws power -- it's not a graphics card) and converts a DVI signal to LVDS. Sadly, it doesn't do much in the way of scaling non-native resolutions, but it was much cheaper than the SGI Multitlink.

In searching for information about the GFX-1600SW, I ran across a link that was 404-ing, but a trip to archive.org revealed the page. As it seemed helpful to folks trying to make modern use of the 1600SW, I've captured it and placed a copy here, on this site. Have a look. I tip my hat to 'Orion,' who created the page.

Wish me luck in this endeavor. The adapter is in the mail -- I'll let you know how things turn out.

February 5, 2008

Peter Hirschberg is my new hero. This retro game-craving lunatic / genius has placed upon this earth a 60'x40' patch of pure, unadulterated heaven. To the unwitting passer-by, this magical space may appear to be nothing more than a sizable garage, but what is contained within is almost too wonderful to be believed. I am referring to the Luna City Arcade. It is without doubt the most splendid arcade ever to have existed in this world, for within lie 57 classic arcade cabinets - from Asteroids to Zaxxon - all lovingly restored to shining perfection by Peter himself. A herculean effort, as nearly all of them came to him non-functional and in downright "disgusting" condition. (Peter's personal fav's are Discs of Tron, Tail Gunner, Space War and Lunar Lander.)

See the full gallery, walk-through video and interview over at Gizmodo. And Peter...I bow down to thee.