pmistry

If I play only 1 game this year, it would be DX: Invisible War, as for Serious Sam, Serious Sam 2 should be out next year and apparently you finally get to meet mental. I don't know why they aren't calling the game SS: The Third Encounter or Final Encounter though, but a new engine is being used to make it.

I have been fiddling around with some game demos lately, and War themed games are certainly the "thing" right now. I played Vietcong - didn't really like it much...but has nice graphics. I also finally tried Battlefield 1942, ummm no, kinda boring, seems fine for multiplayer though. I also heard that Battlefield will be getting a second mission pack/sequel as well, based around Vietnam. I played the Call of Duty demo and it was alright, but the part I was playing I didn't enjoy much, but maybe other parts are really good, I have heard good things about this title, but I am sick of WW2 stuff, been playing too much MOHAA, and its recent expansion pack...Breakthrough which kinda sucked.

Windows Server 2003 for Max Payne 2? Just use XP or 2000 or even 9X, I am sure you have these OSes.

Try 3.9 now...

I think the problems are evident if you have only "256K" of RAM. All kidding aside, download Lavasoft Ad-Aware 6 Personal and have it scan your system, fully, it will also scan your registry and eliminate all that spyware.

Are your sound drivers DX9 compatible? Check DX Diag and run the sound tests. If not you might need some codecs installed, check Windows setup to see if all Audio/Video compression are installed under Multimedia.

I fiddled with the demo, and it seemed more like a mission pack/companion to Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, rather than a whole new game, but anyone played the full version yet?

Just an update for some folks, here are more system specs that have managed to get the game running: AMD Athlon 1.333 GHz Abit KT7, VIA 4-In-1 v4.45 256 MB DDR266 Memory GeForce 3 Ti200 64 MB, Detonator 23.11, DirectX 9.0 Windows 2000 Professional SP4 40 GB Hard Disk, NTFS formatted Intel Pentium 4/800 FSB 2.4 GHz Abit IS7 1 GB Dual DDR400 Memory Radeon 8500 / 128 MB, Catalyst 3.8, DirectX 9.0 Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP4 Western Digital 80 GB 7200RPM Disk, NTFS Formatted Intel Pentium 3 - 667 MHz Abit ST6 128 MB PC100 Memory GeForce 4 MX, Detonator 45.28, DirectX 9.0 Windows 2000 Professional SP3 20 GB Disk, FAT32 Formatted AMD K6-2 300MHz DFI Socket 7 Mainboard 384 MB PC66 Memory ATI Rage Pro / 8MB, DirectX 7.0 Windows 2000 Server SP2 15 GB Disk, NTFS Formatted Plus a bunch of other configs as well, I just listed these since they cover a wide range of Windows 2000 versions and hardware. The good news is that all these video cards work, since people have told me that they have had success with it: All GeForce 2/3/4 series cards, includes MX and Ti models. A few GeForce FX cards have been reported to work as well, but both cards reported are the GeForce FX 5200. So I am unsure of the 5600/5800 and 5900 variants. All ATI Radeon cards have actually been reported except the new 9800. But these are good to go 7000/7200/7500/8500/9000/9100/9200/9500/9600 and 9700! ATI Rage Pro and Rage 128 boards work as well. Some cards that have given trouble with the patch include, the 3dfx Voodoo Series, I have only gotten reports on the Voodoo1 and Voodoo3. S3 based cards as well as Kyro based cards have been kinda wonky too. Game will still work under software, as reported. As well the original GeForce card with SDR or DDR has caused 1 problem, and I have no other reports, but I assume it will work since all the other GeForce series cards are good. I am really pleased with all the feedback on this...its great to see, I believe I have sent this patch out to more than a 200 people, so its amazing.

There is a fix for this game to run under Windows XP, search this forum and you will come with a link. However, there won't be any sound when using the patch. As for under Win98, it should work, but you need an older video card. That game uses VESA graphics, and VESA died really quickly once DirectX came along. Its too bad no one will port that game under DirectX. You might have a little luck using the Generic ATI driver when configuring the game. Use manual override instead of auto detect.

Very true, Microsoft played their cards right...Windows 95 was a success and once Windows 98 hit the street it was over. In between though they had NT Workstation 4.0, which people loved so much...

Perhaps Linux wouldn't have been the upstart that it is today and being the competitor to Windows that it is. IBM is a big company, if they made a few decisions here and there, it might have survived in the home user market. It was definitely had potential...

Try to figure out your PSU manufacturer. Some cheapo brands aren't very good and may give you fits from time to time. Investing in a good PSU is a good idea. I use Enermax personally.

My friend had a pretty crappy computer.... Lucky Star, SLOT 1 motherboard, this board had 1 PCI slot, 0 AGP slots, and 1 ISA slot, and 1 AMR slot. It also had 1 parallel, 1 serial, and 2 USB ports. Celeron 333MHz 32 MB PC66 Memory, cheapo brand Integrated video on the motherboard, some SiS variety, that used system RAM for video RAM, so he had 24 MB of usable system memory Integrated audio and modem, via the AMR slot. 16-bit ISA network card. The funny thing is that I tried to give him my old ATI 2 MB PCI card, because it would give him better performance than the crappy onboard video, plus free up some memory, but his PCI slot was not usable because it was actually a PCI/ISA shared slot! Imagine that, you have 1 PCI and 1 ISA slot only on your motherboard and you have to choose one, and he already had a LAN card in the ISA. Sad...

I see alot of people converting W2003 Server for use as a workstation. Ok that is all good and all, but why go through all that trouble when you could just use Windows XP Pro or Windows XP Home? I put up some arguments here: By the time you get down to it, for workstation use Windows 2003 Server is more or less like Windows 2000, it would be just be easier to run Windows 2000 Pro or Windows XP, right? You install Windows 2003 Server, but then you have to go about configuring it for workstation use, for example, enabling hardware acceleration, downloading DirectX, getting drivers, etc, etc. Not to mention add stuff like themes if you wanted them. I do agree that Windows 2003 Server doesn't have all the bloatware that XP has, but you still have to configure it a bunch to make it work like XP. So what are everyone else's opinion on this?

Click Main, Contact List Options and then uncheck always on top.

I can't click the Desktop tab, under the Display Control Panel item. It just crashes to the desktop, complaining that it can't run a DLL as an APP. So I have no clue as to fix this. The only thing I installed was Service Pack 1a. I tried uninstalling this and revert back to SP1 but no luck.

My PC-cillin has detected a virus, so yeah....I have a WORM KYBOT.C and a bunch of JAVA.A etc viruses. I don't know how they got there, but my brother was using the PC to surf some weird sites, with "ifffy" JAVA programs. Just wonderful. Off to format land we go.

Not until Windows 95 came did people start getting serious about 32-bit computing. Even though Windows 95 was hybrid 16-bit/32-bit OS. However, once editions of Office 95 and other programs came out in 32-bit form, 16-bit applications started to dry up quickly. I predict this is what will happen when 64-bit or 128-bit computing will come into play. So until Microsoft releases a proper version of Windows that supports 64-bit computing, then we can expect people to get serious about it. However, games did take awhile to migrate away from MS-DOS roots. It might take awhile for games to root out of Win32. Since only now are games starting to leave the Win9x world, but the majority of games that will come out this year will still support Windows 98 and Windows Millennium.

Yeah it is pretty expensive right now, 64 dollars Canadian at FutureShop. Might be a better buy when it hits the discount bins.

Well I decided to try it, so I am using the 180 day trial. Now does anyone know how I can enable AGP Texture Acceleration? Mine is grayed out in DirectX Diagnostics. I have already installed DX9 and ATI Catalyst 3.7.

What brand is the Radeon card? Have you tried manufacturer drivers instead of ATI Third party drivers? Try older revisions of the VIA 4-In-1's. Try installing the VIA AGP driver in standard mode first and see if it works. Lower the AGP Aperture memory size in the BIOS to 64 megs or 32 megs. Is the card overclocked? Try underclocking it. Check to ensure that FAST WRITES are off in the BIOS? Set the AGP drive strength to AUTO in the BIOS. Try all of those and see if the problem persists.

Thanks for the heads up on that Immortal, I didn't know the entire Radeon lineup did support T&L. As for your integrated video. You'll have to check your motherboard manual and see if you can disable it, and check inside to see if you have an AGP slot. If you don't you might want to consider getting a better motherboard, or you'll be stuck using a PCI based GeForce2/GeForce4MX video card. I don't think there are any other better PCI based solutions out there.

T & L stands for "transform and lighting" its a special rendering technique first introduced on GeForce2 video cards. Most cards since then have them, except the Kyro brands and some of the lower end Radeons like the 7000, and 7200. Your card is old and I am pretty positive that T&L support is not there, so you'll need to upgrade your video. For your system I think it would be a great idea. Get yourself a shiny new Radeon 9500+ and I think you will be quite happy.

I use XP Pro and have no urge to change whatsoever. But so many people on so many different forums are asking questions on how to convert 2003 for workstation use, including on this forum. Plus, there are a bunch of guides already written for this kind of stuff. Its just like those people who use Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server as a workstation....why? I can understand if you got it for free off Kazaa then sure go ahead and experiment, but why would anyone buy those OSes for pure workstation use is beyond me.

I guess some people just like legacy OSes for some reason or another. But face facts, NT4 is dead as a mainstream OS. I am sure there are some businesses out there that still use it for older Office applications, but new Office software won't be NT compatible. The same goes for Windows 95/98/ME, 95 is dead. 98 is well on its way and it will take ME with it. Windows 2000 will be around for awhile....but XP is where its at.