Donald2B

There is also a Hercules Prophet 2 PRO. It is a GeForce2 GTS Pro, 64 MB of RAM and it has s-video out. I am running this card and it works great. Don't know about prices in the UK though.

Same problems here. Didn't fix a thing for me. 8)

I liked it soo much that I went and bought two copies. One for home and the other for work!! Best 40 bucks I have spent on computer software in a LONG TIME!

You also might want to try up[censored] your VIA 4-n-1 Drivers. I just realized that...duh. Anywhoo...I know that I have had to do that for some people to make the machine run better and smoother. You can find them here: http://www.viahardware.com Good luck! Let me know if you continue to have problems.

He is referring to the driver version. The video drivers that you are using are fairly old and outdated. I would try the 12.X drivers or even some of the older drivers. I know I have had good luck with the 10.40 drivers. You also might want to turn down the acceleration on the SBLive! down a notch so it is not running in full hardware acceleration. I have had performance hits from that.

Depends on what OSs you would like to dual boot. I usually put Win98SE on first and make sure everything has a driver and all of that good stuff and then install Windows NT or 2000. Windows 2k will make a boot.ini file which will then allow you to chose which operating system you would like to boot into. In your case since you already have Win2K installed you could go ahead and install Win98SE. You will not be able to boot into Win2k for the moment, but that is okay. All you have to do is run a repair on win 2K and then all will be well.

Please post your system specs so that we might further be able to help solve your problem. Without seeing any system specs I would say try different video drivers. Especially if you are running with a nVidia card. Drivers can make all the difference.

Excuse me for being a little ignorant, but how does one go about changing the PCI latency? Is this a bios setting?

Dragon-Lord I would generally have to agree with you on that, but I have an exception to the rule. My home computer, the one in my signature, is a dual processor and I am running in full accelleration mode with NO popping, static or whatever. I can play all games using full EAX support and I haven't had a single hiccup to date. Yet my work machine is almost identical in everyway except for faster processors. So I don't know what is so special about my home machine because I am running the latest Liveware! 3 drivers. So it just makes me wonder why one works fine and the other doesn't. I will have to look into this some more.

Almghty...you make some valid points...but come on!! Tribes 2 and Black & White!! Um...those are totally not the same. Tribes 2 deals with all of the players in the world, not just AI. Get into a game with 30+ players in tribes 2 and tell me that the two games are the same. I don't think so. Then there is the Tomb Raider 3 vs. Indiana Jones 3D. Hmm...lets take a look. Tomb Raider 3 is a rehash of 1 and 2 with minor upgrades. Indiana Jones was a totally new engine. Just because both of these games are situated outdoors, doesn't mean anything. The gameplay is different, there many major differences between the two. Black & White has some incredible graphics and so does Tribes 2. But in the same aspect both of these games took an average of 2+ years in development. Regardless of what is better and what people consider shotty work by programers...you are all still missing one basic thing. Games need to make money! 3rd Party resalers of hardware need to make money (ie. nVidia, ATI, Asus, etc.) If the games stayed the same and kept the same system requirements, we as gamers would get extremely bored. Once it has been done we want bigger, badder, and faster. But to say that you don't want to upgrade your hardware to get that is rediculous. I work in the industry as well, and yes I too would like to see some games that are totally optimized and run awesome right out of the box with absolutly ZERO patches. But by the time they would be released something bigger and better has come out and the game will be overlooked. I think we could go on about this for the next century and we would still be having this conversation. I do think that the programmers deserve some praise for what they go through. Between totally revamping a 3D engine in the middle of the project and still make the deadline is pretty impressive. I would also have to agree that there are different levels of talent in development teams, but regardless there are tons of great games that we play everyday as well as the games that we look forward to playing in the future. The worst part of this entire topic is that most of the time it doesn't matter how good the programmers really are. Deadlines will always be more powerful. Not every company can afford to spend 2+ years in development. You miss a deadline and you are out x amount of dollars. Then you find yourself unemployed and looking for another job.

Yeah, download accelerator was the problem...but the drivers are not the end all for my problems. I have a dual processor system and now all of the popping and crackling sounds are back. Hmmm... Looks like I will go back to the drivers included with Win2K.

I am using Netscape 4.7 with Download Accelerator Plus 4.0

What is the login and password to download these drivers. I keep getting asked to login. Thanks

I have to agree with Brian Frank!! Everyone keeps referring to Half-Life....I don't mind if everyone starts making comparisons, but at least keep it apples to apples. Instead what is happening is that people are complaining that a game engine equivilant to the Quake III engine doesn't run as fast as the Quake engine on the same machine. Well no kidding the Quake based game is going to run better. There is no way that we can make a game that will work on the million different hardware configurations and multiple OSs that are being used. We would never get the game out. Consoles are a whole entire different entity. There is a set specification to work for. You optimize everything to work on a set group of hardware and nothing else. Thats it. It gets so frustrating as a developer because we can't please everyone, and the ones that we don't please whine louder than the ones we do please.

I happen to work for a game company and I think that DavidNewbould's "Lazy Programmers" is a bunch of crap!! Regardless of what anyone says, money drives the game. If your game runs long, and runs out of money, I don't care how good the programmers are, the first thing to go is optimizations for older hardware. Does this suck? YES. Unfortunately the turn over on games is getting shorter and shorter and to go out and buy a fully optimized and bug free game is almost unheard of. The point is, it takes a LOT to get a game from design document to retail shelves, and if it doesn't work on your machine at full speed well tough. There are so many hardware combinations around today that there is no way a game can be optimized for all of these. So you take the most popular cards and go from there. We do the best we can with the given amount of time. There is nothing worse than seeing a game you have put your heart into for over a year and get shipped with known bugs, and optimization problems. But when time and money dictate schedule, quality usually is the first thing to take the hit. ~end rant~ PS. I have a TNT2 M64 card as well and there is a huge performance difference from it to the Geforce and GeForce2 cards. I have had almost every flavor of nVidia card in my machine at one point in time. ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 1 Gig PC100 CAS 2 RAM Hercules GeForce2 Pro 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum 5.1 Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

I will have to agree with Xiven on this. Cooperative mode is AWESOME!! Nothing is better than getting 10 of your closest friends into a cooperative multiplayer game with the dificulty setting set to Serious! It is truely awesome! I haven't had this much fun playing a multiplayer game since....I can't think of a better time! ; ) ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 1 Gig PC100 CAS 2 RAM Hercules GeForce2 Pro 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum 5.1 Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

I have played through almost half of the game and it is AWESOME!! I don't know what the other modes are like, I am playing through in Serious Mode. Kind of reminds me of Doom in the way that the monsters just keep spawing and spawning and you wonder if you are ever going to kill all of them. I really enjoy it. It is a nice change to the first person shooters that have come out recently. Two thumbs UP!! ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 1 Gig PC100 CAS 2 RAM Hercules GeForce2 Pro 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum 5.1 Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

Well, that is strange then. I am able to boot fine with 768MB but no higher. That sucks. Looks like I will have to revive my 1 GHz T-Bird. I develope art for pc games and I need 98 to run older games that will not run under 2000. I didn't realize adding more ram was going to kill 98. Oh well...Off with it's head! ; )

It just depends. If I find a lot of good deals I will just tend to buy everything at one time except for the monitor. I have a couple of 19" monitors lying around that I use as interim. I have helped many other build computers and they were working with a budget and could only spend so much at any one given time. So I would have them buy parts in order to get them up and running as quickly as possible and then they could add pieces as the could afford them. Most of the people that I build computers for kind of want them right away and they can't stand to wait a couple of weeks, or months for that matter, to get their computer. I am fortunate to have a couple of local computer places that sell parts very reasonable so I don't usually have to order on line. Anyhoo...that is my 2 cents worth. ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 512MB PC100 RAM Elsa GeForce2 GTS 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum 5.1 Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

For what it is worth: Live! DriveII CD-ROM CD-RW 2 HDDs with coolers ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 512MB PC100 RAM Elsa GeForce2 GTS 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum 5.1 Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

This is going to sound really strange, but for me to get better performance on my work machine I had to turn down my audio hardware acceleration all the way down to using just emulation. Then I got kick *** frame rates using all settings maxed. Just a thought. ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 512MB PC100 RAM Elsa GeForce2 GTS 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

Here is my getup. Rock Solid! Zero problems with anything. Yes, this is a BX based board and it might cost a little more, but it is incredibly solid. I recently built 5 other machines with mobo only with PIII 800Es. Not a single problem. All using either a GeForce 2 GTS or MX. My two cents worth. ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 512MB PC100 RAM Elsa GeForce2 GTS 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

Sixtyniner, Actually, my system has been the most rock solid system that I have ever used. I am currently using the 6.34 nVidia drivers for my GF2 and I am using Liveware 3 for my SB Live!. When I first put it together I was using a TNT2 M64 video card because I was waiting for the GeForce 2 cards. I am dual booting with Win2K/Win98SE. I have run Linux, BeOS, and WinME successfully with no problems. This has been a dream system to work with and has been up and running almost non-stop for about 5 months now with no problems. Unfortunately there are no BX based boards that I know of that support AGP4x. I believe this is a limitation of the chipset. I wanted stability over anything else since I do a lot of computer animation and render times tend to go multiple days. Hope this helps! ~Donald2B ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 512MB PC100 RAM Elsa GeForce2 GTS 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

As far as I know NT doesn't support USB or will it ever support USB. Upgrade to Win2k. The compatibility will be much better than NT. On a side note, I was able to get my Razor Boomslang 2000 USB mouse to work under WinNT, but NO middle mouse button / wheel and no extra features that make this mouse awesome. I have since moved on to Win2K and everything is good. ; ) ------------------ System Specs: Asus P2B-D Dual PIII 700MHz 512MB PC100 RAM Elsa GeForce2 GTS 64MB Video Card Promise Ultra66 Controller WD 15.3 GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM WD 20.5GB HDD ATA66 7200 RPM Asus 50x CD-ROM Sony 4x4x24 CD-RW SB Live! Platinum Razor Boomslang 2000 USB Mouse Wacom 6x9 Intuous Art Tablet SuperMicro SC-750A Case w/ 400 Watt PS

Actually the latest Netscape 6 is Pre-Release 3. As to dual booting, I am not sure what you are asking here? If you are talking about using both Netscape 6 and 4.7x then yes this is possible. Just install them in their own directories and everything will be fine. This works for me in both Win98SE and Win2K. ; )