Gaming, AMD & HP

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be musing about the connections between the humble concept of the PC, where it started for myself, which processors and upgrade options I've taken, which dead-ends I've been down and where that took my gaming experience.

And where I hope to take my gaming experience in the future.

Today of course I'm running a quite nice Intel i7 processor and an EVGA GeForce 1080 GTX graphics card, however, that rig is nearing end of life for me, only the graphics card is a recent edition, and so as a high-performance low budget kind of chap I will be looking at my options, including the latest offerings from both Intel and AMD and the modern differences in nVidia versus AMD graphics offerings.

The secondary thread from this will be a little retro-grade gaming, this is not going to be full on retro - though I am in the mood for some Carrier Command on my Atari ST - we're going to be looking at retro post 2000 stuff.... Watch this space.

So why does this post have "HP" in its title, well... the community out reach team over at HP have sent me a missive, and though they have a zero budget want to share my posts with you guys in the world.

If you came here from a HP/AMD re-tweet, post in the comments below!

Three Games I Can't Face (Again)

Three games I often think about, but which I could never return are raising their heads with me lately, the first being Eve-Online.

I was invited back by a friend, whom wanted me and my three decently trained (for 2012) accounts to go back in to the game, and run mining operations for him.  If you're not aware, mining in Eve is pretty much staring at rocks, you have to be in a special place, and busy with other stuff to let your game time turn into this monotony.

He assured me there's loads of new stuff, "since you like mined Xel, there's loads"... But my heart just wasn't in it.  I did install the game, and try a free account for like 25 minutes, until I got utterly bored with it and had to stop.

My main problem is probably the style of game play, I loved Eve, I played way back before the new engine.  It was a clicky menu fest then, and it seems twice as much so now.

Though I still love the Armageddon!

The next is World Of Warcraft, I don't often get invited back to WoW nowadays, but when I initially quit I was asked perhaps every other day.  With the release of the movie however, my interested was peaked, and so I took a look... 

What have they done to my beloved Stormwind?

I just can't, I can't face it.  But I look back on my appearance on "Shut Up We're Talking" (which incidentally spawned this very blog) and I remember saying that damage & level inflation would devalue and dumb down the game... Boy, was I right, or was I right?

The third, and final one, is CubeWorld.  I was big into this when it came out, I begged a friend to lend me his account before I bought it (which he wouldn't - *cough* tight wad) but buying into it, was great.  It mixed Zelda with Minecraft with a proper olde tyme Adventure feel.

I had high hopes it would become part of my regular rotation, unfortunately, development seems to have utterly stopped, and it blows in the wind like dust from my gaming bones.

Do you miss an old game?  Do you insist you have quit a game, or stopped subscribing to it?... Let us know what it is in the comments below!

Fuck Blizzard Game Design & World of Warcraft

Yes, you heard me, it is decided I'm never going back to that game... Not because of the cost, not because of the shit game mechanics, not even because of the seemingly cast amount of brain cells they've pulled out of the base requirements to play the game... No, I'm not going back now because of one very specific reason...

My beloved hunter class, my PVP, solo, questing finest... No longer has melee weapons... I played a nightelf hunter, twice over.  I was a PVP demon with them, and I loved them... Can't play like that anymore, no more swords....

I just rolled a Dwarf hunter on the Standard Edition (Free to play) and was like.. "Where's my little starter axe"... opening the character sheet... Hmm, where's my main hand weapon slot?

Now, I could deal with them removing the quiver, it annoyed me I had to use a bag slot for it, I can handle them removing the arrows/ammunition requirement too... It was brain dead, getting ammo is a basic thing, though I did see long running raids Hunters did run out of ammo - if they were not ready for it - i.e. Engineer with a post box, mail yourself a load of extra ammo before raiding, when you've done a few bosses pop a postbox and replenish... simple, easy, but because some forethought is required, it seems Blizzard have dropped this totally.

But why drop the melee weapons?.....

I've checked forums and checked the patch notes, they went in 2012, and there seems to then be a slew of Human hunters... *cough*.. Human hunters, jesus, so they're new to the class and they go on and on with piss and vinegar about "No hunter should use melee"... "Melee Hunter = Bad Hunter".

Really?  Cus I used to own, I was a demon, and I loved being able to run and slash and move... Okay, remove the minimum range for a hunter, fine, but don't remove the weapons.

Fire a gun at point blank range you're as likely to be hurt as the target...

And to whomever came up with this change at Blizzard... "You're a fucking retard"... Seriously... Der...

World of Tanks - Grinding to the T34

I've reinstalled the machine with Windows 7, and sure enough all the networking problems I was having have gone away, but I'm pleasantly surprised with how spritley the machine now is.

Vista must have been really really in efficient, for example, running World of Tanks, I would run her only in medium to low settings to get 20 fps...

With no changes of hardware, just an update to Windows 7, and I'm now in 1680x1440 resolution, high settings for everything and I get 50-55fps.

Its so pretty....

That was the main victory of the evening, which I spent enjoying with lots of rounds of World of Tanks.

My first discovery was something I had spotted before, but I think will take the next patch to explain, you see you now get missions in the game.  Or at least the rewards for the mission, but you don't have any way of knowing what the missions you have are.  They maybe listed somewhere, but no-where I've spotted in game.

In patch 8.8 however, which is coming soon, WarGaming are adding a way to spot what the missions are.

The night however, as enjoyable as it was, did result in a spectacular number of Defeats for me, despite my best efforts.

Sometimes I was simply out played, sometimes I was clearly stuck into odd matches, and I was spending a lot of games in my T-80 Light tank - an odd machine, grinding the XP for my T34.

But my efforts were not helped with derps like this

Or grease balls like this, whom I spotted on numerous occasions sat in strange locations usually at the back of the pack waiting to pick off enemy targets which the rest of the team - whom are lower tier - have softened up for them... Basically reaper creepers, that's the term I'm going to invent for them.

I did get my T34 before ceasing playing for the evening, and I even unlocked the high-pen gun, but I'm not happy with the vehicle, its match making is pretty terrible.

And I'm also stuck with the news that my favourite tank - with my most trained crew - the VK30.01H is about to be turned from a tier 6 medium into a tier 5 heavy?  Go figure, Jingles has made comment about this, but... Argh, I just want to smack WarGaming.

It might be time for a break and return to war thunder, in which I have also been playing recently, and made a level with my Japanese aircraft.

Also still enjoying Elite Frontier...

Long and Fraught

It has been a long and frightfully fraught day, tomorrow can only get better... We're off out to sort out a new mortgage for a house we're buying... which will be fun.

But, for entertainment this evening, I've left off with my World of Tanks kicker, and I've played a couple of rounds of war thunder... I'm not sold on the whole plane upgrades thing (yet) but I'm so happy to see the oft remarked about broken economy get a fix.

And as ever even on my terrible 260 GTX graphics card on this machine that game looks gorgeous.

However, its not as gorgeous as the other game I've been playing this week...

No folks, don't adjust your sets, that is the graphics, this is actually the best graphics you'll ever likely see in this particular game, for this is Elite II Frontier - the best game ever - but this is amazingly the Atari ST version, decompiled and then stripped of ST hardware called and then converted to using OpenGL on the PC to render... an amazing piece of programming which I can barely get my head around - despite having downloaded the code and had a look - and also an amazing way to re-enjoy this most classic of games.

Not a lot of people know this, but I was so taken with this game that I tried to start a club around it, long before the internet, and before BBS's were buzzing about this game I send a missive off to the late great ST Format and said I'm here talk to me as the Frontier Club.  My parents went mental about this when my little brother showed them in the magazine.

They thought I would need a license or pay tax on whatever I had, so they made me turn it into a free users group, which promptly flopped.

But for a short time I made my first ever bit of cash from these computers, and that little bit of cash I made was turned into a few news letters, envelopes and stamps to mail people their disks back and forth, I had five regular commentators, and for their £5 each "member" of the original list got a couple of news letters, planned to be quarterly, they got some fan fiction, and the exchange of saved games from other players in the club.

My parents killed it tho, my little brother also, to this day - despite my working as a software engineer - they don't seem to realise how much they held me back when I was at the forefront of something popular and amazing, and making money...

Pascal Programming on the Atari ST

Here's a strange feeling... I have the feeling that I've just done something unique for the day today... I think no-one else on this planet was coding Pascal on an Atari ST today... But I was...

I watched a video where by one of the tenants to meet in order to consider yourself a programmer was to know five languages fluently (that's computer programming languages folks, not GCSE French or German).

My considerations for my five languages are C++ (and therefore C), C#, Java, Pascal and Perl.  The latter I'm fairly rusty on, I only did one major task on it and that was a while back, so I'm going to have a look back later.  The C family and Java I use all the time... So this left Pascal.

I always put Pascal down, its on my CV, its one of the first languages I ever learned, its certainly the first language I actually coded and put through a compiler and linker (rather than just interpreting), I learned it in Turbo Pascal for DOS and my first job after leaving university was to work in Delphi (a derivative of Pascal) coaxing some legacy systems of my employer from Delphi to Borland C++ Builder standard code.

But that was a LONG time ago.  Over a decade.  So I took a step back and looked around for a copy of Turbo Pascal (I own one so it was around somewhere) but all I found was a broken zip file and a few 16bit applications I could not run on any of my current machines.  My old Laptop (the one my brother had stolen in a house burglary about eight years ago) had it all on it, so its gone... What Pascal/emulator/virtual machine do I have which I can work and reference and remember?  And you'll never believe where I ended up.

I ended up with an Atari ST emulator and making an image of the ST Format cover disk with Personal Pascal upon it.

My first task was to extract the Cover Disk LZH file - which took oh sooooo long.

Then I set up my desktop and got used to the interface again.  I love my Atari ST, I have the real machine under my desk and software still hanging around.

So, I'm using Hatari, compiled under gcc running on ubuntu for this work...

The challenge I had then was to pick something to actually do, I chose a simple application I have on the back burner for an item on GetACoder which I've bid on, and started to port the code from C# to Pascal...

The first thing I realized was how little infrastructure, or helpful, code there is in Pascal, you have to declare everything procedurally, my brain is very much object orientated.  So thinking procedurally rewired a whole bunch of connections in my brain... Then I had to remember how to use pointers in Pascal... I remember fighting with this before (when I was 16) but now, with years more experience I breezed through the logic and the allocation and disposal of resources.

The application was back together pretty quickly... except... I had a couple of bugs, the first bug I had was that in the iterator passing down the linked list of integers at each row in the code it was not referencing the correct "next" pointer.  So I had an infinite loop... doh.

But, oh my god, what a ball ache to debug it.  There is no debugger in this free Pascal compiler/linker, so debugging I was reduced to the level of primitives...

Putting in writeln statements looking where the code went wrong, instead of calculating values on the fly I was having to declare variables for them write them out to the screen and check their value visually as I let the program move between readln statements... Utter total ball ache.

But in the end the program was running...

(Don't worry about the negative values, thats just the 16bit integers rolling over a lot earlier than they do in my 32bit implementation).

The code, I'll post another day for you folks to enjoy... But this little foray into ST nostalgia did one of two things... firstly, finding these bugs in the code made me become very intent on the software as it left my fingers, far more intent on making sure its correct than I am with modern systems - where a quick compile helps find what's going wrong where - in the ST to compile this trivial code was a lengthy operation - taking up to a minute to compile and link alone - this changed my approach to the code, I was attentive, nurturing and double checking at each step making sure the logic was perfect that simple typo's and spelling mistakes were not made... I missed code complete terribly, but this lack of functionality pressed me to be a better programmer.  I had to remember what I was doing, where and when, I also have to think about the names of the functions and procedures I was laying down and remember their names, names which I had made meaningful.

All in all, to this point the coding has been a successful exercise.  Helping me refresh my knowledge and count my blessings working as a developer today.  On some levels I miss this kind of coding, closer to the machine, down near the bare metal, but in many more respects I thank progress for the innovations of modern development environments.

The absolute weakest thing about the code I produced on the ST however was that, because editing was such a chore, because there is only limited memory (1 megabyte) and that to have to strip the code down for compilation comments would take extra memory space, I simply ceased commenting my code.  I suddenly understand how frustrating some of the code problems I dealt with as a Millennium Prep manager really must have been for the folks I kept whipping into a frenzy.

Retro Avenue

I'm going all retro today, I've just received a whole bunch of games bought with some money I got for my Birthday, thank you Paul!... I have....

SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, this is really retro, this game itself was released in the early naughties, so it's got to be nearly 7 or 8 years old. But I loved the original SimCity on my Atary ST :) I've fired this puppy up and have a play already. I enjoyed flying a plane around, I loved how even touching a car to another resulted not in a tiny fender bender, but your car exploding like water being thrown into hot fat... and of course I was thrilled to be able to wipe my city from the face of pangea with ligthtening, fire, earth quake, robot attacks, UFO's and alsorts of nasties.

Supreme Commander, I've heard so much about how good Gas Powered games are, and this title did receive a "Must Buy" and better ratings when it came out... So I'm holding that one to play last.

And right now, a game I loved when I played it on my 486SX-50mhz PC way back in the day... Command and Conquer... I loved C&C and Red Alert... I played them until my eyes bled. But they took a real hiatus for me when, as a student, I struggled to scrape together £35 to go buy Tiberian Sun when it came out... and the thing crashed more than an old ZX80! It was a buggy piece of crap. And I was so heart broken.

At the time of this bebarcle with Tiberian Sun the internet was in it's infancy, I didn't have access to "patches", infact I never realised there might be patches out there... I was firmly of the position that software should be right straight out the box [an ideology sadly lacking today].

So, anyway, right now I'm watching the combined installer for "Command and Conquer: The First Decade" install right now... I've just laboriously typed in the six different activation codes for each title I'm going to play... and I'm waiting with baited breath.

More later...