Almghty

I use to never think about this but recently i've taken to checking my machine whenever i move it. I guess with a slot based drive it should be okay *shrug* with with tray loading I have noticed with some that when moving the machine ..or tipping at certain angles the cd in the tray would become dislodged .. I came clsoe to probably wrecking a cd or two when i ejected the tray and was almost ready to insert when i noticed a cd just floating inside. So i guess never leave your cd in when moving

Are we talking about Shadow Warriors?? The arcade game? The one also known as Ninja Gaiden elsewhere? The one where you can toss guys ..kick ...and sumos at the end of a level, punks etc Is that the one???? I had no idea it had been released as a PC game .. HOWEVER I have played it using MAME and the sounds ..graphics all work fine in XP.

Okay after some testing there is some sort of bug with the new XP drivers; the official ones. It appears to me that they work fantastic with the newer cards but there is a slight issue with the TNT2 Ultra and perhaps others. I was running a dual card setup with the Geforce2MX and TNT2 Ultra. Geforce2 MX crapped out and I was forced to use hte TNT2 Ultra. Everything was crapped out, screen savers ..games ..Direct3d wouldn't detect, OpenGL..etc So I thought ..a clean install was needed but nope it was still the same. Instead I went and got the official win2k 1 release back. They are working beautiful. I was getting strange results with the official xp drivers.. For instance when I started dxdiag and conducted the direct3d test it would work ..but a second time round and it would fail. The same evreywhere ..things would run once if I was lucky. ITs like a register was not reset properly or something. Anyohw ..thought you might like to know ..i spent a frustrated 4 days.

My vote too for 12.41

but it will be back eventually .. you should have tracked down the memory leak. For instance ... Next time it says that .. check your task manager. Close ALL the tasks down and if your memory is still high ..that means one of the apps is unstable or poorly written.

You should be able to ..i used it once or twice ..and went back to my editor and the suns jdk. For me the GUI is neither her or there ..

Have you guys played around with the settings at all in Xp? The network connection no longer comes up automatically. Neither does your 'precious' volume control You can to go to the control panel ..do volume properties ..and then on one of the tabs ..there is an option to make it appear in your task bar. The same for showing your network connection ie. the network card versus an ADSL auntheticated connection which is shown on the taskbar anyway. No doubt some other things dont appear on the bar anymore which is good. IT was getting too crowded anyway.

ATI also have dual mon capability ... If you were to rank in terms of IMAGE quality it would be (TOP to bottom) Matrox ATI Nvidia If you were interested in GAMES with ImAGE quality in mine than ATI is probably the medium. I dont know if DUAL AGP is the solution. Given that at the moment anything aside from the primary monitor in win2k/XP is more of a helper screen. A place to dump your tool bars ..palettes etc etc. The Nvidia drivers are suppose to give OPENGL accelerated performance IF both cards are Nvidia on every screen for work stuff like maya ..3dstudio. Which is hardly games type stuff ..meaning you craft models ..than render ..so we are talking about realtime generation most of the time.

Scuse me? All Nvidia cards support dual monitor in that if you add another NVIDIA card the driver will detect it and you will get two screens. IF you are referring to DUAL monitor OUTPUT from ONE card then only the Geforce2MX offers thsi solution. As far as I know ...I have tried ..TNT2 Ultra, TNT2 M64, Geforce2MX 400 and in all combinations I was able to get a dual screen setup going. Again it is the driver that you use that will depend on the features. For example some drivers will allow you to play games without needing to disable the second monitor ..although this is typically a OPENGL problem ..hope this clears up some things.

really? i haven't seen XP but i thought 30-35 secs was great in win2k mine might even be lower ..25 perhaps. the thing that helped me speed up was allocating a static ip address to my nic .. i have a via chipset so i got all the proper stuff correct ata100 drivers and that was what sped it up.

oops ..doh .. yeah ..mistake by me .. i gotten use to people talking about driver version = this frame rate type of stuff

no offence intended but 1 fps difference? do you even notice?

which games did you have trouble running?

hmm tough question. The answer is MAYBE but the hassle is just too great and you can never recover it completely. If you were running Norton Undelete monitor (whatever its called now) you might be able to. I guess u want a plausible solution. First you need a DISK explorer editor .. this will look at the information on the drive. The odds of finding all that info relies on two things 1) other data has not overwritten your area. 2) other data has not overwritten your area. The odds of data NOT overwritting those clusters is very rare in NT since the page file grows ..internet explorer writes temp files. The same applies in 9x. Even uisng a DISK tool you are just hoping to retrieve addresses because anything else other than text is abit more complicated. If you feel the data is too precious there are firms who go the next level.

I am only going to say this based on what other people here have said with regards to D2; regarding the creation of keys. IF THIS is the case then..it is relatively simple. Give your brother ADMIN rights (wait till i finish) Log in as him ...play diablo2 ...that should create the keys quit game. log off ..remove his admin rights and IF d2 works that way it should then find the keys next time..provided it does not modify anything else. I have not tried this since i am the only one on my computer.

I dont know which backup wizard you are talking about ...but i'll just be general. Sometimes its a driver issue with not recognising cdrw drives. For instance i have cdrw drive and when i installed ezcd 4 i couldnt see the cdrw drive because it said it didn't exist and yet when i used something like fireburner it copied cds no probs. On up[censored] to 4.03c everything worked.

It is a great game and the engine is relatively fast. They have utilised the usual tricks to give the impression of vast distances wihtout resorting to fogging. I play it when i'm just going out ..gets the blood pumping.

Everybody has already commented on your driver version so i wont do that. With Win2k you need to shutdown alot of services which are not used. The list of services are on this site somewhere(?), my machine i used for dev and networking so most of my services are up. Try not to have too many rubbish on your taskbar, do you really need icq , yahoo IM, MSN, etc etc running? It doesnt seem much but each one takes up the processors time. Most games can be copied to the hard drive, which means the game no longer has to access the cd drive and everything runs smoother. I dont really like sblives liveware (i think its buggy) so if you aren't using the 4 speaker capability of sblive then use the default drivers that came with win2k (this is juts my personal view)

Its been a very interesting thread and I hope it continues a little more on peoples feelings towards game programmers and what they do. Essentially most are harking about the closed development cycle of a console versus the neverending number of configurations for a PC. Which explains the smoothness of many console games that can never be duplicated 100% on a PC. In console land everything is the same whereas a PC not all the mobos are born equal, not all memory is the same, not all VGA cards handle T&L. But you guys have to admit, there are games out there which you play from similar genres that you sit back and think "damn why does this game play like a dog" I'm not talking always about the graphics, i'm talking about controls, movement, physics ..overall feel. For a game like that which only gets better when you shove in your geforce 9 and athlon 9 ghz..thats when you should be thinking "they must have hired idiots to program it" not "damn so this is how the game was meant to be played". Optimization isn't just sitting back and letting some software do it all. Its painstaking to go through the code, profile certain sections and even then still miss obvious speedups. Take for a example a program with these two lines scattered everywhere. for(counter = 0; counter < 3;counter++) cout << " Hello" << endl; Overall it would be quicker to just roll out the loop than have it all neat. In the end it could probably speedup your entire app/game by a factor of 2. Did the developers of Quake123 need to use the BSP algorithm for their game? No they could have used something else but that algorithm is speedy which is why alot of people still use it.

Fair enough. I will help to compare apples with apples because clearly there are either no programmers in here or people believe programming is so hard that they must have done a good job already and should be applauded. In comparing new age games, we have Tomb RAider 3 (last revelation?) and Indiana Jones 3d which came out at the same time. Both same type of play with equivalent graphics. Yet when playing both on the same system Indiana Jones plays like a dog. If you then play Tomb Raider 4 (lost chronicles?) you will find that now plays like a dog, so what happened? As I said development teams come and go and talent comes and goes. Programmers are like doctors ..for every great doctor there are lots of average doctors. Again we take something like Black & White with its outdoor arena and track it against Tribes 2. Same hardware and settings and you will find Tribes 2 is slower. Why? It cannot be the arena because the graphic engine only has to contend with what you see. So even if Tribes is some 20km x 20km map ..you are always limited in what you see on the screen. Both games are set outdoors, Black & White is probably more CPU intensive with its obviously more complex AI in the background. I am not angry at anything, i can pretty much play any game on my system. I work in the industry so i'd like to see some classy work. To have people say to other people "geez tribes 2 ownz your system sucks upgrade" is just the blind following the blind like when microsoft gives you a new bloated OS and says "XP ownz, your dual amd 1.3ghz is too slow upgrade"

yours is not to judge ..if you can't help say no and rack off. do you like it when you change underwear each time you have to tell your mum? Well its the same thing here with MS.

I agree with that statement BUT it should be rephrased to game developers introduce new technology to players. Not make you have to buy it in order to play it. In this example take Sierra and their police quest/kings quest series. Everbody was doing the Roland / Adlib sound card support when they introduced support for a more costly card the Soundblaster. Players didn't have to buy it but the sounds were better. The same thing for Halflife ..we didn't have to get a graphic accelerator but it looks better ..the game still played at the same speed. The point is alot of game developers introduce support for new hardware in that it is nice to have to make it better but the game should run well without it. The argument to go buy a console is warranted but given that the Xbox will run windows CE, have a nvidia card and an intel chip ..makes it ludicrious given thats what a PC is. So if a developer cant make it go quick on a normal PC what hope does he/she have? A PC is like a console, you just need to learn the tricks ..and not many people take time to learn the tricks ..which is understandable given that there are alot of directx calls, win32 api calls plus the undocumented ones. [ 19 April 2001: Message edited by: Almghty ]

I program more than just games ..in industries where speed is everything ...i go from banks to hospitals where every ounce of speed is required. The same can be same for games. From ASM to Java ..from VGA mem calls to high level libs like opengl. The original post has a point and that is that programmers are indeed lazy. Some companies perhaps do spend the extra effort to churn out decent code but alot are relying on too much upper layer and they dont delve enough to the lower layer ..the layer closest to the hardware. When people program using DirectX or Opengl they are sitting so far above the graphic card it is not funny. Take into consideration the PS1 and PS2 ..now I have yet to work on the PS2 but with the PS1 it came with its default libs. I challenge everybody whos done games for that console ..are any of you using it? NO i didn't think so ..redid your own to get every possible ounce of speed. Never say that because its slow lets wait for Geforce 9. What sort of attitude is that? Before the advent of graphic accelerators we were doing ASM calls, writing our own peeks/pokes into graphic cards and getting every ounce of speed that we could. Games from that era could be seen from those that were written with C (average) and those who were written mostly in C with many vital calls in ASM (blindingly fast). Tricks are there to speed up routines, polygon count CAN be reduced so that the load on the card is reduced. Does the texture really need to be that big? Why the f*#k should it draw all the polygons of a truck that is 10km away when the engine should just erase it? I consider Black/White to be very well written ..from the lowly (m64) it zooms in and out very well and handles the polygon gracefully. Why the heck should we have to invest in some dual athlon 2.4 ghz with a geforce 999 to play a game that is so sophisticated it might as well have been sold to the army for its simulations.

There is an actual scale recommended by MS ..might be in the MCSE books or something i forget. But on average for different memory sizes .. its + 1 1/2 (i think?) So for a 256mb ram you'd set it to 256 + 256 + 128. if you have two physically different drives ..set the pagefile on the second drive.

There is ..its just that at the registry you can assign spool directories for each individual printers .. But in your case ..choose printer in settings and then under 'File' choose 'Server Properties'. Then Choose Advanced and you can specify your spool directory like that.