Be Excellent To Each Other

edit: New page!

What's that? Looks Fallout related.

No idea, I searched for Green Screen Game

Game for iOS called The Hacker

Oops sorry wasn't around today to post!

Anyway, that should be absolutely fine for everything you'll want to do, even gaming at 1080p with modest detail settings and no AA or suchlike.

As noted you'll have the option of adding in a discrete graphics card in the future, which can either be AMD to work with the APU's integrated graphics, or you could just disable them completely and lob something like an Nvidia 750Ti in there.

Considering there's a 24 inch screen and an OS included in the price, that's not bad going at all.

As a final note it isn't a particularly powerful CPU in that the architecture is pretty much an evolution of the old Athlons (clock cycle for clock cycle they're much weaker than Intel chips), but it is a quad-core part with a high clock speed, so I would imagine it'll be alright with properly multi-threaded video editing software. Plus of course you'll be running with faster RAM, more of it, improved motherboard chipsets, and so on.

Overall I'd say you'll be fine with it.

What is this all about?

As I understand it you can do a sort of 'low-rent Crossfire/SLI' arrangement by pairing a discrete AMD GPU with the integrated GPU in the APU (AMD call their CPUs with integrated graphics APUs), and sort of combine their power to create a fully operational Death Star.

For obvious reasons only AMD graphics cards work in this configuration.

It's not something I've ever really looked into so even that may be total nonsense, but that's my recollection of it.

If you do this please be aware that you need to be really careful where you place the Thermal exhaust port, as this can lead to catastrophic failure.

My understanding is that it's less about combining grunt and more about using the power-efficient (and quiet) integrated GPU for the desktop and switching to the beefy GPU for games. This is an idea I first saw in Apple's laptops, which shipped with dual GPUs for a while around 2009-2013 or so. In a laptop it's handy for battery life. Less important in a desktop but can help reduce fan noise.

New PC arrived earlier and it's all set up now. It's very nice. Should be more than fine for everything I need I think. Windows 8 is fucking weird, though.

I mean I think I sort of get what they were trying to do but the frequency with which it dumps you back to the more traditional layout just makes it all feel disjointed and odd.

Stick at it for a week and if it still bothers you then...

http://www.iobit.com/iobitstartmenu8.php

Note though it's rather resource heavy so can cause a bit of lag on pressing it to it actually opening up. It's a great free solution though.

X8 was finished..



But I could not get the R9 290 to play ball in there. So, I bought one of these.





Ideal for workstation duties. In other news I've had one of these sitting in the box in my hallway for about two months now.



Hisense 65" 4k 120hz 3dtv. My uncle was supposed to help me fit it to the wall but needed an operation on his hand so my brother is coming up from London next week. That should really give the Titans something to work on...

Decided to get a couple of little treats for myself, a new keyboard and mouse.

Keyboard because my trusty old Saitek Cyborg is starting to get a bit tired after nearly six years of heavy use, couple of the keys are losing their fluidity of motion, surface is wearing away on some of the keys etc. Plus I want a bank of extra programmable/macro keys for WoW, as such I have ordered myself this.

http://www.ebuyer.com/503883-corsair-ve ... 9000020-uk

Rather extravagant perhaps but I'd expect five years minimum out of it, Cherry MX Red switches for every single key, and a couple of friends have moved to mechanical keyboards and absolutely swear by them.

The 18 keys off to the left are all fully programmable, which of course is perfect for an MMO (it's marketed as an MMO keyboard).



Mouse simply because I need more buttons available to me, as there's a limit to how many keybinds you can do, even with CTRL/SHIFT/ALT modifiers (or rather, fucking remembering them all). I find mouse buttons far more conducive to muscle memory, and just easier to get exactly the right one at the right time, although 12 buttons along the side may be a step too far....

It does mean with some regret that I'm replacing my legendary Logitech MX510, which is hands-down the best mouse I've ever owned, but I'll probably retire it out to the bedroom laptop where it can live out its senior years in a low-stress environment. (And I'm replacing it with another Logitech, as the MX510 has been so fucking good, it still works perfectly and it's years old and it's seen an awful lot of action.)

Yes it's a lot of money for a keyboard and mouse, but since I basically live on my PC (not just for leisure but for when I'm working from home too), and all my interaction with it is done through those two peripherals, it makes sense to have nice ones IMO. (See also, screen and speakers, worth stretching the budget for.)

On top of all that, my current PC just continues to deliver the goods in terms of games and overall performance, despite the CPU/mobo/RAM being over six years old and me having bought them second hand off a mate at work, and the GTX670 still delivers the goods graphics wise, and the 128GB SSD whilst small, is big enough if I limit it just to the games that benefit from it (WoW does). It helps that I'm back into WoW of course which is fairly undemanding, but it was kicking BF4 around at 2560x1440 with really nice graphics options, so why spunk a load of cash on upgrades or a whole new PC?

With the XBox One and PS4 being seriously underwhelming in raw horsepower terms, I can honestly envisage it lasting for this entire console generation when it comes to cross-platform titles, which is good for my pocket!

http://www.ebuyer.com/579402-logitech-g ... 910-003624

Look at this, sofa warriors!

http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-control ... zer-turret

HOW MUCH IS IT I MUST NO?

Mind you, my mouse is quite good at just being rubbed along the sofa. This is not a euphemism.

New PC incoming for Mrs Hearthly, she's now an official WoW-head and so is Hearhtly Jnr, so we're short of a machine that's capable of running the game. (Currently Mrs and Jnr share an account and take it in turns to play on the trusty old Sony Vaio laptop, but we'll have to span that out to three accounts now.....)

Mrs Hearthly has been on a laptop for so long (albeit with a screen planted on top of it and using a normal keyboard and mouse) that I didn't want to get a traditional ugly PC case arrangement for her, so I've gone for a case that's only about 3cm bigger than an XBox One in all directions (and doesn't need an external power brick as that's internal in the case).

Quad-core Intel Haswell i5 processor (3.5GHz boost to 3.9GHz), quality mini-ITX motherboard, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 2GB GTX960 graphics card (the perfect 1080p@60 max-it-out graphics card whilst remaining cool and quiet), and a slot-loading DVD-RW.

It should pretty much kick as hard as my PC, and that can run BF4 at 2560x1440 with HIGH settings overall and keep to around 60FPS, so it'll totally max out WoW on her 1080p screen and maintain a solid 60FPS.

The old Sony Vaio runs WoW OK-ish but with the resolution dropped to 1600x900 and loads of compromises on the detail settings, draw distance, shadows, lighting effects, and suchlike - and even then it regularly sees the wrong side of 30FPS. (Hearhtly Jnr will inherit the laptop for the current WoW account, Mrs Hearthly will get a new WoW account of her own to go with the new PC, since Hearthly Jnr has pretty much taken over the existing one anyway.)

Back in the day I'd have done the build myself but I can't be arsed with that shit anymore so I'll allow others to take the strain in that regard, plus this case is reckoned to be quite awkward to work with so I'll defer to their experience with it. The cool thing about it is the right-angled riser from the motherboard that allows a full-length dual-slot graphics card to sit inside such a small case.

By all accounts the noise and thermals are really good too due to positive air pressure and strategically placed fans.

Already en route according to the courier tracking, but it appears to have got stuck near Birmingham somewhere, don't know if there's a WEATHER BOMB in the area......

Mrs Hearthly's PC has had the best part of a week to bed in now (it turned up the day after my last post), and I'm seriously impressed with it.

If you think gaming PCs are big and noisy, with loads of wires going all over the place, and generally a bit of an intrusive pain then I'd really recommend giving this sort of form factor a go.

SIZE - It's a bit bigger than an XBox One (3cm in all directions, but the power supply is internal instead of external), but it can be orientated vertically or horizontally depending on preference. We've gone for vertical in the corner of the room (on top of my old 'donkey work' downloading and other menial tasks PC), and its footprint is very small like this.

NOISE - When idling it's effectively silent, there's a tiny bit of fan noise if you get your head right up close but scarcely audible. Under torture load (100% CPU and 100% GPU simultaneously (Prime95 and Furmark)), it builds up to a sort of gentle thrum, by far and away the quietest PC I've experienced. The whole thing is geared more towards restricting noise than keeping thermals right down, so it lets the GPU hit around 80C, and the CPU gets into the high 70s - both of which are well within thermal limits.

In a more normal gaming scenario (WoW totally ULTRA-ed out at 1920x1080) it's far more towards 'silent' than 'gentle thrum'.

PERFORMANCE - For my own curiosity I installed Steam and Origin, it manages the likes of BF4 and GRiD2 ULTRA-ed out at 1920x1080 and maintains a solid 60FPS with just the odd dip. By all accounts the GTX960 is damn near the perfect 1080p GPU but can start to struggle a bit at 2560x1440.

Needless to say it can handle WoW with aplomb (1920x1080, full ULTRA, solid 60FPS at all times), and general Windows/application performance is superb.

The SSD benchmarks are as you'd expect from a brand new SATA-3 device, just shy of 600MB/s (!) transfer rate in one of the tests. (It blows my Crucial M4 SSD right out of the water.)

The motherboard is a decent ASUS mini-ITX board, so the onboard sound is excellent, plenty of USB ports including USB3, decent UEFI BIOS with a great low noise preset for all the fans, and so on. The CPU is using the stock Intel HSF which is fine as the Haswell architecture runs nice and cool.

Windows boots in seconds, goes to sleep in seconds, wakes up in seconds, everything loads damn near instantaneously, it's one of the snappiest PCs I've ever used.

AESTHETICS - It's a pretty understated and austere case, couple of LEDs for power and drive activity and that's it. Would look very tidy under a telly. Using a wireless keyboard and mouse (as Mrs Hearthly is) there's a USB dongle in the back, so the only cables are power, HDMI, sound and network, which I've neatly tucked away.

OVERCLOCKING - Not even going to try, as my main goal is low noise. Mrs Hearthly's used a laptop for years so she's used to low noise. By all accounts the GPU should have an extra 250-350MHz in it as a given, but of course that'll mean heat, and heat = noise.

OVERALL - Highly recommended, I'd honestly have one myself, just replace the GTX960 with a GTX970 for 2560x1440 gaming.

Fuck me, first proper Battlefield session with the new Logitech G600 MMO mouse last night and it wasn't pretty. It's a fantastic mouse for playing MMOs with, and it's great for general Windows/application/Hearthstone etc use - but for a fast FPS shooter? Not a bit of it.

Too big, too heavy, the buttons down the left hand side are a total distraction, and my muscle memory with the incredible old Logitech MX510 is just too deeply ingrained. Time and time again my muscle memory was putting the right amount of 'effort' into moving the mouse to get over my target (I've played so much Battlefield over the years I'm practically Zen with it), and I was coming up short (literally coming up short, I hadn't moved my crosshair enough).

It won't do, so now I need to track down a Logitech MX518, which is basically the MX510, but rebranded. I suspect this will mean the end of active service for the G600, as since I bought it I've really tidied up all my WoW keybinds and could well do without all those buttons after all..... Oh well, at least it didn't cost seventy fucking quid.....

Only problem is it looks like they stopped making the MX518 a while ago, so tracking down a new one at a reasonable price might not be easy. Hang, it's now known as the G400, so I need to track down one of those instead.....

Hmmm, even the G400 isn't exactly mainstream anymore, seems like the G402 is the latest iteration of it, although that looks a bit fancy. Sunday online shopping, I can live with that.

Anyone want a cheap G600 lolz? They're acebest, honest.

Pfft! Decided to do a bit of Saturday afternoon benchmarking because that's how I roll, and Mrs Hearthly's new PC is actually faster than mine!

Doesn't matter what the benchmark is, it consistently punches about 10-15% harder than my PC, even during mega-extreme graphics benchmarking where you might expect the supposedly constricted 128-bit memory bus of the graphics card to hurt her scores a bit.

So that's

Modern i5 > Older i7

GTX960 > GTX670 (so new midrange faster than older high end)

New mini-ITX mobo > Older full fat high end gamer's mobo

Basic 1600MHz DDR3 RAM > Older and slightly slower but super-fancy DDR3 RAM

And so on.

Plus on top of that, her PC is a hell of a lot smaller and quieter than mine whilst it goes about it all. Oh yes and her SSD is a fuck lot faster too.

This is the first time ever that Mrs Hearthly has had a better PC than me, there is now a rift in the space time continuum.

The green LEDs of jealousy

My laptop is a bit slow and I barely have any applications on it other than Office 365 (available soon on PS4).

How'd I make it go faster?

Paint a white stripe down the side?

Put an SSD in it, generally speaking it's hand down the single biggest upgrade you can make to any PC/laptop in terms of general speed of use. (And it makes stuff like Windows Update and suchlike a trivial matter too, no grinding away at a hard drive for an eternity after a large raft of updates.)

Oh yes and you never need to defrag again either. And they're silent.

I've never defragged it (it's fairly fresh out the box) but it says here on this Windows page I just looked up that the Win 8 defragger runs on a weekly schedule.

I'll check out SSD.

What are the specs on it? And what make is it? Some manufacturers are absolute fuckers for loading their laptops up with ten metric tonnes of crap that slows them right down.

It's this one I think:

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msu ... .308409300

The weird thing is, it looks like the screen can be detached but I can't figure it out. Maybe it doesn't!?

Buy a new one. Seriously, I love you man, but the idea of anyone trying to talk you through an upgrade ofanything--especially a laptop--makes me want to kill myself. Just post a 'Help me buy a new laptop' thread and let's go from there. I'm begging you.

Oh come on, some of my best work in this forum have been me trying new pooty things. My attempt at updating Wordpress reads like a detective thriller or something. What about when AE helped me buy a PC and then I couldn't get it to work on my TV cause I was plugging the HDMI cable in the wrong hole?


Oh, and while I'm here, why can't I get MAME to work? MDS files, MDF files? Why ain't there a "Run" button. Bloody internet making everything complicated.

I haven't had a new version of MAME since 2006. TBH it's always been a fucking nightmare of a thing because it's all about PRESERVATION and AUTHENTICITY, the actual, y'know, playing of games has always been seen as something as an irritating off-shoot from the curation aspect.

They also used to constantly change the ROMs that would work from one version to the next, because they discovered a few bytes that weren't being emulated properly, or something. If you managed to miss a few versions you could easily find that half your fucking games had stopped working.

All that said, I do have a version of MAME32FXPP (which was one of the friendly frontends geared towards games rather than being a museum piece), which hails back to 2006 but still works perfectly on Windows 7. (Can't promise you on Windows 8, I've never tested it.) You can even use an XBox 360 joypad with it, and configure the controls on a per game basis, and stuff like that. (It also has the equivalent of a 'RUN' button in that you just double click on the game you want to play.) I had what was a pretty complete set of ROMs at that time, so all the ROMs I have work with that version of MAME. (Except where the emulation wasn't quite right.)

It runs to just shy of 15GB, if you stick a 32GB USB key in the post to me I'll happily copy it across and post it back to you, I still fire it up from time to time, you can't beat a bit of Chase HQ. Even though it's 9 years old I guarantee that most of the games you remember and would want to play again are in there, TBH most of the really desirable stuff was sorted out pretty early in MAME's life, even in 2006 it was fairly unusual for something to get added that I was interested in.

If you want a bang up to date version your other option is to use one of the many MAME burner services, this guy for example will send you out a full and current MAME set for £95 on a portable hard drive (it runs to 250GB now due to all the CHD games), or £16 for the same set on 9 DVDs but missing all the CHD games.

http://www.retro-burner.co.uk/arcade.htm

250 gig?

But I downloaded the one Zaphod pointed out and it's about 5 gig and, frankly, it's got so many games that it's completely inaccessible. I want to play "a" game and have, like, 1000 to choose from. How on earth can you decide when you've got all that!?

For some reason though, full screen really takes a massive hit on the frame rate while playing it in an almost full sized window is fine. And that's on the gaming PC.

It was many, many years ago - but I did set myself the task of loading and playing Every. Single. Game. supported by MAME. Not all in one sitting, of course, just doing a chunk whenever I felt the inclination to.

Any game that I quite liked, I added to the Favourites list, and from there on I'd return to those from time to time, and the ones I liked best would get the highest 'Played' count, so eventually I could sort the games list by 'Played' and all my most played games would be at the top of the list. It worked really well and I discovered a load of games I had no idea even existed.

Try 'Uo Poko'!

There was also a bizarre Taito game that was a load of mini games, it was all in Japanese (it never got a US or EU release), but I could work most of it out. It was called 'Crayon Shin-Chan Orato Asobo' or something like that, there was definitely something about crayons in there.

Beyond all that, surely you have a load of games in your head that you remember from years ago?



That shouldn't happen, although I have no idea what version of MAME you're running. The only thing it should really tax is the processor since it doesn't use any GPU acceleration (or at least, it didn't used to), and even then it shouldn't give modern CPUs much to worry about.

I remember when Mortal Kombat was first added to MAME, CPUs at the time were just getting up to the 1GHz mark, and they couldn't run it without skipping frames. Turned out Midway used some pretty fancy custom chips that took a lot of grunt to emulate.

I can't seem to find any controller config for the Zaphod approved version of Mame.

Got a link to the zaphod version?

The version of MAME I'm running hails from 2006, and that works fine with a wired 360 pad.

It was here viewtopic.php?p=850856#p850856

Its just a torrent of an earlier version with the roms pre-setup.

Controller config should handle whatever you have (as long as windows does) - if you need to change options then in game its <tab> and then go through the menu's to re-define them.

It should work fine on full screen (even on really old machines) unless your trying to run something 'recent'

Gotcha. Will try again tonight.

Spy Hunter!

Also note that there should be a default control config, which is exactly what it sounds like, but you can customise each game on an individual basis if you wish.

The default config works fine for a lot of games (as the standard arcade set up was just a joystick and maybe 1-4 buttons, which just maps in my case to the 360 pad's left analogue stick and the front four buttons), although some of them are a bit more esoteric, and analogue controls can be a little bit hit or miss.

On the version of MAME I'm running some of it can be done through the GUI before launching a game, and yes, the <TAB> key brings up the menus in game.

It's very configurable and you should be able to get any given game working pretty much exactly as you want it to.

How good is the raspberry pi as a mame machine?

http://www.instructables.com/id/2-Playe ... /?ALLSTEPS

This is seriously tempting to put together.

Spy hunter is a 'funny' one as its analogue controls - you might find its defaulted to your mouse or similar - try going in and re-defining things but you might also need to play around a little bit more to get it working (my suggestion is to pick something else first to make sure things work then get Spy Hunter going)

I've seen a few different front ends and setups for it - it will handle 'basic' stuff fine

This was one of the other threads on it I bookmarked at the time

http://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/2p ... _presents/

https://imgur.com/a/eZCgV

which is just making it into a very basic emulator for console stuff

Hullo all.

Due to my PC becoming increasingly creaky - what, five years old now? - and my humble small hard disk filled to danger-point with photographs wot-I-took, I figured I better buy a new PC. And somewhat daringly I just have done, without consulting your wiser heads or anything.

I went for this specification from Overclockers. My current desktop was from them you see, and I had no complaints, it being a very stable if nowadays achingly old machine. Here's the gubbins:

Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary overclocked to 4.2GHz
8GB of DDR3 RAM
Nvidia GTX 960 2048mb card
2 x 2TB Hard Drives (The main reason for upgrading)

Price with VAT & P&P: £593

Um, that's basically it. Now if only there was a Triple-A title that I actually wanted to play, eh chums? Oh well, I can give Elite a whirl anyway. Is that still good? I've no idea. What games would you buy with this? Other than the awesome Homeworld remaster, obv.

Oh, still hooked on Sunless Sea, btw.

You're a cerebral sort of chap Pete, give Hearthstone a go!

Oh Good Lord, Harthly, that looks like the worst thing ever. Cracking vid though.

Man, I don't think I've EVER actually enjoyed a Blizzard game. No, really.

Not even the original Starcraft? (Yes I know the second one wasn't that great.)

But failing that just install Steam and Origin, there are ridiculous numbers of fantastic games available on both of them for absolute peanuts, and sales roll around all the time on top of that.

The PC you've got there should chuck most things around at 1080p with high detail settings and a reasonably solid 60FPS. The CPU is the weak link as it's only dual core, albeit with a mighty overclock and solid Haswell architecture, but it will have its limitations.

Definitely start with Steam and Origin, and just browse through their catalogues, there's an embarrassment of riches to be found there.

Cool, I've got Steam & Origin already but not that many games outside of niche low-fi indie stuff. I do have a slightly better laptop that can sort-of-just-about run Saints Row 4 and stuff, but it's not that much fun playing on a dinky screen close up.

I'm not sure I'll be playing that much on it in the end, to be honest. Just too dang busy! But it will be nice to be able to finally play Battlefield 3 which I somehow got for free ages ago (I forget how) and see if it is actually any better than Bad Company 2, which I suspect it isn't.

Yeah, I also had a beef with Starcraft, and I think part of the reason was the absurdly out of scale units. For some reason it bothered me to have spaceships only slightly bigger than men. Then came Starcraft 2 and just UGH.

Also secret main reason: HOMEWORLD HD! (And Shipbreakers when it comes!)

BF3 is a fantastic game, is it as good as Bad Company 2 though? Is anything as good as BC2? You could argue a strong case for that being DICE absolutely at the top of their game, maybe only eclipsed by BF2142 and of course that's very old now.

BF4 is a solid game now, after months of being a bit shonky in various ways. If you can grab it cheap on Origin (and I've seen it in a sale more than once) then definitely worth a look.

There are countless superb games on Steam (and to a lesser extent Origin) that you can buy for a few pounds, it's always worth keeping an eye on the offers that pop up regularly. Origin also give away games for free once in a while, some of which are actually quite good, such as Sim City 2000 and Theme Hospital.

Yo dudes!

My PC has been finished and is now being delivered, I can expect it early next week. Excitement she wrote! I'm definitely getting Cities Skylines too, watched an hour long preview of it and it's beginning to look like everything SimCity wasn't. Glee.

But here's a big question - I opted for no OS as I already have Windows 7. Can I use the same key on my new computer? A buddy is buying my old one, but I suspect that I might have to deactivate it on the old PC and activate it on the new. Is that true?

Depends on the key - if it's an OEM one (came with pc, has sticker attached to it) the license if for the pc rather than yours and not transferrable*.

If it's not, you can just install windows on the new pc and wipe the old.

* You may still be able to do it, but it is against the license and so don't expect any help if it doesn't work.

If you've got the key and install media and it's a retail copy of Windows you should be OK, if it's an OEM key then it's theoretically tied to some aspect of the motherboard on the original PC and won't activate on different hardware (I'm not sure how true this actually is, but as Mr Dave says, you won't get any help from MS if it doesn't work on the new PC).

As a general rule you'd want to deactivate the key and then completely wipe the old PC before passing it on anyway.

If you're not going to wipe the old PC before passing it on then you need to deactivate the key on that machine if you're going to try to use it again, which you can do from an elevated command prompt and typing the command:

slmgr.vbs /upk

This won't 'release' the key in the true sense of the word (but it will deactivate it on that PC), as it'll still be recorded on the MS activation servers and how how many times it's been activated, and on what hardware, but it should theoretically free it up for another installation. The old PC will continue to work but will complain that it's not activated on each boot and have a horrible black background once within Windows.

If the key is on a sticker on the old machine somewhere, there's nothing stopping the new owner just typing the key in when Windows nags them for it, I'm not sure how that would pan out if you're already using the key on an another machine.

"It's a second hand computer with an unvalidated copy of Windows, but he assured me that the differences would be merely some minor cosmetic issues..."

Cheers guys! That really helps. It's a boxed copy I bought separately with key, so that should be okay, and I've only installed it the once before. I'll be wiping the old computer as I pass it on.

In that case you'll be fine, having a retail boxed copy of Windows can make these things a lot easier