It has been a very eventful last couple of days! I have
parts en route for the Socket 7 Sioux Server project - I have
decided to replace the processor I got with the motherboard,
mostly because it has become one with the heatsink, and although
it still seems fully functional, I don't much trust it to hold up
under the stress of 24/7 operation.
I recently managed to get in contact with one Richard Carr,
a programmer who back in the 90s made a few very good shareware
titles that, although popular on the compilation circuit and with
reviwers in some of the magazines of the time, did not receive
anywhere near the same level of recognition as your Apogee or
Epic releases. I had been trying to reach out to him for years
now so I could finally obtain full versions of his games, and
fortunately he is not only alive and well but still has the games
readily available for sale! There are a few other shareware title
authors I'm still trying to track down as well, but full
registered versions of Capture the Flag, Treasure Island and
Pirate Battles have sort of been my white whale for quite some
time now.
I am also in the midst of the (fourth or fifth) rebuild of
my LGA775 machine. This poor guy keeps getting gutted for parts
for other builds and for testing new parts. Most recently, it was
stripped down so I could replace its guts with those from some
dead equipment at work while I waited for parts to do a proper
repair on the equipment. It's just so danged compatible with
nearly everything. The motherboard is an Intel DG31PR, with two
PCI slots, one each of PCIe x1 and PCIe x16 slots, two DDR2 slots
which can support up to 4GB of 800Mhz RAM in dual-channel
configuration, four SATA 3GB/s ports, and one each IDE/PATA and
FDD ports on board. About the only thing it doesn't support are
Netburst CPUs, which I mean could be construed as a good thing,
haha. Unfortunately, it would seem something went wrong with the
last teardown I did of the machine, and I lost the data on the
HDD. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to redo everything
from the ground up.
Build List: LGA775 WinXP Monster!
Intel DG31PR LGA775 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650, 3GHz Quad Core
Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800, 2x 2GB
Western Digital Caviar Black SATA HDD, 1TB
Nvidia Reference GTX550 Ti, 1GB
Generic SATA DVD Drive
Generic 1.44MB FDD Drive
Generic Internal USB Multi-Card Reader
OS: Custom WinXP SP3 Distro
I have typically installed WinXP on this machine, sometimes dual-
booting with an older version of Debian to use as a file-transfer
machine. Of the computers I have built, it's the one most
appropriate for WinXP in terms of age of parts as well as
performance, and a WinXP machine fulfills a niche in my little
home lab as some older games either won't boot or won't run well
on newer hardware/OSs. WinXP is also the OS I spent the most time
with personally, being the dominant OS through my high school and
college days, so there's some nostalgia there as well. I'd like
to run a dual-monitor setup on this incarnation of the machine,
but I'd much rather have a more powerful card than the one I have
before trying that. Unfortunately, at the moment it is the most
powerful card I have that is still compatible with WinXP. The
monitors I have in mind are only 1440x900, so hopefully it'll be
fine.
