[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Phil Stracchino]

nate at portents.com wrote:
>>I've also wondered whether it might get around the problem of being
>>unable to use many games except using a No-CD patch (and unable to use
>>any game at all for which no No-CD patch exists) because the copy
>>protection mistakenly thinks the machine, which has SATA disk and PATA
>>DVD writer, has no optical drive installed at all.
> 
> I'm confused what is causing your system to be "unable to use many games
> except using a No-CD patch", unless you are using a SCSI CD-ROM drive or
> somesuch.

I'm baffled, too, honestly.  The CD/DVD writer is regular PATA, and it's
the master device alone on the first and only active PATA channel.
HALO, Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, Civ4, to name three examples I
know so far ... as far as they're concerned, it's invisible.  Everything
else sees it just fine.

Halo, I can work around with a no-CD patch.  Civ4 and Splinter Cell will
not run on the machine, period, no matter what I do.  Fortunately, Civ4
is my wife's and works on her machine, and Splinter Cell came free with
the POS video card, so I'm not out any money for it.


> StarForce [...]
> checks your system to make sure you don't have a debugger running, an
> emulated CD/DVD drive presenting disc images as real discs, etc.

I didn't realize StarForce would puke if there were emulated drives
present *even if the game CD was in a physical drive*.

>>(Don't even get me started on the festering LeadTek piece of shit I
>>purchased under the mistaken belief that it was a usable and stable
>>video card for any game more graphically demanding than, say,
>>Minesweeper.)
> 
> Unless a person is willing to memorize lists of letter-number combinations
> and what they actually correlate to in terms of GPU architecture, graphics
> memory architecture, and how they correlate to real-world quality and
> performance in both a theoretical and practical sense to both OpenGL and
> DirectX, then buying a video card is the equivalent of playing slots. 
> That part of the industry has kind of gone off the rails.

It's not really a problem with the GPU chipset.  I have a pretty good
understanding of the capabilities of the chipsets.  The problem is that
LeadTek's implementation is utterly wretched.  I've never positively
determined the cause, but the behavior is *consistent* with the card
having memory leaks in the firmware that show up when doing 3D
rendering.  They denied there could possibly be a problem for close to
eleven months, until I get the vendor involved, at which point they
tried to simultaneously claim that (1) they never knew I'd been having a
problem and (2) they'd been helping me all along.  They RMA'd the card
and replaced it with another identical card, with slightly newer
firmware but with the exact same problem, and by the time I'd confirmed
the same problem was still present on the replacement card, the warranty
had expired.

I will never ever buy another LeadTek product again.


-- 
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-886-3518
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater