Curse

funbun · Apr 21, 2005, 03:03 AM // 03:03

Also, remember that the A64 processor don't have a front side bus. The memory controller is on the die. So, "FSB" speeds are actually the same speed as the processor

ZennZero · Apr 21, 2005, 03:14 AM // 03:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by Droppz

How about this card, more than enough?

Interface: AGP Interface/2X/4X AGP supports
Chipset : ATI Radeon 9000 pro
Memory :64MB DDR, 128-bit memory /Maximium memory Interface :6.4GB/s with 4000MHZ D.

Could i play w/ the highest setiings?

Honestly, with the system you mentioned above, you won't be able to play the game on the highest settings with any video card. The rest of your system will be holding it back. I can play the game on its highest settings and get a pretty respectable framerate, but I built my system within the last 2 months (Athlon 64 3000, Radeon x800 XL, 1 GB Ram, etc. and with a healthy overclock on everything). With the card you have listed above, you could probably run the game reasonably well at low-middling settings. To do much better than that you will probably have to spend a fair amount more money and either buy a much better video card or (preferably) put a whole new rig together.

funbun · Apr 21, 2005, 03:32 AM // 03:32

My system is close to your Zenn. You video card is much better than mine though. I built this system about a year ago.

A64 3000+ @2.42Ghz
9600 Pro
1gig RAM
Chaintech VNF3-250
homebuilt watercooling

Sin · Apr 21, 2005, 07:02 AM // 07:02

SSE4

For mentions sake, speaking in acronyms (i.e. ILP, IPC, etc) can be about as useful as chat speak.

I believe my asking of a question at the beginning of my post was taken in the "challenge" way rather than in the "addendum" way. I was agreeing with you in stating the questions that brought me to arrive at those conclusions to connect-the-dots regarding what I had to say, as it seemed it would be more explanatory that way. Your posts are informative so I was merely continuing the trend in the best way I knew how.

Hope this clears that up.

SSE4 · Apr 22, 2005, 08:53 PM // 20:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sin

SSE4

For mentions sake, speaking in acronyms (i.e. ILP, IPC, etc) can be about as useful as chat speak.

I believe my asking of a question at the beginning of my post was taken in the "challenge" way rather than in the "addendum" way. I was agreeing with you in stating the questions that brought me to arrive at those conclusions to connect-the-dots regarding what I had to say, as it seemed it would be more explanatory that way. Your posts are informative so I was merely continuing the trend in the best way I knew how.

Hope this clears that up.

I don't mean to sound like I'm opposing you in any way, I simply like to explain things thoroughly in case anyone actually cares. And sorry, to go over what I was talking about with the acronyms: ILP is Instruction Level Parallelism. IPC is Instructions Per Cycle. MTP is multithreaded parallelism. And I think that was everything. It's a rather nasty habit, but I often use those just so it takes less time to type, I apologize. Although I bet just by looking at it you knew what I was talking about anyway.

kzap · Apr 22, 2005, 09:01 PM // 21:01

Back to the topic, you can play the game on a system with 256MB Ram and a GeForce 2 MX with all the settings on low or off and it will be playable. BUT everything will load slow AND PvP will be very difficult since your computer will slow down with all the close combat.

Sin · Apr 22, 2005, 09:52 PM // 21:52

SSE4 nah, and me too man. I don't wanna come of opposing either, so I apologize if I did, was just making sure is all.

So far as the acronyms, no I haven't been an assembly programmer for a decade or so. Many modern day terms are not part of the "school" I was in. Besides I was self-taught for the most part, books were my school marm, so to speak. And as you can imagine most of the better books for structure and basics in programming in assembly were older than a decade ago. Was a fun time and fun to learn but my friends, family, etc. lost ability to contact me, even if I was in the same room.

I mean, you know you been programming too much when people say your name, or any word for that matter, and you give them the hex, binary, octal and ASCII (sorry I didn't do EBDIC) equivalents off the top of your head. Basically lost my mind to the machine and have made many an effort to rid myself of those kinds of habits.

Imagine your having a girlfriend of the Jenny McCarthy type and interrupting a...umm...moment of regular importance for a couple with "I have to work this out, I have to debug this right now!" They don't last long then. I would dream a program, debugging it, and type it in the next day, and ya it would run, fully debugged.

See that's not "normal" or "reasonable" so I had to get out of it before I lost my entire sense of being at all made of flesh and blood. Some parts of the flow though remain, almost intrinsic. Thats why what I posted earlier had any sense of validity to it. I appreciate any clarifications and corrections you were making too. If I understood the theories or methods you were naming I would probably better understand the response but it's okay. We have lots of time on the board to learn more.

ZennZero · Apr 22, 2005, 11:08 PM // 23:08

Sin, you have officially earned my respect. I used to dabble in assembly a bit and really getting things done is several orders of magnitude harder than any higher level language. I once wrote an x86 emulator and assembler (it would accept only a limited subset of the x86 instruction set) and dealing with all of the assembly was the biggest PITA.

Anyway while I am glad to hear you have "recovered", I mourn the loss of good assembly programmers. It is rapidly becoming a lost art on everything but embedded platforms (and even many of those).

Sin · Apr 23, 2005, 01:28 AM // 01:28

Wow ZennZero I'm impressed! Yea it seems it is getting lost in the inefficient "i can pull a library" high level language mess. I was into it quite a while ago really. Like I wrote a word processor for 66 char across that had to have timing loops to communicate with teletypes (110 baud era). Yea I go back a ways. It was fun though, 2k of ram and it would center and right justify and left justify, tab, just very basic, but it was how it had to interface where the real programming was.

I had to write it on an apple II with a Z/80 CPM card because they were cheap and easy to get, then it was put on a Kaypro or Osbourne portable computer. Purpose was so people could communicate with their home office through the phone line, to work on a letter, etc. Back then that was a big deal. and when you only had 64k of ram if you were lucky (most machines had 16k) what I wrote was considered a marvel! hahahaha I played with 68000 assembly too just because I love the 14 addressing mode, like "Post incremented pre decremented absolute" hahaha

Was your emulator for carrying programs to a particular platform or the kind that one uses to test programs, like to put in a hex code or neumonic to see the accumulator and stack results? If it's the latter i'd be interested in checking it out sometime, maybe do some brushing up

ZennZero · Apr 23, 2005, 05:57 AM // 05:57

More the latter - It was actually written in (relatively early) Java so as to be cross platform. You could run your x86 assembly on PPC, ARM architechture or whatever, so long as it had a JVM. I did it so long ago (as a student project in college) that I would be rather embarrassed to show it to anyone

But I appreciate the interest. It was a horrid and massive beast of a program of like 10K lines of code (for both pieces together) -- certainly a far cry from your 16K of assembly of yore. I used to noodle around on Apple II's, but I was far too young to have experienced what you described. The closest I came to doing anything remotely resembling programming on those was Logo

(if that can even be classified as such). At any rate I am glad this community has some old school hackers in it. It is a refreshing change from the "D00dz w1ll my d4d'z c0mp. run guild wars y0?1/? I g0tz 256mb ram!!" crowd.

Sin · Apr 23, 2005, 06:32 PM // 18:32

Someone had to keep the holes open or the system would be impenetrable today!

One of my favorite things was figuring out how to read the unreadable from a disk or how to replicate the unreadable sector. Whatever it took to copy it as long as I had something to go by, some program what I could edit the track sector parm table to. Sometimes it was a change you could make to DOS so the disk just read like a normal disk, then you copy the files over flawlessly.

Then there were dongles....EEPROM burning baby!

When I had my software company our disk protection was really simple but seemed impossible to the would be hack. Eventually the 100th monkey thing happened, but that was about 3 years later. See we always added one more track, later we found a way to add 2, but the thing is the copy programs and most going through the normal DOS wouldn't read that far unless changed. Some disk utilty eventually let people read one more track and that's why we went another out. See we would put the disk catalog on that track, FAT and all. No way to read the disk without accessing the track and no way to do that without booting in our modified OS, which, if you format a disk to copy the program, puts it all on that same outside track again. Imagine getting the copy, going to your computer that is already booted up, putting the disk in and it doesn't read. Then imagine booting from the floppy and running the program but it can't find your hard disk directory and asks if you wanna format it. God we had fun! Just one of the "simple" protection moves we made at the time that is rather commonplace today.

ZennZero · Apr 23, 2005, 10:28 PM // 22:28

Interesting stuff - do you still work in the software industry?

Sin · Apr 23, 2005, 10:36 PM // 22:36

No, I left it. I can't discuss for a variety of reasons. Let's just say I didn't like the direction it was headed as far as how it would affect the way I lead my life. Retirement was a far greater option and it was at a reasonable time to make that decision.

Manderlock · Apr 23, 2005, 11:02 PM // 23:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sin

No, I left it. I can't discuss for a variety of reasons. Let's just say I didn't like the direction it was headed as far as how it would affect the way I lead my life. Retirement was a far greater option and it was at a reasonable time to make that decision.

You lucky retired dog you

Bgnome · Apr 25, 2005, 02:30 PM // 14:30

question answered.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=4262