Dev Day Diary: Hardware

After my last encounter with the Post Office left my wondrous plexiglass rig a pile of plastic, I was glad to see that the cheapest computer in the world (and I got it for only $200) arrived safely. Before I even powered it up, I popped the case and started swapping out parts.

At first, I thought my jinx had followed me because I couldn't get any video out. I remembered an evil old HP I had (which committed suicide in Iowa a couple years ago) which required a hidden, undocumented, jumper swap for using the AGP slot and was a bit worried about that. But not even the onboard video card was working. On a hunch, I swapped my RAM out with the original and it powered up just fine. So I now have 1GB of SDRAM which is essentially a pair of ugly earrings.

Getting my old 120GB hard drive into the case was a bit of a chore as well. The GQ has this big metal lip which obstructs the 3.5 hard drive bay requiring a bit of brute force to literally shove the drive into position. Once that was done I had to disconnect the floppy drive in order to get the power cables to fit, but it's not like that's a big loss. Probably replace it with a media reader down the line anyway. The old 9700 Pro worked without a hitch and I took out the 56k modem card and replaced it with the Audigy 2, though it looked hungry for drivers.

So I need to buy some new RAM and probably a wireless card, though there is onboard ethernet so the latter is optional. After that, it should be a average game rig ... won't perform great until I replace that Celeron D. When the AGP X850 drops in price, I'll consider doing both.

But for now, I've got a Windows box again. I plan on picking up Guild Wars over lunch along with the RAM and a KVM swapper. I had considered getting a cheap LCD and using Synergy instead, and I may yet. I use a similar setup at work and it's really quite sweet.

I'm not sure when I'll start to port Atlas over. I've got the start on a GUI framework going and probably need to finish that. My biggest impediment is the custom C++ that will need to be recompiled, and I think the upcoming code push is going to include a lot of that. Once the GUI works, I need a buy menu, things to buy, and a way to sort inventory. Probably don't want to do all that in script.

I was going to get some Atlas screenshots, but I recently put in some placeholder graphics which aren't my own, so I'll wait to replace those first. At the rate things are going, I may have a demo by Christmas. However, it should be noted that from my modding days ... my estimates are usually off by a few months.