Pile o’ Video Cards

Diamond Viper II (2000 – 2001)

My first video card ever, I bought this primarily for playing Team Fortress Classic (a Half-Life multiplayer mod) and Unreal Tournament.  And at those two games, it did quite well.  According to Wikipedia, the Viper II had a mere 12 million transistors and a core clock of 125Mhz.  I was surprised to see that it came with composite and S-Video connectors for outputting to TV.  You’ll also notice its lack of a fan.

Geforce 2 Ultra (2001 – 2004)

The Geforce 2 Ultra was twice as powerful as the Viper II at a transistor count of 25 million and a core clock of 250Mhz.  This card helped me battle my way through classic games of the time such as Jedi Knight 2, Dungeon Siege, Deus Ex, Grand Theft Auto 3, and Rise of Nations.  This was the only time I bought a high-end version of a video card.

Later in this card’s life, I put it into a rig I built for my sister, and she of course mistreated it.  Hence the fan on the video card seized up and fell off.

Radeon 9600XT (2004 – 2009)

Weighing in at 76 million transistors and a core clock of 500Mhz, the Radeon 9600XT was an excellent video card that held its own right up until 2008 when Shader Model 3 games started coming out.  During its reign, I was enjoying games such as Half-Life 2, UT 2004, Company of Heroes, TES4: Oblivion, Counter-Strike: Source, and Dungeon Siege 2.  Starting with this video card, I also began using dual-monitors and haven’t looked back since.  I modded my card to add copper heatsinks on the RAM chips and later on replaced the HSF with an all-copper one.

Geforce 7300GT (2009)

This video card was really only a stopgap until I could build a whole new system.  At 177 million transistors and 350Mhz, the 7300GT was one of the last video cards to still support AGP.

Tropico 3

The Tropico series is all about managing a tiny island nation in the Caribbean, and the third game in this series definitely does it best.  There’s something very addicting to this game in its delightful blend of economy management, city-building, and island vistas.  Because your island only starts with roughly 50 citizens, you can connect with their individual needs and preferences and fulfilling those feels very rewarding.  The near infinite combinations of variables for the presidente, scenario, and island makes Tropico 3 that much more replayable.

Company of Heroes

The accurate portrayals of World War II weapons and combat and the exceptional graphics are the two main factors that make Company of Heroes so enjoyable to play.  There’s nothing better than seeing a mammoth German Tiger tank crushing everything in its path with all turrets firing and the ensuing visceral fireballs and carnage.  And on top of this brutal combat comes a very intelligent strategy game where the balance of power is constantly shifting, keeping you on your toes.  The campaigns (Normandy, Market Garden, Caen) in Company of Heroes are great for occasional replaying, but the skirmishes are even better for a quick bout of WW2 action.  (Best if consumed with Band of Brothers.)

Red Faction: Guerrilla

Red Faction: Guerrilla is Grand Theft Auto with explosives.  Who knew that the creative destruction of buildings could make for such enjoyable gameplay.  On top of that, you feel like your actions are actually having an effect on the world as you start completing missions and freeing zones.  But mainly, blowing stuff up never gets old.  (Highly recommended to go xliveless, though.)

It all starts with a sledgehammer

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Dark Messiah combines a lot of the features I love in a game.  It has great first-person combat, character development via a skill tree, plenty of loot to find and equip, sneaking around and stealth kills, and nice graphics and level design.  The combat alone is quite intense and takes some careful choreography from the player; so, executing the perfect attack is very rewarding.  All of these RPG elements combined with the combat and great locales make for a wonderfully replayable adventure.

Call of Duty: World at War

World at War is like playing a non-stop action WW2 movie.  And everything about this game is focused on keeping the action coming.  Normally I would be opposed to constantly spawning enemies in a game, but here they only force you to ferociously press on.  It’s an amazing-looking and -sounding game as well.  Even though the full game can be played in only a few hours, I find myself playing the game (or portions of it) over and over.

If a game is not on this list, that doesn’t mean Cursor Lock won’t work for it.  Honestly, Cursor Lock has never been confirmed to not work for any particular game.  This is more a list of offending games, really.

But now with my rediscovered freedom, I have copious amounts of free time and thus time for video games.  As happens on occasion, I’ve been going nostalgic with my gaming choices lately.

Darwinia is a cute and clever real-time strategy game where you help a fictitious researcher regain control of a simulated cyber-world from a malware infestation.  It has just the right balance of puzzles and blowing shit up to make it incredibly fun.  The only problem is that it ends too quickly.

Black Mesa is a community remake of the original Half-Life using the newer Source Engine.  I’ve mentioned this mod years ago, but it only just got released recently.  Obviously, it’s a little too ambitious to remake a whole game when no one is getting paid; hell, Valve didn’t even want to do a proper job with Half-Life: Source.  And it shows as there are places where the quality is noticeably amateur.  Regardless, I applaud their efforts as it’s definitely fun and action-packed.

Given the recent SimCity debacle that’s been in the news, I (and it seems many other players) have given the previous SimCity game a whirl.  It’s been a while since I loaded up SimCity 4, but I was quite surprised to find its graphics were still mainly sprite-based, which is a bit jarring after playing so many 3D games with freely-moving cameras.  It’s definitely interesting to see your city take shape and how your choices affect that.  But I find the low-action gameplay to be sleep-inducing, and it makes me wonder how long the game will stay interesting.  Although I haven’t been playing it lately, the inadequacies of SimCity are making me consider going back to Tropico—it just seems like the right balance of macro- and micro-management in a city-builder game.

Going back even farther, I’ve also been enjoying some of the late 90s classics Age of Empires and Age of Kings.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that both of these games still install and run on Windows XP, granted XP is pretty old itself.  I was also surprised at how difficult these games got and really quickly.  It’s no wonder that I cheated so much back in the day.

I also found out that I actually made a campaign for AOE called Time of the Phoenicians.  You can amazingly enough still download it from AOE Heaven.  The story and writing is pretty awful and the gameplay buggy (I was 15), but the maps were still pretty detailed as you can see below.

I fiddled with video card drivers some just in case that helped—it did not. So, eventually, I swapped my new video card out for a Radeon HD 4650 that was lying around.  Although early signs were hopeful that I had isolated the video card as the problem, the swap actually had only slowed down the frequency of blue screens.

I was starting to think that I’d have to build a new system core (motherboard, CPU, and RAM), but I still knew of one more trick to try.  There’s a program called Memtest86+ that will repeatedly test your entire PC memory (RAM) to see if there are errors with it holding correct values.  I’ve used Memtest before to make sure new memory was good, but I’ve never actually seen it find any errors.  It didn’t take long before it did find errors this time, though.  I narrowed the problem down to two addresses around the 500MB mark in the first DIMM.

I had two memory addresses that were repeatedly returning errors in Memtest86+.

So I took that first stick of memory out and left the other matching stick in and tested again.  After three full passes, Memtest was showing no errors for this stick.  Next, I swapped sticks.  And as one might guess, errors galore.

So, I swapped the sticks again and also returned my beefy new video card to Serpent 3.  And I’ve enjoyed an entire evening of gaming and videos with zero blue screens.  Luckily, Diablo 3 doesn’t seem to demand more than 2 GB of memory.  Memtest FTW!

But I was disappointed to not find anyone else who picked up on this on the interwebs.  So I put together this little clip so you can hear what’s so funny about these goatmen–I mean “goatminn”.

Goatmen

1. Election day must be a federal holiday.  All states must allow same-day voter registration. † ‡
   Every citizen should be encouraged and able to vote.
2. No state may hold a party primary earlier than four months before federal elections. ‡
   End the constant campaigning.
3. All candidates for federal election may take only public financing and individual donations no more than $1000 per candidate per election. †
   No more bought politicians.
4. Congress will have term limits.  Senators may serve no more than three full terms (18 years).  Representatives may serve no more than five full terms (ten years). ♦
   End the reigns of career politicians.
5. Presidents are elected by popular vote, not Electoral College. ♦
   No more elections decided by swing states.
6. Congressional redistricting must be done by an impartial computer algorithm that only takes population into account and not demographics. ‡ or ♦
   End gerrymandering.

† Requires federal law ‡ Requires laws in all states ♦ Requires constitutional amendment

Steam Widget on WordPress.org

As I said I would last weekend, I got my new Steam Widget up on WordPress.org.  I still want to add some things like stats links and currently in-game, but I think it’s a good first release.

Also, I forgot to mention this in my last post, but it’s pretty cool still.  A German guy did a drum remix using my remastered versions of the Deus Ex UNATCO and Area 51 themes and posted them on Youtube a few months ago.  Check it out.

The widget formatting is completely customizable via templates and/or CSS. The templates use patterns that will plug in values for the following:

• Recently Played Games
  • Game Name
  • Steam URL
  • Icon URL (32px)
  • Small Logo URL (120px × 45px)
  • Large Logo URL (184px × 69px)
  • Time Played Last Two Weeks
  • Time Played Total
• Player Profile
  • Steam Username
  • 64-bit Steam ID
  • Avatar Icon URL (32px)
  • Avatar Medium URL (64px)
  • Avatar Large URL (184px)
  • Time Played Last Two Weeks

Screenshots

Download

Download Advanced Steam Widget (53.5 kB)

Also on WordPress.org

Steam Widget

Also, I noticed you noticed my Steam widget.  I just added it over the weekend and people are already clicking through on the game links.  I did the widget based on my code for Sitewide Recent Images (more about that on my work blog), so it supports the same caching and template options, which the other two Steam widgets on wordpress.org failed at.  I hope to release it over the weekend.

Here’s a list of games that Cursor Lock is reported or confirmed to fix.

Features

• Locking only when focused–requires no special user interaction, nor does it interfere with task switching between screens
• Uses a superior method of capturing the cursor compared to other solutions (i.e. MouseTrap)
• Ability to open one program and lock another allows Cursor Lock to work well with launcher programs
• Can confine the cursor to window borders, in addition to a whole screen
• Customizable hotkeys allow for complete control of locking in any situation
• Alternate locking modes that run in the background for full user control and special circumstances
• Intuitive GUI support program for quick setup of Cursor Lock shortcuts
• Integrated help system for shortcut setup program
• Highly optimized and efficient locking program that uses practically no memory or CPU

Tutorial

Screenshots

Download

Download Cursor Lock (173.47 kB)

Changelog

SnakeByte Studios 2012

Heeeey…I have a new website.  It’s very much a work in progress, but I needed to make it live now because it’d probably have been another year before I finished completely.  As I mentioned a couple posts ago, the new site is powered by WordPress.  However, I mostly scrapped the theme I was working on in favor of a heavily modified Twenty-Ten and Nivo Slider for a homepage header.  The theme is not too unlike an idea I’ve been playing around with on my work blog, which itself was inspired by another theme called Dusk to Dawn.

Besides the other reasons I gave for switching to WordPress in the aforementioned post, which in summary were:

1. Visitor commenting
2. Full-featured backend
3. Familiarity from using at work

I also just don’t have time to code my own site from scratch anymore.  And this is fine—I get enough coding websites at work—and will allow me to focus more on posting and other projects.  Speaking of other projects, I finished another map for Company of Heroes over winter break.  It’s a remake of a map from the original Red Orchestra.  It’s also on FileFront.

Sarif Manufacturing Plant

1. Damage mod in a crate in Storage Room 3 of the Sarif manufacturing plant

Detroit

1. Reload Speed Mod found above the fire escape just inside DRB territory. Jump aug required.
2. XP E-Book on the ground level of DRB territory.  Map
3. Praxis Kit found behind a weak wall near the sewer exit into the DRB territory.
4. Ammo mod in a storage unit near Sarif HQ. Same place where Zeke Sanders asks you to meet him (if you let him live).  Map
5. Ammo capacity mod in the storage room near/below the Sarif HQ helipad

FEMA Facility

1. Reload Speed mod behind some boxes in a security office of the FEMA camp.

Hengsha

1. There’s a Hive membership card in a guest room on the third floor of the Hung Hua Hotel.
2. Reload Speed mod in a storage unit in Lower Hengsha near the Hung Hua Hotel.  Map
3. Targeting mod in a storage unit just west of The Hive.  Map
4. Ammo Capacity mod in a storage unit near the Harvester parking garage in Lower Hengsha.  Map
5. Ammo Capacity mod behind a fence on a catwalk in the Youzhao District of Lower Hengsha.  Map
6. Praxis Kit at the bottom of the elevator shaft of Hengsha Court Gardens apartments in Lower Hengsha.
7. Rate of Fire mod in a room in the basement on The Hive.
8. Rate of Fire mod behind a breakable wall on the second floor of Alice pods–just above the arms dealer in the supply room.

Tai Yong Medical

1. Ammo Capacity mod in a locker above the Cryo-Storage area of Tai Yong Medical. Use the catwalk path.
2. Reload Speed mod in a large shaft in the pangu section of Tai Yong Medical. Can only get there through a vent.
3. Praxis Kit found in a desk drawer in the Tai Yong Medical labs.

Picus

1. Ammo Capacity mod on the Picus roof.
2. Praxis Kit found in one of the desk drawers in the newsroom of Picus.  Map
3. Rate of Fire mod in the mensroom near the Picus newsroom.
4. Silencer in a drawer concealed by boxes in the Picus studio
5. Reload speed mod in an office on the lowest floor of Picus (boss floor).  Map

Detroit 2

1. A quite obvious Praxis Kit on the floor of Sandoval’s apartment. Beware: It’s a trap!
2. XP E-Book on Sandoval’s desk in his underground liar
3. Ammo capacity mod in a wall cavity just after the Sandoval encounter.  Map

Hengsha 2

1. Damage mod in a cell on the lowest level of the Harvester garage.
2. XP E-Book on a desk in the operating room of the Harvester Parking Garage
3. Ammo capacity mod in a safe next to Tracer Tong’s computer on the lowest level of the Harvester garage.

Hengsha Docks

1. Target Leading mod in a shipping container at the Hengsha Docks. It’s near the entrance gate and on top of other containers.  Map
2. Rate of Fire mod in a storage unit on the west side of the Hengsha docks area.
3. Damage mod in a storage unit on the west side of the Hengsha docks area.  Map
4. Reload speed mod on the south side of the upper level of the Hengsha docks warehouse; near the sniper walkway.  Map

Omega Ranch

1. Ammo capacity mod inside a supply closet at the start of Omega Ranch.  Map
2. Reload speed mod in the locked dormitory of the Omega Ranch barracks.Map
3. Damage mod in the armory of the Omega Ranch barracks.  Map
4. Target seeking mod in a supply closet just before the elevator to the restricted area of Omega Ranch.  Map
5. XP E-Book in Doctor Reed’s safe at Omega Ranch. Requires Level 5 Hacking.
6. Cooling mod in the hidden room in Hanger 18 of Omega Ranch.  A crate is blocking an open vent.  Map

Panchaea

1. Burst round mod in a cargo container in the exterior area of Panchaea.  Map
2. Cooling mod in a dormitory of the Panchea tower. Only reached through a vent in a nearby room.  Map

SnakeByte Studios Logo

SnakeByte Studios is the professional outlet for me, Snake. This site is a portfolio for all the work I’ve done, both personal and academic, and with the main purpose of helping others. Here, I post as much as I can of my custom apps, game mods, digital media, and writings.

Although some friends have contributed to the site over the years, I’m responsible for 99% of the current content and design. So, while originally the intent was to be a multi-faceted tech site, it’s devolved back to its humble beginning as a personal site. For a complete history of the early site, see the S&L Timeline.

About Snake

I have a BS in CS and previously worked at a university library for more than three years. They mainly paid me to kick ass at what I already do for fun. Right now I’m working on some of my own projects and taking a break from the 40 hour a week grind.

I love video games of all genres (except sports), sitcoms, and politics. Occasionally, I’ll code programs in my spare time. They’re usually small and specialized apps that were made to assist my everyday activities. I try to release as many of my projects for free online as I can. I also dabble in sound, music, video, image editing, and generally all things digital or electrical.

Systems

Since 2000, I’ve built all of my desktop computers, which are designated “Serpent”. Whenever I upgrade the core components, the system version number is increased.  See the below timeline for my past and present hardware.