Crayon Physics Deluxe

Check THIS out. Wowsers.

Breakdown of the Relationship - Part 6

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND WE'RE BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!

After a weekend where I'd racked up a decent amount of brownie points Sunday rolled around with a required trip to Gipps St to help Auntie Plop move furniture... what a coincidence the monthly gathering of the dorks was at the town hall..

"baby... you owe me... I'm goin in & I don't want to get yelled at for whatever I drag out of there"

With a clean & crisp $50 in hand I storm into the swap meet shouting "I NEED A PC FOR $50!!!"

It turns out they think piece of shit old office Dells & the like are still worth between $150-200 so my shout changed to something closer to

"I NEED A MOTHERBOARD & CPU THAT DEFINATELY WORKS FOR $50"

Thankfully an angel that smelt like an unwashed tracksuit was happy to oblige, P4 1.7ghz on an intel board WITH 256MB RAM AND a driver disk AND a jumper diagram AND a 30 day warranty, all mine for $50..

Fucking bargain..

Get the bastard home, whack it in a case, hook it up. fire it up..

BOOM!@ (not bad boom.... good boom.. like booyaa)..

Decide to break with current tradition & go with XP on it mainly because of XP's fine hibernation shit.

Get XP installed, update some drivers from the fucking super handy driver disk they gave me & RType2 (my test bed game) is running like a dream. (the switch diagram was also super handy)

Best of all, so is hibernation. I've been struggling with what to do about booting & shutting down the mame cabinet once it's built, I don't want to leave the thing running 24-7 as I have to pay for all that power it's eating. but I also want a MAME session no more than 1 minute away whenever I want. XP's hibernation mode should be all I need not to chew heaps of power when it's not in use but also give pleasure to your nuts in enough time for your current day nerd not to get distracted & go searching for boobs while it's booting up.

so now I pretty much have the machine up & running. grand total spent so far?

$20 for monitor
$50 for Motherboard & CPU

Plus $60 for a PCI graphics card I forgot I bought in a fit of desperation last week & now I don't really need. meh... it's handy to have laying arond...

But most importantly... I have a PC up & running who's only right for existence is to play MAME on... which means I have a touch more inspiration to start building the cabinet

GRINDCORE 08

'08 is looking to be the year I rocked my nuts right off, and it's not even Xmas '07 yet.

Grindcore08 in Jan, at the Corner
- my wife is even considering coming

Maiden in Feb
- two highlights in the first 2 months

How will the rest of the year measure up?
Well, Fuck I'm Dead have a live dvd,
so we can make a beer and bong night of it with that one.

Also I propose we work shifts watching the Arthouse website for gigs
and make a commitment right here and now to make 2008 the year our ears broke.

RPGtonight

Tha Stomp put me on to this today.

Fucking word to your pants!

Let's get this shit started already.

Breakdown of the Relationship - Part 5

Awww sheesh, I'm having no damn luck... getting Win98 running on the machine was a cinch, however getting mame going has proven a nightmare.

The onboard graphics card is in the free pc, how shall we put it... shitfull

I know we don't need a super cool graphics card to play MAME, & after a bit of fooling about I got R Type 2 running fine (not having sound drivers was causing alot of the drama of stuff running slow) but on the old graphics card it would REFUSE to go fullscreen. just flat out refuse.

OK no drama, start digging for old PCI graphics cards & come up with 2

plug 1 in, & get it going. however somewhere along the line this card has stopped showing the colour red..... no amount of trying to blow dust off it or trying different drivers will help...

Card number 2, & really shitty old Trident card, I manage to get some drivers for it & cross my fingers. no dice. drivers aren't right & it completely throws windows into a barney...

Now after a weekend of swapping between all these cards & shit (I mean seriously, I was swapping cards out every 5 mins) I decide to fuck win98 off & try it all with DOS

Boot machine, hear monitor kick in.... nothing on screen, swap card and
Boot machine, hear monitor kick in.... nothing on screen, swap card and
Boot machine, hear monitor kick in.... nothing on screen, swap card and
Boot machine, hear monitor kick in.... nothing on screen, swap card and
Boot machine, hear monitor kick in.... nothing on screen, swap card and
Kick machine & storm upstairs....

I knew there was a reason I swore off old hardware 18 months ago...

So now I don't know what's going on, either I've fucked the free machine or I'm hoping that when I go back in 12hours time I boot & it forgets it's a fuckstick & just boots normally.

Overall I'm getting a bit jack of it, & rightly so Mel is getting pissed off with me spending hours downstairs trying to get it going..

Problem is, when I have an issue like this. I'm like a dog with a bone I CAN'T not get it working. it annoys the piss out of me & I can't think straight till I've solved the problem or smashed the shit out of whatever's causing it.

Stay tuned.. probably for smashing.. followed by spending