In message <20060514133222.14589.qmail@web34414.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
          kravnus wolf <kravnus@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Wow! The machine you guys have are like heavy gamers.
> Do you guys play games often?

Not really... I play StarCraft with a few friends at university (StarCraft
will run on anything faster than a 486DX/75) but I don't really play anythi=
ng
more recent than that. Oh, I'm about three-quarters of the way through
Half-Life I. Can't be bothered buying HL2 though - I don't really get time =
to
play games.

I've also got a full copy of Need For Speed Underground 2, but I'll be damn=
ed
if I can figure out why it's crashing on the "Loading game data" screen. I'm
also a bit of a SimCity nut, and I play a lot of freeware adventure games.
<www.the-underdogs.org> and <www.abandonia.com> are pretty good for that so=
rt
of thing. So I guess I am a bit of a gamer, but I play more of the older
games. Used to love playing Sonic on my brother's Sega Megadrive II (Sega
Genesis) though :)

The main reason I bought the AMD64 box was because the CPU slot on my P3-550
mainboard had failed, and the cost of a replacement motherboard made it more
economical to tear the thing to bits and rebuild from the ground up. I used=
 a
few bits of Blu-tack to hold the CPU in place, then a few days later found
out that the cheque Parallax sent me (second place in the 2005 SX design
contest - SX logic analyser) had cleared. I then proceeded to spend =A3400 =
on
the CPU, RAM, video card and power supply, then about a month ago put anoth=
er
512MB of RAM and another 80GB hard drive in.

I have to admit, it's nice to see just how quick the MPASM32 progress bar
can be made to move.. :)
Most of the time, the AMD64 doesn't feel a great deal quicker than the
laptop. Then you start building a large program, the CPU ramps up to full
speed and it proves its worth.

=A3400 (actually closer =A3550 with all the extra add-ons) was a bit much f=
or a
computer, but it's worth every penny to have something that "just works". I
had a bit of bother getting Autotrax running ("help, no EMS memory!") but
running it under DOSBox (dosbox.sf.net) solved that one. Only problem with =
DB
is that it eats vast gobs of CPU time, so my laptop battery doesn't last ve=
ry
long. And the machine gets rather warm...

-- =

Phil.                         | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G VF+UniPod
philpem@dsl.pipex.com         | Cheetah: Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxeV2 1G+180G
http://www.philpem.me.uk/     | Tiger: Toshiba SatPro4600 Celeron700 256M+4=
0G
-- =

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