Re: Beta Testing
 

You've got a long way to go before you catch up to the Canadians! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/stupid.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Well if hardware gets you in. this baby should be a lock for a slot.
Stack

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Heb je wel eens (was een jaar of twee terug) enn (Jeugd)Journaalfilmpje gezien over een bepaald vakantiedorpje in Spanje? Komen bijna alleen maar Nederlanders, end dan nog van die "typische" "doorsnee" stereotiepe Nederlanders. Een van de meest verkochte artikelen van de lokale supermarkt (gerund door een Nederlander) was..... pindakaas. Zelfs de lokale bevolking sprak vloeiend Nederlands. Er waren meer kaaskoppen dan Spanjolen in dat gebied.

You think we're not capable of catching up on Canadians? You should see the Costa del Sol in Spain during summer.....

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

tesco looks under the forums for canadians... Damn they are there as well...

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Peanut cheese?

Re: SEV Betatest...
 

Peanut BUTTER, strangely translated..... It's supposed to be "popular" amongst people for use on a slice of bread. We (as being non-stereotypical Dutch people) most often use it to make..... how do you call "pindasaus" in English?

Re: SEV Betatest...
 

What is pindasaus? In the US most peanut butter is used for sandwich making and in candy/cookies. Probably a lot gets eaten right from the jar too.

Sandwich of choice is usually peanut butter and jelly. But peanut butter and cheese is good. Also peanut butter on a stalk of celery is quite good

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

OMG! Very nice... but you need to build an enclosure for it... if only to shield the EM radiation from it

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

That's a question that I can't answer for two reasons..

1) It depends on how many people apply to be in the beta. (and since Aaron allready said he's accepting applications til the end of the month, that number is not available yet.)

2) I have no idea how many slots Aaron will be making available. (and no, I'm not going to ask him, he's currently very busy getting the AI ready for beta.)

That said, your chances are better than playing the New York State Lottery.

Nuf said, Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

And full speed of 13Ghz, it put out as much heat as a blow torch, could hardly keep it cool sitting in the open. In the old alfa case I was using, CPU temps would hit throttle stops in less than an hour at full load.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

!
That's astounding Thermodyne... how did you build it and how much does it cost? I want one...
How is it set up, is it a Beowolf cluster or something? It looks like some kind of supercomputer array.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

It's a....well a it's.....a...Damn if I really know.
Its a $1000 quad processor I guess. 1st board is the master, and the other four are slaved to it. As programmed, it took folding@home work units apart and split the work between the four slaves. When it was synced, it returned results at a rate of more than 4 times the speed of the master working alone. Slaves are ram drive systems with 512mrg drives and 64megs of system memory. Master has 128 megs of ram and a 100gig raid 5 ide array. All cpu's are XP3000-266's. Main boards are VIA 400 chipset biostar's ($32 each) with hacked bios flashes. All ran nix. Never could get it to stay in sync for more than about 18 hours. Ended up running it as 5 2K blade servers in a cluster with good results. But it cost about $10 a day to run, so I lost interest at about 40K worth of units.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

If you could tell me how you built that, I would like totally buy you a burrito next time I see you in person.
I've heard of RAM disks, but never actually ever used them. It is RAM that is mounted as a hard drive, right?
Also, I assume they're communicating over the network to do work, right? or did you hook them up in some other way?

Re: SEV Betatest...
 

Ok, I know it's totally OT, but still.....

Pindasaus is, directly translated, "peanut sauce". I believe it's Indonesian by origin but I don't know, we most often make it when we eat rice for dinner. It tastes really good with blocks of tofu in it.

Re: SEV Betatest...
 

What I used to translate what you said translated most of it, and 'peanut cheese' popped out...

Re: SEV Betatest...
 

That would be the green fuzzy peanut butter?

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Ram disks can be software and use set aside blocks of system ram, or they can be hardware based. The ones I used were just little plastic things that plugged into the IDE cables. Originally they had Disk images on them used for testing new PC’s that were being shipped without software. Not sure what kind of ram is actually in them, but they work like a small very fast hard drive.

The connection between the boards is gigabit ethernet. Windows used just plain old tcp/ip, with nix it used UDP. Master board has a quad port LAN card in addition to the onboard connection.

To get started, I just searched Linux clusters and dl’d the directions for building it. But like I said, it was never fully reliable as a Nix cluster. As a windows cluster, it just ran like five systems that shared one raid array. I had to cut everything out of the OS install that was not needed in order to make it fit on the ram drive, then I just ghost cast the end product to the ram drives.

For the bios hacking, I will have to try and find the guys email addy for you. I just looked in some OCing forums where they talked about custom bios files and then started asking if anyone could set a file up to do what I wanted. After some wasted time, I got pointed to this guy who had built some seti stacks and then he knew another person that had a custom file for a biostar board. And so forth and so on. Then one thing led to another and with about $1000 bucks worth of chips and boards and some ram plus an arm full of stuff I had sitting around, and a few parts begged and barrowed, I put it together. Then I bounced between bliss and pulling my hair out for a couple of months. The problem seemed to be that the system clock generators hertz changed with temp. The hotter boards in the center seemed to fall behind and then. I kept messing with it until I had to give the quad network card back to it rightful owner. After that I just ran windows

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

d000d that is soooo sweet.
I might try that some day (yea right, like I will ever get around to it)
so water cooling might be a good idea then? or maybe build it in a mini frezer http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Thermodyne, your comp is dream of any computer tinkerer...

I had a long time ago a monster computer that i build using several old boards and processors, if i remember well it was 3 486-66mhz and 2 Pentium 133 with every board networked with the others and a stripped down version of Win95 in every HD (they ranged from 500mb up to 2gb in one of the pentiums)... my idea was to create a gaming network to play DukeNuken3D and other games, and i plugged monitors and keyboards in every ne of them.... i and me fried gave it the name of "Frankie" because it was a whole mess of cables, boards and eletrical discharges... i lost it to an eletrical surge that fried the majority of the boards...

Your machine looks like a big brother of my old "Frankie", minus the monitors and keyboards...

hummm, lets see what bits and pieces i have around here to see if i can build something.....

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Carefull my friend MAkinus, don't frie yourself. That would be... less desirable. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

btw, don't forget to send me a message when SE V comes available.


Oh no! Makinus and Thermodyne made a horrible monster! It's alive! Run for your live! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Thermodyne, I totally owe you a burrito now. I wonder if its possible to find RAM disks these days, since normal HDs are so cheap. I would like to find a RAM disk that uses SATA, that would be sweet. I'm sure if I was an electronics whiz, I get a controller and rig it up.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Ram disks are portions of your RAM that are set aside as virtual HDD space. what you are describing sounds like a FLASH disk, which would be non-volotile and orders of magnitude slower.

RAM disks are more or less obsolete due to modern memory management practices. it used to be that you could make things run uber-fast by putting the program on a RAM disk instead of your hard drive, and taking advantage of the higher speed of the memory and of the faster bus that the SIMM / DIMM banks were on.

These days, computers have such stupidly large quantities of memory, and OS memory management routines are so advanced, you will generally be slowing yourself down by second-guessing your system and trying to force software to run on a ram disk.

There are, however, solid state FLASH based hard disks with no moving parts in them. these are crazy fast, and models exist for both SCSI-3, Fibrechannel, and IDE. now if you just had a massive SAN filled with them...

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Flash is not the same thing. It works the same but is built on a newer technology. The first ram drives actually had sticks of sdram ram, and 1/2 a gig was huge. today they use ddram and go up into the tarabite range.

The little drives I have predate flash, sodimm I would think based on age and IDE 33 standards marked on them.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

so what your talking about is volitile storage? it could be fast, but the overhead required to populate it would be anoying.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Yep, every time you power down it needs to be reloaded. But ghost casting makes it quick.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Maybe the next gen of OS will see a return to having the the OS on ROM. I always thought that made a big difference in speed. And now days the technology is getting to where having several Gig of ROM is very doable.

The biggest benefit would be that the systems themselves would need to be designed with some sort of conformity. That would in return stabalize the PC market that is just progressing too fast for the general public. (Why do you think consoles are popular? two reasons, Price and the fact they they remain a stable platform for several years instead of becomming obsolete as soo as you make the purchase.

Oh well, my vote is to go the OS on ROM rute.

Nuf said, Cheers!

P.S. But what does all this have to do with the SE5 beta? Nothing So might I suggest we start a new thread about "The future of PC's and Super Rigs."

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

maybe not ROM, but repackaging an OS as some sort of flashable bios extension might be nice (you need to be able to easily patch it)... what about a name like aios (advanced i/o system), or maybe aiospabocus for win-like OSes (advanced i/o system, plus a bunch of completely useless stuff). http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Uhm... I like "aiospabocus" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Cmon DEG, we are talking about here, Im surprised we kept it on-topic as long as we did http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Actually, this discussion could be loosly related to the se5 beta, we are discussing sys specs after all, my bad, sorry.

..Speaking of sys specs, I just bought myself a new comfy high-back chair for my computer station. Now I'll be really comfortable for the beta and beyond!!

Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Hmmm........does it have a cup holder? Or do you use the CD reader for that http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Oh shoot, I forgot the other laptop I have. I also have a Dell C610 (1ghz P3, 512mb RAM, 16mb video card) laptop I could've put into the application...
I really got to get my act together.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

I wonder how many people here have 64 bit processors.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

They haven't been out in the consumer marketplace long enough for too many people to have them.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Do you mean some true 64-bit cpus, like alphas/itaniums or mixed 32/64 AMDs?
Well, I have amd64 3000+ on a workplace. They're [amd64] pretty widespread now.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Got an AMD64 3200 on my main machine

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

NEWS FLASH - Imagine If Bill Gates got involved...... *highlight to read*

<font color="#B7AE9F">
Do to overwhelming demand for open beta slots the game developer was bought out by Microsoft and will from this day forward be known as MicroFador.

The beta will now be a buy in beta with the low price of $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 per slot. (Ya as if)

Currently all 32 slots are open.

"We here at MicroFador, by we I mean the pencil neck geeks that our parent company has send down to look over MY neck, want to express our [sudder] deepest [/sudder]apprecaition to the MS for allowing us to continue using BIANARY, a registared TD of Microsoft, in our programing process. At this rate our latest game, Space Monopoly, formerly SE V, will be ready for X-box sometime in the coming century." Former CEO - Malfador, Now Arron Boy at MicroFador.


"We sincerely hope that all of you fans will still be alive and able to fork over your retirement money to buy this title when it eventually comes out. In the mean time we highly recommend the game MOO3 as we have just aquired the rights for it." - CEO / Head Pencil Neck MS Geek - MicroFador</font>


"Humor, I love it!" - Data stoned on new humor chip.

DISCLAIMER:
This was just for fun and in no way is meant to be taken literally or in any way to mean that I have nothing but the deepest respect for MicroFa--- ooops, I mean Malfador. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Sorry, I just couldn't resist being weird.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

I've been running AMD64 since the FX came out of the foundry. Here my first experiance with the FX51.
First boot of FX51

Here are the numbers it put up in November of 03
Bench marks

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Of course, any of use AMD athlon 64 users who use windows are only running it in 32 mode. But then Microsoft will release XP 64 bit edition.

If anyone of us 64 bit CPU people get in the beta, maybe we should try to get XP 64 bit to test the game with.

Re: SEV Betatest...
 

Is this in ANY WAY related to the SEV beta? Don't think so, but just want to know what it's about.

Re: SEV Betatest...
 

No, not at all. Shrapnel has formed a new beta testers pool for various upcoming games that will be published by Shrapnel.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

So what you are saying is that this copy of Windows XP64 is really 32 bit? amd64 bit windows has been beta for over a year now.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Just sent my application!

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Aaron should consider inviting several linux junkies to beta, so they could do some testing under wine or cedega. I definitely would like to see se5 running on my debian.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

I was over at the Strategy First website and saw no indication that SE5 is on the "announced games" list - has there been a press release?

It is a "no-brainer" that one of the key things in any beta is constant 2-way communication between the dev team and the testers to exchange ideas, file interpretation theories, save games, updates and report bugs of course. Nowadays, this is accomplished quite easily via dedicated forums (like the ones here at Shrapnel). During the SE4 Gold beta, Shrapnel did a 10/10 job in hosting chats, MP test times and keeping those lines of communication open. Has anyone had experience on Strategy First beta's? Do they have dedicated forums for beta testing? How involved in the testing are they?

Just Curious

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

I hope I get into beta...

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

As I understand it we will be able to sign up until 31-3-2005.
So the people who will be selected will be informed on:


APRIL 1st


Hhhmmmmmmm..........;)

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

"We're sorry to inform you of this, but you all filled out your forms wrong. We will not be having beta slots this year."

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Of course not NullAhston! We are all seasoned in the ways of bureaucracy, and have been honing our form-filling skills since the age of six! Therefore, some of the applicants (at the very least) will successfully fill in their forms. The others shall be totemised at once, thanks to the wondrous technology offered by Frobozz Electric.

And on a completely unrelated matter: I offer courses on form-filling for anyone not feeling quite up to the task. Afforable prices, and no strings attached. No FBW need apply... assuming I make my Will roll to eschew such a blatant ploy.

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Totomised?

Re: w00t Beta Testing w00t
 

Totemised! Or totemized, if working under the nefarious spell of "confusing grammar": why have some verbs ending in -ise and others ending in -ize? Truly, it only seems to be a marketing device to increase the sales of aspirin and... Why are you speaking of a wild tangent?

Totemisation is the process transforming someone into a small totem, as introduced in the Zork series. It really is faster than torture, cleaner than execution, and it takes very little place. Besides, the creatures contained in the totems are still alive, so the tormenting value remains quite high. Because of all the merits of the process, totemisation has become the highest punishment in Zork, and virtually the only one too. Lenience is only the kind of things used by writers to create plot twists, allowing the heroes to merely remain imprisoned, thereby allowing them to save the world; if there was no laxness, heroes would stay dead when their time is due.