On Saturday 01 June 2002 02:12 am, Paul Johnson wrote: > On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 12:26:48AM -0700, ben wrote: > > send me a list of what he'd need to do the same, and i'll work on > > enabling the transition. > > At the time I did this, I was taking a PII 450 with a 15GB drive, 100MB > RealTek nic, and a nVidia GeForce2 AGP and 256MB of RAM. More is better > on the processor, video card and RAM. I would recommend at least a 1GHz > CPU, 384MB RAM, and any current nVidia card. Pick a sound card that the > kernel itself can handle. My ISA soundblaster 16 still rocks the house. > > For a box primarily used for gaming, go with a base Debian install with > as few daemons as you can get away with. Run the MTA from inetd. Go > with sid so you always have the newest X; STAY AWAY from KDE and Gnome; > it'll slow down your machine dramatically and you're gonna have a bad > time. Use the most minimalistic WM you can tolerate (though one Linux > gamer I know doesn't even have a wm installed on his LAN party box). > It's not that all these things take up huge amounts of resources, it's > that you can squeek every last drop of power out for the game and > reclaiming a few CPU cycles and even a little bit of RAM gives the game > that much more power when you need it. Especially considering if you're > at a LAN party, getting absurdly high frame rates at high resolutions > and deep color depths is where it's at (I never understood this part for > anything other than a DSW, if I play on a resolution higher than 800x600 > or 1024x768, I start to lose the ability to orient myself quickly and > keep a razor-sharp aim at higher resolutions (past that, to me, the > picture starts to feel a bit too concave. I'd rather have a narrow > range of vision and depend on audio in my headphones than try to aim > with the field of vision of an insect crammed into a 21" CRT.) > > It has dramatically sped up the LAN party set up and take down process > when I've served DHCP, and it didn't take anything away from the game > that I noticed. > > Selection is a little bit slim pickins, but out of the bigname stuff, we > have everything you can find on ftp.lokigames.com, and all idSoftware > games from Doom I to Wolfenstein 7: Return to Castle Wolfenstein. > (Linux got Quake III before Windows did, id develops thier games on > Linux and backports to Windows, so id games run pretty damn well, and > thier most recent releases run flawlessly). We have a Civilization > compatible clone, FreeCiv, in main, as well as Linux gamer classics like > xpilot and for the truly old-skool, the bsdgames. I had a generic login > on my gaming box (since it only came up at LAN parties, I even installed > Debian on it at a LAN party to demonstrate it to friends) that had no > password so folks could log in and play hunt in putty from thier > machines when everybody else was playing WarCraft (cult hit among my > group, the rest of us hate the brutally slow gameplay, even if though > it's a nice change of pace late in the party). > > > forgive the ignorance, but what's ut? > > Unreal Tournament. > > The good news is, for all the stuff Loki Games ported over and all id > Software's stuff, if you have the Windows version already, you can just > snag the Linux binaries off the appropriate website, the installer will > often copy the data files off the CD to the drive, and then you don't > have to carry around a box of CDs to deal with the anti-piracy BS the > Windows folks have to deal with on a lot of those games. > > UT, Quake III and Return to Castle Wolfenstein is like crack, adrenaline > and caffine to me. 8:o)
thanks. i appreciate the time you put into the response. quake III is the key. if i can get that running on my machine, then half the battle is won. am i correct in assuming that, in the game world, there ain't no such thing as free beer, and that linux gaming requires buying m$ versions for the data files required? is there a port of resident evil? my kid gave me an elaborate critique on the the movie, evaluated on how true it was to the game. actually, i think that milla jovovich is his second serious movie star crush--after anna paquin--since he selected 'joan of arc,' of his own free will, on a recent video hunt. i guess i can google the answer to the question above. bottom line--thanks, balloo. the more i can replicate what he's got on his doze box, the more i can lure him away from the devil. he's the best kid you could imagine, but it always freaks me out that he knows more about m$ie than i ever want to learn. makes my life feel like the omen, sometimes. ben -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
