2011-12-21

Turning to the dark side

So, becoming a Sith is turning to the dark side - possibly. Having got my son Star Wars The Old Republic for his birthday he wants someone to play with (me!).

Unfortunately it is not working well with wine yet, so it seems. And not available for Mac. So that leaves wind owes as the only option.

So now I have a windoze machine - that really is turning to the dark side. I think it will be temporary until wine works well enough with SWTOR. But still, I have no idea how to use one of these things. It looks like I can turn it on and click on the WoW or SWTOR icon, and not have to touch anything else. I hear they get lots of viruses - though I have had my annual flu jab - I am not sure I want to get infected with microsfot.

Of course, if I have to get one, I may as well get the nvidia card that does 3D and an Acer monitor and glasses. It looks awesome for WoW in 3D - impressive.

Still a shame the game makers don't do a side-by-side output mode for a normal 3D TV, as that would allow playing on the 55" TV rather than this measly 24" screen. It seems, however, that the 3D is all in the graphics drivers and the game may not even be aware of it. After all, games are just feeding 3D textured triangles to the video card these days, so it can all be done behind the scenes, it seems. It helps if the game designers near it in mind in the design, though.

I'll try SWTOR on 3D as soon as my copy arrives - hopefully today.

Of course, we already have issues. The is operating system and WoW and SWTOR only, so we figured a small(ish) 60GB SSD would be fine. Nope! 60GB all used up. So getting a bigger drive this morning. Anyway, this is my Feast of Winter Veil present to me - thank you Grandfather Winter.

10 comments:

  1. Parallels on the Mac is a good answer for this...

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  2. Similar problems here:

    1. Wife's work have her on a ECDL course(which, by the way, seems to be practically worthless) and this is so unbelievably MS biased. For this reason I've installed Win Xp under VirtualBox which works fine - I managed to purchase a copy for £20. However, I don't what the 3D performance is like under VirtualBox.

    2. All my children who have left home (3 of 'em) use Facebook to keep in contact which precludes me as there's no way I'm going there. So far, I've no answer to this one.

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  3. Indeed, so far we have a new 120G SSD which formatted and installed the games, and then the whole thing froze, the SSDs took turns not being visible to the BIOS, and then the boot drive is corrupted so much it needs reinstalling.... Arrrrg

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  4. SWTOR is approx 19GB installed but requires around 25GB free space to install for some odd reason.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. I am loving this, we'll get you into a car next Adrian and buying prebuilt PCs from Currys >:D

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  7. You are a believe a very good programmer, would it not be less pain to get SWTOR to work under wine?

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  8. I have spent all day on this now - and back to reinstalling windoze yet again. I think you may be right!

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  9. Think of it as training.. after about the 20th time you'll be an expert at reinstalling Windows.

    'elite' level is going into all the settings and changing them from the defaults into something that's actually sane :p (Although to be fair to MS that's a lot better on Win7 than on previous incarnations).

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  10. OK it has a waste bin and two game icons on the desktop and that is it. As for 20 times, I got close to that just yesterday on this one machine!!!!

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