mikew

No. This is just some crap OEM motherboard: link to crap MB spec Looks like The_Nephilim was right....

Argghh! I lose all the BIOS settings when I remove power, so the little battery must be flat. There seems to be only one BIOS setting which may have some effect. This (I think) defines the behaviour if AC power is lost, then comes back. It defaults to 'Stay Off', but can be changed to 'Stay On' or 'Auto'.

Good idea! and I absolve you of all blame if it all goes tits up. I might be away for some time....

Thanks. It's a mid ATX case, has a few PCI-e ports and I've now done some research and there are PSUs and GFX cards that fit. Anyway, I thought I'd start by replacing the PSU with one rated at 1000W, but is only a half inch or so longer than the original. Here it is: http://www.fractal-design.com/?view=product&category=3&prod=29 ..not cheap either. Unfortunately, when I try and start the PC, the fan spins for a second or so, then it all shuts down. Everything is OK if I go back to the original PSU. Either the new one is DOA or (more likely) there's something weird going on with the startup logic.

Cruel, but true. I fell into the trap that many others did when buying these machines, which is assuming that with 1.5GB of video RAM, the card must be good. So should I pimp my PC or not? Normally, this would just involve replacing the PSU and GFX card. This is a HP Pavilion though, where all the cards are OEM. If they've moved some of the motherboard functionality to the graphics card, I'm obviously stuffed....but they wouldn't do that would they? Anyway, I've managed to get one of the panels off to reveal the biggest CPU heatsink I've ever seen. Otherwise, it's a bit of a mess. The PSU is rated at 460W, so it would have to go, but there is isn't much room to put one in that's physically bigger. If I get those cables out of way, I could put in a somewhat bigger GFX card. What sayeth the experts?

Great work guys. ...unfortunately, I have nothing to contribute.

Great article. ...I'm not sure why you called them 'Nazi codebreakers' though. They seem like a nice couple.

Excellent! Thanks for the link.

Back to my normal PC.....and am rendered speechless! Not much left to do now.

Donster, best wishes to Lottie from the other side of the pond. (and I mean the Atlantic, not Lake Michigan) Old Guy, sounds like the makings of a Calcium business......

Ah, Doris Day.... A bit before my time, but I appreciate a bit of class. I wonder what this series will look like in 60 years time: "This day in the War on Terror" Who will the "Babes" be?

Thanks for the update. It crashes on my current PC, probably due to the mix of files that I have. Will try again tomorrow.... Are we sure 0076,007b and 0093 are tests for flags? That was my original interpretation, but it may be that it's an order to perform some action, then jump/call.

Yes, it's something like that. The only way I could make some quantitative measurements was to fly over terrain at known heights and reading the radar altimeter. This gave a unit as about 8 feet. For moving objects like planes, these units are divided by 256, giving a resolution of about 0.375" (or about 9.5mm if you're french)

Yes, all very good in theory, but he has no understanding whatsoever about human nature.

...did wonder about that....Thanks!

We'd need to understand the collision detection system first. For instance, using the viewer I identified pldstn_2.ssd as defining a tile with a pipeline running across it. But looking at the parsed ssd file shows that no collision boxes are defined for the pipes.

Interesting.... Then we have the effect of the most distant tiles fading away, so that the horizon is roughly a straight line The fog as been turned off to show this up better.

Damn, I thought that first advert was going to prove what I've always maintained....that you can get all the vitamins you require from beer.

Nice visuals! .....not keen on the music though. Was all that done with LOMAC?

Orgasmic! Where are you getting the fog parameters from...and the relationship between the terrain and sky?

Just need to create that aliasing effect, and you'll be there. Awesome job!

If it will cheer you up, I don't think the one you touched (N351BD ??) was the one that crashed (G-HAEC).

Brilliant! That z-axis projection insight is certainly paying dividends.

The thought had crossed my mind when dealing with the 0083/0087 files, that the LOD offsets might make sense if the files were compressed in some way when reading them into memory. Have no real proof though except that I can't make the numbers add up as they are. Thanks for the updated build. It's getting better and better. I've missed a few days, so need to catch up.... ...and I'd forgotten about DrKevDog's AGP textures. Seems like years ago I rendered a couple of the sky textures together with a modified newhoriz.3 file. The textures are 24 bit colour, but would likely end up looking blocky if there wasn't some smoothing mechanism.

OK, well you need to put your picture somewhere that it can be linked to, eg Photobucket. Then you just surround the link with IMG tabs like this, I've replaced IMG with ZZZ so you can see the format. [ZZZ]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Kapitulation-reims.gif/220px-Kapitulation-reims.gif[/ZZZ] The final result with IMG is here: