eXtraordinary Puking

[handslive]

To start the saga off, I got a copy of Morrowind for Xmas. But I couldn't get it to run in a stable way. I spent most of one weekend reading every damn thing on their web site. Forums, support documents, FAQs, everything.

Their recommendation was that I disable hardware acceleration for the sound card. Did that and instantly noticed that I was getting more sound and better quality sound. Weird. But the game continued to be unstable.

Next recommendation was to disable, of all things, the AGP texture acceleration. This is the piece of the 3D video card that makes sure polygons in the game get filled in quickly. In fact, they usually assign a specific portion of the available memory on the card just for texture mapping. And they've got special hardware and code for making sure they can color in the pretty pictures very rapidly. So you know there's going to be a performance hit for this.

However, this did in fact make the game stable. With one exception. The map in the game did not work. It always looked like it was filled with static, coloured static.

Talking with friends, the response was usually "Did you get the latest video drivers and sound card drivers?" Well, yes but the vendors in both cases are not providing regular updates to the Windows 98 versions of these. Honestly, I don't know if they're any better about ME or XP or 2000, but neither vendor had updates past 2001 for these cards.

Okay, time to take the plunge, then. In the first place, XP allows programs to use more memory. The operating system is also better able to use all the available memory. (I've got 256 MB. On 98, it only knows about 128 MB of that.) In many ways, this suggests that the game ought to be more stable under XP.

So, this weekend I went out and bought an internal DVD drive and picked up an OEM version of XP Pro at the same time. This is much more like 2000 (and NT before that) than it is like 98. This is undoubtedly part of the difficulty I encountered over the weekend, but I suspect the install would have gone much the same in any case, even with XP Home. Anyway, it should have been a one-time pain.

Firstly, it completely deleted my previous Windows installation. I was prepared for it do much more than that, in fact. Although I couldn't make a complete backup of my C drive, I made notes about what I did have installed so I could re-create it after the fact. Thankfully, it was able to convert the drive to NTFS without destroying everything. I didn't have to convert to NTFS, but what's the point of going to an OS that supports file permissions if I don't make a point of enabling them?

The install itself was pretty painless. Then I started re-installing software. I had, stupidly, thought it might preserve some information from the previous install, but no. This meant I would have to re-install everything on both drives. Like an idiot, I didn't think through what this would mean in some cases. For example, I thought I'd kept a backup of my bookmarks, but I ended up losing both my Mozilla bookmarks and my IE bookmarks (which I'd forgotten about entirely and those were all work/VPN related). I also lost my web-site configuration settings for Dreamweaver (which I use to maintain the aikido club's web site and my CompSci web site). Nothing horrific. I think I've got a backup of my Mozilla bookmarks at work and all the other stuff is recoverable piecemeal.

The real problems began when I started looking at drivers and software that I had received with the various devices in the computer. The installation of Easy CD Creator and DirectCD caused XP to complain that this software would make the system unstable. I took this to be a generic warning because the drivers weren't digitally signed, but it turns out there is an actual problem reported on both Adaptec's and Microsoft's site. But for a while on every reboot, I'd get a little icon in the tool tray that told me there was a driver problem and XP had disabled the offending software, click here for more information. (And "clicking here" simply resulted in the icon disappearing.) I had to manually search through all the device drivers in the Device Manager to find the one's that were causing problems -- they also don't highlight problem areas with extra graphics like they did in 98.

But the real pain was with the sound card. I installed the original software (which includes the 98 drivers and several very useful applications and then went to the Creative Labs site to download updated drivers. However, when installing the big, it-does-everything package the replacement applications all come back and complain that I don't actually have a Sound Blaster Live! installed (it's actually a Live! Value --- the cheap OEM version of the same thing which I discovered about when they stopped shipping new drivers for it is not actually anything like the same thing since it gets very different, incompatible driver software and less overall support, hence the whole "turn off your sound card acceleration" hint from the Morrowind folks).

So this required uninstalling the software, but it doesn't come with a proper "uninstall" utility except for the individual applications. Fortunately, XP provides a "rollback" mechanism for removing offending drivers. Many reboots later, I'm back where I started. I've finally got the proper drivers installed (although I still have to disable them in order to get decent sound in Morrowind), but I haven't been able to get the original (useful, if you'll recall) applications installed. I think it will probably require another round of installs to do that properly and the utilities I was accustomed to using may still not work afterwards.

Did this help Morrowind? Well, I've got a map function now. But I've lost the level of stability I had previously. I'm conflicted about whether a sound card upgrade or a video card upgrade would be the thing to do. Probably the video card, but the sound card has been the biggest source of pain.

There are some other things about the change that have been annoying, and non-Morrowind related. Mozilla loads slowly enough now, even with the Quick Launch feature, that I've disabled Quick Launch. What's the point of using this feature if:

• it slows down my startup during login so badly (like 5 minutes) that I want to grind my teeth -- bad enough that I have to put up with that at work where I can blame it on an old Pentium II, MacAfee, and the network login, who needs that kind of trouble at home?
• I still have to wait for it to swap back into main memory even when it's resident in the tool tray and this takes as long as starting it from scratch typically would.

One other weird thing involving the monitor. My monitor (an "Envision") isn't in the list of supported monitors and it's not PnP. The result is that I was only getting a 60 Hz refresh rate at first (I changed it to a generic "Super VGA 1280x1024" monitor and now it refreshes at 75 Hz, which is better. During boot, the monitor flashes briefly before the main welcome screen comes up and then the little row of LEDs on the front panel all light up (well 4 of the 8 anyway) and after this I can't change settings on the monitor without turning it off and back on. I'm downloading drivers for the monitor as I write this.

Intellectually, I believe the amount of frustration experienced here is a direct result of the size of the change. This was a big leap. Interestingly, I've removed most of the other pirated software off the system in the same go. I no longer have Office installed. I've actually paid for my copy of Windows this time. I didn't have CD keys for some of the games that were installed (Freespace, Starcraft, Age of Empires) and I haven't played some of those in so long that I'm not sure I care to anymore.

I'm surprised to find myself still caring about this issue. Ethically, it bothers me to steal software and it always has. I've used different rationalizations for it at different times and a part of me believes that, for games anyway, this is a lot like the whole public library and copyright issue. In spite of what the publishers tell people about lending and copying, it's still true that people will spend money on the product when they have money to spend. This is true for books. I think it's true within certain parameters for music. And, for me anyway, it's certainly been true for software.

My tendency to pirate software has declined as I've had money available to purchase it. The places where this isn't true have consistently been for packages that are simply too ridiculously expensive for the private individual. And most of those I only use because my employer uses them and there's no reasonable way to use them while working at home unless I do pirate them. We used to have a license agreement with MS that allowed a certain number of licenses of Office for home use by staff for example, but no longer. Same thing with the virus scanner from Network Associates (although I don't miss that -- AntiVir is better anyway).

Comments

[puppytown.livejournal.com]

I think you should invite nlindq and his sound and video cards over to test these theories out. Cheaper than upgrading and less risky! Morrowind got much more stable once he installed Win2000.

I've got a paid-for copy of XP Pro, too, but I'll be upgrading from Win95. I've got to save up to upgrade the rest of my creaky ol' computer though: upgrade list.

[handslive.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's been behaving much better over the last week. Of course, I also installed SP 1 and the other 31 security related patches. (Yes, those numbers are right.)

The sound is also funny on the desktop when things are starting or stopping and hitting the hard drive. I've cranked the hardware accel back up and it doesn't seem to affect stability in the game anymore. I'd really just turned it off because that's what I ended up doing with win95.

Still need to have texture accel turned off, though. I'm thinking about trying the latest nVidia driver again, though. Maybe it'll work better under XP (it totally screwed things up under win95).