Matthew Walton’s Blog

So what have I been doing during my latest absence from blogging? Well, as might not be surprising to most of you, I’ve been playing City of Heroes. Finally got Nettle to level 36, got picked up by a very good random group (apart from the defender’s tendency to try and snipe things and get killed, which is totally not necessary when there are other snipers on the team) and did the second respec trial. Dead easy really – must get round to doing the first one some time!

At the weekend I installed my new hard drive. It’s a 200GB SATA drive (Seagate and very quiet) exactly the same as my existing 200GB SATA drive. It replaces two IDE drives (noisy), one of which was starting to get unreliable. All is well of course until one gets around to installing Windows XP Home on it (Linux was already on the existing SATA drive; Windows was on the dodgy 40GB IDE which is now headed for oblivion). In theory of course, one should be able to load the SATA drivers at boot time, because the XP installer doesn’t have SATA drivers in it (this is the SP2 version, couldn’t they have bundled a few?). So then comes the first big shock: Windows XP is incapable of loading drivers from a CD at boot time. After I stopped swearing about this, I found that my motherboard comes with a couple of floppies specifically so that you can install Windows XP on SATA drives using its on-board SATA controller. The trouble is, I have no floppy drive in my computer.

A few minutes with a screwdriver and mum and dad’s PC corrected that.

Unfortunately, loading drivers from both disks didn’t help Windows see the drives. Ho hum. Check the motherboard manual just in case it says something. Why so it does, here’s a clue – there are only drivers for the SATA controller which is linked to the RAID chips, not the normal one which the disks were plugged into. How very odd. Plug the disks into the other one, Windows sees them, installs onto the new one just fine.

The trouble is, Linux doesn’t like the RAID controller and I never did put any effort into getting it to boot off it. So now I need to get Windows liking the normal SATA controller enough so that I can swap both disks back to it. As it turned out, that was pretty easy, because the motherboard driver CD has those drivers on it. Tip for Microsoft: when Longhorn comes out, I know you’ll have put SATA drivers in the install kernel by then, but could you please allow extra drivers to be read from arbitrary locations in an ISO9660 filesystem? Thanks.

Then I had to get the Linux bootloader (GNU Grub) installed on the new disk so that Linux could be booted again. Stick in AMD64 Gentoo 2004.2 LiveCD, boot off it (non-framebuffer kernel, for some reason the framebuffer on the CD doesn’t work for me). It comes up with both disks visible, so I mount / and /boot and chroot into the installed system, run grub, some panic with the config file and disk designations, forgot the root= line, haven’t got the pretty pictures woring yet, but it does boot and work fine.

So that’s all over and done with. Except that my music is mysteriously missing – will have to stick the 120GB IDE drive back in at some point and copy it over again.

Anyway, last night I got my hands on LEGO Star Wars, which is to be perfectly frank an extremely silly game. Short in story terms – it only took me a few hours to play through the entirety of Episode I – but lots of fun. It’s not often a game has me laughing out loud. Seeing little LEGO men fighting with lightsabers is just too good. It also looks beautiful. They recommend nVidia cards as they use Shader Model 3.0 and nVidia’s fancy shadow technology, and I’m sure it looks excellent on those, but it’s jaw-dropping enough on my Radeon 9800 Pro. Since I’m intending to get an nVidia card next time, I should get to see it in even more glory soon (the shadows are a bit lax, I must admit).

So it won’t take me long to finish Episode III (not too much of a spoiler for the movie actually, as there’s hardly any explanation of what’s going on beyond a brief bit of text at the start of the level, this is probably why it was allowed to be released before the movie comes out), so what then? Free play mode of course! In keeping with the general silliness of the entire game, you can go back and play any level you have completed with any character you’ve unlocked, in order to find all the secrets, get more money, and buy more silly accessories. Which include moustaches for your LEGO characters. Since it’s impossible to find half this stuff using the characters you’re given in story mode (I’ve already run into a few places I need people who can jump higher – why Jar Jar Binks can jump higher than a Jedi I do not know, but I suppose they had to give him something to do) this should prove interesting. Or at least highly amusing.

Definitely the best Star Wars game I’ve heard of since Jedi Academy.