Drives do not eat that much power (~10 Watts each is normal as far as I know). Have you tried different cables/adapters?

As the PC boots "a bit" it does not sound like the PSU to me. 

Despite the incendary nature of snow (talk), it is fscking awesome, walking back from pub last night I had half an inch of snow on top of my hood by time I got back. Was epic snow. Tempted to go sledging in my kayak (planing hull ftw) 

RickyT: thanks for the moral support - a problem shared and all that...

Spirit: yes, I have tried changing the cables but nothing so far

Tried running power from another computer that is also running several drives(Heath Robinson eat your heart out) and can now eliminate the PSU as a source of the problem. This also allows me to narrow it down to the primary slave drive.

The BIOS sees the drive OK but this is probably reading data from the drive's electronics, not from the platter.

I need to think a bit more about why it should have crashed during a game of Quake: would the engine be accessing the HDD during play for any reason?

I know the drive is readable as I can see all my files via my Heath Robinson set up. So the drive has not failed.

Mmmmm. Curiouser and curiouser. 

I use Maxtor drives, always have and never had any problems 'till now.

So, I am looking at my spare Maxtors - a DiamondMax 16 and a DiamondMax Plus 9. Both are Primary Masters set up with 'clean' OSs, one is XP and one is Vista, you know, just in case.

I notice that each has jumper settings that are slightly different when setting them as primary slaves. And I think to myself (what a wonderful world), I know I set the jumper on this slave as a slave so perhaps the jumper has come loose(yeah, I know, fat chance).

But guess what - can ya guess what it is yet, can ya?

This DiamondMax Plus 9 that I use as a slave, the one that causes the computer not to boot, the one that has been in the computer for at least two years, has its jumper set just as I remember - top pins 2 & 3. Only trouble is, that this DiamondMax, different to all the other DiamondMax that I have, clearly shows the jumper settings as - you won't believe it - no jumper required when being used as a slave!!

So I remove the jumper, plug power back in and it boots perfectly.

Of course now I want to know why it worked like that for two years and only decided there was a problem when playing starkmon. Is starkmon a utility disc in disguise?

Who can tell me? 

I was wondering when someone would find that feature :)

Now go and make a nice demo! 

pretty fucked up. o.0

glad you got it fixed and all, but why the hell was it letting you boot up for all that time with incorrect jumper settings?? 

Just maybe, the crash in Quake didn't have anything to do with the hdd, but forced the BIOS to reinitialize something (like ASPI or whatever it is these days that controls hardware), and maybe that resulted in a different configuration than before, which produced the error. 

In anticipation of Willem's upcoming mdl editor, I give you a tool for generating the mdls to edit in it.

http://www.btinternet.com/~chapterhonour/md3tomdl.zip

It's a little command line job which takes a suitable md3 and outputs an mdl which closely approximates it. Hopefully helpful for people who would like to make things in maya/max, but can only export them to md3 from there. Just put this at the end of the pipeline, and your models can be used in Quake!

Source code, and an example ogre.md3 are included - screenshots of the latter were shown on here many moons ago, but it's a bit bloodier now... 

I cannot find the console command which toggles the overall screen flash (which is vaguely yellow) during weapon firing and instead has a "dynamic" muzzle flash, any clue? 

gl_flashblend (0, 1) 

is this trend just a cheap way to reduce the amount of stuff on screen at once and so artificially pump up framerate? or are there other reasons? 

Example? 

pretty much everything.

60 seems to be the new 90 but i recall seeing something that must have been like 45 or 50 (o.0) 

Isn't it something to do with widescreen support in games? I know of quite a few games that support widescreen resolutions but at an incorrect fov that gives a strange effect when your playing (hello Bioshock). 

I don't recall any game doing that. Seriously, do you have an example? That's sounds crazy. 

I read once that the fov in half-life 2 was reduced to 75 in order to make the characters' faces larger and easier to read. Which seems like an acceptable reason, if you want your game to be about the cutscenes : - p. 

lower FOV is probably better for more "realistic" games like half-life or medal of honor. (both use 75 i think.) It makes architecture look bigger (wide fovs artificially shrink the sense of scale) and makes it easier to see details (the tiny keycard on the desk that you're supposed to pick up), makes your motion feel slower, you can see distant stuff better (enemy snipers,) and it feels more cinematic (wide angle lens in movies = goofy, zoom lens = dramatic.) 

that's interesting; i hadn't thought about the cinematic/dramatic effect angle of using lower fov.

daz: i think what you are talking about was a bug with bioshock, no? there was eventually a patch that fixed that, iirc.

willem: crysis was 60 degrees, which made the game feel really cramped and confining. it was especially annoying when you had those great vistas and you could only see like half of it on screen.
fallout3 is also like 60 or 75. at least fo3 lets you change it, so i bring it up to 90 which makes the desolate landscape much cooler to look at.
jericho felt confined too, although i don't remember it being as bad as crysis, so 75 i guess?
mass effect felt really low, i think this one was the one which felt like it was sub 60.
been looking at screenshots of deadspace and that one looks like 60 or so. 

I guess I just missed that whole wave since I'm primarily a console gamer these days. The games all look as normal to me on my 360. Maybe it's a widescreen thing as was proposed earlier... 

Me: no im trying to get an mp game going
Him: what game
Me: quake
Him: lol good luck
Him: no one plays that piece of shit
Me: yes they do
Me: www.celephais.net/board
Him: you'd have better luck playing duke 3d
Him: thats all fake
Me: i dont like duke
Me: fake?
Him: no one play quake
Me: check the board
Me: tell them that
Him: that board is fake
Him: and outdated

Right. 

It's been quite a long time since I've played Quake online. I remember using zQuake, so I wanted to get a coop game going with a friend. I got the file needed for zQuake so coop would work.

We are using Hamachi, and no matter what she can't seem to connect to me. Just says "no response".

We've tried

connect (hamachi IP)
connect (hamachi IP):27500 (zquake's documented port?)
connect my.actual.ip
connect my.actual.ip:27500

Nothin' works. Any clue? 

using ezquake

But I'm a n00b when it comes to MP, so I dont know. Its pretty easy to work ezquake though! I just got a server from:

http://www.quakeservers.net/

Maybe they'll be able to help.

Although I bet someone here knows how to help :) 

how could a message board be fake? o.0 

Thanks, although I'd just prefer to get a simple LAN game going. Hamachi never usually fails me. Oddly enough we have better luck in racing games than FPS. 

Im no expert. I remember doing a system link back in about 1999 with a serial cable (!), but I dont even know what Hamachi is %)

Have you tried using a standard Quake port (i.e FitzQuake or AguirRe's Modified GlQuake) and then going through the menu system, selecting Multiplayer> Co-Op> then er, TCP/IX (lol)> then "search for games", or something like that, rather than trying to connect to the server manually?

(You can probably tell Im guessing)