Birthday, Brought TES4: Oblivion + Budget Graphics Card, Mac OS x86 failure
Posted September 12th, 2008 by
Well, on Sunday (7th September) I had some of my family and darkthorn over for my birthday. That went alright, there was cake. Cake was yum. Felt kind of sick during and after party but that finally disappeared as it approached bed time. For presents, money was what I received and that totalled about $100 to which I’ve put to good use. 
So on Tueday, I went to the computer shop and purchased a graphics card with virtually no direction other then that I wanted composite out and it had to be under $85. The first place I went to, the shop keeper had no idea what I was talking about and then went on to tell me that I’ve got an S-Video port on my VCR which I know for a fact that I don’t and then tried selling me a card for $120 when it met neither of the parameters I set. I headed over to the other shop and came with home with a NVIDIA GeForce 7300GS 256MB which met the composite out and the price requirements. I’m fairly certain I could’ve done a lot better online, but it does what I want, and I’m not really a gamer at all, so aslong as it run’s Aero and Compiz-fusion I’m happy. I’ll take the price premium for the convenience off not having to wait, deal with money transfers, and wait.
Today, I went and purchased The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion for $35 at Dick Smith Electronics. It runs pretty well, more then playable, even more so once you consider that the card I’m running it on is ultra budget and not even this card iterations budget offering. I haven’t played much of it yet. My monitor is pretty dark even when maxed out and Vista doesn’t play nicely with the NVIDIA brightness adjustments when it comes to gaming, so even though the desktop could be as bright as a flash light, in-game still is dark as hell. No-one seems to have a fix, thus I went and tried installing Windows XP but my CD for that is borked again. So, I’m fixing that.
Today, I also went about attempting to install Mac OS X. It was a failure, even though people have claimed on the OS X 86 project’s wiki that my hardware should be compatible. I’m stuck behind the dreaded Still waiting for root device error message, the suggested fixes of using an IDE hard disk didn’t work. I tried two of them. Trying inside VirtualBox didn’t do much better, thus I’ve now got another coaster. Can we ever have enough? I mean I didn’t expect it to work, but it’s disappointing all the same.
Earlier in the week I created and uploaded a better browse and submission page to Muse’s Success. I’ll be so glad once I get rid of WordPress.
For the moment, I’m tired. Bed!