[GLLUG] Building a new system

[troettger at comcast.net]

WineX is a great application for games.  Its a comercial offshoot of wine 
developed specifically for games. They consistently and monthly work on 
updating it.  You pay a small fee for a membership to there club and are then 
able to download tar balls or rpm's at your desire.  You also get to vote on 
which games are worked on next.  It also works much better then wine for 
standard apps that normally wine would have a problem with.  Its being 
developed by transgaming.  The fee is very cheap and reasonable.

http://www.transgaming.com/

As far as game systems I am an avid gammer.  Working in computers as well I 
also have a few different pc systems in my home for various purposes and need 
to keep costs down on my systems to afford the things I need to expand my 
skills.  I find that keeping up with my games demands is really not that 
difficult.  I run some very high end games right now on fairly standard and not 
so expensive hardware.
1.25ghz processor
128mb Graphics card Nvidia  (also have an ATI radeon 9000 pro with 128mb of ram)
512 mb of ram

I upgrade as needed but overall I didn't pay more then $100 to $125 a peice of 
the graphics cards, the RAM was Very cheap and my processor was only $125 as 
well.  

I find it cheper to build my own systems and it allows me to recycle hardware 
like hard drives, and cd-roms which I normally have a stack of.  I have an M$ 
system I use for games right now and am considering converting it to Linux if I 
can get some of the games working under Winex.  

I personally don't like console games as much as pc games.  Not enough variety 
or control.  I have PS2 and rather have my pc. 

But that's just my 2cents.
> Keyes, Randall wrote:
> > If you can't laugh at yourself... :)
> > 
> > Still, my wife is a PC gamer who constantly is cursing M$, so if you 
> > folk hear of a viable alternative for playing PC games on another OS, 
> > let us know. :)
> > 
> > I hope to get WINE running on a machine for her this fall, but I've seen 
> > mixed reviews.  She's a heavy RPG'r.
> 
> Seriously... consider a console. I always thought of myself as a 
> computer gamer but lately gaming rigs have gotten *much* more expensive, 
> relatively speaking.
> 
> What do I mean by that? I mean that it used to be you *had* to drop 
> thousands of dollars on a system to satisfy a "computer person" like me. 
> At that point, spend $200 on a graphics card and *bam*, top-of-the-line 
> gaming system. So in a way, only the $200+ graphics card was "gaming" 
> expenditures.
> 
> Now that the processors and all have advanced so far past the apps, 
> that's not as true as it used to be. I have a Duron 800 MHz at home, and 
> *no desire* to upgrade. With a nVidia TNT2 in it, it's a great little 
> system for almost everything I want to do. To replace it now is 
> impossible, because you can't buy that cheap anymore. ;-)
> 
> Thus, to keep up with computer gaming now costs thousands for the latest 
> CPU and graphics and a lot of other stuff, which is now *not* necessary 
> to have a decently usable system. So to a person like me, the true price 
> of computer gaming has skyrocketed in the last few years.
> 
> The only issue is what kind of RPG your wife is into. The big consoles 
> like the PS2 tend to have what I think of as "nose stinging" RPGs... 
> after being led around by the nose for 40 hours, your nose starts 
> stinging. (I enjoyed Skies of Arcadia, for instance, but after being 
> raised on Fallout and other computer RPGs, it never once challenged me 
> with anything like a non-linear dungeon; I guess that would be too scary 
> for their target audience.)
> 
> At the risk of being tarred and feathered, I'm seriously thinking of 
> picking up an XBox sometime in the next few months, for Star Wars: 
> Knights of the Old Republic, and Morrowind, for the upcoming "Game of 
> the Year Edition" (market-speak for "gold" version containing the 
> expansion packs built-in, apparently), both very computery-type RPGs in 
> terms of freedom. (The console crowd are going ga-ga over the freedom in 
> those games; hopefully "they" figure out what "we" computer RPG-ers have 
> known for a while and console reviewers start to bitch about linearity 
> in their RPGs... but I digress.) (Yeah, Microsoft may suck but I have no 
> loyalty and low opinions of Nintendo and Sony as corporations too, so 
> what are you going to do?)
> 
> Something worth thinking about. Also, some games do run OK in Wine, and 
> it can be worth trying them out to see which they are. For instance, 
> Fallout runs flawlessly under wine (except sometimes the videos lock up, 
> so skip them), so that's one less reason to reboot for me. You may not 
> be able to run them all in Linux, but every one you can move over is 
> that much cooler.
> 
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