hansolo77

Bummer, maybe somebody else will attempt to tackle this project. I would, but I don't have a tankstick.

Wow sounds like you know a bit about bikes Draco. Who would have known? I really don't know jack crap about them. I spent some time last night actually checking up on Amazon for some price ranges on parts if I needed to replace anything. To my surprise everything is actually pretty cheap. Aside from the frame and rims/spokes it looks like everything else on the bike is custom. And most of the custom parts are Shimano. Again, I don't know much about bikes, but I've definitely heard that name before. On Amazon, replacement Shimano parts are pretty easy to come by. I was expecting to pay $20-30 for the things like new brake cables if needed, but Amazon has those for like $5 bucks. Even like the chain that is pretty orange with rust can be replaced relatively cheaply where I thought it would be pretty expensive. My only problem is that I have no idea how to actually do those types of repairs. It looks to me that brake cables, shifter cables, and chains would be the hardest things to replace. Things like reflectors a pre-teen kid could do with a simple screwdriver. But I'm pretty stoked about it. I've always wanted to try to learn about bikes and customizing, and this looks like a great way to get started since most of the work is done already and I'm just doing simple maintenance on it now.

No problem bud.

So my car was broken. I was trying to save up to get it fixed, but Dad got tired of waiting for his parking spot to become available. So he called up somebody who works on cars and said "if you can make it work, you can have it". So the guys came and took my car away. As far as I know, they still haven't got it running (it was overheating after about 3 minutes of turning on the ignition) and it's been probably 3 months. Anyway, I now have to rely on transportation from Dad and their car. This is causing a lot of pain and issue because Dad has to take me to work, then my stepmom (works like 50 miles away) then keeps the car all day so he can pick me up when I'm off (usually 6 hours later, and she works 8, hence the need for keeping the car) and then her. So long story short, the fact that we only have 1 car is costing us a TON of money in gas so he can keep the car all day and drive 50 miles both ways to drop her off and pick her up. That's 200 miles A DAY. So I needed to find some way to get to work on the cheap. I refuse to take a bus. I live far enough away from work that walking is a pain. It takes me like 45 minutes to an hour to walk home from work the nights I work late and dad doesn't want to come out to get me. So I've been looking at buying a bike. Figured it would cut the transportation time down some, plus it would help me get into shape. I've been seriously considering buying a WalMart bike, but I really couldn't afford a new one for like $200. Pro bike shops want even more, in the thousands. So I've been patiently waiting for garage sale season! Well, needless to say, it's here. Our community has a special Garage Sale Festival every summer where for 3 days everybody who's selling sells on those days. The streets are literally LINED with cars and people walking around buying. It's like going to the flea market or something. So the first place we went to that had bikes, there was this little old lady like in her 90's trying to sell a Schwinn for females for like $300 bucks. The note on it said never rode, and there was considerable dust on it. I passed. The next place had a nice size bike for men, had no price tag, and was completely rusted out. The cranks wouldn't turn and the chain was busted. I passed again. Then I saw a place that had a nice size male bike next to a kids bike with training wheels on it. It wasn't rusted at all except for on the front and back frame reflectors. He wanted $30 bucks for it. I thought, OK, and asked him about it. He said it was a "few" years old, but was bought at a store for $900. They tried to sell it last year for $90 but nobody would buy it. So this year it was marked down to $30. The brake shoes looked brand new, as did the treads on the tires. The frame and rims weren't bent. Everything looked great except for the little bit of rust and the fact that both tires were flat. I only had $25 in my pocket at the time, so I told him if he wanted a full $30 I could run to the bank and get another $5 but they said it was ok, and sold it to me for that! I got it home, then had to go to work. While I was there, Dad apparently did some research (I was unable to duplicate in my quick searches). Apparently the bike could well be worth MORE than $900 based on the parts. The bike manufacturer is Raleigh and it says it's a Technium. Dad said this bike would have been made around the early 90's. No biggie to me if I can ride it work and stuff though. But it's nice to know there's some hidden value in this thing I bought for $25! We're gonna try and do some work on it tomorrow. WD-40 the SH!T out of it to make sure all the moving parts are well lubed. The tubes need inflated, hopefully they're just flat from not being used and not blown. There is also a bit of concern with the brake cables in the back, looks like it's hanging on by a thread rather than the entire cable. Dad, however, has high hopes there's nothing wrong with it. And if there is, I can afford to put $100 bucks in or whatever to get it street safe, considering I only paid $25 for it. I'm really excited! I'll post some pictures tomorrow if I remember to take some...

Hard to say. There may have been a configuration in the forum that automatically puts all images into thumbnails to keep everything neat and tidy. On the other hand, you have an image that's not a thumbnail in your signature... take a look at how you have that and try it. I believe all you need to do is have it inside an [ img ] set... Like this: [ img ] link to images [ /img ] Of course you'll want to take out the extra spaces.. I just did that so the post wouldn't think i'm trying to add an image.

Lol redneck all the way (probably the music helps)

Just write out the command in the LAUNCH AFTER part of the config for that emulator. You may need to create a batch (.bat) file and give it Admin privileges though if it won't close unless you're admin.

LOL! Dude that sucks. Is there any grass under all that? Good luck.

Yeah I did just that. I read about 3 different tutorials and what not on my specific processor and another 2 on my specific mobo. I'm still using the stock cooler and I think that's going to limit me big time. Everybody said to use ORTHOS for load testing and a utility called Core Temp to monitor the temperature of the CPU cores during testing. Well, I loaded up my BIOS and discovered it was RAM that had a turbo setting. But I did find where it was set to use a x8 multiplier. I changed it to x9 and rebooted. Now the CPU is constantly running at 2400 (yay!). Unfortunately because of the new loads my fan is working overtime. When I run ORTHOS, it runs for about 1 minute then the internal speaker starts going off saying the CPU is overheating (it runs around 56c normally, and was peaking at 68c in a minute of load testing). So I think I'm not going to be able to overclock. In fact I'm going to take it back down to x8 to protect it from overheating. Oh well, no biggie. At least I know what to keep my eyes out for as far as upgrades are concerned. And I even learned a bit about overclocking too.

I like it when people agree with me

I have a screen in my BIOS called MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) that has all the tools for overclocking. Not really knowing what I'm doing, I'm going to research a bit and see what I can find. I don't want to harm my system by OVER clocking per say. If I can just get to a point where the system is running at advertised speeds i'd be happy. Well, I shouldn't say I'd be happy because even at 2400 it's probably still not going to be fast enough for PS2 emulation. Anybody got any old Socket 775 processor's laying around? I'd be interested in hearing what you're willing to lose them for. Here's a list of compatible processors with my motherboard: http://www.gigabyte.us/support-downloads/cpu-support-popup.aspx?pid=2847 Unfortunately, I did a look on those quad cores via ebay and amazon. A USED processor with no heatsink/fan is going to run me a ridiculous amount (in the $350-$400 range). It's going to have to be a processor from that list too because I can't afford to shop around for a brand new mobo/cpu/ram set. And even if I could, I have a specific requirement for my media center pc to have 3 pci slots for tuners, 2 pci-e slots for digital tuners, the pci-e slot for the video card, and at least 6 sata connectors (1 os drive, 1 media drive, 1 game drive, 1 hot swap drive, 2 dvd/bluray drives (one is for xbox stuff)). So my requirements really limit my selection.

Yup, changed my game threads to just the titles. I also updated the Poll and Game of the Month threads to look nicer too.

Just updated the thread topic. Nothing major to report.

Just updating to say I changed the name of the thread. Removed the "Hi-Score Competition" part.

I've never tweaked any of my clock speeds. But I do recall my BIOS has some built in automatic mods of overclocking, and "Turbo Boost" sounds familiar. As for the cpu speed ramping, it might be doing that. If I sit and watch the cpu-z screen, it will go up and down, but I've not seen it go above that 1600. Actually, I just loaded up Crazy Taxi (NAOMI) and played it while watching CPU-X and it did ramp up to the full 2400. So I'll have a look in my BIOS and see if I can manage to adjust the multiplier to stay at 9 or whatever. I never even noticed really that it was doing that. The only thing I've noticed was that if my computer is under a heavy load the fan would get louder.

Try VLC.. it's a low weight player that plays a lot of stuff Media Player doesn't. Don't really know why, but it's my go to player when things aren't working right.

Now this is interesting: Would this indicate that I'm not running at the 2.4 GHz range but rather 1.6 GHz? If so, I'm apparently UNDERCLOCKING my processor. When I look at the "My Computer -> Properties" screen it shows 2.4. I wonder if that's just cause the operating system knows that process runs at that speed. But CPU-Z shows it's not running that speed. Anybody know anything about overclocking? If I truly am underclocking, I'd like to get my speed up to at least where it's supposed to be heh.

Yeah I actually lost 2 lives trying. My mouse went off the window and I couldn't get it back on in time.

Tom knows best. I didn't develop the program so he's the one with the best answers.

LOL!! What if you really needed to find images of Atari Breakout though heh. I did break all the bricks, it just resets again. Pretty cool find!

The line that is failing is: 09:34:15.8 5/14/2013: Open: Failed Opening Video: c:\documents and settings\mame-cabinet\my documents\my videos\music vids\cher - believe [official music video] [hq].mpg Are you sure that's the correct path for your video? If it is, you might need to put the whole path inside "" (quotation marks) since it has spaces in it.

I dunno, I think I'm bust on this. I have all the speed hacks I can find. I'm using the latest SVN and versions of the drivers. I've tried all different driver configs, changing between hardware/software, enabling/disabling different things. Everything in Native and 4x3 mode (thinking 16x9 might be making it work even harder). Nothing seems to work. I even use framskipping and turbo at 300%. Nothing seems to help. Baldur's Gate is a complete loss. I can't play it when half the screen in garbled, and it runs at like 12 fps. Devil May Cry runs at a choppy 40 fps. Too slow to have any real ability to play. I'm going to try a couple more things, but I think I'm just gonna have to live without being able to play my PS2 games. Such a shame. I'm ripping my copy of Devil May Cry to see if I can get any kind of speed boost playing directly off the hard drive. If not I'm going to call this project over. It might work great for some but my system specs are apparently not good enough.

Heh according to the "Will it work" thread, I should be fine. But not. My CPU supports SSE3 (minimum is SSE2). I have 6gb RAM (minimum is 512mb or 2gb in Vista). As for recommended however, I do have the Intel Core2Duo but it runs at 2.4GHz, not 3.2GHz. I don't want to overclock because I don't know how and I know it's not safe. I can't afford to break my computer and get a new one right now. What's interesting is they say you can have the i3/i5/i7 at a lower speed. So aside from that, I should be good.

Yeah videos like that made me excited to try it out. But I guess my system just isn't up to the task. It does look like your audio might be delayed though. I wish I didn't loan my copy of FFX to my brother.. He moved down to South Carolina and then lost it. With Devil May Cry, I WAS in Native. That's why I don't think it'll ever work for me. If I can't get playability out of Native, it's probably not worth trying. I wonder if I might get better performance if I make an ISO out of the disk rather than try to read it directly through the DVD drive.

I couldn't wait. I took some aspirin for my headache and tried to load up Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance. The screen "cracked" right down the middle and only rendered the left half. It was soooo slow and everybody was talking like they were some kinda ENT (Lord of the Rings). I then tried Devil May Cry. Although the opening videos were ok, the actual gameplay was really slow. Oh well. Guess I just don't have the system resources to run PS2. One possibility though might be because my Media Center had just kicked on to record something, so maybe it'll run better tomorrow during the day when it's not recording.