The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

It's either a MOBO addressing problem, or the bios. Since my Board is 11 yrs outdated, I seriously doubt the bios will receive tending

 

Good point - that sounds like the same limitation size-wise, as sp1. Well, I bought the laptops about 3 years ago, refurbished. They are prior to core duo technology - so that means, what, prior to 2006 for sure, right? Yes, I just read a review from Spring 2005.


It's the pentium M chip, 1.6 ghz - although the reviews show that you could have gotten them up to 2.0 ghz. It was an architecture developed for laptops and low power consumption out of Intel's facility in Israel, while they were simultaneously developing stateside the power-hungry P4 netburst. Later, as I understand it, they went back to the direction of the pentium M in creating, in Israel, the new core architecture. For example, for its speed, the pentium M was relatively top-heavy on L2 cache, with 2 MB, whereas my 2.8 ghz p4 had only 0.5 MB L2 and my 3.2ghz p4 had only 1 MB L2, and I didn't get to 2 MB L2 until I bought the faster 3.8 ghz P4 chip.


With its pre-cursor to core technology, heavy on L2, the laptop is a pretty good performer. Whereas my p4 oc'd 5% to 4ghz, will perform 230 frames per second, HT off, one core 100% the other core idle (if I leave HT on it drops to 140 frames per second and 50% on each core) on a single-threaded m4v to avi converter, and my p4 3ghz also-2MB L2 with faster memory than the other p4, comes in at 205, HT on or off doesn't matter, the laptop pentium M, which doesn't have HT, at only 1.6 ghz, comes in at 155. Compare that to the 2.8ghz p4 with only 0.5 MB L2, and likewise no HT, nearly twice the clock speed, which comes in at only 128 frames per second.


Oh, and I might as well mention, for completeness, regarding the newer core-type architectures, my brother's quad core phenom 1, works one core and comes in at 330 fps, and the quad 9450 2.6 ghz, my current gaming setup, with no oc yet, works one core and comes in at 425 .

Ah hah, so Kevin knows what I am talking about.

But ........

Wow, I was wrong - I thought for sure, DDP, that you would have encountered that. I guess it's not that common of a problem then, or you're mostly working on the newer stuff. Well, if you get a customer with 7 year old technology, especially a laptop, who wants a big 320 gig ide drive, watch out for that 137 gig bios limitation.

It's so nice to have everything working, and then two weeks later, "It won't start."

#$@%^#!!


But you guys are right, all this old prior-to-core is definitely getting dated.

But for regular everyday non-gaming use, and for most browsing (except when they really load up the pages with a lot of flash advertising) these older, near 2 ghz and higher, netburst machines are still pretty good performers, especially with light-weight Chrome - IE pretty much requires new hardware.

Rich

 

Always workarounds. Obviously USB 2.0 would recognize an external large drive. Or, an add-in card would override the size limitation.

 

I guess you guys are right about add-on cards. And for external it's no problem. By the time xp boots up, you can see any size drive.

But really, would an add-on card help you with the boot drive?

And what about USB, Kevin - will the bios see a full size external drive? My gut says "No" but let's see what happens. I'm curious about that.


I'M SURROUNDED BY ANCIENT HARDWARE - EVEN BY KEVIN'S STANDARDS

Regarding some of the old hardware that you've worked on, DDP, that sounds familiar to me - I've worked on some old hardware too, but I can't say that I have ever tried to put a high capacity drive on any of those older bioses. And they were all towers, not laptops. I remember norton cloning software, and we used to be impressed if windows 98 would format something as monstrously huge as an 80 gig drive. I still have a collection of old boxes out under the "workbench" in the sunroom dating back to a 200mhz, vintage probably '98, a 400 mhz, a 633, and Miles' original machine straight out of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia on the coast, around '98 or '99.

A very pretty town - "Momma said, 'life is like a box of chocolates.'" That scene in Forest Gump, was filmed right there in the little park.

The graphics machine that he bought to do his modeling, and put his resume together, was state of the art at the time. It had dual processors, 330 mhz, with 2MB L2 cache each processor. It was the NT operating system (to see the two processors) two SCSI hard drives, 256MB of ECC memory, and a giant Oxygen graphics card, as large as a mobo.


RECYCLING MILES' (THE VALVE ANIMATOR) GRADUATE '98 MODELING MACHINE

I pulled the Oxygen card out after not being able to get drivers for it - it's sitting in a cabinet in my trailer waiting to be sent to Jeff' graphics card museum.

I left installed the old 3dfx voodoo card in there that Miles was also using, when he booted into windows 98. He wasn't entirely happy with NT for everyday stuff, since it had none of the bells and whistles of the more consumer-oriented windows 95 and 98, such as something so simple as browser support for varying the shadowing on a window when you pass the mouse over it, such as above right now, in the box that says "Unsubscribe from this thread." The box subtly changes, and the contents drop a tiny bit as the mouse passes over - all of that was absent from NT.

The dual processor 13 year old machine (Kevin - you should relate to this with your 11 year old motherboard!) is now being used by a friend who has a more modern 6 year old 1.6 ghz laptop, but was formerly given an old 440mhz tower for email (the case says "My favorite PC") which later went bad and I couldn't fix it a year ago, the hard drive failed. So now he has the old dual-processor SCSI machine, and it is slightly more powerful running xp than his former. I tested it to see if it was truly multi-threaded with the two discrete processors, and yes - it can process the m4v to avi converter benchmark program, at 100% on one processor (at a crawl - 17 fps) while simultaneously browsing the net on the other processor.

So you can see I'm surrounded by old hardware. I have used the floppies from some of them, for example on Miles' graphics server, a dual core E6600 that was last Spring's Raid 1 project, with two sets of Raid 1 inside the Antec case on a pair of 250s, and a pair of 500s - backing up at 5 gigs/minute to a twin 1TB enterprise disk Raid 1 esata $50 Cavalry box that I have posted about - a super great product from Newegg. I needed the floppy to let him invoke the F6 install Raid drivers routine for recovery console access. For another machine, I took the memory from "my favorite PC" and now the miniature 660mhz has 220 MB or so, and it can actually browse, whereas before on its meager 64 MB, it could barely get a web page to open, as you can imagine.

But anyway - back to my thought about upgrading graphics cards.


RICH NEEDS TO MAN UP TO CF 7970S FOR 30" BF3 GAMING THIS SUMMER

After a spin with BF2 last night, on my old gaming p4, I am thinking more seriously about cf 7970s for later this summer. My reasoning is this:

Out in the sunroom on my former gaming machine, hooked to a 20" dell 1600x1200, I have a demo of BF2 that is still a kick to go on from time to time, just a quick couple of hours once in a while, maybe once a month or so. It's the old free demo believe it or not.

You boot up the game, sign in with BF2, and there are about 20 maps total. On this one, the host is Cobra, and it's called Mini-Map - a reduced map of the demo with only 4 flags total. No tanks - the tanks explode about 10 seconds after they re-spawn. There are no flying vehicles, only jeeps and vans. You only have one grenade, so no grenade spamming. But assault rifle gets 4 for the launcher. There is C4, but no claymores. You respawn fast in 5 seconds, down from normal 12. They host 64 players, and they usually have 50-60 at any time.

It is pretty much fun, for a couple hours of action at a time. You have to keep moving, snipers all over the map, but that's okay. You're only out for 5 seconds. Sometimes it breaks down to total spawn camping if one team can control 3 of the 4 flags - you can't capture the other home flag no matter what you do so you can't shut off the spawning. When that happens I change to anti-tank because the fast fire rate of the uzi gives me a better chance of surviving the spawn campers. But it usually balances out pretty well - we had 3 flags last night and we were trying to box the marines into their beach hole, but before you knew it, they escaped and had 3 flags and we were the ones who were boxed in. MEC narrowly won that round anyway.


THE DEMO IS MORE ENJOYABLE THAN THE GAME

They closed down the minimap late last night around 11:00 pm, so I decided to finally load the full BF2 on the old gaming machine. But the maps I got on after that were boring. I got on a Kirkland map that had no vehicles, toward the end of the night, which became a stupifyingly boring sniper contest across the fog-bound river. Talk about dull. Later I jumped on a map of the dam, and that was also ridiculous, just one guy, a great helicopter pilot, blasting anybody who tried to get a tank running. LOL

I thought later: the Cobra demo minimap, which has been customized, is actually a more fun experience to jump into for a few hours from time to time, when I am not setting aside several days, or a week, for serious gaming in the trailer, turning the table around. Also last night, I tried installing Modern Warfare 1, but the p4 with 3850 won't run the 1600x1200 display above 30 fps max, and it drops to low 20's most of the time. I could cut back on quality, but I just decided to uninstall the game. Versus 24" gaming at 1920x1200, that's nearly 80% of the pixel count, and the p4 3850 combination can't cut it even for 24" gaming for the newer games. I can't believe I was trying to do a limited form of 30" gaming on it for so long, although at the end it was a 6000 3dmark6 points machine - I remember when I first met you guys that Sam had the fastest forum gaming rig at 7000 points.


KILLING IS SO MUCH MORE FUN WHEN YOU'RE SURROUNDED BY BEAUTIFUL GRAPHICS

So my point of this whole thing, was that made me think about BF:BC2, how much better it is than BF2. It is sooo much better, the graphics are so much nicer, the whole game is just more fun. I'm especially glad that I jumped in early on that, when there were more players on the Vietnam maps, which in my opinion are the showcase of the game - a real war - real maps - real history. Now sadly there are very few players on those maps, and you can't play squad deathmatch like before and run with a couple of buddies trying to take out Cong or Marine, anybody on the other 3 four-man squads.

I picked up on that after Jeff talked about squad-based BFBC2 gameplay, with his clan buddies. I tried it out, and squad deathmatch Vietnam was the best - very cool coop - nobody on mic however - almost as much fun as Left 4 Dead coop which is saying a lot. Switching to the Russian maps these days, I do have to say that I have discovered that some of them are quite beautiful, like the one with the waterfall and only a couple of amphibious vehicles.

So thank god I was given the 13000 3dmark6 rig, and could join in on BFBC2 for 30" gaming. But now that's the past, and here's BF3, and it's time to upgrade, and I'm missing out because of hardware - I bought the game - I struggled through the single player, but for multiplayer, to get into the action, I need to upgrade.

And the longer I wait, the more game experience Jeff is getting, to kick my butt when I finally join in. And Jeff is saying "run ultra textures" and I believe him. It makes sense - why not have a beautiful graphic experience while you're killing everything that moves, or that looks at you cross-eyed?

I guess I need to think more like Sam - remember that you can sell the old hardware. So if I put a couple of 7970s in there at about $800, well maybe in two years when the 9000 family has something twice as powerful, I'll be able to get back $400 of that $800. If I think of it in those terms, it's only a $400 outlay to hold me for the next two years. That's not bad.

Rich

 

Well, windows xp really isn't the problem. I'm pretty sure I had hard drives totaling over 2Tb at one time with windows xp. But my board, which is IDE/PATA only... who knows. Never tried it. I asked the repair shop years ago, if it could take a larger drive. HP said it would not. Whether due to the bios or board is anybodies guess. Thankfully, I no longer have to worry about it.

USB 2.0 is a different factor all together. It would depend on the bios's ability to recognize an external USB drive. I believe my BIOS is right before bootable USB. But I'm not too concerned about it. I'll probably sell that PC for $20...

 

Any bios that can't read IDE drives over 137GB won't have USB boot support, but you will still be able to see the drive as a secondary in windows. Those transcode speeds are meaningless without quality settings. In freemake my i5 can achieve 90fps at 720p, 200fps at 480p and almost 1000fps at 320x240.

 

I don't think I've ever been able to make usb boot work - and I guess that's why.


Hey I want to report - that last post I wrote about upgrading perhaps wasn't just totally wishful thinking, as all you guys probably suspect.

I know you guys realize I am the world's slowest upgrader, here on the forum with some of the world's fastest upgraders, lol. Which I guess includes Kevin with his new hot nvidia - of course he fried the old one, so he needed something QUICK!!

Anyway, I spent a few hours last night figuring out exactly how the 750 toughpower PSU is hooked up. If I am going to go cf 7970s, I need a 6-pin and an 8-pin cable to each card. I have the W0166 modular model - the newer toughpower 750s don't seem to be modular any more.

Anyway, I took the first upgrade step! I ordered three modular cables from thermaltake last night that will give me the 6-pin and 8-pin cables I need, if I actually pull the trigger this summer. That's a good sign - I'm getting serious!

That's a neat trick - so you're circumventing the sp1 137 gig limitation, by starting out with w98se, and upgrading to xp, is that what you're saying? Is your xp disk sp2, or just basic xp.

But wait a second - are you formatting Fat32? I guess you are, that's the only format w98 can see.

But why would you do that - Fat32 is so slow compared to NTFS. I can hardly get xp defrag to work at all on my fat32 80 gig drive - it is sooo slow, and even testing the full defrag program from the guys who make the xp defrag program, still tested super slow on FAT32. But xp defrag by comparison literally flies on an ntfs disk of any size. And NTFS is optimized, versus Fat32, regarding transfer speed.

On my old desktop running dual boot w98se and xp sp2, I have two Fat32 drives, but the rig I migrated to a few months ago, is just ntfs, two 250 gig drives in Raid 1. I am done with Fat32 and I will never go back, lol.

To circumvent the 137 gig limitation, I would install xp on any disk that happened to be around, of any size, no matter how small, choosing ntfs, not Fat. I would install sp1, then sp2 (I know sp2 is supposed to contain sp1 but I have had problems skipping sp1.) Then I would clone with acronis from the small disk to my 320 gig.

Another question I would have, DDP: How do you get w98se to run on a machine with more than 1 gig of ram? Or do you pull some of the extra ram before you do everything, leaving just one gig? I ask because the Dell that I converted over to, a p4 3 ghz, was going to be a dual boot, until the 2 gigs ram killed my attempt to install w98, despite trying a bunch of stuff on the internet. Windows 98 se looked like it was installing - it said it was finishing - but it wouldn't boot up.

For sure. I have no idea what the quality is.

Edit: see below to next edit - I now believe it's 424x240.

I just use the same exact converter, on the same exact file (one of the Rachel Maddow shows - about the controversial law in Arizona a year or so ago requiring anybody who "might" be an illegal immigrant to show papers.)


PAZERA M4V TO AVI CONVERTER

So the scores are only my very informal in-house bench, just to compare my various cpus. We were considering modifying the Rachel Maddow feed that my brother has on his mac, coming down in m4v itunes format, so we could put it on a thumbdrive and plug into the tv, in the TV's media center, and display it on the 47" bigscreen. I downloaded the converter and converted that one show. Then for the fun of it I tested it on some of the other desktops that I have around here. Since the tv won't handle any high def through a thumb drive, it would have been 720x480 max, which would be 480p.

But that can't be correct, because your i5 beats my Q9450 hands down, which clocks at 425fps, and you're saying 200fps. On the other hand, the converter I use for the bench might be quicker and dirtier than freemake. (It's the pazera m4v to avi converter.)

Edit: I looked it up, and I see that in the conversion folder, I have the fully converted Rachel Maddow avi, which XP tooltip says is 424x240. So, Sam, if you get 1000 fps at 320x240, that would yield 750 fps at 424x240, which is about right - you get 750 on the i5, and I get 425 on the stock clocks Q9450. I would guess a 3.6ghz overclock ought to put me closer to 550, would you say?

I know next to nothing about video conversion. The project died after just that first conversion, because my brother decided he prefers to watch Maddow in his room on his 30" Mac monitor - he has several feeds constantly coming down.

In fact, he was gone the other evening, Saturday, the night I went on the BF2 demo, Cobra minimap, in the sunroom. But sadly, at first I couldn't play it, because my game ping was in the 200s. I was jerking around - it was totally unplayable. I had been away from that demo for about 2 months, it's the only game installed on the sunroom p4.


THE MYSTERY OF THE BANDWIDTH BOGART

But I didn't remember ever having that problem of a super high ping. I decided to check out my internet bandwidth. My speedtest.net came in at about 1.5 Mb/sec, we pay for 12. My ping on pingtest.net, showed 150, with line quality D-. My command prompt ping to google similarly was in the 150 range. All the readings were awful, and rebooting the cable modem, router and switch didn't help. I started to call the cable tech support line and was working through the computer answering machine options.

But just then I glanced at the switch, and I noticed huge activity to my brother's port. He has a gigabit ethernet connection and it glows green on the new switch, while my p4 has the older 10/100 and glows orange. His green #2 port was blinking like crazy!

But I knew my brother was not around. I hung up on the Cox cable computer, and walked into his room to see what the hell was going on. I flipped on the lights, and jiggled the mouse. His mac showed that he was downloading only 80 KB/sec - that's nothing - we pay for 12 Mb/sec, or 1,500 KB/sec and we get that - I have seen dual valve downloads coming in at 750 KB/sec each game I was downloading.

So no problem there. But his upload seeding speed was around 220 KB/sec. We are supposed to get 1/4 upload, which would be 375 KB/sec, but the 220 he was showing is the most I have ever gotten on upload. So I decided that had to be the cause of the monopolization of the internet line - the upload seeding of some anime was locking up the cable and making the BF2 demo unplayable.

My first thought had been to just unplug his line from the switch, after all, he was gone. But I am glad I investigated - as I say it was his Itunes feeds, and some anime torrents. I'm not a Mac person, but I stumbled on the transmission settings, which showed "not limited" and I ended up throttling him to 75 KB/sec upload, and 750 KB/sec download.


BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

I was interested in seeing what affect that would have on the p4. I went back out to the sunroom, and my ping now showed 15, down from the very ugly 150. The line quality grade jumped from D- up to grade A.

LOL

I went back to the BF2 demo, Cobra minimap, and was able to run around per normal. We beat the marines, and I came in #8 of 21 on my team - solidly right there in the middle, haha.

If I'm really lucky, he may never notice the throttling - he's not super tech oriented. In fact, he watched in amazement about a year ago, as I took his G5 apart and found a very minor unusual fan noise that had appeared, which was bugging him, which turned out to be a stuck fan in the bottom psu assembly. That assembly has two fans, and one was stuck.

Man is that G5 built beautifully - all these baffles to guide the air flow - there are 5-7 fans in there, but it's totally silent.


APPLE G5 ARCHITECTURE CLOSEUP

I unplugged and unbolted the PSU module, and used a shop vac to blow it out, going outside the house, next to the garbage cans, the fans spinning way up under the blast of air while my brother watched in incredulity. The dust flew everywhere!

I was impressed by Apple engineering. My brother, who taught himself CAD, is technical regarding software, but he would never have thought about diving into the hardware like that - his thought was to upgrade and ditch the machine. But it's all my fooling around on the p4 rig, as reported on this forum, drilling holes, adding fans and air filters, that made me think nothing of doing that - just like all you guys would have approached it the same way.

The fan became unstuck and the machine was good as new. The G5 returned to total silence - and his erratic crashes and very unusual internet transmission problems totally disappeared. With the stuck fan, his PSU probably had been overheating, and his voltages were probably not as stable as normal, is my guess. So he got another year out of that machine, gave it to our other brother, and picked up his new one about a month ago.

Keep your fingers crossed, guys!

If my Mac brother doesn't catch my transmission settings adjustments - I may have just permanently solved the mystery of the Bandwidth Bogart.

Hahahahaha.

Rich

 

Fried the old one...

You know... I don't even know that it is fried LOL! I heard a pop. Yes. But I can see nothing visually wrong with the GPU. I inspected it 3 times now. I cannot find the slightest irregularity. I'm very tempted to plug it in. No doubt I would either get no video signal, OR the board simply wouldn't allow post.

You know what though? My GTX 570 is plenty for me I love it. Everything I've played looks good, and it handles it well. I seem to play basic games lately though :S Facebook flash-based games. E.g. Monster world, Angry birds, Diamond Dash, etc. I really need to get back to the real INTENSE gaming

 

Angry birds. Kevin you are a scream!!! What about the new one, Grandma and her shotgun saving the world from aliens. I saw my niece who used to play angry birds, playing that on the ipad today.

You need to get back to Left 4 Dead, and try out the multiplayer. Break out!! A lot of people don't seem to have mics - you can be anonymous! You know you like that game - it will really look good on the GTX 570!

 

Grandma shooting aliens eh? Might have to check that out LOL!

 

Like I said, Kevin - you are a scream!! Hahaha

Oh, yeah, the old days of fdisk and then format. We were always wondering how big of a disk w98 could handle. Well, DDP, Sam asked me a couple years ago why I hadn't binned w98. But it's because of my favorite program, PaperPort. I got it free with a scanner in '98. Then they came out with PaperPort 7 in color - still for windows 98 - probably around 2001. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Before PaperPort, and before long file names, I was creating these graphics for real estate presentations - why they should hire me to sell their house, or for neighborhood fliers when I was farming a neighborhood to get the listings that would come up.

The fliers were done in Pagemaker, and were linked to jpgs - or tifs - or bmp pictures. It started out in early Pagemaker as tifs only.

So I would create a nice brochure and then I would have to try to figure out how to describe it so I would know which one it was, in 8.3 naming convention. That was a challenge. A bit later, maybe windows 98 (or maybe they already had that in windows 95) they came out with support for long file names. Anyway, around the same time, I got the first PaperPort. It was black and white - but I could print a thumbnail of my brochure in a paperport folder, and give it the brochure name. So now I knew which brochure was which. A bit later after color PaperPort, version 7, I created the thumbnails, and then put a shortcut on top which opened the Pagemaker file to create that brochure. Since PaperPort didn't know what to do with a Pagemaker file, the shortcuts were little buttons on top of a thumbnail of the brochure.



Now I was really in heaven. The little shortcut button, with the P for Adobe pagemaker, opened up the brochure shown in the thumbnail. Pretty slick huh!!

A bit later, I upgraded to PaperPort 8, made for XP. But the placement of the shortcuts, on top of the thumbnails, was lost in PaperPort 8. All the shortcuts would group together at the bottom of the paperport folder. One of my assistants and I called tech support, and the guy was amazed that this functionality had been lost, but told us that we had no chance of a patch, since we were the only ones who were bothered by the problem. He said, just print the pagemaker brochure at highest resolution to PaperPort and then print it from PaperPort. Well paperport 8 had added resolutions up to 600 dpi which was great. But I told the rep, that the Pagemaker file was designed to print in color at 1440 dpi on an Epson printer that could go as high as 2880 dpi, and there was no way I was going to drop to 600 dpi print resolution.

My solution was to stay with PaperPort 7, put it on XP, and run with the older PaperPort for years. But some of the advantages of PaperPort 8 caused me to run all my computers dual boot, put 8 on XP, leave 7 on windows 98, and operate my business mostly in the Windows 98 boot. But for the last few years, I am pretty much only XP. There is one way around the shortcut problem, and that is to have the actual Pagemaker file on top of the thumbnail. It will be the same size - just a button. Within Pagemaker, it has all the links to the graphics and jpgs and tifs, which are in a different location - different graphics folders.

I am still in the middle of that shortcut project - eliminating the shortcuts, so I don't have to run windows 98 anymore.

LOL

So, on my former business desktop, as of 1 month ago, which is a 1 gig Ram 2.8 ghz p4, dual boot windows 98 on one drive, xp on drive d, both drives fat32, it is a virtual nightmare to try to defrag xp - you have never experienced anything so slow. For disk c, windows 98, I just use norton defrag, which is fast. But diskkeeper, the company that licensed its defrag to microsoft for xp, made a fat32 version of the defragger, but they didn't optimize it like the ntfs version. It is at least 50 times slower. Otherwise fat32 is not that much slower than ntfs in general, I don't believe. I should have never formatted the xp disk, disk d, in fat32, but I wanted windows 98 from disk c to have access to those files.

Anyway, that is why I know that xp runs fine on fat32, until you try to defrag - then just plan on the process taking about a week, as you start it over and over again, to finally get some decent level of defrag. I ran the trial version of the full diskkeeper defrag, but that was no faster - it only gave me a much more detailed view of the files it was very slowly moving around to do the fat32 defrag. I ended the trial and told them their product was unacceptably slow on fat. They don't care - I'm the only guy running xp on fat32. LOL

And my new desktop is all ntfs, xp, super-fast defrag, Raid 1 mirror. When I finally finish the shortcut project on the other machine, eliminating the shortcuts and putting all the actual files in their place - probably another 20-30 hours worth of work - then I can bring in those repaired paperport folders to my new desktop. I can actually look at the existing folders now - with the shortcuts on top of the thumbnails as in the graphic above, but if I move one thing, on exit from the folder, the hidden placement file, a file called max.ini, is updated by the program, causing the shortcuts to drop to the bottom of the folder the next time I open it. So I might look at one of the old folders, but I get out of there fast without moving one single thing.

Anyway, DDP, interesting to talk to you about the old operating systems. By the way, do you play any video games yourself? We know what Kevin will soon be playing, Grandma and her shotgun saving the world from aliens - the new upgrade from Angry Birds. Hahaha.

Rich

 

Model warships - that sounds fantastic!

Especially since I am all about war, lol - especially world war II.

Are you saying you buy plans to build the warships, or to repair them, or you buy parts for them? It's a graphic card and game thread but as the most popular seem to be shooter games (like Kevin shooting those angry birds) and mostly war-based shooters, how about posting a few pictures of your warships?

Rich

 

Wow, DDP, you are a real kit enthusiast!

That takes me back a while, when some buddies were big into Revell airplane kits. I remember myself applying some decals and some very fine finishing paint to some really nice jet models. The biggest were maybe 20" long. I may have helped out on some ships as well. There is a lot of history connected with that type of hobby, plus who isn't impressed by those enormous vessels? I went on a tour one time of the naval base at San Diego including going on board a battleship.

That reminds me of the video game Medal of Honor Pacific Assault, which I feel equals the early Call of Duty titles, including COD2. It starts out with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and soon involves entering a battleship through the hole at the water line, flooding one side to keep the ship level on the harbor floor, and fighting fire and smoke to make my way to the top, then manning first a 50 caliber, then a bit later replacing one of the sailors on the revolving chair of one of the big ack ack AA flak guns, to keep the ship from being sunk.

That 52" model must of yours must be a beauty! So do you have a special room - your den for example - where you have your display? Do you take any of them to shows? Who sees your models?

I can imagine how awesome some of those models must look, with authentic coloration, flags, penants, etc. If you posted a few pictures, that would be very cool.

Not too long ago, on hula tv, I would say within the last 12 months, I pulled up some high def, just to see what they had, and they had a series, World War Two in Color. I have a high interest in anything about WWII. A good part of that was the Pacific campaign and all of the amazing naval battles. On some of the islands, the marines on shore stood in their foxholes looking out as the Japanese and Allied vessels traded blow after blow, several miles apart, which is close-in fighting for the big ships. How far can they hurl a projectile? Is it 5 miles, on the really big guns?

The Japanese built the largest battleships ever known - super battleships - I think that I recall a total of only 3 were built - before they began to start losing and went on the defensive.

The Allies had de-focused on battleships, and concentrated instead on aircraft carriers, believing that ultimate naval superiority was in air power, 20 to 100 miles apart, through air-dropped bombs and torpedoes, rather than on-board artillery, and battles involving trading punches close range. But the Japanese thought a very strong battleship was still an important ingredient of naval power.

When we went back in, intending to recapture the Phillipines, they caught us in a lightly protected area, having first sailed away, and then having turned back which we didn't expect. Their monster ships destroyed the light ships that had been left to guard the original beachhead, while our main armada had been faked out, and was a day away searching on the other side of the island group. But as it turned out, those American light ships attacked with such ferocity, ill-fated as the attack was, that the Japanese thought there was a much stronger force, and eventually decided to withdraw. They clobbered us, but didn't stay to deliver the killing blow to the beachhead, which would have had a major negative impact on Marshall's plans.

The first light boat that attacked was completely overpowered, got in a few lucky blows without doing much damage to the stronger ships, and was soon sunk, and then the survivors had to deal with tiger sharks for several very long days and nights before final rescue - it's a famous naval story of bravery and tragedy.

In another battle, one of the Japanese super giants was caught by an aircraft carrier group, and unfortunately for it, its AA defense capability was lacking compared to the strength of its firepower. It withstood a merciless air attack that lasted hours, multiple bombs and torpedoes finding their mark - I think the attack group was a score or more of planes, and as I recall, there were no plane defenders. Over the course of several hours, the super battleship remained afloat and under power, although on fire and damaged way beyond the capacity that any other normal battleship could take - but yes, it finally sank.

Those were ferocious battles. So historically, how did your biggest model - that British battleship - do in the war? Did it survive? Some of the ones you mention I think were damaged at Pearl Harbor, like the Oklahoma, is that correct? I'm sure you know the history of all of the them.

So, do you have a camera? Come on, DDP, photobucket is waiting. LOL

Rich

 

My dad is a long-time model car collector. He usually buys two kits, one to build and one to keep wrapped up. He has several limited edition and/or limited import kits that are worth hundreds. He also has limited run kits with special boxart or features included in the kit. Particularly a '65 Nova made by Bandai(before it was known as Bandai) back in the late 80's with 6 individual parts to each hood hinge. He favors Japanese models over American models for their quality and the crispness of the molding. Some American companies produce excellent kits but Japanese companies produce much better quality on the Average.

Myself, I build some planes and cars, but my forte' is Sci-Fi mechs. I have several Gundams, Wanzers, Armored Cores, and Battletech 'Mechs built and detailed. Both table-top miniatures and scale models.



I actually have both of the kits shown here, though I tend to do mine with a "factory" finish

The white one, in the background, is a kit by Bandai, who also owns one of Dad's favorite brands.