The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Have had and used several P4 machines over the years. From the old and slow 1.8 Willamettes on socket 423, to the snappy Northwood Extreme Editions on socket 478. The LGA775 Prescott Pentium 4s never lived up to the Northwood versions and it took until Cedar Mill and a 65nm process to make them competent CPUs. By that time though, Athlon 64 was dominating. The Pentium 4 left a lasting lineage, and if you had a good one back in the day, they were generally pretty good CPUs. Finding a 3.6GHz 660 Prescott for under $100 was an easy track to a faster PC for many.

The Celerons were sad though, especially the Northwood Celerons. Basically take that year's given model of Pentium 4, and cut the L2 cache in half or a quarter, and that's a Celeron. Northwoods had 128KB of L2 and they were just awful. The improved Prescott Celeron D only had 256KB and it was also pretty bad. Vs 512KB and 1/2MB respectively. The Cedar Mill Celerons were a different beast, as they had 512KB of L2 so were much closer to a Pentium 4 than older versions. Pentium 4s were cache-starved. They somehow found a way to make Northwood P4s and Cedar Mill Celerons work very well with 512KB but the Prescotts sucked until the 500 series got replaced by the 600 series and 1MB went to 2MB.

Pentium D was also interesting as there were two series of that. 2x1MB and 2x2MB. Smithfield and Presler. Presler was generally better but both were Prescott-based. Cedar Mill came along during the Pentium D's lifetime and honestly the Pentium D should have been based on Cedar Mill. It was a much better chip than Prescott and even rivaled the hallowed Northwood in many ways. For sheer cycles per clock though, Northwood Extreme Editions remain the kings of Netburst. The Presler Extreme Editions were 65nm, dual core and hyper threaded but they were still Prescotts and never approached the same level as Northwood and Cedar Mill. I have a 3.6GHz Northwood and X850XT sitting in my closet waiting for a vintage home.

The Pentium 4 was never really that bad a chip. It had downsides sure, but it set the performance standard for a modern PC with the 2.4GHz Northwood, and later the 3GHz 630 Prescott. So much so that Athlon XP/64 chips were named 2400+, 3000+, 3800+, etc as a direct comparison to Pentium 4s. Also, almost all PC games until the last 5 years or so listed their specs in terms of Pentium 4 clockspeeds. I loved my Pentium 4 PCs. Their greatest drawback was that they arrived smack dab in middle of the capacitor plague era, and the relatively high heat they put off was popping already faulty capacitors. Gave them a nasty reputation for reliability. On a solid state capacitor 775 board like my X38, a Pentium 4 can be a solid performer.

 

I thought the D900 series were Cedar Mill based, being 65nm? Whereas the 800 series were 90nm. By the time we got to P35 and X38 though, Pentiums were definitely very old tech. Core 2s were around when we were still on the 965 chipset. In a way I'm kind of glad the Netburst architecture was such a spectacular failure because it forced Intel do perform a ground-up rethink which led to Core 2. With the refresh of the architecture to 45nm that followed in 2008 ish, it led to an architecture that, more than 7 years on, AMD have yet to beat.

 

They were 65nm but they were still Prescotts in design. Several sources claim they are Cedar Mills but they are not. Cedar Mill was more efficient and performed slightly better per-core.

 

I thought the die-shrink was the only difference with Cedar Mill vs Prescott. When I'm looking at it, the 650 and 651 (Prescott and Cedar Mill versions of the same clock speed) seem to perform identically, apart from the wattage figure?

 

In my personal experience Cedar Mill is a much better chip. I am open to being proven wrong, and even personally run benches can lie. Pick your poison. The Pentium Ds are indeed Prescotts in design though.

 

But wait - when you say, Sam, that the dramatic failure of netburst forced Intel to the redesign leading to core 2 duo, which has allowed Intel to forge ahead and stay ahead for 7 years, shouldn't we also give AMD credit for innovation that, as Jeff pointed out, made them dominant for a while - 64 bits - large cache?

In Israel Intel did a re-think - basically dropping netburst and their dreams of 10 ghz with full pipelines - and looked closer at how AMD was beating them.

And as I understand it, they already had architecture that pointed to core 2 duo in terms of how some of their mobility chips had been designed. And we see that they already had dual core chips - the D's that Jeff mentioned, plus of course hyper-threading.

It's been quite a while since I read about the core 2 duo architectural shift - but wasn't a great deal of it the result of integrating much larger cache size, and much more accurate branch split forecasting, into the processing mix?

I think I read that they figured out, or discovered by trail and error, that the gains from accurate branch prediction far outweighed the losses by guessing wrong - you incorporated larger caches to store all the last instructions, and devoted a good chunk of silicon to run forecasting algorithms, moving the instructions ahead betting on a correct guess. The result was that you were so far ahead when you were right, three steps forward, one step back, that being wrong a few times didn't end up hurting performance all that much.

Boom, you double performance vs netburst at the same clock rate, reduce power and heat, and take the lead back from AMD. Nice!


(Now if Warner Bros could only fix Arkham Knight, everything would be dandy!)

Rich

 

I don't really think Intel dropped Netburst until they were forced to - it's been a long time now, almost a decade in fact, but my recollection was that they only ditched it when they realised it'd be almost impossible to breach 4Ghz, let alone 10. I think it's fair to give AMD a lot of the credit for pushing things forward in that era, the Athlon64 and comparative X2 were undeniably the superior product back then, in contrast to the Athlon XP which was 'not as good, but good enough'. By the time the Northwood P4s were besting the top of the XP range, the 64 came along to sit on top. The X2 was even early on allowing considerably better performance than the Pentium Ds of the day, especially with the 4800+ which was pretty much the equal of Intel's best dual-core clocked at 4Ghz. Socket 939 is really, in my opinion the last time AMD held the lead. By the time AM2 arrived (after quite some hype I recall) and people realised the initial crop of CPUs for it only offered 10-20% gains tops, the Core 2 Duo was only 2 months away, and once it arrived, the X6800 was offering gains of, if I recall, around 40% over the previous champion 4800+. The X2 did actually catch up fairly well with the 6400+, but with most of the AMD parts being 125W chips versus the 65W of the Core 2s (75 for the extreme), you could see what was coming. Intel have had the lead ever since, and by the time it got to the second stage of the i-series in Sandy Bridge, they were so far ahead that frankly, R&D pretty much ground to a halt. No competition, no need to invest. Meanwhile huge piles of workstations go out every year with broadly similar performance to the last.

 

Hmmmmm. Not much R & D anymore? You're probably right. Time to pay off the investors with some decent dividends, I suppose.

Speaking of performance, I see that Arkham Knight, if they ever fix it, wants SP1 on windows 7. From what I read, SP1 doesn't really add anything graphically or performance-wise - fixes a few bugs, etc.

I wonder if I'll really be forced to put SP-1 on the machine when I start to load the game. I already have the patch - it's almost a gig in size. But it's not installed.

What do you guys think?

 

Why wouldn't you have SP1 installed? A lot of the service pack stuff is security fixes, which you really ought to have...

 

Well, I hear you, but on the gaming machine I don't browse - maybe just a tiny bit to expand steam articles - I normally game with the internet disconnected - and I have no email there. I don't trust windows update not to mess up my machine - I am the last to put on a service pack - only recently did I update my xp to service pack 3 because of turbo tax.

On the Windows 7 gaming machine, I DID install service pack 1 at one time, and immediately I lost the aero look. I only did it to get Raid functionality - I was thinking of a Raid mirror. That was almost 3 years ago. I reversed the install and got aero back, and decided not to try to run a mirror.


So I'll install sp1 if Arkham Knight forces me to, but first I'll try to run the game without doing that.

Again - in reviewing the sp1 fixes, I didn't see anything like a better net library - anything that would affect programming. But maybe I'm wrong. Like Jeff said, I am open to being proven wrong about that.

Or maybe, like Kevin, I should just say "I'm wrong, wrong wrong wrong - but so what?"

(just kidding Kev )

 

All the runtimes/redists are usually available separately, but SP1 is basically a security patch. If your machine never interacts with any others then fine, but otherwise, there's little reason not to install it, service packs only tend to be dangerous when they first come out, and Win7 SP1 has been around for years...

 

Okay, sounds good.

Yes, I've had it here in the folder for years. So if it is not really performance-enhancing, mandatory for net libraries or such, then it seems like I should be able to run Arkham Knight without the patch.

I'll see if they let me.

When do you think the game will be ready for civilized people - anytime this year?

(I could still go back to Batman Origins, by no means did I complete all the puzzles in that game outside of the campaign, but I've been busy with the canon MX-870 color printer.

I finally got around to trying to fix the one my brother left here - he gave it to me when he showed up again last week - and I filled the cartridges with OCP ink just a few days ago - what a mess that was until I learned what I was doing!

Then I didn't put one of the carts back in correctly, and I got a "dreaded 5100 error" on high res printing. Looking for bits of paper blocking printhead - tiny staple - etc. discovered nothing wrong. Nothing. Curiously the printer would print low res, but not high res. But it was sure spending a lot of time running cleaning cycles.

Finally one forum said, "reseat all cartridges." Sure enough, like a dummy, I had left one a bit loose - it popped loose when I unclipped the one next to it. All the lights had gone off as they should have - the electrodes made contact - but the clip somehow wasn't properly pushed into place. That was quite a relief when that error went away.

Then I realized that my text was much darker than from the printer I bought on ebay. Under a magnifying glass I saw it was darker because it was double-printing each letter. Ah hah - sounded like printhead alignment. I am deep into manual alignment at this minute - auto align did help but not all the way.

And today I learned how to get the printer into service mode to engage it with the service tool. This is way beyond normal usage.

A close relative, sister of the Left 4 Dead animator, is waiting for me to learn how to do this stuff, so we can pick up archival matte paper and print up some pretty stuff with which she can paper the walls of her room - she likes Nirrimi Hakanson for example.



But she doesn't want my old standby, costco glossy, as she doesn't want high light reflections all over the place - I don't blame her. So it has to be matte paper.

As soon as I can get my act together she is ready to get started on these prints, lol. I sent her to your website, Sam, interfacelift.com, but she is mostly interested in these kind of portraits as above, and we have been able to find some high-res versions.

She doesn't want all letter-size prints, - we will be slicing some of them. A nice project. I found some sample paper packs from some expensive places - a "toothy matte" called somerset enhanced velvet. This is all beyond anything I ever did before, lol.)

 

Arkham Knight is due for re-release later this month, I believe.

 

Hey, that's good news. Cross your fingers they don't make me add service pack 1 - I like my aero look.


SHORT VACATION FROM GAMING - COLOR PRINTING ISSUES
I ordered another printer from ebay - another canon mx870. I got it from Gloria on ebay, for the same price as the first one, $133. The first one is from Shaun. I have included those names in the names of the printers, so I can tell which one I am printing from as I do my testing. My brother is named Cliff, so the printer he gave me is mx870-cliff. The perfect one is mx870-shaun, and the one that is coming will be mx870-gloria.

Hopefully mx870-gloria will be as good as mx870-shaun. Gloria printed out a nozzle test and an alignment page for me and explained why she had written "good as new" in the listing. Her explanation was that the printer has hardly been used - they are still on the first set of canon ink - they ended up getting one with fewer cartridges.

I imagine that a lot of people bought these printers when the prices dropped - they ended up around $200 at the time they stopped selling them - but in some cases started at $500. They print, scan, fax, etc. I need the printing, and I need the scanning - you can open it up as a table-top scanner at max 1200 dpi, or use the auto document feeder at max 600 dpi. We don't use fax machines any more, so I don't need that. Digitizing the real estate hard copy contracts into pdf format is important - we don't use paper any more than we need to - and the auto scanning that I tested on my brother's printer was impressive.

But I think I mentioned that I couldn't get my brother's printer to print at all - he was out of ink. Rather than work on it - he hadn't yet given it to me - I bought the shaun printer on ebay. The print quality is unbelievable.

But before I placed the final "buy it now" on it, about 40 minutes before the end of the auction, I went over to Best Buy and looked at what they had as the new Canon all-in-one machine, with the same print technology. The new replacement is MX922 - it sells for $99 brand new!!

It does everything mine does - printer, scanner, auto document feeder, etc. The Best Buy sales rep has one - he lives at home and his dad bought it for real estate.


I didn't like two major MX922 changes from the MX870:

1. I didn't like the fact that there is no longer a rear paper feed tray. The rear tray gives you a straight paper path. They now give you two trays in front, not just one. But in the case of those front trays, you are dependent on the rollers to pick up the paper. Last night, on my brother's printer, I encountered the roller not picking up the paper from the front cassette. I checked - it had paper. I tried again, and again the roller slipped. I went into the print driver on the computer, and told it to assign all automatic paper to the rear tray (for example when it prints out a nozzle check - it does so on plain paper, which is supposed to be what is loaded into the cassette - with the rear tray for fine paper.) The rear tray idea is also helpful if you are using thicker paper which is harder for the rollers to pick up - like heavy matte, or glossy.

2. I also did not like that the ink cartridges are even smaller, with no transparent window. One review mentioned "pricey ink." I imagine the no-window is to make refilling harder.


​

MY BROTHER'S PRINTER, MX870-CLIFF, HAS FAULTY LOGIC
And I just yesterday bought the ebay printer from Gloria, because my brother's printer turned out to be ruined - something is messed up in the printer controller board.

It prints fine as long as you don't deviate from Paper Setting: plain paper. At that setting you can print at quality setting Fast, Standard, or High, with the High of course being the best looking. You can throw matte paper in, and the printout looks better than on plain paper.​

BUT YOU CANNOT SET IT FOR MATTE PAPER.​

As soon as you choose any of the settings that are not plain paper, like glossy, matte, Hakagi, high resolution, photo paper, etc. - there are about 20 paper types - the text turns bold through overprint within about 1/100th inch next to the original character. Why does it turn the text bold?????


Sam, any theories?


On the mx870-shaun, the ebay printer, it does not do that - the text turns a little darker, but the overprint is EXACTLY in the same place as the regular print.


On my brother's faulty printer, mx870-cliff, perhaps it is a misalignment, but it is way too gross to be able to be fixed with the alignment tool - I tried. The least added bold - almost not too bad - is the Hagaki A paper type. But on the mx870-shaun, the good printer, when I choose Hagaki there is not one bit of boldening at all - the text is just as thin and crisp as on the plain paper setting.


By the way, that 5100 error went away on my brother's printer, and then it came back again, lol. I don't know what's going on with that, but it probably was NOT a case of inserting the cartridge wrong. So all in all, the printer has problems. As I said, I put it out for everybody to use as a not-super-fine quality color printer, and scanner. One relative made a quick copy of a page of musical score she was cutting and pasting today.


WHY SO MANY PRINTERS?
So, including my brother's ruined printer, that makes a total of 3 - the last one is being shipped to me.

Here is my thought about wanting two good printers: I simply need one as a backup to the other in case I am in the middle of printing out glossy property brochures or even business cards, and there is a printer problem. When I was using the Epson 980 I always ran two network printers at a time - I went through 4 printers in total.


I am pretty impressed by this MX870, and so I have invested about $250 in extras: $100 in OCP ink from germany, $24 in 8 sets of virgin carts (empty canon cartridges never refilled) $20 in chip resetter, $39 in refill clips (similar to the clip on generic ink - it fits tightly over the feed hole into the print head, so your ink doesn't dry up - then you use a small piece of tape over the air inlet on top, and you use a small 1/8" diameter rubber plug in the hole you drilled on top on the other end, with a piece of tape over that - the guy in the youtube video recommends electrical tape - I have been using scotch tape, but I think I will give electrical tape a try) - $45 in a spare ebay head (but I now search ebay by head part number, and I see some as cheap as about $33.) I will probably be picking up a few more heads in a month or two.


So that's $250 in extra supplies for the printers. That may sound like a lot of money but these printers consume vast amounts of VERY expensive ink - that's why Canon sells the printers so cheap - they make their big money on the sale of ink. I read that the retail ink market is about $18 billion a year, and the oems still retain 80% of that.


The retail price for one 5-cart set of ink is $80. If you get lucky, you might find a set for $50. I think I saw a set on amazon for $35.

But even at that low price, three sets puts you over $100. Is 3 sets a lot of ink? NO IT IS NOT! You can use up 3 sets without really even trying!

I have already gone through two sets on the small amount of test printing I have done on my brother's printer - some of that also is because that faulty printer seems to spend a lot of time on head cleaning - don't ask me why - and head cleaning consumes quite a bit of ink. I don't care so much, because I have huge jars of ink, dye cyan, dye magenta, dye black, dye yellow, and a big jar of pigment black for the 150% larger pigment black cartridge. Pigment black, unlike dye black, does not get diffused in mixing with the other dyes. It contains non-soluble bits of pigment suspended in solution, which totally overprint the dyes - and canon blends it in to give you crisp text overprinting areas of color.

It is also the black that you use when you print out papers in black and white - no color - although canon does mix a little color in just to keep the color nozzles from drying out.

OH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD - WAIT A SECOND!
I started to say, I read on a forum about a college guy, like Sam two years ago, who ran out of pigment black, and had to turn in his essay the next day. The stores were closed. He had a full dye black cartridge but the printer stubbornly refused to use that. Then he changed the paper selection type to "high resolution paper" which was able to get the printer to use the dye black ink, and printed out his essay.

ALL OF A SUDDEN THAT RINGS A BELL - HE CHANGED PAPER TYPE!

Holy crap! Is that my stupid problem with the mx870-cliff? By switching to a fine paper type, other than plain, is that triggering the set of dye nozzles to add to the pigment black, to enrich the pigment, I suppose, - but in my case cause a mis-print by about 1/100th inch, producing a negative bold that I don't want? I suppose it lays down the dye black first, then overlays with the pigment black - whose row of nozzles are a separate section away from the dye nozzles. Yes it is a misalignment problem! ​

Of course you can use cheap generic ink, but the professionals (on the forums at printerknowlege.com) do not do that - they feel the quality is much lower, and also that the printer may suffer damage. They use high end ink, and they refill the genuine Canon cartridges, which they say are much superior to generic carts. The highest quality of ink, according to several of the pros, is the type I ended up getting, OCP of Germany. The ink is supposed to be so close to OEM quality, exceeding oem specs in a few cases (specs include viscosity, density, etc. etc - about 6 very detailed European specs) that you can freely mix the ink into Canon cartridges, without draining the carts out first.


The pros say that the head is a consumable. The heads on these, unlike my former Epson 980s, do not need a service tech to change - so labor is free. I had the Epson head changed on two different occasions - service tech total fee with head and labor - about $160. As I mentioned, ebay has these heads at the mid-$30 range. This head easily pops into the printer, and you drop down the securing latch.

The head is usually consumed after only about 8 sets of ink. The issue is heat breaking down the nozzles. The micro nozzles, printed using a photolithography method similar to making computer chips, consisting of over 2000 nozzles within the space of a postage stamp, have actuators, one per nozzle, that flash from room temperature to several hundred degrees within a couple of microseconds, in order to boil the ink and fully eject the tiny droplet, as small as one pico-liter, a billionth of a liter - that is about the smallest size droplet in the business. Epson used to brag about 5 picoliters, and it was MUCH better than what I had been getting from Brother, which I originally thought was pretty good.

I never had a problem with the quality of Epson - so this heightened quality from Canon is staggering - under a magnifying glass the text is dead-on.


Here is a really cool video on how it all works:
(
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GtPiQmaQ4k
)


Anyway, if heat is the issue, then if you want to prolong the life of the head, you try to keep it running cooler. How? By slowing down the print speed. First you start by setting the printer to "Quiet" mode. This can double the print time. Second, you can also increase the "drying time" between sheets of paper - normal is about 20 seconds, maximum is about 45 seconds.

On my brother's printer in the sunroom, mx870-cliff, I took it out of quiet mode. Let them print as fast as they want. I don't care so much about that printer, although the head is probably perfect. But it won't get much use out there anyway. The printers that WILL get use are -shaun and -gloria, depending on how much real estate business I do.

Well, that is a lot on printers. I have totally neglected Arma 3. And I still have about 120 user-designed missions I haven't tried - those missions totally rock!

In fact I never posted the pictures of what happens when I ambush the 11-man patrol. I don't usually get killed, but I may get wounded. And there may be one or two guys I didn't get. The drone tells me who they are, and where they are.

I might try some Arma 3 tonight. Jeff, did you ever give Arma a try? I know that Sam has not yet done that.

Kevin - you liked Left 4 Dead offline. I am telling you - there is so much value in Arma offline, it has to be maybe the best $50 game out there - complete with full campaign, and all those showcases, and all those user-designed missions.

The graphics are excellent - not quite a Crysis, but close - waving grass, fine distance - you can scope in at 500-600 yards, and with range finder out to about a mile. But don't play it until you catch on to how you can create your own game saves. Then the possibilities are endless. The best thing is to download the game, and download all the user missions - start each mission to get it going and to download the map - in my case about 150 missions. Then go offline, and NEVER allow steam to update the game or you will lose all your saves, which happened to me twice.

Rich

 

Well, now that I've finished(finally!) scrapping a camper travel trailer, I may just have time to try a new game. Or play the ones I've already got, and have been dying to play lol!

Sounds interesting Rich!

 

Another tale of the woes of using inkjet printers. Unless you're printing glossy prints for photo albums, laser printers do just as good a job, the cartridges never misalign or dry out if unused, they last ten times as long too.
We use HP all in one colour laser units at work, they're very cheap at around £160 (about $200 pre-tax) they have a good print speed, a decent ADF scanner that I think can do SMTP scanning as well. With all the money I used to waste on ink cartridges I've never looked back.
I think the model we use is M277n but I'll check when I arrive at the office.

 

You're like me Kev - I am dying to get back to gaming, but pre-occupied with other stuff - maybe tonight.

Yes, if you pick up Arma 3, you will never look back and regret it. If you have any questions about creating your own save system, I have the answers.

On virtually every user-created mission, or in the campaign, they allow you ONE save. Some of the missions or campaigns put in an additional save point after completion of some objective. I found out where the save folder is - it is in a different place for every part of the game. I create a save. Then I follow my shortcut to the save folder, take out the save that I just created, and put it in my own numbered folder, usually with a description of where I am in the mission, and I leave the game save folder without a save in it. That allows me to save again at any time.

As long as there is no save in the folder, you can make your own ONE AND ONLY SAVE!

That also allows you to play missions intended for 4-man coop, like Operation Greenfield. I couldn't believe how many enemies were spawning on that mission. I kept creating save folders 4.12 killed 3 more, 4.13 killed 5 more, 4.14 killed 2 more. I beat the mission and counted up the casualties - I had to kill 100 of those guys. Then I read about the mission - it wasn't for single-player, it was for 4-man coop. To heck with that. I parked my squad outside town, went in on my own, killed everybody, thanks to the incremental save points, stole the escape helicopter, rescued my guys, and beat the mission.

One of the most exciting: I had a save point where a special enemy team came in which included a marksman with a sniper rifle. I had the enemy machine gun, the 7.76 zephyr with 150-round belts. I am particularly deadly with that weapon. I killed the squad, then took the marksman's sniper rifle, and ignored completing the mission, turning it into a sniper game. The game nicely continued to spawn enemies, so I never ran out of people to kill - I always eventually got killed myself.

Then steam updated Arma, and I lost that save point.

Don't ever let steam update Arma!!

I will go back to Operation Greenstorm again - maybe tonight. It really is a great mission. I would love to find that sniper rifle again. I wonder if I should check all the 100 guys I have to kill, to see if any of them is a marksman. On second thought - I doubt it. I think it comes at the end.

Most likely that marksman is a part of a seal team which only comes at the very end after I have blown up the last ammo dump - which was at the church. I think I recall that I heard myself take note of the seal team - "Special Forces squad 150 meters north." That may be how the game is set up to work. So I'll make the church my last ammo dump in hopes of triggering the seal team again so I can capture the sniper rifle. ​

With the save, you skip all the preliminary, and get right to the action
On the scenario, combined arms, I have a save point where we are defending our captured post from the counter attack. I got tired of getting out of cover, throwing smoke, switching to the launcher, and taking out the attacking amphibious vehicle. So I moved my save point to just after I kill that vehicle.

• I have a save point for the normal 30-round rifle, but with extra health that I got from the enemy amphibious vehicles in the captured post.
• I have another save point from a captured enemy rifle.
• I have another from when I picked up an enemy machine gun.
• I have another save point with the 100-round clip rifle variant of the normal 30-round rifle.
• I have another save point from picking up an enemy grenadier rifle, and loading up 10 grenades from the amphibious vehicle.

So now, depending on how I want to play the enemy counter attack, I go to my save folder with that particular save. I start the scenario, then switch to my chosen save. More lately I have been getting very good with the grenade launcher, hahahaha.

I knew it was just a matter of practice.

I scope in each time, and also go to the map, scroll up to increase the map zoom, then go back to the rifle. That little 3-second trick maximizes the rifle zoom, so you don't have to hold down the right mouse key. The grenadier scope is a little red dot. High up on the hill to my left, the red dot needs to be about a half inch above where I want the grenade to hit - those guys are probably only about 80 yards away. Out in front of me, for the enemies that are 300 yards out, I have found I need to be about 3 inches above them, to launch the grenade that far.

I don't know if real life grenade launchers can shoot that far, but in the terrific book, Outlaw Platoon, about combat in Afghanistan, they had one guy who had done really well with the grenade launcher at two years of MOS training school. So when they got trapped in a valley, the captain who wrote the book, started him off popping the enemy emplacements at the top of the adjacent hill. That allowed them to get the FOB artillery, "off-site arty" to lock in firing positions, through the help of one of their guys on the radio who specialized in "walking in" the artillery rounds. The arty took care of everything, but the grenade launcher was a big help until then. If you haven't read the book, it's much better than Unbreakable. I almost wanted to sign up, or better yet, to volunteer Jeff. ​

There is a special thrill when the enemy way high on the hill to my left, gets behind some scrub bushes where I can't see him, but I correctly launch a grenade up there. I don't hear from that guy any more. Or maybe he gets up and runs to the open, about to go prone and nail me, and I have just loaded another grenade, and my safest option to avoid getting killed is to pop one up there really quick. If I'm not accurate, I die. If I am accurate, occasionally he gets blown 10 feet away! That always makes me laugh!

Then I turn my attention to the guys coming from the front. Again there are trees with cover. I might have 2-3 grenades left. By then I am usually finishing the round with enemy Katiba rifle fire, but occasionally those attackers get to some tree cover. Several times I have popped a grenade where I think the guy went - and 5 seconds later the game signals that the counter attack is over (in other words, that was the last guy and I got him!)



You can of course create save points with the various vehicle scenarios. You can get really good at helicopter flying that way.

The one single user-created mission that shocked me with no ability to create a save - I even learned to beat it by being extremely careful, of course, and by switching to one of my squad members on one particularly dangerous spot. Yes, sometimes you can become the other guy on your squad. I got killed, but I was able to switch back to myself and finish the mission. LOL


With save points, I got a good 4-6 weeks of terrific gameplay out of that one mission involving rescuing the drone - maybe 100 hours on that one user mission, Operation Scotch Lass.

I flew the drone back safely, then I practiced sniper rifle against the attacking 5 guys at the airport with a special save spot. Then I drove the truck to the gas station, killed those 3 guys, and switched to dune buggy. I got into the town and found 3 more dune buggies - that can be useful if your buggy gets shot, or if you fly into a corner too fast and hurt the steering. You can still drive, but it isn't smooth. So now I just switch to a good one. I also found a range finder with a one-mile scope.

I used to dune buggy to the top of a large hill, use my WHOT infra red rifle scope to find live enemies, then use the range finder to get a clear picture of where they were and where they were headed, then tear down there with the dune buggy and try to get behind them.


Later I went back to the original sniping at the airport, but I no longer liked my old rock - so I moved closer to the road, taking off my silencer so I could attract them to me by my loud fire. Then as the game director got more clever (yes, I think there is a director like Left 4 Dead, because as soon as you start beating the missions, the enemy tactics improve - they get craftier.) I found that they sometimes outflanked me and got behind me. I switched walls, then they went all the way back the other way, and go behind me again.

I thought - "Wow, I need one of those little portable quadracopter drones that you can carry in your backpack." Then I realized I had just flown back a large predator-style airplane drone - but still a drone with the same kind of camera - and the same ability, like the quadracopter, to "loiter" over the battlefield flying circles, sending back live camera images through the "turret controls". So I went back to the save just before I flew the drone home, and created 3 new scenarios where I did not fly the drone home.


That is when I really started to play the hell out of that mission!!!! That is when I found the 11-man patrol that I posted about, coming in behind it, but more lately, taking the other route, and coming in in front of it. I still have to finish that post with screen shots ("to be continued") about what happens, when they're all coming toward me, after I start shooting!! It gets a little dicey as we say in the seals. I mean, as Jeff says in the Seals.

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Sam, I must admit, I AM very impressed with laser color printing - how they manage to combine those different colors so accurately - and as you say, no worries about heads drying out - and the toner is cheaper.

Back in my Epson days, I looked closely at laser, and my feeling was that the colors were not as vibrant.


DO WE KNOW ANYBODY WHO REALLY LIKES SATURATED COLORS?

Take a wild guess.

So, you know me - I like VERY RICH, and DEEPLY SATURATED colors. At that time, laser just didn't do it for me. Two weeks ago, the Best Buy sales rep whose dad had bought the MX922, said pretty much the same thing - he mentioned that they sell some nice lasers, but he said his feeling was that while laser is very good, even superior for a lot of reasons, the colors aren't as vibrant.

But maybe that depends on the machine.

I will quote Jeff again, "I am open to being proven wrong."

 

Me using IPS displays over TN/VA should hint at my preference regarding colours - accuracy is king, not saturation and contrast. I like high contrast and colour saturation, but only for certain things - when it comes to desktop usage, high saturation gets tiresome fast. Ironically, the saturation on the last VA panel I used was actually very poor, possible due to a narrow gamut I'm not sure.

 

I need to reconnect my Dell U2410. If only for my split desktop. I'm finding my needing it lately. See, I run a USB microscope. And I run other tasks as well. It would keep me from having to move windows around and what not lol