Progress!

Tonight’s vm setup was a little more successful. I don’t have them up and running yet, but all files have been copied over for me to begin plugging everything together tomorrow! While waiting for files to copy I got a little more animation done in SFM; I’m about a minute and a half of animation in so far, and another 3 and a half minutes to go… give or take. All of these things require great patience… and tea.

Pressing Forward, Laying Backwards

Did more server work this evening. I made a backup of the current gameserver files, and got Samba up and running under AlmaLinux to perform the file transfer. It was fun trying to remember how it all worked — I haven’t setup a Samba share in an eternity. One of the problems with setting up a Linux server is that once you have it deployed it remains reliable (when configured properly) enough that when it comes time to upgrade or switch OS’s it’s fun trying to remember what to setup, what to give permissions to, etc.

Tomorrow’s goal will be to boot the Quake III Servers. It’ll give me a potential excuse to shoot some shit, and old school! Shit… that means I’m gonna have to mod Quake to run in 4K! XD

Weekend Open Thread

I’ve been spending the better part of the evening trying to diagnose a problem friends’ gaming computer. As it turns out, the memory controller is borked on the motherboard, and I’m going to recommend to them that if they’re going to change motherboards that they might as well upgrade the processor too. As it is the hardware dates all the way back to 2014. I’ll have to go over the details with them tomorrow, and come up with a potential upgrade plan.

Reason 498603986 For Not Installing Windows 11

If you haven’t been paying attention; Windows 11 has been recently added as an optional upgrade to Windows 10 users clinically insane enough to upgrade to an open beta… especially if they have an AMD CPU.

Microsoft’s chief product officer Panos Panay once said “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you.” Unfortunately, a couple of days after launching, it’s turning out to be something of an unwanted gift. Besides being blamed for Far Cry 6 crashes and deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is now causing performance drops on AMD chips as well. That’s according to AMD themselves, who announced in a support post that updating to Windows 11 could cause a 3-5% performance drop in some applications as well as a 10-15% drop in “games commonly used for esports.”

There are currently two problems; L3 Cache Latency, and Microsoft forgetting how to utilize AMD’s core scheduling technology. There was a similar issue that took place years ago under Windows 7 with AMD’s “Bulldozer” processors, but in this case it’s entirely an issue with Windows 11 not working properly. The L3 Caching issue is kind of interesting; what is so different between 10 and 11 to cause such a performance loss?

Either way I spent most of my time under Linux these days… so. 😛

In Other News: Windows Update Still Sucks

It’s a good thing I spend about 97% of my time under Linux, plus also run a neutered Win 10 Pro install. This recent update sounds like a special level of fuck to those who were unfortunate enough to have it forced through an update.

The latest offender was “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – SCSIAdapter – 9.3.0.221”, a Windows-recommended driver for AMD users. The problem? The driver was stopping some users’ PCs from booting, and the patch has since been pulled from the Windows Update list.

But the real problem here, as noted by Windows Latest, is that Windows Insider users had already flagged the driver as being dodgy. It was bad enough that users had to resort to some command line kung fu to nuke the update, which is a whole nightmare that nobody should have to go through.

Of course, this only affects owners of systems that run AMD motherboards. If I ran a typical Windows 10 install where it updated to the latest of everything this would have knocked me offline. This is why I spend most of my time under Linux. I can update at a time convenient for me to make sure I have enough time to fix shit if things happen to go awry. 😛

Vacation Day 1: Mild Annoyances Are The Best Annoyances

Had to do my first ever factory reset on my Fire HD8 today. I’m not sure how I managed it, but once in awhile when I plugged in headphones Alexa would try to activate, and since I don’t have the tablet registered with Amazon it begs me to register. I usually just hit the Not Now button and get back to the apps I’ve installed outside Amazon’s eco system; but there must have been a FireOS update that took it out. I tried to close out the app, but to no avail. I managed to get back to the homescreen, went into Waterfox and found that the only button I had at the bottom of the screen was the Back button. I had no choice but to restart, and found that I couldn’t continue any further until I registered the device.

Of course… I’m too much of an asshole to give up that easily. 😛 Factory resetting it did the trick, at least for now. I’ve been trying to replicate the problem again but haven’t had any luck. I’m planning to do a little science experiment with a little help hopefully not too far long down the road that could help prevent this from happening again.

I also had to fix a couple things in Windows tonight too, went under there tonight to play and privately livestream DMC2 (don’t ask). I wanted to run OBS in the background but found that my drivers were out of date, as the AMD codec was missing. Updating the drivers fixed the problem but… when installing the driver I had to hit reset on my computer because all of a sudden all of my USB ports fucking died. Windows went into Recovery Mode… and failed. I booted in anyway and sure enough, everything was fine.

So yeah, vacation is off to a great start. 😛 Better to have it now than during a busy bork week. Think I’ll end the night with a game that doesn’t end in DMC2…

All Systems Go!

New monitor arrived! All pixels are good. Just in time too, since I start my vacation after work tomorrow! I played a little Portal 2 tonight, and also started chopping up Broforce footage. It’s a shame that I have to start from scratch again, but there are several improvements that have been made to Shotcut since I last chopped up footage for a fresh project. Different audio tracks now show each waveform if being separated from an mp4 or mkv multitrack recording, more filters and fine tuning, and the overall performance boost from adding more RAM, the 3900x and having Manjaro installed on NVMe makes all the difference. I actually feel like I’m moving through it much faster. I also have Source Filmmaker installed to my old Samsung 870 Pros (one SFM install for each operating system) to improve long load times in due part to all of the fucking assets I’ve accumulated over the years.

Well, that’s enough self indulgence for this eve…

Goodbye Mint, Hello Manjaro

With the new PC build in place I felt it was a good excuse to upgrade my Linux install, though I couldn’t decide between upgrading to a newer version of Mint or venturing out to try another distro. I contemplated trying Solus OS, but found it to be a little too heavy for my liking. I’ve heard Fedora is getting better on the gaming front, but that distro still leaves a sour taste in my mouth… CentOS for gaming is also too much of a pain to setup for gaming (but it is excellent for running this website!), so I finally settled on the latest version of Manjaro Linux.

This was surprisingly easy to setup. Usually when I setup Linux there are at least two different repositories that I have to install in order to get some of my favorite programs (or having to compile them from source myself). But right out of the box this came installed with the latest open source mesa drivers, Vulkan, controller drivers, and Steam is even preinstalled! I still recommend updating your software/drivers after any OS installation.

I couldn’t find OBS on the package manager, but it was easy to grab via snapd. This version of OBS comes with all kinds of plugins already pre-installed, most of which are handy for livestreaming, and my personal favorite; the VAAPI plugin for recording with AMD GPU’s. Now I record my gameplay directly from the GPU just as I can under Windows. I’ve known about this plugin for quite awhile, but never got around to compiling it for OBS under Mint or CentOS. I did some test recordings with Sonic Mania and Crash Bandicoot using Proton, and the quality is on par with my Windows install. This will make it easier for me to do comparison recordings between Win 10 and Manjaro.

I’m happy to finally see Linux get this kind of attention! This has definitely come a long way since the days of having to gather up like 12 different repos and getting stuck in dependency hell in order to get half of these things to work properly. Now 97% of the stuff I use everyday runs outside of Windows… stunning.

I Basically Have A New Desktop Now

I’ve been busy getting my system put back together. Finally have the 3900x installed onto the new motherboard (ASRock x570 Taichi). Now I’m rocking two NVMe drives, two SSD’s and six 7200rpm server grade mechanical drives. I still have some things to refine under Windows 10, but I’m pretty much all setup under Linux (Manjaro this time).

Should have everything back up to 100% by tomorrow!