the road to oblivion

by oBelIX

Please note – you may want to read the PS's first. 

oblivion – The condition or state of being forgotten or unknown

oblivion – The absence of awareness

oblivion – "The elder scrolls", a computer game.

this post describes a herculean effort to get the above mentioned game to work.

Actors 

  • me
  • shamanth
  • mahesh
  • arun
  • anand
  • manish
  • monga
  • peesu
  • t3
  • aziz

The hardware

  • one ATI Radeon 9800
  • one 512 MB RAM chip
  • one 80 GB External HDD
  • one SMPS
  • one 40 GB Seagate HDD

The story

Chaos got oblivion. Now, if you read the reviews or have seen the screenshots you would know that it was one of the most anticipated rpg's of the year. (and based on the 20 odd hours that I have played it definately deserves its 9.3 rating). 

So, initially thought that the game would run in the lab. Downloaded it and tried there, ran at one fps. Realized we need better hardware. Also realized that no "one" one has good enough hardware save for peesu. 

Came up with a plan. Put my graphics card (one ATI Radeon 9800), anand's RAM (one 512 MB chip) into Shamanth's PC. (Those of you who dont know shamanth please check here. ) (I had to take my card out of manish's pc for that …)

Now we had to transfer four gigabytes over wireless LAN. Since I had already copied the game to my PC (over SMB not DC++) I moved the harddisk there. Copied game there. Started oblivion.

The first glitch – The game would freeze after the first cutscene. So, figured we would install from the CD and try. Borrowed an external 80 gig hdd from Arun. Took it to Mahesh's room. (incidentally, you can learn about them both here). Wired LAN rocks, copied 4 GB to Mahesh's HDD. Tried copying to Arun's external harddisk.

The second glitch – Windows said "Not enough free space". So made some space. Now the drive has 8GB of space. It still wont copy 4GB of an iso. Then realized … its a stupid ass FAT32 filesystem. wont support a file larger than 4GB. Chopped up the file and copied to HDD. Then copied to Shamanths PC. (incidentally had another random argument with aziz).
The era of bliss – So shamanth and I started playing the game. It was going good except that shamanth was becoming extremely possessive and not wanting to share … grrr … However, it seems that the universe is conspiring against the game.

The third glitch – Shamanths SMPS blows up. And I mean literally blows up, with a white spark and stuff like that. His room loses power. Takes another one day to repair. At this time, the prudent thing to do would have been investigate why this happened. However, we moved my SMPS to his PC and started playing. We played for like 60 hours (sham 40, me about 20 – I still dont know why he was cribbing). Laughed a little at peesu who was sucking at gaining levels (mostly bcoz he was doing yucky quests). T3 and monga also got enthralled by the game.

The fourth glitch – Now after so many hours you'd think that  everything would keep going fine. Sadly, something started to overheat. Either my card / or shamanths CPU.

The current scenario – We decided to stop playing because sooner or later some hardware was going to go kaput. My SMPS and card are with me, my PC is working. 
Sham's pc is totally useless i.e. w/o smps and RAM.

The bottomline – No clear way of playing oblivion in the near future.

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PS – "STATUTARY WARNING" This post is a description of the pain in getting oblivion to work. Mostly, I expect that you would not care and feel bored after reading it.   

PS1 – have been thinking abt BTP and what to do and how to do

PS2 – will goto pt from the first of MAY 

PS3 – GRE classes are boring

PS4 – I am going to flunk at GRE

PS5 – C++ rocks, inheritance rocks, source control rocks.

PS6 – SE is important – atleast the bit about writing clear code and not screwing up source control. 

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