Steel Penny Games

My hands are aching, legs are shot, and I'm pretty tired right now.  I've just finished completely rebuilding two of my three new IBM Model M clicky keyboards!  I'd have posted some before and after pics, but I didn't want to frighten anyone.  The before pics are horrifying, and the after looks just like a brand new clicky Model M.  But in case anyone in the Austin area (or not) is looking for some more of these ancient but awesome 'boards, Comptuers 4 Kids has quite a few still kicking around (check their eBay store).  They're a little overpriced at $45 a pop, in filthy condition, but you can't beat local pickup and in-person returns, if need be.

So, why refurb Model M's?  Why not buy a new keyboard?  Well, I honestly haven't found one that is A) solidly built, and B) aren't ridiculously expensive.  The Omnikey was good, but went out of business.  Now CVT makes them, but the suckers have Windows keys--which I find absolutely no use for.  I'm told the DasKeyboard is good, and particularly cool because you can get a version that has no markings on any keys, for the sure-fingered h4xx0r in you.  Pretty intimidating to people who just want to sit down and tinker on your machine.  But really, I haven't had a good keyboard come new from a factory since the Fujitsu (non-clicky but awesome, still use it daily) that came with my 386-40mhz in '93, and I always check the keyboard aisle in computer stores.  They're all crap.

Another reason I wanted to get more Model M's is we've just hired another programmer, Will Marsden (welcome!), and all the keyboards I had sitting in the spare hardware box were mushy ones relegated to being connected to servers or other temporary assignments.  I feel like it's my duty to make sure that people that work with/for me  are afforded the highest quality experience we can comfortably afford.  I know I'd want that from any job I'm at, and grumble a bit when I'm handed sub-par equipment.  While some folks may not think much of the gesture of tracking down 20 year old hardware and spending an hour or so cleaning it with soapy water, isopropyl alcohol, and Q-tips... think of it in terms of your own job. If you are a violinist, wouldn't you love to work in an orchestra where the conductor gets everyone in the strings section a Stradivarius?  If you're a waiter, wouldn't you like to have your manager looking for the absolutely most comfortable shoes and insist on getting them for you?   Acquiring the best keyboard ever made for a person who will be typing on it for 8+ hours a day and restoring it to brand-new condition is one of the best gifts I can give for coming to work with us.  At least, I think so.

We just bought new machines a couple of weeks back.  They're pretty sweet.  I don't normally splurge on things, but I do like to buy quality that serves a purpose.  So, rather than buying a typical off-the-shelf Dell or even an HP workstation, I decided to have some built by my good friend Jeremy Siprelle who knows how to build such things.  I'm a demanding customer, though, and wanted some top shelf parts and some solid but economical parts.

The case is a Silverstone Raven.  Beautiful, oddball, and huge.  Beautiful because Jeremy built everything so the power cables are all shrinked in black against a fully powder coated black case, so there's no light leakage or reflections inside the case, except from the motherboard and piping.  We didn't get a circus case with glowing LEDs... that's for kids.  But looking inside a perfectly clean case is a joy in itself.  Oddball, in that the motherboard is rotated 90 degrees so that the connectors are UP rather than BACK.  This helps heat rise off cards, as well as the massive but slow moving fans in the base of the case blow just enough air upward that the heat is extracted, but make almost no noise.  Huge, in that it's at least 8 inches longer than a normal case, so there's plenty of room to mount a ridiculous number of hard drives in it.  My one gripe about the case is that since there's a lid that is relatively close to the connectors, if you buy any dongles or rigid converters, you may have trouble fitting the lid back on.  Display port - to - HDMI connectors sometimes are this way, and we had to buy cable-style ones rather than rigid.  No biggie, but a minor annoyance.

The mobo is a Gigabyte X58 of some variant, with a Core i7 920 and 6gb of tri-channel ram.  Plenty of bandwidth, lots of speed, and 8 cores (4 + 4 hyper).  Yeah, it's fast.

Most important, though, was my insistence on a Sandforce driven solid-state drive (SSD).  The first one I could get a hold of was the Corsair, which at 100gb is not tiny but not huge either.  It's incredibly snappy compared to the 7200rpm drives I'm used to.  Oh, and silent and produces virtually no heat.  Today, though, I was dinking around and decided to run a few benchmarks.

HOLY CRAP.  The drive wasn't all that fast.  Access times are incredible, but the throughput was lousy at the low-end, and only climbed up near the 285mb/s it's supposed to have when you get up to very large file sizes, and  even then it was only at 235mb/s.  I gave it a pass since the drive is already 60% full, and SSD's are supposed to degrade a little as they fill.  Except Sandforce controllers aren't supposed to.

After an hour of reading and tinkering and running benchmarks, I found out that the BIOS needs the SATA controller to be configured for AHCI rather than IDE mode, and the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Msahci) needs to have a tweak 'Start' changed to zero (0) rather than 3.  Change the registry first, then the bios, then reboot twice and Windows 7 will figure it out.  Don't sweat the first reboot... it takes a long time!

Once I'd gotten that fixed up and re-run the benchmarks, I'm getting over 120mb/s at 4kb random reads and writes, and easily hitting 285mb/s on anything over 64kb.  Smokin'! So, if you have an SSD, you might consider checking your settings.  Yes, they matter.  A lot.

JH

I bet you were reading this and thinking to yourself, "I wonder who I know that would like to work in the games industry with some fairly veteran talent, but doesn't want to be forced into doing some run-of-the-mill AAA project that is rehashing a tired old property, or has a numeral exceeding 3 in the title".  Thanks for that.  Go ahead and check our job postings and pass on the link to your friends that totally kick ass.  We like people that totally kick ass, chock full of Chucknorium. 

By the way, it's a little known fact that Mr. Norris used to make games back before he kicked ass for a living, so it's a natural regression.  Those of you who don't remember, all of Chuck's games were impossible to play for mere mortals, let alone beat.  But Chuck Norris just squinted at the screen and the AI were afraid to shoot.

Thanks,

Jason "Please don't roundhouse kick me into yesterday" Hughes

Last night went fairly well.  There were two other speakers before me.  They went on quite a long time, and unfortunately some folks had to leave early, being a school night and all...  But those who hung around were a great audience.