Sunless Sea tip. If your captain died and you don't have a lot of money/weapons to pass on (IE just the default stuff), there's an option to inherit the previous captains map. Which I found incredibly useful. Just knowing where to go saved me a ton of time and allowed me to gather up enough for the Townhouse, a new gun, and an heirloom. Still going decent for that character but will be in a much better place with the next one now.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Sunless Sea tip. If your captain died and you don't have a lot of money/weapons to pass on (IE just the default stuff), there's an option to inherit the previous captains map. Which I found incredibly useful. Just knowing where to go saved me a ton of time and allowed me to gather up enough for the Townhouse, a new gun, and an heirloom. Still going decent for that character but will be in a much better place with the next one now.
Although if you do this, your new captain won't be able to get all those juicy Fragments from discovering the islands again.
All I know about Sunless Sea is that it came out of Early Access and the text is very small and hard to read if you're watching someone play on a stream
Hey Steam thread! I thought I'd ask here 'cause I don't know who else to turn to.
So, it seems when I play certain games, they don't like to play nice with full screen mode. Whenever I switch to full screen, the image gets all zoomed in and weird. Examples:
Not fullscreen:
Fullscreen:
The only games I've found this on so far are Metal Slug 3, Closure, and Cave Story (tho I'm sure there's others). Not sure why they're doing this. I'm running a Geforce 970, but it did this on my old Geforce 470 too. Have reinstalled Win 7, still does it. Playing on a TV, via HDMI. Google searches have come up with a few others with the same issue, but no fixes. Any ideas?
XBL: Jhnny Cash PSN: Jhnny_Cash Steam ID: http://steamcommunity.com/id/hypephb 3DS: 0619-4582-9630 Nintendo Network ID: DBrickashaw
You might know me as D'Brickashaw on Steam.
Hey Steam thread! I thought I'd ask here 'cause I don't know who else to turn to.
So, it seems when I play certain games, they don't like to play nice with full screen mode. Whenever I switch to full screen, the image gets all zoomed in and weird. Examples:
Not fullscreen:
Fullscreen:
The only games I've found this on so far are Metal Slug 3, Closure, and Cave Story (tho I'm sure there's others). Not sure why they're doing this. I'm running a Geforce 970, but it did this on my old Geforce 470 too. Have reinstalled Win 7, still does it. Playing on a TV, via HDMI. Google searches have come up with a few others with the same issue, but no fixes. Any ideas?
Sadly I can't help but I would be interested in finding out about this too as I have at least one game that does the something very similar.
All I know about Sunless Sea is that it came out of Early Access and the text is very small and hard to read if you're watching someone play on a stream
A good stream of this would need the person to take the time to read out the text and stuff.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Hey Steam thread! I thought I'd ask here 'cause I don't know who else to turn to.
So, it seems when I play certain games, they don't like to play nice with full screen mode. Whenever I switch to full screen, the image gets all zoomed in and weird. Examples:
Not fullscreen:
Fullscreen:
The only games I've found this on so far are Metal Slug 3, Closure, and Cave Story (tho I'm sure there's others). Not sure why they're doing this. I'm running a Geforce 970, but it did this on my old Geforce 470 too. Have reinstalled Win 7, still does it. Playing on a TV, via HDMI. Google searches have come up with a few others with the same issue, but no fixes. Any ideas?
All I know about Sunless Sea is that it came out of Early Access and the text is very small and hard to read if you're watching someone play on a stream
A good stream of this would need the person to take the time to read out the text and stuff in a British accent.
Hey Steam thread! I thought I'd ask here 'cause I don't know who else to turn to.
So, it seems when I play certain games, they don't like to play nice with full screen mode. Whenever I switch to full screen, the image gets all zoomed in and weird. Examples:
Not fullscreen:
Fullscreen:
The only games I've found this on so far are Metal Slug 3, Closure, and Cave Story (tho I'm sure there's others). Not sure why they're doing this. I'm running a Geforce 970, but it did this on my old Geforce 470 too. Have reinstalled Win 7, still does it. Playing on a TV, via HDMI. Google searches have come up with a few others with the same issue, but no fixes. Any ideas?
I'd reinstall the drivers and check the box that says clean install. This fixed an issue I had when I first got my GTX 970. Might be some old driver file causing funkiness.
I think we may be judging betting unfairly and as "not real" as we are because of cultural bias towards games
But remember people have been gambling on things as important as the Gatorade color at the super bowl or which section of field a cow takes a dump in for years.
This is really not much different.
Betting on Counter-Strike is far less silly than most Superbowl bets I've witnessed. My personal favourite was an over/under on the number of windmills Pete Townshend would perform on his guitar when The Who played the halftime show.
The price of the virtual items, which seem to be mostly cosmetic in nature, seems really high. I'm not even big on collectibles in the real world, but spending that kind of money on something that only exists as long as somebody keeps the servers running just boggles the mind.
I think that the internet has been for years on the path to creating what is essentially an electronic Necronomicon: A collection of blasphemous unrealities so perverse that to even glimpse at its contents, if but for a moment, is to irrevocably forfeit a portion of your sanity.
Xbox - PearlBlueS0ul, Steam
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
I am fashionably late to this because my internet has been acting up lately and wouldn't let me connect to Steam, but it turns out that @Handgimp gifted me Surgeon Simulator. Thanks! I can't wait to mutilate some innocent patients!
I think we may be judging betting unfairly and as "not real" as we are because of cultural bias towards games
But remember people have been gambling on things as important as the Gatorade color at the super bowl or which section of field a cow takes a dump in for years.
This is really not much different.
Betting on Counter-Strike is far less silly than most Superbowl bets I've witnessed. My personal favourite was an over/under on the number of windmills Pete Townshend would perform on his guitar when The Who played the halftime show.
The price of the virtual items, which seem to be mostly cosmetic in nature, seems really high. I'm not even big on collectibles in the real world, but spending that kind of money on something that only exists as long as somebody keeps the servers running just boggles the mind.
It's partially understandable since the items won't wear down over time due to environmental factors like a basement flooding a comic book collection or the like but also means that whoever is the last buyer/owner is when the servers/game dies is left in the hole. It's a long, high stakes game of hot potato.
Hey Steam thread! I thought I'd ask here 'cause I don't know who else to turn to.
So, it seems when I play certain games, they don't like to play nice with full screen mode. Whenever I switch to full screen, the image gets all zoomed in and weird. Examples:
Not fullscreen:
Fullscreen:
The only games I've found this on so far are Metal Slug 3, Closure, and Cave Story (tho I'm sure there's others). Not sure why they're doing this. I'm running a Geforce 970, but it did this on my old Geforce 470 too. Have reinstalled Win 7, still does it. Playing on a TV, via HDMI. Google searches have come up with a few others with the same issue, but no fixes. Any ideas?
Thanks, just tried it but no dice. Thanks for digging, though.
@Ed Gruberman I'll keep you in the loop if I find anything. More than a little frustrating.
@cardboard delusions Well, I did a full clean install when I got my 970 a few weeks ago (uninstalled all the old drivers before installing the card, then re-downloaded and installed everything), so I don't have much hope for it, but I'll probably try that again in a bit, just to see...
XBL: Jhnny Cash PSN: Jhnny_Cash Steam ID: http://steamcommunity.com/id/hypephb 3DS: 0619-4582-9630 Nintendo Network ID: DBrickashaw
You might know me as D'Brickashaw on Steam.
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Kind of tempted to take the star wars humble bundle for Jedi Academy just so I can finally live out my dream of playing as an evil rodian jedi that SWTOR has long denied me.
I wanna buy two copies of Gunpoint as gifts, one for myself and one for a buddy, but can't since I don't own it? Any workaround to this?
You usually have to do it as 2 separate transactions, unfortunately.
Ah, it seemed that way. Kinda shitty considering exchange and transaction fees but it's not a lot I guess. Cheers though!
To be fair, that game is awesome enough that it completely warrants the extra couple bucks you might have to spend doing it that way...
XBL: Jhnny Cash PSN: Jhnny_Cash Steam ID: http://steamcommunity.com/id/hypephb 3DS: 0619-4582-9630 Nintendo Network ID: DBrickashaw
You might know me as D'Brickashaw on Steam.
For the past decade I've been hearing how amazing Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't hold up so well, and I can usually adapt to pretty much anything.
These checkpoints are horrible. I died after a boss fight and I had to fight him again. In general, the checkpoints are far apart.
Every section seems heavily scripted, with only one real way to get through. Fail, and go 10 minutes back, making the same motions over again by rote.
It's also from the days of really half-assed PC ports. Using a controller? Button prompts will be for the keyboard, or stuff like "Button9" or "POV 0". It has full controller support, except the title screen that says "Press Enter," and boy do they mean it; they'll except nothing else. Color mode options are "8 bit int" or "16 bit float". Are you kidding me? What are terms like "int" and "float" doing in there? Thank god I have a degree in computer programming.
hey steam thread. Been a while. Still crazy in here? All this sunless sea. Caught up on the steam battle, looks like some good RPG fun for us steam folks.
Any FNG @corriganx ? Looks like I might be alone for a while Friday night, and I would love to get my game on. If we have a small turn out, I made a penny arcade logo map for worms. I think it would be fun.
If there are people here who haven't played Bastion I will actually buy that game (maybe next time it goes on sale) and gift it to people. Some of the best music I've ever heard in a game, and several moments that just took my breath away. Excellent gameplay too.
If there are people here who haven't played Bastion I will actually buy that game (maybe next time it goes on sale) and gift it to people. Some of the best music I've ever heard in a game, and several moments that just took my breath away. Excellent gameplay too.
The kids gave up on trying to gift bastion after the calamity. There was just no one left, at least no one who wasn't already in the Bastion and most of them, well, their gift war never gets to have a happy ending
Not Steam-related (except in the general gaming-being-affected sense), but I need to vent.
As is commonplace with gaming laptops, for those of you who don't delve into such things, mine has a dual-GPU setup: the integrated Intel system-on-a-chip (in this case, Intel HD 3000), and the discrete gaming GPU (AMD 6990). I typically run it on the Intel, for various reasons, and just manually switch over to the AMD when I'm going to play a game; and then back again once I'm done and the GPU's cooled down.
My laptop just decided (after a reboot, courtesy of Windows Update) that it couldn't find the 6990 any more. Wouldn't detect its existence to switch over to it, and it wasn't even showing up in the BIOS. Rebooted a whole bunch of times to try and get it to show up. Nothing. To Google! Of course, worst-case scenarios are already flitting through my head. If the GPU's fried, it is at least on a daughterboard so it can be replaced, but that's an expensive part to have to source, even now. Anyway. Google turns up the usual community threads about similar and related problems, and I start scouring them. Suggestions come up from Dell support site (my lappy is a Dell-era Alienware). Reinstall the Alienware On-Screen Display app. No change. Reflash the BIOS. No change. This doesn't seem like it's looking good.
I find a suggestion from one of Dell's techs to go into the BIOS and change a poorly-worded graphics setting (I forget what it exactly said now) from "SG" to "PEG". Sure, what the hey. Reboot.
Nothing.
As in, black screen. Even the backlight wasn't coming on. The laptop then emitted a series of eight beeps, from the old PC speaker (how often do you hear that term any more?). Which is terrifyingly loud in my machine, as it transpires, and it's 4am here (don't ask). Well, shit. Reboot. Nope, same. It is, to all intents and purposes, dead.
I grab my old laptop, a much more modest machine of 2008 vintage; a Dell Studio 1537, if you're curious. It's a cantankerous old thing now but it's been through a lot with me and it simply refuses to die. Boot it up, which feels unbearably sluggish now I'm used to the Alienware's SSD boot drive, and punch the exact terms I'd searched for before into Google to find the same help thread I'd been perusing when this bloody tech had made this seemingly idiotic BIOS setting suggestion. And keep reading. Yes, someone else had the same result. Dammit, that'll teach me not to read a bit further before taking a Dell tech at their word. He recovered by getting his machine to boot from a USB drive. That wasn't going to work for me as I couldn't even get the BIOS screen to display any more and I didn't have the machine set to look for a USB boot drive first anyway.
Then, a suggestion that made sense. And one that had occurred in vague form in the back of my mind but I'd basically dismissed.
Pull the graphics card out (thank the computer gods it's not soldered in) and reseat it.
Well, why not. Nothing to lose now. Besides many hundreds of pounds worth of computer hardware I busted my backside for and can't afford to replace...
First, to Youtube to find a video how-to. Easily found. This won't take long.
Out come the teeny screwdrivers, static precautions are taken to the best of my ability. Bottom cover off. On this model it's basically the entire floor of the laptop so you can get at damn near everything easily, which is nice. One disconnected plug and three screws out, and out comes the gigantic GPU fan. Two more screws and prise up the GPU daughterboard, which brings the heat sink and copper pipes with it. Then carefully pull it back until it disengages from what I assume is the laptop equivalent of a PCI-E connector. It's out.
I've tinkered with the innards of just about every PC I've had since 1993... but, honestly, not all that often. I still find it bloody terrifying. Doubly so in laptops.
A quick look at the connectors, they seem clean on both the card and the laptop. I'm not going to try anything elaborate here; I'm just going to reseat it for now. Slip it back in, push it into place, and lower it flush with the motherboard. Two securing screws back in, pop the fan back in, screw that back down and plug it in, and close up the laptop. Pop the battery back in, flip it over...
And it works. As soon as the screen flashes to life I hit F2 and change that goddamn setting from "PEG" back to "SG". I figure that must disable the switchable graphics and force the laptop to use the discrete GPU. Which, of course, it couldn't find, so it just blared out an error message as best it could.
Reboot properly now. Into Windows, and the switchable graphics option is back, all present and correct. And I get on the forum and start typing this. Thank you for reading. If you did. Can't blame you if you didn't...
- - - - -
TL;DR - My laptop suddenly couldn't find its GPU. After following a suggestion from a support tech that seemingly completely broke the machine, ultimately I fixed it by reseating the GPU. At four in the bloody morning.
For the past decade I've been hearing how amazing Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is. I'm here to tell you that it doesn't hold up so well, and I can usually adapt to pretty much anything.
These checkpoints are horrible. I died after a boss fight and I had to fight him again. In general, the checkpoints are far apart.
Every section seems heavily scripted, with only one real way to get through. Fail, and go 10 minutes back, making the same motions over again by rote.
It's also from the days of really half-assed PC ports. Using a controller? Button prompts will be for the keyboard, or stuff like "Button9" or "POV 0". It has full controller support, except the title screen that says "Press Enter," and boy do they mean it; they'll except nothing else. Color mode options are "8 bit int" or "16 bit float". Are you kidding me? What are terms like "int" and "float" doing in there? Thank god I have a degree in computer programming.
It's said that nothing ages as fast as the state-of-the-art; and as such, I can imagine that game hasn't aged well. For its day, on its original platform (the first Xbox), it really was absolutely breathtaking and a real showcase title for that (IMO) underappreciated console.
Back to the PC, though. I wonder if the controller issue would be fixed in the "remastered" version of Butcher Bay that was in Assault on Dark Athena, since that was 2009 and controller support was more civilised by then, and the original was 2004.
More to the point, why aren't they - or Dark Athena at least - on Steam? Dagnabbit.
Seriously, though, how are we supposed to have a true post-scarcity economy when licensing issues keep coming up? Dammit, places and peoples, I want my future now!
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Yeah, I own Chronicles of Riddick/Assault on Dark Athena on Steam. Can't remember when it was taken down, but it's a shame.
TL;DR - My laptop suddenly couldn't find its GPU. After following a suggestion from a support tech that seemingly completely broke the machine, ultimately I fixed it by reseating the GPU. At four in the bloody morning.
Ugh, I need to open up my laptop soon and see if I can figure out what's wrong with it. It's quite likely the display itself is damaged. It was in my backpack (which has a padded pocket for laptops) when I was traveling home on New Year's Eve via bus. The ride was very bumpy. A few days later I turned it on and noticed everything that should have been black had a snowy look to it with a bit of a red tinge. Everything that should have been white was a sort of light aqua color. And a lot of other colors looked fine. I hooked it up to my TV and everything displayed fine, so there's either a problem with the display or a bad connection somewhere. Not looking forward to finding the issue.
And to think, I was complaining about my newfangled 32GB USB thumbdrive failing. (Meanwhile, the old-and-busted 4GB stick I've had for years keeps on truckin'.)
Glad you got it working again, Jazz. Working with PC hardware is a job, working with laptop hardware is an adventure.
You can still get it on GOG. I think it was actually removed from steam because the tages authentification servers for it went down? I seem to recall it was taken down when one of the incarnations of Atari filed for bankruptcy. So you CAN still get it...just not on steam.
You can still get it on GOG. I think it was actually removed from steam because the tages authentification servers for it went down? I seem to recall it was taken down when one of the incarnations of Atari filed for bankruptcy. So you CAN still get it...just not on steam.
GOG's the next-best place! I might have to do that.
TL;DR - My laptop suddenly couldn't find its GPU. After following a suggestion from a support tech that seemingly completely broke the machine, ultimately I fixed it by reseating the GPU. At four in the bloody morning.
Ugh, I need to open up my laptop soon and see if I can figure out what's wrong with it. It's quite likely the display itself is damaged. It was in my backpack (which has a padded pocket for laptops) when I was traveling home on New Year's Eve via bus. The ride was very bumpy. A few days later I turned it on and noticed everything that should have been black had a snowy look to it with a bit of a red tinge. Everything that should have been white was a sort of light aqua color. And a lot of other colors looked fine. I hooked it up to my TV and everything displayed fine, so there's either a problem with the display or a bad connection somewhere. Not looking forward to finding the issue.
Ugh. Yeah, that doesn't sound hopeful. Unless it's a ribbon connector come loose or something. Best of luck. If it comes to it, I hope you can find either a new panel or (possibly a better option) a deceased example of the same model you can rip the panel out of for as little cash as possible.
Posts
. . . Long pig is best pig?
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
I ate my woookie.
Steam ID: Good Life
Although if you do this, your new captain won't be able to get all those juicy Fragments from discovering the islands again.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
It actually reminds me of a less lenient Star Control 2 where you have a very real possibility of running out of fuel and hyperspace hates you.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
So, it seems when I play certain games, they don't like to play nice with full screen mode. Whenever I switch to full screen, the image gets all zoomed in and weird. Examples:
Not fullscreen:
Fullscreen:
The only games I've found this on so far are Metal Slug 3, Closure, and Cave Story (tho I'm sure there's others). Not sure why they're doing this. I'm running a Geforce 970, but it did this on my old Geforce 470 too. Have reinstalled Win 7, still does it. Playing on a TV, via HDMI. Google searches have come up with a few others with the same issue, but no fixes. Any ideas?
You might know me as D'Brickashaw on Steam.
Sadly I can't help but I would be interested in finding out about this too as I have at least one game that does the something very similar.
SteamID: edgruberman GOG Galaxy: EdGruberman
A good stream of this would need the person to take the time to read out the text and stuff.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
@Hyperion
I found this. Hope that helps.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
I'd reinstall the drivers and check the box that says clean install. This fixed an issue I had when I first got my GTX 970. Might be some old driver file causing funkiness.
Betting on Counter-Strike is far less silly than most Superbowl bets I've witnessed. My personal favourite was an over/under on the number of windmills Pete Townshend would perform on his guitar when The Who played the halftime show.
The price of the virtual items, which seem to be mostly cosmetic in nature, seems really high. I'm not even big on collectibles in the real world, but spending that kind of money on something that only exists as long as somebody keeps the servers running just boggles the mind.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
It's partially understandable since the items won't wear down over time due to environmental factors like a basement flooding a comic book collection or the like but also means that whoever is the last buyer/owner is when the servers/game dies is left in the hole. It's a long, high stakes game of hot potato.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Steam ID: Good Life
Thanks, just tried it but no dice. Thanks for digging, though.
@Ed Gruberman I'll keep you in the loop if I find anything. More than a little frustrating.
@cardboard delusions Well, I did a full clean install when I got my 970 a few weeks ago (uninstalled all the old drivers before installing the card, then re-downloaded and installed everything), so I don't have much hope for it, but I'll probably try that again in a bit, just to see...
You might know me as D'Brickashaw on Steam.
That's weird. You can't buy a gift at all? Any other games not let you buy a gift?
You usually have to do it as 2 separate transactions, unfortunately.
SteamID: edgruberman GOG Galaxy: EdGruberman
To be fair, that game is awesome enough that it completely warrants the extra couple bucks you might have to spend doing it that way...
You might know me as D'Brickashaw on Steam.
Have you seen him? Now you have
These checkpoints are horrible. I died after a boss fight and I had to fight him again. In general, the checkpoints are far apart.
Every section seems heavily scripted, with only one real way to get through. Fail, and go 10 minutes back, making the same motions over again by rote.
It's also from the days of really half-assed PC ports. Using a controller? Button prompts will be for the keyboard, or stuff like "Button9" or "POV 0". It has full controller support, except the title screen that says "Press Enter," and boy do they mean it; they'll except nothing else. Color mode options are "8 bit int" or "16 bit float". Are you kidding me? What are terms like "int" and "float" doing in there? Thank god I have a degree in computer programming.
Any FNG @corriganx ? Looks like I might be alone for a while Friday night, and I would love to get my game on. If we have a small turn out, I made a penny arcade logo map for worms. I think it would be fun.
Stock Car Extreme just released on steam!
Game has been out for a long while now, just not on steam. Awesome racing sim.
Have you seen him? Now you have
The kids gave up on trying to gift bastion after the calamity. There was just no one left, at least no one who wasn't already in the Bastion and most of them, well, their gift war never gets to have a happy ending
As is commonplace with gaming laptops, for those of you who don't delve into such things, mine has a dual-GPU setup: the integrated Intel system-on-a-chip (in this case, Intel HD 3000), and the discrete gaming GPU (AMD 6990). I typically run it on the Intel, for various reasons, and just manually switch over to the AMD when I'm going to play a game; and then back again once I'm done and the GPU's cooled down.
My laptop just decided (after a reboot, courtesy of Windows Update) that it couldn't find the 6990 any more. Wouldn't detect its existence to switch over to it, and it wasn't even showing up in the BIOS. Rebooted a whole bunch of times to try and get it to show up. Nothing. To Google! Of course, worst-case scenarios are already flitting through my head. If the GPU's fried, it is at least on a daughterboard so it can be replaced, but that's an expensive part to have to source, even now. Anyway. Google turns up the usual community threads about similar and related problems, and I start scouring them. Suggestions come up from Dell support site (my lappy is a Dell-era Alienware). Reinstall the Alienware On-Screen Display app. No change. Reflash the BIOS. No change. This doesn't seem like it's looking good.
I find a suggestion from one of Dell's techs to go into the BIOS and change a poorly-worded graphics setting (I forget what it exactly said now) from "SG" to "PEG". Sure, what the hey. Reboot.
Nothing.
As in, black screen. Even the backlight wasn't coming on. The laptop then emitted a series of eight beeps, from the old PC speaker (how often do you hear that term any more?). Which is terrifyingly loud in my machine, as it transpires, and it's 4am here (don't ask). Well, shit. Reboot. Nope, same. It is, to all intents and purposes, dead.
I grab my old laptop, a much more modest machine of 2008 vintage; a Dell Studio 1537, if you're curious. It's a cantankerous old thing now but it's been through a lot with me and it simply refuses to die. Boot it up, which feels unbearably sluggish now I'm used to the Alienware's SSD boot drive, and punch the exact terms I'd searched for before into Google to find the same help thread I'd been perusing when this bloody tech had made this seemingly idiotic BIOS setting suggestion. And keep reading. Yes, someone else had the same result. Dammit, that'll teach me not to read a bit further before taking a Dell tech at their word. He recovered by getting his machine to boot from a USB drive. That wasn't going to work for me as I couldn't even get the BIOS screen to display any more and I didn't have the machine set to look for a USB boot drive first anyway.
Then, a suggestion that made sense. And one that had occurred in vague form in the back of my mind but I'd basically dismissed.
Pull the graphics card out (thank the computer gods it's not soldered in) and reseat it.
Well, why not. Nothing to lose now. Besides many hundreds of pounds worth of computer hardware I busted my backside for and can't afford to replace...
First, to Youtube to find a video how-to. Easily found. This won't take long.
Out come the teeny screwdrivers, static precautions are taken to the best of my ability. Bottom cover off. On this model it's basically the entire floor of the laptop so you can get at damn near everything easily, which is nice. One disconnected plug and three screws out, and out comes the gigantic GPU fan. Two more screws and prise up the GPU daughterboard, which brings the heat sink and copper pipes with it. Then carefully pull it back until it disengages from what I assume is the laptop equivalent of a PCI-E connector. It's out.
I've tinkered with the innards of just about every PC I've had since 1993... but, honestly, not all that often. I still find it bloody terrifying. Doubly so in laptops.
A quick look at the connectors, they seem clean on both the card and the laptop. I'm not going to try anything elaborate here; I'm just going to reseat it for now. Slip it back in, push it into place, and lower it flush with the motherboard. Two securing screws back in, pop the fan back in, screw that back down and plug it in, and close up the laptop. Pop the battery back in, flip it over...
And it works. As soon as the screen flashes to life I hit F2 and change that goddamn setting from "PEG" back to "SG". I figure that must disable the switchable graphics and force the laptop to use the discrete GPU. Which, of course, it couldn't find, so it just blared out an error message as best it could.
Reboot properly now. Into Windows, and the switchable graphics option is back, all present and correct. And I get on the forum and start typing this. Thank you for reading. If you did. Can't blame you if you didn't...
- - - - -
TL;DR - My laptop suddenly couldn't find its GPU. After following a suggestion from a support tech that seemingly completely broke the machine, ultimately I fixed it by reseating the GPU. At four in the bloody morning.
Steam | XBL
It's said that nothing ages as fast as the state-of-the-art; and as such, I can imagine that game hasn't aged well. For its day, on its original platform (the first Xbox), it really was absolutely breathtaking and a real showcase title for that (IMO) underappreciated console.
Back to the PC, though. I wonder if the controller issue would be fixed in the "remastered" version of Butcher Bay that was in Assault on Dark Athena, since that was 2009 and controller support was more civilised by then, and the original was 2004.
More to the point, why aren't they - or Dark Athena at least - on Steam? Dagnabbit.
Steam | XBL
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Another casualty - probably of licensing, as it usually is - of this digital future in which we live? *sigh*
Steam | XBL
Seriously, though, how are we supposed to have a true post-scarcity economy when licensing issues keep coming up? Dammit, places and peoples, I want my future now!
Ugh, I need to open up my laptop soon and see if I can figure out what's wrong with it. It's quite likely the display itself is damaged. It was in my backpack (which has a padded pocket for laptops) when I was traveling home on New Year's Eve via bus. The ride was very bumpy. A few days later I turned it on and noticed everything that should have been black had a snowy look to it with a bit of a red tinge. Everything that should have been white was a sort of light aqua color. And a lot of other colors looked fine. I hooked it up to my TV and everything displayed fine, so there's either a problem with the display or a bad connection somewhere. Not looking forward to finding the issue.
My Backloggery
Glad you got it working again, Jazz. Working with PC hardware is a job, working with laptop hardware is an adventure.
Edit: See, Geth knows what it's like.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
GOG's the next-best place!
Ugh. Yeah, that doesn't sound hopeful. Unless it's a ribbon connector come loose or something. Best of luck. If it comes to it, I hope you can find either a new panel or (possibly a better option) a deceased example of the same model you can rip the panel out of for as little cash as possible.
Steam | XBL