Re: Audacity and Gentoo

On 2006-01-15, Nix <nix-razor-pit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Yeah, but the smaller the fan the faster it has to spin to move a given
> amount of air :/

No *** sherlock ;-)

> I don't know how overspecified most machines are when it comes to
> cooling, but I *do* know that in the summer months, I've had cooling
> problems with machines here. (No air-conditioning in this house.)

I will be watching for this come the summer months, I only set my rack
up about a month ago (probably not even that long ago) and am
expecting to get some overheating from something somewhere. With the
house heating on I can open the rear door and feel a little heat
wafting out but not much, and I don't close the rear door completely
as the wires for my home-made radio time sync clock run out of it to
the clock box on the top of the rack. Also I bent the rack getting it
out the back of my landy so it lists slightly to one side meaning the
door doesn't like closing that much ;-)

> Really? My disks downstairs run at ~45C even with 1U fans, and one
> of my older ones upstairs stabilises at 62C if you don't shove air
> over it (although with enough air it's cooler than the downstairs
> disks).

I'm thinking more of the size of the disc as well as the temperature,
it's a larger piece of kit than just a processor and probably has a
lower maximum temperature than the processor does. The size means it
chucks out more heat even though it's at a lower temperature, and
needs a bit more effort to cool it. They're not normally a problem
though but when you start cramming several 1U servers on top of each
other, two to a case, I reckon the discs will be more of an issue than
the CPUs. Just a hunch though.

> See, I'd never even heard the term `JAMMA' before... now, thanks to
> the JAMMA FAQ and Google, I know. I had no idea these things were
> standardised to that degree.

Not all of them are by a long stretch, but you probably read about
that already anyway. It makes a lot of sense as then a game kit would
consist of just the board with a JAMMA connector and standard-sized
marquee cards to go in the front of the cabinet. My cabinet is a
completely neutral cabinet with no game-specific markings on it at
all.

> That's... disturbing. A board built with MAME in mind?

Yep, it even has "shifted" keys to allow you to control mame. If I
press and hold the 1-player start then the 2-player start, it sends
the keypress that quits mame, and returns me to the menu system I set
up to select the game to play. Also the shift system is used to
control the game once it's running, e.g. press and hold 1-player start
then move player-1 stick down to pause, or move the stick up to adjust
volume, or move it left to bring up the MAME in-game tuning menu etc
etc.

All the keys are re-programmable though so you don't have to use
MAME. It is the one with over 5,000 arcade games emulated though.

> ... and hot and wavering and smell of burning insulation.

Some people like to keep the original monitor as it certainly adds
authenticity, but you can get pukka arcade monitors new and a VGA
graphics card that runs at 15KHz refresh so if you want you can set up
a new system that runs at the original resolution. I use 1024x768 and
use Xv extensions on my graphics card to scale the screen. My machine
is a P3 800 and it manages fine, although vector graphics are much
slower now after I upgraded to mame 0.99, I'm thinking of downgrading
it again to 0.65 or thereabouts. The earlier version ran games like
Asteroids, Battlezone, Space Harrier and Double Dragon at full speed
on a P450, my P800 can't quite do it any more and has dropped a lot on
vector games.

> (although some arcade games had such peculiar controls that you
> can't really put them in a standard cabinet that you want to use for
> anything else as well...)

Mostly the later machines that arrived when the games consoles started
to take off, although things like lightguns work with MAME for
shooting games, and there are plenty of analogue yoke controls for
things like Star Wars and flying games.

> *boggle* the *speed* has reduced? What on earth? Is this some sort of
> elaborate patent-evasion thing or something?

Not far off. The official aim of the MAME project is to emulate the
hardware itself, and not to make playable games. The playable games
are a side-effect of the hardware emulation. In this manner, they
regard a hack that makes the game playable without emulating the
hardware properly as a temporary fix to make the already emulated
hardware testable, then when time permits they revisit the hack and
make a proper hardware emulation of that bit of the game, which slows
it down.

The problem is that if MAME was made to allow you to play over 5,000
arcade games for free, often from companies that still exist, there
would be copyright threats all over the place. As it is, the
manufacturers know that it exists (MAME devs have conversations with
them on occasion) but overlook the copyright violation as it's not
costing them anything and keeps interest in their brands alive. If
MAME is blatantly a games-playing system or starts to become a tool
for earning money though, this is all at risk, which is why the MAME
devs stamp on any ebay auctions that mention MAME too much, to avoid
it becoming a brand associated with hard cash.

> (Some simple googles in that group don't reveal anything. about this
> weirdness. And I'm happy with my Radeon 9250. :) )

MAME has hardware emulations of things like 3DFX cards but won't use a
real 3DFX card in a machine, on average the question "why is this" is
asked about twice per week. They have to maintain their "documenting
the hardware through emulation" approach. They have a whole
playstation 1 hardware emulation in there, which will play Tekken,
very slowly..

> We're thinking of putting it on polystyrene blocks and seeing what that
> does.

Should help a lot, especially if it catches fire ;-)

> Passive-cooled -> <400MHz, and probably <200Mhz, as even my P233 got a
> case hot enough to scorch when the fans failed. The last machine I owned
> that I could truly run fanless was esperi, my 486.

Yes, but I'm talking mini-itx motherboards here with cool-running x86
clones up to 600MHz with fanless heatsinks, and 1GHz and above with
heat pipes. I might put heat-pipes onto a 600MHz running to a front
or rear mounted heatsink to take the rack into account.

> They Intermezzo people are all working on Lustre now, which *rocks*, but
> doesn't quite serve the same goals as Intermezzo did (as in, it's meant
> for big, big, *big* distributed filesystems, how many petabytes do you
> want with that?)

Hehe, I might have a look at that. Especially if it can be used to
turn unused hard disc space on my machines into a shared storage
area. I have lots of machines with 20 or 40 gig discs doing nothing
but holding a 3 gig operating system.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!
.