A few packages arrived today, my first order from Copyleft (this kick-arse mouse pad, wrist rest and various Debian badges/stickers) and the GeForce 2 MX card from a local retailer (Asus V7100). After installing the card into the system (and compiling/installing the new 0.9-5 drivers), the system completely hard-locked when attempting to start X. No clues in the system log, the recent XFree86 log, etc.

Four hours later... :)

Turns out my motherboard (also by Asus) has two modes of "video caching": UC and USWC. USWC (Ultra-Speculative Write Combining) apparently provides slightly better performance, but naturally doesn't work with all video cards. Seems that the V7100 is no exception. After setting it back to UC, all is well.

Performance is pretty damn impressive for what you pay for. It's one of the 'budget' range of video cards, and even though "GeForce 2 MX" is mentioned, it just runs at about the same speed as a GeForce 1 DDR, though slightly more overclockable.

A simple Q3A benchmark (demo001 - 1024x768 @ 32-bit color, Vertex lighting): 55.8fps. A bit better from 30-odd from the old TNT2. Soldier of Fortune is far more playable, surprisingly Heavy Gear II has turned into liquid silk.

I've posted some info to www.mcdownloads.com about my little issue, I'll submit something to the Linux Hardware Database in a few days after a bit of testing.

Seems that OpenGL with xmame is still a little screwy (okay, a LOT screwy) with these drivers. I suppose I should be fortunate that there are about six other display targets I can use (including svgalib, standard X11 and SDL). Compiling is fun.

ErikLevy: Not one in a year or more? Consider yourself lucky... you'd might have ended up with an unhealthy addiction to "Counter-Strike" or something (cough).

Crap... 8 days to go until the Olympics?! This coming from the same television network who repeatedly made pointless adverts such as "874 days to go" all of these years.

I'm predicting two things to occur in Australia during the games:

• milk/bread/essential supplies shortage
  (consequence of people glued to their damn televisions)
  
• the slowest Asia-Pacific backbone response times ever recorded
  (consequence of International users all downloading Olympic-centric content)

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm going to stock up on bread and milk...