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Thanks to help from Chris Dillon, I’ve found some places where Identd can be improved when used with an NT network. There are some new features that should make administration a little easier.

You might find that calling the undocumented /GOSERVICE command from a UNC path can cause big problems. It seems that Windows doesn’t load the entire program into memory, so when you log out and back on again, it tries to somehow reload the other parts of the executable and craps out. I’ve added a new, documented, /INSTALL switch which should fix all this. Look forward to v1.4 in a few days.

The bug can be reproduced with the following sequence of actions:

\\HOSTNAME\SHARE\IDENTD /GOSERVICE
(logout, login)
\\HOSTNAME\SHARE\IDENTD

Filedudes rated Identd 4/5 dudes. Not bad for open-source software.

For those of you using Windows ‘95, ‘98 or NT, try out my Identd server. It’s great for those of you using mIRC or eggdrop (the standard IRC bot) on a Win32 system.

I’ve been hard at work setting up the #i740 channel on EFNet. If you want to stop by, irc to any EFNet server (I use irc.chat.org) and type “/join #i740”. There’s a bot set up there for answering a number of faqs.

As for HP-IDE ‘99 that I’ve been promising, it looks like school is going to overwhelm this project for now. I may be able to get a basic usable version up by Christmas, but we’ll have to see how things go. Thanks for all the support, guys!

I’ve put together a comparison between the i740 and the 3dfx video cards I’ve current got installed in my system. If you’re looking for the better card in terms of quality and price, the results may surprise you…

I’ve got a Pure3D LX 3dfx and an Eontronics Picasso i740 card installed in my system and I ran some Quake2 benchmarks. Here are the results:

Relevant System Info:

• PII 300 (not overclocked)
• 128MB RAM Canopus Pure3D LX in a PCI slot
• Eontronics Picasso i740 in the AGP slot

Canopus Pure3D LX:

• Cost: $150 CDN (was an awesome deal four months ago)
• fps (512x384): 34.4
• fps (640x480): 23.4
• (screenshot no longer available)

Eontronics Picasso:

• Cost: $115 CDN
• fps (512x384): 38.7
• fps (640x480): 37.2
• (screenshot no longer available)

The screenshots were taken in the same spot in the game at 640x480 and saved as JPEGs with 95% image quality. While I run the game under the Pure3D, it seems to have a “cartoonish” look to it. As well, some of the textures seem to be a little blurred (take the broken pillar just to the right of the player as an example). The darker image of the i740 may reduce its blurring effect, however.

Look at the awesome display of coloured lighting on the floor to either side of the door in the i740 version. The boys and girls of Intel put a lot of effort into the visual aspects of this card.

Personally, I’ve grown to like the ambience in the i740 version over the 3dfx-rendered one. I guess this is just a personal opinion so feel free to post a rebuttle. As soon as Unreal supports the i740 chipset properly (and vice-versa), I’m going to sell the 3dfx to someone without an AGP port.

The config.cfg file used to run the benchmarks is no longer available.