Americas Army Gentoo Game CD

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

I am absolutely blown away by the AA Gentoo Game CD . My first attempts with the bootable cd were on a IBM ThinkPad x23 laptop sporting a ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility Chipset, and a Dell box running Nvidia RivaTNT64. I did not expect either one to work (I was at work and bored) but I just wanted to give a shot to see how the hardware detection and what not goes. Things went pretty well. The laptops card did not have DRI support, but the TNT card did. I was only able to see the menu part of the game. I got home and booted my Dual proc box with ATI Radeon 9500 PRO, a card which I was unable to get DRI working on and I was kindda skeptical. But I was proven wrong when I was presented with a 1280x1024 resolution screen with all graphics options turned on in AA. Game play was amazingly smooth..better than Win2k.

Cons of game cd: A full blown ver. of mozilla. I dont understand why in the world would I need mozilla mail, and composer. Chatzilla I can understand...maybe to get some help on IRC. I didnt agree with the use of mozilla inthat build I wish that the developers would have gone with Phoenix, or whatever its called now.

The choice of light weight Fluxbox was a good move! The dev team might wanna also concider including glxinfo and glxgears to the menu.

I am still not sure how the game manages to run so well despite the fact that its all happening in RAM and reading from a CDROM. Also I was wondering if someone knew of a way for me to replicate the settings from the cd to my native gentoo installation on the box. I dont understand how DRI is working on the bootable cd for my card, when Xfree 4.3 clearly states that it does not support DRI for my card. :roll:

Also Id like to heard other peoples experience with the boot cd and their hardware configuration.

gearheadsmp · Posted: Fri May 23, 2003 11:55 pm Post subject: You don't have to use DRI.

Use the official ATI drivers. I dunno if you can turn the FSAA and other eye candy on and off at the driver level like you can with the Nvidia drivers (I actually downloaded the ATI drivers and read the readme to see what the install script does). I do know that the ATI drivers auto-config an XFree86 config for your specific card, and it can even setup Twinview/Hydravision/whatever for you.
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"Captain, yer overloadin' her as it is. The power supply just isn't built to take two hard drrrives."

Yeric · Apprentice Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 150

Glad yours works dute
Mine just presents me with a blank screen, no sound nada

Maybebecause I have a geforce 4 ti 4200 with agp x 8 set in mb
works fine under gentoo running games

but not from cd

gearheadsmp · Posted: Sat May 24, 2003 4:46 pm Post subject: don't use the framebuffer

I have the same exact problem when using the 1.4rc4 or AA LiveCD's - it's the framebuffer. For the AA LiveCD, hold down [F2] until it gives you a lilo prompt, then type 'nofb' to disable the framebuffer. I had to do this on my nForce2 box, but it worked fine with the framebuffer on my Inspiron 8000 (Intel i815 chipset).
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"Captain, yer overloadin' her as it is. The power supply just isn't built to take two hard drrrives."

Yeric · Apprentice Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 150

SpoonMeiser · n00b Joined: 25 Sep 2002 Posts: 62

Does AA work properly for everyone? After I complete the first training exercise, I can't upload the badge I gain to my jacket. I get; Error: unknown. Which isn't entirely useful. Using Mozilla to connect to the internet after booting from the LiveCD is fine, so I don't think it's a problem with the connection...

Has anyone else had this problem, can anyone offer a solution, or at least a guess as to what might be happening?

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

Does anyone know how I can make AA to show me what Frames per second im getting (like in quake). I really want to do a solid comparison between the game performanc between windows and Gentoo.

gearheadsmp · Posted: Sun May 25, 2003 5:06 pm Post subject: RTFM

In the manual they have available on the AA site, it has a list of all the commands you can run in the console ([~] button as usual). Page 194 has it: 'stat fps'. You can also do 'stat net' for connection status. Most of the commands only work when playing offline, as they let you do things such as change the gravity and grant yourself the blessed M203

. The manual for this game has to be the best game manual I've ever seen - it has all the server commands, maps of the multiplayer missions, the whole shebang. And no wonder, 'cause it's 230 frikkin' pages long.

Download link for manual
_________________
"Captain, yer overloadin' her as it is. The power supply just isn't built to take two hard drrrives."

Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

Thank you very much. I should have looked for the manual on the site..instead i was doing google searches :-P

CaptainPellaeon · n00b Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 9

I have a board made by Sapphire. The board corresponds to 8500LE. When I boot up the AA LiveCD, the fglrx drivers says it's a third party board, and the agp module would not load up.

I know that the ATI 2.5.1 drivers work with third party boards, but the new ones do not. I was wondering if there is some way to fix or work around this since it will be a while before I can setup a Linux system.

gearheadsmp · Posted: Mon May 26, 2003 3:12 pm Post subject: try the DRI drivers

If the official ATI driver that comes with the current Gentoo Games LiveCD doesn't work, you can try the DRI/DRM drivers as a last resort. Before you resort to mounting the ISO in loopback, and replacing the drivers in the livecd.cloop file that is. They'll be in the usual places - /lib/modules/kernel-2.4.20-xfs-???/drivers/char/* and /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/* . So look in the charachter devices folder first, and try the 'radeon' DRM driver first.
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"Captain, yer overloadin' her as it is. The power supply just isn't built to take two hard drrrives."

Gelfling · Posted: Wed May 28, 2003 7:36 am Post subject:

I like the small fonts in use as it boots up. How do I set the font size to this exact same size in my own gentoo setup?
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Stalione · Guru Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 335

Search for framebuffer and for grub/lilo option vga= on this forum. I am sure you will find your answer.