A Profound PR Problem
Posted: 2007-12-30 10:37
I'm not really sure if this should go in the general, the feedback or the help forums since what I've got to say falls under multiple categories, anyway, as for what I need to say/ask. Please move it wherever it needs to go.
I bought BF2 a long long time ago, the demo enthralled me and I had to have it. Of course as time passed over the course of about six or so months I lost interest. Every so often though, I'd get an itch to come back to it. The last time before now was about two years ago.
Recently I was browsing around the ModDB and noticed PR on the top 100 mod list. I'd been eying it before in the early BF days but the last version I remember playing was mini mod 2.0, so it was still pretty well in its infancy at the time. Looking over the site and the new details I got really excited and decided it was worth reinstalling BF for to see all these cool new things I saw screenshots and had read about. I have one very big problem though.
About nine or ten months ago my old PC died. It lived a good life, it was kind of a frankenstein monster kept alive with sporadic hardware transplants, but finally technology went far enough ahead that wasn't possible anymore without redoing everything, and so it died a silent death. I'm not a rich person by any means, in the last few months I've regularly had to decide between bills and food. I only have the internet because I do programming work from home (how I pay the bills) and therefore need it to do my job. So when time came to replace my PC, I did what I could, but I only got just enough to get something running. This meant also re-using older parts from my other machine.
This gave me a rather unique problem though. You see, my old machine was a socket A, yes you heard me, Socket A. Technology from a time when AMD wasn't changing their pin layout every six months "just because." I couldn't get new hard drives (wasn't in the budget) so I salvaged my old ones, as well as my old DVD ROM. Now, my new machine is a nice NForce motherboard that runs an Intel core 2 duo. SATA is the flavor of the day and it has only one PATA connection. This means I can only hook up two PATA devices at once. I have three hard drives, my OS drive, which is too small to fit hardly anything but the basics on, and two data drives, which is where games and the like would go. Now, this means I have two choices when operating my PC. I can either run the bare OS with no frills, and play DVDs, or I can play games and have no DVD-ROM. You all I'm sure can tell where this is going by now.
I can't play BF2 without a no DVD patch on the executable. I have a 100% legitimate bought and paid for copy, with a 100% legitimate key (I'd never be able to play online without it, and let's face it, multi-player is what this is all about.) This means I will always get kicked from punkbuster servers within a few to ten or once even twenty minutes. Eventually though, it always boots me. Some servers don't have punkbuster up in regular BF2 (bad experience there, I tried it once just to see.) but at last check, no PR servers have it off.
Is there any hope here? Something I can do aside from wait and hope I trip on a pile of money big enough to buy more hardware? I just figured I'd ask and see if someone knew of something before I decided to uninstall BF2 again out of frustration. Thanks in advance to anyone who's taken the time to read my whole rant here.
I bought BF2 a long long time ago, the demo enthralled me and I had to have it. Of course as time passed over the course of about six or so months I lost interest. Every so often though, I'd get an itch to come back to it. The last time before now was about two years ago.
Recently I was browsing around the ModDB and noticed PR on the top 100 mod list. I'd been eying it before in the early BF days but the last version I remember playing was mini mod 2.0, so it was still pretty well in its infancy at the time. Looking over the site and the new details I got really excited and decided it was worth reinstalling BF for to see all these cool new things I saw screenshots and had read about. I have one very big problem though.
About nine or ten months ago my old PC died. It lived a good life, it was kind of a frankenstein monster kept alive with sporadic hardware transplants, but finally technology went far enough ahead that wasn't possible anymore without redoing everything, and so it died a silent death. I'm not a rich person by any means, in the last few months I've regularly had to decide between bills and food. I only have the internet because I do programming work from home (how I pay the bills) and therefore need it to do my job. So when time came to replace my PC, I did what I could, but I only got just enough to get something running. This meant also re-using older parts from my other machine.
This gave me a rather unique problem though. You see, my old machine was a socket A, yes you heard me, Socket A. Technology from a time when AMD wasn't changing their pin layout every six months "just because." I couldn't get new hard drives (wasn't in the budget) so I salvaged my old ones, as well as my old DVD ROM. Now, my new machine is a nice NForce motherboard that runs an Intel core 2 duo. SATA is the flavor of the day and it has only one PATA connection. This means I can only hook up two PATA devices at once. I have three hard drives, my OS drive, which is too small to fit hardly anything but the basics on, and two data drives, which is where games and the like would go. Now, this means I have two choices when operating my PC. I can either run the bare OS with no frills, and play DVDs, or I can play games and have no DVD-ROM. You all I'm sure can tell where this is going by now.
I can't play BF2 without a no DVD patch on the executable. I have a 100% legitimate bought and paid for copy, with a 100% legitimate key (I'd never be able to play online without it, and let's face it, multi-player is what this is all about.) This means I will always get kicked from punkbuster servers within a few to ten or once even twenty minutes. Eventually though, it always boots me. Some servers don't have punkbuster up in regular BF2 (bad experience there, I tried it once just to see.) but at last check, no PR servers have it off.
Is there any hope here? Something I can do aside from wait and hope I trip on a pile of money big enough to buy more hardware? I just figured I'd ask and see if someone knew of something before I decided to uninstall BF2 again out of frustration. Thanks in advance to anyone who's taken the time to read my whole rant here.
