Sort of back

Been investigating the possibilities of the onboard graphics card on this 2008-ish computer ('least 'til I get enough money for a decent graphics card) for gaming with RVS/swat 4 and I was pleasently surprised with the results.

RVS works grand out of the box, smooth framerates all the way.

Swat 4 has been an interesting journey. I found an application called 3D Analyze, that emulates hardware PCI graphics card (nvida and ati) and emulates various aspects of the cards, up to and including pixel shader 2.0.

The lack of hardware Transform And Lighting (T&L) on my onboard graphics chip was the culprit when I was trying to get the flashlight to work properly (previously it just gave out one big illumination in a 180 degree arc in front of me).

Rather niftily, 3D analyze does the T&L processing on the CPU, which makes me glad I have an intel core 2 duo 2.2Ghz CPU!

Apart from some doors, suses and hossies appearing as black textureless blobs sometimes (annoying 'cos I can't see the doorknobs on some doors 'cos they're just literal black holes, not even light shines on 'em!) and slight framerate drops when firing the M4 or looking at the arcade rooms in funtime amusements, Swat 4 TSS runs very very nicely on this computer.

Now, if only I had a decent graphics card in this machine.