Fire Three for Effect!

Jerry builds a new dual Pentium Pro system from the ground up -- and gets a case of the software-installation blues.

Jerry Pournelle

It was a wild month. It began with a weekend conference with the administrator of NASA. It ended with a real surprise.

We'd just gone down to the beach house in San Diego when we got a call from the Navy Public Affairs Office. The Navy's newest warship, the USS Hopper DDG-70 , named for the late Admiral Grace Hopper, was sailing fro m Maine to San Francisco and would be stopping in San Diego. Did I want to sail with her up to the Golden Gate?

S o, at Oh Dawn Hundred the next day, I was at the San Diego Naval Base, and off we went. Later that afternoon, Pacific Fleet asked the Hopper to assist in a real medevac operation, so instead of heading to San Francisco, we steamed west to get in position to let a helicopter from the USS McClusky land and refuel. This was the Hopper 's first cruise and the first night helicopter landing she'd done, but aside from a spectacular look at a zillion stars 150 miles offshore, it was all very much routine.

The USS Hopper , incidentally, is the first Navy ship designed to have women (the Navy calls them females) aboard in all capacities: officers, chiefs, and crew. Of some 340 people aboard, about 40 were females, and while I have some misgivings about this, I must say there was certainly no compromise in efficiency.

The executive officer rated the ship's ability to go to general quarters and clear for action at 74 percent (12 minutes) on the morning's drill, up from 70 percent th e day before. This is pretty good for a ship that hasn't been commissioned yet. They figure they'll be at 100 percent by the time they reach Pearl Harbor, where the ship will be stationed.

When we came in at the Golden Gate, John Dvorak came aboard from the pilot boat. He was somewhat startled to see me already aboard.

The Hopper is filled with the electronic ability to track hundreds of air and sea objects, and needed it all to come into harbor. There must have been 50 sailboarders out in the Bay zipping about like gnats, as well as dozens of pleasure boats. Commander Thomas Crowley, the Hopper 's skipper, left coming in through the gate and alongside a San Francisco pier to his officers, but I did notice that while he was out on the weather deck enjoying the view, he had a small commercial hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver.

Early BYTE readers will remember Grace Hopper, who had as much to do with computerizing the Navy as anyone I know of. She was also a formi dable public speaker, as I found out when I twice had to follow her act. She was famous for giving away "nanoseconds": wire about a foot long cut to the distance electrons would travel in a nanosecond, and a good way to visualize why smaller is better in computer architecture.

More on modern military electronics another time; but it was a great way to end the month, and if the Hopper 's crew is a good example of our modern defense force, the country is in good hands.

It's a good thing the USS Hopper wasn't going to the Seattle area , or I might have tried to talk the skipper into bombarding Microsoft. I wouldn't want them to take out the whole place, just the building where the installation-software programmers work.

We're building Fireball, a new dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro (the new one, with the on-board 1-MB secondary cache) system with the Micronics W6-LI motherboard, a Distributed Processing Technology (DPT) PM2044U SCSI RAID controller board with an RC4040 RAID/caching module (bundled with the DPT-RS3/UR RAIDstation Kit) -- although the W6-LI has a perfectly good Adaptec SCSI built into the motherboard as well as the customary dual IDE, 64 MB of buffered nonparity extended data out (EDO) memory from Net Memory (since sold to Viking Components, at http://www.vikingcomponents.com ) -- when you're running a system this fast, it's important to get memory that meets or exceeds the specs -- and a Teac CD-C68E 8* six-disc CD-ROM changer that you can configure to look like six different drives or one drive, as you like.

All this goes into a PC Power & Cooling ETA Solid Steel Tower ATX case with a Turbo-Cool 400 ATX power supply. It uses a PC Power & Cooling Dual CPU-Cool (H) fan on each chip; without those chip fans, the system would be useless. The Dual CPU-Cool (H) is actually two fans (PC Power & Cooling calls this fault-tolerant redundant cooling), and each is capable of keeping the chip running. I have relied on PC Power & Cooling components for more than a decade, and I have yet to be disappointed.

The Micronics motherboard has Sound Blaster built in. Unfortunately, although it is built in, it runs off the ISA bus. Using ISA-bus devices in a PCI system can eat 5 percent to 20 percent of the system resources and slow things down surprisingly. As I write this, the only decent PCI-bus sound card is the Diamond Multimedia Monster Sound card (see the October Web Exclusive column), and while that's great for Windows 95 (Win 95) games, it doesn't work with DOS games or other DOS-based programs that won't run in a DOS box. For the moment, we have left the built-in sound card active, but we'll change that when there's a good alternative.

We also added a SOHOware PCI 32-bit Ethernet adapter card from NDC Communications ( http://www.ndclan.com/ ). We chose that because it was the cheapest PCI Ethernet card at Fry's when we went to buy disk drives for the DPT-RS3/UR.

We first set up Fireball with only one processor, so it made sense to bring it up with Win 95, in part because Win 95 is better at Plug and Play than Windows NT. Also, because while I eventually want to put NT 4.0 (and then a beta version of NT 5.0) on Fireball -- the Pentium Pro chip is more appropriate for server applications, because the big cache makes it fast, but it doesn't have multimedia extensions (MMX) -- I first wanted to test it under Win 95 and then Memphis, which is now officially Windows 98.

We have a beta version of Memphis running on RacingCow, a Gateway 2000 150- MHz Pentium system, and it's pretty cool; I think I am going to like the final version. On the other hand, all the sto ries I hear are that if you have 32 MB or more of memory, you will get all the advantages of Memphis and then some with NT 5.0 Workstation. We'll see.

It's as a server that the DPT controller with its RAID capability comes into its own, so more on that after we add the second processor and convert to NT.

Bringing the system up was a breeze. I used DOS 6.22 to boot up, format, and SYS the hard disk. I installed Norton Commander to make it easier to manage and edit the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. As always, I'd forgotten how to set up DOS and a CD-ROM drive, but fortunately we have plenty of examples around here, and the Teac CD-ROM changer came with DOS drivers. Now for Win 95.

The trick with installing Win 95 is to use DOS to copy the CAB files from the Win 95 directory somewhere onto your hard disk (the traditional place is C:\Windows\Options\Cabs) and install from there. The upgrade version of Windows wants a Windows 3.11 setup disk; when Win 95 Setup demands proof that you're worth y, insert that into the floppy drive. If you use the CAB trick, be sure to write down the exact path to those files. When you add hardware or make configuration changes, Win 95 Setup will demand your Windows installation disk -- and once it gets drivers off a floppy disk, Setup does not have a browse button. You must type in the exact path to the files it wants.

The first time that happened was the first time this week I wanted to bombard the Microsoft campus. It wasn't the last.

I got Win 95 installed just fine, but then came time to make the network happen -- and it just wouldn't work. I got every kind of screwy error message. I tried telling Device Manager that there wasn't any network card, so it would discover it at the next boot-up; alas, it would almost forget, but somewhere in the dark recesses of the imbecilic registry, it remembered just enough to foul things up. I physically removed the network card; same problem. Win 95 just couldn't forget.

After 3 wasted hours, I decided there was only one thing to do: remove the network card, reformat the hard disk, and reinstall Win 95 from scratch without the network card.

That worked, except that this time I forgot the CAB trick, so I was installing from CD-ROM. I got it all working without a network. Shut down. Install the network card. The system came up, detected new hardware, and asked for the drivers. I said, "Have disk." It found the drivers on the floppy disk and came back -- and reported that it could not find the Win 95 installation disk.

Oh, it knew to look in the E (CD-ROM) drive. What it didn't know was to look in the Win 95 subdirectory of that CD-ROM. Worse, I had forgotten what subdirectory the files Setup wanted were hiding in -- and there was no browse function. You either give it the proper subdirectory or cut your throat. If I'd had command of a missile destroyer at that moment, I really would have been tempted to fire three for effect.

What I did was remove the CD-ROM, put it in another machine, look at th e directory structure, figure out that it wanted E:\WIN95, put the CD-ROM back in, and type in the path. After that, everything went swimmingly. In minutes, I had a very fast machine connected to my network.

By fast, I mean, like WOW! fast. With that SCSI DPT drive with its big cache, the new Pentium Pro 200 chip, and Number Nine's Revolution 3D video board, this machine screams. Unless you need MMX, Pentium Pro may well be good enough, especially if you can get it as an upgrade to an existing system.

Larry Aldridge says the additional on-board cache works best in systems with either dual or quad processors, which primarily means NT servers, where you don't need MMX anyway. In a few months, there will be Pentium II chips with a larger cache, and those will probably be faster than the Pentium Pro 200s we have, but for just now, this may be the fastest NT server going.

Alex says my network installation problems may have been due to getting a no-name Ethernet board. We don't recall having simil ar difficulties with 3Com Ethernet boards.

Now for some tests. The problem is, how do you test the system, and more to the point, what drivers do you use? That is, the Revolution 3D board came with two sets of drivers: those you ought to use to run programs, and a set optimized for the standard benchmarks magazines use. The benchmark-optimized drivers will spit out triangles at some hideous rate, but the result doesn't look nearly as good as the slightly slower but gorgeous results with their standard user drivers. Benchmarks govern many purchase decisions, and they probably shouldn't. It's easy to optimize drivers for benchmarks.

Incidentally, when Phil Parker from Number Nine was showing off the Revolution 3D, one of the tests he was proud of was performance on good old WinTach, which does after all test some practical uses rather than just the ability to spit triangles.

The problem is that WinTach is quite sensitive to color depth and resolution. Fireball, with the Revolution 3D, has a Wi nTach of 368, as compared to Cyrus, the Cyrix P-166, with 128. However, if I move Cyrus from 256 colors to 32,000, the WinTach goes up to 300 (78 on word processing). I can recall when a value of 30 was blazing speed. Princess, my dual-processor Compaq workstation, has a WinTach of 245, but a story goes with it. Apparently because of the big monitor, the word processing part of WinTach goes really slow and gets a score of 12.3; but everything else is blazingly fast.

In any event, we used the standard drivers, and the Revolution 3D is clearly good enough. Indeed, at $300, it may be the best way to "upgrade" an older system. We have an opera tonight, so it will be a day or so before I get to it, but I intend to take that Revolution 3D out of Fireball and install it in Cyrus and Princess to see if there's noticeable improvement. I think there will be improvement; noticeable is another matter, since both are pretty fast at what I do.

I did have one major glitch. One game that I use to test system spee d is MicroProse's This Means War. The game remained fun for longer than many, but more important, when you get lots of objects on the screen, it slows down enormously.

This Means War will run only in 256 colors. Number Nine's HawkEye software changes resolution and color depth on the fly without rebooting the system; but if you use that software, This Means War blows up in odd ways. It runs fast, faster than I have ever seen it -- one of the complaints reviewers had was that the game was slow, but with this machine it isn't -- but weird stripes appear. After a while the message fonts change, not only in the game, but after you exit. The only solution is a reboot.

If you change to 256 colors and reboot, the game runs without problems, but it's no longer spectacularly fast. It's fast enough, but there's no WOW! factor. Number Nine boards formerly didn't have a "change color depth on the fly" capability, because that isn't really supported by Win 95, and you have to trick the OS to do it. They got we ary of being condemned for not including something they didn't believe in, so the capability is there now, but they aren't surprised that it can cause problems.

What I have done is to change colors on the fly, but I leave the HawkEye program open to the "resolution exchange" tab. When my game graphics get screwed up, the game is still playable; but when I am tired of the lousy graphics, I save and exit.

Then I go to HawkEye. It's unreadable -- when the graphics go bad inside the game, they're still bad when the game has gone away -- but I have memorized where the color-depth buttons are. I punch any one of them -- it doesn't matter which -- and apply, which fixes everything. Then I use HawkEye to go back to 256 colors, load the game, start with the saved game, and go. The system is so fast that this takes almost no time. And Alex has found that we can use Alt-Tab to get to the HawkEye control panel without exiting the game at all, and that will refresh things, too.

I haven't had any other pr oblems with the Revolution 3D, and I wouldn't have that one if I didn't want to avoid rebooting every time I play a 256-color game.

David Em has been working with the Revolution 3D board (see "Number Nine's New Spin: Revolution 3D," November BYTE), and he likes it for professional graphics. It's certainly good enough for games. As an all-around upgrade to medium speed -- say 150 and higher Pentium systems -- it looks like a very good bet. The 2-D graphics capability is better than some of the far more expensive boards we have tried, and the 3-D is quite good for the price. More after a bit more testing, but I like it just fine so far.

Another candidate for a games update board is the STB Velocity 128 3-D board. This thing screams in both 2-D and 3-D. It has S-Video and SVGA-Video output as well as composite video you can feed to your TV. With a 21-inch monitor, it will do up to 1600 by 1200 pixels at 65,000 colors. There are NT as well as Win 95 drivers, and it supports DirectX. It's a PCI-bus ca rd, and on benchmarks and features, it compares quite favorably to both the Matrox Millennium and the Diamond Monster 3D. Eric Pobirs, our intern, has been quite fond of it. He will probably have a full report shortly, on the BYTE Web site or mine, http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp .

It is a game board. That is, it has 4 MB of synchronous graphics RAM (SGRAM) standard, but that's all you can put on it. It's more than enough for games, but it's on the low side for professional (especially 3-D) work. It is $100 cheaper than the Revolution 3D and has the video output ports; if you're mostly interested in games, this board will upgrade a slower system something wonderful. If you need professional quality, the Number Nine Revolution 3D looks good to us. If what you want is games (as well as standard stuff like word processing and Internet crawling), look into the STB Velocity 128.

I really like Teac's CD-C68E CD-ROM changer. No carriers, naturally. It comes with software that will let it play CDs. I never do that: a good stereo is cheaper than a high-end computer and plays music better. I gather some people do like to play CDs through their computer, and that certainly works.

As I said earlier, you can configure the CD-C68E to look like one drive or six. If you make it one drive, there's a program to let you select which disc is mounted when you access the drive letter. It's all intuitive, and it all works. I'm still experimenting with the "one drive letter" configuration accessed through the network: so far, I find I must go to the machine it's installed on to change accessed discs. There may be a way I haven't found. There's no difficulty at all if you configure it so that each disc has a separate drive letter and share them all. Recommended.

After we got Fireball going, I mad e the terrible mistake of installing Helix's Nuts & Bolts.

The first problem is installation: Nuts & Bolts wants a serial number in addition to the installation CD-ROM. While the registration card gives you the right digits in the right order, the program wants that with spaces and dashes -- and it is not printed that way. It took 5 minutes of increasingly infuriated experimentation to get Nuts & Bolts to install.

When it did, it apparently spotted that I have a network and must have assumed Fireball has a modem, although as yet it doesn't. I say this because whenever I bring up Fireball, Nuts & Bolts trundles a while and then informs me that it can't update itself, OK? Until you acknowledge that OK, you won't get anything else done. Then it does a bunch of other stuff, finally putting up gauges and toolbars similar to what Norton System Doctor does. All that works, I guess. I put it that way because I didn't do much testing.

What you don't want to do with Nuts & Bolts i nstalled is simply turn the machine off without a proper shutdown. I seldom do that, and in fact all my systems are on either Clary or APS uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes). However, it's a necessary test for any system because it's going to happen sooner or later, if for no other reason than that sometime your system will be locked up and require a hardware reset. So, once I got Fireball working and networked and running Nuts & Bolts, I hit the switch and went to bed.

The next morning I turned Fireball on, and when it asked to log in to the network, I hit the Return key. After a while, I realized that nothing was happening and instantly saw why: Fireball is on a test stand in the middle of the room, and the Ethernet cord runs across the floor. While the machine was off, I had disconnected the Ethernet so that the housekeeper wouldn't trip on it, and I'd forgotten to reconnect.

No problem, thought I. I'll just plug in the Ethernet cord. Alas, still nothing happened, and after a while it w as pretty certain that nothing would happen. Hardware switch time. Be sure the Ethernet is plugged in. Turn on the system.

It died spectacularly. First, up came Protected by Bombshelter, one of the components of Nuts & Bolts. Came up and stayed up; the machine was locked up with that. Turn it off again and pray. This time, it was stuck on some other component of Nuts & Bolts. Two hardware resets later, I got control of the system.

It was incredibly slow. I mean, Windows 2.0 on a 386 type slow. Unusably slow. Shut down and reboot yet one more time. This time, it hung up on that message about not being able to upgrade, and it was still slow. Not quite as slow as before, but still slow compared to a good Pentium system. At least I had control, so I created an "old start" folder, moved all the Nuts & Bolts program icons out of the start-up folder to that, and rebooted once again.

System speed was fine now. For a test, I moved the Nuts & Bolts stuff back to the start-up folder and rebooted yet once more -- I do this silly stuff so you won't have to -- and this time everything came up properly with the proper speed. Then I ran a few games that I know will crash Win 95, had to do hardware reset, and brought the system up with and without the Ethernet cord attached. The results were predicable: so long as the Ethernet hardware was properly connected, the system came up fine. Without it, Nuts & Bolts caused some real problems.

Meanwhile, Eric was using Nuts & Bolts on another system. When he wanted to change some of its components, it demanded the serial number: and lo!, this time, it wanted a different configuration of spaces and dashes from the one it demanded at installation!

At that point, I concluded enough was enough and removed Nuts & Bolts from all my systems. When they get the installation bugs fixed, I may look at it again; but, in fact, I didn't see any advantage over CyberMedia's First Aid or Norton System Doctor, neither of which has ever caused me as much trouble as Nuts & Bolts just did. Not recommended.

The game of the month is Strategic Simulations' Pacific General. It's one of the General series, which means it is optimized for playability rather than realism, so the sea battles like Midway don't go anything like they did in the real world. On the other hand, they're fun, and the land battles work fairly well given the limits of the General engine. You won't get sucked in the way MOO got you, but I found myself playing later into the night than I'd intended.

The book of the month is by Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Cornell University Press, ISBN 0-8014-3152-2). This is quite the best political biography of Madison you will ever see, and a wonderful analysis of Madison as both framer and one of the authors of The Federalist . There is today all too little attention paid to the relations between the national government and the states, and more 's the pity.

The computer book of the month is the Waite Group's Visual Basic 5 Interactive Course (ISBN 1-57169-077-8), which comes with a Web-based course and access to both frequently asked questions and on-line expert help. It has the only explanation of class objects I've been able to understand and is pretty complete up to intermediate level. It probably isn't the only book you will need to learn Visual Basic 5, but coupled with Teach Yourself Visual Basic in 21 Days (Sams, ISBN 0-67230-978-5), it will carry you a long way.

Now I have to go build up a system to send to my son Phillip. All about that next month.

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Product Information

CD-C68E..............................$179.00

Teac America
Montebello, CA
Phone:    213-726-0303
Fax:      213-727-7652
Internet: 
http://www.teac.com/

Enter 1040 on Inquiry Card.
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this product


ETA Solid Steel Tower ATX............$299.00


Turbo-Cool 400 ATX...................$219.00


Dual CPU-Cool (H)....................$ 49.00

PC Power & Cooling
Carlsbad, CA
Phone:    800-722-6555
Phone:    760-931-5700
Fax:      760-931-6988
Internet: 
http://www.pcpowercooling.com

Enter 1041 on Inquiry Card.
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DPT-RS3/UR RAIDstation Kit..........$1645.00

Distributed Processing Technology
Maitland, FL
Phone:    800-322-4378
Phone:    407-830-5522 
Fax:      407-260-6690
Internet: 
http://www.dpt.com/

Enter 1042 on Inquiry Card.
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Nuts & Bolts about..................$  49.95

Helix Software
Long Island City, NY
Phone:    800-451-0551
Phone:    718-392-3100
Fax:      718-392-4212
Internet: 
http://www.helixsoftware.com/

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Pacific General.....................$  49.99

Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA
Phone:    888-808-4311
Phone:    650-897-9900
Fax:      650-897-9956
Internet: 
http://www.ssionline.com

Enter 1044 on Inquiry Card.
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Revolution 3D 4 MB of WRAM, about...$ 299.00


8 MB of WRAM, about.................$ 399.00

Number Nine Visual Technology
Lexington, MA
Phone:    800-438-6463
Phone:    781-674-0009
Fax:      781-674-2919
Internet: 
http://www.nine.com

Enter 1045 on Inquiry Card.
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Velocity 128........................$ 199.00

STB Systems
Richardson, TX
Phone:    888-234-8750
Phone:    972-234-8750
Fax:      972-234-1306
Internet: 
http://www.stb.com/

Enter 1046 on Inquiry Card.
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W6-LI about.........................$ 599.00

Micronics Computers
Fremont, CA
Phone:    800-577-0977
Phone:    510-651-2300
Fax:      510-651-6692
E-mail:   
service@micronics.com

Internet: 
http://www.micronics.com/

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 product


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Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, 29 Hartwell Ave., Lexington, MA 02173. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope and put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at jerryp@bix.com . Visit Chaos Manor at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/ .