From the Workbench

Jerry builds yet another system, his first with an AMD K6 processor, and adds a second Pentium Pro to Fireball.

Jerry Pournelle

The computer revolution has mostly been helpful , but computers also give companies chances to make mistakes that would never happen without them. A case in point: BankAmericard, the original Visa. I've had once of those since they started, 30 or so years ago. Always paid my bills, usually on time, so over the years they kept increasing my credit rating.

Then one month I had a balance of three bucks or so. They had sent the bill late, so it arrived after I'd paid the bills for the month, and I ignored it. Come next month, they had a late fee that was larger than the bill. Plus interest. That bill came late, too -- I sometimes wonder if they program their mailing system so that the bill will arrive after the date you have been accustomed to pay --  so I paid it with some extra.

I was angry enough about 224 percent per month interest disguised as late fees that I didn't use the card for a month or two. So this month, I get a notice that my credit limit has been reduced, presumably because I have a positive balance. No skin off my nose. I have other credit cards that don't try to roll me. It seems a stupid way to persuade me to use the card more.

Meanwhile, a storage company where I keep a bunch of mathoms -- stuff I can't quite bring myself to throw away -- has lost all record of the fact that I paid two months in advance and keeps socking me with late-payment fees. When I call them, the people I talk to, managers included, keep telling me that, "The computer says..." Apparently, they have no other line. One day, I'll take the trouble to find an intelligent human being with some authority -- there must be one somewhere, mustn't there? -- and suggest they hire a competent programmer, since the one they had probably died of senility.

And now since that's out of my system, I can go back to my love affair with little computers.

The legend has it that the cobbler's children go barefoot. Not quite true, but when my son Phillip went into the Navy, he needed small systems to use aboard ship; this meant rugged rather than fast. Now that he's in the Navy's postgraduate school, he can use a better one, and I figured it was time I built him a system.

As always, I started with a PC Power & Cooling case and power supply. Their Personal Mid-tower AT/ATX, which does either form factor, is $69, not much more than the el cheapo no-names and worth every cent. Then I got one of the better no-name PCI motherboards from Fry's. This one came with decent documentation written in the weir d translated English computer tinkers have become accustomed to. Fry's is good about warranties, so I felt safe enough in buying one of their boards even if I never heard of the Taiwanese company, in this case, I will ( http://www.iwill.com.tw/ ), that made it.

Normally, I would have bought a Micronics motherboard, but Fry's didn't have any that day, and I wanted to get the system built immediately. I planned to deliver the machine to Phillip as part of a trip to the Bay Area, and I wanted to be sure I had enough time to test everything. Ninety percent and more of all failures take place in a computer's first few days of life. Therefore, it's important to burn it in while the warranties are still current.

I got a Western Digital hard drive kit -- they come in all sizes and are all quite good; a 32-MB dual in-line memory module (DIMM) -- largely because all my systems have had SIMMs and I wanted to see how this worked, and DIMMs are supposed to be faster; and a Sony floppy drive. I got a Diamond Multimedia 12X Multimedia Kit with a Mitsumi FX120 CD-ROM drive, a 32-bit Sound Blaster-compatible sound board, and pretty good Labtec LCS-1012 Space Saver speakers. Apparently it was a closeout item, because it was at a very good price.

Now for the CPU. Phillip likes games, so I wanted a multimedia extensions (MMX) chip. I have Intel CPUs in most of my own machines. I know they work. I've had good experiences with Cyrix chips but had never worked with one from AMD. The 200-MHz K6 MMX Enhanced processor was on a bargain sale at Fry's while I was there, so this looked like a good opportunity.

Putting the system together was easy enough, although I did have to make one more trip to Fry's to get more of those little plastic standoff insulators that hold the motherboard up. The board I got h ad a "big" keyboard socket (AT form factor, as opposed to ATX, which has the PS/2 keyboard socket) and used a slot cover to bring the PS/2 mouse port out. I saw no need to waste a slot on that, so I bored a hole in the case and installed the mouse- port connector there. I then called Larry Aldridge at PC Power & Cooling to complain, and their next release of cases will have a knockout for a PS/2 mouse port.

The board came with connectors for the serial and parallel ports. The PC Power & Cooling case has knockout holes for those, so it was mostly a matter of deciphering the documents and fooling around until everything was connected up. The PC Power & Cooling case comes apart in interesting ways, making the mechanical installations quite easy; without that feature, I would have gone nuts trying to mount disk drives.

I had a choice of video boards. If I thought Phillip would mostly use this system for 3-D CAD and other high-end professional graphics, I would have installed a Number Nine Revolution 3D. At $300, it hands down gives the most bang for the buck of any professional-quality video board out there. (There are better boards, but they cost a lot more; the Revolution 3D stands alone in its price/performance class.) However, Phillip is far more likely to be doing games, and STB boards are not only cheaper, but have some features that make them better for game purposes. Thus, I used an STB Nitro 3D board.

The Diamond sound board and CD-ROM kit were a breeze to install. The CD-ROM drive uses a standard IDE interface, and while, of course, there's an IDE connector on the sound board itself, it was just as easy, and much more convenient, to plug the CD-ROM drive's data cable into the second primary IDE connector on the motherboard.

The Western Digital hard drive is on the first one. IDE supports two devices per interrupt, as opposed to SCSI, which allows seven. If you use the IDE off a sound board, you will in general need two interrupts: one for the sound itself (which is almost always interrupt request [IRQ] 5 now) and one for the CD-ROM drive. The primary IDE already uses an interrupt to access the hard drive, so I got the CD-ROM drive "for free."

The Diamond 12X Multimedia Kit came complete with DOS drivers for the CD-ROM drive as well as for the sound board, and the setup installation knows how to install the CD-ROM drive to either the motherboard or the sound board; it's a very well-designed kit. The sound quality is quite good, and the speakers, although small, are good enough for the things I use a computer for.

Once I had everything but the CPU installed , I did a smoke test: turn on the system and watch for smoke. Nothing happened, so I put in the AMD chip and tried again.

It came close to working. No smoke, a few BIOS messages, but we never got to the floppy disk. No power-on self test (POST) codes -- beep patterns, which tell you precisely where things stopped. Restarts got hang-ups at a different point in the boot-up process, and on ce we got a POST code, but still no boot-up. I tried to get to the BIOS editor, but that I couldn't do.

Any one of several things could have been wrong, but since it almost worked, the most likely problem was a bad CPU. Back to Fry's, which is about 10 minutes from here. I presented the bad chip and all my paperwork proving when and where I bought it, and they exchanged the chip no questions asked. I brought the new AMD 200 chip home, installed a PC Power & Cooling CPU-Cool Z1 cooler on it, plugged it in, said a prayer, and turned the system on. Voilà. Everything worked just fine. Lightning fast, and no problems at all.

Installed DOS, partitioned the hard disk, and installed the CD-ROM drive using the Diamond installation software. Got a certified copy of Windows 95 that came with a system since destroyed (gutted for parts) so Phillip would have a legal OS and did the CAB trick (see last month's column), after which installation was a breeze.

I installed a bunch of software. Over the years, I have collected many handy utilities that tend to go on every system. Copyright isn't generally a problem for systems I'm going to keep, since each new machine tends to replace an old one. In this case, I was careful to stay with freeware and programs the authors want me to test on a variety of machines.

Then there are orphans: programs from publishers who don't even admit their existence, much less any obligation to provide updates and support; or in some cases, whose publishers have disappeared. I never quite know what to do about those. I guess you have to let your conscience be your guide. Finally, I attached the Philips CD Recordable (CD-R) drive to the built-in SCSI and installed Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe. That's one wonderful program. I used it to make backup CDs of everything on the system. I can't let the drive go, but at least Phillip starts with a backup of his system as delivered: OS, utilities, application software, the lot. CD-Rs are great for doing that sort of thing.

Then we packed Phillip's machine in the Bronco and drove up to the Bay Area for a conference. The system worked perfectly when we set it up at Phillip's house, and the last I heard, it was doing a fine job of killing rat cats in Origin's Wing Commander: The Kilrathi Saga, a new release that contains the first three Wing Commander games in one box. Longtime readers will recall that I've always been fond of Wing Commander, which has gotten smoother and slicker over the years. I do have to confess I haven't found the recent releases as purely enjoyable as I did the first one, but this collection is a real bargain that would make a great Christmas gift.

The moral of this story is that you can save some money building a system on your own, particularly if you watch for sales. Some of the components of Phillip's system could have been bought for half what we paid if I'd been willing to wait a couple of weeks. You will not, however, save a lot of money over what you will pay for full systems on sale, from either a big discount place like Fry's or a mail-order outfit like Dell. The main advantage of building your own system is that you'll know exactly what's in it. If you do decide to build, start with a PC Power & Cooling case and power supply, and deal with a reputable company like Fry's that honors its guarantees.

Of course, it helps to have some general familiarity with computer systems, but you certainly don't have to be a hardware guru. The hardest part isn't the electronics. It's figuring out what things mount where and what hardware you need to do it with. Mounting brackets are almost never standard, there are often no instructions at all, and finding ways to insert mounting screws on both sides of a floppy drive can drive you bats if you don't have a case that comes apart easily.

The second moral of this story is that for a Windows 95 system, there is no problem with using the AMD K6 CPU. I do have reports of problems with some application software under NT Server, but none with Windows 95, and certainly we found none. The AMD K6 is at least as fast as the corresponding Pentium with MMX and costs quite a bit less. It ran all the programs I tried, including both old and new games, and while a couple of games reported that "This game requires a Pentium and you only have a 486" or words to that effect, ignoring that message caused no problems.

The chip runs hot. Don't even think about using one without a good cooling fan, and my advice is to get the proper one from PC Power & Cooling. Moreover, if you don't use a PC Power & Cooling fan, be sure to get some of their heat-conducting compound. This is a white goo you spread in a thin layer on the chip to give it better thermal contact with the heat sink/cooling fan.

My first installation of the AMD chip was with the chip fan recommended by Fry's and no conducting compound. Even though the chip fan had proper mechanical connection and was running fine, that chip got hot enough to fry eggs on. After I converted to the PC Power & Cooling CPU-Cool Z1 cooler -- a heat sink with a fan in the center -- with the conducting compound, I could put my finger not just on the heat sink but on the chip itself; and while it was warm, it certainly wasn't hot.

Given proper attention to cooling, the AMD K6 chip is plenty good enough.

This has been the month for new hardware. Last month, we built Fireball, our new RAID-capable server, from a Micronics dual Pentium Pro board, using a single 200-MHz Pentium Pro with a megabyte of cache memory. I tested that machine under Windows 95. This month, we added the second processor.

Adding the processor was simple: just drop in the chip, spread the heat-conducting goo, attach the PC Power & Cooling fan (with this chip, there is no other cooling system I'd recommend), and then put in the voltage regulator unit that comes with the motherboard if you buy the dual-processor configuration. There's only one place the unit can go, so you won't have any problems at all.

Unlike previous dual-processor systems, there's no BIOS notification that a second processor has been detected. The only way to know that the second chip is working is to install an OS that can use it. In our case, we installed NT 4.0 Workstation and then NT 4.0 Service Pack 3.

It all went very smoothly, with only two minor glitches.

I installed NT 4.0 from Windows 95 simply by running an NT 4.0 Workstation original equipment distribution disk under Windows 95. At the end of the process, I was told to remove all floppy disks, shut down the system, and then let it boot up in DOS. The instructions didn't make it clear whether it meant shut down or let Windows 95 bring it up in DOS. I decided that shut down meant exactly what it said, and for good measure turned the machine off; in general, it's good to get in the habit of shutting a machine down entirely rather than just rebooting.

When I turned it back on, it came up in what looked like DOS and immediately continued the installatio n. Getting Fireball attached to my local Ethernet was just as easy, as were installing the NT drivers for the Revolution 3D board and installing the NT Service Pack 3 upgrades.

Fireball came with Sound Blaster Pro- compatible sound on the motherboard. Windows 95 installed that automatically, but NT 4.0 didn't know it was there. I'd anticipated that, and before I shut down Windows 95, I went to the Sound properties and wrote down the I/O address (220) and IRQ (5) for the sound system.

When NT was up and running, I installed the sound, and that brought the second glitch. At one point, NT asks for the SB16 drivers from the NT installation CD. Alas, the program doesn't know where to look, and it is exceedingly difficult to find precisely where the SB16 drivers are. Eventually, I discovered them in E:\DRVLIB\AUDIO\SBPNP\PPC\, which I suppose should be obvious but wasn't to me. That done, I had no more problems.

Fireball now offers the choice of Windows 95 or NT 4.0 on boot-up; that got installed more or less automatically as part of installing NT 4.0. It is, as you would suppose, blazingly fast. With the Revolution 3D video board, we get a WinTach of almost 700, which is incredible. It is certainly the fastest machine at Chaos Manor.

The Distributed Processing Technology SCSI controller, incidentally, makes the external drives in the RAID box almost as fast as the internal primary SCSI drive. If you're looking for a fast system, a good caching controller is a must, and DPT pretty well wrote the book on those.

The next step is to install NT Server. With the dual Pentium Pro 200 by 1-MB cache chips and the DPT SCSI RAID controller, Fireball will then be one of the fastest servers around; both fast enough and large enough to host a Web site.

I've been experimenting with Web tools. There are a lot of them.

I am no fan of Office 97. In particular, I can't recommend Word 97, because, as I write this, it's not stable, and, while Microsoft has improved file conversion between it and Word 95, Word 97 doesn't do a lot that I need done that Word 95 doesn't do. That said, Word 97 is a pretty good Web tool. It will convert normal text into HTML, preview pictures and illustrations, give you some cool background textures, insert links, give you WYSIWYG previews, and shift into HTML editing mode. All this comes quite naturally to a Word user. I created my first Web pages with Word 97.

Better is FrontPage 98. The problem with FrontPage is that it really wants you to set up a Web server on your local system. It will let you use a toy server, but it spends little time explaining how to do this. I don't think there's much wrong with FrontPage 98 that some good tutorials won't cure, and it's certainly a very powerful tool; more than one professional Web-page designer will find FrontPage 98 all the Web tool they will ever need.

The problem is that FrontPage 98 is almost too powerful.

Comes now Web Express from MicroVision Development. It is a WYSIWYG Web-page editor that keeps tr ack of all your links and builds a map of your Web site's activity. It has both WYSIWYG and HTML edit modes. It understands frames and tables. It doesn't have as convenient a system for previewing illustrations as Word 97 or FrontPage 98, but it does work well with large and small image files.

Best of all, you can take an existing Web site, import it into Web Express, and automatically build a complete map of all the links: bookmarks, page links, external links, recursive links, all get mapped into a comprehensible diagram. It then tests all those links and shows you which ones are broken. The other night, I did a complete reorganization of my Web site --  http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp  -- with Web Express. I'd put that off precisely because I had built a complex system of links that I no longer understood. Web Express took care of that problem immediately.

Web Express doesn't have the background patterns built into Word 97, but it handles pages built by Word 97 just fine; and by examining the way Web Express deals with those backgrounds, you can discover how to apply them to new pages created in Web Express.

In a word, I like Web Express just fine, and unless you do really complicated Web sites (in which case my advice is to bite the bullet and learn FrontPage 98), you will probably find that Web Express is all the tool you need. Recommended.

In a previous column, I described some of the difficulties of keeping CD-R, CD-ROM, and digital versatile disc (DVD) drives on the same system. I suggested that one way is to turn off the CD-R drive until you need it and then turn it on and reboot.

Readers have since pointed out that you may not have to reboot: it is possible to get Windows 95 to see a SCSI device turned on after boot-up. Go to Control Panel/System s/Device Manager and push the Refresh button. That will sometimes cause Windows 95 to see the device. I say sometimes, because it doesn't always work, and it has unpredictable effects on drive-letter changes. I have never seen any harm in trying it, but I generally expect to have to reboot if I turn on a SCSI device I'd left turned off at boot-up.

Good news: I have been sent a new "OmniKey" keyboard. It is called the Avant Stellar and is sold by Creative Vision Technologies. It was designed by Inter-Fatron, the same people responsible for the Northgate OmniKey. Same heavy-duty construction, same clicky feel, same everything, with function keys across the top as well as on the side. Switchable position for Ctrl. "Windows" keys. This will definitely be one of my products of the year.

Alas, it doesn't have the Backspace key where it belongs. The [ ] keys are there, and Backspace is up on the numbers row where two-finger typists always put it, but no new keyboards have Backspace in the right plac e. Other than that, it's about perfect. If you bang keys a lot, you will love this. Recommended.

Olympus now has new software, in particular, a TWAIN32 driver, for their wonderful cameras. It is easy to use. It's not so easy to find unless they have revised their Web site, which they promised me they would do. If all else fails, send them e-mail, and someone will give you an exact URL. I won't give it to you here, because I can't swear it will work when you read this. So it goes, but it's well worth finding.

Olympus has discontinued the D-300L camera I have, but their new ones are in many ways even better, and now the software is easy enough for Aunt Minnie. It sure makes it simpler to put pictures on a Web page. If you are looking for a camera, be sure to check out the Olympus digital cameras. Highly recommended.

I know I promised a report on Memphis , but, alas, the new build we got was even less stable than the earlier one. I think you will like Memphis -- now of ficially Windows 98 -- when they get it finished, but stay tuned.

Two books this month . Terry Pratchett's Maskerade (Harper/Prism, ISBN 0-06-105251-5) is "yet another novel of Discworld," in which Granny Weatherwax meets the Phantom of the Opera. If you don't know about Pratchett and his insane Discworld novels, you have a treat in store for you. Incidentally, the Psygnosis game Discworld II (which includes Discworld I) would make a perfect gift for any computer-using science fiction reader.

The other book is by the late Walter M. Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (Bantam, ISBN 0-553-10704-6). The cover says it is a sequel to Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz , one of the truly great science fiction works of all time, but it's better than that. This story takes place after part two of the novel but before the remodernizations of part three. Canticle was a story of fall and redemption, and by God's grace, its post-atomic war set ting is far less likely than when it was written, but Miller was a wonderful writer.

The computer book of the month is Steve Heller's Who's Afraid of Java? (AP/Harcourt, ISBN 0-12-339101-6), in which Heller teaches his wife all about Java. Well written, thorough, humorous, and filled with examples. If you want to know what Java is all about, this is probably the best single book I have seen for learning it.

The game of the month is Microsoft's Age of Empires. It's like Civilization only with real-time play like Warcraft; you start in the Stone Age and try to build a civilization as one of 12 peoples, including my favorites, the Minoans. The artwork is gorgeous, and the game is well thought out. There's good AI for the opposing sides, and you get a choice of civilizations.

There's only one problem: it's no fun as a game. Command and Conquer and Warcraft started a trend toward "real-time" strategy games in which you start with a dark screen and few resources; you have t o build your base and your army. Both of those games have a very slow option, and they are designed so that you don't need to control all that many units at once; moreover, the scenarios are constructed so that you seldom operate on more than one "front" at a time.

Microsoft apishly copied the real-time strategy and build-your-base features of these predecessors but set the clock speed so high that at its slowest, it's impossible to control very many units at once. Moreover, the free-form aspects of the game, which ought to make it fun, make it excruciating, because you always have to run from one place to another and click like a maniac. To make it possible to play at all, they limit the number of units you can have to 50, which isn't nearly enough for a mature civilization engaged on several fronts plus defending the homeland. As a result, it's impossible to build the large and complex civilizations depicted in their ads.

Age of Empires is worth buying for the scenery, but you won't play it much until they get at least two fixes: a way to slow the clock way down, and a "stop action" that lets you look at your units, plan research and construction, and give marching orders to ships and troops while the clock is stopped. Given those fixes, this would be the best game I've seen in years; as it stands, it's the most gorgeous whack-a-mole you will ever see.

If intellectual games of construction don't appeal to you, try MicroProse's 7th Legion, a sort of The Empire Strikes Back meets King Kong . Fair warning, the artwork is terrific, and there's enough blood and gore for Hannibal Lecter. Don't give this to small children, but I have to say I haven't got this involved in this kind of game since Wing Commander I. This one claims to be real-time strategy, but in fact it's best thought of as a shooter.

John Dvorak and I are about to test the commercial promise of the Web, and David Em has an important graphics report in the Web Exclusive section, including a big win for Apple; don 't miss it. Next month, I'll tell you how to deal with a failing memory.

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Product Information

Age of Empires................................$ 54.95

Microsoft
Redmond, WA 
Phone:    800-426-9400
Phone:    425-637-9308
Internet: 
http://www.microsoft.com

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this product



AMD K6 MMX Enhanced Processor...........about $165.00

Advanced Micro Devices
Sunnyvale, CA
Phone:    800-538-8450
Phone:    408-732-2400
Internet: 
http://www.amd.com/

Enter HotBYTEs 1054.
Information on 
this product



Avant Stellar Keyboard...................Call company

Creative Vision Technologies, Inc.
Hamel, MN
Phone:    888-770-0500
Phone:    612-478-6446
Internet: 
http://www.cvtinc.com/

Enter HotBYTEs 1055.
Information on 
this product



Easy CD Crea
tor Deluxe 3.0....................$ 99.00

Adaptec, Inc.
Milpitas, CA
Phone:    800-442-7274
Phone:    408-957-4535
Fax:      408-957-7150
Internet: 
http://www.adaptec.com/

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Nitro 3D......................................$ 99.00

STB Systems
Richardson, TX
Phone:    800-234-4334
Phone:    972-234-8750
Fax:      972-234-1306
Internet: 
http://www.stb.com/

Enter H
otBYTEs 1057.
Information on 
this product



Personal Mid-tower AT/ATX.....................$ 69.00

CPU-Cool Z1 $25
PC Power & Cooling 
Carlsbad, CA
Phone:    800-722-6555
Phone:    760-931-5700
Fax:      760-931-6988
Internet: 
http://www.pcpowercooling.com

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7th Legion..............................about $ 55.00

MicroProse, Inc.
Alameda, CA
Ph
one:    800-695-4263
Phone:    510-864-4440
Fax:      510-864-4600
Internet: 
http://www.microprose.com/

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this product



Web Express 2.0...............................$ 69.95

MicroVision Development
Carlsbad, CA
Phone:    800-998-4555
Phone:    760-438-0305
Fax:      760-438-7406
Internet: 
http://www.mvd.com/

Enter HotBYTEs 1060.
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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.earth-link.net/~jerryp/ .