Quoting: denyasisKeyrock - What is your trackball? I've been looking to replace my old one, but don't want a thumb ball...

It's a Microsoft Trackball Explorer. 5 buttons, index/middle finger driven ball, thumb scroll wheel. Best damn mouse I've ever owned. I had one many many years ago, but over time I broke it (I love the trackball, but the build quality on the buttons is not exactly top notch), that was when I was younger and didn't take care of things like I should. I fixed it (read: superglued), broke it again, fixed it again, finally broke it beyond fixing. I went out to get a new one and found out, much to my horror, that they stopped producing them years earlier. I tried for years to find a suitable replacement, but nothing could replace the Trackball Explorer. Eventually I got desperate and searched online. You can still find them on ebay and such, but they're expensive becasue they haven't been manufactured in like a decade plus and they are sought after. I wound up paying twice as much for a used one than what I paid for a brand new one some 10 years earlier. Worth every penny.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: eridanired123

Quoting: AnxiousInfusion... No picture of that yet.

Where did you got that keyboard with the Mint logo? Seems I can only find keyboards with Windows logos for super key.

You can buy custom keycaps for mechanical keyboards, several different places make them, some will print whatever you want on the keycap for you (within reason).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

My simple gaming/general purpose setup. My hotas flightstick is in the bottom shelf that you can't see in the picture and my wheel and pedals are in the closet. My Wii U is also stashed in the closet because... well, because it's a Wii U. :whistle:


My 10-keyless Cherry MX Brown mechanical keyboard sporting luscious Tux keys instead of ugly Win keys. Can't see it very clearly because I'm a terrible photographer. :P

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'm glad they addressed this. The overlay is a big feature of Steam. Having said feature come with a 20% FPS penalty would knock much of the shine off the shiny new Vulkan API when using Steam.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The performance on my rig is generally good enough to play. I mean, by all rights I should be getting triple the FPS on Titan X that I do get, but I ca deal with FPS mostly in the 40s. The occasional stutters are annoying, but I'm willing to put up with them just because this is such a good game and it's been so long since I played it. Back when I played it on Windows, many many years ago, the experience was pretty awful too, but it was worth suffering through because the game is so fun. I'm going to hold of for a few days, though, and see if someone manages to get the Gentlemen of the Row mod to work on Linux. It's such a fantastic mod, really makes the game experience that much better.

As an aside, I'm sad they never did the female Latina voice after this game again. It got replaced by a Russian sounding voice in SR3 and a French sounding one in SR4. Both those voices were good, but the Latina voice from SR2 was amazing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It plays fine on my beastly machine. Not brilliant numbers, mind you, but very playable. Only had a couple stutters during the opening cutscene the first time I watched it (no stutters the second time), other than that the game runs smooth, at FPS lower than it should on my system, but quite playable.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: grenadecxI managed to play through the SR2 without any performance problems at all. Buggy cutscenes and some mission gamebreaking bugs however, but that's about it. I'm not surprised that the performance here is terrible however. After playing the port of SR4 on Linux I lost all hope.

That's the thing about the SR2 Windows port. It was originally a XBOX 360 game and it seems like no thought was put into it ever being anything other than a XBOX 360 game when it was originally developed, so Volition used a bunch of tricks to squeeze performance out of it that worked great on that one specific piece of hardware but on other hardware like PS3, the game had problems. On PC, though, it was a complete crapshoot as some of the game's logic was tied to the XBOX 360's processor speed and other nasty hacks used to make the game run great on the 360 worked okay on some machine configurations, so so on others, and utterly horrible on others still. A machine having more horsepower wouldn't necessarily make the game run better, it would make it worse in some cases, because of the way the engine was programmed. It was a mess. Worked just fine on some PCs, not so much on others.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

SR3 was a much more proper PC port on Windows than the famously terrible SR2 port, still not brilliant, mind you, but much better, so there's more hope that Virtual Programming's eON port of SR3 will improve over time (whereas hope of improvement to the SR2 port is lower since the Windows port was so awful to begin with). I'm downloading it now.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Niiiiiice. :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The performance is pretty dismal and I have a high-end machine with a i7-4790K and a Titan X. At 1440p with max settings minus motion blur, v-sync, and anti-aliasing at 4X I bounce around the low to high 40s. Turning off AA seemed to do nothing for FPS. I could deal with those framerates, but even with a reasonably fast SSD I get the occasional stutter. It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen way more than I'd like.

I don't know how much can be done about it as SR2 is famous for being one of the worst PC ports ever made. It's been so long since I played it on Windows that I don't remember how much the various tricks floating around the web helped, but I suppose I should hunt those down and also see if the Gentlemen of the Row mod works on Linux.

It's not unplayable for me, but the occasional stutter is really annoying. It's too bad because SR2 is a really really good game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments