post music: nyck caution - good company (ft. katori walker)
Okay, so, this post is a little bit overdue, mostly because I forget this exists sometimes. A few months ago I did a writeup on the MSI MEGA PC series. That was pretty much right after I got it in. Now that I've had some time with it, I could explore what I wanted it for:
I wanted to put Windows XP Media Center Edition on it.
Straightforward enough, until it isn't. You see, XP MCE was not ever released to retail-- officially it was only released to OEMs to preinstall on compatible Media Center PCs. Nowadays, that's not a problem; if you sail the seven seas for long enough you'll find XP MCE. No, the problem is hardware compatibility. More specifically, graphics card compatibility. XP MCE was only certified to run on a certain subset of graphics cards. But, more broadly, these compatible graphics cards needed to a. be compatible with DirectX 9, and b. be an AGP or PCIe card. From what I know and have researched, most MEGA models, including my 865, have AGP-era boards-- for knowledge posterity, as far as I know there are three PCIe models, the 865 Pro, the 915, and a rebadge of the 915.
This means I had to get an AGP graphics card. But I couldn't just get any AGP graphics card, I had to get one that was good enough and one that I could reasonably afford-- with retro computing now expanding to the XP era this is becoming increasingly difficult. I settled on a reasonably priced ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. I got it in, put it in, and was on my way. Until I wasn't.
The system POSTed fine, and I was in the desktop. Excitedly, I fired up the Media Center software. And it loaded right up, I saw the animation, and also several artifacts on screen. My graphics card had failed VRAM. Now, this was an as-is sell, no returns, so I tried everything to make it work: reseating the graphics card, reseating the system RAM, running memory tests, diagnostics, I even tried underclocking the card to see if the artifacts went away to no avail. I had no choice but to look for another card. I did.
Except it was another Radeon 9800 Pro. You see, these cards are the only cards you can easily get for under a hundge. I wasn't aware at the time of rampant failures of these class of cards. Oh did I become aware of it, the hard way. This second card caused the MEGA to fail POST. Dead on arrival. At least for this one I got a partial refund on it, which eased the pain and also may allow for a frankenstein-class build with the first card if the VRAM chips worked. That was for another time, though, and I wanted to get this build going.
Are you aware of the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? This was me after having bought a THIRD Radeon 9800 Pro and seeing it not POST. A crazy revolution, because I paid extra for a card that the listing said "tested working". Fortunately, I was able to return this one for a full refund. My regards to the seller for having a model of such a cursed card.
By this point I was in full "fuck it" and after doing some looking around I picked up a new in box Radeon X800 XT All-In-Wonder. And this one worked great.
Except when it doesn't! Despite having an All-In-Wonder card, there were no bespoke XP MCE drivers for it, and that means none of the TV tuning or video input functionality works in the Media Center software-- I have to use ATI's bespoke bummy-ass aspect-ratio disrespecting dedicated tool. Also I can't ever update the drivers anyway because if I do, the TV and video functionality break completely! Even if I went out of my way to get the specific All-In-Wonder drivers (which are different from the regular Catalyst drivers for some reason), they'd still break on my card. Driver hell is a bitch, and I'm glad I got a new in box card because if I just got the loose card I'd be fucked. Or maybe I wouldn't because a loose card wouldn't include the bespoke cables required to make the TV and video functionality work.
But at least it works now. Next steps are a RAM upgrade, maybe installing an SSD, and maybe maybe a CPU upgrade.