Gabe Newell: Valve will release its own console-like PC

I agree with this.

 

it doesn't exclude the big potential DIY gaming PC builds have (and the fact it's becoming more and more accessible), and for the others you have "dell PCs" (including laptops) or a small shop, friend or whatever capable of offering something, from what I understand the idea from Valve covers well both sides.

most people building the PC for the first time are not going to need to play with the "UEFI" settings much or at all, current motherboards will work perfectly with default settings basically, specially if you only have more than one or two HD, maybe an optical drive or usb drive for installing windows 7/8, or if steam OS is developed to a point it offers the same kind of experience,

 

I think the point is we all did dumb stuff as kids . I know I did but at the same time the hardware has advanced also.

I remember bending a pin on my Athlon but that wont happen with the new intel designs .

I also remember IRQ ...

 

Didn't know you could fry the PS/2 port by hotplugging it. I discovered by accident that a PC will hang if you pull out a PS/2 cable while it's running - or at least this was the case way way back when, not sure if winXP was even released at the time so it may not be true anymore.

I did hear about people frying serial/parallel ports on 16-bit home computers by hotplugging cables to them. Usually blew the CIA chips or equivalent, apparantly... Never happened to me though, but I usually took care not to plug any connectors while my Amiga was still running. Well, other than mouse/joy port of course.

Well, some BIOSes were plenty cryptic, and overall the whole BIOS infrastructure was just too friggin old and obsolete. Seriously, it was code dating back 30ish years, you can't build forever on shit like that, it won't work. You gotta let go sometime.

Network access via UEFI may come back to bite us, maybe/probably in this day of 0day exploits and all, but at least on my mobo it's a feature you have to toggle on manually, in two different places no less, so it's not an issue for me personally.

 

I think most of us did that at one point.
I did it the first time I tried to reapply thermal paste, and it was on a pentium, so no excuses there!

Yeah, and most of the chipsets that had that problem where VIA chipsets...

I kind of agree with Grall though.
Most people don't want or have the time to mess with custom built pcs.
Even if it is a lot easier these days.

 

And forgetting to terminate SCSI chains. Not to mention the nightmare that was the RLL drive...

 

Wow, yeah, I'd completely forgotten about this!

HA, by the way! I encountered more than one occation where you had to terminate a different SCSI drive than the one at the end or else it Would Not Work!

Correct termination = no boot.
No termination = no boot.
Wrong termination = boot! WTFBBQ!

 

Frying happens with the really old keyboards which draw like 10x the current of the more modern ones. If it doesn't have Windows keys, is so heavy it can be used as a lethal weapon, and the date written on the back is from when the USSR still was around, beware.

But it gets hairy with dual boot. "It works when I do nothing with it" is often true of desktop linux as well, your firefox vlc and stereo sound will work but when you want to share a folder, have 5.1 or play games you might have to fight a battle with lots of stuff and learn too many things.. The linux situation has greatly improved though so with a modern one and mainstream enough desktop you can e.g. share a folder by right-clicking it.

I really have a non-technical friend who wants to dual boot, he was used to Ubuntu (gnome 2) for daily use, now that will be Mint with Mate (gnome 2 still lives on) and he simply wants Windows for occasional gaming and especially LAN gaming.
The bad UEFI behaviour was Windows 7's fault actually. I just ran the installer, it refused to install and after that the boot entry called "linuxmint" was corrupt and is unfixable till I learn to fix it. I lost a lot of my time.
The motherboard was very recent btw (micro ATX FM2+, 2014), is made by Asrock which I trust for BIOS features and support.

I can see that kind of stuff be a problem for Valve's Steam OS, customers might want to dual boot it with Windows and bork things.

 

debug
g=c800:5

Oh those were the days. Glad they're long gone.

 

I'm glad I'm too young for the above command

I still have to deal with SCSI controllers though, so chain termination is still a thing...

 

Debug saved many a ship at sea! Knocking out quick and dirty com files to do the jobs the OS should have been doing was about as close to using a 'real' OS as you got at the time!

But I agree, that was a learning curve that we are much better for not having any more!

 

SCSI was just plain voodoo and completely random in how it worked. I always thought the problem was that though the spec said how you were to make things work there were no rules for implementation so it was all played a little loose and fast! Though the data transfer speeds, at the time, more than made up for it. When you got it to work that is.

 

A lot depended upon the controller but the idea of needing a SCSI bus terminator was ludicrous.

 

If you had a well implemented controller, you got full DMA access, so high transfer speed at negligible CPU impact. Big difference usually compared to IDE at the time.

Of course, IDE got some decent DMA modes as well eventually...

 

THe first Steam Machine is from Alienware.

Irony of fate should never be underestimated.

 

I don't get it, I'm assuming the irony is that it's not?

So nvidia created a "custom" GPU specifically for Alienware? How is it no one has heard of this yet?

 

The funny thing about that link you posted is that it's actually not a steam machine at all, but just a regular windows PC with a regular 360 gamepad, due to valve fucking up their timetable as usual.

It's one thing going according to "valve time" when all that affects you is you and your own reputation, but when independent hardware vendors start getting caught in the wringer by their unreliability I'm sure people will start getting mighty pissed off at valve, and pretty quickly too.

After all, manufacturing lines, component orders and so on aren't all whipped up in a heartbeat, and nobody can sit on unsellable stock because valve can't get their own shit together.

 

The irony being that the steam machine has turned into a windows machine, thought it was obvious.

For the custom GPU I would bet more on a custom PCB to fit the design better as well as an unusual amount of ram for the chip it embarks.
I would bet that it doesn't mean custom silicon.

As a side note depending on the GPU it could prove an interesting PC for the price.
Nvidia came with an interesting conf when its new maxwell GPU shipped yet it did not included windows cost.

 

If the model was "well, there aren't many good games so use a Windows PC to play over the network", then it's perfect. That's a Windows gaming PC and what was needed, right?

 

I asked a dude in the Alienware booth at e3 "Do you really think 2gb of vram is a good idea?" and he had no good answer. Seriously, 2gb? Better hardware won't matter if these machines are ram starved.