Well, no actual progress on the Coding Dream yet, although I've been reading mass essays on coding style and concepts. Still waiting on my compiler. I may have to settle with Visual C++ 5.0, and I don't wanna. ;-D However, I have had some fun with hardware, of which I will now relate every detail.

I finally broke down and bought a Voodoo3 2000 PCI card. Stop it right now, I know what you're screaming. Voodoo 3 2000? Why not 3000? And why not AGP? Put your worries aside as I explain My Master Plan. Soon, I will have two gaming machines. My current machine (henceforth referred to as DemiGod) will be replaced as my mainstay gaming machine by the one I'm building (which will be dubbed Tiny God).

Now, DemiGod has served me well since why back in 1996(?) when I received an STB Velocity 128 (the original nVidia Riva chipset with 4MB on board) for free as a promotion. This card made my squeal with joy. I didn't know back then how important it was to have video acceleration, and oh, the views were fine. Later I would push myself to heaven with the Diamond Monster II with the gorgeous Voodoo2 chipset and 12MB. And life has been fine. Mind you, I'm using the old video card & accelerator combo that takes up two of my precious PCI slots. Further, since this machine is a P233MMX it has no AGP support.

However, Tiny God is being built with a SLOT1 processor (probably a Celeron 400 PPGA with bridge cause they're damn cheap right now. Obviously this comes with an AGP slot which I intend to devote to the video card because I am no fool. However, the glory days of having the 3D card seperate from the video card are gone. This is not a good thing in my book. I want a TNT2, or probably a GeForce256 card, in that AGP slot, but this will leave me with no Glide support, which (as Origin's Ultima 9 has taught us) may still be required from time to time. I was fairly distraught over this until the solution fell into my lap.

I'll take out the two video cards out of DemiGod (the Riva128 and Voodoo2) and replace them both with the recently purchased Voodoo3 2000 PCI. Now, I could have spent an extra $50 to get the Voodoo3 3000 PCI, but they were out of stock, and this is really only an original Pentium system we're talking about --- any Voodoo3 should do.

Now, in Tiny God, I'll place the afore mentioned TNT2 or GeForce256 card andlap in my old Voodoo2 accelerator card. This way on the few games that deman Glide, they'll get it with a fairly decent Voodoo card. The processor should be able to compensate for any speed loss. *crosses fingers*