It's been a pretty busy week in the shed as part of my arcade machine project, culminating in me wanting to douse my motherboard in lighter fluid and cooking my dinner off it..
I told you this wouldn't go as planned..
Well I finally found my Windows 7 disc and decided to give my setup a proper upgrade. So the first time I popped it in it did what it did, installed nicely, gave me a lovely welcome screen and then promptly crashed.
So I fired it up again and on the side of caution it decided a start up problem check was in order. It found nothing wrong so to be completely amusing again it lasted a little longer on the main screen before it suddenly restarted itself.
I hooked up a network cable so it could install some updates and midway through downloading things, it reset.
I swore at it, it reset itself again.
I pleaded with it, it reset itself again.
Thinking it was the BIOS being old and useless, I re-flashed it to a later version. One which my current install suddenly decided it couldn't work with and simply gave up. 'That's okay, I'll just reinstall Windows 7 again and it should be okay.'
At last count, I've tried 12 installs and every single one of them failed. Every. Single. One. It would get to a certain point in the install and suddenly decide it couldn't find the next file it needed and I'd have to start again. Just like the 11 other times.
It turns out that depending on the program you use, burnt ISO's of Windows have pretty decent failure rate. I discovered this by using two different burns, both of them useless. In the end I had to create a bootable USB to load Windows 7 and wouldn't you know it...worked first time! So in future if your cd/dvd version seems to be hanging on one little part, try via USB. Here's a handy guide from Lifehacker on how to use WinToUSB.
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| After it fixed a lot of damage on the way of course... |
So after finally being able to give my rig a name, it loaded up the main screen...and crashed. Gah. Surely a one off..
I loaded up Mame, put in a rom, got into the load up part and suddenly the entire screen went green. And stayed that way. Not ideal arcade conditions lets be honest.
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| I cannot play under these conditions... |
This was quickly solved by the latest NVIDIA update for the motherboard. It seems the drivers it had were from 1974. While I was at it I also put in Microsoft Framework 4.5 (needed for the Gigabyte update programs I believe) and attempted to install the latest Direct-X but it failed to install for some reason. The lesson learnt here is to make sure you have the latest updates to absolutely everything.
(6/1/2016 EDIT: The additional lesson is to get it onto the internet as soon as you can making it so much easier to find those critical updates...)
Mame test two: Fired up, got the game started! Glorious!
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| Could it be... |
60 seconds later, it restarted again. ARGHRRHGRHGRHRGRHGWTFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So after brief glimpses of glory, it's now trouble shooting time.
Is the memory buggy?
Are the capacitors in need of replacing?
Is this the worst idea I've ever had? (Don't answer that)
Up next -
Emergency heat assisted surgery is called for! What could possibly go wrong?
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