-
Since I'm trying to kill time waiting on the DVD drive to finish making ISOs of the other two games, might as well derail this thread further ... :D
Wow, the end sure came fast after taking out the Emperor. Went to coronation ceremony, two quests with Pi and Khun, kept the guild shop greased with merch in between, and next thing I know, I'm like staring at the credits. Getting there was a load of fun. The fight with Tri-Kite (why not?) was more like something the late Gorilla Monsoon would describe as "the unstoppable force versus the immovable object". And while the first part of the battle wasn't too horrifying as long as I had a full trigger bar to keep Pi and Khun alive in between Rengeki counters), the avatar battle was nothing but. At first, it we had some good tit for tat going. But the moment I started gaining any lead on him, I'd screw up and he'd close the health-bar gap quick. When he had just an inch of life left (and I had about 4 inches to my own), he started going data drain happy and then slinging scythes at very close ranges. Dodging all that while trying to stun him with the damned pea shooter was pretty intense. By time he whittled me down to 2 inches of life, he had no life at all. Just would not stun for the life of me.
Out of luck or desperation, he lunged at me and I dodged and countered with the scythe instead of the pea shooter. That did the trick! :D
Now I just had to charge up and nail him with Data Drain ... and that was the easiest part of the battle. Since Skeith is invincible during that period, I figured Kite would keep his distance and dodge. Nope. Like a dumb ass, he channeled one my favorite parts from the movie "Army Of Darkness" basically lunging at me for a scythe combo without the "I'll swaller yer soul" screech. I stood there like a stump on a log and ate it ... then he ate it. Boomstick straight down the gullet! Well not quite - but at least it clipped him in the shoulder trying to dodge after I recovered from the recoil. Can't complain about that ... ;)
I will complain - however - about the 6 hours I burned for nothing sitting here with SeaTools and the HDD out of the PS2. I didn't have enough space to spare on my computer for all my games so there were casualties (mostly dual layer games) but at least the storage pod is right outside the kitchen door instead of across town. I'll be fine as long as my DVD-ROM drive holds up. But SeaTools really frosted my hide -- first the DOS version kept freezing my computer. Why? Don't have the foggiest, but I suspect it was the SATA controller it claimed to support. From there, SeaTools for Windows gave my drive passing colors in the SMART test ... and the long test ... well, after 5-6 hours I aborted it. It kept freezing my desktop every 20 mins or so. When I aborted, I checked the event viewer and saw ATAPI errors right in line with those freezes every 20 minutes. Rebooted and tried a Short DST on it ... and same damned thing. That's when I suspected SeaTools might not like the IDE-SATA dongle from my old nForce2 board and probably wanted the drive hooked up to a dedicated IDE channel. Piss on that ... :D
Told SeaTools to take a flying leap, launched WinHIIP, re-formatted the drive using the smallest partition sizes I could get away with. Next, temporarily stuck the drive into the PS2, created the +OPL partition with uLE, and then booted Codebreaker so its partition would be created as well. Then slung the drive back on the PC for WINHIIP to start restoring 60GBs worth of games ... and it was slower than usual. Getting roughly 20mb a second transfer speed instead of the usual 41mb a second. Ahah, my source drives were never defragged because I lacked to free space. Yup, that'll do it! Once my games we're restored, I needed to go another deleting spree on my source drives just so I could make ISOs out of part 2 and 3 ... and they were finished by the second paragraph of this post.
Heh, didn't mean to kill that much time here ...
Gonna install them now, and then I'm go curl up somewhere ... :sleep:
-
Please tell me you finished doppelganger and other side quest on disk 1
you get somethings on each disk that help and re matched the data in @home they carry over too and unlock things as well
side note why so much trouble with you HD really :lol:
-
Nope, I ignored the doppleganger and jumped straight into part deux because I wanted to test the clean wipe on the HDD by sit through the long intros cutscenes as well as find out the skinny on Atoli before going to sleep. I only have about an hour booked into it, though. I planned on going back to take out the Doppleganger and max grind Pi, Khun, and Piros, finish up the chaotic PKs sidequest, and maybe take care of the rest of the Abyss quest. So starting over on part 2 with updated clear save data won't be much of a setback.
As for the HDD, I forgot to mention that while I had the freeze issues earlier due to a lost file chain corruption on my USB stick, I also had a freeze in uLE trying to copy and paste data to and from the HDD and Mass. When I rebooted back, all the data I had copied to the HDD from MASS was gone. As if the file transfer never happened. Tried the copy/paste again and uLE didn't freeze. That was before I ran a CHKDSK on the USB stick -- that fixed all freezing issues I was having across the board. Still the notion that data just disappeared into the ether didn't sit well with me. I wanted to outrule a failing drive while also ridding it of excessive fragmentation -- WINHIIP displayed more yellow and orange on the sector map than green because once I formatted the drive once way back in 2010, I left it alone except for deleting and installing different games. As a result, there were plenty of {empty} partitions in between my games, and that was leading small yet annoying things like audio skips and lag due to seek latency on the HDD that are gone now.
For example, the beginning intro and other areas of Valkyrie Profile 2 had small skips because WINHIPP installed it across 3 of the smallest {empty} partitions -- hundred of thousands of sectors separating them. Add a seek latency of 60ms, and you've got enough to give you a quick hiccup in the video/audio as the read heads have to hightail it across the platters to the rest of the data. My DVD of the game is in immaculate condition, but that issue made it seem like my DVD has scratches when it doesn't. Since last nights wipe and reformat, that issue is gone -- WINHIPP reports a fragmentation of 0% as opposed to 21.2% ... ;)
This also achieved another thing: over the last 3 months, I upgraded Everest to AIDA64 ... and I now have conclusive evidence that the latter is more paranoid over "Re-Allocated Sectors" than the former, and its ridiculous. A drive with just 1 reallocated sector makes AIDA64 give it the big yellow exclamation of doom. But a drive with less than 30 reallocated sectors would be giving a clean bill of health not only by the manufacture's tools, but by Everest and Linux as well. For good reason - its not necessarily the sign of a faulty drive; a power flux on +12 rail from a failing or junk PSU, a crimped/twisted/worn out IDE or SATA cable, or even a motherboard with a southbridge that has literally gone south (I won't mention names *cough*nVidia*aherm*) can produce false positives. Give it a good source of power, a brand new cable, salvage any data, perform a long low-level format with the manufacture's software, and -- quality platters, quality servo, and read heads notwithstanding -- there's a better chance those sectors can be recovered than the drive suddenly pulling a Joachim Valentine and saying, "I'm not a Fujitsu - I'm an IBM DeathStar! Beware, ye glass platters of evil of my Kokobutt of truth and justice!!" :D
Welp, back to making ISOs ... only got like 2 hours sleep, and when I let the dog out, it was colder than a witches tit in a brass bra. No snow yet, but winter has come early - enough for me to stand there in the kitchen doorway shivering while waiting on the coffee pot, looking at the storage pod and asking myself, "Do I really wanna be out there in middle of friggin' February?!?" Hence four Sterlite tubs of PS2 games on my floor scaring the shit out of my cat until she declares it a new stairway to "Chloe-Land" (i.e. nickname for a bed mattress standing upright again the wall that she loves to scale like a squirrel, turn around, and flash gang signs at me from 8 feet in the air) :lol:
-
Wow just asked if you got dop and look I found out your HD history and your living stile good to see your humor in tacked and drive to BTW:D:cool:
-
No, humor is when you first use the steam bike in part 2 ... :D
Devoted 50+ hours getting used to "The Terror Of Death" navigating Mac Anu is his overglorified Segway and they swap it for an LT500R ... :lol:
Wow - Khun and Pi actually join in on punting Chims, too. There is a god! :)
