Thursday, December 24th, 2020
          
          	It has been a very eventful last couple of days! I have 
          parts en route for the Socket 7 Sioux Server project - I have 
          decided to replace the processor I got with the motherboard, 
          mostly because it has become one with the heatsink, and although 
          it still seems fully functional, I don't much trust it to hold up 
          under the stress of 24/7 operation.
          
          	I recently managed to get in contact with one Richard Carr, 
          a programmer who back in the 90s made a few very good shareware 
          titles that, although popular on the compilation circuit and with 
          reviwers in some of the magazines of the time, did not receive 
          anywhere near the same level of recognition as your Apogee or 
          Epic releases. I had been trying to reach out to him for years 
          now so I could finally obtain full versions of his games, and 
          fortunately he is not only alive and well but still has the games 
          readily available for sale! There are a few other shareware title 
          authors I'm still trying to track down as well, but full 
          registered versions of Capture the Flag, Treasure Island and 
          Pirate Battles have sort of been my white whale for quite some 
          time now.
          
          	I am also in the midst of the (fourth or fifth) rebuild of 
          my LGA775 machine. This poor guy keeps getting gutted for parts 
          for other builds and for testing new parts. Most recently, it was 
          stripped down so I could replace its guts with those from some 
          dead equipment at work while I waited for parts to do a proper 
          repair on the equipment. It's just so danged compatible with 
          nearly everything. The motherboard is an Intel DG31PR, with two 
          PCI slots, one each of PCIe x1 and PCIe x16 slots, two DDR2 slots 
          which can support up to 4GB of 800Mhz RAM in dual-channel 
          configuration, four SATA 3GB/s ports, and one each IDE/PATA and 
          FDD ports on board. About the only thing it doesn't support are 
          Netburst CPUs, which I mean could be construed as a good thing, 
          haha. Unfortunately, it would seem something went wrong with the 
          last teardown I did of the machine, and I lost the data on the 
          HDD. I'm going to use this as an opportunity to redo everything 
          from the ground up.
          
          Build List: LGA775 WinXP Monster!
          
          Intel DG31PR LGA775 Motherboard
          Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650, 3GHz Quad Core
          Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800, 2x 2GB
          Western Digital Caviar Black SATA HDD, 1TB
          Nvidia Reference GTX550 Ti, 1GB
          Generic SATA DVD Drive
          Generic 1.44MB FDD Drive
          Generic Internal USB Multi-Card Reader
          OS: Custom WinXP SP3 Distro
          
          I have typically installed WinXP on this machine, sometimes dual-
          booting with an older version of Debian to use as a file-transfer 
          machine. Of the computers I have built, it's the one most 
          appropriate for WinXP in terms of age of parts as well as 
          performance, and a WinXP machine fulfills a niche in my little 
          home lab as some older games either won't boot or won't run well 
          on newer hardware/OSs. WinXP is also the OS I spent the most time 
          with personally, being the dominant OS through my high school and 
          college days, so there's some nostalgia there as well. I'd like 
          to run a dual-monitor setup on this incarnation of the machine, 
          but I'd much rather have a more powerful card than the one I have 
          before trying that. Unfortunately, at the moment it is the most 
          powerful card I have that is still compatible with WinXP. The 
          monitors I have in mind are only 1440x900, so hopefully it'll be 
          fine.
          
          -Prokyonid