Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

(10-17-2012, 08:27 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]That sounds about right. Most of the posts are going to be old because quite frankly most of the people using dolphin recently have a system with a more modern cpu. A few years ago there were still a decent number of users with athlon X2 cpus that hadn't upgraded yet, today not so much. And a lot of the people who do have one end up upgrading when we tell them their hardware isn't good enough for what they're trying to do.

Yeah, you see just 18 months ago I upgraded from a Tbred Athlon XP 2100+ (OC'd @ 1.9GHz). I'm probably the only computer geek in the world that doesn't need a totally GAR PC. Heck the nerdiest thing I use it for is reading visual novels, and those work fine on a first-gen Intel Atom underclocked to 990MHz!

Quote:Yeah, you see just 18 months ago I upgraded from a Tbred Athlon XP 2100+ (OC'd @ 1.9GHz).

Holy frak, that CPU is ten years old! You are so retro you're practically hipster, at this point.

(10-17-2012, 03:36 PM)MaJoR Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Yeah, you see just 18 months ago I upgraded from a Tbred Athlon XP 2100+ (OC'd @ 1.9GHz).

Holy frak, that CPU is ten years old!

Indeed, and I only upgraded to that from a 733MHz Pentium 3 in 2006.

The thing is, my performance needs are quite minimal, especially since don't do high-end PC gaming. However, I do know a lot about making your OS be a lean machine, and that can help a TON on lower-end hardware. I mean, let's see you run a copy of XP with a disabled pagefile on only 768MB of RAM.

The kinds of things I DO require are very specific and are very different from typical PC user:

• 1. silence is very important, if my monitor isn't louder then the PC isn't silent
  2. ever since I got an SSD for their silence I cannot stand the slow response time mechanical HDDs have
  3. RAM amount must be enough so that I can have my pagefile disabled and have at least a 1.5GB ramdisk.
  4. low heat output is a must, otherwise my bedroom (where my PC is) gets way too warm, especially in summer (Northeast Ohio here)
  5. monitor must support 640x480, 800x600, and 1280x720 and display them fullscreen without upscaling nor aspect ratio distortion (pixel doubling is allowed)
  6. monitor must have a high contrast ratio, particularly with a focus on the black levels (I mainly use my PC at night and accordingly use a dark color scheme in Windows, Firefox, all webpages, and even in games where I can change it like StepMania and the CyberiaStyle 6 theme.)
  7. monitor must have very good response time; if there's blurring of text when scrolling on a webpage with light-colored text on a black background then it's too slow.

So really I don't need an uber PC for all of that. In fact for the monitor stuff only a quality CRT (like my Trinitron) will fulfil the requirements - the closest thing in the future would be a 3840x2400 OLED monitor.

Quote:Yeah, you see just 18 months ago I upgraded from a Tbred Athlon XP 2100+ (OC'd @ 1.9GHz).

Quote:Indeed, and I only upgraded to that from a 733MHz Pentium 3 in 2006.

So you're consistently 5-6 years behind.

Quote:Heck the nerdiest thing I use it for is reading visual novels, and those work fine on a first-gen Intel Atom underclocked to 990MHz!

1. You run dolphin (clearly), that's pretty demanding
2. Why would any sane person underclock an atom? It consumes only a few watts and accounts for only a small fraction of the total system power consumption.

Quote: I'm probably the only computer geek in the world that doesn't need a totally GAR PC.

GAR?

Quote: I mean, let's see you run a copy of XP with a disabled pagefile on only 768MB of RAM.

That's not that hard. Also why on earth would you want to do that?

Quote:3. RAM amount must be enough so that I can have my pagefile disabled and have at least a 1.5GB ramdisk.

Why? You already have an SSD.

Quote:5. monitor must support 640x480, 800x600, and 1280x720 and display them fullscreen without upscaling nor aspect ratio distortion (pixel doubling is allowed)

Once again, why?

Quote:1. silence is very important, if my monitor isn't louder then the PC isn't silent

Then why do you use a CRT display which emits an extremely annoying high pitching squealing sound (this is one of the reasons why I can't stand CRTs)?

Also the only way to make it quieter than the monitor is to have it emit absolutely no noise at all. Which is borderline impossible with a high TDP cpu like an athlon X2. How did you manage to passively cool everything including the cpu?

It would make a lot more sense to have a low power cpu like an atom.

Quote:6. monitor must have a high contrast ratio, particularly with a focus on the black levels (I mainly use my PC at night and accordingly use a dark color scheme in Windows, Firefox, all webpages, and even in games where I can change it like StepMania and the CyberiaStyle 6 theme.)

CRT users don't believe me when I tell them this but modern LED LCDs have surprisingly good black levels and contrast.

Quote:7. monitor must have very good response time; if there's blurring of text when scrolling on a webpage with light-colored text on a black background then it's too slow.

I have never seen an LCD have this problem. Maybe a really old/crappy one.

CRT fans always tell me about how awful the response times and ghosting are on LCDs but no matter what I do or how hard I look I can't see any noticeable ghosting on any of the LCD displays that I have ever owned.

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Yeah, you see just 18 months ago I upgraded from a Tbred Athlon XP 2100+ (OC'd @ 1.9GHz). Indeed, and I only upgraded to that from a 733MHz Pentium 3 in 2006.

So you're consistently 5-6 years behind.

Yup. My current and last PC were old rigs of my PC gaming friend that I bought off of him for cheap (my entire current PC minus the monitor and SSD was only $70)

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Heck the nerdiest thing I use it for is reading visual novels, and those work fine on a first-gen Intel Atom underclocked to 990MHz!

1. You run dolphin (clearly), that's pretty demanding
2. Why would any sane person underclock an atom? It consumes only a few watts and accounts for only a small fraction of the total system power consumption.

1. I only really run it for lulz. I don't actually play much on it since I've both a GameCube and a homebrew'd Wii. If I had a GAR CPU then maybe, but it's low priority, especially since the Wii is hooked up to a Trinitron CRT as well, so the games don't look crappy.

2. Netbook, and therefore battery life. It's a 4-year old model so it never had the 10-some hours battery life that modern netbooks have. (it only gets around 4 hours, around 6 when underclocked; around 7 and a half hours when underclocked and the screen closed).

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote: I'm probably the only computer geek in the world that doesn't need a totally GAR PC.

GAR?

Meaning extremely totally hot-bloodedness-ly awesome.

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote: I mean, let's see you run a copy of XP with a disabled pagefile on only 768MB of RAM.

That's not that hard. Also why on earth would you want to do that?

I've only had my SSD for 6 months, so it was a counter to mechanical hard drive's slower response times - also up until about a year or so ago even that amount of RAM was enough for me.

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:3. RAM amount must be enough so that I can have my pagefile disabled and have at least a 1.5GB ramdisk.

Why? You already have an SSD.

I work and edit quite a bit with uncompressed audio. Show me a consumer SSD that consistently gets over 1 gigaBYTE per second on all type of write performance. Regarding the pagefile, it's because my new PC has more than enough RAM for my needs already, so I figure why waste my SSDs storage space and busy-time write cycles on a pagefile?

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:5. monitor must support 640x480, 800x600, and 1280x720 and display them fullscreen without upscaling nor aspect ratio distortion (pixel doubling is allowed)

Once again, why?

Visual novels, 99.99% of which are 640x480, 800x600, and 1280x720. Aspect ratio preservation is because the characters would be stretched fat otherwise. No upscaling is because 99.99% of scalars in monitors make text look blurry, and the good ones in HDTVs are not real-time and therefore cause latency issues. Fullscreen viewing is because I don't like reading small text for hours; also because I'm easily distracted and therefore immersion is important.

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:1. silence is very important, if my monitor isn't louder then the PC isn't silent

Then why do you use a CRT display which emits an extremely annoying high pitching squealing sound (this is one of the reasons why I can't stand CRTs)?

This depends largely what CRT model you use. My Trinitron only emits a VERY quiet hum/buzz that's very similar to the noise-floor of an analog amplifier or a vinyl record, and therefore isn't uncomfortable at all.

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Also the only way to make it quieter than the monitor is to have it emit absolutely no noise at all. Which is borderline impossible with a high TDP cpu like an athlon X2. How did you manage to passively cool everything including the cpu?

My monitor is technically not 100% silent, but it's dang close. Nonetheless, if my PC is on but my monitor is off, my BREATHING is louder. Heck, due to the variable nature of CRTs and breathing, my breathing can even be louder than my monitor as well.

As for my CPU, it's very simple:

• *I have the 65nm G2 stepping 65w Brisbane rather than the 90nm 89w Windsor
  *I have removed it's IHS (which I've done on 3 other Athlon CPUs as well)
  *undervolting, though while this massively helps heat output it only minimally helps CPU temps
  *I use a 125w Athlon stock heatsink, which is actually larger than the modern AMD 125w stock heatsink (provided for free from, again, my PC gamer friend)
  *CPU fan is a non-stock 92mm fan running at ~400rpm
  *A good quality thermal paste

While I cannot run it passively at stock clocks, I CAN turn off my fans (including the 120mm fan in my PSU) and stay under 60c when running at 1GHz @ 0.775v (useful for music consumption, visual novels, and ASMR relaxation).

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]It would make a lot more sense to have a low power cpu like an atom.

And it would have cost more than $70 for a PC with that. For reference, the earlier-mentioned netbook was gotten only a year ago for free from my same gamer friend due to a dead hard drive and because it was "too slow" (most likely due to OS bloatware - it would lag even in the original Doom! After installing a 32GB SSD and a slimmed-down XP installation I can even play Quake II online with the thing).

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:6. monitor must have a high contrast ratio, particularly with a focus on the black levels (I mainly use my PC at night and accordingly use a dark color scheme in Windows, Firefox, all webpages, and even in games where I can change it like StepMania and the CyberiaStyle 6 theme.)

CRT users don't believe me when I tell them this but modern LED LCDs have surprisingly good black levels and contrast.

I know that they do, but they fail my resolution requirements. Also they are typically not good enough at light text on a black background, especially at night/in a dark room. Black areas should look the same as the black bezel does in the dark, and if it's brighter then it's not good enough. Heck I think the nightsky in my not-too light-polluted boondocks of northeast ohio is brighter than the black areas on my CRT.

(10-18-2012, 04:06 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:7. monitor must have very good response time; if there's blurring of text when scrolling on a webpage with light-colored text on a black background then it's too slow.

I have never seen an LCD have this problem. Maybe a really old/crappy one.

CRT fans always tell me about how awful the response times and ghosting are on LCDs but no matter what I do or how hard I look I can't see any noticeable ghosting on any of the LCD displays that I have ever owned.

Well it's not too much a problem anymore. My father's 3-year old HDTV makes StepMania look like a blurry mess, but on my Aunt's 1-year old HDTV StepMania is perfectly crisp.

Quote: 1. I only really run it for lulz. I don't actually play much on it since I've both a GameCube and a homebrew'd Wii. If I had a GAR CPU then maybe, but it's low priority, especially since the Wii is hooked up to a Trinitron CRT as well, so the games don't look crappy.

No matter how good your display is your games are going to look terrible at 640 x 480 with no AA.

Quote:2. Netbook, and therefore battery life. It's a 4-year old model so it never had the 10-some hours battery life that modern netbooks have. (it only gets around 4 hours, around 6 when underclocked; around 7 and a half hours when underclocked and the screen closed).

I'm skeptical of this. 1st generation atom systems paired a 2.5-4 watt cpu with a 20+ watt chipset. Unless you're also undervolting the chipset underclocking the cpu is barely going to make a dent in total system power consumption and should not produce those kinds of results. Can you tell me more about this system including exact specs?

Quote:I've only had my SSD for 6 months, so it was a counter to mechanical hard drive's slower response times - also up until about a year or so ago even that amount of RAM was enough for me.

You countered a slow HDD by disabling page file and using a system with little ram? That makes no sense.

Quote: Regarding the pagefile, it's because my new PC has more than enough RAM for my needs already, so I figure why waste my SSDs storage space and busy-time write cycles on a pagefile?

Because you're putting your system at tremendous risk for zero benefit. Page files don't use much space and assuming you actually have a good amount of ram should almost never be used by the system so they don't eat up a lot of write cycles either.

No offense but in my experience people who disable their page file are usually crazy whack-jobs who have read too many sketchy articles and forum posts by people claiming to get some magic speedup or other advantage by disabling it. I have yet to meet one with a logical reason for doing it based on actual evidence.

Quote:Visual novels, 99.99% of which are 640x480, 800x600, and 1280x720. Aspect ratio preservation is because the characters would be stretched fat otherwise. No upscaling is because 99.99% of scalars in monitors make text look blurry, and the good ones in HDTVs are not real-time and therefore cause latency issues. Fullscreen viewing is because I don't like reading small text for hours; also because I'm easily distracted and therefore immersion is important.

I can't use CRTs for reading because they make my eyes feel like they're about to start bleeding after a few hours. No matter how much I play around with the color/hue/saturation, brightness, contrast, and refresh rate this does not change. I have no doubt that it's because of the high frequency flickering.

Quote:*I have removed it's IHS (which I've done on 3 other Athlon CPUs as well)

That's extremely dangerous and won't help much on older cpus like yours. Though I applaud the effort, few people would have the balls to even attempt that.

Quote:*undervolting, though while this massively helps heat output it only minimally helps CPU temps

How is that even possible? Reducing heat output significantly should significantly reduce cpu temps unless you're already close to ambient temperature. That's just common sense/thermodynamics.

Quote:*A good quality thermal paste

It won't help. The difference between good and ok thermal paste is 2-3 degrees.

Quote:While I cannot run it passively at stock clocks, I CAN turn off my fans (including the 120mm fan in my PSU) and stay under 60c when running at 1GHz @ 0.775v (useful for music consumption, visual novels, and ASMR relaxation).

Ah. Now this I can believe.

Quote:After installing a 32GB SSD and a slimmed-down XP installation I can even play Quake II online with the thing).

That's based primarily on GPU and CPU performance (as I'm sure you know). An atom should be able to easily handle quake III.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote: 1. I only really run it for lulz. I don't actually play much on it since I've both a GameCube and a homebrew'd Wii. If I had a GAR CPU then maybe, but it's low priority, especially since the Wii is hooked up to a Trinitron CRT as well, so the games don't look crappy.

No matter how good your display is your games are going to look terrible at 640 x 480 with no AA.

Trinitron SDTV. Do you not understand the significance of a Trinitron? They were pretty much the best CRTs ever made. A standard def picture looks miles better on one of them than on an HDTV.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:2. Netbook, and therefore battery life. It's a 4-year old model so it never had the 10-some hours battery life that modern netbooks have. (it only gets around 4 hours, around 6 when underclocked; around 7 and a half hours when underclocked and the screen closed).

I'm skeptical of this. 1st generation atom systems paired a 2.5-4 watt cpu with a 20+ watt chipset. Unless you're also undervolting the chipset underclocking the cpu is barely going to make a dent in total system power consumption and should not produce those kinds of results. Can you tell me more about this system including exact specs?

Honestly I don't really understand it myself. The netbook in question is a Asus eeePC 1000HA.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:I've only had my SSD for 6 months, so it was a counter to mechanical hard drive's slower response times - also up until about a year or so ago even that amount of RAM was enough for me.

You countered a slow HDD by disabling page file and using a system with little ram? That makes no sense.

You have the order wrong. The system already had that much RAM and the slow HDD. I later then decided to disable the pagefile to help with response time of switching windows and/or programs.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote: Regarding the pagefile, it's because my new PC has more than enough RAM for my needs already, so I figure why waste my SSDs storage space and busy-time write cycles on a pagefile?

Because you're putting your system at tremendous risk for zero benefit. Page files don't use much space and assuming you actually have a good amount of ram should almost never be used by the system so they don't eat up a lot of write cycles either.

What tremendous risk? No offense but I think people that say that haven't actually tested it out themselves and are just going by the fear mongering they hear about. The worst thing that happens when you run out of accessable memory is that a program crashes and gets force-closed to free up memory. Not only that, but as you approach around 500MB of that limit things actually slow down - this is useful as a warning sign. But yes, I HAVE found a performance benefit - minimize a program and leave it sitting for 30 minutes. Restore the program back up after a while and WHOA LAG. No pagefile makes the program restore instantly. Contrary to what Microsoft says, at least in XP, Windows INSISTS on using the pagefile even if you have gobs of free memory.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:Visual novels, 99.99% of which are 640x480, 800x600, and 1280x720. Aspect ratio preservation is because the characters would be stretched fat otherwise. No upscaling is because 99.99% of scalars in monitors make text look blurry, and the good ones in HDTVs are not real-time and therefore cause latency issues. Fullscreen viewing is because I don't like reading small text for hours; also because I'm easily distracted and therefore immersion is important.

I can't use CRTs for reading because they make my eyes feel like they're about to start bleeding after a few hours. No matter how much I play around with the color/hue/saturation, brightness, contrast, and refresh rate this does not change. I have no doubt that it's because of the high frequency flickering.

This too is dependent largely on your CRT model. A good quality Trinitron monitor can to 800x600 @ 120hz and have quite a clear image at high resolutions, especially the flat CRTs.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:*I have removed it's IHS (which I've done on 3 other Athlon CPUs as well)

That's extremely dangerous and won't help much on older cpus like yours. Though I applaud the effort, few people would have the balls to even attempt that.

It's pretty easy actually, at least for me. I've attempted it on 4 Athlon CPUs total and I've succeeded with every single one. And the difference is larger than you think - my father's 1.9GHz Brisbane saw an 8c temperature drop.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:*undervolting, though while this massively helps heat output it only minimally helps CPU temps

How is that even possible? Reducing heat output significantly should significantly reduce cpu temps unless you're already close to ambient temperature. That's just common sense/thermodynamics.

You'd think, but it's not that simple. Read this post I made on another forum:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1305799/60#post_18221571

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:*A good quality thermal paste

It won't help. The difference between good and ok thermal paste is 2-3 degrees.

All the little things add up though. 3 degrees from an undervolt, 3 from thermal paste, 5 from IHS removal, and you're already more than 10c lower.

(10-18-2012, 10:14 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote:After installing a 32GB SSD and a slimmed-down XP installation I can even play Quake II online with the thing).

That's based primarily on GPU and CPU performance (as I'm sure you know). An atom should be able to easily handle quake III.

I know, I was just explaining that something was borked up in the previous OS configuration because an Atom should NOT be slower than my old 733MHz Pentium 3 was.


CLARIFICATION: There are both Trinitron PC monitors and Trinitron SDTVs.

Quote:Trinitron SDTV. Do you not understand the significance of a Trinitron? They were pretty much the best CRTs ever made. A standard def picture looks miles better on one of them than on an HDTV.

It doesn't matter. It's either going to look blurry or pixelated depending on the display. There isn't enough information in 640 x 480 to make an image look good when it's blown up to a large size.

Quote:Honestly I don't really understand it myself. The netbook in question is a Asus eeePC 1000HA.

Yep, just looked up the specs. The chipset uses a lot more power than the cpu.

Perhaps they share a voltage source? I doubt it but I suppose it's possible. Also any changes to the FSB would effect the NB.

You should be getting more than 4 hours out of it unless you're using an OS with poor power management or your battery has deteriorated.

Quote:You have the order wrong. The system already had that much RAM and the slow HDD. I later then decided to disable the pagefile to help with response time of switching windows and/or programs.

That still makes no sense.

Quote:What tremendous risk? No offense but I think people that say that haven't actually tested it out themselves and are just going by the fear mongering they hear about. The worst thing that happens when you run out of accessable memory is that a program crashes and gets force-closed to free up memory. Not only that, but as you approach around 500MB of that limit things actually slow down - this is useful as a warning sign. But yes, I HAVE found a performance benefit - minimize a program and leave it sitting for 30 minutes. Restore the program back up after a while and WHOA LAG. No pagefile makes the program restore instantly.

Do I really need to explain to you why having a system that is so unstable that programs will crash when they run out of memory is a bad idea? Because if you can't see why that's bad then god help you. Page faults were added as a standard feature to CPUs and mainstream OS for a reason. It's so useful that everyone pretty much refused to work with any system that didn't have it. It's not fear mongering that created it, it was the frustration that people put up with back when it didn't exist and they were desperate to have a feature like this.

I don't know about you but I don't like the idea of having programs crash without saving data. You don't even necessarily know which program is going to crash. All you need to do is accidentally open a high memory application or an application with a memory leak (which you might not necessarily even know about) and boom, one of your other open applications could crash and you just potentially lost data. So yes that is a tremendous risk.

I have tested it myself. Never again. Some of my games were extremely unstable when I turned it off. A number of tech sites and organizations have tested it too and written articles on it. It doesn't effect performance at all unless you're right up against your memory limit and in that case your programs are about to crash anyways.

Having programs that have been sitting completely idle for a long time take half a second to load up instead of a microsecond is not a big enough deal to risk having programs crash on you. You have an SSD and a ramdisk for gods sake.

Face it you wouldn't use a cpu that could cause applications to crash in certain situations if you weren't extremely careful so why put up with this?

Oh and one more thing that I almost forgot to mention. Disabling it takes away memory that windows would normally be using for SuperFetch which means drive activity will usually go up and your recently accessed documents will take longer to load.

Quote:Contrary to what Microsoft says, at least in XP, Windows INSISTS on using the pagefile even if you have gobs of free memory.

Having a page file and having it enabled is not the same thing as "using" it.

Quote:This too is dependent largely on your CRT model. A good quality Trinitron monitor can to 800x600 @ 120hz and have quite a clear image at high resolutions, especially the flat CRTs.

Having a clear image has nothing to do with this. CRTs cause more eye strain than LCDs regardless of image quality. Some people are more sensitive to it than others.

Nintendo Maniac 64 Wrote:*undervolting, though while this massively helps heat output it only minimally helps CPU temps

NaturalViolence Wrote:How is that even possible? Reducing heat output significantly should significantly reduce cpu temps unless you're already close to ambient temperature. That's just common sense/thermodynamics.

Nintendo Maniac 64 Wrote:You'd think, but it's not that simple. Read this post I made on another forum:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1305799/60#post_18221571

Your post talked about how chips with lower die area don't dissipate heat as effectively. Which has nothing to do with explaining how lowering voltage (which doesn't change the dissipation characteristics) would alter heat output but not temperate. Not to mention the tests that I've done on my own cpu (and many others) directly contradict this.

Ok, you've put me in a bind here, basically we've gotten to the point where I'm just getting sick of doing this back & forth thing. The problem though is either I keep doing this back and forth thing and annoy myself with the hassle of having to keep managing the the quote blocks and the OCD paranoia of you interrogating me farther and that maybe I missed something or I try to stop conversing about this resulting in it seeming like I have no come back and annoy myself with feeling like a coward. Heck posting this rather than replying to one of your comments feels like being cowardly already, but if I comment on one then it'll seem like I lack a comeback on the others and therefore are deliberately ignoring them...heck this whole post could be perceived as nothing but a glorified cover-up of having no comeback!

What's a guy to do...

Quote:Ok, you've put me in a bind here, basically we've gotten to the point where I'm just getting sick of doing this back & forth thing.

I'm not, I rather enjoy it

It's nice to have someone around here who sticks up for what they believe in to argue with. A lot of these others either left, went apeshit crazy and got themselves banned, or just stopped trying.

And yes I do realize that I criticize everything that anyone says here that I disagree with. Get used to it because if I didn't stop over the course over the last 6,570+ posts you can imagine that I'm not going to stop anytime soon.