PC Recovery How-to

This started off a reproduction of a leaflet I wrote for the company I work for. It basically attempts to answer the question : “How do I recover my computer” or “How do I run a system recovery” (and permutations there-of) in as few lines as possible. Because I am not constrained for space on here, I have expanded on it somewhat and will continue to do so, if you have any questions, feel free to comment and ask.

The reason for this procedure is simple – recovering your system to the ’shipped’ or factory settings is the best way to clean your system. Over time Operating Systems (Windows is the worst for this) accumulate lots of rubbish. This can be in the form of zombie or orphan dependencies (e.g. .DLL or .OCX files in Windows that are no longer needed) miscellaneous and or useless configuration or drivers and even damaging or misinstalled components. Some retails can not take in laptops or computers for warranty repair unless a full system recovery has been performed first due to the high occurrence of non-supported software related problems being futily sent to manufacturers for hardware repair.

Please note, a full system recovery is NOT the same as a Windows Restore / System Restore point recovery or a partial system recovery. In some cases, Windows Recovery Environment (only on Windows Vista) can solve the issue although I mostly have found it time consuming and unhelpful.

Step 1: Back up all your data

When done correctly, a full system restore will completely wipe your computer. This means all your data (e.g. photos, documents, music) and settings (e.g. ISP / Internet, Web Passwords etc) will be removed. Please make sure you have a complete copy of all the data you wish to save on a external source (e.g. a USB Flash drive, USB Harddrive, CD/DVD, NAS etc) before you continue.

Step 2: Determining what recovery method your PC / Laptop uses.

Regardless whether the unit is a PC or a Laptop, it would have been shipped with a method for recovery. This can be in the form of backup CD/DVD(s) or preinstalled on the computer in a hidden ‘partition’ on the computer’s hard drive. You may have been required to create the recovery discs yourself when you first switched on the computer. If this was the case you normally would have been prompted. If you have not created recovery disks or something has happened to render your recovery partition useless, see troubleshooting #4.

Step 3a: Performing the Recovery with Recovery Discs

If your machine has (or came with discs) read on, if not, skip to the section 3b.

Put the (first if applicable) recovery disc into your machine and restart the computer. When the computer switches on, you may be presented with the option to ‘boot from Optical / CD / DVD / Media’, press enter (or the key specified) to do this.
The disc should now boot into the recovery mode. (If not, see troubleshooting #1.)

Follow the on screen instructions. When imaging / recovery is complete, your computer will restart. Remove the recovery disc from the drive when prompted.

Recovery should be complete, follow any remaining instructions on the screen.

Step 3b: Performing the Recovery from a Recovery Parition or Image.

If your machine has backup software installed on the hard drive, please read on.

The process is very similar to the one discussed in section 3a, except there will be a short time window where a certain key combination will need to be pressed BEFORE Windows XP / Vista starts to load. If you see Windows XP / Vista start to load, you have missed the window of opportunity and should restart and try again. A PC or laptop system will go through the following steps whilst booting:

1) Video card POST *

2) Main BIOS Post (CMOS and Ram check)

3) Secondary BIOS POST (for RAID cards or some legacy 13h network equipment) *

4) Cycle through boot device order. At this point you might see a small white icon flashing in the top left corner for a moment.

5) Transfer execution to boot sector (MBR) of specified harddrive.

6) Windows starts to boot.

* Only applicable to some systems.

This key combination changes depending on the model and manufacturer but will be something along the lines of [alt]+[shift]+[F10] (for Acer PCs) or [F12] (for some Toshiba and HP models) etc. More confusingly, different manufacturers check for this key combination in different places. Acer tend to check for the keypress predominantly during stage 3 to 4 although some models exist which check for the key combination during BIOS POST (stage 2), HP base units normally check during stage 2 whilst their laptops wait until stage 3 to 4. The general rule is start pressing the keys when the BIOS shows up and keep pressing them until you get to the recovery partition. If your operating system starts to boot, simply restart and try again. CHECK with your manufacturer the key combination your system looks for.

When done correctly, it will take you to the recovery section of your computer. Follow the on screen instructions selecting, if asked, the full system recovery option. If this fails, please see troubleshooting #3.

Recovery should be complete, follow any remaining instructions on the screen.

Troubleshooting
For more detailed information relating to your specific model, please consult the manufacturer’s website or helpline.

#1 - Can’t Boot from Recovery Discs
If you are trying to run a recovery from a CD/DVD but it is not loading (booting) from the disc, you will need to make sure the CD/DVD drive is checked before the hard drive (containing the software issue) is read by the BIOS.

You will need to go into the BIOS by pressing a button almost immediately after the computer is turned on. This can be [F2], [F8], [F10] or [Del] depending on the specific model you have.

CAUTION, do not touch anything other than what is directed here.

When inside the BIOS, check the ‘boot order’ to make sure the CD/DVD drive is booted first. These drives can be called a number of different things, when in doubt consult the manufacturer. When you have changed the boot order, save the configuration into the CMOS and let the computer reboot.

#2 - I have lost my recovery discs / I didn’t back up my recovery software
Some manufacturers have a facility to send you replacement discs if you have failed to keep or create your recovery software. There may be a charge related to this service, please contact the manufacturer. (See #4)

#3 - Can’t Boot from Recovery Partition / Recovery from recovery partition fails
Some software problems (e.g. malware / viruses) can corrupt the built in software recovery. If this has happened, there will be no way to complete the software recovery and you should contact the manufacturer for further instructions. (See #4)

#4- Recovery partition destroyed / useless or no recovery option.
There is a more advanced way to perform a system recovery than using the built in recovery method. I would only reccommend this for more advanced users as it involves manually installing and setting up Windows (XP or Vista) and installing drivers by hand. You may also need to be comfortable manually partitioning your hard drive. This method will give you a better, more responsive system free of crapware / bloatware preinstalled be the manufacturers as well as potentially utilise wasted hard drive space.

With almost all Vista PCs (I will cover XP in a moment) you will receive a Vista Installation DVD. This DVD contains every version of Windows Vista and you can use it to wipe your computer and reinstall Windows Vista. The process to using the disk is the same as is outlined in Section 3a substituting the recovery discs for the Vista disc. Simply select the version of Windows Vista that came with your machine (you can install any edition of Vista e.g. Home Premium / Basic, Business or Ultimate but it will be limited to a 30 day demo) if you are unsure which version you have, check the side of your PC (or under side of your laptop) for your Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity (sometimes called CoA.) This brightly coloured certificate will not only have the version of Windows you are entitled to use written on it, but your Product Serial key as well – this will be important as it proves you are entitled to run the particular version of Windows and will be required during the installation.

Alternatively, if you are using Windows XP (or another Operating System like 98/95, NT, 2000, Server etc) you may need to obtain a Windows CD. I am not sure of the legality of this, but if you find a download somewhere online for a Windows CD image (I won’t provide a link) and install it using the Product Serial key provided on your certificate of authenticity, strictly speaking you are not committing piracy as you are entited to run that operating system on that machine. Because I am not a lawer, I do not know if such a proceedure would be legal and as such can not recommend it. You can always buy a new CD (OEM version) or go directly to the manufacturer for a replacement.

Once Windows Vista/XP (etc) has installed, you will have the basic framework for your PC / laptop. What will still be missing is the drivers and software. Drivers can be downloaded from the manufacturers website and should be done prior to reformating your computer. Some operating systems (XP and prior although to a lesser extent Vista as well) will need security software loaded onto them before you allow the computer to be exposed to the Internet. There are a number of free alternatives as well as commercial options.
Useful Contact Numbers (for the UK)

Sony 0870 240 2408
Acer 0870 853 1002
HP 0870 010 4320
Toshiba 0870 220 2202
Fujitsu Siemens 0870 243 4390

Bypassing Acer Security

Today I came across an ACER PC (M1610) at work that needed restored back to the manufacturer’s settings. Acer ship their desktop systems with part of the hard drive hidden in a recovery partition that can range in size from 6 Gb to 20 Gb depending on the specific PC model. The problem was the customer who owned the PC had set a password on the recovery interface and had promptly forgotten it. I had a chat with Acer who were naturally very happy to take the PC and charge the customer to reformat and re-image the entire drive. Unfortunately I spoke with a rather arrogant technician at Acer who claimed there was no way to get around this password, those that know me will know this is like mixing firecrackers with a kid with matches. I decided to fix the issue myself.

What you will need:

1 – A bootable CD with some live or preinstalled environment (e.g. WinPE/BartPE CD or any Linux live CD with NTFS 3G although I would recommend the former given the flakiness of Linux NTFS drivers.)

2 – About ten minutes.

Recovery tools are glorified branded imaging/cloning tools (like Ghost or Acronis True Image.) They have three main components, the program binaries (i.e. the GUI/UI and low level formatting/writing tools), the configuration files and the backed up / imaged data itself inside an image file. This image file can be one large multi gigabyte file or lots of smaller chunks and it contains not only all the files and folders, but NTFS file table system/ bootloader and MBR information. This means the entire image can be written onto a hard disk (or hard disk partition) and after reboot, the user could be presented with a fully functional system. Its for this simplicity that companies like Acer do their recovery in this manner.

I booted using a WinPE XP cd (but you can use anything mentioned above) and took a look at the partitions on the hard drive finding the following:

C: NTFS 69.5Gb (Formatted total)

D: NTFS (although reported as unformatted) 69.8Gb (Formatted total)

Hidden (Not mounted by default) NTFS 9.8Gb (Formatted total)

4Gb Unallocated space. (Wasted)

I mounted the hidden partition and eventually after some trial and error, found the file containing the password and password hint details. This was the file called “aimdrs.dat” (found on the root of the recovery partition) and could be opened in notepad (although I used and would recommend a good hex editor) and showed a very simple file layout as shown below:

[MyData]..PD=12345..HT=abcd efgh..

Where “12345″ is the password, encapsulated between the equals and two full stops. “abcd efgh” was the hint. This was literally the entire file.

Changing either of these simple strings is very easy and after a reboot into the recovery software (via [Alt] and [F10] during BIOS POST) you will once again be able to access the recovery software. I would recommend you do not change anything else in this hidden partition unless you know exactly what you are doing.
I hope this helps someone stuck in a similar position and is likely applicable to many more systems than just Acer PCs.

Hidden World of Linux: Follow up Part 1 – NAS

Since my previous post on the hidden uses of Linux attracted so much attention, I thought I would do a brief follow up adding a bit more to my conclusion in which I discussed the main drawback to all these great Linux distributions – power consumption. At some point I am going to buy a power meter and test a variety of old computers I have around the house to see how much power they draw, but for now I just want to give some illustrated examples of low power hardware that can be bought which are ideal for some of the uses described in my prior post.

This is the first of two follow up posts. This way I can go into detail about each specific section. In this post I will be discussing NAS (Network Attached Storage) and will follow up shortly with a post on Firewalls later.

Realistically retail NAS devices fall into two categories, ones with a single harddrive and ones with multiple harddrives.

Single hard drive setups

There are a large variety of single harddrive NAS systems available at fairly reasonable prices and, unless you need a specific feature that a Linux/BSD distribution like FreeNAS provides, it will likely be better to purchase a separate NAS drive. This way you do not need to worry about installation / upgrading potentially buggy software and the power requirement will be in the tens of Watts.

For the sake of argument, let us consider three hardware examples for building (or reusing an old computer for) a single drive NAS. The first is by far the cheapest – reusing your old PC. All that is really required is a new harddrive to replace the small one the PC would originally have been shipped with.

At an average price of £35 for a 250Gb SATA drive (slightly less for an IDE version,) simply reusing an old PC is by far the cheapest option, however there are a number of things to watch out for. Old computers used to have limitations as to the maximum hard drive capacity the BIOS on the motherboard would be able to address. Back in the days of single GB hard drives, a then theoretical limit of 137Gb must have seemed as far off as 32Gb RAM for desktops does today. Fast forward back to today; whilst modern systems are very happily addressing far more than 137Gb thanks to logical block (LBA) 48bit addressing, chances are you will want at least around 160Gb space for your NAS meaning this could be a problem for some of the really old hardware. The reason for this so called “ATA Interface Limit” issue (which is by no means the first in computing – check out this great article) is a mathematical limitation in the way in which harddrives used to be accessed at a very low level using discrete geometry (cylinder, head and sector numbers.) BIOS patches are available although these are few and far between.

Worn power supplies are also a potential hazard, check before deploying a system for 12/24 hour use that the power supply cooling fan is in good condition and that there are no overheating issues caused by an old or clogged cooling system in the rest of the hardware. Please do not open up a power supply – such an action could be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing. When in doubt, replace it – it will be cheaper in the long run than if you end up setting fire to your house or destroying your data through a power spike induced head crash. In summary, this option is by far the cheapest of the three, but there can be some problems along the way.

The second option I explored, would be to buy a complete, custom tailored PC system for use as a headless NAS. I went to one of the eshops I frequently purchase from and quickly, virtually built a low powered, cheap PC that would be suitable for such a purchase. Surprisingly, it turns out that building your own NAS box is a lot less expensive than I would have thought with my NAS PC costing a total of £108 (Full specification and links in appendix at the end of this post) inclusive of the £35 250Gb harddrive used in the previous example. This compares very favourably with the (currently) cheapest single HDD NAS box available from the same eshop which is £77. With your own PC, you get the advantage of customising the services your NAS provides giving you greater control coupled with expandability down the road, an option unavailable when buying a retail NAS. The downside to this is the increased power consumption. To mitigate this, I picked recent components which have power saving features like AMD’s Cool and Quiet as well as the special, low power consumption versions rather than going for a generation (or two) old technology which was roughly the same price anyway.

The final ’self-built’ NAS hardware option I wanted to explore is building a NAS with ultralow power embedded components frequently used in routers / modems and in actual NAS systems. It is possible to buy a limited selection of embedded motherboards, some even with low power processors like the VIA C7 or AMD Geode. VIA C7 processor boards seem to be a lot cheaper, and I selected a board which had everything minus RAM, the HDD (hard disk) and a power supply. Unfortunately, due to the limited production scales of some of these ITX boards (you pay a premium for the miniaturisation) the cost of building such a low power device was higher than I anticipated. The total price for a small, very low power embedded NAS build was £143 (full specification in appendix at the end of post) also inclusive of 250 Gb hard disk drive.

As you can see, the cheapest option, (predictably) would be to reuse old hardware assuming it is only two or three generations old. In all three PC specifications, I have kept the harddrive size and cost the same in order to allow for a greater comparison, but I find it hard to recommend either self build option even given the extra flexibility that such a computer would yield running a BSD distribution like FreeNAS. Also, although FreeNAS is a fairly mature product, there is no guarantee that it will work flawlessly with the hardware you have (I had some ACPI issues with my test machine) which would render potential effort useless. If you have an old PC and hard drives lying around then you have nothing to loose by trying FreeNAS, I would even encourage it, otherwise I must stick to my original comment – if you are only want a NAS for casual backup on a single drive, buy an off the shelf product.

Multiple hard drive setups

If on the other hand you want more than a single HDD, this is where things start to get interesting, there are very few (reasonably) priced multi disk NAS systems on the market. The key exception is a piece of hardware I alluded to in my previous post which I would like to talk briefly now about. (I am sure other options exist, but this is the only reasonably priced one currently available in the UK market.)

The enclosure I found which would allow two drives to be used is made by Nanopoint and is model ‘Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B.’ It has an interesting feature set, supporting 2 SATA harddrives with Samba, NFS, FTP, RAID 1 & 0 as well as a USB to act as a print server. Unfortunately it is twice the price here in the UK than in the US but it seems to be one of the very few NAS enclosures that allows for RAID 1 across two harddrives. This was important as I am after a system that has built in redundancy – if one hard disk failed – another automatically had a copy of all the files. (Although the theory behind RAID is somewhat flawed – more on this another time.) I am seriously tempted to buy one of these and if I do I will write a full review with how it compares to FreeNAS at a later stage. UPDATE: I have found another similar device by Netgear (SC101 SAN/NAS device) although it only supports IDE drives, the other features seem roughly the same.

This is the point where FreeNAS starts to really distinguish itself from some of the commercial offerings. The reason is simple, anything more than one or two hard drives is seen as either SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) or Corporate grade and has an appropriate price tag and feature set. FreeNAS can, and will scale beautifully with a number of hard drives (even performing fault tolerant RAID 5 as well as the more popular RAID 1) although at the moment, it does not support clustering or failovers. This is relatively trivial as we are getting now into the realms of enterprise grade computing.

Due to the relatively simple firmware required to get these devices working (even with a variety of services) it will likely be cheaper over the course of a year to skip distributions like FreeNAS or OpenFiler and instead opt for a NAS drive enclosure, unless you specifically need some of the features FreeNAS offers or you are using several hard disks.

Related Idea : Virtualisation

Thumos made an interesting point in one of my posts about using a server running multiple virtual environments which each role (e.g. firewall, NAS / SAN, MythTV etc) all running on one PC. The downside of this would be, as he noted, dramatically increased hardware requirements and to be honest, I am not confident such a system would be able to handle all those roles effectively but I am not an expert on Virtualisation. Windows Server 2008 can do some pretty amazing things in this respect with their hypervisor based virtualisation system.

Related Idea: Windows Home Server

Although strictly speaking Windows Home Server is a completely different program (and incompatible with freedom (or F/OSS) software philosophies) it deserves a mention given the subject of this post. Built on a modified Windows Server 2003 r2 core, Windows Home Server adds automated backup as well as some impressive disk management tools. Perhaps the most striking to me was the absence of RAID as we classically see it. RAID has become ubiquitous for redundant, performance or server/enterprise grade storage solutions mostly because the only practical alternative is confined to high end data centers. Ask an IT expert or geek the various modes to connect multiple hard disks and invariably you will get a discussion involving RAID 0,1,5 (or mixed modes like 0+1, 5+0, 5+1, 6, 8 etc) and JBOD spanning with likely no mention of DFS or FRS. These are Microsoft technologies developed “in-house” by their Advanced Technologies Lab (ATL).

To understand DFS and its routes, I had to take a brief crash course in enterprise level computing as the technology was not initially developed for use in Windows Home Server finding its routes a few years before, however the similarly between DFS and the storage technology in WHS is very similar as Paul Thurrott notes in an early preview of WHS. Infact, DFS started life a as a way to transparently link various SMB (Samba) Shares in a way in which there would be greater flexibility, transparency and reliability in corporate environments with multiple data centers. DFS generally can be used in one of two ‘modes’, the first being locally administered (without an Active Directory) and the second being domain based roots which by their design provides redundancy and is the most commonly used. There is an excellent demo of this technology on the Microsoft website.

The key to software implementation of data redundancy in Windows Home Server is found in the transparent way storage shares are presented to the end user, not through a network mapped drive letter or a (classic) network share. Infact, WHS automatically shadow copies data in such a way that a copy of it exists on more than one hardware device protecting against failure. This is completely different from RAID 0 which directly mirrors the contents of an entire drive (byte for byte) onto another one to provide redundancy. In the event of a hard disk failure (or capacity upgrade) the RAID array must be taken offline and rebuilt with a replacement disk. Furthermore, because the data is mirrored from one hard drive to another, the maximum size of the mirrored array is constrained to the smallest drive in the array. Windows Home Server supports hot swapping of disks, meaning that if a hard disk fails there (likely) is no data loss nor interruption in service. If an extra drive is added (e.g. via USB) or an existing drive is hotswapped it expands the overall space available to encompass the new storage and automatically (shadow) copies the data on it’s existing drive(s) to (re)create redundancy.

The hardware requirements are significantly higher than just running FreeNAS, a minimum of a 1Ghz processor and 512Mb of RAM are required before the installation will continue making it twice (or 3/4 times) more resource hungry than F/OSS equivalents. The ability to access your data remotely (through Windows Live integration) is interesting as it acts like a RAS dynDNS service, but it means trusting a third party for your authentication. A properly configured local network with secure FTP or Samba services would provide exactly the same (if less flashy) functionality with the advantage of giving you complete control over who, what and where your network can be accessed from.

Conclusion

There are features that FreeNAS provides which ‘off-the-shelf’ NAS enclosures will not and for this it is an extremely good piece of software. For multiple harddrives and / or multiple users all requiring different services, I would recommend FreeNAS everytime possibly even with some of the ITX hardware (coupled with a PCI RAID card) suggested above, however for someone wishing to make a single HDD into a NAS for occational home use it is unlikely to be a smart choice.

Appendix : Example hardware costs

Please note, these are example prices correct at time of research, please do not go and take this as a recommendation of a system specification, it is for illustration only.

First example : Equipment already in your home.

Existing hardware eliminates a lot of initial outlay.

Harddrive: £35 (Seagate 250Gb SATA HDD) – Although I am not a fan of Seagate, there are better drives available.

Total Cost: £35

Second example: Building a very basic / cheap PC

Processor: £19 (AMD Low Power (45 W) AM2 Sempron)

Motherboard: £27 (MSI Motherboard)

RAM: £7 (512Mb Extra Value PC2-5400 RAM)

Harddrive: £35 (Seagate 250Gb SATA HDD) – Although I am not a fan of Seagate, there are better drives available.

Power Supply: £10 (Budget 350Watt) – Although I would STRONGLY recommend never buying a budget PSU.

Case: £10 (Budget ATX case)

Total Cost: £108

Third example: Building a low power ‘ITX’ form factor PC

Motherboard & Processor: £50 (Via iDOT) – Very cheap low power board

RAM: £7 (512Mb Extra Value PC2-5400 RAM)

Harddrive: £35 (Seagate 250Gb SATA HDD) – Although I am not a fan of Seagate, there are better drives available.

Case & Power Supply: £42 (Simple small case)

Total Cost: £143

Clancy: The XCOM Story Interview

Well the response to my post about XCOM: UFO Defense (or UFO: Enemy unknown) had a lot of positive feedback which was gratifying to see! It never ceases to surprise me just how many die hard fans of the game still exist and is the greatest tribute any of us could bestow at the grave of Microprose. But threatening notes to Infogrames and hopeful glances at Microprosesystems aside, I wanted to follow up on one of the work in progress games I mentioned, specifically, Clancy: The Xcom Story. I got in contact with the developer behind this promising project and he very kindly agreed to answer some of my questions.

First of all, let me say I love the idea behind your mod, have you
seen the UFO bit of Gary’s mod Worst Case Scenarios video and did
it influence you in how you want your mod to look / play? Will there be
making extensive use of physics for anything?

When I decided I wanted to make a HL2 mod based on X-Com, I knew that
I would have to limit the scope of the project. It would be
unreasonable for me to plan to recreate x-com in it’s entirety. I
decided that this game should specifically recreate the mood and
environment that I experience in the original game. One of the most
exciting elements from the original game was the destructibility of
the environments. If an alien ran behind a fence you could just shoot
the fence down! HL2 and Gary’s mod have an amazing physics engine, and
I would love to recreate the destructibility of X-com’s environments,
but I want to avoid using the physics engine as too much of a gameplay
element. Don’t get me wrong, I love the physics engine, and I’ve spent
many hours in gary’s mod building exploding rocket cars, but I want
this to feel like X-Com, not like Half-Life 2 with bits of X-Com in
it! The game will have physics, but I’ll have to tinker with
environmental destructibility to make sure it doesn’t take precedence
over the story.

I take it you played UFO: Enemy Unknown, what did you like best about
this game and did you play any of the sequels (e.g. Terror from the etc.) If so, did you like them?

The original X-Com is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve
played the game many times over. I really love the combination of
combat and economy. That sort of gameplay combination affords an
enormous amount of control over the game you’re playing.

When I used to play the game, I would make a story up in my head to go
along with the characters. I would imagine what it’s like for them to
be shot while coming down the skyranger ramp, or to be lost on the
other side of a barn while your friends have entered an alien ship. I
always thought it would be an interesting way to write a story, to
sort of transcribe what happened in the game as you played it. Sort of
a writer who had to kill off characters when they died in the game,
irrelevant of what the writer wanted. I don’t really enjoy writing as
much as some people do, so I never did that, but I think the idea of
telling stories within the X-Com setting was always something I wanted
to do.

I never liked Terror from the Deep, I barely played it. Numerous times
I tried to, but after a few minutes of it I gave up. The colors,
sounds, item names, it’s all wrong. there’s nothing new. I never
really figured out Apocalypse either. I played some of the newer
variations on the genre, such as Ufo: aftermath, and aftershock. I
thought those were pretty good, though the base building and item
management is weird, and you don’t have as much control as you did in
the original x-com. The failing of so many of the clones is that they
left out the geoscape portion. Making it just a series of combat
missions with no story. Games need to have more then fun moment, the
moments need to count for something. In the original X-Com, a
successful mission was more than just words on a screen, it was more
funding, more soldiers and weapons, more research, etc…

A single player mod is a lot of work, you have models to design and
animate, textures to create as well as maps. I can see from your video
(which I love BTW) that you already have some of that completed, could
you tell me more about what you have done and what you are aiming to
implement? For example, will you implement HWPs ?

Right now I’ve only scratched the surface of what I want to do. Most
of the work that’s completed is the script. When the script is done it
will serve as an outline for the rest of the project. From that I can
form a list of assets that the finished project will need, such as
maps, characters, guns, etc. Then I will have to scale the project as
I’m working on it. If it takes too long I can scrap less essential
levels. Basically, I hope for the best, and plan for the worst. One
thing that’s definitely going to be in the game is the X-Com base,
which by the the way is not in the video. The base will have all sorts
of things as “decoration” Everything from fighter jets to alien
containment to HWPs!, how much of that is also a functional gameplay
element remains to be seen. Depending on how much coding is done, I
would love to have functional HWPs and some fairly advanced weaponry.
I can only do so much myself, and I’m looking for anyone with
programming skill who wants to be a part of this project!

A lot of people are doing some very unique things at the moment with
the HL2 engine. A great example of that would be the HL2: Real Time
Strategy project. Are you planning a linear single player mod (which
plays like RebelStar: Tactical Command or are you
planning on implementing non linear gameplay?

Non-linear gameplay is a strange thing in the game design world.
Everyone wants it but no one is willing to make it. The real problem
with non-linear games is the time it takes to design them. Giving a
player even only two separate paths can mean turning a 10 hour game
into a 5 hour game. While I happen to think nonlinear games are my
favorite method of storytelling, I don’t really have the time or
resources to make one right now. But hey, fallout 3 is coming out
soon! Making a linear story will give me the ability to concentrate
getting good gameplay and an exciting story into the time players will
spend playing the mod.

Will we get to go inside an Alien Battleship ? What other types of
UFO might we be able to explore?

Yes! I’m planning on including an alien ship in one of the levels. And
it should be an exciting level for me to model and texture. I’m
looking forward to working on that one. The battleship is the most
likely one to include, as it’s one of the largest and most likely to
have a formidable army in it! I don’t think there’s a need for more
then one alien ship right now. The levels should have as much variety
as possible.

Ethereals, are you looking to implement them and if so, will Psionics
feature in your mod?

I’m planning on including all the aliens, how many I can actually
include will depend on time and other factors. Again, any talented
character modellers who want to be a part of this should contact me!
That being said, the ethereals are near the top of my list. They have
a tendency to float around and shoot at the player from the sky, which
would be an amazing element to include. The psionics would be a little
trickier. I hated the psionics in X-Com, it was a terrible thing to do
to the player to have all your soldiers start shooting each other. I
can’t foresee a major inclusion of this in the mod. It would be silly
to take control away from the player as any sort of gameplay
mechanism. Though I’d imagine it could be an interesting story
element. It’s certainly a part of the etherial’s character.

Who is the protagonist (i.e. the playable character) – is he/she a
civilian running for cover who gets caught up in this (for example in a
terror mission) or are you a fully fledged XCOM member?

Clancy was a police officer. After being one of the first people to
encounter an alien he was recruited to join X-Com as a soldier. Much
like Half-Life 2’s title character, Clancy will be somewhat
tight-lipped. In the mod we’ll get to learn a bit of the psychology
behind his character. Including an explanation of why he’s so quiet.

Will you be working with AI scripted teammates or will you be a lone
soldier against the aliens?

I don’t like being alone in games, it’s… Lonely. I love the way
games like Call of Duty make you feel like part of an army, you get
friends to charge over the hill with you! On the other hand, there are
definite gameplay advantages to sending the player alone. Games go too
fast if all you do is follow the army around. I don’t want the player
to assume that if you don’t shoot an alien, someone next to you will.
Loneliness and fear also play an important part in creating tension
and suspense. I’m going to have to balance it out. It would make no
sense for X-Com to send a single soldier into battle. But Clancy will
find himself on his own when it counts.

Will the game finish at Cydonia ?

The mod is not going to follow the entire story of X-Com, but rather,
Clancy’s own story. The mod only covers a small portion in the middle
of X-Com’s history. The events at Cydonia take place after the mod. I
wanted to focus less on telling the story of X-com, and more on what
it’s like for the people involved. Perhaps if I ever make a sequel I
could include Cydonia!

Is there anything else you would like to add?

It’s easy to start a project, but it’s difficult to finish one. I love
working on this mod, and I will not allow the project to be
neglected. I’m still looking for coders and character modellers who
want to be a part of the mod. So good luck out there! Thank you for
your time, and keep watching the Clancy site for more updates!

Definately one to keep an eye on, if you can help out please do! Check out the site along with the great preview video.

EEE 900 and Desktop Series

I have been holding off posting more information filtering through from the EEE camp until now. Most people are already aware that the 900 Series will be the second generation of the proven EEE brand from Asus. It uses the same form factor with some key differences in the hardware. Firstly, Asus have added a bigger (8.9″) at 1024×600 resolution TFT screen which is a welcome upgrade from the fairly anemic 700 series. On top of this, the screen will feature a touchscreen panel (previously added by a talented hardware hacker) despite Kevin Lin (VP Sales at ASUS) previously going on record dismissing the rumours that ASUS were looking into a touchscreen version. It is also likely the CPU will be upgraded although nothing concrete has been announced as well as rumours of GPS functionality in the future.

Not only that, but it appears multitouch, a technology highlighted by its wonderful implementation on the Apple iPhone, is also going to feature on the second generation laptop. This is likely to be limited to zooming in/out on photos as well as some page browsing tweaks. Apart from that, the 900 Series of EEE PC will also feature more flash memory (8 and 12Gb models being announced) as well as a hefty pricetag increase. According to ASUS, the RRP is likely to be around $500 when it starts to ship in a couple of months time.

Unfortunately, if what happened with the first generation EEE PCs repeats itself, we are likely to see the price tag of $50-80 more (especially in the UK and Europe.) The issue that concerns me here is that it slips out of the ultracheap ultraportable niche and starts to go head to head with cheap machines produced by the likes of Acer, Fujitsu Siemens and others. Whilst these machines are generally dreadfully underpowered, it is likely to dampen interest in the EEE 900 series which would be a shame.

UPDATE: An excellent video review from CeBIT2008 of the new EEE PC can be seen here.

Briefly I would also like to mention the EEE ‘desktop’ PC which has been rumoured for a while. Engadget are running a story with some leaked pictures purporting to be the EEE desktop, although ASUS have not confirmed such a product range is even in development let alone released any rough specifications. As an early prediction, I do not think these ’slimline’ desktops will do particularly well. Laptops were a different story, they presented ‘light’ mobile computing without the encumbrances of price and weight. In a market filled with low power desktop PCs, the only thing that could make the EEE desktop systems competitive (and desirable) would be a crazily low price tag (~£100, maybe £160 tops) because otherwise they are simply trying to take a slice of another niche market which already has some hungry wolves circling.