Blessed by the Potato

Wow, Portal was every bit as awesome as I heard. Neat new puzzle gameplay, hilarious computer, short but sweet. Add on cake and companion cubes and you’ve got a winner.

In fact, it took me longer to get my video card updated to a new set of drivers than it did to play through the game (about 3 hours, but I still have to play the bonus stages I unlocked). It’s an Asus made X1650 Pro (ATI) over AGP. And for some reason, ATI drivers don’t work on it. I install them, reboot, and then face a screen full of fuzz. Go into VGA mode, try another driver, repeat. When I last tried this, I ended up sticking with the out-of-date drivers that came on the CD (dated mid-2006 or so), which were good enough to run CivIV. Unfortunately, Portal just wouldn’t start up under those old drivers, so I had to try the process all over again. Fortunately, news of this stupid card’s incompatibility has spread enough that I found evidence of it when searching the web… just too bad it came too late to keep me from buying the stupid thing in the first place. To make a long story short, Asus has dropped the ball on this card, hard. Their drivers are really out of date for this card, and it is completely incompatible with other versions. I found two potential fixes: the first involved reflashing the BIOS on the card to make it think it was a Sapphire made X1650 Pro AGP. The other involved a custom version of the Catalyst drivers (“Warcat XG 7.4”) which properly recognizes this card.