u/passive_Gamer1234

I have a decent sized backlog of games to keep me busy until 11-19 rolls around. Today I will fire up Precinct for the first time. Picked it up on sale and have yet to try it. Anyone else playing it? Thoughts?

Howdy folks. Thought I would do an intro and offer up my gaming background. In 1976 I went out with my family to Shakeys Pizza for a nice family dinner out. In the Shakeys was a couple of arcade games and my little sister challenged me to play one called Breakout by Atari. This was my first time playing a video game.

We both played it for a while and I really liked it. I was an electronics nerd and I was working on designing and building my own computer since I could not afford an Altair or IMSAI. I wire wrapped up an 8080 SBC with 4K of dynamic RAM and a home made DMA front panel.

I would toggle machine code into it and play around with it but since I did not know any analog design, I was a digital only guy, I had no way to drive a video display. About this time I got a job as a junior engineer at a floppy disk manufacturer by using my computer as a kind of adjunct to my job application. I had dropped out of high school in the 10th grade but the company looked past my lack of a degree based on my home-grown computer design skills.

Now that I was making a decent paycheck I was able to afford a real computer and I bought an Apple ][+ which came with a version of Breakout. I played that for a bit but spent most of my time writing assembler on the machine - They released a floppy disk system for the machine and I bought a pair of drives for it.

Around 1980, games started to appear for the machine in earnest. I played Akalabeth and Hi Res Mystery House among others. Zork and Scott Adams adventure games. I loved games that created a world for you to explore. Ultima and the Infocom games along with a number of various arcade shooters. I got my latest game info from a couple of magazines that I subscribed to - Byte, Creative Computing, Interface Age and Kilobaud among others.

At this point I had transitioned from hardware to writing assembly software for the Z-80 in a teller terminal system and assembler for the IBM 360 for a bank. In the summer of 1981 I sold my Apple ][ system in order to buy an IBM PC. For me, the writing was on the wall and the PC was the future and certainly that proved to be the case.

After a year or two all of the old Apple games had been ported to the PC and a plethora of new ones started to appear and I was an avid collector and player. The Sierra Online Quest series of games was a favorite and I played them all. Working in an engineering environment I was surrounded by other nerds that loved gaming as well so there was always someone to talk to about the latest releases.

Fast forward to the 90s and I was still gaming on the PC - I had started a company with a friend that we ran part time. When we showed our prototype sound effects editing system at the NAB trade show we were approached by a sound company to buy our company outright which we agreed to do.

From that I was able to buy a house for cash and invest another $100K into it to create a dedicated home theater room / man cave with a projection system and a 15' screen with THX surround.

I was building and upgrading my computers myself at this point. However, gaming on the PC was becoming more and more frustrating. You would buy a new game and spend the first day trying to install it - reconfiguring hardware and screwing around to get the right driver versions etc.

So I said screw it and decided to switch over to consoles and see what they had to offer. I bought a 3DO and a couple of games. I loved the CD quality games and the FMV. Road Rash was a favorite and looked great on a 15' screen. Later that year I bought a PS1 and started to assemble a collection of games for it.

I chipped it so I could burn rental games and play them on it and added a game shark. the PS1 looked awesome on the home theater system and sounded great. I am also a musician playing guitar and keyboards and at the time I owned (still do in fact) A Roland D-50 synth. First time I fired up the PS1 and heard that sound I was all like holy crap that's a pre-set on the D-50 and indeed it is.

My home theater gaming setup was very popular with the neighborhood kids and a lot of gaming titles I would pick up just for them to play that I did not care about. Every day after school about 7-10 of them would come knocking to play the latest fight / racing / tomb raider what ever game.

In 1997, I met what would become my future wife. I had met her in the engineering department at the bank - She was a networking nerd. After dating for about 2 years we got married.

We lived at my house (she had an apartment) for about a year when she expressed a desire for us to buy a house together. She said she always felt like a guest in my house. And so we did. Bye bye man cave (*sniff*)

At this time my interest in gaming had fallen off. My wife was not a gamer and never expressed an interest in it so I did not do any gaming at this time. My leisure time was spent with my wife traveling, scuba diving and other activities. She taught me to cook like a chef among other things. During this time I had digitized my video collection of about 1000 laserdiscs onto my PC.

I wanted some way to play them on the TV across our internal network that the wife had built. It was 2006 and I had just bought a nice flat panel plasma HDTV. So I bought an XB360 and used some free software called Connect360 to stream my video collection out to the TV.

One day I am in Software Etc. sniffing around and I see they have a cowboy game for the 360. Red Dead Redemption. Odd name but screenshots looked good so I bought a copy of it. Picked up a few others as well. Oblivion and Fable.

A few weeks later I am playing RDR and the wife comes in and asks what movie I am watching. I tell her it's a video game and she is astonished by the quality of it. She sits beside me and watches me play for about an hour as I explain that it's an open world and demonstrate a few features to her.

I offer the controller to her but she demures and goes off to do something else. Talking to a co-worker one day he describes how his wife loves gaming - I ask if she was always that way and he says no - he converted her. I ask how and he said he bought a LEGO game and did couch co-op with her and got her hooked.

So I went and bought a copy of LEGO Star Wars the complete Saga. I played it for a bit to get a feel for it. Then one evening I suggest that we try the game together. She pushed back slightly saying she has no interest in Star Wars. I assure her that will not be an issue as it's the gameplay that will be of interest.

That was all it took. Now she is hooked. A few years later I buy the new PS4. I make a point of buying 2. One for the bedroom and one for the living room. This way we can both play and the console does not get hogged by either one of us which was becoming an issue by this point.

She loves the PS4's ability to record game play and to sleep in the middle of a game. She plays mostly LEGO titles but tries other games as well. She loves the Batman Arkham series as well as the Spiderman games.

I got her to finish the GTA V story mode finally and she loved it. I introduced her to GTA Online and she hated the griefers / try hards etc. so we started playing in a friends only session together.

When the PS5 came out and was constrained in supply she became obsessed with getting one and would spend a few hours every night trying to secure the purchase of one which she eventually did and got one for me as well. Today, we play GTA Online twice a week.

Retired now, we both have plenty of time for gaming and it is still something that we can do together and have great fun with. Now, at 70, I cannot imaging not gaming and I am very thankful that my nerdy wife is an avid and active gamer as well. But then, she is but a mere child at 65 so I expect that kind of behavior.

OK, that is my story and I am sticking with it.

I still game daily. Recently finished a GTAV Playthrough as a bit of nostalgia before VI releases. I play GTAO with my wife every week. Retired so lots of time to get through the backlog.

Edit: seems like a nice easygoing group here. Nice to see that on Reddit. I'll post a detailed history of my gaming in a few minutes :)

In an effort to get a feel for the city and it's layout, do you think it's reasonable to use The Crew 2's Miami as a kind of testing ground to get a feel for where things are in Vice City? I know that in GTA V there were elements of the city that were reversed (Hollywood sign vs. Griffith Park for example) but on the whole it holds up.

Was thinking of getting a feel for Vice City by using the Crew 2 - Thoughts?

I am a native of Los Angeles. One of the things that struck me when GTAV was released was that I thought they really nailed the feel - The vibe, as it were, of Los Angeles. Every city I have ever been to has had a distinct feel to it. From the microscopic amount of VI content that you have seen, do you think that VI will nail the real Miami feel?

I use 2 dell monitors and while my user flair says iMac I actually use a Mac Studio (M3U 96GB / 2TB). One of the monitors is connected via HDMI and the other via display port. The issue manifests on either monitor. If I open a new tab everything works properly. If I open a new window however, the mouse smears the display and displays many ghost images of the mouse pointer.

Can anyone speculate as to a resolution for this issue? It's not super critical as I almost never use the open new window command and I can certainly open a new tab and tear the tab off to it's own display if need be to work around this.

Thank you in advance.

My first modern Mac was a Mac Pro (Early 2008). Quad-Core Intel Xeon running at 2.8 GHz. It had 2 processors and 8 cores and 14GB of RAM. I had a bunch of drives in it for a total of about 6GB storage. I loved this machine. It was rock solid, had a nice number of ports on the front.

But, all good things come to an end and I needed to upgrade it due to the software I was using needing a newer OS than that machine would support.

It was 2017 and Apple did not have a reasonable upgrade from the MacPro so I ended up with an iMac 27" 5K 8 core i7 4.2GHZ with 64GB RAM and a Radeon 580 with 8GB. This was, to my mind, a temporary compromise machine. I hated the form over function design with the power switch and all of the ports on the back of it.

But, for the most part, it met my needs. After about a year the audio started to randomly crackle. Even if there was no audio playing it would just start to crackle for about 30 seconds. It might do this once or twice a week. Not the end of the world so I just lived with it.

At the end of each workday I would sleep the machine and I had about a 1 in 5 chance that I would come in in the morning to start the day and find that it had woken up at sometime during the night. I wrote a script that would log when this happened and it was generally around 2-4AM.

SUPER irritating. This never changed even as the OS evolved into new versions that I would upgrade to. The other thing it would do is kernel panic. Now I could depend on it doing this about once every 2 days or so. I wiped the boot drive and re-installed the OS clean a few times trying to overcome these kernel panics that were originating in the OS, not in my apps. But alas they never went away.

The last item that would drive me nuts is renaming a file in the finder. Randomly, I would double click on a file to re-name it, type in the new name and hit enter and it would revert back to the original name. I would have to re-name another file in the same folder to get it to revert to the new name that I had given it...

One of my primary applications got updated in January and set it's requirement to have Apple Silicon in order to run the latest version which I needed to do due to the file format change that would make my old version incompatible with the client's.

So it was time to retire the iMac and upgrade. In January I replaced the iMac with a Mac Studio M3U with 96GB of RAM and a 2TB internal SSD. It's been 7 months since I made this transition. In that time this machine has performed flawlessly. NONE of the issues I had on the iMac have manifested with this new machine.

It's sleeps properly, it has never kernel panicked, the rename issue has been resolved - I assume Tahoe took care of that, the audio system has been perfect (knock on wood). Performance has been excellent. Unlike the iMac, I have ZERO complaints with this machine. It has been 100% solid.

It sits on my desk backwards so I have easy access to the TB5 ports that I use for removable client media. This not only allows easy access to those ports it puts the power switch in a very convenient place.

My wife was running a 2012 MacPro trashcan with 12 cores as her desktop machine. I think she spent about $10K for it when she bought it new. When the Mac Mini M4 came out she bought one and upgraded the memory to the max and upgraded the storage to 1TB to replace the Mac Pro 2012.

I was a bit skeptical of how it might perform but it just annihilated that old MacPro's performance. Very impressive considering the cost difference. She hates where the power switch is at but other than that she loves that little thing.

I encouraged my wife to upgrade her Macbook Pro (15" 2015 model) that she was using for FCPX at the same time I was upgrading my iMac. She chose a 16" M4 Max with 64GB of ram. She is ecstatically happy with it and since we bought both machines in January we missed the price hikes on these.

Anyway, I just thought I would post up some positive viewpoints on our current state of our Macs. Thanks Apple. We are very pleased.

I hear it described as toxic etc. What is the story? I know it is super popular with kids.

Do I need to remove any previously installed version of NAM like the base install?