To date I have primarily used the Tablet PC for business use, but there have been a few moments where it’s been used for non-business. Our youngest child has used it for drawing and I’ve tried out a couple of games that came preinstalled with it, and more recently a game that was made for the Pocket PC and ported to the Tablet (Bubble Bust). Haven’t really put the Tablet through the hardcore PC gaming tests. Yet.

That’s right, after six months of Tablet PC ownership, it was time to see if my M1400 tablet could run something besides business apps. How would it hold up as a gaming machine?

I was a bit cynical at the get go, because I didn’t have much success running the video program Visual Communicator when making the pilot episode of The Two. In the past I’ve had trouble running the Massive Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Everquest on some lower end systems, so I decided to try installing and running this on the Tablet PC as a good benchmark test.

But first I needed to upgrade the Everquest game software as we were woefully behind on the game’s upgrades and expansion packs. Our last purchase was Kunark!

(One bad thing about these MMORPGs is they are never-ending. So it’s not something to do for those who don’t have tons of free time or can limit play sessions.)

A trip to Best Buy revealed the Everquest Platinum edition for $19.99 USD. This comes with the original Everquest Classic game and the first seven expansion packs: Ruins of Kunark, The Scars of Velious, The Shadows of Luclin, The Planes of Power, The Legacy of Ykesha, Lost Dungeons of Norrath, and The Gates of Discord.

At one time, like back in 2000/2001 we had two Everquest accounts and built up a couple of characters to level 12: a Druid, Enchanter and an Ogre warrior. One month between 2000/2001 and present I reactivated one of the EQ accounts for a single month and Sony still had our characters in tact. Nice feature for returning players that their stats on characters they’ve played quite a bit don’t get deleted. I don’t know what level a character has to be for this to take place, but in our case, all three of our level 12 characters were there a few years ago and I was curious fi they would still be in tact in 2005.

But first the install. You’ll note from the first picture above that I installed EQ while in portrait mode. Since the M1400 is a slate which includes no CD/DVD player, I used an external CD drive connected via USB to install EQ Platinum.

The install screens were a bit off in portrait mode, so I changed to landscape orientation with 1024×768. Also, the cursor was moving around rapidly and uncontrollable from the digital pen so I needed to plug in a USB mouse. I also had a USB keyboard handy. My original thought was maybe I could use Synergy to control the game via my main machine mouse and keyboard and not have to use USB.

A good 30 minutes later — yes, it took that long to load all the game files for all expansions — I was at the login screen. Foolish me that I hadn’t yet renewed our Sony Station account, so I had to go there first before being able to do anything. Once upon a time EQ used to have a free demo area where players could check their hardware out. Didn’t see this option here.

When it came to subscription options I noticed that they are raising their prices by $2/month (from $12.95/month to $14.95/month — both + tax) and that they now have a Mac version. I’d like to test out the Mac version someday to see if/how it would run on my Mac. They also have additional options for accessing other Station games. For $21.99 + tax you can get access to EverQuest, Everquest II (plus 4 additional character slots), Everquest Mac edition, Planetside, Star Wars Galaxies (we have this one too) and the three station Pass games (Infantry Online, Cosmic Rift and Tanarus). This deal seemed more attractive than the base Everquest subscription. There is also the most expensive $39.95/month Everquest Legends subscription. The Legends sub seems ideal for MMORPG gamers who have lots of gaming time on their hands.

I signed up for the $12.95/month option and added the USB keyboard. Upon first login and choosing the EQ server our characters were on (Cazic Thule) I saw this:

Wow. How much I’ve forgotten about the game! It took me a good 30 minutes just to get back into the swing of what keys to press and mouse actions. I was very rusty.

The picture above shows the West Commonlands desert view but doesn’t totally capture how gorgeous Everquest looks on the M1400 Tablet PC. I was seriously impressed. There was no lag or slowdown as far as moving the keyboard but the USB mouse seemed to move a bit sluggish. I might have to tweak some setting inside EQ on that. Overall, the M1400 passed this install and first play test admirably.

Uh oh, jittering screen
The second day (today) was more of a struggle. When I first loaded EQ the screen started jittering back and forth uncontrollably and wouldn’t let me get to the login until I pressed the hardware button to bring up the Windows Task Manager. And then this stablized the video, but only until the Windows Task Manager was on screen. Sort of a hokey workaround but it worked to stop the jittering during the login process. Once in the game, though, the jittering returned and I suspected that it had something to do that Windows was loading the game in a window when it should have been maximized.

This didn’t help. So I went to Sony support to see what searching around there would produce. I found this thread which recommended to delete the eqclient.ini file which is in the Program Files -> Sony -> Everquest and then restart EQ. This removed the jittering. I then went into the options inside EQ and reset to 1024×768 with 32 bit depth. That seemed to be the best setting. To test these settings further I rebooted and went in again to see if the jittering returned.

The reboot was successful!

BTW, didn’t take my character long to get slain by a couple of Giant Spiders. Man, the draw of EQ is strong, even after years! Fellow EQ players, if you “see” Odusmaster, then send a tell-o. Now I’m thinking about trying out Everquest II and Star Wars Galaxies to see how those games look. The Station Access (Standard) is calling!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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