CVGM.net - Chiptune, Demoscene and RetroGame Music

Hi,

Several people have asked in the past about the donations to CVGM, so I thought it was time that I put this together to explain a bit about it, so I don't have to keep answering the same questions over and over again

CVGM accepts donations to help pay the monthly server fees and bandwidth for the hosting & our streams, currently I (FishGuy876) pay this out of my own pocket, which works out to just over $90 a month. The server we use is an 8-Core Intel Xeon CPU X5650, upped to 16GB of ram, it is dedicated and resides at the wonderful Joes Datacenter in Kansas City, Missouri.

The site is an expensive hobby for me, and while I don't mind paying the fees, I do appreciate donations to help with covering some of these costs. The site has grown tremendously over the last few years, so any kind of donation is truly appreciated. Donations are completely voluntary, and no-one is obliged to do so. However, if you really love what the site does for you, please consider a small donation.

I will now present some methods for donation that have been asked about over the last few months.

PayPal Donations
PayPal is one of the easiest ways to donate. You can donate using a one-time system, by clicking the Donate! button in the "Meet The Dream Team" section. From there, you can set up regular donations of any value.

Patreon Donations
I still don't know how I feel about setting up a Patreon account for donations, as for me I see too many people using it the wrong way. If enough people ask about it, I guess i can set up something and just go from there.

Other Methods
If you would like to donate in other ways, or a different variant of any of the above then feel free to email me at fishguy876 [at] cvgm.net for more info. Thanks!

Extra Special Donations
I would like to thank DarkWolf for donating a Sega Nomad to CVGM. This will be put to great use recording Genesis soundtracks.

I have received a few questions about BitCoins, and how people can get a hold of them so that they can donate them. There are a couple of ways to get them, you could either purchase some online (through a source such as Mt Gox or Tradehill, or you can use your computer to "mine" for them.

Mining for BitCoins is actually a fairly simple process. If you have a decent ATI or nVidia video card in your computer, you can use it to mine for bitcoins fairly efficiently. You can use a CPU to mine for coins, though a video card GPU will mine for them many times faster and more efficient. I will post a link to a resource where you can look up your hardware and get an idea for the speed it can mine.

The best software to use for mining on Windows is GUIMiner, it is available to download from http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=3878.0. Download and run the EXE, and it will extract to a folder of your choice (creating one called guiminer). We reccomend mining in the rfcpool mining pool (https://www.rfcpool.com) where you will need to register an account to get started. Once created, launch GUIMiner and got to file -> New Miner and select OpenCL or Phoenix for ATI cards, or CUDA for nVidia. You can also select the ufasoft CPU miner if you wish to use your processor. You should change the Server dropdown box to 'Other' so you can enter your own pool details (on versions after 0701, rfcpool is listed in the dropdown box). In the host name, enter pool.rfcpool.com and your username you registered with. If you added a worker, you will need to lay out the username as UserName_WorkerName. Password can be anything. Once entered, click Start Mining and watch your coins come in on your rfcpool stats page!

There are dozens of resources on the web for the best ways to optimize your setup for mining, I can try to answer some of them if people get stuck on some of the basic questions.

Additional Links:

BitCoin hardware Summary - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
rfcpool website - https://www.rfcpool.com

Screenshots:


My GUIMiner summary screen on my nVidia GTS 450 card. I have an aggressive & conservative mode, so I can use the PC for games while mining, and aggressive mode for when I want it to run flat out.


My settings screen for nVidia. The CUDA miner will automatically figure out the best settings for your card.

Can you PM me an Address to send a money order???