LAN party @t Mikes

I know this entry is about the LAN party, but I have some not so exciting news to tell everyone first. Okay, remember that entry about G4TV (Television with Gamers) I made about 2 months ago? Well they’ve apparently sold out TechTV and now TechTV joined forces with them. Although TechTV use to be my favorite channels until May 28th showed up, I found out that The Screen Savers and Call for Help is still on in the morning. So technically speaking G4-TV is added to the long list of DirecTV channels. Occasionally I flip back and forth between Anime Unleashed and Adult Swim (Cartoon Network) at midnight. G4-TV spokes-people ware creepy tattoos and punk cargo pants now making G4-TechTV a mixed bag in my opinion.

[May 29th] Later on today my cousin gave me a call from California. David’s going to Japan in 2 weeks. He’s in the Navy because he learns to be a helicopter mechanicl. He's done with school and he's gonna be living large experiencing whatever he learned over the past year at military school. This is his military job not his civilian life job. I think he wants to become a carpenter after the military. We use to spend a lot of time together as kids so naturally we get a long together quite well. Today was a little different. We talked about Power Rangers and the call ended up with him saying I have a serious problem for knowing the actors names that were cast in Power Rangers. This all started when the White Ranger (Tommy Oliver, not his real name) in the old Power Ranger series shows up in the new Power Ranger Show, Dino Thunder. Not that it matters to me now-a-days. But I look up the actor’s bios and this particular says on his fan site he likes Korn and Linken Park. Same guy I saw on television when I was a kid, though now I have lost total respect for him now that he’s a hard rock enthusiast. He just seemed to be a nice guy in the old shows.

[May 30th] I went over to bob’s house to get rid of a TV and weight set. The TV was about 25 inches, but low resolution. My parents actually wanted to get rid of it. I took Bob to my house and we loaded the Compaq and Custom PC in the Jeep. I took all my hard drive backup cds along…just in case. Bob and I had a long conversation of when Bob and his girlfriend Angie are going to move out of his house to an apartment in River Falls, WI. Closer where he goes to school, after Bob, his dad, Randy and his dad go fishing up in Canada.

[At Mikes House] The game of choice was Unreal Tournament 2004. The people there were Bob, Mike, his wife, Jim, Joe and that other guy. Mike had a hacked iso image of all the UT2004 cds to install on everyone’s computers. It was the only way we could play UT2004. I got a couple game images and mp3 files on my hard drive from all of this. Jim was rocking (I don’t know how else to put it) Jim had like 36 frags to the second place person 20 something. I only lead the game once, that’s because I did something crazy in the game. Jim knows a lot about computers, there is little he doesn’t know. The UT2004 patch messed up our ability to use the no-cd patch. So Jim’s brilliant know-how got us all playing together again. I also downloaded MP3s from Jims server, which was cool since he had 35 GB of them. Some Pink Floid, Third Eye’s Blind, and a whole bunch of music off Jim’s hard drive. I went home at around 2 AM because, well MIke was getting tired….that is until some of the guys started to look at porno. No comment here. So, Yep, time to leave!

[At home the next day] I rushed to rip the Final Fantasy VII image to CD-ROM so I could play it. IF you haven't known, I also own the PSX version, and I was thinking of playing the PSX version this week. Than I realised that Mike had FFVII in his collection so I was very, very, extremely thrilled. I know it's one of the best PSX games in excistance and refined the RPG genre or so I heard (one of the first RPGS with C.G. Cutscenes, but cheesy ones at that) I had a glimse at the game when Bob played it at his house. When FFVII installed, the game crashed for being ment to run on Windows 95. But luckily I found a WinXP patch for the game. I plan to install Star Trek Elite Force II and play that. While it is a FPS, it does have Star Trek from it. The Federation has the most advanced technology in any Star Trek game / movie. I don’t know what the “star date” is, but it takes place in the future so I’ll live the Star Trek genre in first person form. You are a commando type recon party whom goes against the almighty Borg (seen in ST: The Next Generation, ST: Voyager, and ST: First Contact), I thought how cool! ST: Elite Force II has good reviews at IGN.com, Gamefaqs.com, Gamestats.com. Star Trek I know is a dieing franchise, but the game wasn’t a poorly financed, poorly designed game at all. In other words, it makes Star Trek look good from what I read at my favorite site, IGN.com. It got a 8.4/10. Sure, it runs on the aging Quake III engine, but it suprisenly l looks quite good supporting 1600x1200 with software anti-analyzing (good stuff.) For a long time I thought Star Trek - Elite Force II was a sleeper hit when I was thinking of buying a copy with my hard-earn cash. I found that Jim had a backup of the game so I copied it instead. :) The game disappeared from Wal-Mart this month. I wasn't really looking for it anyways, I wish they've would have kept it on the shelves. I understand though software coming in the dozen by the month so of course older software will be pushed off the shelves.

Here is a list of copy protection to help people out when backing up there games
Use a retail version or shareware version of Alcohol 120% 1.4.7 or better.

Tested OK:

1. Unreal Tournament 2004 – Securom 4x/5x | 2x speed
2. Unreal Tournament 2003 – Securom 4x/5x | 2x speed
3. Far Cry – Securom 4x/5x
4. Knights of the Old Republic - Securom 4x/5x
5. Dungeon Siege – General Protection
6. Freelancer – General Protection
7. No one lives forever 2 – Laserlock
8. Halo Combat Evolved – General Protection
9. Metal of Honor Allied Assault – General Protection
10. Call of Duty – Suricom 4x/5x
11. Diablo 2 – LaserLock (has unreal amount of errors, may take hours to rip)
12. Elder Scrolls III – Morrowind – General Protection
13. Unreal Tournament – General Protection or Laser Lock
14. Final Fantasy 7 – General Protection
15. Freelancer – General Protection
16. Quake III Arena – General Protection
17. Star Trek Elite Force II – General Protection
18. Any Games older than 2000 – General Protection

For more information on copyright protection look at http://afterdawn.com.

As for the MAC emulation I’m doing. I am going to hold off until later. My emulator of choice is Pear PC because it’s website ( http://pearpc.sourceforge.net ) has a full documentation on how to install MAC OS 10 on PC. I’m currently on the GCC step and still have a ways to go. I need a compiler apparently to add source to the file where MAC is suppose to be placed in (called a virtual drive.) I got the GCC compiler at ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/cygwin/gcc-2.95.2/ .

Cheerio dudes! Tune in for some exciting updates on this page in another 3 days!

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Getting MAC OS 10.1 to install on my PC
Date: 5/28/04 at 12:58PM

Speaking of which, I was searching on the Internet today and I was looking at Windows Emulators for Linux. I disliked Wine and I need something else. So I found WintoLin 3.0 on Emule. It doesn’t download at first…which doesn’t surprise me. It’s commercial software for Linux. I thought that everything on Linux had to be open source. Well it’s being sold for 50 dollars and comes with its own Installer. Why can’t the software take the Windows partition “/hda1/” and boot it in a window in Linux? That would be so much easier than trying to “emulate” Windows.

EMULATING MAC OS 10.1, FACT OR FICTION?

I will emulate MAC OS 10.1 if it’s the last thing I do. I may have not told you this, but I snuck a retail version of MAC OS 10.1 home from school about a year ago. MAC OS can not be installed on PC for processing reasons without an emulator. MAC OS runs exclusively on Motorola processors which blocks it from being installed on an IBM machine. Today I was looking at MAC OS emulators which claim they can set up a ‘virtual drive’ for a MAC OS to be installed. The emulator emulates the Motorola processor and Mac file system. I heard this DOS emulator Fusion 3.0 is good. It use to cost 50 dollars back in 2000, but since then it’s been abandon-ware so I can download it for free off http://emulators.com/fusion/ Now if only I could get OS 10.1 to install on it in the emulator window, that would be awesome. All my friends would ask me how did I emulate a MAC on my PC? I would smile back with a questionable grin not saying a word. I’ll tell you guys if I get MAC OS 10.1 running.

I’m also trying to get an emulator I think has some promise called Soft MAC 8.2 for Windows. However, when I run it, it says ROM file not found. I don’t know what that means? I know I want to install MAC OS 10.1 on my PC so therefore technically speaking there isn’t any software on my PC yet. Or does it mean virtual drive file? I don’t know the answer. It’s bugging the crap out of me. And if it is a virtual drive, how the heck do I get the emulator to see it? I got all my applications off http://www.emulators.com/download.htm and http://www.zophar.net/mac.html .

On another note, I also downloaded Pear PC 1.2. Pear PC is free and a very small download - 224 KB. When you extract the zip into a folder, it’ll be 620 KB. It doesn’t come with any OS10 disk image maker to install any OS on which is a little confusing to a novice MAC user like me. I need to find Macintosh bios too. Who wants to emulate a MAC, it’s so evil. MAC users are evil, why emulate it? Yes, I have to know what they know! It’s the only way I can become a genuine computer guru.

MAC OS has a Windows emulator called Virtual PC and it does fairly good job. It can emulate running any windows application on a PowerPC. I saw it working on TechTV’s The Screen Savers. Any of the dozen MAC emulators could do the same thing for my PC, right? That’s my way of thinking.

Come back soon, I’ll modify this entry as soon as I get MAC OS 10.1 running on my Windows XP! I’ll be sure to include a non-modified Paint Shop Pro image. And those of you who are already doing this…just laugh on your own time, okay! But if you have any comments to help me emulate it, please write something! I need all the help I can get.