Emulated Linux on Dell!!!!

Sorry about the 4 plus day period between this post and last post. Actually, I was very busy today. First, I played Final Fantasy X-2, and then I played a little Mega Man 7. Mega Man 7 was fun, just not as fun as Final Fantasy X-2. I talked to David for four hours (I’ll get to this later) than after. On Wednesday, I did figure out how to burn Knoppix CD to ISO, and emulate Linux on my Dell. Big applause for me.

Today, I got Linux to run on my Dell computer. It’s not the conventual way either. The problem is no emulation software to boot Linux partitions on Windows were free until I came across Corporative Linux 0.6.1. Anyways, to make this work, Windows needs to fake a cold boot of Linux. My blasted Dell has this issue of locking non-Windows OS out so when I take Linux related college classes I can not work on Linux on my Dell. This program runs under Windows, and runs Linux by booting it up naturally. Anyways, that’s how I can use Linux on my computer. On my other computers, I do it the normal way. Otherwise I work on Linux homework on my other PCs.

On Wednesday I found a free CD image, containing over 50 open source programs for Windows called GNUWIN. I know, to many bloggers, MS windows is the only option. For those of you who game through Windows, this software downloadable off several servers linking to http://gnuwin.org gives you almost every Microsoft Windows port of Linux software in the world. To burn this program to CD for free, I use Burn4Free at http://burn4free.com. All programs included with GNUWIN II are open source, not freeware. Freeware is closed source software that’s freely available. Open source and freeware is much like free Mountain Dew. If Mt. Dew tastes great, and if it were free, most people would gratefully take it and think nothing of it. I also know, from being a Windows user myself, that whatever works, commercial or not commercial, will be what most users will use. It makes perfect sense doesn’t it? This defiantly applies games. If it has good graphics, and very awesome game play physics then most people will get that game. I am like this. I have this huge videogame collection with over 300 games.

Thursday, I didn’t go anywhere special so I concentrated on cartoon sketches. I have my own drawing which doesn’t fall under any other category besides amateur. It’s better than stick-men drawings, and my sketches are even partially 3D! I drew myself holding a can of mountain dew, but it found itself in the recycle bin. O_o. I’m not going to post any pics on this blog when my I’ve just started. The reason being is I wanted to test myself if I could learn how to draw anime off the drawing tutorials. I am really not an anime person nor am I a big artist. The hardest aspect is trying the get the eyes perfect. I know if I can make one eye well, I can always mirror it using Paint. But that didn’t stop me from finding out just what it takes to draw the cartoons you see on TV. It’s a lot of erasing on MS Paint. I use Paint for everything related to drawing pictures. I downloaded tutorials to my hard drive using the SAVE AS option, and followed the instructions. I examined the pics of course. That was the easy part. I’ve been working on this from 10PM Thursday up to 7AM Friday. This pretty much kept me away from the Playstation 2 the pass 24 hours. Right now I’m trying to beat Chapter 3 in Final Fantasy X-2. I didn’t continue practicing drawing tonight, other things were much too important.

I got my tutorials from the following sites:

• Animeworld.com

I am about 44% into Final Fantasy X-2 now. In each chapter I skip the Macalania Woods. The bluish blobs that change shape and squish Yuna, Rikku and Payne stealing their entire HP. It happens all the time when I’m in this place. It makes me mad, I am trying to avoid this place whenever possible. Anyhow, I’ve made it to Kilika Island, and did that little mini game with the guards. Once in the jungle, I couldn’t get pass the bamboo stakes, and accidentally saved during the process. If I can’t get pass this then I will have to start Chapter 3 over again. Two or three hours will be lost. I have 3 game saves on my memory card. One at my current location, one at the start of chapter 3, and the third must be a new game because I was only 2 hours into it.

Now that I got the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, I might as well get the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection too. Right now I don’t really know. I am not a 2D fighter fan. I don’t like Marvel vs. Capcom for it’s insane speed for combos and stuff. Although Street Fighter is slower, this previous experience ruined my interest in 2D fighting games. SFAC comes with the Street Fighter 2 Animated *anime* Movie. Hmm, I wonder if I stick this game into a normal DVD player, it’ll show the movie? Probably not since the black label says Playstation 2 in white bold letters. When I was at Bob’s house yesterday, he had made a new friend, who thinks Mega Man is really cool. This guy wants MMAC, and he thought it was 50 dollars? I knew what the price was so I told him. Anyways, I wanted to watch someone who knew the old games so I could get some extra tips. Frankly, the game is not kind to me. MMAC was one of the top selling games this month on both Gamecube and PS2. It’s a very good thing I haven’t been around someone who hated Mega Man yet.

I had my 2nd voice-over-IP conversation today. My last one was over a year ago with my friend Bob. Today I talked to my cousin, David, through MSN Messenger 6.2. I know – people do this all the time. I don’t because it slows down my surfing speeds. We first talked about Xbox. David owns an Xbox, but he doesn’t own many games for it. He only uses it to watch movies, but he also bought surround sound speakers like mine but better, because they’re expensive. Sony makes awesome stuff! The Navy gets them from the States, and the US merchandise store on the base can carry only so many games. He apparently lives by a navy landing strip so he sees aircraft take off and land. David’s cell phone is out of service in Japan so the only way I can speak to him is MSN messenger’s voice-over-IP service. We talked about various Navy aircraft, a little about what is going to replace what and when. He bought a Star Trek movie collection with three movies which he told me all about it. We both like ST: Voyager. He’ll give me some more episodes when he comes home near the end of the year. I told him about Project 64K, and how he could connect to a gaming server to play Goldeneye 007 or Mario Kart 64 with me.

Some Interesting news from NGemu.com saying that Xbox emulation is possible at full speed on current PCs. Before I was saying that Xbox emulation would only be possible on 4 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB of SDRAM, and a 128-bit Geforce 5700. According to NGemu, some XBOX games like Turok: Evolution runs well on a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM and Nvidia Geforce 5600. The developers of both Xeon and Cxbx are working hard trying to find ways to fully emulate Halo, and Panzer Dragoon Orta. The current Xbox emulators need a BIOS, and a copied ISO image from the original Xbox DVD. I tried running Xbox version of Halo on my Dell, and I couldn’t get it to work. I will keep my eye on Cxbx emulator when it comes out. I’m excited for the first release! In case you were wondering, I want the XBOX game to be playable from the DVD-ROM drive and not ISO. Three emulators achieved this, EPSXE, SSF, and PCSX.

On the other hand, PS2 emulation sounds to be getting more practical. The latest unreleased build of PCSX2 is able to runs games in real time from the screenshots I saw. I downloaded the latest and greatest Direct X 9.0 plugin (GSPX9) for PCSX2, and tried to get MMAC to work on it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the emulator to recognize the plugin.

Then by the end of my conversation with David I told him to imagine himself in a packer jacket, a cheese head hat, with green and yellow face paint on a horse! I thought this was very funny. He said I was very tired, and needed to stop talking too him. I did listen to him.