Hello world again. Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of D-Day. I have nothing to say about D-Day except a lot of people lost their lives trying to keep world peace. I seen D-Day in a lot of WWII films like Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day so I guess I have an idea what it was like on June 06, 1944.
I was practically running Sega Dreamcast discs on my computer. In reality I was only playing a Tetris demo that ran on Chankast. So techicially speaking I was playing a "Dreamcast game." I know a few of you are really excited to emulate the Dreamcast, that’s why you came here today. Chankast 0.1 is the best Dreamcast emulator out. It runs the Dreamcast boot screen fine and detects my controller. Someday I’m going to buy a nice Logitech gamepad for my PC. I have to go all the way into Woodbury, MN to get one because no one sells any in Hudson, WI. Wal-mart sells Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and they don’t have a Flight Yoke to go with it? Don’t they know that plenty of people will cash out 30 dollars for a decent Flight Yoke USB 2.0 controller? I got Nyko Air Flow PC for 30 dollars, a pretty good deal considering that you'll pay twice as much for Logitech’s. I use a controller to play games emulated with Project 64K, EPSXE, Gens, J Nes, Falcon 4.0 and now Chankast! I don’t like Flight Yokes as much as Gamepads, period! I read off NGemu.com that Chankast is the only emulator that can emulate games, thus being light years ahead of other Dreamcast emulators available for download. Again - with some difficulty to emulating the game. I expect this though. Some emulation is better than none. Soon we won’t have to burn the disc to our hard drives, Chankast will just run it off DVD-ROM. I haven’t seen a specific plug-in for Dreamcast games yet. I think it’s really awesome that there is a way to play Dreamcast games on my PC – that is if I can copy an ISO image. For those of you who hate to look for proper BIOS, I made it easier for you. I have copy on my server.
The clerk at the videogame store in Hudson told me that Sega discontinued the Dreamcast because the some one came out with a Boot Disk which could boot the Dreamcast enabling copied games to playable on it. Only a small portion of the GDROM can be read by CD-ROMs. The only way anyone including me can play Dreamcast games on the computer is to download Dreamcast images off the Internet. Discontinuing Dreamcast was a good decision on Sega’s part because in 2001 they told IGN.com that they were barely breaking even on production costs. This was when Sega stock was down and Sammy Corporation bought them out as of 2003. In the gaming industry’s view, Sega’s Dreamcast is a failure, although I believe most people say that because they never owned one. Oh yeah and the little fact that Sega stopped making games for it. Sega stopped making Dreamcast games because everyone was saving for Playstation 2…. I had my Dreamcast three years earlier than my Playstation 2. So come on! Dreamcast had Soul Caliber, Resident Evil 2, Street Fighter 3 Alpha, Crazy Taxi, Skies of Arcadia, Grandia II, Chu Chu Rocket and one of the better 3D Sonic games. I personally loved the Dreamcast for 3 years (1999 - 2002) until I got a Gamecube in 2001.
Required Files to Emulate DC disk:
• Find game image off the Internet (impossible to play discs on PC)
• DC BIOS (multiple languages) http://pressenter.com/~scampbel/dcbios.rar 986 KB
• Chankast 0.2a http://www.chanka.org/ 600 KB
• DAMEON TOOLS 3.46 – http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/portal/portal.php 500 KB ( to mount cd image to a “virtual drive” )
I’ve played around with the Sega Saturn emulator, Saturone, and it’s coming along. I found a working USA bios for it. It was a little difficult finding one because most bios on pear networks are the Japanese bios. I tested the emulator with Sonic 3D Blast which ended up with the Sega splash screen and Travelers Tales screen loading, and than the emulator crashed. The BIOS screen as some gamers like to call it shows up flawlessly. In fact I played an audio cd and it worked which proves the BIOS works. Now it’s up to the people working on the emulator to make it emulate the games. It’s hard to say this is illegal because I’m running legit Saturn CDs in my CD-ROM. And it is unlikely for someone else without Saturn CDs to use this emulator unless you’ve either a.) Played a demo or b.) backup a friend’s Saturn game and used it in Saturone.
Other BIOS on my server:
PSX – http://www.pressenter.com/~scampbel/psonebios.zip (works with EPSXE) 400 KB
PS2 – http://www.geocities.com/hoppymister2003/ps2bios.zip (works with PCSX2) W O R K I N G L I N K !!!
Saturn - http://geocities.com/hoppymister2003/SaturnBios.zip (works with Saturone ) W O R K I NG l i n k !!!
* Fact for Europeans - Gameshark or Action Replay will allow any Playstation to be multiregional and this also works with Playstation emulators and the like. I've tested Action Replay on EPSXE for Legend of Dragoon and the cheats work with it.
As for today, I’m going to try to contact one of my friends. Meanwhile, to pass the time, I'll watch the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. If I start at 8am I can watch non-stop until 5:30PM. Two best friends of mine drove back from a week flshing in Canada. I don’t think neither of them will want to come over since they drove 100 miles. Again, Bob will probably want my help either tomorrow or Monday moving stuff to his new apartment. His girlfriend lives with him now, and they need a place to say. My parents and I have gotten along well. I can go pretty much where I want without having to worry about gas money. I know that’s a great trade-off for cleaning my room and helping out with what ever needs helping out on. My parents are getting old so they like to have a young man around the house. Getting a job has cross my mind hundreds of times though I’m having so much fun downloading stuff. I’m on the Internet most of my time. I do try to get away from this blasted computer some days. Today wasn’t anything special so instead of wasting it sleeping all day, I play some games. I really want to get Direct Way. I occasionally day-dream of what I can use cable/broadband for. With the water damage costs, I may have wait into 2005. Downloading the big files off the T1 server at school is really fun. What takes me a day to download can only take 30 minutes.
Free Software Pick of the Day:
1st dialer - http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Network_and_Internet/Dial-up_Networking_Dialers/ 1st_Dialer_Download.html
Sunday, June 06, 2004
My cousin got to fly in real navy simulator this w
It is only fair that I tell a little bit about stealth aircraft. Unless another country has an aircraft using stealth technology, none I know about. Only Americans have aircraft’s that show up as a small bird on radar. I know to some people that may be really cool and to others is very disturbing. The fact is the US government is not sharing any information on what alloy the airplane is made of. FACT: we know its very light and an extremely reflexive metal which forces radio waves to bounce off into space not returning to the radar command post. That’s a good thing for the pilot. THE F-117a Nighthawk is entirely controlled by computers and supposedly can not be flown without them. Nighthawk bombers were used in the Operation Iraqi Storm last year bombing military bases.
I think the most interesting plane in my era is the F-22 Raptor. It’s not only stealth based but also can go past MACH 2 and has alternating jet engines for those 90 degree angles without the plane locking up (Stalling) or blacking out. It’s crusin’ speed is just under Mach 1. Some say the Raptor is one of the easier aircraft to control in the air force.
I have this cousin, David, who is assigned in the West in California somewhere by San Francisco at an navial academy where he says there is a very, very cool air-force simulator complete with all the bells and whistles of a real aircraft also having spectacular graphics. He said the airforce academy got it this year. I assume that this simulator can only simulate one type of aircraft. I mean look at the screenshot. The detail in the game is much higher than any computer’s hardware ability today. Even if you have your Microsoft Fight Simulator 2004 pumped all the way at 1600x1200 with 16x anti-analyzing, this air force simulator would have more detail (higher resolution) than anything ever seen to the average computer user. AHEM! Non-navy people that is.
What’s interesting is the military simulators that the Navy uses are designed to control exactly like the airplane even the stealthly F-117A, so my point is, in a game like MS Flight Simulator 2004, how can they know about how a Nighthawk would fly if it is unlikely that one of them ever flown in one? I haven’t really seen anything big in flight simulation since it’s first appearance in 3D. Maybe I’m wrong and something in the “gameplay” has changed. The computer knows over a billion worst case scenarios. David says it took him 10 times to get off the ground. I suppose there is also a tutorial on these simulators as well, so I mean he wasn’t in the dark when he first controlled one. I mean where do game designers know how military aircraft jets fly if they are only game designers? Thus, I conclude most game designers aren’t retired civilian pilots and ex-navy pilots. I don’t know maybe there are a few ex-navy pilots who develop games after serving? Of course actual pilots have to test the simulators to see if they work just like in real life.
It’s like this….I like to speculate. I also wonder where the Navy gets it’s hardware because no company can make processors this fast yet except for maybe IBM or Intel. And making them costs as much as $3000 each. Maybe IBM hardware designers get the RAM, and sound-cards for the simulators at Best Buy or something?
So now I end my story on flight simulators. And if I had something like a high quality Logitech yoke pad and Flight Simulator 2004 or even Microsoft Combat Sim 3, if you got past the basics, how much more life-like can the game play be? I have a game called Falcon 4.0, developed by Microprose. Micropose did make 50 maps for Falcon 4.0. It’s very hard, was made back in 1998 and use to crash often on my computer. Back then it required an 8MB graphics card and 166 MHz CPU. A Pentium II at 400 MHz with 128 MB or RAM, and a 16MB graphics card was recommended. So it’s just a tad out of date graphically. LOL! But do graphics really matter that much? I don’t think they do last time I checked. The game had bugs even after I used the patch. However, it still could look very realistic on my PC, still had a lot of “flat terrain” that looked flushed out for some reason? Anyways, the instruction booklet for the game is damn big - like 400 pages thick! I didn’t bother to read it all just jumped into the pilot’s seat and learned by crashing. I learned that flying is much easier than landing. Landing is a whole different can of beans. Flying is just about staying in the sky, but all things must come down sooner or later. So if you learn to land your aircraft, that’s about 2/3 of the whole game. I successfully landed a F-16D Strike Eagle in this game many times...though I keep running off the road. I'm only begining to fly in aerial combat. The instruction booklet comes in a 3 ring binder…ouch! Other flight games I’ve played are Ace Combat 04 and Air Force Delta I have flown in a real aircraft, never piloted one.
Patches I use for Falcon 4.0 are:
- Official patch from Microprose v1.08 (17 MB)
- Super Pack 4.0 (134 MB)
- SP 4.1 hotfix on top of SP 4.0. (8 MB)
I think the most interesting plane in my era is the F-22 Raptor. It’s not only stealth based but also can go past MACH 2 and has alternating jet engines for those 90 degree angles without the plane locking up (Stalling) or blacking out. It’s crusin’ speed is just under Mach 1. Some say the Raptor is one of the easier aircraft to control in the air force.
I have this cousin, David, who is assigned in the West in California somewhere by San Francisco at an navial academy where he says there is a very, very cool air-force simulator complete with all the bells and whistles of a real aircraft also having spectacular graphics. He said the airforce academy got it this year. I assume that this simulator can only simulate one type of aircraft. I mean look at the screenshot. The detail in the game is much higher than any computer’s hardware ability today. Even if you have your Microsoft Fight Simulator 2004 pumped all the way at 1600x1200 with 16x anti-analyzing, this air force simulator would have more detail (higher resolution) than anything ever seen to the average computer user. AHEM! Non-navy people that is.
What’s interesting is the military simulators that the Navy uses are designed to control exactly like the airplane even the stealthly F-117A, so my point is, in a game like MS Flight Simulator 2004, how can they know about how a Nighthawk would fly if it is unlikely that one of them ever flown in one? I haven’t really seen anything big in flight simulation since it’s first appearance in 3D. Maybe I’m wrong and something in the “gameplay” has changed. The computer knows over a billion worst case scenarios. David says it took him 10 times to get off the ground. I suppose there is also a tutorial on these simulators as well, so I mean he wasn’t in the dark when he first controlled one. I mean where do game designers know how military aircraft jets fly if they are only game designers? Thus, I conclude most game designers aren’t retired civilian pilots and ex-navy pilots. I don’t know maybe there are a few ex-navy pilots who develop games after serving? Of course actual pilots have to test the simulators to see if they work just like in real life.
It’s like this….I like to speculate. I also wonder where the Navy gets it’s hardware because no company can make processors this fast yet except for maybe IBM or Intel. And making them costs as much as $3000 each. Maybe IBM hardware designers get the RAM, and sound-cards for the simulators at Best Buy or something?
So now I end my story on flight simulators. And if I had something like a high quality Logitech yoke pad and Flight Simulator 2004 or even Microsoft Combat Sim 3, if you got past the basics, how much more life-like can the game play be? I have a game called Falcon 4.0, developed by Microprose. Micropose did make 50 maps for Falcon 4.0. It’s very hard, was made back in 1998 and use to crash often on my computer. Back then it required an 8MB graphics card and 166 MHz CPU. A Pentium II at 400 MHz with 128 MB or RAM, and a 16MB graphics card was recommended. So it’s just a tad out of date graphically. LOL! But do graphics really matter that much? I don’t think they do last time I checked. The game had bugs even after I used the patch. However, it still could look very realistic on my PC, still had a lot of “flat terrain” that looked flushed out for some reason? Anyways, the instruction booklet for the game is damn big - like 400 pages thick! I didn’t bother to read it all just jumped into the pilot’s seat and learned by crashing. I learned that flying is much easier than landing. Landing is a whole different can of beans. Flying is just about staying in the sky, but all things must come down sooner or later. So if you learn to land your aircraft, that’s about 2/3 of the whole game. I successfully landed a F-16D Strike Eagle in this game many times...though I keep running off the road. I'm only begining to fly in aerial combat. The instruction booklet comes in a 3 ring binder…ouch! Other flight games I’ve played are Ace Combat 04 and Air Force Delta I have flown in a real aircraft, never piloted one.
Patches I use for Falcon 4.0 are:
- Official patch from Microprose v1.08 (17 MB)
- Super Pack 4.0 (134 MB)
- SP 4.1 hotfix on top of SP 4.0. (8 MB)
Saturday, June 05, 2004
Yet another webpage design by me!
Brand new webpage template I’ve made. It look better then my previous webpage. Address didn’t change. It has Gordon Freeman on it. It took me from 5:30am to 11:30am to do everything. I saw this page called Final Fantasy Dream, and it seemed to be pretty popular, so I copied her design. I tried to keep anime out of my webpage design, but I was compelled to have one from Soul Caliber. Besides I have a Squaresoft website http://www.geocities...01/square_index.html . Squaresoft should surprise fans with Chrono Break screenshots anytime now. Chrono Break is suppose to talk right after or years after Chrono Cross, which I played through, it was okay. The characters didn’t talk…and there is something about silence. I mean if voice acting can destroy a game….why even have it? Good example, Super Mario Sunshine.
I started a Live Journal website [ http://www.livejourn...com/~renegadeviking/ ] I only had two entries. I started with introducing myself and what I’m was doing that day. It seems like the only way to start a new blog. About Movable Type, my ISP and Geocities don’t support PHP so there’s no way I can play with Movable Type. The directions are easy to follow. Earlier I was looking at a bluish theme for my movable type webpage.
Wednesdays are my days off from school. I watched The Rock (Sean Connery + Nicholas Cage) and Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) I forget the tag line in Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry is better because it’s a man to man action flick. Kind-of like The Godfather was. Two vendetta’s face each other in the whole movie. The good guy always wins. The two movies have nothing in common.
I had to make due with my free time. My cat was sick and crapped all over the house and mom brought him to the vet. Bob and I planned to do something on Monday, it seems that he has to look for a new house. Bob’s 20 and he’s going to school. Maybe his sisters are driving him nuts over Internet usage. He’s looking at a place in New Richmond. Plus he seems to be always busy which doesn’t allow time for friends.
In reality I was looking for a new friend. I lost all my high school friends. And I’ve been home mostly. I wanted to go to the beach at Willow River State Park , but that requires money for a window sticker. Riding bike means free access, though it would tire me before I swim. I think a sticker is $15. If it was that much -- I would have gone swimming at the YMCA.
Chow! Until next time!
I started a Live Journal website [ http://www.livejourn...com/~renegadeviking/ ] I only had two entries. I started with introducing myself and what I’m was doing that day. It seems like the only way to start a new blog. About Movable Type, my ISP and Geocities don’t support PHP so there’s no way I can play with Movable Type. The directions are easy to follow. Earlier I was looking at a bluish theme for my movable type webpage.
Wednesdays are my days off from school. I watched The Rock (Sean Connery + Nicholas Cage) and Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) I forget the tag line in Dirty Harry. Dirty Harry is better because it’s a man to man action flick. Kind-of like The Godfather was. Two vendetta’s face each other in the whole movie. The good guy always wins. The two movies have nothing in common.
I had to make due with my free time. My cat was sick and crapped all over the house and mom brought him to the vet. Bob and I planned to do something on Monday, it seems that he has to look for a new house. Bob’s 20 and he’s going to school. Maybe his sisters are driving him nuts over Internet usage. He’s looking at a place in New Richmond. Plus he seems to be always busy which doesn’t allow time for friends.
In reality I was looking for a new friend. I lost all my high school friends. And I’ve been home mostly. I wanted to go to the beach at Willow River State Park , but that requires money for a window sticker. Riding bike means free access, though it would tire me before I swim. I think a sticker is $15. If it was that much -- I would have gone swimming at the YMCA.
Chow! Until next time!
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
I got Longhorn XP Pro free, and it isn't stealing
Do you want the next version of Windows Free? Then head over to Soft32.com to download your free version of the Longhorn Desktop Enhancement 6.0 Software. I’m only the 151389th one to download it. What it does is changes your desktop to look like the Longhorn Professional screenshots you see on the Internet now-a-days. It’s also supposed to fix some bugs in Windows XP. Interesting enough it looks just like the screenshot in my Longhorn entry. Looks can be deceiving since the Microsoft team may develop a more stable version that’ll cost 200+ dollars when it comes out. The interesting part is Longhorn Professional XP’s (Freeware Version by unknown third party)About box. The About box gives all the credit to Microsoft. Longhorn is patented by Microsoft isn’t it? I know Longhorn runs on top of WinXP. I look at the Windows version it is still 5.1.2600, same exact number it was in Windows XP. I hope Microsoft doesn’t track down the developers of the Freeware application and sue them. They did give Microsoft all the credit. No names appear from anywhere.
Features in the Longhorn Pro XP Mod available at http://www.tcmagazine.net/ and http://Soft32.com
• You can change your Start menu to have 5 different themes
• It’s a lot like Windows Blinds except more stable.
• 5 themes that look like the screenshots that changes the taskbar, the scroll bar, the Start menu, the color of the toolbar, the outer rims of the graphical user interface
• Puts a drop down menu on top of each directory window. If you don’t like it, you can always remove it.
• The ability to go back to the WIN XP PRO theme and WINDOWS Classic theme without uninstalling the Longhorn Pro XP Much of Win XP Pro stays intact
• Changes Boot Screen to that nice Green Hills, Blue Sky theme with the Longhorn Logo on it.
Some very cool sites to check out ….
1. Fasterfiles.com - Here is a very, very cool site for downloading UT2003, UT2004, Quake 3, Half-life, Far Cry, Neverwinter Nights mods (includes maps, skins, models, uploaders)
2. Soft32.com – This is where I found the Longhorn tweak for Windows XP. Counter-strike 1.5 and 1.6 can be downloaded here as well!
3. IGN.com – A site that specializes in reviewing games, movies, cars, models and supporting RPGs with http://nwnvault.ign.com, http://ffxivault.ign.com and such.
4. Sourceforge.org – has a TON of open source software. Some programs carry over from Linux like Gimp 2.0, and Gaim and make a 1st appearance on the x86 Windows OS. Other programs like CDEX use Sourceforge.org as their primary server. Most of the downloads there are supported by phone company servers and university servers so you’re likely to get the best bandwidth 90% of the time.
5. lame.sourceforge.net – the only open source MP3 encoder and in my opinion one is enough because it does compress mp3s at a good ratio and does sound as good as any other MP3 encoder. Computers are fast enough now-a-days that speed isn’t an issue. An example would be on my computer, a 3 minute 50 second song compressed at 128 KBPS takes approx. 23 seconds. Real.com says Xing is faster. I don’t need an encoder 5 or 6 seconds faster than LAME that makes you pay 40 dollars for it. In fact you don't have to pay for Xing, but it's really hard to find the MP3 encoder. I just found the Xing MPEG encoder.
6. http://www.tcmagazine.net/ - Full of hardware / software reviews and top downloads for the latest software.
[#2 Topic] Like I said before, gamers like to go all out and they can’t do that with the game lagging, that’s why we have the wonderful thing called patches! While patches don’t necessarily make the game more fun, most of the time it does. Patches are made famous by fixing those crash bugs that are no fun at all. I know I’m getting a little off topic but the difference between Diablo 2 v1.0 and v1.7 was enormous. I know the v1.03 patch is famous because Diablo 2 Battle Set comes pre-loaded with it.
The famous game, Planet Side, became famous when the patches made the game much worst than the retail version. It started off very popular and it got less and less popular as the patches were released. This is an example for the industry of what not to do when making patches.
I went to school to download Counter-Strike 1.5 and Counter Strike 1.6 off the T1 server right before I wrote this entry. It wouldn’t be a great idea to download over my modem. :) The CS 1.5 is about 150 MB and CS 1.6 is 340 MBs. I have them on CD if anyone wants to play them with me. I find that Counter-Strike is by far the most downloaded mod on the Internet. I know when I go to Soft32.com, it is amongst their most popular downloads. I wonder when Ritrual will develop CS 2.0? Perhaps when Half-Life 2 comes out? Who knows…maybe there’ll be plenty of Mods of HL2 for anyone to be trigger-happy for over a year? HF2 popularity has only increased keeping in the #4 place at Gamestats.com. I pretty much said all there is to be said on Half-life 2 right now (AKA I had 4 blog topics on the subject). Some people like to play CS 1.5 on X-Fire so I wanted to download both versions. I have to install both one of these days and check the servers. I’m not going to play CS now. When I downloaded 50 maps for Unreal Tournament 2004, I know I was interested in it for 4 days straight. Will I have to learn a whole new learning curve with Counter-Strike?
I'll end this up by showing the top 10 software picks of last month:
10.) Microsoft Office Professional 2003
09.) Gimp 2.0
08.) JASC Paintshop Pro 8.1
07.) Digital Sound Recorder (records sound from your desktop and can convert them to MP3 format)
06.) Quintessential Player 4.51 (mp3 player also rips shoutcast music or any mp3 / OGG based broadcast)
05.) eMule 0.42g (person / person file sharing unity)
04.) Namo Webeditor 6.0 (it's like Macromedia Dreamweaver)
03.) Longhorn XP Professional 6.0 (Desktop Enhancement Mod)
02.) CDEX 3.51 (MP3 Ripper also has Ogg Vorbis and Monkey Audio encoders)
01.) Mozilla Firefox 0.8 (web browser)
Features in the Longhorn Pro XP Mod available at http://www.tcmagazine.net/ and http://Soft32.com
• You can change your Start menu to have 5 different themes
• It’s a lot like Windows Blinds except more stable.
• 5 themes that look like the screenshots that changes the taskbar, the scroll bar, the Start menu, the color of the toolbar, the outer rims of the graphical user interface
• Puts a drop down menu on top of each directory window. If you don’t like it, you can always remove it.
• The ability to go back to the WIN XP PRO theme and WINDOWS Classic theme without uninstalling the Longhorn Pro XP Much of Win XP Pro stays intact
• Changes Boot Screen to that nice Green Hills, Blue Sky theme with the Longhorn Logo on it.
Some very cool sites to check out ….
1. Fasterfiles.com - Here is a very, very cool site for downloading UT2003, UT2004, Quake 3, Half-life, Far Cry, Neverwinter Nights mods (includes maps, skins, models, uploaders)
2. Soft32.com – This is where I found the Longhorn tweak for Windows XP. Counter-strike 1.5 and 1.6 can be downloaded here as well!
3. IGN.com – A site that specializes in reviewing games, movies, cars, models and supporting RPGs with http://nwnvault.ign.com, http://ffxivault.ign.com and such.
4. Sourceforge.org – has a TON of open source software. Some programs carry over from Linux like Gimp 2.0, and Gaim and make a 1st appearance on the x86 Windows OS. Other programs like CDEX use Sourceforge.org as their primary server. Most of the downloads there are supported by phone company servers and university servers so you’re likely to get the best bandwidth 90% of the time.
5. lame.sourceforge.net – the only open source MP3 encoder and in my opinion one is enough because it does compress mp3s at a good ratio and does sound as good as any other MP3 encoder. Computers are fast enough now-a-days that speed isn’t an issue. An example would be on my computer, a 3 minute 50 second song compressed at 128 KBPS takes approx. 23 seconds. Real.com says Xing is faster. I don’t need an encoder 5 or 6 seconds faster than LAME that makes you pay 40 dollars for it. In fact you don't have to pay for Xing, but it's really hard to find the MP3 encoder. I just found the Xing MPEG encoder.
6. http://www.tcmagazine.net/ - Full of hardware / software reviews and top downloads for the latest software.
[#2 Topic] Like I said before, gamers like to go all out and they can’t do that with the game lagging, that’s why we have the wonderful thing called patches! While patches don’t necessarily make the game more fun, most of the time it does. Patches are made famous by fixing those crash bugs that are no fun at all. I know I’m getting a little off topic but the difference between Diablo 2 v1.0 and v1.7 was enormous. I know the v1.03 patch is famous because Diablo 2 Battle Set comes pre-loaded with it.
The famous game, Planet Side, became famous when the patches made the game much worst than the retail version. It started off very popular and it got less and less popular as the patches were released. This is an example for the industry of what not to do when making patches.
I went to school to download Counter-Strike 1.5 and Counter Strike 1.6 off the T1 server right before I wrote this entry. It wouldn’t be a great idea to download over my modem. :) The CS 1.5 is about 150 MB and CS 1.6 is 340 MBs. I have them on CD if anyone wants to play them with me. I find that Counter-Strike is by far the most downloaded mod on the Internet. I know when I go to Soft32.com, it is amongst their most popular downloads. I wonder when Ritrual will develop CS 2.0? Perhaps when Half-Life 2 comes out? Who knows…maybe there’ll be plenty of Mods of HL2 for anyone to be trigger-happy for over a year? HF2 popularity has only increased keeping in the #4 place at Gamestats.com. I pretty much said all there is to be said on Half-life 2 right now (AKA I had 4 blog topics on the subject). Some people like to play CS 1.5 on X-Fire so I wanted to download both versions. I have to install both one of these days and check the servers. I’m not going to play CS now. When I downloaded 50 maps for Unreal Tournament 2004, I know I was interested in it for 4 days straight. Will I have to learn a whole new learning curve with Counter-Strike?
I'll end this up by showing the top 10 software picks of last month:
10.) Microsoft Office Professional 2003
09.) Gimp 2.0
08.) JASC Paintshop Pro 8.1
07.) Digital Sound Recorder (records sound from your desktop and can convert them to MP3 format)
06.) Quintessential Player 4.51 (mp3 player also rips shoutcast music or any mp3 / OGG based broadcast)
05.) eMule 0.42g (person / person file sharing unity)
04.) Namo Webeditor 6.0 (it's like Macromedia Dreamweaver)
03.) Longhorn XP Professional 6.0 (Desktop Enhancement Mod)
02.) CDEX 3.51 (MP3 Ripper also has Ogg Vorbis and Monkey Audio encoders)
01.) Mozilla Firefox 0.8 (web browser)
Monday, May 31, 2004
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!
----------
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.
[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!
----------
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.
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