Building a LAN with VirtualPC on Windows.

I’m sure everyone has hit that limitation of virtual networking where you cannot say map a drive, or connect to a hosted site on a VM from a machine like a laptop.  While sometimes it is practical with wifi, other times it is not.  And well maybe you just don’t want to expose your virtual machines to the world.

Luckily there is a solution, and it’s built into the OS!

The first thing you need to do is install a ‘virtual network adapter’.

It’s pretty much the same, from 2000,XP,Vista,7 (and yes, 2003/2008), go to hardware, add a new component, then manually select a network adapter, and go to Microsoft as a vendor.

On 7 (probably vista as well) it is more.. convoluted.

Go to the control panel, and then search for ‘hardware’.  Then select “Device Manager”

Right click on your computer name, then select add legacy hardware.

And now it’ll kick off the add hardware wizard (does anyone know a simpler way to kick this thing off?)

Hit the next button..

And we are going to manually add the loopback adapter because it’s not a physical device, it’ll never get ‘discovered’.

So we select network adapters, then continue.

Scroll down the manufacturer list, and select Microsoft, then scroll down the right side, and select the “Microsoft Loopback Adapter”.

Then it will confirm the selection, hit next and it’ll install the driver.  Now go back to your control panel, and search for “view network connections” and you’ll now see the loopback adapter showup on the pane.  From here you can set your own ip address that you want to use, turn off your firewall and then you can map drives etc etc…

And as I had mentioned before you can even ‘share’ out your internet connection to your loopback network by right clicking on your internet facing connection, then hit the ‘sharing tab’.

Then simply click the radio buttons, and make sure your loopback is in the dropdown (The dropdown only shows if you have multiple connections, if you only have the two, then it is greyed out because.. it’s the only connection, nothing to worry about though!)

And to verify if you right click on the loopback, and bring up it’s properties, make sure the virtual machine bindings are checked off so that VirtualPC (or VirtualBOX) can bind into the loopback adapter.
And in the case of Virtual PC, with all of this done, just take your VM, and select the loopback on your network and go from there.

 

Phew that’s about the extent of it, but keep in mind if you are using SPRINT and their glorious dialer, it’ll detect more then one active interface with TCP/IP and it will either refuse to dial, or hangup immediately.  Naturally there is a way around it, that I had mentioned earlier.

At a minimum it’ll help me adding loopbacks into the newer windows versions, that have done their best to hide this functionality.

Wasteland & Battletech

Click to play!

I was playing fallout the other day, and I had to find out what inspired the whole thing.  I should have remembered this game, wasteland.  Although to be honest I found it overly complicated, and got killed off way too often.  Then again I was 11 when it came out so it was slightly beyond me.

Oh well I set it up on jdosbox to see if I’d do any better years later, and sadly the answer is… no.

But it reminds me of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks Revenge, with all the animated graphics … Another fine game of 1988.

Click to play!

Which was great fun, but I need to figure out how to set the cycle speed in jdosbox as it’s too fast (it doesn’t feel too fast but time certainly passes too quickly).

Oh well this was the best gaming I remember in the summer of 1988.

 

Internet Explorer 3.0 for the MIPS.

I got a tip that there actually was a version of Internet Explorer 3.0 for the MIPS. I was thinking there was no way, as there was no mention of this thing as IE 3.0 came out after the MIPS had been dropped from the roster.

Well luckily it turns out to be true.

The original download link is here, and I’ve mirrored it here.

Who knows what other things are out there for the MIPS?

 

Gameboy color emulator… in javascript!

I have to say I’m really quite impressed!  It’s quite playable, the sound is great and well it’s all around awesome!  And yes it’ll even play original gameboy files!

Unlike most ‘web’ based javascript this one can play local files.. Perhaps it’s something worth looking at modifying existing stuff for that kind of options?

At any rate be sure to check it out here.

It’s amazing how javascript is really becoming a contender now that browsers are basically compiling it.  It’s very cool!

Save Officer Spock

It finally happened, well 30 years ago.

Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: fa.sf-lovers
Path: utzoo!duke!cincy!chris
Date: Mon Jun 8 11:06:47 1981
Subject: Save Officer Spock
From: chris
X-OldUsenet-Modified: added From; converted from A-news; fixed Message-ID; added Xref
Xref: dummy dummy:1
Perhaps you are not yet aware of it, but a new Star Trek movie
is in the making this summer. While that is all well and good,
there is a problem with it. It seems that Leonard Nimoy will no
longer be available for the role of Spock after this movie;
thus they are killing him off. Loyal trekkies here have taken
great offense to this, as well they should. There are much better
ways to remove the necessity of having the character present.
A local radio station has begun a campaign the call SOS (see title).
They are encouraging letter writers, and wil forward the mail they
collect to the producers of the movie. If you would like to write,
or contact them and start your own movement, here is the address:
SOS
WVXU-FM
Xavier University
Cincinnati, OH 45207
Live Long and Prosper!

From what I recall the breaking story of how Spoke died in Star Trek II was one of the first ‘big’ nerd crisis on usenet. I’m sure it has more to do with the date of when usenet started to get popular vs other big ‘shocks’ of the time like Empire Strikes Back. The old usenet archives sure do provide an interesting ‘view’ into our past, of even 30 years ago. I’m out of town for the next few days so … no big stuff coming up but I thought this was worthy enough to post.

Old Usenet! Party like it’s 1981!

Check out this amazing site, olduse.net!  It’s really amazing!  What Joey Hess has done, is get a copy of the old USENET archives from the UofT, and parse out all the dates, set them in the right format for a news server, then stream them in ‘real time’ as it was, back in 1981.

That is right, it’s August 6th 1981.  Star Trek II still hasn’t happened yet, can you wait for the hype and the build up for the biggest geek movie since.. well when everyone found out last year (1980) that Vader was Luke’s father?

News/2

What is also cool is that you can take any news reader (even News/2) and point it to nntp.olduse.net and read away!  And not to mention the incredible setup with a telehack like interface to a news reader.

Now I’ll just have to figure out a way to stuff USENET into Synchronet 2.. (I’m sure Synchronet 3 will/would be way easier, but heh you know, OS/2 …)

Oh and here is a timeline of things to look forward to.  But I guess being a ‘time traveler’ kind of takes the fun out of it.

Infocom Games

feelies!

Did you ever love Zork?  Personally I was into Planetfall.  And what made Infocom cool was the ‘feelies’.  I guess it’s pretty obvious that if you found me here, then you know all about the rise and fall of Infocom, and how it was how they wanted to diversify into business applications… And their portable strategy backfired big time.

But back to the games.  While talking to someone and the topic of Infocom came up, I had to see how many I had as I’d managed to buy one of the ‘collection’ sets of Infocom games.  Sure I felt like “I had them all” but after finding accardi-by-the-sea I found out that not only was I missing some, but they actually had every version of these games that had been released!

Talk about an exceptional collection!

And if you love all the packaging, check out here & here.

 

Domain Poker

No really this isn’t some cheezy ad for ‘internet poker’.  Wait, well maybe it is.  Anyways I was on my Synchronet with a friend when we tried ‘Domain Poker’, and the version that shipped with Synchronet for DOS-OS/2 is the trial version.  And it’s old.  So while googling for an updated version I came across dpok2k.zip

Happy Y2K and beyond!
In support of the renewed interest in Synchronet BBS Software and it’s expectedtelnet capabilities some of you have been asking for registered versions of theold Domain Entertainment doors.  Instead, I’ve gone ahead and recompiled thesome of the doors (the games) so that they don’t require any registration.
Be aware that Domain Entertainment no longer makes, sells, or supports BBSdoors so use these at your own risk.  Domain Entertainment assumes no liabilityfor errors or omissions in these files or damages resulting from the use ofthem.
You may freely distribute this software so long as it is distributed in it’soriginal form with all accompanying files.

Wow that’s pretty cool!

So I’ve loaded it up on my BBS, and I’ve also updated the ‘bubble‘ BBS.

Although I don’t know poker for crap, any time I’ve won it’s with ‘neutral computers’ that don’t cheat. lol

Synchronet in a bubble

Or at least that’s what I’m going to call it.

Click to run!

Basically it’s a super minimally configured copy of Synchronet configured to run on jdosbox.  There is no external ‘world’ to talk to.  There isn’t even any ‘persistence’ all changes will be lost after a simple refresh.

There also isn’t any user id’s it’s completely virgin!

Simply click on the picture, and hit the space bar once the menu comes up and you can login!  Since it’s just console access there is no modem, dialing, tcpip stuff to worry about.  If you can run java you can run this.

So why would I or you bother?  I guess its an importunity to suffer through the BBS experience.  Maybe I’m just leading up to something else, something really involved to setup so for most people this click & go java thing is about as close as they want to go to ‘feel’ it and it doesn’t involve any actual setup, nor any programs to configure.  And of course, you cannot ‘trash’ this thing beyond hope as the moment you refresh your browser, it’ll reload the image and you are back to the start.

And maybe it’s a sign of the times as well.  Comparing a BBS install to any *AMP install of today really shows in some way just how far we’ve come, in terms of installation.  Not to mention back in the BBS days nobody used SQL, everyone wound up writing their own multiuser database.  Actually in retrospect I have to wonder why more were not based around Dbase/Clipper/FoxPro.

At any rate, it’s really impressive to see that Synchronet is not only still going but thriving out there.  And the center of it all is DOVENET.  A quick and easy way of distributing messages easily can make a community…   Which sadly this thing doesn’t have any network IO so … no community.  See it’s like a bubble, easy to pop, and in it’s own little brief world.

For anyone crazy enough to take the plunge you could download version 2 of Synchronet right here. Then you can telnet to vert.synchro.net and setup an ID for your prospective BBS.  The best part is the simplicity of getting messages in & out… FTP!  You can even use ncftp to make scripts to send / get messages.  I cooked up something terribly simple to do that here.

While I did add TradeWars 2002 as a door, but you’ve also got the other defaults Synchronet Blackjack!, Domain Poker,Supernet Centipede..