It’s been a trying year, and despite the HKPF’s best efforts to make it a terrible one, we won’t let them. If anything the events of the year just make family and friends all the more precious, just is our time with them.
There never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done, and that list of could of, should have builds.. Its tough. In spite of it all I’ve still managed to do my own “out reach” helping kids where I can help with internships, books, food or even a shoulder to cry.
Not a peripheral was stirring, not even a mouse; The new motherboard was strewn on the floor in dismay, In hopes that this crap Jingsha board would finally work;
The processors were nestled all snug in their sockets, While visions of posting danced in their heads; But motherboard back in her antistatic bag, and I in my cap, Had just settled on giving this thing a long winter’s dirt nap…
Contents of the box
On the surface this board seemed like quit the bargain. The Jingsha x79 dual socket board features 8 memory slots unlike the 4 in the Huananzhi board allowing me to go from 64GB of RAM to 128GB! In addition the board also has a native M.2 storage slot! All for the low low price of around $100 USD!
Neat!
While I did find that upgrading my power supply to the bigger 850 watts which certainly didn’t hurt stability, I thought that it’d be more than enough power for this new board.
And I kind of liked the idea of having a management engine that might out for ‘lights out’ when I’m traveling.
But no, it was nothing but grief. Most of the time I was stuck with error 99 which apparently has something to do with not enough power on the PCI bus? Granted I was rocking my RTX-2070, but it was running fine in the Huananzhi! Putting in the lowest & dumbest video card I had got it to boot windows up, quickly followed up with a crash.
IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL
Now for the best part, I pull the disks, as I’ve had this install going from my old Mac Pro, so maybe the HAL is stale or something else is going on like that old bootcamp error. So I make an install USB stick, with NO customizations, using the Microsoft tool. AKA stock.
And I get the same crash.
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
What the Fuck. I don’t even know. Considering it’s crashing on install media it’s clearly the boards fault. The processors worked fine in the old board, and putting them back along with the memory and it’s working fine again. Something is wrong with the board.
So back into the bag, back into the box, and onto the shelf. Can’t say I’m such a happy elf.
Anyway it’s getting late. I’m off home, but a quick stop to the grocery store to try to remember how to make eggnog or something to at least make me forget this wasted sideline.
The engine suffers many limitations from supporting 8bit machines, although they did uplift the graphics, music and sound although they didn’t increase the overall sizes. And the engine on the PC side was written in PASCAL of all things. I mean it was the hip language of the era, and well C is just too portable and reliable. The later SSI games were C++ apparently.
That said, for MS-DOS purists and those wanting to be legit, the old SSI AD&D games are on sale over on GOG, broken up into a few collections.
With collection 2 being the gold box editions, featuring:
POOL OF RADIANCE
CURSE OF THE AZURE BONDS
HILLSFAR
SECRET OF THE SILVER BLADES
POOLS OF DARKNESS
GATEWAY TO THE SAVAGE FRONTIER
TREASURES OF THE SAVAGE FRONTIER
FORGOTTEN REALMS UNLIMITED ADVENTURES
Which is a bargain at $3.39 USD!
I don’t know why I’m finding so much fun things on GOG, but here we are. In other news I got a new $99 USD dual Xeon board, although it seems to have some weird mystery issues including a ’99’ power issue, and when it does boot even the install media for Windows 10 bluescreens. Sad.
Somehow I missed it, that GOG had managed to snag the rights right after November 2019, and released the most excellent Westwood studio’s version of Blade Runner! It’s currently on sale for $8.99!
Also included is a bunch of concept art from the film!
Naturally it’s using ScummVM to run the game, instead of the horribly broken Windows 95 specific executables from 22 years ago.
While starting up the game it dumps this:
Blade Runner
From the dark recesses of David Leary's imagination comes a game unlike any
other. Blade Runner immerses you in the underbelly of future Los Angeles.
Right from the start, the story pulls you in with graphic descriptions of a
grandmother doing the shimmy in her underwear, child molestation, brutal
cold-blooded slaying of innocent animals, vomiting on desks, staring at a
woman's ass, the list goes on. And when the game starts, the real fun begins - shoot down-on-their-luck homeless people and toss them into a dumpster. Watch
with sadistic glee as a dog gets blown into chunky, bloody, bits by an
explosive, and even murder a shy little girl who loves you. If you think
David Leary is sick, and you like sick, this is THE game for you.
JW: Don't forget the wasting of helpless mutated cripples in the underground.
It's such a beautiful thing!
DL: Go ahead. Just keep beating that snarling pit bull...ignore the foam
around his jaws. There's room on the top shelf of my fridge for at least one
more head... - Psychotic Dave
MG: Is David Leary a self-respecting human or is he powered by rechargeable
batteries?
JM: Chrome...is that what that is?
JM: It's hard to imagine that thing on either a car or a horse.
MG: McCoy! What a witty chap...
JM: He keeps me chuckling non-stop!
JM: That McCoy--he's one funny guy! Jet-black fire truck, hehehehe...
Iv’e been in Japan the last 10 days, but upon my return to Hong Kong this little 9kg box was eagerly awaiting me!
I know that ‘unboxing’ donation videos are quite popular, but I thought I’d do the blog equivalent. I don’t want to ‘out’ the sender, although I did email them back a big THANKS, although I didn’t get a reply. Maybe it’s an email thing but I wanted to tell them THANKS again!
To start is a bunch of loose CD’s including old SDK’s, and the infamous Windows 2000 RC1 set including Dec Alpha builds of workstation & server. Also in there is Beta 3 of Windows 98! Cool!
In the box was also Back Office 45, Visual C++ 6.0, a sealed copy of Windows 2000 Server, Visual Studio 2005 Standard and Expression Studio 2.
I’ve always loved this, it’s NT 4.0 and all the good bits of 1997, like Exchange 5.5 & IIS 4.0! Also in there is a copy of Outlook 2000, so this is a much later build/packaging of Back Office 4.5 . I’ve always wondered how many if any Back Office purchasers ever used SNA Server. I’ve seen it something exclusively used in real enterprises that have site licenses anyways.
Visual C 6.0 is the last x86 compiler that was ‘pure’ before the .NET invasion. Although you can with a bit of work get 2003 and onward to build for strict Win32, but who wants to work? This is getting increasingly hard to find, and getting far more expensive. But it’s great to have this in retail in the box again! (I used to have this and Visual Studio 97/6.0).
It almost feels wrong to break the seal on this, although I’ll probably do an active directory deployment eventually now that I have machines running in the USA, Hong Kong, and Japan.
I’m super thankful for all of this, and if anyone else wants to send me their ‘old / obsolete junk’ drop me a line!
You can find this over on gog. I remember the original that I had on the commodore 64, it was super tough (well for a kid), although I do remember chasing mutant rabbits through some farm, along with all the text being in a book, because the disks were simply too small back then.
But it was the inspiration for the later Fallout. Nice to see how it’s managed to get out from under the control of a dead & collapsed studio.
And sure enough the are the latest versions of the game files to be found according to doom.fandom.com. Great! So to further the abuse I tried them under my mutilated DooM.
Ultimate Doom seems to work just fine on it’s own I tested it briefly warping to a few levels but yeah it just works! Doom2 however bombs out that the resource TITLEPIC is missing from the wad. How disappointing!
Naturally I just took the easy way out, and basically checked for the resource, and load another if it’s missing.
@@ -477,7 +477,11 @@
else
pagetic = 170;
gamestate = GS_DEMOSCREEN;
- pagename = "TITLEPIC";
+ /* the Doom 3 BFG EDITION version of Doom 2 is lacking the titlepic */
+ if(W_CheckNumForName("TITLEPIC")>0)
+ pagename = "TITLEPIC";
+ else
+ pagename = "DMENUPIC";
if ( gamemode == commercial )
S_StartMusic(mus_dm2ttl);
else
Another interesting thing is that DooM 3 BFG also includes the gravis ultrasound bank data, so you could load them up into some other emulator and enjoy that gravis experience. I don’t know if it’s licensed or what, but it’s a nice touch.
Back when OpenGL accelerated hardware became a thing at the consumer level (and even non OpenGL, like the Rendition Verite v1000E !) games like Quake suddenly took on an entirely new life, with the amazing ‘realism’ that OpenGL could bring. And what an amazing change it was from the software renderer.
I had bought the Diamond Fire GL 1000, and it honestly kinda sucked. It did the OpenGL demo’s okayish under Windows NT, but Quake, not so much. But it was a sign of things to some, as I could run the 3D pipes screensaver without running the CPU at 100% But the Fire was meant more so for ‘adult’ or productive things, not for playing a game.
So here we go again, yet another major vendor that has been around since the 1970’s decides that all their prior content needs to be purged ‘because reasons’.
Kind of sad that a few people in an old church can preserve the internet, but a megacorp like Intel cannot even be assed to keep their downloads available.
I’m sure the virtus/spyware/scamware/ransomware people are just salivating at this, as now they can easily add these named & tagged downloads to their lists, as more and more people run into intel branded gear, and attempt to recycle it’s use.
