Author Archives: neozeed

Summer Steam Sales…..

Posted on by
5

I almost wish I could get this into games…

If you’ve never played Fallout, I’d highly recommend it.  No not that fallout, the old one. The original one.  Although not currently on sale, it is on GOG as well.  As the video mentions though, Fallout 3 was ‘ok’ but kind of un-remarkable.  New Vegas was head and shoulders above, and 4.. well.. it’s best to pretend it never happened.

I guess whatever drama was behind selling the original version has been finally cleared up and it’s everywhere now.

I also thought it was somewhat worth mentioning that You can browse Moby games by system requirements, so you can easily find all the ‘Direct X 3‘, and ‘Direct X 5‘ games.  There never was a Direct X 4.  I did kind of enjoy ‘The Hive‘, although I never had enough time to finish it.  I guess in that sense though it is significant as it is one of the handful of early first Direct X games.

Fallout MS-DOS over Windows 95

There was an MS-DOS version, along with MacOS 7 version, albeit for the PowerPC.  The MacOS version doesn’t run under emulation.  It was later carbonized for early OS X, which again is PowerPC only.  I haven’t tried it on OS X 10.6, the last version of OS X that included Rosetta.

You can find the MS-DOS exe / patches on kaneoheboy.com The GOG version for Mac OS X used to the MS-DOS version in DOSBox, however it’s been updated to the Windows version to use WINE.  On my machine the default launcher for STEAM and GOG don’t work, however the ‘classic’ launcher works fine.  If you get the black screen, then you too have to run the low resolution version.

For whatever reason, my Windows 95 + Direct X 7.0a won’t run Fallout.  Very strange, but the helpful message:

Oh well.

Using Voodoo 2 emulation with PCem / 86Box

Posted on by
8

I’ve never had a Voodoo card before, I had was the Sierra Screamin’3D Rendition Verite 1000, which came with it’s own drivers that set the whole thing up. As always work got in the way of fun, and I missed out on the whole Direct X thing on Windows 95, as I was busy working on MS SQL on Windows NT, where hardware OpenGL cards were the way to go.

But thanks to emulation we can re-live the pain!

I setup emulation for an Intel Advanced/EV board, with an Intel Pentium Overdrive CPU at 166Mhz (my machine can handle that easily with the new builds!), 32MB of RAM, and a Phoenix S3 Trio32 video card set as Fast VLB/PCI.  After that toogle Voodoo Graphics, set the card model to the Voodoo2 , and bump up the RAM to 4MB, because we live in the future!

Also I should mention, that much like real hardware, it is best to go into the BIOS (F1 to enter BIOS setup) and make some changes, disable the built in audio card, serial and parallel ports.

And make sure the board is set to use the ICU with Windows 95 Plug & Play support.

To go from old, I installed Windows 95 from virtual floppies.  Its the oldest/smallest retail version of Windows 95, so I know if it’ll work here, it’ll work on much newer versions.

For me the S3 card is picked up by Windows on it’s own.  Now for the fun with better graphics.  As a test I’m using Wipeout 2097 / XL for the PC.  Although the game comes with Direct X version 3, I have found that the video emulation has major issues with the updated Direct X v3 drivers.  I did find that the Direct X 7a drivers work fine, along with the last reference  driver for Windows 9x.  Now I know you’ll want to know where to find ancient software like this, and it’s all on this great site falconfly.de

In my case, I found it easier to install Direct X 7, then expand the Voodoo driver, and in the hardware manager, find the ‘unknown’ device, and point it to the voodoo driver, reboot and you should be now set!

You can verify the installation by running dxdiag

3dfxV2.drv

One thing of note, is that all 3D accelerated options are “full screen”.  Which I don’t think really matters as by default PCem runs in a window.  If you are multitasking odds are you aren’t trying to multitask with Windows 95….

Wipeout XL

And I have to say, it looks GREAT!

SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics Summer STEAM sale

Posted on by
Reply

So, speaking of the SEGA Forever, the SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics are part of the summer STEAM sale!

$161.37 HKD!

So I am assuming it’s $20 USD or 18 Euro/16 GBP for this insane collection:

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Alien Soldier, Alien Storm, Altered Beast, Beyond Oasis, Bio-Hazard Battle, Bonanza Bros., Columns, Columns III, Comix Zone, Crack Down, Decap Attack, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Dynamite Headdy, Ecco the Dolphin, Ecco Jr., Ecco: The Tides of Time, ESWAT: City Under Siege, Eternal Champions, Fatal Labyrinth, Flicky, Gain Ground, Galaxy Force II, Golden Axe III, Golden Axe, Golden Axe II, Gunstar Heroes, Kid Chameleon, Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole, Light Crusader, Phantasy Star II, Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom, Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium, Ristar, Shadow Dancer, Shining Force, Shining Force II, Shining in the Darkness, Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic CD, Sonic Spinball, Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Space Harrier II, Streets of Rage, Streets of Rage 2, Streets of Rage 3, Super Thunder Blade, Sword of Vermilion, The Revenge of Shinobi, ToeJam & Earl, ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, VectorMan 2, VectorMan, Virtua Fighter 2, Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair, Wonder Boy in Monster World

So if you haven’t already got this great collection, now is the time to do so!

And for those who like other emulators, yes the ROMs are available uncompressed!

\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sega Classics\uncompressed ROMs

Just dig around and you’ll find them.

SEGA to lauch SEGA Forever tomorrow!

Posted on by
Reply

It looks suspicioutsly like the old iOS versions of SEGA games I used to have back when I used an iPhone (2010-2012)

So yeah, leaderboards, and other stuff, and freeumium on mobile only.  Although I guess that means anything Android will do, including PC’s and Mac’s running Android under emulation.. Or ‘big’ Android systems like kiosks, and ‘computing sticks’ that’ll plug into any nice big TV set.

Add in some bluetooth controlers, and I try to pretend it’s 1988.

Since I live in the future, let me get you a list of what is available for you ‘tomorrow’

SEGA Forever purchase options

At least there is a play version with cloud saves too.  I guess $1.99 USD is OK in the scheme of things.  I don’t want to think how many times I’ve bought this game though lol

Store blurb for Phantasy Star II

And here is the long scroll…

phew!

10+ downloads.  So it just launched!

New ‘redir’ / ‘hostfwd’ syntax for Qemu

Posted on by
2

it’s mandatory now in 2.9 so where we go.

Instead of:

-redir tcp::42323:23

which listens on all ip’s and redirects host port 42323 to port 23 on the default guest IP address of 10.0.2.15 we now have to use

-net user,hostfwd=tcp::42323-:23

as you could tell from this ‘easy’ syntax.

-netdev user,id=mynet0,hostfwd=hostip:hostport-guestip:guestport

Right?

Hacking Flight Simulator 4 for multiple monitors

Posted on by
Reply

This has to be one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Long story short, Wayne was able to exploit a ‘feature’ of older non random address location where a machine is configured the same way will always load the same program in the same address space.  Using this knowledge he was able to work out in memory where the location of the plane was kept in memory.  Adding a ‘server’ and two ‘client’ versions of DOSBox he could then transmit the location of the plane to the two other DOSBox client’s and then just set their viewports to left & right, and now he has an immersive simulation.

It’s a great read here: on tinmith.net

And this also is why ASLR is so important on internet connected devices, and servers where you don’t want to have known addresses in RAM where you can find important ‘protected’ data structures.

Galaxy Patrol Cosmofighter

Posted on by
Reply

I’d never seen this machine or game before so I thought I’d share a few pictures

Sega in it’s glory days

Apparently this game is pretty rare, and was only recently dumped.

Also an ancient Doraemon car driving game

Old belt driven game

Doraemon in his car

Doraemon fan club and driving license

One of those days.

Posted on by
4 
/*
* Abosolutely brilliant. Assume that sizeof(long) == 4. The author of this
* code should give classes on how to write non-portable code. Other bitches:
*
* (1) assuming that all architectures are big endian
* (2) storing/accessing shorts on unaligned boundaries
* (3) assuming all machines align things to 4 byte boundaries
*
* Define a 2-byte word type and a 4-byte word type.
*/

source – internal.h

sigh.  Anyone have a PDO/Enterprise Objects disc? for some reason I think I need pdo.h

GopherVista

Posted on by
7

Continuing with our gopher madness, next up we have GopherVista.  And this is everything I had hoped it would be when I first learned about this project. I had joked to another friend that it’d be cool to crawl and feed the indexer data in a manner that could basically bring AltaVista back to life.  And we laughed, and I had my utzoo search and that was that.

Except it wasn’t.

However, across the internet, Ben didn’t hear any naysay about limitations or anything to get in the way, and went ahead and wrote a crawler in go, kept the results in a sane name/db order for later sanitization in and out of AltaVista, and after an aggressive gopher port scan of the internet, he created GopherVista, an index of the gopher-verse, running on Windows 98.

No, really, you read that right, GopherVista backends on Windows 98!

Read all about the creation of GopherVista over a Ben’s blog blog.benjojo.co.uk.

GopherVista

Keep in mind that this is a search engine, not a proxy, so it’s best to use something like Internet Explorer 4, or an ancient Netscape that supports both HTTP 1.1 & Gopher.

I have to also say, that something like this is far cooler, and better thought out than my utzoo hack, and I’m just happy to have inspired him, but now I really want to re-think my setup, and of course index all the things….

Peter Godiwn’s Gopher Server

Posted on by
16

Thanks to reader Peter Godiwn, he built a .net Gopher Proxy that can read several providers via API, and to get the ball rolling, he built a WordPress connector, and yes it works great with my site!

The added bonus is that now I am automatically updating my site via gopher.  It lives as a root, so instead of taking my existing gopher offline, I added a new DNS record, and brought up:

gopher://gopherblog.superglobalmegacorp.com

Naturally that URL won’t work for 99.99% of the people out there since their browsers don’t support gopher, but the Floodgap Gopher proxy, will do the trick!

One cool feature is that it can take modern images, and convert them to GIF for older browsers.  Images even work on Netscape!

Auto converted PNG to GIF

You can find source & binaries on his github page.

Super thanks to Peter, and what a fitting 10+1 post!