Here is one of the dockets, along with this one that includes images of the complaint.

The age old battle of owning right to SDF Macros redistribution outside of Japan.  It’s a shame that this is dragging on, as Battletech has been seemingly crushed every moment in it’s life, from originally going by Battledroids and having to be renamed care of Lucas co, then buying art assets it turns out that had been sold prior to New harmony gold.

Rumor is that it’s over the robotech movie stuck in development hell.  Which is a double shame as I don’t see it having mass appeal, and the latest Harebrained Schemes game was moving along quite well.

It’s bizzare in a world where making things with Japanese assets is less money than doing realestate and it’s more profitable to go to litigation rather than licensing them.

I wonder if it’s even possible to discuss BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, using the included drawings, and media in this litigious age.

While trolling through the internet archive I stumbled onto this ‘zine from back in the day, ‘gif news’.  I think it’s kind of interesting in a way, back from the time of dialup BBSes, although later in 1991 it did become available over the internet, but It’s original issue as below was availbale over dialup.  The early collection is here.

Domo Arigato! Thank-You! Gracias! Merci! Sheh-Sheh!

For taking the time to download the first 1990 issue of GIF News. I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year/decade! May the 90’s bring good fortune to everyone who reads GIF News. This issue has articles on: The Eighties, The Colonel’s Bequest, VGA Games, sound cards, and more!

And behold.

 

Of course it is reminiscent of web pages.  Back in the day, various online services wanted this kind of look and feel for news, and in some ways this news paper folio design carries on today.  Although this kind of thing may not have caught on, much like offline readers, everyone wants a live feed.  And we are so lucky living in the iPhone world, when we went from shitty annotated, and cut down websites, to having hand held computers that rival some desktops, but also a significantly fast enough internet connection.

I don’t think I would have bothered trying to setup something like this back in the day, but the barrier for random posts, much like this thanks to things like wordpress sure lowers that barrier, and a random thought can become a post, as easy as 1-2-3!

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.

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:

I can’t believe it either.  It’s been 10 years since my first ambitious post.

And off to a crazy start, I tackled installing NetWare 3.12, Running Xenix under emulation, and getting Mach 3.0+Lites running, among others in the first month.

As far as posts go, some months are obviously better than others, and so much has happened in the last 10 years, I’ve moved cities, states, countries and continents.  I’ve been though breakups, marriages, children, deaths, losing jobs, losing money, starting companies, renting houses, buying a house… It’s been incredible.

Looking back, in some places, I wish I’d written more, as this blog has been really technical which isn’t so bad, but even then it’s exceptionally terse.  Lots of stuff doesn’t format correctly, and the one thing I don’t like at all is that it doesn’t render on older browers.  But I have so much going on during the day, I don’t have time to write a CMS.  I had tried a few people to spec out something to read the wordpress DB, and generate pages + gopher pages, but they always go running for the hills.

I hope to keep on trying to modernize Darwin 0.3 .  I know that the world at large really doesn’t care, and I have a feeling that Rhapsody DR2 has some fundamental flaws that really prevent it from being anything useful, although it can’t be re-sold so it’s dead anyways.

So where will I be in 10 more years? I really don’t know.  I know one project I’ve been constantly putting off will have to come to light sooner or later, but I do want to move to virtuallyfun.com .  I know my blog is hard to find, it’s a custom name, on a really really long DNS zone.  10 years ago, I was hosted on wordpress, back at blogspot.com, but after their nearly 2 week outage, I moved out onto my own machine.  I’d almost move back to someone managed, as I have so much other stuff going on, running a site isn’t worth my time, but I haven’t had time. When I do make the move though, most people won’t notice I plan to do a 302 + a refresh to bounce to the new domain, and all being well it’ll preserve the same schema so other than a shorter domain in the titlebar most people won’t notice.  Right now it’s doing it, but backwards.  But rest assured, I’m still keeping superglobalmegacorp.com ..

I hope to at least keep this thing up, keep it slightly interesting.    Over the last year, the #1 page is Darwin 0.1 + Rhapsody DR 2 booted!  I honestly didn’t think that would be anywhere near as popular as it is, but even after OSNews locked the topic, I still get over 100 hits a day.  The #2 spot is Dunc’s Algomusic MkIIIb, after being linked to from [Vinesauce] Vinny – Text to MIDI.  Which just goes to show, I really can never tell what is going to be popular..

Laters!

In the off chance you’ve never read it, the book The Cuckoo’s Egg is an incredible read.  However what is more interesting with the passage of time, and with the revelations of various 3 letter agencies is understanding why they were so slow to react, and why they were ultimately dismayed with Stolls’ work to alert others is that they too were no doubt actively exploiting the same exploits that the Russian sponsored German hackers were using.  Much in the way that some vendor holes have remained pretty much during the products entire lifespan (Cisco PIX being one…).

(this is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

I was little busy and I didn’t process new binary submissions for over three years. Here they are, more or less in order of appearance.While not a lot for 3 years they are very important historically! Also almost all contributed, thank you all!

AmigaOS bootable floppy disk by Jason Stevens.

Android port by Adam Gutman. See below, it also runs on a watch!

MVME PowerPC Linux by Plamen Mihaylov.

ELKS by Lorenzo Gatti. This also includes a boot image! It’s hard to believe I somehow missed ELKS in my own efforts. Also there is a boot image available.

MVME M68k NetBSD by Plamen Mihaylov. Thank you for collecting all these beautiful and rare Motorola MVME machines!

HeliOS on Transputer by Michael Bruestle. Oh boy I have been looking for this for quite some time! Unless you started 30 years ago, transputters are rather hard to get into from scratch. This port should also work on Atari ATW800. I wish I had one to test 🙂

BSDI 1.1 by Dima Naumov. This is very cool because of all the flavors of BSD I somehow missed this one! I’m still trying to figure out BSDi, BSD/OS and BSD/386 naming convention. Someone please help.

VxWorks by myself. While VxWorks port existed before it was only compiled for a simulated Pentium (SIMPENTIUM) rather than actual target CPUs. I have came across a set of compilers and built it for ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SH and Xscale. I still don’t have SPARC. See this post about how to run your own target on VMware.

ReactOS by Dima Naumov. While it’s expected that native Win32 aclock will run on ReactOS, this is a build targeting the OS specifically. Sharp X68000 running Human68k OS, by Jason Stevens. That’s a nice surprise! I’ve been looking for this one for a while. No screenshot for but hopefully Jason will be able to produce one. Human68k has a very cool looking GUI!

Microsoft XENIX 1.0 running on AT/286 by Michal Necasek. This was possible thanks for Michal’s huge efforts to patch this historical os to run on VirtualBox.

I happen to own the original set of floppy disks that Microsoft produced and shipped to various OEMs such as IBM, Radio Shack, Intel, SCO, etc.

The set comes with a development kit which now you can run on a VM. You can read some more about efforts to virtualize Microsoft/IBM Xenix on Michal’s Blog.

Venix/86 on AT/286 by Jim Carpenter. This port was delivered as part of a virtualization challenge, which was won by Jim. Thank you and congratulations again! There also is a runner up entry by Mihai Gaitos which has some fascinating details including about Aurora software that came with the system.

Wyse UNIX for 386 by Mihai Gaitos. This port was delivered as part of a similar virtualization challenge, which was won by Michai. Congrats!

Cisco 1700 (PPC) emulated via Dynamips by Jason Stevens. This one is also very close to my heart because of my networking past and present. I will definitely want to try load it on a physical device! Jason is also working on MIPS version so hopefully this will run on Cisco 2500 and up.

Android Wear. Parker Reed send me this photo of Aclock Android by Adam Gutman running on an actual watch! Wow this is so cool!

BSD/OS 4.1 aka BSDI for SPARC by Plamen Mihaylov. Also thanks to Cory Smelosky for releasing the images!

EFI firmware on various platforms, such as x86, x64, ia64, arm32 and 64 by Natalia Portillo aka Claunia. This aclock can be launched from UEFI Shell or by running EFI standalone application if EFI shell is not available.

This is a screenshot of aclock EFI x64 running on HP DL380 via iLO remote console.

Linux and FreeBSD builds for ARM and PowerPC by Natalia Portillo. Claunia sent me a Christmas package with a aclock builds lot of missing CPUs for Linux and FreeBSD, both 32bit and 64bit PPC and ARM for both OSes. Total 8 binaries!

Singularity on x86 by Natalia Portillo. SingularityOS was a research operating system from Microsoft. Rumor has it Microsoft wanted for it to eventually replace Windows NT line with managed code OS. As expected it didn’t perform too well and with doom of Windows Vista the project was eventually scrapped. Singularity development kit has been released to the public on CodePlex. Since the OS is text mode only, it was a natural target for Aclock. A port in C# (OMFG) has been created and the binary integrated in to the iso boot image.

RISC iX running on Acorn R260 by Raymond Stricklin aka Bear. I was scorching the earth looking for a working copy of RISC iX and there he had it. Thank you. It’s beautiful.

Minix 3 for ARM by Natalia Portillo. Latest release of Minix adds experimental support for ARM architecture. No network and framebuffer but aclock works over a serial console!

Again thank you for all your contributions!

If you want to to help contribute to aclock, there is a wanted list. Some of them come with a monetary reward. Please contact me before undergoing any major work as some of them are under way.

Also, aclock now lives on GitHub, for easier.. everything.

So you know all the old speedtest.net stuff.  They have their old flash based client, and a html5 client, but what if you are on a bare VPS, and you don’t want to install X and the gigs of desktop to run a simple bandwidth test?

Well install python, and then run this:

curl -s  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py | python –

And away it goes!

# curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest.py | python –
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration…
Testing from Joe’s Datacenter (172.86.179.14)…
Retrieving speedtest.net server list…
Selecting best server based on ping…
Hosted by Packet Layer Consulting LLC (Kansas City, KS) [5.37 km]: 5.394 ms
Testing download speed……………………………………………………………………..
Download: 53.06 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed……………………………………………………………………………………….
Upload: 110.83 Mbit/s

Nice!

16x8GB memory.  Sure it’s not the newest, or greatest, but it’s nice to be able to right size the RAM on all my lab crap, and now have all kinds of extra RAM.  The machine is built around SAS, but I don’t have the right sled adapter, and only a single disk.  Although it really doesn’t matter as there is a really nice internal USB slot inside this Dell r710, and VMWare installs just fine onto it. I already had all my virtual machines on an external NAS so it really didn’t matter.

I’ll probably either get more sleds and SAS disks, or some kind of flash PCIE cards.  I haven’t really decided yet.

It’s crazy to think of a time when 128kb was a lot of memory, let alone 1MB, or even a monstrous 16MB. It seemed crazy to hit that 24bit limit of the 286, then the 32bit limit of the 386.. At least we are a ways off from hitting the 64bit limit, but now that I have work servers with 1TB+ of RAM, well, it’s only a matter of time.

So if you can read this, then the server is working.

After a few errors here and there, it appears to be working now.

Hopefully this clears up the phantom ‘logging in’ issue others were having.  Also I haven’t seen any php5 updates on Debian 7 in a while, so it was time to dump the DB, and copy over into a new VM.