Category Archives: videos

Presenting MacFlim

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This is beyond super cool! Video has always been something of the realm of ‘high end’ machines, back when QuickTime became a thing it was lauded at running in a postage stamp sized window with absolutely incredible artifacting. And that was running with a Quadra (68040) back in the day, the transition from 68000 to PowerPC really helped with video on the desktop with much faster clocks and better caching.

The idea of video on any of the compact black & white Macs, even the ultra high end SE/30 68030 based Mac seemed something out of fantasy. But thanks to modern processors, massive storage and the ability to front process the video, it is now possible to do playback on a B&W mac!

Enter MacFilm 1.0 by Fred!

This is some super cool ‘impossible’ tech for the low end macs!

This is nothing short of incredible!

Of course the ‘downside’ is there is no audio.. And it’s directly blitting to the 512×342 B&W display so if you are not running on a 1 bit original display it’s not going to work or just blast seemingly junk to the screen.

Maybe if big 80’s media wasn’t so slow, or massive SCSI disks didn’t cost as much as a car we could have been enjoying an almost Brazilian future of black and white movies on tiny CRT’s.

Linus Tech Tips looks at the Jingsha

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Luckily for them, they had far better luck than I did. I’m using the same processor, the E5-2667 v2, which I had paid 1080RMB each (155 USD) for, although I did get the board for 650RMB (93 USD). So I have a better buyer, but I had no luck with the board.

The processors and RAM work fine in the older Huananzhi, so at least I know those work.

And since rebuilding the machine, I’ve had 10 days of uptime now in this configuration, so it defiantly works in the non Jingsha board.

And yeah for the heck of it, here it is running Cinebench R15 with a score of 2521, and using all cores, all threads. But as a limitation of Xeons of the time is no real turbo, as when it’s running it’ll go to 3.6Ghz, but it’ll happily idle once completed in the 1.x range.

Confessions of a paranoid DEC Engineer: Robert Supnik talks about the great Dungeon heist!

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What an incredible adventure!

Apparently this was all recorded in 2017, and just now released.

It’s very long, but I would still highly recommend watching the full thing.

Bob goes into detail about the rise of the integrated circuit versions of the PDP-11 & VAX processors, the challenges of how Digital was spiraling out of control, and how he was the one that not only championed the Alpha, but had to make the difficult decisions that if the Alpha succeeded that many people were now out of a job, and many directions had to be closed off.

He goes into great detail how the Alpha was basically out maneuvered politically and how the PC business had not only dragged them down by management not embracing the Alpha but how trying to pull a quick one on Intel led to their demise.

Also of interest was his time in research witnessing the untapped possibilities of AltaVista, and how Compaq had bogged it down, and ceded the market to the upstart Google, the inability to launch a portable MP3 player (Although to be fair the iPod wasn’t first to market by a long shot, it was the best user experience by far).

What was also interesting was his last job, working at Unisys and getting them out of the legacy mainframe hardware business and into emulation on x86, along with the lesson that if you can run your engine in primary CPU cache it’s insanely fast (in GCC land -Os is better than -O9).

The most significant part towards the end of course is where he ‘rewinds’ his story to go into his interest in simulations, and of course how he started SIMH when he had some idle time in the early 90’s. SIMH of course has done an incredible amount of work to preserve computing history of many early computers. He also touches on working with the Warren’s TUHS to get Unix v0 up and running on a simulated PDP-7 and what would have been a challenge in the day using an obscure Burroughs disk & controller modified from the PDP-9.

Yes it’s 6 hours long! But really it’s great!

New Year! New Machine!

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24 cores!

New format for stuff too!

I picked up an ‘interesting Chinese motherboard, a dual LGA2011 board, some DD3 ECC memory, and 2 of the cheapest ‘widest’ chips I could find, the 6 core E5-2620 v2. The board cost me $200 US, the memory was $90 and the CPU’s were $40. Although the board is E-ATX, and that means I’ll need to get a new case as it won’t fit anything I have lying around.

I think I finally got the hang of Vegas. It’s taken far too long to get here, but I was hoping to have received the board much quicker as it shipped from 30km from here, but they did their best to NOT ship to Hong Kong.

I know it’s far too long, and far too maranding. Oh well it’s late and I’m just babbling like crazy.

Stanford uploads 111 lectures by Donald Knuth.

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This is pretty cool! I didn’t know they were recording stuff back in 1980!

Stanford has a nice playlist here.

Naturally it’s full of TeX & Mathematical writing, along with trees and other ‘fun’ CS stuff.

While we are overall drowning in cat videos, and other uh ‘multimedia’ content, it’s still amazing the wealth of information that is available to the world (well the part of the world that can view YouTube).

I have no idea what the licensing is, but it’d be such a shame if it was hosted on additional platforms to make them available to the larger world.

Test video of Fallout 76 on a 2006 MacPro

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So, I thought my mic was working but yeah it’s not. I’ve shot a bunch a footage, and did some capture stuff too. Turns out the audio I though I had working isn’t. I should have started with a 10 second short to get things ironed out.

I’m using old crap I’ve had lying around in this case, software wise, I’m using liteCam Game: 100 FPS Game Capture, which I guess is ‘okay’ for video capture. It runs on my 2006 MacPro so that’s great, but the video compressor it likes to use, the RSUPPORT MPEG4 Codec isn’t understood by the video editor I’m using, VEGAS Pro 15 Edit Steam Edition.

So FFMPEG to the rescue!

ffmpeg.exe -i 20190107-122714.avi -t 00:05:00.0 test2MP4_.mp4

This gets me a 5 minute clip trans-coded from one MPEG-4 to another, but at least Vegas can read it now.

I used the great program myTube to clip audio from another video, and convert only the audio stream into something Vegas could deal with:

ffmpeg.exe -i DASH-Yakety Sax- Music.dasha” -vn -c:a copy Yakety Sax-Music.mp4

Editing was a fun time flailing around figuring out how to cut tracks, fade in/out add in other layers, and that’s when I noticed that my MIC wasn’t capturing anything. And I didn’t want to try to literally phone it in, so it’s a test video.

24 minutes to render a 5 minute video!

I was kind of crazy, and used the 2006 MacPro to make the video file. I should have known with the ‘blazing’ speed of 0.407x doing the trans-coding that this was going to be SLOW. Obviously dual Xeon 5130‘s @2Ghz isn’t really ideal for video editing today.

Clearly I need a bigger boat.

But just like running Fallout 76 on a 13 year old computer, it still runs. SLOWLY.

I wanted to some crappy branding/art things, but as I made a new channel I’m too much of a n00b apparently to set custom thumbnails. So I need to fluff it out or something I guess.

So here we go!

Consider it more of a process test, I need to get some lighting, and figure out what is up with my audio, maybe hit SSP and get an old audio board or something. Let me know how terrible it looks/sounds… I’m still working on transitions and stuff. I got Vegas on sale for a tiny fraction of the price, I guess it’s high time to use it.