‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the office

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UPDATE the Jingsha finally redeemed itself. It was the RAM.

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.

Curse of the Azure Bonds

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A while ago I’d mentioned that as part of a large MS-DOS gaming upload to archive.org the old SSI ‘gold box’ games were online, including CotAB. What is more interesting is that while digging around for Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, I found Simeon Pilgrim’s work on decompiling the old MS-DOS EXE, and converting it to run in .NET!

Yes, that’s right it’s all in C# You can find the project & downloads over on github.

This is nothing short of amazing!

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.

We Can Remember your electric sheep for you Wholesale, prices start at $8.99

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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...

NEAT!

Christmas came early!

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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!

Wasteland 2 Director’s Cut Digital Classic Edition: Now on giveaway

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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.

You can find it here: https://www.gog.com/#giveaway

How much DooM is there in the Doom 3: BFG Edition version?

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Another follow up to my ages old “Just how รขโ‚ฌหœoriginalรขโ‚ฌโ„ข is the Ultimate Doom on steam?“, I thought I’d follow up with the DooM 3 BFG version.

I already have DooM 3, but this is apparently remastered, and includes the previous versions!?

It’s not like it really offers anything I don’t have, but it’s on sale so whatever let’s go.

And in the base/wads directory there they are!

fb35c4a5a9fd49ec29ab6e900572c524 DOOM.WAD
c3bea40570c23e511a7ed3ebcd9865f7 DOOM2.WAD

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

It’s a shamefully basic patch. But it works.

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.

Quake 2 for the RTX just got updated

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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.

Oh how times haven’t changed all that much.

new glass!

At any rate, Quake II for the RTX, has been updated on Steam. It’s hard to believe it, but it looks even more so amazing than before. The ‘solid glass’ option looks pretty nice too.

At the moment I don’t have anything else really RTX ready so to speak. But it ssure looks pretty amazing!

So Intel being Intel decided that preserving it’s past isn’t worth the few hundred GB.

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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’.

Archive.org once more again steps in, and is archiving the void.

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.

Web Rendering Proxy – Full Page Scrolling

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Due to a popular demand I have added an option of generating full page height screenshot and allowing client browser to do the scrolling.

https://youtu.be/lDqrPxkOFlI

This makes the browsing experience much smoother, you have resources for it. Beware, a full page screenshot can be several MB in size encoded as gif/png and much more as a decoded raw bitmap on the client. I managed to crash Mosaic and OmniWeb a few times. Fortunately typical Wikipedia page is under 1 MB so for most part is should be fine. To activate just put 0 in page Height.

I have drafted a pre-release on github for testing. Please let me know any feedback. I’m also thinking whether enable this by default, or not.