[X] My Assistant

Lol 1 hour and 50 minutes before Windows compression of files and folder in that folder end.
Maybe that wasn't a good idea (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif)

Got some PCMCIA USB cards in. One usef NEC branded one, and two new china AKE branded clones.
The NEC one worked flawlessly in my CF-18 toughbook under windows 7. I'll have to test the chinese ones, and test both under XP SP2 really verify.
It comes with a little aux power cable, but that doesn't seem to be needed for flash drives, mouse dongles, or uC/TTL serial cables.
Eddy: Is there a mobile browser that doesn't suck?

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Dec 9 2019, 19:54

Installing Starcraft II was a valuable source of information:
New records for my Internet: 103 MB/s for download, 20.5 MB/s for upload.

Something I'm actually clueless about:
Can modern-ish PC optical drives even play music with those old CD games that used redbook audio? Like, the ones that'd be connected internally to your sound card years ago. Is there some kind of provision for sound over SATA? Or do you just need an old drive to play redbook audio games with the music (without using some software drive emulator)?

I think i have a couple of the old 4-pin cables around here somewhere or another, and I know my sound card has plugs for them (it's old).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 11 2019, 14:47

Something I'm actually clueless about:
Can modern-ish PC optical drives even play music with those old CD games that used redbook audio? Like, the ones that'd be connected internally to your sound card years ago. Is there some kind of provision for sound over SATA? Or do you just need an old drive to play redbook audio games with the music (without using some software drive emulator)?

I think i have a couple of the old 4-pin cables around here somewhere or another, and I know my sound card has plugs for them (it's old).

I've never heard of redbook audio, all the games that had music on the cd for BGM that could also play in hifi systems were just separate disc sessions with index and wav files.

Something I'm actually clueless about:
Can modern-ish PC optical drives even play music with those old CD games that used redbook audio? Like, the ones that'd be connected internally to your sound card years ago. Is there some kind of provision for sound over SATA? Or do you just need an old drive to play redbook audio games with the music (without using some software drive emulator)?

I think i have a couple of the old 4-pin cables around here somewhere or another, and I know my sound card has plugs for them (it's old).

The only sound issue I know of old video games not having music is the one where you have to use an old IMAADP32.ACM file to get the music.
No idea if that has any link with your issue, I never saw the keyword "redbook audio" before.

The only sound issue I know of old video games not having music is the one where you have to use an old IMAADP32.ACM file to get the music.
No idea if that has any link with your issue, I never saw the keyword "redbook audio" before.

Firstly:
Not using windows… Not natively, anyway, And Wine provides an open source version of imaadp32. So does ReactOS, actually. It's just actual windows that might not anymore.

Secondly:
Red book audio is the CD audio format defined in a book by Philips, which has a red spine, thus the name.
Orange book is CD-R, green book is CD-I (yeah the game console) and so forth.
Quake, for instance, would stream music off the CD drive, such that the player would play a music track in the same format as could be played in a standalone player. Analogue audio was output from the drive, usually via a connector on the back or a headphone jack on the front. Half-Life also used it.

[www.vgmpf.com] http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=CD is a list of a few well known games that use it.

Looks like CDEMU [sourceforge.net] might support emulating it, but obviously that would have to be with a CD rip, and I'm still curious if anyone makes drives that can do it without using the usual 'digital audio extraction and emulation' methods (meaning an analogue line output on the drive itself).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 13 2019, 08:28

Firstly:
Not using windows… Not natively, anyway, And Wine provides an open source version of imaadp32. So does ReactOS, actually. It's just actual windows that might not anymore.

Secondly:
Red book audio is the CD audio format defined in a book by Philips, which has a red spine, thus the name.
Orange book is CD-R, green book is CD-I (yeah the game console) and so forth.
Quake, for instance, would stream music off the CD drive, such that the player would play a music track in the same format as could be played in a standalone player. Analogue audio was output from the drive, usually via a connector on the back or a headphone jack on the front. Half-Life also used it.

[www.vgmpf.com] http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=CD is a list of a few well known games that use it.

The only 2 games i remember that had audio on cd was Anno 1602 and Carmageddon II.

my fav


copyrighted music in a game wew lad those days were good, i think twisted metal had good songs too


This post has been edited by Pillowgirl: Dec 13 2019, 08:27

The only 2 games i remember that had audio on cd was Anno 1602 and Carmageddon II.

my fav
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCP8Yl4VWV8

I've always loved that song, and that's a great version of it.

copyrighted music in a game wew lad those days were good, i think twisted metal had good songs too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tht84wkn0Q0

Cool stuff, thanks. Now want to try those. Heard of carmageddon at least but never played it.

Lots of Sega CD games used it, too. Lunar: The Silver Star is one of my favorite Sega CD games (and probably two of maybe five good ones that got US releases IMO). It uses it. I'm not going to link it because it's not too memorable for music.
Unfortunately Lunar: Eternal Blue, which had a much, much better score, chose to not take that route and the quality is much lower despite the better score. My guess is they just didn't have enough room on the CD, since the game is a lot bigger, so they had to do some compression on it.

(Too bad the series never really got to this level again and pretty much got killed.)

I don't think the Playstation remakes used redbook, although some other playstation games did. Especially earlier ones. I think if anyone ever wants to play Lunar, the PSX remakes are probably a better way. They're pretty much improved in every way, though the stories changed a tiny bit and they really did basically remake both games rather than a simple 1:1 "port." New music and all. I am attached to the Lunar 2 Sega CD soundtrack though.

Since I realize I didn't flat-out say it, all music CD's you can play in a normal CD player are redbook audio.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 13 2019, 08:47

Obtained a copy of Pokémon emerald with something other than the battery broken preventing the RTC from functioning. After making it worse by not checking the temperature of my soldering iron and lifting a pad on the board, and then breaking the power pin off the RTC chip I managed to fix it, scraping away the package plastic above the pin I snapped and re-routing the battery power.

I am sorry, my poor game pak.
Gonna be hell when I need to replace the battery again.

I wish that benchmark program I used had been made better.
If it had warned me beforehand to turn off G-Sync, or allow to actually uncheck the checkboxes for some benchmarks (to redo only gpu ones in proper conditions), I could have gotten the right results.
Instead I'm told my pc is great for notepad and things like that (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

I wish that benchmark program I used had been made better.
If it had warned me beforehand to turn off G-Sync, or allow to actually uncheck the checkboxes for some benchmarks (to redo only gpu ones in proper conditions), I could have gotten the right results.
Instead I'm told my pc is great for notepad and things like that (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

Sounds like blaming the software for trusting the hardware to behave in standardized ways (unless there's some industry-wide adaptive sync standard that I'm not aware of).
But the second idea (checkboxes) sounds like it would be a nice improvement. If it were open source, it'd be easy to implement, too.

I don't care about benchmarking my system though; if it plays the games I want at a speed I am OK with, anything else is just going to try to tempt me to buy hardware I don't need so it stacks up better against "the big boys™."

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 15 2019, 10:14

About blaming, nope, I know my poor result is due to g-sync because the website receiving the results said so...and yet despite knowing g-sync break the results, they could not put a simple text warning (like "please disable g-sync if you have it before the benchmark"), or harder, a g-sync detector in the software.
About the checkboxes, they are here in the software, they are just unclickable/unmodifiable (this is stupid (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/dry.gif) )
And I did the benchmark because I like that "userbenchmark.com" site, and wanted to contribute with my config (since they have community-based data).

Also my latest tech thought: still haven't thought properly on how to access this computer remotely (I don't want to half-try, must have thought of all details before trying and activating stuff)

This post has been edited by uareader: Dec 15 2019, 15:20

About blaming, nope, I know my poor result is due to g-sync because the website receiving the results said so...and yet despite knowing g-sync break the results, they could not put a simple text warning (like "please disable g-sync if you have it before the benchmark"), or harder, a g-sync detector in the software.

Ah, that's fair. I misinterpreted. My bad again.

About the checkboxes, they are here in the software, they are just unclickable/unmodifiable (this is stupid (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/dry.gif) )

Well, that is impressively bad then.

And I did the benchmark because I like that "userbenchmark.com" site, and wanted to contribute with my config (since they have community-based data).

That's fair in your case, but I still think they can (to others at least) give a false impression that their build is "bad" because it's on the lower third of the scale, despite the user not doing anything besides the benchmark that actually requires more power. I think it tends to encourage overzealous upgrading to "keep up with the Joneses," as is said.

Also my latest tech thought: still haven't thought properly on how to access this computer remotely (I don't want to half-try, must have thought of all details before trying and activating stuff)

I like SSH. Even if you're running windows it's doable.
I had a WinXP machine for several years that ran sshd in cygwin. I could run windows programs, start a VNC server (with traffic passed over the encrypted SSH connection), and so on from it. Even just a normal windows command prompt (running 'cmd' or other windows programs from a cygwin bash shell actually works, unlike "bash for windows" or whatever the actual name is for the ubuntu thing in Win10). Registry editing and stuff is also possible, either via a VNC session or just the 'reg' command built in to windows.
You can also use it for forwarding a port, which is often handy.
I don't remember too much trouble setting that up, though it must be said that I already was vaguely familiar with how to configure that sort of thing. I think I had to add an allowance for sshd in the windows firewall, but that's it.

I still have that winXP machine, actually (it's a Dell Latitude D630), but it's been powered off for most of the last few years and I don't think Cygwin supports XP anymore so it'd probably be hard to update everything without just upgrading the OS. In which case I'd probably ditch windows on it.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 15 2019, 15:35

Trying to decide if I want the latest xubuntu they released a 32 bit version of, or something else for my CF-18. Intel Celeron.

Trying to decide if I want the latest xubuntu they released a 32 bit version of, or something else for my CF-18. Intel Celeron.

Try Arch, I've always been an advocate for it. I have installed it on my desktop in 20011 and since then never reinstalled the OS.

Or gentoo if you have the patience for that.

If Arch is anything like it used to be, I don't have the patience for it even.

Think of it the following way: Ubuntu and Fedora and the like you reinstall every 2-3 years and spend 1 day configuring. Arch you install once every 15 years but spend 5 days configuring - the first time, the next time you just copy over your home directory.

The gain in time is in the long run.

I barely have motivation to do anything usefull nowadays, too involved. I tend to have multiple laptops instead of a desktop. When I stuck an SSD in my primary laptop, I opted to just do a clean install instead of migrating the install, which was itself migrated from a different dead laptop. That hard disk went in another laptop still, and is just used in there without any changes done.
But anyways, the CF-18 is a rather specialized role, and I don't let the Win XP or 7 on it have internet access. Linux would be handy for linux only and multi platform software, and to make it so I don't have to sneaker-net in codeplugs, firmware, etc.
I've not seen how the drive is partitioned up yet, but the plan is to just copy the 60gb hdd directly to the 128gb ssd, then just fill the extra space with a new partition- if it only has 2 or 3 already. That'll be Wednesday or later depending on other projects- my new radio add-on screen won't accept firmware, and I need to drop the truck's fuel tank.

I have pacman on my debian install so I can more easily build AUR packages.

I'd consider an arch hop if they weren't in the systemd camp. As of now I've managed to keep it off my debian system but it's getting harder all the time. (It brings nothing but trouble whenever it jumps in)

I re-implemented an old tool (for categorizing images) that I made in Python & GTK3 using C & GTK3. It's a lot faster to start up, but I have a funny feeling I've probably forgotten several free()'s. It's too late and I'm too tired of working on it to do a valgrind run and know for sure, though.
The average time the program is open for a single run is measured in seconds (it spawns from mcomix on a keyboard shortcut so I can treat it like a menu dialog), so I feel less guilty about it than I honestly should in these days of memory management units and protected mode operating systems.

Maybe once the weekend hits.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 17 2019, 08:56