xdaniel

Right, so, first things first, because it's kinda pointless to rewrite this for posting it here, have a link to a long, long story about how my life got flipped, turned upside down I acquired a couple of Power Mac G4s, ranging from damaged to dead, and turned them into one pretty decent machine.

 

Now, after you've either read the aforementioned story, or skipped it because it's long-winded and without tl;dr, have the (most likely) final specifications of this neat little G4 Mac of mine!

 

 

 

I'll probably do a follow-up post to my blog site thingy soon, detailing some of the upgrades I've done, some of the things I've tried out since writing the first one.

 

(Yeah, readership here's probably declined even more since my last post, but eh, whatever...)

I got Moon and started with Litten as well, and also have beaten the main game^(*). Still have a bunch of post-game stuff to do, I'm guessing.

I like the return of trainer customization, very much so, and I hope it's here to stay for any future non-remake mainline game. That aside, there's the various things they've done to shake up the formula, such as replacing the gyms with trials and the removal of HMs, as CorruptedMoon mentioned. I also like the idea of having regional variants of Pokemon; it makes sense and results in some pretty cool redesigns/adaptions (ex. Ninetales, Marowak), but also some rather goofy ones (say, Persian or Exeggutor). Then there's some other minor things, like the rather high amount of flying target locations which is appreciated too, instead of the more typical "one Pokemon Center per city", or the overall graphical, level design and gameplay upgrades these games have gotten -- the islands of Alola feel even more "organic" than the comparatively straight routes and other locales of previous generations, plus there's no grid we have to move on anymore.

My dislikes are pretty minor, if I can even think of any... uh, the way you pick up berries one by one by one from their piles, instead of just all of them at once, or how the HP bar depletes at the same rate regardless of how many HP are left (i.e. the opponent is down to a sliver of HP, yet that sliver disappears as slow as any other segment of the bar). Maybe also the still relatively low performance of the game in battles with more than two Pokemon, tho I suppose it doesn't help that I'm playing on an O3DS. Minor things like these are all that comes to mind regarding things I dislike in the game, so I guess they've done a great job overall.

Favorite character I'm not sure about, maybe Lillie for her development over the course of the game, although Hau is fun, too. Speaking of fun -- or funny, I guess -- there's the Team Skull Grunts and their moves as well Favorite Pokemon has got to be the Litten line so far, plus Fomantis/Lurantis, and Mimikyu, maybe? Litten going from fire kitty to the badass flaming wrestler (see Z-Move!) Incineroar, then the cute and cuddly looking Fomantis becoming an elegant (but still cute) mantis as Lurantis, and Mimikyu... well, everyone knows about Mimikyu by now. I think it's adorable and it's probably the only Pokemon I... kinda want a plushie of.

 

(*: I was one of those who couldn't wait and played the leaked ROM that came out ca. Nov 8th on my secondary 3DS. I've since bought a copy of Moon, the "fan edition" with steelbook case even, copied my save data over to the cartridge, and continued playing on my main system. I also didn't go online before release, so I didn't get banned like so many other people playing the leak.)

 

...

 

Also a quick note about two more things I found while cleaning up the attic, but which I haven't yet brought here for lack of transportation. I remembered having had these at one point or another, a long time ago, but didn't expect these to still be around: an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX and an IBM VGA CRT monitor! From what I can gather on the internet, this system is a 386SX machine based on IBM's microchannel architecture (like most PS/2s were), with between 1 and 8 MB of RAM on-board (4 MB was standard, apparently?), an ESDI hard disk (around 40 to 60 MB?), and a 3 1/2" 1.44 MB FDD. I really need to get these over here as well, so that I can check whether the system and/or monitor still work, or if they're something for the trash. I'm not particularly attached to either, so at least the CRT's fate really depends on the condition.

 

...

Well, something's whirred back to life for the first time in ages yesterday...

 

 

Alright, so what exactly do we have here? It's an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX, from the looks of it in its stock configuration, or very close to it. The exact specs -- as far as I can tell anyway, more on that later -- are as follows:

• 16 MHz Intel 80386SX
• No FPU (does have a socket for one)
• 4 MB RAM (2x 2 MB)
• 60 MB ESDI hard disk
• 1.44 MB floppy drive
• Micro Channel architecture
• VGA, serial, parallel & PS/2 ports on-board

It turns on, counts the memory (up to 3968 KB, because 128 KB video RAM, I assume?) and... gets stuck with errors 161 and 163. "Well, no big deal! Let's just reset the BIOS settings to their defaults and see what we get!" ... is probably what I would say, if I wasn't already at least slightly familiar with these machines. Errors 161 and 163 respectively mean "CMOS configuration lost" and "CMOS error, clock not updating", which indicates that the on-board Dallas clock chip, which can be seen on the last photo above with the cable tie around it, has failed. The big problem with these is that these Dallas chips don't just contain the circuitry for the clock, but also its crystal and, worst of all, the battery -- i.e. unlike most, if not all modern PCs out there, you can't fix CMOS issues by just replacing a small coin cell battery on the board. And this battery is what usually fails with these chips.

 

Now, what's even worse with these PS/2s is that they won't boot when faced with errors 161 and 163. In that case, you can only boot it off of its Reference Disk, which is basically the BIOS setup and diagnostics in one. So I looked online for an image of the disk, which was much less painful than I had imagined, wrote that to a floppy disk using my ThinkPad 380ED, then put the disk into the PS/2 on boot, and... the drive started spinning, reading the disk, and eventually I was greeted by a white-on-blue IBM logo on the screen. The software detected the broken CMOS configuration, proceeded to automatically configure the system, then asked me to press Enter to restart.

 

...which still didn't fix the errors I was getting, so I assume that, at the very least, the battery inside that Dallas chip is as dead as it can be.

 

For this battery issue, there's two courses of action: First, get a replacement chip off of eBay, most likely a fake from China, as apparently neither this nor other compatible models of the chip are still being manufactured officially. Or second, literally hack up the existing chip to expose the battery contacts, break them, solder on an external battery holder and attach that to the chip's package. I opted for the former, for now at least, hoping that the chip from China is at least a new, good quality fake, and not just a used and possibly already dead original.

 

And that's... pretty much where I am with this machine right now. I'm waiting for the replacement RTC to arrive before I look for and purchase any additional parts for the system, although there's not much you can really get for it anyway -- Micro Channel cards are rather expensive, and the only one I might want is an ethernet card... which would have BNC connectors, which would mean I need some kind of adapter or hub with both connection types to connect it to my modern RJ45 network, which is a pain. So for data exchange, I'll probably just try to use the null modem cable I've used with my Amiga 500 before; MS-DOS has some tools for that, I believe (Interlnk/Intersvr). MCA cards aside, I suppose an FPU would be nice to have, although it probably wouldn't make much of a difference with the software I'm planning to use -- which, well, is really just MS-DOS and maybe Windows 3.11, anyway.

 

As for what I'll be doing with this... I have no idea. It's a low-end 386SX after all, so applications and games alike won't be much fun to use on it, and if I do want or need to use some DOS or 16-bit Windows software, I still have my Pentium 100 tower, as described in my original post. I guess I'll simply be keeping it for its historic significance in IBM's bid to try and recapture the PC market after losing it to the XT/AT clones, as well as introducing technology that ended up becoming standards on many PCs for two or so decades afterwards (VGA, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, etc).

As for Trump, it was me trying to be funny because all the times Trump said 'WRONG' during the debates. It was just meant as a joke. :3

Don't worry, I know, it's just that (all politics aside even, which is a whole different can of worms) I find him extremely unlikeable, so even jokes about him I'm feeling... rather meh about.

Got a lot of Vita and PSP games since I last posted, mostly digitally and mostly via PSN sales. Let's see...

 

...in no particular order:

• Puyo Puyo Tetris (PSV; new, physical import)
• Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed (PSV)
• Hyperdimension Neptunia ReBirth 2: Sisters Generation (PSV)
• Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax (PSV)
• Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth (PSV)
• Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited (PSV)
• Touch My Katamari (PSV)
• Phantom Brave: The Hermuda Triangle (PSP)
• Gods Eater Burst (PSP)
• Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X (PSP)
• Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero? (PSP)

There's also been a couple more or less gaming-related flea market finds and such, although nothing extremely exciting. All loose unless stated otherwise:

• Sega Master System, model 1 (10€)
• Atari 520ST (10€, still untested as I'm missing a power supply)
• AMD Phenom II X4 830, 4x 2.8 GHz (free!, now running at 4x 3.22 GHz)
• XFX AMD Radeon HD 6750, 1 GB GDDR3 (20€)

Zeth and Shadow Fire: Well, that explains some things, I guess? Probably some misunderstandings on my part, coupled with, well, the overall drama back then with (ex-)team members saying this and that, etc... hell, maybe me misremembering stuff as well, it's been several years after all. But, Zeth, did you have to use a picture of Trump of all things? <.<

 

Arcaith: There is some iffy code in ex. SharpOcarina regarding vertex normal calculation, if I remember correctly -- because some .obj exporters didn't even generate normals, or only did surface normals, or something? -- so I'd guess it's a combination of the model's geometry and the importer's code messing things up... but I last touched that code maybe five years ago, so I don't quite recall how it worked or what it did.

Based on your story comments, I'm getting the impression you didn't like URA Zelda's story very much when it was in development. Pretty sure that was gonna get pretty dark and edgy near the endgame. I remember a super epic final boss theme and lots of stuff about Zeth as an in game villain after all...

 

Working on real hardware is an issue, though it wouldn't be the first example of a popular mod with that problem. Not sure if Brutal Mario would work on a real SNES with some of its broken music, and just about the entire Mario 64 ROM hacking scene has issues getting those hacks to work on hardware. Pretty sure Mario 64: Last Impact doesn't work on the actual N64.

 

Patreon is a hotly contested issue, and one that's becoming very common with fan games and hacks now. Pokemon Uranium and AM2R used to have them, and I think Last Impact and Star Road still have Patreons for funding.

 

But yeah, guess we'll have to wait and see what happens here. A few more big OoT hacks are definitely something we need to see.

Right, especially once the whole "Zeth as a super endboss" stuff came up, I did get rather skeptical about the story -- not sure if I publicly said as much, but it's what many people thought at the time, from what I recall. On the flip side, I'm also pretty sure I remember the Ura team being pretty upfront about the project having developed away from the 64DD Ura Zelda, and that, by that point, its only relation to that game was the name. This, on the other hand, is being "advertised" as a Link's Awakening remake, despite already showing the same signs that Ura did (dark, edgy, etc.)

 

Of course it's not the first example of a mod not working on hardware, but it's most likely gonna be next in that line, a line that's only getting longer if no one steps up to change things in this rather decrepit scene, by writing tools that are tested against real hardware -- which requires access to a flash cart, which requires programming knowledge, knowledge about the N64's graphics hardware, etc. as well as patience and persistence. I am lacking the flash cart, patience and persistence, as well as (these days) the interest in OoT hacking. Plus, emulators are slowly getting more accurate, too -- I remember trying the Project 3rd Quest demo using an LLE emulator and/or graphics plugin of some sort (forgot which exactly) and it looked about the same in that as it did in DeathBasket's hardware test video, i.e. with horrible depth-related rendering glitches. And yeah, I've seen a video of Mario 64 Last Impact's behavior on hardware very recently too, and that's not a pretty sight, either, with extreme graphical glitches, flickering, slowdown, etc...

 

I'm not sure how I feel about Patreon when it comes to, as you mentioned, fan games and hacks, especially the latter. Sure, if you're making pretty models, cool sprite art, etc., etc. then I don't see a reason why you shouldn't be rewarded for it. The next step -- turning these models and sprites into a game -- is where things split. If you're making a game from scratch using a regular PC game engine (think Unity, Unreal, whatever), then it's fine. But if you're making a hack, and you're using someone else's tools or documentation or whatever, at least acknowledge them in your campaign, on your website, whatever. Even better, try to track them down and ask them if they'd appreciate a donation for the work they've done. Then it's on them to accept or deny it, and hell, for the longest time I would've denied it; I think someone did offer me compensation for writing or improving some OoT tool once, but I denied because I was just doing it for fun and was using others' documentation. Now tho, with all these Patreons of that kind running, and with me not being in the best position financially (as in, I'll live, but wouldn't mind something extra once in a while), I'd probably accept such an offer.

 

Anyway, I'm ranting again and I really shouldn't do that all the time, but yeah, agreed on the wait and see, as well as that we need more bigger OoT hacks -- preferably by people who also won't shy away from doing their own research, programming and documentation, to improve things for everyone in the long run.

I have been quite critical of this project on Twitter when I first heard about it a couple of days ago, when it hit mainstream news, for multiple reasons. For one, the "deeper, original, more inspired storyline" part, which I fear could turn into overly dark and edgy nonsense for the sake of it -- especially with me being a big fan of the original LA (my favorite Zelda, even above OoT) and its, in my opinion, already wonderful balance between a more serious, thought-provoking story and lighthearted moments.

 

Then, on the hacking side of things, there's the unlikeliness of the hack working on real hardware, ex. with him most likely using one of my converters, or something related to them, to import the maps (the rather messy lighting/vertex normals being a telltale sign of them); and in turn, I'm also skeptical about the "many new methods" for modding he's discovered according to the interview. Also, there's the -- admittedly comparatively small -- Patreon he's running, i.e. making money off of the work of others (spinout, cooliscool, myself and countless others who've worked on research, model importing, etc.) without which his content would never find its way into the game.

 

That said, I still wish him luck because the basic idea is nice, because his map models look pretty good, and because there's been very few big OoT hacks that got anywhere. I don't like the project, as outlined above, but I do respect the work he is putting in it.

gets water hose, starts extinguishing the fires

 

Eh, I liked Crush Gear Turbo more. But I guess Beyblade is okay?

 

(CRUSH ALL RIGHT! CRUSH ON HIPPY! CRUSH GEAR RIDE! )

Winamp v5.666 holdout here. It does what I want and need it to do, so until it no longer works on my then-current OS or is shown to have some really grave security issues, I don't see the point in switching to a different program.

My phone sucks, and just using an Android VM on PC is no fun. So, uh, can't play it.

 

Kinda looking forward to Sun/Moon on 3DS, tho! So there's that!

Getting my recently acquired ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to work in my also recently acquired Power Mac G4 Digital Audio~

 

 

 

Just for the record, in Hex Workshop, "Options" -> "Preferences" -> "Display" tab -> "Character Filter" drop-down. Good to hear you've got it to work in another editor, tho!

 

Hex Workshop v4.23, started through AppLocale and set to Japanese, with Hex Workshop set to use the Windows ANSI character set:

 

 

 

 

AppLocale needs a workaround to be installed on systems running Vista or higher, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article; running Windows 7 here and it works fine once installed. You can probably get it to work with other hex editors, too, if you start them through AppLocale.

 

Try checking "Sync Game to Audio" in the audio plugin settings if it isn't already, otherwise I have no idea.

I'd tend to agree with DL77, commentary can be nice if it adds something to the video - say, giving interesting factoids about the game or, in the case of a port or remake like this, pointing out differences to the original version, things like that -, but commentary for the sake of having commentary isn't very enjoyable for this type of game in my opinion. I do like it when let's players ex. explain what they're doing or even just tell stories in a sandbox game, but with something story-based and relatively linear, commentary should complement the game, not take it over.

So, this place is pretty dead. However, I feel like writing about a machine I've spent a lot of time with over the last week or so, and Twitter isn't exactly the place for walls of text. And no, I don't want the character limit removed there.

Anyway, the machine in question is an Apple PowerBook 3400c, a 1997/1998 vintage PowerPC-based Macintosh laptop. This particular specimen is one I got at a flea market some seven or so years ago, and for quite cheap at that - I think it was 10€, maybe? It was much less than I would've expected, at least. I got it, messed around with it a bit, with Mac OS 9, with networking it to my PC back then, and then promptly lost interest again. In part because I didn't really have much software for it, and in part because OS 9 just wasn't very enjoyable and ran rather sluggish on this system.

Fast forward to late December 2015. I am not sure what exactly came over me, but I felt like just doing something with my couple of Macs, the iMac G3 and the PowerBook in particular. So, about a week ago, I fished the PowerBook out of storage and looked at what I had:

• Apple PowerBook 3400c
• 200 MHz PowerPC 603ev
• 32 MB RAM (16 MB on-board + 16 MB expansion)
• 20 GB Toshiba HDD
• 20x CD-ROM drive
• 12.1" LCD (800x600, 32k colors)
• Mac OS 9.0.4 (International English)

Plus various issues, none of which I have fixed yet, such as wobbly hinges (kinda like they aren't properly screwed down in the bottom half of the case) and a dead PRAM battery (think CMOS on PCs, i.e. for date/time and other settings), as well as the usual scratches, dead or stuck pixels and the like.

To start out, I backed up the few files I wanted to back up, before getting ready to format the HDD. Now, the only real link to the outside world that the PowerBook has on its own is the standard RJ45 ethernet connector, but without extra software, Mac OS isn't capable of ex. accessing Windows' shared folders, nor is the opposite true. So what was my lazy man's solution? Hack together a file upload script in PHP, start XAMPP (meaning, Apache and PHP) on my PC, and use the Mac's Internet Explorer 5 to "upload" the files one by one to the PC! That worked fairly well, although had I wanted to save more than just these couple of files, I probably would've rather got some sort of FTP client for the Mac and used my PC as an FTP server...

Well, files are backed up, so I started collecting software for the system from the internet - including a bunch of stuff that's technically pirated, but I can't really see anyone care about me downloading ex. an ISO of the 15+ years old, unsupported Mac OS 8.5 for my also 15+ years old and equally unsupported PowerBook. Once I had the basics, such as OS 8.5 in German, I went ahead and booted the system from the OS CD, formatted the HDD and installed OS 8.5. Another hour or so later, I had the OS running, installed the update to OS 8.6, as well as some additional software to allow the Mac to access the aforementioned Windows shares. Then came more software, general tools, some things I wanted to try out, etc.

And here comes the point where this old machine genuinely impressed me - for the first time, that is. I got SoundJam MP, a media player that was later purchased by Apple and apparently served as the base for iTunes. I had seen someone on Twitter (fail0verflow's marcan, I think) use this program on a 20th Anniversary Macintosh, which was a 1997 limited edition system roughly comparable to my PowerBook in terms of specs but ex. with a 50 MHz faster CPU, to stream AnimeNFO Radio over the internet, and I wanted to try that, too.

Imagine that! Streaming 192kbps MP3 from the internet, over a 10 MBit ethernet connection, to an ancient 200 MHz laptop! Such a dumb idea!

And it worked. It worked almost flawlessly. The sound occasionally cuts out for half a second, but that doesn't happen very often and is something I'll just ascribe to Classic Mac OS' kinda crappy, cooperative multitasking. Not sure if that's actually the reason, but it certainly seems that way to me. I also tried the same with 320kbps MP3 files stored on my PC and accessed via the local network, and this worked just as well. Maybe I'm exaggerating this achievement, maybe a 200 MHz Windows PC would be just as capable of playing back streamed MP3s at these bitrates, but these days it seems like to me that, say, anything below 1 GHz isn't capable of doing anything media-related anymore.

Anyway, after that I went looking for more software, especially games, although I actually haven't yet tried out very many of them. I found a lot - in fact, much of the software I'm using, freeware and otherwise, came from the same place (tho I'm not sure if I should name or link to it here) - but so far only played two, both ports from other systems: Warcraft II and Puyo Puyo 2. Both of them work quite well on this laptop, although they would both benefit from better input devices than what I have. The keyboard configuration Puyo Puyo 2 uses is awkward if you're used to either an SNES controller or reconfigurable emulator keymaps, and a working mouse would be nice for Warcraft instead of having to use the touchpad.

As for the second time the system impressed me, it was when I unplugged the power supply to see how much juice the battery has left. I started SoundJam MP and the AnimeNFO Radio stream and just let it run, periodically glancing over at the screen to check what Mac OS reported regarding the battery. Slowly but surely the battery indicators dropped; the bars showing the charge level and the timer showing the approximate remaining runtime...

And, well, slowly is the keyword here. I ended up plugging the power back in when the system reported one minute of charge left, which happened 73 minutes after starting playback. On a stock Apple battery, presumably also from 1997, or maybe a few years younger. But even if the battery is from, say, 2000, this machine still lasts a whole lot longer than my current, temporary PC laptop does (Dell Latitude C640 from 2003 or thereabouts; less than 10 minutes) and than my sadly broken 2009 laptop did (Asus X5DAB-SX070V; battery dead by mid-/late 2014). And this was while doing the whole streaming radio spiel. This was the point where this ancient laptop impressed me more than it should've had any right to.

Now, what am I going to do with the PowerBook going forward? I'll keep it, that's for sure. I found an Orinoco 16-bit PCMCIA wireless LAN card for rather cheap on eBay, which should work in this machine and other, older ones I have (ex. IBM ThinkPad 380ED) or might come across, so I'll certainly try to one-up the streaming radio stuff by making it all wireless. I also want to fix some of the issues it has, such as the dead PRAM battery (found some advice online on how to use replacement CMOS battery packs for PC laptops in this one) and I want to check what exactly is causing these irritatingly floppy hinges (which has to wait until I got the proper Torx screwdrivers or bits). Another interesting thing would be trying to rebuild the original system battery, despite it still holding out for over an hour. This is a low-priority thing at best tho, exactly because the battery still lasts as long as it does.

Well, I guess that's about it for the 3400c and for the moment!

Got Sayonara Umihara Kawase+ (PSV), as there's been reports of the PC versions being delisted on Steam, after the publisher folded in December. That is, I got it not because they folded, but because I wanted the game anyway and was worried it might disappear from PSN, too:

 

 

 

...and played through Hyperdimension Neptunia ReBirth 1 (also PSV) twice, to see both endings and get all the trophies:

 

 

 

Now that we're back on the old forum software, let me repost my pick-ups since the updates, as well as a little thing I hadn't yet posted about...

• Gal*Gun, Tales of Xillia 2: Day One Edition (PS3)
• PlayStation Eye camera & Motion controller (PS3)
• Persona 3 FES (PSN, PS2 Classics)
• Shin Megami Tensei IV (3DS eShop)
• Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection (PS3)

...and these aside, trading in 7 games (and adding some funds to my PSN account) yielded me this:

 

 

 

...and I'm really loving it so far!

Very nice to see the old forums again. The only minor problem is that some less important things (ex. private messages, reputation) appear to have not yet been reimported. Once you have some free time, could you get them from the backups if possible? That aside, thanks for reverting to 3.4!

", and prevent SceneNavi ZRE from ex. recognizing a scene!" ...

 

All the program is coded by me, i don't know anything about C if you get the idea to me of check your source code... and yes, SN was a good motivation in that part of the program and the desing of the main window...

Well, you have to admit, if something as simple as a bit of text is already nearly identical in wording to that in another program, it's not much of a stretch to think that other parts of the program might have also been copied.

 

If you've really coded it all by yourself, then that's great! OoT/MM hacking could use some more, capable coders, and this is looking pretty nice

3) Zelda64 ROM Editor:

This is the biggest program here, i've made this to make my life more easy for OoT Modding.

This, apart of a simple area editor, have a LOT of more tools to edit almost every-part in the ROM.

 

Edit - Scene Data Table Editor (Scene Start/End, Title Start/End, Etc)...

 

That information text looks very familiar. You're not trying to pass everything here off as completely your own, right? Just be mindful of the licenses of any of the programs you might've used in yours.

So, my laptop died. That is, the Asus one I bought new in 2009, named Kazari. The one that helped me through the first couple of months of this year, when my real life was more or less in shambles. Doesn't even reach POST anymore, apparently a fried northbridge or graphics chip and a common problem with this model.

 

Got the old Dell Latitude out, for whenever I might need a portable computer. Desktop of that one in the spoiler, can't remember the wallpaper source, it's probably on Danbooru. Tho not even this system's working as well as it should...

 

 

 

 

Although, maybe I should be thankful. I've read of cases where the laptop died just two years into its lifetime, as opposed to mine reaching almost six years...

If you're one of those people who still cling to Model2N64, here's what's probably gonna be my final contribution to model conversion and importing for OoT/MM: http://forums.zelda64.net/single/?p=8441682&t=11206118

Image source: スプラトゥーンいろいろ (image 2) by blueberry on pixiv (partially NSFW!)