| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-05-17, 04:50 in Resurrecting Visual Basic 3 shareware in VB6
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 Post: #401 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Aw man, MSGBLAST.VBX, there's a blast from the past. If I recall correctly, it was pretty easy to make a VB app send custom Windows messages to any other window, but any incoming message that didn't exactly map to a pre-defined function was dropped. For example, WM_CLICK messages caused the VB runtime to invoke control's OnClick subroutine, but the Win3.1 drag-and-drop messages didn't have standard VB subroutines to handle them, so you couldn't drag-and-drop files from File Manager onto a VB app. MSGBLAST was a way to hook into otherwise-ignored messages - I think it gave you a generic "message arrived" subroutine that included the message number as a parameter, and let you do whatever you liked. It was a nice half-way point between the tidy and manicured garded of VB, and writing your own WinMain function in C. Of course, you could still get pretty far without MSGBLAST if you knew about about the state machine of Windows messages. I remember having my tiny teenaged mind blown when somebody showed my how to make a custom fake titlebar that could still move the window around. I assumed it would be a bunch of work, involving having to poll the cursor position, track movement, and repeatedly set the window's position properties, but it was actually much simpler: in the VB "OnMouseDown" handler for the widget, you send the widget a fake WM_LBUTTONUP message (so it assumes its no longer being clicked), then you send the window a fake WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN message (so it assumes the title-bar is being clicked) and the Windows default message handling does everything else for you. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-05-17, 04:53 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Post: #402 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Posted by funkyass I recently installed Windows 10 in a VM, and when I got to the part about setting up a Microsoft Account, there was no way to create an offline account. I hard-shutdown the VM, disabled the emulated network adapter, and booted it up again. This time, I could only create an offline account (which is exactly what I wanted), and once I got to the desktop I re-enabled the emulated network and all was fine. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-05-17, 04:54 in Upcoming game announcements/news
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Post: #403 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Isn't Doom Eternal a single-player game? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-05-27, 10:31 in bsnes 115: is it possible to activate fullscreen by default?
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Post: #404 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
There's no option to always start in full-screen mode, but if you launch bsnes with the "--fullscreen" command-line option it will start in full-screen mode. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-06-18, 11:47 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #405 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I remember playing Mille Bornes under Win3.1, but it wasn't a VB app and it definitely wasn't 34MB. I poked around in a backup of my old Win3.1 box I had handy, and I found a MB.EXE... but sadly the file-size was 0 bytes; apparently it got corrupted somewhere along the way. Luckily, it looks like somebody uploaded it (or something like it) to the Internet Archive, and at 28.6KB for the .ZIP download, it might be worth checking out. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-06-27, 07:31 in Real VT102 emulation with MAME
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Post: #406 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
In which I try to use MAME's VT102 emulation as a real Linux terminal emulator. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-06-28, 07:34 in Real VT102 emulation with MAME
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Post: #407 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
It's true. :/ The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-06-30, 09:05 in Real VT102 emulation with MAME
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Post: #408 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I also mentioned it in Freenode's #mame, and one of the regulars there mentioned they had already implemented XON/XOFF flow control inside MAME! Unfortunately, it's only in the latest version 222, not the 221 that's in Debian, and it's only for the "null_modem" RS232 back-end, not the PTY back-end. So you can use it to connect to a TCP socket (if you want to run a shell executing arbitrary commands from a network socket) but that's about it. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-07-09, 08:28 in Textern: edit textareas in a real editor
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Post: #409 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Back in the days when Firefox had single-digit version numbers, there was an add-on called "It's All Text" that let you edit the contents of a text-area in an external editor, with all your favourite keybindings, etc. Once Firefox replaced its old add-on ecosystem with WebExtensions, that extension died and I've been looking for a replacement ever since. I recently found an add-on called Textern that does the same thing, but (in accordance with the WebExtensions security architecture) it comes in two parts - a Firefox extension that can be installed with a single click, and an external helper script written in Python with all the dependency hassle that implies. So, I wrote my own external helper in Rust, so I can distribute a single statically-linked binary that basically Does The Right Thing. My project's README has basic installation instructions if you're interested - although I should note it currently only works on Linux, and I've only made a pre-built binary for x86_64. I created issues discussing macOS support and Windows support if anybody wants to help with those. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-07-20, 05:05 in EA Genesis baseball games
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Post: #410 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Everything in higan uses manifests, although only the SNES has a database of verified game and board manifests — everything else just uses the traditional heuristics for that particular platform. I'm afraid it's been a while, so I don't exactly recall how to ensure higan uses a manifest on disk instead of generating one, but I *think* it should work. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-08-02, 08:09 in Maxane's Marvelous Modding Madventure (Personal GBC modding)
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Post: #411 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
- Game Boy Cool - Maxane Boy Color - iPhone Zero - UNIVAC 9,000,000 The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-08-18, 07:33 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #412 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
You might notice American banknotes are pretty conservatively (boringly) designed; even though notes are updated regularly the design stays consistent enough that cartoons can represent money as "a green rectangle with a dollar sign and a squiggly border" and everybody recognises it. I read somewhere once (although I can't find a reference now) that American currency used to be more creative and distinctive, but then in 1896 a banknote design titled Electricity Presenting Light to the World featured Electricity as classic Greco-Roman goddess complete with exposed boob and loose garments. Despite America being all about plundering the Greco-Roman aesthetic, this was apparently a step too far and the backlash caused the Banknote Design Department to change its artistic course dramatically. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-08-21, 04:47 in Where is the official download link for higan?
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Post: #413 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
v110 is the most recent release with "higan" and "byuu" branding (although I don't think we have separate byuu binaries). v115 is the most recent release, but it has "ares" branding, and executables named "luna" (like higan) and "lucia" (like byuu). I do intend to clean up the branding and make a new release, but right now I'm focussing on handling the backlog of contributions and bug-reports people have made. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-08-22, 06:14 in game genie "special load" option...
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Post: #414 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Game Genies should be emulated, because they're historically significant. However, if you actually want to use Game Genie codes yourself, emulating a Game Genie is strictly worse than using the emulator's built-in support: you can't copy/paste, you can't just type them on your keyboard, and you're limited to a handful of codes instead of thousands. > ...there are Super Nes roms that took shortcut by only dumping the MAIN chip (usually on cartridges PRG-ROM -Sega CD is another thing), but skip onboard co-processors when available. This changes rom's size...and at least if put on "wrong end" of PRG-ROM (again usually) it would seem to shift the absolute address a bit... Game Genie codes affect the addresses visible to the SNES CPU. On board co-processors aren't visible to the SNES CPU (or they would be included in the dump), so they don't have any effect on Game Genie codes. bsnes and higan allow the extra undumpable data to be stuck to the base ROM dump, but only at the end, not the beginning, and it's very careful to separate the two parts and treat them individually. If a Game Genie code works with one specific ROM dump on one PC in one emulator, it should work with that specific ROM dump on every PC in every emulator. Any emulator where it doesn't work is broken. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-08-28, 06:07 in Mozilla, *sigh*
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Post: #415 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
As a counterpoint: I've been using Fenix over Fennec since it was nightly-only (in fact, I'm still using the nightly channel). It's a bit annoying that it doesn't support bookmarks or the "Top Sites" list that Desktop Firefox uses, but even on desktop I mostly just type the first letter or two of a site I want to visit from my browsing history. Since Firefox Sync copies my browsing history to my phone, that still works just fine. Also, I've made icons on my home screen for the sites I really want to visit regularly. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-09-08, 09:21 in Migrating Windows 10 from VirtualBox to libvirt
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Post: #416 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
A while ago I needed Actual Genuine Windows for something, so I booted up VirtualBox and installed Windows 10. I picked VirtualBox because it was familiar and its GUI was more approachable than the inscrutable command-line of QEMU. It worked pretty well, but I don't have a lot of disk space free right now, and although VirtualBox lets you create a "dynamically sized" disk image, that size only ever goes *up*. You can shrink the size back down, but it requires doing a defrag, and running a command to zero unused portions of the disk, and then shutting down the VM and running a lengthy command-line process to scan for zeroed disk chunks and deallocating them. But wait! (I thought) in this modern age we have the ATA TRIM command! Surely we can trick Windows into thinking it's installed on an SSD, and then it will just send TRIM commands when it deletes data, and the VM can automatically deallocate the corresponding chunk of the disk image and everything stays neat and tidy with no additional effort! Unfortunately no; VirtualBox does have experimental support for TRIM (that you have to manually edit config files to enable) but apparently it just crashes the VM. Well, that's a blow, and honestly I'm a bit tired of VirtualBox having to recompile its kernel module every week. Isn't KVM the Linux standard VM system these days? And GNOME 3 has an adorably simplified app called Boxes that will probably (maybe) do the right thing without me having to think too hard, I should give that a go. In my first attempt, I told Boxes I wanted to pick an OS install image myself, but instead of picking an ISO I picked VirtualBox's .vdi disk image, which it happily converted to QEMU's qcow2 format and booted up. To my intense surprise, it booted first go! But of course it still had all the VirtualBox guest tools installed, not the QEMU/KVM ones, so it didn't adjust its desktop resolution or have clipboard integration or auto-release the mouse cursor when I moved it outside the VM window, which was annoying. I uninstalled the guest tools, rebooted, and... Windows blue-screened. Every time. Oops. Luckily, my second attempt worked. Here's what I did: - In GNOME Boxes, I imported the VirtualBox disk image, creating a new QCOW2 disk image, which I could then boot successfully - I downloaded the SPICE Guest Tools installer and... installed it, which added all the QEMU/KVM compatible drivers, and when I rebooted desktop-resizing and mouse-auto-release worked - I uninstalled the VirtualBox guest tools and rebooted again, and this time Windows did *not* bluescreen - To get file-sharing working between host and guest, I installed spice-webdavd into the VM as directed. That caused a "shared folders" UI to appear in GNOME Boxes, but didn't actually result in a network drive appearing in Windows. I poked around and discovered "C:\Program Files\SPICE webdavd\map-drive.bat", which mapped the network drive and it's still there on subsequent reboots happily enough. - Unfortunately, Windows 10 did not report its disk image as an SSD, so I didn't know if it would trim. Running "debug /L c:" claimed to be retrimming the drive, which was an improvement over VirtualBox (which just said "TRIM not supported" or similar), but I wasn't sure what that actually did - Luckily, GNOME Boxes is not *just* a simplified front-end for QEMU/KVM, it's actually a simplified front-end for RedHat's libvirt virtual machine management software. So I installed the full virt-manager package, booted it up, and not only did I get a *lot* more GUI options to tinker with, I also got a nice syntax-highlighted view of the underlying XML configuration I could edit. - Specifically for the TRIM use-case, I went to the virt-manager configuration for "IDE Disk 1", opened "Advanced options" and "Performance options", and I changed "Discard mode" from "Hypervisor default" to "unmap", just to be sure. I did find some reports that TRIM only really worked if you used the "virtio" or "virtio-scsi" disk controllers, instead of emulated-IDE or emulated-SATA, but either of those options just made Windows blue-screen at boot again, even with the fancy virtio drivers installed, so I went with the thing that worked. I also found a ServerFault answer that suggested Windows 10 should automatically recognise QCOW2 disk images as thin-provisioned disks and treat them as SSDs with TRIM, but that didn't happen for me. virt-manager also has an "Operating System" setting that's set to "Generic Default". It can be set to "Windows 10" but it's not entirely clear what that would do, and I haven't tried it. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-09-08, 22:00 in Migrating Windows 10 from VirtualBox to libvirt
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Post: #417 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Yes, I had to reactivate. I'm not sure if it's normal, but Windows didn't say "we're not sure if your licence is still valid", it claimed it had no licence. So I typed in the same licence code I'd used previously (A Win8.1 key from the ACPI tables of my laptop) and it was perfectly happy. I wonder if anybody's experimented with automatically exporting that ACPI table to from the host to the VM... Yeah, I'm sure I could whack together a QEMU command-line that would do the same thing (and in fact, when the VM is running, I can just copy that command-line from `/proc/whatever/cmdline`) but for something as wild and complex as modern PC architecture, I do appreciate the hand-holdiness of a GUI. If you'd rather not use libvirt, there's other QEMU front-ends. But libvirt is RedHat's alternative to enterprisey systems like VMware Server - it wraps Xen as well as QEMU, it can serve VMs over a network, automatically start VMs at boot time, etc. It's probably overkill for my "just run Win10 locally" needs, but I figure I have a better chance of migrating from libvirt to something else in the future than from some custom thing I whipped together. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-09-14, 06:05 in Computer Hardware News
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Post: #418 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
Is NVIDIA's announcement enough? I believe Apple, Qualcomm and maybe Samsung have perpetual licences, so it doesn't matter what NVIDIA does, they can noodle around and do their own thing. However, one of the big advantages of ARM is its popularity - if NVIDIA screws up and the low end of the market moves over to RISC-V or OpenSPARC or something, those companies might want to shift over as well. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-09-23, 09:33 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Post: #419 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
I'm curious how 3D graphics work in SM64 ports. As I understand it, N64 graphics are notoriously subtle and difficult to implement on modern APIs, which is why AngryLion's renderer is so well-respected. Did somebody crack the code for SM64, or is it just that supporting SM64 specifically is a lot easier than supporting every N64 game at once? The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
| Screwtape |
Posted on 20-09-23, 11:07 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Post: #420 of 443 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 1101 days Last view: 172 days |
A few days ago I watched a three-and-a-half-hour not-entirely-serious "review" of DOOM, and it occurred to me that although I'd had copies lying around pretty much ever since I learned it was something my parents wouldn't approve of, I'd never actually *played* the game as intended, without cheats and without just warping to a particular level. So, I did that. I played on the easiest difficulty, because I wasn't really taking it seriously, but I still had a good time - there's something satisfying about nimbly dodging an imp fireball even when you aren't in any real danger, and it was fun to explore each map and find secrets based on a few stray lines in the overhead map and a bit of inside knowledge about how DOOM levels work. As a follow-up, I went on to play the first episode of Quake under the same conditions. The tech was obviously a lot fancier, but it didn't have the same energy-level. At least part of that was the whole 3D thing - in DOOM, the level is confined to a flat plane, so you can always make sense of it by switching to the overhead map and thinking about it. Quake is fully 3D and has no map, so levels curl around themselves like geometric fever-dreams and there's no real point trying to engage with them because they're mostly just "lookit this neat architectural moment" anyway. I also wonder how much of that comes from the popularity of deathmatch, too - sure, there were a lot of DOOM maps designed to be playable as point-to-point single-player levels and as multi-player arenas, but Quake was designed when that was already a popular thing, while DOOM invented the idea and so it wasn't as prominent. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI. |
