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| tomman |
Posted on 23-10-01, 23:26 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs)
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Dinosaur
 Post: #1261 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
PulseAudio is dead and buried, say hello to the new king of loud penguins, Pipewire! If you just upgraded to Bookworm and were using Pulse, you're now already on Pipewire through pipewire-pulse, and most likely you haven't really noticed. THIS is the kind of progress I like - do your goddamned job behind the scenario without anyone ever being aware of your existence! Bravo, Pipewire, you've achieved in a few years what the Pulse folks took almost half a decade to achieve. But the job is not complete - your few ALSA-only games are in YO DAWG mode going through Pulseaudio bridges, and those are being bridged to Pipewire. This is insanity, and the solution is to apt-get install pipewire-alsa, let it nuke the remnants of Pulseaudio, reboot, and hope the house of cards that is the Linux audio jungle doesn't fall apart again in 10 years when some Forward Pushers of Things come up with Yet Another Audio API™. Side casualty: projectm-pulseaudio is dead, and the visualizations of Easy Effects (OH GOD, THIS SHIT LOOKS SO IPHONE IT HURTS!) are lame. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-10-04, 20:41 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #1262 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Complete sets are complete (please no more surprises, Central Bank of Venezuela!) - That's ~$26 at current exchange rates... albeit I paid almost that solely on the replacements alone! - Those 3 coins (worth ~$0.05) were a total waste of metal - nobody uses them and they were barely issued! - Your approximate odds to find a replacement per denomination: ~0.0003%, ~0.003%, ~0.002%, ~0.002%, ~0.0002. - Russian security printers love to skip letters for no good reason at all, but they're consistent on that (note the missing D-series on both the 20 and 50-bolivar notes). - That very dirty C-series 10-bolivar note was the second toughest overall to find, as they issued less than 100 thousand pieces! WHY. - Want all of them mint uncirculated? Abandon all hope then. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-10-08, 23:52 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs) (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1263 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Stuff I've learned in the last ~18 hours after trying to run games that play videos (especially Japanese ones) on Wine: 1) You don't need to install codec packs anymore on Wine - these days it relies on GStreamer for that, so you need to install a few i386 GStreamer packages (including gstreamer1.0-libav). The problem these days is not codecs, but renderers - you may or may not need (or even want) native quartz.dll, depending on how picky is the game. 2) Do not mix native and builtin quartz.dll and dsound.dll - at best you will only get nasty audio glitching, at worst, things will get crashy-crashy and not lovey-dovey. 3) If your game uses DirectMusic (THAT'S WITH YOU RECETTEAR!!!), abandon all hope. While Wine recently started to work again on actually implementing this ancient music synth API (long deprecated and forgotten by MS since Vista), the support for now is unusable. Use Winetricks to install DirectMusic (which also brings native dshow.dll, since it won't work otherwise). Oh, and don't expect to have both DirectMusic and non-DirectMusic sounds working on the same application! (In other words: kiss that OP movie goodbye) 4) If you're lucky, your game (or VN) will work fine out of the box on a new, clean Wine prefix without any overrides. But Japanese developers can barely make games that work on regular Windows PCs sold in Japan, so expect this to be the exception, not the rule. Wine's target is modern Western games, mostly - far more kids care about playing CoD than your niche bullet hell game, and that's where the efforts are aimed to. 5) Stuff like Lutris overcomplicates things - I've seen stuff so overengineered that it would be almost like installing Docker to run games, seriously. And Proton does not spark joy on me, sorry. 6) Wine has an up to date repo for Debian, so use that one instead of the old crusty packages of stable. Their packages are well behaved citizens and will be installed under /opt, while being properly integrated with your Debian box. 7) Get used to the idea of razing and rebuilding your $WINEPREFIX from scratch every few years - we're dealing with Windows-y things, after all. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-10-20, 14:16 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1264 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Two quickies: 1) https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1052690 - that's what's happening after installing the latest GRUB2 security update and noticing that your Windows boot entries are gone, even after enforcing GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false... because some postinstall script has braindamaged logic and will comment that setting without even warning you first! 2) https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=22830 For the first time in almost 20 years, Wine's DirectMusic implementation DOES SOMETHING! Enough to let Recettear have sounds, and even some music without resorting to winetricks and native DLL overrides. It's still quite rough (background music won't loop, for example), but you will want to update to wine-devel 8.18 anyway. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-10-24, 00:18 in 32X CRAShTEST: the mushroom of doom strikes back!
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Dinosaur
Post: #1265 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
I'm now aware of the fact that Ares has a working 32X emulation core, and that it's assumed to be reasonably accurate, so expect an update for this crashtest in the not so immediate future. Sadly my initial impressions were not great: my hardware is simply too weak for it - at best I get ~35FPS and heavily distorted audio :/ But on the flip side, it passes the infamous Mars Check Program with flying colors! So this gonna be fun... Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-10-28, 02:50 in I still HATE smartdevices
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Dinosaur
Post: #1266 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
The latest security update for my Redmi Note 11 BROKE the lockscreen wallpaper! Oh, and it installed the OneDrive crapp, because fuck you that's why! Congratulations Xiaomi, you've succeeded in copying Microsoft's worst ideas on computing: abusing security patches to break unrelated features and to sideload crapware. I'm this close of declining every future security upgrade, sekuritah lolsearchers be damned. Seriously, nothing can be trusted ever these days, not even FOSS, much less proprietary junk from either 'merica or China. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-11-21, 01:32 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs) (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1267 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
I should have caught this earlier, but didn't because the Linux world keeps giving me material to rant 'till death does its part: do NOT use modern distros on old GPUs, as hardware acceleration features on those are getting nuked left and right! I was trying to run some Ren'Py-based VNs on my T40 under Debian Bookworm, when suddenly I notice things are more than laggy. Stuff would run but... performance would be AWFUL. Dicking around, turned out I didn't had any 3D acceleration whatsoever on this thing anymore! After some investigation, found why: Mesa had deprecated more vintage GPU drivers, including R100, R200, i915, i965, and some early Nouveau stuff. Those drivers didn't got nuked right away - instead, starting with release 21.3, Mesa punted them to a new branch named mesa-amber, which can be installed separately on top of whatever Mesa your distro ships as they can coexist side by side. OK, not bad, let's try them... First catch: Debian is not shipping this yet despite being a ITP for it due to the usual Nedflanderist puritanical licensing BS that nobody but Debian package Nedflanderist puritanicals care. Ubuntu does ship mesa-amber, but they killed i386 years ago so I can't use that. Fortunately we have properly Debianized sources, so let's build me some .DEBs! Since I'm lazy for setting up a i386 chroot here, I used my ole' Thinkcentre M50 and its totes powerful Northwood to build those packages. Several hours later, I was greeted with this:  ...wtf Mesa, are you shitting on my parade? Because you are shitting on my parade, that is! OK, so mesa-amber is borked, and with no hopes for getting this fixed upstream (they're not doing serious maintenance on that branch, other than the rare compiler bugfix), this means I need to check out older Mesa versions. I'll spare you the gory details (building Mesa .DEBs involves fishing out dozens of patches because half of Mesa's changelog is "LLVM/Clang changed things AGAIN so compiler fixes LOL", one or two segfaults down the road, also did I mention that Northwoods are awesome builders?), but those were my results: - Mesa 22.3 + mesa-amber: Broken 3D. - Mesa 21.3: Broken 3D. - Mesa 20.3 (the one shipped with Bullseye): 3D works OK! So... uh, yeah, this means I'm not updating this T40 to any future Debian release just because of the GPU drivers. And now I realized that the one thing that is killing my fleet at home with modern Linux is Mesa breaking older GPUs, nothing else! Can't wait for Wayland to turn all of my computers into paperweights because I commited the heinous crime of living in a commie wasteland without access to last month AMD/nVidia product launches! Time to retire the "Linux gives a new lease in life to older computers" motto, because it's no longer valid. At this point, either stick to old Linux releases you can't probably install anymore because the repos have been shutdown or archived for ages, or just stick to Windows :/ Spoilers: I couldn't run those Ren'Py titles anyway - it can now find a hardware renderer, but will fallback instead to software mode because OpenGL 1.3 is too oooooooold for a dumb visual novel engine where apparently drawing static CGs and text has the same hardware requirements as the original Portal! Yes, I'm more pissed off than usual when writing this. UPDATE: Turns out mesa-amber isn't completely useless: while glxgears is broken, sm64ex actually renders more or less fine! Ironically, I got the same bugs on both Mesa 20.3 and mesa-amber, so I guess the level of bitrot on the ol' R100 GL drivers is uneven. We really need a crowdfunding initiative to give some love to those vintage GPUs, but alas, noone that can code is interested beceuse those GPUs are either not on a Mac, or not old enough! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-12-19, 02:08 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Dinosaur
Post: #1268 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
The one and only, the infamous murder and cheating simulator, Been waiting for 11 years on my backlog, but now that Wine can finally run it out of the box (and I can't make enough emphasis on this, as unlike your ordinary VN, School Days is actually an interactive anime, so perfect video playback is a must if you actually want to play this thing, something that has been a sore point for Wine for almost 2 decades), let's cross this one out off the list. OH GOD WHY I SPENT MONEY ON THIS!?!?!?! (found the receipt from October 2012 telling me that I burned $39.95 on this!) Anyway, with 5 out of 21+2 endings to clear yet, here are my impressions: - Makoto is a horny cheating bastard, we all know that. I don't get why all the girls in this school set their eyesights on this dude... but then at least he is a normal horny boy. Taisuke on the other end is a flat out rapist, and it's a shame there is no route where he dies! - The whole plot of this thing is an absolute trainwreck (which is ironic, considering that a good deal of the action on this VN actually happens around actual train stations): "guy gets in love with random girl he met at the train, random classmate offers to help him to hook up with random girl and succeeds, but classmate actually has been in love with guy since forever". Yes, I'm aware that this shit happens all the time in Real Life™, but still it's pure crap :P - The bloody (literally!) bad endings!!! Did I mention I _hate_ gore!? This is one of the reasons I don't play FPS games, I have really low tolerance to bloody scenes... and the very first bad end I got had to be THAT ONE. And the game makes sure for you to NOT forget by displaying the very last scene of the last ending you got on the title screen. Classy. - Now onto our lead heroines: Sekai is a crybaby that can't grow a pair and tell Makoto that she loves him before ending in this trainwreck. And Kotonoha... OH BOY, what the hell is wrong with this girl!? She literally REFUSES to get dumped, EVER! But once you know her past, you can even feel pity for her... almost. At least there is harem ending where you get both girls... which is nicely tucked between two bloody endings. - Initially I hated Hikari (loud screaming tsundere bitch, lovely)... until I got to her endings (she gets TWO!). Ended liking her for no good reason~ On the flip side, I didn't liked Setsuna that much despite being a cutie, because she is willing to backstab her BFF for that cheating MC. Otome and Nanami can rot in hell, thanks. - Every single filler character here is absolutely unlikeable human trash, especially Kotonoha's classmates. - BUGS! I wasn't aware that 0verflow was better known as 0verflaw... until I actually RAN the game. School Days HQ is more like a 11GB bugfest with traces of a visual novel inside. Broken route chart, broken flags, videos that sometimes will not play, meter bars that go offscreen if you push them too far (ha!), nonsense story branching, blatantly broken lipsync at some scenes, rampant abuse of animation recycling, weird crashes and hangs, and in my particular setup, Furnace Laptop Mode™. Almost all of those bugs are present on ALL editions of the game, no matter the OS or patch level! - No yuri ending, despite the cover art hinting at that! Veredict: School Days has its moments, but it's mostly unburnable trash. Even the HQ version hasn't aged well... Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-12-19, 02:28 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #1269 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Spotted today at a local supermarket: - Translation: "We've got an update for you". Literal translation: "We're about to screw you badly!" - Normally those price scanners are WinCE appliances (in this country, usually made by Symbol/Motorola), but this supermarket picked full fat Win10 PCs for it. WHY. - Yes, that's a legit Dell 5:4 refurbished display, which is extra fun considering that this specific supermarket only opened for business barely a year ago. Someone made a good deal buying all the cheap old junk they could find~ - The ad on the background is for bleach, a drink that should be served in extra large servings at Microsoft's HQ to those responsible of this abomination! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-12-20, 12:20 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #1270 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Posted by tomman GET #7M: some girl from a random Chinese cellphone game... with a "do not use this for training your AI!" warning - December 19th, 2023 >6 years -> <4 years -> <3 years -> >2 years -> 17 months -> 13 months -> 11 months Wow, two million milestones in a single year. I guess reaching the 10 millionth post by 2024 doesn't sound that farfetched anymore. Now, if there just were more translators too... so much fun posts and comic strips/books stuck at the "translation_request" hell... Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 23-12-29, 02:52 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs) (revision 3)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1271 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
EDID shenanigans time~! Managed to save enough monies to buy a shiny new computer monitor for the vintage Thinkcentre: an 24" Aiwa AW24FHDM4 (actually not made or even designed by Aiwa, but by some Chinesium OEM named "ChangHong Electric" according to the EDID manufacturer code). Not exactly cheap, but computer displays are difficult to find in this city at any reasonable price... or size (as much as I hate widescreens, I must face the facts: 4:3/5:4 displays are ticking timebombs with those aging CCFLs, and LED-backlit models are made of unobtanium. And yes, TVs are cheaper, but they're also impossible to find in any size under 32", and very difficult to get without the Android pest). This display has the neat feature of having triple inputs: VGA, DisplayPort, and HDMI, which means I'm futureproof'd for now, regarding wired connectivity. And here comes my pain: this is a 75Hz 1080p panel, and my Radeon HD2600 is HD capable, right? RIGHT!? Not quite: after a initial attemmpt via a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, I could see the early boot messages, but as soon as KMS kicked in, all video would be gone. Blackness. Flying blind. No, the computer wasn't hanging - it was still reachable over SSH, and after checking around, I found what was happening: the default video mode over HDMI is indeed 75Hz, but this ancient Radeon simply can't deliver 75 full HD frames per second, not for money, not for love. It pretends it can, but it silently drops dead. Now, if I use xrandr to select the 1080p60 mode, video springs back to life! And if I boot with "video=1920x1080@60", I also get KMS consoles too. Fun fact: over VGA, the monitor reports that its preferred mode is 1080p60, but of course I haven't splurged $MONEY just to waste 2/3rds of the connectivity! Something had to be done: - video= boot parameter helps with consoles, not with Xorg (let's pretend Wayland never existed for the purpose of this exercise). - xrandr helps with Xorg if you tack it somewhere in your X session scripts... but only after somehow I manage to logon (this machine is setup for autologon from lightdm, except that it sometimes fails). Quite hard to logon on a dead display... - Forcing refresh rates on Xorg config files involves modeline fuckery. No. Just. NO. - You know where this is going: it's time for EDID shenanigans~! In the past, messing with broken EDIDs have been a endless source of pain and sorrow for me. From finding a non-broken editor to understanding the format of its extensions to shoving down Linux kernel's throat my haxx blob, this has never ended well for me. But this time I had no option.... - Dump your EDID by reading it from /sys/class/drm/card0-$OUTPUTNAME/edid. Don't bother with get-edid and friends, they're largely relics from the past these days and won't really work with modern-ish hardware anymore. - For editing the EDID, the only option in town for Linux is wxEDID, except that this HDMI display exposes the 75Hz mode over CTA-861 DTDs, something that wxEDID fails to parse and that won't let me edit anyway. And every single other EDID editor in existence requires Windows 10 these days, or fails to work with Wine. Ended tracking an archived copy of Analog Devices' EEditGold, which refused to install on XP but ran fine on 7, although opening my dumped EDID on it had a gotcha (you must IMPORT, not directly OPEN it). After fixing the DTD block to pretend 75Hz never existed, I exported my fixed EDID and got it back into my IBM box. - To get Linux to load your haxx EDID, Arch wiki has the answer (as usual). Except that while this fixes X11, it does nothing for KMS consoles because Debian uses early KMS by default, and during that phase your root filesystem is NOT mounted yet! Solution? Get your EDID blob into your initramfs image. Sounds easy? NOT! I found this guide for Ubuntu, but the suggested hook script makes some stupid assumptions like that your EDIDs live at the root of /lib/firmware/, and not at the suggested place which is /lib/firmware/edid/. Ended getting this script down to its most barebones possible version: ...and it actually copied my haxx EDID~! - Oh, remember that the input names you need to use for drm.edid_firmware= are the ones reported by the DRM driver, not by xrandr! In my case, since my DVI-to-HDMI adapter is attached to the secondary DVI port, the port name i need to use is "DVI-I-2", not "DVI-1". Again, you can get those names from under /sys/class/drm/. A couple reboots later to ensure that my edits were sticking and working, and I finally got flawless 1080p60, partying like if it is 2008 again! ...or you can simply plug this thing to a modern GPU, but where is the fun on that? Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-01-01, 20:30 in Happy new year
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Dinosaur
Post: #1272 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Starting here with a 3 hour blackout just 30 minutes past midnight (NEW RECORD!), and with a icky quake in Japan... yeeeesh, another great year for the collection begins. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-01-01, 20:42 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1273 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
TVs have never been good monitors anyway. And I also have no room for anything over 27" on my current setup! (Now I wonder what are the options for those that need a small TV - 15 years ago you could just and buy a 14" CRT or -if your budget was generous- a 15" LCD that would fit even at the tightest of the college dorms) But then, given that this display is to be used sporadically only, then 24" is more than enough for me. I'm more worried about the general disregard towards build quality across the board: those Apple-thiiiiin bezel-less designs just scream "I'M GONNA BREAK if you dare touching me!". I do not recommend those Aiwas either - the first one I got only lasted 3 hours at home before I was returning it to the store due to a small cluster of 9 dark pixels with obvious manufacturing damage. And the replacement came with a bright spot near the bottom bezel whose brightness varies a lot (between "not there" and "who is shining a LED from behind!?") depending on the scene! On the flip side: - It has 3 inputs: HDMI, DP, and VGA - It has an audio output jack for HDMI audio - It supports Freesync - The next cheapest display was a Samsung that costed $25 more, lacks DP/audio output/Freesync, and looked even more fragile! (The idea here was also to futureproof my investment as much as possible) - Every other display on local stores were $50-100 more expensive, even for obviously trashy Chinese brands! Sadly I had a tight budget, a small timeframe to get the deal done (yay inflation~), and I really needed the display (plus refurbs were about the same price because Venezuela became Bizarroland for any kind of appliance that isn't a cellphone). Fun fact: the UVD HW video decoder on this Radeon HD2600 not only needs DPM to be turned off, it also needs some warmup (especially when using the DVI/HDMI outputs) - the first few seconds of playback WILL be janky, and there is a risk of the card hanging up if you try to do anything funny, but after that it will be stable... until the next reboot. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-01-03, 14:38 in Happy new year (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1274 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Japan can't catch a breath in this new year: first a quake, then this: https://avherald.com/h?article=5132b9fe&opt=0 A Japan Coast Guard Dash 8 bringing supplies to the quake-struck zone slams into a landing JAL A350 at Haneda Airport. Everybody on board of the Airbus survived, but this A350 became the first hull loss for the type... and the Dash 8 crew had a worse fate: 5 dead, and a surviving captain in critical condition. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-01-31, 19:29 in Upcoming game announcements/news
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Dinosaur
Post: #1275 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Coming later this 2024: Fate/Stay Night Realta Nua... in English... on Steam! This comes on the heels of the (quite pricey) launch of Mahoyo on Steam last December (on which for one regional pricing didn't fucked us raw!). And it only took Type-Moon nearly 2 decades to realize that we baka gaijin pasocon peasants are perfectly milkable as Western console and cellphone gamers to :) ALL OF MY MONEY, NASU! HAVE IT! (before the commies kill our international CCs... again!) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-02-11, 15:55 in Stupid computer bullcrap we put up with.
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Dinosaur
Post: #1276 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Future is sloooooooooowly arriving in this house. Starting late December 2023, my ol' rigs got blessed by the joys of SOLID STORAGE DEVICES! Sadly, due to budget and logistics constraints, I was forced to shop locally, so my experience have turned out to be more painful than expected! - The Asus got a 1TB Crucial MX500, one of the Cadillacs of SATA 2.5" SSDs (I explicitly avoided Samsung after its recent QC fiasco with most of their EVO lineup using bottom-of-the-barrel Ez-Vanish™ NAND). Also, HECHO EN MEXICO. No problems so far there (sadly I couldn't buy two, or a dozen... just one) - Upgraded the Dell and ye ole' Thinkcentre with a deal on a couple Acer SA100s. A deal that turned into a scam after I ended becoming the unfortunate winner of the Flash Memory Lottery! When I saw those SA100s for sale at a big chain appliances store, I quickly pulled the cellphone, looked for some reviews, those that I found looked legit and honest ("TLC flash! Reasonable performance! CHEAP!"), and after melting the credit card and arriving home, the party ended abruptly: the drives were using trashier QLC (a silent change that happened sometime around 2023), and even worse, 2 weeks later, the drives were slowing down massively on reads! (sometimes reaching speeds rivaling meh USB2 sticks!). Fully rewritting + TRIMming the drive would restore read speeds... for a while. Sadly returning those SSDs were not an option (apparently appliance store chains in Venezuela believe that "24 hours" is a reasonable warranty length for computer parts), so this was a tough $55 lesson :/ Does anyone want some CHEAP preowned SSDs? :D - Ended replacing one of the Acers for another infamous drive, a 480GB Kingston A400. If there is a poster child for the Flash Memory/Controller Lottery, the A400 series fits the bill nicely. Kingston only promises specs, not consistency on the internals - they're a hodgepodge of every major flash memory TLC/QLC part (even YMTC embargoed garbo) and large SSD controller (SMI, Phison, and even Marvell!) under the hood. Mine turned out to be a Marvell-powered SSD with unknown flash (as the Marvell A400 firmware blocks the commands used by these handy Soviet SSD ID tools), but I suspect it could be more QLC trash. Oh, and SMART selftests are NOT supported on the Marvell variety either! Like, wtf man... - Even tried to give some solid state love to the retroboxes - found a good deal on some decomissioned bare Sandisk X110 64GB SATA SSDs who lived most of their life inside PoS retail boxes. Sadly none of my SATA-to-PATA bridgeboards decided to play ball - only ONE worked fine with a cloned drive, and only in ONE box... the PCShits mobo from the dumpster. Tried to solidstate Saki Mark II, but alas, the Compaq/Intel econoline setup got wildly confused when trying to boot from those bridged drive. And turns out no SATA drive (be it solid or spinny) in my arsenal would do CHS addressing AT ALL, so no joy either on my 386sx :( - The plan was also to upgrade the PATA-only laptops to mSATA + mSATA->PATA bridgeboards, but importing them is right out of the planning (for now), and nobody sells those boards in Venezuela at any sane price :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-02-11, 23:16 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #1277 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
After finishing with School Days HQ, I went and like the good masochist I am, picked its - I hated Otome in SDHQ. I hate her even more after Shiny Days. Seriously, poor Ai Yamagata deserves better than this! - Everybody's favorite yandere princess got demoted to... slob lazy princess. At least Kotonoha got far better endings here, even if all of them basically were "from zero to [CENSORED] in one night at the festival". And she is the sanest of the Katsura bunch here! - Poor Sekai, cockblocked by mom at the eleventh hour :D - Yes, you can do not only the protagonists, but also her mums too. Trio of desperate - Things Setsuna enjoy: Paris, using childish nicknames. Things Setsuna hates: threesomes, being reminded constantly that she has the body of a little girl, videogames, manga, Niki. - Shiny Days is actually a remake of Summer Days, whose sole major addition is the Inori route. Well, many people HATED it, but my opinion on it is that while it gets boring at times, Inori is a very quirky and fun character, and her route does reveal quite a lot of the behind curtains scene on the power struggles at the lovely beach town of Haramihama. Getting to know some of the characters up close and personal is always a nice addition to any canon. - SDHQ was a mess but you could get to make progress with careful usage of savestates and the (screwy) route map. Shiny Days on the other side it's nigh out impossible without a walkthrough... and most there are trash or unusable (I found a handy one at GameFAQs, of all places!) - Did I mention that the reason to get into this hell was in part to contribute to Wine's languishing AppDB? Well... School Days HQ was more or less well behaved despite its 0verflaw Kwality™ reputation. Not so much Shiny Days, where the one thing that shines are the random crash dialogs under Wine. In particular, the one ending involving Otome is UNFINISHABLE under recent Wine versions due to the rampage of random, unpredictable (but highly reproducible) crashes! Looks like Wine hates her even more than me :D But yeah, sadly that means that just for that it's impossible to 100% this game on pure Wine, unless you wanna test your luck with a 2 year old release. Oh, and JAST USA changed the installers a few years ago to incorporate the latest patches, and I had mojibake issues with those when changing the default install dir! (which you should do if you intend to install *ahem* A Certain Content Restoration Patch). Veredict: Far better experience (crashes and convoluted routemap notwithstanding) than the original game, Shiny Days is a good read/watch/play if you survived the initial School Days experience. Sadly this is the end of the road for me with the Days franchise, as the next game on the road (Cross Days) has a fat chance in hell to ever get localized (it has contents far more polemic than the infamous Kokoro route), no English fan translation group is touching it either because it's radioactive, and while an Spanish translation amazingly exists... it's a dead link locked behind a Meta Platforms firewall :/ Time to move on to something less... insane. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-02-13, 12:40 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Dinosaur
Post: #1278 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
Posted by creaothceann Which is 1) embargoed, 2) Orrible®, and 3) not exactly the most charming platform for games, much less VNs. Fortunately I still have more than enough native metal here to run those problem titles (had to get that pesky Otome ending on my ol' Inspiron running crusty W7), but come on Wine, there is life beyond This Week AAA+++ games! (Also, I refuse to mess with Proton). ...Or I can switch targets to non-PC titles: just started playing the Oreimo PSP VN. Yes, that Oreimo. And as someone that never watched the anime or intend to read the LNs, I can now understand somewhat the Kirino hate. But this VN is... confusing. Those folks decided to throw out the door the traditional decision system you would expect from any VN, and instead replace it with the very unique and irritating "two-shot"/"O.R.E. System" mechanisms which don't give you a clear clue on where are you going. So far, I'm stuck at the "two male friends visit the Comiket to get some BL merch for their totally cute lil' sisters, there is nothing weird here no sir!" bad ending. Thaaanks Bamco/Banpresto. Well, at least there are targets other than Kirino... if I don't ragequit this garbo decision system first! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-02-13, 15:09 in Stupid computer bullcrap we put up with.
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Dinosaur
Post: #1279 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
SSDs can be unreliable, but modern HDDs are not exactly robust either, especially anything made by Seagate these days. Having said that, I've also had bad luck with Toshiba rust spinners too - 2 out of 2 brand new drives that died after 3 years (a MQ01ABD100 2.5" that developed what turned to be G-list corruption, and a DT01ACA300 rebadged Hitachi 3.5" which ended with severe surface degradaton, something very un-Hitachi). Having said that, here is my storage strategy from now on: - I'm not going back to rust spinners for OS/apps boot drives. - Backup strategies shall be reinforced, and I'm not trusting backups to flash memory! Can't give a opinion about He-filled drives: they're very VERY expensive where I live :/ Posted by wyatt8740 Unfortunately my two PATA laptops (a Thinkpad T40 and a HP Compaq nx9010) require drive trays, and most SATA to PATA bridgeboards would not fit anyway on those - hence the need for a mSATA-to-PATA bridgeboard which conveniently has the same footprint as a 2.5" drive. mSATA SSDs are not hard to find here, but as Venezuela has absolutely ZERO market for vintage hardware of any kind, that kind of converters are impossible to find, even online (and importing is not an option unless you want to massively bleed money) So... I guess I'll keep feeding the ticking time bombs here :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 24-03-12, 02:26 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Dinosaur
Post: #1280 of 1287 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 21 hours Last view: 8 hours |
OK, ~87% later, I'm about to clear this "My Little Sister VN Can't Be This Wretched" thing: Another VN where if you expect to make good progress, a GOOD walkthrough is a must. But the good ones are in Japanese, and the English one are more unpredictable than Kirino's mood changes (Ended using one from Fuwanovel, where people actually made the effort to debug the flaws). The O.R.E. system and the two-shot dialogs are a mess, but they make more sense the more you get into the routes, although most two-shots are only good for the CG gallery and to be annoying. And now, onwards to the heroines! - Kirino: ~14 years later, I can finally understand why all the Kirino hate. Uuuuugh, tsunderes. Especially a tsundere with a strong brocon syndrome. Her endings were... meh. But then I understand that they toned waaaaaaay down the incest topic comapred to the original LNs, and yet still there is too many moments of her being a stingy brat every time her beloved big brother sets his eyes on another girl. Sorry, can't love her. NEXT! - Kuroneko: "Ooooh, a meek hime-cut flat-chested goth lolita catgirl cutie! She ticks all of my boxes!" Nope, once playing her route all you get is a incredibly awkward girl that can't be sincere with her thoughts. But then, again she got her route intentionally botched for this release to save the actual romantic stuff for the LN. Boo! On the flip side, not every day you get reminded of the importance of backups and system updates by... a goth lolita catgirl that writes shitty doujinshi :P - Ayase: Because every VN has to provide a yandere bitch, here is your designated nutcase. OK, she ain't Kotonoha, but gets dangerously close at times. The queen of stupid misunderstandings. But her non-bad endings are actually the best of the bunch, especially the good ending wich is D'AWWWWWW~! Surprisingly she has a latent otaku side, which may or may not be fine. Her route is definitely a good read. - Manami: D'AWWWWW~! Plain childhood friend girls are the best, even if poor Manami overdoes herself during half of her route :D Another fun read, with the right amount of drama. - Saori: She is weird by definition (and proud of it!), but her route was just sad, not weird. Even her good ending basically is a shotgun wedding. Ugh. She deserved better, folks! - Others: Well, there is And of course there HAD to be a Disc 2, which will actually check your homework before letting move on! But I'll save that nightmare for later, as my VN backlog is still bigger than Kiririn's ego. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
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