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| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-03, 17:58 in Resurrecting Visual Basic 3 shareware in VB6 (revision 4)
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Dinosaur
 Post: #721 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Let's get this PCKENO/BACCARAT combo done, after much intense preliminary work: As I've said, this couple shareware Lose Your Money Simulators™ are from the same author and use the same bunch of VBXs, some of them being terrible in the way: - Crescent (Sax) QuickPak (CSGROUP.VBX / QPRO200.DLL): You have to crack the installer (it's a 4-byte patch) in order to bypass the $800 BS fee for lameloid controls that haven't been updated since 2003 or so. This is a mixed bag - of all the original QuickPak controls, CSGroupBox (aka sivbGB) was the only one that didn't made it for the promised ActiveX land, so a direct upgrade is not possible. But what the hell is a CSGroupBox? Nothing but yet another fancy Frame container! You can actually make a pretty convincing replacement with our good old friend, Sheridan's SSPanel From Hell:  Separated at birth? You decide! The makeshift version is pretty much pixel-perfect, at least on VB3. You still have to spend quite some time moving, cutting and pasting controls around with VB3's barebones form editor (of which VB6 builds on it, adding next to no improvements - you can't still drag to select multiple child controls inside a container control!). This is the most labor-intensive part of the port, since it's very easy to screw up the original layouts if you aren't careful. The other part of the equation is QPRO200.DLL (its 32-bit counterpart is QPRO32.DLL), which is a "bonus" utility library that ships with QuickPak, featuring all classes of useful functions. Some of them are very broken (WinDir doesn't bother cleaning up the return string so Win32 consumers will break, so you should be properly using GetWindowsDirectory anyway), some of them silly (Encrypt2, seriously?!), and some of them redundant when used with newer VB versions. - FXTools (FX***210.VBX): Ugh. Did shareware developers paid $400 for this bunch of horseshit back in 1995 when the 32-bit version was new!? I have no qualms over the original 16-bit VBXs, but their 32-bit counterparts are so fucking broken I can just imagine that Pegasus tried to bury the product as fast as they could, if only to prevent lawsuits. They eat CPU time for no reason, fail to render properly (FXShape), don't let some other specific widgets to be placed/rendered over them (like standard Labels), and are completely unusable on design time! This hurts PCKENO badly, as this app uses FXShapes to draw the keno balls at the game table form top. Don't ever try animating ANYTHING AT ALL, or you will deadlock your UI thread, BADLY. - MediaKnife (MKTLS16.VBX): Another terribad 32-bit port of a $400 "multimedia/FX" set of controls - these games use it only for playing WAVs (because sndPlaySound was too easy/hardcore for this specific author I guess?) that aren't even shipped with the shareware versions! MediaKnife installer is also broken due to its use of GetDiskFreeSpace API that returns incorrect values for partitions larger than 2GiB (Microsoft was discouraging developers to move to GetDiskFreeSpaceEx since before Win95 went RTM, but not many Win32 compilers could deal with 64-bit integers back then... even on VB6 you have to resort to a dirty hack!), so it may not even let you install the product on some setups out there depending on how the result overflows (it didn't let me on my 15GiB XP partition on my ol' HP laptop, yet it succeeded on my nearly-empty 40GB test VM). The installer was made with PC-Install, another defunct program from yet another long-defunct software shop, but thankfully the fix is a single instruction (2-byte) patch to override the GetDiskFreeSpace check. After littering my registry with more ActiveX junk, spending a couple days with those CSGroupBox replacements (not difficult, just boring as hell), and upgrading API calls, I was done. I don't understand those Vegas card games, and Keno sucks, but whatever :P Registration notes: This executable uses license files (.LIC), 3840-byte binary blobs that are structured in 96 0x40-byte string records. Each record is encrypted using QuickPak's Encrypt2 lameass XOR-based crypto (seriously: they even say on the documentation that you should not rely on it for anything serious) using one of two keys: - "gouofawildcatsgobeatasuyoustudmuffinsyou" for even records - "eatabowloffuckyouslutmonsteryoufagfucker" (no kidding!) for odd records The odd records are ignored - all relevant license fields are stored on the even ones, twice. If any record pair mismatches, the license is rejected and program assumes it's in trial mode (to reset your trial, delete any WIN31EX_.Z@? file on your Windowas directory This also implies that all you need to unlock the full version is a 3840-byte blob full of zeroes (!!!), as the license check routines doesn't even attempt to validate the data further - there is a serial as part of the license but it's just cosmetic. What this program DOES check for is for a couple specific registered user name values: "Sofsource Inc." and "COSMI Corp" - both of these switch from "Registered" to "Retail" license mode, and the latter one renames the product to "Las Vegas Super Casino", so I guess those were used for a sublicensed version for specific customers. Oh, and the very same license file unlocks BOTH products, yet they were sold separately back then! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-08, 18:02 in Resurrecting Visual Basic 3 shareware in VB6
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Dinosaur
Post: #722 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
TIL there is no working decompiler for VB4: DoDi's VB4 solution is a disassembler - he never managed to complete a working decompiler. He did started work on a VB5 disassembler but that effort too led to nothing. His VB decompiler pages were deleted around mid-1999, and he switched to Pascal crosscompilers shortly after that, putting an end over his VB decompiler saga. With some effort you can find the original VBOPT4.EXE release for version 4.11 (there is a later 4.12 which was eventually released by scene groups, but that one is now lost forever?) and its VB6 "rebuild" by the same guy that decompiled and rebuilt the original VB3 decompilers. But don't get fooled - this is not a proper decompiler by any stretch of the meaning: it CAN output some code, but nothing else! It only works with really simple executables (the only one I've got working with was the Setup executable from the VB4 Setup Toolkit, and even then it generated unusable code), it can't save, and it crashes a lot. Here is a quick list of what tools are available out there for decompiling all known Visual Basic versions: - VB1/DOS: Nothing :/ - VB1/Win: Nothing :/ - VB2: DoDi - VB3: DoDi - VB4/Win16: Nothing :/ (DoDi's may recover forms and some code snippets, but that's all) - VB4/Win32: Nothing :/ (ditto; also Semi VB Decompiler claims it may recover forms for 32-bit VB4) - VB5: VB Decompiler, VBReFormer, Semi VB Decompiler. VB5 introduced the native compiler that really complicates decompiling efforts. No decompiler claims 100% compatibility, but VB Decompiler boasts it can recover the most code when matched against the competition. VBReFormer does not support p-code executables. These two have crippled lite/free (read: useless) versions, but their Pro products aren't insanely priced if you really want to get serious. The "semi" on Semi VB Decompiler is there for a reason: it can barely recover any code, if at all! But on the flip side, there is a Github repo with sourcecode (!!!). YMMV. - VB6: Same options as VB5. - VB .NOT: Many. Native compiler is gone for good. Unlike p-code, MSIL/CIL is documented and decompilers are abundant, both free and commercial. Realistically speaking, if you lost your Classic VB sources, your options are not good. Very old VB1 code is unrecoverable, for VB4 you only get a sneak peek, for VB5/6 you're expected to spend some cash just to get forms and half of your code if you're lucky and planets align, and for VB2/3 you've got the greatest chances to recover code you can recompile into a working executable (or even port it to Win32!), but it's not a straightforward procedure by any means, yet it's fully doable if you're willing to endure some pain. And dealing with obsolete ActiveX junk. Those Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-10, 01:25 in Resurrecting Visual Basic 3 shareware in VB6 (revision 4)
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Dinosaur
Post: #723 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Let's check another collection of old forgotten shareware on CD, this time I borrowed some bits from Walnut Creek's Giga Games series (discs 3 and 5). Their info files are a mess, and they don't even tell you most of the times if your game needs extra libraries, like the VB ones, so this time I only managed to checkout a few samples: - BJ_POK33.ZIP: More Ultisoft shareware, but this time it is NOT another reskinned slot machine simulator! QCARD.DLL consumer and has SSFrames, but otherwise it doesn't share the same sins as their video slot games (string font sizes, mainly), so pretty much a straightforward port. All these Ultisoft games feature a catalog of their complete shareware lineup, which upsets VB6 because it features >1024-character lines, which causes the IDE to refuse saving anything at all until you break up those lines. No, nobody (be it sane or clinically insane) does one-liner complex functions in VB - these guys instead fitted all their catalog descriptions in code which led to the ridiculously long lines. Unlike most Ultisoft products, their shareware card games shipped separate executables built from different codebases for shareware and registered products, so there is nothing to unlock here - the nagscreens are here to stay, including the catalog dialog that was now promoted to an actual nagscreen too! - HS32.ZIP: MOAR Ultisoft gambling simulators - this one is particularly lame (but so are actual horse races to me). Once again, nothing noteworthy to write about, except for the fact that this continues the Ultisoft tradition of hardcoded regkeys. NEXT! - LASBLO20.ZIP: Oh joy, a rare VB4/16-bit sample! I thought nobody bothered with that release (either stick to VB3 until it was practical to do, or jump ship to Win95 and the promised 32-bit land ASAP). Unfortunately this means I can't do anything at all since there is no VB4 decompiler :/ - MIMA250.ZIP: Some shitty Missile Command clone from Canada made in VB2 (DoDi may bitch with some non-errors, but the decompiled code is useable). You fight - RDTPV10S.ZIP: Someone that liked card games and auto racing decided to find out what happened when you combined both, and this is the result, a somewhat entertaining piece of shareware. This one was fun - two custom VBXs with no 32-bit replacements: * WAVE1.VBX (actual name: WAVE.VBX from Mabry Software): For those devs that were too lazy to wrap sndPlaySound and/or found the MCI control overkill. I didn't even bothered with this one - moving this to sndPlaySound(SND_ASYNC | SND_NODEFAULT) only took me like 3 minutes for the 18 WAV files this game uses. * ROADTRIP.VBX: This one is a really custom control (not just a generic 3rd-party control made by someone else), coded specificaly for this game - it's a glorified imagelist, except that it ships with hardcoded images ("resources") of the custom card deck designed for this game. Naturally this means that this VBX is useless outside this game, and therefore there is no point looking for a 32-bit OCX, as this game never got a 32-bit release despite being released in May '96. The replacement involved carving the VBX for the card deck images (which were good ol' .BMP files, complete with headers instead of just raw bitmaps) and MS Common Controls ImageList, which with minimal code changes served the exact same purpose. So basically I ended trading away two unknown VBXs with a single API call and a standard MS OCX. I could have put all the card images on a single bitmap, letting me to use PicClip, or even do away with external dependencies and just BitBlt some cards but the key here is to be lazy :P Shareware source base, the highscores dialog is there (complete with its backing code!) but the actual menu item event handler just serves a "Please Register" messagebox. Now let me talking about their "shareware protection" bits: this game enforces a 14-day trial, and once it expires you're locked out. For this, the game creates a fake DLL (mci00826.dll) on C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\, a hardcoded path, which is bound to fail on those rare Windows installs back when MS allowed you to setup Windows on whatever directory you wanted. Oh, and that's a no-fly zone on anything past XP, or NT without admin privileges. This game also does something incredibly lame: it checks its 18 WAV files on boot to ensure their file sizes are consistent against an internal table, and bails out if you have changed even one of the files... yet there is no error handler on that proceudre, so the program will crash instead at the first missing file. I guess that too served their purposes as well. - SOL3.ZIP: Packed installer EXE, so I'm leaving this for later as I'm lazy to fire up the VM and install. - USC22.ZIP: Yet another Ultisoft shareware card game, and as you've expected, this is the crippled shareware binary. There are previews of the games only available on the registered version, but no actual code to drive those, so there is nothing to unlock here :/ QCARD.DLL consumer, and it uses almost every API function, even some of the "undocumented" ones! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-11, 01:07 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #724 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
In this episode of Bad Caps: The TV: Remember Saki's VRM woes? Last year, the onboard VRM on the M535/8 (to this date I'm not even sure what mobo I've got - all I know is that mine lacks the COAST slot) started pooping its pants, starving my Pentium MMXs from its precious life juice: in mid-2019 the 2.8V setting could barely got this P54C thing to boot beyond kernel panics or GRUB hangs, so I went and bumped it to 2.9V in -checks Samba panic logs- August 30, 2019. So far, so good. Those MMXs don't even mind the extra juice, and my stock Socket 370 Intel cooler manages to keep this thing almost ice cold. Plus, I do care about the yearly maintenance of my room aircon. Fast forward to last week, when daily blackouts made its return due to the (very delayed) start of rain season (we don't have four seasons, only "Eternal Summer In Hell" and "rain"). Of course Saki hates that because its ~22yo Taiwanese caps are in its last legs, and after the last 12-hour blackout today I got nothing but segfaults, panics, and more panics. The VRM is clearly dying, most likely due to those capacitors being run pretty much dry. Time to bump voltage again, because "2.9V" right now actually means "2.8V for no more than 60 seconds if noone is crunching numbers". The M535/8 series has the following voltage settings on jumper J9: - A: 2.5V (only for Cyrix CPUs) - B: 2.7V (mainly for K6) - C: 2.8V (default for Pentium MMX) - D: 2.9V (unused) - E: 3.3V (default for non-MMX P5 CPUs) - no jumper: 3.5V (unused) So there is no "3.0V" step, only the big 0.4V leap that in normal conditions would mean "fried MMX at POST". But nothing is normal at Soviet Venezuela anyway, so what the hell, let's try it - here are the possible outcomes: A) Fried MMX at POST. B) No POST. C) POST, boots... and severe overheating. D) "3.3V" actually means "~3V when the drunken onis party hard at the Trump Building", buying me a few extra weeks of life before the caps die because P55Cs are Toyota Tough™. Take your pick. Hint: the fancooler is barely warm. Too bad there is no retrocomputing scene here at Soviet Venezuela where I could just borrow another VX board for a few years :/ Ah well, Debian Jessie LTS runs into EOL in -checks on Debian wiki- June 30, 2020. Ah well, I'm fucked anyway :( No, I don't want to hear the words "Raspberry" and "Pi", thanks. ARM toys aren't compatible with Communism™. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-11, 01:37 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #725 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Fun fact: as you know, PC Chips only made junk boards, often using fake parts. Rebadged chipsets were one of their specialties: for them, everything was VX, TX, BX, or after Intel ditched the *X names, they just came up with nonsense like "GFXcel". The idea was to fool less-techy people making them believe that those noname chipsets were as good as the real Intel deal - sometimes trying to sell utter rubbish (VIA, SiS, Utron), or in rare cases, shadowing actually decent chipsets on their own merits (ALi). But once in a blue moon, they would actually came with legit Intel chipset solutions, like the VX/Triton II on my M535/8. Those are true anomalies, basically the best of crop from a otherwise unremarkable shit factory from Taiwan. My Saki is the living proof of that - sure, the VX was one of Intel lamest chipsets ever (seriously, 64MB caching limit so adding more RAM would actually make your PC run slower - all because the HX chipset was too expensive for econoboxes), but once again those things would basically survive the apocalypse just fine :P Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-12, 23:10 in Resurrecting Visual Basic 3 shareware in VB6 (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #726 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Speaking about Road Trip: the game turned out to be quite fun, but the AI/RNG is just horrible, plus the game is a pile of bugs: - If you need a specific Solution Card to counter a specific Hazard Card, chances are you're going to draw pretty much every Solution Card in the deck except for the one that you need, while your opponent gets all copies of the card that it's useless to him. This quickly leads to nasty no-win situations because there is no balancing whatsoever, basically killing the "skill" aspect of the game. - When you win, sometimes no matter how many times you dismiss the game summary dialog, it comes back as soon as you hover your pointer over the game field or menu bars. This seems to be due to a timer going amok. - You're supposed to get a 14-day trial, but it seems that all you get is a ONE-DAY TRIAL due to the very botched way of the game to parse dates: their "software protection" method stores on its fake DLL the installation date as the day of year, which is calculated by extracting the day and month of the current date, which is done using Val(Mid$(Date, n, 2)), where n=1 for the current month and n=3 for the current day of month. If you already spotted why this is BLATANTLY BROKEN, chances are you don't live in good ol' US of A because if this dev ever read the VB docs he should have known that the string representation of a date this way is locale-dependant! (The correct way to do it is to use Format$ with a custom date format, Day/Month built-in functions, or even better: DatePart which already gives you the day of year, although that one required shipping an extra DLL back then because that for whatever reason, MS considered DatePart to be a "financial function", which depended on MSAFINX.DLL) - Their "software protetction" routines also store some other unknown stuff on said fake DLL, even on the registered version (according to leftover code on the shareware executable - the methods were exactly the same except for the botched trial expiration part) The history of this game ends sometime after 1997, when an update was released (this time the dev had updated to VB4, but the app was still 16-bit, and aside extending the trial period to 30 days and replacing the custom ROADTRIP.VBX with VBIO.VBX and COMDLG16.OCX, the bugfixes -if any- are unknown), promised Internet play for future versions, and promptly vanished from the Internet before crossing the bridge to the new millennium. A pity, as I genuinely see some potential on this card game... UPDATE: Road Trip is a computer implementation of the French cardgame Mille Bornes ("thousand milestones"), which is played with actual cards. Nice~ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-17, 01:05 in COVID-19 (or why 2020 will SUCK for a lifetime)
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Dinosaur
Post: #727 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Considering all the weird shit that it's happening around the world (protests in USA, Europoors being Europoors, Soviet Venezuela being as hopeless as usual, every government in world blatantly lying about their statistics, and the prospects of a working/effective vaccine being, well, a lottery even for 2021), I hereby decided that I stopped giving a fuck about COVID-19 AKA the Chinese Pest™. If I'm going to die from this, so be it. No, I don't have the virus... but then I can't just go out and get tested because you're simply not allowed to walk into a hospital and get tested without a "very good reason" to do so. I'm not going to read anymore about this disease that either will wipe half the mankind, or will do nothing but to remind us that we're among stupids :/ I already have bigger troubles in life. I guess this board where nobody bothers posting anymore because MUH SOCIAL CRAPPS has become my safety vent, but still... So yeah, I'm leaving this thread alone. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-17, 23:36 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 4)
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Dinosaur
Post: #728 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
It seems my pointless quest for dumb AKA "taking apart abandoned ancient VB3 shareware with a decompiler" led me to discover a rather cool card game I didn't knew it existed: Mille Bornes (that's French for "thousand milestones"), a game created by a Frenchman that actually was born in Ecuador (!!!), based on a even older "car card game". Apparently this game was somewhat popular in the 70s at some places, and it's still in print to date, both in actual cards and versions for computerizers. Needless to say, I got hooked. The game is that simple, even simpler than UNO, you'll quickly learn the few rules in no time. Seriously, that Frenchman that turning something as boring as a car trip into a card game just nailed it. Since it's obvious that my chances of getting my hands on an actual card deck (and the required flesh'n'bones friends) are ZERO (it seems there is a Spanish version but since this doesn't use a poker, Spanish, or UNO deck, noone has ever heard about it over here), my only options are the digital versions. Turns out the options I've found so far are a mixed bag: - Road Trip (Carcajou Software): The original VB3 shareware that started this trip (pun not inteded!) for me. Uses custom card designs which are not that bad despite being postage stamp sized .BMPs from 1996 (one of the Remedy cards has a hilarious spelling error). Unbalanced as hell - the AI is simply a RNG gone mad (according to the dissasembly it's a hodgepodge of redundant copypasta code): let's say the computer plays an Accident hazard card on you... and you won't be getting that Repair remedy card you need, EVER. Or you will be suddenly full of every single Out of Gas card in the deck that you can't play on your foe because the computer has protected itself with the unlimited gas safety. Rarely you get a really head-to-head close game - most likely you've lost the game before playing your first card :/ Apparently they didn't addressed any of those bugs (among others) in the second (and final) VB4 release, yet they were planning to add online matches. Other deviations from the original game are: * No counter attack (coup-fourré) implemented, which seems to be the signature move of Mille Bornes. If you get slammed with a Hazard card, no matter if you have the matching Safety card in your hand, you can't counter the hazard, wasting one precious turn. * No 700/1000-mile limit: you just keep racking as many miles as possible (assuming the broken AI doesn't shut out you first!). Game ends after the draw pile is exhausted and both players play (or discard) all of their cards. * No 2x200-mile card play restriction. Although the Safe Trip bonus is implemented, this is neglected by the fact you can play as many 200-mile cards you draw. - This one-man software shop made a more modern PC version for all the relevant desktop platforms (Linux and fruity designer machines included, 64-bit ONLY) in some hipster bloated crossplatform framework (seriously: it's a 20MB download while Road Trip was barely over half a meg; the bulk of the install is a single 34MB framework .so in the case of the Linux version). This one uses actual copyrighted graphics from the real deal (it's amazing that in this lawsuit-happy 'murican society that Asmodee hasn't C&D'd this guy yet), albeit at reduced resolution (which could be a problem for those on HD/4K hi-rez displays). The AI on this one is pretty much the same "you already lost the game" affair as Road Trip, although this game offers both aggressive and defensive game styles. Still, this one is very playable... if you can cope with a couple minor but potentially game-breaking UI bugs: * At some point in game, the engine starts discarding every card you choose to play (you're supposed to discard by right-clicking the target card, which opens a context menu). This becomes VERY ANNOYING, leading to botched games if you don't get used to using the context menu to play your cards! Because there is nothing more infuriating that discarding that 200-mile card you just needed to clear the goal. * The game may refuse to exit sometimes (or throw weird exceptions at exit), at least under Linux. Be prepared to Ctrl+C/kill the executable when you want to quit playing. * There is a Spanish translation, which is pure rubbish. Fortunately the game features a language editor, so this is not a big deal :) But enough about computerizers for us dinosaurs! The PC is dead, so what about cellphones? Card games and cellphones have been proven to work since some Anonymous Coward managed to get Klondike running on those early Java phones. There is nothing at F-Droid, and a search on the Play Store through Aurora returns four candidates: - The official Mille Bornes app by Asmodee's digital arm. Not free (costs $2,99), and it's a bloaty pig (104MB!!!). NEXT! - Two adware crapps, possibly sending all your dick pics to Chairman Winnie Pooh at the CCP, BCC'd to the FBI/NSA/CIA/Jeff Bezos' secretary. Fuck no. - Road Rally 1000, the only one that it's completely free (but only as beer, not as freedom), and tipping the digital scales at 466KB, it won't be breaking your data plan. In exchange for a tracker-free app, you get a very barebones implementation of the original games. Card artwork are the SVGs from the Wikipedia article, for crying out loud! At least this one got the game rules right (including coup-fourré), and it automatically knows when to play or discard (unlike ExpressShare's Xojo version). I can't believe that this is the best digital version I've found so far despite its very simplistic UI, and it had to be a version for smartdevices :/ Yes, the AI is actually not broken on this one, with the expected EASY MODO/balanced/you've-already-lost-the-game settings that NONE of the PC versions bother implementing! If only we could get those Unlimited Gas safety cards in real life over here... Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-21, 22:21 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE
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Dinosaur
Post: #729 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Today I've found this translation patch for Puyo Puyo Sun 64, which is not just your average translation patch: - Voiceovers! The original N64 game lost those because carts are expensive and Compile was cheap (and soon after that in the verge of bankruptcy). This patch borrows the original voiceovers from other Sun ports (mainly from the PSX port), and the price you pay in exchange for fully voiced cutscenes is a 128Mbit ROM (original game was half that). - It is Real Hardware Compliant™. This is *not* a PJ64_v1.x "ROM", but it has been tested on real consoles using actual flashcarts (although it may not work on specific Everdrive versions due to implementation bugs in those) - The same guy walked the extra mile (or a thousand of them? HA!) and brought another patch that will turn any stock Sun 64 ROM into an Aleck64 arcade ROM with Japanese/Korean/English localizations, and voiceovers in two of those languages. For extra lulz, said conversion has been actually proven to work in an actual Aleck64 arcade board (and considering that MAME support for the platform is sketchy at best, you really have no other choice if you want a playable experience but to shell out some Federal Reserve Notes for arcade hardware). Pretty cool, huh? To be fair, it seems that Sun is the least loved Puyo version out there (the N64 version is particularly annoying as it does not support the analog stick, and the default Mupen64+ d-pad keyboard mapping is very awkward for me) - I still am waiting for a Puyo Puyo~n patch (now that we actually have graphic and RSP plugins that allow the game to run with pristine video), but as good ol' Vectorman used to say, "I'll take that". Satan exploits global warming to turn the island into a tropical paradise so he'll be swimmin' in women. Cut a swath of Puyo genocide across the land and put an end to his lecherous scheme. This is an Oscar Award winning plot, right there. Why Sega is not making a Puyo Puyo movie yet!?!??!?! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-22, 18:47 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #730 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
The platform had only 11 games released (including the cheap porno one, Vivid Dolls, and a sequel for Hi Pai Paradise that it's not listed there), plus at least two known unreleased protos (Rev Limit and Variant Schwanzer, and while there are a ROM dump for the latter, it's in the hands of a collector that most likely won't be releasing it anytime soon) Despite being built on the ever-popular powerhouse of the N64, Aleck64 never caught on and by 2004 it was essentially gone. BUT! Not all hope is lost, if you want to testdrive those unique games: since the hardware is exactly a N64 (I'm not even sure on how much RAM it packs, all I can find is conflicting numbers - some sources claim it has as much RAM as a stock unexpanded N64; others pull figures up to 144Mbit which is double the standard N64+Expansion Pak - remember that the N64 uses some weird 9-bit RAMBUS), the very same guy that hacked up all those locales into Puyo Puyo Sun 64 and made an Aleck64 ROM cart out of it also managed to "reverse-port" 6 of those Aleck64 games so they can run on a vanilla N64 with nothing else but your favorite flashcart AND the Expansion Pak. Oh, a standard controller would be nice to have, too. Save your quarters for something else. Yes, Vivid Dolls is too on the list of "ports", if you're that desperate for pornless porn :P UPDATE: Someone at the Everdrive forums dropped a 4shared folder with prepatched "consolized" Aleck64 ROMs, including some extra games that aren't listed in the site I posted earlier (they all come from the same romhacker - Zoinkity really loves the Aleck64!). The entire Aleck64 library is now yours to enjoy on a retail N64 (or your favorite accurate emulator). Here is the full game list supported by MAME, straight from the aleck64 driver: All of those have patches available for turning them into retail N64 ROMs. The platform never left Japan, yet several of those games are already in English! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-22, 21:37 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #731 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
What the hell, let's try Vivid Dolls - it's one of the smallest Aleck64 games at 64Mbit, so I can afford the download :P Yes, it's a H-game indeed... albeit a very very cheesy one. Did really Nintendo let Seta use their platform for this junk!? The gameplay is nothing special - I think I've played this kind of "draw lines to uncover stuff while avoiding hazards" in older dumbphones years ago, with the difference that I didn't uncovered half-naked girls on those. With or without T's & A's, these kind of games end getting awfully boring after 10 minutes. Pick from eight girls, each one has 3 stages, where your pick loses some clothes on each successive stage. Curiously enough, for a game made in JAPAN for SALES AND USE ONLY IN JAPAN, all the models are westerners! (hell, the entire game IS IN ENGLISH!) Bunnysuits, cheerleaders, nurses, all the usual (Western) fetishes are mostly covered. Pretty girls, sure... but these ones don't satisfy my particular taste, sorry. The music is meh, while the sound effects are possibly the worst part of this game - the only effects here are "generic Western sexy moan #23", "generic Western sexy moan #27", some warning alarm, and "generic explosion #15", basically. Guess what effect you get when you coin up... yes, a "sexy moan". Gross. Arousing factor: approaching zero. The only "wood" you should expect from this game is the one from the desk/table where your computer sits over. Play a couple stages, have some good laugh, then straight to the Recycle Bin. WTF Japan, you can do better than this! Where is muh J-J-JAM IT IN arcade!? Word of warning: On Mupen64Plus, Angrylion's LLE video absolutely hates this game: even with cxd4-sse2 RSP LLE plugin, the game will hang with a blackscreen past the Aleck64 bootsplash (the coin switches AKA C-Up/C-Down won't do squat). GLideN64 will work, albeit with graphical glitches. CEN64 also wants nothing to do with this game - it rejects the ROM due to an unknown CIC type and refuses to run. Amusingly enough, stupidly cheesy games require horrible plugin choices - good ol' brokenass Rice Video + HLE RSP does manage to deliver! FWIW, Zoinkity's ROM hacks and conversions are confirmed to work on hardware - be glad your emulation choices are broken enough/not that broken to protect you from suck) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-23, 12:06 in Computer Hardware News (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #732 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
It's official now: the Mac is https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-transition-to-apple-silicon/ https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Going-In-House-Silicon This now puts those longstanding rumors to rest: Intel is dead to Apple, and so are Real Computers for them too. A matching macOS release has now been announced too ("Big Sur", WTF is with those silly codenames!?) with Rosetta 2 for limited x86 compatibility. Oh, and the convergence of macOS and iAppliancesOS is happening too, as those new Macs will natively run iDevices apps (so I guess those will be getting touchscreens out of the box?) Kiss goodbye your very expensive creative tools and Steam games, Mac guys. Enjoy the ride while it lasts. No word on the future of the Mac Pro. Apple could have revived PowerPC (remember that they bought a PPC arch licensee years ago, PA Semi), but nope, they had to switch to cellphone CPUs :/ Today is a sad day for the future of personal computers, no matter what lies those ARM pundits want us to believe. Oh, this also kills Boot Camp and seriously threaten the future of bare metal Linux on Macs (for those that actually see Macs as "overpriced half-decent PCs" instead of "Think Different™") - Apple's "solution" to the latter is "you can always have VMs" instead of "wipe macOS and install Debian". Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-23, 20:48 in Computer Hardware News
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Dinosaur
Post: #733 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Posted by Nicholas Steel Apple wants to control the entire supply chain. Since Intel won't license x86 to them and they are still butthurt with PPC, their next best choice is ARM, where they already hold a design license allowing them to own and mess up to the last transistor on their custom A-series silicon. For those still waiting those Threadripper cheesegraters: wake up, it won't happen, the dream is over. Your options are sucktastic Wintendo Diez which breaks all your shit twice a year, and sucktastic Loonix with no proprietary applications you want to run. But then, it's not only Apple ditching Intel at the "very expensive designer computers" end: at the very niche but highly lucrative supercomputer market, Fujitsu is moping the floor with them with their newest baby, Fugaku. Yes, you've read it right: it's a half-EXAFLOP (that is, 500PFLOPS) beast... and that's because it's not finished yet - the final design calls for a whooping ONE EXAFLOP, and that will be for early 2021. When it's done, it will be more powerful than the next 10 machines on the TOP500, with plenty of muscle to spare. And it's being done with ARM64 cores - 150K of 'em. Because Fujitsu (which was the last SPARC holdover besides Orrible) has seen the writing on the wall. But then, supercomputers are not exactly the first things you would think when Joe Gamer, Fred Videncoder or Tim Starbucks from Javascripts'R'Us thinks about "high performance computing". Also, IPC is a thing, and supercomputers cover very different use cases we're not likely to see at home or work. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-24, 00:53 in Computer Hardware News
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Dinosaur
Post: #734 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
I think you can blame Jef Raskin for that - Jobs just Remember: it was Jobs who didn't wanted to have videogames or a color screen back when the competition was using those features to sell (even Apple's own Apple ][ line was among those) My prediction: the new ARM Macs will sell, but mostly to people deeply invested into the Apple ecosystem (i.e. fanboys, Starbucks customers, iOS developers), while they will lose a sizeable chunk of market among the professional sector. However, anything that hurts Intel is A-OK on my book, even if it comes from Apple! Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-06-28, 03:30 in Computer Hardware News
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Dinosaur
Post: #735 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Posted by CaptainJistuce Complete with fashion designer ISA: "You're Assembling It Wrong™". They will also take away the ALU because Courage™. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-07-01, 01:53 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
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Dinosaur
Post: #736 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Some console hacking and emulation news: - Remember the GB emudev whose sole goal in life is to reverse engineer and emulate pretty much every GB/GBA accessory ever made? This guy has really ventured into the unknown, over and over and over. The latest achievement? Sewing machines. Apparently the GameBoy sparked the revolution of automated stitching and embroidery at home - some bits even reached American soil about 20 years ago! And now you can recreate this experience using virtual fabric and threads. You can now thread your fake thread into your CPU threads YO DAWG! - Speaking about dead but still popular consoles, this other guy managed to pull a Dreamcast on the good ol' PS2. After venturing with game exploits to launch homebrew from burned DVD-Rs, ROMkiddies complained loudly: "PAL-only?! Do I need to buy some long-forgotten demodisc from some eBay scalper? Fuck you!", he found yet another exploit... but this time on the PS2 DVD player application built into the system ROM. Say hello to the most legit PS2 Tetris DVDs ever made :P Yes, you can also anger Sony by using that to make your own self-bootable pirated game DVD-Rs... just like nearly every Dreamcast owner was rocking it in 2000! Well, I guess Sony will plug that one in the next patc-- wait, the PS2 is already out of production? Nevermind then. Mind you, this is not as convenient as HDD loaders, but then not everybody owns a fat PS2 with the requisite PATA+Ethernet adapter (and not all Slims can be modded to re-add the missing IDE port). But then, you don't need to buy a pre-hacked memory card or a modchip - all you need is a DVD burner and some blank media. Wait, are you a millenial that don't know what the hell is a "disc"? Fuck you then. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-07-05, 02:56 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 2)
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Dinosaur
Post: #737 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Super Nazo Puyo: Rulue's Roux Turns out that there is more puyo beyond Puyo Puyo. Enter the Nazo Puyo series, where instead of In other words: goddamned puyos! You gotta be very creative when solving most of those puzzles: I spent like 30 minutes stuck at a "clear all puyo" puzzle, just to have the answer reveal before my tired eyes: I had to draw a goddamned H pattern with 3x 2-red and 4x 2-yellow puyo in a garbage-filled base pattern! ARGH! All of this because Arle wants to eat curry, yet all she knows is how to solve problems with puyos. Flawless plot!. And in the good ol' fashion of Madou Monogatari series of RPG games featuring our puyo-obsessed heroine, you don't get a health bar/indicator - instead, you get to look at Arle's face: the more desperate she gets (oh boy, you just don't make cute RPG protagonists cry!), the nearest you're from a game over. Fortunately, real game overs don't really seem to exist in this game - it tracks your progress with its battery-backed save RAM, and you just get to redo the set of puzzles you missed. Each successfully solved puzzle helps Arle level up, which also helps her stand some more abuse. (BTW: that's the only user-translated Nazo Puyo entry out there - there are like 2 SNES and 3 Game Gear titles released only in Japan) Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-07-06, 18:31 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 3)
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Dinosaur
Post: #738 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Speaking about Socket 7 wonders, Debian 8 (Jessie) LTS ended a week ago, which means Saki is now completely unsupported by any of the currently maintained Debian releases*, as i686-class CPUs (Pentium Pro and later) became the baseline for the i386 port starting with Stretch. But... for how long Debian had actually supported my hardware? Let's recap: The M535/8 motherboard is a design from circa 1996, built around an Intel chipset design (i430VX/Triton II) from 1995 (as the copyright on the actual ICs silkscreen says). My particular specimen (a v1.3 board) was built sometime around early '97 - IC datestamps are from late January to mid-February, and since I can't just tear this thing down to find the PCB manufacturing date at the back of the motherboard, let's consider component supply lead times and assume an assembly date of late April '97 at the very latest (yes, this mobo was already outdated junk when its original owner bought it brand new). Now, let's check this handy Debian version release history page. The nearest release would be a couple months later (Debian 1.3 "Bo", released in 1997/06/05), nicely giving some time between the assembly at Taiwan and the arrival at your friendly crappy computers dealer on an unspecified Venezuelan location (which could have been several months in between considering how glacially slow were Customs back then), so let's assume support for VX boards was rudimentary on whatever 2.x kernel they were using back then (2.0.27 on Rex, .34 on Bo), but Good Enough™ to boot to a text console - maybe even to X and TWM if you knew which magical enchants to recite. Let's count: Bo->Hamm->Slink->Potato->Woody->Sarge->Etch->Lenny->Squeeze->Wheezy->Jessie 11 releases in a 23-year time span! Not even Apple can claim such a great support! Sure, this machine stopped being able to boot to X at least 10 years ago (last time I tried, it was in 2006 - it took forever and a half to start KDE 3... but surprisingly it could even run NetBeans!) Compare to Windows versions likely to be run on this hardware: 95 (support ended in 2002), 98 (2006), possibly NT4 (2004), maaaaaaaaybe 2K (2010) if you maxed out RAM and had a suitable PCI videocard, and I guess XP (2015) would boot on this one with a lot of effort (but forget about service packs!). That is, between 5 and up to 18 years of support, depending on which degree of pain you were willing to endure. Thus, Debian is truly the "Universal" OS. No - Saki hasn't been running Debian since 1997: I became her owner back in December 2006 as a bunch of spare parts at the college dorms (I know absolutely nothing from her previous life as a desktop computer, but I guess it ran Win9x until being decommissioned). Original name was "p100crashbox", then shortly after became Saki as her first duty under my ownership was to record audio from dubbed anime at the regional Animax station (bittersweet memories indeed, and one of the many reasons I fucking hate $ON¥) - extra points if you guess the anime! No, it's not the "girls playing mahjong" one. Her first OS was Knoppix 5.0.1, which was based on Debian But I guess the road is now over, now wondering what will die first: those failing capacitors on the VRM, or the about-to-pumpkinize kernel 3.16 and friends. But then, I'm no stranger to the eternal EOL'd road :P tl;dr: What would be the oldest computer that could run the currently supported Debian stable release? *There is ELTS which extends Jessie lifetime up to 2022, but it's strictly a 3rd-party program, and only a very limited selection of sponsored packages are supported. Plus I don't know if their i386 packages actually work on pre-i686 targets... Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-07-07, 13:42 in Computer Hardware News (revision 1)
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Dinosaur
Post: #739 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
Cool, now let's compare apples to apples. The Surface X is a fine machine, but not the class of computer people would buy for doing "pro stuff", i.e., the class of stuff most Mac users used to do (edit video/audio/images, creative stuff, developing software on languages other than JavaScript). Anyway, more bad news if you liked having a real GPU on your Mac: kiss goodbye your Radeons, as Apple is envisioning an "all-Apple" hardware strategy: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10631 https://twitter.com/never_released/status/1280207485278789633 Yes, that means the only GPUs you'll get on those new ARMacs are custom iGPUs. Makes a lot of sense for their portables an low-end desktops, but this also spells more doom for the Pro lines. This effectively kills Mac as a gaming platform (unless that by "gaming" you mean "cellphone pay2win junk", and in that case you have no business at all buying computers). I don't envision AAA+++ game publishers porting their $60 flagships to ARMac - but then few of them really cared about the platform in first place (and you thought we Linux gamers already had it very rough), and I seriously doubt Apple can come up with a Radeon/GeForce-killer silicon. Let's recap the whole GPU-on-Mac ordeal: nVidia was already "persona non grata" on recent MacOS versions, Intel is getting ejected even before the Xe becomes a retail product (if ever), and now AMD has been shown the way out of the building. I HOPE external Thunderbolt GPUs still remain a viable workaround for the few pros still commited to stay at the Apple camp, but knowing Apple, they don't want you making blockbuster movies or platinum disc music albums anymore on their computers - their platform still survives basically for iOS development. But then, who knows? Maybe I'm wrong, a naysayer, have no dog on this race, and Apple does the impossible and convinces every pundit in the industry that x86 is dead and ARM is the new PC revolution and only dinosaurs will stick to Linux-powered x86 relics... but I'm not holding my breath for that. Too bad AMD can't just buy Intel and opensource the x86 architecture to everybody :/ Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
| tomman |
Posted on 20-07-11, 13:17 in Peoples purchase history allegedly erased from Sony servers
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Dinosaur
Post: #740 of 1285 Since: 10-30-18 Last post: 24 days Last view: 7 hours |
If you bought $ON¥ products and services, you deserve what you get. I'll stick to my Sega Genesis games, thanks. Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™ |
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