Archives for 02 / 2004
View my past ramblings
Finally!
Thursday, 26th February 2004 at 9:19AM (1638 days ago)
been really busy, so haven't had much time to post. i haven't been working on the table as much as i'd like to, mainly because redhat was giving me the shits. i got an email this morning announcing the release of freebsd 5.2.1, which among other things, fixes issues with ATA devices! the exact problem i was having with freebsd 4.9 and 4.7! so i downloaded an iso and burnt it... low and behold it works!
so now i have a working freebsd 5.2.1 release on the table and will definitely get this biatch working. so i feel much better about that. :) we've had crappy rain over the last few days, sucks big time.
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Cuteness
Sunday, 22nd February 2004 at 6:22AM (1642 days ago)
so i managed to get xmame working 90% under linux, just have to fiddle with the sdl lib to get it liking the colour depth(s) that xmame needs.
was just snapping some random pictures of the kitties :) i can't believe i've already snapped over 1000 shots with my camera, god bless digital cameras.
the family is coming round today for lunch, so i've been cooking all morning, a nice big beef roast. that's some goood eating...
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Decisions Decisions
Tuesday, 17th February 2004 at 3:13PM (1647 days ago)
so once again i've changed my mind. i was thinking freedos was a good idea, up until trying to get sound driver support working. no dice.
so i'm currently looking at another linux distribution which is looking very nice and is based on debian, so that's good too. it sees my ac97 onboard sound card and it doesn't bitch about the graphics card either!
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Go Speed Racer!
Tuesday, 17th February 2004 at 1:05PM (1647 days ago)
after much fiddling around with my slow ass cdrom (4 speed i think), i copied some games across and the mame software as well as the frontend. what can i say, mame absolutely flies on freedos! killer instinct, which is known for being notoriously unplayable on many machines gets over 60 frames per second!
so i've now got it booting very quickly, takes about 4 seconds from power on to the frontend. bam! my next hurdle is getting dos to talk to my sound card. i've got drivers that came with the motherboard, but they don't detect the sound card, time for plan b. usb is also proving to be a pain in the ass, so i've ordered a ps/2 cable for the ipac and will just settle with that (no stuffing around).
will take some more snaps today :)
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Change of Plans
Monday, 16th February 2004 at 3:02PM (1648 days ago)
so after much messing around and mind changing, i've decided to settle on using freedos. dos you say?? well after looking at the different versions of mame and the different os'es i could use, freedos seems to be the best for a number of reasons:
1) it's free
2) it's very fast! boots in about 2 seconds
3) it's small, only 5MB installed
so i've got freedos installed on the table and have started to slowly copy some test games across via cdrom. networking in dos isn't fun, so instead i'll mount the drive on one of the other machines (as i've only got serial ata on my g5) and copy the files across. yay for osx supporting multiple filesystems.
there are some nice gui frontends for dos that have nice anti-aliasing, etc and they're super lean and quick!
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List
Thursday, 12th February 2004 at 7:12AM (1652 days ago)
so i decided to setup a discussion list for the table. if anyone is interested send off a blank email to mame-subscribe at creativebastard dot com.
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Success
Wednesday, 11th February 2004 at 11:22AM (1653 days ago)
so turns out redhat doesn't like the ati radeon 9200 se. but...
i managed to salvage an old nvidia geforce mx2 card i had lying around, and it supports advance mame perfectly! meaning i can continue with my original plan of transferring the bootable cd to the hard disk. the card actually works really well, the games play super smooth. at the moment i've got the table booting off a cd, but i'll solve that issue shortly.
i will need to tweak the advance mame settings for it's display and the controls as they don't seem to be the default mame keys and the joysticks and buttons are configured for the default mame config. i'll either need to adjust advance mame or just program the controllers. i am leaning towards the latter as i can setup hotkeys, meaning i can press start 1 and coin 1 to shutdown the table, etc, etc. it's all really coming together nicely :)
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Bump
Wednesday, 11th February 2004 at 9:09AM (1653 days ago)
update:
so i hooked up a 3com network card to the table and connected it to the network so i could ssh into it and compile what was needed. i've just managed to compile all the libs for advancemame, now to compile advancemame itself. fun fun!
earlier today:
so i compiled mkisofs on my g5 this morning and burnt a test cd of advance mame's bootable iso linux cd. little did i realise my graphics card (ati radeon 9200 se) isn't support in the kernel they have. so i can scratch the idea i originally had of transferring the image from the cd to the hd (using ghost or similar). i started to install redhat 9 this morning, and it seems to be happy with the graphics card, so i'll have to go down that path.
i couldn't find any old ps/2 mice lying around so i decided to use one of my old apple pro mice, hehe, funny seeing an apple mouse hooked up to a pc.
it shouldn't be too bad having redhat on there. my other option is to get the source for the advance mame bootable cd and recompile the kernel to support the ati radeon 9200 se, but we shall see.
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It's alive!
Tuesday, 10th February 2004 at 4:12PM (1654 days ago)
so i hooked up the power switch and jumpered the drive(s), then fired up the table. yay it works! so i started installing a base redhat on the sucker so i can start to do things with it.
it boots up quite fast, which is a good thing, i'm hoping i can reduce the boot time even more once i get linux installed.
it's actually starting to come together after all this time. now the next hurdle will be getting the front end working nicely so i can shut down the table via the controllers and also wiring the power switch into one of the arcade buttons.
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Flanders
Tuesday, 10th February 2004 at 1:01PM (1654 days ago)
so i got another piece of the pie for the mame table today. i bought a power switch from jaycar electronics.
i'm gonna start putting together the front end for the table now that i can power it up properly. then i'll need to start planning the actual construction and design and finish of the table itself. i'd say this will be the trickiest part of all.
tonight we're off to stef and henry's for dinner, should be a blast.
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You talkn to me?
Thursday, 5th February 2004 at 3:18PM (1659 days ago)
casper is a funny boy, i decided to take some snaps of the cats and i put the cam on the ground, he came up and sort of looked at me like "what are you looking at?"
been playing around with a few ideas for different designs. a bit stuck at the moment, having mental blocks, but i'll get there :) i must find some time to do some more work on the table.
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Shutterbugs
Tuesday, 3rd February 2004 at 11:28AM (1661 days ago)
i'm thinking of adding a photos section to the site, and start to get out and use my camera a lot more. i snapped a couple of photos of pixel and casper today fast asleep in the sun.
pixel reminds me of a cuddly bear, she's gotten very dark in the face, as has casper.
still thinking about a redesign and maybe changing and adding a few things. i was thinking of maybe putting together a discussion list for the table or having a separate section of the site just for it. all ideas that are up in the air, hopefully i'll have time for most of my ideas.
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Woo!
Monday, 2nd February 2004 at 7:22AM (1662 days ago)
finally got our new site live :)
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Bling Bling
Sunday, 1st February 2004 at 6:22PM (1663 days ago)
so i did a little bit more on the table, only wired up the power and the cdrom and hard drive. still got a bit more to go. i need to wire up a power switch so i can turn the damn thing on, you'd think they'd give you some kind of power switch with the mobo, but nooooooo.
i think i may redesign this site after all.