Archives for 03 / 2004
View my past ramblings
Desktop
Tuesday, 30th March 2004 at 9:22AM (1605 days ago)
so if you happen to be a reader of desktop magazine (australia only), check out april 2004 edition.
turn to page 56... there's a little article on web standards with us featured in it :)
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I call him "Mini Mame"
Monday, 29th March 2004 at 7:12AM (1606 days ago)
so once again i've changed things. i know i know nobody can keep up with me :) i keep thinking of ways to improve everything. i've been researching via mini motherboards. they measure in at the size of a cd jewel case and come packed with features for a price you can't deny. inbuilt audio, video, ethernet and cpu. the cpu is not an intel or amd, it's their own cpu which is compatible will all intel stuff, so linux, etc will run on it no probs.
waiting to get my hands on one before i do any more on the table, i've also started the design stuff in relation to the construction of the table itself.
on another note, i'm using the current hardware i have to build an internal voice-over-ip pabx system for us, exciting! :)
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Gentoo
Tuesday, 23rd March 2004 at 2:12PM (1612 days ago)
so after much experimenting with dos and freedos, it turned out to not be the best solution for a number of reasons. so after more research, i'm currently investigating gentoo, and i'm really really liking it. gentoo is similar to freebsd with it's ports tree.
plus rather than installing the os as it wants it, you actually build the os as you want it. so i've been building my own custom gentoo based on the hardware i'm using from scratch. i bought a new graphics card too as i really want to use advancemame and the radeon 9200 wasn't supported, so i bought an nvidia geforce4 mx 440. i also sold my radeon 9200 on ebay to cover the cost of the card, which was nice.also a happy birthday to my little casper, he's 2 today!
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Cooking with gas
Tuesday, 16th March 2004 at 1:09PM (1619 days ago)
so my sound card arrived today along with my new male to male ps/2 cable for the controllers. and both work great!!! sound is now working and the joystick seems to be behaving much better than b4.
i've also been doing a few changes here and there and am now using dos 7.1, which is actually gpl and is more compatible for what i want to do. i've got a boot screen going on so you don't see any of that ugly dos stuff going on and i'm now trialling arcade os which works much better than advancemenu, but for some reason it's not seeing my games, still trying to work that out.
arcade os is actually nicer looking than advance menu and seems to be snappier. i've also got the table shutting itself down when you quit out of arcade os. so you can control the whole thing using nothing more than the joystick. arcade os also allows you to load games onto the table from a cd drive or floppy drive.
now to start building and speccing the physical side of things.
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Too Weird
Friday, 12th March 2004 at 3:22PM (1623 days ago)
so i'm sitting here and take a glance out on my balcony. what do i see?
two flies going at it on my damn balcony! freaky little critters they are. they're still there and haven't moved an inch, they didn't even flinch when i got the camera up close.
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More
Tuesday, 9th March 2004 at 12:22PM (1626 days ago)
so i was playing around a bit more today and decided to snap a few more pics of the table in action. i think i need to tweak the advancemame config a bit more as some of the resolutions are a little off-centre, but no biggie!
apparently the ipac isn't suppost to work in usb mode under dos. the bios on the motherboard i have lets you use usb under dos, but it does make things really slow at times. so i've ordered a male to male ps/2 cable from blackbox and will try it under ps/2 mode, should help things.
i'm hoping to get a hold of that sound card by the end of the week. i've found some places that have pure dos drivers for the different creative labs cards, which is a big help!
at last i am finally starting to see it all come together, which is a really great feeling! once i've got this done i need to start working on my demo unit and actually building the damn thing! :)
i'm going to start making some more time to post some things to the list and get that going, so if you aren't subscribed as yet but wish to, shoot off an email to mame-subscribe at creativebastard dot com.
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Still here
Monday, 8th March 2004 at 1:02PM (1627 days ago)
so i'm still here, just been really busy and haven't been thinking about posting. i've had a little break from the table as i haven't had a chance. but i started playing around again last night.
i decided i am going to try freedos again, but this time with advancemame, which works really well under freedos. so i now have a fast booting table directly into the advancemenu frontend. i still haven't got the internal sound card working under freedos, but i've seen other people able to get certain soundblaster cards working. so i bid on one of those cards on ebay today, and hopefully will win the auction. not bad for $10.
i keep changing everything, i know, but i'm determined to find the best setup. advancemame is really quite clever, i looked up lg's website to get the h-sync and v-sync specs on the screen and gave these to advancemame's config util, which helped me configure perfect video modes for the different games. and boy does it work well!
the only drawback of using advancemame is for some reason it doesn't like the ati radeon 9200 i have, so i am using my old geforce 2mx i have lying around, which works surprisingly well.
wow this is turning into a really long post :)
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Keep watching the skies
Monday, 1st March 2004 at 6:03PM (1634 days ago)
so after some more messing around in freebsd 5.2.1 i have audio and video working! thanks to the vesa driver in fbsd the video works perfecto. i am just tweaking the video settings in xmame at the moment to get a perfect video size.
yesterday was such a nice day. saw lord of the rings - return of the king last night, man that was a long movie! 3 and a half hours! and honestly, could the ending be any more longer?? you think it's finished then they sneak another one in on ya.
i downloaded the new version of salling clicker, man that is a cool app.
so looks i'm actually getting somewhere with the table. once the software is done, then i can start building the prototype table with all the funky stuff.