SWAT’s blog

Last saturday I visited the cebit again. I go there almost every year (I try to). This year it was a bit smaller than the year before. Not all of the exhibition rooms were completely filled, but it was extremely crowded nevertheless. At the end of the day my feet hurt and I had a memory card full of nice memories. I will share some of them with you:

The good:

• New toys / previews
• IBM sphere (extremely cool)
• Open Source was also represented (even if it was not a huge part of CeBIT)
• Ubuntu-DE stand
• Free/clean toilets and the parking

The bad:

• The weather, it rained a lot and I missed the sunshine.
• Ugly toys like the Hummer housing
• I was only one day at the CeBIT

The ugly:

• Extremely crowded ( a lot of children )

Events, FOSS, Games, Hardware, Ubuntu, Ubuntu-NL, Ubuntu.com

It took me a while to get Red Alert and the expansion Counterstrike working correctly on Ubuntu. I wanted to use a nocd patch, but unfortunately I could not find a working one that also works with Counterstrike. I tried Cedega and Wine and they both did not work completely. Sometimes the CD could not be found or Counterstrike could not be installed etc.. The solution was: dosbox!

Note: Red alert has a DOS and a Windows95 version. I installed the DOS version, which has a great installer (ow sweet, fond memories)
Some general dosbox tips:

• Mount a CD: “mount D D:\ -t cdrom”
• Mount a CD (if it is not recognized by Red Alert correctly): “mount D D:\ -t cdrom -usecd 0″
• Capture/Release the mouse (if you need to use the mouse within DOSBox): CTRL + F10
• Umount: “mount -u d:”
• Switch to full-screen (and back): ALT + ENTER

How do you get Red Alert working with dosbox on your computer?

1. Make images of the original CD’s since nocd patches will get you nowhere. (only if you do not want to use the original CD’s)

cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile game_name.bin --device /dev/scd0 --driver generic-mmc-raw game_name.toc

2. Create a custom dosbox directory

mkdir dosbox_redalert

3. Start dosbox and mount your dosbox directory and CD image

mount c: /home/swat/dosbox_redalert/
imgmount d: /home/swat/redalert.bin -t iso

4. Install Red Alert and any expansions. I installed Counterstrike after installing Red Alert.

d:
setup

5. If you want, you can patch the game to any version (I installed the 1.08 patch). The patch will first ‘unarchive’ itself and then you will have to copy the PATCH.* files to the Red Alert directory and run the patching wizard.
Enjoy the good old feeling of Red Alert!

Games, How to, Ubuntu-NL

The good old days of high quality gaming, with not too fancy graphics, are over. Back when the game was ‘new’ and had ‘just hit the stores’, I bought a copy of “Fallout“. It was one of my first RPG titles, which I really loved. Remember that this was the time when a “humongous install” was 1.6 GB and 64MB of RAM was ‘a lot of memory’. A lot of years later I wanted to purchase Fallout 2, since I was missing it in my collection, but I couldn’t find it in stores (that’s pretty logical). A while ago I read something about a package which contained Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics and I just had to have it, so I ordered it at Bol.com. One day later my precious DVD arrived, filled with the 3 games and I was filled with nostalgic joy. Cedega enabled me to easily install and play my precious games on my computer. I’m still shocked that the game still feels a bit slow sometimes, but hey, that’s because of the emulation. I’m happy enough that I don’t need a copy of Windows to play it! I had to make a little tweak to be able to play these games at normal speed. I need to start the games using the CLI, because otherwise the menu fading would have been very choppy. The very, very slow fading will make the game unplayable, since it takes almost a minute to load the menu. The magical command is: nice -19 cedega falloutw.exe Note: I couldn’t even install the games using Wine (0.9.27). Please do not ask why I am using that version. Now another set of great games run on my machine and I am pretty satified with the result. The Fallout series still is pretty awesome and it pulls you in right from the start.

Games, Ubuntu-NL

The latest addition to the popular “Command and Conquer” game series is “C&C3 - Tiberium wars”. It follows the storyline of “Tiberian sun” and the evil Kane has finally returned. “Tiberian sun” and “Red alert” got me addicted to the Real-Time Strategy genre and I purchased and played all the C&C games. This one I picked up at the local MediaMarkt for about 33 euro’s, which was a lot less than the usual 44 euro’s you would have to pay elsewhere. I use Cedega to play all my “Windows” games, so I had to figure out how I could play this game. This question was quickly answered when I looked through the Cedega forums and the unofficial wiki. Apparently you can install C&C3 with wine 0.9.35 (haven’t tested that), but I used the other method (it’s easier imho). Here’s the trick to get it working. Borrow a Windows installation and install C&C3, patch it and then use a noCD patch (test if it works). You’ll need a place to copy the files, so create a game directory using Cedega. Copy the Windows game directory to the correct directory in the game directory that Cedega created. Copy the following dll’s to the C&C3 directory on Cedega: gdiplus.dll, msvcr80.dll and d3dx9_29.dll Export all registry keys that this game uses (it’s a pain to find and export them all). Import the registry keys into Cedega (I manually edited the system.reg file and it was a lot of work). Create a shortcut to CNC3.exe (use PixelShaders 2.0, VertexShaders 2.0, FBO on (if you want shadows and VFX detail on “low”), ALSA, Scheduler on, GLSL on, Occlusion queries on) Enjoy C&C3

Games, Ubuntu-NL

Well, today my package arrived and it contained two Playstation2 games (DanceStage Fusion and DanceStage Max) and my Deluxe DDR Ignition Dance Pad (with a USB connector!) Now I can also play games like pydance and Stepmania on my own computer. Apparently Feisty automagically recognizes the pad: input: USB Gamepad as /class/input/input11 input: USB HID v1.10 Joystick [USB Gamepad ] on usb-0000:00:02.0-2 Got to go and lose some pounds (playing Fusion on my PS2) and have some fun.

Games, Hardware, Ubuntu-NL