Latest updates

I've gotten a number of updates to my homepage recently.
I've gotten some information on the "About Me" page.
I haven't gotten a gallery up, but I've linked to a few galleries where I have posted some of my work.
The Tools page and Contact me is pretty much done for now.
Links is still fairly empty, but that should be changing soon.

Welcome to visitors of usshomestarrunner.com

Webpage updates

I'm thinking about getting back to work on my hompage at http://sparcman.net/Documents/main.html.

To begin with, I've updated my rather lame header image to a snappier looking one.

Old image:






New image:

Half-Life 2 Episode 3 speculation*Ep 2 Spoilers abound*

I have my own ideas about what we might see in Half Life 2 Episode 3 and I wanted to put them up in my own space.

Lets start with a review of things revealed by the storyline so far:

• The Borealis is an Aperture Science research ship.
• Aperture Science is behind the portal gun in the game "Portal"
• It vanished mysteriously while in drydock and even a part of the drydock disappeared with it meaning it was either vaporized or teleported. Since Mossman did find the ship it must have been teleported - presumably by technology similar to the Portal gun.
• The ship is now located somewhere in the Arctic wastes.
• Chell was NOT located in the arctic wastes when she escaped from GLaDOS and so is unlikely to make an appearance in person.
• Eli was VERY concerned about the technology on the Borealis which makes sense as the Combine does not have any kind of local teleportation technology - yet.
• Even the teleport technology that Eli and the others from the resistance have developed requires a transmitter and receiver device to make a controlled teleport. The Aperture Science tech bypasses those requirements.
• Eli is now dead. Get over it already. He's gone.
• The superportal is now closed, but there are Advisors still on Earth who will likely begin working on establishing a new connection to the Combine homeworld.
• Kleiner's pet headcrab Heady is probably dead after having sneaked into the warhead of the missile. Though I doubt anyone but Kleiner will care about that.
• Despite appearances, the G-Man is not human. He has the ability not only to jump around in space, but to distort space and time. On at least a couple of occasions, he appears like a vision - visible only to Freeman (beginning of HL2 and Ep2 when the Vorts are healing Alyx).
• The G-Man and the Vorts do not share the same motives, but appear to have the Combine as a common enemy.
• The Vorts appear to be sincere in their alliance with humans while the G-Man seems to have someone else's interests in mind.
• The Advisors are more than just props in the game engine and in fact can be killed with some noclip action (you can even shoot them without noclip from the interior of the hangar before you step on the lift with Eli and Alyx as the wall they are hiding behind is not solid).
• This strongly suggests that at least one physical battle with the Advisors is in Gordon's future, but poses an interesting problem as they are very tough to kill and Gordon has always been totally defenseless against their powerful telekinesis.
• Dr Mossman's status is unknown. She may be at the Borealis or not and she may or may not be a captive of the Combine.
• The Combine have been to the Borealis including soldiers and hunters.

Now for my speculations and predictions:

• The game likely starts with Alyx and Gordon traveling to the Borealis in the helicopter.
• I'm sure they will bring some assistance. Barney, Dog and Vortigants are likely candidates.
• Perhaps the Vorts can shield Gordon from the telekinesis of the Advisors somehow.
• Before the chopper can reach the Borealis, it will be shot down with Gordon, Alyx and at least one of their helpers barely pulling themselves out of the wreckage.
• They'll find themselves on unstable cracked glacial wastes and will likely face headcrabs, zombies or whatever on the way on foot to the Borealis.
• Once there, they probably need to deal with a guard force of Combine stationed outside the ship.
• After they can make their way inside, they'll find some kind of evidence left by Dr Mossman revealing where to go next.
• The ship is booby-trapped which is the only reason that the Combine haven't already retrieved the technology they're after, but means Freeman and company have to watch their step and split up on occasion.
• At some point, they encounter the Portal gun and confiscate it, but instead of Gordon getting it, Alyx takes possession of it (after all, Gordon always gets to "have fun" with the gravity gun and now it's time for Alyx to get to play with cool tech). Besides that, it keeps the game from being "Portal 1.5". For a few brief moments, Alyx trades the Portal Gun with the gravity gun for some areas that need an HEV suit to get though and also need the portal gun. Once past such obstacles, Alyx gives the gravity gun back and takes back the portal gun (which she does use on occasion, but only when needed).
• Before locating the Borealis teleport technology, they probably have to defeat at least one advisor and Gordon will need to have some immunity or a way to cripple the advisor's telekinesis.
• They succeed at some point in destroying the Borealis and perhaps recovering the Portal gun in the process (using it to escape the explosion I bet).
• At that point most or all of the advisors still on Earth have converged on the Borealis and are killed in the explosion giving Earth a bit of relief from the Combine.
• This is the end of Gordon's role as a player-controlled character in the Half-Life series.
• Why? With the death of Eli and considering how much Gordon has done, he will be selected to take charge of the human resistance and another character will take the front-line in Half-Life 3 (Barney? Chell? Dog? Dr Kleiner? who knows).
• Not only that, He and Alyx will finally have a chance to explore their relationship and well... . They're almost certainly destined to be a couple.
• (edit) G-Man will most certainly make an appearance in this episode and we will learn more about who he (it?) is and what his purpose is in this whole mess.
• (edit) Perhaps we'll learn that G-Man is an agent of a force far more powerful and sinister than the Combine.
  

Mame Arcade Multiscreen

With multiscreen support appearing on more and more video cards these days, it's a good time for a recent enhancement for Mame (see my previous emulation article if you don't know what Mame is) allowing multimonitor support for games that use more than one screen. In Mame and Mame32 there is no easy way to list all the games that have multiple screen support so I developed a simple application that reads the game information and finds that information for you. I think someone came up with a Windows script, but I didn't know about at the time.

Before I go on, a quick disclaimer. Do not contact me asking for ROMs or where to find them. If you don't have them and you don't know where to find them, I cannot help you. I could get myself into trouble if I did.

First go download the application from http://www.box.net/public/s4aipr0eqp
Note that this was designed to run under Windows XP. If you're using Windows 2000, you will need to install the Microsoft .NET framework from Microsoft's website. You may also need to do so if you're running an older copy of Windows XP.
There is no installer. It just runs from wherever you have the file. You can run it from your desktop if you want. Before you do that though, you will want to extract the game information from the Mame executable.

You need to open a command prompt. From your Start menu, select Run and then type in cmd and click Ok.

Navigate to your Mame directory. Depending on where the program is on your hard drive, the command will be something like CD \Mame32

Extract the XML data file by typing mame32.exe -listxml > mame32.xml (use mame.exe if you're not using the Mame32 GUI version)

Now go ahead and start Multiscreen.exe (the file I had you download a moment ago)Click File -> Open and browse to the same folder as the mame program.

Select the mame32.xml file and click open.

Depending on the speed of your system, it should take a few seconds to a minute or two to read in the data.

When it's done, it will report how many multiscreen games were found and show them in a list.

The list will also show how many screens are supported on each game.

Now from the file menu, we have a few options.

• You can export this list, as-is to a text file for reference.
• You can create a folder ini file. By putting this file in the "folders" directory of Mame32, Mame32 will create a multiscreen folder within the GUI that lists all of the multiscreen games supported.
• Lastly, you can create individual game ini files for all multiscreen games enabling the number of screens each game supports. (These go in the ini folder of Mame32)

Live Boot CDs

Introduction

Live boot CDs are CDs (and DVDs also) that you can put in your computer and boot up into an operating system from the CD. There are a several uses for live boot CDs not limited to training, demonstrations, data recovery, recovering an unbootable OS(Operating System), safe web-browsing, creating a network appliance, diagnostics, migrating an OS to a new drive or even "covert operations".

How they work

Modern operating systems often work best when they have a hard drive to use as temporary storage space as most programs need somewhere to store configuration files and user information. When you open a ZIP file for example, the data needs to be written to disk before you can read or use it. Live Boot CDs normally set up a simulated drive that uses part of your computer's RAM to store files. The operating system itself and programs generally load directly into memory from the CD. Sometimes a specialized 'low-memory' Live Boot version is required to be able to operate on systems with small amounts of memory (anything less than 256MB of RAM may have problems with some Live Boot OS's)

Live Boot Linux

While you could create your own Live Boot Linux disk, there are already a number of them ready to download and use. The most prominent would probably be Knoppix. Knoppix is designed to be a Live Boot enviroment, but it can be installed to your hard drive if you choose. There are currently two versions; a DVD version that almost totally fills a single-layer DVD and a 'lite' version that fits on a CD. Even the lite version is packed with web browsers, office applications, graphics tools, system tools and games. Some websites offer detailed instructions on how to take a prebuilt Knoppix distro(short for distribution - that is, one of the many flavours of Linux) and make your own customized version (some Linux knowledge is recommended). Other Live Boot OS's include Linspire(or the free version; Freespire), DSL and Morphix.

Live Boot Windows

If you want a Live Boot Windows CD, you will need to create one yourself. Don't worry, it's not as bad as you may think. Using Bart PE, you can take your existing Windows 2000 or Windows XP install disk and build your own Live Boot CD complete with tools and applications without having to know the inner workings of the process. There are a number of PE Plugins that allow you to add applications and tools to your PE (which stands for Pre-execution Environment I beleive) disk. Often, freeware tools and programs will be included with the plugin, while other programs that have license restrictions or that you need to buy will have only the plugin files and instructions of how to use the plugin. There are some good sites that have detailed instructions for how to use Bart PE. In my opinion, anyone that does regular maintenance on Windows computers should have a Windows PE disk.

Benefits

If you surf the web from a Live Boot disk, you're practially immune to virus and spyware attacks. If something goes wrong, reboot and your system is clean. If you have already gotten a virus and can't boot your computer anymore, you could boot a Windows PE disk to run a virus scan and fix any damage done. Or if nothing else, copy your vital data to a USB drive (after cleaning the virus of course!). I've used a PE disk to migrate the entire OS from one hard drive to a new, larger drive without having to mess with imaging software. One of the key benefits of Live Boot Linux CDs is that people unfamiliar with Linux can give it a test drive without having to reinstall their computer or risk losing data. DSL Linux is only 50MB in size and is designed to be loaded into a USB flash drive as an alternate boot media (for those newer systems that support booting to a USB flash drive). In my previous article about emulators, I mentioned virtual machines. Most virtual machines can be configured to use a CD ISO image file instead of your real CDRom drive so you can use one of these to test your CD before you burn it to a disk.

Summary

If you work with computers, you should definately have at least one or two of these CDs in your toolbox. Happy booting!

Blog of the Day

Just a quick note to celebrate that I made Blog of the Day with my last post about emulation. I was starting to wonder if anyone would ever find me here. :D

I'd like to bring up one of my favorite topics; emulators.

What it is

In computer terms, an emulator is a program that mimics or emulates something else, usually some kind of computer hardware. If you've ever ran any really old computer programs on a computer running Windows NT4, 2000 or XP, you probably used an emulator without even realizing it. That's because 2000 and XP are 32-bit operating systems and many older programs are 16-bit. 16-bit programs cannot run on a 32-bit operating system, but Microsoft wanted to provide a way for users to be able to use most of their older programs on the newer, 32-bit platforms to encourage them to upgrade (give your $$$ to The Corporation). So Microsoft came up with two programs known as NTVDM (New Technologies Virtual DOS Machine) and WoW (Windows on Windows). NTVDM is an emulator that reads in code created for the old DOS environment and converts it in real-time to instructions that a 32-bit environment can understand. WoW is another emulator that works with the NTVDM that does the same for older 16-bit Windows programs (Windows 3.1 was a 16-bit Windows environment that ran on top of MS DOS). There is now 64-bit versions of Windows that have a 32-bit WoW emulator to run regular 32-bit programs, but no 16-bit support. There are many other emulators as well.

More PC examples

VMWare is a prime example of an PC emulator. It allows you to run a computer emulation from within Windows or Linux. You can load an operating system onto it just like you can any computer and even play games or surf the net from it. You can even run more than one emulation at the same time and network the emulated computers together. VMWare sells server software designed to take one physical computer and, using emulation, break it into multiple virtual servers each running their own operating system and software. Microsoft carries a competing pair of programs called Virtual PC 2004 and Virtual Server. There are also a few free PC emulators out there such as DOSBOX and QEMM. Some of these are ideal for people (like me) that have a lot of old DOS games that just won't run an a Windows XP system because the emulation in NTVDM and WoW isn't good enough to run most graphic and sound intensive programs because these programs want to access the computer hardware directly, but this isn't allowed in Windows NT, 2000 and XP and NTVDM do not actually emulate video and sound devices while the PC emulators usually do.

Other examples

When I first discovered the world of emulation, it was emulation of older computers and video game consoles. It was with great pleasure to learn that I could relive the days of the Commodore 64(which mine long ago stopped working) and Amiga without having to aquire and connect any actual hardware. Not only that, but there were emulators for GameBoy, Nintendo, and Super Nintendo. I actually had a device I bought over in Hong Kong that copies Super Nintendo game cartridges onto floppy disks (cost me $300, but it was worth it). Then I could transfer the games onto the computer and run them on an emulator. Don't bother asking me for games, I'm not about to risk giving them to anyone. Eventually Nintendo-64 and Playstation emulators came along amoung many others.

MAME

I think the grand-daddy of all game emulators is called MAME(Multiple Machine Arcade Emulator). It is actually a collection of emulators to emulate the hardware of original arcade games. The emulator is totally free, but the games are not. For the most part getting the games (known as ROMs - for the Read Only Memory chips they usually reside on) means either buying joystick a package that includes an emulator with some games, getting the original circuitboard from an actual arcade machine and using specialize equipment to extract the game data or obtaining the games via illegal channels (don't ask me from where, I'm not going to help you). At this time, MAME is capable of emulating thousands of arcade games, but not all of them are fully functional.

Other Emulators

There are many other emulators out there. There are emulators that emulate a Texas Instruments calculator. There are also emulators that run on other platforms such as GameBoy emulators that run on PDAs.

The drawbacks

Depending on what you're running the emulator on and what kind of system you are emulating, emulators can be slow. As an example, some games in MAME (generally the newer ones with 3D graphics) have an estimated system requirement well above what is currently on the market (I think I saw something like 5GHz processor requirement once). In order to legally run emulations, it normally requires that you own the original equipment and/or the original software or ROM. For instance, the TI calculator emulators need a BIOS ROM from the original calculator to work. The only legal way to get it is to extract it from the calculator (which the emulator is able to do). In most cases, getting ROMs for game consoles or arcade machines requires special equipment that most people do not have easy access to leaving most emulation fans resorting to locating the illegal channels I referred to earlier.

My plans

In the future, whenever XP becomes obsolete, I want to abandon Microsoft and switch over to Linux. I plan to use PC emulators to run any older stuff that I want to continue using. It's not that I don't like Windows, it just that I don't like Microsoft and their desire to control everything that happens on your computer.

See my emulator links for resources

Emulator links

www.vmware.com
VMWare - From free PC emulators to enterprise-level server emulators, these guys are the big boys in the market right now

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/
Virtual PC 2004 - One of Microsoft's emulators competing with VMWare is now free. VMWare has emulators that run on Linux, however and Microsoft (obviously) does not.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/default.mspx
Virtual Server 2005 - Another of Microsoft's emulators competing with VMWare. This one is for setting up servers on an emulated computer. It's also free to download and use.

http://www.mame.net/
The original MAME site - Downloads for the console (non-graphical) version of MAME

http://www.classicgaming.com/mame32qa
MAME32 - MAME long ago switched from 16-bit to 32-bit, but MAME32 is simply MAME with a built-in graphical interface making it easier to use.

http://www.ticalc.org
TI Calc.org - Site that features many programs and games for use with TI calculators. Calculator emulators can also be downloaded here.

http://www.viceteam.org/ VICE - A Commodore 64 emulator that also emulates a number of other similar systems

http://www.hoxs64.com/
Hoxs64 - A newer Commodore 64 emulator that I've never tried, but looks promising.

http://www.dreamfabric.com/c64/
JaC64 - Cool! It's a Java Commodore 64 Emulator that runs in your web browser! (warning, it takes a long time to start up)

http://www.snes9x.com/
SNES9x - One of the best SNES emulators (amoung many) that I've ever tried. Easy to use interface and reliable emulation

http://www.zophar.net/
Zophar's Domain - Information on numerous emulators for various OS's

http://uae.coresystems.de/
UAE - An Amiga emulator

http://www.epsxe.com/
ePSXe - A very good Playstation emulator

http://www.pj64.net/
Project 64 - A Nintendo 64 emulator that is fairly up to date