Random old game stuff

Just because I took the time to look at NFG Games, I have a couple of goodies to share. First off is this translation of Nintendo's most awesome manual ever, for the Famicom Disk System, available here.

Second is this animated GIF, courtasy of NFGman himself. It's the opening animation to Zoom's Phalanx on the X68000

I'm psychic.

I was right. I messed up configuring the kernel. But I wasn't that far off, in my defence. As far as I know (which is admitedly very little, as I didn't check it out very well), All I forgot to check was the ethernet capabilities. If I had remembered to do that, then I would have been pretty OK. I've already installed some good net utilities like BSD-telnet and the indespencible tf (Alas, the MUD is dead in this world!), along with links and lynx. (Why does one person need two different text web browsers?)

So anyway, I ended up using genkernel, as I had guessed. This is terrible - I'm going to have kernel bloat for all eternity now. I'm going to have to wait longer at every boot for the kernel to probe the devices and install modules as necessary.

I should have used FreeBSD. It would be way easierish.

Anyway, I'm hoping that recompiling the kernel won't have any effect on the things that I had already configured, like networking and all that huzspa. I'm glad that Linux is so great at multitasking - if it weren't, I'd be having a terrible time trying to type this out now. I'm probibly going to have to sleep on this project anyway.

Oddly enough, I can't get XP to boot now, and if I try to reinstall it, I'll have to install another bootloader. Again. Oh poo.

Fear....

Well guys, it's the moment of truth. I just finished configureing the Kernel. I made a bunch of stupid mistakes with it though, like enabling SMP support, although it's only a single-core single-CPU machine, and enabling KVM, although I have no real reason for virtualization - especially at the Kernel level. I'm just hoping that I configured the processor part correctly.... If I failed in that, I will have to try configuring the kernel yet again. Oh lord.... If that happens, I'm just going to use genkernel's wise autoprobing abilities and just eat the used time.
I hope that someone out there understands that phrase.

And in case you didn't notice, I AM going to be giving updates every time I need to wait for compilation.

Akir Is a Stupid Little Brat

In an odd move, I have decided to install Gentoo once again. You know what this means - Long periods of me not being able to access my files. Longer periods of waiting for compilation or downloading sources.

Am I insane?

I think so....

So anyway, I'm in the middle of installing the base system. I've already unpacked the stage3 tarball, updated portage and it's snapshot, and got information pertaining to kernel configuration. After waiting for a near eternety waiting for the nearest mirror to give me the updated base files, I find myself waiting yet again for the Kernel (gentoo-sources, of course) to download. Of course, this is all after the 107MB stage3 tarball and 39MB portage snapshot.

Oddly enough, I think it's been worth it. It's been forever since I got to use a 'real' bash shell in a real linux environment. Syllable is gone now, of course, which may or may not be such a bad thing. I just hope that my linux-using guru friends are still alive.

Installing Gentoo has, for the first time in a long while, made me think. There are a number of choices to make when you're installing an operating system from near-scratch. The main question in my mind at the moment is which desktop environment I'm going to use. KDE? Gnome? xFCE? Enlightenment? BlackBox? Perhaps even (gasp!) GnuStep? Heck, I could just install them all and use whatever's best for the application.

Wow. I'm going to have lots of fun. Or sarcasm, depending on my mood.

Blank Minds

I think I'm going crazy. I just signed up for MySpace. Again! There's that confirmation Email in my inbox. I think I shall ignore it until it goes away....

Taking a Bite Out of Apple

Well, Someone pulled the wool over my eyes. Since I was a child, I was indoctrinated into the "Windows is good, all else must die" philosophy. I remember the wonder I experianced once I started using Linux. The fact that I compiled my own components brought me into a real high for the longest time.
Well, recently, I got myself a Power Macintosh G3 mini-tower. I don't mean that artsy blue-and-white unit, or anything like that. I'm talking about the first release in the beige case. It's actually a bit better then the first G3 - It's a G3 server, which means a 9GB SCSI HDD with a 300MHz processor, running Mac OS 9.2.2. I just upgraded it's RAM to 320MB.
You'd think that 300MHz would be slow, but that's not the case. IBM and Motorola (I think this was before their chip fab was separated to Freescale) really outdid themselves with the PowerPC 750.
This leads me to wondering.... If PowerPC chips outperformed intel chips at 300 MHz, why doesn't Apple use it now? It's easy to see that it's lightning fast - just watch how quickly Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator generates a three-dimensional image. Intel chips, on the other hand, have a history of being low-end. What's worse is that whenever they come out with new instructions, they still run slow. What's worse is that everyone knows how badly everyone programs on those chips - you can't find a single commercial program without insane bloat anymore.
This leads me to believe that Apple has betrayed their history. They used to be for making simple machines that can be used to do otherwise complicated tasks with ease. Now their operating system is based on UNIX, for crying out loud! While I'm glad that they've opened up their systems some more, I'm upset that they're no longer as simple to run as their 'classic' systems were.
I guess that I don't have a point with this rant. Well, perhaps I do. Don't upgrade to Mac OS X!