Keen on M1

Recently I came across Commander Genius, which [..] let's just say is a way to play Commander Keen on modern machines.

Since I am on ARM64 Darwin, a bit of tweaking needs to be done to run this x86_64 solftware. Here my notes:

 

• You need Rosetta installed
• You need to install openssl for x86_64. To not conflict with Homebrew for arm64, install it in a separate directory.

Open a x86_64 shell: 

> arch -x86_64 zsh

Install homebrew in a different directory (I use /Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64, choose what fits your need)

> mkdir /Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64
> curl -L https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
100 3812k  100 3812k    0     0  3721k      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:-- 9451k
> export PATH="/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64/bin:$PATH"
> which brew
/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64/bin/brew
> brew install openssl@3

• change line 3 of the install script as below

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/Volumes/1TBSSD/opt/homebrew-x86_64/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH ./CGeniusExe

That is it.

(S)VCD - I've got no time for this

 (S)VCDs 2025

The other day I found my Internet Backup from around 1999 on CD-R.

Among the disks where "a few" (S)VCDs - a format probably nobody knows by now.

 

I didn't have time to deal with the whole vcdxrip and what-not. The data is not of high value, and given that 99% of CD-Rs read without error (despite their age and non-ideal storage), I figured I just don't care and use cdrdao.

 

cdrdao read-cd ----read-raw --device <Your device>  --datafile disk1.data disk1.toc

 

Then just take that home and extract the data with a little bit of dd.. 

for f in *.toc; do ~/bin/vcd_extract.sh $f; done

Downgrading the G4

I could no longer take the pure performance of my G4 PowerMac, so when I saw this old ATI card in　the Junk section of the local Hard-Off for 100円, I had to pick it up.

Before the down-grade, I was running a hacked Nvidia GeForce, which replaced the original ATI (that I still have). 

Firstly I was surprised that the card actually works. I guess I (or it) was lucky that it was only in the Junk bin without protection for long.

Test-setup:

• MacOS 10.4.11 (Tiger)
• Cinebench 2003
• GeekBench3

Results

Geekbench results where identical, since it doesn't test GPU in that version.

Cinebench, impact was high:

 But hey, I don't keep that thing around for performance computing.

As a bonus, my MacOS 9.2 partition is now usable again. I could not for the love of god get it to work with the Geforce.

So finally I can enjoy errors like this again :-)

"I'll finish you like Macintosh does floppy disks."
 

 2020 Gaming PC

.. or maybe not

Limelight 2020 personal workstation

I came across this random computer. It didn't (and still doesn't) work, but I thought I take it apart to figure out what it might be.

 

I suspected it might be some sort of XT clone, and indeed, inside is a M80C86 from OKI. Isn't "M"for "military"? Looking at things, this looks like a clone of a Tandy laptop (which itself was a clone of the IBM).

I took this baby apart, because the floppy drives where kind of stuck - they would not take disks. And also I wanted to check for any bios batteries to remove.

Yeah - greetings from 昭和６２年, that thing has been removed.

It came with 2 expansion cards

Here some pictures of the mother and daughter boards

I was able to get the floppies going, but looking at the age of this thing, it probably wants DD disks, which I currently do not have. Speaking of the floppies, they are not standard - some weird thing going on with the eject button being in the middle.

Also - check out this keyboard. I like that there are even extra Y/N keys - amazing.

The keyboards lower keys where all stuck, but pulling them out and giving them a few days rest seems to have fixed them. The machine is also incredibly clean, seems like it was never really used. Not sure what to do with it though. Unfortunately it does not have a monitor out and even though the display (barely) works, it's not really great for doing anything with.

Too long in Japan syndrome

So yesterday I take the kids to some park in 世田谷 and for Tokyo standards is a nice big park. While I stroll around, I notice some fellow bloody foreigners of the pale kind stalking through the undergrowth, apparently looking for something. I notice that even their kids are very involved in helping to find whatever they have lost, so it must be something really important - maybe their phone or car keys.

I was 0.5s away from asking them what they lost and if I can help looking for it. - Then it dawned on me. Today is Easter Sunday - they are looking for Easter Eggs. 🤦

My path to the S8 replacement.

So my trusty Samsung S8 died the other day without any apparent reason. It was just charging and all of a sudden in the middle of the night it starts screaming (well beeping really loud) and the screen flashes. Half drunken I just pushed the power button to shut it off. That is the last thing I ever heard of it. It was dead from the next day. I have insurance, however because the phone is "too old", there is no way to have it repaired. The only option is a A42 as a replacement phone. This sounds good, as it is a new phone and thus gets a somewhat recent Android version, however being an "A" phone from Samsung - it lacks a lot of features that my S8 had. I was never a big fan of the "Samsung Experience" (quite an awful experience imho), but I found multiple work-arounds via 3rd party apps to make it bearable (Nova, other keyboard, Bixby-button work-around app, force uninstall some apps via USB).

That made think: What are the average peasants options?

I came up with these for me:

The somewhat affordable droid		Pros	Weight		Cons	Weight
Google Pixel 5a		No bloatware - no "custom" experience - no extra assistants	5		Relatively expensive for the average peasant	4
		Big modern screen	4		You submit to the digital overlords	1
		Good stereo sound - headphone jack	3		Big and chunky	2
Score		Fingerprint sensor that "just works"	5		No Wireless charging	2
16		Very good cameras	2		The side buttons are not very ergonomic	1
		Long software support expected	2
		USB-C	1
		5G support	1
		Multilingual (Keyboard, Interface, Assistant)	3
		Total	26		Total	10
The DoCoMo "replacement" for the S8		Pros	Weight		Cons	Weight
Samsung A42		Big modern screen	4		Bloatware OVERLOAD	5
		Headphone jack	1		Awful speaker - MONO	3
		Pretty good cameras	2		under screen fingerprint scanner (works about 50% of times)	2
Score		Cheap	4		There will be 0 feature updates / OS updates and security updates will be months late (I know from S8 experience)	2
-9.5		USB-C	1		Only Japanese and English of the relevant (for me) languages are supported. (No German, No Español, No Pусский)	3
		Pitty for non big IT company	0.5		No wireless charging	2
					The side buttons are not very ergonomic and "inverted"	1
					Extra malus for the system stability, random crashes and quirky work arounds to get basic apps like youtube and casting to work	3
					No 5G	1
		Total	12.5		Total	22
5 year old device from apple		Pros	Weight		Cons	Weight
Refurbished IPhone 8		Cheap	4		Small, but good screen	2
		Good stereo sound	2		No Headphone jack	1
		Still surprisingly good camera	2		Thunderbolt	1
Score		Fingerprint sensor that works best	5		used (battery not 100%, might not have as much life left as a new one)	4
12		Multilingual support (really good with Apple)	3		outdated specs (C/GPU slower than modern)	2
		Wireless charging	2		No 5G (of course)	1
		Long software support	2
		Ergonomic side buttons - quiet mode switch	1
		Great integration with Mac	2
		Total	23		Total	11

M1 Mac vs the beast

 It's time to upgrade the computer - aka the beast. Short story - the whole M1 concept convinced me and I got myself one of those M1 Macs. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and really can't complain. So now, the old beast has got to go. But before I pass on it's parts for recycling - I wanted to compare how this old, big and heavy Xeon electric heater compared to the M1 performance wise.

Compare the Geekbench5 results

	Single Core	Multi Core	OpenCL
The Beast	528	2816	21098
M1 Mac	1559	6080	17628

As the above table shows - the M1 is significantly faster than the beast. However, for gaming the beast has a small advantage  - mainly due to the somewhat modern GPU that I inherited from my nephew.

Obviously the M1 is better in so many other ways - energy efficiency - size - connectivity (yes - only 2 thunderbolt ports, but that's vs 0 on the beast) - noise (no fans vs 8 ). So yeah - another hurray for the Apple M1. The only thing I miss is my virtual machines - but I will come up with a solution for that (probably a new beast - headless - AMD based).

The beast - definition

Motherboard Information

Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. X58A-UD7

CPU Information

Intel Xeon X5650
1 Processor, 6 Cores, 12 Threads
GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 44 Stepping 2
Base Frequency 2.68 GHz
Maximum Frequency 3 GHz
Socket 1366 LGA
Codename Westmere-EP
L1 Instruction Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L1 Data Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L2 Cache 256 KB x 6
L3 Cache 12.0 MB x 1

Memory Information

16.00 GB 669 MHz TypeDDR3 SDRAM 2 Channels

OpenCL Information

AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series
Compute Units 16
Maximum Frequency 920 MHz
Device Memory 2.00 GB