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