BSD & Gaming

A ‘First Day’ Ceremony will be held at the Kennedy National Space Center Wednesday night May 4th, 2011. The celebration focuses on the new stamp for Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his flight.

The stamp issued will commemorate Shepard’s suborbital flight on May 5, 1961 and is the first stamp honoring a single astronaut on a stamp all by himself.

Full article and details here – [LINK]

Back in 2000 when Red Alert 2 was first released I fell in love with it immediately.
While I enjoyed the previous C&C game Tiberian Sun very much and still play it occasionally, it just didn’t capture the imagination like Red Alert 2 did.

Growing up in the last gasp of the Cold War I can still remember doing Civil Defense safety drills in elementary school. Those years made a strong impression on me, the fear of war with the Soviet Union weighed heavily on everyone’s mind and even though as children we may not have understood all the details we knew it would be something bad. In fact to this day any book, movie, or game that reflects the feel or imagery of the Cold War era still evokes an emotional response and fires my imagination. That connection has even led to a need to collect some Civil Defense relics in recent years… go figure. There is something about that iconic CD logo that I’m drawn to. Anyway enough of that I’ll get back on track about playing Red Alert 2 on BSD using WINE.

The ‘Good News’ :

Playing Red Alert 2 on BSD [ FreeBSD or PC-BSD ] is possible and it seems to run well now that I actually have it installed.

The ‘Bad News’ :

I have not been able to get RA2 to install easily. I still don’t know what the issue is but for whatever reason trying to get RA2 to install properly straight from the CD just isn’t happening. I keep getting errors preventing it from completing the install. I won’t go into all the gory details but basically I gave up and did what the Ubuntu Linux folks did, installed it on a Winblows box – then copied it to my WINE drive.   @*&# !!! Bah!

Once the installation ‘goat rope’ was over I ran into issues with the damned cd copy protection crap, I hate games that insist on the CD being in the drive in order to play – it doesn’t prevent piracy it just exposes the original install cd to potential for damage. Needless to say I had to continue to take the Ubuntu communities lead and follow their advice on countering that nonsense.

Red Alert 2 is over a decade old, but I think it is still a great game and worth the effort to install. I realy prefer RA2 versus what I consider to be the ‘over the top’ cartoon graphics and general silliness of RA3. If anyone ever finds a ‘finished’ conversion mod making RA3 into a likeness of RA2 please let me know. I found a few mods that are or were being worked on but found nothing complete.

WineHQ’s information about Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Ubuntu documentation for Red Alert 2 under WINE – [LINK]

Wikipedia information on Red Alert 2 – [LINK]

Red Alert Den’s custom maps, missions, and misc. files – [LINK]

Only six more days till Fallout: New Vegas is available for those of you waiting to run out and grab a copy hot off the press. I myself am not in any rush and will not likely get a copy till long after the hoopla is over.  Bethesda’s Fallout 3 was a disappointment compared to the first two incarnations of the game, but I do admit that after watching the G4TV trailers I found myself more interested than I expected. Fallout: New Vegas is being developed by Obsidian Entertainment and not Bethesda which may be it’s saving grace.  Let’s hope Obsidian will be able to steer the Fallout franchise back on course.

Telstar Logistics reports that Hanger One could become a location for the Smithsonian. Pictures and full details on Telstar’s web site.

[LINK]

For those of you who haven’t found it yet, there is a really good Dieselpunk web site located at http://www.dieselpunks.org with tons of great information and picture galleries. Don’t waste any time go on over and take a look,  it’s really worth it !

In a New York Times article Amazon.com says it was selling 143 eBooks for every 100 paper copies and now sales are on the increase hitting 180 per 100. I can understand why sales are up from my own perspective. I love to read …and I love books! However years of lugging around tons of books every time I move has been a nightmare, being able to have all those hundreds of pounds of books on a few data disks…. it’s just too convenient.

It’s not an easy choice when you sentimentalize hard-copy books the way some of us do. Some books in my collection were gifts from people and those are especially hard to consider getting rid of. Every book holds a memory for me, not just the work itself…  where I was, what I was doing and experiencing at the time when I read it. That experience doesn’t hold for me with the digital editions. Getting rid of my hard-copy versions is something I’ve been contemplating for some time now but not a choice I’ve been able to make yet.

NYT’s story is here – [LINK]

WIRED had an article marking today’s anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. It got me thinking about a lot of things, mainly about where we have been as a country and where we are going in the future. It’s tough to see positive things when, as a nation, we are so dispirited. It was huge events like Apollo 11 that helped us to see we can do great things and we can reach outside of our petty worldly fears and selfishness for something bigger. I just hope in today’s apologetic rhetoric we don’t rush to rewrite history into a more politically correct version forgetting the accomplishments made and losing hard won lessons.

The knowledge gained from NASA’s work has affected everything from the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the homes we live in to the technology that goes into the cars, computers, phones, and every other gadget we love. Maybe the short sighted folks in D.C. will remember that and realize that while it may cost a little to keep it fed, NASA is the “golden goose” that pays us back a thousand fold everyday.

For WIRED’s article go here – [LINK]

I eventually plan to move to a more rural area, but this has a serious downside. By that I mean having very limited access to the internet. The area I want to live in some day is currently saddled with only one real option and that is mobile broadband. Almost all of the plans I see are capped around 5gig a month depending on the provider. If you’re a serious geek a mere 5gig per month is nothing. Hell just thinking of chopping my access down that much makes me feel panicky and claustrophobic!

There doesn’t really seem to be much choice but to learn to live with the 5gig and adjust my net habits – ugh it’s a damned depressing thought. Maybe by that point I’ll have a real life (whatever that is) and won’t care, or perhaps the zombie apocalypse will occur and I’ll be too busy reloading to worry about my internet connection. Who knows.

I did think of one small thing to help cut back on bandwidth, instead of browsing with Firefox which sucks down tons of flash, pictures, and various other media… I could use the browser called Lynx.

For those not familiar, Lynx is an old school text only browser that won’t hog your bandwidth so much. It’s not pointy clicky,  but if you just want to surf, read the news, or check blogs it works great. It’s available for just about every OS (FreeBSD, linux, Windows, etc).

If you want to check it out take a look here – [LINK]

Tiberian Sun and the Firestorm expansion pack are now free from the official Command and Conquer home page under the classic games section.

Get it now! – [LINK]

I loved Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2, they are some of my all time favorites. It’s funny I was just looking for those cd’s in my collection the other day and couldn’t find them. I just downloaded a copy and will be giving it a run with WINE as soon as I get a chance.

[Update] – WINE 1.1.31 runs Tiberian Sun just fine, in fact it’s more stable than when I ran it under WinXP Pro. I don’t know why but under XP it crashes after playing for 30-45min, none of my other games do…..  go figure.

Setup winecfg for Win98 mode and the recommended registry settings are pasted below. Enjoy!

Improving performance

• Run ‘wine regedit’, browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine. If there is no key (the stuff with folder icons) called AppDefaults, then create it
• Right-click on that key and create a new key game.exe
• Create a new subkey Direct3D. In that key create two string variables:
  DirectDrawRenderer with value opengl
  RenderTargetLockMode with value readtex

“TICKETS, Get your TICKETS!!”

Calling all Steampunk enthusiasts out there! March 12-14, 2010 in Emeryville, CA will be the date and location for the upcoming convention. I really wish I could be there, but being on the east coast and money shy will make it a no go situation for me.

[LINK]