Ideas Lab

So, on Friday the 22nd of March, myself and classmate Scott Butcher went to the Ideas Lab being held in C9. It was pretty interesting to attend to, honestly and I think I learned quite a bit from it about how to find answers for real-life problems in groups.

We were put into a group of 5 to work out how to find ways to help people who are struggling with dementia and their carers with looking after them. We came up with a pretty well-grounded idea of having surveillance on the dementia sufferers that only their carers can look in to to check if they are well without taking the trouble of going round to their house. 

There was also some other features of the package we proposed like a part-time carer to let the main carer put their feet up for a couple of days a week and cool off from looking after the person.

We felt the ideas we came up with were the most viable and most cost-effective of the three groups' ideas. One of the other groups had basically overheard most of what we said when we were working on the idea and copied it but failed to transfer some of the better features (or so we suspect) and the last group came up with some completely bat-shit insane ideas that used technology that was far too expensive for anyone to realistically afford or virtually non-existent in the current world (robot-helpers with good enough AI to help with things).

Much to our dismay, the group with the stupid overly-expensive and far-fetched ideas won this little Dragon's Den style competition. I don't think the judges even realized how much the technology they were proposing would cost.

Took away one of the runners-up goody bags while the winning group got the good goody bags. I guess it wasn't all for nothing since I got a lollipop!

Some music, nothing major

Haven't had a whole lot happen that would be worth writing recently, nor have I found anything particularly interesting to convey my thoughts on.

However, I was informed of a indie chiptune artist that goes by the name of Adhesive Wombat by a friend because he thought it might be the kind of music I'd listen to. After listening to some of the tracks by this artist I have now become quite a fan.

Maybe catchy electronic chiptunes aren't everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed listening this guy's music on his soundcloud page.

Always-Online DRM Rant

Something that has annoyed me (and the rest of the internet) a bit recently is the always-online DRM that game publisher EA has released with the new SimCity game. As a Simcity fan who has played the games from as long ago as the SNES Simcity, through 2000 and Simcity 4 Deluxe, I am quite disappointed by this outcome.

So yeah, EA copied Ubisoft's bad example by having the DRM for their game require the player to be online and connected to their servers just to play singleplayer. What if I come home one day and my internet has gone offline for maintenance or something? That would mean I can't play my game.

This isn't the only problem however, EA's servers are, as it happens, complete crap! People who have bought the game cannot play it because they can't connect to EA's servers. People who do manage to finally play it get disconnected at regular intervals and lose all of their savedata because that is also hosted on EA's servers.

I guess what EA was thinking was to try and stop the imaginary millions of legions of pirates who are evil from stealing their games! Well I guess they succeeded, but their own bloody customers can't play the game either! What a great launch for what could have been a good game if not for it being completely ruined by its DRM.

I can safely say I will not be getting the new SimCity because of this and I'm glad I wasn't gullible enough to pre-order it. It's common knowledge that EA is a garbage publisher nowadays who has no idea what they are doing when it comes to the PC market, I'm not the only potential customer they've lost from bad business practices.

DOSBox

So for a new blog post, Gordon suggested that I "try and get a really old game like Realms of the Haunting working". This is a game I had played a few years ago and never finished, but I am very familiar with the practice of getting old PC games from the 80's and 90's running on new computers.

There is an open-source and free program called DOSBox available for many different OSes. What it is is just an MS-DOS emulator that works through a command line interface. It turns troubleshooting for old DOS games on modern machines into child's play, just running the game's executable file through DOSBox is enough most of the time.

You can check the very large list of compatible games with the program on the website which are colour-coded as either Broken, Runnable, Playable or Not Supported. Fortunately by this point in time, years since DOSBox had started development, most of the games in the list are able to be run through DOSBox with great results.

A few of the games that I have used the program for in recent memory are Blood (a 1997 computer first-person shooter in the style of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D), The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (which an interesting project involving reverse-engineering the Daggerfall engine to make a "source port" style platform is being made for, since the source code for the engine doesn't seem to exist anymore) and Crusader: No Remorse (a top-down isometric sci-fi action game with a catchy soundtrack).

Dad's PC Problems

So I woke up this morning to find out that the previous night my dad was having problems with his computer. I wouldn't call him completely computer literate. After a virus scan picked up some "infected files" in System32 and told him to "manually remove" them, he proceeded to move the infected files found in System32 to the desktop and turned off his PC. I theorize that these were somewhat significant components since the events following meant he couldn't start his computer up.

Today he told me this and that it won't turn back on properly. After trying to turn the computer on it gave me the boot menu of options like "Start up Normally", "Start up in Safe Mode" and "Return to last previous state which it had turned on correctly". After trying all the options and finding that the computer wouldn't start up and only loop back to this area in the start-up process we tried something else.

We switched the Master Hard Drive with the Slave Hard Drive (which was from a previous computer that had Windows XP installed on it), it gave me an error which I recognized as it having another drive or disc higher in priority than the Slave Hard Drive. I unplugged the External Hard Drive and anything else that could possibly interfere.

The computer booted up into Windows XP through the Slave Hard Drive, through the use of the keyboard only (since the mouse refused to install the plug'n'play drivers for some reason) I was able to replace the System32 files on the Master Drive to their usual place. I also backed up all of my dad's files from the Master Hard Drive to the External Hard Drive at the same time, in-case anything was to be lost from such tampering.

After replacing these files the computer started up into its usual state.

Hex Editing a Problem

Today I tried to play the old PC game Turok 2: Seeds of Evil which I used to have on Nintendo 64 but had never played the PC ported version. I shortly found that the only available resolutions for the game are in 4:3 with no option for any 16:9 resolutions such as my own monitor's default resolution 1920x1080.

I didn't really enjoy looking at the smudgy imagery that 4:3 resolutions provided on my screen, so I searched the internet for a solution to the problem. I found that with use of a Hex Editor I can edit one of the game files and replace the values for 800x600 for example with ones for 1920x1080. 

I opened up a Hex Editor which I already had on my computer for a number of years (known as HxD) but hadn't had many opportunities to use. I replaced said values then opened up the game and set the resolution to 800x600 in the settings to trick it into using 1920x1080. Which worked!

Further blogs I will be following

I have found a total of 5 blogs to follow, including the TechCrunch blog that I had mentioned previously.

The other four are, with brief explanations:

• Kotaku, which is mainly a gaming blogsite.
• PC Pro Blog, another technology blogsite about recent PC news.
• Youtube's Blog, the massive video uploading site's official blog.
• Blog Project 1.0, a classmate's blog about his own interests.