Geekery

Protocols of the Unknown #1: The Witless

A trite text adventure game I wrote, partly out of nostalgia and partly to figure out how to work with the Inform library.

AMFV Decoder Wheel

Behold. Okay, it's dead simple, but a vitally missing component to the AMFV game. Browser JavaScript required to use this.

TinyMUSH 3.0 SSL Rogue Patch

I offer no support, but here it is. You'll need to have OpenSSL 0.9.5a or higher installed. As well, the game will expect you to create a server.pem certificate file and stick it in the game/data directory. Have fun. There is an issue with SSL and @restart. For those who are not concerned with preserving the incoming IP address, stunnel is perhaps an adequate alternative and should avoid the @restart issue.

PHP and Oracle8i

I ported a file-based inline hit counter to PHP. Here is the source code. YMMV. You may have to alter the flock() command for more recent versions of PHP.

I managed to get PHP4 and Oracle8i 8.1.6 stable and talking to each other, but only after making PHP4 a compiled-in module of Apache 1.3.12. I'm not sure why I had problems with making a DSO for PHP4 on my RedHat 6.2 install, but there you have it. Before starting up httpd, ensure the Oracle database and the listener are up.

SayWat

I've written my own MUD client, now greatly mutated from its origins in Anton Rang's (Tarrant's) TinyTalk 1.1.2. --more--

Redhat Linux 5.1 and SB AWE64

Because of the state of 2.0.35 kernels, I had to endure this installation ordeal. Things got much better after the upgrade to the 2.2.x kernels in RedHat 6.x+. After installing the 2.4.x kernel in RedHat 7.1+, it detected more functionality in my card. Now if only someone would do a joystick driver for X Windows...

ICQ beta 98a and SOCKS

When I initially ran ICQ beta 98a through WinGate 2.1d the former crashed all the time. The problem lay in ICQ's SOCKS support. I resolved it by getting SocksCap32 from NEC. SocksCap32 also stabilized the Win32 Pueblo client, and allowed the Ultima Online client to run. For those who want to duplicate my setup, I ran Win95 OSR2.5 (with IE4) with the USB and Winsock2 supplements installed.

ATI-TV Installation Mystery Solved

I bought an ATI-TV add-on TV tuner card for my system, but it just wasn't being recognized when I installed the video player software. After much wrangling (and probing of DejaNews), I found that I had to set the following in an installation file called ATICAP.ING to force the software to install the video capture drivers:

[Player.Components]
ATIVideoPlayer_English=ATI VIDEO PLAYER
ATICapture.Device_English=ATI Capture Drivers,ALWAYS,NODISPLAY_UNCONDITIONAL

Works like a charm now. Now if only I had bought their stock...

Pueblo and TinyMUX

TinyMUX 1.6 patchlevel 0 doesn't get Pueblo support right. Try out my mux1.6-pueblo.patch (22.5K) on the base distribution to get it working. It's up to release 5 now.

The MUD server fails to inform the Pueblo client of its Pueblo support and wake up (easily fixed in the connect.txt file), players' @HTDesc attributes weren't being picked up, the comsys channel system didn't provide escaped HTML output, the @emit/html and @pemit/html commands didn't terminate with an end-of-line sequence and thus didn't always trigger the Pueblo client, and /html did not interoperate with the other switches provided by the @emit and @pemit commands. I also added the /html switch to the @oemit command, and made the result of the inventory command clickable. Recently I fixed @pemit/list/html brokenness, and added a hpemit() function.

As an aside, the Windows Pueblo client doesn't handle a SOCKS proxy correctly, though SocksCap32 provides a workaround.

ForceFX

I had a CH Products ForceFX joystick. While their DirectX beta drivers circa 1998 worked fine with the game Heavy Gear, I found them annoying, as they either didn't check for a throttle control or presumed the existence of a rudder control. Nothing a little Windows 95 registry hacking couldn't solve. Here's the revised analog and DirectX joystick entries in the form of registry files; they should coexist with the existing drivers.

Oddities

I discovered that I could sort of read Tandy 2000 floppies (720k 5.25 inch) on a relatively new Windows 95 PC, even though that format is not officially supported by Microsoft. Can't format them, though. I have a Panasonic 5.25 inch floppy and an ASUS TXP4 motherboard, if that's relevant. I don't think it quite gets the sectors right, though. Oh well.

The final revisions of the ASUS TXP4 can be clocked to an undocumented 5.5x66MHz (366MHz!) with a K6-2. The setting for CPU E at 5x is: BF0 [1-2], BF1 [2-3], BF2 [2-3]; 5.5x is: BF0 [2-3], BF1 [2-3], BF2 [1-2]. I ripped the appropriate BFn clock multiplier settings from the K6-2 specification PDFs at AMD's web site.

Even with the K6-2's floating point perfomance being inferior to the Pentium MMX, I found that the higher clock speed of the AMD chip allowed it to at the worst match a Pentium 233MMX without using 3DNow! I contemplated a K6-3/400 in order to regain effective L2 caching after upgrading past 64MB RAM (darn the limitation of the 430TX chipset), but never got around to finding one.