So I spent a happy few hours this Sunday cleaning the dust off the various parts and then hooking it up to the TV in the living room.  I gained a sense of perverse satisfaction from seeing a computer from 1982 hooked up via an RF lead to a 40″ 1080p LCD panel.  Of course every appears in black and white since it was only a quirk of CRT display technology that allow the Spectrum to have a colour display.

After trying out a few commands, and typing the obligatory “Hello World!” program, it was time to try and load something from “tape”.  Problem number one: I have no Spectrum software on tape.  Problem number two: even if I did have tapes, I don’t have a tape deck with which to play them.  The first problem is easily solved by downloading virtual tapes, these TZX files are backups of the original Spectrum data.  I downloaded a few 16K games from World of Spectrum.  Then I used the winTZX tool to convert these files into .wav files.  Yes that’s right – audio files of that godawful screeching noise you thought you’d never have to hear again.

For some reason the soundcard in my MacBook Pro was too noisy, or not loud enough, or too loud or something, but playing the audio via WinAmp resulting in the Spectrum not quite reading the data from the “tape”.  So I gave the Spectrum some solid state storage: a first generation iPod Nano!  I copied the .wav to the Nano, typed LOAD “” and pressed play on the iPod.  Boom!  Or should I say “screech” as the Spectrum loading screen burst into life.  A couple of minutes later (did it really take that long to load 16K!?) and I’m looking at the load screen for Escape which, it must be said, doesn’t seem nearly as “original and absorbing” as it used to!

So that was my nostalgic Sunday.  It’s reminded me of the rest of my early console collection, and that I need to get hold of some of the other 8 and 16 bit machines from my early computing days…

It is now possible to change the Windows Live ID attached to your Xbox Live account. This means that I can stop using the obsolete hdurdle@hotmail.com address and move the account – and all my Gamer Points – across to my main email address. Thus laying to rest the last service that had anything attached to my old Passport account. If you’re a 360 gamer, I’m “The BOfH” – note the space and the capitalisation.

Oh yes, and Microsoft also introduced Divx/Xvid support to the in-dash media player. W00t!

He used a custom compiled “rcon” binary to talk directly to the game server’s Remote Console port. This is the port that allows an administrator to configure the game, kick players, change maps and generally do all the useful stuff that a game admin needs to do. It’s the protocol used by the hlstats live stats page to determine what is happening right now on the game server. Unfortunately, as far as my Googling shows, such a binary doesn’t exist for win32. There is a perl module (kkrcon.pm) which does the work inside hlstats, but the command line wrapper for kkrcon.pm – kkrcon.pl – doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2001 and so doesn’t work for Source titles.

A little Perl hacking later and I’ve created a version of the kkrcon.pl wrapper that is capable of using the Source rcon protocol. You can download both the module and the wrapper here: source server rcon perl script. This was tested on Windows Server 2003 running ActiveState Perl.

With that done, we can use MRTG to run another Perl script which will run the new kkrcon.pl with the right parameters, request some data from the game server and then parse it into a format that MRTG can understand. The two scripts I used are much the same as I found on the Zokahn site, but tweaked to use my new kkrcon.pl instead of the binary and to pass the parameters in a slightly different way. You can grab the scripts here: MRTG Counter-Strike: Source perl data source scripts.

The last step is the MRTG config file itself, here’s what the CSS Users part of mine looks like:

Target[server.CS-Users]:`.\m_cs-s_users.pl <server_ip> <port> <rcon_password>`
Title[server.CS-Users]: Active Counter-Strike:Source users
PageTop[server.CS-Users]: <H1>Counter-Strike:Source Users</H1>
MaxBytes[server.CS-Users]: 16
ShortLegend[server.CS-Users]: #
YLegend[server.CS-Users]: Active Users
Legend1[server.CS-Users]: Current active CS:Source users
LegendI[server.CS-Users]: Users
LegendO[server.CS-Users]:
Options[server.CS-Users]: growright,nopercent,gauge,integer
Unscaled[server.CS-Users]: ymwd

It’s very important to note that those are back ticks (`) on the first line – NOT apostrophes (‘). This caught me out and stopped MRTG generating data until I’d fixed it.

You can see my graphs here, although there isn’t a lot of data yet – just waiting for the clan to wake up and start playing!

The clan, all together for the last time in a while, since our man ‘Slinger is returning to the US for the foreseeable future.

I couldn’t believe that any publication would bother to publish something like that, even as an “opinion” piece in a student paper and even only on their website.  The author, who may be a veritable genius when it comes to philosophy, clearly has no idea what he (she?) is talking about when it comes to technology.  They don’t seem to understand the difference between emulation, virtualisation and dual booting, and have apparently very little grasp of hardware specifics…

When a Mac starts to emulate a Windows platform completely, the computer must provide additional voltage to provide the computing power.

Ignoring the author’s misconception that the Mac is emulating Windows (it is running Windows natively on an X86 chip remember…) what’s this about additional voltage?!  What?!  The intel chip in my MacBook – when running XP – is pulling the same power as when it runs OS X, or the same as the identical chip that runs Windows XP in the latest HP notebook.  Windows XP playing games such as UT2004 on the MacBook causes it to generate as much heat as OS X playing the Universal Binary of UT2004.  It’s hot (really hot), granted, but the idea that Windows is magically making the processor run hotter than OS X will ever allow is false.  It just gets as hot only quicker.

getting a Mac to run PC games will result in heartache – this I can guarantee

The author doesn’t specify exactly what heartache it will result in… My MacBook runs Half Life 2, CountStrike: Source, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Rise of Nations in some cases significantly faster/smoother than my Dell.  What heartache?  Heat-ache maybe, but no worse than OS X causes!

For reiteration, Macs cannot run Windows like PCs can.

Urm, yes.  Yes they can.  That’s rather what all the fuss was about when Apple put Intel chips inside.  INTEL.  x86 chips.  The same instruction set that nearly every PC on the planet uses to run, oh, for example, Windows!  Do you think the author understands the difference between a PPC and an Intel chip, and the reason why a Mac can now run exactly like a PC?

I can’t bring myself to refute the fifth paragraph (“My third point references to the industry.”) as it is so full of misunderstandings of the technology, the businesses involved and the computer industry’s recent history that it’s just not worth it.

Boot Camp crashes and burns?  Hardly.  It’s beta software.  It came with a warning.  Anyone who chose to ignore that warning and install it on a production machine deserves any hassle they get.  That said, my installation of Boot Camp was utterly without problems and I’ve heard lots of other positive reports on various forums.  I’m grateful to Apple for providing Boot Camp and the driver suite – I’d just like some of my minor niggles addressed!

• No Audio Routing
  If you plug headphones into the headphone socket audio continues to come out of the speakers. This is known (and documented by Apple) but is still irritating. If I’m in the office I quite often listen to mp3s/the radio on headphones. Also, when I play games I nearly always do so with headphones on for the immersive experience…
• Limited Bluetooth Support
  I use my phone’s Bluetooth headset as a headset in games that support it (UT2004, CounterStrike) and for Skype calls. Either the driver in the MacBook doesn’t support the headset profile, or the hardware doesn’t support it. Either way, it’s an annoying limitation.
• Heat
  This is the real killer. The MacBook Pro runs hot… Even in OS X – when you push the CPU – it gets very hot. Running in XP though, without the advanced power management, it gets hot quickly. So hot in fact that the grill to the left of the keyboard becomes painful to touch. That’s no good for prolonged periods of typing!
• The Trackpad
  In OS X there is a tickbox for trackpad settings that “ignored unintended input” – so if you knock it with your wrist while typing it knows to disregard it. Not so for XP. Try typing for any length of time and you find the cursor jumping all over the place as you accidentally click all over your document. Grrr!

I imagine that further updates to the beta will fix some of these niggles, but for now I’m still using the Dell for day to day work and games.

One thing I did manage to do with the MacBook Pro was remap the keyboard. Now \ is in the correct place (next to left shift) as is the back tick (next to the 1 key) and I’ve given myself a right-alt key (the right command key) and a del key (next to the left cursor). So I can hit ctrl-alt-del and I have a right-alt to control MS Virtual Server properly now!

It’s a fantastic games machine; HalfLife 2, UT2004 and RoN all perform flawlessly… I just worry about the heat. I hope Apple issue a BootCamp driver update for APM.

Funny. Rude, but funny.

Here’s a screen I don’t see very often:

Of course the chances are that I won’t be able to repeat it, but victory felt gooood. A swift nuclear strike followed by a combination of ground troops, artillery and air power, and his capital was conquered. Mwaahahahah! Current 2005 score is 2-1 to Teech in 1on1 games.