Dangerous Dave's Dlog

For some reason, the internet at my flat stopped working last Wednesday. So we have all just been playing LAN games against each other, since you can't study without the internet (or some other lame excuse like that). Since it's the weekend (and we use a small company), nothings being done about it; but if I get up tomorrow and we have internet I'll be very happy. If not, I'll be making yet another phone call.

If anyone wondered, Rise of Nations, Red Alert 2, Warcraft III, and Age of Empires 1 & 2 + expansions all work fine under Windows 7 (64 bit). Theme Hospital doesn't (it's 16-bit). Yeah, I don't often play new games .

Game Maker also runs "fine" (as in the same as it does on Vista).

-Dave

After running Windows 7 in a virtual machine, I decided to install it natively. Here is a guide to getting around some of the problems. The information is a combination of everything I learnt from random Googled sites.
Note: My method requires a DVD burning capable Windows machine.

First of all, you need to partition your hard drive. How big is up to you, but I suggest 30GB+. Windows 7 doesn't appear to support FAT32, so you are stuck with NTFS (The only downside is that you can't natively write to the partition from within Leopard, but you can read).

Boot Camp Assistant will partition your hard drive for you, so use that. In fact, you can follow it's instructions until the restart, unless you already have a Boot Camp partition, in which case you have to use something else to do the partitioning.

Throw in the DVD you burnt of Windows 7 (if you haven't done this yet, I suggest using a rewritable, or reading the rest to decide whether to make the other changes or not before burning).
Reboot your MacBook, and hold Option at the first grey screen until the cursor appears and it gives you a drive selection. Double click on the Windows 7 disk.

One of three things will happen (Note: Problem 3's solution may fix problem two as well):

1. The Windows 7 installation will start: Follow the instructions.
2. You will get a message:

"1.
2.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type:_"

You Wont be able to do anything.
Or 3. You will get an Error code 5.

Ok, there's probably a million things that could happen, but they are the top 3, in my estimated order of probability.

To fix problem 2, here's what I did(Taken from a post here:


1. Insert Windows Install disc into DVD drive
2. Using the build mode of ImgBurn, go to the advanced tab, then bootable disc and then select your DVD drive in the extract boot image drop down list. Go ahead and extract the boot image and store it somewhere on your hard drive.
3. Go to the information tab and add your DVD drive as the source file
4. Options tab, check that file system is ISO9660 + IDF and UDF revision is 1.02 (should be anyway by default)
5. Go to Advanced tab, sub tab Restrictions and further sub tab ISO9660: Set Folder / File length to Level X and tick the four check boxes at the bottom (allow more than 8 directory levels, Allow more than 255 characters in path, Allow files without Extensions, Don’t Add ‘;1’ Version number to Files. (Note it’s this bit that actually solves the problem the rest is effectively just duplicating the existing disc)
6. Move to the bootable disc tab: Click the tick box to make the image bootable, emulation type to “none (custom)” and the browse and select the boot image you previously extracted from the windows disc. Finally set Sectors to load to 4.
7. Click the big create iso button to create the bootable iso.
8. And use that iso to burn a new install disc.


That fixed problem 2 for me. Then I rebooted and tried to load my new disk, and was met with an Error Code 5, AKA problem 3 from above.

To fix this, I followed these instructions (From here:

0 - create 3 folders c:\server2008iso c:\server2008exe c:\server2008dvd
1 - download this .exe file and put into c:\server2008exe
2 - put .iso you downloaded from ms into c:\server2008iso and unzip it
3 - move .iso file out of c:\server2008iso
4 - open a dos prompt in c:\server2008exe and type:

oscdimg -n -m -bc:\server2008iso\boot\etfsboot.com c:\server2008iso c:\sever2008dvd\server2008dvd.iso


To unzip the iso, I used WinRAR.

Now the soloution to 3 claims to be a solution to 2, but I had fixed 2 by the time I came accross it. You could try it first to see if it fixes both problems.


After doing these, you should be able to boot the install disk just fine. Choose language, then custom install. Choose the right partition, and install. It may reboot into Mac OS at points if you didn't use Boot Camp, just restart and choose the new Windows partition, and it will continue where it left off. After a while, you should find yourself running the Windows 7 beta.

Next step, right click. Ha, gotcha! You are going to need some drivers.
Stick in your Leopard DVD. If you recently got your MacBook, see the simple solution here. If, like me, you got yours before 64 bit drivers were invented, you have two options. Download the update to Boot Camp, or use these drivers(From first post here). I did the second, and also downloaded the sound drivers from the RealTek site. I don't much care about some of the missing drivers, but you can just scroll down the above linked page to find a download for all of the drivers, which I guess saves you getting the Boot Camp update.

I hope this guide has helped you to install Windows 7 if you were having problems. If you don't yet have the iso for Windows 7, you can't download it from Microsoft anymore. You may have to acquire it by other means .

-Dave

UPDATE: Windows 7 RC released, see this: Windows 7 RC

Before I knew about either the new Opera alpha or the new Safari beta, I thought that I would be writing a post about why I was going to stop using Opera and move to FireFox. All has changed.

The new Opera, well, it just works. I've been using Opera since before speed dial was invented (which isn't as long as I'm implying). Over the years, I settled on one I liked best; Opera 9.27. Just enough features, not too much throttling at the wrong times. Soon, FaceBook stopped working, Hotmail stopped working, and I'm sure there were more. The recent versions of Opera did little to fix these issues, hence why I stuck with my version.

The new Opera 10 alpha has fixed nearly all of the issues I once had. Funnily enough, the first page I tried (which was a Flash game on FaceBook) was unplayable. I set off to test other Flash games and they all ran fine except this one. So I filed a bug report and installed this new alpha over top of my old Opera version (that's how much I liked it). FaceBook (and more importantly, Mouse Hunt) worked almost flawlessly. Hotmail worked great. I liked the skin a lot better than the previous Opera's default skin.

But there is still something that bugs me. I think the title bar is a complete waste of space. It has three buttons at one end (close, minimise, and "maximise" (I don't know it's actual name...)), and the page's title. The title is also on the tab for the page, and I'm sure the buttons could be relocated (I'm not the kind of person who closes my browser window anyway). In comes Safari. As if by some kind of black magic they had read my mind (or just copied Chrome). They moved the tabs to take up this space, which has had mixed reactions among Safari fanboys, but you can tweak it back to the original placement.I love it. I think it's brilliant, and I want it in Opera.

Safari has also added a sort of Chrome/Opera start page hybrid. It looks really good, much better than Chrome or Opera's, and you can change the number of sites displayed. It fills itself with the top visited sites, but allows you to pin them so you don't lose them if you stop visiting. I would have liked to be able to set them myself (like I can in Opera), but you can't. Safari has also included cover flow for viewing your bookmarks.

One obvious change is the more Windowsy look, which makes you cringe at the thought, then you have a look, and it doesn't look too bad, then you decide that yeah sure it kind of looks horrible but it is XP so what do you expect, it looks much better under Vista.

The initial release of Safari 4 beta didn't work with Hotmail, but updating the Webkit to the nightly build fixed it for me, though doing this in the Windows version hasn't worked AFAIK because it is a few builds behind. Changing the User agent string to register itself as FireFox fixes the issue for Windows users (Google up how, it's rather simple).

Both of these releases have reinforced the fact the FireFox is not for me. I would lose features I actually use and gain features I would never use. I think I will continue on with Opera being my main browser, and Safari as 2IC.

-Dave

For the past two weeks I have had all the spare time in the world, yet no free time to update my blog.

I finished work on the 8th of February, giving me two weeks of free time before heading back to university. On the 9th, I drove for 8 or so hours to a beach batch where I stayed for a week with my girlfriend, father and relatives. There was no internet access, and most of the time spent there I was either fishing, at the beach, or sleeping.

The following week I organised to get power and internet connected, and organising for all my stuff to be returned to my flat.

But enough about me. I have made a bit of progress with my new (yet still probably never to be released) game. There are now three levels, each reasonably unique, and nearly complete. I'm using one of the (as yet not fixed) GM for Mac bugs as an excuse not to work harder on it, but that might change with lectures starting next week (lectures are a great place to make games, because it's an Ultimatum. Either make the damn game, or you will have to listen to what the lecturer is saying).

I'm having trouble conveying my ideas with black squares as sprites, but hopefully the replacement of those with animated walking things will help get the idea across. Also, the game is to be themed around finding pieces of a time machine. Problem is, I don't know how to build a time machine. All I know about time machines is that your flux capacitor must be fluxing and you need to be going 88MPH. Since you can't pickup a 88MPH, so far the only pickup I have is a flux capacitor.

If anyone knows what other components you need to make a time machine (or can think up something that could fit), please speak up now .

-Dave

For those who don't know, today (January 8th) is the day of birth of David Bowie, Stephen Hawking, and Elvis Presley.

It is also the only day ever which, in 1835, the USAs national debt was 0.

And for those who didn't know, this historical day is also my birthday

-Dave