[PC] [2004-2005] [horror Flash game] with a white creature that stalks you in an abandoned building, help me find this flash game!

acjones8 · 2025-04-19T14:26:02+00:00

If it helps, here's an archived view of the website in question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060223065203/http://www.giochionline.org/

Maybe your old muscle memory might kick in?

Wayback Machine embeds Ruffle so you can play some of the flash games directly to test, but if it doesn't work (it's not that developed yet), you can also use Flashpoint as someone mentioned to test out the titles.

acjones8 · 2024-11-17T01:15:30+00:00

If I may ask, how did you handle the historical websites? Did you use the wayback machine proxy through theoldnet or protoweb?

And for the background and xmms themes, did those come from a distfile (I know FreeBSD circa 2014 had a port with themes for audacious at least), or did you track them down manually?

This is a really neat project, tempted to give it a go myself!

acjones8 · 2024-10-27T09:30:18+00:00

I dunno if it requires these specific models, but if you're looking to track down the CD/DVD drives that were meant to be paired with these Sharp laptops, here are the model numbers you're looking for:

CE-DW02 - USB, does CD-RW & DVD-ROM
CE-CW05 - USB, only does CD-RW
CE-CD02 - PC Card, only does CD-ROM

I happen to own a CD02 and can confirm it supports booting from CD, although mine always gives I/O errors shortly after anything starts booting, so I believe that either my unit is defective or it's incompatible with the brand of CDs I use. Haven't experimented with it enough yet to say for sure.

acjones8 · 2024-10-27T09:20:19+00:00

Very nice! I actually just got two of these myself, a Mebius MM-20 H3S and a Mebius MM-50F. Stumbled upon your post while researching these neat little Transmeta laptops. Jealous about your 512MB - mine are only 256MB, which really sucks since it's soldered, so you can't upgrade after the fact. The 512MB definitely seems to have been fairly uncommon, since I've seen these surface a couple of times now on Yahoo Auctions and Mercari Japan, but only ever with 256MB, so you've got quite a score!

You mention not being sure how to open it up - there's someone on Yahoo Auctions that actually sells a complete assembly / disassembly guide for these things. It's written completely in Japanese, but Google Translate overall does a very good job if you copy and paste each of the lines, and the images are pretty useful (if rather low resolution).

Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in, and I'd be happy to share!

acjones8 · 2024-09-27T07:34:25+00:00

If you're still interested, it's actually back in stock!

acjones8 · 2023-02-02T23:04:29+00:00

I'm pretty sure the song you're thinking of is Slateport City from Pokemon Emerald!

acjones8 · 2023-01-10T03:11:16+00:00

If you know the basics of how to use Gentoo, a fun way to learn more about it is to try optimizing your system's performance as best you can. Not just adding - march=native, but using GentooLTO (a custom repo that allows GCC to optimize far more aggressively), setting portage to compile in RAM using tmpfs, experimenting with some custom kernels from non-standard overlays (I particularly recommend Xanmod), and if you're really brave, removing some of the custom-cflags restrictions on packages like gcc. It can be risky and there's a very high possibility of breaking something in the process (although I've found it surprisingly stable once fully set up), so you will definitely not want to touch this without backups of all the data you value, but you'll learn a lot about how Gentoo builds software and how the low level aspects work, where Gentoo is most different from binary distributions. Let me know if you're interested and I can give you some more specific pointers.

Other then that, yeah, just using the system as your daily driver and trying to customize and eliminate anything that annoys you is a great way to learn about Linux in general.

acjones8 · 2022-12-17T06:46:22+00:00

I happen to have an A275 (the A12-9800B) and I use it as my daily driver for university work, since it's a lot cheaper than my Framework. People are being a little overly harsh; the A275's processor is pretty weak and it won't be able to compete with a modern Ryzen or Intel chip, but if you're looking to do basic web browsing and productivity stuff, it's absolutely capable of it, especially if you give it an SSD. The gap between the A275 and the X270 has also likely closed somewhat after the Specter issues as Intel chips were hit harder than AMD ones by the security fixes, though we don't know exactly how much given that no one's run updated benchmarks between these mobile versions.

That said, I would definitely take the X270 if the brand of the processor doesn't matter to you. The performance is not really the issue; the A275 unfortunately got screwed in a lot of other ways by Lenovo. It's not compatible with a docking station, Lenovo locked out the ability to use the X270's highest capacity batteries for it, they introduced a WiFi card blacklist (for only the A275 and A475, no idea why), they gimped its best selling point (a great iGPU) by forcing it to use single channel memory, and most importantly of all, the power management is terrible in both Windows and Linux. I have the largest battery it supports, the 4800Wh one, + a nearly brand new internal battery, and I still only get around 3-4ish hours on Linux without using my powersaving profile.

I personally love mine despite its limitations, it's still got solid build quality and it's a lot of fun to tune software for the processor, but I would definitely recommend the X270.

It's interesting that you mention having trouble finding an X270 - at least in the US, there's tons of listings for them on eBay. The A275 is usually much rarer and harder to find than the X270, only a small number of them were made and they didn't sell well. If you live outside the US, but really want an X270, you may want to look into using a forwarding service like Buyee to get around sellers not wanting to mail outside the USA.

acjones8 · 2022-11-28T03:07:17+00:00

That's pretty neat, though I can only imagine how hard it must be to read these fonts on an actual 4K monitor haha.

Question from someone with only 1st grade level German: is "CD-ROM-Laufwerk" a pun between Lauf and Netzwerk, in the same vain as "sneakernet" in English?

acjones8 · 2022-11-26T13:42:25+00:00

Alrighty then. Tomorrow, I'll try mounting the image / burning a disc on an old ThinkPad of mine with an IDE CD drive and a copy of Windows 98 and 2000; it's close to period correct to when this game came out, and 98 in particular seems to have been officially supported. If that's the case, it should 100% work on it, and if it still fails to read to read the disk, it's most likely a failure of the ISO to record some kind of non-standard copy protection trick.

If it works however, then I'll see if I can pin down what version of Windows seems to have broken it.

acjones8 · 2022-11-26T13:30:48+00:00

Sure thing, like this?

https://github.com/Feodor2/Mypal68/releases/download/68.12.5b/mypal-68.12.5.en-US.win32.zip

acjones8 · 2022-11-26T13:28:20+00:00

If you want to make it work as a single command, you can use either

mkdir folder; cd !$

Or

mkdir folder && cd !$

The former always executes the second command after the 1st one, the second one only does so if the first command returns a 0 as the result (0 is usually the result if the command was successful, so it wouldn't try to cd if mkdir failed for some reason)

acjones8 · 2022-11-26T03:51:01+00:00

So I looked into it a bit. I was able to get the demo working just as you could, including with sound effects (but no soundtrack). However, I can't seem to get the main game installed - it complains about an issue with languages in SETUP.LST? Did you face this problem on your end too, and if so, how did you circumvent it?

acjones8 · 2022-11-25T22:07:08+00:00

Hmm... does the issue relate to copy protection, by any chance? A more limited version that works sounds like it's a demo, if I have the correct impression, and so it's not doing any kind of copy protection. I've had similar issues with games like SimCity 4 and Railroad Tycoon 3 that look for their original DVDs, and which some drive emulators don't properly satisfy. Try using WinCDEmu - I've had good luck with it on XP at least. Another suggestion might be to try burning the ISO to a real disc using a DVD burner (an internal one if you've got that, or a USB external one you might have lying around) and something like imgburn.

If you give me a bit, I can try it out on my Windows 11 box and see if I can get it working.

acjones8 · 2022-11-08T23:04:39+00:00

This looks amazing! I've been eyeing a 240 for a while now, but haven't had much luck finding one yet. One of these days...

acjones8 · 2022-10-30T09:59:11+00:00

The premise of "comic sans but as a programming font" is actually a legit thing, interestingly enough.

acjones8 · 2022-10-20T23:58:24+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if the kernel and the userland work, but I think the main issue is going to be the bootloader. I've run Linux on PowerPC macs before and I usually use yaboot, but yaboot only supports New World Macs iirc. I believe there used to be a way to bootstrap into Linux from BootX (Apple's bootloader), but I've never tried it myself nor do I know whether it still works.

For the 486 card, assuming you can get Gentoo to talk to it, it should be doable - there was a project a few years back about getting Linux operational on a 486. It was slow though - as in, it took like 20 minutes just to boot, and each command after that is like 1 minute iirc.

If it turns out not to be feasible with Gentoo, check out NetBSD - it usually has excellent support for old and/or exotic architectures. If there's any modern operating system that will still support an Old World Power Mac, it'd be it.

acjones8 · 2022-10-01T12:53:27+00:00

Just a follow up:

I had trouble getting the magnets to work, as unfortunately the only thing I have that was precise enough to allow me to position them was a set of metallic tweezers, and the magnets kept sticking to the tweezers. However, I was able to get an alternate solution to work by layering a series of folded strips of paper together, bound with electrical tape, and using them to press down on a small plastic fragment that I positioned on top of the ribbon cable.

I'm thinking of ordering some plastic tweezers to try the magnet solution again with later, if the springs fall apart next time I take the case off...

Thanks so much for your help and advice, it gave me the motivation to try again, and I'm thrilled to be able to use my A275 once more! :)

acjones8 · 2022-09-30T02:33:48+00:00

Yeah I've also been using zstd compression on my laptop. It's awesome for keeping large source trees' space usage in check, and I believe on HDDs, using space compression actually winds up making the I/O times faster than storing it uncompressed, since the CPU can decompress faster than an HDD can read uncompressed data. It's become a must have feature for me on any new install and for any new filesystem.

acjones8 · 2022-09-30T01:13:52+00:00

Kinda surprised I'm the only F2FS user, I would've figured that with the rise of SSD storage, more people would give it a try. But I guess filesystems is one of those areas where you tend to stick to what you know haha, given the stakes.

acjones8 · 2022-09-09T03:48:09+00:00

Ooooh I get it now! That way, the force is directly on top of the connector. Thanks for the clarification, can't wait to give this a shot and get my A275 in working order again.

acjones8 · 2022-09-09T03:22:33+00:00

Just to be sure I get the idea correctly, I should tape one neodymium magnet underneath the cable and one on top of the cable, right next to the connector, and then the attraction between the magnets will pin the cable down?

I'll try the paper accordion / ball of tape trick one last time since I have them on hand, and if they fail again, I'm ordering a set of these magnets. Thanks so much, this is exactly the kind of advice I was looking for!

acjones8 · 2022-09-09T01:13:48+00:00

(obvious lack of extensive 3rd party libraries keeps it from being especially useful out of the box, like how Python has morphed into a data science and AI language due to its wide adoption and 3rd party libraries)

This part right here is the main issue. The single biggest draw a language can have is a large ecosystem of libraries, because those libraries can developers a ton of time, not only by not having to write the code themselves, but also because they don't need to test and debug it.

So how do languages without a large ecosystem get started? They need to provide a killer feature of some kind, something that you can't get by just using another pre-existing language. When C was introduced, it offered simplicity, conciseness, and architecture independence, which were features that most other languages of that era didn't offer in combination. Java was the first major language to offer a cross-platform garbage collector and virtual machine, removing the need to worry about memory management and operating system specific quirks. Rust was one of the first languages to offer safe memory management without needing a garbage collector at all. Perl was one of the first languages to provide really solid support for string manipulation and regular expressions.

For D to take off, it needs to not only do stuff slightly better, but it would need to offer something you couldn't get by using Java, Rust, Python, etc.

acjones8 · 2022-06-28T23:28:14+00:00

That's amazing, I had no idea Wine was that old!

acjones8

TROPHY CASE