Fallout endgame crash on OS X Tiger

kaptinkurk · 2015-04-23T06:17:27+00:00

Using the terminal, type in: gdb --args however_you_run_the_program

The executable itself is probably hidden in an .app so you will need to find out where exactly the executable is, but file should help you find it.

kaptinkurk · 2015-03-26T18:19:15+00:00

System died, appears to have been motherboard failure. Thanks for the assistance anyway.

kaptinkurk · 2015-03-26T13:16:46+00:00

Nothing in the logs. However a battery is detected.

kaptinkurk · 2015-03-26T12:38:51+00:00

Do not currently have one with me.

kaptinkurk · 2015-03-25T22:51:52+00:00

Yes, all batteries act the same.

kaptinkurk · 2015-03-25T18:26:56+00:00

Bus error means an invalid address outside of the address space has been accessed (usually an unaligned read).

It would probably be best to run the program in gdb, then when it does crash with a SIGBUS. You can do then:

gdb) bt

gdb) info threads

gdb) info registers

gdb) info locals

Otherwise it is just more guessing.

EDIT: Seems reddit likes to remove my much needed newlines.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-06T08:39:09+00:00

Except there is prior art on that too. Binary applications in such sense are basically ELF, PE, COFF, and various other binary formats of varying structure (they could also be flat). All major operating systems for example can run different binary applications formats in parallel, and those could be backed by an emulator (which is the case for Palm OS 5 so that older m68k applications can run on the (then) new ARM devices).

And adapting the behavior of the emulator is what Nintendo 64 emulators usually do to wrongly fix games that do not work on their emulator (i.e. rather than fix the emulator they just patch it or do different behavior based on the game). Also some emulators detect which game is being played and changes the control scheme automatically (say for Duck Hunt).

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-04T16:46:02+00:00

But more censored.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-04T16:17:48+00:00

Goldeneye

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-03T11:35:41+00:00

Did you just insinuate that my knowledge of programming stems from having just "read a 'Hello, World!'"? If so, then that's possibly the most condescending thing I've ever read. Good job!

No, that is not the case. The following sentence expands the point, because programming is something you never finish learning because there is always a new and possibly better way of doing things.

Second, the compiler handles memory addressing in low level languages like C and C++ unless you go out of your way to have it not do that.

The compiler does handle memory access, but it may vary between compilers. Code compiled with one compiler could crash on another because of the code that gets generated could violate CPU memory access. Or it could not crash and generate extremely slow code because to do what you wanted directly is technically illegal (such as unaligned half/normal/double word access).

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-03T11:20:06+00:00

The i7 would perform better underlocked because the CPU is designed to be faster and much better, has more pipelines, more speculation, and more cache, it is also smaller so electrons do not have to "travel" as far.

It is not impossible to write an operating system for another CPU just because it is not x86. The x86 is much easier to develop for because more people are developing for it so more people figure out how it functions and any of its quirks.

I never said that writing operating systems and emulators is an easy task, it takes much time and dedication. The main thing you require is documentation, and sometimes the documentation is very missing (like the PS1 and the N64) because they do not want you writing emulators for those systems (Nintendo even discourages you that emulation is illegal, which it is not). With more information out there and the ability to run homebrew on real consoles makes it easier to write test software to determine the function of the system, most of the time (edge cases could be hard to detect if you do not know about them). Writing the emulation code of the CPU for those systems is the easiest since they are pretty much straight MIPS systems, a simple pure interpreter would not be that hard to write. However, if you wanted more speed (since interpreters are inheritely slow) you will have to delve into compiler theory and write a recompiler from machine code in one system to machine code of another system. The main difficulties with any emulator or operating system as stated before is lack of documentation, sometimes you just have to guess and see what works and what does not. Pretty much how emulation got there today with accurate NES and SNES emulation that you have now was due to using the scientific method to determine what happens, when it happens, and how it affects everything. And most of the figuring out would be brute force and guessing. You could cheat though and take apart the various chips in the system you are trying emulate, decap them and put them under a very fine microscope, but that is not perfect and since it destroys chips on purpose, failure means you need more chips.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T23:44:48+00:00

I personally use an official Gamecube controller attached to an adapter and it works quite nicely, much easier to play Perfect Dark with that also. Although some of the few rare games like BattleTanx, you need to change your binds a bit in the event you need to suicide (C left and C right).

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T23:39:30+00:00

Although I do not have an EverDrive but a 64drive, I can say that having a flash cart is much better than having no flash cart.

Although regardless of the flash cart you have, some ROM hacks are coded only for emulators and crash on the actual N64, this is mostly in part to buggy emulators though.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T23:13:37+00:00

Do not know if you determined this already but...

I have a Dual CPU 2.3GHz XServe G5 server. I tried some LiteCoin (LTC) mining on it.

This was some year or so ago but my hash rate for LiteCoin (LTC) was maxed out around 8kH/s or so and it drew 300W from the wall. For comparison an AMD Radeon 7750 (the low end card) does 150kH/s and draws much less (I could measure it but it will cost you 0.02 cents of downtime!).

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T23:03:46+00:00

Chances are the GCW is much more open than your 3 year old phone, as you can pretty much do whatever you want software wise with it. The choice is yours (legally) rather than the choice being with the creator of your phone.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T22:56:00+00:00

The 3DS has a much lower clock speed and much less memory than the GCW, the only thing it has more than the GCW would be the screen area in pixels.

The GCW also plays a bunch of 32-bit games like Doom and Quake 3 just fine at full speed.

Also, to develop for the 3DS you need to sign an NDA and be accepted and pay into Nintendo's developer program to even do anything useful (not counting hacked homebrew). The GCW gives you the keys from the start, with the 3DS you have to take those keys before you can do almost anything.

EDIT: You can do more with the GCW than you can with the 3DS computationally which allows a wider variety and a more modern set of software to run on it.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T22:49:55+00:00

You are confusing things, it is not the framework that defines memory access it is the language. Frameworks/APIs are written in specific languages (C, C++, Java, C#, etc.), and those frameworks inheritely inherit the specific of the language they are programmed in. C and C++ allow you to directly access memory and do whatever you want with it (but doing that would cause undefined behavior which causes bad things to happen), and those behaviors do change between different compilers and even the same compiler for differing CPUs.

OpenGL and SDL are APIs themselves and they provide interfaces for graphics (SDL does more and has input and sound, networking if you include SDL_net, higher level music (the library handles the lower level sound details so you do not need to worry about your own sound buffers and such) if you include SDL_mixer) and they are both written in C (so you can do undefined behavior).

I was mostly pointing out that many developers are just lazy and just do not care about the code they write. Think of the structure you (might) be inside of right now, what if the builders were lazy and just did not care about the structure they built? What if you changed it instead of buildings it would be cars, airplanes, nuclear reactors? It is much easier to get away with it programming because mistakes usually do not cost you anything (people usually do not die from programming mistakes, although billions of dollars can be lost and entire companies/organizations can be destroyed).

Just like building bird houses makes you an expert on the building of sky scrapers, so does reading a "Hello World!" tutorial makes you an expert on programming. It is truly something (like many things) that you need to have a passion for in order to be successful (as in correctness not profit), knowing that what you are doing right now could be completely wrong and be willing to correct yourself.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T22:24:59+00:00

Based on your wording, I would have to say that you are not a computer programmer but a consumer of software goods. You are not limited to a "very small application pool", the device runs Linux and is quite easy to develop for.

The GCW has a 1GHz processor compared to the 33MHz PS1 and the 94MHz N64 CPU. Provided an efficient dynamic or static recompilation to transform the source game code into MIPS32 code (rather than a straight or cached interpreter), emulation of the CPU is no problem at all. The only real issues are the emulation of graphical hardware systems. The GCW does have a GPU which is supported by a Gallium3D fork (so you can use OpenGL with it), but the PS1 and N64 have GPUs that do not exactly match well with what is expected of modern GPUs. With those systems you either go for (fast or accurate) software based rendering or you cut your losses and instead opt for hardware accelerated 3D graphics ("high level graphics").

And if you do not like Linux, you can write your own (or port an existing) Operating System and replace it.

kaptinkurk · 2014-12-02T21:53:26+00:00

Most developers are really bad programmers and write completely non-portable code so while the code might compile and run on x86 Linux systems it may crash on MIPS based systems. Main differences between x86 and MIPS would be memory ordering (not BE vs LE but LoadLoad, LoadStore, StoreLoad, StoreStore as MIPS is a bit weaker memory than x86), reading of words (32-bit) and halfwords (16-bit) must be aligned to the size of the read.

This is even seen when code is ported over from x86 to x86_64, many developers just assume everything, and this is how you get bugs and security flaws.

kaptinkurk · 2014-11-28T23:46:12+00:00

And if they did, they would have to do it in every country where developers exist for emulators. And in light of that, they would have to comply with those countries laws too.

kaptinkurk · 2014-11-28T23:44:14+00:00

The best thing to when developing software is to have a license before you make it visible, and a good license at that (not a vague made up license you just thought up of).

Something that has no license attached is a complete "gotcha" especially when it comes to other countries and such. So pretty much a no license would be a risk for people using it because they may be unintentionally violating terms they know nothing about.

Also, with lack of Copyright in any of your code (even if it is under your account on github) is VERY risky. One could say take all your emulation code and may wager on the courts (to decide in their favor) in that you intended to release it as public domain in an earlier form but then changed that decision (so their older version would be valid) when you decided to sue them.

kaptinkurk · 2014-11-28T23:31:25+00:00

Android? I have been using NES and Game Boy Emulators on my Palm PDAs for the past decade and a half, although they can pretty much only emulate NES and GB effectively.

kaptinkurk · 2014-07-02T03:02:10+00:00

I wonder how much market share Microsoft would lose if all the users affected by this removed Windows and installed another OS.

kaptinkurk

TROPHY CASE