The Place to Be!

I’m a retro computing and gaming junkie, so when I saw that my homeboy, @TeLeKiNeSiS mentioned on twitter the other day that he was getting back in to Willy Beamish I got all hyped up Cornholio-style…that was hard to explain at work. Anyway, here’s a pic of Flashback and The Adventures of Willy Beamish, two of the games I’ve been spending a lot of time with lately…complete with my original boxes. I bought the PC versions of these on floppy way back in the early 90′s, but I’m actually running the SegaCD version of Flashback via Kega Fusion and the CD version of Willy Beamish via DosBox on the hackintosh.
As you can see in the pic below I’m on level 8 of Flashback. I’m actually on Day 4 of Willy, even though the pic shows the beginning of the game. I didn’t finish either of these games originally, so it’s a real treat to make my way through and finally see the endings. You just gotta love the emu scene for making this stuff possible!

-D

So, it’s official now, Snow Leopard will be out this Friday, August 28th.  I just put my order in and it said that it will deliver on the 28th, so I’m hoping to having some fun this weekend upgrading my Macs…and (crossing fingers) hopefully the Hackintosh.  I saw a vid on youtube where somebody said the Snow Leopard build they used to upgrade Leopard took only 13 minutes to complete so I’m wondering if it will install similar to one of the combo updates which would probably be good news for Hackintosh users.

-D

So, my big thing for the past few months has been the Hackintosh. Been having a blast with it and steadily moving towards it being my main day-to-day system. Having said that, the dual 2Ghz G5 has been my main system for 5 years and, despite not getting a lot of face time lately, it remains the primary repository for all of my docs, music, movies, contacts, photos etc. I still sync my iPhone on the G5 every morning, I still set up calendar events there and sync them with google…basically, yeah, I use the Hackintosh most of the time now, but the G5 is still the vault for Digital Dbot. So, it kinda sucked bawlz when Mrs. Dbot told me she heard some clicking noises from the office and
thought something was wrong with the G5. I checked it out and sure enough the main drive had gone belly up on me. Years of photos, music purchases, family holiday videos etc were on that drive which now only would be useful as a loud clacking metronome. (continue reading…)

Like I mentioned a while back, one of the reasons for building the Hackintosh was so that I could run a bunch of virtual machines on it and knock the rust off of some of my technical chops a bit. So, right away I slapped Server 2003, XP and Windows 7 beta on. They all worked surprisingly well, my fiance even used the XP VM every day for a couple of weeks before she got her MSI Wind. So, that’s all fine and dandy, but I was also gonna need to have a bare metal install of XP so I could get some of the more demanding games going that wouldn’t run great in a VM (I blame GelohPig..had he not got me UTIII I may have never done it!) So, I slapped another drive in the Hackintosh, installed XP and whenver I need to boot directly in to XP to get my game on I tell the BIOS to boot from that drive. Funny thing happened. The other day my girl was checking on some wedding stuff she had on the XP VM and left VMWare Fusion running when she was done. I looked at the console and was surprised to see that my 3 virtual machines had somehow become 4!! What? Take a close look at the picture above and you’ll see that VMWare Fusion found the seperate install of XP and added it to my list of VMs as a Boot Camp partition fully ready to boot! I was especially impressed with this considering I dismount the XP drive when I’m in OS X so I don’t cross any of the data up. So, of course, I had to try it out. I started the VM up and it booted right into XP without a hitch and installed VMWare Tools for me. Runs great. Only difference I can see is that you can’t suspend it like a standard VM because it has to contend with the fact that you might reboot the system directly in to XP at some point. For that reason, I’ll mostly stick with standard VMs because they resume from suspend so fast it makes it a lot more convenient to bounce in to the VM and do what you have to do and get out. But, for times that I might want to run something that’s on the physically installed version of XP and don’t want to leave OS X, this is a great option to have.

-D

Folder Actions is a great feature that OS X has to help you automate actions to be taken on files. It works by letting you associate a script to a folder that will kick off any time an item is dropped in that folder. It can do something as simple as resizing an image you drop in the folder or go as far as doing a long list of complex workflows. Check out the following screencast and some of the code I used to make a simple drop folder for uploading files to my site. (continue reading…)

Here is the list of parts I used to build the Hackintosh. GelohPig, TeLeKiNeSiS and PhiberOptiks based their list off of this one and made minor changes in places that wouldn’t impact the OS install process (much.) It’s a pretty damn good starting point for a Hackintosh that can grow over time…say, by adding a quad core proc And with a price point of around 280 without hard drives it doesn’t break the bank. (continue reading…)

TeLeKeNeSiS in the process of installing Leopard on his Hackintosh.  That makes four systems built in the past month by P2B members.  Good stuff!

-D

This is an early shot of a couple of virtual machines running on VMWare Fusion on my Hackintosh.  Originally, the whole reason for slapping this system together was to run Windows 7 for gaming and a bunch of VMs so I’d have a cheap dev environment at the crib to help keep up with work related tech.  Some time during the last couple of weeks of spec’ing stuff out I thought “hmmm, what if I gear this towards hackintosh compatible parts and get an extra “Mac” out of the deal.  If it doesn’t work I can move ahead as originally planned and if it does work…BONUS!”  Well, things definitely worked out towards the bonus side of the project (more on that later.)  This system beats the pants off of my daul 2GHz G5 and out paces my Aluminum MacBook by a decent clip too.  And, it still works out nicely as a “Dev Lab in a Box”.  Nice.

-D