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http://www.dkeith.clara.co.uk/... ? (And get it out of the floppies while you still can...)

Another prototype

And the production version

I have the game. It's called Lights Out. Here is the manufacturer's page (it's made by Tiger), and here is an interesting page about it.

Your friend has what is called a "copier". You can read up on these copiers here. Today, console piracy involves mod-chips or flash carts. In fact, there is even a flash cart made for the SNES, which lets you read ROMs from SNES carts and write ROMs to the flash cart so that they can be played on a real SNES.

You also have to worry about the LEAF (law enforcement acceptance factor). In some countries, case mods for a PC are deemed much more legitimate than modchips for a console.

I suppose it depends on where you live. But the beauty of the Xbox (original) is you can software-mod it (softmod). A cheap used copy of MechAssault or Splinter Cell and an Action Replay is all the physical junk in your hand you need to put linux on the Xbox. The rest is just a software download which forces a buffer overflow in the game and install your mod. I don't see why anyone would pay money for either a pre-hacked Xbox nor a modchip, when it is so easy to do it yourself. And this way it is your own equipment.

There are several GUI launchers that have been customized for launching emulators.

I meant for the kids. Well, I suppose for me, too. Some of the launchers/menus for a linux'ed Xbox are very simple, pretty much just copy the discs to the harddrive and it pops up in the menu selector. And most software has a unique logo which they can rely on to pick the game they want to play.

But how did you copy the ROM images from your Super NES and Sega Genesis cartridges so that you could use them with your modded Xbox console?

You'd need an old GameDoctor or the like. There used to be an import place nearby that sold all this junk (also carried the excellent Hori joysticks for Playstation). Alas, he went outta business years ago. I guess they weren't all that popular here. There's a fella in the UK who I think still sell them off his website. http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/shop/
Unfortunately, the elusive quest to find that rare game isn't the same anymore because of eBay, and because there are so many places online to find the dumps.

So I don't know if Sony put a use to them but 3rd parties have.

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

If you examine the madwifi driver FAQ it makes reference to regulations explicitly permitting "open" code controlling hardware that can receive/transmit many frequencies.

5.3. Why is the HAL closed source?

The Atheros chipset can tune to frequencies that are out of the ISM band(s). These frequencies are licensed by various regulatory agencies, and radar systems thus an open HAL is disallowed by just about every regulatory institution in existence (i.e. FCC etc). On a practical/usability note: Were it not for the binary nature of the HAL, then the same nerds who deploy the "power hack" for the WET11 could be generating emissions all over the restricted bands using madwifi hardware. Ask yourself, which would you rather have, more power, or less interference?

I expect just receivers will bear less of a burden, but I would not be surprised if Gnu Radio was already illegal with massive criminal penalties associated.

Which is an atrocity, frankly. Please correct me. Please.

I definitely don't claim to be an expert, as I only visited this website about a week ago, but it looks kinda like the "contrail shadows" found here:

That doesn't really explain the flash - but that looks unrelated to me anyway.

The madwifi FAQ - they state the reason for the binary only HAL.

The specific regulation is here

Basically, the problem is that if you were able to tweak the settings of your transmitter chip, you could do things the device wasn't manufactured for, some of which may cause interference and whatnot. This is perfectly fine - if you have a license from the FCC for such things, but if you don't, you're SOL. Thus, by making the firmware binary only, it's difficult enough to tweak those parameters that it counts as a manufactured device, just like a toy walkie talkie does, and the manufacturer bears the responsibility for the device. This way you don't have to pay a ton of money for an FCC license just to talk to your access point.

So why do companies have a problem with free driver distribution?

A: In the case of wireless, the FCC plays a part.

An 802.11 Wireless Card is a software controlled radio, and must be licensed per FCC regs (in the USA, your country's rules might be different). Since the 802.11 PHY operates over several channels within the specified band, it must be able to select and switch between these channels via software, and to adjust its transmit power for optimum performance based on the changes in temperature of the transmitter, and changes in the frequency, among other things.

But different regulatory domains (countries) allow different channels within the bands, meaning a card in the US may be able to operate on a channel in the B band which is not licensed for another country, or vice versa. This is particularly true in the A band, where a whole middle "chunk" is not legal for use in the US.

Bottom line is that in order for the producer to get a license for the radio (and trust me, you do NOT want it to be the case that you, the operator, have to secure that license), he is NOT ALLOWED to expose the controls for power, et al, to the end user.

Now, if the driver / firmware (distinction / similarity discussed elsewhere in the thread) is open source, then by definition the controls in question are exposed to the end user. There would be nothing to prevent an end user from operating his card at a higher than legal power, or outside the legal freqs for the local regulatory domain.

NOW, all that being said, that is not to say that SOME hardware manufacturers haven't tried to do the right thing, and strike a compromise.

The MAD-WiFi Project http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi, (FAQ here) produces an open driver for the cards with Atheros chipsets. The bulk of the code is open, and under a good license. To meet the FCC requirements, they implement the "required to be secret" controls in a binary-only Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), but the rest of the code is open, free for you to read and modify.

And it works. I'm typing this through a Netgear card, running the MAD-WiFi driver (with TKIP encryption, IEEE 802.11i 4-way handshake and authentication handled by wpa_supplicant) on Gentoo Linux.

Credit is due to Sam Lefler and most importantly to Greg Chesson (of Atheros). Yes, it's that Greg Chesson, the same one mentioned of late by Rob Pike in his recent ./ interview.

Note that, AFAICT, all of this happened without Theo de Raadt pimping around or making an ass of himself, as he is want to do. Disclaimer: I lost patience with Theo and TheoBSD a long time ago.

There were a bunch of units that did this, but it was a bit more complicated than the flash carts that the GBA has. Basically you have a big machine (almost as big as the SNES itself) that you plug in to the cartridge port that has a floppy drive built in. I personally had a UFO Super Drive, but the Multi Game Doctor was probably the most popular one.

The pain in the ass part about em was that you had to store all the roms on floppies, which sometimes meant segmenting them.. The unit would load the roms off the floppy into memory, and then you'd run from there. Worked great as long as you had enough RAM in your unit to load the game you wanted to play. A lot of the big SNES rpgs were too big for my 18mbit unit though. :/

-superlime

From the FAQ:
The driver is based on a binary HAL...

So you'll likely have this problem with any newer distribution using kernel 2.6 until the driver gets brought up to 2.6 (assuming it hasn't already, I don't know for sure...)

I've simply removed from my laptop the Intel Pro Wireless 2100 WiFi Mini-PCI card and replaced it with a Atheros 802.11a/b/g chipset. The Multiband Atheros Driver for Wifi (aka MadWifi) is well supported under Linux. It even has a great FAQ.
The card I bought is an IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN MiniPCI Adapter (IBM Part Number: 31P9701), and works flawlessly under REHL3.

a quick google seach brings up..

Fetish Doll at Skin Two

and

http://www.skintwo.com/

Too bad it's gone now, looked kind of fun.

HaloSim3 Software is a sundog simulator which models how light passes through ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere. Beautiful and fascinating.

I'm not quite sure why this and ice crystals are so fascinating, but I have the book mentioned in the article, which consists of hundreds of black pages with 1" square images of snowflake magnifications. In the first instance it sounds insane, but it never fails to hold peoples attention.

The mised the last one. Here is the correct link.

Some more images. Image. Page. Front, buttons, ports.

Some more images. Image. Page. Front, buttons, ports.

I am surprised there is no mention of the landmark game Elite for the BBC. This was HUGELY popular, and even helped increase sales of the BBC. Check out New Kind for a realistic PC version, and Darkness Falls for a new slicker game.

Take a look at this explanation which explains what a parhelia is =)

interesting stuff

Have you played Elite : New Kind Very faithful.

The source for a replacement binary for Frontier: First Encounters (Unix/Linux, DOS/Windows 98/2000/XP) can is here, and you can get the complete data files here(shareware, meaning you should send 5 British Pounds to Frontier Developments if you continue to use it after 30 days).

This was another benefit of being at Otakon this year, Boa, the band that performs the theme song was also there. (Some of the band were even on our floor of the hotel, woohoo!) Definitely a great band that I hope doesn't get trashed when the debut in the states next year. Here's their official website. Root for them when they release here in Q1 next year... they are a great band and great people.

(And no, I don't represent the band. I'm only a groupie. :)

Can't happen in the USA? Already has. What the RIP Bill (soon to be the RIP Act, and in force shortly thereafter) does is make Carnivore legal and indeed mandatory in any ISP in the UK.

My own ISP (ClaraNet has threatened to relocate overseas if it comes into force rather than let anyone snoop on my email.