Once upon a time I used a program called WinMX to download my warez, including music, movies, and games. One game I accidentally downloaded was No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way, which was an ISO that I was able to use DAEMON Tools to play. Upon playing this game I immediately fell in love with the Genre and Playstyle.
Read MoreCategory: gaming
Liars Dice
Thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean I’ve been introduced to this game that uses dice and a wager component, with the movie using “years of service” as it was the only thing the pirates aboard the Flying Dutchmen had as currency. As a young 20-something I used to Play 7’s and 11’s, where if you rolled 7, 11, or a pair you’d get to tell someone to drink. A simple game that I don’t want to pass to my youth just yet, and I feel a simple gambling game is better to pass along.
Liars dice is easy:
Read MoreLearning Docker: Take 1
It was time. I’ve been waiting for enough time to learn Docker and begin to get familiar with it. I’ve heard of it, seen it in action, and thought it was the coolest thing in the world and I had to learn it. I decided to take the dive off the actual Docker ship and descend into the depths.
So, I found a YouTube video from the Docker YouTube video channel (link: https://youtu.be/iqqDU2crIEQ). Albeit it provided me some terminology and knowledge, it didn’t really tell me everything I wanted to know, like some under-the-core or how docker did the docker thing. I learned how to build, ps, port forward, docker hub, and a Dockerfile, but then they went to docker-compose and I got lost.
So, after sitting on that video and registering all the information I decided to set a goal: Load minecraft in a docker container. This shouldn’t be difficult, as it requires java, some source files, and that should be simple.
Read MoreSethbling, Sethbling, wherefore art thou Mario
This has been quite an interesting series of Youtube videos. Allow me to explain:
It started off with a Fark article lovingly entitled Guy creates an artificial intelligence that learns how to play and beat a Super Mario Bros. level, of which the guy was the one and only Sethbling. Sethbling has been an amazing staple in the Minecraft community, and previously unknown to me is also a Super Mario Brothers speed runner.
He explains MarI/O (Mar + I/O, for those keeping up), in which he uses an emulator, some LUA, and a method of artificial intelligence to play and finish the first level of Super Mario Brothers.
The actual article from the University of Texas and the subsequently linked Wikipedia Pages (Neuroevolution, Evolutionary Algorithm, and Artificial Neural Network) are excellent readings.
This led me to the Credits Warp method. For speed runners, their goal is to finish the game as soon as possible, and with the Credits Warp this method is now the fastest.
The whole “Credits Warp” got me thinking about how this was actually done, so I found an amazing explanatory video on this specifically.
Rewriting a SNES using the console controller sounded amazing, and led to the next video on the list from tasvideos (the explanation) and the tasvideo where arbitrary code was executed for an amazing result (Starts at 32:00):
So, now i’m chilling with an amazing TAS execution of Super Mario World being fully run, and it’s pretty cool to see how people could just let computers do their thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Y2voAvVz4
DOOM ][
Killing time on beautiful monday night before my tuesday morning work and I realize that my train of “links” tonight span 15+ years and need mentioning.
I was killing 10 minutes in World of Warcraft when I came across a quest to “Subdue 6 Clefthoofs”, but there was a counter from 1 to 5. Typical bug that has existed for 6+ months in an MMORPG. I ended up looking this thing up, and while “Subduing” you get to use a gun called the Blixthraz’s Frightening Grudgesolver, or BFG for short. Long story short, this gun that subdues actually nukifies these Rhino-type mobs, and then the night begins.
A comment on Wowhead links me to DoomWiki’s BFG9000 Page, which takes me back many, many years. I ended up eating dinner while spending 40 minutes watching a Doom 2 Speedrun:
So, I ended up attempting to play Doom 2 from my computer, only to be disappointed in the 32/64 bit issues with the old DOS/4G program. I fired up Doom95 only to get a stupid DirectX error. Thanks to overclock.net it was as simple as copying dplayx.dll to dplay.dll in my C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and i’m Doomin’ away!
After getting a bit bored of actually playing it and reminiscing too little, too late, I found SLIGE and Doom][ Control and kept thinking to myself “Man, alot of these websites look to be going the way of the Dodo”.
I’m just glad I could walk down memory lane, finding expected dead links and surprising live ones.