GameCube emulator not working

I tried GameCube emulator on my home machine, and was very disappointed to find out that none of the game works.

Well, at least the games I like on N64 emulator still works, and man they are load of fun!

Ripping GameCube ISO from .... a DVDR burned from an ISO :-I

Ever since my Wiikey clone stopped working, I stopped caring about the several Gamecube DVDR discs I expanded from some .iso. With the new gamepad I got yesterday and found a GameCube emulator Dolphin, my interest in trying out GameCube games suddenly comes back. So I tried ripping the DVDR disc back to .iso so that I could try them on my PC. Well, I used PowerISO and the Luigi's Mansion seemed to ripped and ran OK, but the rest of the other discs weren't working so well.

Eventually I got the trial version of Magic ISO, tried, and found then it worked pretty well.

Bring my damn Windows VM back to the domain!

After was fustrated after I found out that:

• Somehow my Windows Server 2003 OS in VMWare suddenly loss Internet connection
• Somehow my another Windows Server 2003 OS failed to login to the domain.

To solve the first problem I did the following:

• In command line run "ipconfig /release"
• In command line run "ipconfig /renew"

That solved my first problem.

For the second one, I:

• release my machine from the domain by joinning a new workgroup say "WK123"
• Try join the domain about. If failed, try ipconfig release and then renew again.
• If still failed, try changing the machine name and then join the domain.

No VLC video wallpaper

Despite of what is layout in here, the video wall paper didn't work on Vista when using VLC Portable. Sigh.

What up with MSDOS error when copying file from DVD to harddisk?

Continue my saga of copying files from DVDR disc to harddisk: I was pretty puzzled by the noisy DVD Drive that it failed copying a file, and gave me a strange Windows error prompt saying some MSDOS operation failed stuff. But after I rejected the harddisk, and then insert it in again, the copy operation was success again. That seems pretty creppy to me. But since there was zero problem on another quiet drive, so I can pretty much conclude that it's just the problem with the noisy drive, and not the discs themselves.

Noise and quite DVD Drive

I was trying to make sure that the DVDR discs I burned at home were OK, so I brought those 4 discs to the office and tried copying content from the discs to harddisks and see if they were intact. Both of my office machines had no problem recognizing and copy content to the harddisks. But I realized that the drive "HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-H31N" is much noisier and took more time when dealing with one of my disc, while the drive "TSSTCorp DVD+-RW TS-H653F ATA Device" is more quite, stable and reasonable in speed, copying the content within 9 minutes for copying the content of the whole disc.

The strange thing is that I have no idea what the brand of neither drives are. Maybe I can figure that out my Googling.

Figure out 3D support in VMWare

It all started this morning when 3D Studio Max 9 pooped on me. Instead of reinstalling it again, I was thinking, maybe I should just install it on a VMWare VM. And so I did. It seemed to work pretty OK.

But then I surfed the Net and found out that there was indeed 3D acceleration support on Workstation 5.0. The question is : does it work with VMWare Workstation 6.0? I tried following the instructions and althought it didn't crash, it also doesn't seem to give me anymore 3D power. People also talked about how it did not provide any Areo graphic enhacement. What a bummer.

I tried running Daz Studio, Crysis and Portal on it. Man they all sucked.

And then downloaded the 6.0 manual, read Chapter 14, and found that the current Direct 3D support seem very very lame. So freaking disappointed. Oh well, I'll just give the latest VMWare Workstation 6.0.4 a try and see how goes. Sigh. Not much hope.

Crysis and ATI HD 4850 ... awesome

Crysis is smooth at silk when running under ATI HD 4850. MY only tweak is lower the anti-alias rescan to 2x (instead of all the way to 8x). Other than that I cranked the resolution all the way up to max, plus every detail to max, and it ran smoothly. No wonder people that Crysis is amazingly pretty. I totally agree now that I see them in my own eyes.

The power of having a better graphic card

I finally got a ATI HD 4850 graphic card, and suddenly playing BioShock and Portal becomes a totally different experience.

Ultimate Flash video downloading tool

I tried various kind of Flash video downloading tool for non-mainstream content (those that are not hosted in popular video sharing site like YouTube), including some new FireFox extensions. They all failed one way or the other. UUme FLV Spy 1.0 is the only one that can realiably capture video no matter what site I am at. Google the name about and you should be able to find it. The most important feature is the in-place download, which allows you to download the file within the context of the web page. It's critical because those days more and more site check your client infriomation, like browser version and such, to prevent people from ripping the content. Since UUme FLV Spy is basically piggy backing on IE, the server will see it as IE to browser trying to access the content, and let it get thru.

Making good use of Logitech V20 Speaker

I brought a Logitech V20 Speaker and so far I am please with the performance. I have issue using it on my home desktop, but I strongly suspected that it's mainly because I have too many USB devices connecting to the desktop. In fact, I used the speaker with 2 of my office machines and then my Lenovo X60T Tablet PC, and none of them had issue. In fact, I even hooked the speaker to my X60T running OSX 10.5.1 and GarageBand 2008 had no problem recognizing and use it to play music.