Author: loserx

R.I.P. Pavarotti

Always a tragedy when music dies.

Queen + Luciano Pavarotti - Too Much Love Will Kill You (Brian May)

This is my favourite non-opera memory of the maestro, a fantastic duet between the opera singer and the astrophysicist.

Published
Categorized as Music

Thermochrom’ing

Indeed, the thermochrome CD is very nice. Unfortunately… the tropical climate of Singapore renders it useless. I need to hold the CD up to the air conditioner to cool it down enough.

That said, I’ve recently discovered our local band The Observatory released their album second album Blank Walls with a thermochrome cover. Very nice, and all along I was thinking that the ink used was just especially susceptible to oily fingers.

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Categorized as Music

Stevie Wonder – Drum Solo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SCZv7786KY

Monstrous technique and a thick, fat groove. I love how the regular drummer is just standing behind and sorta shuffling his feet (I should just go be a pizza deliveryman or something).

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Categorized as Music

Rhapsody of Fire – Power of the Dragon Flame

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZqzfZPLZw4

Duh Magnet
“It’s got Power, Dragon and Flame in it! Triple Threat, man!”

“AWESOME!” *mad riffs all round*

loser-x
dude…that video would be embarrassing for a singapore band

Duh Magnet
Singapore bands have trouble making ends meet, hence dignity is more impt. [:)]

…

Duh Magnet
Finished the PotDF mtv. It was truly a masterpiece. [:)]

loser-x
“There’s just no way that we can win, that was a masterpiece.”

Duh Magnet
Seriously, I think most metal songs should only have videos using concert footage, there’s no other way to make it non-ridiculous.

loser-x
or just a straightforward performance video

Duh Magnet
Assuming limited budget, competence and imagination, that is.

loser-x
but given their “moves”, that would be embarrassing too

Duh Magnet
I like the “finger rings round eyes” gestures. Seriously….

The Alternative To The (QuickTime) Alternative

I have been using QuickTime Alternative for a long time, but onegoodmove is crashing Firefox with the last available version of QT Alternative. And given the developers stopped any further development after Apple requested that they remove the package from their website, I needed an alternative.

Now, I am not keen about going back to the official QT Player, even though the developers of QT Alternative published a guide on configuring QT Player “for optimal performance and user satisfaction”.

I managed to find “QT Lite” (thanks, Google!) which is very well put together, with just the components I need. CoreAVC and CoreAAC are not longer included but that is not a huge issue.

Overall, very happy with this “update”, and Firefox is no longer crashing on onegoodmove. Thanks, whoever put this package together.

CCCP 15

CCCP15 “Chiyo-chan’s Cute Player” is released. Whoo! Lots of smashing changes which you can read about on the release thread, but for me the best thing about this  release is the new, custom MPC Chiyo-chan logo. Though I guess it would be pretty weird firing up pornos after seeing that face…

…*cough* not that I watch pornos or anything…

That Stupid Club is now CS 2007-rised

I’ve been putting this long overdue update off due to some ridiculous workloads and just plain laziness (which would explain the lack of posts too). But yes, That Stupid Club is now running on Community Server 2007, only with the same stupid theme. The new skinning engine is really nice, but unfortunately I am just not imaginative enough to do something nice with it.

I have not ported my blog skins over so this blog is not currently running on my favourite skin Barthelme. Soon, I hope…

MAME Starter Guide

MAME

Note (Jan 2011): this guide is pretty much outdated. I might write an update soon.

What is MAME? It is an emulator intended to document the hardware of arcade games systems. Of course, for most average users it is the side-effect of being able to play more than 3000 unique games that’s the important thing.

Well, that’s all well and good, you say, but how do I start? I’m glad you asked.

First, you will need to download MAME itself. If you run Windows, you can download the official release which is run off the command line, but I would recommend Mame32, which has a really nice GUI. For Mac OS X folks it’ll have to be MAME OS X (not very imaginative, yes) or SDLMAME, which is also the best option for Unix/Linux systems.

Next, you will need the ROM images*.

You can download some freely available ROMs to test. Place the downloaded ROM files into the roms folder where you unzipped MAME to.

To obtain more, Pleasuredome is the best way if you can work BitTorrent. The total size of the ROMs stand at almost 16 gigs currently, and so might take a while. The MAME ROM torrents are ratio-free but please do not abuse the ratio. Some games require CHDs which are compressed hard drive images, but these are generally not worth it as most PCs are too slow to emulate these games properly.

Or if you prefer, you can request for one of the Lazarus guys to burn you a copy. Read the instructions carefully, and note that I have never used their services.

That’s really all you need to start playing. You will probably want to grab the “Extras” torrent from Pleasuredome too. Lots of niceties such as screen captures and photos of the cabinets.

Additional stuff to grab:

* downloading of ROMs is illegal in most cases. You are downloading at your own risk.