CD-ROM Art - Akumajo Dracula X Chi no Rondo - PC Engine CD-ROM

 I took a low resolution image of Dracula X's disc art and made it better. It was originally made for printing on an Epson et-8550 but should scale to print on any disc printer. Hopefully someone will find this helpful.

libFLAC.so.8 errors with GOG games on Linux

I was getting ready to throw down some Starfleet justice when my crusade was derailed by the absence of libFLAC.so.8 . It seems that the DOSBOX binary GOG includes with their games is missing the libFLAC library. Not only is the library missing but it wants a specific version of it. I'm sporting Fedora 39 on my main box and my version of flac-libs was newer than what GOG's DOSBOX wanted. I found a packaged version that was as close as I could get and from a similar Linux distro. I ended up using flac-libs-1.3.3-12.el9.x86_64.rpm. My line of thought was to extract the libraries and throw them in the lib64 directory of the  installed game. In the end it worked and I was happy. 

I downloaded the correctly versioned RPM package from HERE. Once I had it in my Downloads directory I used rpm2cpio to decompress the rpm file. The command to unarchive the rpm via cpio is 

rpm2cpio flac-libs-1.3.3-12.el9.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv

After the deed was done I moved all the files form ./usr/lib64 onto the <game directory>/dosbox/lib/lib64/ directory. Upon completion of this you should be back aboard the NCC-1701 and doing whatever it is a Starfleet Captain does.

slmgr.vbs -upk

slmgr.vbs -ipk W269N-WFGWX-YVC9B-4J6C9-T83GX

slmgr.vbs -skms 216.164.82.46

slmgr.vbs -ato

slmgr.vbs -dlv

Do you need to 'open' a bunch of .dylib files and macOS bitches about it?

On a brisk December morning I was trying to run qemu from a terminal on my Mac mini. When I issued the 'qemu-system-ppc' command macOS threw a shit fit about all 36 .dylib files in the libs directory not being from a recognized developer. I figured I needed to right click and open each one a few times to set them as unblocked. I got about five files into it and was like "e'ff this noise'. I went out on google and found this site. The below command fixed the problem.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine <file name>

or in my case

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine *.dylib

Thank you Dave Anderson.

Enable XMOS Audio Codec on Atomic Pi

I've had an Atomic Pi for a while not but only started to mess with it. One of the features it has is a XMOS dedicated audio codec. Unfortunately it does not enable at boot time on Linux. Make the below a shell script and execute it to bring the magic of audio to life. You might have to run the script using sudo. This needs to be done on every reboot.

#!/bin/sh
echo 349 > /sys/class/gpio/export echo low >/sys/class/gpio/gpio349/direction
sleep 1
echo high > /sys/class/gpio/gpio349/direction
echo 332 > /sys/class/gpio/export echo low >/sys/class/gpio/gpio332/direction

If all goes as it's supposed to then you should have audio through the built on speaker out jacks.

 

SELinux and Custom Systemd .service Files

I had a custom systemd .service file I was trying to add and have it run at boot time. Unfortuniately it kept bitching at me about "Failed to start readpartition.service: Unit readpartition.service not found.". After looking around the Interwebs I found the below page by Craig Earley. The girth of it was to run this command so SELinux will allow it as a service.

sudo chcon system_u:object_r:systemd_unit_file_t:s0 <name of service>.service

This command is useless if you aren't running a SELinux enabled Linux Distro. But it works like magic if you are.

For a more in depth look at the problem and it's solutions visit Craig's page:
https://craigearley.com/2020/05/15/how-to-enable-a-systemctl-service-unit-without-disabling-selinux/

Thank You, Craig Earley!

WINE and isskin.dll

I was making my best attempt at running a software installer of questionable origin only to receive this error.

Runtime Error (at - 1:0): Cannot Import dll:C:\users\xxx\Temp\is-00IEG.tmp\isskin.dll

After digging around the glorious Interwebs I found an old post on WINEHQ with the same error. The answer to the problem was

winetricks vcrun6sp6 mfc42

After installing the above 2 dll's the installer worked and all was well.