Category: Geek

Yesterday night I downgraded my PSP from version 2.0 to 1.5. The reason I did that was so I could play pirated PSP games and install Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis emulators.

The downgrade was a bit scary, whenever you play with a hardwares firmware you risk fucking it up so that it becomes useless. Luckily my downgrade went smoothly and my PSP is now version 1.5. Games like SOCOM which I received the other day need a software version 1.52 or higher, so I downloaded another software which makes the PSP think its another version, I made it think it was version 2.0 and I can now continue to play SOCOM online.

I ordered a 1GB Sandisk Ultra II memorystick duo from Amazon so I could install the PSP games on. I ordered the Ultra II version since its faster then the regular memorystick and will help when it comes to loading the games faster.

Until the 1GB stick arrives I am using my 128MB memorystick which won’t fit any downloaded pirated PSP games but will fit a ton of emulators and Roms. I installed a Super Nintendo emulator with the following games: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, NBA JAM Tournament Edition, Super Metroid, Super Mario World and Star Wars Empire Strikes Back. They all run very nicely on the PSP and I spent most of my time flipping between Mortal Kombat and NBA JAM, my two favorite games ever. I still need to download NHL 94 which is one of my favorite sports games also.

Using thepiratebay.org I was able to find around 30 PSP games which I managed to download. A 512MB memorystick would be enough to run most of them but if you are planning to install more then 1 game on a memory stick it would be a lot better to get a 1GB stick. Some games like Collin McRae take up 975MB of space which won’t even fit on a 512MB stick.

So if you have a PSP and want to downgrade and install emulators and downloaded games, here are some links to help you out.

Downgrading from 2.0 to 1.5 Guide
PSP Version Changer (WAB)
PSP Emulators
PSP Torrents
I have 1.5 now what?

Type about:config in the address field
Then right-click and select New -> Interger
Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins and click on OK
Then type 2 in the next dialog and press ok and you are done.

Sigh, I love MAME, but I have to agree with the writer, MAME has morphed into a sad story. [Link]

Tivo-Guy just purchased a new machine Intel machine to run OS X and he installed and ran Xbench and here are the results:

My Mac at Work
G5 Powermac
CPU Speed: Dual G5 2.0GHZ
L2 Cache: 512KB
Bus Speed: 1GHZ
1GB RAM
Score: 97.06

Tivo-Guy
Intel Computer
CPU Speed: Pentium 4 3Ghz
L2 Cache: 2MB
Bus Speed: 800Mhz
1GB RAM
Score: 47.63

My Mac at Home
Digital Audio PowerMac
Dual G4 1.6ghz (GigaDesigns)
L2 Cache: 512KB
Bus Speed: 133Mhz
1.25GB RAM
Score: 44.86 46.16

Tivo-Guy’s Mac mini
mac mini
CPU Speed: G4 1.4ghz
L2 Cache: 512KB
Bus Speed: 167mhz
1GB RAM
Score: 37.04

Ripping Fabric
12″ PowerBook
CPU Speed: G4 1.33ghz
L2 Cache: 512KB
Bus Speed: 167mhz
512MB RAM

Score: 29.18

Nat
12″ PowerBook
CPU Speed: G4 867mhz
L2 Cache: 256KB
Bus Speed: 134mhz
640MB RAM
Score: 25.13

I was expecting Tivo-Guy to get a much higher score then mine but surprisingly we are pretty close. My brothers (Ripping Fabric) and Nats Powerbooks were the slowest but thats expected. Although again I was expecting my brothers Powerbook to be a lot faster then Nats.

Update: I added a Mac mini and G5 Powermac to the list above.

Update 2: I rearranged my hard drives and somehow I now score a 46 instead of a 44 bringing me 1 point difference between my Mac and Tivo-Guys Intelmac.

The past week I have been having serious issues with Spam on this blog. For some reason my previous spam checker Hashcash was letting some spam through and I was getting at least 30 comments a day via email awaiting my approval that were all spam. So I decided to try a different Spam plugin called Spam Karma. Right away it detected the recent spams and adds them to the blacklist. So far I haven’t received any new Spams but the day is still young. Hopefully though I won’t be having any more spam issues.

OK, this post is connected to yesterdays Hot Hot Hot post. Here are pictures of the inside of my Mac so you guys can understand my problem. As you can see the interior of a Mac is laid out different from PC’s and so cooling devices that work with PC’s wont work on Macs. Currently air is being brought in using the fan over the hard drive and coming out from the top from the power supply.

Here are the pictures:
Inside my Mac 1
Inside my Mac 2
Inside my Mac 3
Inside my Mac 4

Suggestions to my cooling issues are welcomed. I have 4 hard drives inside by the way, 2 side by side and 2 on top of each other on the far right.

Oh my god what a fucking loser! [Link]

My favorite mail.app anti-spam tool just got better. With their most recent update, JunkMatcher can now integrate with SpamBayes! [Link]

Yesterday Tivo-Guy messaged me telling me he was able to install and run OS X Tiger on one of his machines at home. Tivo-Guy unlike us regular geeks is a Super Geek who can turn a kitchen blender into a computer if he wanted to. So I decided to share a link on how to setup OSX to work on your PC in a language us regular geeks can understand. [Link]

I spent most of Friday morning installing emulators and game roms on my Xbox. On my Dreamcast I had a ton of emulator CDs and games including over 1600 Sega Genesis games. So, I spent the morning copying all the Roms off the Dreamcast CD onto my Xbox, then I downloaded some Xbox emulators from #xbins on Efnet and installed those also. Now I can play tons of games that were made for the Genesis, 32X, SNES, Coleco or MSX on my Xbox. They also all run extremely well with no slowdown what-so-ever. Next step is to get some NeoGeo roms and a NeoGeo emulator for the Xbox.

Most Xbox users with modded Xbox’s can’t play on Xbox Live because Microsoft would ban them once they detect a modded Xbox. Luckily for us though there is a service that competes with Xbox Live and its called XLink. Basically what XLink allows you to do is to play ANY System-Link capable game online, even games that don’t have Xbox Live. Not only that but XLink also works with other systems including GameCube, PS2 and the PSP. Whats even cooler is that its for free! [Link]

Note: For those of you who have old modded xbox’s, for KD10 you can get a new chip that will allow you to turn off the mod and play on Xbox Live, check in Rihab Complex for more info.

I guess only people who were into computers in the 80’s will get this. [Link]

My favorite search engine in the late 90s was HotBot. I even had an @HotBot.com email address until they got taken over by Lycos and all the emails got shut down. So every now and then I check HotBot.com to see if anything has changed and I try the search engine to see if they updated it and the answer was always no. So to my surprise I checked HotBot.com over the weekend and it turns out they finally updated. HotBot now uses Google and AskJeeves for its searches but whats cool about HotBot is you can customize your own start page.. visually. You can have it basically looking anyway you want or you can use some preset themes they have provided for you. You even have a lot of options on how you want to results to be displayed on the page. Its a pretty cool update and I’m going to start using HotBot a lot more often now. [Link]

Never in my life have I ever wanted to try Linux as much as i want to know. Symphony OS is a Desktop computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux and Knoppix GNU/Linux. Rather than using the KDE or Gnome Desktop environments as most Linux distributions do, the Symphony OS team created the revolutionary Mezzo Desktop environment. Symphony provides what is consider to be the easiest to use Linux experience there is. [Link]

I finally decided it was time to upgrade my aging PowerMac. My Mac at home currently is a Digital Audio Graphite PowerMac with a G4 733mhz processor, 1GB of RAM, 260GB of Hard Disk space, Geforce2 MX and a 8x CD writer. Its a pretty ancient machine but its stable and it has a nice personality. I was stuck between what new Mac to get, I though about getting the soulless PowerMac G5, I have one at work, a Dual 2GHZ G5 and it reminds me of hospitals… it basically lacks character and gives a very sterile feel. Also I would rather wait and get the intel versions that will come out next year. I thought about getting the sleek 20inch iMac but they are very limited when it comes to upgrading. I thought about the 12inch PowerBooks but I dislike them a lot. I have played around and used both my brothers and Nat’s powerbooks and they seem fragile and look PC-ish. The 15inch and 17inch Powerbooks I believe are too big to carry around often and I really also didn’t want my primary Mac to be a laptop.

So, in the end I decided to stick with my current PowerMac except upgrade the hell out of it. I just ordered a Dual G4 1.6ghz chip upgrade from GigaDesigns. I will be upgrading the crappy 8x CD writer to a Pioneer 8x DVD writer (finally will be able to read DVDs on my mac!). I will upgrade the VGA card to an ATI with dual monitor support so I can hookup my extra Sony 17inch monitor to my 21inch Sony monitor I am currently using. I will also get another 160GB hard drive (this brings the total of 4 internal IDE drives, 2 running at ATA66 and 2 at ATA133) since with my recent movie downloads I started running of space. To top things off I will also order a beautiful 12inch Snow White iBook. I had a G3 700mhz iBook a few years ago but it died a tragic death.

This way I will have a total of two Macs. The PowerMac will serve as my primary computer where I will do all my design work on. The iBook will be my secondary computer where I will do all my web browsing on, most probably from the living room. Will take before and after pictures of my PowerMac and posted them here when I am done.