Sadly doesn’t look like SWAT 3 runs on modern systems, compatibility modes for XP and 9x don’t help nore does dandy tricks emulating an old GPU in software ala dgVoodoo. Although I suppose, loading Win98SE into a virtual machine might work.

That’s a great shame because the game was both pretty well done and ahead of its time nearly ~20 years ago. It remains the best tactical shooter I’ve ever played, and that’s probably been a lot over the years.

On the flipside with a little lovin’ the original R6 runs pretty well. The only technical issue I’ve had is a ghosting between the mouse cursor in and out of game which makes using the menus a hard on the eyes. Rather than taking my chances: I stuffed dgVoodoo’s Direct3D libraries in to begin with. R6 is so old it still offered a software renderer, so might not be so necessary.

I remember first playing Rainbow Six and finding it both intently interesting and quite frustrating as a kid; mainly for the laser-eyed snapshot of death effect, which is not as big a problem decades later. What remains irksome though is that path finding was effectively infantile back then. Thus in a game that resolved to plan a strike with multiple fire teams — you’ve got an A.I. that can barely avoid walking into walls just trying to follow you around. Aside from that, I’d say it remains a good game.

Scary advances in time and drive tech: when you plop in an old game CD and it feels like most of the install time is how fast you can read unpack the data off a CD-ROM.

Rummaging through the bin in my closet, I went looking for my old tactical game of the year edition of SWAT 3. Along side it of course the sequel, my original copy of R6 III: Raven Shield and the first Rainbow Six. Needless to say when these games originally shipped most people had IDE hard drives and Windows 9x still had a very large market share. SSDs didn’t exist :P. Installing games off CD-ROM took quite a bit longer when SWAT 3 was a young game; I think I just spent a whopping five minutes counting disc changing.

Hmm, kind of wonder if there’s still a copy of the patch file for R6 anywhere. I still remember downloading that 33~35 meg file once upon a dial up life and being glad that no one had called our phone number for nearly four consecutive hours ^_^.

It would suffice to say aging sucks. But when I stay up late, still get enough sleep, and feel much the zombie in the morning, I can’t help but think it has more to do with how much of my youth was spent with next to no sleep.

So much of my younger days, sleep time fell somewhere between 0400 – 0700 with wake times usually 0900 – 1000. Because in my family if you wanted any peace or needed concentration that meant waiting for everyone else to be asleep. Ironically back then I didn’t consume caffeine either, lol.

Last night was more like 0045 – 0915, or about eight hours of glorious sleep. Pardon me whilst I drain coffee like crazy.

Special bonuses to running the built in OpenSSH service on your W10 install: being able to SSH in and taskkill a fullscreen game that is stuck.

Because apparently the “Hey, let me freaking alt+tab to taskmgr!” problem remains possible even after decades ^_^.

Looks like Prey is on sale for $6 over on Steam, or about $8 with both expansion packs.

Can’t say that the game especially tempted me on release but the reviews I’ve read over the years made me consider, might be worth playing. I suppose atg this price and when you make it the PC version, it’s a bit hard to pass up.

Despite my times with the PlayStation 2 and Xbox One, I can’t say that I have ever cared much for using a controller for shooters. For many games, yeah a controller is both fine and kinda nice. But the more precise speed and accuracy becomes necessary: the more I want a mouse ^_^.

The painful math of availability: when you start calculating the cost of pre-ordering a recent series about to land on disc, versus how much of your wishlist could squeeze into the same price.

I’m a touch tempted to nab the pre-order of That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime Season while the first part of season one is both available and cheaper than release pricing. But at the same time checking my Amazon list: the same price range when you factor in shipping (and Prime) would equal nabbing two series–older ones more likely to disappear. Where as Rimuru might disappear before I get around to acquiring it someday.

Many series see a western releases these days but I’ve generally find availability becomes a problem within the decade. One of my favorites is quite expensive and very scarce if you want the Blu-ray, and the series only aired ~5 years ago; even its license holder only offers DVD versions on their store front :'(. Many older series often I can only find DVD releases if they made a bargain bin recycle or apply a bit of careful hunting. One in particular on my shelf kind of fit both scenarios but over a decade ago, having been adapted from a visual novel that is now ~15 years old and quite damned unavailable today.

This leads me to worrying about how much good stuff might simply disappear.

Actually that makes me think about Robot Jox. As a film that impacted me greatly as a child, I kind of leapt at the DVD offering and was disappointed by the ultra-craptacular release. It was nearly unwatchable. And then bloody amazed when the Blu-ray came out with an excellent transfer–for a film so little known that I never really expected a post-VHS anything to happen.

Sigh. It’s both a good and a bad thing that I don’t buy many discs per year, be it anime or film. Actually, I’m pretty sure Marvel’s release schedule would bankrupt me otherwise, lol.

At least my battery usage reflects what my tablet has been up to. How much gets sucked up by my music streaming habits is kind of worrisome though.

Over the years I have uttered many words at the software I deal with, mostly profanity.

I’m pretty sure the loving to hateful words ratio between me and ALSA is about 0 : 1,000,000. Or in short if I ever say “I effing love ALSA”, it’s a pretty safe bet that I’ve been replaced by a bodysnatcher or something.

Generally I have used ALSA directly as much as possible over the years because at the end of the road on Linux systems you will always, sadly, end up with that. But I also find that configuring and living with it tends to be a bitch on wheels of fire the more complicated people make things. Let’s say that ALSA is something I suffer not something I love.

Well, recently I’ve had a bit of a pain in my arse dealing with ALSA, GStreamer, and trying to do audio passthrough. And I’ve learned that I really do like PulseAudio.

mpv is able to do passthrough but that doesn’t suit my purposes, or let’s just say scripting that ain’t my real objective.

$ mpv –aid={track #} –audio-device=alsa/{device} –audio-channels=5.1 {my file with fancy audios}

GStreamer is smart enough to passthrough audio if you send the bits to the sink. Most elements that manipulate audio expect audio/x-raw data like you would get out of your audio decoder. But the sinks can also take other formats–much like my surround system knows how to decode pretty much anything.

What I ran into was alsasink never reporting any of the compressed formats my graphics card supports, after GStreamer tries to decipher what the device is capable of.

Enter PulseAudio!

$ gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=”{my file}” ! queue ! {demuxer} ! audio/x-ac3 ! queue ! parsebin ! pulsesink

Where I had no luck getting this to work with alsasink it was easy as pie with pulsesink.

Deciphering the documentation to configure the default profile for my card via pactl and add the formats I want to passthrough to my surround sound system was a snap that only took 15~20 minutes. Figuring out the device names used for pulsesink based on pactl list was a bit tricker. I spent 2~3 days screwing with ALSA before that.

For bonus points: I could test ahead of time using my laptop’s HDMI port and pavucontrol to configure the outputs, letting me know if this would be possible at all before I started learning how to do it with pactl.

I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the guy who wrote PA, or that I truly gave a flying hoot when the Linux desktop world went to PA and we all threw out things like aRts and ESD. My only horse in that race was I wanted audio to work in applications like mplayer and firefox without having to screw around.

In retrospect: I should have just learned how to use PulseAudio a long fucking time ago instead of dicking with /etc/asound.conf and amixer and all that BS. Because those aspects of PA really do suck less in my honest experience.

And then I find myself remembering FreeBSD and its OSS, in which the only issue I ever really had with audio was whether or not there was an suitable driver for my card, lol.