Saturday, 16 November 2024

Mac Mini / Whack Winnie: installing Windows on a Mac. Also: Duckstation Playstation funtimes

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The above disabling is to do with installing Windows 10 on a mid-2010 Mac Mini (the Whack Winnie), which is a process I’ve gone through AT LEAST four times now. Windows 10 installs fine, but upon updating and restart, there’s no display output. My workaround was initially to disable ALL updates, as above, but I paid more attention on one of the installs and noticed it seemed (logically) that it was when the Nvidia driver updater that the system fucked-out.

So, another install later: I allowed updates, but then went into Devices and disabled the Nvidia driver. The display seems fine using whatever driver Windows uses when that is disabled, and the system works fine upon restarting. All other updates install fine.

Someone else seems to have suffered the same issues:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/win-10-on-mac-mini-mid-2010-blank-screen-installing-vga-driver-if-use-gpt-format.328962/

I’ve come across this “Bootcamp” thing, which seems to be some Apple affair for dual-booting. I ignored it all and utterly wiped any trace of Apple off the harddrive, for better or worse, wisely or wrongly. The only tricky thing has been when trying to access the boot menu: this seems to require a wired USB keyboard, and holding Alt upon power-on.

Windows seems to be running ok, though there’s no way of getting sound out of the machine; not via HDMI or the headphone jack. That’s a setback.

We’ll come back to the “WhackWhinnie” a little later on (if I remember…)

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Duckstation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnPC/comments/p8ph2z/duckstation_not_opening_sdl_or_qt_file_because/

PS3 wireless controllers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/nwi796/how_to_dual_shock_3_on_windows_10_wirelessly_and/

Duskstation has been a great success! Honestly, it’s been a surprising success considering how, as usually detailed here, nothing really works…

I’ve been able to install it on my regular Win10 PC (no Linux or WhackWhinnie nonsense going on) and jumped through A LOT of hoops to get controllers working. Unintuitively, wired controllers (OG PS controllers connected via USB adaptors) have been a bit of a flop, especially for two-player, but wireless PS3 controllers connected via USB (and A LOT of ancillary programs) have worked GREAT and even worked for two-player!

I’ve had a truly joyous time playing Nuclear Strike (there are various aspects of the game controls which gel with my mind, somehow) and Crash Bandicoot was a big hit. I want to have another go at playing through the Oddworld games, and see if the James Bond games live up to Goldeneye…

ANYWAY…

Here’s some of the previous crap I put myself through when trying to get the MacMini to work:

Next time: Retropie, MacMinux, DuckStation on WhackWhinnie

Friday, 15 November 2024

PS3 Controller & Automatic Updates

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https://ds3-tool.en.softonic.com/ fail

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS3/comments/nwi796/how_to_dual_shock_3_on_windows_10_wirelessly_and/

ALTHOUGH! The following link is dead:

https://vigem.org/projects/DsHidMini/DS4-Mode-User-Guide/   

A brief aside about automatic updates:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-do-i-permanently-disable-automatic-windows-10/82e1e076-8dff-475e-8c5e-a2061d1a4c5a

“I understand you had problems with Windows updates, sorry about that.

Updates are released with improvements, security fixes or news, so it is always recommended to keep your computer up to date.

In this case as you want to pause the updates once and for all, follow the procedures below.

1. Press Windows+R, type services.msc and click OK;

2. Scroll down the page to find the Windows Update service;

3. Right-click on the service and select Properties;

4. Click the stop button;

5. In Startup Type change to disabled and click OK;

6. Restart your computer. “

How helpful of them.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

MBR/GPT nonsense, PiNAS pondering, LINKDUMP

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https://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/321097-how-install-windows-7-uefi-mode-usb.html

https://iboysoft.com/howto/the-selected-disk-is-not-a-fixed-mbr-disk.html

Diskpart says:  “The disk you specified is not MBR formatted.” when trying to format GPT?

Just Format MBR first… then Format GPT. What a dipshit system.

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In other news, having tired of smashing my balls in a door, I thought I’d have a go at some Linux shit again. What the zark for, I have no idea.

After the PiHole failure, I resolved to get rid off all my Pi kit.

SLIGHT TANGENT

Just adding a load of links here, in case I ever get desperate and/or bored and/or desperately bored:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/l158qt/best_performing_retroarch_build_on_a_raspberry_pi/

https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/7jq3s5/confused_where_to_put_psx_bios_ubuntu/

https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/pvv534/raspberry_pi_4_lakka_emulation_guide/

https://www.lakka.tv/get/linux/rpi/install/first-boot/games/

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-configure-samba-to-use-smbv2-and-disable-smbv1-on-linux-or-unix/

https://www.lakka.tv/doc/Accessing-Lakka-filesystem/

https://forums.libretro.com/t/roms-bios-where-to-place/2573/3

https://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/321097-how-install-windows-7-uefi-mode-usb.html (this didn’t seem to work for making a drive that would boot on the WacWini)

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/186875-uefi-unified-extensible-firmware-interface-install-windows-7-a.html

https://iboysoft.com/howto/the-selected-disk-is-not-a-fixed-mbr-disk.html

https://www.emu-land.net/en/consoles/psx/emuls/windows

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=rerun+duckstation+wizard

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=raspberry+pi+show+processor

Monday, 4 November 2024

Old Desktop #1: unRAIDing HDDs, reinstalling Windows 10, EE rant

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The backup saga continues. Perhaps I’m suffering from a virtual form of my IRL hoarding: data hoarding…

On the old, huge, Fractal-cased PC, it was time for some changes. Like in the HP AIO, I’m un-RAIDing the three drives in there to increase capacity.

First I made sure that any data on there was backed-up to the ‘Definitive’ external drive. I then accidentally deleted not only the stuff I had checked, but a whole copy of my personal generic data. This was a good lesson in why a back-up is necessary: accidentally deleting data has to be one of the most common causes of data loss…

Hoping the gone-data was still on the other PC (the other old desktop), I proceeded to restart and use CTRL-I to unRAID the three 1TB drives. Weirdly, after this, the computer failed to boot, despite the boot drive being an utterly separate 128GB SSD; it would just go into BIOS each time, like there was no boot device. I tried unplugging the three formerly-RAID drives, but no beans. Well, looks like we’re reinstalling Windows today too…

Actually, booting to BIOS was useful because it showed me that I’d not seated one of the RAM sticks properly.

In other news, this week I’ve tried to do a poor-person’s NAS by simply attaching a USB drive to the USB port on the internet router. It didn’t work, and it seems EE have disabled that functionality on their new “Smart” Hub “Plus”.

The next day I tried to set up Pi-Hole. This also didn’t work, again because EE have removed features from the hub, this time the DNS settings.

On top of that, they sent me an email saying the broadband bill was overdue; where the zark did my previous Direct Debit disappear to? Why didn’t they mention it wouldn’t carry over?

And don’t get me started on the incompetence demonstrated by the “engineer” who came over to install the fibre connection…

Unimpressed with EE at the moment.

UPDATE October 2025: just a theory after rereading these posts, but could the reason for the old desktop not booting be that I had more than one harddrive (crucially: three of them RAIDed to act as one drive) connected when installing Windows? This might have done that weird thing where the installation puts a random Windows partition on a drive other than the ‘main’ one (the one you’re intending to install on). Then, when I removed the RAID from the drives, that “important” partition went up the wazhoo, taking the ability to boot with it. Just a theory, that I have no evidence for, but you never know