A few weeks ago I decided to embark on a great experiment….to see if I could successfully install Max OSX 10.6 on my PC hardware.  This is not a task for the light-hearted.  Apple likes to keep their OS running on their own hardware, which is prohibitively expensive (compared to PC hardware).  I wanted to experience OSX for myself,  but I wasn’t going to fork over $1500 for new hardware when I have a perfectly capable machine here.  So I decided what the hell…why not try, right?  I’m going to detail every step I took to get this beast up and running.

To start, if you’re even considering any of this, you need to make sure you have compatible hardware.  To make life really easy, stick with Intel processors if you can.  Apple uses Intel in all of their systems (as of this posting..who knows if that’ll change in the future), so if you want the most pain-free experience, start with that.  Motherboard support seems pretty good across the board, as long as you’re sticking with simillar hardware to what’s in the Mac.  Here’s a list of all the hardware I have in my system:

Processor:  Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
Motherboard: Asus P5K-E Wifi/AP (using the P35 chipset)
RAM: 8GB DDR2 1066 (4 X 2GB sticks)
Video Card: XFX ATI Radeon 5870
Monitors: 3, one hooked up to DisplayPort, the other 2 to DVI
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Live 5.1 USB
Hard Drive: 250GB SATA

Now these were all the important pieces.  I do have an Asus Xonar DS as my main sound card in Windows, but there aren’t any Mac-compatible drivers.  I just dug up my old Sound Blaster USB one to use instead.  I also have my old Geforce 8800GT video card sitting in the extra PCI-Express slot, which I use in Windows as my PhysX card.  I wasn’t intending on using this at all, but I wanted to leave it in the system if I could.  It seemed like all of this hardware would work so the next step, OS installation.

For this you’ll need a few things things.  First, get a retail copy of OSX Snow Leopard from Apple.  It’s only $30, so it’s worth going legit (or as legit as you can…).  Plus it’s much less of a headache that way.  Some of the pre-built OSX images out there (like iAtkos and whatnot) have extra drivers and stuff in them, and can cause problems when you update(as I discovered…my first experiment didn’t turn out well using that method).  Second, you’re going to need a a couple pieces of software called iBoot and Multibeast.  You can get both here.  iBoot is going to allow you to boot into OSX since regular PC hardware won’t work by itself.  Multibeast will allow you to make small tweaks and install extra drivers that will make your life much easier.  So I downloaded both of those, burned iBoot to a DVD, and just threw Multibeast onto a USB stick.  Also while you’re at it, grab the OSX 10.6.7 Combo update from here and throw it onto a USB stick too.  Makes life easier later.

I’m only sticking with 1 hard drive here too…again, to make my life easier.  Make sure it’s empty (or at the very least don’t mind formatting it).  You’re also going to need to make sure your BIOS has the SATA system set to ACHI.  If not, iBoot and the install DVD won’t boot.  You’ll be able to find all these settings in your BIOS.

Put in iBoot and restart your computer.  It should boot into a menu where you can choose to iBoot…don’t yet.  For me, I had to do 2 things here…first, unplug the SATA cable from my HDD.  Without this I was constantly getting EBIOS read errors when going into the OSX Installer.  Second, eject iBoot from your DVD drive, insert the Snow Leopard DVD and press F5.  This should refresh the menu and the new option should say Mac OSX Install.  Choose that and you’ll begin the boot process.  Once the Apple logo comes up, you can plug the SATA cable back into the HDD.  When you can take control in the installer, just go through the menus.  Once you hit the point where you can choose where to install the OS, make sure you create 2 partitions.  One for the main partition and one for a backup (trust me…you’ll need this).  Then just install to the first partition and away you go.

Once installation is done and you reboot, you’ll need to make sure you put iBoot back in.  You’re going to need to keep that in the drive every time you boot for the time being (we’ll fix that up later).  When you get to the iBoot menu you’ll be able to choose 2 options: either iBoot or your new OSX partition.  Move over to the OSX option but before you hit enter I had to type “PCIRootUID=1″.  This allowed me to actually boot into the system…without it, it would just lock up.  Press Enter and you should see the intro video…go through the steps, create your user account, blah blah blah.  After this, you should be in!!  Awesome…except for me.  I didn’t have the correct video resolution (let alone proper desktop expansion across 3 monitors), nor did I have network access.  That’s ok…we’ll fix both in short order.  First thing to do is to make a backup…go to Applications->Utilities->Disk Utilities, and do a restore from your main partition to the backup one.  If you run into any problems along the way, you can just use iBoot to boot into that partition and restore back to the main one (which I had to do on multiple occasions).

Now back to the system.  I fixed my network problem first because I didn’t have the 10.6.7 on a USB stick.  But if you do, we’ll install that first.  If not, look below for the network fix but be prepared to reapply that after the OSX update (it updates the network drivers, forcing you to do the entire process again).   Install the OSX update off of your stick (or from a networked drive in my case) but DON’T RESET after you do…just leave the installer up.  If you do at this point, you’ll have a busted OS and need to restore.  At this point, fire up Multibeast.  It may crash (and bring down the Update installer window too) but don’t worry…just restart Multibeast.  Go through the Multibeast screens and when you get to the point where you can choose different options, you’ll want to install EasyBeast and the PCIRootUID fix.  This should make it so you won’t have to type anything in when you boot.  Restart.

At this point, I had proper video resolution.  I made some adjustments in the Display settings but that was it.  Great.  Now to get connected to the Interwebz.   This part was tricky.  There didn’t seem to be any kexts out there for my specific network chipset but I luckily found this great walkthrough.  The trick here though is my network didn’t come back right away.  It took a couple resets…but that’s ok.  Also since my motherboard had wifi, I wanted that to work too if I could.  Lucky for me Realtek (the wifi chipset manufacturer on my board) provided drivers.  I found them here.  Ran that installer, restarted and backed everything up.

Once network access was up and running, I was almost done.  There was just a few small things I still wanted to get fixed.  First, the OS only detected 4 of 8 GB of RAM.  Also, I was still at the mercy of iBoot…EasyBeast isn’t enough for my machine, not if i wanted to keep hardware accelerated graphics.  I wanted to be able to boot into my system without the need of a boot disc if I could.  Lastly, I was still in 32-bit mode.  Ideally I’d like to be running the 64-bit kernel if I could.

Well the first and second problems were easily solved with 1 step.  Using Multibeast, I installed the Chameleon ATI Experimental Bootloader.  Once this was installed and I restarted the system, I was able to boot into OSX without the help of iBoot and the machine detected all 8GB of RAM.  In order to get it to boot into the 64-bit kernel though, I needed to modify the boot.plist file.  Look for a file called com.apple.Boot.plist located in the /Extra folder off the root of the hard drive.  Open this file in TextEdit, and look for an entry for “Kernel Flags”.  You probably see an string entry just below that says “arch=i386″.  Change that to “arch=x86_64″ and reboot once more.  You should now be running the 64-bit kernel. Remember, after this point, do another backup.

I was now at the point where everything essential to my computing experience was good to go.  I had a desktop that spanned 3 monitors, I had sound and network access…I was solid.  I was now able to install all of my other software, run updates through the Apple Software Updater thing…all that good stuff.  As I kept saying above, any time you are going to install a new driver or a system update from Apple, always make a backup of your drive incase something screws up. You can then always just revert back to the last good state (albiet after a somewhat lengthy copy process).  But that’s better than having to reinstall everything again.  There’s still small things: I can’t put my system to sleep (not sure if it’s even possible to fix that) and I still have my main windows drive unplugged while I use OSX, but that’s fine.

I’m now rocking OSX and can happily develop for the iOS platform without having to jump through hoops using a Virtual Machine.  If you have any questions/comments, please post below. I’ll update this article as I go with new discoveries and whatnot.  But for now, I hope this guide helped.

Until next time…

In all seriousness though, I’ve had a good reason to be away for so long. Things have definitely changed over the past few months, and I thought I should share them with everyone.

To start, I’m living in Montreal now. It was somewhat of an unexpected move, to say the least. To put it in the simplest terms, an opportunity presented itself and I took it. I am now working up here for Bioware Montreal, my dream company. For those that know me, they know how much of a Bioware fanboy I am, and to be given the opportunity to be a member of this team and make some really awesome games is truly a dream come true. I can’t say too much about what I’m specifically working on, but I can say that I’m part of the team making Mass Effect 3.

Unfortunately, I did have to leave a great job in Toronto at Tecmo Koei Canada. TKC gave me my start in the industry, and I’ll be forever grateful to them for that. I worked with some truly awesome people over there too, and won’t ever forget them. Regardless of the games we ended up releasing, I think those were some of the best people I have ever worked with. We had something special there. The truly sad part of this whole story is that I just learned that TKC went through a massive round of lay-offs this week. A lot of these friends are now without a job. I know they were all great people, and I know for a fact that every single one of them will land on their feet in short order. I wish them all the best in their future endeavors. To any of them reading this, you WILL find something you want to do…trust me.

The last bit of news is of course my trip to Italy. My girlfriend and I took a trip over there from December 28th through to January 7th. We started in Rome, and from there traveled to Florence, Pisa and Venice. What a time that was. It’s almost a totally different world over there…almost. There is a lot of stuff that’s very familiar, but also so much that’s different. To start, there is a McDonalds over there, but it serves beer The architecture is just amazing. Walking around the Coliseum was a sight to behold, and seeing the leaning tower in Pisa was spectacular. We even took a gondola ride around the canals in Venice. Just phenomenal. If you ever have the opportunity to go, take it. The only regret we have it that we didn’t have enough time to explore Florence. Next time, I suppose…

What else…wow…so much that I’ve missed. Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers for winning the Super Bowl. Didn’t really touch on football much this year. That’s probably because my Cowboys self destructed. I still watched, but just never had the urge to comment about it. I’m sure more thoughts will spill out now that I’ve started to settle down here in Montreal.

Until next time…

The paint job isn’t near as perfect as I was hoping for.   The overall color was darker than I was hoping for, and I couldn’t keep my hands steady enough, so some of the lines are a bit rough. Once I got the decals all placed and the clear coat applied, most of the imperfections went away, and the whole thing turned out pretty good.

Here’s a few pictures of the final model:

[View with PicLens]

Until next time…

Now, for those that know me, I’m also a HUGE Star Trek fan. Obviously these 2 things came together, and I did have a couple Star Trek models. One being the Enterprise with lights and sounds from the original 6 movies, and the second being the iconic Enterprise D. I don’t know whatever happened to these, but needless to say, I don’t have them anymore.

About 3 or 4 years ago, I got the itch to try this out again. I wanted to stick more to the Star Trek models, specifically the Enterprise E. Well, at the time, these models were well out of print, and best I could do was to hit up Ebay and hope for the best. Unfortunatly, all these models were running in and upwards of $100 at the time (eg this). Well, on a university budget, I said no.

Just over a year ago though, a company by the name of Round 2 decided to bring back a lot of the old AMT Star Trek models, and one of their first was the Enterprise E. The thing was that these models were all going to be reasonably priced as well. So, I hit up Ebay, and for a cool $30, I had myself a brand spanking new model.

I then thought why not go full out and get the entire line. I did a bit more research, and it turns out that most of the Enterprise models were either already re-issued, or where in the process of being so. So, I picked up the original Enterprise, the Refit from the movies, and the NX-01 from the show “Enterprise”. Coming in short order is the Enterprise D (from the show) and the Enterprise B (from the movie Star Trek Generations). I’m so pumped. The only thing missing now is the Enterprise C. But I’m sure this will come in time.

And this weekend, I figured I’d make my start on the E. Here’s a few pictures of my work in progress:

[View with PicLens]

I’m hoping to get most of it done this weekend, but what I don’t, I’ll finish up this next week.  I’ll post a few more pictures once the E is done.

Until next time…

Anyways, the point of today’s post isn’t to talk about Windows Home Server (although I can make a seperate post on it later discussing it further…).  Today, I’m gonna talk about setting up some extra services on it so it’s not just used as a media storage server.  I needed to set up an SVN repository on it, along with Trac to handle some of my personal projects.  SVN is a version control system mainly used for code, and Trac is a Wiki and bug tracking software used to keep track of all kinds of things for any sort of project.  I use both of these at work, and am very familliar with them, so I decided for my personal stuff, I would stick with what I know.

Now, installing anything that’s not specifically meant to run on a Windows server can be a little tricky, but fortunately I discovered for this little experiment, it wasn’t too bad at all.  To start, I needed a version of SVN that would run on Windows.  Conviniently, I found something called VisualSVN Server.  It’s a fully functional SVN server, but has a nice GUI interface for managing it in Windows.  You can create your repositories here (and easily set them up with the base trunk, tags and branches directories that all SVN repositories should have), and also create users and groups.  Perfect.  Much easier than mucking with ini configuration files.

The second part to this puzzle though is Trac.  Now, for both SVN and Trac, you need a web server.  Windows Home Server convinently comes with IIS for it’s own web serving capabilities, but trying to get SVN working with IIS is a nightmare in of itself, let alone Trac too.  VisualSVN Server includes a version of Apache, so I figured Trac could hook right into that.  Well, as luck would have it, the guys over there running VisualSVN has detailed some nice instructions here, along with a package you can download to get yourself up and running.  Now, I basically followed everything on that page there to the letter, except 1 small thing.  I couldn’t get the SVN server to start after I installed Trac.  I had to grant access to the folder the Trac libraries were installed too (‘Program Files\VisualSVN Server\trac’ in my case) to the Network Service user.  After that, everything started up correctly.

Now, the package that I downloaded to install Trac didn’t include the latest version (they’re up to 0.12 now….VisualSVN provied 0.11.6).  I really wanted 0.12 as that’s what I’m used to at work now, so I thought I’d take a shot at trying to upgrade it.  This turned out to be much easier than expected.  I went to Trac’s download page and grabbed the Windows zip package.  I unzipped it to some temporary folder, opened a command prompt, and typed the following:

python D:\Temp\Trac 0.12\setup.py install

*where D:\Temp\Trac 0.12\ is where you unzipped the package too

After things were installed, I started the SVN server back up, and bang…I was in business.

Anyways, I thought I’d share this little adventure to anyone who might find this useful.

Until next time…

A couple weeks back, I finished playing a DS game called Infinite Space.  It came out a while ago, and I just managed to get around to starting it back around the first of May.  All in all, I was very impressed with the game.

Infinite Space can be best described as a Japanese RPG, but instead of fighting orcs, elves and giant eyeballs, you’re in a space ship fighting other space ships.  Seems pretty cool, eh?  To RPG it out even more, you not only get 1 ship, but a whole fleet of them.  AND, you can customize your ships too, from what kinds of weapons each ship has, to what modules are in the ship, like Crew Cabins, cargo hold, Sick Bays, engines, bridges, and many, many more.  Oh, and to top it all off, you also assign crew members to different posts in your fleet, like First Officer, Chief Engineer, and even Head Chef.  Yeah, this game is an RPG in the true sense of the genre.

The game starts out as the main character, Yuri, discovers a crashed ship on his home planet.  He helps the pilot get the ship ready, and she (Nia) takes Yuri along for the ride.  You pick up new crew members and other characters along the way, do quests for various people, and discover this incredible force that enters your galaxy and wants to take it over.  It’s kinda your standard plot, but I’ll tell you, the storytelling is really good.  I couldn’t put the game down.  I just wanted to see what would happen next.  It’s got some of the Japanese RPG-type characters and such (like the quiet, but concerned hero, beautiful side-kick with very revealing clothing, and other stereotypes), but hey, this was created in Japan, right?  It’s part of the charm.

As for the gameplay itself, as I said above, you have a fleet of ships.  You’ll fly around from planet to planet, sector to sector doing the story missions and side quests, and you’ll get into random space battles along the way.  When a battle starts, you’ll have a meter that fills up (think the ATB meter from any of the SNES-era Final Fantasy’s).  When your turn comes up, you’ll use a portion of this meter to either Dodge, Attack, or Barrage (super attack).  Regular attacks take up 1/3 of this action bar, and they are just that…regular attacks.  A barrage though uses up 2/3′s of the bar and hits the enemies with a much stronger attack, except that it can be dodged.  Hence this is where dodge comes into play (which itself takes up 1/3).  Once you get into the battle system though, it’s pretty simple to understand.  Later in the game, you’ll gain access to special First Officer powers (depending on what crew member you put in your first officer slot), fighters, and Anti-air guns to combat fighters.  All these make for some interesting battles.

There’s also melee battles, which if I were to pick a weak part of this game, this would be it.  You have 3 attacks to choose from: Leadership, Slash, and Shoot.  Leadership beats Slash, Slash beats Shoot, and Shoot beats Leadership. Each side has a bar that starts to tick up as soon as you make a selection.  This then gives the other side about 3 seconds to choose an action (and their bar starts to tick) before you actually switch to your action.  The AI tends to be totally random though on it’s choices, so there’s no logic here…just straight up guessing, and hoping you guess right.  There are a few things you can control, like your health and attack strength, but if you never guess right, it won’t matter.  I tended to just load up on health and attack, and hope I got lucky.

The main story takes you across many different systems, and you do meet many different characters along the way.  It took me over 55 hours to beat this game, so it’s not for the light-hearted (mind you, I was farming for some of the best ships and components in the game, so naturally this takes a bit longer).  If you’re able to put up with the length and a bit of the JRPG-stereotype stuff, this is a must-play game, and worth every penny.

Overall, I’d give it a 4/5.

You can find it on Amazon.ca (kinda expensive) or just try searching on Ebay (if you can get lucky and find a copy for around $40).

Until next time…

AlishaHayes.com

This is the website of my good friend, Alisha.  She’s self-publishing her first book, Red Herring, and I helped her put the website together.  My other good friend, Dave Bardwell, did most of the artwork, and I put the site itself together (in Flash, if it wasn’t obvious).  Please check it out….I’m pretty proud of this one  It took me the better part of 2 solid months of work, but it turned out amazing in the end, if I do say to myself.

I want to congratulate Alisha, of course.  She’s been a really close friend of mine ever since public school, so when she asked me if I could do the site, I said sure.  When she then told me of how she wanted it, I almost fell out of my chair  But, I said why not…it’ll be a challenge.  And it was, but it was worth it.

As for the contents of the site itself, if you think the book sounds interesting, please buy a copy from Alisha.  She’s worked really hard on the novel, and if things go well, there will be more books in the (hopefully) near future!!

Again, congrats Alisha on a successful launch.  *Raises a glass of scotch* Cheers!!

Until next time…

And here’s the results:

Yes, that would be 4 screens that I can work on simultaniously.  The 2 right screens are connected to my current desktop.  I have my laptop on the far left there, with the 3rd monitor connected to it right beside it.  Now, the trick here is I’m using a piece of software called Synergy2 to share my mouse and keyboard from my main desktop to my laptop, which allows me to just move my mouse off to the left hand side of the screen, and transfers the new mouse position across the network to the laptop, and it’s as if I’m controlling it normally.  Pretty cool stuff.

The limitation of course is that I can’t obviously move windows from my laptop to my desktop, but it’s great to keep the browser and IM clients opened on the left 2 monitors, while I keep my main work (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Flash, etc…) open on the main 2.  I just get giddy over all this stuff

Anyways, just wanted to share.  I’ll post more when the entire Eyefinity setup is complete and have a real game running on it.

Until next time…

I’ve been a huge fan of Command & Conquer ever since the very first one came out way back in the mid-90′s.  The original C&C was one of the very first games we bought back when we got our first Windows 95 computer, and I’ll tell ya, I loved the hell out of it.  The awesome (albeit extremely cheesy) custscenes, the awesome units…nothing better than watching an Obelisk just slaughter an entire army.

I did play C&C Red Alert, but could never really get into it.  I don’t know if it was the fact that the units weren’t as advanced (ie sci-fi like), or that I just didn’t care as much for the story.  Either way, I did play it, and its 2 expansions, but the teaser in the game for C&C2 just made me more excited for that.  I did also play all the subsequent RA games, but again, didn’t enjoy them near as much as the original, Tiberium series.

Tiberian Sun, the followup to the original, was delayed a fair bit (especially considering Red Alert and the re-release of C&C on Windows 95 came with a trailer in 1997), but finally came out in 2000, 5 whole years after the original.  I don’t think the entire fanbase liked it as much as the first, but I sure did.  They really focussed in on the story this time…super cheesy of course, but they were still pretty fun to watch.  Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese from the first Terminator) and James Earl Jones (the voice of Darth Vader) made appearances, along with Joe Kucan reprising his role as Kane…this time, much more sinister and dark.

When C&C3 – Tiberium Wars was announced in 2006, it shocked everyone.  I don’t think anyone was expecting another C&C game from the original series anymore, especially after they made C&C Generals a few years before that.  But I couldn’t have been more excited.  It was the first game in the Tiberium series to use a 3D engine, and did it ever look beautiful.  AND, we even got a 3rd playable race, the Scrinn, who were hinted at in Tiberian Sun.  Great custscens again, with lots more Hollywood talent, including Micheal Ironside, Tricia Helfer and Grace Park.  The gameplay was a little stale by this point (with games like Company of Heroes taking RTS’s in an entirely new direction), but it was still fun as hell.  There was also 1 expansion, Kane’s Wrath, that filled in a lot of details in between the 2nd and 3rd games (from Nod’s perspective), and continues a little beyond too.  I find it didn’t add a whole lot to the gameplay, but the story was cool.

We are now at the final entry in the Command & Conquer Tiberium series, Tiberian Twilight.  The name comes from the original name of C&C3, before the entire Westwood studio was scrapped and absorbed into EA.  EA held a poll online to choose the name of this game, and the fans overwhelmingly chose Tiberian Twilight.  A fitting name to the final entry in the series.  All the cheesy (although more serious in tone this time around) cutscenes are back, but they totally revamped the entire gameplay experience from previous C&C games.  This time around, there’s no base building, and it’s all about control points and micromanaging your units.  I’ve just started playing it myself, so I can’t really give any opinions on it yet.

I just wanted to show my love for one of the grand-daddy’s of the RTS genre (yes…Dune II was first modern one, but C&C made it popular).  It’s sad that this is the end, but I’m sure Red Alert 4 is still in the pipes, and also really excited to see where they take the C&C franchise as a whole after this.

Until next time…

If you’ll notice, in the Last Played column for Galcon Fusion, it says I last played the game tomorrow (click on the image if you want to see it a little better)…hmm…maybe Steam’s got some new kind of time warp machine that can predict the future?  Or maybe it’s just a bug, as things like this can happen in betas.

Still, funny none the less.

Oh, by the way…you can pick up Galcon Fusion for only $2 on Steam until Friday morning….it’s part of Steam’s Midweek Madness sale this week.  It’s a pretty cool little game.

Until next time…