Monthly Archives: February 2005

Sorry, alllllmost!

Well I’m making progress on my quest to play StepMania on my Mac. I now have an adapter that works perfectly with StepMania, as well as being able to produce the up/down and left/right doubles — as long as I use a real Playstation controller. If I attach my Mad Catz Beat Pad, I get no input from the joystick. Apparently it’s a known problem with the old grey Mad Catz Beat Pads, so I have to go out and pick up a new black one, or another brand. I’ve been eyeing the Red Octane Ignition pads at Gamestop, but $100 is a bit much for a soft pad, considering you can get a hard platform for that much.

I guess I’ll leave the grey pad and the Mac-incompatible adapter I got last time upstairs for my sister to use on the yucky Windows computer in the living room.

Daisy.. daisy…

root@sigbox:~# uptime
12:23:26 up 152 days, 20:45, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.04, 0.06

I have to shut sigbox down today for an upgrade 🙁 152 days, 20 hours, and 45 minutes without being powered down or restarted. But when it comes back up, it will be running a fresh install of Slackware Linux 10.0 and have a much larger storage capacity.

Your performance is REFRESHING!

W00t! So I finally broke down and booted Windows on one of my 2 linux boxes and played some StepMania. It was awesome, I haven’t played since the end of December when came to visit.

Soft pads are teh suck, I miss the hard platforms we had in the apartment, even though the buttons kept cracking. I can’t go higher than light mode, otherwise the pad moves too much. It happens sometimes on light mode, too, but only ’cause I’m a fat-ass 🙂

Also, one of the designers of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 is smiling evilly, knowing that his automatic update message box keeps interrupting my game every few minutes to “remind” me that it installed some updates, but I haven’t restarted my computer yet. Well duh, the reason I didn’t reboot yet is because I’M BUSY PLAYING A GAME!! Eventually I just gave in and rebooted.

I also ordered a really HID-compliant USB adapter, so in 2 – 3 business days I can play on my Mac, and the Windows box can go back to running MythTV again.

Bird Friends!

I did some freelance computer work today, including upgrading an old lady’s XP box to SP2 and removing 5 variants of the MyDoom / NetSky / DoomJuice viruses. So as I’m working, her bird climbs up my leg, up my arm, and onto my shoulder:

I felt like a pirate, and not just because I had to change her volume license key before I installed Service Pack 2 😛

Yarr!

That wasn’t your REAL dance, you can do BETTER!

So, my quest to be able to play StepMania with my dance pad is still incomplete. The first adapter I got will only send buttons on an axis, so it can’t send up/down and left/right together.. but it works great in Mac OS X, and I’ve been using my Playstation controller in a few emulators.. lots of fun. Yesterday I received my Super Dual Box, which is another 2-player PSX to USB adapter. Everyone raves about how compatible it is an how well it works.

Sure it works well… if you’re on Windows. It claims to be USB HID compliant, but in typical chinese-knockoff fashion, it only pretends to be enough of a USB device for Windows to see it, but not Mac OS X or Linux. It shows up correctly on my Mac and my linux boxen, but it wont send any data when you press buttons.. making it pretty useless.

If any of my Windows friends would like the adapter, feel free to give me $10 and you can have it.. it works perfectly in StepMania on my Windows XP machine, however I refuse to play DDR upstairs, so it’s time to purchase yet another cheap chinese adapter and hope for the best.