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Posted by Dave on

Little Ship Club

South of the Island Rally 2009

Lymington to Bembridge, with overnight stays at both ports.

Train from Petersfield to Lymington, leave Petersfield at 11 minutes past the hour

Sat 02 May

  • Petersfield (PTR) to Havant (HAV) 12:11 -> 0:15 -> 12:26
  • Havant (HAV) to Southampton Central (SOU) 12:37 -> 0:42 ->13:19
  • Southampton Central (SOU) to Brockenhurst (BCU) 13:30 -> 0:21 -> 13:51
  • Brockenhurst (BCU) to Lymington Pier (LYP) 13:59 ->0:10 -> 14:09

Monday 04 May

Bus to Ryde, then Hovercraft and Train from Pompey on Monday, which is a Bank Holiday

Their web site, http://littleshipclub.co.uk/

Posted by Dave on

Dosbox

They say “DOSBox is an emulator that recreates a MS-DOS compatible environment (complete with Sound, Input, Graphics and even basic networking).” Their home page is at http://www.dosbox.com/.

lba2 on WXP

I have now used it to run Twinsen’s Little Big Adventure 2 (aka LBA2) on my Alienware Aurora.

Here’s how!

  1. Download the Installer
  2. Install DosBox
  3. Read the documentation at their Wiki and at MagicBall. In particular you need to grok the mount command and use it to make the CD drive visible and also to chroot the install directory.
  4. Use dos box to install the game from the CD. See MagicBall’s guide.

There are several ways to then run the game. I have created a shortcut which invokes dosbox and provides the commands to the program using the -c flag. I havn’t yet got to grips with writing a batch file and using that as the -c argument.

And now we have the original adventure

Firstly, visit LBA HQ and its download panel, which offers you a .rar archive. This contains a .iso file. This thread at http://lbahq.com describes how to cut a CD version of the archive which allows you to install both DosBox and LBA. Since I have a copy of DosBox on my Alienware, its probably possible to configure DosBox to consume the .iso, but I havn’t done this yet. So burn a CD, and XP’s autorun will run the game installer. This gives you instructions as to how to configure he game to run under DosBox. The command line arguments are documented at LBA & DosBox on this site.

LBA running in a dosbox

I boasted about this achievment on my sun, now oracle blog.

Posted by Dave on

XML Paper System (XPS)

XML Paper System

I have a new laptop and have been configuring the additional tools and applications required to make it do a job of work. At the moment, I have no .pdf print driver yet and needed to save a web resource. I have Windows Vista 64 as my host OS and shall be running virtual box 32 bit guests. I was offered the fax driver, and the Microsoft XPS driver. I thought that PS would be some derivation of postscript, but it seems not.

I had discovered ixquick earlier in the morning, a privacy respecting search engine, and queried it using the search string “what application reads an .xps file”. XPS stands for XML Paper Specification and the Microsoft page hosting the application is fairly easy to find,

What is not clear is that this page is .net 3.0 and Vista ships with 3.5 and with the reader turned on. Attempting to install the reader again issues some odd error message about the windows feature switches. Reading the Microsoft page more clearly makes it clear that the viewer is installed in Vista, as does the association on the .xps suffix with an icon. The download should not be installed on a Vista machine.

makes clear that .xps docs can only be read using IE, although they document how to enable this for Firefox, it is an odd but interesting additional example about how IE is bound to the OS. In this particular example, I could have avoided all this ache by using the “Save Page as…” option.It seems I may need to revert to my more old fashion print solutions i.e. binding a postscript print driver to the FILE: port, or getting/buying a .pdf driver.