Sadly, I was ordered by my better half not to buy it - despite the “incredible 16-bit graphics” and 7 in-built sports games - 2 more than you get with the Wii.  I guess I’ll have to make do with Nintendo’s offering.

I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04.  Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install.  I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer - with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount - but that was easily sorted.

What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless.  Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee - with no official Linux driver available.  The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently - oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.

Rather than put up with a spotty signal, I grabbed the madwifi-ng build I had from the original Ubuntu 7.04 install and compiled it on 8.04.  A quick reboot later and the wireless is back to its old reliable self again.  This way, I get the best of both words - the reliable wireless from Ubuntu 7.04, and the shiny new Compiz Fusion desktop effects from Ubuntu 8.04.

The driver I used for this is available here, so if you want to do the same as I did simply download the file and extract it as so:

tar xfvz eeewifi.tar.gz

Then start the compilation and installation process thusly:

cd madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018
make clean
sudo make install

Reboot, and your wireless should be working a treat!

There are problems, however: while the original works fine, Max Payne 2 suffers from major audio glitches in the video sequences.  Sticking, juddering, popping every few seconds - it’s a mess.  I tried setting processor affinity, turning Direct3D acceleration off, setting Windows 2000 compatibility mode - the works.

I finally figured out that it’s not actually Max Payne 2 that’s the problem, but rather the Bink video playback DLL that comes bundled.  Having upgraded the RAD Video Tools to the latest version, I was able to recreate the problem outside the game engine simply by playing back the - admittedly fairly high-resolution - intro video within the Bink Player.

It turns out that some older software - Bink playback tools included - don’t like SMP systems, i.e. systems with two or more logical processors.  The good news is that there’s a relatively simple fix.

By switching the timing mode Windows uses from a purely hardware one to an emulated system, the playback is smooth as a nut.  While there’s a non-zero chance that I’ve reduced the performance of my system by some miniscule amount by doing so it’s more than worth it to get my older games running as nature intended.

To switch the timer mode, simply add the flag “/usepmtimer” to the end of your primary entry in boot.ini.  Reboot, and et voila - Max Payne 2 working sweet as a nut.  To give you an idea, this leaves my boot.ini file reading:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /usepmtimer

Now if you’ll excuse me, the lovely Mona Sax is waiting.

Okay, it was company MD Gareth (no relation) Davies in a daft hat handing out the results of the Secret Santa we’ve been running.

I’m pleased to say that I came away from it with an absolutely awesome toy crossbow - which is powerful enough to send a dart flying half-way across the office.  I don’t know who was buying for me, but they know me scarily well.  The only problem was keeping Lee away from it for the safety of people around him.

Sadly, I was too distracted by the crossbow to see the recipient of my gift’s reaction, so I’ll just have to hope that they were suitably pleased.

The full letter - the same one I was unable to post - is available on their secure website, and thanks to the organisation’s modus operandi is unlikely to be going anywhere soon no matter what threats Davenport Lyons makes.

What a shame someone ignored the strongly-worded threats in the letter against publication.  Oh, well - thank you, kind - and, more importantly, anonymous - Wikileaks contributor.

More specifically, accusing people of downloading pornographic movies from peer-to-peer networks.  If you think about it, it’s the perfect scam: it’s one thing to stand up in court and defend yourself from accusations you downloaded Sid Meier’s Alpha Centurai but quite another to publicly associated yourself with Army Fuckers.

According to the BBC, the letters follow the usual Davenport Lyons theme of “you’ve been naughty, give us £500.”  Again, Davenport Lyons is ignoring the very real possibility that their ‘monitoring’ company, DigiProtect GmBH, is acting on poisoned data.  They’re still laying it on thick and threatening extremely expensive court action too.

The good news is that none of this is worth a damn.  As I’ve said before, make yourself a nuisance and they’ll go away.  So far, not a single person who followed my advice and replied to the demands with a Subject Access Request has been taken to court or made to pay a single penny.

If you’re curious as to what the Davenport Lyons letters look like, a very kind individual has sent me a scan of one he received after being accused of sharing a video file.  Unfortunately, I have been advised that Davenport Lyons doesn’t like the thought of people being able to prepare themselves and collaborate on a defence and is actually threatening anyone who publishes the letter online with legal action.  As a result - and because I don’t want to give them any ammunition that could take this site down - I’m unable to publish it.

As always, keep making a nuisance of yourselves and take heart from the fact that not a single person that has put up even the most basic of defences has been successfully sued by Davenport Lyons.

Ken and Gill Murdoch received the usual “give us £500 or we’ll sue” extortion letter from the firm but denied any wrongdoing, claiming that - and forgive me for quoting direct here - “their internet IP address may have been hijacked by illegal downloaders.“  No, seriously - that’s what the article says.

Although Davenport Lyons has since dropped the case, it took the intervention of Which? Computing magazine on the Murdoch’s behalf to get them to do so.  Sarah Kidner, editor of the magazine, decried the “heavy-handed tactics” employed by the firm but then shot herself in the foot by saying that “consumers need to be aware of the dangers of having their computer address copied by hackers” - again, I’m not making this up.  The editor of a computing magazine, for chrissakes.

Lazy tabloid journalism aside, the article should at least offer hope that Davenport Lyons really don’t have the balls to back up their claims of copyright infringement - as I’ve said all along.

Accordingly, I’ve put a page on this ‘ere site called - surprisingly - For Sale, which contains - again, surprisingly - a list of all the items I’ve catalogued.  The page will be updated just as frequently as I can bring myself to, with the easier-to-catalogue stuff getting added first - which means that the C64 with its two large boxes filled with games will likely be last.

If you’re interested in any of the items you see, make me an offer either via e-mail or through the comment link on the page.

Just think - for under £3,000 you can get an ‘ultimate games machine’ with a Pentium 200MHz CPU, 32MB of RAM, and a whole 3GB of hard-drive space!

Let’s compare to my mobile phone shall we?  ARM 266MHz, 16GB of usable space, 64MB of RAM…

I wouldn’t mind, but this was only 1996…