Manuel's random discoveries

A futuristic thing about MSX is that it was the first homecomputer (I think) which had a few games released for it on laserdisc. See also www.mccw.hetlab.tk/93/msxlaserdisc/en.html

I'm always crazy with product codes, because they might reveal other (unreleased) titles. So, I started googling on the SS098 series and found the following list (MSX titles included):

• SS098-0001: SpaceDisc Vol. 1  Space Shuttle Mission Reports - STS 5, 6 and 7
• SS098-0002: Star Fighters (MSX game)
• SS098-0003: Nihonkai Daikaisen - Umi Yukaba (MSX game)
• SS098-0004: SpaceDisc Vol. 2  Shuttle Downlink - The Repair of Solar Max
• SS098-0005: SFX Museum: vol.1 To the year 2010 Richard Edlund, ASC.
• SS098-0006: Visual Pathfinders: John Whitney
• SS098-0008: Inter Stellar (MSX game)
• SS098-0010: SFX Museum: vol.2 Apogee & dream quest, Motion Control (1985)
• SS098-0011: Cosmos Circuit (MSX game)
• SS098-0013: SpaceDisc Vol. 3  Apollo 17 - Mission to Taurus Littrow
• SS098-0018: SFX Museum: vol.3  R. Taylor B. kroyer J. Whitney Jr. R. Cobb, C. G. I. in SFX.
• SS098-0019: Esh's Aurunmilla (MSX game)
• SS098-0022: SFX Special: Charles Halpern (1984)
• SS098-0043: SpaceDisc Vol. 4  Voyage to the Planets - Voyager & Viking
• SS098-0044: Rolling Blaster (MSX game)
• SS098-0047: Visual Pathfinders: Robert Abel (1985)
• SS098-0050: Visual Pathfinders: Leni Riefenstahl (1985)
• SS098-0051: Visual Pathfinders: Norman McLaren

There are more in even higher series (like SS08-6xxx), but I only tried to find stuff which is in the below 100 series like the above. Any additions welcome!

Interesting how MSX games are completely mixed with videos ("Videographics") which are about Space (which matches a few of the games), film makers (I guess that's what Visual Pathfinders is about) and Sound Effects. And with that, it's all there is in this series, it seems.

I couldn't find any titles with product codes similar to the other MSX laserdiscs (mostly PG00n-nnXX series). Note that these have interesting stuff encoded at the end. I think KO is Konami (Badlands), and SG is SEGA (Astron Belt). No idea what TO is for...could be Toshiba, Toho, Tokuma Shoten, Tomo, or even something else... Any idea?

EDIT: note that SS098-0003 is called Nihonkai Daikaisen - Umi Yukaba and not "Umi Yakuba" as many sites say. (This may have been my own fault, but OK, it's hereby corrected!)

Some guys... phishing is in almost all cases already so obvious. Practically all e-mail that asks you to do something and does not have your full name in it, is phishing.

But some guys... they are so lazy... how stupid do they think I am?

Look at this mail I got today:

From: "service" <service@parasaga.com>
Reply-To: managementunit01@j-mail.info
Subject: UPGRADE YOUR WEBMAIL ACCOUNT
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:50:30 +0800
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=gb2312
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

EMAIL 
This is to inform you that we want to do a little maintenance, and 
during this 
period you may not be able to access your account.so 
you send us your 
password: 
Username: 
To do that will improve ur account, non-compliance with this your o 
account may be disabled. Please, we are sincerely sorry 
for 
incoveniencies.Thank you much for using our email.you can 
also visit our 
website (managementunit01@j-mail.info) 
www.WEBmail

I mean, does this look professional? No. There is almost no reason to think that this is genuine at all..

• spelling errors
• layout errors
• broken links (well, sort of an url at the end)
• no name mentioned
• obvious e-mail address which doesn't belong to my ISP (there's not even an attempt to hide it)

Well, how obvious can it be? What were they thinking?

I really hope for the sake of this world that no one thought this is a genuine e-mail.

While I'm at it, I could just as well give you my first Debian tip.

I'm using the testing distribution of Debian GNU/Linux, because it gives excellent trade off between new software packages and stability. However, sometimes you just want a package from unstable (e.g. wine or fglrx-driver, or something). The problem is that you don't want to migrate half your system to unstable and you also don't want to download the package manually and find out about dependency problems, as it is quite cumbersome.

So, the first idea is to put an "unstable" repository in your /etc/apt/sources.list. The disadvantage is that aptitude (or whatever apt front-end you use) may decide to install certain packages from it. We don't want this: we want to control ourselves whether we want a package installed from unstable or not. So, I only want to install something from unstable when I explicitly ask for it and not have half my system silently upgraded to unstable.

Of course this is possible and here is the trick to do it. Create the file /etc/apt/preferences and put in it:

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: -1

This means that apt will never choose a package from unstable, unless you explicitly ask for it, exactly what we wanted!

To try this, first do the usual aptitude update, so that the package list gets refreshed (with the packages from the unstable repository you added to your sources.list. Then, you simply do something like this:

$ sudo aptitude install -t unstable wine

When doing this, you will usually get a gigantic list of packages that will be kept back. This is good! We want them to be kept back, because they're possible updates from testing to unstable versions of packages. But the most important thing is to see what apt will install ("The following packages will be automatically installed") as dependencies. Check this first to see if you're not going to upgrade half your distribution! In the case of Wine, I usually just check if it's only going to update Wine packages.

Then it's OK and I can enjoy a new version! If all kinds of other things from unstable would get pulled in, I'd usually decide to cancel the installation and just wait until it goes into testing. This can happen if there is a huge migration (e.g. new libc, or new X windows, or so) going on and all unstable packages are already linked against the new libraries, while your testing system is not.

Hello all! Welcome to my blog. And I also welcome myself on my own blog, as this is the very first post.

I had something like this long before blogging began, in 1996. It was called MSX Activity Log (MAL), in which I wrote what I did about my MSX hobby. I kept it up for about a year only, though, but you can still read it online here.
Yeah, I'm a pioneer :P

Anyway, the idea of this blog is that when I discover some random thing that might be useful to share with you, I can easily post it here, so that other people (those who can use internet search engines) can benefit from it. Topics will probably be mostly free software (Debian in particular) and MSX and the combination: openMSX.

So, let's see how this will go. I hope you'll enjoy it and/or find it useful.

Manuel