eth0's webplace

Gonna be a terse post, but managed to run Battlefield 2142 patched to 1.50 on Windows 7 RC 1 by setting the compatibility mode to "Windows 98/Me"!

Tried the obvious various "XP" and "Vista" modes, no joy.

No yet tried multiplayer, so the crappola of punkbuster has yet to be tested but may also work if ran with administrator permissions.

YouTube -- Chainsaw Bayonet
Want to know what group of individuals will survive the zombie apocalypse? Well, this redneck makes a fine looking prototype of weapons found in games such as Gears of War.

Ok, so this project started off one day with a conversation on the [KM] Empires server with [KM]Fagballs & MOOtant and we where discussing the usual crap like “when’s EmpiresMod gonna be moved over to the Orange Box” etc etc…

MOOtant raised a point that apparently VAVLe have omitted some code from the Orange Box SDK and that would make a Linux build a little tricky. (Where “tricky” read “impossible”, thanks VAVLe!)

Just as i’m about to launch in to a Yahtzee Croshaw-style tirade, [KM] Fagballs mentioned that it could be possible to run a Windblows version on Empires on a Linux box via “Wine“, the later being:

… a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.

Now at this point in the conversation the geek part of brain kicked in to 5th gear and pondered this: Would it be possible to run a Garry’s Mod server with Empires content under Linux? Both Fagballs and MOOTant at this point concurred that such a thing should be possible and that [KM] infact runs/ran a GMod server under Wine.

So now i had first had to revisit the first issue; Before i can get a server up i need to first integrate Empires content in to GMod10. This resulted in the Empires forum entitled “Howto add Empires content to Garry’s Mod 10 (the clever way)” as a resource of other intrepid soles to try this out on the client-side.

So that was last weekend.

This weekend’s task was getting a dedicated GMod 10 server running on Wine, which i’m pleased to say was very easy and now happily running on my dedicated Linux box with the Empires content and the usual Wiremod, Lifesupport, PHX and various useful STools.

The one tiny problem was that i also wanted Episode 1+2 content which unfortunately can’t be got via hldsupdatetool. So began the slow upload of many GBs of additional GFC files from my home PC and to add insult to injury i then have to rip open the Episodic GFC with GFCScape so i’m really hoping that GFCScape is also gonna run ok under Wine.

So at time of writing i’m about 2 and half hours away from the GFC uploads finalising so hopefully sometime this evening (BST) i’ll announce when the server is ready for beta testing.

In the meantime (and congrats btw for reading this far!) you can join my alpha version server by:

• First following the aforemention installation instruction for getting Empires content in GMod 10
• Then joining my server @ eth0.uk.net:27015

Special Note: Nobody, to my knowledge, has actually done the first step successfully (i.e. forgot or decised to “do it [there] own way”) and so do drop me a message on steam friends

While i’m waiting for the 42GB of Steam GFC to download in preparation for my new GMod server (more on that later), i decided to burn off the 4hrs wait by converting the homepage, for the moment, to wordpress.