Sunday 26 August 2018

Enabling Colossal Cave on Cortana

I am back at it. The first step was getting a version of Colossal Cave running. I found Eric Raymond's official public port:

  • https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure
  • http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure/

I compiled it for Windows (using MinGW-64) and made a few changes (removing unix curses and flushing input appropriately so it worked inside a pipe.)

The next step was putting together a Cortana dialog-based shell calling an external process to invoke it. The fun here is the node.js event loop. Reading and writing to the pipe did not happen when I expected, so the dialog was out of sync until I forced the Cortana dialog to happen after pipe write.

So I now how a demo-able version of Colossal Cave on an Invoke with Cortana.




What is next before publishing?

  1. Support multiple, concurrent users (yay fork).
  2. Support save game.
  3. Improve the Windows 10 prompt to repeat the text.

Sunday 12 August 2018

Recovering my files....

So... I bought this lovely ROG portable (Strix 17 GL703GE) and started developing on it.  Near the 90 day mark, I noticed the machine would not sleep.  I found out, slowly, that the left arrow key would fire whenever it liked.  It was pretty random at first, and then got persistently worse.  Imagine trying to type when some invisible monkey keeps hitting backspace...

In my wisdom, I thought "heck I'll just make an image of the two disks" with disk2vhd.  Smart right? And I'll wipe the computer and restore the disks on my replacement.

No. Windows does not have any tools out the box that do low level device copy for exact cloning. And mounting a vhd, though Windows can do it via diskmgmt or partdisk, there are some issues...

I tried to make a bootable partition on a USB drive.  First problem, my partition was out-of-range for an MBR style boot.  I needed EFI/GPT, but for whatever reason my ROG's boot menu would not recognize my cloned partition.

I though I'd use linux and gparted.  Nope. After trying to find the right drivers for the ROG, I could not get the vhd mounted as guestfish uses a "FUSE" device that doesn't support block level reads (no cat, no dd from /dev/fuse...)  And... most of the live USB tools would crash loading gparted. I spent hours getting to a point I had a bootable linux with the right video and track drivers just to discover I couldn't copy from a "file system in user space".

So... bought a new USB drive and made a partition of the same size as my former boot disk.  I use cygwin to copy from a mounted vhd to this partition. Then, I had to fix up the partition to be bootable.  And then, I had to use bcdedit, bootmgr, and msconfig to let me boot from my clone... so that I could repeat the process back to the new machine's boot partition.

And then, I discovered that my windows login credentials didn't work.  For whatever reason, my login account didn't have permission to access my own home directory.  So I got to figure out takeown, and regrant permissions to myself.

What a pain...