Recovering damaged videos with untrunc

This is more for personal reference but I know someone somewhere will need this and I want to have it here as a light house because this was a pain to figure out.

There is an application called untrunc which can help recover a damaged video file as long as you have another file that was produced by the same device, in my case I am recording playthroughs and this is happening because the hard drive is giving out on me for random reasons, I can't ask much from a hard drive that has been in use for more than 8 years.

untrunc can be found here: https://github.com/ponchio/untrunc in its original form and an improved version here: https://github.com/anthwlock/untrunc

The one from anthwlock is the one that worked for me, the one from ponchio would not compile no matter what I did, for reference this was done both in Debian 9 and 10.

Once I followed the steps from anthwlock I had it installed, I added it to /usr/bin and I ran first the following command:

untrunc -v (good video) (bad video) because as it was the thing would not go through, I did not understand why though so -v told me that there was an issue with consistency, because the first video was larger than the second, how did I go around this? By using -a and -s so it looks something like this:

untrunc -a -s (good video) (bad video)

You may get a ton of prompts telling you if it's OK to continue, go ahead and from there you should be able to recover the damn thing, go at it, edit it and have fun!

Crusader Kings II - Holy Fury: Powernexing Ireland (Week 3)

Week 3 of the Powernexing Ireland Campaign for Crusader Kings II, Holy Fury (3.0.1.1)

Battle Report of the Week:

For the third week of the Iron Man Powernexing Campaign we have gone through two Kings, rebellions, vassals coming to power and taking territory outside of our currently controlled domain, the crowns continue to be under the hold of a single Tanist but struggle is evident as voting is contested between different members of the family, our control over the Isles is almost complete as we have almost finished pushing Denmark out of the Isles and we are slowly bringing Pictland into our control.

One important note that I would like to point out for this section of the playthrough is the creation of titles, while this may not be evident here is a little more into this matter as I never went deep into this when I was doing this in the playthrough.

Why divide titles between vassals or why create new titles?

Division of power in Crusader Kings 2 is very important, due to limitations of the Tribal/Feudal Lord system in real history there was only a limited people that one single person could handle, this is the same in game mechanics in which you are limited to the amount of titles you can have as well as territory and vassals, having too many vassals under you means less gold and in the long run means more problems, to go down the line let me exemplify:

We currently control 40 counties, out of those 40 counties we can only rule 8 due to our rank, stewardship and other traits/bonuses, this means that the remaining 32 counties have to be governed by other people be it one each or a couple each, the optimal division of power, in my opinion, is done through very small divisions of land, if out of those 40 counties we can make 10 duchies that means that approximately each 4 counties would need a duchy, we can hold two at most without getting a negative opinion penalty, the remaining 8 duchies are to be assigned to 8 vassals who in turn will have 3 vassals below them, with this division of power it is harder for rebelling vassals to bring against us a large amount of allies into the fray, if they do these allies will be divided in very small sections that in turn produce different amount of money and troops, to us this is an advantage to control internal rebellions but when external threats come we mainly have to relay on our retinues, armies and available vassal armies.

What is coming next:

For the next week here is a sneak peek, we did manage to accomplish two important goals, one, the Empire of Alba was formed before 850 and two, we are now Feudal and have not been grinded to death by our neighbors or our vassals which is quite impressive for me.

What is Powernexing?

Powernexing comes from Diplonexing, I’m not sure if I heard it first from Arumba or Quill18, which in turn means to quickly and without consequence annex territory from your neighbors without getting yourself in the middle of the crosshair, basically this means that we will get territory through border disputes, fabricated claims, intrigues, marriages or any other method that will get us more territory under our belt, but there is more to it than simply saying it, applying it is a whole different story but let me put this into context as we are slightly cheating here by choosing the right scenario.

Setting up the battleground:

As an old tradition I always start as a Count in either Ireland or England, it is not so much that I start as a Feudal or Tribal Count but rather this position allows me to experiment on different techniques and ideas that I have, in one playthrough I decided to start moving south instead of consolidating inside the islands so I eventually ended up with territory in northern France and northern Spain, in another instance I invaded Norway and Sweden then was crushed by the pagans in Finland, a fun playthrough, and as another old tradition we have done a playthrough in Russia and managed to get an Empire so large it was becoming very complicated to govern everything without more than two human players.

Agenda and Objectives for the Playthrough:

I always keep ideas in mind about how and what I want to do for a playthrough, for this particular one I came up with the following agenda:

Agenda:

1) Test new mechanics from the DLCs past Horse Lords, this means using and abusing old mechanics too to accomplish our objectives

2) Iron Man mode only, if I fail I fail, no reloading, no rage quitting, no cheating, nothing, it is what it is and the world keeps moving on with or without my intervention

3) This is a single player campaign and no other players will intervene, for other playthroughs this could be different though

Objectives:

1) Start as a Count and go all the way up to Emperor, this does not mean the title of Emperor must come from being the Emperor of Britania, it can be from any other Empire or forming our own

2) The original culture of the founding character shall remain the same, any characters who do not have this culture will have it pushed into them

3) The same applies for the culture inside Ireland, it shall always remain the same as well as religiously it shall remain Catholic, adjacent territories to Ireland shall eventually become of the same culture

4) Only family shall control the counties, duchies and kingdoms under the main ruler, as the expansion continues everything shall temporarily remain under the hands of others but at a minimum, every mechanic shall be used to bring everything under the rule of the same dynasty

5) Prisoners will be ransomed when possible otherwise released, traitors will be executed when no titles are under their belt otherwise it will be removed from them, this also applies to family

6) The dynasty needs to be at least one hundred members big by the turn of the next century from the start date, in this case 869, through any means possible

7) Council members should only be family when possible and applicable, otherwise other members may be part of the council

8) The ruling member of the family will always have the largest amount of territory possible for the rank it possesses, always, which also means that Centralization shall be performed as soon as possible in order to get more territories under the same ruler, other family members shall have equal amounts of territory to avoid major confrontations between them

9) Peace shall always be enforced inside the realm and as soon as it is possible the vassals shall have all power removed including the council

Here are the links to the videos:

Ireland Pt. 10 – https://youtu.be/olL2IVljkLw

Ireland Pt. 11 – https://youtu.be/9BvmKiGxXQE

Ireland Pt. 12 – https://youtu.be/yNcUXPVcE-g

Ireland Pt. 13 – https://youtu.be/QDjE0DtG6o4

Ireland Pt. 14 – https://youtu.be/uXass7maqZ4

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/vicosurge

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vicosurgeplays

Crusader Kings II - Holy Fury: Powernexing Ireland (Week 2)

Week 2 of the Powernexing Ireland Campaign for Crusader Kings II, Holy Fury (3.0.1.1)

Battle Report of the Week:

For the second week of the Iron Man Powernexing Campaign we have made considerable progress in expanding our holdings and have doubled the amount of territory under our belt, the entirety of the island of Ireland is now under our control and we have taken over the crown of Wales as well and managed to keep it under one ruler in what could have potentially been a succession crisis.

Currently from our position we are bound to become the sole rulers of Britannia in a matter of decades if not potentially years, below is a sneak peak at what is to come the following week regarding the current path of expansion.

This is how we ended this week, the north of the Isles will be ours by inheritance through our bloodline, some other members of our family are also in France, Germany and the southern side of the Isles, at this rate we will have family helping us from the continent in case we needed so.

The screenshot above is a sneak peak of what has transpired during one of the sessions of next week, while expansion was considerable so was our threat and now, we have an eye upon us, have we failed to keep our cool and will we get the wrath of our neighbors on top of us, maybe another planned invasion? Find out next week on this thrilling playthrough of Powernexing Ireland/The Isles!

What is Powernexing?

Powernexing comes from Diplonexing, I’m not sure if I heard it first from Arumba or Quill18, which in turn means to quickly and without consequence annex territory from your neighbors without getting yourself in the middle of the crosshair, basically this means that we will get territory through border disputes, fabricated claims, intrigues, marriages or any other method that will get us more territory under our belt, but there is more to it than simply saying it, applying it is a whole different story but let me put this into context as we are slightly cheating here by choosing the right scenario.

Setting up the battleground:

As an old tradition I always start as a Count in either Ireland or England, it is not so much that I start as a Feudal or Tribal Count but rather this position allows me to experiment on different techniques and ideas that I have, in one playthrough I decided to start moving south instead of consolidating inside the islands so I eventually ended up with territory in northern France and northern Spain, in another instance I invaded Norway and Sweden then was crushed by the pagans in Finland, a fun playthrough, and as another old tradition we have done a playthrough in Russia and managed to get an Empire so large it was becoming very complicated to govern everything without more than two human players.

Agenda and Objectives for the Playthrough:

I always keep ideas in mind about how and what I want to do for a playthrough, for this particular one I came up with the following agenda:

Agenda:

1)      Test new mechanics from the DLCs past Horse Lords, this means using and abusing old mechanics too to accomplish our objectives

2)      Iron Man mode only, if I fail I fail, no reloading, no rage quitting, no cheating, nothing, it is what it is and the world keeps moving on with or without my intervention

3)      This is a single player campaign and no other players will intervene, for other playthroughs this could be different though

Objectives:

1)      Start as a Count and go all the way up to Emperor, this does not mean the title of Emperor must come from being the Emperor of Britania, it can be from any other Empire or forming our own

2)      The original culture of the founding character shall remain the same, any characters who do not have this culture will have it pushed into them

3)      The same applies for the culture inside Ireland, it shall always remain the same as well as religiously it shall remain Catholic, adjacent territories to Ireland shall eventually become of the same culture

4)      Only family shall control the counties, duchies and kingdoms under the main ruler, as the expansion continues everything shall temporarily remain under the hands of others but at a minimum, every mechanic shall be used to bring everything under the rule of the same dynasty

5)      Prisoners will be ransomed when possible otherwise released, traitors will be executed when no titles are under their belt otherwise it will be removed from them, this also applies to family

6)      The dynasty needs to be at least one hundred members big by the turn of the next century from the start date, in this case 869, through any means possible

7)      Council members should only be family when possible and applicable, otherwise other members may be part of the council

8)      The ruling member of the family will always have the largest amount of territory possible for the rank it possesses, always, which also means that Centralization shall be performed as soon as possible in order to get more territories under the same ruler, other family members shall have equal amounts of territory to avoid major confrontations between them

9)      Peace shall always be enforced inside the realm and as soon as it is possible the vassals shall have all power removed including the council

Here are the links to the videos:

Ireland Pt. 5 – https://youtu.be/4-3Pf-p4S6M

Ireland Pt. 6 – https://youtu.be/poS7ar-xWag

Ireland Pt. 7 – https://youtu.be/32gEjBlZQ78

Ireland Pt. 8 – https://youtu.be/eJqX1Y4XfqM

Ireland Pt. 9 – https://youtu.be/9sYDpupQBm8

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/vicosurge

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vicosurgeplays

Imperator: Rome, a sequel to Europa Universalis: Rome

At last, after so many years Paradox Interactive has decided to push out a new Grand Strategy game in the Roman Era, their previous development was called Europa Universalis: Rome and the expansion, Rome – Vae Victis, sure added something to the game but at the time I felt it lacking, needing much love and a revamp of some of the awkward mechanics inherited, from my own perspective, from an earlier version of Europa Universalis III and a limited engine, if memory does not fail me there was this great improvement on the Europa Universalis III engine that made it look fantastic from the original blob it presented itself like.

Something that stroke me as interesting when trying Crusader Kings II back when it came out was the fact that it shared some of the mechanics of the Rome game, it had individuals with their own goals and ambitions which could lead an army, govern, rebel, plot murder, all the goody stuff CK2 players enjoy so much nowadays was inherited and polished (after a couple of expansions, mechanic revamps and other things in between) to what we know today of it. From the side of Europa Universalis, I am unsure how much it was inherited but I can be sure that with the current version that is coming out, Imperator: Rome will greatly benefit from the Europa Universalis IV mechanics and the now polished Crusader Kings 2 mechanics.

At the time the images that have shown up look great and remind me so much of the original Rome games, there is no need to go for battles such as Total War, Total War is there for those huge epic battles on the ground that you can enjoy from the shoulder of the Legions you send down to cause havoc, no, we are here to enjoy the massive intricacies of the military (with hopefully improved upgrade mechanics that do not tie you to one update whenever the game feels like it and research that was arbitrary as hell), political (I can already see the civic faction breaking oh so many games, they broke so many of mine and caused so many rebellions I would change the people in power five times before I got to understand how the hell anything worked), diplomatic (hopefully as Rome you can get some sweet casus belli to expand your Empire all the way to Asia and also interesting decisions with your neighbors so they don’t eat you alive from the get go such as that little devil Pyrrhus breaking hell all over the shores of southern Italy) and religious system (some of the bonuses were really broken and the fact that you could get the total opposite to what you wished really made you think if you should even consider it on your to-do list but if you did not do it then you were asking for the religious faction on breaking your back every single time) of the Roman Empire.

Other mechanics that are coming back to my mind were the Legions your provincial Governors or Legate would command a Legion which in turn would start to become loyal to him, on one side this would be good because your treasury would be released from the much needed money during the early state of the game, on the other hand these men had become loyal to him so in case he rebelled they would stand by him no matter what, this would lead to some very interesting battles in which Legions would be fighting on the same square against other members of the same Legion who had fought with them side by side.

The sea battles were horrible, and I could never understand why the Romans would not capture more ships once they had discovered the retractable arm they could throw onto other ships, in real life this would give the Romans the advantage they needed over their much larger Carthagian foes as their sailors were not ready to face the might of the Roman Legion from ship to ship. The mechanics were oddly clunky and I was always praying my transported troops would make it to wherever they had to go because losing one of my Legions, any Legion, could cost me a bunch of territory.

Those barbarian invasions were also a hell of an adventure to deal with, I would leave regional legions (attached them to a local Governor who could be so useless at times) to defend tracts of land such as northern Italy (the alps mostly and using the bonuses of the mountains to my advantage) and fight the massive mothballs of up to 100K barbarians, sure the slaves and money I would get from them would be absolutely great and with the right politics you could get freedman and citizens in a considerably breeze (quite some time to be honest) which would in turn help Civilization push further out and bring the rest of the territories into being gloriously Roman (because what else is better than to have 100 Civilization and be the center of all European civilization, eh?)

As a Historian with a formal education one of the things that drove me to study History were the Total War and Europa Universalis games, I was amazed by the Roman and Medieval eras and to this day they continue to be some of my interests as a Historian, I also believe that teaching through videogames is one of the best ways for the current generations to learn about the many interesting aspect of Humanity (even if this vision is eurocentrist).

Now, if only Paradox Interactive would take their time to rework that Sengoku game they made, I know that would be another really interesting period to visit and while we are at it, a Victoria 3 game, anyone?

Crusader Kings II - Holy Fury: Powernexing Ireland (Week 1)

Week 1 of the Powernexing Ireland Campaign for Crusader Kings II, Holy Fury (3.0.1.1)

Last week I started a new Iron Man campaign for the latest DLC of Crusader Kings, Holy Fury, in order to help friends get up to date with the latest mechanics and some other interesting features I am seeing with other DLCs that we have not properly tried out since the time Horse Lords came out, at this point all available official DLCs from Paradox Interactive are active and the purpose of the Campaign is to Powernex Ireland as fast as possible, some explanation is in order.

What is Powernexing?

Powernexing comes from Diplonexing, I’m not sure if I heard it first from Arumba or Quill18, which in turn means to quickly and without consequence annex territory from your neighbors without getting yourself in the middle of the crosshair, basically this means that we will get territory through border disputes, fabricated claims, intrigues, marriages or any other method that will get us more territory under our belt, but there is more to it than simply saying it, applying it is a whole different story but let me put this into context as we are slightly cheating here by choosing the right scenario.

Setting up the battleground:

As an old tradition I always start as a Count in either Ireland or England, it is not so much that I start as a Feudal or Tribal Count but rather this position allows me to experiment on different techniques and ideas that I have, in one playthrough I decided to start moving south instead of consolidating inside the islands so I eventually ended up with territory in northern France and northern Spain, in another instance I invaded Norway and Sweden then was crushed by the pagans in Finland, a fun playthrough, and as another old tradition we have done a playthrough in Russia and managed to get an Empire so large it was becoming very complicated to govern everything without more than two human players.

Agenda and Objectives for the Playthrough:

I always keep ideas in mind about how and what I want to do for a playthrough, for this particular one I came up with the following agenda:

Agenda:

1)      Test new mechanics from the DLCs past Horse Lords, this means using and abusing old mechanics too to accomplish our objectives

2)      Iron Man mode only, if I fail I fail, no reloading, no rage quitting, no cheating, nothing, it is what it is and the world keeps moving on with or without my intervention

3)      This is a single player campaign and no other players will intervene, for other playthroughs this could be different though

Objectives:

1)      Start as a Count and go all the way up to Emperor, this does not mean the title of Emperor must come from being the Emperor of Britania, it can be from any other Empire or forming our own

2)      The original culture of the founding character shall remain the same, any characters who do not have this culture will have it pushed into them

3)      The same applies for the culture inside Ireland, it shall always remain the same as well as religiously it shall remain Catholic, adjacent territories to Ireland shall eventually become of the same culture

4)      Only family shall control the counties, duchies and kingdoms under the main ruler, as the expansion continues everything shall temporarily remain under the hands of others but at a minimum, every mechanic shall be used to bring everything under the rule of the same dynasty

5)      Prisoners will be ransomed when possible otherwise released, traitors will be executed when no titles are under their belt otherwise it will be removed from them, this also applies to family

6)      The dynasty needs to be at least one hundred members big by the turn of the next century from the start date, in this case 869, through any means possible

7)      Council members should only be family when possible and applicable, otherwise other members may be part of the council

8)      The ruling member of the family will always have the largest amount of territory possible for the rank it possesses, always, which also means that Centralization shall be performed as soon as possible in order to get more territories under the same ruler, other family members shall have equal amounts of territory to avoid major confrontations between them

9)      Peace shall always be enforced inside the realm and as soon as it is possible the vassals shall have all power removed including the council

Here are the links to the videos:

Ireland Pt. 1 - https://youtu.be/2WUdL1iDBjA

Ireland Pt. 2 - https://youtu.be/bXLrcRJgWWY

Ireland Pt. 3 - https://youtu.be/UAHOH7_30hA

Ireland Pt. 4 - https://youtu.be/tKX07S3voqw

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/vicosurge

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vicosurge

My journey through Paradox Games

It’s funny to think about how I got into Paradox Interactive Games by pure accident, I had seen the original Europa Universalis game at a Circuit City, guess how old I am, and as I kid I was always thrilled to find more games like Civilization and this game looked like it, but something told me that this was not for me, at least not yet, and I ended up buying Half-Life Blue Shift that day, a game which I enjoyed for a short time and then I stashed away until I sold it at a discount price because Steam keys and all being digital nowadays.

Fast forward many years later and I was going through a neighbors collection of items he has for sale on a weekly basis, there I found it, Europa Universalis III -Wow, the franchise has gone out this far out? Gotta give this a try- and after paying a dollar for the game I went home and installed it, I found it to be very plain of a game, an interesting concept but the game felt dated as hell, something was telling me there had to be more and while looking I noticed that screenshots for the game looked oddly different than mine and they all referenced versions that were way ahead than mine, turns out Steam had it and I came to find the wonderful world of DLC galore that Paradox brings to the table with every game they release.

But lets go step by step on this, I put the key in, install the game and wow does the world and engine feel completely different, the mechanics were so complicated and then I saw that the DLCs would bring in a lot of flavor to the game, eventually I did buy all the DLCs for EUIII and started to enjoy the game but then I found out that there was a game called Europa Universalis: Rome and Vae Victis, the grandfather of the upcoming Imperator game, I was thrilled to play something related to the Roman Empire as I was just starting my long journey, eight years now, to get my degree in History.

Rome and Vae Victis felt oddly dated but I found something satisfying managing to survive as any nation, thrive and eventually colonize half of the world while crushing the rest of it, harder than it would seem seeing that civil wars seem to be cyclical in this game and some of the mechanics were broken to the point where it was a bit pointless sometimes to play through the campaign.

If I’m not mistaken at the time Paradox had announced that they were releasing a new game called Crusader Kings II, the thought of this being the second iteration made me wonder how good the game could be that it had to get a sequel, I tried the demo out when it came out and I could, for the life of me, not grasp all of the mechanics but they felt oddly familiar from the world of Rome and Vae Victis and not so much from EUIII, I was thrilled to know more, when the game came out I got myself a copy, I must admit here that I did not own a legal one but I redeemed myself and bought the game later on with all the DLCs up to Holy Fury and I have done so with almost all of Paradox games to date.

There was a slight problem with Crusader Kings II though, when I played the game back then on its first iteration it was good but it lacked something, I suspected that DLCs would come out throughout the months or years and I was right on this, not that I was proud of this or anything since this is a considerable cost when you sum all of this up and yet I still bought all of the DLCs. The interesting part of Crusader Kings II is that I have managed to understand, with time, all of the mechanics and some of the dirtier secrets on how to play real evil, so evil that I did notice that the AI would sometimes offer you matrilineal marriages and you would not notice this with all the things going on at the same time, clever girl!

I also got a friend to play Crusader Kings II with me, we did it locally and managed to form an enormous Russian Empire that spanned up to where the Holy Roman Empire was and then some, parts of France belonged to my family because of clever marriages and some plots, plots which were heavily abused also, and were fragmenting Europe to the point the Muslims were on the south of France and in Italy, the Tsarina, a character that started her reign at five years of age, would be one of the most memorable characters I have used to lead a dynasty, she managed to double the size of the Empire, crush rebellions, all enemies, was loved by everyone, had equally distributed land between vassals to avoid huge power struggles which had almost tore the Empire apart during its early formation, no sinful traits, the epitome of catholic religion, yes, Russia became catholic because we could not wait to become Christians and push forward technologically, building and troop wise, staying as pagans had some benefits but none that we would consider that useful on the long run; I have also created Empires from the island of Ireland that made Britannia rule as early as the Norse invasions to the islands, unified Italy under Italian rule, managed to expand the Byzantine Empire as a loyal vassal who in turn would become the de facto Imperial Family of the Empire for centuries to come, all of this and more stories I have from Crusader Kings II, a great game that is a bit hard to get into with all the mechanics going around but nonetheless highly addictive and recommended for anyone really interested in understanding Medieval history. While I suspect that CK2 is coming at the end of its lifetime I am unsure if we will be seeing another sequel to Crusader Kings, CK2 has some flaws but in general you can enjoy and completely make or break the game at will.

Europa Universalis IV has never been my thing, since it never was it has become a very strange game for me that while I have a grasp on I cannot get through with most of the things that are going on, I need to basically read and re-read a ton of mechanics that I missed out on, I find this strange because CK2 was not like this, with CK2 I stopped for a long while and when I came back the game, while changed, still made sense and the mechanics became obvious to me, with EUIV I still struggle to this day and the fact that the game requires a considerable amount of resources from my computer has not allowed me to get on with trying the game out the way I want it to, also I am missing a lot of the DLCs because, again, this is not a game that I was really into and only one person that I know personally has ever played the game to the point where he had some understanding of the game but was in the same place I find myself.

Victoria II, Vicky 2, whichever way you want to call it is a game that I consider personally was left wanting after only two DLCs were released for it, the game is excellent and the mechanics used in the game are very peculiar, at first I would have thought that war was the key element but after being reminded that this is the age of Imperialism and Industrialization I quickly understood why the market was a key component of having the right resources, the right territory and why scrambling for Africa and Asia was such a huge deal, we managed to play this with four people and got very far before the game continuously crashed on us, the highest moment for me was making Mexico a Great Power and keep it at number one, annexing Texas, not having the US hand me my ass in open warfare, expanding the country to half of South America, parts of Egypt and Abu Dhabi, conquering Dai Nam and parts of China and having a 100% literacy all around the country while owning the Panama and Suez canals, surviving a Great War and seeing how Europe tore itself completely apart.

Hearts of Iron III and IV are games that I tried but ultimately never really picked up hard upon, while I enjoy the whole idea of playing through World War II and have managed to survive the red tide of the Soviet Union as many countries, also China becoming a massive crazy super power, I do not feel like there is much there to talk about, there are some really interesting challenges that include playing as Luxemburg but after HoI3 it was not of much interest to me, I got HoI4 because I expected something completely different and well here is where we are.

I am taking note that for all of the previously mentioned games there are several Mods that can improve or completely change the way the game is played or the story in general, while I get this I am concentrating purely on what Paradox offers natively, I have also not mentioned the free updates which include some very interesting changes to the base game, if you do not own DLCs you can still enjoy a good portion of the game and years later Paradox will eventually start unlocking some of the aspects of other DLCs into the game, like with Crusader Kings II, but this is many years down into the game and DLC have been on the market.

Making a slight stop here at one of the lesser known games of Paradox, Sengoku, which while a good concept I felt that it was a bit hard to get into and while it intrigued me I left it be for a while, just right now I found out that it was on sale at about a dollar and had to snatch it, will probably play the hell out of it to find out if maybe I was too fast to dismiss the game and Paradox should revisit a game that had a lot of potential or if this was indeed better left alone, it intrigues me though because Rome/Vae Victis took a while to have a sequel done, which is still being worked upon, so I’m wondering if either Victoria or Sengoku will ever get a sequel pushed through.

The last game on the list is Stellaris, this is a strange one because having played it from the beginning I always felt that the game was heavily lacking on all fronts, a very good concept and one that Paradox was willing to throw itself behind of, with the latest 2.2 “Le Guin” update the game was completely revamped to the point it is a completely different game, I will actually have to write an entire review about it because I feel that the changes done to the way resources are handled, the new market, planetary distribution, districts and buildings, some of the technologies and the fact that you are now only stuck with hyperlane technology, which makes sense in a way but this is debatable, and considering I went all in with the DLCs, including the new MegaCorp DLC, I can say that changes are good but finding a balance in this new game has been complicated due to the way I used to play the game, also Corporations are absolutely broken by the way they work in general and the Criminal Heritage civic gives some insane energy bonuses, having 250+ energy before the end of the first century was something I was not expecting but it is part of finding ways of breaking some of the mechanics.

Did I mention I like breaking the mechanics of these games as much as possible?

The History of why I shouldn't buy things I don't know too much about or how I learned to configure a Sun Server SunFire v100

Introduction:

This paper contains information regarding the initial opening, setup and deployment of a Sun Server SunFire v100. The paper may or will contain technical terminology including detailed information regarding every step taken on how everything was performed.

Opening:

The server came wrapped in bubble wrap, packing peanuts, air bags and was inside a cardboard box, the item is as described and as shown in the pictures provided by the eBay seller, it is a SunFire v100 Server, no rails included, has mounting ears, one of them has some oxide, on the back there is a Sun card which is used for configurations, the inside is in great shape and clean, seems as if it had been recently pulled out of production. Inside there are two IDE hard drives, 40 GB each, with 2GB of PC133 RAM split up in 4 modules of 512MB each one. The processor seems to be mounted with the heatsink but to avoid moving or messing with anything at this point, no cable has been included or any other accessories are available with this item. Final cost of item was 35 USD on July 2018 of which 12.50 USD was the cost of the item itself, the rest was for shipping and handling. This item was opened on July 14^th, Saturday, 2018.

Setup:

Connecting the server to a light source did not turn it on as it is with most servers nowadays, there is a switch but it was not flipped, to connect to the console a Toshiba Satellite machine with Windows 98 and serial port was used, a DB9 to RJ45 cable was used to connect to A/LOM on the back of the server, as it turns out LOM indicates that the server is on stand by mode through most of the commands and can power on through this method, doing so does power on the server and a full boot up took the server onto Solaris 5.10 which was configured with an AT&T business IP address, there was no information available or anything critical leftover on the server two hard drives.

Rebooting the server did not bring the system back to its original mode, it would seem as if the server has fallen back into net mode for no apparent reason and wants to forcibly boot into a PXE Server or some other server that will provide it a kernel so that it can work (this seems to be normal from back in the day on what Sun was doing). Going through the options it seemed logical to install another OS into the Server since Solaris was not working properly and the version, while still supported, was of no use to me and I would rather have anything else than this, such as Debian or Gentoo.

One of the initial issues found with the system, aside from the problem of not booting up, was making the Sunfire v100 stop trying to boot through net and go into anything else, on the LOM prompt this can be done first typing on the LOM prompt bootmode forth, this will stop the current boot process and take us to the OpenBoot prompt, in order to get to this prompt the Sunfire v100 has to be powered on (LOM>poweron).

Once the server has been halted it is easy to boot from the CD (or DVD, depending on what you may have on your machine, by the looks of it this has been somewhat rigged to use a slim CD-ROM but it could easily use a CD/DVD Burner from the looks of it, while I do have some slim readers/burners I have no intention of burning any CD/DVDs from this machine at this point), type the command boot cdrom and it should go into the CD, in my case it would not read the CD or would give me the error Fast Data Access MMU miss with, by all means, could mean that anything is not working properly inside the server and thus this is why it is not booting up.

Following some instructions I first disabled the auto-booting, this can be done (as indicated in this link: https://it.toolbox.com/question/fast-data-access-mmu-miss-in-sunfire-v120-061010) by doing setenv diag-level? max, then, setenv auto-boot? False, then, reset-all. If all commands are followed correctly the server will throw up all the things that it is currently doing and will not boot towards anything, it will simply reach the OpenBoot prompt and stay there (I have yet to find a way for ALOM to forward logs to a SIEM or any other log storage method so that these can be read elsewhere).

While doing so I got a warning about a possible issue with RAM, DIMM0 was the probable culprit per the initial boot-up so after shutting it down I removed it and booted back, the error still came up but I ignored it, at this point I wish I had not lost a whole day figuring out what to do when the error was in front of me the whole time.

Booting to a CD worked, I had issues probing for the drives but I decided to ignore it (later this issue would be resolved through a different method as provided by Oracle on some documentation they still have on their website). It took about a whole day for Debian to run the installation and in the end crashed, OpenBSD and NetBSD did the same, I had looked at a YouTube channel, Backyard Tech, in which he explains to another user the possible issues he could be facing with a Sunfire v120 (originally I had only intended to buy the Sunfire v120 but I found the Sunfire v100 at about the same price so I also went for it, the Sunfire v120 is another story that required a whole different document to explain the ordeal it will be to get it to work). One of the things he had mentioned was to burn the CD as slow as possible to have the least amount of errors, one of the steps I took to make sure that the system would load, but had mixed results. Having the Sunfire v120 at hand I changed the CD-ROM but found the same results with the CD which made me suspicious of the internal controller.

Since I had no way to change the controller or do anything else at this point I went back to square one and removed all the RAM, in the end the problem with the server was indeed the RAM, it would seem that either some of the sticks or ports were not working properly, leaving only one stick of RAM, on DIMM 3 (remember that RAM is inserted from back to front not the other way around, this is important and is notated on the documentation and the images provided on the cover plate of the Sunfire v100). At the moment 512.

A link with assistance on configuration of OpenBoot can be found here, the website contains all the necessary information to properly configure OpenBoot to boot to the correct disk once formatting has been performed and also to troubleshoot properly since I was originally not able to probe for SCSI or IDE drives, once the procedure was followed everything was showing up and working fine, boot up now takes me directly to Debian when turning it on so there is no real necessity at this point to go through the Windows 98 machine to work on LOM, this is being used only to monitor resources consumption at the moment: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2731/gkkvd.html.

With Debian installed there is another issue, installing it was no issue, interestingly it would not pickup the repository for sparc64 from the ports repository, could not add it manually either at that point so running with whatever the netinst CD had was what needed to be done at this point, the site for the sparc64 port indicates that some commands need to be run in order to get the proper software installed once the source.list file is corrected (all the information can be found here: https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64). The problem in the end is that the security repository for sid is not working, not sure why this is, and there is a considerable lack of packages available for the platform. While I could install apache2 and the compilers through build-essential, python3 and pip3, the packages for MariaDB Server 10.1, MongoDB or any other database aside from PostgreSQL are missing, as a matter of fact most of the libraries required to build MariaDB are missing from the Debian repository, for the last two days (Thursday 19^th and Friday 20^th) I have been compiling libraries to get MariaDB to run on the Sunfire v100. I know I could use SQLite or PostgreSQL but I would like to have MySQL/MariaDB available in my current Debian build