Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

Exclusive Club

I had to alter the MultimediaWiki permissions to disallow new user registrations. There was a curious case of vandalism that was suspected to be a bot which would register a new 6-character username and use that username once in order to either delete a large swath of text from a random wiki page or delete all the plus (+) symbols from a random wiki page. The latter vandalism could be far more damaging if left unnoticed. There might be better access control mechanisms but I wanted to cut this nuisance off quickly. I finally upgraded to the latest MediaWiki verison in the 1.6 line and am looking into a 1.9 upgrade as well. There are probably better controls in the latest line, though they are likely sparsely documented.

Every time something like this happens I always find myself wondering what the originators of the wiki concept were thinking in the first place. A wide open website where anyone can edit anything. And we’re supposed to just trust everyone to behave. At least there are trade-offs built in to the software that can be adjusted, as I did today. It just stuns me to realize how fragile the model is, how much more damage someone could do if they wanted, and what kind of measures that Wikipedia must have to take to thwart this on a larger scale.

HD Hotel

IMDb reports: High-Definition Movies Coming to Hotel Rooms. The story says that the capability will be provided by an outfit named nSTREAMS; they presently produce all kinds of large boxes that provide multimedia entertainment to hotels, hospitals, schools, and karaoke bars. I don’t see any boxes on their website that specifically tout HD support, but they must be coming soon.

I gained a small interest in these hotel-based entertainment solutions just recently when I came across a thorough investigation of something called the Famicombox, apparently a pay-per-play NES solution installed in hotel rooms a long time ago. These systems never made it to the U.S., but there were successors at least in the N64 generation and I believe for the SNES as well. I think PlayStation might have gotten in on the hotel action as well.

ROM-Based FMV

I found out that the Nintendo 64 version of Capcom’s timeless Resident Evil 2 features FMV. This is amazing given that that the game is cartridge-based and only has 64 megabytes of data. According to some reports I have read, the N64 version had essentially the same FMV content as the the original PlayStation version had (which came on 2 CDs and had dedicated FMV decoding hardware at it disposal).

I’m sure I’m not the only person to wonder how this N64 FMV works.

Further, I read that the Neo Geo version of the 1994 remake of Double Dragon featured a FMV clip from the hilariously absurd 1994 movie. Naturally, I’m curious how that video was stored. I believe the Neo Geo was another strictly tile-based console which would have required vector quantization.

Trixter’s Favorite Text Editor

If you think I’m obsessed with long-obsolete software and technology, I’ve got nothing on Trixter. This guy actually had a bake-off to determine which text editor performs best on an original 8088 PC. Forget vi vs. Emacs. Check out main article. Actually, vi is a contender but it didn’t fare well.

Check out Trixter’s blog for more classic hardware hacking, including information on how he is reworking his infamous 8088 Corruption PC video demo.