Remember my 64Gb Ipad last year? Well, it’s no more. I decided to sell it for a cut-price to a friend that he will use it more than I did. I must admit that this piece of hardware served its purpose for me. I found out how the gestures work, loaded up a hell of a lot of apps, but still; I never managed to get used to it on a day-by-day basis. Instead; I am carrying around mostly my Sony VaioP25G on which (guess) I have loaded up OSX. The most annoying thing about it is its GMA500 intel VGA card.
Take my advice: If you are into the hackintosh gig DO NOT take a laptop/netbook with this VGA embedded. The most you can take out of it (afaik) is native (1600x768x32bit) framebuffer desktop. No Quartz Extreme nor Core Image.
There seems to be a Korean guy that managed to take a video of his VaioP with full acceleration support
here:


I don’t know how he managed; I don’t speak Korean either, so anyone who might wanna help, please be my guest.

Despite all the economic problems, people have the urge to find reasons to celebrate. Even if the predictions for 2011 are not the most forthcoming (well; at least not for Greece...) we do have our hopes to keep us strong and willing. So; my best wishes for all of you and your families. Health and prosperity to everyone! Happy new year everybody!

Sadly, we people have very short memory. I reckon this to myself several times per day; sometimes it has to do with an algorithm I simply can’t remember, some other time it has to do with some historic-o-political event that I can’t quite recall.
Fortunately, I do have a personal mental assistant to this issue of mine and he is a live one; his name is Pantazis -Peter- Houlis an infamous mathematician and puzzle inventor, who -just by pure luck- has the same hobby with me: Arcade games... but not only that.

He has a great collection of puzzles and he invents some of the most impressive ones I have ever seen (even though I can’t manage to solve even a Rubic’s cube myself).
Lately, he added a small brick onto my amnesia wall serving me with the ability to remember (?) some of the ancient Greek puzzles this world knows. The pdf is in beta stage (not final) but he said to me I can post it for you here; so be my guest. Take your time; you’ll love it.

Thanks Peter!

Android comes from the Greek words ‘Andras’ which means ‘Human / Man’ and ‘Eidos’ which means ‘Species’. So a proper linguistic explanation in common English, should have been ‘Human-like species’, or ‘Something that possesses Human abilities’.
I know, this seems like a pretty heavy introduction for saying something that simple like: ‘Hey, I got a new droid phone’, but; you know, I am an info-addict so, let me do my thing...

So, it’s pretty obvious; I got a Dell Streak. There are many reasons for this. I just love its 5” display; 5mp camera with 720p video recording @ 30fps, pretty fast processor... and last but not least, its . I got it updated to Android 2.1 Eclair using various methods; some of them included a possible heart attack as a result of bricking a brand new expensive phone unit, but thankfully, I got it up and running pretty soon before that happened...
For 450 Euro off e-bay for a brand new device with 32Gb fast miniSD included, I *think* I got myself a bargain... (or not).

Let me get this straight. If you asked me 2 months ago whether I was going to buy an iPad or not; well, it was a matter of no discussion for me. I’d simply wouldn’t go for one...
Well, that was up until 3 weeks ago, when I ran into one of these little monsters. A friend brought it back from abroad (no you can’t find them here in Greece yet) and he offered it to me for five minutes to play with. It was the 16Gb one, wifi only model.

Next thing I remember, was me getting online and searching for one of it’s brothers. As I mentioned above, iPads are not officially available in Greece and you can get them ONLY from side-importers (usually overpriced). I got mine from ebay and I preferred the UK shopping over the mother-site over into the USA due import taxes. After a week’s searching I finally got my 64Gb wifi-only iPad. Remember I got this in a period that Euro was at it’s lowest exchange limit with the GBP and still; I got this for about 750 Euros (closest thing to this price in Greece was 1100 Euros).
+ =
I got myself into this task since day one. I wanted my new toy jailbroken and free to install everything I wanted on it. So after a short google digging I finally got my software of choice. It was called . It got my iPad jailbroken and ready to install Cydia apps. After that the world was (kinda) mine... Please be aware that if you make the process, your location services won’t be able to work after a reset. Here’s what you should do:

1. Go into ‘Settings->Wifi->network->IP Address’
2. Open a terminal on your mac or pc and write the following:
ssh (where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your ipad’s ip address)
3. When it asks you for a password enter ‘alpine’ (without the brackets)
4. Enter:
launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locationd.plist
5.Wait for 10 seconds and then enter this:
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locationd.plist

That’s it! Location services back on!
Short tutorial after the break:


I want to say that Apple did a great job on this one. I don’t know about the iphone4 but iPad is the king of tablet computing at the moment. If you can spare the cash, I would highly recommend it. Over and out.

It’s about 13 years now since I decided to maintain this page. Sometime at the end of 1997 I have learned about MAME and back then it was a real thrill, I tell you! Things have changed since; and if you could ask any of us back then, what it was going to be like after 13 years, no one could predict how big MAME was going to be.

Anyway; we are still here and doing the same (more or less) things. I certainly cannot claim I manage to play EVERY new supported game with every ‘u’ release, but I surely manage to keep alive the spirit; and hopefully will continue to do so within 2010 too.

Happy and prosperous 2010 friends; and manage to keep alive the child in you!

Ti’s the time to sing for ye all!
Ho Ho Ho! Meeeeery Christmas!
It’s also the time to think of those who suffer all around the world. Those among us who recently lost their ability to live the warmth of a house, or lost a person they love; or even lost them all and all they have left, is their loneliness...
Please take a moment to pick up the phone and make a warm wish. If you have the ability share some love, and if you don’t have some to spare, spare some money to someone who needs it.
We all do have something in common. We are ALL here; and we are so small and vulnerable.


Merry Christmas everybody!

I have purchased a used X1 a couple of months ago, mainly for GPS use. I do have to say that this must be the phone with the most rom-mods in existence nowadays. After a lot of try and testing, I have found myself one of the best -in my opinion- custom rom. It sure has some minor glitches, but you will love its speed and features. Read more and get it from here.
I strongly recommend to become a member it’s a great community forum afaic the wm devices.
Almost forgot. READ how to flash the rom before you try anything! You might end up with an expensive brick in your hands...

It took me about a day to clean up the mess the trojan horse has caused... I have also informed the host-master about it and guess what; the server pc has revealed about 1000 .js (javascript) files with the malicious code. As I grow old I can certainly become wiser; I must admit I didn’t know the specific technique.

A nice thing also, is that has removed the ‘threat’ window after 8 days (it says from 2 to 10 days in their memorandum, I guess it was fast enough from their point of view). Now you can surf safely, no malicious javascript crap-code here now.

Ah, finally, I will be away for a whole week, so don’t expect any frequent updates; and no, it’s not vacations. It’s a job trip to the other side of Greece (Florina). A side effect is that I may have the chance to meet with a couple of friends in between; Grip (Spyros) and George (Anastasiadis)... So, see ya in a week!

It seems Google had it right. Our server was compromised some time ago and a trojan horse injected javascript malicious code to every single html file that had web access to the outside world. This has happened to over 90 sites that is hosted there and guess what; gameland was one of them.

The issue is described here while it’s a little bit different in our case; it leads to some china mortgage site instead of the russian one (WTF...)

I still have an issue with google communication though. It’s the 3rd time within the past week that I have sent the review request and nothing happened. I must assume that there is no real people behind the form (some bot does the job).

...sigh!...

has decided that this site malicious software that installs without the user consent. I have to say two things:
A. Why on earth you people are not more specific about the threats you found? (ie: page ‘x’ contains malicious code, please remove it)
B. Why after reviewing a host-master’s message about false posting don’t act within a couple of days, or week (at least respond to the message!)

To all of the visitors here; I am sure most of you know why you’re here. This site has never distributed any malware, virus, cracks, drugs, pills, women, booze, crapware or whatever the google’s advisor might have thought it did. Just press ‘ignore this warning’ and get inside. I assure you; it’s as safe as ever. Of course you can choose otherwise and trust .
It’s fine! really!

Whacker

Probably the most exciting new feature of the internet today! Wolfram Research has released it’s online ‘all-knowing’ engine that can virtually answer to all your science (or not) questions. Give it a try here.

I don’t know if you have ever been in Greece so far, but I guess Easter it’s one of the best seasons of the year to be here. Everybody’s happy; except for the lamb! So, from my position (waiting for holy Sunday) I want to wish to everyone here happy Easter. Peace, love and prosperity to all of you!

Seems like yesterday when I first got myself into the emulation community. Sounds funny but all these years from 1997 up to now, is like someone kept me frozen in time. All those games of the past, the original ‘feel’ of the gameplay, just keep me thinking and feeling that I am still 14 years old... and maybe it’s true! Maybe I still am; not in my brain of course, but surely in my heart.
Happy new year everybody!

I found this little cutie linux-like santa somewhere in the net and I figured out that’d be cool to let him wish you Happy Holidays!

I’d like to give my best wishes to all you MAME fans and friends out there. May the new year be better than 2008 and worse than 2010. Health and Prosper everyone!
Whacker

I can tell you, I can rarely remember a worse Christmas in my life. Politic controversies, youth explosive attitude, a dead 15 year old boy who was shot from the gun of a police officer; all happening here in Greece... In any case, human history has shown that the worst we people do is to forget. I’d add: ‘to ignore’ too.
Goodbye Alex...

You know I’m an Apple fanboy since sometime in the early 80’s but as I grow older I think all my computers will be with an apple on the top of them...
New MacBooks out today. Enjoy them here.

It's like being a boy and you're expecting your new toy, like... forever! I have been on the waiting list of Apple Greece for about a month and 5 days, but it's finally here:

It's the 1.8Ghz model but not the SSD one. It has an 1.8" 80Gb hard disk inside and -frankly- I prefer it over a +999$ upgrade to the solid-state 64GB disk one. I am into computers for about 2.5 decades now and I can say this: It's like you have been on an average-everyday car for 25 years. Driving it from home to work and back, taking your kids and wife on vacation... And then, you decide to treat yourself a brand new Ferrari. You know you shouldn't, but yet you just did it. This is exactly my experience of my first 48hrs with my new Macbook Air... and you know what? I definitely like it!
Whacker

Here's another one to celebrate. I hope every single one of you have the best in this year. Hopefully this will be better than the last one and worse than the next one. Happy 2008 everybody!

Whacker

I guess life is something you can never understand due to many reasons. Predicting the future would be a nice addition -if you ask me- to make our lives better. On the other hand, most of us, due to our incapability to predict the future, tend to believe that life itself, will last 'forever'; well apparently, it will not.
My dad 'left' for the big trip last week, aged 67. He was that kind of person you could call 'bon vivere', he was very 'alive' very pleasant and had the motto: 'live your life the best way you can'...
Sadly he left early, after 4 months in the hospital due to a heart attack episode, but I can tell you, he loved every one of his moments...
He was the one who told me about the arcade games when I was a kid, and got me there to play 'galaga' back in the '80s. He also loved Ms Pac-Man; I had him fixed a MAME PC last year - he used to spend hours and hours there... His only problem was 'why can't I have more than 5 lives?'...
Well, dad in this one, we only have one; and sadly, we don't get another coin.

I'll miss you...
Your son.

We, the people of Peloponnese have all been through it, for over 20 days. Rain forests of southern Greece are pretty much history now. Where there were green leaves; now lies only blackness and ashes. I personally try hard when I'm going to work every morning to keep myself calm. Anyway...
A friend sent over a petition page today about the forest fires. You can read what's all about and sign for it by clicking here. The more who sign this, the better. If you have been through a similar situation then you know that's important. Thanks for your participation.

Whacker.

Tags: Greece Forest Fires, Petition

Time is an extraordinary healing machine. One day you lose someone you love, after several few, you just get over it. Well, let's hope we don't forget the significant parts after the disaster. Southern Greece has lost much more than the fire death-toll of 65 persons... We lost a lot of it's natural beauty and the natural protections the rainforests were providing all these decades. Let's all hope for the best.

Whacker

There are no words to describe the sadness of a human that faces the corpses of a burned mother holding her four children lying on black ground; only a few kilometers away from where our Greek ancestors first established the Olympic games. There are no words to describe the disaster that stroke Greece the last five days. There are no words to fill the gap in our hearts and the anger in our minds... Who is behind all this? Why nobody couldn't prevent it? Why nobody couldn't stop it?
The whole world faced the burned ground of "Kronion hill". The last moment the fire-fighters could manage to prevent the fire from burning the Olympic museum. The death-count in Greece at the time being is 63. Sixty Three people lost their lives in this fire-madness. About a thousand more have no place to live. They lost everything. Yesterday the fire in Kalamata reached about 800m from the house of my parents. God bless the pilot guy, who made two flights and managed to pour the water at the right spot so that it was extinguished just before the first house in Yiannitsanika. It's like being in a war of terror...
I hope nobody in the world finds himself / herself in a position similar to what we are living the past five days. God help us all to find the courage to live after all this. We need lot's of it to face, every day from now on, a once beautiful green place; now turned into an black, ugly, ghost cemetery full of ashes and carbonized trees.

NEVER AGAIN!

A horrendous disaster has been over our heads for the last couple of days. Ashes and thick smoke fills the air here in Kalamata. 52 people at the time being have lost their life in this extreme fire madness. The whole Peloponnese is suffering and many people have lost their homes, their property, their animals. I definitely believe this whole fire-blast was pre-organized by someone or many. The huge question-mark here lies after the word "WHY". I have managed to find some photographs for you from a local newspaper site. You can view them here.

Also there's a video that a friend send me. Click on the following image to watch a helicopter fighting with fire. His family blog is here (in greek).


Let's hope all this will end soon. I keep feeling I'm missing someone I love every single minute.

As of yesterday, I'm officially relaxing. The feeling of having nothing to do is what I need right now for atleast 2 weeks. There are a few things to worry at work, but I'm gonna have to deal with them later. Wish you all happy summertime!

Microsoft never got me 'wowed' no matter how hard they try. Well, at-least up until now. Check out this link here and review the new way of the things to come. Amazing...

There are a few changes in my personal life the past two weeks, which kept me from updating this site. I'd like to let you in most of this stuff, since I find them amusing; and hopefully you will like to get involved too.

Mac OSX86

This is not new, it's a task that kept me busy for the last few months. I'd define it as the way to transform an ordinary PC to a Mac-like machine able to run MAC OSX software. It's not as simple as it sounds and definitely needs a lot of work and RTFM study, in order to make it happen. Nevertheless, it will worth all the pain and loss of sleep you may lay on it. A nice place to start is an article I have posted about the subject to our friendly site, cdrinfo.com. Don't expect accuracy, it's not there, since at the time it was written the knowledge base was somewhat limited. So, read without prejudice and follow the links. Hopefully I'll be able to support many of you if you have questions in the near future. The article is located here.

Whack-a-Godfather

After 9 months of wait, a baby came in town. My best man Maddog (former poster in this site) became a father and guess what, I'll be the Godfather! I must state here that this little guy is beautiful (and currently very hungry) and I'll personally make sure that he'll keep himself on the right side of the road (aka: retrogaming)

My New iPod

On May 21, I had my nameday. I got lot of presents and a great deal of love from all my friends (thank you dearly). A present that I definitely couldn't resist was an iPod 5.5G (80gb) Video that I was offered. It's an amazing machine, but unfortunately it's not (currently) able to fulfill my 1st rule for any portable machine I own... to play MAME!
The thing is that every single other model of iPod is able to run a specific version of Linux that's capable to run a port of MAME, but due to some HD controller issue, the specific model is not able to recognize the ext3 partition at this moment. I'll wait and enjoy the rest of its capabilities for the moment and I'll keep you posted of any changes.

Whacker

Two days ago we celebrated the Orthodox Easter here in Greece (and everywhere in the world, actually...). I would like to express my best wishes to everyone out there, whether you're an Orthodox Christian or not. May the light of God enlighten the minds of those who control our future. Peace and prosperity to you all.

Whacker

I have been staring at it since yesterday. I can't figure out what exactly is that I want more: The mac inside the phone; the media capabilities; the wifi internet browsing (Edge won't play in Greece); the 8Gb embedded memory; or the OSX intergrated OS?...

Gosh, I want one soon!

It's now known that I'm proud of the place I live. Kalamata, Greece looks marvelous in the summertime but it's also nice during the winter. I'd like to share with you the first sunset of 2007, in a photo i got with my cellphone today. I replaced my previous windows background with this, hope you like it like I do.

Whacker.

We'd like to wish a very happy and peaceful 2007 to everybody. May this year bring happiness all around the world, an equal life to the poor nations, food to those who are starving and love among us all. The faster we all understand that we are participants in the same game, this world will be a better place for all of us...

I hope this post finds everyone with his/her family. I wish you and your beloved ones health, prosperity and love. May 2007 will have no wars, no hunger, no natural disasters. Let's all help this world become a better place for us and our children. Let's all use our car less, walk more, plant a tree... Ah, and don't forget to play old arcade games!!!
Merry Christmas and a happy new year everybody!

Whacker

It seems that our old server is dead and buried. Nothing to complain about though, it served it's purpose more than its computer guts could bare; for almost a decade. We are in a new home now and as you can understand there are a few things to move along from the old site. This is not as easy as it sounds, but hopefully, we'll manage to make it look good again.
Thanks for your understanding and Happy holidays to you all...

Whacker