BT, or Youview rather have introduced a new games channel/app/services to their selection of apps that are provided with the service. These are in a similar style to the games offered previously to Sky (Gamestar and PlayJam) and the ones offered on cable where they run directly off the STB and have to be loaded each time they are accessed. The games are rather simplistic in nature due to the limited capabilities of the hardware that Youview is based on, which was originally released in 2012.
Still, better late than never. On a similar note Sky also offered a similar service through their Sky Q service, and Virgin Media offered buyable games on their Tivo platform (Unsure if this is present on the 360 box, which is a different software platform)
Tetris
The game we all know and love. The background music plays for a minute, stops, and fails to loop. This leaves you with eerie silence. A leaderboard with high-score is available, and you can enter your own name. This only appears to show personal players’ scores, it does not show scores from other players online.
Rummikub
I have no idea what the fuck this game is about, the instructions are too long and I lack the attention span to even care. I try to put numbers on the board but the thing won’t let me. I guess its like Scrabble with numbers?
Pongal
Football/soccer-themed pong game. The opponent AI seems to have been lifted from Mario Party since it’s possible to win by doing nothing. The options menu lets you change the game’s difficulty and the speed of your opponent.
SuperMaze
A simple maze game where you control a ball that highlight the squares of the maze when moved, The objective is to highlight all the maze squares which will progress you to the next level. Music sounds like a Butlins/Thomas Cook advert
Bubble Jam
Puzzle quest-type game, the objective is to clear the board by popping bubbles of the same colour in segments of three or more.
QuizTV
A bunch of Buzzfeed-style questions that consist of ‘What kind of character are you?’ or ‘How well do you know this show’ – Most of these will appeal to an American audience with very few subjects regarding British TV shows or music.
Carrot Mania Space
A platform game, you have to collect all the carrots in a level whilst avoiding the rival foxes. This game seems to have a few achievements implemented.
Letter Wizard
A countdown/wonderment style game where you have to find a word in a scrambled set of letters. You can swap certain letters out and receive bonuses for longer words or for using certain letters.
Super Collapse
Here you have to try to clear the board of all colours, whilst a new row is added every 10 seconds. You can only delete in blocks of three or more.
Gem Matcher
The controls on this game are a joke, will the up and down buttons being used to adjust the angle, but the left key will quit the game and the right key will bring up the help screen, which takes a few seconds to load. As for the gameplay itself, you have to aim and throw gems in order to clear the screen by adjusting the angle, along with the power of the shot. Some gems take more shots in order to break. Like Tetris, the music on this game does not loop and will stop after a few seconds.
Summary
Overall it’s a good addition to the Youview service, though there are some early quirks present that will hopefully get ironed out within the coming months. There are a few performance issues with some of the games, particularly with SuperMaze. As this was running on the BT TV Pro box, this might be more of an issue with older Youview units.
Still in the future we could see more games being added to the service, in addition to more TV gaming providers like PlayJam (Who still exist) and even cloud gaming services like PlayStation Plus (Formely PlayStation Now), Google Stadia or Xbox Live Cloud. BT already offer Xbox Gamepass as part of their broadband and TV bundles. Still this will require dedicated controller support which will have to be included within the Youview software.
Here is Mandrake 7.0, an operating system based on the original Red Hat Linux distro. I tried to get this OS running previously last year after trying it in Vmware and Virtual Box – to no luck. Pcem, and 86Box did make some good progress but the PC I was running at the time wasn’t capable of emulating the Pentium CPU that was recommended to run, which resulted in a lot of speed dips. Fast forward a year and a new PC, and I’d through we give this another try. Also remember this is 90s Linux, which is a ghetto compared to modern Linux (which I barely understand how to use)
Running in 86Box
First attempt
DataExpert EXP8551 – Had a few failures with this one, the initial motherboard that was chosen had issues detecting the CD-ROM disc, or the drive itself. As the motherboard lacked native CD-ROM booting, we had to use the included boot floppy disk which would load a basic kernel with a couple of CD-ROM drives. However non of these worked with the DataExpert EXP8551 motherboard, and so we had to change the board to another one, this time a Gigabyte GA-586IP which worked with the floppy boot disk
Second attempt: Gigabyte GA-586IP – This one seemed to work fine, at least except for the keyboard when in safe mode. Not sure why since we are emulating a regular PS/2 keyboard.
Once we got the install up and running, it was possible to progress through the install as normal, selecting a typical install that would then install the required packages.
At some point, we are asked to provide some details regarding the hardware installed so that Mandrake can detect and install the correct drivers. The X window system requires a supported video card that can provide some sort of graphics acceleration, here I used an S3 Trio PCI video card with 2MB of video ram, that is supported in 86Box. I had used other video cards which will bring up an error message that the X server cannot start due to the video card being unsupported. When you make a selection you are advised to test the configuration, where you can select the screen resolution and refresh rate, the colour depth also.
You can do this, but I’m always paranoid the OS will crash if it does not correctly identify or load the correct driver for the video card, even worse on 86Box, where there might be an emulation or inaccuracy issue that causes the OS to crash. If needed you can leave the graphics settings as they are, then change them once we have an OS.
Mandrake will ask a few more questions, like if you have any further PCI devices, network cards, user accounts and admin password settings. Once you are done, the OS will reboot. Remember to eject the floppy or CD when you are rebooting.
Once booted, you will be at the login screen, remember the username and password you set up earlier, you have to enter it manually here, there are no username icons to click like in Windows XP or Mac OS 9. From here you can choose the desktop environment, two common options are KDE and GNOME that you will recognize from modern Linux distros, but a few others exist also. I recommend KDE, as GNOME & Enlightment looks more like a mid-90s RTS game in this distro. Enlihtmetnt also shows up in GNOME. First time logging in will be a bit slow as Mandrake tries to prepare the desktop, or workspace as Linux calls it.
OF you don’t see the login screen and only see some weird-looking command prompt screen, type startx to start the X window system, if that doesn’t work then you need to check the video card you installed is supported and installed correctly.
Kudzu
When you add hardware to Mandrake, this triggers the Kudzu utility to run, which detects the hardware and set’s up the correct driver, if Mandrake has one built-in, otherwise you will have to specify where to install the driver from, good luck with that…. The only problem here is the keyboard stops working when Kudzu is triggered, meaning I cannot select anything and Kudzu ends up timing out and then proceeded to boot Mandrake as normal.
I’m not sure if this is an issue with the motherboard or the super I/O controller that causes the issue with the PS/2 keyboard, this motherboard dates from around 1996 whilst this OS came out in 2000, so it should be more or less compatible. Because of this, I’m not sure if any devices added are actually working, I added a PCI ethernet (AMD Pcnet_) but was unable to perform any sort of network activity.
Sound
On the subject of adding devices, I tried to get the sound to function, since I intended to play a few early Linux games like SimCity 3000 which had native Linux ports. For this, I had to use a SoundBlaster 16 sound card, which was an ISA non-plug-play card that required There is a utility that can be used to install the soundcard, but this requires that you know your soundcards IRQ and DMA channel parameters (You can get these from the 86Box settings, and even change them if there’s a conflict) There’s an opportunity to test the sound by playing a short sound clip, which is Linus Torvalds telling you how he pronounces Linux The sound did work somewhat, I could playback MIDI files but after the OS was active for a while the sound would start to crackle. I’m not sure how to fix this and am wondering if this is just a glitch with the emulator.
Additional drives
This I also struggled with since Mandrake only detected one floppy drive (I had configured two 1.44MB floppy drives on both the emulator and the BIOS), and had added a ZIP drive. This was detected upon bootup but I’m not sure how to mount or access this from either GNOME or KDE.
Bootup
Another thing I noticed is that Mandrake will check drives for errors every once in a while, this happened because I left the date set at the motherboard default (1994), when I changed it to 2000 and booted it up it performed a check on all drives partitions.
GNOME
One of the desktop environments, this bares a lot in similarity to Microsoft Windows of the era, which isn’t a bad thing and can be customized once you are used to the mandrake interface. Here you have your standard taskbar with a set of icons, the first (Which looks like a foot) brings up a Start-like menu with a list of different applications installed
The second icon is your help button, with brings up the Gnome help browser, which looks similar to a standard HTML browser, not like the Windows 98 help. The third icon is the GNOME configuration, which will host settings in relation to GNOME itself. Here you can change elements like the desktop background or the default window manager, which by default is Enlightenment. To a regular user, this might seem confusing as coming from Windows you are going to be familiar with the concept of Windows Explorer, which aces as the file explorer and window manager. But in Linux, this has been outsourced to various different components. Whilst this is supposed to give a lot of flexibility, it is generally considered to be a lot more confusing, and in the end is just another component that could go wrong, what happens if a window manager isn’t fully compatible? Lastly are the icons for the terminal (You’re gonna be using this a lot in Linux) and Netscape internet browser, and an icon for organizing multiple desktops. You can hide the bottom bar by clicking either the left or right arrow buttons, which will slide the taskbar away. You can then unhide by clicking on the same button Overall it’s quite a nice feature-packed environment, not ideal for the basic user but for those who have an advanced workflow, I can understand why some people would prefer this environment.
Enlightenment
Looks to be a standard window manager used with GNOME. This isn’t much on an environment on its own, although you can select it from the login screen and it will just bring up the Enlightenment elements. This seems to tie in with GNOME, and when logging in with GNOME, Enlightenment will start The pager acts as a way to manage multiple desktops and windows and lets you move between the different window environments, it will also create and display a snapshot thumbnail of the running application There are menus that can be brought up, left-clicking opens the User Menu, which lets you open most KDE or GNOME applications. This has to be done on left-clicking on the desktop, without the cursor hovering over an icon. It’s a bit fiddly to access and isn’t much use when you have a full-screen application running. Right-clicking will bring up the settings menu, which is just for Enlightenment. Here you can change the various elements and preferences, like setting the default theme to be used for Enlightenment or the desktop background. As mentioned, several themes are available which can be changed, the default is BlueSteel which you can see above, others available are Apple Platnum which gives a Mac OS 8/9 feel, Aliens which is just creepy for an OS, Absolut_E, BeOS which is styled after the OS itself, Blue_OS which gives the OS a nice shade of blue, GTK+ and lastly minEguE which actually looks sleek and modern despite the name looking like someone had just mashed the keyboard.
Lastly, you can set animations and effects for when you open or move a window, like when you open an application, it can slide in quickly from the side, this will depend on how powerful your computer is and what effects are supported by the video card.
KDE
The default desktop environment that comes with Mandrake, you can log in to this by changing the desktop environment on the login screen.
A few default themes, including a MacOS knockoff, a BeOS knockoff & an Alien Xenomorph skin (Who asked for this nightmare theme?)
Applications
There’s a lot to cover here, although not all applications were functional. I’m not sure if it’s due to missing dependencies that didn’t get installed or if something went wrong when selecting the applications to install.
ENU emacs: Popular text editor with a few features added on
gEdit: Commonly used text editor, it’s like the Windows Notepad but has a few more features packed in for software development.
Gnumeric 0.46 : A spreadsheet application, not sure how well this deals with a regular Excel formatted spreadsheet. This was before the advent of OpenOffice, or LibreOffice.
GtimeTracker: This seemed to crash the entire system when used? I would guess this is some sort of timer or an alternative to Microsoft Project.
Gxedit: Another text editor, this seems more geared for HTML instead.
Multimedia
CD Player – Plays standard redbook CD audio, for 86Box make sure you mount a BIN/CUE file with its CUE file intact and it should work fine.
kmpg (Audio MPEG Player) – This one was unreliable, some files would playback albeit in a garbled form, sometimes it would playback just fine. Also occasionally throws an error message that your decoder has gone to nirvana, Kurt Kobain has my decoder?
I’m not sure how the MP3 codecs were implemented on early Linux distros, since MPEG Layer audio was a patented format that required royalties. Unless it’s using the SoundCard to decode, but I doubt the SoundBlaster 16 has any MPEG decoding capability, let alone MP3 support.
My guess is there is some sort of free reverse-engineered package that does the decoding, and the application simply taps into it to play back the MP3 codec file.
XMMS – The default audio player. This is hard to see since the user interface was too small and I couldn’t get it to play anything
kMP3 – Managed to get an MP3 player to playback in this application, but it was also unreliable. Some files would play a garbled sound at the start of the file, but would then play back normally, others would play back just fine. Perhaps it doesn’t play back well with Mp3 files that are encountered with a certain bitrate, or encoder?
AudioMixer (GMIX 3.0) – This allows you to change the different volume control settings for your soundcard, along with the MIDI, Microphone and CD audio output.
kModBox: Opened but then froze the entire system?
Games
AisleRiot: Some sort of card game, like the Windows Solitare
FreeCell: Another card game, also very similar to its Windows relation
gataxx: Did not work, the game would not start
Glines: Another game that refused to run
Gnibbles: it’s a snake clone, similar to the Nokia versions but has a few extra features like multiplayer (Local only, use different keys on the keyboard) and different levels. Different pills have can have certain effects, like the yellow ones increasing the length of your snake considerably, whilst the red one reduces it (some sort of diet pill?)
GnobotsII: An interesting game with bizarre movement controls, here you have to move in a certain direction to avoid the enemy robots from killing you. The controls are a pain here since they are mapped bizarrely on the keyboard, i.e Y is up and left, N is right and down, L moves you right. Help file loads in Netscape browser, and is written using size 8 font making it difficult to read
Gnome Chess: A regular chess simulation game, played from a 2D view.
Gnome Mines: Its just the Windows minesweeper
Gnome xBill: The infamous game where you have to prevent Bill gates from installing Windows on various systems, sadly this refused run
Gnome-Stones: Have no idea what this game does, and there is no help file or any listing or instructions
Gtali: Some sort of poker game? I had no idea how to play this one either
gTuring: What in the fucking fuck is this?
Iagno: Some sort of boardgame where you have to flip what looks like checker pieces.
Mahjongg: A typical Mahjong clone
Same Gnome: You can change the pattern of the objects to planets, marbles or stones
xsolider: Looks like a space invaders game, I couldn’t get this to start even under the KDE environment
xhextris: Not Tetris, HEXtris played with hexagon symbols using another weird keyboard layout, you have to use J to move left and L to move right, instead of using the keyboard arrow keys or WASD
Kpacman: a pretty good Pacman clone, looks almost like the arcade original
Ktron: My favorite game so far, probably because it’s the only one that isn’t a mindfuck to play. It’s Disney’s Tron
Smiletris: Some sort of Tetris with small 3-piece shapes?
Graphics
Electric Eyes: Some sort of image/photo viewer
gPhoto: Looks to be a photo editor, I tried to get it to open a GIF file but it ended up crashing. An application on Mandrake simply quits to the desktop, no error message, illegal operation or error reporting notification.
Gqview: Seems to be an image viewer, although this had issues reading from the CD-ROM. It does give shortcuts to popular image editing applications that are installed on the system for editing.
The GIMP: Popular and well-known Photoshop alternative
xPaint: Functions like MSPaint on Windows, a bit difficult to get used to, but once you get used to its interface its quite feature-packed.
Internet
Netscape: The popular web browser
KRN: Looks like a newsgroup browser/reader? Sadly without any network access were unable to test further
An existing Windows 3.1 installation is required to launch setup, and this release can be considered an upgrade of sorts. However very little gets transferred over, likening it to a fresh install
Results of the hardware detection, our SoundBlaster 16 is not detected, and neither is our network card.
A crash towards the end of the setup, this left the VM unbootable and we had to reboot into MS-DOS to launch the Chicago installer again. Providing you told setup to install in a different folder (Chicago instead of WINDOWS) then you can easily boot back in Windows 3.x
Installing again fixed it, no hardware change was done. Could just be a random bug in the install?
Upon first boot, Windows ‘explorer’ will convert your program manager groups to the ones that Chicago will use.
You will see that what we know as Windows Explorer will be known as File Cabinet.
The File Cabinet looks a lot like My Computer from the final builds of Windows 95.
The Main program group, it seems there are still elements of the old Program Manager present.
Windows Metrics, also known as just Metrics lets you adjust various user interface components, and lets you save and apply certain themes. There are currently no themes included by default.
Disk drive information for both floppy drives and hard disk drives, looks a lot better and more detailed than the final release.
System Information, shows build version and the amount of memory installed. Resourceses refers to the Windows GDI.
What looks to be device manager, a lot of things here are incomplete and show up as blank dialog boxes.
A heavily dithered graphic.
Right-clicking and bringing up the properties pane.
The full file browser, known as the file cabinet. An issue I found was this build does not show more than five drives, which is possible if you attach multiple SCSI drives. Since the floppy drives are useless in this build you might as well get rid of them.
Viewing and modifying the screensaver. All of these came from Windows 3.1
Modifying the desktop background
A list of games, and a look at Minesweeper game that comes included
The task pane, also you can customise the size of the taskbar. This seems like a docking area where icons can pinned for quick access, instead of displaying the active windows like Windows does today. Instead the tasks window serves this purpose.
Software Compatability
Seems to be a very mixed bag in terms of what works and what fails to run. The full Win32 API has not been implemented so 32bit applications will not work and existing Windows applications seem to have a mixed compatability with some programs refusing to run or crashing.
Microsoft BOB
Installs but does not run. Instead a Dr Watson error comes up
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office 4.3 installs and runs without issues
Netscape
This is odd, it installed but then claims not to find the exe file when we try to open?
Opera
Opera browser, installs fine (in another language for some reason, despite English being selected)
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer 3 had a 16bit release for Windows 3.1 which should work on Chicago build 58 but it’s unable to run
Simpsons Cartoon Studio
The application tried to run in full screen, but the task bar on the bottom remains visible. Alos the Office toolbar (From the Office 4.3 install) remains visible. Another thing to note was the game failed to start using the shortcut provided by the installer, and only worked instead by navigating to the CD-ROM drive and launching the CD-ROM executable from there.
Adobe Reader
Installs and works fine, but it looks like a few graphics are missing from the installer and are replaced instead by a white box. This could be a driver or emulation issue with the Cirrus Logic video card used.
The third release of Mac OS X, let’s hope the bugs from the last version were fixed in this build. Some screenshots come from QEMU (4:3) and off a real PowerMac G4 (16:10)
The desktop, not much has changed from Puma, aside from a few new icons in the dock.
QEMU has a few issues running this build of OS X relating to the finder, where the main Finder window will not open correctly. As a workaround, you can click on the Go menu and then select the window you wish to open.
The emulated IDE controller also has a few issues with a blank/duplicate hard disk.
Install
Install procedure remains the same as the previous versions, with the ability to modify what components are installed. Print drivers were removed since we are never going to use them in QEMU, and we also dont need any additional languages.
Setup
After the install we are presented with the registration wizard.
Desktop
Appears mostly the same as Puma, although you lose the pinestripes out of the dock. Finder window appears to be the same as Puma, with some elements of Windows explorer included which gives it a browser-based feel with the back and forward buttons.
Rendezous is a feature that you will come across in OS X, this allows for local network devices to discover one another, typically used for media devices like DVR (Digital Video Recorder), and Printers. This was later renamed Bonjour, although the technology remains the same. In Safari you can view any local webpages offered by supported devices, such as the configuration webpage of certain routers, and in iChat you can use it to discover other users that have Rendevous enabled. Many OS X applications make use of this technology.
Sound: Works somewhat if you use the screamer audio builds from emaculation. It’s not very good quality audio with stuttering and crackling when playing mp3 audio via iTunes (This might have more to do with the emulated CPU running at 200MHz. Eventually the sound just gave up one time and I had to reboot the OS to get it back.
Applications
iTunes – Version 3 comes bundled with this release and serves as the default music player. This release predates the iPod and the iTunes store, and thus cannot sync without an update.
iChat – Apple’s alternative to MSN Messenger, which supports AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) accounts. works to some extent, whilst the online service will no longer allow sign-in from this client, we can enable Rendezvous chat to communicate with other compatible users, at least on the local network. iChat was originally intended to be used with AOL Instant Messenger.
DVD Player: Plays back DVD movies if your Mac is equipped with a DVD drive or a Combo (DVD Player with CD-R capability) or a Super drive. Also blocks screenshots when using the built-in grab tool.
iMovie: A basic video editor that lets you create home movies, complete with special effects using clips stitched from various video files, typically from a digital video camera. You can also add your own voice effects, allowing you to add commentary to your video. This is one of those apps that runs in full screen, hiding the dock.
iPhoto: Import pictures from your digital camera and organize them into various different albums, Different effects can be applied, and features a printing utility if you have a photo printer.
Address Book: Appears to have a brush aluminum appearance which would later influence the Finer window interface for Panther and Tiger
Sherlock: opens but refuses to load any channels, possibly its no longer online.
Photo Import: is a tool that transfers photos from a supported digital camera connected via USB, and can transfer files to your Documents directory. You can choose to import them all or manually select which images to transfer and if they need to be rotated. YOu can also set to delete the photos from the camera itself to free up space. A good utility but surely this could have been integrated into iPhoto.
Bundled in later updates:
Safari – Although mainly introduced in Panther, one of the OS X updates introduced Safari as an alternative browser. This was to replace Internet Explorer and would include its own rendering engine.
AirPort: Additional drivers are included in later releases of Jaguar, third-party cards are supported providing they are using a specific Broadcom-based chipset (The wireless card in my G4 is actually a BT Voyager branded PCI card). But you are still limited to WEP support, no WPA or WPA2.
Third-Party
RealPlayer: Popular video streaming application, before Youtube was king video clips and music videos were streaming using RealMedia .rm files. RealPlayer later evolved into a full-fledged MediaPlayer similar to iTunes or later versions of Windows Media Player
Opera: An alternative browser using the Presto rendering engine. This was from the era when Opera was a browser you had to pay for, but a free version existed that would show adverts.
Camino: A fork of Firefox designed to be built for use on Mac OS X, making full use and integration into the Finder.
Appleworks: Apple’s own productivity suite of applications that consists of a word processor, spreadsheet and desktop publishing. Technically this is first-party, but is not included with the OS install. Appleworks was never really popular, and many mac users would opt for Microsoft’s Office which had full compatibility with the mainstream file formats. In contrast, the CWK format was used to save text documents.
Norton Utilities: A must for early versions of Mac OS X, includes a set of tools to keep OS X running smoothly.
Drew1440: Blog 