kapsobor

i recently stumbled upon CR-ISCHE having its own poeut entry (see pouet.net), which led to the idea of presenting old code red releases from time to time.

code red is a group belonging to the pc demo scene since some time in 1994, i believe. we released mostly (if not only) fun files, sometimes mocking some ppl or just showing off while demonstrating nothing. and of course, releasing progressive S3Ms was our main activity :)
there used to be codered.demo.org (you might still find some of it on web.archive.org), after the distro sites went offline years ago - as any other group in those days we had several mailboxes listed as distro sites or headquarters.
nowadays there is no active website, i plan to place all files to the one remaining code red official release site at pr0n.de, but have failed to do so for several years now...

cr-ische

FILE_ID.DIZ:

CR-ISCHE is a 32kb game written for the mekka/symposium (an annual demo party) in the year 1997. we just needed some release so i quickly put this stuff together in - behold - turbo pascal (i think). obviously it was never meant as a real compo entry and the resulting position #10 resembles that fact rather good :)
still, playing it today is incredibly funny (once, that is), reading the intro is also marvellous, snippet from ische.doc:

                .i s c h e

 [adults only!]

 32kb game first presented at mekka 97.

 .story

 you have been arrested by evil forces. when you tried to escape they
 realized how seriously you could harm them and decided to kill you.
 therefore you will have to try to survive and finally to flee from
 the prison grabbing a double-rifled shotgun, a case with unlimited ammo
 and an energy shield capable of blocking up to 100 shots.
 but your task is not easy as the enemy appears every time in a place 
 in which you do not expect him to hide.
 try to terminate as many evil soldiers as possible before they 
 kill you to save your own life.
 
 .instructions

 use arrow keys to aim left and right and hit space bar to shoot at
 a target.

somebody at pouet even made a screenshot, so i will not stop without posting some of my own:
astonishingly, i found out this game has been downloaded thousands of times at gamezworld.de. the archive also contained a fabulous NFO on "the current state of CR" which is (falsely, instead of ische.doc) linked as ische.nfo at pouet. still, i like that amiga-like nfo reader.

to download and play, use the fabulous Dosbox, sadly cr-ische has some grafic issues and the sound does not work out of the box (due to base address setting of GUS under dosbox). this, i just remeber, was also the case on the competition machine, the game had no sound on the big screen and was therefore even more boring :)

leech it: CR-ISCHE.ZIP

this is (hopefully) the first of more to come descriptions of old code red releases. they will be selected in a random order.

just incase someone has the same error i had when trying to use the printer drivers for epson alc 1100 on debian/ubuntu: after some searching through debug error messages i noticed that the shipped wrapper shellscript (/usr/local/bin/pstoalc1100.sh) will fail with an "arith syntax error" when doing if test 1 -ge $((Copies));.
the problem is: it uses /bin/sh, which actually points to dash in debian/ubuntu. and dash cannot cope with this syntax. change the script to use /bin/bash instead and you will have no trouble printing.

brrfft, it took some time to find this one.. I had some unexpected errors on two mysql servers running as multiple masters. after inspecting the mysql settings it showed something like this:

mysql> show variables;
[..]
| version_compile_os              | pc-linux-gnu                | 
| wait_timeout                    | 28800                       | 
+---------------------------------+-----------------------------+

my initial suspicion that a timeout occured due the wait_timeout setting was thus dropped, as the default setting of eight hours (28800 seconds) were not suspicious at all.
so i had to focus on other reasons for mysql's misbehaviour. after some exploration from within the mysql client i took a look at the config-file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf in debian et al) and i stumbled upon this:
the setting for wait_timeout in there was surprisingly low. but this value - which was obviously used by the server, as it caused my problems - was not used when displaying the global variables via show variables. incredible. all other variables seem to be displayed correctly.
anyhow, it seems one should not trust the varialbe-values from within mysql client.
( tested with 5.0.32 and 5.0.45 )

㏊㏊㏊ wow, not a single g00gle-hit for "㏊㏊㏊". once google allows searching for multibyte unicode characters, this entry might be among the top hits.