Making Age of Mythology work in Parallels

By James | Published: October 23, 2009

Now I’m not a gamer, but I do like to have the occasional multiplayer game of Age of Mythology or Age of Empires. When I purchased the upgrade to Parallels 4 earlier in the year I was disappointed to find Age of Mythology wouldn’t run on it.

You wil get the error message “This graphics card is not supported by Age of Mythology”, etc.

I did some research and found a forum post by awittenauer which pointed me in the right direction. By copying existing GFX files and modifying them so that AoM would recognise the Parallels Video Driver, I was able to get it working easily. I imagine this process should work for other games if you are receiving a similar message.

AOM Parallels Screenshot

  1. First, download my Parallels GFX Config Files
  2. Unzip and copy the contents into the gfxconfig folders of your game. In my case this was C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Mythology\gfxconfig   &   gfxconfig2.
  3. You should now be able to run the game.

If you are still having trouble getting it working, or want to add support for different resolutions, open up the parallels.gfx file in Notepad. Here you can customise resolution options etc.

Please let me know how you get on! Thanks again to awittenauer for the idea..

Posted in Mac | 3 Comments

Affordable Video Conferencing – Part 2 – Software

By James | Published: October 22, 2009

Following up on the Affordable Video Conferencing – Part 1 post, I promised another post talking about the software I installed on the video conferencing unit. My Flare Solutions friends reminded me a couple of days ago to finish the series.

If you haven’t read part 1 – do it now. In summary, I converted a Dell Small Form Factor PC into a Video Conferencing trolly. I mounted the PC to the sack barrow using some tiedowns.

After trialling many different options – trying hard to find a free one – we were left with a shortlist of Mirial Softphone, or Polycom PVX. While there were other free products out there, we specifically wanted a product which would allow us to do direct IP calls, so we could call into parties using real hardware conferencing units too.

We trialled both products, not scientifically. The general consensus was that Mirial perhaps had slightly better performance/quality, but the user interface of Polycom PVX was much more intuitive.

Both are great products, in the end it came down to affordability – Polycom gave us a great educational price through an NZ dealer which sealed the deal.

Our video conferencing setup hasn’t been without its problems – first it was a faulty network cable, then we didn’t have a static IP address set for the unit in Hokitika, obviously small problems which could happen with any units.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that this seems to be an area that could do with some quality open source development!

Posted in Research, Work | Tagged | Leave a comment

IPv6

By James | Published: August 19, 2009

I’ve been playing around with IPv6 over the last few days; my ISP doesn’t give out IPv6 addresses yet, but thanks to Hurricane Electric I now have a /48 being routed straight to me. In theory I could subnet that /48 into 65536 subnets, each containing a ridiculous number of hosts.

This is a strange feeling after growing up with 1 routable IP address to somehow share across a whole network and having hundreds of NAT port forwards. It really should make life much easier.

But… there are a few implications. Previously in many situations we have been able to rely on NAT as a reasonably effective firewall. NAT is excellent at that. Customer ADSL/Cable routers will need to now have firewalls which many don’t… and if they do have firewalls it is almost certain they wont be managed properly.

So IPv6 end to end connectivity is all very well; but now instead of managing port forwarding there is going to need to be managing of firewalls instead. By default I am sure they will be managed by UPNP; so basically may as well not be running a firewall unless UPNP gets some security added.

Lastly, I realised IPv6 means you can no longer use the excuse of decreasing the size of broadcast domains when subnetting or using VLANs… It now will be reducing the multicast domains seeing IPv6 now uses multicast to replace the broadcast functions. I’m pretty sure most usually VLANs are more about security anyway than broadcast domains.

Posted in Tech | Tagged | Leave a comment

Affordable Video Conferencing – Part 1 – Hardware

By James | Published: December 23, 2008

After receiving a quote for a Polycom video conferencing unit for around the $5000 mark excluding extras, I set out to put together an affordable conferencing solution. In this two or three part series I will cover the design, build and implementation of the solution as I get there.

We began with a couple of requirements:

  • The unit must be portable, able to be wheeled around the campus.
  • Upon arrival at the location, it should be able to be up and running within a couple of minutes.
  • As our demand for video conferencing isn’t that high, the unit should be able to be used for video editing, to help justify the cost of having a powerful computer on the unit.

I first spent a few hours looking through catalogues of AV Trolleys and general computer trolleys, but wasn’t able to find any I was satisfied. The trolley would need to hold a computer, monitor, webcam, keyboard/mouse, speakerphone.

Last Wednesday I was down in our tech workshop when I noticed a sack barrow and realised we could convert one into a pretty useful trolley ourselves.

Read More »

Posted in Tech, Telephony, Work | Tagged | 2 Comments

Affordable IP Phone Systems

By James | Published: November 4, 2008

Asterisk has been around for a number of years now, most tech consultants will be aware that there are open source PBX solutions that can run on your PC. However, until I discovered the Atcom IP series of Asterisk appliances, I knew I would have a hard time convincing small businesses of the benefits of VoIP.

There is a strange sense of security that goes with having a dedicated appliance for something as critical as telephony. Businesses that are used to having a phone system on the wall somewhere may not be totally comfortable having a phone system running on any old PC sitting in the server room (although this could be a safer option, as you always can drop the hard drive into another machine if something goes wrong with one).

While there have been Asterisk appliances from major names like Digium, their cost is not much cheaper than a POTS system, making migrating from a traditional phone system hard to justify. The Atcom IPxx series on the other hand which you can get the base unit for under $500, depending on how many analogue trunks and extensions you want.

I should note that it is not a trivial cost associated with moving to VoIP – if you have existing analogue phones the cheapest way will be to use ATA devices such as the Linksys SPA8000. VoIP phones start at around the $200 which soon adds up.

The ATCOM looks fairly easy to set up. There will be a learning curve, but it is definitely within the scope of in house IT staff to create new extensions, reconfigure IVR menus, if not set up the whole system from scratch.

For the price, I would buy two, and keep one as a spare that I could drop the flash card into should anything happen to the other.

The Atcom IP01 / IP04 / IP08 can handle around 30 concurrent calls, which is plenty for any small to medium business in New Zealand.

My immediate reaction when I saw this was to buy it just because it was so unbelievably cheap. Unfortunately, being a student means that isn’t quite a good enough reason to buy one.

Update: July 2009
I still haven’t tried out any of the ATCOM gear. I have to say I am nervous about the quality, I’d love to think it would be excellent, but until I have tested it I won’t know. In New Zealand of course you are probably still going to want analogue trunks instead of relying on 2talk/SIP trunks unless you have a really nice internet connection.

Posted in Telephony | Tagged | 2 Comments

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