5 ms·

A recent encounter was a fix for playing the original BioShock under Windows 7 - the sound would not function more than for the first intro. The trivial fix is

A recent encounter was a fix for playing the original BioShock under Windows 7 - the sound would not function more than for the first intro. The trivial fix is to plug in something to the microphone port. [1] Another good one - back around the era of the original NVIDIA Ion boards, I was helping to run a cluster of these boards as an experiment in low-power computing. [2] Some ran Linux, some ran Windows. Running CUDA code under Linux headless is fine, running it under Windows with a non-Tesla GPU was nontrivial at best (and involved hacking up the Tesla variant of the driver to add some PCI IDs). Unfortunately, it turns out that this breaks if you don't have an actual display attached to the machine. The solution that was implemented was to take 36 naked male VGA headers and solder resistors across just enough pins to convince the system that there was a display there, and then install them. Or the Samsung SMART IDENTIFY hard drive bug - which meant that the advice "disable SMART to keep your data safe" was sometimes valid. (The drives had a FW bug that caused them to drop data in the write cache if they got a SMART command before flushing it.) [3] I'm sure I'll think of more later. [1] - http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1093192 http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10931... [2] - http://www.nvidia.com/content/gtc/documents/sc09_szalay.pdf http://www.nvidia.com/content/gtc/documents/sc09_szalay.pdf [3] - https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks

kevhito 10y ago
The resistor-vga trick is one I use somewhat regularly. When traveling to give a talk, I sometimes like to practice my talk with powerpoint's "presention mode" in front of me. You can't easily get that mode without a second monitor plugged in. I keep a single bare resistor that can be stuck into two holes in the VGA connector. I keep the resistor inside a folded slip of paper so it doesn't get lost, and the paper has a reminder on it too showing which two pins to connect. Works perfectly.
bluesilver07 10y ago
The 'plug-in microphone' fix was common to other games like Call of Duty as well (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2196456 http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21964...). From one of the Steam forum entries - "The reason plugging in a microphone works is because 'Stereo Mix' is automatically turned on when you plug in a mic."
- Senji 10y ago
  This would probaly not work on some shitty audio cards with shitty drivers that have explicitly removed "stereo mix" for "copyright purposes".
  - rincebrain 10y ago
    Would it? I'm not entirely sure what the origin of the technology involved is, but as they said, it implicitly enables it even on drivers that don't have it as an explicit option (like the audio driver stack on my Win7 box, at the moment).

kevhito 10y ago

The resistor-vga trick is one I use somewhat regularly. When traveling to give a talk, I sometimes like to practice my talk with powerpoint's "presention mode" in front of me. You can't easily get that mode without a second monitor plugged in. I keep a single bare resistor that can be stuck into two holes in the VGA connector. I keep the resistor inside a folded slip of paper so it doesn't get lost, and the paper has a reminder on it too showing which two pins to connect. Works perfectly.

bluesilver07 10y ago

The 'plug-in microphone' fix was common to other games like Call of Duty as well (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2196456 http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21964...). From one of the Steam forum entries - "The reason plugging in a microphone works is because 'Stereo Mix' is automatically turned on when you plug in a mic."

Senji 10y ago
This would probaly not work on some shitty audio cards with shitty drivers that have explicitly removed "stereo mix" for "copyright purposes".
- rincebrain 10y ago
  Would it? I'm not entirely sure what the origin of the technology involved is, but as they said, it implicitly enables it even on drivers that don't have it as an explicit option (like the audio driver stack on my Win7 box, at the moment).