Haven’t written a blog post in a while. Mostly because I figure I should take blogging a bit more seriously from now on — slow work makes fine craft, or whatever. The other reason is that I recently went through the whole “install Windows 10 on an old Mac” ordeal. It was a real rollercoaster, I hit a mountain of pitfalls, wasted a ton of time, and eventually got it working. So I decided to write it up, partly as a summary and partly in the hope it helps someone else.

Someone recently handed me an iMac and asked me to put Windows 10 64-bit on it, so their kid could watch educational videos. Personally I think an iMac should stick to macOS — sure, it’s kind of crap, but it can still play videos fine. But the owner asked for it specifically, so all I could do was see if it was even possible.

This iMac is the 2011 model: i5 CPU, discrete AMD GPU, no SSD, just a 500 GB mechanical drive. The default system is Windows 7 installed via Boot Camp, and the original macOS is Lion. Truly an ancient machine.

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I vaguely recall that the last time I played a game with Kantoku art was years ago, and I ragged on it pretty hard. Honestly, looking back now…

Still deserves a good ragging.

Why? Because Kantoku always works with CUBE, and the heroines in CUBE games inexplicably turn into Easy Girls—like, they confess to the protagonist and before you know it they’re spreading their legs. Yeah yeah, I know it’s an eroge, but even for an eroge you can’t keep doing it so bluntly. Nobody watches porn for the plot anymore? Well, a little story goes a long way—it makes it tastier.

So after all these years, a new game with Kantoku art drops, and the title alone is high-tier:

Kamisama no You na Kimi e

I honestly don’t know how to translate it. I feel like in Japanese this kind of sentence could mean “to you, who is like a god,” but a direct translation would be “to you like a god.” The English subtitle is To you like goddess, so I guess it’s the first meaning.

But none of that matters. What matters is the scenario lineup—they brought in three guys who specialize in writing toilet paper… oh wait, I mean light novels. Looks like they decided to go all-in on the story.

But how did it actually turn out?

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Back when I was on Unity, you could swap the app icons in the dock, so now that I’m on Fedora with GNOME Shell, naturally I had to see if the same trick works.

And of course it does.

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The great open-source shepherd that is Fedora ships WenQuanYi Micro Hei by default, and the moment it hits actual Korean text the glyphs pile up on top of each other. Looks like absolute garbage.

See:

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Been on Fedora 31 for almost half a year now. Honestly no complaints — Mawei keeps telling me Fedora will break, but it’s been weirdly reliable on my machine.

Aside from some Qt programs constantly rendering fonts wrong, and the occasional Qt window manager going completely haywire…

Got the itch recently, so I figured I’d upgrade to the Fedora 32 Beta. I’m going to install Ubuntu 20.04 in a couple weeks anyway, so this is basically a taste test.

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This isn’t my first 8BitDo controller, actually, but the one I bought before somehow went missing, so all I’ve got left is one with a bad feel.

This time, in order to play some “poorly optimized garbage Unity game,” I had to buy a new 8BitDo controller. Times have changed, though—this thing has evolved. It’s got built-in rumble now, and supposedly a gyroscope too.

I’ve used it for about two weeks, so let me share my impressions.

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Fries made at home. They might not be as thin and long as the ones you buy out, but you have to admit the thicker ones are actually better, and they don’t taste bad either.

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So I swapped that laptop over to a 4K panel a while back, and selling off the leftover 2K screen would’ve been a losing deal. Better to just mod it into something.

There’s no shortage of kits online for turning a laptop panel into a portable monitor, but my list of demands was a bit long.

• 2K (2560x1440) support
• HDR support
• USB-C single-cable
• Built-in battery would be nice
• As thin and light as possible

Which all sounds like the kind of wishlist that never ships, so I settled for “however many of these I can actually get.”

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So I upgraded to a 2K HDR screen a while back, used it for a bit, and honestly the colors are a little too vivid, and even with 500 nits I never use the brightness. But the biggest thing:

2560 x 1440 is just stuck in an awkward middle ground.

I’m a Linux user, and Linux has always been terrible at fractional scaling. People say Wayland supports it now, but one, my discrete GPU has no Wayland driver, and two, Wayland performance is a joke — the mouse stuttering in particular is absolutely maddening. Word is Wayland mouse handling goes through libinput, which shares a single thread with gnome-shell, so high system load equals stutter.

Fucking stupid. In the end I couldn’t stand 2K’s nonsense scaling anymore and chose to “throw money at the problem” — went 4K.

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Hato, the writer who got famous off the Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart series, went quiet for a while and then came back — this time on Steam. A game called Marco & the Galaxy Dragon (マルコと銀河竜) showed up, and it had that “we’re not hurting for cash” look about it, plus the standard day-one Simplified Chinese, so it read like a cash grab from every angle.

By that point my opinion of Hato had already soured pretty badly, because with Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 2 he’d started going way too sappy and way too self-indulgent. You couldn’t even tell what the main plot was about anymore, and the jokes were getting harder and harder to follow. My personal take is that he’d gone full “mentally ill genius” like certain other famous scenario writers — call it “too artsy to understand” if you’re being polite, “can’t write a straight sentence” if you’re not.

I still wasn’t happy with the game, but Mayuge flat-out refused to gift it to me, so I had to go get it and play it myself.

Pretty simple reason:

“How am I supposed to dunk on it if I don’t play it?”

Anyway, after playing this “scam game,” I feel like I underestimated Hato. Sure, I think he’s a bit unhinged now, but I forgot that he’s got a real gift for doing big things on a shoestring — something he’d already made obvious with the ultra-low-budget galge-to-anime adaptation he spearheaded.

Put simply, Marco & the Galaxy Dragon is exactly that kind of “big things on a shoestring” game.

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