Category: windows

Setting up a free C64 emulator for retro game fun

I just installed the C64 emulator VICE on an old Windows laptop and set it up with shortcuts for some old time games that I used to play in the 80s.

My 6 year old son really likes Donald Duck’s Playground where you do odd jobs as Donald to earn cents and dollars to buy playground equipment for your nephews and let them play:

Setting up the game required the download of a zip archive containing a *.d64 image file that can be autostarted by VICE. I created a desktop shortcut to the x64.exe file in VICE with the path of the d64 file as command line parameter. That gives you a shortcut that will start VICE and autostart the game right away. Add the -fullscreen option to start the emulator in fullscreen mode.

I had to enable keyboard mapping for Joystick 2 as shown on the WinVice c64-Wiki.

VICE is a cool emulator that runs on Unix, MS-DOS, Win32, OS/2, BeOS, QNX 4.x, QNX 6.x, Amiga, Syllable or Mac OS.

Games I might try next include Spy vs Spy, Aztec Tomb, Q-Bert and I few others. :)

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Install portable JDK on Windows without admin rights

I found the basic idea here, the exact steps are:

iron-java-mug_120x120

  1. Install Portable 7zip
  2. Download Oracle JDK installer for Windows (*.exe)
  3. Run 7-ZipPortable.exe from your Portable 7zip
  4. In 7zip find and right-click the jdk installer exe file
  5. From the context menu use 7-Zip – Open Archive and then Extract
  6. Now extract the resulting “tools.zip” to a folder that is writable for you
  7. Open a cmd.exe, cd into the folder and execute this:
for /R %f in (.\*.pack) do @"%cd%\bin\unpack200" -r -v -l "" "%f" "%~pf%~nf.jar"

Kudos to Nick Russler for figuring out this tricky unpack200 command line!

OpenJDK builds for Windows now available from Redhat

As I mentioned in an earlier post, officially supported OpenJDK builds for non-Linux platforms have been notoriously hard to come by in the past, at least until Azul started their Zulu builds in 2013. Unofficial community builds are also available from the ojdkbuild project on Github.

Today Redhat announced that their OpenJDK offerings now include builds for the Windows platform as well.

After Google decided to use OpenJDK in Android N, I guess this is another strong indicator of OpenJDK’s value and increasingly wide adoption.

Which process is locking a file on Windows ?

List processes locking a file by file path sub-string:

Command line

  1. Install the handle tool from the Sysinternals suite
  2. Run handle -u [file path sub-string] in a cmd.exe window

The -u option includes the user owning the process.

Example:

handle -u "some.pdf"
AcroRd32.exe   pid: 11208  type: File  localnet\oliver 
244: C:\Users\Public\Documents\some-folder\some.pdf

GUI

  1. Download Sysinternals Process Explorer
  2. Menu : Find – “Find Handle or DLL …”

process-explorer_find-handle-or-dll

process-explorer_search-handle-or-dll_dialog

Zulu – Certified OpenJDK 8 builds for all operating systems

You might have heard that Java is Open Source. And then you noticed that the Java SE downloads from the Oracle website are not actually Open Source. Maybe you also heard about OpenJDK.

So how does this fit together?

OpenJDK is an Open Source implementation of Java and Oracle Java engineers do work on Java with the OpenJDK community and and within the OpenJDK projects.

But source code needs to be compiled into executable binaries to be useful for end users. And that’s where things get dicey …

Where to find OpenJDK builds

For a long time there has been no reliable source for certified, well-supported builds of OpenJDK for all platforms.

The various GNU/Linux distributions, like Fedora, Debian, etc, have provided OpenJDK builds for a quite a while now, but for Windows and MacOS there were only some unofficial, often outdated hobby projects without reliable security updates.

Zulu – Open JDK builds

zulu-duke

This changed within the last 2 years: JVM vendor Azul Systems first released their “Zulu” line of free OpenJDK builds in September 2013, mainly targeting Windows Servers and the Microsoft Azure cloud. In 2014 they added support for Linux, MacOS and Java 8, as well as Docker images. All Zulu builds are certified against the official Java SE TCK. The focus is on the JDK and servers, without browser plugin or webstart.

The Azul website does not clearly state their security update policy for their free builds, but they offer deb and rpm package repositories that seem to contain latest builds of OpenJDK that match the current Oracle JDK update versions. Also, their engineers participate in the community and allegedly contribute back to OpenJDK.

Zulu – OpenJDK 8 for Debian stable

For Debian stable (Wheezy or Jessie), Azul is a convenient way to install OpenJDK 8, since the Debian openjdk-8 package is currently only available in Debian unstable and hasn’t even made it into the Debian testing yet.

Here is how I set up the Azul deb repo and installed their OpenJDK 8:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 0x219BD9C9
apt_source='deb http://repos.azulsystems.com/debian stable main'
apt_list='/etc/apt/sources.list.d/zulu.list'
echo "$apt_source" | sudo tee "$apt_list" > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zulu-8

Please note, that the package installation automatically sets the Java related system alternatives to the Zulu ones. So right after zulu-8 installation the java version in your system path will be something like this:

oliver@basement:~$ java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_45"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (Zulu 8.7.0.5-linux64) (build 1.8.0_45-b14)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (Zulu 8.7.0.5-linux64) (build 25.45-b02, mixed mode)