Red Alert 3 (Mac) Activation Failed Solution

I just got a digital copy from gametreeonline.com. Dragged the app to /Applications, updated to newest version and fired it up. And Boo ! “Activation Failed, check your internet connection” blah blah.

After messing around for an hour, I found the solution. Not only you need “administrative privileges” as described in ReadMe, you have to actually be root to run this thing ! So that’s it, login as root, or open a terminal and run

sudo /Applications/Command\ and\ Conquer\ -\ Red\ Alert\ 3.app/Contents/MacOS/CNCRA3-launcher

. The problem was caused by SecuROM which needs to do its dirty stuff with root privilege.

Resident Evil 5 Review

More than three years has passed since the release of Resident Evil 4. Now here comes the latest installment of the series, first time on next-gen consoles, also first time on a non-Japanese console.

I just beat the game through. I cannot find a suitable word to describe it, awesome just isn’t enough for the game.

Graphics

It’s amazing how Japanese developers keeps pushing consoles to their limits. There was Dead or Alive 4, Ace Combat 6, Ninja Gaiden 2, and now there is Resident Evil 5. The great graphics makes the game looks just like a movie, and an HD one, XD. Lighting was great, with only minor bugs on enemy shadows.

Audio

Again it’s amazing how much attention Japanese pay to soundtracks in their games. Like every other RE game, RE5 has just the right soundtracks that blended into the gameplay naturally. Sound effects are borrowed from RE4 I think. Again it makes you feel natural, when you hear the menu selection sound, you just know it’s Resident Evil.

Storyline

I don’t wanna be a spoiler so I’ll just say the story’s quite good. Enough background information of new characters or untold past stories were provided in cut scenes. And comparing to RE4, huge amount of documents regarding Umbrella, Biohazard incidents and each characters were added in the new “Library” feature. The RE series has been like a puzzle, and now with RE5, many mysteries are solved.

Gameplay

The basic combat system remains the same as RE4. More weapons are available in this installment. The popular purchase and upgrade system is preserved. Also trivias like figure collecting, hidden costumes and weapons are still there.

In RE5 you play with your partner throughout the game. It’s important and fun to balancing weapons, items and ammos between Chris and Sheva. Also for the first time in history you can enjoy the horror of Resident Evil with your friends by cooping on Xbox Live or Playstation Network. The multiplayer feature already gained popularity with the Xbox Live demo. Now with the full game, there’s more chapters and more fun.

Trivia

The game was released on Mar 5 for Japan and Asia (Hong Kong), prior to North American. Currently there’re four versions in the HK market: Resident Evil 5 and its limited edition (with posters and a 2GB chainsaw flash drive), Biohazard 5 (yup, that’s the Japanese version) and its limited edition (also posters and flash drive, and a making-of DVD). The HK/Asia version is bilingual, based on the language preference of your console, the game automatically switches between English and Japanese. Also the asia version features two box arts, both Resident Evil 5 and Biohazard 5.

Resident Evil: Degeneration

New Xbox Experience Allows Installing Games on Hard Drive

Just tried the new update for a few hours. Totally amazing. And the most exciting part is now you can install a full retail game on your Xbox hard drive. you still need the game disc in the tray to play for copyright protection reasons. Ninja Gaiden 2 loads much faster from hdd. Normally a game took 6 to 9 gigabytes so now players got a good reason for the 120g disk.

PSP Firmware 5.0

The firmware came out with PSP3000 and a major enhancement is the support of full screen video-out for PSX games. Also PlayStation Network (PlayStation Store) is available for direct access on PSP. The download speed is very good.

Hours ago Sony released 5.01 firmware, fixing a compatibility issue of PSN download on large (8G or above) memory sticks. 5.00 users are required to update in order to be able to access PSN again.

Some screenshots of the PSN store and the new PSX video-out on my 22 inch LCD TV.

Call of Duty: World at War

First installment in the series that sets in the Pacific War, that’s something to look forward to.

There’s also a higher resolution version on Xbox Live Marketplace.

Hong Kong bans Modchips

A new copyright regulation comes into operation in Hong Kong. According to the regulation, “circumvent” device and technological measures, which includes most modchips and custom firmwares, are illegal, for both retailers and users.

Any device / action, which circumvents the copyright protection by the copyright owner, is considered illegal. Selling or USING these device are considered illegal too. According to this regulation, most modchips, custom firmwares, warez, keygen, cracks, etc. are banned.

However, if a modchip / custom firmware ONLY disables the regional code check, it is acceptable. (However it can’t let the user use BOTH pirated copies AND imported copies. i.e. Any device that enables the ability to use a pirated/home-made copy is illegal).

Making / selling such devices or providing installation services for such devices are considered as CRIMEs.

GTA IV “Liberty City Gun Club” Trailer

Well, I’ve never been much of a GTA fan, but this trailer surely speaks to me.

“If every citizen was armed, no one would be DUMB enough to shoot people !”

PSP Internet Browser HTTP Headers

I remember visiting a PSP-only website, which when browsed on PC, gives a different output saying something like “you should view this on PSP”. I wonder how they implemented it.

I guess PSP must send some kind of special info to the server, so I wrote a little PHP script showing request headers. (traditional sniffers / browser plugins won’t work now, unless you wanna port them to PSP yourself, lol).

As my hosting does not allow apache_request_headers, I have to extract the data from $_SERVER myself.

<?php
foreach ($_SERVER as $k => $v) {
	if (substr($k, 0, 5) == "HTTP_") {
		// Format the variable names
		$k = str_replace('_', ' ', substr($k, 5));
		$k = str_replace(' ', '-', ucwords(strtolower($k)));
 
		echo "<tr><td class=\"e\">$k</td><td class=\"v\">$v</td></tr>\r\n";
	}
}
?>

You can point your PSP to http://playground.softboysxp.org/show_request_header.php and test it yourself.

Here’s a snapshot taken on my PSP

Clearly, there are two PSP-specific variables, x-psp-browser and x-psp-productcode. Also notice that the User-Agent was set to reflect PSP’s browser.

Further Research

I googled x-psp-browser and found this document by SCE.

Guidelines for Creating Content for the “PSP” Internet Browser (Japanese)

User-Agent by far can only be “User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)”

x-psp-productcode represents the region of your PSP and can be one of the following

x-psp-browser is in the format of “n.nn (xxx; yyy; zzz; …)”
n.nn is the version of the firmware
xxx, yyy, zzz … being parameters, specify from where the browser was lunched, with LX for XMB, SX for applications under XMB, and LU being applications on UMD or Memory Stick. Another parameter, “system”, specifies the version.

Another variable, x-psp-application can be used to specify the name of the game/application, when the browser was launched by an application on UMD/Memory Stick.