Hexxeh's Blog

I present, SteamEnabler for Mac. This is basically what you saw in the previous post, except about a million times easier. Simply run the app, type in your username and select the game you want to install. The only catch is, that you need to have the GCFs for the game you want in your “Steam Content” folder; SteamEnabler does the rest. You’ll need to have installed Portal already for this to work, too. Some people running Leopard have had trouble running this, not sure why this is. Should work great on Snow Leopard, though.

The following games are currently available:

• Team Fortress 2 – works very well
• Counter-Strike: Source BETA – works, but you can’t connect to real servers, listen servers probably work
• Day of Defeat: Source – lots of messed up textures, I’ve basically put this in to see if anyone can play around some more and get it working fully

I’d like to thank Nem for his fantastic HLLib library, which saved me lots and lots of time in putting this together. I’d also like to thank HubmaN for his help and advice on this.

Download: http://helium.hexxeh.net/SteamEnabler.zip

After Valve released Portal for Mac last week, it’s been possible to get Team Fortress 2 running on your Mac. After lots of fiddling around, I’ve nailed down precisely how to do it. First, a video:

Here’s the howto I’ve come up with:

1) Reboot to Windows or grab yourself a Windows machine.
2) Create a folder called “team fortress 2″
3) Extract the following GCFs into it, in order: source materials.gcf, source models.gcf, source sounds.gcf, source 2007 shared materials.gcf, source 2007 shared models.gcf source 2007 shared sounds.gcf, team fortress 2 materials.gcf, team fortress 2 content.gcf, team fortress 2 client content.gcf, source 2007 mac binaries.gcf. These may be more than is actually required, but your client will just crash if it’s missing something sometimes, so it’s better to get them.
4) Put this “team fortress 2″ folder alongside your “portal” folder in “Steam Content\yourusername”.
5) Open a Terminal, and navigate to this new “team fortress 2″ directory.
6) Run the following command: chmod +x hl2_osx
7) Run the following command cp tf/bin/client.dylib bin/
8) Run the following command cp tf/bin/server.dylib bin/
9) Ensure steam_appid.txt is present and contains “440″.
10) To launch the game, type the following: ./hl2_osx -game tf -novid

Doesn’t run quite as well as it does in Windows, but it’s nice not to have to reboot. How do I do this, you might ask? It’s quite a long process right now, but if you’re up for the challenge and don’t mind getting yours hands dirty, then there you go. Steam will need to be running when you launch the game, or it’ll just crash. You might also need to have the GCF files in the right folder too, didn’t test this, I had them there anyway. If you crash just as the game is about to enter the map, try setting all your graphical settings to the absolute minimum, as this sometimes helps. Once you get in, you can bump them back up again. Not sure why this is the case, but it helped for me.

As a bonus, here’s Counter-Strike: Source BETA running too: http://grab.by/4rJL
(Note: the FPS is actually around 250fps, I had to tab out to take a screenshot which caps it at 20fps because it’s in the background)

Maybe you can kill that Boot Camp partition like I did now. Have fun!

I’m pleased to say that I can now offer VPSes located in Europe! The servers are hosted in Frankfurt, Germany. This is pretty much the same deal as the US node, except for the fact that I’m no longer offering the 128MB VPSes (the $5/m extra for twice as much is worth it, trust me). Pricing is pretty much the same as the US node:

• $12.50 – 256MB RAM – 20GB disk – 125GB bandwidth
• $17.50 – 384MB RAM – 30GB disk – 180GB bandwidth
• $22.50 – 512MB RAM – 40GB disk – 250GB bandwidth
• $30.00 – 768MB RAM – 60GB disk – 375GB bandwidth
• $35.00 – 1GB RAM – 80GB disk – 500GB bandwidth
• $60.00 – 2GB RAM – 160GB disk – 1000GB bandwidth

As you can see, I’ve reduced the prices on the larger VPSes compared to the US nodes, to make them more attractive. Bandwidth is also a bit cheaper, but IP addresses are a bit more expensive:

• Extra IP addresses: $2 each per month
• Extra bandwidth: $30 per 500GB per month
• HVM: $7.50 per month (only available on 512MB and above)

I’m allowing customers to use HVM if they wish, but this is at an extra cost per month as shown above. This means you can run Windows, if you so wish (and have a license). We’re also running a slightly faster quad-core (2.83Ghz vs 2.4Ghz). First come first served, once it’s gone, it’s gone! Payment is via PayPal only. You can get my contact details to order using the link at the top of the page.

When writing the build system on Nitrogen, the VPS I bought to set all this up on, I hit a pretty big snag that’s holding things back. Basically, due to the way Fivebean do their virtualisation, I couldn’t create the images properly (no loop devices thanks to OpenVZ). I contacted my provider, Fivebean, and while they’ve always been great to me, they couldn’t come up with a solution: but understood fully and offered me my money back.

So I had to go find either a cheap dedicated server or a Xen-based VPS. I looked around, but I couldn’t find anything suitable in my price range ($30 or less per month). So then I had an idea. What if, I bought a high-spec dedicated server and virtualised it myself? So, that’s just what I did. The idea behind this is, that I can sell off the capacity of the box I don’t need to make up the extra cost. Here’s the box I’ve bought:

• Intel Xeon 2.4ghz quad-core
• 8GB DDR2 RAM
• 500GB HDD space
• 100mbit connection
• Located in Atlanta, GA

So, I’ve created various plans and I’m basically selling them at what it costs me plus roughly estimated PayPal fees. If you’re interested, drop me a line at hexxeh@hexxeh.net or pop into ##hexxeh on FreenodeIRC (if I’m not around, drop me an email, or alternatively you can tweet me and I’ll get you a tweet back once I’m online). Here are the plans I’ve come up with:

• $7.50 – 128MB RAM – 10GB disk – 65GB bandwidth
• $12.50 – 256MB RAM – 20GB disk – 125GB bandwidth
• $17.50 – 384MB RAM – 30GB disk – 180GB bandwidth
• $22.50 – 512MB RAM – 40GB disk – 250GB bandwidth
• $32.50 – 768MB RAM – 60GB disk – 375GB bandwidth
• $42.50 – 1GB RAM – 80GB disk – 500GB bandwidth
• $80.00 – 2GB RAM – 160GB disk – 1000GB bandwidth

All prices are per month. If you need something a bit different, please ask and I’ll see what I can come up with for you. There are also various extras available:

• Extra IP addresses: $1 each per month
• Extra bandwidth: $40 per 500GB per month

After your VPS is delivered, you also get access to a VPS control panel (I’m using SolusVM: http://solusvm.com) where you can reboot/reimage your VPS and check how much bandwidth you’ve used and so on. Right now the selection of OSes is fairly limited: Debian 5, CentOS 5.3 and some older versions of Fedora and Ubuntu.

So as far as ChromiumOS goes, I’ll be resuming work on it once I’ve got this box filled with customers. That way I can stop worrying about making sure it’s paid for for this month and start using my slice to get the new build system running.

After the downtime on the ChromiumOS site, the site and wiki have been transferred to this new platform so there shouldn’t be any speed/stability issues there now.