Installing mist.inf on Windows 8.X

When trying to install the usb driver for the MIST on Windows 8.X you get the error that the driver isn’t signed and therefore you can’t install it. It doesn’t matter if you try it by either right click on the inf file and choosing “install” or if you try “update driver” in the device manager.

The only possibility to install it is to disable the driver signature enforcement. How this can be done is described here: http://10rem.net/blog/2013/01/07/installing-unsigned-drivers-on-windows-8-64-bit-or-how-to-get-stm-st-link-working
In short:

  1. start an admin console
  2. type shutdown /r /o
    /r for reboot
    /o for the advanced boot options
  3. before windows starts again it prompts you for what kind of action you want to take. Choose Troubleshoot -> Advanced options -> Startup settings.
  4. press restart.
  5. Once it reboots you get a startup menu with different options. From that pick the “Disable driver signature enforcement” option

Now you can install the driver but you’re still prompted if you really wanna install it when its not signed. You’ve been warned 🙂

Amiga: Exception “Line 1111 Emulator” ($2C) at XXX…

I’m a proud owner of an Amiga 1200 with an internal 4GB CF ide hd and an external 2GB CF to exchange stuff with my PC. Because the initial setup wasn’t that good I reinstalled the system with 3 partitions and installed the Classic Amiga Workbench.
All games went on partition 2 and 3 for using with WHDLoad. Most games work fine but I wonder why certain games work from the external CF card but not from the internal. After some searching I found out that it might be worth to check the MaxTransfer setting of the partition as the scsi.device driver in the original version (40.12 on my setup) only works fine with certain values.
I used the Harddisk Installation Tool to do this:

1) Select the desired drive and press “Partition drive…”
HDInstTools

2) Select a partition and press “Edit Partition…”
HDInstTools_001

3) Click into the field MaxTransfer and change it to 0x1FE00 (Why?)
HDInstTools_002

4) Press “Use”, then “Use” again and finally “Save changes to drive…”



Note: You have to do this for all partitions of the selected drive.

After this changes I didn’t noticed problems anymore. So far, so good 🙂

Useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Fast_File_System
http://hjohn.home.xs4all.nl/SFS/maxtrans.htm

visual studio: what to do if compiling or starting the debugger takes ages?

When compiling XBMC I noticed from time to time that starting the debugger takes up to 10 seconds where it looks like visual studio does nothing. After making the logging more verbose I found out that visual studio tries to read some log files before it starts. They are named *.tlog and in my project are at least 800-900 files:

Deleting them recreates some of them at the next compilation but it doesn’t take ages anymore to start the debugger afterwards.