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It’s a casino heist movie, you uncultured swine.

And Connect for Lemmy.

Photocopy of a photocopy.

Or, in more modern terms, JPEG of a JPEG.

I’m sure we can find volunteers willing to kill themselves once they’re done with the killing. 🤷‍♂️

True, I should’ve probably waited for the community patch that’ll fix these issues.

And yet, every other game I’ve tried so far (including several with better graphics) actually worked out of the box without requiring Windows or even driver updates, or having to spend ages compiling shaders. 🤷‍♂️

Yeah, probably, though computers take space, and electricity… though, admittedly, these days you can probably run a mail server on a raspberry pi (if you can get your hands on one) powered by a potato… 🤔

The plan sort of was to eventually (once I can afford a new machine) move everything to VMs, with GPU pass through for the gaming one (I can’t afford a dedicated gaming machine — nor have the space for it — and I want something I can easily reset to a clean installation in case of Denuvo and similar malware without messing with my work software), but moving the servers and firewall to a small dedicated machine might indeed be a more realistic (and maybe even cheaper) approach…

“Graphics card not supported.”

Find out I have to update Windows.

Hadn’t updated since around 2018 and everything worked fine, but OK, fine, let’s try it.

Can’t figure out how to reenable Windows update (it kept trying to come back, like a dog swallowing and revomiting its own puke, so at some point I’d disabled it with extreme prejudice, and it seems it stuck).

Manage to find a Microsoft tool that’ll update Windows 10 to the latest version without going through Windows update.

Upgrade assistant does its thing and at seventy-something percent complains VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there. I was only 2 major versions behind, shouldn’t’ve been a problem, but all right, have it your way.

Update VirtualBox, looks like Upgrade assistant is finally happy, after a couple aeons Windows is updated.

“Graphics card not supported.” Fuck. You.

Update graphics drivers (couple more aeons; in for a penny, in for a pounding).

While Nvidia does its thing, try to start the VMs in the new version of VirtualBox. “Can’t start operating system”. Well, fuck.

Eventually figure out that at some point around version 6 VHD support got fubared and Oracle never fixed it. This is why I don’t update.

Start converting VHD disks to VDIs, which should fix it. What’s a few more aeons between friends.

While I’m at it the drivers finish updating. Try to start the game again, third time’s the charm.

Fans reach take off speed! Main screen goes black! Logos start showing! It lives!

“Compiling 1 of 7000 shaders”

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

System grinds to a halt. Finally manage to open program manager and kill the game. Probably shouldn’t have started it while I was migrating the virtual disks. (The fact that it’s a 980ti probably doesn’t help either, but hey, it’s worked perfectly till now, including with Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3, and by jingo it’ll work with Starfield).

“It just works.”

Anyway, meanwhile the disks finish migrating, and at least now the VMs work. Update the VirtualBox extensions just to be sure, reboot the VM…

Black screen.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Find out at some point the display drivers got fubared for Windows 2003 / XP and Oracle never fixed it. Manage to start the VM in safe mode and uninstall the VirtualBox extensions; after fixing the display settings, it sort of works again. Yay. Second VM is staying with v5.x extensions, thank you very much.

Say what you want about Bethesda (they almost certainly deserve it), but at least they ain’t Oracle.

Sigh.

Gonna eat something, relax a bit, and leave the game to compile shaders while I sleep.

With luck, tomorrow it’ll be done, and it’ll just work.

I mean… as someone who’s had to port some .NET framework software to .NET 6… yes… but.

20 years old .NET framework code will keep working, sure, as long as you can find and install the correct .NET framework runtime, but maintaining it might be a different matter… you can code .NET with notepad, if you feel like it, but for .NET framework code you will need Visual Studio, with the proper SDKs… which might not be available in the latest version of Visual Studio (on occasion I’ve had to install VS 2019 so I could compile old .NET framework code in VS 2022).

And when you get it to compile you still might have to deal with third party tools (Crystal Reports, for instance) that don’t work in modern .NET or later versions of Visual Studio…

And of course then you want to add something new to the code, which is why you went through all that trouble to begin with… but the tools for what you want to do are only available in modern .NET, or as nuget packages that won’t work with framework… and you’ll have to migrate the whole thing to the latest long term support version of .NET… which sure, is several orders of magnitude less work than rewriting the whole thing in some other language, and heavily automated… but is still a whole process.

But then of course there’s the bits of .NET framework that got deprecated during the transition (or in later updates), or the third party libraries that never got updated… and you’ll have to find or implement replacements for those…

But yeah, once you’ve done all that your refurbished 20 year old code will still work today, and significantly better than it did before… and if it isn’t too ridden with windows dependencies (WPF and the like) it might even be portable to Linux or Mac, or whatever. And it’ll probably still work (and do it even better) 20 years from now.