Best way to fix that is to join in and post something!

Otome isn’t my personal interest (my sexuality goes the other way), so I don’t have much to say myself, but I’ve seen Elevator7009 trying to build a community first on kbin.social (before that site died) and then on kbin.run (before it died) and now there and I’d like to see her efforts succeed.

If you’re not interested, feel free to ignore it, but if you’d like a place on Lemmy for discussion, there are at least a few people there who’ve been trying their damnedest to get something going.

I’m a huge fan of otome visual novels, but I don’t think it’s something that many here would appreciate lol

FYI: !otomegames@ani.social

Glad I could help you make progress – I hope you can get it all the way working now. Good luck!

How 'bout that! :D

If the SSD itself is OK, then it was probably trying to boot the SSD still. The blank screen issue might have to do with the graphics drivers then? I remember having a similar blank screen problem with Ubuntu a long time ago where I had to put in “nomodeset” as a parameter in GRUB when booting until I got the right drivers set up.

the tablet supports pxe boot. Do you think I could get mileage off of that if I set up a server on my other laptop and connected them via ethernet?

Maybe. If it’s not too much trouble to set up and you can’t get the USB to work again, might as well try it before throwing in the towel.

I’m rather confused by the fact that the USB drive worked for you before but doesn’t any more and yet seems to be OK on other systems. Is there anything like “fast boot” enabled in the BIOS maybe? (Try turning that off if so.)

Also, when you’re trying to boot from the SSD, can you get anything out of GRUB by tapping shift or escape (or maybe other keys) while it’s trying to boot?

Do you think that removing the ssd will help?

It’s a sanity check to help you rule out things like unintentionally booting from the wrong device. Can’t boot from hardware that’s not there! If the USB does work with it removed, then something you believe about how the device boots is false and you can then try to figure out what. A lot of BIOSes will “helpfully” try the next device in the sequence if it can’t successfully boot from the first one – which can be really confusing when debugging.

Some other thoughts for things to check: does the device confirm that it can actually see the USB drive in some way? Does a USB keyboard work in the port you’re using? If there’s more than one USB port, have you tried a different port? Do your USB drives work in another computer?

I rebooted to the installation media to try another install. It was black too.

I assume you’ve probably already checked, but in case not, is the boot order correct? What happens if you remove the SSD entirely and try to reboot to the USB without it?

Also, does the SSD boot in another computer?

If you can’t get anything to boot on the tablet, I’d RMA it.

I have a few of those, and while the ones I bought have worked out fine so far, I think it’s worth cautioning people that they are annoyingly loud doing basic operations.

I tried booting an old Surface off a USB stick with stock Ubuntu once – probably either 20.04 or 22.04. (I tried this in June 2022 but didn’t make a note of the versions in my journal, unfortunately.) I was able to get it to boot, but I couldn’t get touch/pen controls working so I decided against replacing the OS. I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to bother experimenting with it further – I assume it probably needed the custom kernel.

kbin.social has been totally down for a while. I don’t think your posts are actually federating when you post into a kbin.social magazine right now; the votes you are getting are probably from other lemmy.world users only.

I was curious, so I did some searches on this topic for you and found these pages:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155134
• http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/practical-python-porting/

The second link in particular notes:

The reason that things are much easier with all ASCII data is that practically every Unicode encoding in existence maps bytes 0x00…0x7f to the corresponding code points, so byte strings and Unicode strings that contain the same all-ASCII data are basically equivalent, even semantically. What usually trips people up with non-ASCII data is that the semantic meaning of bytes in the range 0x80…0xff changes from one encoding to another.

But, thinking like a systems programmer again, for many purposes the semantic meaning of bytes 0x80…0xff doesn’t matter. All that matters is that those bytes are preserved unchanged by whatever operations are done. Typical operations like tokenizing strings, looking for markers indicating particular types of data, etc. only need to care about the meaning of bytes in the range 0x00…0x7f; bytes in the range 0x80…0xff are just along for the ride.

So the trick for beating Python 3 strings into submission is to put in encoding and decoding calls where you need to, choosing a single-byte encoding that doesn’t mutate 0x80…0xff. There are many of these; most of the Latin-{1…6} sequence (aka ISO-8859-1…10) is has this property. What you do not want to do is pick utf-8 or any of the multibyte Asian encodings. Latin-1 will do fine; in fact it has an advantage over the others in memory consumption, which we’ll describe below.

Whether depending on this is actually correct or not is beyond me, but it seems like people have actually been using that pass-through behavior in practice and put it into things like Python2 -> 3 migration guides.

The first link suggests that the seemingly undefined ranges are valid as C0 and C1 control codes which may be why it doesn’t throw errors.

DOSBox runs on both Linux and Windows (and probably Mac too?); I was suggesting it since you might be able to replace the dying DOS computers with a modern system and just launch the legacy system as an application under it. (You might be able to do the same with a VM as well, but DOSBox came to mind first and may be easier to setup and distribute.)

Just a thought. If it’s not useful, feel free to disregard.

Can you run the DOS software under DOSBox?

I spent a while looking thanks to your post and only found stuff from 2022 as well. My Chinese is basically non-existent though. (I can pick out a word here and there from knowing some Japanese, but that’s about it.) Someone who knows Chinese might have better luck digging.

I did find this file from 2022 (14999x6982 – ⚠️ 100+ MB PNG): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/The_geologic_map_of_the_Moon_at_1-2.5M_scale.png

Associated information (and preview): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_geologic_map_of_the_Moon_at_1-2.5M_scale.png

I assume that’s the one you’re referring to from 2022?

All the news stories just have low-res previews.

Is there a preview that looks different from this? I don’t see a preview at all (just a picture of people at some sort of presentation) in your link – but my browser might just not be loading it if there is one. (I generally block scripts.)

Edit: tweaked wording slightly

you might check out Trackless if you like interactive fiction

Thanks. I’ll check it out.

BTW, I thought of another game that might be of interest to you. Have you seen Not for Broadcast? It’s an unusual game where you play as the controller in the studio switching between multiple video feeds of actual actors presenting the news on TV. You get to make choices about what to show, what to cut, and what ads to play in your broadcast – which affects the world in an exaggerated fashion. The game timeskips to show you how things play out over the years. There’s some distractions that make it a bit more gamey than a VN but you can turn most of them off if they’re too annoying, I think.

Have you explored text adventures / interactive fiction? They’re even more niche than VNs but there’s some good ones out there. I remember liking Worlds Apart back when I played it. (15+ years ago… o___o)

One of these days I should go dig back into them again.

I don’t know about KDE in particular, but I’ve had problems with USB mice waking various Ubuntu systems when they’re not directly connected (i.e. there’s a hub or KVM in between it and the computer). The workaround I used for that was to remove the mouse input (e.g. by carefully pressing a physical button on the KVM) – which was good enough for me – but I think there is a programmatic way to block particular classes of input from waking the system if some device is waking your system inappropriately.

Doing a quick search turned up this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/252743/how-do-i-prevent-mouse-movement-from-waking-up-a-suspended-computer – I can’t vouch for any of the specific techniques there though.

Worth noting that while I had a problem with the mouse specifically, other hardware could be causing your system to wake up.