Creating a ramdisk in OSX 10.7 - For Games :)

Lately I have been pondering buying an SSD for my Mac Pro to improve my IO but for some reason I can't pull the trigger. I am not sure what the hell I am waiting for all I know is I can't decide on size or fully trust the reliability. I put an SSD in my wife's laptop 8 months ago and everything is fine. So who knows.. Maybe I will take care of business and get one. In the mean time I decided to go a different route.

I got all these here megarams..

So my mac pro is sitting pretty with 24 gigs of RAM. I know it sounds like a lot because well.. it is but when you rock a few VMs on it it starts to get chewed up pretty quick. I have the standard fair 7200RPM 1TB drive that came with this mid 2010 Mac Pro and I wanted more so I thought maybe I should do a RAMDISK!

What is a RAMDISK?

A RAMDISK is simply a drive located in memory. It is similar to SSD in that it is fast but has one serious drawback... It's gone when you reboot or dismount it. So don't write a 400 page thesis and save it to a RAMDISK or you are done. Consider yourself warned. Now for games its great because I can put the entire game in a RAMDISK and it loads super snappy like. There are tons of other uses for RAMDISKS and google is your friend if you are looking for other uses.

So how many megarams do I need?

Well this really depends on how big your game is. Currently my Diablo III uses around 13 gigs so I made my ramdisk 15 gigs. The joy is you can make you RAMDISK crazy sizes and it only takes from RAM what is actually being used. So if you specify a 2 gig RAMDISK and you copy 500M to it you will see that you are only using 500M of memory. Keep in mind that though if you oversubscribe this drive you will start to page and your system will run like dog doo.

Ok I get it now what?

First thing is first.. you have to calculate the size of your RAMDISK. To do this pick how many megabytes is going to be. For quick math sake let's assume we are creating a 10M ramdisk. So the calculation would be as follows: 10 * 2048 = 20480. Now remember 20480 because we are going to need it.

Now lets go ahead and create this bad boy. Use the following command:

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "Geekempire" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://20480`

You should now have a 10M RAMDISK called Geekempire mounted up.  The cool part is you don't need root to do this. Now lets kick it up a notch when it comes to Diablo III and automate this mug. create a file called diablomount.sh in your home directory using your favorite text editor and drop the following in there and then:

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ "Diablo3Ramdisk" `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://30720000``

 rsync -a --progress /Applications/Diablo\ III /Volumes/Diablo3Ramdisk/

open /Volumes/Diablo3Ramdisk/Diablo\ III/Diablo\ III.app

Next make this puppy executable by running:

chmod 755 diablomount.sh

Then run it with:

./diablomount.sh

This will create a 15GB Ramdisk and copy your Diablo III install to it then launch it. Keep in mind you will NOT want to run this script multiple times! Once the RAMDISK is created you will have to go click on it or just use the last line again from the shell script. Make sure you are launching it form the RAMDISK otherwise you are wasting all those megarams for nothing.

I would write a guide for windows but I only have home premium which has a 16GB limit on RAM. So you are on your own if you want to do it it winders. I am in the process of working on a gui based program where you can basically pick a game you want to do this with etc. We'll see how that goes.

Smooth out

 

Epic Friday Night Battles

Had some epic battles last night on PS2.. Check out the pwnage.. We were doing special op harassing the enemy by doing back caps and delaying reinforcements.



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Where is the forum yo?

Got a few questions today about where our forums went. The truth is we ditched them. We did this for a couple of reason the main being upkeep. The forums were a pain in the ass since every time there was an update they would revamp the template system. It took a long ass time to customize the templates every time a new version dropped.

So where did we move that type of functionality? Well we moved it to our Facebook group. Our group is located here.  Its not open to the public so ask to be added and we will take care of it. I am working on integrating Facebook functionality with this just have not had the time just yet. Also if you think you have something to contribute post wise feel free to msg me and we can add you as an author on the blog.

Smooth out

Stake Land Movie Review

I was cruising around on Netflix the other night when I stumbled upon this gem. I have always been into post-apocalyptic type movies so that is what caught my eye. This movie is sort of a cross between "The Road" and your standard vampire type movie.

Plot:

Badass dude saves kid and teaches him his vampire hunting ways. They are traveling to a place called "New Eden" and the flick basically follows them on their journey.

Likes: 

Like I said previously love the concept of post-apocalyptic America and what people do when there are no laws. For me I couldn't stop watching it. I turned this flick on to fall asleep to and I found myself glued to the tube. From the picture and descriptions and the fact that I had never heard of it made me believe that this was a total dud. The Netflix rating for me was 4 stars so it was pretty much on point. The acting was believable and there were no stand out awful performances that would give it that B movie feeling. I found myself wanting the movie not to end.

Dislikes:

I think the pacing was off at certain times. There were some story lines that left me wanting more. I don't want to go into too much more detail because I don't want to ruin it. The ending sort of left some things open for me which I was hoping they would elaborate on.

Summary:

If you like gore and crazy religious whackos then this is your movie. The "Vamps" were sort of zombie like and that added a interesting twist to it. It's definitely worth a watch and leave a comment below on what you thought.

Exit56 Scale Rating: 4 out of 5 Exits

I'm Back!

It is time to get your game face on.

Changing things up..

Hey all,

We are in the process of revamping Geekempire. Instead of hosting forums any more we will leverage blogger and our facebook groups for communication. You will see a lot more geeky posts here about all things that our community is interested in. Stay tuned for more.

Smooth out