I passed my 5th Kyu Karate grade (green belt) last Thrusday. I still have lots to learn and I'll improve my physics in January in order to start competitions in March~April, 2005.

I also received a long awaited game for my PlayStation2: AeroElite Academy: It's a flight simulator but not so mutch "arcade-oriented". You have to learn from basic plane handling to ACM within the J.A.S.D.F. course plan: T-3,T-4,T-2,F-1,F-4EJ,F-15DJ and F-2A (rhah lovely). I got my fighter qualification in 4 hours of flights and now I'll begin the J.G.D.F. rotary wings school. I'm in the 6th part of the exam while flying an OH-6D Cayuse chopper. I hope to fly the AH-1S Cobra soon. I also saw that I also can try carrier-based operations with F/A-18 and F-14 planes. I found the game somewhat realistic comparated to many of the other console-based flying games.

Sometimes, I refly on my PC with IL-2 WWII flight simultation. BF-109G4 and FW-190 are not easy to handle, I often stall and crash. That game may be "old" for some gamers but I still find it nice to play with, like EF-2000 or Strike Fighters Project 1.
Hello Santa, If you encounter to have the new "Wings Over Vietnam" and "Pacific Fighters" games, don't forget me, OK? ;-)

Gotcha

Fine, I did it and it was easier than I was expecting. Just load Sony CD1, swap to CD2 and install like a regular RedHat7 system, than copy of the 2.2 kernel on a memory card. Booting still needs a similar SELECT+R2 press for PAL screen output. I modified /etc/X11/XGSConfig to comment out "pal interlaced" output in 50Hz. It took me 3/4 hour to complete the installation and ping my DMZ network through the wifi bridge.
For the fun, cpuinfo BogoMIPS on PS2 & AMD-K6-2/333:

#cat /proc/cpuinfo
cpu : MIPS
cpu model : R5900 V2.0
system type : EE PS2
BogoMIPS : 392.40
byteorder : little endian

# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 5
model : 8
model name : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
stepping : 12
cpu MHz : 334.098
bogomips : 666.82

PS2 Linux here I come

Back again after two weeks of inactivity. I modified my Playstation2 in order to use it as a "minimal" set-top box. I also acquired a Sony network adapter (the one which also has an IDE controller), a 40GB maxtor IDE drive, USB keyboard & mouse and a D-link DWL-810G wireless bridge. Configuring the bridge is simple, but I had to downgrade the link speed to a forced 11Mbps due to my AP (Pentium100 Debian box with a ZoomAir wifi card on PCMCIA/ISA adapter running at 11Mbps with
hostap since 3 years).

The Sony network connexion (Central Station) needs you to open the firewall ports for outbound TCP/43-54-80-443 and I created a DMZ for the PS2's WiFi VLAN. After 4 tries (!!!) I succesfully registered ont their network but their servers are awfully slow. I'm now waiting for my PIN code but I don't have any network-enabled PS2 game to test :-(

Next task is to install the Sony Linux toolkit owned by Thomas on the hard disk. There are two DVD, first with Sony proprietary (damn) bootable microcode and second with GNU/Linux itself. I need a 8MB memory card to install the kernel (old 2.2) on it and each time I'll have to use Linux, I'll need to insert Sony microcode DVD in drive then press a "Select + R2" sequence on my game controller to use my PAL TV as VGA and wait for memory card then HDD boot.
That's the official support. I'll try to hack this awful setup to only use the internal HDD. I hope the O² modchip will allow this as I read that HDDLoader does tasks like this (but "backup games" doesn't interrest me). Then I'll update the Linux with a blackRhino disto (Debian-based for PS2) with a 2.4 kernel and some MP3/OGG drivers to connect to my music stream server in the office... I don't expect much performance from the PS2 as its CPU is s
omewhat powerfull as an AMD K6-333 and it only have 32MB of RAM. Note that the Japanese kit is different: see here