Gaming and Consoles Forum - What Spectrum Emulator works best with Vista? - Page 1

Turn UAC off?
I hate the thing, every little move you make you have to "OK" it and gawd help you if you put anything near your machine on rewritable media that it thinks shouldn't be there... few seconds later will have you saying "where did that go.....?"

'Course you could always just buy an old Speccy off Fleabay

Jimbo : oÞ

"There's that word again... is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull in the future?"

Yeah you knew I'd answer this thread didn't you. It was ineveratable.


Quote:
Jimbo Þ says...
Turn UAC off?As much as you might hate it, UAC is one of the most important security additions to Windows in years. Turning it off is a) bad, b) stupid, c) see a+b.


Quote:
Jitendar Canth says...
I'm giving ZX Spin a try, which works well enough out of the box, but once you start trying to configure it, UAC throws a wobbly.ZX Spin is a really good little emulator, just don't install it to Program Files, stick it in cemulators/zxspin or something instead. That will solve your UAC issues. It's not in active development anymore (I think it's closed source, and various contributors have various combinations of code for it but nobody has the full thing, and it's a complete mess so they won't release it) alas.

But it's one of my favourite speccy emus. Annoyingly it doesn't run the Interface 1 when in Spectrum 128k + mode (toastrack model). I think there is a version after 0.666 somewhere about which I may or may not have (I'd need to boot up my laptop to check) and may also help a bit.

Fuse is another excellent one, which is open source.
http://fuse-emulator.sourceforge.net/

I use that a fair bit, it has great hardware support, is pretty accurate, and has been ported to a number of platforms.

There are others but those are the best imho.


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Gave Fuse a try, it looks to be a little more capable than ZX Spin, and hasn't thrown up too many problems with Vista. I'll probably alterate between the two.

Shame ZX32 doesn't work well. It insist on switching Vista to 256 colours, even though it runs just fine on Win98 with 24 bit colour!


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This item was edited on Monday, 2nd January 2012, 17:02

Quote:
Rob Shepherd says...
As much as you might hate it, UAC is one of the most important security additions to Windows in years. Turning it off is a) bad, b) stupid, c) see a+b.Can't effin stand it and have so far never found it to do anything useful for me in so far that I've never had a virus, never had an account hacked or similar and never had anything of a similar nature affect my machine(s)
(excluding that update that I think fried my hard drive from previous)

UAC is off on both my Vista machines and if you consider it bad or stupid then an explanation would be appreciated TYVM (instead of just telling me I'm stupid... which it appears you've already done )

Jimbo : oÞ

"There's that word again... is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull in the future?"

Quote:
Jimbo Þ says...
UAC is off on both my Vista machines and if you consider it bad or stupid then an explanation would be appreciated TYVM (instead of just telling me I'm stupid... which it appears you've already done Tongue)Forgive me if I go a bit too patronising here, just not sure how basic a description to give. So if I've got to the point I'm insulting you just presume it's for others who know hardly anything about security!

INCOMING WALL OF TEXT

Every process/program/service that runs under Windows does so in the context of a user account. Providing you have formatted your HDD with NTFS (hopefully nobody uses FAT/FAT32 for anything other than USB sticks and optical media these days) then every file on your HDD has an Access Control List, which tells it what accounts can do what.

Part of the reason Unix/Linux is historically way more secure than Windows is the way it has user accounts for specific parts of the system, which prevent them doing things they shouldn't be allowed to do. So the part of the system that handles email can't change config files or install a trojan somewhere nasty that gets run everytime you boot up the system.

The only account that can access everything is root, hence why people proudly say they have root access to some box or another whilst waving their willy around. If you log into a *nix box, and you want to do something that may ruin/compromise the box in some way, you have to log in as (or switch your user to) root.

Windows on the other hand has pretty much encouraged a two tier system, there is the system account that can usually access anything but no user is able to log in as, and then the account you are logged in as. Pretty much everything on a modern windows system runs under those contexts, apart from a few other things but lets not muddy the waters just yet.

Now, to do a lot of things under Windows you have to have an administrators account, that being one which is either the actual Administrator account (Microsoft's equivalent of root) or a member of the Administrators group. To install software on *nix, or configure some part of the system you have to switch to root, to do this in Windows you just have to be an Administrator.

Since using Windows without being logged in as an Administrator is a total pain in the bum, because you literally can't install any new software, change a load of configuration options, access a bunch of files on your HDD, anyone who isn't using a work PC will have their user account in the Administrator group. Windows pretty much forces you do this because the only alternative is every single time you want to install something or tweak the system, you'd have to log out, log in as Administrator, install/configure, log back out, then log in as your normal user.

So far, so what, I hear you say. Well the downside of being logged in as an admin, anything running under your account on the system can do anything to the system. Someone sends you an email with a funny powerpoint presentation in it that has an .exe extension, and you run it? Well that program has full access to do anything it wants to your entire system. From sending all your personal data to some bloke in Russia, to setting up a back door on your PC to relay spam for someone flogging Viagra.

Hopefully now we can at least agree that due to the short sightedness of Microsoft, running programs in the context of an Administrator on a day to day basis is not a particularly good thing.

Enter their solution, UAC. What this does is every time your administrator account wants to access certain folders or files on your computer that it perhaps shouldn't be allowed to, it pops up a window asking you to make sure it can do that. Once you click the yes button, then it can do whatever good/nasty thing it was going to.

If you've used *nix much you'll be used to being asked for the root password, much like UAC bugs you in Windows to just click a button. But Windows users HATE anything like that, they just want their PC to work, so you get a confirmation dialog and not a request to enter a password every time.

By turning off UAC, you expose yourself to the very real possibility that any security vulnerability on your system could compromise it and you'd have no way of knowing. UAC is not the first line of defence by any means, but it is probably the last chance your system has of telling you something is doing something it shouldn't and you should stop it.

Or to put it perhaps another way, turning off UAC is very much like turning off your anti-virus, both have a very similar aim, to stop malicious software from doing bad things to your PC. The latter does it by comparing every file you run against a list of known signatures for dodgy ones, and this list is always out of date. The former stops bad things by alerting you when something tries to alter any important part of your system.

So you really should turn it on.

And also, you've never had a virus or an account hacked... that you know of. This is pretty much all that anyone can say on the matter, and some of it may be more down to good fortune than anything else, and none of it is any indication on the likelihood in the future.


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Quote:
Rob Shepherd says...
And also, you've never had a virus or an account hacked... that you know of. This is pretty much all that anyone can say on the matter, and some of it may be more down to good fortune than anything else, and none of it is any indication on the likelihood in the future.
Well, yes, but then you could say the same about any system anywhere that hasn't found the said culprit, including if UAC had allowed a change to happen that hasn't yet flagged up the vulnerability.

Add in my other point, what if UAC finds something it didn't like?
Instead of saying "Oh, this looks like it has something wrong with it/it's a virus/it's dodgy shall I run it?" UAC just insta deletes it.

Oh, and to run a powerpoint exe from an email....? You'd be as well downloading and running that DOC.TXT.exe or the MUSIC.MP3.exe from the other mail... <koff>

Jimbo : oÞ

"There's that word again... is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull in the future?"

Quote:
Jimbo Þ says...
Oh, and to run a powerpoint exe from an email....? You'd be as well downloading and running that DOC.TXT.exe or the MUSIC.MP3.exe from the other mail... That was an example as my mum does this occasionally. Actually there are many documented issues with all sorts of email clients that required nothing more than you to see a preview of an email in your preview pane before installing a back door into your system.

The simple fact is browsing the web can expose you to vulnerabilities (especially if you have Flash or Java installed, even if you use Firefox) which your anti-virus is useless against. And that's before you download any program from it (surely you've done that!).


Quote:
Jimbo Þ says...
Add in my other point, what if UAC finds something it didn't like?
Instead of saying "Oh, this looks like it has something wrong with it/it's a virus/it's dodgy shall I run it?" UAC just insta deletes it.No that's not what UAC does at all, if any program tries to access a file in a certain directory (or even certain files) it pops up and requests your permission to let it. It doesn't delete anything, all it does it allow or disallow a program from accessing a file or directory.

UAC doesn't attempt to understand what is good and what is bad, that's what your anti-virus does (based on a list which is always out of date, since new virii and trojans come along daily), what it does is try to protect things that bad stuff messes with, and then puts the decision into your hands.


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