XTerm*background:       Light Cyan
XTerm*colorBD:          DarkBlue
XTerm*colorBDMode:      True
XTerm*cursorColor:      DarkSeaGreen
XTerm*font:             -*-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-14-140-*-*-*-*-*-*
XTerm*font:             -*-lucidatypewriter-bold-r-normal-*-14-140-*-*-*-*-*-*
XTerm*foreground:       Black
XTerm*geometry:         100x40
XTerm*rightScrollBar:   True
XTerm*saveLines:        5000
XTerm*scrollBar:        True
XTerm*scrollTtyOutput:  False
XTerm*toolBar:          True
XTerm*trueType:         True

My Fedora 13 desktop

Nice!!

gnome-shell --replace

… and the existing GNOME panel will be replaced using shell.  When done playing, simply press Ctrl-C from the terminal and you are back to your regular Metacity window manager (and then I use Compiz Fusion to reload Compiz).

Gnome Shell has a modern look & feel about it, runs smooth and stable, but it is clearly feature incomplete.  The project has it mapped to be ready by this September.  Although the feature list for Fedora 14 (Laughlin) has not yet been published, its project schedule is fairly regular and I suspect Gnome 3 and this shell will be an integral part of that release.

Speaking of Compiz and modern looks, I enabled a feature in its configuration settings manager, Login/Logout, by prefixing its Logout Window matching criteria to include:

(class=Gnome-session & type=Dialog) |

… with its fade out set to 2.0 seconds, saturation to 0.0, brightness to 75.0, and opacity to 66.6667.  That way, when I log out of my current window session, I get that “familiar” look of my session darkening and fading into the past.

A bug exists with Compiz in regards to customizing your mouse cursor theme — I prefer Oxygen_Zion myself, but Compiz insists on using the default, except when you open an application window, then the mouse renders in the custom theme until you travel outside its window — very annoying.  A workaround fix is to:

mkdir ~/.icons/default
cat > ~/.icons/default/index.theme << EOD
[Icon Theme]
Name=Oxygen_Zion
Comment=Black
Inherits=Oxygen_Zion
[Desktop Entry]
Name[en_US]=index.theme
EOD

… then logout / login to make the change persist.

Here’s a list of my favorites to start off with, which loads a rich set of games, internet, and programming stuff for my 64-bit workstation:

alacarte
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686
anjuta
anjuta-doc
avant-window-navigator
awn-extras-applets
ballbuster
ccache
ClanLib
ClanLib-devel
codeblocks
codeblocks-contrib
codeblocks-contrib-libs
codeblocks-libs
compiz-fusion-extras-gnome
compiz-fusion-gnome
compiz-manager
conglomerate
control-center-extra
cups-pdf
dosbox
ecj
eclipse-cdt
eclipse-changelog
eclipse-dltk-ruby
eclipse-jdt
eclipse-phpeclipse
eclipse-rpmstubby
eclipse-shelled
eclipse-subclipse
emerald
emerald-themes
extremetuxracer
fedora-packager
fluid-soundfont-lite-patches
fusion-icon-gtk
games-menus
gambas2-ide
gcc
gcc-c++
gconf-editor
ghostscript-doc
glade3
glest
glunarclock
gnome-applet-sshmenu
gnome-games-extra
gnome-games-extra-data
gnome-hearts
gnome-themes-extras
gnubg
gnuchess
gnubversion
hexedit
htop
intltool
iptraf
kernel-devel
livecd-tools
manedit
Maelstrom
meld
mono-basic
mono-basic-devel
mono-core
mono-data
mono-data-sqlite
mono-debugger
mono-devel
monodevelop
monodevelop-debugger-mdb
monodevelop-debugger-mdb-devel
monodoc
mono-extras
mono-jscript
mono-locale-extras
mono-nat
mono-nat-devel
mono-tools
mono-winforms
mozplugger
multimedia-menus
ncurses-devel
neverball
nspluginwrapper
nspluginwrapper.i686
oxygen-cursor-themes
oxygen-icon-theme
penguin-command
perl-libwww-perl
preferences-menus
PySolFC*
revisor
rogue
ruby
ruby-devel
ruby-docs
ruby-irb
ruby-ri
scorched3d
SDL*
security-menus
stellarium
stellarium-doc
strace
subversion-gnome
supertuxkart
timidity++
wesnoth
wine
xmlcopyeditor
xmlto
xscreensaver-extras-gss
xscreensaver-gl-extras-gss

Then there is adding on repositories from RPMFusion.org for these packages:

atari++
e-uae
gltron
gmameui
mame
mame-ldplayer
mame-tools
mess
mess-data
mess-tools
mplayer
mplayer-gui
mplayer-tools
stella
vice

Next, add-on these Adobe essentials:

AdobeReader_enu
flash-plugin

… and yum remove totem-mozplugin which is totally useless and actually gets in the way of background media playing with Firefox (mp3, midi, wav, etc.)

To get a rich set of fonts working for Gnome, Firefox, and OpenOffice, I also like to unpack a copy of this fonts archive into my home directory folder, .fonts

Finally, add Sun Java support for the command-line and web browser:

alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/latest/bin/java 20000
alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/java/latest/bin/javac 20000
alternatives --install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/java/latest/bin/javaws 20000
alternatives --install /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so.x86_64 /usr/java/latest/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so 20000

… and don’t forget to run alternatives --set for each Java component.

Of noteworthy, WordPress with MySQL upgraded with no apparent issue and the external MailScanner RPM package is running unmodified.  That’s a relief.

One significant change for me was the placement of custom upstart files.  I had my role-playing game daemon simply defined before as /etc/event.d/rpgd, however, it now needs to be moved into /etc/init as rpgd.conf.  Go figure, but a simple mv and initctl start rpgd command later and it was up and running.

I suspected upgrading a minimal guest instance with few outside modifications would be fairly straightforward.  I do not believe I will go this route on the workstation and laptop, instead I will stick to the practice of backup and re-install for those bare metal needs.  Stay tuned.

But instead of crafting new scripts to compile it, I headed instead to a Gnome-based programming tool, Anjuta IDE.  What attracted to me most outside of the expected C source and header file management was its integrated ability to work with autogen and subversion.  Autogen produces configure and makefile for multiple targets, which is useful since rpgd (aka Hack & Slash) is made up of three binaries: rpgd (the service daemon), rpgclient (the user interface), and rpgweb (cgi to display player stats).

Now that I have the project under new IDE and version control, it should make for improved coding and debugging while maintaining the ability to compile, link, and go on multiple architectures.

And I got all of it to fit with only the minimal 8kb memory expansion required for those software sprites — with BASIC reporting only 1-byte free after LOAD.  Funny how that always makes me feel good.

Berzerk MMX on VIC= 20

I thought I was really clever at the time writing my random dungeon level generator — it was my first practical use outside of a classroom to implement a recursive function.  Because the dungeon ‘walls’ were probability driven, a function was needed to validate that every ’tile’ in the arbitrarily-sized dungeon floor was accessible by the hero.  Without this kind of validation, the hero would eventually find himself ‘trapped’ on a floor with no means to escape.

The recursive function was simply invoked as chkroom(0,0), whereas the 0,0 passed were parameters to the starting point in the dungeon map matrix.  Upon entering each tile, a flag is cleared for that element in the matrix.  Next, a condition is checked if the tile to its right is accessible.  If it is, call chkroom() with +1 added to X.  If not, do the same condition checks for down, left, and up directions calling chkroom() passing values Y+1, X-1, and Y-1 respectively.

And at the conclusion of all this recursion, do a loop through the dungeon matrix to check if ALL of the flags had been cleared.  If any persist, do the dungeon regeneration and this validation again until it has passed.  The higher the frequency of random walls generated increases the pattern complexity of the floor, which exponentially increases the probability that the floor will not pass with an ‘all clear’.

Today, I am working on a port of an old arcade favorite, Berzerk, for the Commodore VIC 20.  The playfield for the game is a fixed 3-row by 5-column matrix for each floor.  Given that the game needs to be written using 8-bit assembler, I quickly dismissed the idea that using my C algorithm to validate a floor could be feasible.  After all, VIC 20 is a relic machine running at 1mHz and limited memory of only a few thousand bytes available for the program, graphics, and sound all the while using a 256-byte system stack.  Ah, but the challenge by it all . . .

Generating the random walls for each floor is a simple matter, but validating that all its ‘rooms’ are accessible was turning out to be very problematic.  Every time I thought I could solve this puzzle using bit operators (OR, AND, XOR) to assure that its rooms and corridors could not trap the hero, I would only later stumble upon an instance where even my most elaborate of schemes failed.  This was getting a bit frustrating, pun intended.

So I wandered back to my dungeon floor validation and decided it was so simple of an algorithm that it may be possible to translate it to assembler and still keep it within reason of the machine’s constraints.  After some writing and whittling, the resulting code turned out perfect!  It is called by simply zero-ing the starting cell (R0) and invoking CRAWL.  Here is its listing:

CRAWL:
  LDX R0
  LDA MAZE,X
  CMP #$80
  BCC @fini        ; been here?
  AND #$7F         ; clear accessible bit
  STA MAZE,X

@right:
  LSR
  BCS @down        ; right wall?
  PHA              ;++ push walls
  LDA R0
  PHA              ;++ push cell
  INC R0
  JSR CRAWL        ; explore right cell
  PLA              ;-- pop cell
  STA R0
  PLA              ;-- pop walls

@down:
  LSR
  BCS @left        ; bottom wall?
  PHA              ;++ push walls
  LDA R0
  PHA              ;++ push cell
  CLC
  ADC #5
  STA R0
  JSR CRAWL        ; explore cell below
  PLA              ;-- pop cell
  STA R0
  PLA              ;-- pop walls

@left:
  LSR
  BCS @up
  PHA              ;++ push walls
  LDA R0
  PHA              ;++ push cell
  DEC R0
  JSR CRAWL        ; explore left cell
  PLA              ;-- pop cell
  STA R0
  PLA              ;-- pop walls

@up:
  LSR
  BCS @fini        ; top wall?
  PHA              ;++ push walls
  LDA R0
  PHA              ;++ push cell
  SEC
  SBC #5
  STA R0
  JSR CRAWL        ; explore cell above
  PLA              ;-- pop cell
  STA R0
  PLA              ;-- pop walls
@fini:
  RTS

This old dog is always happy to re-implement an old trick!

No more copying multimedia to the modest-sized PS3 internal hard disk — just point PMS to the workstation’s file directories, ISOs, etc. to share with PS3, and it is conveniently integrated and organized on the gaming console.  Will wonders never cease?

The PMS UI reveals a lot of options, but fortunately it comes preset with normalized values and pick-lists with human-readable adjustments.  It comes bundled with its own tsMuxeR package, but it plays best by leveraging other multimedia codecs and transcoding from the mainstream projects in MEncoder and VLC.  And there are free text entry boxes to override and enhance even the nerdiest of implementations.

I made this simple script to add as an Avant Window Navigator launcher item:

#!/bin/sh
cd pms-linux-1.10.5
env JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/default ./PMS.sh
exit

OpenCBM provides an API library and some useful command-line tools.  The following is an example of how to format and copy Commodore files to the floppy drive:

$ sudo modprobe cbm

$ dmesg | tail
cbm_init: using passive (XM1541) cable (auto), irq 7
cbm: resetting devices
cbm: waiting for free bus...

$ cbmctrl detect
 8: 1540 or 1541 

$ cbmctrl command 8 "N0:VIC20 3-JAN-2010,10"
$ cbmctrl status 8
00, ok,00,00
$ cbmctrl dir 8
0 ."vic20 3-jan-2010" 10 2a
664 blocks free.
00, ok,00,00

$ cbmwrite 8 quikman+8k.prg
[Info] writing quikman+8k.prg -> QUIKMAN+8K.PRG,P,W
[Info] identified a 1540 or 1541 drive
............-
[Info] 00, OK,00,00
$ cbmwrite 8 omega-fury.prg 
[Info] writing omega-fury.prg -> OMEGA-FURY.PRG,P,W
[Info] identified a 1540 or 1541 drive
....................\
[Info] 00, OK,00,00

$ cbmctrl dir 8
0 ."vic20 3-jan-2010" i1 2a
47   "quikman+8k.prg"   prg
76   "omega-fury.prg"   prg
541 blocks free.
00, ok,00,00

Of course, I can now hook-up this drive to a real VIC 20 computer and play what’s on the diskette(s).  But for giggles, I can even use the Commodore 8-bit emulator, VICE, to test drive my floppies, for example:

$ xvic -memory 8k -device8 2 +truedrive \
-keybuf 'LOAD "QUIKMAN+8K.PRG",8\0D'
...
sucessfully loaded libopencbm.so
/dev/cbm opened.
...

VICE 2.2 on a 24" HP display

Nice!