RZ is where it waits for you to send the file. So send it the file. You do this in Hyperterminal, using Zmodem.

I've got that the X is exacutable, I just dont know where to put my "chmod 755" command. Where did the empacman file end up? I didn't tell it to go anywhere specific when I transfered.

It goes to the current directory. In your case, according to the example you showed above, it's in /empeg/bin.

Yeah, I sent the file. when I do a ls -l now the file is there, but how do I change it to an exacutable? I tried the "chmod 755" a hundred way now and no luck. This is my first attempt at any of this, once I grasp what's going on I'm sure everything will be more clear. Right now, I'm just confused.

chmod 755 empacman in the directory where it is.

Ok, did that (was trying to chmod 755 the empeg/bin#/empacman) now the empacman file is rwx. I still can't find it from the hijack menu though, what gives?

After setting it to executable, you still need to:

- Set your drives back to RO.
- Execute the program (./empacman)
- Type EXIT

then it will be on the Hijack menu.

Have you done this:
cd/<wherever empacman lives>
./empacman
exit

?
Edit: Bah, yeah what he said

Thanks to ALL, I am now playing Empacman. This is my first attempt with Hijack or any of this stuff, it was confusing at first but I think I have the concept now. I can't wait to start messing with other stuff now!!! Thanks again!!! High Score 5490 first try!

The slightly more complex part comes when you want this good stuff to survive a re-boot, not exactly straightforward but you've got a friend in empeg-preinit

The reason I didn't type all of the exact keystrokes from top to bottom was so that I could illustrate a point: That we really really need a way to easily add userland apps which doesn't rely upon the shell prompt at any point. Someone please make a function for this. Should be as simple as FTP'ing the file to the player and adding an entry to config.ini. There's gotta be a way to do it.

Ahhhh..men!

Well, as somebody said somewhere, it would make sense to require preinit and then package the program with a preinit script. Then all that would be required is to upload the package and then reboot. I PM'd Mike at one point about adding some related functions to jEmplode, but I think he got busy doing some other stuff before he even had time to consider it, but what do I know?

omg, That's totally cool.... New permanent addition to my player...BTW, all the speeds seemed perfectly fine to me. My only suggestion is the institute a pause, then hit up to quit, or hit the wheel again to unpause. Totally rockin!!!! Man I wish I could pull something like that off.

Oh, and btw, it stays running in my hijack after I quit out. Running Hijack 2.77.

it does ?

how'd you pull that off ?

I'm on it. Here's one idea

1) App developers ensure that their application's files are live in an application level directory - ie mygame has all neccessary files in the directory /somedir/mygame/ and not just in /somedir/
2) .tgz files are created of this directory, not of the files. so when we untar mygame-0.1.tgz into /programs0/ the directory /programs0/mygame/ gets created, and all the files put there.
3) Included in this tarball is the file /mygame/empeg_install.sh which contains some variables eg:

#!/bin/bash
#install.sh
export PATH = mygame
export BINARY = mygame/mygamebinary
export PRIORITY = M99


4) JEmplode installs and execs a script that sets a lot of stuff up - formats /dev/hda2, modifies /etc/fstab, creates a couple of mounting utilities, and installs a couple of scripts; /etc/preinit.d/N10mount and /etc/preinit.d/M0appinstall.
5) JEmplode installs the preinit binary.
6) JEmplode modifies config.ini to ensure that reservecache is set to a sensible value.

7) At this point users can ask JEmplode to dump an application tarball into the empeg. JEmplode puts it in a known location...eg /programs0/new
After a reboot, preinit finds it's first 2 scripts. The first one mounts the /programs0 partition ro. The second script, M0installapps.sh checks to see if there are any tarballs in /programs0/new/. If none exist, it exits. But if there are any, it untars them into /programs0. It then sources the empeg_install.sh script contained in the tarball, and uses the information found there to set up /etc/preinit.d/ entries Finally it moves the tarball so it doesn't get found next reboot... eg to /programs0/installed


Issues:
There wouldn't be any feedback on the final install process. For the whole part this isn't a huge problem, as most stuff will untar almost instantly, and the application will be ready for use next boot. But emptriv takes an exceedingly long time to untar because of the huge number of question files. I don't see an easy way around this problem. Yes we could make JEmplode do the application install itself, but this would either require telnetd to be installed and run so that JEmplode can run commands natively and get decent feedback, or kernel changes to allow JEmplode to achieve the same thing through the ftpd in hijack. Neither is really a desirable solution.
(I'm happy running telnetd on my empeg because it never gets plugged in anywhere but my home network - but those of you plugging in at work should *not* run it in it's current state - there's no password protection (and it would be sniffable anyway), and it has full root priviledges, meaning that anyone could scrub the entire drive(s)).
The ideal solution would be for emptriv to consolidate the questions into a few much larger files, and seek to position within it when looking for a question. But I understand that this would also be a pain to do.


Opinions?

See my reply to you in this thread...

The only part I'm not too keen on in your version is that the .tgz gets left on the empeg after the install process is done. Given the apps partition is only 30MB, I'd rather it be removed (in anticipation of an explosion of 3rd party app development )...

Oh, I don't know abount the M0appinstall, either. I think it might be a little excessive -- I mean, how often do new apps appear (in anticipation of the aforementioned explosion never occuring)? However, I can't think of any other way to get apps installable by JEmplode...

Then there becomes the problem of programs that dont like eachother... such at empgps and emptrivia... it would be nice if you could put some kind of "link" in config.ini such as:
Empgps: /programs0/empgps
Empackman: /programs0/empacman
Emptrivia: /programs0/emptrivia

So that those names would appear in the hikjack menu but wouldnt have to be running to be in there. Then you could open up empgps and when your done "close" the program (kill the process).. this way the programs wouldnt have to run into eachother....

Although it would be nice if the programmers would make the programs work together or if they dont have time or what have you to release the source so someone could. I am really interested in gps but that project has seemed to almost die off completly ; (

-Greg

Yeah. But you'd need to be able for hijack to start programs which is a problem which hasn't been solved yet. Mark Lord has a thread about it somewhere...

- Trevor

didn't someone implement a "picker" that would do this sarting and stopping of different applications ?

Could Hijack send to the player like ./program ? .... or even as ghetto as telnetting to localhost and doing it (this would be an extreem way to do it.. not very recourceful but its an idea)

I like how picker works but the problem is that you only get the option when you startup the player. So if you wanted to use another program you would have to reboot the player. I wish there was a way to bringup the picker menu just like hijack.
-Greg

How about adapting Picker to be a userland application that binds to Hijack and does its process crceation entirely in user-space?

How did you get empeg-preinit installed? I tried:

ftp -s:install.ftp [my empeg IP]

But the first line of install.ftp (quote site rw) was skipped.

I added a blank line to install.ftp and tried again. This time it executed the rw command, but it's now hanging on the put (empeg-preinit hijack).

Also, the install.ftp does a cd into /bin to place empeg-preinit as hijack. The README file mentions /sbin instead.

Clue, please.

Can't answer most of your questions as I use Linux, not DOS.

But /sbin and /bin are the same directory - one is a symlink (windows translation: shortcut) to the other.

OK. That's good! Symlinks are your friend.

Now the only gotcha I have is that I can't get anything to transfer over ftp. (Maybe it needs to be in passive mode?)

Even if I try an ls, "150 Opening data connection" comes back and it just sits there until I ^C out of it.

At least it didn't do anything harmful ('cept it IS still in rw mode - yikes! [grin]).

OK - I used Hyperterminal, went in that way, and uploaded the file into /sbin (as hijack). Then I made /etc/preinit.d ... and I think I'm almost there!

amazing! the game looks great but when i reboot it is no longer in the hijack menu. how hard is it to start programming things for my rio. i would love to make some cool programs but i dont even know where to start.

I have been reading this thread for a bit .. played with the program some and wanted to add what I went through in order to maybe cut some corners for anyone else having problems.

Let me start off laying some groundwork. For starters, I am not a Linux/Unix user. I have very limited exposure to them but do understand some of the concepts. I did have to download a few things.. the developers version of the software for my player for example.

OK - I installed beta developer v13 and re-installed the new version of Hijack. I am going to assume that everyone knows how to do that already, and has them up and running.

In my case, I have DSL at home. My computer has an ethernet card that I use to connect to my DSL line. I recently added a small and cheap 5 port ethernet hub to my connection, so both my computer and DSL line are all 'hubbed'.

With this, I can use another ethernet cable and connect my empeg player. Since my DSL provider (Verizon) uses DHCP to assign IP addresses, it assigns my player an address as soon as I power it up automatically, I do nothing. I know this works, I can start up my copy of emplode and it sees the player and displays the IP address for me. It also still sees the USB connection, I could chose that if I wanted.. but anyway..

NOTE : I used FTP to send my files, and to make my CHMOD settings. It is possible to use Telnet as well, if you want.

Once you get an ethernet connection, I use my favorite FTP client (WS-FTP) to connect to the empeg player. No problems, I can connect anonymously so no login ID or pass is needed.

With my FTP program connected, it allows me to set the player in READ WRITE mode. The player is in READ ONLY mode by default. I cannot tell you how to set the player in Read Write unless you also use WS-FTP. But evidently, this is an important step, I got the afore mentioned '150' errors in FTP until I set the correct mode.

From here, I chose to make a directory under Drive0 named 'games' and uploaded my empacman file there. I also used my FTP client to set the rights to 755 for the file and the newly formed 'games' directory.

I then disconnected my FTP program and logged in to the player by way of Telnet. There is a pretty good link in this thread somewhere that told me how, if I remember exactly where I would say but sorry. I found it, you can too. Once connected via Telnet, I executed the file by typing './empacman' and then (if I remember right) logged out of Telnet.

I then brought back up my FTP client and set the player back to READ ONLY mode. <-- Do NOT forget to do this or else bad things can happen.

At this point, I could enter HiJack and the menu selection was there, the game started with no problem.

I am now at a familiar problem, how to keep the setting in the HiJack menu. This is beyond my grasp so I cannot give any insights here. Believe me, I will be reading to see if anyone can post a step by step solution for the rest of us.

If anyone is still seeking help, at least up to this point, feel free to email and I will be glad to do what I can. Remember, I am no guru when it comes to this stuff.. but I did learn a few things installing this program.

I would like to add to everyone else, this is very sweet and well done; kudos.

Also, you asked for suggestions. I have only one at the moment.

Since I studied Pacman back in Highschool (in order to make my own DOS/Pascal Clone), I noticed one behavior right off that was very different from the original game:

That is, you have it right that the ghosts do not come out until a certain number of bullets are eaten. However, if the ghosts are killed, they come back within a short period of time, not bullet count.

Without this behavior, the game is much easier, since I can concentrate on getting large sections of bullets, then eat a super bullet (thus killing all the ghosts), then concentrate on getting any small sections of bullets.

But I'd like to repeat my appreciation of this fine gift! It's very well done.

Oh before I go, I think sound effects would be nice (but also annoying to someone else in the car, so make them optional if you do). I also like the idea of fruit and extra lives. All of these shouldn't be too much to add; I'm sure someone else will do them .