Hi folks,

I've been working over the last month on a project that is now at a stage I'm ready to release to the public. Find attached to this message a zip file containing version 0 of empacman.

The file is an empeg executable that requires hijack to function. Once the file is executed on your empeg, it will create a new hijack menu item for you to launch the game.

The controls are as follows:
up - face top, rio/kw remote 2
down - face bottom, rio/kw remote 5,8
left - face left, rio/kw remote 1,4
right - face right, rio/kw remote 3,6
quit - face knob, rio remote cancel, kw remote *

Version 1 complete with source is forthcoming. I just want to get some feedback on its current state, to nail any bugs and make any smart or highly requested improvements.

So, anybody out there who wants to beta test my game please get to it, and report your findings in this thread.

Cheers,

Richard
--

OMG that is so so utterly cool. My hat is off to you.

Can't play it well yet because it starts out kinda fast and it's hard to think fast enough to hit the buttons, but I'll prolly get the hang of it.

So to get this working, I just log into the empg shell and run it? does it need to be in any special directory?

Gotta tag it as executable. Doesn't need to be in a specific directory, but if it's in, say, drive0/var it won't get erased by an upgrade.

Then "Q" outta the player from the shell. Execute it (./empacman) then type "exit" to get back into the player. Then fire up Hijack and it'll be there on the Hijack menu.

Optionally, you can start it up with each player boot from a custom init.

That's an amazing addon you've done there, a really really nice piece of work! I can't wait to show off Pacman on my car stereo

This is in no way a criticism but personally I'd prefer it if the pace was somewhat slower, I too found some buttons less responsive than I expected and got chomped up fairly easily as I was unable to navigate as I'd expected.

I did what my question asked above, and it worked great. However, after I played it once, the shell gave a message saying:
hijack: removed menu entry: "empacman"

After rebooting, I no longer had the menu option.
In order to get it back, I had to repeat the process. How do I get it to stay as a permanent menu entry?

I also got that message at the shell prompt (removed meny entry empacman) but it's still on my menu. Just checked.

The trick is that you can't reboot the player. If you reboot the player, the menu entry will be gone. Unless you make empacman run on every boot by putting it into a custom init.

Is there a faq that talks about these custom inits? I'm assuming that it is not the config.ini file.

There's no FAQ on it, It's a pretty advanced linux thing. You kind of have to know what you're doing. Search the BBS, there are some threads on the subject.

What we really need is a way to install and run things like this without having to replace the init. There has been some talk about modifying hijack so that you can execute userland programs directly from its menu, and configure them by putting them in config.ini. This would be the ultimate, and someone could do it without linux knowledge or complicated instructions.

Am I right in assuming this applies also to emptriv?

That app was really neat, I say 'was' because it too doesn't survive a reboot while still appearing on the Hijack menu. I followed the emptriv thread as much as I could but got out of my depth after a while.

I'd happily settle for a 'middle ground' on this, i.e. I don't mind fiddling with a .ini file to make these cool apps available all of the time. Can you recall if something exists that meets this criteria?

Edit: I don't want to steal the thunder from this great game with a semi-OT question, please feel free to direct this elsewhere .

I don't mind fiddling with a .ini file to make these cool apps available all of the time. Can you recall if something exists that meets this criteria?

That's my point, it's not as simple as fiddling with an ini file, and I wish it were.

This absolutely rocks. Very well done.

As a side note, I have moved my telnetd and viewer and empacman into /drive0/var and can't get preinit.d to work. Executable permissions are set and simply moving them back to /empeg/bin works fine.

It's likely that that directory is not mounted when preinit wants to run those programs. You could try changing the first letter of your startup scripts to an `M'. This should tell preinit to wait to execute those scripts until that directory is mounted.

Thanks Bitt. I figured it was something like that but hadn't got as far as working it out for sure. Thanks.

Sorry for hijacking the thread kirkis

Holy [censored]! Thats awesome.

How about some sound fx?
pacman
pacman2

Tom

Wow! This must be the best app i've tried yet!

I setup empeg-preinit.v3 just now, and preinits loads, and tries to load the empacman file from the preinit.d folder. but i get this error.

/etc/preinit.d/N01empacman: /etc/preinit.d/N01empacman: cannot execute binary file

I've tried the file with both the 'N' and 'M' prefix, and i still get this error. How can i fix this, and get this programming running all the time?

Did you make it executeable? If not:

chmod 755 /etc/preinit.d/N01empacman

/Michael

yes, i've made it executeable, first i tried 755 on both the folder preinit.d then on the N01empacman file. If i type ./N01empacman from the hyperterm window, it loads and binds to hijack. but the preinit gives that error when it tires to load it.

Can someone post a empeg screen shot?

- Jon

Wow!

Thanks!

- Jon

OK.. this one has to go into Hijack!!! is that easily doable?

I found some pacman wav's that sound good, anyone else think this game needs sound?
http://emuxhaven.net/emuxhaven/multia/extras/sounds.zip

Tom

preinit scripts must be scripts. If you want it to start a binary program, then you'll need to write a one-liner to start it.

Could you give me an example of the one liner script? I've never written a script for the empeg, or linux for that matter.

===================¨
#!/bin/sh
/path/to/actual/program_to_run
===================

Just the part between the lines with =='s. #!/bin/sh must be on first line of file.
Be sure to save it it with Unix style line endings, if creating it on a non-unix system, or it will not work (use something like UltraEdit on Windows).

Save that in the preinit.d catalog with an appropriate name and keep the real programs somewhere else. Don't forget to make it executeable.

/Michael

Way cool. Time to install pre-init

Thanks for the help, i just got it working. I downloaded that UltraEdit Program, and the script still didn't work. So i installed ae on my empeg, and opened and saved the file, didn't make any changes, and it worked! Yay! Pacman is the coolest thing (till gps comes around )

I finally caved in, RTFM (and this board) and installed the excellent empeg-preinit-v3 and wished I'd done it sooner, I now have emptriv and empacman on my Hijack menu, OH YES

I do have a slight problem though, running emptriv removes empacman from Hijack's menu and I need to reboot to get it back again.

Here are my serial logs:

Player Bootlog
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg50-hijack-v276 ([email protected])
<..snip..>
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-beta11 2002/02/08.
empacman running as pid 15
opening display...
opening font file...
creating font image...
ok...
loading categories...
waitmenu...
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Feb 7 2002
Vcb: 0x4054d000

Run emptriv 1st time
hijack: removed menu entry: "emptriv"
hijack: removed menu entry: "empacman"
failed EMPEG_HIJACK_BINDBUTTONS: Device or resource busy

Quit emptriv
waitmenu...

Run emptriv 2nd time
hijack: removed menu entry: "emptriv"

Quit emptriv
waitmenu...

In /etc/preinit.d i have 2 files:
1. M10empacman
---> #!/bin/sh
---> /drive0/empacman

2. M15emptriv
---> #!/bin/sh
---> cd /drive0/emptriv
---> ./emptriv

Edit: Changing the order of empacman/emptriv (M15emptriv & M20empacman) doesn't make any difference. Additionally, both games work fine standalone with no errors reported from Hijack.

Can anyone shed any light on what's going wrong here please?

In the interests of full disclosure, in the case of preinit, you don't really need the shebang line. This is another aspect of the same reason that it needs to be a script in the first place. However, for the sake of consistency with other scripts, you should probably put it there nonetheless.

For those of you who are a bit linux-shy but who want to use 3rd party apps such as this one (which rocks bigtime), I've created a script that will do some of the legwork for you - see "/programs and preinit - the easy way" in the programming forum.

Oh my dear god.

I'm lost for words. This is outstanding. Unbelievable. All this and more.

For a 'Version 0' release, this thing is so professional, so polished, as to be untrue. If there's anyone even slightly considering putting this on their empeg, DO IT. DO IT NOW!

Couple of minor points - the pause after munching an enemy seems a tad large (in the order of 0.5 secs) - this might feel smoother if it was more like 0.1 secs? Secondly, is there any way of saving a high-score table?!

I just cannot express how utterly cool this is!

A.

Also, as an addendum - don't listen to these old dodderers who can't press the buttons fast enough . This thing seems to run at a perfect speed on mine - not so slow as to be boring, and not so fast as to be uncontrollable. Also, I like the way you can 'queue' commands with the buttons - not sure if this was intentional, but it's pretty neat.

Oh, and we do need a map editor.

A.

Secondly, is there any way of saving a high-score table?!

I wouldn't count on that -- you'd have to have your drives mounted rw anytime you play...

I would love to be able to have empacman and emptriv on my empeg but know very little about doing this kind of stuff. I tried to get emptriv working a while ago but was unsuccessful doing so. I am just an average windows computer user with very little knowledge of programing and no knowledge of linix. Could someone please do step by step instructions of how to get these programs to work on my empeg. I would really appreciate it and I'm sure there are probably others in my position who would find this a great help. Thanks in advance!

Oh, and by the way, I have win98, 2.00-beta11 and the latest hijack installed

See the thread "/programs and preinit - the easy way", and follow the instructions there first. This will do a lot of preparation for you, and will help installing telnetd..

After you have done this, telnet in, and run the command rwp
Then ftp the empacman binary to /programs0/empacman.
Then on the telnet session, run the command chmod 755 /programs0/empacman
Finally, run the command rop and reboot. empacman should now be in the hijack menu.

One very minor problem I have noticed which may be out of your control. When the unit spins the drives up, the whole game seems to pause while it waits for the drive.

Can't say I have ever noticed the player software pause while the drive spins up though.

this is the perfect reason to build the 'joystick conversion' mod into your empeg (Neo-2-Rio's custom job)... for the ultimate PAC-control

Hi folks,

Thank you so much for the feedback so far. Here are some of my thoughts on the things that have been mentioned.

I'm getting a mixed response about the game speed - any more opinions out there about how fast the game should run? Yes, the button queuing was intentional.

Do others agree that the pause when eating a ghost is too long?

I see no mention about the control layout (on the remotes, the front panel doesn't leave many options), so should I take it that it is satisfactory, or is there a better layout someone can suggest?

As for the sound effects suggestion, I thought there was no need as it would be good enough just listening to your music collection. I'm not sure how to go about adding sound effects, but for someone whos keen enough I'm sure they can be implemented once I release the source.

The same goes for a few other suggestions like the high score table. As mentioned this would require mounting the drive as read/write, unless you don't mind the scores being wiped each time the machine reboots. I'd rather not tackle such technical issues but theres nothing stopping someone else from having a go.

The game doesn't have the same priority as the player software, so if the player is very busy, like spinning up the disk, then the game will freeze. I figured that this is an acceptable compromise, but others may disagree. I think this too will go in the same basket of leaving it to others who may have a bit more technical knowledge of such things than I do.

I don't want to cop out of making any changes myself, but I'd rather concentrate on less technical issues, on the game itself and ways the gameplay could be improved. Some things I thought of myself but didn't know if there would be a demand for would be some of the extra bonuses from the original that are absent, such as extra lives for reaching so many points, and the fruits.

It's encouraging to see that there aren't any reports of serious bugs. Would I be right in thinking that there is very little, if any, work that needs to be done? One thing I concentrated on was getting good behaviour for the ghosts, trying to mimic the different personalities of the original. I don't know how successful I've been. Do people find that the ghosts are challenging or too easy to beat?

As for the source code, I hope you guys can be patient with me as I don't have a lot of spare time to be spending on this project. I want to make the code much prettier before I release it, as parts got rather messy in my rush to finish the beta. A corresponding new version of vfdlib should also appear at the same time as I've found a few bugs in the bitmap handling in the course of writing empacman.

I'd like to think that once the source is out there it would give others the example they need to bring some more great apps to the empeg. At the very least it means that people will be able to customise empacman to their tastes - e.g. if you really want to change the game speed then changing a few constants and recompiling is all it would take.

About the installation process, I don't mind that this thread has raised the issue. I hope that there is now a higher incentive for a more user-friendly procedure to be devised. I applaud people for their attempts thus far. I believe the ultimate solution would be one where apps could be downloaded and configured from JEmplode, with no need for any other shell/ftp trickery.

Cheers guys,

Richard
--

empacman is pretty amazing stuff. I too took the time today to install preinit and telnetd onto my empeg. Simply amazing.

speed: I like the speed, but maybe it could start out a little slower and speed up as you pass levels.

the ghost pause is okay for me.

I'd like to see the score and bonus stuff added, but opening the source would easily take care of that. And from the few minutes that I played, I didn't notice any major bugs so there doesn't seem to be a lot of work left to do.

later,
ajay

any more opinions out there about how fast the game should run? [...] Do others agree that the pause when eating a ghost is too long?

I think overall game speed is fine, but the eating a ghost pause is just a smidge long. If it doesn't get changed, it won't bother me.

I see no mention about the control layout (on the remotes, the front panel doesn't leave many options), so should I take it that it is satisfactory, or is there a better layout someone can suggest?

I don't really see how it could change any. Maybe get the remote key definitions from config.ini? I might prefer to use 2, 4, 5 and 6, for instance. The only control that I think is missing is a pause button. Some traffic lights aren't long enough to get an entire game in, and I'd hate to have to try and drive while I finish my game... Maybe a knob press can pause, instead of taking you back to the hijack menu? A long knob press can quit, instead.

[...] the high score table. As mentioned this would require mounting the drive as read/write, unless you don't mind the scores being wiped each time the machine reboots.

This would be a good compromise. I wouldn't mind having a high score table for things like road-trips...

The game doesn't have the same priority as the player software, so if the player is very busy, like spinning up the disk, then the game will freeze.

It was a bit annoying the first time it happened, but I got used to it pretty quick. There's probably a way around it, but I'm in no rush to get the fix...

Some things I thought of myself but didn't know if there would be a demand for would be some of the extra bonuses from the original that are absent, such as extra lives for reaching so many points, and the fruits.

I wasn't good enough to notice if any of that stuff was missing, but now that you mention it, there's a demand for it.

Perhaps options like game speed, priority, ghost munching pause, etc, can go in config.ini (or its own rc file, and take a command line option for how to locate the rc file).

Other than that... Woohoo!

(Note to whoever maintains the car stereo mp3 player matrix -- you've got a new category to fill out: Plays video games. )

One small thing that might be nice on the control front, would be to have the knob also able to control the direction of the little dude, similar to the game 'Snake' on some Nokia mobile phones.

On that game, you can use keys in a very similar way as on the remote control, but (on supporting phones, i.e. 7110) you can also use the wheel or up/down buttons. On the empeg, this would translate to a turn to the left making the little dude turn left *from his point of perspective*, and the same for the right turn.

To make this a bit clearer, if you click the knob once left, you would get:

Dude travelling up: turns left
Dude travelling left: turns down
Dude travelling down: turns right
Dude travelling right: turns up

This would be a nice touch, especially as in some vehicle setups, using the four keys on the left could cause your hand to obscure much of the screen.

On a more technical note, and I have not much of a clue on this front, would it be possible to create a 50k partition that could be left mounted RW - something so small that it would take virtually no time to fsck (is that the right word?) on startup. empacman, or any other program, could mount this rw at the start of a game, and ro at the end, and this could be used to save high-score tables or similar. On the offchance of a power-down during play, the tiny partition size would mean a barely noticable delay to the next bootup. Could this work?

Cheers,

A.

On a more technical note, and I have not much of a clue on this front, would it be possible to create a 50k partition that could be left mounted RW - something so small that it would take virtually no time to fsck (is that the right word?) on startup. empacman, or any other program, could mount this rw at the start of a game, and ro at the end, and this could be used to save high-score tables or similar. On the offchance of a power-down during play, the tiny partition size would mean a barely noticable delay to the next bootup. Could this work?


Well, if you use /dev/hda2 then it's still only 32MB, and would fsck very fast compared to a 10/20/30 GB partition. It'd still be a very good idea to only make the drive rw for the time needed to write the table, and make it ro again immediately afterwards. But this should only happen on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdc2...We shouldn't touch any of the existing partitions from an app.


But as for the game itself - excellent stuff. I'd also like to see the ghost munch time shortened a tad. I (personally) think that the pacing and difficulty is excellent as it is. I'd like to see bonuses and extra lives. And maybe some different maps for different levels?

Speed: Fine for me. Seems very close to original Pac Man speed, at least while the player is running.

High score table: I have been begging Mark Lord to think about adding disk-writing capability to hijack. He has a scheme in mind where Hijack could take a few sectors of the disk and write to them, even though the disks aren't mounted r/w. I have a few uses in mind for my software, and the high score table is yet another good reason to have such a facility. However, Mark is enjoying his summer like the rest of us, so we might not get such a feature for a while. I would shy away from any high score feature which needs to mount the drives rw, I wouldn't want that at all.

Great job with this one, it's really a fun game and I look forward to a release with source code. As someone else who was slow in releasing the source to my software, I say take your time and clean it up... If I had released my first draft code, it would have been worthless. Great stuff.

Er, one thing I noticed is that when you hit the knob to quit out of empacman, it actually *quits* out of the process, rather than unbinding from Hijack and sleeping. At least that's what's happening on mine... This requires a reboot to get pacman back in the menu. It's a pretty quick fix to make it stay on Hijack (and thus in memory) so you can go back to it... If you were real tricky about it, you could probably even have it start where you left off once you go back to it...

Or if you release source, I'll probably just do it myself... I don't want to have to reboot to get pacman back each time. Am I the only one seeing this?

I've following the thread and didn't quite see the part where it explains how to make the menu item stay after reboot. How is that done?

[I've following the thread and didn't quite see the part where it explains how to make the menu item stay after reboot. How is that done?

There are many ways to accomplish this, but the easiest is to install wfaulk's preinit daemon (do a search for preinit and look at some of the more recent messages, I think pacman might even be mentioned in some of them.)

I am really stupid when it comes to programming! I have communication between the empeg with hyperterminal, but don't know what to do in it.. Also connected through ethernet.

My question is how to install empacman for the inexperienced! I have Hijack's latest version running too..

Thanks..

Look up.

Er, one thing I noticed is that when you hit the knob to quit out of empacman, it actually *quits* out of the process, rather than unbinding from Hijack and sleeping. At least that's what's happening on mine... This requires a reboot to get pacman back in the menu. It's a pretty quick fix to make it stay on Hijack (and thus in memory) so you can go back to it... If you were real tricky about it, you could probably even have it start where you left off once you go back to it...

Or if you release source, I'll probably just do it myself... I don't want to have to reboot to get pacman back each time. Am I the only one seeing this?


I've seen a few reports now about the way empacman unbinds from the menu. It's not supposed to be quitting but sleeping as you suggest. I didn't experience any of these problems myself, but I'm running a slightly old version of hijack. I suspect the problems have arisen since some recent work was done to the menu handling stuff in hijack.

I'll have to take another look at my code. As you say, these issues can easily be resolved, if not by myself, when the source is public.

I like some of the suggestions I'm seeing, like being able to pause the game instead of just quitting, and the knob turning idea.

Cheers guys,

Richard
--

Well, if you use /dev/hda2 then it's still only 32MB, and would fsck very fast compared to a 10/20/30 GB partition. It'd still be a very good idea to only make the drive rw for the time needed to write the table, and make it ro again immediately afterwards. But this should only happen on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdc2...We shouldn't touch any of the existing partitions from an app.

I don't think the issue is so much one of having partitions mounted ro vs. rw as it is that as soon as you start talking about doing this sort of thing, you're destroying all the hard work the empeg guys put into keeping the drives spun down as much as possible.

Not really, we're talking about a quick spin up every few minutes to write the table during the occasions that the game is being played - which is somewhat comparable to the spin up frequency for reading the mp3s in normal use anyway, and is still far less frequent than the spin-ups needed for disk *reads* for emptriv.

Not really, we're talking about a quick spin up every few minutes to write the table during the occasions that the game is being played - which is somewhat comparable to the spin up frequency for reading the mp3s in normal use anyway, and is still far less frequent than the spin-ups needed for disk *reads* for emptriv.

Remember that the reason that the disks are kept spun down as much as possible is 2-fold. Firstly to reduce power consumption (and heat dissipation), and secondly to reduce the chance of a head crash in a moving vehicle. And this is great - but is not an absolute necessity. The occasional additional spin up is not something that would really greatly concern me.

Hmm... I suppose. What if the high score table was kept in memory until the user explicitly saved it? That way after my passenger completely obliterates my high score, I can "conveniently" forget to save the scores before pulling the empeg out of the dash. "Oops. Terribly sorry 'bout that. Guess I still have the high score..."

wow im impressed, any plans for more games? I would love to see more ports of some classics, im taking a arm programing class in about a month so im going to have projects and stuff and hope to make one for the empeg. This game kicks the llama ass. Thanks!

Yes, Mark did change the way things bind/unbind from menus... I think.

The only bug I think I have found is that the Kenwood remote can't be used to go up. Left, right, down are all ok, but the ghosts get me every time at the bottom of the screen when I use the Kenwood. The Rio remote works fine.

This is on my Mk1, I haven't tried the Kenwood remote with the Mk2.

The only other problem that springs to mind (not an empacman bug though) is an error when synchronising. Dropping to the shell and killing the empacman process allows the sync to go ahead. I saw this issue mentioned with regard to emptriv or some of the other third-party apps, so I know that it isn't an empacman issue.

Apart from that empacman absolutely rocks! I even noticed that the ghosts seemed to have similar 'personalities' to the arcade original. The only thing I seem to remember is that the arcade Pacman had a 'blind' spot somewhere in the maze. Popping into a particular corner when the ghosts weren't already chasing you would result in the spooks running round for hours and you would not be caught. I am sure I have a 'How to win at Pacman' book somewhere that described it. I'll try to dig it out from its hiding place and check

Tony,
You make this sound sooooooo easy. I have never done this before and after reading the FAQ and trying to atempt this install several times including having to repair the e2fsck error I created, I still can't grasp what you mean by "Gotta tag it as executable" and "Execute it (./empacman) then type "exit" to get back into the player". Someone who has done this before please give us dummies a heads up, Please.

Perhaps this will help?

In the "r-w-x" thing, the X is executable.

Tony,

What do I do from here is the question?

q
Restored terminal settings
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Player exited normally: 0
Switching to shell-player loop
Starting bash.
empeg:/empeg/bin# rw
empeg:/empeg/bin# rwm
empeg:/empeg/bin# rz
Šempeg:/empeg/bin# e.**B000000023be50

At this point I've already transfered the file, I get to here and I'm stuck, what do I enter next?

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 .

I'm with snoopstah about controlling with the knob. I'm very used to playing snake on my nokia phone with only two buttons, and would like to be able to play pacman with the knob. If that could be implemented in the next release, i'd be the happiest empeg owner in the WORLD!

I am no rocket scientist.. or even a unix/linux user. But I am familiar with a thing or two.

Would it not be an easy task to edit whatever file HiJack uses in order that my empacman is always in the menu? I imagine I could look at the code and figure out the required syntax from the existing menu items.. but what file do I need to edit?

I am comfortable with my CHMODs and up/downloading so I am sure I won't mess anything up .. would it be that easy or is there something more to it that I am not aware of?

Hijack has no such file describing the menu items. The menu items in the menu (restore visuals, calculator, screen blanker, etc.) are all hard-coded, though I believe there are config.ini options to hide them if you don't want them.

User apps are inserted into the menu by programatically "binding" to the menu. This means that in most instances, if there's an entry in the hijack menu for a program (empacman for instance) that means it's running in the background.

However, a program called launcher (do a search) has been written to handle this situation more elegantly. Launcher has a configurable file which lists your apps and how you want them started. It also requires another add-on called preinit which starts the launcher itself.

After setting preinit and launcher up properly (they're not easy for novice users, just to warn you) you should be able to have empacman available in the hijack menu whenever you want to play, which is I think what you're looking for.

Has a patch been released for empacman to work better with launcher yet? ie. empacman doesn't attempt to bind to the menu when you select it from launcher, but rather just .. launches?

I know that the author of empsoko added a command line option '-l' to his; has this already been implemented in a similar fashion for empacman?

Ah. Probably not, then.

I guess I should look into adding launcher support for my own apps as well.

Is empsoko source public yet so I can see how he did it?

I don't think tman has released the source for empsoko yet.

Your best bet would probably be to just get in touch with tman, and ask him how he interfaced with launcher.. Or you could contact canuckInLA; he probably has a good idea how to get it working with his launcher.

Thanks. There are so many new utils/apps/games that have been released recently that I'm having trouble remembering who all the players are... I sometimes struggle to remember all the empeg programs I'VE written.

Not that I'll feel like doing any of this myself until after I port all my apps to VFDlib, and not that I'll want to do that until the autumn comes and I start spending more time indoors...

Since writing that last post of mine, I did happen across Launcher and other empeg utils. Yes, I was simply looking for a way to get my empacman to stay put in my HiJack menu.

I feel confident that I can install the utility apps that I need, its just a matter of sitting down, going over the instructions (Gasp!) and doing it.

Having a computer for a sound system is becoming more and more fun all the time!