Hey guys,
I've been looking everywhere (prob. not right places, tho)
For info on how to install Tony's emptriv game on my Rio Car.
Yes, i'm still quite new at this and not very tech. minded

I have MK2a with v2.0b11 Developer and v269 hijack installed
I can't seem to find complete list (step-by-step) on how to install this, only parts.
If someone could direct me to correct place, or explain here that would be great.
I have already downloaded the,emptriv-0.92.tar from Tony's site

Thanks for any help
Glen O
(accept)

ditto, i can get it to work, but i can never figure out how to extract all of the questions, without getting an error.

Well, I've got it working, let me see if I can help out.

1) get the file from tony's page.

2) ftp the file to your empeg use an ftp program or typing the follwing at a prompt:

cd downloads (change to the directory that your emptriv.tar.gz file is)
ftp 192.168.0.5 (or whatever)
(push enter until you ger a prompt)
site rwm (set the music drives read-write)
cd /drive0 (questions are pretty big, so put on music drive)
mkdir files (or whatever you want to call this
cd files
mkdir emptriv
cd emptriv
put emptriv-0.92.tar.gz (transfer file)

3) get at a shell prompt using hyperterminal or similar program as described in the FAQ

rwm (just incase the ftp undid this)
cd /drive0/files/emptriv (change to directory)
tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz (z uncompresses and x untars)
chmod 755 emptriv (give executable permissions)
rm emptriv-0.92.tar.gz (if you want you could also remove the .c source and the Makefile)

4) now you can run it from hyperterminal with "./emptriv" in that directory. It should load up.

5) "exit" to start up the player.

6) emptriv will now be in the hijack menu!

Please post if you have more specific problems. The only problem with this set up is that emptriv must be manually started from the prompt every time. You could attach it to your init using Frank's modified init but that makes it start every time. I could post an easy how to on that as well if you want. You could also put the picker on your init like tony does to choose whether to start on every boot, but that's complex and lengthens the boot every time. What we really need is an easy way to start and stop programs from within hijack while the player is running. Something tells me you'll see something like this in the next few days (hint, hint).

John

Something tells me you'll see something like this in the next few days (hint, hint).

Excellent. I was hoping someone was working on that. I saw Mark's post hinting that someone should write such an animal, but I haven't had time to play around with the new WAITMENU behavior just yet. Hopefully the new Hijack still works with the old method of binding so that I don't have to rewrite my apps for the new Hijack versions.

Anyway those instructions look good to me. I'd just add that if you don't have a developer image installed on your Empeg, none of that will work. I've had people write me asking why stuff doesn't work and it turns out they're running the consumer image of the software.

accept, I read your email this morning (sorry about the delay but Yahoo! cut off my POP3 access and I rarely check web-based email.) If you have the developer image on your Empeg, johnmcd3's instructions should work.

Justin, I have a feeling you're trying to install the questions on your root partition, which, by default, is formatted in such a way that it can only hold a certain number of files. Emptriv comes with ~20,000 questions. Better use a subdirectory of /drive0 as noted above.

If none of this works for you guys, let me know.

ya thats what i was doing tony, i remember now it was so long ago when i tired doing that, ill try it tonite, i love the program thou, major props, it keeps the passangers shut up, and i can stil enjoy my music.

Glad you like it! I really need to do something about the category selection screen though, it's ugly as sin and slow to redraw. Maybe when/if I port to that sweet new graphics library someone just wrote, I'll figure out a better way to select categories. Maybe some kind of two-level menu or something.

who knows, its great fun, i would love to see u work on it some more, its probably in second place to hijack to my favorite program on the empeg

I tried to get Emptriv working last night. I put Emptriv on drive0 as suggested, run Emptriv from hyperterminal then restarted the player and all was working, emptriv was in the hijack menu. I am now trying to get it to start every boot so it can be used in the car, with no success. I tried the preinit method and used a script with prefix M to wait until the music partitions have been mounted, all works ok but emptriv is the last thing to start and does not appear in the hijack menu (no errors on starting emptriv). I figured (probably wrong) that this was because it started after the player, so I tried using Picker to start it, but as emptriv was starting I got an error that said it couldn't load the font file, and no sign of emptriv in the hijack menu. Has anyone got emptriv to work without having to start it from a shell prompt?

Thanks, Mark.

well, I've made it work, let me see if I can help you out.

First off, a hijack-compatable program can be bound to the menu while the player is running, so that wasn't your problem.

You got the error about the font file because emptriv wants you to be in the same directory as it when you run it. One way to deal with this is to use:

cd /drive0/files/emptriv
./emptriv

instead of "/drive0/files/emptriv/emptriv" to start the program. Another, perhaps better, way to deal with this would be to edit and recompile the program so that it doesn't have this limitation. Getting all the graphics libraries set up correctly can be a big PITA, though, so I just did it for you. If you replace your emptriv binary with this one you can start it from any directory and not get font file errors. (However, using the other way eliminates the possiblity that I've somehow introduced a bug into the program. Unlikely, but always possible.)

Now at this point you should check to see that your script properly runs emptriv by directly running it. Common problems would be having windows (not UNIX) line breaks in your script and not having it be executable. If your script runs it properly but It still won't start automatically, yell, and we'll see if we can't fix that too.

John

Oh yeah, I forgot that silly attachment thingy.

Edit: Huh? It doesn't seem to be appearing. One sec...

Edit 2: Ah, the file is a bit too large for this server, here's a link to it on my not-yet-existant website.

Many thanks, I will give it a try later this evening and let you know how I get on. I had taken care of the Unix file type thingy but I'm not sure about making it executable. I will check this out as well, although it did look as if it was running the script.

Thanks again......Mark.

I tried your first suggestion of changing to the directory before running and everything worked fine, until I tried to sync with emplode and it failed at the checking media stage (just said media error). it was attempting to do one of the longer checks because I'd reached the 20 mounts limit. Panic set in, and I deleted the emptriv files along will all directories on drive0 that I had created and tried the sync again, everything worked OK. Any ideas why the sync failed? I tried to sync a few times before I deleted emptriv, and rebooted empeg and PC, no luck. Having thought about it I wondered if it failed just because a program was running on drive0, but yet again I'm probably completely wrong.

Thanks...Mark.

Hmmm. There was no real cause for panic, emplode couldn't care less about other files on drive0 and I don't think it would have problem with a program running. (FYI: If you want to see what's running type "ps ux" at the prompt. You can stop processes with "kill pid" where pid is the process ID listed with the ps command.) Also if you could run the script then it was executable, typing "chmod 755 name" gives the file "name" executable privileges.

What propably happened was stuff relating the the drives being mounted read-write instead of read-only. If you don't type RO after putting files on, but before you start up the player, then the drives are writable while the player is running. Emplode will not like this because having the drives mounted read-write in the bumpy environment of the car could lead to file system corruption. (If they are read only, they couldn't be messed up, see?) Really, this isn't a big deal at all. Thats why hijack has the option to turn off file system checks. However, it's not the end of the world to let emplode meticulously go through and make sure the files are in order next time. I think typing RO before starting th player should prevent this from happening.

With regard to the emplode error, not sure, what the exactly cause was, but if it only happened once or twice I'd not worry about it. I'd always reboot the empeg before a sync to to make sure everything is normal. If it keeps happening you could post the exact error here and perhaps a serial port log of the error happening.

Let us know how the emptriv install goes!

John

Thanks for the help, I paniced because I could not get emplode to sync at all with the changes I had made, I couldn't swear to it but I'm fairly confident the drives were RO, I re-booted the player a couple of times using Hijack and I think this mounts the drives RO in the process but I also think I did this manually as well.
Anyway I've had another go at installing Emptriv, no problems everything works OK, and for the moment Emplode seems to sync OK, however it hasn't tried to do the long file system check yet, fingers crossed everything seems to be working OK.

Thanks for all the help.....Mark.

Edit: I've had the emplode sync error again, this time I killed emptriv and tried again and the sync went OK. It would appear that emplode doesn't like emptriv running during a sync.

hrm. interesting, ill have to check thou out, if thats the case, can u have the preinit script run only in the car, as i tend not to play emptrib out of the car, and or have a script that shuts the program down before a scyn? any comments tony

I can't run emplode right now to test it, cause I don't have access to a windows machine, but I don't see why this should happen. What is the error recieved? Perhaps its fixable in emptriv or hijack.

However, if it is the case, I'm finishing up a major project which makes it easy to start and stop programs at your whim even in the car and without rebooting. This means you won't have to have programs like emptriv run everytime, just when you want to use them. And when you're done, you can close them, returning memory to the player's caching algorithm. It should be done this weekend sometime, there is only one bug I'd like to fix left.

John

The error in emplode just says "media error" and re-boots the empeg. I don't see any output on the serial port.

Mark.

when i run ./emptriv my player just halts, when i think about it i dont tihnk ive even tried to get it to run in beta11, thou it dosnt seem to be a problem for anyone else, any ideas?

You have Hijack installed, correct? And the latest version of emptriv?

yup, it just frezzes at the waitmenu.. its been puased there for a good 12 hours now

Well don't hold your breath, it's not coming back.

lol ya i figured as much, i got it to run a few times, i deletes some of the 20,000 files bring it down to around 7000 and it works faster ect. ect. once ur done working on ur other projects tony, do u have any plans to cut that number down and make it a few files insted of 20,000 other one?

i deletes some of the 20,000 files bring it down to around 7000 and it works faster ect. ect.

No it doesn't. There's nothing about my program that would cause it to work faster by deleting questions. The only part that would be quicker would be the initial counting of the categories, which only takes 2-3 seconds. During normal gameplay, you aren't going to notice a speed benefit by deleting questions. I think any perceived benefit is in your imagination.

Also, I'm not 100% certain, but I can imagine that deleting question files would cause the problems you're seeing where it seems to lock up. My algorithm chooses a random category, then a random number between 1 and the number of questions in the category. If you go deleting questions, I don't know what could happen with that. I might not be doing a lot of error checking, I think I check to see that the file is there, but if it's not, all bets are off.

I'm *pretty sure* you could get away with deleting an entire category or multiple categories, ("rm FSW.*.dat" if you don't want the Star Wars questions, for instance.) That should work. But deleting various questions within a category and leaving behind others, that isn't going to work. Not unless you renumber all the files.

Anyway, the point of a trivia game is to not have repeat questions... I admit 20,000 is a lot and it takes up more disk space than your average game, but I wouldn't say that question loading or displaying of them takes a long time, nor does the program take up a lot of memory (it only loads them when it needs them, it doesn't read them all into memory!) So I don't know why anyone would want to go deleting questions.

If 20,000 is too much, then what is a good number? Not everyone likes all the categories, and I thought that burning through all the questions in your favorite categories wouldn't take very long if I only have 5,000 questions or so. It's all about replay value.

So if any of you are deleting questions, then you need to renumber the categories consecutively. You also need to make sure the *.0000.dat file is there, since that's the one that gives the info about the category's name, and whether it's enabled when you start up (change the 1 to a 0 in the *.0000.dat file if you want that category disabled when you start.)

Now, is anyone who hasn't been deleting questions having problems with lockups?

Now, is anyone who hasn't been deleting questions having problems with lockups?

Yep, that'd be me (and probably that other guy). We'd gotten lockups in the next/done menu. If you haven't fixed it by the time I finish the 1 1/2 projects that I'm working on, (grrrr, see programming tread) I'll look into them also. I don't know what else to say except you can't move the buttons in that menu.

John

well i finally got it working with all the questions new problem thou i cant get it to load on the preinit script, i see that the player trys to laod it but i get this

opening display...
opening font file...
cannot open font file

but when i go to the promt to load it, it works fine, any ideas?

also when playing the game the questions seem to be messed up normally the first answer under [1] is always a random number, and when it tried to give the correct answer its typically gets an [@] for the answer i have been succesfull with some of the questiosn but most of them have this simpltom.

An earlier post by John in this thread tells you how to fix the font file error.

I am getting the lockups at the next question button and I haven't deleted any questions.

Thanks...Mark.

Yeah, sorry, you need to actually be in the directory it runs from... I will fix that in the next release. I think John McD already patched in a fix at some point.

I'll look into the lockups. About how frequent are they? One in ten questions? One in a hundred?

1 in 20-30 questions.

Well... I can't reproduce this one. I just went through about 150 questions, each time checking to see that I could still switch between "next" and "done", and I have had no lockups. I've waited for disks to spin down, etc. in between some of them, too. Not sure what's going on here. I've probably played through 1000 or so questions throughout the time I've been developing and playing the game, and never had any type of UI lockups. You guys have ReserveCache in your config.ini? Mk2 or 2a? Playing music while playing emptriv or no? Just trying to find a pattern.

It should be pointed out I'm using a slightly older Hijack (269 I believe.) I will upgrade tonight and report my results.

I have not deleted any questions... And am locking up...
Running hijack 271.

Okay, I just upgraded to v271 and tested out emptriv. Practically got tendonitis zipping through about 100-200 questions before I decided that I'm definitely not seeing this one. What else is new?

I don't really know where to go to debug this one. However, I plan to (sometime after my class project is done early next week) port emptriv to the new vfdlib graphics library. That'll give me a chance to look into other stuff too. In the meantime, anyone who's handy with a shell prompt can help me by answering these questions:

1. Can you still get around in the shell when emptriv hangs?
2. If #1 is yes: After this lockup happens, is the emptriv process still running?
3. If you have "wc" (word count) installed on your empeg (usually in /usr/bin) can you run a

"ls -1 | wc -l /usr/local/emptriv/questions"

for me, to count the # of files in the questions directory? (substitute the path of your questions directory)

Otherwise I don't really know how to get to the bottom of this one, short of sending out a massively-instrumented version and pouring through log files. I do enough of that at work.

I'll try to diagnose it as i get it also. However, I just got an incredible (programming / computer) job today. Which is awesome in some many ways but means I have less time for my empeg, we'll have to see how much time I can juggle to it.

John

I have a silly question...

I've been reading this thread and I wonder...

Would those "lock up" symptoms happen if they were missing some of the Emptriv files? For example, if they had tried to install Emptriv to the root partition instead of drive0/var and ran out of disk space and therefore didn't have all the files in place?

Just a wild guess.

Congrats on the job! Yeah I have the same dilemma. I write code by day, and it's hard to come home and work on emptriv. I enjoy it, but sometimes, I just wanna sit out on the porch and read Maxim.

Well I went through that, saying that people shouldn't go deleting files. Interestingly enough though, if it ran out of space while creating the files, it *should* work because the files should still be numbered consecutively, and not be missing any in the middle. I would most expect this to happen if files were missing in the middle, like if a category had 0000, 0001, and then 0099 or something. Because my poor-man's random algorithm counts the # in each category in the beginning, stores that, and picks one of those. If it doesn't exist, I'm not sure what happens, but I can try it out when I get home.

lectric has been PMing me and he claims that emptriv is disappearing from the ps output, suggests it's crashing, maybe running out of memory or something. It shouldn't be a memory hog, but the GD lib (and my inefficient use of it) can't be helping... Maybe a port to vfdlib will do the trick.

hey tony, another quick question, any idea on my weird stuff on the questions and answers it will go like this. there will be a questions thats all fine and dandy

Q: what is the blah blah blah...blah

then the answers screen will come up and ill always get a random number from 1 - 10 in the 1st answer spot

a: [1] 8 [2] a regular answer [3] a regular answer ..ect.

then lets say i answer wrong or if the right answer isnt there becuase its in slot 1 with the random number it will show up like this

Wrong Answer, The Correct Answer is [@]

any ideas?

OMG!
i tihnk i figure out whats wrong, all of the game files are in dos format, looks like i have to start over with the install.

Looks like a bug... Actually, did you unzip the archive on Windows and then transfer it to your Empeg somehow? That looks like something that could happen if the linefeeds got screwed up. Windows and UNIX use different characters for linefeeds, and I'm not sure how I'll handle if they get screwed up.

You say this happens on all your questions? If it just happens on a few, then there's a possibility the a few of the question files are messed up. I obviously didn't write 20,000 trivia questions myself, it was a bit of Perl magic and I did my best to make sure they were all in good syntax, but who knows... Could you elaborate on the problem a bit?

Haha, jinx.

Maybe it's time for an emptriv FAQ.

I untar'd right on my empeg. For all you interested, I changed ReserveCache to 212, giving roughly 1 Meg of free RAM, so that shouldn't be a problem. Alll the files are there, and installed from linux, the directory is /drive0/after/emptriv. It is launching through preinit.d using:

cd /drive0/after/emptriv
./emptriv

when the process locks, memory is instantly released to the available memory and the process is gone, however, the display is completely locked. Music keeps playing, I can telnet in and poke around, etc.

anything else anyone wants to know about my scenario?

Oh, running 2.0b11 Dev /w hijack 271 on an MKIIa.

RAM doesn't seem to be a problem, and since it always locks up in the same spot, and I'm not allocating any memory there, I'm officially ruling out RAM. No idea what it could be though, since I don't have a reproducable test case.

BTW, don't run with a high ReserveCache like that during normal operation, or your player app won't be caching and will always have to read from disk a lot.

And if it IS fouled up question files, and only a few are fouled up, that's gonna be a bitch to find as it would be the NEXT question, not the current question. And by the way, If you don't feel like working on this, then don't for a while. There is no terrible rush here. I know this type of stuff is a royal PITA, it one of the reasons I quit coding like seven years ago. I wouldn't even know where to begin anymore, things have changed so much.

putting it back now

yikes, im having the same emplode problem now as well, emplode dosnt like emptriv running while it sync, if i close emptriv it syncs fine, i even put another RO command into my preinit and that still didt do it, i get this error when emptriv is running "Synchronize failed while checking media. Error 0xc0041010" i made hijack and empeg-preinit 755 in both /bin/ and /sbin/ ive messed with it minimal, but still nothing only way i can sync is to close emptriv, or take it out of the preinit and reboot.. *shugs* any ideas tony,

also thanks for being a champ thru all these emptriv questions it seem the program has gotten quite popular in the last few weeks, strange since its been out for so long.

Doc, it hurts when I do this...

"Don't do that."

One thing I know is that checking the media (fsck) takes up a good deal of memory, in fact the player app turns swap on before it does the fsck to avoid such a crash.

I have no idea why it would cause a crash. I also don't really want to test it out because I value my music partition and crashes while fsck is running are bad for your music's health.

So, like, quit out of Emptriv (and all other user apps, I would recommend) before you sync.

I also note this crash as a low-medium priority. I also use the preinit (not franks' init) if that matters. My files have never been on a windows machine, either. To me this this bug smells like one that like be hard to try make happen on an empeg that it wasn't happening on. we (the people expiriencing the crash) should be responsible for providing more info, or better yet, diagnosing it ourselves.

John

Sounds good. Whatever info I get, I will take note of and try to address when I go to port emptriv to the new graphics lib. That will at least be a bit of a change, and chances are I'll clean up some other code while I'm in there. I am done with my classes next Tuesday, so after that, when the sun goes down, my time is pretty much mine. Looking forward to having some empeg-hacking time.

sweeet.. if u need any help with anything ill do my best.. im mostly a gfx guys, maybe a nice webpage for ur software

I would appreciate help on this - how would I add emptriv to the modified init and how would I set the modified init to run on startup? Thanks in advance.

Hrmmm... Mine does the sync error too. And I completely forgot about this till just now. -=DOH=- Workin fine now.

Chango, Do a search on preinit.d. Pretty easy, actually. I was surprised.

i've figured out why emplode gets that sync error. for some reason, sync tries to umount the drive, and cant do that because the process emptriv is still running. it halts after that. do we need to modify some script so you kill emptriv before you do umount?

Hrmmm... I also have to kill VNC. (Killed telnetd too for good measure). In other words, -=SHRUG=-

any process thats running from the music drives would have to be killed before u can sync. thats the way it is, i guess.

I just installed your emptriv program, nice work. Great app. The only thing that is bothering me, is the having to kill the process before running emplode. Is there anyway, we could move the binary emptriv file to anywhere but the music partition, say /usr/userland for example, but keeping all the questions and other files on the music drive. I guess you would just need to recompile the binary, and have them look for the files in the correct location. Would tihs solve the problem that emptriv is having with emplode?

see this link