Remix

With the tiny mcurses build of ttyclock under my belt, I set my sights on some larger targets to mcursify.  First up was the alsamixer.  Even with the salsa rebuild it's still quite large due to the big fat lump of static ncurses embedded in the executable.  I added a few more stub functions to mcurses and made a new 60K (before upx) alsamixer for a savings of 100K.  Not bad, if only it worked.  Segfault!  Rather than wade through the voluminous verbiage of alsa goodness, searching for the offending mcurses function, I decided to look elsewhere for perhaps a smaller starter mixer.  Turns out there's not much out there and most of it predates ALSA, using the earlier OSS mixer controls. 

I like the simple compact look of rexima though.  So I built a 19K  mcurses version, hoping it might just work.  And it did.  Sorta.  It came up with only three controls displayed: PCM, PCM2, and IGAIN.  WTF?  I twiddled them anyhow.  PCM is what it says, the mostly useless master volume control.  PCM2 controled the headphone volume, and I think IGAIN handled the volume for weird zipit microphone input.  With no way to control the tiny zipit speaker, this wasn't gonna work.  Fortunately I went to the net and discovered these are just the default mappings from the emulated OSS mixer to ALSA mixer controls, and you can override them by writing the correct settings to /proc/asound/card0/oss_mixer in your boot up scripts.  On IZ2S and it's derivatives, that place would be at the end of the setup-alsa.sh script.  So I whipped up some changes and settled on the handful of controls I'm likely to use.  I also squeezed the rexima display down to zipit size, and added a splash of mcurses color.

Once I had the emulated OSS mixer under control I thought it might be fun to dig through the old curses music players.  Who knows what sort of nuggets might be in that pile.  I decided to try building the orpheus music player because it claimed make use of mpg123, which is included in IZ2S, and it mentioned internet radio support.  It's internationalized C++ so it's probably too bloated for the jffs.  Because of that I went with a regular ncurses build, after tweaking the screen layout and key bindings with the usual zipit fixes.  It looks ok, and it seems to work, but I don't think it's really what I want.  It did however prove that OSS mixer based programs can be viable on IZ2S.

That's orpheus up top working its way through a funky Eddie Hazel playlist, with rexima mixin it up down below in the bottom dxvt window.

Here's a 21K rexima executable with source (including mcurses) and a modified IZ2S setup-alsa.sh.  You can borrow the new oss settings from the bottom of the alsa script if you want to use this on the jffs.