A New Gmu

So once again I was settling down, just letting the todo list grow, when out of the blue wej announces a new release of his gmu music player on the zipit IRC channel.  Gotta try it.

The new large font is big improvement.  And the png file with the new font is actually smaller than the original.   Go figure...

Gmu now comes with an ncurses GUI which can be run from a remote PC.

I couldn't figure out if it has any volume control, and I miss the o and * markers from the SDL frontend.  Also the help messages on the bottom don't all fit on the zipit screen.  But overall, it seems to work.

Update:  Our nitpicking on the zipit IRC channel resulted in a quick update to the new gmu release addressing most of the bug reports and enhancement requests.

I've made a patch to build it with regular non-wide-char ncurses.   Now I just have to package up a full IZ2S build.  For now, I've packed it up without the libs.  If you don't already have them you can get the shared libs for the codecs from one of the older gmu packages and put them in the libs directory on the root of the sd card.

gmu-0.9.1-iz2s-nolibs.zip

Also, here are some tinyirc updates for IZ2S and openwrt that address problems with the command line display for long lines, and some other screen refresh issues in the openwrt build.  The upxed executables are around 13K.  Both tarballs contain the updated source code in addition to the executable.  Someday I'll get it into a github repository.

Note: The IZ2S executable uses the shared ncurses lib posted a while back.

tinyirc-iz2s-cmdfix.tgz
tinirc-wrt-cmdfix-src-bin.tgz

And I might have created a functioning nethack build for openwrt if anyone wants it.  Rumor has it the official packages don't work right now.

And finally, although I was unable to conquer the high CPU usage issue in the openwrt build of gmu, I did build an openwrt version of my IZ2S libSDL with the ALSA buffering patch.  It also has slug's patches for gmenu2x. It smooths out some of the glitches when playing music from slow SD cards and may fix other minor sound issues with SDL programs.  It also allows me to use a shared lib version of rockbox so maybe someday I'll be able to squeeze that onto an openwrt jffs.

libSDL-wrt-alsa-buffered.gz

Here's the patch I used to build it in openwrt.

005-sdl-alsa-buffer.patch


Update January 2016:

I added support for the oss driver because it works better for applications like games and music trackers that require lower latency than streaming audio (the alsa driver works better for that).  To use oss in SDL you'll need to set the SDL audio driver environment variable to dsp.  I usually make a wrapper script to do that for apps that need it.

SDL_AUDIODRIVER=dsp

libSDL-1.2.so.0.11.3-wrt-alsa-oss.tgz

I also finally made a version with the sticky key patch from 2013.  It should allow you to use a sticky keymap with sdl applications, but it's completely untested on openwrt at this point, because I forgot how I did that on iz2s.

libSDL-1.2.so.0.11.3-wrt-alsa-oss-sticky.tgz