Flappy Bee

The crummy "working title" from last week's post (that I ended up keeping for lack of a better idea) reminded me that about a month ago I'd started an iz2s build of hocoslamfy (aka. "flappy bee") for the zipit, but forgot to finish it for some reason or other.

So I decided to complete the build and give a try.  Back in a previous life, at a different job, I was the Christmas week Joust champion for several years running.  However my reflexes are not what they once were, so I have yet to make it past bamboo shoot number 3 with the flappy bee.  But I will.  Someday.

Unzip it onto the root of the uz2s SD card and see if you can beat me.

hocoslamfy-iz2s.zip

Update:  

WooHoo!  I made it to 12!  Really, I swear it's true.  See...

Unfortunately I also discovered it saves the high score file on the ramdisk instead of the SD card, so this too will pass -- the instant I reboot the zipit.  I'll have to fix the code and recompile when I get a chance.

Update2:

Actually I might not have to fix the code after all.  Apparently hocoslamfy, irssi, and other programs that I don't remember right now get the location of the home directory from the passwd file instead of the environment.  Currently the /mnt/sd0/etc/passwd file uses the default settings from the stock kernel ramdisk, which sets the home directory to /.  Editing that file and changing the / to /mnt/sd0/home makes the programs save their data and config files in the right place.  I'll fix that permanently for the next uz2s beta.

B3

Last week I did some work on the bard text to speech epub reader for iz2s.  It works fine, but I really want the better voices from the flite text to speech system.  So I followed some internet hints to the flite_hts_engine and tried that. It's quite small, and it sounds great, but again it's using floating point math, so it's too slow on the zipit.  The docs mention maybe someday adding fixed point math, but I'd guess it's unlikely.  Soon enough only the processor in your toaster will be without an FPU.  While it might be nice to talk to the little guy and tell it not to burn everything so much, I don't see that happening real soon.

Meanwhile I've also been adding icons for things to the gmenu2x layout in my ultra large iz2s build.  Here's the apps screen.  I'm getting to the point where I should probably move a few things off to another tab.

Here's the internet apps.  Still got some room there...

Even though some of the toys and games are command line apps, I still like to have icons for them.  Hmm, MilkyTracker looks like a dup from the apps screen.

And now the programming tab finally has some interesting stuff on it.

New for this release I've done a quickie hack of the load81 lua game building environment for the zipit screen.  I'm planning to switch the text to use the psf console fonts via psflib so I can get more on screen, and I'll probably have to do something about the enormous baby blue border.  I used the esc, prev, and next keys to exit, swap screens, and save the file, just in case you run it without a mouse.

I've kept the code that boots into rockbox first, because that's the way I use it.  If you don't, and would prefer not to press the smiley escape key to get to gmenu2x, you can simply comment out some or all of this section of the z2script.sh startup script on the root of the SD card.

##########################
# Boot right into rockbox for music in the car.
ln -s /mnt/sd0/music /audio
kbbrightness 511 63 50
#/mnt/sd0/bin/gmenu
/mnt/sd0/bin/rockthecar
#
# Done with rockbox.
##########################



Here's the stuff.

uz2s-beta3.zip