Back on the Map

Last time around I did some updates to libmikmod and the sdl-mixer library.  Considering my previous lack of testing on them, I decided it'd probably be best to be a wee bit more thorough this time.  So I tracked down some oldschool galaga style games and gave them a zipit makeover.  I'd really prefer to get a nice version of centipede, joust, or one of the many zelda clones on the zipit, but didn't see anything that struck me as easy, so space shooters was it this time.

I started with dodgin' diamond and all went well.  Even the two player mode seen above appears to work, although it's difficult to get 2 different hands on the zipit keyboard at the same time.   Next I decided to give the fancier looking powermanga game a try.  I thought I maybe powermanga would be a more challenging port, given the code size and some floating point bits, but it was pretty smooth right out of the box on the medium sound quality setting.  So I'll take that as a win and move on.

I still wanted to leverage my success with the fixed point supertux patch into something more substantial, so I decided to see if I could do anything with protracker.  I'd like a few more tracker options on the zipit, and my little piggy tracker port was stuck on a blank screen for some reason.  Meanwhile protracker looked almost feasible.  I did a quick and dirty screen hack to remove the pixel doubling and chopped last 15 rows of the display to fit it onto the zipit screen.  It actually looks fairly decent, but appears to require the fake mouse controls on the dpad buttons, and all sorts of internal mixer and filter code needs a conversion to fixed point if I ever want to hear more than an occasional squeek out of it.

Unfortunately, about halfway through the float to fixed point conversion, we hit the Christmas holiday season and the zipit irc channel came alive with chatter.  Someone mentioned the pspmaps location lookup appeared to be broken.  My attention deficit disorder took control and off I went into fixit mode.  It didn't take long to discover that google had shut off the V2 googlemaps API a while back.  The V3 options were JSON or XML.  No sign of the CSV and KML options from V2.  Oh well.  I'd been meaning to tinker with JSON again someday.  And now that day had arrived.  I checked out a few small JSON libraries for C, but I'd seen cJSON before in the opentyrian code, and it looked simple enough, so I went with that.  After a modicum of testing, I had a working fix for both the location and driving direction lookups, so I bumped the version number.

Someday I'd like to add an option to use the OpenStreetMap lookup as well.  That way there's a backup solution, just in case google decides to obsolete their API again.  Also, I suspect openstreetmap might make it easier to add support for more permanent offline map sets.

I noticed the original pspmaps site was gone, but there was a github project with a few odd fixes from just before the google API change.  So I forked it, got back up to speed with git (after maybe two years of rust), and rebased the openwrt-zipit pspmaps project off my github fork instead of the dead link to the past.  I still haven't restored my openwrt-zipit build system after the recent hard disk crash, so hopefully somebody will notice and rebuild the openwrt pspmaps package.

Here's the goodies:

dd2-iz2s.zip

powermanga-iz2s.zip

I still need to package up pspmaps.  For now here's a new executable and urls.txt file for pspmaps on openwrt.  Just untar it in the pspmaps directory.

pspmaps-update_2_4_wrt.tgz

Do the same for the iz2s executable.

pspmaps-update-2_4-iz2s.zip

I'll have to do another blog post if ever get one of those trackers working.

In the meantime I should probably say something about the Navit GPS/map program since it came up in the same IRC conversation as pspmaps.

By following the TomTom build recipe I got it to compile for iz2s, as a possible offline map alternative to pspmaps.  Apparently it wants to be in Germany?  However it crashed when I attempted to bring up the internal gui, so it clearly still needs some work...

Update:

Ok, I fixed the crash and found the maemo build recipe, which had some more clues on how to configure it better for the zipit, like converting the svg icons to png, and discouraging floating point math.

I still have a few more icons to track down and convert, but most of the menus look all right now.  Perhaps it's time to fetch some more map data, other than that sample patch in Germany.

So I visited the Navit Planet Extractor website and fetched me a rectangle of OpenStreetMap data.  The smallest chunk it wanted to give was around 80 megabytes, so I went with that.  It sorta worked.  I could search for towns and streets contained within the map data, but the map itself was a mess.  It was very slow to update and missing (or simply not displaying) features that I know should be there.  Perhaps the 32 megabytes of RAM on the zipit is not enough?  I've read some notes that suggest Navit is not the most efficient app in the world.  I'll have to play with it some more and see it there's any way to make it feel like a useful tool on the zipit.  Or maybe I'll just grab the 700MB prepackaged blob of north east corridor USA map data from the Planet Extractor and see if I can make the zipit pop...

Or maybe I should try to use something like gmapcatcher to fetch map tiles for pspmaps.  I might have to reorganize the pspmaps cache to be compatible with the directory structure though.  It looks like it might be close.

Update 2:

It actually was pretty close.  Well, not really.  The pspmaps cache is a simple list of N numbered png files.  The meaning of those files is stored in a separate disk.dat file as a list of x,y,z coordinates (and a number for the specific map service), one entry for each numbered file in the cache.   It's these entries that match the directory and file structure of the gmapcatcher data, exactly.  They also match up with the OpenStreetMap Slippy map tilenames convention.  That meant it required just a few new lines of code in tile.c to convince pspmaps to check the offline gmapcatcher data before resorting to a network lookup.

Here you can see where pspmaps used some offline tiles saved by gmapcatcher.  I used two different map servers so I could be sure.  On the bottom left is a tile fetched from google by pspmaps.  The rest of the image is made up of tiles pulled from the offline files saved by gmapcatcher.  I forget which map service it was using, but you can easily see the difference.

Anyhow, I'll eventually put some sort of Navit package for iz2s here, and another revision of pspmaps too.

Update 3:

I've run out of vacation time so I zipped up a Navit package for iz2s.

navit-iz2s.zip

I haven't yet tried any of the large pre-made data sets, so I don't really know if it's actually useful.  I'll get back to it eventually.

Meanwhile, I think pspmaps has a lot of untapped potential.  I put the code in my github repository and added my offline map code to work with the OSM_tile data from gmapcatcher.  I also fixed it to remember a preferred default map service, and tweaked the code to allow you to skip map services that don't interest you.  

I've got a few other small changes that I'd like to make.  The simplistic linear searching disk cache implementation could use some work to allow it to scale up.  Maybe hash table lookups, or at the very least least make it do a binary tree search.  I'd also like to add some simple versions of the gmapcatcher functions.  A small radius local area capture with a few autozoom levels would be nice.  And an OSM_tile format offline map export function would make it possible to use the zipit instead of gmapcatcher in a pinch.  And of course I still want OpenStreetMap location and driving directions lookup as an alternative to google.

Some wilder ideas include better driving directions, with access to the text version of the route, and maybe markers for the turns.  Point of Interest data might also be fun to play with.  Maybe OpenPOIs or the OpenStreetMap Overpass_API would work?  I could probably use some of the 16x16 png icons from Navit as the markers...

Hopefully I'll have something worthy of a release soon...

Ok, this has the offline stuff and allows you to comment out map services that you don't want in urls.txt.  See the readme.txt file for details.  Once again it's just an updated executable with urls.txt and a readme file, not a full package.

pspmaps-update-2_4-1-iz2s.zip

Same for the wrt update...

pspmaps-update-2_4_1-wrt.tgz

Update 4:

As life would have it, I actually got a chance to try out pspmaps in a real world situation. I had to visit a company near Boston to get me some nifty software training for work.  Christmas flew by and I still don't have a smart phone with a data plan, so I loaded up the offline cache in pspmaps on the zipit.  I also generated some driving directions.  It worked, but just barely.  The screen is just a wee bit small to see enough of the map while driving, the thin blue directions line was barely visible at night on the road, and I really could have used the text directions.

I can't do much about the screen size, so I widened the blue line in the code and got to work on parsing the text out of the JSON driving directions.

 Wider is better

I'm using the SDL_rtf sample app as a mockup for the display.  It works reasonably well for my purposes (and I still dream of a minimal word processor app on the zipit someday) so I think I might stick with it when I fold the code back into pspmaps.

While I'm at it, maybe I should try to hook up the flite speech synthesis from the bard package to read the text out loud.  At the very least I should try and feed this sample text to flite and see if the pronunciation is intelligible.  That should be an interesting exercise.

Update 5:

Ok, I haven't tried to hook up flite, but I did fold the SDL_rtf driving directions code back into pspmaps.  I really like the way it autowraps the text for me because I wasn't looking forward to writing that part myself.  I had a bit of confusion with latin1 text until I realized the rtf unicode escape sequence \uN is apparently not yet supported in sdl_rtf.  However testing reveals I can simply convert the directions to extended ASCII from the 8 bit latin1 codepage and use that, as seen here.  

 Better watch out for the speed cameras!

The last release of SDL_rtf is more than 10 years old, but it's had a few unreleased updates on the SDL mercurial repository.  I fetched the most recent update for SDL-1.2, from 2012, but didn't see anything that looked like unicode escape sequence support.  So for now I'm sticking with the SDL_rtf v0.1 code.  I added SDL_rtf to the list of openwrt-zipit packages but I don't have a compiler set up to build an actual package for it.  Because of that, I decided to static link SDL_rtf into some pspmaps executables.  

Here's another round of executable updates (and the urls.txt config files).

pspmaps-2_4_2-iz2s.zip

pspmaps-2_4_2-wrt.tgz

The Backspace key gets you to the text directions screen on the zipit.

Faking it, Part 2

Last week I had some pretty good luck with a quick and easy build of the wetspot2 game that I discovered on the gcw zero recent news page.  So I thought maybe I'd go for a twofer and cherry pick another easy target off that list.  I measured things up and decided the last-mission game also looked ripe for the picking.  Naturally, things weren't nearly so simple.

Remember last month when I confessed to pushing a fake build of libmikmod in order to fascilitate a quickie build of SDL_mixer, which I needed to get sdlbasic running?  Well, it turns out libmikmod wasn't the only joker in the pack.  Apparently I also skimped on the SDL_mixer build itself.  I vaguely remember that was somewhat of a challenge to compile because I wanted it to use libmpg123 instead of libsmpeg.  But that involved a bunch of finicky hand patching.  When I finally got that going I failed to check out the other build options.  Turns out the default ogg support is the floating point version, not the fixed point libtremor code that works on the zipit.  Oops.

Which brings us back around to the last-mission story.  I was getting nowhere.  It would load a blank black screen, and then appeared to hang.  So I added some debug printfs and discovered it was actually running behind the black screen, loading a bunch of ogg sound files at something shy of a snails pace.  If I waited long enough, just short of an eternity, it would actually bring up the splash screen and allow me to attempt a game.  Sorta, kinda.  Press a button, then wait a minute for the the floating point ogg code to process the associated squeek or beep sound.   Repeat.  Not much fun at all, really.

I checked the SDL_mixer readme file and sure enough there was an option for libtremor that I hadn't selected.  That might work better than the fake floating point support on the zipit.  So I did a rebuild on the library and now the game loads and plays at reasonable speed on the zipit.  As an added bonus, the new SDL_Mixer lib also fixed up playmus to work on ogg files.  I wonder what else I might have missed.  Say, doesn't supertux use ogg?  Perhaps I should take another look at that.

Meanwhile I've got a new SDL_mixer and last-mission package to put up here...

libSDL_mixer-iz2s-tremor.zip
last-mission-iz2s.zip

Update:

So, I fetched supertux and applied the 4 patches from the openwrt-zipit project before compiling.  The resulting executable took a while to load, but it ran and the music played ok.  However the controls were sluggish and the frame refresh rate was pretty darn awful.  Digging into the code revealed floating point math all over the place.  Oh well.  But wait, I don't give up that easy.  I ran some internet searches and found a fixed-point patch for a slightly older version of supertux that was done for the zaurus.  I also found some tantalizing hints that someone might have updated them to the newer code, but could't locate the goods.  The outdated patch was pretty large, but I gave it a shot and then attempted to manually merge the rejected parts.

As far as I can tell so far it seems to work.  The controls are smooth and the game is much more playable.

So now I just gotta pack it up and make an updated version of the patch...

supertux-iz2s.zip
supertux-0.1.3-fp.patch

Two Steps Back...

Seems like only yesterday I installed a brand new 500GB harddisk in my tired old laptop so I'd have plenty of room to work on the zipit stuff.  But apparently it was in there for almost exactly two years last week when it suddenly decided that was enough.  Looking back I suppose it wasn't all that sudden.  It started humming a few hours before it froze, but at the time I thought it was the CPU fan.  Oh well, live and learn.  Shoulda done more frequent backups.

The most recent backup of my iz2s development VM was over 6 months old, and the openwrt backup was even older.  Ouch.  So I dug up a much smaller, slower drive from my junk pile and put the latest LMDE linux on it to get back up and running before the long holiday weekend.  Turns out the 500GB drive wasn't completely dead yet.  I could run it for a few minutes as an external usb drive before it would seize up, just long enough to pull off the iz2s dev stuff.  Phew!  Openwrt was another story though.  I tried a few times, but never got more than half of it.  I gotta think about it before I try again so I don't brick the drive first.  Maybe I can use rsync to resume where the last attempt gave up?  Then I need to come up with a better backup strategy for the long term that plays well with my inherent laziness.  

Meanwhile I had to test the restored iz2s VM and make sure all was well.  I was already running out of holiday so I chose an easy target.  I saw the wetspot2 game mentioned in the recent releases section of the gcw zero forums and thought it might be fun on the zipit.  Since it was developed in C and SDL it looked like a good fit.  The game compiled ok right out of the box, but I eventually tweaked the makefile a teensy bit for the zipit.  Then I changed the 2 player keyboard settings to get a little more separation on the cramped iz2s keyboard, but that was it.

Single player mode uses the dpad arrows to move the crab and the control key (...) to push the blocks.  For two players the tab (Zipit) key is used to move the blocks for player 1.  Player  2 gets the S, Control, Z, and X keys to move the crab, and the space bar to push the blocks.  I actually tried this with one of the kids and it's not too bad.  The player with the arrow keys has a slight advantage though.  I know this because I had the other keys and lost.  It had to be the keys.

wetspot2-iz2s.zip

Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  While the laptop was out of commission I found some time to dig into the iz2s wifi config scripts.  Every so often they'd connect, but fail to get a dhcp lease.  Subsequent retries never seemed to work, and so I was always forced to reboot whenever it happened.  But this time it occurred during my laptop downtime, so I had no excuse not to investigate.  Nothing better to do...

It didn't actually take very long to see what was going on.  The dhcp request failed but the wpa_supplicant demon was left running, and that's what interfered with my retries.  So I patched the script to kill any running wpa_supplicant before starting a new one.  Now a retry usually succeeds.

With that fix in the bag I decided to tackle another nagging wifi issue.  I finally ported the iz2s Easy Wifi Configurator script to work on the jffs.  Sometimes I prefer the dialog driven EWoC script to connect because there's less typing, making it easier to use in a dimly lit location.   The main issue was working out a suitable substitute for awk to fetch the selected line out of the list of SSIDs in one of the dialogs.  A one, two punch of head followed by tail did the trick.  Shoulda thought of that a long time ago...

ewoc-iz2jffs.sh

Can't Fake the Funk

I'm a bit of a sucker for puzzle games like sokoban, especially when they play the oldschool chiptunes for background music.  So a long time ago when my kids went through school and they had some fancy TI graphing calculators, I thought maybe I'd eventually inherit one and hack it to play some silly puzzle games like blockdude.  But, kids being kids, they either lost or broke the darn things and I forgot about it.

Time passed, and then a year or so ago I'd just finished patching up a zipitized build of the Funktracker Gold music tracker (and mod file player) when I spotted a gp2x version of blockdude.  I tweaked the keyboard settings and compiled it for the zipit but couldn't quite get the bleeping sound to work.  My blog post at the time had the title "Game Sounds" so providing blockdude without sound was never gonna fly.  Worse yet, I could not even solve the first level.  Embarrassing!

So I moved on and built some silent console games instead.  I don't think I've passed the first or second level on any of those either (I sense a trend here...) but at least everything seems to work.

Recently I was thinking about fixed point math again, which led me to discover the ancient gp2x version of SDL includes a really nice fixed point math module, with arm assembler code.  Nice.  That in turn led me to some opengl implementations which also incorporate the fixed point module.  I absolutely must explore that some day, but meanwhile it got me thinking again about chiptunes, mod trackers, and eventually my problems with blockdude.

This time I realized the first sound blockdude plays is from a mod file with the title soundtrack.  I remembered that I'd done a quick and dirty build of libmikmod, way, way back when I was trying to compile sdlbasic.  At the time, I only needed libmikmod because it was required to build the SDL_mixer library.  But I didn't have any mod files handy to test it, so I simply used the default config to fake it, and then promptly forgot about it.

So now I did some testing with blockdude and the SDL_mixer playmus utility and discovered that not only did my build of libmikmod refuse to make a peep, it also locked up the sound driver so that nothing else could use it either.  Not good.  So I fetched the latest libmikmod-3.1.18 bugfix release code and applied the config settings from the zipit openwrt makefile.  With the new libmikmod installed, playmus and blockdude could crank out the cheezy chiptunes in all their funky low-fi glory on my zipit.  I'm still stuck in level 1 though...

Here's the goodies.

libmikmod-3.1.18-iz2s.zip  (also includes the playmus utility from SDL_mixer)

blockdude-iz2s.zip

Update:

Made it to level 2.  I feel much smarter now.

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

Return of the Bard

Recently, while prowling the net for GCW Zero goodies that might be willing to work for me on the zipit, I spotted some hints about a new release of Bard the Storyteller.  That got me thinking, maybe it was about time for an iz2s build of Bard.  I'm not sure why I never got around to it.  Perhaps I was worried the performance wouldn't be up to the level of the openwrt build, and I'd be stuck with the robotic 8KHz Kal voice instead of the surly 16KHz version.  I don't know.  Anyhow, I finally decided to give it a shot.

So I applied the old openwrt-zipit Bard patches, then tweaked the battery monitor and screen blanking code for iz2s.  I also adjusted the key bindings to move the page up and down functions onto the zipit Prev and Next keys, and added the increase and reduce functions (for volume/fontsize/speed) to the period and comma keys, as well as the volume +- rocker buttons.

It seemed to work ok, but the highlighted words seemed to jump ahead of the spoken voice quite a bit, so I dug a little deeper into the code.  I noticed some floating point code sprinkled about, here and there.  Seems like an odd choice to target small underpowered devices like the Nanonote, with no native floating point, and yet control the volume with a floating point multiply for each and every audio sample.   I switched that code to use an 8-bit fixed point volume multiplier.  I also converted the idle time check code to use integer milliseconds, like the rest of the SDL code instead of floating point seconds.  I did the same for the audio sample position timing code.  That might have made the "lip sync" a tiny bit better.  But it's hard to tell.

Here's the iz2s bard and flite executables, and a libzip that I needed to build it.

bard-iz2s.zip

I'll put together a patch file with the code changes ASAP.

But first I want to do some experiments with the rest of the voices.  I built the default set of flite voices, but aside from kal they all use floating point numbers for the data.  So they're an order of magnitude slower on the zipit.  That's ok if you want a higher quality voice, but you can't use them in bard because the text processing is too slow for realtime.  It might be nifty to fixup bard to "lip sync" the text on screen with a preprocessed .wav file, but I'd rather see about converting the voices to fixed point.  I examined some of the data and so far the largest number I've seen is around 220, and all the floats have 6 digits after the decimal point.  That range of values would probably fit quite nicely in a 12.20 fixed point format, which would speed things up enormously, and might even sound ok if the math doesn't overflow.  We'll see...

By the way, this might be a good time to mention that I finally remembered to add the missing speaker setting in the /mnt/sd0/bin/setup-alsa.sh script. 

  /mnt/ffs/bin/amixer -q sset "Right Speaker Playback Invert" on

I also toggled the identical setting in /mnt/sd0/etc/asound.state.  Without  that setting the speaker isn't really loud enough to hear.  But with it, I could almost picture myself listening to internet radio via the speaker, if I forgot my headphones.  It's certainly good enough to listen to the bard speak.


Next up, maybe a beta3 of the ultra iz2s SD card image.