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MythTV, now with games

News ·Sunday October 29, 2006 @ 04:48 EST (link)

The event that precipitates most divorces is the birth of the first child.*

—Do You Know What It Means To Be Married, MSN Lifestyle

Our latest bad driver is from Friday, WA 725 VAP, a gray SUV tried to cut me off entering WA-520 from 40th Street at about 1730 as I was driving home. I'm not sure what type of vehicle it was, I only caught the plate when he cut across a median, zoomed past me and honked, after the road split back to two lanes.

* They don't provide any sources to back this up, so take it with a grain of salt, it's MSN Lifestyles, after all.

cirith-ungol The next thing to be added to our MythTV setup is MythGame, which is basically just a gateway to running external games and emulators. I borrowed some DVDs with MAME ROMs from JB at work, and loaded them onto the video partition. I'm using xmame (X windows version of MAME, version 0.106, which fortunately matched the ROMs), which is a massive pain to set up because there's no decent documentation, even if after STFW; and when I say there's no documentation, you know I mean it. However, I managed to glom together an xmamerc configuration (eventually gave up on sound, though; it's choppy and there's no solution and I really don't care). I had a lot of trouble with video modes (eventually went with video-mode 2, which was the only one that worked fullscreen; 2 means to let OpenGL handle it, I think). The ROMs come as a bunch of zip archives, and although JB said something about them using 7-zip compression, that was a complete red herring and never mattered at all. I never had to uncompress the files; I just set up MythGame with the right ROM directory and told it to scan, and it pulled the names and required files out of an internal database. The command line was simply /usr/games/bin/xmame %s, where MythGame replaces the %s with the path to the game chosen in the UI, which isn't horrible, but has some horrible gaps, like having to use left/right and not accepting back/OK as it does other places, and not allowing use of the keyboard to jump to a letter (granted, most people are just using a remote, but it wouldn't have been a very hard thing to add; I just might add it myself).

Next I installed a SNES emulator; I tried SNES9X, since it was X-native, but it would only display in a tiny window and wouldn't recognize the keyboard. I tried ZSNES, and it worked much better, especially following a hint to use a command-line of /usr/bin/xterm -e /usr/games/bin/zsnes %s (in retrospect, the same xterm hack may have worked with SNES9X). ZSNES is also great in that it has a configuration UI within the program. One issue I had with ZSNES is that X kept blanking the screen mid-game, but I just surrounded the run command with xset s off and xset s on to disable the standard X screen blanker (since input is by the X-box controller—which neither it nor MAME had trouble recognizing, although MAME's much tougher to set up a keymap for; I already have buttons set to load/save state on ZSNES). Nice deal on the X-box controller; it's USB, so it works on PCs, and it was only $25 at the Microsoft store vs. $40 retail; we plan to pick up another one, and maybe a copy of Windows to play head to head using that machine; it might as well serve dual purpose, it's sure got the marbles for it. The first (and only, so far) game we ran was Super Mario World; JB has some SNES ROMs too which I'll borrow when I get to work this week.

We've ordered a second Hauppauge PVR-150MCE card from Amazon, to be able to record/watch at the same time (or record two things at once, or use software picture-in-picture). The time-shifting and scheduling abilities of MythTV are great—we can record all House, or Stargate SG-1, or Good Eats (cooking show that Bob got me interested in) shows, or a show such as E. R. weekly in a particular timeslot (to avoid filling the disk with reruns showing at other times), search for upcoming movies, etc.

Handy link: MythTV keys cheat sheet.

I finished Virtual Light (William Gibson); not a bad yarn, not much direction to it, though. Now starting on (re-reading) Stephen R. Lawhead's Taliesin, the first book in the Pendragon Cycle, and some GRE preparation books. We watched Butterfly Effect 2, which got boring fast because the idea's essentially the same as the first: guy can go back and change the past, but each time he does, he breaks something really badly, and he can only fix it by destroying himself and letting his friends be free.