Some games that were released for the Xbox have configuration files, even though the final product was intended to be placed on non-changeable discs. Since these games were also released for a certain computer operating system, and have known tweaks that can be done there, it seems logical that at least some of those tweaks can be used in the Xbox version.

And today I decided to try digging around in the configuration of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy.  This game uses the Quake III: Team Arena engine, so theoretically it can use any of the tweaks the engine recognizes, right?

Well, not on the Xbox.  It seems that some things work, such as enabling the Frames Per Second display; others do not, such as trying to force the rendering mode to a less intensive method. I suppose those are hard-coded in the executable (default.xbe), and override the configuration file (base/default.cfg).

The rest of this post contains  what tweaks I’ve attempted alongside whether they worked or not. Expect this post to be updated from time to time, and don’t expect me to try anything that has to do with multiplayer ping and such.

Not only do I not take any responsibility for any lockups or any other problems you might encounter while messing around with the configuration, I stress that some of the settings may cause issues — especially the ones marked as such. Please back up the default configuration, or be able to extract it from the original disc, before attempting to experiment.

Attempted Tweaks: Existing Lines

r_textureMode — tested GL_NEAREST, GL_NEAREST_MIPMAP_NEAREST, and compared FPS to the default GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR.  No difference.

cg_drawFPS — Default “0″ for no display. Changed to “1″ to test r_textureMode. Works.

cg_marks — Default “1″ to display wall scorching from lightsabers. Setting to “0″ disables this.  Works, but I don’t see how this is necessary in single-player on a console.

cg_saberAutoThird — Default “1″. While logically changing this to “0″ would make it possible to have first-person lightsaber battling, this appears to have No effect in single-player.

cg_simpleitems — Default “0″.  Changed to “1″, items became 2D icons. Pretty handy, as you can see where they are even if structures are in the way. Works.

r_vertexLight — Default “0″.  Leave at default. Causes Xbox to lock up on some levels and display gray boxes for many things in others. Some levels may work, such as Yavin Jungle, but have odd lighting issues. Useless, causes crashes.

r_detailtextures — Default “0″. Tried “1″. No difference.

r_fastsky — Default “0″. “1″ is supposed to disable drawing the sky, but No difference for me.

r_overBrightBits — Default “0″. Increasing this is supposed to increase brightness, but apparantly decreases performance. Which makes this setting’s making No difference make perfect sense . . . except that it normally couldn’t be changed, anyway. :s

r_depthbits — Default “0″. Tried “16″ and “32″. No difference.

Attempted Tweaks: Custom Lines for Quake3 Engine

cg_draw3dIcons — is supposed to force use of 3d HUD icons, but No difference.

Consulted Resources

http://www.thejediacademy.net/~jastaff/stuff/Random/fps.html

http://www.planetquake3.net/tweak/glossary_commands.html

Today’s note is on dealing with those pesky .SWF Flash animations. While Swfdec-gnome is relatively decent at decoding the few I deal with, I’d like to convert these animations to a video format, such as OGG Vorbis or WebM. Why? Because unlike with Flash videos (.flv files) such as found on YouTube, .SWF files are almost always compressed — and FFMPEG can’t deal with compressed .SWF files. The result being, MPlayer can’t play them.

I really don’t expect it to, anyway — MPlayer is an audio and video player, NOT an animation decoder and player. But I’m very tired of needing a Flash decoder just to watch the animations of MSPA‘s Homestuck adventure comic, when it would be better for people with slower computers and a dislike of nonfree software to serve videos.

So, during a couple breaks from my efforts on Project Permafrost, I’ve been trying to find a way to convert these SWF animations. I’ve had very little luck so far — while there is some software for the job, it’s virtually all for a certain operating system from a company in Redmond, WA, USA. Most of this software works by taking the displayed output from a Flash plugin and converting it to a video — a very CPU-intensive and hacky solution. Video files were created, but they were composed only of empty, black frames with no audio.

Since the only converter I could find for my operating system was useless, I next turned to the tools for creating and modifying the SWF animation itself, and thus to the swftools and flasm packages.

Swftools is a collection of tools for working with Adobe Flash files, as you may have guessed. Flasm is for disassembling and modifying the Flash Actionscript bytecode, and supports SWFs produced by Flash 8 and earlier. Sounds complicated? Yeah, seems that way to me too, and sadly I don’t have time to investigate them deeply right now.

What I did find, by reading the help text for both the swfextract tool (found in the swftools package) and Flasm, was two options that inspired some hope. From swfextract:

…
Sound extraction:
-m , –mp3 Extract main mp3 stream
…

And Flasm:

…
-x Decompress SWF
…

These suggest three courses of action. In each case, “file.swf” should be replaced with the name of the SWF file you’re working with, of course.

The first is simply copying out the audio directly from the SWF animation.

swfextract -m file.swf

This produces a file named “output.mp3″ in the same directory you run the command from.

The second course of action is to decompress the SWF file, so MPlayer can work with it.

flasm -x file.swf

This will, obviously, decompress the SWF file. The original is saved with a “$wf” extension. MPlayer can play the resulting uncompressed SWF file, but (in my case, at least) can only play the audio.

The third option, of course, is to ask the author(s) to release a video format conversion themselves. They may be hesistant to do so, of course — they may wish for people to HAVE to come to their site to view the animation, instead of someone uploading the video to YouTube or someplace similar. This could be slowed by requiring people to pay for the video, I suppose, but also partially defeats the purpose of the entire endeavor — the goal of which was to be able to easily watch the animation on a computer without needing Flash or putting the CPU under maximum load for the several minutes of the animation.

It’s progress, I guess. If one can call only being able to listen to the animation “progress”. I’m getting back to work now.

Project Permafrost is my attempt to create a central community for users of the Ice Window Manager to interact. I’ve set up a forum at http://icewm-themes.sourceforge.net/ where we can:

• Post new themes for review and critiquing
• Share configurations
• Create up-to-date documentation that’s a bit less hapazard than the current official manual and how-tos
• Socialize (in the “Oort Cloud” forum, requires being logged into a Sourceforge account to even see)
• Make as many ice-related puns as possible.

There are, of course, some rules for this new community. A few of the most important ones are listed below.

1. No themes that don’t have a clear license. It can be GPLv2/3/later, LGPLv2/3/later, a BSD-like license, or any of the Creative Commons licenses, but IT MUST HAVE A CLEAR COPYRIGHT LICENSE SPECIFIED AND IN THE ARCHIVE.
2. No themes that violate someone’s trademark. Sorry, but your super-slick theme that looks just like the latest Redmond OS interface? No Start Button logos.
3. Don’t be a pain.
4. No discussions of how to do illegal things. Debate of whether the thing should be legal or not? Maybe in the off-topic “Oort Cloud” forum, we’ll see how that goes.

The spreadsheet I linked before is hosted in the Project Permafrost files section, along with all of the currently redistributable themes from the motherlode mirror (under “TundraThaw”).

As mentioned before, the forums are here.

And there are plenty more ice puns available, don’t worry.

Meanwhile, the last marked-stable version of the “experimental” branch (1.3.6) was released in Januray 2010. I haven’t used that version, but sometime since it was branched from the stable series a bug was introduced. This caused IceWM to crash, and if it had been started with icewm-session it would try to restart, but have taskbar issues. It seems to be this bug on the IceWM bugtracker, which has been closed.

Other than this odd bug, I found very little difference between IceWM 1.2.37 and 1.3.7p2 when I last tried them — the only one I noticed was the battery charge monitor. In 1.2.37 a number was displayed, while in 1.3.7p2 a vertical bar represented the remaining charge.

In anycase, download IceWM 1.3.7 and try it out. ^_^ Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to figure out where to host the ancient, circa 2001 themes I found and downloaded that now are no longer publically available at the ONE place on the entire search-engine-indexed Internet.

For the past month, I’ve been working on a long list of Ice Window Manager themes. Organizing, labeling, judging free-or-not-free (as in freedom, not beer). Determining whether they should be reorganized, and which need files renamed to fit the original authors’ plans.

This doesn’t seem like a hard job, does it? It isn’t. Just very, very tedious. Especially considering I examined and organized those themes by “Look” — the theme file option that decides how some things are drawn — by hand. All 184 of them. And then went back and input information on each one into a spreadsheet.

For each one, I viewed the default.theme file, as well as any documentation provided about the theme (few had any) for the author name, email address, description, and various flags on whether each theme had a paticular option. For example, the gtk-look theme “Helix” does not have its own image for the menu button on the taskbar, no specified license , no trademarked images to the best of my non-lawyer research, is properly organized other than lacking a README file, does not have custom “ledclock” images for a fancy-looking clock, has one “desktop background” image (in PNG format, so you’ll have to compile in imlib support to use it), and no custom or recommended font, icons, or mouse cursors.

Note the “no specified license” part. If a theme does not have a specified license, it basically has no license. I haven’t perused *all* of the ancient IceWM mailiing lists yet, but I’ve found no explanation of what license the themes must be under. Under my (again, non-lawyer) understanding of United States law, that means the copyright/license is limited to the original author. Including the legal right to redistribute. *sigh*

Considering that some of the provided email addresses are now defunct, and other themes don’t even have an email address provided, there is no way to contact these authors for permission to redistribute them. Since they were provided to the old IceWM project, which is under the LGPLv2 license, I *could* risk assuming that the themes were intended to be under the same license as well, but this seems possibly unethical. There are very few that I have risked marking as redistributable, and only because they are based on the example themes that are provided in the source code repository — meaning that, as derivative works, they too have to be under the same license. See the benefit of specifying your work’s copyright license?

I’m more-or-less sure about what themes are currently able to be redistributed at this point, and I plan to create a repository (not on Sourceforge) to share them as soon as possible. In the meantime, you can enjoy the spreadsheet — in both a single, multi-sheet ODS file or in a gzipped-compressed tar file of multiple, single-sheet CSV (comma-separated values) files, however you prefer.

Well, the files really are an ODS file and a .tar.gz file, but I had to rename them for WordPress to let me host them. I don’t like Javascript-heavy websites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, the perpetually broke Omploader, et cetera. Particularly because of the closed, nonfree nature of the system, but they’re just annoying regardless.

Rename these as instructed in the parentheticals.

• IceWM_Legacy_Themes_data.pdf (rename to IceWM_Legacy_Themes_data.ods)
• IceWM_Legacy_Themes_data_csv.pdf (rename to IceWM_Legacy_Themes_data.tar.gz)

“Why didn’t you just provide REAL PDFs?” Because the spreadsheet looks AWFUL as a printout and in PDF form. Much too wide.

Note the yellow title bar and the somewhat modernized and colorized Minimize, Maximize, and Closerize –er, Close — buttons. It’s amazing what a little splash of color does.

And how can we forget the IceDesert theme that greets new IceWM users in the first place? We cannot, that’s how!

It’s very unfortunate that these themes, along with the other all-very-similar-except-one themes, are the default set. There are some incredible themes that blow anything that Metacity (Gnome2′s WM) or Openbox (LXDE’s WM, since they dropped IceWM) can dream of.

For example, the Infadel2 theme used as an example in the current (ha!) IceWM theming manual and included in the source package:

The beautiful and *not copying another operating system’s look* DustIce theme (menu looks best with gradient support):

Port of the Azenis WindowBlinds theme to IceWM (old screenshot):

Did I mention that IceWM has rounded corners? Yes, you can use XPM transparency! No PNG/alpha transparency, apparently, but the XPM transparency works just fine thank you.
If you look closely, you’ll see that this theme has it’s own mail icon. Also, it uses icons that are either duplicates of or actually are the Windows 95 application folder icons in the menu . . . you might not like that, but you can replace it.
Hopefully you won’t mind me not providing full-screen screenshots of the rest of these — I only get so much storage space here.

The “Tile” theme, which you can find buried in Debian’s icewm-themes package:

The “Natural” theme, also in Debian’s icewm-themes package:

The “device” theme (Debian’s icewm-themes again), which seems really familiar to me but I’m not sure why. It might have something to do with my playing a lot of early-1990′s games when I was younger; this theme’s window decorations feel like a game’s GUI from then. I’ve made this screenshot taller so you could see the more-intricate-than-usual design of the left- and right-frame images:
Admittedly the window decorations are the main “cool feature” of this theme, as the taskbar is an unappealing dark blue, the menu (“Start”) button is a big “LiNUX” pixmap that doesn’t go well with the blue, and the menu has the Motif-esque gray chiseled arrows against a gray background. It still serves as an example of the more original designs, and of the capability to reorder and reposition the window controls in any desired way.

These are only a few of the themes IceWM has. Saying that IceWM is ugly because of the themes that come with it is like saying a house interior that hasn’t been painted yet, and is still plaster-on-drywall, is ugly. It can be made to look however you want to, and takes up a tiny sliver of your computer’s resources.

It can be setup up to look like anything from TWM to Winblows 7. Still don’t believe me? Look at this screenshot and the theme that makes it possible if you like, and tell me that doesn’t look disturbingly and trademark-violatingly like Windows 7.

The sheer flexibility of it, combined with how lightweight and fast it is, makes me a very happy IceWM user. How nobody is still developing it, how awful the lack of comments in the source code is, and how spread out the community is makes me very sad.

But calling it ugly? That makes me laugh.

The netbook I’ve spent a lot of time on, trying to hack together a useful and enjoyable set of software on and wrestling with the PSB driver on. I’ve written a series of articles on improving the experience o it, which is listed on the “How-tos” page under “Acer Aspire AO751h”. During my attempts to get the PSB driver working correctly on Arch Linux — a longtime project — I also wrote a simple script for setting the backlight brightness from the command line, requiring much less typing than manually changing the brightness level and not requring Xorg.This made it useful for console work, as the xbacklight tools of course requires a running Xserver.

This morning I tried to turn it on and, although the power button LED lit up and the keyboard LEDs flashed, and the hard drive powered up, nothing else happened. No output to the LCD, no output to an external monitor. It does not attempt to boot from the hard drive. It’s almost as if there was no memory in it, but I don’t have another “stick” of RAM for it and I’m *not* spending US$50 or more just to find out if it’s the problem or not.

It doesn’t bother me much, though. The battery still has 80.05% of it’s design total capacity, and works perfectly, so I should be able to get some decent money for it. The hard drive is SATA-based, so I don’t need an adapter to connect it into my desktop, which in turn means that I don’t have to worry about how to get my data off of it. And frankly, as much as I like helping others with problems, and as much as I needed this netbook to do that — I was waiting for this horrid thing to die. My Dell Latitude C600 plays hi-def video better than it did (with equivalent power usage, according to Powertop), I had to run an outdated Xserver on it, and even then I couldn’t get OpenGL graphics to work, since that required a much older version of Mesa than Arch Linux ships with and builds against.

I’m more disappointed by the failure of my 2nd generation iPod Nano. It only held 2 gigabytes or so of music, but with Rockbox’s ability to play OGG Vorbis files (thus I could get the same quality at a much smaller file size) this wasn’t an issue until very recently. It seems its demise is the result of a very, very odd flash chip failure. For those who know, it was the storage flash chip. We (myself and the *very* helpful TheSeven in FreeNode’s #freemyipod and #rockbox channels) are still puzzling over it, and waiting for “the hardware guru’s” ideas. Well, it has mainly been TheSeven doing the puzzling while I type in commands, but you get the idea.

This failure basically leaves me with an ARM platform with 1MB of working flash, an LCD screen, and a control wheel with five buttons and touch-sensitivity. Perhaps I can learn some coding with it. Some hardware hacking-in of SD card support, a driver.

Unfortunately, it leaves me bereft of a device to help test Rockbox patches with. At least I was able to help help test the patches preventing Stkov nand, and the next day verify that the change making the working patch unnecessary worked. And tested the “lamp” application improvements and the lcd_backlight_sleep patches, of course. I just wish I could’ve helped more there.

Perhaps I’ll get a new Nano2G sometime, since they’re about US$50 on eBay, or perhaps a refurbished iPod Mini. But what I would really like is a music “jukebox” device that *only* plays OGG Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex audio files. I know that plenty of players support these. I know that there are chips dedicated to decoding Vorbis, and possible some for FLAC. I would be very happy if someone were to build a digital audio player that *only* plays these formats, made them as free-as-in-freedom as Richard Stallman’s laptop (a Leemote Yeelong of some type, if I recall correctly), and provided software for it. Seems like it would be cheaper, since licensing wouldn’t be needing from the owners of patent-encumbered formats.

So what do these two failures mean for my blog? Well, I have no idea. I’ll have different projects to be posting about, certainly, and probably won’t be paying as much attention to the state of “Poulsbo” support in GNU/Linux systems. And Rockbox may or may not be discussed as often, since I have nothing to test it on.

There are other projects I’ve been keeping on the back burner, however; there will still be plenty for me to work on, and enough to post about. So, join my Twitter feed or subscribe to the RSS feed that WordPress so kindly generates automatically.

Recently — for me, since I tried r27995 and updated the install procedure — the Nano2G has been plagued with odd, seemingly random panics when writing to “disk”.

*PANIC*
Stkov nand

Apparently this has to do with a stack overflow (I guess that’s what Stkov means ). The fix that actually works (even if the author thinks it’s a “kludge”) is a patch hosted at http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/11601. Note: the “underlying problem” was fixed and committed in r28011, this patch is not needed if you update to the current build.

As for the feature, with another patch the actual screen will now shut off, not just the backlight! This is something I’ve been waiting for since I first started using Rockbox on the Nano2G. Here’s the patch: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/11604, enjoy! Not really sure how much power it saves yet, but it works perfectly. About 4-5 seconds after the backlight shuts off, so will the screen itself. When you press a button (assuming the “hold” switch isn’t on, of course) both the backlight and the screen immediately come back on.

At the moment, these are not in the SVN yet, so they are not in the daily build. You’ll have to install Subversion and the packages needed to build the Rockbox toolchain, check out Rockbox’s svn repository, build the toolchain, download the patch into the root of the directory the repo was downloaded to, patch, and then configure and build Rockbox.

Don’t worry, if you aren’t familiar with the process the Rockbox wiki describes the process quite simply, and the process of building the toolchain is completely automatic. Not a user of a GNU/Linux distro? Sorry to here that — the sections on developing with Cygwin (the recommended method if you have to use Window$) are here, for installing the toolchain, and here, for the build process.

Happy Rockboxing!

For example, I previously had to use iLoader to load Rockbox, as for some odd reason attempting to transfer ANYTHING after the initial Rockbox installation resulted in a White Screen of Death (WSoD) upon the next startup/reboot with the Rockbox bootloader. Now there is a revamped version of iLoader, designed around the new emBIOS, and I have had NO luck getting Rockbox to load at all. iLoader just freezes/stalls at “Booting Rockbox”. I’ve talked with a few of the folks working on that project, and so far only myself and one other person have reported it. Something about my Nano 2G have a revision 7 board, while a developer has a revision 9 that doesn’t have the problem? EDIT: Issue fixed in r188 of iLoader, released as iLoader v0.2.1. Kudos to TheSeven!

Meanwhile, the Rockbox bootloader works perfectly and I have no WSoD issues at all, even after transferring several hundred megabytes of OGG files. (And one MP3 . . . )

So I think it’s time to replace my how-tos on Rockbox.

Although I prefer to restore the iPod to it’s stock state before installing a new bootloader, this is only necessary if you used an older, pre-emBIOS version of iLoader. It is NOT necessary if you used the Rockbox loader. Feel free to skip to the “Installing Rockbox Software” section if you didn’t use a pre-emBIOS iLoader. (Or if this is your first time “jailbreaking” your Nano)

Also, this is NOT about updating the iLoader version after you’ve installed it. That’s it’s own procedure, one I’m still learning about and isn’t covered in the Wiki yet. You can learn about that on the iLoader webpage.

Restoring to Stock, Apple-firmware State

First, (with permission) borrow someone’s Windows-laden machine and uses iTunes to restore the iPod Nano 2G to stock firmware, if you’ve installed an older version of Rockbox on it before. Allow the restore process to finish — the progress bar beneath the Apple logo will fill completely and the iPod will reboot. Assuming all went well, the iPod will load the stock firmware and a “Do Not Disconnect” message will appear.

Installing the Rockbox Software

Reset the device (Menu+Select) (Select is that button in the center of the scrollwheel) and when the Apple logo appears immediately press Select+Play to enter disk mode. The timing can be a bit tricky, so you might need to do it a few times for it to work.

At this point, you need to extract the Rockbox zipfile directly to the iPod. For example, if your iPod Nano is mounted to /media/IPOD, this command (from the directory you downloaded the zipfile to) will do the job:

unzip rockbox-ipodnano2g.zip -d /media/IPOD

Or if you prefer a GUI, use your GUI’s archive program to extract all of the contents of the zipfile directly to the iPod Nano’s storage partition (which is the folder newly-mounted under /media in distros that mount drives automatically, like Ubuntu).

Installing the Rockbox Bootloader

Now we install the bootloader. We’ll need the ipodpatcher program (32-bit version, 64-bit version) here. Again, change to the directory you downloaded the files from before running this commands.

chmod +x ./ipodpatcher
sudo ./ipodpatcher

Put in your password if necessary, then press “i” and then ENTER to install the bootloader.

If all goes well, something like this will be spouted out at you:

[INFO] Creating OSBK backup image of original firmware
[INFO] Using internal bootloader – 54336 bytes
[INFO] Padding input file from 0x0000d440 to 0x0000d800 bytes
[INFO] Wrote 55296 bytes to firmware partition
[INFO] Bootloader installed successfully.
Press ENTER to exit ipodpatcher :

Safely remove the device (sudo eject /media/IPOD should work well, where IPOD is the folder your iPod Nano 2G was mounted to.)

Now your iPod Nano 2G will reset and quickly load your new firmware. Have fun! I’ll have a couple more posts about this in the next day or two.

I’ve gotten tired of wrestling with the “Poulsbo” hardware in my netbook, and the project I’m working on isn’t quite ready for me to talk about yet. So, I haven’t really had anything to talk about. But today, I came across an article on Free Software Magazine that I think deserves some attention.

The title, “10 Years On: Free Software Wins, But You Have Nowhere To Install It” is a decent summary of the article. Tom Mobily, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Free Software Magazine, discusses how the future — and even the present — of mobile-device-based free software is very disturbing; although the software itself is free, open-source software, the devices don’t allow you to CHANGE the software installed and require you to HACK the device just so YOU can control the device that YOU PAID FOR.

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/10_years_free_software_wins_you_have_nowhere_install_it

Short URL: http://fsmsh.com/3371

I’d give an excerpt, but ironically the copyright license the article uses only explicitly permits “Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article” (emphasis mine).

So, my thoughts on this problem? Well, not to sound like a younger version of Richard Stallman with a shorter beard, but “This is why the GPL v3 has a new section to prohibit this behavior.” Or, more succinctly, “JUST USE GPL V3 AND WE WOULDN’T HAVE THIS PROBLEM YOU IDIOTS!” He might seem a little crazy, but he usually proves to be right.