Hi folks,

I've been working over the last month on a project that is now at a stage I'm ready to release to the public. Find attached to this message a zip file containing version 0 of empacman.

The file is an empeg executable that requires hijack to function. Once the file is executed on your empeg, it will create a new hijack menu item for you to launch the game.

The controls are as follows:
up - face top, rio/kw remote 2
down - face bottom, rio/kw remote 5,8
left - face left, rio/kw remote 1,4
right - face right, rio/kw remote 3,6
quit - face knob, rio remote cancel, kw remote *

Version 1 complete with source is forthcoming. I just want to get some feedback on its current state, to nail any bugs and make any smart or highly requested improvements.

So, anybody out there who wants to beta test my game please get to it, and report your findings in this thread.

Cheers,

Richard
--

OMG that is so so utterly cool. My hat is off to you.

Can't play it well yet because it starts out kinda fast and it's hard to think fast enough to hit the buttons, but I'll prolly get the hang of it.

So to get this working, I just log into the empg shell and run it? does it need to be in any special directory?

Gotta tag it as executable. Doesn't need to be in a specific directory, but if it's in, say, drive0/var it won't get erased by an upgrade.

Then "Q" outta the player from the shell. Execute it (./empacman) then type "exit" to get back into the player. Then fire up Hijack and it'll be there on the Hijack menu.

Optionally, you can start it up with each player boot from a custom init.

That's an amazing addon you've done there, a really really nice piece of work! I can't wait to show off Pacman on my car stereo

This is in no way a criticism but personally I'd prefer it if the pace was somewhat slower, I too found some buttons less responsive than I expected and got chomped up fairly easily as I was unable to navigate as I'd expected.

I did what my question asked above, and it worked great. However, after I played it once, the shell gave a message saying:
hijack: removed menu entry: "empacman"

After rebooting, I no longer had the menu option.
In order to get it back, I had to repeat the process. How do I get it to stay as a permanent menu entry?

I also got that message at the shell prompt (removed meny entry empacman) but it's still on my menu. Just checked.

The trick is that you can't reboot the player. If you reboot the player, the menu entry will be gone. Unless you make empacman run on every boot by putting it into a custom init.

Is there a faq that talks about these custom inits? I'm assuming that it is not the config.ini file.

There's no FAQ on it, It's a pretty advanced linux thing. You kind of have to know what you're doing. Search the BBS, there are some threads on the subject.

What we really need is a way to install and run things like this without having to replace the init. There has been some talk about modifying hijack so that you can execute userland programs directly from its menu, and configure them by putting them in config.ini. This would be the ultimate, and someone could do it without linux knowledge or complicated instructions.

Am I right in assuming this applies also to emptriv?

That app was really neat, I say 'was' because it too doesn't survive a reboot while still appearing on the Hijack menu. I followed the emptriv thread as much as I could but got out of my depth after a while.

I'd happily settle for a 'middle ground' on this, i.e. I don't mind fiddling with a .ini file to make these cool apps available all of the time. Can you recall if something exists that meets this criteria?

Edit: I don't want to steal the thunder from this great game with a semi-OT question, please feel free to direct this elsewhere .

I don't mind fiddling with a .ini file to make these cool apps available all of the time. Can you recall if something exists that meets this criteria?

That's my point, it's not as simple as fiddling with an ini file, and I wish it were.

This absolutely rocks. Very well done.

As a side note, I have moved my telnetd and viewer and empacman into /drive0/var and can't get preinit.d to work. Executable permissions are set and simply moving them back to /empeg/bin works fine.

It's likely that that directory is not mounted when preinit wants to run those programs. You could try changing the first letter of your startup scripts to an `M'. This should tell preinit to wait to execute those scripts until that directory is mounted.

Thanks Bitt. I figured it was something like that but hadn't got as far as working it out for sure. Thanks.

Sorry for hijacking the thread kirkis

Holy [censored]! Thats awesome.

How about some sound fx?
pacman
pacman2

Tom

Wow! This must be the best app i've tried yet!

I setup empeg-preinit.v3 just now, and preinits loads, and tries to load the empacman file from the preinit.d folder. but i get this error.

/etc/preinit.d/N01empacman: /etc/preinit.d/N01empacman: cannot execute binary file

I've tried the file with both the 'N' and 'M' prefix, and i still get this error. How can i fix this, and get this programming running all the time?

Did you make it executeable? If not:

chmod 755 /etc/preinit.d/N01empacman

/Michael

yes, i've made it executeable, first i tried 755 on both the folder preinit.d then on the N01empacman file. If i type ./N01empacman from the hyperterm window, it loads and binds to hijack. but the preinit gives that error when it tires to load it.

Can someone post a empeg screen shot?

- Jon

Wow!

Thanks!

- Jon

OK.. this one has to go into Hijack!!! is that easily doable?

I found some pacman wav's that sound good, anyone else think this game needs sound?
http://emuxhaven.net/emuxhaven/multia/extras/sounds.zip

Tom

preinit scripts must be scripts. If you want it to start a binary program, then you'll need to write a one-liner to start it.

Could you give me an example of the one liner script? I've never written a script for the empeg, or linux for that matter.

===================¨
#!/bin/sh
/path/to/actual/program_to_run
===================

Just the part between the lines with =='s. #!/bin/sh must be on first line of file.
Be sure to save it it with Unix style line endings, if creating it on a non-unix system, or it will not work (use something like UltraEdit on Windows).

Save that in the preinit.d catalog with an appropriate name and keep the real programs somewhere else. Don't forget to make it executeable.

/Michael

Way cool. Time to install pre-init

Thanks for the help, i just got it working. I downloaded that UltraEdit Program, and the script still didn't work. So i installed ae on my empeg, and opened and saved the file, didn't make any changes, and it worked! Yay! Pacman is the coolest thing (till gps comes around )

I finally caved in, RTFM (and this board) and installed the excellent empeg-preinit-v3 and wished I'd done it sooner, I now have emptriv and empacman on my Hijack menu, OH YES

I do have a slight problem though, running emptriv removes empacman from Hijack's menu and I need to reboot to get it back again.

Here are my serial logs:

Player Bootlog
Linux version 2.2.14-rmk5-np17-empeg50-hijack-v276 ([email protected])
<..snip..>
player.cpp : 385:empeg-car 2.00-beta11 2002/02/08.
empacman running as pid 15
opening display...
opening font file...
creating font image...
ok...
loading categories...
waitmenu...
Prolux 4 empeg car - 2.1434 Feb 7 2002
Vcb: 0x4054d000

Run emptriv 1st time
hijack: removed menu entry: "emptriv"
hijack: removed menu entry: "empacman"
failed EMPEG_HIJACK_BINDBUTTONS: Device or resource busy

Quit emptriv
waitmenu...

Run emptriv 2nd time
hijack: removed menu entry: "emptriv"

Quit emptriv
waitmenu...

In /etc/preinit.d i have 2 files:
1. M10empacman
---> #!/bin/sh
---> /drive0/empacman

2. M15emptriv
---> #!/bin/sh
---> cd /drive0/emptriv
---> ./emptriv

Edit: Changing the order of empacman/emptriv (M15emptriv & M20empacman) doesn't make any difference. Additionally, both games work fine standalone with no errors reported from Hijack.

Can anyone shed any light on what's going wrong here please?

In the interests of full disclosure, in the case of preinit, you don't really need the shebang line. This is another aspect of the same reason that it needs to be a script in the first place. However, for the sake of consistency with other scripts, you should probably put it there nonetheless.