Javascript wtf in firebug

For reasons unknown to us, this piece of code acts very strange. First it evaluates selected == index which it considered to be false. (outlined in green in the image) So far so good. However, what it does next is a real WTF.
Can someone explain to us why this code runs INTO the if statement?
The if (false) { whatever } part?
Personally I’d expect the code to jump over the if block, since that’s what if statement are for. Skipping code unless the evaluation is true.
Or explained a lot better on wikipedia. However, what happens is that whatever is actually executed.

So after carefully inspecting this piece of code and saying obscene stuff, minds boggled, trying to find that hidden semicolon or whatever, we couldn’t find it. Maybe a browser bug? But both Opera (version 10.10) and Firefox (version 3.5.5) failed in the same way.
Maybe some magic with jQuery? Whatever it is, it remains a mystery to us.

I went to their page and found out they require a login for no apparent reason. I tried bugmenot and decided that bugmenot is a piece of shit since they refuse to carry logins for almost all sites I try to use it for. Getting angry with the login I registered with a throwaway email account (if you don’t have one, consider using something like mailinator) and downloaded their image. Wonder why they don’t use a torrent for it… oh well, their problem.
And since I’m still fed up with their login garbage, HERE’S A DIRECT LINK TO THE CHROME OS IMAGE. It will probably break real soon, but wget on this link worked on a completely different machine, so you might get lucky for now.

Once the image completed downloading and after installing the latest version (3.0.12 today) of VirtualBox, I created a new machine. Obviously I couldn’t be bothered to read whatever the clowns of gdtd had to say (if anything) about creating a virtual machine and the required settings for that, so I went with “It’s Linux, enable all possible acceleration and NX flags and whatnot and put it on a SATA controller, for network use a bridge, and here’s 1024MB of memory”. Surprisingly it worked right away.
After only a few seconds this screen came up:

Chrome OS Login screen

Chrome OS after login

Clicking on the leftmost tab thingy gives us some more toys for now:

Took a while to load over here though, but that could be because of a slow internet connection.
All these ‘applications’ are actually shortcuts to websites. Google Docs etc are nothing new, and the Chess application is simply a piece of flash. Oh well, at least that means flash works.

Conclusion:
It’s a fun toy for now, quick to boot but not so great if you have a slow internet connection. Other than that it’s not really useful yet, but that’s to be expected from an early build like this.
Maybe I’ll try it on some real iron later. Since Google is targetting it at netbooks etc I might give it a shot on our EEE PC
It will be interesting to see how this OS turns out when they finally release it.

Dragon Age and Wine

First I decided to check it if the game would run in Wine. The appdb has some info that doesn’t sound too terrible, and since the latest git builds sometimes give better results I needed to test no matter what the test results said. So I built the latest git version of wine (which should be version 1.1.33 by now, but since they had WineConf it’s still labeled 1.1.32) and fired up the installer in a new prefix. I always install games in their own wine prefix so they don’t bug eachother with dlls and hacks needed to get them running. The game seems to need a few hacks from winetricks, specifically gecko and vcrun2005. Without the gecko component the Dotnet part of the installer crashed for me (it takes forever to install though). You might also want to install physx, since the game uses that as well. (and a lot of ppl had the physx installer fail through wine, good thing it’s in winetricks now). Finally I also installed d3dx9 just to be sure, since it needs DirectX to run.

Installing using the Installer

The installer should now come up, like this.

Dragon Age - Installer (wine)

Dragon Age Installer Adminerror (wine)

Dragon Age Installer under wine (2)

Dragon Age – Manual installation

Since the installer is pretty much a bitch, and I noticed it didn’t do much except for bitch and wine and unrar some packages, I tried to see if I could get it to run without needing the installer. Here goes! (you need the rar utility for this).
I created a new wine prefix and installed the required winetricks parts as above, but instead of running the installer I did this:

After this you should have a directory listing that looks very much like after using the official installer. The only worry I had was the game looking for registry entries, but it seems like those aren’t needed that much. (read, for me it started without asking stuff).
In fact, what baffles me is: this way it doesn’t even ask about a CD key. Very very interesting. However, I did need to use a no-cd patch to get it to run under wine (for both installation methods). Meh, nothing new there.

Running it under wine

Starting up the game will probably give you a black screen that does nothing until you click/bash your keyboard a few times. This is because the intro movies don’t work under wine at the moment.
However, you can disable those movies in the .INI file:

(or use a text editor).

Dragon Age Title Screen (wine)

For me the flickering was basically gone (during gameplay at least) when I reduced the graphics detail to “low”. (I could have Framebuffer effects enabled and also texture details set to high).
What helps is basically lowering the graphics settings:

• Lower the resolution
• Don’t run fullscreen

Anyway, that makes it playable under wine.

BenV’s opinion on the game

It’s a very worthy game to play if you’re into Baldur’s gate etc. The graphics are very nice compared to what I’m used to (especially under windows ) and the interface works properly.
The intro story is completely different depending on the race, class, and background (noble or commoner) you pick. I played as a casteless dwarf rogue and had the intro story living in the slums of the city, my sister being a whore trying to marry her way up to the noble class, while thieving and robbing my way around myself. Needless I butchered my way through the intro, cheating my boss out of some money and fighting a lot.
On the other hand my girlfriend started out as a human mage and had a lot less fighting and a lot more blabla and stuff from dreamworlds etc and could talk her way through a big part of the intro. (of course she also ran into the necessary fights, if it were only to teach the combat system of the game).
Speaking of which, the combat system is also well done. The party can be told to hold ground and they will actually stay there instead of having your archers/mages being raped in the front. Stealthing around and backstabbing also works very nicely

No LAN games

Anyway, I’m sure you can read enough reviews about the game that explain all that in much more detail.
But the one thing that is very very bad is the lack of multiplayer LAN games.
If there’s one thing we loved about Baldur’s Gate it was the ability to play the game with 3 computers all controlling the very same party, all players with their own character.
So why is it not in this game? I’ve seen a lot of BS on slashdot and other sites where the basic arguments are:

• It would take too much time to implement and therefore reduce the quality of the single player game
• It’s not possible without having a linear story / it would need a completely different story not geared to “the one”
• UI must be more complex for multiplayer
• I’m a fucking retard

Well, I think:

• Adding multiplayer would require LAN support which is extra code (but they already need that pretty much because of the DLC garbage). However, it’s not THAT MUCH more. A few screens to setup a game and deal with permissions together with a few tweaks to deal with synchronisation. That’s all. Peanuts compared to the rest of the game.
• See Baldur’s Gate, we -loved- that kind of multiplayer. Doesn’t need a different story at all, exactly the same story was excellent.
• The UI can be exactly the same, worked fine for Baldur’s Gate. There are however a few details that are nice to have when doing a multiplayer game, like people still being able to walk around and do stuff while others talk to NPCs, but no major overhauls.
• Yes, you are.

I’m sure most people who scream “NO” to the multiplayer support (and I wonder why) assume that big changes are needed to the game to make it multiplayer. Perhaps they have the wrong idea about what kind of multiplayer makes us happy.
However, since EA games got involved (see the whole DLC fiasco) there’s little hope that it’ll be changed.
Pity. Anyway, it’s still a very nice game. Time to play!

The Settlers 1

The Settlers 2

Anyway, today I decided to try out this free open source clone (that can even import Settlers II maps these days, isn’t that cute?).
So on to the build process. I leeched the SVN version (you know me, official releases are for sissies) and took a look through the source. Waaaah! SCONS…. so much for getting my hopes up. Oh well, let’s see how well it does today.
Running scons started with some notifications about not having optipng and pngrewrite and such (might get those later if I care about those 3 bytes they might shave off, I like the programs though) and then bailed out with this:

To which I told it “No, it is not.”. Guess I’ll have to fix that for you huh? Fine. (yeah, I don’t bother to check requirements these days… they’re all for pokemon OS anyway, I’ll just find out where the train stops by letting it derail).
So I find the SDL_gfx site from google and copy paste the latest release link to slackbuild.pl, which leeches it and starts compiling. Until:

Oh really, asshole… mhm, maybe google did not give me the latest release page. Or maybe SDL_gfx fails. Let’s find out.
So I run into ohloh’s sdl-gfx page, that has a button that made me slightly mad/angry/annoyed/I kill you.
It looks like this: Where’s the download?. Yeah, where’s the fscking download, that’s what -I- want to know. So I follow the link and get the option to

provide your users with downloads in 2 ways

. *RAAAH*. Do I look like a project manager to you? *RAGE*.
The quickest way to fix these kind of issues is usually to forget about official sources and immediately walk to the pokemon OS repositories to get the patches. Funny how they are convenient sometimes. So I run to their latest repository version, fetch their patches and check them out. Huh, no patches for this? After which I finally read the README from the official SDL_gfx source. *hehehe*, maybe I should have done that before I started ranting about this. The README mentions:

To build without MMX code enabled (i.e. PPC or for AMD64 architecture
which is missing pusha/popa):
./configure –disable-mmx

Aha! To be fair, it was kind of hidden in the README after a lot of blabla about stuff that I really don’t care about like what primitives it supports. Normally I do read the INSTALL file, but that contains the boilerplate GPL install file for this source. Makes me wonder why they don’t automagically disable MMX, that’s what configure is for after all. Oh well.
With the –disable-mmx configure switch it compiled and I had a package. Back to Widelands:

What the heck is libgigglez?

libggz wraps many common low-level functions which are often used in C programming.

I see, another Boost wannabe. Or maybe libc. Or glib. You get the point.

The first such group is memory handling, which offers functions such as ggz_strdup() or ggz_malloc(), which resemble their counterparts from libc but are more convenient to use. For instance, ggz_strdup(NULL) returns NULL instead of crashing, and ggz_malloc() includes a reference counter to be used for debugging in combination with ggz_free().

Ahaha, yeah, more convienient. Instead making sure you’re not trying to copy garbage in the first place you could simply copy NULL by using ggz_strdup and have your program end up with empty strings or a not working communication protocol. Much more convenient indeed
And obviously they haven’t heard of the malloc debugging features that are already present in the libc library. Hopefully their debugger is more easy to use and shows more info, but I don’t care for now. I’ll regard this ggz library as “More choice is always better”. Let’s see if it works on slackware64.
I stashed libggz-0.0.14.1.tar.gz through slackbuild, which compiled it without any issues. Good. Scons also wanted ggz-client-libs so I also ran it through slackbuild. Another win for slackbuild.

Back at Widelands scons finally agreed on the libraries and went on, then complained about my TERM variable since it was not equal to “xterm-color” or “dumb”… seriously, why bother checking if you’re going to act retarded anyway. Stick to terminfo/termcap for color support. After that it complained about me not having ‘krazy2′ and

you will submit code with i. a. spelling errors!

Yeah, that’s just what I was planning to do. And they will quake in their boots when looking at my code.

After 5 million more “Checking for errors” checks it went on compiling. Finally it said:

Time to play!

Widelands titlescreen

Widelands ingame (1)

Widelands ingame (2)

While it’s still very much in development, it already is fun to play. You’ll recognize a bunch of stuff from the original game, but Widelands also changed some things like buildings and resource names. For example where Setllers 1 required a Sawmill, Widelands requires a “Wood hardener”. Convenient stuff like watch windows are implemented so you can keep track of a building, roads can be built piece by piece but also in 1 go like in the later Settler games, statistics about buildings and production, and there’s tons more. They included background music and sounds like birds singing etc, which is cute, but it’s a good thing they can be turned off as well.

Widelands with watch window

Widelands ingame story stuff

So far I enjoyed playing the tutorial campaign. However, I haven’t done the combat part yet, I’m quite sure I’ll get bored of the game when I run into that….. but don’t let that stop you!
Go give the game a try, it’s fun

Widelands ingame Statistics

PCSX-Reloaded about screen

PCSX-Reloaded running Final Fantasy 8

PCSX-Reloaded showing Final Fantasy 8 intro movie

PCSX-Reloaded showing Final Fantasy 8 intro movie (2)

Offtopic: Do you know what really annoys me in games?
UNSKIPPABLE CONTENT!
In this case the intro movie, but it goes for countless of things: cutscenes (either ingame or fmv), “game over” screens, long talks that I don’t give a damn about when I already know what they’re saying… I’m sure there are plenty more examples of this. If you’re developing a game, make sure you don’t force your gamer through this nonsense. Yeah, it’s cute, and we understand that you spent countless of hours wasting your time on fancy graphics, but after the first time I really don’t want to sit through it again. Especially if I just died and am forced through it -again-.

So now that I had it running in the background and could rant while it showed the intro, here’s an ingame shot

PCSX-Reloaded showing Final Fantasy 8 ingame

Keep up the good work PCSX-Reloaded guys!
And fix your homepage.
Things that are currently wrong with it:
* It doesn’t tell me anything ABOUT the product, except for that it’s a fork/branch of PCSX
* It doesn’t have any screenshots (what is it with graphical programs that don’t have screenshots on their website? That’ s a FAIL right there)
* It doesn’t have any information on requirements etc, I just tried to compile it on 64 bit linux because I hoped it would work, not because your site tells me it does.

Needless to say I went for the source ball. Through my famous slackbuild script of course!
That went fine, until configure barfed about some CEGUI thing.
What’s a CEGUI thing?
Apparently it’s some kind of windowing/widget library. Yeah, another one.
So I ram it through slackbuild, which went fine as usual after I did a make distclean in the source dir. Some how the first build fucked up, don’t ask me why.
Anyhow, I installed the CEGUI package and ran back to the smc source dir.
Slackbuild had no other issues this time so out rolled a package. After installation I tried to run it.

Here’s what it said after my screen went black for about a second and came back:

Yeah, that’s what I get for trusting yet another crap library with widgets. *sigh*

However, I had just enough energy left to try one detour into bug/issue fixing land.
Google came up with basically only 1 thing, so after trying my best to read some italian forum I trashed it back through google’s own translation service.
Now that it was in dutch it was a bit more readable, it hinted about using the freeimage library instead of the default TGA codec (which obviously failed).

Installing the freeimage library was pretty trivial, although they don’t use autoconf so I had to go through their Makefiles manually.
The first hint of trouble is usually when source packages come delivered in the famous .zip format. Oh, sorry, I meant .ZIP-EVERYTHING_IS_CAPS format. Seriously, don’t get me started on how many times those kankerthings exploded in my /usr/src dir so far, completely splattering up everything there.
Good thing I’m good with rm. Anyhow, this zip package was decent and created a dir (without version number though).
After fiddling with the makefiles and building freeimage, I also build freeimage plus and stashed it into a package with makepkg.
Phew, sweat on my forehead. Hopefully slackbuild will be able to handle this some day….. (dream on)

Back to CEGUI — compiling it with the freeimage library went without problems, and after upgrading my previous CEGUI package it was finally time to retry SMC.
By the way, did I note that all these packages compiled on x86_64? Good job on that one guys

This time the screen actually came up with some mario^H^Hyo like stuff! Just like the good old days with the SNES!
It looked a bit like this:

On the background the theme music played that reminded me quite a bit of the original snes game.

Messing around with it a bit I quickly got myself killed a few times and had some fun.

I soon realized that the SNES version had better controls, but then again… playing on a keyboard is kinda cramped for platform games.
So I reconnected my Logitech Rumblepad 2 to see if it would work. Well, if works great
Not a snes pad (the thing is a lot like the original playstation controller), but it played a hell of a lot better.

Conclusion: if you’re feeling bored, give it a shot. Good for a bit of fun, and it has a level editor as well!
(which can be seen in this impressive edit I made here

Keep up the good work, guys from SMC!

To get it running, open up your favorite terminal that supports 256 colors and allows palette changing – I found both xterm and urxvt to work.
Make sure your TERM variable is set to something that allows this, for instance in urxvt:

or this worked for me with xterm:

Something like this is the result:

Enjoy!

Not just the DOS stuff from back then was great, but also the console games.  We had a NES and later a SNES and games like Zelda, Mario, Mega Man and Double Dragon gave us a lot of education

Somehow we missed the Final Fantasy series though, but one of the things I often play these days is one of the RPG genre.  In fact, I played Final Fantasy 2 on my laptop just a week ago

“But how, my stupid x86 machine doesn’t accept these cardridges!“.

Well, you need a bigger hammer obviously. Try stuffing them into the PCMCIA slot if you have one, I hear they are twice as fast. Or if you strip the plastic casing you can maybe insert them into an ISA slot if you still have one. You might need an adapter for the PCI slots though.

…

Oh, you’re still here? Well, ok, try an emulator if your slot smashing skills aren’t up to par.

<rant alert>

So someone explain to me:

If you’re writing an emulator…. you know, a thing that has to waste tons of CPU cycles in order to play dress-up and imitate a console with a different architecture…

Why the # wouldn’t you make it as cross platform as possible? Yeah, sure, I understand that you want to make it fast and hack in some assembly code. In fact, I love assembly code

However,  that concept is getting more obsolete every day. So if you write an emulator, MAKE SURE IT COMPILES ON BenV’s MACHINE!

That means it should run on at least x86 AND x86_64. Why write an emulator that’s obsolete even before you finish it? I’m looking at you pcsx2 -.-

Applaud to DOSBox for that matter, they get it right.

</rant>

So anyway, for the NES games I suggest using FCEUX these days. It runs on both x86 and x86_64, and it runs my games on my new slackware 64 installation… which makes me happy

For SNES I always used ZSNES, but they’re still stuck in the DOS era… trying to upgrade their obsolete assembly code to more generic stuff like the QT toolkit. It works great if you have an x86 installation, but it refuses my new slackware 64…. and I refuse to chroot back to my old slackware32 for an emulator like this. Puh, I’d sooner start it in dosbox :p. “But BenV, how do you play A Link to the Past then these days?”. Ahh, a good question, but it’s easy: I simply use bsnes. Runs all my snes games so far

Then there’s the matter of the prutsstation, or PSX. Yeah, that’s another disaster area… let me know if you have a decent emulator. Guess I’m stuck to using epsxe in a chroot environment for now.  Other than that it works pretty well once you get the plugins etc sorted, but I haven’t touched it lately. (guess why).

For N64 we have another good emulator these days, called Mupen64plus. To my surprise a simple recompile worked on slack64, so no issues there (good coder ). And it runs zelda, what more do you want?

Then there’s the new PSX, or PSX2. Yeah…. that’s in the same (sinking) boat as the PSX. Only 1 reason to play: final fantasy. Only 1 somewhat decent emulator for this: pcsx2. Unfortunately it feels like they don’t give a damn about linux, and certainly not 64 bit linux. They “dropped the 64 bit build”…. idiots. So if you feel like it you can get it running on 32 bits, which I’ve done, and it runs ok. But you need a fast pc (multicore) and a decent graphics card and then it still runs like a garbagecan on wheels. (the wheels come off every 3 meters and you have to open the lid, shuffle the garbage around and close it again before it continues). Of course they are quite active, so that’s good, there’s still hope. For kicks lotjuh tried running this thing on windows, and it runs a bit better there, but they still have a lot of work to do. Let’s hope they consider dropping the 32 bitch port and switching to 64 before they’re even obsolete in windows land.

That’s all the emulators I can think of at the moment… or at least, that I want to talk about, this page is getting long enough. Yeah, there’s plenty more, like mame,  ccs64, stella and whatnot, but you can handle google yourself if you want to play those things.

Oh yeah, one more important thing: Gamepads
If you want to play these console games, you want… I’d almost say -need- a gamepad. Final Fantasy and Zelda can be played with the keyboard just fine, but you’ll be crying me plenty of rivers if you attempt to complete Mega Man or Double Dragon with the keyboard. A little while ago I got myself a Logitech Rumblepad 2 which I’m quite happy with. Yeah, it’s not a rectangular box that’ll give you hernia and makes your skin come off after playing a few hours of mario like in the old days, so you’ll have to miss out on that nostalgia….

but like I say, I’m quite happy with it. It even vibrates if you push the right button . Needless to say it works under linux…. although you will want to enable the kernel option for it. My kernel config has CONFIG_LOGITECH_FF=y, CONFIG_LOGIRUMBLEPAD2_FF=y, and CONFIG_HID_LOGITECH=y, and so far all decent emulators play with it without much hassle.

So if you’re bored, go get one of these emulators, a gamepad, and give it a shot!

Give it a shot if you’re bored

Oh, and they have a nice list of why to play, including “It’s free!” and “This list goes to eleven”

Also, don’t blame me if you find yourself still clicking around while your coffee mug is empty again. I won’t refill it for you.

Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN

Oh yeah, here’s my char:

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

For comparison, here’s the original Wallmaster image from Zelda (stolen from a zelda wiki, thanks guys, feel free to steal this one back :-p):