BenV's notes

So I was bored and went through the usual slashdot, kernel.org, freshmeat.net, etc.
Once reading through the news on happypenguin.org I noticed it must be mario season or something.
After checking the descriptions I decided to check out Super Mario^W^WSecret Maryo Chronicles.

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:

benv@janeman:~:0>smc
CEGUI Scheme Exception occurred : Imageset::xmlHandler::startElement - An unexpected error occurred while creating a Texture object from file 'SMCLook512.png'


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!