I’ve had a small idea rolling around in my head for while now. While operating in a shell, there are certain commands that often follow others. Sometimes there is a problem. You attempt to ssh into a host and it fails due to a host key mismatch, so you need to run ssh-keygen to remove the key. This happens to me fairly frequently when I am building temporary virtual machines.

Sometimes one command tends to follow another in chronological order. You might list the contents of an archive and then want to extract it. Maybe you stopped a service and want to start it back up shortly thereafter.

I thought it would be nice to bind a key to attempt to insert the next command that I’m going to be looking for. I’m sick of changing ssh to ssh-keygen, adding the -R, and removing the username@ from an ssh command to remove its host key from my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file.

What’s working so far?

The code is ugly, but I have a few useful things working. For instance, commands like these:

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service apache2 stop
ssh crazylongusername@blog.patshead.com
apt-cache show apache2

…turn into commands like these when you hit control-u:

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service apache2 start
ssh-keygen -R blog.patshead.com
sudo apt-get install apache2

If the command line is empty, the previous command will be recalled from history first.

How does it work?

There’s a little zsh function that passes the command line to a Perl script. The (rather ugly) Perl script runs through a list of possible transformations and returns the new command back to zsh.

Why isn’t it all in zsh? Why is the Perl script a disorganized pile of conditionals?

The Perl half started as a quick hack just to see how workable this idea was. I enjoyed using it quite a bit, so it ballooned up fairly quickly. I started the job of porting it back into zsh before I posted the code up on github. It didn’t look like zsh’s regular expression capabilities were very advanced or easy to use. I may be wrong about this. I may have been looking in the wrong place.

That doesn’t explain why it is still if after if after if. I thought about moving all the regular expressions out to a config file, or at least setting up a dispatch table. I thought it would be best to wait and see if any more complicated transformations pop up.

Why control-u?

Why not? I wanted to use something easy to reach and the default binding for control-u was something I never use.

Where will it go from here?

I’m not sure. I mostly come up with ideas as I’m working in my shell. I’d like to set up some more circular command lists. There a group of about four or five ls commands in there now that loop back around to the beginning. I’m thinking I might do something similar for dig/ping/mtr, and I bet there are plenty of related commands like that that all take similar arguments.

I’d love to hear some ideas!

Where to get it

I uploaded the repository to github, and the README explains how to get it.

I have it set up to install directly into Prezto, but it should be pretty trivial to get it to work as an oh-my-zsh plugin or on its own without any fancy configuration framework.

I created a problem for myself late last year. I drove almost nine hundred miles and left my laptop’s power supply at home. It seemed like I had three choices.

• Drive to the local Fry’s (or similar) and buy a new one
• Have someone go find my power supply and ship it to me
• Order one and wait for it

I checked the websites of a few local stores. My gargantuan laptop requires a rather huge 120-watt power supply. As it turns out, these are quite rare and the only one that might have existed locally was pretty expensive. Some quick math told me that I could have one delivered over night for a good bit less.

That left me with two options. I’ve been saying for years that I should have a spare, universal laptop power supply that I can just keep in my laptop bag. This seemed like a good excuse to get one.

I ended up ordering this “Syba 120W Universal Notebook AC to DC Power Adapter with 11 Power Tips”. I was hoping to find one with a USB charging port, but there wasn’t really a ton of selection at 120 watts. Also, in agreement with the pictures on Amazon, the charger actually has the brand name “Spyker” on the side.

I’ve had it for nearly a year now and so far it has been working just fine with my HP DV8T laptop.

The box has a list on the back specifying which tips work with certain makes and models of laptop. I had the brillant idea to take a picture of the list before I discarded the box. I should have looked at the picture first.

I feel like I’ve done Charlie over at Charlie’s Games a bit of a disservice here. I am pretty sure Irukandji was the very first native Linux game I purchased for my arcade cabinet. Since that day, nearly two years ago, I’ve written about over a dozen of the games I’ve installed on my arcade cabinet. Some of those games aren’t even actually native to Linux!

I recently went though two years’ worth of OS upgrades and I have also been tweaking all my games to work properly with my arcade cabinet’s new secondary display. When it came time to configure Irukandji I ran into a few problems.

At first, all was well, except that I had no sound. I don’t recall this being a problem before my OS upgrade, but I can’t say with absolute certainty. My arcade cabinet had an older version of Irukandji installed, so I upgraded it.

This fixed the sound, but as soon as I set it to run full screen it would segfault. I had the same problem on my laptop. I exchanged a few emails in the middle of the night with Charlie. He was extremely helpful, and he very much pointed me down the right track when he explained to me that Irukandji runs natively at 800x600.

With that information in hand it was a simple matter to use disper to set the television output to 800x600 with “aspect ratio stretching.” The NVidia driver is now actually driving the television at 1280x720 but stretching the virtual 800x600 display up to the correct size.

The controls

Irukandji is one of those games that is awesome enough to not require a single mouse click to control. Moving around the menus is done with the arrow keys, and choices are selected with the “fire” button. Easy peasy.

There is only one tiny problem I have. I had to map buttons to the “enter” and “q” keys. “Q” is used to quit the game. I needed to map “enter” to confirm the submission of my excellent high scores.

I’m very good at hitting “q” instead of “enter.” If you see any names in the high score list with large quantities of the letter “q” at the end, those are most likely me.

The game

The game is quite awesome on an arcade cabinet. It is another shoot ‘em up, and I can never get enough of those. I seem to be collecting quite a few games with these shiny, glowy, neon graphics. They always look right at home on an arcade cabinet.

I didn’t get to play this one much when the arcade cabinet was new. My video flipping requirement made the game slow down quite a bit with my original video card. I’m hoping to rectify that situation in the upcoming weeks!

Space Phallus

I had previously avoided installing Space Phallus on the arcade cabinet. Before we moved, our young six-year-old nephew used to play games on the arcade cabinet pretty regularly. I didn’t really want to have to be the one to explain what a phallus was, what it was using as ammunition, or what it was firing at.

I don’t have to worry about that now. Space Phallus will hopefully be making its debut on my arcade cabinet in the near future.

Scoregasm and Bullet Candy Perfect

I wish I planned a bit better. Twin-stick arena shooters almost never fit my control layout. Even if I had a pair of arcade joysticks at any of the seats, they’d often be difficult to use for most twin-stick shooters due to the fact that they’d be digital controls.

Maybe Scoregasm or Bullet Candy Perfect will fit on my next arcade cabinet!

Yet Another Shaky Cameraphone Video

Thank you again, Charlie, for helping me get your excellent game back up and running on my arcade cabinet!

My ~/bin directory and Bash configuration had been slowly growing since some time around 1998 or so. Every few years I would cut back the weeds, but it had definitely been steadily growing right up until I switched to zsh a few years ago. That gave me an opportunity to cut pretty deeply and throw out a lot of cruft that I just don’t use anymore.

It has been a few years, and I think it is time to do a little weeding again. I would also like to try to make some improvements and additions.

Some of the goals

• Clean up my zsh configuration
  • only define aliases for tools that are actually installed
  • move away from oh-my-zsh
• Better, more automated revision control of config files
• Single command to install my config on a new machine (like ssh-copy-id on steroids)
• On new machines, automatically install
  • Required infrastructure (zsh, git)
  • Commonly used programs (ack, bwm-ng, autojump, tmux, etc)

Moving past oh-my-zsh

I really like the layout of oh-my-zsh’s directory structure. I used to maintain a single, large .bashrc file full of random aliases, functions, and environment variables. With oh-my-zsh, any file I drop in ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/ will be included for me. I have a few hundred lines of code in there spread over two dozen files.

I’ve run into a problem with this several times, though. oh-my-zsh loads your custom config files first, then it loads its plugins. There have been times when I want to override just one little alias or settings that a plugin sets up for me, and the cleanest way to do that seems to be editing the plugin.

Tracking changes to files that ship with oh-my-zsh is made easy by git, but it doesn’t feel very natural to have to do this with oh-my-zsh… I’m equally happy maintaining my own fork of oh-my-zsh or just maintaining a set of configuration scripts within oh-my-zsh. I don’t think I should have to do both.

I’ve already begun switching to Sorin Ionescu’s Pretzo, which is a fork of oh-my-zsh. Sorin has eliminated oh-my-zsh’s line between plugins, libraries, and custom scripts. Everything in Pretzo is a “module.”

Better revision control of configuration files

Today I am maintaining four git repositories for files in my home directory. One each for ~/.oh-my-zsh, ~/bin, ~/.sawfish, and ~/.emacs.d. My ~/.xsession file lives in ~/.sawfish with a symlink back to my home directory. I used to keep my .bashrc in ~/bin but my .zshrc lives in my oh-my-zsh repository.

I came across a really great idea while investigating oh-my-zsh forks. It seems to have completely vanished from the Internet since I found it, though. He had a pair of scripts called persist and forget for moving configuration files into a git repository and leaving behind a symlink in their place.

He didn’t push the idea as far as I would have liked. His implementation could only store individual files. I would like to be able to persist entire directory trees with a single command. I also need a way to recreate the symlinks on other machines.

Pushing my shell config and ssh key to new machines

I’m a big fan and a heavy user of ssh-copy-id. It is a good, lazy way to push your public key out to a new server. I’d like be able to run a single command to push my ssh public key and my entire shell config out to fresh servers with a single command.

Cosmos Neoprene 7” Purple Tablet Case

The purple Cosmos brand case was five dollars, and Amazon Prime shipping got it here in just a few days.

It is quite a bit smaller than the black eForCity sleeve and has to stretch quite a bit to fit the Nexus 7. I really like the snug fit, but I wouldn’t want to have to fight to put it in on a regular basis.

eForCity Black / Red Zip Sleeve Case

The black case with the red stripe was only two bucks with free shipping. We bought three of these and they took about three weeks to arrive. The material these are made out of is quite a bit thinner than the Cosmos. The case is also noticeably larger. The tablet can actually move around a bit while it is in the sleeve. Contrary to the item description, these cases are black on the inside and outside. They are not reversible.

I’m happy with the two-dollar cases. I just wanted to have something on hand so that I won’t scratch up the screen when I throw my tablet in my laptop bag. Chris had to have one of the purple cases. She said she was too lazy to knit another case this time.

• The Alldocube iPlay 50 Mini Is Your Nexus 7 For 2024

Due to some unforeseen circumstances and a hearty amount of procrastination, I am very, very far behind with my little arcade game write-ups. The last game I “reviewed,” if you can even classify these as such, was Super Meat Boy. Since then I’ve bought at least three more Humble Bundles and a handful of other games.

Those newer Humble Bundles include quite a few games that should be a good fit for the arcade controls, like “Dustforce,” “Wizorb,” and “Canabalt.” I was also hoping to shoehorn “Shank” onto the cabinet, but I’m quite a few buttons short.

I’m sorry about the dangling wires in the pictures. I only just hung the TV for the arcade cabinet upgrade a few days ago and I haven’t gone shopping for any materials to hide those cables with. Hopefully they’ll be hidden next time!

Still writing about Humble Indie Bundle #4

I’m a big fan of shoot ‘em ups. I’d guess that I started out playing quite a bit of Parsec on our TI 99/4A when I was small. Later, I moved up to games like Gradius, Lifeforce (a.k.a. Salamander), and Zanac. I certainly played A LOT of Zanac. So I was pretty excited to find another new retro-style shoot ‘em up to play on my arcade machine.

I’m having a lot of fun playing Jamestown so far. I only just finished “The Badlands” and unlocked “New Madrid” on the “difficult” setting. The bullet hell hasn’t gotten hellish enough to be too hard for me yet, but I do find myself having to use a “continue” more often than I’d like.

I haven’t even gotten around to purchasing any of the other ship types yet. I need to finish writing this so I can get back to playing!

The controls

The game was ridiculously simple to set up on the arcade cabinet. You only need arrow keys plus three buttons to play the game. I mapped a fourth button to the escape key to bring up the menu.

All the menus can be navigated by moving a mouse pointer around using the arrow keys.

The obligatory shaky cam video

I’m in the middle of my cabinet upgrade and I’m modifying all sorts of configurations and settings. The work is going slow. I can’t help wasting time playing games every time I get another emulator set up to run on the second display.

I thought this would be a good time to start writing up an inventory. I’m going to add to these lists as I go, and hopefully I will manage to keep them up to date.

The Computer Hardware

• Athlon X2 3800+ (2 cores, 2 ghz)
• 1 GB RAM
• Random Motherboard with 6 SATA ports
• Random old 2 port 3ware SATA RAID controller (just for an extra SATA port)
• Cheap $1.50 USB Bluetooth dongle
• Six (6) 1 TB SATA disks (RAID 6, for network storage)
• One (1) 320 GB SATA disk (OS and Games)
• NVidia GTS 240 1024 MB (112 CUDA cores)

Operating System

Just upgraded (it is early in October now) to Ubuntu 12.04 from 10.10.

I’d been rather lazy about this. As long as it could store files and play games I didn’t really want to touch it.

Why am I trying to force everything to 1080p or 720p?

With the older NVidia driver, the TV will only run at a handful of resolutions. When I force a resolution other than these, the NVidia driver scales the output to one of these two resolutions. This was slower, but it meant that everything was always running at the correct aspect ratio.

The most recent NVidia driver will drive the TV at a few more useful resolutions. Unfortunately, it stretches resolutions like 640x480 from 4:3 to 16:9. I can’t correct this with settings on this particular TV, either.

Nintendo Entertainment System

For NES emulation I am using MESS. I’m trying to use MESS whenever I can because its split-screen cocktail mode is very useful on my arcade cabinet.

Switching from cocktail to normal mode requires quite a few button presses and joystick moves. Bring up the menu… Change the display mode… Change the rotation… It feels a bit like punching in the Konami code but without the muscle memory to assist you. I need to automate this.

The performance is excellent. It’ll play split-screen or normal at 1080p without any frame skipping. MESS is pretty picky about which ROM files it will run, though. I’ve tried to run a “hacks” like ZeldaC and Mario Adventure but they both fail to run.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Up until today I was using MESS for SNES emulation. I’ll have to check and make sure that I’m not crazy, but I am almost certain it ran fine in “cocktail” mode at 960x540.

My new television will not run at 960x540. I couldn’t go any lower than 1280x720. At that resolution it was dropping 50% of the frames in “normal” mode.

For now I switched it to snes9x-gtk. It is running at 1080p with bilinear filtering without a problem.

PC Engine

This is another one that MESS manages to do a great job at emulating. No frameskipping at 1080p in either cocktail or normal orientation.

Sega Genesis

From a performance perspective, this one runs flawlessly under MESS. No frameskipping at 1080p in cocktail or normal orientations.

I do currently have a strange issue, though. The “player 3” joystick will not work at all. I’ve remapped the keys in MESS exactly like I have for the NES, SNES, and PC Engine. I can use the buttons to shoot or jump just fine, but it refuses to move the around.

MS-DOS

DOSBox seems to run at 1080p with the same “amazing” framerates I remember getting from the real hardware.

I haven’t found many old DOS games that I would want to play, though. So far I only decided on three:

• Commander Keen
• Skyroads
• Jazz Jackrabbit

Arcade Emulation

I use MAME for all my arcade emulation, of course. I haven’t tweaked it for the new television yet, but I know it’ll run “cocktail,” two-player Mortal Kombat 2 with no frame skipping at 1080p.

Native Games (and “nearly” native Windows games)

I’ve written entries about some of these games already. I’m going to slowly build this list as I reconfigure and test these games on the new display. I’ve already noticed a few games that now run fine at 1080p that I was running at tiny resolutions like 640x384.

Inverting the display for my poorly chosen monitor is a huge performance killer.

Actual Native Linux Games

• a7xpg – 640x480, perfect
• Bit.Trip Runner – 1080p, perfect
• Braid – 1080p, 60 FPS
• Cave Story Plus – 1080p
• Dustforce – 720p, FPS too low (need to investigate)
• Fotonica – 1080p, perfect
• Irukandji – 800x600 (native)
• Jamestown – 1080p, perfect
• noiz2sa – 640x480, perfect
• Parsec47 – 640x480, perfect
• Rico – A Tale of Two Brothers – 1080p, perfect
• rRootage – 1080p, perfect
• Super Hexagon 1080p, perfect
• Secret Maryo Chronicles – 1080p
• Syder Arcade – 1080p, perfect
• Swift*Stitch – 1080p, requires mouse
• Titanion – 640x480, perfect
• Torus Trooper – 640x480, perfect
• Thomas Was Alone – 1080p, perfect
• Tumiki Fighters – 1080p, perfect
• Val and Rick – 640x480, perfect
• Voxatron – 1080p, 35 FPS
• VVVVVV, 1024x768, perfect
• Wizorb – 1080p, perfect

Flash games running in a full screen Google Chrome browser

These are mostly playable but usually a little slow. Adobe’s Flash player for Linux isn’t nearly as well optimized as it is on Windows. Most of these run just fine on my laptop, so a CPU upgrade would probably straighten them right out.

• Canabalt – Same low frame rate at any resolution
• KRUNCH – 1024x768, low frame rate
• Offspring Fling – 640x480, 20-22 FPS
• Pakkuman’s Defense – 640x480, a bit sluggish

Windows games running under Wine

• Arcadia – 1024x768, perfect
• Knytt Underground – 1080p, perfect
• Mactabilis – 1080p, perfect
• Mutant Mudds – 1080p, perfect
• Omega Race 2009 – 1024x768, perfect
• Pid – 1080p, perfect
• Space Fury – 1024x768, perfect
• Spelunky – Plays fine. (Very slow in score room. Problematic when quitting.)
• Star Castle – 1024x768, perfect
• Tiny Plumbers – 1080p, Wine 1.5.17, very minor slowdowns, better at 1080p than 640x480!
• Super Mario Bros. X – “Full Screen”, very minor frame skipping. No noticeable frame skipping on my laptop, so it just needs more CPU
• SYNSO:CE – 1080p, Much smoother since at least Wine 1.5.29
• Vatn Squid – 800x600, smooth gameplay, slows down between rounds
• War Twat – 1080p
• Zektor – 1024x768, perfect

Windows games running poorly under Wine

• Viriax – 640x480, Seems to have some slowdowns during gameplay

Native Linux Games that require an analog gamepad

For my purposes, these don’t qualify as “arcade” games because they can’t be played with the digital controls that are installed on my arcade cabinet. Most of these are best played on a gamepad with a pair of dual analog sticks.

• Bastion 1080p, smooth. It doesn’t “see” enough buttons on my gamepad to be playable
• Bullet Candy Perfect – 1080p, perfect
• Psychonauts – 1080p, perfect
• Scoregasm – 1080p, perfect
• Shank – 1080p, perfect
• TORCS – 1080p, 30-60 FPS
• Speed Dreams – 1080p, 30-60 FPS

For a long time now, I’ve been thinking that the wall behind my arcade cabinet is rather bare. At first I thought I should find some sort of retro, video game-related painting or poster or something. More recently, though, I’ve been thinking that hanging a TV on that wall would be more functional.

Adding a second, upright screen to my cocktail cabinet will turn into a sort of combination upright/cocktail arcade machine. It will still be possible to play two-player games while sitting across from each other while also being able to play single-player games directly across from the larger, upright screen.

I’m stretching the definition of the word “upgrade” a little bit in this case. It might be more appropriate to refer to this as more of an “add-on.” I’m going to call it an upgrade anyway…

Choosing a TV… One that isn’t too big

I’ve been arguing with myself for weeks, possibly even months. I like to buy everything at the “sweet spot” of the price curve. That price point seems to be right around 47 inches for LCD TVs right now. Over the past few weeks I spotted two TVs around that size for well under $300, one was $260.

I did a little bit of testing using my old DLP projector. I was hoping to play some games at various sizes between 32” and 47”. The projector just didn’t want to cooperate with me, though. If I put the projector on the tabletop, I could only get about a 13” screen out of it. The required distance to reach even a 32” viewing area would have required a longer VGA cable than I have available. My rather large cranium would be sitting right in the middle of the projector beam, creating a shadow of my very ridiculously large cranium.

It did give me an idea of what various television sizes would look over there. and 47” was going to be way too large. I ended up going with a 32” TV.

What is left to do?

You can probably see from the pictures that I’m a little bit ahead of the planning stages already. There’s still quite a bit to left to do. There’s a couple of cables hanging down the wall. I’m going to have to find a way to hide those or pretty them up a bit.

The more difficult and possibly very tedious task will be to reconfigure most of the software… I have my MAME, NES, SNES, and pretty much every other console emulator set up so that each player sits on opposite sides of the arcade table. I’d like to be able to play single-player games up on the TV using the player-three controls.

MAME and MESS let you switch between the split-screen standard and cocktail mode on the fly. I’m a little more concerned about the controls. Swapping the buttons around with xmodmap is easy enough, but I use buttons on the system control functions (mostly exiting a game or bringing up the MAME/MESS control panel).

My arcade cabinet recently survived a 950-mile road trip, on a moving truck, from Georgia to Texas. I’m happy to say that it survived mostly intact, with only a few minor cosmetic issues.

Some design goals created some weaknesses

Structurally speaking, the interlocking design of the arcade cabinet makes it surprisingly sturdy. From a cosmetic standpoint, some of our design decisions made some parts of the cabinet quite fragile.

We were trying to avoid using fasteners (screws, bolts, etc) of any kind at all, and we were absolutely determined to have absolutely no visible fasteners what-so-ever…

We did end up having to use some screws, but none of them are visible. We used screws and metal brackets underneath to tie the four control panels together. We also used screws and metal l-brackets to attach the front control panel cover panels.

The glue works great, mostly…

We completely succeeded on the second goal. To avoid fasteners, we ended up gluing many of the blackened Plexiglas panels to the cabinet. The glue we used sticks very stubbornly to the cabinet body. It also sticks very well to the paint on the back of the Plexiglas panels…

However, the paint doesn’t stick quite so well to the Plexiglas. As you can see in the pictures, the paint has separated from the back of the clear plastic.

The problem with the painted glass top

There are also some small nicks in the paint on the tabletop surface. I expected this to be a problem. The paint just doesn’t stick all that well to glass. I had trouble with peeling paint around the four points where the glass rests on the cabinet from very early on. I ended up putting squares of tape over those sections to protect it a bit.

Fortunately, it is very easy to touch up these spots. I haven’t decided how I’m going to try to protect that paint in the long term. I thought about slathering on a coat of polyurethane to the blackened areas. That should help distribute the pressure a bit.

There’s plenty of new games on there now!

I’ve collected quite a few good arcade-style games since I last saw my arcade table back in November. I already wrote about Super Meat Boy, but there are a handful of other games.

I’ve also installed Jamestown and Bit.Trip Runner from the same Humble Bundle. Toki Tori, from the Humble Bundle for Android, looks quite good on there as well.

I also picked up a copy of Swift*Stitch. I’m a bit bummed out about this one. The game is a lot of fun, and the vector graphics would look right at home on an arcade cabinet. It also runs flawlessly under Wine. My cabinet doesn’t have a trackball or mouse, though, and all the menus seem to require a mouse. It looks like it’ll be too complicated to set up cheater mouse bindings like I did for Titan Attacks!

My arcade cabinet’s recent road trip only resulted in some very mild cosmetic damage. I have been separated from my arcade table for quite a few months, since a few weeks before the release of the fourth Humble Indie Bundle. There were quite a few games in that bundle that will be finding a home on my arcade cabinet, but I have been hoping for a native copy of Super Meat Boy ever since I started building the thing!

Playing Super Meat Boy on an arcade cabinet

Playing Super Meat Boy on an arcade cabinet is so much more fun than using the keyboard. The difference is probably a lot like reading Shakespeare in the original Klingon. Super Meat Boy feels like it was made to be played on an arcade cabinet.

When I bought the fourth Humble Indie Bundle back in December, I just had to try playing Super Meat Boy. I gave up on level 1-14… I’m not entirely sure whether I was just unhappy playing with a keyboard or if I just didn’t want to spoil the fun of playing on the arcade cabinet!

Things went a lot better when I loaded the game on the arcade cabinet yesterday. Before I knew it, I was completely through the first world and well on my way through the second! I won’t be surprised if I’m most of the way through the game in the next few days, assuming I can find some time to play!

Minor Problems

The controls for Super Meat Boy are simple enough and I had no problem mapping them to the joystick and buttons. However, I am having trouble with the video settings. It always wants to run in a window when it starts up. Super Meat Boy’s GUI on Linux lets you choose a resolution and set the game to full screen, but it doesn’t remember that setting after I quit.

I can live with this for now, but when I get some free time I might fire up strace and see if it is failing to open or write to any config files.

Update: Super Meat Boy on Linux has been correctly saving and restoring settings since the June, 2012 update.