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.

I recently read about this nifty new real-time syntax highlighter: zsh-syntax-highlighting. It looked like it would be pretty handy, so I decided to try it out for a couple of weeks.

It is a bit too colorful out of the box

Too many things are highlighted by default for my tastes. Every correctly typed command, every file name, and every globbing character is highlighted in one way or another. I was especially unhappy with the underlined path names.

Some highlighting is really awesome

I may not like all the extra noise, but there are a few things that I’m finding to be very useful. Highlighting a misspelled command in red is very nice. It is nice to catch typos before trying to execute a command.

Highlighting reserved words should be pretty helpful. I use one-liner for loops all the time, but I’m very good at leaving out the do. Highlighting makes that slightly more, obvious but I sure wish the done would highlight red if it didn’t match a do. It does match pairs of brackets, though, so maybe I can get in the habit of using those instead of old bash-isms…

It also does a good job of quote highlighting. That will probably help me catch mismatched and unescaped quotes pretty easy.

Customizing colors when using oh-my-zsh

I had a bit of trouble here. I tried setting the color variables in a file in my ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom directory while loading zsh-syntax-highlighting as a plugin from my ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins directory. When I did, this it was acting like the colors were not already defined. I thought this was a bit strange because oh-my-zsh loads plugins before it runs anything in ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom.

I didn’t investigate this very heavily. I just moved zsh-syntax-highlighting into my custom directory and loaded it manually.

Here’s what my zsh-syntax-highlighting configuration looks like:

ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_HIGHLIGHTERS=(main brackets)

source $ZSH/custom/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[default]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[unknown-token]=fg=red,bold
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[reserved-word]=fg=green
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[alias]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[builtin]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[function]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[command]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[precommand]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[commandseparator]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[hashed-command]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[path]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[globbing]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[history-expansion]=fg=blue
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[single-hyphen-option]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[double-hyphen-option]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[back-quoted-argument]=none
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[single-quoted-argument]=fg=yellow
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[double-quoted-argument]=fg=yellow
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[dollar-double-quoted-argument]=fg=cyan
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[back-double-quoted-argument]=fg=cyan
ZSH_HIGHLIGHT_STYLES[assign]=none

Most of what I did was remove colors.

Last January, or maybe a little while before then, I decided to set a small goal for myself and my arcade cabinet. I wanted to buy at least one native game for the arcade table each month.

I’ve written about some of these games already, but I haven’t managed to get to all of them yet. I figured that since it has been about a year since I set my goal, that it might be a good time to look back over the last twelve months or so and see how I made out.

The list of games, nearly in order of purchase

• Irukandji (blog, home)
• Titan Attacks (blog, home)
• Braid (blog, home)
• Cortex Command (blog, home)
• Gish (blog, home)
• The Bundle of Wrong (SYNSO, War Twat, and friends) (blog, home)
• Mactabilis (blog, home)
• VVVVVV (blog, home)
• And Yet It Moves (blog, home)
• Voxatron (blog, home)
• Blocks That Matter (blog, home)

There’s also a few games that I’m pretty excited about, but I’m traveling right now and it will be a while before I can install them on the arcade cabinet. I’m hopeful that they’ll all fit in very nicely there:

• Super Meat Boy (blog, home)
• Jamestown (blog, home)
• Bit.Trip Runner (blog, home)
• Shank (blog, home)
• Cave Story+ (blog, home)

If my arcade table happened to have a different controller layout, then I’d be able to add a few more games to the list:

• Droid Assault (blog, home)
• Ultratron (blog, home)
• Scoregasm (blog, home)
• The Binding of Isaac (blog, home)

Those are just the handful of twin-stick shooters that I already own, and they would all be playable if I had built an upright arcade cabinet.

Are bundles considered cheating?

I’ve listed over 16 indie games I purchased for the arcade table during 2011. The majority of them were part of various Humble Bundles. If I’m counting actual individual transactions, then the count is closer to eight.

At least two of the Humble Bundles that I bought didn’t include any games that I could use on the arcade cabinet, and most of them came with duplicates… So I’m just going to split the difference and say that I did reasonably well last year.

Plans and hopes for 2012

The last couple of games I was waiting patiently for were Super Meat Boy and Voxatron. I don’t really have any specific games in mind that I’m waiting for next year.

I’d really like to get caught up with writing about the rest of last year’s games. I’m already at least a half dozen games behind. I’ll end up a full year behind by 2013 if I don’t work harder!

Another game from the Humble Voxatron Debut. This is an exciting bundle for my arcade cabinet! There are so many great games that fit quite well on an arcade cabinet: Voxatron, Gish, Blocks that Matter, and Jasper’s Journey.

Blocks That Matter

Blocks That Matter is a fun little puzzle platformer from Swing Swing Submarine. I haven’t had a chance to get too deep into the game yet. I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but I’m up to the level where I have to out-run the giant blob guy that is chasing me.

The puzzling aspect seemed pretty simple, but I have a feeling that I’m being deceived… I think there’s already been two little secret boxes that I haven’t figured out how to get to already. In the game, you control a little robot, the Tetrobot. He is able to collect blocks of various materials (wood, sand, rock, etc.) by drilling through them or bashing them a few times with his head. He is able to place down groups of four blocks, in patterns shaped like Tetris pieces.

Some of the blocks, such as rocks, can support their own weight. Other blocks, like sand, will fall if they are not supported by another block or wall.

The controls

Blocks That Matter has my favorite kind of controls: every single thing in the game can be done with the keyboard. No mouse required for anything at all. That makes it so easy to drop it onto an arcade cabinet. All that was required was mapping my controller buttons to the correct keys.

I forgot to record a video…

… So all I have is this lousy picture:

I am cheating a bit this time. I haven’t even played Voxatron on my arcade cabinet yet because the replacement power supply hasn’t arrived yet. The Humble Voxatron Debut will only be running for about two weeks, so I figured I should write about it sooner rather than later!

The controls

Voxatron maps very easily to the arcade controls. It uses the arrow keys for movement, z to jump, and x to shoot. The only other keys that need to be mapped will be enter and escape, for moving around the menus.

The game

Voxatron is a neat little 3D platform shooter. It feels a bit like Robotron with the addition of jumping. I’ve only played through a few levels, so I haven’t seen much of the game yet. I’m (impatiently) waiting to play it with the arcade controls!

The blocky retro-style graphics look awesome. I especially like that the little light guy’s head lights up when he is shooting. Voxatron will definitely be a welcomed addition to the growing collection of modern games on my arcade cabinet.

Update 2011-11-11: It is actually on the cabinet now!

The cabinet is back up and running and Voxatron looks amazing on there! I was very impatient and ended up playing through the whole “adventure” mode on my laptop long before the replacement parts for the arcade cabinet arrived. I know now that it is much easier to handle the hold-button-to-lock-shooting-direction control setup with the arcade controls than it is with the keyboard!