LinLog

Gamercise-induced writer's block

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I have gamercise-induced writer's block. That's my term for being unable to think of anything good to blog about because I'm tired from playing high-impact video games.

Aside: Boy, "high-impact video game" is kind of a tortured phrase, isn't it? It sounds like the force-feedback controller is going to leave bruises and knock things off your shelves. Actually, it remindes me of one gamer I heard refer to "high-stakes games." Doesn't that give you images of the computer electrocuting you if you lose?

The reason I'm tired is because Sarah ordered herself a copy of Dance Dance Revolution for the PlayStation 2 the other week. I didn't have any interest in it, but she wanted something fun to do for exercise. It also had the side benefits of being relatively cheap and actually putting my PS2 to use.

However, when I watched Sarah actually playing, it looked like a lot of fun. I always thought it looked kind of silly, but when I tried it, it really was a lot of fun. And I can't even dance! In fact, not only am I not very good, Sarah tells me I look like a spastic chimpanzee while I'm playing. But I don't case, because it's still a lot of fun.

I'm kind of enjoying this whole physical video game thing. It's a lot of fun and it actually does get your pulse up. In fact, it would be nice to get the PS2 in a room other than our bedroom. That way, I could play Dance Dance Revolution for my morning exercise rather than just doing half an hour on the eliptical machine. I wouldn't be able to read at the same time, but it sure would be more exciting.

And while I'm at it, maybe I should get a Wii. Those look like they'd be great fun too....

Wesnoth improvements

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

After upgrading to Kubuntu Edgy, I see that I've got a new version of Battle for Wesnoth. The upgrade installed version 1.1.8, which is a significant improvement over the 1.0.x version I was running before. I have to say, Wesnoth has really gotten good since i got hooked on it three years ago.

The graphic improvements are nice, but those aren't really the best changes. What really helps it is the improved music, sound, and dialog. I'm in the middle of the Heir to the Throne campaign right now, and it feels a lot more polished than the last time I played it. In fact, the sound and music are now good enough that it feels like you're actually losing something when you turn them off!

I was particularly pleased the dialog is getting better. Portions of it were really kind of corny and stilted. They've also fleshed out the characters a bit, giving them more than one dimension. For example, Li'sar now actually has some motivation for betraying her mother, rather than just turning on a dime when the good-guys fill her in. They've also started giving Konrad a little sense of reality, as opposed to just making him a caricature of the innocent young hero. It's really quite refreshing.

People may complain about the open-source community being unable to produce decent games, but you konw what? I'll take Battle for Wesnoth over some crappy 3-D "kill everything in site" game any day. Snazzy visuals is not synonymous with quality, regardless of what the people at nVidia and ATI might like you to think.

Breaking out DOSbox

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I've been indulging my fetish for "vintage" (i.e. really old) games again. This time it's with my 10 year old copy of Wing Commander: Privateer.

I really loved the Wing Commander series, and Privateer was always one of my favorites. It's a very free-form game, but it still has a story line. The flexibility it affords you is really enjoyable. You can be an honest trader, a mercenary, or even a pirate if you want to! Plus you get to customize your ship, which is always fun.

After digging out my Privateer CD, which also includes the Righteous Fire mission set and a copy of Strike Commander (another Origin title in the same vein as Wing Commander but set much closer to the current day), getting it installed and working was a pretty easy matter. The only special thing I had to do was turn off EMS support in my dosbox.conf file and bump up the CPU cycle and frameskip settings. The emultation is bsaically perfect!

Of course, I've long since thrown out the Privateer documentation, so my first problem was remembering how to play the game. Forunately, I found a handy page that included a PDF version of the manual along with various other helpful information.

The only thing I really dislike is the controls. See, I don't own a joystick anymore, and apparently DOSbox doesn't really support them that well anyway. If you've ever tried to play a Wing Commander game without a joystick, you will recognize this as a problem. Oh, sure, I can use my gamepad or the keyboard. Without a joystick, your movements are jerky and it's hard to keep an enemy ship in your sites. Maybe I'll have to see if I can get a cheap joystick in the local EB Games. Come to think of it, do they even have cheap joysticks anymore? I can't remember the last time I saw one.

Playing Wesnoth

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

I've been playing some Battle for Wesnoth the past couple of weeks. Today, I finally finished the "Heir to the Throne" campaign. It was on easy, but I finished it. This isn't the first time I've gotten to the end of Wesnoth, but it is the first time I've seen the ending. I first picked up on Battle for Wesnoth a couple of years ago, when version 0.4.0 was out. I played it on and off for a while and got to the end of the playable levels on several version. However, by the time I lost interest, they still hadn't written all the levels for the standard campaign.

I must say that Wesnoth has come a long way since I started playing it. The graphics are better and the game play has evened out, but it still retains that wonderful simplicity of game play that I so love in strategy games. It's the same reason I still enjoy playing my old copy of Bandit Kings of Ancient China under Dosbox. They both allow for a rich, enjoyable game without making you think too much about the minutia of running an army. I guess it's just a matter of finding the right level of abstraction for the game.

I did have one small problem with Wesnoth today. Apparently a key got stuck on my keyboard, or something, because I ran out of disk space while I was playing. What does that have to do with the keyboard, you ask? Well, after deleting some unused files so I had some space to work with, I started looking for the source of the problem. I thought I had several gigabytes left and I hadn't done anything big recently, so I was a bit confused. It turned out that my home directory, which normally runs a couple of gigs (what can I say - I'm a pack rat), had swollen to 9GB! A closer examination revealed that my ~/.wesnoth directory was up to 6GB. This is where the stuck key comes in, because that's the only explanation I could think of for why there would be 3800 images, at about 1.7MB a piece and all created today, in the Wesnoth screenshots directory. Weird....

At least SimCity 3000 still works

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

In a fit of optimism, I did a little more playing with Tuxracer tonight. It still doesn't work. On the up side, I was at least able to get all three of my Loki games to work.

I have copies of Loki's ports of Quake III Arena, Railroad Tycoon II, and SimCity 3000 Unlimited. Both Railroad Tycoon and Quake 3 still work perfectly on Kubuntu Breezy. However, SimCity needed a little research.

The straight-off-the-CD installation of SimCity didn't work at all. It bombed out every time with a message about an invalid glibc version. Fortunately, there is a version 2.0a patch for SimCity, which I still have a copy of. Applying the patch didn't work right away either - I got a message about invalid usage of trap. However, when I ran the patch with bash filename instead of sh filename, it worked. Probably a bug caused by bash using sh compatibility when invoked with the sh symlink.

Anyway, after installing the patch, it still didn't work - I just got a segfault. However, I found the answer in this post on Ubuntuforums.org. It turned out to be as simple as telling SimCity to assume a different version of the kernel. I just started it with the command following command, and it worked perfectly:
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.2 /usr/local/games/SC3U/sc3u

So that's three out of four proprietary games still working. If I ever get a better video card, maybe I can make it four out of four. Of course, if the games were open-source, I could try to fix them myself, but I guess you can't have everything.

I love emulation

pageer@skepticats.com (Peter Geer)

Emulation is great. No need to dual-boot or go out and find a replacement for hardware that broke down years ago. Just fire up an emulator and you've got a whole different platform running in a convenient little window on your desktop.

Although video game emulators like ZSNES and MAME are nice, my current favorites are DOSBox and QEMU. DOSBox is a DOS emulator, kind of like DOSEMU, but more focused on games. I currently use it for exactly one thing - playing Bandit Kings of Ancient China, one of Koei's classic strategy games. This was literally the first PC game I ever bought. I got it and a copy of Tetris from a game store back around 1991 or 1992. I've since lost the copy of Tetris (which was the only program I ever bought that came with a 5.25" floppy disk), but I jealously guarded the Bandit Kings disks for years. They finally went bad a few years ago, but fortunately I had a backup of the game files, so I can still play my original copy. In fact, I even still have the instruction manual and poster that came with it. For some reason, I just never get tired of that game.

QEMU is cool for an entirely different reason. It's an open-source "process emulator" that supports full system emulation. In other words, you can use it kind of like VMWare, meaning you can install an old copy of Windows onto a file on your hard drive. This is a very handy thing to be able to do. For one thing, it allows you to use all that old Windows-only software you probably have lying around. It's also very nice for testing purposes if you're a web developer, since you will almost definitely want to test your pages in Internet Explorer. And after all, Wine is a big pain in the neck to install and configure, while installing a virtual copy of Windows is pretty simple. Also, you can have multiple QEMU disk images with different versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. I don't think you can do that with Wine.

The only problem with these programs is that they require more CPU power than I really have. My trusty 500MHz AMD K6 has served me well, but it can't really handle heavy emulation. However, QEMU does have an "accelerator" kernel module which is supposed to speed things up considerably. Unfortunately, the accelerator module is not free software and is only available in binary form. Plus it only works with the current CVS, not the any of the stable releases. Oh well. I'm compiling the CVS source now, so we'll see how it works. Hopefully I won't need it once I finally get around to upgrading my system.