For those of you who are a bit linux-shy but who want to use 3rd party apps such as this one (which rocks bigtime), I've created a script that will do some of the legwork for you - see "/programs and preinit - the easy way" in the programming forum.

Oh my dear god.

I'm lost for words. This is outstanding. Unbelievable. All this and more.

For a 'Version 0' release, this thing is so professional, so polished, as to be untrue. If there's anyone even slightly considering putting this on their empeg, DO IT. DO IT NOW!

Couple of minor points - the pause after munching an enemy seems a tad large (in the order of 0.5 secs) - this might feel smoother if it was more like 0.1 secs? Secondly, is there any way of saving a high-score table?!

I just cannot express how utterly cool this is!

A.

Also, as an addendum - don't listen to these old dodderers who can't press the buttons fast enough . This thing seems to run at a perfect speed on mine - not so slow as to be boring, and not so fast as to be uncontrollable. Also, I like the way you can 'queue' commands with the buttons - not sure if this was intentional, but it's pretty neat.

Oh, and we do need a map editor.

A.

Secondly, is there any way of saving a high-score table?!

I wouldn't count on that -- you'd have to have your drives mounted rw anytime you play...

I would love to be able to have empacman and emptriv on my empeg but know very little about doing this kind of stuff. I tried to get emptriv working a while ago but was unsuccessful doing so. I am just an average windows computer user with very little knowledge of programing and no knowledge of linix. Could someone please do step by step instructions of how to get these programs to work on my empeg. I would really appreciate it and I'm sure there are probably others in my position who would find this a great help. Thanks in advance!

Oh, and by the way, I have win98, 2.00-beta11 and the latest hijack installed

See the thread "/programs and preinit - the easy way", and follow the instructions there first. This will do a lot of preparation for you, and will help installing telnetd..

After you have done this, telnet in, and run the command rwp
Then ftp the empacman binary to /programs0/empacman.
Then on the telnet session, run the command chmod 755 /programs0/empacman
Finally, run the command rop and reboot. empacman should now be in the hijack menu.

One very minor problem I have noticed which may be out of your control. When the unit spins the drives up, the whole game seems to pause while it waits for the drive.

Can't say I have ever noticed the player software pause while the drive spins up though.

this is the perfect reason to build the 'joystick conversion' mod into your empeg (Neo-2-Rio's custom job)... for the ultimate PAC-control

Hi folks,

Thank you so much for the feedback so far. Here are some of my thoughts on the things that have been mentioned.

I'm getting a mixed response about the game speed - any more opinions out there about how fast the game should run? Yes, the button queuing was intentional.

Do others agree that the pause when eating a ghost is too long?

I see no mention about the control layout (on the remotes, the front panel doesn't leave many options), so should I take it that it is satisfactory, or is there a better layout someone can suggest?

As for the sound effects suggestion, I thought there was no need as it would be good enough just listening to your music collection. I'm not sure how to go about adding sound effects, but for someone whos keen enough I'm sure they can be implemented once I release the source.

The same goes for a few other suggestions like the high score table. As mentioned this would require mounting the drive as read/write, unless you don't mind the scores being wiped each time the machine reboots. I'd rather not tackle such technical issues but theres nothing stopping someone else from having a go.

The game doesn't have the same priority as the player software, so if the player is very busy, like spinning up the disk, then the game will freeze. I figured that this is an acceptable compromise, but others may disagree. I think this too will go in the same basket of leaving it to others who may have a bit more technical knowledge of such things than I do.

I don't want to cop out of making any changes myself, but I'd rather concentrate on less technical issues, on the game itself and ways the gameplay could be improved. Some things I thought of myself but didn't know if there would be a demand for would be some of the extra bonuses from the original that are absent, such as extra lives for reaching so many points, and the fruits.

It's encouraging to see that there aren't any reports of serious bugs. Would I be right in thinking that there is very little, if any, work that needs to be done? One thing I concentrated on was getting good behaviour for the ghosts, trying to mimic the different personalities of the original. I don't know how successful I've been. Do people find that the ghosts are challenging or too easy to beat?

As for the source code, I hope you guys can be patient with me as I don't have a lot of spare time to be spending on this project. I want to make the code much prettier before I release it, as parts got rather messy in my rush to finish the beta. A corresponding new version of vfdlib should also appear at the same time as I've found a few bugs in the bitmap handling in the course of writing empacman.

I'd like to think that once the source is out there it would give others the example they need to bring some more great apps to the empeg. At the very least it means that people will be able to customise empacman to their tastes - e.g. if you really want to change the game speed then changing a few constants and recompiling is all it would take.

About the installation process, I don't mind that this thread has raised the issue. I hope that there is now a higher incentive for a more user-friendly procedure to be devised. I applaud people for their attempts thus far. I believe the ultimate solution would be one where apps could be downloaded and configured from JEmplode, with no need for any other shell/ftp trickery.

Cheers guys,

Richard
--

empacman is pretty amazing stuff. I too took the time today to install preinit and telnetd onto my empeg. Simply amazing.

speed: I like the speed, but maybe it could start out a little slower and speed up as you pass levels.

the ghost pause is okay for me.

I'd like to see the score and bonus stuff added, but opening the source would easily take care of that. And from the few minutes that I played, I didn't notice any major bugs so there doesn't seem to be a lot of work left to do.

later,
ajay

any more opinions out there about how fast the game should run? [...] Do others agree that the pause when eating a ghost is too long?

I think overall game speed is fine, but the eating a ghost pause is just a smidge long. If it doesn't get changed, it won't bother me.

I see no mention about the control layout (on the remotes, the front panel doesn't leave many options), so should I take it that it is satisfactory, or is there a better layout someone can suggest?

I don't really see how it could change any. Maybe get the remote key definitions from config.ini? I might prefer to use 2, 4, 5 and 6, for instance. The only control that I think is missing is a pause button. Some traffic lights aren't long enough to get an entire game in, and I'd hate to have to try and drive while I finish my game... Maybe a knob press can pause, instead of taking you back to the hijack menu? A long knob press can quit, instead.

[...] the high score table. As mentioned this would require mounting the drive as read/write, unless you don't mind the scores being wiped each time the machine reboots.

This would be a good compromise. I wouldn't mind having a high score table for things like road-trips...

The game doesn't have the same priority as the player software, so if the player is very busy, like spinning up the disk, then the game will freeze.

It was a bit annoying the first time it happened, but I got used to it pretty quick. There's probably a way around it, but I'm in no rush to get the fix...

Some things I thought of myself but didn't know if there would be a demand for would be some of the extra bonuses from the original that are absent, such as extra lives for reaching so many points, and the fruits.

I wasn't good enough to notice if any of that stuff was missing, but now that you mention it, there's a demand for it.

Perhaps options like game speed, priority, ghost munching pause, etc, can go in config.ini (or its own rc file, and take a command line option for how to locate the rc file).

Other than that... Woohoo!

(Note to whoever maintains the car stereo mp3 player matrix -- you've got a new category to fill out: Plays video games. )

One small thing that might be nice on the control front, would be to have the knob also able to control the direction of the little dude, similar to the game 'Snake' on some Nokia mobile phones.

On that game, you can use keys in a very similar way as on the remote control, but (on supporting phones, i.e. 7110) you can also use the wheel or up/down buttons. On the empeg, this would translate to a turn to the left making the little dude turn left *from his point of perspective*, and the same for the right turn.

To make this a bit clearer, if you click the knob once left, you would get:

Dude travelling up: turns left
Dude travelling left: turns down
Dude travelling down: turns right
Dude travelling right: turns up

This would be a nice touch, especially as in some vehicle setups, using the four keys on the left could cause your hand to obscure much of the screen.

On a more technical note, and I have not much of a clue on this front, would it be possible to create a 50k partition that could be left mounted RW - something so small that it would take virtually no time to fsck (is that the right word?) on startup. empacman, or any other program, could mount this rw at the start of a game, and ro at the end, and this could be used to save high-score tables or similar. On the offchance of a power-down during play, the tiny partition size would mean a barely noticable delay to the next bootup. Could this work?

Cheers,

A.

On a more technical note, and I have not much of a clue on this front, would it be possible to create a 50k partition that could be left mounted RW - something so small that it would take virtually no time to fsck (is that the right word?) on startup. empacman, or any other program, could mount this rw at the start of a game, and ro at the end, and this could be used to save high-score tables or similar. On the offchance of a power-down during play, the tiny partition size would mean a barely noticable delay to the next bootup. Could this work?


Well, if you use /dev/hda2 then it's still only 32MB, and would fsck very fast compared to a 10/20/30 GB partition. It'd still be a very good idea to only make the drive rw for the time needed to write the table, and make it ro again immediately afterwards. But this should only happen on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdc2...We shouldn't touch any of the existing partitions from an app.


But as for the game itself - excellent stuff. I'd also like to see the ghost munch time shortened a tad. I (personally) think that the pacing and difficulty is excellent as it is. I'd like to see bonuses and extra lives. And maybe some different maps for different levels?

Speed: Fine for me. Seems very close to original Pac Man speed, at least while the player is running.

High score table: I have been begging Mark Lord to think about adding disk-writing capability to hijack. He has a scheme in mind where Hijack could take a few sectors of the disk and write to them, even though the disks aren't mounted r/w. I have a few uses in mind for my software, and the high score table is yet another good reason to have such a facility. However, Mark is enjoying his summer like the rest of us, so we might not get such a feature for a while. I would shy away from any high score feature which needs to mount the drives rw, I wouldn't want that at all.

Great job with this one, it's really a fun game and I look forward to a release with source code. As someone else who was slow in releasing the source to my software, I say take your time and clean it up... If I had released my first draft code, it would have been worthless. Great stuff.

Er, one thing I noticed is that when you hit the knob to quit out of empacman, it actually *quits* out of the process, rather than unbinding from Hijack and sleeping. At least that's what's happening on mine... This requires a reboot to get pacman back in the menu. It's a pretty quick fix to make it stay on Hijack (and thus in memory) so you can go back to it... If you were real tricky about it, you could probably even have it start where you left off once you go back to it...

Or if you release source, I'll probably just do it myself... I don't want to have to reboot to get pacman back each time. Am I the only one seeing this?

I've following the thread and didn't quite see the part where it explains how to make the menu item stay after reboot. How is that done?

[I've following the thread and didn't quite see the part where it explains how to make the menu item stay after reboot. How is that done?

There are many ways to accomplish this, but the easiest is to install wfaulk's preinit daemon (do a search for preinit and look at some of the more recent messages, I think pacman might even be mentioned in some of them.)

I am really stupid when it comes to programming! I have communication between the empeg with hyperterminal, but don't know what to do in it.. Also connected through ethernet.

My question is how to install empacman for the inexperienced! I have Hijack's latest version running too..

Thanks..

Look up.

Er, one thing I noticed is that when you hit the knob to quit out of empacman, it actually *quits* out of the process, rather than unbinding from Hijack and sleeping. At least that's what's happening on mine... This requires a reboot to get pacman back in the menu. It's a pretty quick fix to make it stay on Hijack (and thus in memory) so you can go back to it... If you were real tricky about it, you could probably even have it start where you left off once you go back to it...

Or if you release source, I'll probably just do it myself... I don't want to have to reboot to get pacman back each time. Am I the only one seeing this?


I've seen a few reports now about the way empacman unbinds from the menu. It's not supposed to be quitting but sleeping as you suggest. I didn't experience any of these problems myself, but I'm running a slightly old version of hijack. I suspect the problems have arisen since some recent work was done to the menu handling stuff in hijack.

I'll have to take another look at my code. As you say, these issues can easily be resolved, if not by myself, when the source is public.

I like some of the suggestions I'm seeing, like being able to pause the game instead of just quitting, and the knob turning idea.

Cheers guys,

Richard
--

Well, if you use /dev/hda2 then it's still only 32MB, and would fsck very fast compared to a 10/20/30 GB partition. It'd still be a very good idea to only make the drive rw for the time needed to write the table, and make it ro again immediately afterwards. But this should only happen on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdc2...We shouldn't touch any of the existing partitions from an app.

I don't think the issue is so much one of having partitions mounted ro vs. rw as it is that as soon as you start talking about doing this sort of thing, you're destroying all the hard work the empeg guys put into keeping the drives spun down as much as possible.

Not really, we're talking about a quick spin up every few minutes to write the table during the occasions that the game is being played - which is somewhat comparable to the spin up frequency for reading the mp3s in normal use anyway, and is still far less frequent than the spin-ups needed for disk *reads* for emptriv.

Not really, we're talking about a quick spin up every few minutes to write the table during the occasions that the game is being played - which is somewhat comparable to the spin up frequency for reading the mp3s in normal use anyway, and is still far less frequent than the spin-ups needed for disk *reads* for emptriv.

Remember that the reason that the disks are kept spun down as much as possible is 2-fold. Firstly to reduce power consumption (and heat dissipation), and secondly to reduce the chance of a head crash in a moving vehicle. And this is great - but is not an absolute necessity. The occasional additional spin up is not something that would really greatly concern me.

Hmm... I suppose. What if the high score table was kept in memory until the user explicitly saved it? That way after my passenger completely obliterates my high score, I can "conveniently" forget to save the scores before pulling the empeg out of the dash. "Oops. Terribly sorry 'bout that. Guess I still have the high score..."

wow im impressed, any plans for more games? I would love to see more ports of some classics, im taking a arm programing class in about a month so im going to have projects and stuff and hope to make one for the empeg. This game kicks the llama ass. Thanks!

Yes, Mark did change the way things bind/unbind from menus... I think.

The only bug I think I have found is that the Kenwood remote can't be used to go up. Left, right, down are all ok, but the ghosts get me every time at the bottom of the screen when I use the Kenwood. The Rio remote works fine.

This is on my Mk1, I haven't tried the Kenwood remote with the Mk2.

The only other problem that springs to mind (not an empacman bug though) is an error when synchronising. Dropping to the shell and killing the empacman process allows the sync to go ahead. I saw this issue mentioned with regard to emptriv or some of the other third-party apps, so I know that it isn't an empacman issue.

Apart from that empacman absolutely rocks! I even noticed that the ghosts seemed to have similar 'personalities' to the arcade original. The only thing I seem to remember is that the arcade Pacman had a 'blind' spot somewhere in the maze. Popping into a particular corner when the ghosts weren't already chasing you would result in the spooks running round for hours and you would not be caught. I am sure I have a 'How to win at Pacman' book somewhere that described it. I'll try to dig it out from its hiding place and check

Tony,
You make this sound sooooooo easy. I have never done this before and after reading the FAQ and trying to atempt this install several times including having to repair the e2fsck error I created, I still can't grasp what you mean by "Gotta tag it as executable" and "Execute it (./empacman) then type "exit" to get back into the player". Someone who has done this before please give us dummies a heads up, Please.

Perhaps this will help?

In the "r-w-x" thing, the X is executable.

Tony,

What do I do from here is the question?

q
Restored terminal settings
Remounting first music partition read-only
Remounting second music partition read-only
Player exited normally: 0
Switching to shell-player loop
Starting bash.
empeg:/empeg/bin# rw
empeg:/empeg/bin# rwm
empeg:/empeg/bin# rz
Šempeg:/empeg/bin# e.**B000000023be50

At this point I've already transfered the file, I get to here and I'm stuck, what do I enter next?