Gamez

If you don't keep up with the blog, I've been re-living the Final Fantasy saga again. I've been playing them in order, and depending on how I feel after Final Fantasy VIII, I may stop or go on to Final Fantasy IX.

In any event, it took me nearly a year of on-again-off-again playing (totaling just under 43 hours of game time):



This story was one of my favorites too. Final Fantasy IV (orginally released as Final Fantasy II on SNES in America) was the first to have all of the original elements of the Final Fantasy we know and love. It's the five-member party, the near-active battle system, classic music, summons, fat chocobo, etc. Yes, and this is the one where you go to the moon. Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to have a level 70 party to complete it. I was fine with my mid-60 level party. Of course, higher would have helped more, but you can defeat Zeromus just fine. As you can see, in addition to Cecil, I brought along Palom, Porom, Cid, and Yang. Yang just uses his "power" for double attacks. Cecil just attacks since his white mage curaga is useless for healing even one person on a turn. Which means, you'll rely on Porom's more powerful curaja or full-life (instead of wasting a turn on a phoenix down, then curing). Next to Yang's attack, Cid's standard attack was important. Cecil is still fairly weak comparatively in the attack department. He's your standard RPG main character (who's always a knight or a fighter) so you have no choice but to bring him along in this case. The majority of your attack will be dealt by Palom. You could have brough Rydia and her summonses, but whatever. Palom has meteor which is probably just as powerful, although not as pretty to watch. Palom will hit for 9999 hit points, but your party will be countered with similar magic from Zeromus. Watch out for that Big Bang attack of his!

Now on to Final Fantasy V!

I remember lots of hours spent in front of the NES playing the so-so remake of Operation Wolf. It was a popular arcade game for its time, due to the heavy-duty light gun. The NES version had watered down graphics, but because it was a Zapper game, it was a must buy. Remember how you had to hit the "B" button on the NES controller to throw a grenade? Remember how you used to tie it to the Zapper with a rubber band? Well, I did. Sadly, the Virtual Console revived this game without support for the Wii remote as a psudo-light gun. It was almost an assumed give that it should be this way, but alas it is not. The NES version also supported NES controller-only, via the D-pad and the "A" button and this is the version you'll get if you shell out 500 Wii points in the Shop Channel. Lame.

After several hours of beating my head against the wall with pcsx, I finally switched over to pSX and got PSX emulation working under Xandros on the Eee PC. I was trying to get pcsx to work because it's in the community repositories, but alas, it has memory card file issues with anyhing BUT the included HLE BIOS, which of course, prevents you from playing anything really good like FF VII :). No overclocking or upgrades were made to the basic 701 model.

1. In order to get pSX to work, you need to have the additional repositories configured. Follow the Eee PC User Wiki article on Adding Additional Repositories. PLEASE don't forget to do the part about PINNING YOUR SYSTEM. This will prioritize the Asus "official" versions of the packages over the user contributions. If you don't you may make your system very unstable.

2. Next, download the Linux package from the official pSX website and then do "sudo apt-get install libgtkglext1" from the command line. That was the only dependency you should be missing from the base install of Xandros on the Eee PC.

3. Once that's done, follow the prompts to point to the BIOS (sorry, no help from me here) and a memory card file for at least slot 1. There's one requirement for the Sound options to prevent that stuttering. Set the latency to 64.1 ms and the XA latency to 40.1 ms (double the defaults). Any other stuttering should be due to a slow SD card, but even my cheap 1GB card (Transcend) managed to make it through the opening FMV and first fight scene at acceptable frame rates. Also under Sound, I have Reverb, Sync sound, and Interpolate on.

4. Under Graphics, you can have Bilinear interpolation on (for smoothing out those pixels, although at the expense of some blurriness and speed). I also turned on the Status icons and set the Full screen mode to 16:10. Nice. Pcsx couldn't even do full screen for me, although it did have lots of scaling options.



For those interested in ripping their PSX CDs to bin/cue format, you can use the following command line example in your terminal:

cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile my_game_rip.bin --device ATAPI:0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw my_game_rip.toc

I never was too impressed with dgen on Linux (for emulating a Sega Genesis, 32X, SegaCD). It was simple to setup and worked with a lot of roms, but not enough of them. I never could get Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to work, nor ANY of the 32X games, even with the appropriate BIOS files. However, because of the simple setup and flexible command line, integration with MythTV's mythgame almost required it.

I wanted to move because I wanted 32X support (and I had the BIOS files), plus better compatibility for games like Sonic 2. I started to research gens, which was supposed to work better, but the more common sources and rpms were older, without the necessary patches to make a command line setup work. For example, the escape key was linked to pause the emulator, not exit it. Boo. Everything on the web points to "gens for linux - mythgame edition" (found at http://mythtv.wbond.net/gens_for_linux_mythgame_edition/). This release also includes patches for GCC4. It compiled fine, but had a weird quirk with gens' double winows and fullscreen mode. Gens runs one window for the emulation and another for the menu. When applying --fs from the command line, it enters fullscreen, but the menu window cancels that until you click or ALT-TAB to focus the emulation window. Again, boo.

I stumbled upon this Ubuntu forum thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=290008. This is gens 2.13 alpha aka gens CVS 20070625. You can browse it on SourceForge here: http://gens.cvs.sourceforge.net/gens/Gens-MultiPlatform/

Follow the links for the RPM, or compile from source if you insist. Beware of the ads and the popups, but don't worry, the download is there. Make sure you delete your old configs in ~/.gens because this version uses a slightly different format. Also, running gens on the command line without a config in ~/.gens will result in a segfault. How do you get the gui to do the basic config? Feed gens a rom file on the command line like: gens /path/to/rom/game.bin so that it'll start a rom and bring up the gui. Best part about this release is that it's a single window now and fullscreen works. I'm using the following as my command line for MythTV:

gens --rompath / --quickexit --fs "$1"

I've got that in a shell script wrapper, because I also call qjoypad to integrate the escape key to exit the emulator.

enjoy.

I actually finished it on December 22, the same night as my last post, but never got around to posting the screenshots. I don't feel like battling through the ghost ship boss again, so here's a shot of the ghost ship on the map and my mighty-fine looking boat! I guess they don't have completed game save screens like in FF...

I've been busy with work and life, so the Final Fantasy saga was sidetracked. Woops. I've been playing through Phantom Hourglass, as well as some other random DS games like Contra 4. I'm just about done with Phantom Hourglass, so I guess I'll post a completed screenshot of that when it happens.

I've finally found the need to do flash video, elsewhere on the site. I've always known FFMPEG was able to do it, but I can't figure out how to make it index (for seeking in a Flash Video player) on the command line. Just to get the immediate project done, I've found flvtool2 is able to do it. It's open source and came out of the Riva VX project. I've never used the Riva encoder, but flvtool2 indexed and inserted proper metadata to enable sync, even after the FLV was already encoded:

flvtool2.exe -U video.flv

It'll work on the Linux command line with wine as well. Just append it to the beginning of the line.

After a short break from Final Fantasy (I was working through getting "expert" on all levels of Diner Dash), I'm starting up again with Final Fantasy IV. I know, lame update, but I'm writing anyway.