PS3 Bodega

Yes, really!  I was having a look around over on the Power Developer Forums and saw this topic:

New PPC Linux Game - Please Test!
(link corrected)

OK, so I’m a bit late — the original post is dated Jul 29, 2006.  Better late than never, though.

The game is “Robin Hood : The Legend of Sherwood,” a strategy game based on the popular legend. What surprises me is that not only do they have a Linux version — it’s also available for PowerPC Linux. And even better — it is easily installed and seems to run perfectly on Yellowdog Linux 6.1 for the Playstation 3.

Demo version download and installation info is here:

http://www.greyhound-data.com/gunnar/robinhood/index.htm?page=downloads

I simply followed the directions there and the demo version started with no problems on my PS3 with YDL 6.1. It loaded at 800×600 in full screen mode on my 720p (1280×720) display, complete with sound and music. The highest resolution available on the options screen was 1024×768 — a little too much for my screen — but 800×600 looked great anyway.

Here’s a screen shot:

Quoting Gunnar von Boehn (gunnar) from the Power Developer forum:

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3949#3949
If you like this game (or if you like to have games for PowerPC linux at all)
then please express this loudly!

The reality is that Linux games are no big cash cows.
The Linux game market is small. Few companies regard PPC Linux a worthwile market.
Genesi is helping here and works on getting more games ported to the PPC platform.

But at the end of the day, companies need to see that customers want PPC titles. If you like this game or any game on PPC then express this and contact the companies. 

Not long after that post, Sony released the Playstation 3 with the ability to install PPC Linux.  As most know, there are some limitations — we don’t have direct access to the RSX for accelerated 2D/3D video, and we don’t have 2 GB of RAM to play with — just around 256 MB, a portion of which is used by the frame buffer.  We also have to deal with a limited hard drive partitioning scheme — 10 GB to the Game OS and the rest to the Other OS (Linux), or vice versa.

Fortunately, even using only 10 GB of your hard drive space for Linux, this doesn’t prevent you from using your PS3 for general computing purposes or playing many of the great Linux games and emulators available.  And thanks to the latest release of YDL 6.1 (and other distros such as OpenSUSE) it’s now easy to use the video RAM for additional swap space — greatly improving performance under heavy loads.

I can see where Sony would be concerned that gamers might purchase the PS3 and use only Linux, not buying any PS3 games (where I presume the “real money” is), but I don’t think this is usually the case.  Anyone reading my blog or forum posts can see I have an interest in running Linux games and emulators on my PS3, but this hasn’t stopped me from buying all the latest releases of PS3 games when I can afford it.

As I see it, the ability to use Linux on the PS3 with no “hacking” required is a great addition to the console.  I still play Warhawk, Little Big Planet, Saint’s Row 2, Grand Theft Auto, jump on Home occasionally for a chat, but also enjoy switching over to Linux for a change.  I regularly use my PS3 with YDL 6.1 installed to browse the web with Firefox, check emails, use the instant messenger, play Linux games and emulators, watch movies and listen to music, and enjoy “hobbyist” programming with Python + Pygame.

So I’d love to see more games for PowerPC Linux that run well on the PS3, and I don’t believe Sony or game developers stand to lose.  Robin Hood : The Legend of Sherwood is a prime example of what can be done even on the limited resources of PS3 Linux.  And it wasn’t even tailored to run specifically on the PS3 — it makes no use of the Cell Broadband Engine’s SPEs and doesn’t make use of wide-screen resolutions like 720p.

I haven’t spent much time with the demo version of Robin Hood yet, but from what I’ve seen so far it’s something I’d consider buying.  The full version of the game is available for purchase at www.rune-soft.com.

EDIT:  After playing with the demo a bit more, I decided to try running at 640×480 instead of 800×600.  It will run fine at 800×600 or 1024×768 but seems a bit sluggish.  I also increased my screen resolution for YDL to 1280×1024 (I’m using a projector) and ran the game scaled 2x using the SPE scaler tool.  The result — great speed and an almost full screen mode at 1280×960 on a 1280×1024 display.

I modified the startup script for the game to automatically start/kill the scaler so it’s all automated like this:

#!/bin/sh

cd "/home/bill/robinhood_demo"
scaler -s 2 -t 10000 & ./robin_demo
killall scaler

UPDATED 4/12/09  –/etc/sudoers is normally read-only; added steps to change permissions as necessary

I had posted a method for setting up sudo (used for executing commands as “root” user) here:
http://blogs.ydl.net/billb/2008/03/05/su-sudo-no-jacket-required/

But, someone pointed out a different and probably better method on my forum here:
http://pleasantfiction.ipower.com/bodega/viewtopic.php?p=649#p649

1. Go to Applications->System Tools->Users & Groups in the menu (it will as for your root password at this point).

2. Select your username, click on the Properties icon, select the Groups tab.

3. Check the box next to the group called “Wheel”, click OK, and close the User Manager window.

4. Open a terminal window, make /etc/sudoers writable, and, as root, edit your /etc/sudoers file:

su -l
<root password>

chmod +w /etc/sudoers

gedit /etc/sudoers

Hit Ctrl-F to open the Find window and search for %wheel

## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel    ALL=(ALL)    ALL

Remove the # in front of %wheel so it looks like this:

## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
%wheel    ALL=(ALL)    ALL

Save the file and close gedit.  Back on the terminal window, change the permission back to normal on the sudoers file, then type exit to go back to your regular user name.

chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers

exit

Note that you could remove the comment in front of %wheel in the section just below where it says, “## Same thing without a password,” but I prefer to have it ask for my password when running a potentially dangerous command.

That’s it … now you can use sudo intead of su, and if you have any other users that you want to set up sudo for just add them to the wheel group in the Users & Groups window.

Happy Halloween!

 

 

No, I don’t normally go “Martha Stewart” and get all crafty on Halloween, but with a 7-yr old daughter I have a good excuse to relive my childhood.  :)  For me, that means taking her on haunted hayrides, going to local Halloween / Fall festivals, and of course getting her dressed up and going trick-or-treating.  I don’t think I’ll mention the bits about toilet-papering yards and going “egging” until she’s MUCH older. 

 I wouldn’t drop her off to knock on doors of random houses like my parents did with my brothers and I — instead we go to a “Trunk-or-Treat” where local families and businesses park their cars and trucks in a field or large parking lot and hand-out candy from there.  It’s safe, fairly organized, and you don’t have to drive all over town to come home with enough candy to kill a small horse.

When it comes to the pumpkin carving, I  always get stuck with the gory part of removing the “pumpkin guts” …

 

And while she draws the design on her pumpkin, I also have to do the carving (also gory, if I’m not careful).  Last year I bought a pumpkin carving kit on sale after Halloween and somehow we were still able to find it for this year.  She’s all into the “Warrior Cats” books now, so I did one of a cat using a template found on the FamilyFun.com site.  Another was a wolf howling in front of a mountain that she drew on the pumpkin herself.  And of course I just had to do a Yellow Dog pumpkin … 

The tools:

And it turned out pretty good!

 

Wishing everyone a safe, fun, and happy Halloween!

 

I found a great tool for PS3 Linux that uses a single SPE to zoom in on the center of the screen by a factor of 2X, 3X, or 4X. This helps when running many different games or emulators since you can run at the original resolution (much faster than scaling done by the application) and the scaler tool, using one of the SPEs, takes care of enlarging it.

Here’s where you can get the source (translated page): link to “miya’s Diary” post

direct link to scaler.tar.gz

Applications I have used it with so far are Quake 2, QEMU running Windows 95 / Diablo-Hellfire, VICE (C64), snes9x-gtk, and sdlmame.  Screenshots can probably explain this better than I can, so …

snes9x-gtk running a game at the original resolution:

about to start scaler:

photo of scaler running — snes9x-gtk is still running the game at the original resolution, but scaler has zoomed in on the center of the screen (3X):

Here’s one way to set it up … download the scaler.tar.gz file (which includes source & a binary), save to your desktop and extract it, then copy the included scaler binary to your /usr/local/bin folder:

cd ~/Desktop
tar -xvf scaler.tar.gz
cd scaler
sudo cp scaler /usr/local/bin

Or to compile it on YDL 6, just enter make from the scaler folder.  I had to install some additional development libraries on my system  — this might take care of getting them all:  yum install *spu* *ppu*

There are many different ways this tool can be used … for example, you can include it in a script to start Quake 2 like this:

#!/bin/sh
scaler -s 3 -t 3000 & quake2.sh
killall scaler

The -s switch tells it how much to scale, and the -t switch tells it how long to run.  Running Quake 2 at 320×240 on a 1280×720 screen would normally result in the game screen being very small, but fast (about 150 FPS 94 FPS timedemo) on the PS3.  Using scaler you can run it at 320×240 with 3X scaling so it displays at 960×720 and still runs at 150 FPS around 90 FPS (timedemo test), whereas if you run Quake 2 normally at 960×720 you get around 25-30 FPS.  Or course it looks better when Quake is actually running at 960×720, but the additional speed you get from running it at 320×240 and using scaler is great!

Or you can set it up so you can zoom in on the screen at the press of a key using custom keyboard shortcut commands in GNOME.  See here for info on setting up custom commands:

Create custom keyboard shortcuts in Linux

EDIT:  You’ll need to install gconf-editor for this — yum install gconf-editor

I set mine up so I can use F9, F10, F11, and F12 to scale 2x, 3x, 4x, or turn scaling off.

EDIT:  Hmm… it seems that was a poor choice of keys, though…

EDIT:  Here’s a post that describes how you can set up the keyboard shortcuts for the scaler tool in more detail:

http://pleasantfiction.ipower.com/bodega/viewtopic.php?p=735#p735

I’ve been testing the limits of what Windows games can run via QEMU’s x86 emulation on the PS3. At first I tried Windows 98 but it turns out that Windows 95 seems to make things run a little snappier. And most of the Windows games that will work should run on 95 anyway…

I have installed Diablo + the Hellfire expansion with 1.01 update and that’s running very well. There’s a bit of stuttering in the cutscene videos, but gameplay is perfectly smooth and of course the atmospheric music is great.

Instead of worrying with the CD every time I want to play, I made an .iso file of it and play from that instead. To create an .iso file of a CD on Linux, you use this command:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/cdrom_image.iso

Where /dev/cdrom is the device name of your CD ROM drive. It appears the CD need not be mounted for this procedure. For example, to make an .iso of my Diablo CD, I said:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/media/apricorn/diskimages/diablo.iso
(/media/apricorn/ is the path where I have a USB hard drive mounted)

Assuming you’re able to get Windows 95 up and running on QEMU, the process for installing Diablo is simple — just install like you normally would on Windows. DirectX is included on the install disk, too, so you can install that at the same time.

Installing the Hellfire expansion is equally straightforward. You do need to change CD’s though, and this is where using .iso files makes things much easier.

While QEMU is running Windows 95, you hit Ctrl-Alt-2 to bring up the QEMU monitor. At the (qemu) prompt, type:

eject cdrom

change cdrom /path/to/your.iso

For example, to eject the diablo.iso (”cdrom”) and insert the hellfire.iso (”cdrom”) while QEMU is still running Windows 95, I use:

Ctrl-Alt-2 (that’s the number 2 key, NOT the F2 key)

eject cdrom

change cdrom /media/apricorn/diskimages/hellfire.iso

Ctrl-Alt-1 (to change back to the normal QEMU window where Windows 95 is running).

The ability to change .iso files / cdroms while QEMU is running is critical when installing games that require more than one CD.

Other games I have tried on QEMU (some of these screenshots are from Fedora 7 PPC on PS3 instead of YDL, but they run the same on YDL, and some were done on YDL 5.x):

Starcraft — A little stuttering in cutscene videos, but otherwise appears to run OK. I didn’t play beyond the first level.

Thief — Menus, music, and in-game sound are all OK, but WAY TO SLOW to be playable (1 frame per second or less). I didn’t have any hope for this one working anyway, but you never know …

Robert E. Lee: Civil War General — This no longer runs on Windows XP, but runs fine on QEMU on PS3.

Duke Nukem 3D — A bit slow, but playable. A much better alternative is running the Duke Nukem 3D source port for Linux (an RPM for it is on my downloads page — full version game data is required). I had to compile QEMU with Adlib soundcard support for sound to work properly, but maybe I just needed to install a Sound Blaster driver for DOS instead.

Rise of the Triad — Also a little slow but playable. There’s a source port for this one on www.icculus.org but it requires some work to get it running properly. I haven’t made an RPM for this one yet, but I intend to make one.

PokerStars client — Running on Windows 98 on QEMU. Slow to start up but was playable. I only tried this once at the request of someone else, so I don’t know if the latest version of the client still works on QEMU on PS3.

Blasteroids (DOS) — Runs fine if I recall correctly.

Diablo II — Almost! But too slow to be considered playable. I didn’t have any in-game sound, either.

Reference links:

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-an-ISO-File-in-Linux

How to: Install Windows 98 on your PS3 (Yellow Dog Community Board)

http://bellard.org/qemu/user-doc.html

[Edited 7-1-08:  Updated link to QEMU user-doc (site moved)]