Arcade Joystick with MAME on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Today, I saw a cheap China made USB arcade stick at the computer store near my home. Previously I was contemplating buying the Japan made Hori Fighting Stick that will set me back a good $80. Luckily, this stick appeared for just $29. It is a Digi-USB Joystick from Topway and it says Windows 98 to XP on the front. Flipping to the back says "2002 Topway all rights reserved". Being something from 2002, it sounds like a good bet it will work in both Linux and Windows so I bought it and plugged it into my computer running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Typing $ sudo dmesg I found the stick was detected as being:

USB HID v1.10 Joystick [GreenAsia Inc. USB Joystick] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2

And that it was a low speed USB 1.1 device. Not that I needed USB 2.0 anyway. Firing up MAME 0.135 I tried it with Marvel vs. Street Fighter. The GreenAsia Inc. driver in Ubuntu worked flawlessly. Physically, it does not have as good a feel as an arcade stick but it is decent enough to perform all air combos. Great! I finally have a decent fighting stick that works right out of the box. Being a light stick, one nice addition is the four sucker pads on the base of the stick that keeps it in place on the table top.

With 8 buttons, you can configure your favourite layout (American or Japanese) for the common six or four fighting buttons.


My desk is getting rather cluttered with the Tesun dual gamepads and this new joystick.


Here we go, King of Fighters 2002 on MAME 0.135!

The Fly and the Fly-trap

A rather interesting video made by my friend, cciRRus, starring an innocent wasp, his pet fly-trap, and a tweezer. Ownage!

Ubuntu 8.04, MAME & AIGLX on ATI

With Ubuntu 8.04 LTS out for a few weeks now, I finally finished my exams and decided to give it a spin. Downloaded an alternate CD to upgrade my Ubuntu 7.10 from. Unfortunately it failed. It was only later that I realised it was due to my Mythbuntu installation. Should have downloaded the Mybuntu alternate CD instead. Thankfully, the servers were up and a net upgrade quickly placed 8.04 on my PC. Some problems still not resolved though (but not really the fault of Ubuntu). For starters, AIGLX is still working,


But sadly playing videos and watching tv using tvtime with XV still fails in windowed mode due to problems with the ATI drivers. The best I could get is flickering videos. But it is not stable. After messing around with some Compiz settings, it is possible to lose video altogether.


F-spot seems slightly less buggy. Next I decided to install the latest version of SDLMAME v0.125 from here (forget xmame, the base version of mame is too ancient). It didn't work right at the start using opengl rendering and I had to edit "/etc/sdlmame/mame.ini" to set option "gl_pbo 0" before it would run.

What delighted me the most is my Tesun USB-706D Dual Analogue Joypads (looks like PS gamepads, two pads hooked to one usb plug) that I bought for $23 worked right out of the box without additional drivers except for the vibration (not that it mattered). Unfortunately, with Compiz and the ATI fglrx 8.47.3 drivers, the display flickers like videos and tvtime. Hence I had to postpone my eye-candy yet again till ATI gives better drivers. Oh well, back to metacity.


Marvel Vs Street Fighter! It's been a long time.


Dungeons & Dragons 2: Shadows Over Mystara! Used to be stuck in the arcade for 4 hours with my friend trying to finish this with one or two coins. It takes about 1.5 hours to complete the game. So far everything seems alright with 8.04, I have no idea why they packaged Firefox 3 Beta 5 though. Broke some of my extensions but it does have some cool features. Other than that there's nothing really visibly special.

10000 Hours to simulate Blackjack rules

This article on BBC sort of reminded me of my first programming course where I was trying to hard code some blackjack rules for a simple blackjack competition. Now that Genetic Algorithms have started to make sense to me, Pontoon, anyone?

Iron Man

It's amazing, it's incredible, it's Iron Man! Nevermind the super cool hardware, the sophisticated weapons and his attitude, there's some amazing software and interfaces in there too!