Computers

xrayspx's picture

PiST

Music: 

Peter Murphy - The Sweetest Drop

*Skip to the RetroPie customization stuff*

Like every other moderately Vintage / Retro Computing person,
not to mention my whole job being what it is, I immediately bought one of those
12" IPS 16:9 Eyoyo monitors when I started seeing them pop up on some YouTube channels. Thing works great as a bench monitor, but it's kind of a weird size for use with 1980s OSes that expect 4:3. I found that Eyoyo also makes a 4:3 12" 800x600 monitor with all the same inputs so I grabbed one. Since the Atari branded monitors for the ST were 12", and I never saw any of these machines on anything much bigger than a 13" TV back in the day, this looks pretty much exactly as I remember and the correct aspect ratio makes everything feel "bigger" in the right way.

The Pi 3 seems to be completely sufficient for emulating a stock 8Mhz 68000, it just needs enough power, swapping a 750ma power supply for 2.5A made a huge speed difference in emulation. I'm not trying to make this a "modern" experience like PiMiga or anything that requires any more horespower. For software, I started with RetroPie for their package management and the fact that they've already done the work of building all their packages to run from the command line with SDL/framebuffer, plus the ease of tweaking things like the boot splash screen, etc.

Aside from that, it's really just Hatari and Amiberry. I found a 1GB ACSI disk image for the ST which is split into thirds and had a bunch of preloaded software. I've not added anything to it yet, but apparently the hero at 8bitchip has also archived over 1500 ST games and has patched them to run from a hard disk so I won't need to sort through a bunch of disk images which is great. I already spotted Oxyd in the list.

That all makes me want to get NeoDesk running, which I gather is possible though it didn't immediately work in the 5 minutes I had to spend on it. Like I said, for this machine I'm not interested in running a "modern" take like PiMiga. But "nostalgia", well, while I'd certainly love to have original ST or Amiga hardware, I really am more nostalgic for the content and getting in front of Vroom or Nebulus for 10 minutes every 2 months, and it's awesome that it's using the same desktop I spent so much time in front of.

The little boot menu I wrote just replaces the RetroPie autostart.sh file at /opt/retropie/configs/all/ with one that shows the user a menu to select the boot OS or shutdown. Windows 3.11 is a menu option, that's kind of TBD. DosBox is installed but I haven't done the full Windows install yet but it'll be fun to play Solitaire on this thing.


Little tweaks I made to RetroPie

I used RetroPie as my base rather than regular Raspbian because of their great packaging and basic customization tools. I just installed Hatari and Amiberry from the retropie_setup installer and they worked immediately at the command line. The retropie_setup tool also lets you swap out the default boot splash screen. I was expecting to just find the location of the file and swap in an Atari Fuji logo and be done with it. But they've built the tool into their setup utility, and even let you assign an MP4 so I was able to use an animated rainbow Fuji logo so it just looks awesome.

I made one edit to /boot/cmdline.txt to suppress the bootup log output, so cmdline.txt looks like this now:

console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=PARTUUID=8ee2ea28-02 rootfstype=ext4 fsck.repair=yes rootwait loglevel=3 quiet consoleblank=0 plymouth.enable=0

I copied /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh out of the way and replaced it with:

#!/bin/bash

/home/pi/bin/menu

That's pointing to the boot menu screen. It's really simple but really what am I trying to do here? I did add a countdown timer so it will automatically boot to an ST desktop after 20 seconds:


#!/bin/bash
# /opt/retropie/configs/all/autostart.sh

clear
echo "POMPEY PIRATES" | sed -e :a -e "s/^.\{1,$(tput cols)\}$/ & /;ta" | tr -d '\n' | head -c $(tput cols)
echo ""
echo ""
echo "Press '1' For Atari ST"
echo "Press '2' For Amiga"
echo "Press '3' For Windows 3.11"
echo "Press '9' For Bash Shell"
echo "Press '0' For Shutdown"
echo "Press 'T' For Trainer"
echo ""
echo ""

msg="Booting Atari ST in"
tput cup 12 0
echo -n "$msg"

l=${#msg}

l=$(( l+1 ))

for i in {15..01}
do
tput cup 12 $l
echo -n "$i Seconds"

read -t 1 -n 1 system 2>/dev/null

if [ "$system" = "1" ]
then
/opt/retropie/emulators/hatari/bin/hatari --timer-d 0 && reset; /home/pi/bin/menu
elif [ "$system" = "2" ]
then
/opt/retropie/emulators/amiberry/amiberry.sh && reset; /home/pi/bin/menu
elif [ "$system" = "9" ]
then
exit 0
elif [ "$system" = "0" ]
then
sudo shutdown -h now
fi

done

/opt/retropie/emulators/hatari/bin/hatari --timer-d 0 && reset; /home/pi/bin/menu


To-Do

  • ✔I'll probably install Windows and Mini vMac just to do it
  • ✔Add ST High Res mode
  • ✔May add a timer to the menu to boot to the ST after some number of seconds just to make it more immersive.
  • ✔Add a "POMPEY PIRATES" at the top and "PRESS 'T' FOR TRAINER" at the bottom for authenticity



  • xrayspx's picture

    Haiku OS

    Music: 

    Dr. Octagon - Blue Flowers

    I've been playing recently with different unix OS's, trying to resurrect some old hardware and see if I can't make some of these old machines useful again. Like at least have one as an XScreensaver-only machine to keep Natalie amused.

    xrayspx's picture

    Lattice of Convenience - MP3 Playlists

    Music: 

    Underworld - Kittens

    Hopefully everyone can live in the future someday.

    We do a lot with MP3 playlists. I run Airsonic for streaming around the house and in the car, and we have a playlist-based FM transmitter setup, etc. So I have scripts which run every night and generate playlists based on star ratings and other things (GET THE LED OUT ANYONE?).

    Previously what I've done is dump the contents of a bunch of Smart Playlists in Clementine to a file and use those files to generate the randomized 200 track daily playlists. The downside to that is that every time I add music or change star ratings, I'd have to refresh these "base" files like some kind of animal. I had base playlists for "3+ stars", "4+ Stars" and "5 Stars", among others.

    Today I decided to fix all that. Clementine uses a SQLite3 database, so now I'm just querying it instead, and it seems to be working well. For example, my "5 star" playlist in Clementine results in 10800 or so tracks. The same one built from the DB ends up with a couple hundred more tracks, but is pretty close. I'm not entirely sure what the difference there is just yet, but "close enough". What it looks like to me is I probably need to enable Samba case sensitivity.

    The DB records ratings as decimal numbers from 0.0 (Zero stars) through 1.0 (5 Stars). So to build a "4-Star +" playlist, searching for rating >= "0.8", you get ratings like this:

    1
    1.10000002384186
    0.800000011920929
    0.800000011920929
    0.800000011920929
    1.10000002384186
    1.10000002384186
    0.800000011920929
    0.800000011920929
    1
    1
    1
    1

    ! Caveat: Prior to Clementine 1.4.0rc1-533-gf4e70face there was a bug where it was possible to give a song a higher than 5 star rating (higher than 1.0 in the DB) as you can see above, so know that if you have Clementine from the repositories, it's likely you have that bug. For instance in the UI, if you want to show all 5 star songs, use "Rating is Greater Than 4.5 Stars" rather than "Rating is Equal to 5 Stars".

    Now I can just have a cron job to copy the master Clementine DB once a day to my server and drop it in next to the playlist generation scripts.

    The downside to all this is speed. When using the Clementine-Generated base playlists, I could be sure all the files actually exist on disk. However while Clementine will only show you files that exist in the UI, it doesn't seem to do a very good job of cleaning the database of stale files which no longer exist. So if you move or rename files, the old DB entries stick around unless you purge it completely and start over from scratch. That means I have to test every single file as I add it to the playlist, which takes time. It takes about 5-8 seconds to generate my 200 track 5-Star M3U file.

    The 5-Star.sh script is below if you'd like to play along at home:

      


    #!/bin/bash

    rm /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/5\ Stars.m3u

    i=1

    while [ $i -le 200 ]
    do
     file=$(sqlite3 ./clementine.db "select filename from songs where rating > "0.9" order by random() limit 1;" | awk -F "file://" '{print $2}')

     ### Clementine data encodes special characters and accent marks and stuff so I'm using
     ### Joel Parker Henderson's urldecode.sh to undo that: https://gist.github.com/cdown/1163649
     
     data=$(urldecode.sh "$file")
     if [ -f "$data" ]
     then
      ### Have to escape leading brackets because grep treated it as a range and would allow duplicates ###
      ### Can't do that in "data" because \[ isn't in the filename so they'll fail ###

      escaped=$(echo "$data" | sed 's/\[/\\[/g')
      #echo "$escaped"

      ### Avoid duplicates
      match=$(grep -i "$escaped" /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/5\ Stars.m3u)
      if [ -z "$match" ]
      then
       echo "$data" >> /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/5\ Stars.m3u
       ((i++))
      fi
     fi
    done

    For the 3+ and 4+ lists, I repeat this main block, but instead each rating dumps into a text file that I randomize into an .m3u at the end. So for the 3-Star + script below, I collect 130 5-star tracks, 45 4-star, and 25 3-star, push them out to a temp file and then cat temp.m3u | sort -R > "./3 Star +.m3u". I could do all this by creating a new table in the database and stuffing tracks into that, but this was faster for me to write and it works well enough:


    #!/bin/bash

    rm /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/3\ Stars\ +.m3u

    i=1

    while [ $i -le 130 ]
    do
     file=$(sqlite3 ./clementine.db "select filename from songs where rating > "0.9" order by random() limit 1;" | awk -F "file://" '{print $2}')

     ### Clementine data encodes special characters and accent marks and stuff so I'm using
     ### Joel Parker Henderson's urldecode.sh to undo that: https://gist.github.com/cdown/1163649
     
     data=$(urldecode.sh "$file")
     if [ -f "$data" ]
     then
      ### Have to escape leading brackets because grep treated it as a range and would allow duplicates ###
      ### Can't do that in "data" because \[ isn't in the filename so they'll fail ###

      escaped=$(echo "$data" | sed 's/\[/\\[/g')
      #echo "$escaped"

      ### Avoid duplicates
      match=$(grep -i "$escaped" ./3-star-tmp.m3u)
      if [ -z "$match" ]
      then
       echo "$data" >> ./3-star-tmp.m3u
       ((i++))
      fi
     fi
    done

    i=1

    while [ $i -le 45 ]
    do
      file=$(sqlite3 ./clementine.db "select filename from songs where rating >= "0.8" and rating

      ### Clementine data encodes special characters and accent marks and stuff so I'm using
      ### Joel Parker Henderson's urldecode.sh to undo that: https://gist.github.com/cdown/1163649

      data=$(urldecode.sh "$file")
      if [ -f "$data" ]
      then
       ### Have to escape leading brackets because grep treated it as a range and would allow duplicates ###
       ### Can't do that in "data" because \[ isn't in the filename so they'll fail ###

       escaped=$(echo "$data" | sed 's/\[/\\[/g')
       #echo "$escaped"

       ### Avoid duplicates
       match=$(grep -i "$escaped" ./3-star-tmp.m3u)
       if [ -z "$match" ]
       then
        echo "$data" >> ./3-star-tmp.m3u
        ((i++))
       fi
      fi
    done

    i=1

    while [ $i -le 25 ]
    do
      file=$(sqlite3 ./clementine.db "select filename from songs where rating >= "0.6" and rating

      ### Clementine data encodes special characters and accent marks and stuff so I'm using
      ### Joel Parker Henderson's urldecode.sh to undo that: https://gist.github.com/cdown/1163649

      data=$(urldecode.sh "$file")
      if [ -f "$data" ]
      then
       ### Have to escape leading brackets because grep treated it as a range and would allow duplicates ###
       ### Can't do that in "data" because \[ isn't in the filename so they'll fail ###

       escaped=$(echo "$data" | sed 's/\[/\\[/g')
       #echo "$escaped"

       ### Avoid duplicates
       match=$(grep -i "$escaped" ./3-star-tmp.m3u)
       if [ -z "$match" ]
       then
        echo "$data" >> ./3-star-tmp.m3u
        ((i++))
       fi
      fi
    done

    cat ./3-star-tmp.m3u | sort -R > /Volumes/Filestore/CDs/playlists/3\ Stars\ +.m3u

    rm ./3-star-tmp.m3u

    xrayspx's picture

    Caching Password passer

    Similar to the RDP Launcher, I occasionally need to grab passwords that I use all the time from KeePassXC to paste into various forms or prompts. Basically anything I use more than once per day, I have defined in this script for quick access. I don't want to be able to remember these, and I also don't want to have to interact with the password manager UI if I'm in a shell.

    xrayspx's picture

    DVD Ripping

    Music: 

    The Wipeouters - Ravin' Surf

    Another note for myself for later, and boy this is dumb.

    RDPLauncher

    TL;DR: Here's the Link:
    RDPLauncher

    I use RDP a lot and had some scripts to let me launch lots of RDP sessions without having to enter my random-generated passwords over and over. I wasn't happy with how I was handling those passwords so I've made it more secure using gpg and KeePassXC. Last night I made it compatible with Windows and MSTSC which will be uploaded here shortly once it's cleaned up a bit.

    Basically I'll click a shortcut for whatever host, which runs my launcher. I get prompted for my GPG passphrase, which reads from an encrypted file containing my KeePassXC passphrase, which is then used to retrieve the user password for launching the RDP session.

    Gpg-agent uses a cache-TTL to "hold the door open" for 10 minutes by default, so I can launch a bunch of sessions and only type my passphrase once.

    Requirements:

    - gpg client and running gpg-agent (gpg4win, etc) with a private key set up, etc.
    - cygwin if you're running Windows
    - KeePassXC (or some other key-store that has a command-line interface
    to query the database. In the beginning I was just using the gpg file
    with user/password pairs, so that works too)

    The tool has a few neat features:

    - If run from the command line with no arguments, it will prompt for user/pass/host/domain, good for one-off sessions to machines I won't log into much. That's great since I spend all my time in terminal windows and this stops me having to go back and forth to the mouse and keyboard while entering credentials.

    - If launched with -b, it prompts you for information for a one-off connection, but will also build a new shortcut launcher from a template. So like for the first connection to a machine you know you're going to use a lot. (Linux/Mac only)

    - Automatically tunnel sessions over ssh. This means I can launch RDP sessions on my Mac and they'll seamlessly proxy through my work laptop to the VPN.

    For tunneling, I am taking an arbitrary range of 200 ports and incrementing them based on what's currently listening. If there's already a process listening on port 6201, then try 6202 etc until there's an open one. So I can easily open 20-30 ssh tunneled sessions each with its own ssh process which will close down when the RDP window closes. 200 is "probably overkill", which means it might just be barely enough in the real world.

    The launcher shortcut mechanics are a bit different on my Linux and Mac machines so I split the -b script builder piece out based on OS. On Linux, I use KDE/Plasma, and so I generate these as KDE desktop files which look like this:

    #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
    [Desktop Entry]
    Comment[en_US]=
    Comment=
    Exec=/home/xrayspx/bin/rdplauncher.sh -h it-host.xrayspx.com -d xdomainx -u xrayspx
    GenericName[en_US]=
    GenericName=host.xrayspx.com
    Icon=remmina
    MimeType=
    Name[en_US]=
    Name=host.xrayspx.com
    Path=
    StartupNotify=true
    Terminal=false
    TerminalOptions=
    Type=Application
    X-DBUS-ServiceName=host.xrayspx.com
    X-DBUS-StartupType=
    X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
    X-KDE-Username=

    On the Mac side, I use shell scripts with the extension .rdp (which conflicts with Microsoft's client, but I don't care since I never use their client anyway). Those just launch using Terminal, so it does pop a terminal for a fraction of a second, but I really don't have a problem with that. To get the Terminal window to close (and I do associate these files with Terminal.app specifically rather than iTerm2), open Terminal.app, go to the Terminal menu -> Settings -> Profiles (tab) -> "Basic" or whatever profile is your default -> Shell (tab). Choose what action to take when the shell exits. I have it set to "Close if the shell exited cleanly" and "ask before closing" set to "only if there are processes other than the login shell..."

    The launcher for that looks like:

    #! /bin/bash
    rdplauncher.sh -h host.xrayspx.com -d xdomainx -u xrayspx &

    I generate those from the KDE .desktop files with a command like this:

    for host in $(ls | grep "\.desktop$" | awk -F ".desktop" '{print $1}'); do cmd=$(grep Exec $host.desktop | awk -F "xrayspx/bin/" '{print $2}'); echo "\!#/bin/zsh" >> $host.rdp; echo "$cmd &" >> $host.rdp; done

    That creates .rdp files in the same directory as the .desktop files, so now they can be moved around, have chmod set, etc.

    If I call it with AppleScript or Automator instead of a bash script as above, none of the password retrieval process works. I think it short circuits and sends the output back to the AppleScript rather than the bash script which ran the command. If I can get that working that would be ideal.

    The mechanics on Windows are similar to the Mac method. a .bat file which launches the bash script via Cygwin:

    C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty.exe -w hide -e /bin/bash -l -c '/home/user/bin/rdplauncher.sh -h host -u username -d domain'

    On Windows at least the Cygwin window it creates is hidden from the user, so that's nice.

    xrayspx's picture

    TV History Time

    Music: 

    Mojo Nixon & Jello Biafra - Nostalgia For an Age That Never Existed

    So this is super interesting. You know, interesting to me anyway.

    I'm compiling another week of vintage TV shows, this time from 1963. It's remarkable how easy it is to get the exact episode of many of these even compared to getting episodes from 1980's shows. I'm making a playlist for each night and mixing in 1963 commercials throughout, should be fun. But first, see if you can spot why this week's playlist may present a particular challenge:

    As I started out on Sunday night (TVue is boldly not adhering to the TVGuide dictate that Saturday is the first day of the week), I found that while I could find the episode of whatever show I was looking for, the air date listed in IMDB was for like, several months in the future, in some cases as far as March 1964. What the balls IMDB. So it made it kind of tricky to pin down given episodes.

    After the 3rd or so show with this happening, I kind of noticed a pattern. Sunday, November 24, 1963 just doesn't seem to exist. IMDB consistently showed "Nov. 17" and then the next episode aired was 'Dec. 1".

    So seriously what the he... Oh. Right. Yikes.

    My TVue, from the Boston Advertiser, is listing the TV schedule for the week after the Kennedy assassination. I am building playlists to recreate a week of TV which ... ... never existed.

    For the record, this being the 24th, we chose Mister Ed, My Favorite Martian and The Judy Garland Show. I got all the right episodes on those, but I'd have liked to have seen the Ed Sullivan Show, but since that's live I imagine it was just canceled altogether. It was supposed to have a Stiller and Meara sketch, so I just picked one of those sketches from another Ed Sullivan. Growing up with Seinfeld it's just so easy to see "SERENITY NOW!", or "I've got a lot of problems with you people!". Genius.

    As in my previous week of vintage TV, if I can't find a thing, I'll go for the nearest I can get. So for instance What's My Line on Sunday, Nov. 24 Instead I opted for the December 1 episode with Colonel Sanders. I don't know what was scheduled for that episode, or indeed if it was ever actually shot.

    In addition to the JFK assassination horror, one thing that bums me out about this week is that I don't seem to be able to find any episodes of Grindl with Imogene Coca. I really want to see Aunt Edna, but young ('er, she was still in her '50s).

    So here's to building a playlist for a TV Guide week that never happened. Obviously this is going to be oddly similar to 9/11/2001, and ... that's about it really. I can't really think of any other week where the machine of commerce would have simply ground to a halt entirely.

    xrayspx's picture

    Lots of RDP

    Music: 

    Annie Lennox - Why?

    Do you do lots of RDP? Like lots and lots? I do, and even with password management it's annoying. I tend to use generated passwords for all my normal user, Domain Admin user and obviously Administrator accounts. That means lots of workarounds to deal with those passwords while doing bulk RDP sessions.

    A typical use case for me is to RDP to 20 machines at a time, run a thing, wait, and log out. I've always scripted this, but not always in strictly the safest way. Plaintext passwords stored in a script, or read off disk. The philosophy is "if someone can read this script, I've already lost the game anyway", but still it's ugly and sick, and so I fixed it. In my defense, the Red Team never did pop my laptop...

    I already use gpg-agent to facilitate unpacking of log files. On my syslog servers I roll logs over hourly, gzip them and then gpg encrypt them to my key. Then I can download a bunch of them, run my logunpack script, enter my passphrase once and since gpg-agent caches that credential for a period of time, decrypt all my files in one go.

    What I wanted here was basically a way to have keepassxc.cli "hold the door open" and cache the passphrase like gpg-agent does. So what I've done is to use gpg-agent itself for that purpose. I have a GPG encrypted file containing my KeePass-XC passphrase, and I open it using gpg-agent, so it can be reused until gpg-cache-ttl expires.

    I've also always had slightly different copies of this script for use cases of "Fullscreen on my laptop" and "fullscreen on larger displays", so I have a switch here for "resolution" as well. "fs" for fullscreen or "fsbm" for "big monitors". Since I'll never go to my office again, that's pretty much never going to get used. The default for the $res value will remain 1280x960. Reasonable enough.

    I also added prompts so that it'll ask for host, domain, user and password if you run the script with no prompts from a shell. So /that/ will be super useful to me when I have to do a one-off connection to some remote host but don't need a whole launcher for it. While I'm at it, I put in the -b switch so that you can have it generate a launcher based on that input. That saves me hand editing a template when I add a new RDP host.

    I use Linux, but this should work with minimal-if-any changes on Mac and Windows/Cygwin, both of which can run xfreerdp and gpg-agent. I have a good automated ssh-tunneled RDP setup for my Mac, so I might try using that with this so I can use a 4k display for those "busy RDP days".

    Being that I do run Linux, here's how I launch this. KDE desktop files like this:


    xrayspx@dummyhost:~/rdps$ cat windowsmachine
    #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
    [Desktop Entry]
    Comment[en_US]=
    Comment=
    Exec=/home/xrayspx/bin/rdplauncher.sh -h windowsmachine -d domain -u xrayspx
    GenericName[en_US]=
    GenericName=windowsmachine
    Icon=remmina
    MimeType=
    Name[en_US]=
    Name=windowsmachine
    Path=
    StartupNotify=true
    Terminal=false
    TerminalOptions=
    Type=Application
    X-DBUS-ServiceName=windowsmachine
    X-DBUS-StartupType=
    X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
    X-KDE-Username=

    So anyway, here's the thing: RDPLauncher

    xrayspx's picture

    Rippin' DVDs

    Music: 

    Dana Carvey - Choppin' Broccoli

    Today in Lattice of Convenience news, here's how to rip DVDs.

    I barely understand the mencoder command that is the backbone of this thing, and there are many better ways to do lots of the stuff in this script, in fact I know several of those better ways, and looking at it fresh, I see some redundant stuff that cancels out other stuff. But it runs, and I use it, so here goes.

    Ripping DVDs isn't fun, the disk labels are iffy at best, even within a single box set you might go from the Gold Standard "TV Show - S1D1" to "DVD_VIDEO" as a disk label. So it can get kind of ugly. To mitigate that I create an output folder based on the DVD disk label + a timestamp. If you get a run of disks with the same name, at least they're not overwriting each others files because the timestamp will shift. I currently have a dvdrip-output directory with the following DVDs in it:

    ...
    DVD_VIDEO-090720202337
    DVD_VIDEO-090820201025
    DVD_VIDEO-090820201027
    DVD_VIDEO-090820201142
    I_LOVE_LUCY_S2_D1-090520202354
    I_LOVE_LUCY_S2_D3-090620201047
    LUCY_S1D1-090520201043
    LUCY_S1D2-090520201043
    LUCY_S1D3-090520201359
    ...

    Those are all from the same box set. So that's 3 naming conventions from one series. To be fair I think that while it's the same company producing them they probably came as separate "season" boxes rather than one big set. Still. Come on. Jesus.

    Another big gotcha I've hit, again mainly with TV series box sets, a single show might exist on the disk as many as THREE times. Once as a "standalone episode", once as "episode with commentary track" and once as part of a massive concatenated file of all the episodes on that disk. In the case of the commentary track, that audio seems to be separate, so the actual episode rips to exactly the same filesize, the commentary track seems not to be something I have access to, so you just get two identical files at the end.

    So as you're ripping, that's going to triple the rip time.

    The way I'm trying to fix that is to rip the first 30 seconds of every Title on the disk, then do a SHA sum on those ripped sample files. As a Title rips, when it's done I'll drop its clip checksum into a "rippedchecksums" file. The next TItle starts the first thing it does is check to see if its checksum has already been ripped. If it has, skip it. It seems to catch 100% of repeated Titles, and probably 70% of the "Big Concatenated File" cases will match the sum for Title 1. Saves a shitload of time.

    In this case, Title 1 is a standalone episode, and Title 21 is the Big Concatenated File of all the episodes on the disk. Title 21 will be skipped. Since I get about 70 or 80 FPS on my Mac Pro, that probably saved 90 minutes of rip time or so with 3 hours of video on the disk:

    763b6035c4bf239b4425fb8f484018387574baca /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/1-sample.avi
    59cca1b18759647e13e3e1b6a4facace0520fc06 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/10-sample.avi
    125add4181b9dc6eee57c32c07568765b8e4483b /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/11-sample.avi
    4daae35d014032964fe57e70e2cc3450f7dac4e5 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/12-sample.avi
    a942f31a9ee42c5839772f733b2c666195397ad5 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/13-sample.avi
    8c9473a940a9bc685d84e0ac29c66f53efa6667d /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/14-sample.avi
    29d2200d8c46ac11417119b4b7179e4b526d99cf /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/15-sample.avi
    466860b79bba6d132fcc97d6dc7c0c3a20dd771c /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/16-sample.avi
    f4ae11cca0752956c4d6025a8760a260a59fe79b /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/17-sample.avi
    00753d529f4bbf4081f647056cf44db7c630c198 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/18-sample.avi
    b7f9c9087fed6b00d22de5033c153f9ffb3cd3b1 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/19-sample.avi
    14efcb6164f1424b894cc28200ab621ec805ecd0 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/2-sample.avi
    6c411c8869f1e6bc9a6ec298ba9b6a5c9eefc9ae /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/20-sample.avi
    763b6035c4bf239b4425fb8f484018387574baca /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/DVD_VIDEO-090720202337/21-sample.avi

    At the end of it, I still end up with just a directory full of files labeled 1 through whatever.avi. I have to take a few seconds per file to get it to "TV Show - S01E01.avi". But from there FileBot can mass-rename them with episode titles.

    So here's the full ugliness. You'll want to adjust all the paths. I should have made variables, but I don't care, I maybe have 3 or 4 ripping trays running at a time on various machines, so I don't mind just changing the paths for each host. Works on OSX and Linux, and probably Windows with Cygwin, but I don't care about Windows so I'm not going to test it.


    #! /bin/bash

    timestamp=`date +%m%d%Y%H%M`

    id=$(drutil status |grep -m1 -o '/dev/disk[0-9]*')

    if [ -z "$id" ]; then
    echo "No Media Inserted"
    else
    name=`df | grep "$id" |grep -o /Volumes.* | awk -F "Volumes\/" '{print $2}' | sed 's/ /_/g'`

    fi
    name=`df | grep "$id" |grep -o /Volumes.* | awk -F "Volumes\/" '{print $2}' | sed 's/ /_/g'`
    echo $name
    dir="$name-$timestamp"
    mkdir /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir

    maxtitle=`/Applications/mencoder dvd://100 -o bob | grep "titles on this DVD" | awk '{print $3}'`

    for title in {1..100}
    do
    if [ $title -le $maxtitle ]
    then
    /Applications/mencoder dvd://$title -alang en -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate="1200" -vf scale -zoom -xy 720 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128 -endpos 30 -o /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/$title-sample.avi
    shasum /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/$title-sample.avi > /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/$title-checksum
    touch /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/rippedchecksums.txt
    fi
    done

    cat /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/*checksum >> /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/allchecksums.txt

    for title in {1..100}
    do
    if [ $title -gt $maxtitle ]
    then
    chmod -R 775 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir
    sleep 3
    drutil tray eject
    exit 0
    fi
    sum=`cat /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/$title-checksum | awk '{print $1}'`
    match=`grep $sum /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/rippedchecksums.txt`
    if [ -z $match ]
    then
    echo "CURRENTLY RIPPING TITLE #$title"
    /Applications/mencoder dvd://$title -alang en -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate="1200" -vf scale -zoom -xy 720 -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128 -o /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/$title.avi
    echo $sum >> /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/rippedchecksums.txt
    rm /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/$title-checksum
    rm /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir/$title-sample.avi
    fi
    done
    chmod -R 775 /Volumes/Filestore/dvdrip-output/$dir

    xrayspx's picture

    Hello Woodgrain My Old Friend

    Music: 

    A couple of weeks ago Natalie bought an Atari 2600 for me as a present. It came with 60 games, two joysticks and paddles, so it was a pretty good deal. She did ask the seller if it worked, and she said it did.

    When Natalie got it home, I took the 2600 apart to make sure nothing had leaked all over the place or was otherwise obviously broken or loose and it was SUPER clean, which was encouraging. Just some minor nicotine film everywhere, but it was even dust-free inside. So I hacked together a super crappy cable to convert from the Atari's RCA RF cable to coax to get it hooked up to the TV. Unfortunately it didn't seem to work after all. Natalie was pretty bummed out, but I decided that she'd tried to get me a present, and instead got us a project, and so I convinced her not to bother the seller or leave negative feedback or whatever. After all, as far as the seller knew, the last time she saw it hooked up, it probably did work.




    As it was, it did the same thing whether there was a cartridge in or not, just various interference patterns:

    The 2600 is like the VW Bug of electronics. There's not that much in there to break, what can break is relatively easy to repair even for rank amateurs like us, and they sold 30 million of them, so there are loads of parts. We'd make it work, and we'd learn A Thing. And if it didn't work at the end, just dip in and grab another console and try again.

    To that end, we bought a $5 RCA -> Coax converter, a 2600 re-cap kit, and went way overkill on a swell Hakko solder station to replace the garbage iron I had and hated using. I also grabbed some junk electronics to show Natalie what we're trying to do. We're gonna heat this stuff up, get these components out, get all the old solder out and put new components in. I thought of doing a composite video conversion at the same time, but I kind of wanted to take it one step at a time.

    There are only like 5 caps in here to replace, and they also sent a replace voltage regulator. I had previously tested the voltage regulator and it was fine, (near enough) 12V on the input and 5V output, so I opted not to replace it. We split the re-cap duties so both of us could get in some practice on the new soldering iron. It worked great, 0 -> 600 degrees in seconds. We pulled the 3 socketed chips out and hosed the sockets with contact cleaner along with all the switches and the cartridge port.

    After that work, I hooked it back up again and....Definite Progress:

    A staticky display, but definitely playable. Joysticks work, paddles work (after a hosing out with the brake cleaner). I decided to stop touching anything until the RCA->coax converter showed up, since I was 90% sure the problem was probably that janky as fuck cable I gooped together. Natalie had tracking on it, and they said it was delivered "Today" to our same street address, but 3 towns away. It turns out they'd sent the wrong tracking number, however the correct tracking number showed it as having been delivered a week ago. A quick harried rummage through a week's worth of opened shipping envelopes and we found it. Hooked it up and, yeah, I'd say this is pretty much handled:

    I see no point in doing a composite conversion. This is 100x better than any image you'd ever get off of one of these when they were new. If the RF modulator starts to fail, it's always an option later on.

    So now the 2600 is in its place along side the arcade cabinet. Of course all of these roms are available in emulation, and I've got an archive of nearly all 2600 games. If we really want to play some serious Fishing Derby, we can do so there. But it's really nice to have a functional 2600 with original games. Natalie is totally enamored with this whole thing and is already stacking up her favorite games. It's totally likely that we'll flip the whole game-time layout and put the arcade cabinet on music video duty while we play Atari on the main TV.

    There are still games that don't work, and we often have to switch the console off and on once or twice to get a game to start. Some are also pretty susceptible to any nudge to the console, so we'll probably get it back apart, clean the cartridge port properly, make sure all the contacts are good and re-tin them if they aren't, and see if that helps. But really, this instability is par for the course for 8 year old me. It's part of the charm


    --


    I have a very close long-time friend who's been trying to mentor me into doing electronics projects since...1988 or so? I never got any good at it. I only ever had one of those garbage un-regulated plug-it-in-and-wait-10-minutes soldering irons that never really got hot enough. I couldn't be bothered at the end of the day. I was too busy playing games to care. I think he was pretty happy to see me tackle even such a simple project and dip our toes in.

    At the end of it, his only comment was "Working with electronics takes on a different dimension if you have a scope. Fun to see what is happening in a circuit.".

    So I guess we gotta get project-ing.

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