Posts Tagged ‘development stage’

Playing Mame Arcade old school games on Debian Wheezy 7.0 Linux

Wednesday, May 29th, 2013

Play arcade games on Debian GNU Linux 7 Wheezy Tux arcade logo

To play the good old arcade on Debian Linux in previous releases I used GNOME's xmame frontend gxmame in Debian 5.0 Lenny and in Debian 6.0 gxmame was no longer working fine so I was using a KDE package frontend called kamefu.

Yesterday I just re-installed my laptop with latest stable Debian 7 Wheezy and after installing re-installing all packages I regularly use it happened gxmame and kamefu are no longer available in Debian 7. It was kinda of shocking since I already so much get accustomed to kamefu that I don't want to switch to other Mame GNOME GUI frontend.

I tried building kamefu from source (btw kamefu is still in very early development stage 0.1 with no luck). After the epic fail and my laziness to look for what kind of header files part of KDE I have to install. I read what is written on Mame in Debian Wiki here and found out about existence of new package in Debian 7 – gnome-video-arcade, as well understand the so far well knon xmame package is substituted by one called mame. Though name changed mame is not much different from xmame. In theory mame pack should be complete substitute for xmame but in practice my experiments showed xmame was running much more ROM files than the new mame binary.

Here is what I did to have running most of my Mame ROm files on Debian 7 Linux;
 

1. Install mame gnome-video-arcade, mame-tools and xmame-tools debs

noah:~$ apt-get --yes install mame mame-tools xmame-tools
...


2. Create default config file for mame bin
noah:~$ cd .mame
noah:~/.mame$ mame -cc

mame -cc command generates mame.ini config file;

noah:~/mame$ ls -al mame.ini
-rw-r--r-- 1 hipo hipo 6660 май 25 18:31 mame.ini

3.Add location to Mame Rom files in config file

noah:~/mame$ vim mame.ini

Near beginning of file there is section:

 

#
# CORE SEARCH PATH OPTIONS
#
rompath                   $HOME/mame/roms;/usr/local/share/games/mame/roms;/usr/share/games/mame/roms;

At the end of rompath include location of MAME ROMs in my case ROMS are located in;
/disk/Games/Mames/roms
 

rompath                   $HOME/mame/roms;/usr/local/share/games/mame/roms;/usr/share/games/mame/roms;/disk/Games/Mames/roms;

Further on to test which ROMS will work and which not compatible;

noah:~/mame$ mame -verifyroms |grep -i good
1941j       : yi22b.1a (279 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
romset 1942a [1942] is good
1943        : bm.7k (65536 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
1943kai     : bm.7k (65536 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
1943u       : bm.7k (65536 bytes) - NOT FOUND - NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
romset 1944 is good
romset 1944j [1944] is good
romset 280zzzap is good
romset 3kokushi is good
romset 3stooges is good
romset 4dwarrio is good
.....

 

4. Launch gnome-video-arcade binary

noah:~/.mame$ gnome-video-arcade

On first run, you will have to wait a about 10 minutes for program to Index all Rom files it loads up the CPU severely and looks like the program is hanged …

GNOME video arcade debian Linux play arcade games GUI program screenshot
 

As you can see the interface is very simplistic, there is Preferences (menu) but there is almost nothing to configure;

GNOME Video arcade Debian Linux preferences general

AA
Gnome video arcade games on debian linux preferences columns One very unpleasent thing is many of the best games didn't work anymore. Some great arcade games like Punisher, Captain Command, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs who worked perfectly fine on old xmame + kamefu, don't work anymore with mame + gnome-video-arcade.

Besides its simplicty gnome-video-arcade has the precious feature to Record Played Games. To record yourself playing and later replay it use menus;

Game -> Record

or use shortcut (CTRL+R)

Make daily Linux MySQL database backups with shell script

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

Creating database backup with MySQL with mysqlbackupper and mysqlback shell scripts easy create mysql backups

Some time ago, I've written a tiny shell script which does dumps of Complete (SQL Script) MySQL databases. There are plenty of ways to backup MySQL database and plenty of scripts on the net but I like doing it my own way. I have few backup scripts. I prefer script database over keeping binary logs, or using some un-traditional backup methods like backing all binary data in /var/lib/mysql.

One was intended to backup with mysqldump whole database and later upload to a central server running tsh (shell). Using tsh maybe not the best method to upload, but the script can easily be modified to use ssh passwordless authentication as a method to upload.

I'm not a pro shell scripter, but MySQLBackupper script can be used as useful for learning some simple bash  shell scripting.

To use the script as intended you will have to build tsh from source. Tsh is in very early development stage (ver 0.2) but as far as I tested it before some years it does great what it is intended for. You can  MySQLBackupper.sh script from here.
Earlier, I used MysqlBackupper.sh to upload all SQL dumps to /backups directory on central backup storage server, thus I had written secondary script to classify uploaded backups based on backup archive name. Script used is mysqldumps-classify.sh and can be viewed here. Though this way of making backups, needs a bit of custom work for managing backups up to 10 / 20 servers it worked well.

I have written also another mysqlbackup script which is much more simplistic and only dumps with mysqldump and stores copies on hard disk in tar.gz archive. You can download my other simple mysqkbackup.sh here.

Only inconvenient thing about above scripts is they dump all SQL databases. Hence whether necessary to get content for single database from (complete) All database SQL (script backup), I use SED (stream editor) one liner script.

It is interesting to hear how others prepare their MySQL db backups.