Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Nintendo Wii U and my HD TV

So here's a fairly significant update from my tests for some form of TV control via my Wii U gamepad for my Ovation 32" HD TV (OVA-HKC32A5).  For control, my bare minimum requirements are volume control and powering up and down my TV.  In my previous post, I found a signal buried in the Wii U's Akai manufacturer to provide some minor semblance of functionality.  Unfortunately, it's woefully inadequate.  This time, I've gone without much success until I reached 'T'.  All through that time, I was only testing using the volume + and - buttons but since the recent finds, I've decided to also test the INPUT button.  So without further ado, I give you the signals I found in addition.

TAG Signal Type 1 surprised the hell out of me as at this time I had come to get used to nothing ever happening.  Pressing 5 will change the sound mode on the Ovation TV.  Pressing Volume - will open the TV source menu.  The A button will decrease the volume while D-pad right will increase the volume.  D-pad down will alter the picture mode.  Pressing either the left or right stick will decrease the volume of the TV.  None of the other buttons seem to have any discernible effect.

Telefunken Signal Type 21 is the next one.  Again, pressing 5 will change the sound mode.  Pressing on Channel down button changes the picture mode.  D-pad down does this as well.  The volume buttons are properly mapped, so that's a good thing.  D-pad left increases the volume.  INPUT button toggles the sleep mode of the TV.

Telefunken Signal Type 23 is another.  The volume buttons are once again properly mapped.  INPUT button opens the TV source menu.  D-pad left decreases the volume and D-pad right increases the volume.  The channel up and down buttons browse the source menu up and down respectively.

Last one is Telefunken Signal Type 24.  INPUT button once again opens the TV source menu.  Channel up button decreases the volume.  D-pad right increases the volume while D-pad left decreases it.  Power button is properly mapped so it's now possible to turn on the TV and fiddle around with the volume settings.  This is pretty much the bare minimum of what I want my Wii U TV remote to do.  Shame Nintendo had to make me go through an enormous amount of tests just to find this.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Nintendo Wii U and TV Signals

Good grief, Nintendo.  You clearly don't know how to make a user friendly app.  I've gone down to 'P' with no sign of progress except for the Akai one.  I read somewhere that the Akai TVs were rebadged Samsung TVs so that gave me some hope in using the Samsung signals.  I did go through those though and came away with nothing!

Nintendo has a search page for TV remote signals on their website but its all hidden in this crazy ajax search box.  Please let people browse the actual database.  Some people may actually want to try different codes on their TVs and not something tied specifically to their model number.  If you have a wealth of information there, let the people actually see it!

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Update on PulseAudio v ALSA

So, here I go again, diving into this PulseCrap and so, I've found that Ubuntu does come with the Pulse plugins for ALSA.  It's tucked inside libasound2-plugins but I'm starting to think this is the cause for my audio disappearing.  This reminds me of my OSS/ALSA days where sound contention causes the audio to just disappear.  Time to dive into the Launchpad bugs.

According to the archlinux blog, Trine 2 uses OpenAL, but I'm not certain if Natural Selection 2 uses that.  Still need to keep digging, though here's one interesting link I found.

Losing sound on select games...

I've noticed that on some games, I lose sound not only on the game, but also on the entire desktop. It's an odd issue, but I believe I have finally found a possible cause. I have tried playing Natural Selection 2 and although I am happy that it comes with a Linux client, along with Trine 1 and 2, as well as Red Orchestra, the sound goes away until I reboot.

I decided to run ldd on it to see if there were clues. I noticed that when I compare it with games that don't exhibit this behaviour that NS2 has a link to libasound.so which I think is a sure sign that this is another one of those ALSA vs Pulse Audio conflicts.  I will do more research, but this is a theory that is making a lot of sense at the moment.




Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition not on Wii U?

Hey Ed Boon, skipping on Wii U like all the other developers, eh?  How hard is it to simply release an Ultimate Edition DLC pack on Wii U and sell it on eShop instead of pressing discs?  C'mon.  This ain't right!

Monday, January 20, 2014

Kingdom of Amalur Demo Loading Times

I'll keep this brief.  Tried Kingdom of Amalur demo and suffered through long loading times.  Disabling v-sync helps with that but brings some unintended issues like the player stuck moving forward and out of sync audio.  Just deal with it.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Feedback on Thomson Tablet

I've been using this tablet for a while now and the final conclusion on this tablet is that people should not buy this one.  The dual core processor definitely looks attractive but the Infotmic SoC is not good at all.  It's incredibly underpowered and Real Racing 3 struggles to get a steady clip on it.  Overall response is not good when under duress which leads to input failure.  You're buying into this sort of tablet to get performance and you are getting none of that here.  This is just the tip of the iceberg though.

The touch screen performance under normal operations is touchy.  Dragging icons and removing them ends up being such a chore.  It constantly misinterprets taps and touch drag actions which brings the whole experience down.  Battery life is also very short.  I suspect the battery pack slipped into this is no different from other Chinese OEM tablets but the dual core SoC ends up sucking up more juice.  Lastly, the camera stopped working a week ago.  Everytime I try to use the camera app, I just get an error saying that it couldn't connect to the camera.

There's a lot of promise for cheap Chinese high performance tablets, but don't buy into it this fast.  I would advise sticking to a single core tablet as the performance on those are much more reliable.  While Thomson had good and loud speakers and the over all display is much better than the Eken, its several negative points really mar the experience.  This made me look into other tablets of similar nature like Polaroid tablets.  The lack of documentation is disconcerting and I've only found the SoC of only one of their models to be Rockchip.  That's a good manufacturer, but Polaroid tablets don't use Google Play which makes it a no-go almost immediately.  Do your homework and always be careful with these things, guys.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

This is Insane!

I've begun searching through my Wii U TV signal to find a hopeful possible remote control code to use to interface with my TV.  The old Ovation LCD TV (OVA HKC32A5) is an OEM LCD TV from the manufacturer HKC down in Shen Zhen, China.  Unfortunately, it looks like this is no longer being sold here so I figured finding out a possible replacement for my remote control in case that piece of equipment breaks would be a fine idea.  Nintendo's interface is so sucky though so it's been time consuming going through each of the TV signals from the Wii U's database.  Is it so hard to automate the IR transmission and have a progress bar go through every signal type of every brand and have the user just tap Work or Didn't Work?  Gah!

I've gone from letters A to F brands and probably will resume on the letter G when I turn the machine back on.  The lone success case is Akai Signal Type 10 but it's far from perfect.  The remote signal mapping is totally weird in that signal type.  Pressing Vol + would change my picture mode while pressing INPUT would increase my volume.  0 will open the TV's option menu while 7 scrolls up.  8 enters the menu and also increases the volume (if the menu is not open).  The rest of the buttons do not do anything.

I'll be back with an update if I find a better signal type or with a note if I did not find any signal whatsoever.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Random Thoughts: Linux stuff

I've had to deal with some Oracle apps I've downloaded the other day and I needed JDK which I normally do not like to install.  I ended up installing openjdk7-jdk (don't use jre), and I needed to figure out where the Java path is.  It's in /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-xxx/.

The linux command pstree -p is good at showing a list of commands running.  I had a problem with apt-get updating packages when it got stuck on flash.  Killing package-data-do got it sorted.

Finally, I loved Mass Effect 3.  Great game!

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Mass Effect 3's Endings

Yes, I'm late to the party.  Chances are, people have moved on and many others were angry.  With limited exposure to the Mass Effect series, I looked into the original cut endings on Youtube and remembered how random it all looked and felt.  It just ended and there was little of anything in it.  It was so unsatisfying, but I also pointed out that without the actual journey, the ending would be likely meaningless.  BioWare eventually came out with the Extended Cut release and the endings there were much lengthier and more effectively rounded out the ending.  It was much better when compared to the original cut, but without the journey, it would be difficult to understand the experience.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Checking nVIDIA driver blob versions

I'm half thinking about a GPU upgrade for my desktop machine and I'm also thinking that hotswapping an nVIDIA card for my aging GeForce 9500 GT may work.  Doing a bit of homework, I decided to check what the driver version is right now.

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
NVRM version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  313.30  Wed Mar 27 16:56:45 PDT 2013
GCC version:  gcc version 4.7.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.7.3-1ubuntu1) 

From the NV's documentation, it covers GPUs all the way to GTX 770.  That's good to know!

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Even better Youtube Alternative on Android

I had a previous post regarding the old Youtube app no longer functioning and had recommended an app which in the long run did not perform as well as I had hoped.  This has lead me to look into PVSTAR+ which is remarkably more stable and has better streaming capabilities.  It's pretty good and deserves mention!