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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.