Its_All.Lost

Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

MAME on a PCDUINO Nano Lite (AllWinner A20)

So I am going to attempt to “catalog” this project as I do it. Yeah I know, the first fucking time, ever. If it happens we’ll see, jury’s out.

So I have a AllWinner a20 PCDUINO Nano Lite that I snagged for $15 bucks a while back, and its been collecting dust ever since then. Haven’t done shit with this super ardunio-half-pi. Yay me. I wanted an arcade cabinet and this was here so bam diggity! I decided to try and purpose it for this task and since it happens to have a SATA port on it and I happen to have a 250GB SATA drive sitting here… Who’da fucking though eh? Perfect for MAME, its got all the space too (thats what she said).

So.. Ubuntu 12.07 Linaro, precise.

In case you wanted to know, df -h gets me:

I am following this guide https://www.anavi.org/article/177/. He gets all the credit.

I used Filezilla to copy all of my CHDs and ROMS over to the hard drive on the pcduino. Getting that setup was hella easy. Won’t cover it here.

Always sudo apt-get update (it always seems to give errors for some packages on the pcduino, i just have never bothered to removed them from the list).

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libgnome2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxv-dev libxv1

I installed 28.5mg of new crap and took up 83.9 overall, not bad so far.

That last edit was quote a ways down..

Build the source code

…and that too for fucking ever. Jesus.

xmame.x11 roms/starfir2.zip

It works! But requires lightdm to be running. Need to figure out how to ditch the desktop if I can.
Dude on the tut page recommends using the gflags -ah 720 -ws 5 to adjust the resolution.

-ah height, -arbheight depth
Scale video to exactly this height (0 = disable).

-ws xaspect, -widthscale xaspect
Set X-Scale aspect ratio.

-b depth, -bpp depth
Specify the colordepth the core should render, one of: 0 (auto), 8, 16.

-ah 720 -ws 5 -b 16
all the commands here

Basically, the dude has it all right, easy peasy. For once. Follow his guide and you should get a working xmame emulator. No fancy GUI or anything but it does work. Not sure it will work for what I want. I do not think so. I want a nice easy to navigate GUI to be able to use from the cabinet hardware. Not a keyboard and mouse. There seems to be a few of those exact things available for the Pi so I will probably go the unwanted route of using the Pi2 with a USB hub and a USB hard drive. Which fucking sucks. I wanted to use the built-in SATA port. That was the whole fucking point. But I am not about to reinvent the wheel. I will adjust lanes.

Fscking Server

Nothing really “wrong” with it, it is just not handling the load apparently. The thing is running “smoothly” but the demands of the household on this machine are too much. Load times are way too high for my liking… although I am the only one that notices. I need an updated machine really. Alas, no funds 🙁 still waiting for a server to fall into my lap (hint hint).

Outdoor Wifi

I like to sit on my back patio in the evenings. It usually is the coolest part of both my yards, thanks to some large trees of my neighbors and my own. Despite having multiple Wireless Access Points throughout the house already, I noticed the signal was lacking in the backyard. Now I do not have a large house or yard, not by a long shot. In fact “I’ve had bigger”.

Still the drop in signal strength was noticeable. To be honest yes, I could get away with just a single wireless access point, but then I would not have a +24mb connection 98% of the time! With a few Access Points I am able to maintain a +65mb connection rate 98% of the time. Thats worst case. And yes, I do transfer large quantities and large files from multiple machines and it helps with the video streaming – which is heavy is this house.

Getting off topic. So due to the weak backyard signal I decided to deploy an external Wireless Access Point. It is your basic Linksys/Cisco e1200 running DD-WRT. I’ve modified it to run off PoE. Saved me troubles and allowed me to just run a single cat5 to the back via the attic and a vent. I have it mounted in an external enclosure, sealed(ish). It will not get wet. Even put a fan inside via a toggle switch mounted underneath. I was thinking of IoT’ing the switch. The router board fit perfectly inside the enclosure. I couldn’t have asked for a better fit. There is even room to be able to make the antennas externally accessible or detachable (with minor effort) .

I meant to post this a while back when I made the unit. Never got to it. At least now I can vouch for its performance. The thing is rock solid. I have noticed no setbacks from its present location or enclosure. All is well, and it gets moderate use. Ive had more issues with an inside unit.

Now I just need to make the fan remote controlled and add a temperature sensor… If I get around to it I’ll post some pictures.

Random Updates

Nothing techie going on lately, nothing useful to post at the moment. So heres some drivel…

I have an AT&T Note 5 (and love it) and a Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch (also love it). No complaints on either… until the Note automatically updated to 5.1.1, then the Bluetooth died. I had a 30-50ft operating range before the 5.1.1 update, and after the update I would be lucky to get 1ft from whatever I was paired to. The watch disconnected consistently, headphones were useless. Stream music to a sound bar? The phone would have to be literally sitting on it to work. And no, I was not wiping my phone, the “format and reinstall” crap is old MS bullshit. That is NOT a way to fix a problem, you’re just going around it and hoping it doesn’t happen again. I knew there was a 6.0 update coming soon so I decided just to wait. Glad I did. Now, if it happens again…

I tried to not wake up and immediately smoke a bowl today (the 3am session to go back to sleep doesn’t count)… I paid for my mistake, with vomit. Yay amyloidosis!

Unmotivated lately. Thats me. I have so many projects but zero drive to do them lately. Being sick all the time kinda takes the fun out of shit. Or you just really don’t feel like working on a project because you are not 100%. Seems to be a lot of that lately.

I could rant all day about State Disability, SSDI and how much AT&T (as a company/employer) fucking sucks. But I wont, it would accomplish nothing except making my hair fall out and my heart rate triple.

Adventures in SSL, why not – it’s free

I was sooo tired of Chrome telling me my self-signed server wasn’t protected and that someone wants to steal my data from me. Go away Chrome I know, I signed it, it’s all good now chill out. First world problems eh? I don’t want to click twice!! Anyways. I read about someone giving out free SSLs to the webs. Time to get mine while the gettin’s good! Straight for the deep-end, we can swim right?

So if you are here for ClearOS 7 then good, if not ClearOS then go somewhere else. There’s tons of guides for other systems, and if you don’t have ClearOS chances are there is an installer for you that works. We here at ClearOS however feel that nothing should work right out of the box, or if at all. That being said, I actually found this whole process to be “not that bad”.

Heres the setup:
ClearOS 7 and its loveliness
One or Multiple websites, its all the same
Lets Encrypt

Run that for each domain and subdomain you want to add SSL to. Now hope on over and login to your ClearOS box via the web interface. Go to System >> Settings >> Certificate Manager. Scroll down to the middle of the page till you see External Certificates, hit the add button. You should see a box asking for a bunch of files. Perfect. Give it a name like YourDomain, “Certificate File” point this to fullchain.pem. Point “Key File” to privkey.pem, and “Intermediate File” to cert.pem. Hit the Add button again. After a second you should see the new certificate listed on the page. If not something went wrong. In my experience ClearOS would not let me add the certificate if there was an error, and it would complain.

Once you see your cert in the list head over to Server >> Web >> Web Server. Click on the website you want to add SSL to. Scroll down to SSL Certificate, click the scroll-down and you should see the certificate you added in the list. Don’t forget to save. You should now have SSL on your site. Now don’t forget it expires in 3 months. I’ll figure out how to renew then haha.

Now if you want to force SSL, the simplest way I have found so far is to use .htaccess. I though there was a drop-down option to force SSL but I didn’t see it. Open up your favorite editor and create or edit an .htaccess file.

This should force any request over to HTTPS. I found this page helpful when I was doing my Googling:
https://sysops.forlaravel.com/letsencrypt