Johannes' Blog

Finally, the results of the Craptastic Coding Competition 2009 have been published. Although my entry didn't make it in the top three, you still might want to try it. It is a Dingoo release (Dingux) called



As you can already see on the screenshot it is a jump'n'run game.



You can download the game right here:

crapland-game.zip (3.7 MB, Dingux)

Maybe eventually I will release a GP2X version of this game too. Also, I consider improving this game further (adding more levels, a menu and a few enhancement here and there) as suggested by Nova. Ten days isn't that much time for developing a game anyway. ;) But as you can see, it is a crappy great game already, so go and grab your copy right now! :D

Here is another Gmu release for all supported systems. It is mostly a bugfix release. The most important bugs that have been fixed with this release are the backlight-power-off issue and the volume issue, both only occuring on the Wiz. There are a few other changes which are applicable for all systems, though.

Grab the new Gmu release for your device here:

gmu-0.7.0_BETA6-GP2X.zip (0.8 MB)
gmu-0.7.0_BETA6-DINGOO.zip (0.8 MB)

Please note, that you will need the Open2X firmware to run this release on your GP2X. On the Wiz it runs with the default firmware. On the Dingoo you'll need the latest Dingux firmware release.

Here is a new Gmu release. It is available for the Dingoo A320 running Dingux, the GP2X running Open2X and the GP2X Wiz.



This release comes with several new* features:

• Module decoder plugin (using MikMod) for playing tracker modules (such as MOD, STM, S3M, IT, XM, ...)
• Improved MP3 playback performance on GP2X and Wiz (MP3 @ 85 MHz on the GP2X) due to improved ARM assembly in mpg123
• Hardware and software volume control which should allow better volume control on the Wiz and might reduce background noise
• Lyrics support (text files and lyrics from ID3v2 tags are supported)
• Cover artwork support
• Display-off feature on the Wiz
• Various bugfixes

* At least they are new for the 0.7.0 branch. Some might have been available in the old 0.6.X branch already.

Grab your copy of the latest Gmu release here:

gmu-0.7.0_BETA5-GP2X.zip (GP2X and Wiz release, 820 kB)
gmu-0.7.0_BETA5-DINGOO.zip (Dingoo release, 750 kB)

I've added a display brightness control menu to dmenu on my Dingoo, which makes it possible to easily adjust the display backlight brightness. The brightness setting will be saved to disk and automatically loaded on boot. Here is what I've done to accomplish this.

First I have created two shell scripts. One for saving the new brightness setting (brightness.save) and another for actually adjusting the brightness (brightness.set). Both files need to be in the local/sbin directory.

brightness.save (56 bytes)
brightness.set (138 bytes)

Then I have added a new submenu to my dmenu.cfg with menu entries for various brightness settings (10 %, 25 %, 33 %, 50 %, 66 %, 75 %, 100 %). I have used a light bulb image as the menu icon. It needs to be in the res directory inside the dmenu folder.

A new Dingux version has been released, which comes with a new rootfs. An EXT3 partition on the SD card is no longer needed. Actually EXT3 support has been dropped from the Dingux kernel in favor of FAT to make installing Dingux from Windows easier and reduce the kernel size. Due to other changes dynamically linked programs need to be recompiled for this Dingux version. Here is a new Gmu release which is compatible with the latest Dingux release.



To run Gmu extract the zip file to your SD card and execute gmu.goo in the Gmu directory.

gmu-0.7.0_BETA4-DINGOO-newdingux.zip (0.8 MB)