17Oct/0948
OpenMSX on the Z2 – 100% perfect
Busy busy as always, but still trying new packages as they catch my eye. Not that anyone is surprised at what the Z2 can do after seeing Full Throttle running, but for the MSX lovers out there openMSX runs at 100% speed with sound etc etc. 
Just apt-get install openmsx, and run it once with a rom. Exit out, then edit the ~/.openMSX/share/settings.xml and set your scale factor to one. I found a sample config file on the net here that worked well.
That will set the output to 320x240, looks and runs great.
October 17th, 2009 - 09:12
sweet!!!
October 17th, 2009 - 11:18
Yeah MSX is fun, I’ve actually switched to IceWM as well. Once I set the taskbar to be double height and auto-hide, it’s pretty nice (cpu/net graphs etc)
October 17th, 2009 - 14:17
How did you get the mouse to work with IceWM?
October 18th, 2009 - 13:36
Hey Matt,
I made a script with the first line being the mouse emulator
/usr/bin/z2mouse &, and the second beingxinit icewm-session.October 18th, 2009 - 18:49
For those who are playing gb/gbc games, there’s a good emulator in the repos called gngb , I launch it with
gngb -s -Y -R 240x320 romnameand play with the Z2 turned on its side. Actually is pretty comfortable lolOctober 19th, 2009 - 07:12
is it possible to emulate gba on this?
October 19th, 2009 - 07:16
Hi Mike,
Yes. VisualBoyAdvance runs about 30% speed for most roms, but it has not been optimized or compiled specifically for the Z2. It’s possible you could eek out some more performance if you cross-compiled it. Good Luck!
October 20th, 2009 - 13:01
Hi!
Soory a bit offt., but is this Z1 or Z2:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Zipit-Wireless-Messenger-All-Colors_W0QQitemZ280410593846QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item4149c61a36
brgds &
Thanks in advance,
JK
October 20th, 2009 - 13:11
Hey JK,
Those are Z1s. I hear target may be getting some more in stock soon. Good Luck!
October 20th, 2009 - 13:36
What is main difference between them?
Is it worth to buy Z1?
October 20th, 2009 - 13:37
Z1 is much less powerful. It can run linux, but not well and certainly no emulators or games.
October 20th, 2009 - 21:38
So does the Z2 support SDHC?
October 20th, 2009 - 21:39
yes
October 22nd, 2009 - 07:33
So cool… keep up the great work! On my site, I just posted a few observations and how I went about using Matchbox, etc… I’ll have to try out IceWM next.
October 22nd, 2009 - 22:46
Hi Davis!
Have you tried runing gcc on the Z2 yet? No cross-compiling.
Zipit Wireless just changed there bessness model again. the Z2 is still still $49.99 but now comes with 1 year of service free. and the service plan in now $29.95 for 12 months.
Think that the timeing is just coincidence? Or is it their responce to Z2 now having eazy Linux install.
It would e nice is a company offer more features to keep people from flashing their devices with their own software, instead of encripting there boot loader to lock them out like ReplayTV did.
Thou it might just be Zipit compeating with the Peek’s $20 price and $15 month celler service plan.
You know of anyone that has done Hardware hacks to the Z2?
I’m planing on adding a mic jack and seeing about upgrade the miniSD to full size SD so I can use it to upload my Photos.
Not sure if I can trim down the basic Linux to 8Megs.
Hopefull I’l be able to get by with a boot disk. that load the programs into a ram disk.
Ah the good old DOS days before computer had HDD and you had to check out the BootDisk from the computer lab attendant. and you would frag your friends over the network in Snipes
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~boultonj/snipes.html
Thou I might have to some fancy boot level tricks. have a SD card level above the internal Linux level
ht. All it ready need to do is FTP though a graphical image selector would be nice.
October 22nd, 2009 - 23:07
Hey DrA,
Yea, the whole gcc toolchain is in the debian repo, python and java etc too. I hadn’t heard about Zipit Corp changing their business model, but it makes sense to me. The 6″ color photo frames are selling for around 25$ in my area, and have similar hardware. I’d imagine they make a little $$ from each hardware sale now, as opposed to a loss back in 06.
I’ve heard of a few people doing hardware hacks yes, and I know of at least one successful microphone input mod was listed on the old yahoo group. If you’re feeling adventurous you may want to flash the newest 2.6.31 kernel that supports u-boot. You’d have an easy time adding a graphical kernel selector. Didn’t play snipes myself, around that time I had a C64 and was either playing a gold box game or writing a basic program off the back of a magazine.
I’m interested to hear how things work out with any mods you make to your Z2, good luck,
/H
October 23rd, 2009 - 08:23
@H
I don’t know about Flashing a newer kernal, sounds like I would have to compile something. IT took me weeks to to get all my hardware working and the kernal not to panic last time I tried that.
Thou that was the late 90′s I heard it’s much better now?
I’m working on my own Forth based OS with features from AmigaOS and PalmOS. It’s a Distributed OS/VM
I got the Z2 to be my native ARM dev. platform. I’m going to start with the VM and work wittleing down the Linux base system.
It’s backup use if I can’t get Full SD mod to work.
If you interested in my soft I suggest look at
The Metatopia Project
http://metatopia.sourceforge.net/
I’m going to start by doing a rewrite of that under AGPL3.
I have medical condition that had me early able to stay awake more then 6 hours a day so maving done much more than design and Perl scripts to test the underlining architecture.
It’s only been a few months that I have been able to stay awake all day. Being awake is vary nice!
>C64 and was either playing a gold box game
You young wipersnappers. With your raster /graphics/
If I want a Graphical User Interface I use ExtendedASCII !
Ok I had an Amiga 500. and am a Amiga fan
Thou Amiga Inc. is EVIL They are IP trolls that bought the AmigaOS right before Gateways was going to Open Source it.
I remember then the TV news kept predicting that the Michelangelo virus was going to cause an apocalypse . Like Conficker only 15 years earliar.
October 23rd, 2009 - 08:55
Hey DrA,
Yeah, but compiling the new kernel isn’t terribly difficult anymore. Marex-hnd has gotten a nice patchset ready, and has a post on setting it up here http://marex-hnd.blogspot.com/2009/07/further-z2-kernel-hacking.html. I recall recompiling a kernel back in the slack 3.2 days took about 18 hours on my old pentium 133. I imagine it’d take a bit less time on the Z2 provided it didn’t run out of memory and start thrashing all over the place.
A GPL re-write of Metatopia looks interesting. I’d be curious to see how it runs on the Z2. I am also curious about the distributed nature of your new OS, sounds interesting. The Z2 is actually a pretty nice little platform for embedded work, I recall paying around 200$ for my old arm dev board a couple of years ago. How times change…
I am also an Amiga fan, and recall playing my neighbor’s 500 well into the mid nineties. Bart vs the Space mutants and all that. Agreed Amiga inc not the nicest company to their customers. Just makes me appreciate Zipit Corp that much more after hearing the horror stories of what can go wrong with a community.
Ahh yes the Michelangelo virus… the Y2k of the 90s
Glad you’re feeling better and glad you’re involved with the Z2, keep us updated on your work and Good Luck,
/H
October 26th, 2009 - 08:58
*grumble* Sorry I was writeing from my Win box and it crashed so I will have to rewrite my destription of Distribution system.
> A GPL re-write of Metatopia looks interesting.
-
it’s an AGPL not a GPL.
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
Afredo Metatopia(Afredo is my nickname for AGPLv3)
uses what I call Fire-Smoke computeing
The CLUSTER is broken into CELLs.
Each CELL fuctions like Croquet’s TeaTime_Architecture. Every NODE in the CELL. has a exact duplicate of every process in the CELL.
and the CELL communicate between each other useing something like this:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4052/networks_with_letters.php?page=1
Now each NODE in the CLUSTER an be part on more than one CELL. ideally it would be part of every CELL that is connected to the CELL using that NODE’s unquice features (Like the Huma using it
but could be some hardware ) but if the NODE can’t handle they can be moved off the NODE.
Now I worked out fance ticks to allow it to dynamicly split/merge CELLs and do dynamily recompiling the code to the NODE’s hardware.
My system doesn’t defferingate between object and source code.
Think Doxygen for Assembly language.
I’m basing the actual protocals on Croquet
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/TeaTime_Architecture
> I imagine it’d take a bit less time on the Z2 provided it didn’t run out of memory and start thrashing all over the place.
-
I wounder if the if the Z2 perferms better useing a swap in the SD or over a 54 Mbps WiFi connection.
I used the FreeSuperSaver shiping so my Z2 will arrive sometime before the 7th. You think you could run the test? or will we have to wait for me to do it?
> Ahh yes the Michelangelo virus… the Y2k of the 90s
-
Yes. the Y1.9K problem. HeHeHe
> Agreed Amiga inc not the nicest company to their customers.
-
Amiga Inc. is to Amiga as The SCO Group, Inc is to Linux.
Realy Amiga has done every dirt nasty think SCO has
X Steal the name of a decint company? Yes
X Complety Screw of the community? Yes
X Only quasi develp new products? Yes
X Buy up some of the Community IP and send it to the bitbucket? Yes
\ suing people working on the OS over using your IP that you don’t really own? FAIL. Ok they actual own the IP. A rookie mistake but their heart is there. I’ll give them half marks.
4.5 out of 5 on the SCO Evil scale. Not a bad score for Amiga Inc. And they still have time to fix that 0.5 point mistake.
October 26th, 2009 - 10:00
Hey DrA,
Ahh the joys of windows. I am quite familiar. Funny that you link the article descibing a discrete event simulator. The (professional) work I do is on discrete event simulators. I am curious to see the scaling metrics for new cell groups as they are added to the network. With each node having a copy the complete data for each cell, are the cells therefore limited to 32/nodes megs of unique data per node? If you’re using Wifi to synchronize this data, I am also curious about the distributed interconnect overhead and the overall effect that will have on performance.
I don’t have the means to test this right now, however for the WiFi vs SD card for swap, the performance is going to be limited by how contiguous your data is. While the maximum transfer speed on a G network is going to be slightly higher than the transfer speed on the SD card, the seek time for SD is 10x faster than WiFi and that’s going to rate limit you in the WiFi case. This will be especially true with tcp.
I’m afraid I can’t run any tests. I keep loaning out my Z2s to students and friends interested in Linux. This past week or two I’ve been reverse engineering a usb protocol for this other hack project I’ll be posting soon, so It may be a bit before I get back to the Z2.
Sounds like Amiga is another company on my personal no-fly list. That’s a shame, but maybe they’ll get bought out by a friendlier company. One can hope anyway. Hope things work out with Alfredo Meta, I think it’ll be really impressive when running. Good Luck
October 26th, 2009 - 16:57
> Funny that you link the article descibing a discrete event simulator. The (professional) work I do is on discrete event simulators.
-
Cool. you know if anyone has done work, where events are viewed as the crossing of lines in n-space?
I call it the pool-hall approach to DES
It’s nice because you can just cache the intersection points(along with which lines) and then only have to re-evaluate the lines that move.
You notice that there is no clock in this view of the simulation. in fact the concept of “time” isn’t a inherit part of the. of course you can replace that line(segment)s with ray(segment)s if you want one. thou that’s only really needed if you want to be able to run the sim forward or backwards. else you can just project the events onto your “time” line. or if your Albert Einstein your “spacetime” 4-space.
so your DES basically becomes a N dimensional billiards game where you program the collision response of balls that move in straight lines.
This pool-hall approach is based off of my John W. Nystrom’s Calculator model of computation.
Nystrom’s Calculator is just an analog equivalent of a slide ruler.
You should see my Billiards Oriented Programing.
> I keep loaning out my Z2s to students and friends interested in Linux.
Just need AIM Y! and telnet.
-
Really? I figured you where using it to stay updates with your Internet life. That’s how you seems to always resply to my posts so fast. I guess that only what I’m going to do with a Z2.
>While the maximum transfer speed on a G network is going to be slightly higher than the transfer speed on the SD card, the seek time for SD is 10x faster than WiFi and that’s going to rate limit you in the WiFi case.
-
Yaeh network latency… Hmm. Will have to work on a predictive push technique for the remove texture cache
since the normal pull technique won’t work.
>Sounds like Amiga is another company on my personal no-fly list. That’s a shame, but maybe they’ll get bought out by a friendlier company.
-
considering Anima Inc’s only products are vaperware and lawsuits I think that would be a good idea.
October 26th, 2009 - 18:01
Hey DrA,
I tend to reply mostly on my crackberry rather than the Z2. The Z2 keyboard is a bit wider, but ubiquitous cellular access generally wins out for me. Plus I just reply using wordpess for the blog. Z2 + ssh + mutt works for a bit of email here and there, but I like the larger keyboard on my laptop if I go that route.
I have seen aspects of the pool hall approach before, but not as the underlying model for a DES. That is quite interesting. For network event simulators (my bread and butter), many researchers use a hazy waveform collision model for physical event simulation, which is quite similar to your approach. Unfortunately the densely-connected overlaying networking components do not scale in the same manner as their physical components, and current academic research tends to smudge the actual calculations involved in some way for performance sake(either abstracts out the physical layer or abstracts out the networking components).
Having a ray based calculation for the time aspect would be quite elegant from a mathematical perspective. however in order to re-project your events on a single node would the entire CELL be needed for cache lookup? I’d be curious to see if the overhead requirements for caching the intersections outweigh the cost of re-calculating them during replay, i.e. a single node could replay a time-line independent of its containing CELL without running into memory troubles.
This sounds like it will be a very interesting project, perhaps you should consider a sourceforge page for your code repository. If anything, it would be of pedagogical value to folks interested in programming on the Z2. Best of Luck
October 26th, 2009 - 23:05
Hunter can you elaborate on the script you used to get the mouse to work in Icewm. I am a linux noob, no big surprise there. I have been able to follow the walk throughs a bit so far but the script has me. I am using nano, so where should the script reside, what should it be named and what should it contain?
Thanks in advance.
October 27th, 2009 - 07:09
Hey Damon,
Yeah, just add the mouse emulator program (should be download links to it in previous threads on this site) to your /usr/bin directory. Then in your /usr/bin/startx, add the line
/usr/bin/z2mouse-option &This will ensure your mouse emulator is started up when you start icewm. GLNovember 19th, 2009 - 14:26
Know how to get arrow key repeat working so we can play side scrollers?
And thanks for all the work, debian is so much better than OE. I got sick of bitbaking very fast.
November 19th, 2009 - 22:13
How do I get a colon (:) ??
When I press ‘alt’ and the semi-colon key I get a semi-colon. Is there a diff keymap? Or is it a problem that I’m having only?? Trying to use mplayer with an URL so as to play on-line radio programs. Advice would Very appreciated. Also, using the prboom from the apt-get & install how is the audio enabled? Tried headphones & internal speaker ….. no luck.
Thanx!
November 20th, 2009 - 13:07
Hey Sgreen,
Not really no
I know there’s a keyboard module that limits the repeat rate (so we don’t have the old sticky key problem), but I don’t have any of my zipits handy to poke around with. I think we all get tired of bitbaking 
Good luck! Post up if you figure it out, I think there’s a few folks who’d want to know how to set the keyboard delay
November 20th, 2009 - 13:10
Hey Mooose,
Yeah, there’s no colon in the keymap used with flux. You can add one in there yourself, or use onscreen keyboard to print one out. For prboom, have you gotten audio working with other apps? Prboom supports alsa, it could be the volume is still turned very low in your alsamixer. I’ve also heard of prboom having issues if it doesn’t have permissions to access /dev/sequencer. Not sure if that’ll help you much, let us know if so, good luck!
November 23rd, 2009 - 17:00
Hi Hunter,
I’m almost convinced to get a Z2 but do you know if anyone is working on getting Chrome OS or maybe even Moblin on the Z2? Seems those might be perfect.
November 23rd, 2009 - 17:53
Hi Avgjoe,
Chrome OS and Moblin are not quite light enough to run in 32mb ram. They require at least 10x that amount. On the zipit z2 one may potentially install moblin on top of the debian image (I don’t think chrome armel is compiling yet..), but it wouldn’t run. You could install it, then switch out the window manager for something lighter (flux, or icewm is what i’ve been using lately) but at that point you’re pretty much just running debian.
That said the Z2 is a great platform to learn and run linux, and is quite powerful (openmsx emulation
). The debian arm repository means thousands of programs are already running on the Z2, and it’s a great target for mobile development.
Good luck!
December 3rd, 2009 - 18:32
Thanks so much! I didn’t get a chance to check out Chrome OS so I thought it would be a lot lighter. I have a few hacked Linux appliances at home and they’ve been really useful so I think z z2 might be fun for the train rides into work
December 3rd, 2009 - 18:34
All our appliances will run linux one day
December 10th, 2009 - 09:18
Hi, I was not sure where best to post this… Just now getting my Z2 for implementing all the great stuff I see about here.
Question = What is the maximum storage size supported SD card for the Z2A? (mini form factor?). thanks.
December 10th, 2009 - 09:35
Hey Corner5,
Glad to hear you got a Z2. I have heard of others successfully using an 8gb microsd in a micro-> mini adapter, but the largest card I’ve personally used to date is 4gb. Good LucK!
December 21st, 2009 - 11:27
Hey, First I would like to say thanks for spear heading this hack, you are the only place I can turn for thorough information about development for the Zipit Z2. I bought mine a week ago and I absolutely love it!!!! Now I realize that you are not tech support. but I have an issue and I have no idea how to resolve it. When I try to start my device I get the following error:
hostname: Host name lookup failure
xauth: (argv):1: bad display name ” Open Zipit:0″ in “list” command.
and something about setting the priority to 1 when it needs to be zero
and when I close the X window:
xauth: (argv):1: bad display name ” Open Zipit:0″ in “remove” command.
I have googled my eyes out and found nothing. It all seems to point to the hosts file. If this is the same as a windows system should I just rename my device?
Either way if you can or can’t help me these videos are great and don’t stop making them please!!
-cheers
December 21st, 2009 - 11:59
Hey Root Access,
Yeah, these are pretty common problems for people starting out with embedded linux. I believe there are a couple of sites who specifically walk you through the fixing of these issues in the general case (gleaned from info here natch). In your case, I think it may be that your hostname has a space in it, which I am not sure is correctly handled. I would try adjusting that first. Also, do you have network connectivity? I would try with/without having network on as well for debugging purposes. Hope this helps, good luck
/H
December 26th, 2009 - 19:12
Sorry about pestering with some n00bish questions, but I just can’t figure this one out, and I really want to get my new Z2 up and running. (This also seems like the best place for info) I am trying to set the Z2 up using my Ubuntu 9.10 system.
1. I format the sd card with a 300MB swap partition and a ~1600MB ext2 partition using GParted. After formatting, I check the properties of the main partition it claims to be ext3/ext4. (I don’t know if this is a problem or not)
2. I then use dd with root permissions to extract the .img to the main partition of the sd card making sure to seek past the file system sectors. The operation completes w/o errors, but there are no files written to the sd card.
Again, sorry to be bothersome. Any help is much appreciated.
December 26th, 2009 - 21:22
Hey 0hz,
Which image are you using? If it is the debian 2g image, the partitioning is already done. To my recollection, you’ll need to (as root) dd the image to the (unmounted) /dev/sdX (the block device of the sd card). The partitions etc will already be set up, no need to do any partitioning on the card.
If you’re just extracting one of the other images (.tar.gz), then you’ll need to extract it to an ext2/3 partition yourself. But the filetype (.img) makes me think it’s an entire disk image, partitions and all. Hope this helps, good luck!
December 26th, 2009 - 22:54
Yeah, that’s what it was, I’m an idiot… Still learning the whole linux thing. Thanks for all your hard work on this cool project!
December 30th, 2009 - 03:57
I’m having some trouble. I didn’t know where to post, so i did it here. I set up a user account on here (added to the appropriate groups, users, audio, video) to use instead of just root 24/7. I’m using z2mouse-option, and have added z2mouse-option to my fluxbox startup file in root and the user account duplicate of the file.
Lo and behold i can’t get the mouse to work in userspace. What’s up with that?
December 30th, 2009 - 17:39
Hey Shamil,
After starting flux, does your process monitor or output from ‘ps -ef’ show that z2mouse-option is running? Does the z2mouse-option file have world-readable and executable permissions? Not sure what’s going on but hopefully this info will get you in the right direction. Good Luck
December 31st, 2009 - 01:51
z2mouse-option is definitely owned by root and successfully works in root. I guess i’ll experiment with ownership of the file for my user account, but i don’t that will get me much of anywhere. This would be real easy if there was a group for peripherals sort of like there’s groups for audio and video.
I’ll bite the bullet and get one thing done first which is making this thing plain old usable. Then i’ll mess around with a user account.
I suppose a question you could answer for me is where do i get lokichaos’s keymap? I didn’t see it on the page where i downloaded keymap.map and debain-Z2.tgz. And googling “lokichaos keymap zipit” got me an irc archive and pastebin sites.
Good thing to know is i did get this thing working with ext3 (of course with journaling off) for a more speedy fs. It appears to boot up faster, but i didn’t whip out the stop watch yet, however actual loading of programs and apt-get update is faster. A newer kernel with ext4 support and journaling off as well should be pretty awesome too. This debian install is a portal to debian sid as well.
December 31st, 2009 - 12:51
Hey Shamil,
Yeah, permissions can be a tricky issue in linux. The lokichaos keymap should be in aliosa27′s repo, and I believe it was also linked to from the ‘Z2 gaming and system update – GBA, GB/GBC, ScummVM ” article. You can use the output from ‘xev’ to get keycodes for tweaking a custom keymap if that ends up being easier.
That’s very interesting that ext3 sans journaling is speedier than ext2. I would have guessed the opposite, I’ll have to try ext3 next userland I flash. Thanks for the info! If you finally get your keymap tweaked the way you want it, consider posting it up to the sourceforge page for others. Good Luck!
December 31st, 2009 - 18:22
Is there a way to make Puppy works on the Zipit z2?
http://puppylinux.org/
January 1st, 2010 - 16:30
@tango – There’s no port of puppy linux to armel architecture yet. So, unfortunately no.
@hunter – yeah i know that little address for aliosa27′s site for getting the debian images, keymaps, and mouse emulator. Which keymap file in there is lokichaos’s? There’s a file called “keymap-final” in aliosa27′s /projects/zipit2/mark2 folder. After that, there’s “keymap” and “keys” inside of /projects/zipit2.
Now of course i want to be using z2mouse-option, but what is “fkeys” inside of /projects/zipit2/z2mouse-history?
Middle mouse click sounds cool, and maybe alt tab in fluxbox.
January 1st, 2010 - 20:05
Hey shamil,
Haven’t tried them out myself, don’t have a Z2 handy. Might have to trial and error them. To my knowledge alt-tab has been working in flux and icewm when the map is set. You can also set the key combination in .fluxkeys to ctrl-* as well. Good Luck!
January 24th, 2010 - 17:41
Hi Hunter,
Thank you for the help and advice in an earlier post.
Now have debian working on the z2.
Noticed you mention using vnc in another post. Have been trying to get this working but can’t find any vnc clients in the repos that came with the debian install.
Which client are you using and is it ‘apt-get installable’ from a repo?
Apologies for dropping this odd off post question in.
Regards
James
January 25th, 2010 - 10:04
Hey James,
I believe is was using kvnc or krfb to connect outward. For vnc into the Z2, I believe i was using x0rfbvnc. For both yes, they should be apt-get installable. I don’t have a z2 to test with right now, but I recall that I used a kde version for the viewer client. Good luck!