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Use Your Gamepad With Any Game With QJoypad

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

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So now that you have all these games installed and working in Wine you may be wishing for a way to use your game controller in those games that take input from the keyboard only. The program QJoypad can help in this matter. It is not included in the Ubuntu repository but you can grab the source code from http://qjoypad.sourceforge.net/. QJoypad requires QT4 and libxtst-dev which are both in the repository. You can install them from terminal by typing:
sudo apt-get install qdevelop libxtst-dev
There may be a smaller package that will install all of the required packages but qdevelop is the one I used. Follow the installation instructions included in the QJoypad source code in install.txt.
Now that everything has completed successfully it is time to configure your controller. QJoypad has a nifty configuration that makes assigning keyboard buttons to your game controller a snap. Orca, however, does not read QT4 applications. All is not lost though because you can create QJoypad layout files in your favourite text editor. QJoypad uses X key codes for the keyboard. You can get these codes by running xev in the terminal. Switch to the xev window with alt+tab, press the key for which you would like the code, then alt+tab back to terminal and use flat review to find the line that contains the key code. The line with the correct key code will be the second key code line up from the bottom. The first one up always contains the key code for alt because of the alt+tab combo used to change windows. Here is an example layout file with several commonly used keyboard buttons. In a real layout file you can not include the comment lines. Only the very first line in the file should begin with the # symbol.
# QJoyPad 4.0 Layout File
Joystick 1 {
Axis 1: +key 114, -key 113
Axis 2: +key 116, -key 111
Axis 3: +key 102, -key 100
Axis 4: +key 104, -key 98
Axis 5: +key 102, -key 100
Axis 6: +key 104, -key 98
#Left Shift
Button 1: key 50
#spacebar
Button 2: key 65
#Left Control Rapid Fire
Button 3: rapidfire, key 37
#left Alt
Button 4: key 64
#a
Button 5: key 38
#p
Button 6: key 33
#1
Button 7: key 10
#2
Button 8: key 11
#Tab
Button 9: key 23
#Enter
Button 10: key 36
#end Layout File
Place your layout files in the ~.qjoypad3/ directory. Give it a .lyt extension and you are ready to go. To load your layout file, press alt+f2 and when the run dialog opens type qjoypad FileName. For example, if your layout file were named firefox.lyt you would type:
qjoypad firefox
The QJoypad instructions say you can switch layouts on the fly, but this has always given me an error. So, before loading a new layout file open terminal and type killall qjoypad. QJoypad Is a great program that adds just a little more coolness factor to the Linux gaming experience.

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Tags: game controller, Gaming, keyboard, qjoypad
Posted in Gaming, Linux, Ubuntu | No Comments »

More Audio Games in Wine

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

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This talking calculator is also an alarm clock. More importantly, it has optional headphones. Great for class.

There are some audio games that will not work in Wine with out a little modification. This modification may require some assistance because Orca is unable to read Wine related information. Still, it may be possible to press a key combo in the correct order and get the desired result. The first thing to do is to install the winetricks package. Using winetricks can help to get some great things installed. It does, according to the winetricks documentation, have a few adverse side effects. Basically you will not be able to get support from winehq if something doesn’t work. In recent versions of Ubuntu winetricks is included with Wine. So, try typing:
winetricks
in terminal. If it doesn’t work you will need to install it manually. To install winetricks open terminal and type:
wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
It should finish downloading very quickly. When the download is complete make sure the winetricks script has permission to run. To do this type:
chmod 700 winetricks
You can then run the script by typing ./winetricks and when the script opens there will be a long list of packages. You need the vb6run (Visual Basic 6 runtime) and all directX packages except the “not recommended” packages. You can install them all at the same time. A window will come up that is not accessible to Orca. Make sure this window has focus and press alt+y to install the Visual Basic6 runtime. Now you can install a broad variety of games.
Here is a partial list as well as a few notes on some of the games.
If you notice lag in the sound, try installing alsa-oss with:
sudo apt-get install alsa-oss
and launch the game from the terminal with aoss at the beginning of the line:
aoss wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Game/launcher.exe

Kitchensinc Games

The games are all free and very good. They are located at http://kitchensinc.jgriffith.com/ttsgames/ttsgames.htm. You need to download and install winkit first. It is a menu system for the games. When it is finished downloading right click it and select "extract here". When it has finished extracting find and press enter on the winkit folder, then right click the setup.exe file and select open with wine. Press enter four times. wait a few seconds and press enter again. If everything went as it should the installer should close and there will now be a "kitchensinc menu" under applications, wine, programs. If you select the games option the self-voicing menu will launch.
To install the games just download the one you want and when it is finished right click and open with wine. Wait a few seconds to make sure it has opened and press enter, alt+o, and alt+c. At this point the window will close and the game will be installed. To play the game select it from the kitchensinc game menu.
In puppy1, when I changed the voice from the default, the game became unplayable. The golf game tends to crash. To make this not happen, wait until it has finished speaking completely before selecting your club or swinging. Those are the only two I had any problems with and the work arounds are quite simple.

LightTechInteractive Games

The games can be gotten from http://www.lighttechinteractive.com/web page/lightGames.php. The general install format is right click the game after downloading it, select open with wine, and after waiting a few seconds for it to open, press alt+n twice followed by alt+y then alt+n three or four more times for good measure. Finish with an alt+i for install and wait a few seconds while it works its magic. Press enter to close the installer. The games will be under applications, wine, Program, LightTechInteractive. I have installed "Bop It Ultimate", "Light Cars", and "NUM-Crunch". They all work well. In Light Cars, when you have completed a race and have tried to start another race the game may go silent. If this happens, press enter and the game will close. Open the game again and everything will work. These games are a lot of fun as evidenced by their download counter for each one. You will have to run the configuration option before playing the game. Each game has the option in its menu. The configuration utility is not self-voicing, but it is still possible to get through it. When it opens press enter, type your first name, press tab, type your last name, press enter and enter your email if you want(it is not required), press tab and down arrow once for Canada or twice for United States, and finish by pressing tab and enter twice. The window will close an the game will be configured.

L-works Work Around

Other games may work too. The free games from l-works.net work very well. The only thing is, you have to change to the folder where the game is and launch it. This may only be necessary if you have removed PulseAudio in Ubuntu. To change to the l-works directory open terminal and type:
cd .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/lworks
Then use the ls command to get a list of the games installed. Change to the directory with the cd command then launch the game with wine.
wine toy.exe
The games will not work if launched from the wine menu under applications.

Installation Instructions

There are too many games to write the instructions for each in this post. I have already put off publishing it for some time to test and figure out installation issues. That is where you can help. If you install a game and it works, please post a comment with instructions here. Most of the time games can be installed by pressing alt+n several times then alt+i and finally alt+f. Sometimes you have to agree to terms. In this situation, the key series may be alt+n followed by alt+a, press space to check the agree box, then alt+n five or six times and finish up with alt+i ad either alt+f or enter to close the installer. Sometimes the installer may start by asking if you want to install the program. If the installer closes right off when you press alt+n then this is likely the cause so try starting out with alt+y. These instructions should get you through most installers. Good luck and have fun.

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Posted in Gaming, Linux, Ubuntu | No Comments »

GMA Games in Wine

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

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Stay informed of the current temperature with this talking digital in/out door thermometer.

Audio games available from GMA Games work very well in Wine. The one exception is "Shades of Doom" it works until you try to enter a door, then freezes. The only way to close it is to go to system monitor and end the process. The rest of the games have not given me any problems. The basic pattern to follow when installing these games is to right click the setup file, select Open with Wine Windows Program Loader, and wait for a few seconds for it to open. Use alt tab to move between windows until you find something like "Setup inaccessible". When you have moved to that window, press the following keys to install the game:
alt-y
alt-n
alt-y
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-i
At this point, the game will install. Wait about ten or so seconds and then press alt-f to finish the installation. Most of the games add a shortcut to the desktop. You can use the shortcut to launch the game or open applications, Wine, Programs, and find the game listed there. On the desktop you may find a second shortcut with a .lnk extension. It is safe to delete the .lnk shortcut because they do not work in Linux (as far as I know). When you start the demos, there are a couple of windows that do not talk, just press enter three times and game sound and speech should begin. The first few windows are where you can enter your information when you have purchased the game. In the game Lonewolf, the information is spoken from the very beginning. I have tested all of the game demos as well as the free games and I have to say they are all impressive and very addictive. I highly recommend any or all of these games.
One last note, in VIP Mud, when you first launch it, the opening window will read as "Product Security inaccessible" I am not sure what this window is, but if you press enter three times it will start talking. For some reason, voice settings are not always remembered and the "interrupt this voice with typing" option doesn’t work. I have not used it in Windows, so I am not sure if this is a Wine only problem or not. You can interrupt speech with the control key if you need to do so.

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Posted in Accessible Applications, Gaming, Linux | No Comments »

Setting up Wine for Accessible Games

Friday, June 12th, 2009

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There are lots of accessible games that, until now, only work in Windows. Quite a lot of these games will work in Wine, an application that translates Windows applications so they can work in Linux. There are a few things that are necessary to get it up and running though. A lot of the Windows game use Sapi5 to present information in speech format. Thanks to the Open-Sapi project started by Thomas Lloyd, it is now easy to get sapi up and running in Wine with no sighted assistance. For more on the Open-Sapi project, visit http://code.google.com/p/open-sapi/. Now, Let’s get started setting up Wine so accessible games can be installed.

Installing Wine

Although some games work with the version of Wine that comes installed, things will work better, and more games will install and run correctly if you have the latest version of Wine. To do this, you will need to add the Win repository. If you are not using a Debian based distribution of Linux, consult your distribution’s documentation or the Wine website for instructions. Ubuntu Users do the following to add the Wine repository and get the key for it. Open terminal and type:
wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
After that command completes its task, type:
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/jaunty.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list
If you are using a version of Ubuntu other than Jaunty, simply replace the word jaunty in the line above with your version’s name, for example, users of 8.04 would replace jaunty with the word hardy.
Next, get updates and install Wine:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine
You should now have the latest version of Wine installed.

Installing Open-Sapi

For this part, you will need to have subversion installed. If you do not have it, or if you are unsure, type the following command in terminal:
sudo apt-get install subversion
To create the open-sapi directory and download the files, in terminal, type:
svn checkout http://open-sapi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/open-sapi
At this point, files will be downloaded and setup in the open-sapi directory. If you are not using Ubuntu or a Debian based distribution, you can install manually with the instructions from the Open-Sapi Wiki.
For Ubuntu or Debian users, type:
cd open-sapi/installer
chmod 700 osapi.run
./osapi.run
When it finishes, you will have open-sapi installed. Now games that use sapi will work, for the most part. You can also use Open-sapi with Orca through speech-dispatcher. For more information, refer to the Open-sapi project.

Installing A Game

For this example, you will need the Solitaire game from Gmagames. Click the games link, and find the "free games" link. Download the solitaire game. It will save to your desktop. When it has finished, select it and press shift-f10 and select open with wine windows program loader. Wait a few seconds then press alt-tab until you here "setup inaccessible". Orca, of course, does not work with Wine, so the installer is completely inaccessible. You have to know what key combination to press. In this case, press the following with a few seconds between each keypress to make sure the action has completed:
alt-y
alt-n
alt-y
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-n
alt-i
Wait about 10 seconds, then finish with alt-f.
When you arrow around on the Desktop, you should find 2 shortcuts. one will be "GMA Solitaire.lnk" you can delete this shortcut. The other one is the one you will need. Press enter on it. You will get a warning about untrusted application. Tab to the mark as trusted button and press enter. Now, the next time you press enter on the desktop shortcut the game will launch and will be self-voicing.

Getting Help

To access the help file, open applications, wine, program files, GMA Solitaire, read manual in text format. This will open the manual in Notepad. Orca will not read in notepad, but this isn’t really a problem. Just press control+a to select all, control+c to copy, then open text editor and paste with control+v. Now you can read the file with Orca.
Have fun, and keep checking back for more game installation instructions and reviews.

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Tags: accessible games, games in wine, installing accessible games in wine, open-sapi
Posted in Gaming, Linux, Ubuntu | 3 Comments »

Accessible Games for Linux

Friday, March 13th, 2009

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If you ever happen to have some of that mythical stuff known as spare time, you may be wondering if there are any accessible games for Linux. The answer is, there are several of them. There are a couple of MUD clients that work well with Orca. Gnome-mud and tintin++ are both very accessible. to get them, simply type:
sudo apt-get install tintin++
and/or:
sudo apt-get install gnome-mud
in a terminal. Tintin++ is a terminal based client, so you can also use it with speakup if you have it installed. It is also a very powerful client with aliases, speed walking, triggers, scripting, and a lot more features.
There is also a package called bsdgames you can install that has text based games. The games include go-fish, adventure, and wumpus. To get it, type:
sudo apt-get install bsdgames
in a terminal.
there are two more games that are accessible. They require a bit more effort to install though. The first is called AudioQuake. It is located at http://www.agrip.org.uk/download/. I got the Linux/x86 installer (3.2M) file. It is a script that will install everything for you, well, almost everything. To get it up and running, open a terminal and switch to the directory where the file was downloaded, usually Desktop. make sure the file has permission to run with the following command:
chmod 700 AudioQuake-0.3.0.1_linux-x86.run
then execute it with:
./AudioQuake-0.3.0.1_linux-x86.run
It will guide you through the installation of both Quake and AudioQuake. When it is finished, you still need to install a couple of things before you can play. To get the packages you need, type:
sudo apt-get install eflite libconfig-tiny-perl
Once that is done you can play the game by doing the following. in your home directory, type:
cd .zquake
At this point it is a good idea to turn off Orca because from my experience the game will not run if Orca is open. Then, type:
./start.pl
From this point on the game should be totally self-voicing.
The next game is called SoundRTS. It is a favourite. You can get it at http://jlpo.free.fr/soundrts/py25/. Unzip it in your home directory or on your Desktop, it doesn’t matter which. Before playing it you will need to install python2.5 and python-pygame. So, in terminal, type:
sudo apt-get install python2.5 python-pygame
then, to launch it, change to the soundrts directory:
cd soundrts
and launch with:
python2.5 soundrts.pyc
In Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid and later Python 2.5 is no longer available. You can still play SoundRTS by downloading a patch from http://jlpo.free.fr/tmp/soundrts1.0.1-python2.6.zip. Unzip the patch and move all of the contents from inside the folder to your soundrts folder. If you are asked if you would like to replace files select replace all. SoundRTS should now work just by switching to the soundrts folder and typing:
python soundrts.pyc
The patch makes the latest version of SoundRTS work. You can get the latest version from http://jlpo.free.fr/soundrts/soundrts-1.0.1-en.zip
If you would like to add a launcher to your desktop, you can do so with the following script. Open your favourite text editor and copy the following lines:
#!/bin/bash
cd
cd soundrts
python2.5 soundrts.pyc
exit 0
Save the file as ./soundrts.sh in your home directory. If you put your soundrts directory somewhere else other than your home folder, be sure you change the path in the script to match the location. For example, if your folder is on your desktop, it would be:
cd Desktop/soundrts
Make the script executable with the command:
chmod 700 .soundrts.sh
Then, on your desktop, press control+f10 and choose create launcher. In the name, type SoundRTS then press tab to get to the command field. In the command box type:
./.soundrts.sh
Tab to the OK button and press enter. You can now start the game by pressing enter on the SoundRTS launcher on your desktop.
If you used the patch you need to replace python2.5 with python. The game is completely self-voicing. You do not need to turn off Orca before starting this one, it works fine even if Orca is running.
Have fun, I will add more game info as I get it.