You might want to install the msdos-utils package.įormatting from Linux caused me a bit of confusion and manpage digging as it is a two-step process. This allows me to read the 3 kinds of disks that I suspect I have in my collection. The automatically (on my Arch dist anyway) /dev/fd0 is a block device with major, minor numbers 2 and 0 (Floppy disk on controller 0, autodetect format), however, according to devices.txt that comes with your Linux kernel, you will find that for reading 360KiB disks in a 1200KiB drive, you need a device node with major, minors of 2 and 20 instead. The drive I have is a 5.25" model which takes 1200 KiB 80 track disks, however, the disks I need to feed the IBM are 360 KiB with 40 tracks, of cause the drive hardware has no trouble with this, as soon as Linux understand which drive and disk it is dealing with, this is where the special device nodes comes in. Luckily, it seems Linux is still well-versed in the dark incantations needed for communications with these old floppy-drives.Īfter a visit to IRC I discovered that one had to make special device-nodes to make non-(3.5" 1.44 MiB)standard drives function properly on Linux However, having lost those floppies, I only had these game on my fileserver, and not on any floppies, so I decided to set out to get them transferred to the machine. I wanted to play some of the games I had played on my first computer, Alley Cat, Pac-Man and Sopwith. I have a large collection of floppies, though some are of cause corrupted by wear and tear and time itself, but surprisingly many of them seem to stand the tests of time quite well.
I was having some fun with one of my older machines, an IBM Portable 5155 XT.
Amongst input files were FLAC, Mp3, Ogg and video-files in avi and mp4 containers. I came up with this when assembling a playlist for my phone, not needing (or wanting to waste space on) super high quality, or music videoes.
Your files end up in the "out" directory. The -map_metadata 0 attempts to take the first chunk of metadata from the original file, and save its fields in the newly encoded mp3 file, milage may vary, it worked in most of my files. Notice the -vn option, which, in case it's video, greatly speeds up encoding by ignoring the video part of the input file. This loops through all files, cuts off their extention, and trancodes them to variable bitrate between 190-250 Kbit/s ( )
Maybe it's a playlist for a mobile device? Who knows.īut when things like that happen, and you have a directory full of files, here's what you do:
Sometimes though, you have an SD card that's too small, or a device with limited output quality, or decoding resources, and what you want is Mp3 in a space-saving, but still nice-enough sounding Variable Bit Rate (VBR). Some times FLAC is nice, sometimes MP4 videos are neat. I made a little video, showing the complete build and installation process, and my fancy new transitions too. Without further ado: The Wizznic-git AUR package! And I believe that if you like to be updated, then my package is for you: I really do try my best never to push breaking code (jenkins will at least scream at me for making uncompiling code). I have also converted from a Dark and Damp Debian Zealot (DDDZ) to a Happy and Fluffy Arch Linux User (HFALU), and was surprised at how nice the AUR is, some awesome person out there already made an AUR package for Wizznic! (Check that out, here), however, I pondered, and decided to make another package aswell, not as a replacement for the existing one, but an alternative, see, the package I made, is not a stable, or officially "released" wizznic, it is instead, the latest and greatest code, directly from github. While collecting energypoints for the big endeavor of creating more real game content, I decided to implement some transitions into Wizznic, I think they turned out rather nice for a first try. So, I've been busy with real life, and being sick.īut yesterday I did manage to squeeze a few lines of code into Wizznic! :)