I’ve been on the lookout for a server case for the MiniITX motherboard a few months but nothing of a suitable size came up, we happened to visit Ikea to pick up some stuff for the living room and I found a box that would do as a case!
I’ve not taken any pictures of the build as it’s just me drilling and sawing but it’s all finished and so here are the pics of the finished item…
Ok so i had this crazy idea to make a MAME based arcade machine years ago and as it turned out a million other people had the same thought. Unfortunately I just don’t have the space in our current home but the next house will have such a machine built for it!
The recent release of Soul Calibur 4 (and the ever nearing release of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo High Definition Remix - to use it’s full title) reminded me of this desire to build my own arcade machine. So as I can’t make a full size unit i decided the next best thing would be to be able to play these games on the PS3 with proper arcade controls, the way they were meant to be played!
As before it turns out a zillion other people have had the same idea, which is handy really as it means someone else has already solved a few major problems for me - such as how to wire a Playstation 3 controller to use other buttons. I intend to update the blog as the build progresses so that I can keep a record of what not to do when I build the full arcade machine 
With Soul Calibur 4, Street Fighter 4 and Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD on their way I intend to build an arcade style joystick for my PS3 using real Japanese arcade parts.
There’s some great web pages describing pretty much everything you could want to know and more! I’ve also found a couple of shops to buy the parts from (here and here).
I’ve picked up some MDF and perspex today, more coming as it happens…
P.S. If anyone spots any funky arcade/anime graphics i could put as a backing on the controller link me up!
I’ve moved sofaracing.com from the current hosting onto my sofaracing.co.uk hosting. The thing was a bit of a mess and because of which I didn’t want to move various bits accross but I did have a pretty old (and ugly - thanks Tiki) wiki which I wanted to keep the content. As with most things a bit of google-ing revealed a useful solution… A nice bit of open source software called HTTrack will make a complete local copy of any given webpage.
After a completely accidental early morning ordering on Monday at 8:07am I’ve got a shiney new 16Gb iPhone in my hands! I indend to post up hacks and cool things as i find them, one such thing is that you can use the iPhone to remote control iTunes (really will have to get an Airport Express in the house!).
As I have a rather large amount of webspace I decided it would be a good idea to backup the subversion repository to it. This provides good redundancy for a SVN/computer problem!
To achieve this i created the following script for my Debian server:
#!/bin/sh
#
# Description:SVN backup script
#
# The DATE-parameter tells date in format YYYY.MM.DD.
DATE=`date +20%y.%m.%d`# The TIME-parameter tells time in format HHMMSS.
TIME=`date +%H%M%S`# The BACKUPDIR-parameter specifices where we want to save our backups
BACKUPDIR=/backup_directory# REPOS SVN
REPOS=/Repository_location
REPOS_OUTPUT=output_name_”$DATE”_”$TIME”svnadmin dump $REPOS > $BACKUPDIR/$REPOS_OUTPUT.dump
tar cvzf $BACKUPDIR/$REPOS_OUTPUT.tgz $BACKUPDIR/$REPOS_OUTPUT.dumpHOST=’ftp.address.co.uk’
USER=username
PASSWD=passwordFILE=$REPOS_OUTPUT.tgz
cd $BACKUPDIR
echo pwd
ftp -n -v $HOST << EOT
user $USER $PASSWD
put $FILE
quit
EOTrm $BACKUPDIR/$REPOS_OUTPUT.tgz
rm $BACKUPDIR/$REPOS_OUTPUT.dumpexit 0
The ANTCommandos PS2 to PS3 adapter I ordered a few days ago turned up while I was away on holiday. Did a quick test with it tonight with Guitar Hero 3 on the PS3… So far it works pretty much perfectly, there’s only two minor negative points:
1. The tilt needs an extra second or two to activate Star Power, the manual puts this down to a different type of sensor used in the old PS2 guitars (mechanical instead of accelerometer).
2. Holding down Start and Select on the guitar brings up the PS menu, this in itself isn’t a problem, in fact it would be a really handy feature except that you have no way of selecting left or right (up and down is done by strumming). E.g. if you go to “Quit game” when it asks “Are you sure?” you cannot select “Yes”.
Like I said these are really minor points and as this is just going to be used as a second player guitar there’s not really any issue.
As I don’t have Rock Band (yet) I can’t test that but it looks like it should work perfectly.
I’ve been trying some various Torrent clients on the headless server.
TorrentFlux is one I used a while ago and is pretty decent, easy install but lacks a lot of configuration and attempting to schedule the downloads is an utter swine. It also doesn’t appear to be particularly active at the moment - the forum was down when I tried to access it, I had to post on the blog to get them to fix it.
TorrentFlux B4RT seems to be where all the TF users have gone. It’s still in beta so the documentation leaves a LOT to be desired and the install is a lengthy pain in the arse. But it’s all up and running at the moment, it’s got a fair few improvements over vanilla TorrentFlux (including automatic RSS downloading) but still has some of the same limitations as TF for scheduling download periods (though you dont have to do quite as much hacking it still doesn’t respect the queuing system on resume - so if you had 20 torrents queued they will all start when the timer goes off).
Azureus - I plan to have a go at getting this to run headless (it has a very fancy looking web interface) but it is written in Java so will probably be a fair bit more memory hungry than the other two above… Still, if it’s scheduling works properly it could be the way forward.
Clutch is the other client I’m intending to have a go with, again it’s light weight but is just the basics, no RSS downloading or fancy things like that.
First things first you need apache2 and PHP.
Annoyingly when you first try “apt-get install apache2″ Debian will ask you for the CD! Having already removed the CD-ROM this was a potential issue 
All you need to do is remove the CD from the source list, open the list in an editor using “nano /etc/apt/sources.list” and comment out the line with the CD on.
Now apache can be installed from the web sources. When done going to http://server-ip should show you a working apache page.
Install PHP5 and PHP apache support using the following command “apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-curl php5-gd“. When done restart apache “/etc/init.d/apache2 restart“.
I used bits from this guide and this guide to install SVN and WebSVN. Also if, like me, you need to import an existing repository follow this guide.