PIM, the Final Chapter We left off last month with no definitive resolution to getting Google Provider, Lightning, and Thunderbird working to allow calendar access through mobile phone, tablet, or other devices. I'm still running Ubuntu 16.10 on an old laptop, and can't readily upgrade, so I can only run older versions of the PIM software. Fortunately, friend of Everyday Ubuntu and Full Circle Q&A columnist (amongst many other things) Erik the Unready did some testing on his own rig and confirms that the procedure laid out before should work fine as long as you aren’t running a steam-powered version of Ubuntu like I am. Hat tip to Erik – thanks for the input and testing! I do intend to upgrade to Ubuntu 20 soon at which point we’ll probably revisit PIM usage. This month, let’s shift gears to something fun, as we revisit console retrogaming in the context of a great console of the 90’s, the Turbografx 16. As we all contend with the global pandemic of Covid-19, there are small ripples in our lives in addition to all the major ones. One of those small ripples has to do with the delayed release of the Turbografx 16 mini console. Admittedly FAR less important than the many lost lives and losses of livelihood, this has been a minor disappointment to console gaming fans. The Turbografx 16 mini was originally scheduled to ship in April, but its US release has been pushed back to at least December. But what is the Turbografx 16? Glad you asked.

Le dernier chapitre sur la gestion des informations personnelles (PIM)

Nous nous somme quittés le mois dernier sans solution définitive au problème de faire fonctionner ensemble Google Provider, Lightning et Thunderbird pour permettre l'accès au calendrier par phone, tablette ou autres dispositifs. Je fais toujours tourner Ubuntu 16.10 sur un vieux portable et ce n'est pas simple de faire une mise à niveau ; ainsi, je ne peux exécuter que d'anciennes versions des logiciels PIM. Heureusement, l'ami d'Ubuntu au quotidien et chroniqueur de Q. ET R. au FullCircle (parmi beaucoup d'autres choses, Erik the Unready a fait des tests sur sa propre machine et a pu confirmer que la procédure donnée dans les autres articles sevrait très bien fonctionner du moment que vous ne faites pas tourner une très ancienne version d'Ubuntu comme moi. Chapeau à Eric - merci pour tout ce que tu as fait pour moi !

J'ai quand même l'intention de mettre à niveau vers Ubuntu 20 bientôt et, après, on va sans doute revisiter l'usage des PIM. Ce mois-ci, passons à quelque chose de plus amusant, en revisitant les consoles des jeux rétro ; dans ce cas, nous allons voir une console géniale des années 1990, la Turbografx 16.

Pendant que nous luttons tous contre la pandémique globale du Covid-19, outre les vagues importantes, il y a des petites vaguelettes dans nos vies. L'une de ces petites vaguelettes a trait à la sortie retardée de la mini console Turbografx 16. Certes, BIEN moins importante que les très nombreuses vies perdues et les pertes des boulots, cela est une déception mineure pour les enthousiastes des jeux de console. La mini Turbografx 16 devrait être livrée en avril, mais sa sortie aux États-Unis a été remis à décembre, au moins. Mais qu'est-ce que le Turbografx 16 ? Merci pour la question.

In the mid 1980’s, the two major gaming consoles on the market were the Sega Master System and the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Nintendo, or NES, was far and away the more successful of the two (partly due to unfair trade practices that they later lost a court case over), but the Sega, or SMS, certainly had its devotees, and some really nice games. The SMS had very little by way of third party support (mostly because of the aforementioned unfair trade practices of Nintendo), but Sega was a major manufacturer of arcade titles and ported several popular arcade games to the SMS, like Space Harrier, SubRoc 3D, Outrun, and Shinobi. Nintendo, of course, had Super Mario Brothers and an enormous portfolio of both arcade titles and original creations like Legend of Zelda. The SMS and NES had some very high quality games, but they still operated with the limitation of having 8-bit processors at their hearts. Soon, the two companies would release the Genesis and Super Nintendo, respectively, ushering in the era of 16-bit gaming consoles. Games on those two platforms would be a great deal more sophisticated than their earlier 8-bit brethren and would usher in a new era of home console gaming. You could play games at home that were the equal of many contemporary arcade games, and some that were actually better, especially when it came to more in-depth gaming genres like real time strategy or role-playing games that were not at all practical in the video arcades.

But there was a ‘missing link’ between the SMS/NES and Genesis/Super Nintendo consoles: the Turbografx 16. Released in the US in late 1989, the TG16 still had an 8-bit processor as its CPU, BUT it had a 16-bit graphics processor (hence the console’s name). NEC, the manufacturer, somewhat disingenuously touted it as a 16-bit system, but what was not disingenuous was the game quality made possible by the more advanced graphics processor (a HuC6270, for the record). Sega, oddly, licensed several of their arcade titles to the TG16, despite the fact that it was a direct competitor to Sega’s own consoles. The TG16 never made much by way of inroads in the US market, having only 139 titles released, but it was FAR more popular in Japan, with 547 games coming out for it, in addition to the 139 American titles. The quality of games on the TG16 was quite good, and a very noticeable step up from its 8-bit predecessors. I had one back in the day (still do, actually), and I thought it was fantastic. In addition, there was a handheld version called the TurboExpress, which I also have. In the case of Sega or Nintendo, their handheld versions used different physical cartridges. The Sega Game Gear did have an adapter add-on that could be used to play Sega Master System Games, but it did not play them out of the box. The Nintendo Game Boy didn’t even have that (in addition to the original having only a monochrome LCD screen).

Unlike the SMS and NES, the TG16 used a card, not a cartridge. The HuCards, as they were called, were the size of a credit card, although a bit thicker. The Turbo Express handheld used the EXACT same HuCards, which also meant that you bought any specific game only ONCE, to use on your home console and on your handheld. Pretty cool! I would rate the TG16 as definitely quite competitive with the later Genesis and Super Nintendo consoles, and its game library is really impressive when you include the Japanese releases. So, as an old-school TG16 owner, I was looking forward to probably getting the mini console, even though I have the original. My original console is, unfortunately, not currently accessible, as it is in storage and highly inconvenient to try and get to. The mini comes with about 50 titles built in, including many Japanese titles that never saw an American release, and it works with modern TV’s. To me, the titles I don’t have, and the convenience, made it an appealing prospective purchase. But, again, the global pandemic has pushed back its release date from the original planned month of April to December. I can’t wait that long to get my Alien Crush fix!

Mednafen But, never fear! Linux to the rescue yet again! There is an emulator for the TG16 on the Linux platform, called mednafen. If you hark back to the retrogaming column in Everyday Ubuntu for Full Circle issue #141 (page 35), you’ll see something similar for the Sega Genesis, an emulator called dgen. Dgen and mednafen are command-line programs, so they have no graphical interface. This is really a pretty minor issue, as command-line programs are perfectly simple to execute in Linux. Installation First, let’s install mednafen. It’s a pretty simple install that can be done most easily and conveniently via the command-line tool: apt-get. Apt-get is the command-line tool used by Debian-based Linux distributions (of which Ubuntu is one) for the installation and updates of software packages, and of Linux itself. To get to the command-line, click on the Dash, the Ubuntu symbol icon in the upper left of your screen on the Launcher control strip. Type in ‘term’ (without the quotes), and that should be sufficient to bring up Terminal in your list of programs. Alternatively, the Launcher will usually have a terminal icon already set up, in this case, just below the Dash’s icon.

In the terminal, type: sudo apt-get install mednafen and hit <Enter>. The ‘sudo’ part of the command indicates to Linux that you want to run the ensuing command as an administrator, or super-user (sudo is short for ‘super-user do’), a necessity for installing software on a Linux system. It's one of the reasons virus attacks are far less common on Linux than on Windows, as a virus can’t really execute a sudo instruction. Respond to any prompts that the installation process generates, and you now have mednafen installed on your system. However, it has no graphical user interface and doesn’t show up in the Dash, so how are we going to run it? Running Mednafen from the Command-Line Well, in order to run anything on mednafen, we’ll first need to have a ROM set. ROM sets are digitized ‘dumps’ of the contents of cartridges or CD-ROM’s. Quick side note – the TG16 was the very first home console to have a CD-ROM attachment, and there are some games for the TG16 that really make good use of that technology and the storage space it made available. I don’t even remember which TG16 HuCards I had for sure, although I know I had the pack-in of ‘Keith Courage in Alpha Zones’, along with ‘Alien Crush’, which I played an awful lot.

‘Alien Crush’ was a fantastic video pinball game inspired by H. R. Giger’s designs for the ‘Alien’ movie franchise. The targets are mostly animated alien creatures that you have to hit with the ‘ball’. I’m going to go find a copy of the ROM file for that game, since I do own it and should therefore be able to legally play it in an emulator. This is, of course, only my non-law decreed opinion and should not be taken as professional legal advice. ROM’s are pretty easy to find via a Google search, so I readily found a ZIP file with the ROM dump for Alien Crush. For simplicity’s sake, I downloaded it to my local hard drive, changing the name to ‘AlienCrush.zip’ in the process. I’ve saved it to a ‘ROMs’ folder I created under the folder ‘TG16’ in my Home directory. Fortunately, mednafen reads ZIP files, so there’s no need to unzip them. Now, in order to run Alien Crush, I’m going to once again launch a Terminal session. It should default to the Home directory, which you can see by the prompt displaying a ~ character before the $ prompt. ~ is Linux shorthand for Home, which can come in very handy when navigating at a command-line. Type in cd TG16/ROMs then hit <Enter> always keeping in mind that folder structures and names are case-sensitive. This will change us to the TG16 ROMs folder. Type in mednafen AlienCrush.zip and hit <Enter> again, and we can now crush the invading aliens with our mad pinball skillz!

Controls and Keymapping

Controls depend on the numeric keypad for the fire buttons (K and L), and use the A, W, S, and D keys for Left, Up, Down, and Right, respectively. Game start is <Enter>. A more full description of the key mapping can be found at https://mednafen.github.io/documentation/. For Alien Crush or its cousin Devil’s Crush, <Enter> launches the ball, <A> is the left flipper, and <L> is the right flipper.