in svn settings_apply() is called whenever a config is loaded (after boot) regardless of what is in the file. even an empty one will cause a full settings_apply() (which is slow, causes disk access and will stop music thanks to the buflib users).

This patch will apply settings individually if they have a callback registered, and if no settings without a callback are applied it doesnt bother calling settings_apply().

Android:
The Notification bar which use "Remoteviews" may be not suitable for some ICS Roms (see Attachment).
So I change the Remoteviews to "Notification.setLatestEventInfo" to display the track information.

The patch may have some offsets.

This patch implements a menu function to the playlist viewer's contextual menu that moves the selected track after the current playing track. It is especially useful as a simple queuing method.

I have tried to properly handle the situation in which the current playing track is the last in the playlist, but since I don't know exactly how (when) the playlist indexes are updated I wasn't able to do much in that respect, any help is very welcomed.

Since this patch adds the LANG_MOVE_AFTER_CURRENT string, I have also attached a diff with updates to the English and the Romanian translation file.

This patch changes some of the settings of the AS3515 to highest audio quality, similar to  FS#11304  but for AMSv1.

AUDIOSET2_IBR_DAC_50 → AUDIOSET2_IBR_DAC_0

0% reduction (instead of 50%) of DAC bias. This will probably increase power consumption.

Not set AUDIOSET3_IBR_HPH.

Increases HP amp bias. Recommended by the data sheet for 16Ohm loads (and will probably reduce THD).

Would be great if these settings could be changed during audio playback to listen for any actual changes in quality :)

Hi,

I’m experiencing an issue with WMA Pro playback on my Clip Zip.

I’ve got the lastest stable build of Rockbox 3.13. Files were encoded with dbpoweramp.

Some files playback normally, but majority of tracks skips. Always at the same point if not forwarding or rewinding.

Here’s a sample. The track skips at 2.15.

Build 575bd89 2016-12-19

Playing the attached zero-duration WMA '_ length 0.0s WMA.wma' causes crash:

Divide by zero at 6008D274
pc:6008D2&4 sp:600CC7DC
bt end

This WMA file was created by Goldwave and plays without crash in Windows Media Player, GoldWave and MediaMonkey.

Zero-length WAV and MP3 files (examples attached) don't cause a crash.

On the latest development iPod Video and ZEN simulators, MP3 and WAV are reported 'failed' and WMA crashes http://i.imgur.com/k3dKaSN.png http://i.imgur.com/CiYnVuH.png

This font is part of the WenQuanYi Project at [1]. It’s in Chinese, but there’s an english page at [2].

I’m adding this font because:
1. Currently there is no good Chinese font for Rockbox.
2. The best Chinese font (unifont) has unevenly sized Chinese characters, while this font has uniformly sized Chinese characters.

The attachments contain screenshots of the simulator, to show how this font would look like on the iPod Nano. I’ve also attached a screenshot using the Unifont font to show the uneven sizes of Chinese characters, for comparison. I don’t know about other languages, but I’d think other CJK languages work better in this font as well, due to the merging of WenQuanYi Bitmap Song.

According to the project[3], this font is made by combining the GNU Unifont (GPL), WenQuanYi Bitmap Song (GPL) and Fixed-16×8 (Public Domain) fonts. The maintainer of GNU Unifont also acknowledges this fact at [4].

This font is licensed under the GPLv2 with a font embedding exception[3]:

[quote]
** GPL v2 license with font embedding exception:

As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this
font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into
the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting
document to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This
exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the
document might be covered by the GNU General Public License. If you
modify this font, you may extend this exception to your version of
the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to
do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
[/quote]

I don’t mind either way, but it would be up to Rockbox developers whether to strip off this exception. And either way, the font is compatible with Rockbox’s license (GPLv2).

The font I’m attaching is a modified version (and only the bdf); you can download the original version from [5]. My modification is:

— wqy-unibit.bdf.orig 2008-06-01 04:47:36.839752214 +0800
+++ wqy-unibit.bdf 2008-06-01 05:01:51.031748178 +0800
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@
CHARSET_ENCODING “-1” CHARSET_COLLECTIONS “ASCII ISO8859-5 GB2312.1980 BIG5-0 KSC5601.1989-0 JISX0208.1997 ISO10646-1” ENDPROPERTIES
-CHARS 46443
+CHARS 46444
STARTCHAR uni0000
ENCODING 0
SWIDTH 500 0

This is because convbdf will emit a warning “Warning: DWIDTH spec > max FONTBOUNDINGBOX” when converting the font. This is because there are actually 46444 STARTCHAR entries, but only 46443 glyphs – the character “mu” is encoded as 181 and 956, with the exact same glyph. The generated .fnt file is exactly the same with or without my modification.

Additionally, this font is quite big so it’s a bit big on the screen of the iPod Nano. But it would be great on larger screens. Please take a look at the screenshots in the attachments.

Links:
[1] http://www.wenq.org/ [2] http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/enindex.cgi [3] http://www.wenq.org/index.cgi?Unibit_README [4] http://www.unifoundry.com/unifont.html [5] http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wqy/wqy-unibit-bdf-1.1.0-1.tar.gz?use_mirror=osdn

I put up the three patches (before they expire on pastebin.com) that correspond to the three proposals of how the behaviour of PREV/NEXT could/should be changed. Note that only the situation described in the “subject” of this task is considered and changed.

The IRC discussion is at http://www.rockbox.org/irc/log-20090406#21:35:42

The start of the discussion on the mail list is at http://www.rockbox.org/mail/archive/rockbox-dev-archive-2009-04/0057.shtml

“First Keypress Enables Backlight Only” doesn’t work on the 5G iPod. For example, if that’s enabled, the backlight is off and I press next track while at the WPS, Rockbox will go to the next track.

It seems like clickwheel event(s) generated when I touch the wheel turn on the backlight. When the button is pressed, the backlight is already considered to be on and the button press performs its usual action. If I carefully hold my finger still on the clickwheel, let the backlight fade, and then carefully press a button without moving my finger on the clickwheel, I am able to turn on the backlight without causing anything else to happen.

I don’t know what to do about this. Requiring a physical button press might be annoying. Removing this option on affected targets might be okay, because it’s easy to turn on the backlight by touching the clickwheel (and that doesn’t seem to cause anything else to happen). Another possibility is to require more or specific wheel events.

I set player type to iPod 5G because that’s all I have, but I expect this problem also exists on other clickwheel iPods. This problem exists on r20079 and r20033.

This patch allows the line out on the Sansa Fuze V2 to be enable/disabled by means of the existing Lineout poweroff setting (previously used on some iPods).

By assigning this setting to the quickscreen I can switch between headphones and lineout after plugging into the dock. Still no luck in finding out how to autodetect the dock.

I'm not 100% sure that re-using the "Lineout Poweroff" setting is the right thing to do here as it's not powering on/off the line-out - just switching between headphones and line out

The scrollpad on the H10 (20gb, not sure about 5/10gb) has always bothered me with being jumpy, inaccurate, and unintuitive. At the moment (in rockbox) it seems as though it is working as a simple two button device (up/down), with no real dragging capabilities. I am wondering if this is a limitation of the hardware or current software implementation.

The original firmware seemed to work as follows:
split slider into upper and lower field. Tapping in either upper or lower half would create click-type event for up/down. Dragging in upper half would produce scroll up, draggin in lower half would produce scroll down events. The problem was that upper and lower halves are really kinda arbitrary and not easily distinguishable.

What I think would work nicely:
Tapping top and bottom, as before. Remove upper and lower restrictions for dragging, i.e. if dragging down (anywhere on the scrollpad) create scroll down event, if dragging up (again, anywhere) create scroll up event. Drag and hold will scroll in desired direction proportional to the drag speed (as in pushing a puck on ice). Hold (just hold, no tap or drag) on the touchpad creates a sliding value that can be used as a coordinate for different types of continuous input.

To implement this, we’d need some kind of knowledge about what signals the actual hardware provides, what resolution the pad has, i.e. what the physical and logical implementations of the device are. I am not sure how the Ipod scrollwheel works, but it seems that some of that code could be re-purposed, maybe?

I have been using Rockbox for almost 2 years now on my X5L together with the remote and I have frequently updated to the current version, so I am familiar with how it works.

I have noticed that after updating to version 20090221, my X5’s remote’s LCD behaves erratically (strange lines being displayed all over, vertically shaky image) right after booting Rockbox, then the display turns off completely after a few seconds. Strangely though, the controls still work and the blue display light comes on when working the controls, but the display is turned off (there is nothing being displayed, as if the player were turned off). If I unplug and reconnect the remote, the remote’s LCD comes on, but soon turns off again. The X5’s main LCD is working just fine.

I thought that my remote was dying on me, but decided to check if it was somehow related to the development of Rockbox. I reverted back one build after another and found that the last build that works OK for my remote is 20090210. So, in all the builds starting with 20090211 (I have thoroughly checked all from 20090211 to 20090225), the remote is practically unusable. I looked at the changes done on that day (http://www.rockbox.org/daily/changelogs/changes-20090211.html), but could not single out the probable cause.

Great software, anyway!

I've found a problem with the new autoresume feature in 3.8. I use it when listening to podcasts and sometimes find that it resumes from near the end of a new episode - e.g. on a 30 minute podcast it will resume from 28 or 29 minutes - usually about the place where a previous epidsode finished and I skipped past the end credits.

What I think is happening is that there is some code in the database that tries to resurrect the runtime statistics for files that have been deleted and then restored - as the last offset is in this data, it is reusing the last offset from an old episode.

I've put some more logf()s in tagcache.c in build_numeric_indices(). I can see that if the filenames don't match (line 2306) it then tries to match any 2 tags out of the 3: artist, album or title. For the podcasts, the artist and album are always the same (i.e. the producer and which one of their podcasts it is), but the title is different (i.e. "Episode 100", "Episode 101", etc). So if I've listened to Episode 100 and then deleted the file, and then add Episode 102 to the player, it matches the artist and album and so resurrects the wrong data from Episode 100.

I've disabled the resurrection based on tags (just commented it out) and the problem seems to have gone away. A better fix would be to ensure that all 3 tags or matched or to ensure that title is one of the matched tags

Using a bootloader from  FS#9955 , a USB connection is not made if Start Screen is set to WPS, and the user boots Rockbox by inserting a USB cable.

This is possibly also true for other values of Start Screen.

Tested on e280, but I expect it’ll likely be the case on other PP targets with USB

Various users on IRC recently reported cases of filesystem corruption. I have seen them as well, especially when using USB mode (I'm using a Sansa ClipV2, USB-enabled through  FS#11664 ).

One strangeness I've experienced is that when my system has detected filesystem corruption, it is often enough to remove the player from USB and then replug it, without repairing the filesystem and without rebooting Rockbox; on the next USB mount, the filesystem is clean. This might indicate that some buffer is flushed too late for the USB host to see.

[EDIT: Removed previously attached patch, which is now tracked separately as FS#11883.]

Both issues seem to appear with any version of my theme and with any build.
Let's try it with the latest version 1.30 of my theme (in attachment but also here: http://themes.rockbox.org/index.php?themeid=1585 ) and a recent build (I use version: 0c4bd3a-120406)

-Theme loading

When you load the theme for the 1st time, the WPS will never load properly (failsafe). The workaround is to turn off the device and turn it on again and then the WPS will always load properly until you reload the theme for some reasons (trying another theme and revert back to mine etc).
I tried both with the full theme version and this "light" version of WPS: http://pastie.org/3747546

-USB connection (tested on Windows 7, with or without a microSD, and there isn't such an issue with the other themes)

If I plug the USB cable while the player is on or off, it will almost never mount properly.
Usually the USB screen appears on my SBS, the computer recognizes a USB device is connected but either nothing appears in "my computer" or the device appears but is not accessible. When I unplug the USB cable, the Zip gets stuck on the USB screen and only reset can turn it off.
Sometimes it even displays some erros like that when plugging the USB cable: "data abort at 30FSR 0x8 (domain 0, fault address 0x964176 bt pc: 0x3006AC3 bt end" , sometimes it doesn't display the USB on SBS but gets stuck on the main menu.
And rarely in the same conditions it also mounts properly…

Like for WPS, I made a "light" version of SBS without the status bar and that way the Zip seems to mount and unmout properly every time!
http://pastie.org/private/cauhxelaip7hrpqpcwdbxw So maybe a tag in the status bar causes the issue with USB connection?

Rockbox WebOS app.

Built on r31467, 32/64-bit Ubuntu 11.10, running on a 32GB Touchpad

Directions (only tested on the above):

* Install WebOS PDK: https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/develop/sdk_pdk_download.html

* Install platform-native libsdl-dev if you haven't already. Only needed to pass configuration check as the PDK doesn't properly install staging sdl-config for some reason.

* Apply patch (patch -p0 < filename.patch)

* cd webos

* ../tools/configure, select WebOS target (206)

* make && make install && sh ./buildpkg.sh

Notes:

* This is one big hack – I fudged just about everything in /firmware (how the target system works is still not altogether clear to me) and piggybacked a lot of this off of the SDL target. Mostly in the interest of getting it to run without adding ifdefs all over the place. Obviously we'll want to be more methodical and thorough about exactly which changes need to go where moving forward.

* The Touchpad's SDL video implementation appears to adjust orientation and scale output to fit within 1024x768 as best as possible. This means that a 800x480 build will appear in landscape mode, letterboxed, while a 320x480 will appear in portrait mode, pillarboxed. The device itself automatically orients to landscape – meaning, if you're in a portrait resolution and then you exit, everything will initially be sideways – but that doesn't affect input. Scaling routines are noticeably slow.

* I tried building this as a hybrid Enyo/PDK (window mgr friendly) app but had some problems with the native part failing to execute at SDL_Init. So for now no backgrounding or notification bar.

* Make scripts use the ARM compilers installed with the PDK. I'm wondering though if this is superfluous given that the Rockbox toolchain also supports ARM7. I did try exposing some of the ARM-specific assembly but the compilation failed with the PDK compiler.

800x480 build: http://www.jasonyu.net/webos/org.rockbox.raap_0.0.1_all.ipk

When recording, as file size reaches 25.2MB and again at 52.4MB respectively, disk thrashing noise drowns out the recording for about 2 minutes.
This occurs at about 27.5 minutes if recording as mp3.
And about 5.25 minutes if recording as wav.

I am assuming that Rockbox is filling a cache and then dumping the file to disk all at once.

I would expect it to write quietly. Even if it where to write on the fly, the noise would be reduced to short bursts. 2 minutes of interruption is just not acceptable. I missed out on important information during those 2 minute periods.

How can we eliminate write noise altogether? Or at least in the recording itself.

Select ‘FM Radio’ Choose your station.
Then from the menu select ‘Recording’ Press ‘play’ or ‘Rec’ to begin recording.
Wait for file size to reach about 28MB. Then stop.

I can also provide recordings if necessary.

*note: I also had the USB cord attached to give better FM reception.
tested on e260 & e280
Rockbox Version: r15988-080102

Thanks

This patch adds a frequency response graph below the equalizer's controls, making it an EQ that is actually "graphical".

I'm still not sure about the accuracy of the represented curve, in particular the Q factor on the peaking filters seems to have an effect opposite to the expected, though the equations are taken from the same "audio EQ cookbook" the equalizer is based on, any help is appreciated!

The user interface is still incomplete, I want to add proper tags on the axes and bars. I also thought about re-enabling the theme on this screen (why is it disabled?) and change the behavior of the "right" button, making it consistent with other menus.

Tested on a Sansa e200.

While the database initialisation is running, the tagcache queue can overflow due to system broadcast messages. This can be seen by running a simulator (it will crash with KERNEL_ASSERT after a while) or on a target by enabling KERNEL_OBJECT_CHECKS, then initialising the database and repeatedly connecting/disconnecting a charger.

The same problem may well happen with other queues (dircache, for example).

The patch adds two new WPS tags:

1. %Ln yields the number of the list item currently being drawn

2. The operator "/?" (which can be used in the %if tag) yields the string "div" if the first operant is divisible by the second and NULL otherwise.

With these two additions it should be possible to create themes where list items are coloured alternately (as an example).

The whole work has been done by gevaerts on 2011-09-12 (and all the credits also go to him), I only placed the patch to the patch tracker, changed the operator from "/" to "/?", and changed the function name from "skinlist_get_item" to "skinlist_get_item_number".

He posted the patch on the binpaste and it would be pity if it got lost.

The attached patch slightly modifies the keymap of the H300 non-LCD remote to allow access to the browser from the WPS (by use of LONG PLAY).

I know that it works ok from an H300 with a non-LCD remote, but I don’t know if I’ve broken the LCD remotes completely.

Please could users of both the H100 and H300 LCD remotes try this patch and tell me that the WPS context keymap is unaffected. For reference, you can see the intended mapping here: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/KeymapIriverHSeries

It would be useful to change the configure and voice.pl files in order to allow the user to choose also the Loquendo and ViaVoice TTS

I’d like to suggest the following new WPS feature(s):

1. A viewport can be assigned an image as a “backdrop”.

 a. A viewport may be assigned an image dynamically via the WPS tag "%VX<identifier>"
   (i.e. %VXa for image a, %VXZ for image Z, etc.)
  b. As a viewport is being processed and drawn, its backdrop would be drawn "first", followed by any other normal images/characters.

2. Viewport may define FF00FF as a background color, which would then be “transparent”. This would allow overlapping viewports.

3. Fonts drawn in a viewport with a backdrop would automatically be drawn with DRMODE_FG.

Notes on the attached patch file:
+ It was created from the SVN revision 18997 on Nov 3, 2008.
+ Although I stubbed in the new functions for all the LCD drivers, I’ve only flushed out the 16 bit driver so far.

Cheers!

This plugin searches in the .rockbox/rocks/apps/drumkit directory for .raw sound files, loads them into memory, and assigns the keys to play them, creating a drumkit /sample trigger / instrument out of the player. Currently only designed for the Sansa e200.

Room for improvement:

- Add keymaps for all
Allow multiple samples to be played at the same time (by using
Allow for a variety of sound file types to be
Find a better name

This patch adds a sector-based read/write cache between the storage and fat drivers.
It has a static pool of 64 sector buffers which can be locked by the file handling code to replace the sector buffers in the file and dir structs, and serve as cache as long as they aren’t used. It can also be used to enforce exclusive access to a sector.

If requested using the STORAGE_NEEDS_ALIGN define, all storage accesses will be aligned to cacheline boundaries.

Patch changes controls for Doom:

Forward: rec/up
Left/Right: scrollwheel (it needs a lot of scrolls for large turns, but hopefully it can be modified to work better in the future)
Back: down
Shoot/Enter (menu): select
Change weapon: left
Open: right
Esc: power

Some improvements for voicebox on windows. Mainly an option to voice file extensions. Not perfect yet. Instead of an option to voice file extensions there are two voice files options in the hta file. Anyone know what is wrong with this?
Thanks

Hi all.

I have found a funny thing, which should get fixed. In set_prescaled_volume there is this call:
audiohw_set_lineout_vol(tenthdb2master(0), tenthdb2master(0));

As far as I can see this call is not needed here. So this patch removes it, but as I own only a sansa e280 I can not test this change. I hope to commit this soon.

If this call is needed… do we need it every time audio changes or only once at init?

Thanks,
AustrianCOder

Hello World :)
Attached is a VBR WMA music file, which fails to play correctly on my “RockPod” iPod Nano.
The same file decodes perfectly using the latest ffmpeg build.
Therefore I can only assume there is something about this file which triggers a bug in the Rockbox-specific WMA decoder.
Also attached is a microphone recording of the sound which comes out of my iPod when Rockbox attempts to play the faulty WMA.

I have over 3000 WMA tracks, all encoded using an identical method, all of which will not play correctly in rock box, so if you would like any more examples, or information, please ask.

Thanks for all your help :)
(If there is any way I can help debug/update the code for the wma decoder, please let me know where to start, I understand the C source code pretty well)

~Andrew

This patch will correct how thai vowels and tonal makers display.

Here’s a patch to have a functional usb_serial driver allowing the use of “Logf over Usb” debug function.

This bug currently exists as of rev 21444.

If settings are modified on the recording screen they aren't persistent after a reboot unless another setting is changed somewhere in the menu system.

The problem is that global_settings is being modified without a subsequent call to settings_save().

Attached is a fix for this problem. I've so far only tested it on the h1x0 simulator but I think it's a pretty benign change, unlikely to cause problems on other targets.

I tried to make the first shot on adding fm radio support for the Samsung YH-* devices.

–

I got no SD-Card support for my E-250 after boot into USB mode.
I plug in my powered off player into usb and only have access to internal storage.

If i plug in my player booted up there is no problem.

I am using daily build r29174-110131.

Dumb patch but introduces handling for non triangular faces (by triangulating them when rendering). Vertices courtesy of http://mackayj.doosh.net/eliteships.html (in particular I hand-converted http://mackayj.doosh.net/files/vrml/eliteships/cobra3.wrl)

Added seeking by holdplus/holdminus buttons, pause/play by holdmenu button, hiding the OSD panel by briefly pressing power switch.

New build target, for iriver E10.

A lot of target-specific functions are missing, so it doesn't compile when it reaches the linker. But I think it's about time to insert the build target into SVN, and #rockbox seems to agree.

Also, building a simulator build works quite well. The simulator BMP and the keymaps needs some work, but it works pretty well, including music playback.

I've done some testing with building for other targets and nothing seems to be broken by this patch. I couldn't figure out how to include the BMP in the patch so i attach it separately.

at least in the 16bit lcd drivers, all functions which use transparency (or clear pixels) get the pixel colour from the backdrop image, completly ignoring the bg_pattern.

This isnt a problem except in skins where it is perfectly reasonable to want a background image for most of the screen but a solid colour for one or two viewports.

There is a tiny problem though, bg_pattern is set to LCD_DEFAULT_BG which is a valid colour, so we probably need to add a flag to the viewport struct to say if it should ignore the background image or not.

Player = Sansa ClipZip
Rockbox current build :

In the "Graphic Equalizer" menu and when I connect the player to a computer to transfer the data labels are displayed incorrectly (instead of letters symbols, as in the screenshot).
The problem occurs when I use the Russian language.
The problem I see for a long time, please fix it.

Screenshot of the screen that is displayed when transferring data, I could not do.
P.S. Sorry for my bad English.

Hi,
I am using a Sansa Clip Zip with Rockbox 3.13.
I’ve noticed, when I lock or unlock the device, the message, which indicates the current state, does not disappear completely. Its still there.

Cheers,
Conrad

Rockbox 3.1.3 on Clip+ (also iriver h140/340. also previous versions of rockbox).

Some HE-AAC files play back at half speed.

Example file info (comment/lyric fields removed as very long):

General
Complete name : Witness_-_The_Khmer_Rouge_take_power.m4a
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Apple audio with iTunes info
Codec ID : M4A
File size : 4.09 MiB
Duration : 9mn 0s
Overall bit rate mode : Constant
Overall bit rate : 63.5 Kbps
Album : Witness
Album/Performer : BBC Radio
Track name : The Khmer Rouge take power
Grouping : News
Performer : BBC World Service
Composer : BBC iPlayer
Genre : News
Recorded date : 2013-04-18T08:50:00+01:00
Tagged date : UTC 2013-04-18 09:07:25
Writing application : Lavf55.0.100

Audio
ID : 1
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile : HE-AAC / LC
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 9mn 0s
Duration_LastFrame : -1ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 62.7 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz / 24.0 KHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 4.04 MiB (99%)

30 second sample attached (cut with ffmpeg, full metadata)

Forum report http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,43012.0.html

This patch enables you to compile the Rockbox simulator with LLVM (you still need to alter the Makefile yourself though).

However, it fails at linking stage with 'file not recognized: File truncated' errors.

When loading a saved Brickmania game, the game is loaded corrupted. Please see screenshot attached to see for yourself. There is one brick in the right side which is shown corrupted, and one corrupted rectangle in the left side of the screen which drops like a power object, and stays at the bottom of the screen.

This issue happens on Cowon D2 target. It doesn't happen on the D2's simulator.

Looking at the code and comparing the loading/saving function against the Bubble's game functions, I can see that the return value of file operations is not checked (I'll fix that).
In Bubbles, there's a single file operation of reading/writing the game context struct. In Brickmania there are several consequent file operation to read/write each variable. Maybe the drivers doesn't handle this well on this target. A workaround for that could possibly be to join all saved variables under one game context struct as in Bubbles, but that could mask a real bug somewhere else.

This patch contains several improvements to the Chopper game designed to make it run with a high framerate instead of a low, jerky one. Previously, the game depended on sleeping for a number cycles before drawing another frame, causing very jerky motion. Now the game should run at a high framerate all the time. The gameplay should be about the same, at least on targets with a display of >64px. I don’t have any of these smaller targets, so I wasn’t able to test. Please tell me what you think of my changes.

These experimental patches dynamically add new tracks to the database when they are played. This allows users who (for various reasons [1]) prefer to not fully initialize the database to take advantage of database-based features such as autoresume (remember a resume position for each file), runtime statistics, or track ratings.

The current patch set is only a prototype. It's still somewhat inefficient because it does a full database commit and reload for each new track that is played.

The actual database-extension patch (patch 0002) works by refactoring tagcache_build to create a new interface, tagcache_add_file, that adds a single file to the database. This new function runs in the database thread and takes a dircache_entry pointer, which is provided by way of a Q_UPDATE event. The audio thread generates this event in tagtree_buffer_event when the initial DB lookup fails, and later checks the database again in tagtree_track_finish_event. If the DB commit and reload have succeeded in the meantime, this second lookup will succeed and the runtime information the user is interested in (stats, resume info) can be stored in the DB.

Patch 0001 changes the DB commit's buffer-allocation preference from using the dircache buffer to using the RAM DB's buffer. (This used to be the preference until r10003 reversed it, supposedly because the dircache buffer typically is bigger. I don't know yet how valid this argument is today.) This reversal avoids needlessly flushing and refilling the dircache and makes the Q_UPDATE event-passing mechanism more robust (because in-flight update events contain dircache_entry pointers, which would have to be invalidated when the dircache is flushed – which is not done yet).

Current limitations/caveats:
* Requires dircache and Load-DB-to-RAM enabled (and only works on targets that include these features)
* tagcache_add_file does not respect any database.[un]ignore files in the directory hierarchy above the added new file.
* DB needs to be initialized to begin with. There's no UI function for a basic DB initialization (without scanning and adding all files) yet.
* Not very thoroughly tested (mostly in simulator, with small file sets)

Possible improvements:
* Delay committing DB changes if more track-add events are in the tagcache queue
* Incremental commit: Could be optimized for add-one-track case
* Incremental load_tagcache: Avoid flushing and reloading full database
* Add function to initialize an empty DB

Comments welcome!

Footnote:
[1] Reasons for not using the database, or not keeping it up to date, include: metadata parser instability; prefer not keep tags up to date; prefer file browser over database browser

This patch adds a %ch tag that returns the number of channels in the current file.

Unfortunately, the large majority of codecs don't fill in this field in struct mp3entry. In the codecs covered by the rockbox testfiles collection, only atrac, cook and tta actually work.

I don't think it makes much sense to commit this with so few supported codecs, so help is appreciated on the codec side of things

The config caused the iPod to appear frozen (frozen screen) after bootup. The iPod would boot, show the normal boot screen and then created a boot screen mixed with theme settings. Picture: http://imgur.com/E4srA the iPod refuse and refused to mount.

Fix:
1: Boot into recovery diskmode
2: Remove conflicting config.cfg
3: Reboot into normal mode

This is the first plugin I’ve ever written from scratch, and well, it was fun. I haven’t worked out how to use bitmaps yet, bear with me, for now it uses coloured rectangles. Still learning :p.

If this were to get committed, please wait until I’ve added better support for more targets, commented as many lines as are possible to help other people new to making plugins, potentially add AI (Although that would kinda ruin it as it would probably force a draw every time), and figured out how to use bitmaps properly.

If people are willing to test this out for me and tell me any bugs, please do so. I have tested this on the H10, the Gigabeat, and, using the simulator, the iPod mini G2 (Which displays it but out of alignment, will work on that soon.

I realize it’s not too exciting, but for my first real bit of work in C I’m happy :p.