Hey folks!  After many nights of dark LCD-lit rooms, coffee, and code the FCEUX team is pleased to bring you FCEUX 2.1.5.  Most notably, the GTK GUI for SDL platforms (Linux, BSD, OSX) has been drastically overhauled and moved from the previous two window layout (game window/menu window) into a single integrated window.

For the full list of changes, check the official press release and download it here.

For build instructions for SDL, check out my previous post.

Edit 6/17/11 - Arch Linux now includes fceux 2.1.5 in their community repository, so you can fetch it with "pacman -Sy fceux" (link).

If you're an impatient archlinux user, you can use this PKGBUILD with makepkg to build a fceux 2.1.5 package for your system before the official package is updated in the community repository. Just use the following commands:

sudo abs community/fceux

cp -R /var/abs/community/fceux /tmp

cd /tmp/fceux

rm PKGBUILD

wget http://xannode.com/PKGBUILD

makepkg

sudo pacman -U fceux-*.pkg.tar.xz

Enjoy!

-Luke

I have not been very public about my music on the Internet, mostly since I was never fond of MySpace Music or uploading my material to Facebook.  For the past two years, I have been playing in a rock (punk/shoegaze/postpunk/ihategenres) band with a couple of good friends.  I'm going to loosely reference this band as 4# (a name we had agreed on for a while), although we've gone through multiple names, drummers, and band members (as well as beer pizza and guitar strings).  We've had sort of a rotating line-up, which gave me the pleasure of playing my share of rhythm and lead guitar, electric bass, and drum kit.  Anyway, due to the lack of a practice area and other factors beyond the bands control, the band has come to an end.  It's pretty disappointing for me, especially since we just about had enough original material to put together an EP...

As disappointed as I am about this indefinite hiatus, I plan to devote more of my energy to writing and producing my own music.  Between my KORG AX300G, Gibson Les Paul (smartwood series), Presonus Firebox, a Shure SM57 and some free software I should have the tools at hand to make this happen.  I intend to share any wisdom that I might learn along the way while I start to produce my own material.

Even with all this being said, I am really going to miss the experience of playing with a band: let alone with some of the most talented people I know.  It's going to be tough to not have other friends to bounce ideas off of and give/take critique from.  A large amount of the material that my band wrote would not have happened indepedently: it is the product of a couple guys trying to keep on rockin' in the free world.  But who knows what the future will hold?

FCEUX (FCE UltraX) ((FamiComEmulator UltraX heh)) has been a project I've been contributing to since 2007.  FceuX (http://fceux.com/) is a cross-platform NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) (so many acronyms!) emulator written in C++ that sports a wide-feature set, excellent ROM compatibility, and accurate emulation.  Thanks to the hard word of myself (http://sourceforge.net/users/punkrockguy318) and sf:plombo (http://sourceforge.net/users/plombo/), fceuX now also can brag about its integrated GTK2 GUI:

FceuX 2.1.5 hasn't been officially released yet (as of this posting), but if your running Linux or most other SDL capable platforms you can get the latest code from subversion and enjoy the new features for yourself.  The code in svn is pretty stable right now (the release is imminent), so it's safe to run this and your computer shouldn't explode (no guarantees :) ) It's pretty simple to compile, so I'll just post the instructions here for anyone that is interested.

First, install the dependencies with your package manager (or from source if you're one of those kinds of people):

• g++
• scons
• libsdl
• libz
• libgtk2 (optional)
• subversion

Now, let's grab the latest fceux source:

• svn checkout http://svn.code.sf.net/p/fceultra/code/fceu/trunk fceultra
• cd fceultra/

You can edit the "SConstruct" file if you want to turn compile-time options (like GTK) on or off.

Now compile like so:

• scons

After a successful compilation, the fceux binary will exist at ./src/fceux .  You can install it wherever you'd like (or use "./install.sh to install to /usr/local/bin) and start enjoying some damn Nintendo games.

The release is coming soon, so hopefully your-distro-of-choice will be including fceux 2.1.5 in their repositories (I know Arch will be...).

PS:  Does anyone want to build a Mac OSX Binary?  ;)  If anyone wants to give it a try give me a shout in #fceu in irc.freenode.net

Hi internet! I figured I would start a blog to keep track of the projects that I can get in to on my spare time. I don't really have much else to post right now except that wordpress is really easy to install, and it has a decent UI. Anyways, happy trails!