ROM sorter scripts for Final Burn Alpha

Greetings, True Believers! Welcome to another action packed episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. On today's episode we are witnessing the marvelous mystical arts of special guest Dr. Strange. Strange will be using the arcane to copy Final Burn Alpha arcade ROMs from a parent directory to neatly organized child directories sorted by their respective systems! Be sure not to miss the spectacular README.txt for more death defying tips and useful information!

Excelsior! 

To download the scripts form my Google Drive click below.

FBA ROM sorting scripts

Dolphin Emulator and PCSX2 Copr repositories for Fedora Linux

In the times of yore I compiled and packaged a few emulators for various versions of Fedora Linux. Now days I've found people who do a way better job than I and update far more often than I could ever have. Two of the more popular emulators I maintained were the Playstation 2 emulator PCSX2 and the Nintendo Gamecube/Wii emulator Dolphin Emu. I hadn't built a package for quite awhile as I'd been using the flatpak versions of each. As time went on the flatpaks weren't being updated as often as I'd have liked. Not a real complaint as I was grateful both were available at all. I wanted to mess with newer features being sync'd to the git repositories. I could have gone back to building them myself but I'd grown quite lazy. I did some google'ing around and happened upon Copr repositories for both programs. The respective repositories are built on an almost nightly basis and have been of mostly stable quality so far. Both emulators are packaged by Copr user victoroliveira.

The PCSX2 Copr repo can be found at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/victoroliveira/pcsx2-git/ . There are full instructions for setting the the dnf source at the above address. Pay close attention to the part about 32-bit PCSX2 on 64-bit Fedora otherwise you won't get the emulator installed.

Dolphin Emu's Copr repository is located at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/victoroliveira/dolphin-emu-git/ . If you like you can visit the Copr site for full instructions. Or you can configure and install Dolphin Emu using the following two commands.

sudo dnf copr enable victoroliveira/dolphin-emu-git
sudo dnf install dolphin-emu-git

I've installed both of these emulators and they run very well on my system. Thanks, Victoroliveira.

Waifu2x App for macOS

For those who are confused Waifu2x is an AI based image scaler and smoother. It can take a small image and make it dimensionally bigger as well as smoothing the edges. The end result is nice and pretty. Waifu2x is mainly intended for illustrations, anime images, drawings and comic type material. However it works on photos too. Below is an example.

Original Image

Scaled Image

I compiled this steaming pile of Waifu2x for macOS. I built it on macOS 10.15.4 using the latest available xcode. The original github page can be found below.

https://github.com/imxieyi/waifu2x-mac

You can download the prebuilt application form my google drive.

Download Waifu2x form google drive

OpenBOR RPM compatible with Fedore 31

I spent a little time yesterday trying to compile OpenBOR from source without much luck. Upon failure I went out to the web to look for a .rpm package to install and be done with it. I found a .rpm compiled for SUSE Tumbleweed and figured I'd give it a try since I wasn't having luck otherwise. Luckily it worked without modification and I was off to the races. The build is from August 2018 which mostly coincides with the last git update, so I assume it's as up to date as it's going to be.

The only weirdness I noticed is if you try to list to many games at once it segfaults. I'm not sure if that's a Fedora specific issue or if the same happens under SUSE also.

If you're interested in the SUSE package you can find it located at 

https://opensuse.pkgs.org/tumbleweed/games/openbor-3.0.6384-1.17.x86_64.rpm.html

or you can download the .rpm directly from my Google Drive by clicking here.

OBS Studio encoder settings for VA-API hardware encoding

This is mostly a reminder to myself about what settings I need for VA-API encoding to work.

Fedora Workstation 31 Setup Guide according to Jeremy

Although Fedora Workstation 31 has been out for about a month I only just got around to writing my own little setup guide. I'm not really sure this will be of benefit to anyone as it's the setup I use but being pretty general use it could helpful.

After initial installation Fedora will reboot into it's first time setup. Here you will following along and do as it asks. After you complete the tasks you'll be magically transported to the blank desktop that is Fedora Workstation 31!

From here the first thing I do is set up the Fedora Rawhide kernel with no debug stuff baked in. I need this kernel for my Radeon VII to not flip out with my two 144Hz monitors. I have been using it on my main machine for a bit and it's proved to be stable (strangely). Since it's been smooth sailing so far I've moved on to using this kernel on my other computers as well. Use the following two commands to add the kernel repository and update your Fedora install.

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/rawhide-kernel-nodebug/fedora-rawhide-kernel-nodebug.repo

sudo dnf upgrade

After the upgrade command finishes you'll want to reboot your computer to use the new kernel.

Once your computer reboots we'll continue by adding the RPM Fusion repositories. Add and configure them by using the below commands.

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

sudo dnf groupupdate core

sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin

sudo dnf groupupdate sound-and-video

killall -9 gnome-software

Now that RPM Fusion is set up I usually remove software I don't use from the initial OS installation.

sudo dnf remove rhythmbox libreoffice* gnome-photos gnome-weather gnome-maps

In addition to removing I also install a few bits not installed by default. I'll start off with Google Chrome.

Download Google Chrome from https://www.google.com/chrome/ making sure to get the rpm file for fedora. Once it finishes downloading you'll need to install it via the Software Program. You can just double click on the rpm file's icon in your file manager.

After Chrome I usually configure FlatHub access and install some programs.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak install flathub org.gimp.GIMP

flatpak install flathub org.inkscape.Inkscape

flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Games

flatpak install flathub com.mojang.Minecraft

flatpak install flathub org.libretro.RetroArch

 Once I'm finished with FlatHub's programs I move on to installing a few programs via dnf.

sudo dnf install wine winetricks gamemode.x86_64 gamemode.i686 lutris steam gnome-tweaks

After the previous command finishes I install lm sensors. This is so I can read proper data from my motherboard sensors. These include temperature, voltages and fan speeds.

sudo dnf install lm_sensors

sudo sensors-detect

The sensors-detect portion of the command finds what sensor chips are on your motherboard and configures them.

Next up is installing Gnome Shell extensions. I get them all from extensions.gnome.org.

Dash to Dock - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/ 

TopIcons Plus Git - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2311/topicons-plus/ 

KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/

No Topleft Hot Corner - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/ 

Caffeine - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/517/caffeine/ 

GameMode - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1852/gamemode/  

Appfolders Management extension - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1217/appfolders-manager/  

Desktop Icons NG (DING) - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2087/desktop-icons-ng-ding/

Freon - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/841/freon/ 

cpufreq - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1082/cpufreq/

Once finished with the Gnome Shell extensions I'm pretty much finished. All that's left is to log out and log back in using the 'GNOME with xorg' option.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, a little information from neofetch

I saw RHEL 8.1 was released yesterday and was curious about some general information. I was looking for stuff like what kernel version, gnome version and so on. I downloaded the developers ISO, installed it in a VM and updated it. Below are a few screen grabs of the information I was looking for.

Above is the output from 'neofetch'. This pretty much contains the information I was looking for. Below is the output from 'uname -a'. This is the kernel after updating to whatever was available to update on 11.06.2019.

And finally here is the details tab from the gnome settings program.