A couple of years ago Natalie rescued a 1960s Moe Lighting resin pull-down light from the flea market. The mechanism was rusted to hell, half the "egg" was missing, but it was absolutely gorgeous looking.

Yesterday we flipped it upside down and wired it up over our video game cabinet:

The new lamp adds some really nice light at the video game cabinet and we've got another Moe pull-down light in that room already so it's pretty matchy and nice.

I've been threatening for quite some time to post my TV playlist workflow. I'll put up my music video builders as well just because for some reason they're different.

TL;DR: Here's the primary TV script.

Warning

This was banged out over a few nights of non-sober hacking. It's not "good", but it's "good enough" until I can dig in and fix all the inconsistencies. You can get the idea.

The Executive Summary

I believe the correct way to watch TV is to throw the TV on, pick a "channel" and not have to think too super hard about what you want to see beyond choosing where to start watching. With Netflix and Amazon and stuff you're paying some number of dollars per month for access to content, but the way they present it is that you have to find a thing you want to see, then dig into that and play an episode of a TV show. This is let's say inefficient for anything other than single-show binging. Which is why single-show binging got huge when everyone dropped cable for Netflix and Amazon. When you have 400 or 500 TV series to choose from, do you really want to dig into "Season 6, Episode 12" of Cheers, and then choose to hit "Season 5, Episode 9" of King of the Hill, or would you rather hit "Sitcoms" and let the computer do the work?

The Methodology

I prefer the TNT method of "you throw on TNT and now you're watching a block of Friends" or you put on Nick at Nite and you might get Mary Tyler Moore followed by Speed Racer and a Drew Carey Show. So that's what I've built.

I have full runs of many many TV shows, I build daily playlists, around 120 at the moment, for various Genres, as well as several dozen shows to run as "blocks". I mix in commercials, though I need lots more commercials and I need to tailor them a little better so I'm not getting Underoos ads between episodes of The Wire.

So the menus are sort of:

• TV Shows
  • Blocks - Individual 50 episode playlists for ~100 series or so. So we're watching a block of Star Trek, or Seinfeld or whatever.
  • BritBox - Comedies, Cozy Mysteries and Doctor Who, pretty much
  • Sitcoms
  • Nick at Nite - All stuff from Nick at Nite, TV Land etc
  • Buddies - Buddy Cop / Detective type shows. Cagney & Lacey, Columbo, Barnaby Jones, Starsky and Hutch, Burn Notice, all that stuff.
  • Saturday Morning Cartoons
  • Superheroes - The Live Action shows mainly from the 70s. Hulk, Wonder Woman, Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman, that sort of thing.
  • Variety Shows - Laugh In, Kids in the Hall, SNL, blah blah blah, SCTV...
• MTV
  • 120 Minutes
  • Yo! MTV Raps
  • Arcade / Pizzaria - This is like the ubiquitous music from my youth pretty much

  I create playlists of specific lengths because media players really don't deal too well with massive playlists. Though Kodi does better than most. My "MTV" playlist is around 12000 songs if I just let it rip and Kodi handles it just fine. But the main reason for creating playlists and not just say, go into a folder and hit "Shuffle" is that I get to choose my entry point and find a run of TV shows that I want to watch, or skip the first few music videos to start with something "good".

  The Workflow

  These playlists are the simplest possible .m3u files. Just basically lists of absoluterelative paths to individual files with no metadata or context. This requires all the files to be named appropriately such that they're all uniform and informative. "Show Name -SeasonEpisode - Episode Name".ext.

  The Simpsons - S03E07 - Treehouse of Horror II.avi

  Kodi does not automatically add metadata for .m3u playlists in the way Jellyfin/Emby does for theirs. It's on my to-do list to scrape the series name and episode title from Kodi's database and add it in before inserting the file path.

  To create these M3Us I have a few cron jobs on my home server, the steps are pretty simple:

  • Build a master filelist of my TV Shows directory.
  • For each genre + blocks, scan the filelist for shows listed in my /cfg/$playlist.txt file
  • Scan against a master "exclusions" list so I don't include like .nfo files, subtitles, text files, ISOs, "dvd extras" etc.
  • Insert commercials according to a cfg file for each playlist. (Number of episodes before a commercial break, number of commercials per break)

    To build the playlist itself, I scrape all this into an array and randomize it:

    vids=()
    sed "s/^/\/Volumes\/Filestore\/Common\/TV Shows\//" $cfgdir/$vfil.txt > $cfgdir/$vfil.txt.bob
    mapfile -t vids

    That works out to, using Nick at Nite as our example:

  • Create the vids array as an empty set
  • Strip the base filesystem path from all ....../cfg/nickatnite.txt and create nickatnite.txt.bob. This doesn't make sense to me as "nickatnite.txt" doesn't have all that path info anyway.
  • Populate the "vids" array by grepping for all the shows in nickatnite.txt.bob within the overall file list. Remove anything in the global exclusion list, then do a random sort on all that and shove it into "vids". I suppose I could limit this to only the top 50 or however many files right here....

    From there I just iterate through the vids() array in increments of however many shows between commercials. Then I insert the commercials from a similarly populated array and resume iterating through episodes until I hit the total number of episodes I want.

    I do testing to see if a show is part 1 of 2, or part 2 of 2. If so it will grab the other part and place it appropriately in the playlist so you're not stuck with a single episode and have to dig for the other one like some kind of animal. Currently I only handle those two cases for two reasons. Empirically there aren't that many things with more than 2 parts in the entire corpus of Shit I Own. Those that are tend to be things like Rocky & Bullwinkle which stretch out a story arc over half a season, or vintage Doctor Who. Rocky & Bullwinkle really doesn't matter, you get the jist. If I really care about watching a whole arc in a 50 year old Doctor Who, I'll just go watch it. It's not like I can't browse for files. But I don't need 5 hours of shows popping up in the middle of my list.

    I just don't want to have to dig for Time's Arrow part 1 just because Part 2 was fed into the SciFi playlist. I'm usually watching TV as I go to sleep so two hours is plenty.

    Fun fact, I don't count these episodes in the total, so you end up with like a few extra episodes in the playlist if there are multipart ones. Also, if the file I pull is Part 1 of 2, then Part 2 goes in at the end of the bus. So you'll get "part 1", "Some other show", "part 2". Again, on my Todo.

    Anticipating some Qs:

    • "Why don't you just"
      • Use "shuffle mode"?

      Really good question. I'm being polite and I really shouldn't be. Anyway because with Shuffle Mode on a folder of TV shows, I don't get to choose my entry point. I can't for instance skip the first 12 episodes and enter at one I haven't seen in a while.

      • Use Kodi or Jellyfin's playlists?

      One, because this is 100% automated with new playlists every day and I never have to think about it. And it's platform agnostic. I can pull an M3U into VLC or whatever and play it there. I'm not naive enough to believe that Kodi or Jellyfin or whatever is going to be around in 20 years. You know what will be around? Something that can play a bog standard M3U on my TV.

    • Ew absolute paths

    There are reasons for this. One time I owned a Mac. By default that Mac put CIFS mounts into /Volumes/ along with other mounted filesystems. I haven't used a Mac in like a decade, but I standardized on that, and now every machine I have uses the /Volumes/... paradigm for our main file storage.. This can get awkward when I use something like a phone or an Amazon Fire Stick. All of this can be switched at a moment's notice to relative paths from wherever the playlist file is though no problem.

    Also I am now generating both so I can "upgrade" to a Flatpak Kodi since their apt repo isn't going to work anymore.

    • Ew bash

    Get bent. I'm not a developer, clearly, but I know how to get pretty much anything I want to get done, done. Bash doesn't make a habit of introducing breaking changes and it works every goddamn where.

This is something no one should care about. I have removed the legacy Wolfeboro Online forums from my site. It all still exists but I've stopped publishing it.

The reason for this is that my most "popular" content is the most vile racist trolling shit from assholes in that forum and I don't want to serve it anymore. It's not content I want associated with me, so I'm not going to keep hosting it anymore.

Carry on.

And just like that, the balance is restored as I was just informed by The Internet that my phone is no longer supported. Did the phone mention it? Not a chance. Did Verizon? Nah. If I manually go and update it goes out and checks, says it was successful and that I'm up to date with the last Security Update on August 5. As I read it service stopped on August 19.

Why is nothing alerting that fact at all.

And Natalie just replace her battery a couple of months ago. Like she didn't get the battery replaced, she replaced the battery. She's going to be really disappointed that the correct solution really was to just toss it on the pile of perfectly good hardware that gets instabricked by capitalists.

Before I replace my phone I'm going to try and install KDE OS on it or something and try and keep it going.

I am not writing this as a "getting started" or beginners guide, though it might evolve to serve that for some people. It's just notes I'm taking for things I need to look up. I'm not going to do any in-depth technical review or anything, go watch a youtube video for that. My perspective is from a career as a sysadmin and Linux user. Your mileage will certainly vary.

I strongly encourage you to skip my un-edited drivel and just scroll to more listy looking part.

This past weekend we resolved to kicking off, tidying up and playing with the MiSTer Multsystem. The actual "Problem" with getting this project going was that everything was way too easy to get, which has been our luck every time we need any Raspberry Pi's and stuff. We anticipated about a 3-4 month minimum lead time to land all the parts, figure out how it all goes together and how to get software to it. Everything turned up within a week. We got the DE-10 direct from the Terasic and they shipped pretty much immediately. Same story with the MultiSystem pack. I've been extremely interested watching this project as Neil has announced updates and features. The box was well packed and safe even after a real kicking by the various shipping companies.

I think it sat on the Project shelf for a month before we even had time around the holidays to put it together and try it out. It was super easy to assemble. Note: I spent 3 or 4 years in a local computer store in the '90s, and a 25-mumble-year career in IT so your mileage may vary. Actually that's not fair. Natalie did pretty much all the assembly work with me just kind of putting the case together. I'm still paranoid that I over-tightened screws or something since I've never really worked much with 3d printed anything. The case is very nice, well laid out and, while tight, everything is easy to route and very well documented.

Goals vs Reality

The Plan: This guy should sit prominently in The Room, quite probably wood-grained and hooked up to the main TV. There it would host all the console games for all the consoles neither of us ever had, and so have no muscle memory or nostalgia for. You know, For Kids.

The Reality: I was familiar from well-afar of the Mister project for some time. I know why the ST is there, and given all our other projects, this does have the capacity of seriously amusing me. But I wasn't sure about the MiSTer's interface, it looked like it might be a lot less friendly than something like EmulationStation. And that's a thing I go into below.

The other day I temporarily yet elegantly installed the MiSTer in the arcade cabinet and gave it a quick smoke test to make sure it still did things. I took a few minutes to figure out what using the external drive that I just happened to have hanging around was about and the effect it had on the virtual filesystem browser stuff.

1 week later and we spent a couple of hours today playing a bit, loading more games and software, then playing a bit more. Natalie wanted to start getting things documented for the Manual to the Living Room we are slowly beginning to put together. As we went through computer platforms from Atari 8-bit, ST, Amiga Natalie was taking notes on how to load software on each and get back to the main menu and whatever but really aside from necessary differences in how the keyboards are mapped, everything's just the same. We've been playing with an X-Box 360 controller because it's the only controller we own and it just worked. The arcade controls are going to take a bit of effort but the sticks and the trackball work, I just need to map buttons, and from what I can see that's not very hard.

The Big, Ugly Truth

The reason I really liked the standard linux machine plus a slick launcher is because it looks nice on the arcade cabinet and people could navigate it pretty easy. You know what? There are no "people" and this thing is way more convenient to use than the Pi + RetroPie. No trying to keep the button layout relatively synced between a bunch of different MAME emulators. Make that "A bunch of different versions of a bunch of different emulators". Nothing was ever consistent beyond the necessary controls. But it does look cool.

Enter the MiSTer. Since we're not emulating, there's not really anything much to tweak. Everything can pretty much be set up globally aside from a few platform specific changes. Even with arcade cores the UI is so consistent and easy to deal with that I won't exactly be pining for RetroArch any time soon. I need to figure out how to set a default set of controls though so I don't have to set the controls up for every single arcade cabinet forever. I know there's a menu item for that I just haven't pulled the trigger on possibly screwing things up yet.

It's also extremely easy to keep updated with all the latest cores using the "update_all" script. I'm using the "RetroDriven" fork, though I'm not sure what materially differs from the main line version. It's just the one I saw first. That tool was a revelation since you can just have it go out and populate any missing arcade ROMs, as well as adding cores that haven't made it to the main-line MiSTer distribution yet.

Sound can be /amazingly/ better than MAME. I'm not familiar enough with any console game to know what it should sound like vs an emulator. But I played a couple of games to test out Donkey Kong and it took me 3 games to get past just how much better it sounded on exactly the same hardware. I think it's like emulating a Moog synth vs copying it electrically at the circuit level. It'll at least get you a lot closer to "actual hardware" than MAME possibly can. (Important Note: The 4th game of DK I got within 700 points of my personal best 62,500 score on the board, and it's not like I'm constantly playing that game, it's pretty rare for me to do that well that quickly. [I think it's really more like 85k but that was before we had the board so I can't remember])

Conclusions?

While it's true that there are some arcade games that aren't yet "there" on the MiSTer, which work fine on a Pi-3, the fact is that while a given arcade core might not be ready for showtime just yet, like OutRun. And obviously there are systems that are simply too complex for the DE10-nano to copy. There are options, and they're imperfect, but still fun. The Sega 32x core works just fine I guess for games like Virtua Racing, and the Saturn core seems to be coming along fast. However for me a lot of the real value of this system is going to come in running the computers of my youth. Since I always had computers, I never really had consoles aside from the 2600 so I've been playing with the Atari 8-bit and ST cores (and the Amiga, because, you know, let's be real...). I'm even going to set up some hard drive images and profiles for color vs high-res mono.

This will get us through in emulation until the Next Big Kickstarter shows up at my door and I can use the ST to all of its ability with my SpecreGCR cartridge, etc...

I think we're into the MiSTer Multisystem for somewhere in the region of $400-$450. That's kind of steep, however what you get is every game released for every console up to about the PS1 / Sega 32x and maybe Saturn-ish. Plus all the 8-bit and 16-bit computers of the '70s through the early '90s, and their entire libraries. Plus a couple hundred arcade games. All easily managed in a simple to use and easy to understand interface.

Definitely 100% worth a look, especially given what people will spend for those "throwback" mini-consoles with a fixed set of titles baked into some potted-blob SoC.

I'm going to move a lot of the above into sorted bullets. I'm throwing some stuff around and will organize it as I go.