Steel Shapes by Luke Livermore/Design Point

It took me a while to find this and it's not easily found off Google, so I thought I'd make a quick post that so others can search, find this page and be redirected to where they need to go.

Steel Shapes 4.3 is a very elegant Lisp routine to draw all kinds of structural steel shapes. If you've gotten to this page, you probably already know something about it. It was written by Luke Livermore at Design Point. This Lisp routine is his/Design Point's property and it is shareware, not freeware. I am simply linking to another site that is hosting it. CAD Corner Canada has version 4.3 hosted on their website.

Download Steel Shapes 4.3

Playing modules with Audacious

As told in previous posts, I recently installed Ubuntu 9.10. Was really excited about using Audacious media player since it's almost identical to Winamp and has plugins to play just about everything without installing any additional plugins.

I've used Audacious before but hadn't tried to play anything besides mp3s and ogg files. I finally went to try an .xm module today and the thing laid an egg. It skips all over the damn place and sounds horrible. Wasn't too hard to fix though, you can use XMP and UADE as plugins to Audacious, and the XMP plugin just happened to be in synaptic. A quick 'sudo apt-get install xmp-audacious xmp-common' and disabling the default Modplug plugin solved the problem. DUMB, a module player library/plugin focusing on super-accurate playback, also works very nicely. Its corresponding package is 'audacious-dumb'.

P.S. Adlib music sounds absolutely wonderful on Audacious. There are Adplug plugins for both Winamp and Audacious, but the one for Winamp is very outdated...the one for Audacious is just so crisp.

Running emulators on Ubuntu/Linux (UPDATED)

I've been playing around with Linux for quite some time now and have had it as my main operating system a few short times. I decided to switch back to it after the release of 9.10 Karmic Koala, as many improvements have been made since 8.04. It's a lot more stable, I'm happy that wireless is supported out of the box for my netbook, yada yada yada. Anyway, I went to use ZSNES and DOSBox and the audio was working, but extremely poor quality and choppy. Video performance isn't too good, either. Here are some tips:

ZSNES:

Problem: Audio totally sucks. If you run it from the terminal it shows almost constant buffer underruns, at least on my laptop.

Fix: Not much to do except to lower the sampling rate. Go into Config>Sound and lower the sampling rate down from the default 32000 Hz. 22050 Hz solved the problem for me.

NEW Fix: Thanks to LuisMW from EeeUser Forums (original post: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=78631). Replace the default libsdl-alsa (libsdl1.2debian-alsa on Ubuntu) audio backend package with libsdl-pulseaudio (libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio on Ubuntu). It fixes almost all sound problems with every program that uses libSDL. To make ZSNES use PulseAudio: type in 'zsnes -ad pulse' in a terminal window. Alternatively, you can install the 'libsdl1.2debian-all' package to have all options and backends available.

Problem: Poor video performance. You can clearly see how poor the performance is with its built in little screensaver shown before you load any ROMs.

Fix: Go into Config>Video and change to one of the OpenGL modes. This sped up that screensaver by about 200% for me.

DOSBox:

Problem: Sound is extremely choppy.

Fix: Open up a terminal window and make use of DOSBox's command-line switch -editconf followed by a text editor, i.e. "dosbox -editconf gedit". This opens up the config file using the specified program. Go down to prebuffer under the [mixer] section and increase the value past the default value of 10. 30 worked for me, although it adds a bit of lag to your sound. Increasing the buffer size didn't help me.

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I'll be adding to this page as I find more problems and fixes.