It’s surprisingly hard to get the Playstation 2 emulator PCSX2 working if you’re running a 64-bit linux system, even though they’re cross platform and release linux binaries/sources first hand. The primary roadblock seems to be that the thing assumes a 32bit environment, and will refuse to start if it doesn’t find some 32-bit libs. Anyway, I got this working twice, both times quite bumpily, and decided it was high time this got written into a post for archival.

Credits by the way to this video which put me on the right track.

First, we gotta get PCSX2. This can either be downloaded from the site linked above, or, on OpenSUSE, can be obtained in packaged form from Pacman’s Games repo (mirror for 13.1 here).

Then we gotta grab the 32-bit libs that are needed. If you installed it with dependencies off the Pacman repo this may be taken care of for you (I’m not 100% sure), but in any case what you need to do is to pull out the Yast software installation interface and do a search for ‘wx’. This should get you a list like the following:

Now make sure each of those installed items are installed as 32-bit versions. Basically, click each of them, then click the ‘Versions’ tab, and make sure the ‘i586′ version is selected. Else select it, and apply at the end. For other distros, the gist I guess is to make sure you have 32bit/i586 versions of libwx and wxWidgets packages installed.

That should net you the required 32-bit libs, and you can give the pcsx2 executable a whirl at this point and hope for the best. In my case, I had one more hurdle before PCSX2 would run – the thing seems to be looking for the libwx libs in the wrong path. Fortunately it’s possible to tell it manually where to load the libs from by setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. This can be set right before running PCSX2 like so:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/wx-2.8-stl/ pcsx2

‘/usr/lib/wx-2.8-stl‘ is where the 32-bit libwx .so’s are on my system. This may vary for different distros, but it shouldn’t be overly hard to locate. Setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH appropriately allowed me to actually launch the PCSX2 UI, where configuring plugins, BIOS, etc may then proceed.

Running on integrated Intel graphics (I’m on a Lenovo Yoga 11s, Haswell version), the GS plugin that let me run games quite performantly is GSdx, configured to use “OpenGL (Hardware)”. Note that in Linuxland, open source drivers for higher-grade graphic cards (think Nvidia, ATI) don’t tend to perform well for graphic-heavy applications, so you’ll want to either switch to the proprietary drivers for those cards (if they exist and can be obtained), or to fall back to using the integrated Intel graphics chip, which tends to have good open source drivers.

I also had trouble with sound initially, which I was able to get around by first disabling Pulseaudio. Then, using the Spu2-X SPU plugin, configured to

Module: PortAudio
PortAudio API: ALSA
Synchronization mode: TimeStretch
Latency: 50

I was able to get pretty good sound for my games. Note that with ALSA it’s possible to get into a funny situation where ALSA selects a non-working sound card as default sound card – causing you to have no sound since the SPU plugin appears to be hardwired to use ALSA’s default card. This can in turn be remedied using the solution documented in my previous blog post.

Edit: it looks like one does not actually need to disable Pulse. If you can’t get sound on Pulse, try making the updated ~/.asoundrc file documented in my previous blog post. Using that I am able to get PCSX2 on PortAudio to coexist with all my other sound applications.

Whew! And that should cover everything. At least, that’s everything I know :) Perhaps it might help someone struggling with it as I was, but for now, I’m just happy to be able to play Persona 4 on Linux ^^

So yeah I’m still alive. Just on hiatus thanks to loads of irl stuff, as usual. I suppose the saving grace of this blog’s livelihood is that I’ll always have practical motivations to come here and drop a fixit I discover – since it works as my own personal documentation as well. I still want to write anime of course, I just need to find the time.

Anyway, shoutout to Idyllictux for his help with this one.

So OpenSUSE comes built with Pulseaudio nowadays, and for the most part it’s well set up and “just works”. There are obscure cases where it doesn’t quite perform though, for me anyway, cases like recording sound via the mic input, and playing games on PCSX2. Wonderfully enough, it’s fairly trivial on OpenSUSE to kill Pulse and fall back on Alsa. Having done that though, I found myself in a peculiar pickle where Alsa appeared to have found 2 sound cards and picked the non-working one for default. This, too, is not normally a big problem, since for KDE stuff you could just configure phonon in one place, and for stuff like smplayer you could just direct it manually to use the right sound card. Sometimes though, like in PCSX2′s case, things appear to be hardcoded to use the default soundcard, leaving you with non-working sound.

I tried Googling briefly for how I could tell Alsa to disable/forget a sound card, or to switch its default sound card, and found that there, apparently, used to be a tool called ‘asoundconf’ that lets you deal with such things. However, I wasn’t able to find nor install this on my system. Fortunately, Mr Idyllictux demonstrated there was another way:

First, list your sound cards with:

aplay -l

You should get an output that looks like:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: MID [HDA Intel MID], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: CX20756 Analog [CX20756 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0


Look for the number of the sound card you want to make default. Then, create (or edit) the file ~/.asoundrc with the following:

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}

Replacing the ’1′ in ‘card 1′ with the number of the sound card you want to be default. Save it and restart your session, and Alsa should now use the card as default.

Edit: The above will work, but will also create the iffy (and sickeningly familiar) problem of every sound application hogging the sound card (so you can’t have two applications playing sound at the same time). Copying and trial-and-error-ing blobs of config from Idyllictux‘s setup, I was able to discover an optimal .asoundrc as follows:

pcm.!default {
type hw
card 1
}

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "dmixer"
}

pcm.dmixer {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm "hw:1,0"
period_time 0
buffer_time 0
period_size 2048
buffer_size 32768
rate 44100
}
bindings {
0 0
1 1
}
}

Replace ‘Card 1′ with your card as per above. This config (which also works with pulse enabled) actually lets everything I have co-exist sound-wise (including PCSX2 on PortAudio, and smplayer using ‘alsa’ for audio). The only minor downside is that if you run this with pulse, you’ll lose the per-app volume control feature, presumably because we’re bypassing pulse’s software mixer.

This was the last link I needed to get PCSX2 fully working on my 64-bit Linux system. I’ll try and find time to document that one too, hopefully in the near future.

Wow how far have I had to trim my ambitions for a Christmas release. I originally wanted to release two chapters PLUS an anime editorial blog in time for Christmas, but difficult circumstances as well as the decidedly higher difficulty of translating this chapter forced me to trim it down to just releasing this chapter. Believe it or not, even getting just this chapter out on time cost me some sleep. I think the result is a quality release, though, and hopefully that makes up for things a little bit.

There is quite a lot to say about this chapter. Firstly: Chronology and chapter names, which got pretty confusing after Weekly Ascii released a bunch of “specials”-type strips to disrupt their original, incrementally numbered 4-koma “episodes”. Only some of those specials are actually freely available online, so I was myself a little confused for awhile. Using the non-free manga volume given to me by friendly neighbourhood reader Elaine Nguygen though, the chronological order appears to be as follows:

1. The first 12 “episodes”
2. 4 “Specials” (Which I briefly mislabeled “Summer Specials” for awhile)
3. 1 “Summer Expansion Edition” strip
4. 1 “Apple’s chapter” strip
5. 4 “Summer Special” strips
6. “Episode 13″
7. New, apparently manga-volume-exclusive material

Edit: Apparently there is only one summer expansion and the second is called “Apple’s chapter” and is about the iPhone 5. Very confusing -_-

Of these, the first 12 episodes, episode 13, and the 4 “Specials” are all freely available online and have all been previously translated and released.

This release is for the what was originally branded as “Summer Expansion Edition”, and is also the first release of a strip that is not freely available online. This strip was originally published in a printed copy of Weekly Ascii, and is now also part of the on-sale manga volume (which contains all previously published material as well as new original ones).

With that out of the way, the next thing is character names. People have pointed out to me that the names I used disagreed with other online sources. For my part I have always tried to maintain a close transliteration of the names in the raw, but this will hopefully be settled once and for all now: apparently they eventually confirmed and settled on an official set of names, AND also published an English article which contains all of those names romanized, so from this strip forth I will start adopting these new “official” names in accordance with the raws.

Also, with the released strips starting to go up on manga aggregation sites, I will henceforth burn TL notes and credits into the images themselves so they also get transmitted when uploaded to these external aggregation sites.

Whew! That was quite the mouthful. Lastly I would like to remind you again that this is the first release of a strip that is not freely available online, so if you like Hana no Android Gakuen I encourage you to support the authors by buying a volume (paper book and e-book). These are of course in Japanese, and no official English translations exist to the best of my knowledge. As long as this persists I will for my part commit to eventually translating everything in the first volume release – unless a much faster-working translation group picks it up or I get shut down by the creators for releasing non-free strips.

I think that’s all I have to say. Hit the jump for the translated strips, and remember that like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom. Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Pic mostly unrelated, but AIURA was great.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Between Linux and Anime!

One step into the fox’s glare
Then several more, as far as I dare
I leave the sunlit way behind
In silence in shifting shadows twine
Through winding path and jagged stair
Till deep in their enchanted lair
Pulsed my musing hesitation
My fearful, breathless, trepidation
From all sides the slitted stare
My melancholy, my soul laid bare

What is it that you desire?

To be of aid to fellow man
To seek, to know, to understand
A thousand more I daren’t demand

Silent words, like smoke, like foxfire

I held on to all I’d known
The conviction to which I am heir
With chill and wonder in my bone
I sought to sense the magic there
In freshness of the mountain air
Amidst the orange, faded stone
The enigma of a foreign throne
Filled me like a whispered prayer
As far as I dare, as far as I dare
Into the realm of the fox’s glare

PS: if you ever go to Kyoto, give the Fushimi Inari Shrine a visit.

Episodes seen at time of writing: 4

It’s been a while since I’ve watched a show that made me want to keep on watching. The standard twenty plus minutes has always felt like a very comfortable quantum of anime to me, and I’m normally content to watch episodes of the same show one at a time – lighthearted shows so that I can take them in thrifty bite-sized chunks, and heavier content so that I can afford myself some time in musing digestion. Kyoukai no Kanata seems to strike a balance somewhere between both these worlds – serious enough to be exciting, but not quite at the density that makes it straining to keep on watching.

Long overdue, we finally get that (non-imaginary!) magic-based action KyoAni show

Taking a step back and continuing that thought, I feel like balance has more often than not been a conspicuous strength of Kyoto Animation’s production work. It is common to find portions and parts of a KyoAni show lacking finesse and/or thought, but they are usually flanked with just enough quality to smooth things over, and usually never accumulate sufficiently to bubble onto the surface as a serious flaw. The team always seems to have a solid eye on the big picture. And I think this is something pretty pronounced in Kyoukai no Kanata, which tends to feel like a constant juggle between the bad blocks and the good morsels: weak worldbuilding, generally unoriginal plot and characters, straightforward, obvious ideas; against excellent animating, great cinematography, well-measured pacing. It manages to present itself as a show about cute girls doing cute things, about magic users fighting monsters, about isolation and emotional conflict, and about moe-laced comedy, all the while retaining a remarkably integrated image. Great balancing. Through it all it feels like there’s constantly just enough going on to keep the show palatable and captivating.

The fantasy setting really doesn’t take itself too seriously and the worldbuilding tends to just roll all over the place, but elements key to the plot are paced out and told with great effectiveness

Put another way, Kyoukai no Kanata ultimately shines in execution. KyoAni’s strong animating chops combine with some solid scenes and some great directing and pacing to bring to life a very rough fantasy setting and some very rehashed character interaction paradigms – making them bite. Even if it felt like you knew well in advance what was going to happen next in the presented conflict, when it actually arrives KyoAni lingers on it just right and invites you to drink deeply. Without essentially saying anything new, KyoAni shows that you could take something non-novel and still retell it in riveting fashion, thus still creating A-class entertainment.

Fuyukai desu! Great expression in a great scene. It’s impressive that Mirai works as a principal character considering how she has to be the damsel in distress, the misunderstood overpowered heroine, and the dojikko moeblob all at once. Mirai herself is a character of delicate balance.

“This is the power of her cursed blood… Simply touching it will bring about your death as it erodes your flesh… She’s like a reaper”

“In my eyes, you are nothing more than a bespectacled beauty”

There are just some really great scenes, complete with complementing lines, in the thick of the action in episodes 3 and 4. Scenes that really defy the mediocrity of the whole “I thought you didn’t understand me but I was the one who didn’t understand you” conflict structure. While I do hope they explore some more interesting territory moving forward, I have to say I can’t really complain about how things have gone so far. Solid stuff.

…Needless to say I’m sold, and can’t wait to see what the show brings next. I also want to give the ED a mention. I really like this ED – not quite the song, but the whole of it. I don’t trust myself to venture a real interpretation yet, but listening to and watching it at the end of every episode has been wonderful. It never failed to add a final, very palatable finishing touch of magic to close things out.

It also doesn’t hurt that KyoAni made it look pretty as heck