9.  Plugins

Plugins are little programs that Rockbox can load and run. Only one plugin can be loaded at a time. Plugins have exclusive control over the user interface. This means you cannot switch back and forth between a plugin and Rockbox, a plugin is loaded, run and then exited, which returns control to Rockbox. Most plugins will not interfere with music playback but some of them will stop playback while running. Plugins have the file extension .rock. Most of them can be started from Browse Plugins in the Main Menu.

Viewer plugins get started automatically by opening an associated file (i.e. text files, chip8 games), or from the Open with option on the File Menu.

9.1.  Games

See also the Chip-8 emulator in section 9.3.1 and Rockboy in section 9.3.4.

9.1.1.  Blackjack

Figure 9.1: Blackjack

Blackjack, a game played in casinos around the world, is now available in the palm of your hand! The rules are simple: try to get as close to 21 without going over or simply beat out the dealer for the best hand. Although this may not seem difficult, blackjack is a game renowned for the strategy involved. This version includes the ability to split, buy insurance, and double down.

For the full set of rules to the game, and other facinating information visit
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/blackjack-rules.php

9.1.2.  BrickMania

BrickMania is a clone of the classic game Breakout. The aim of the game is to destroy all the bricks by hitting them with the ball once or more. Sometimes a special falls down when you destroy a brick. For a special to take effect, you must catch it with the paddle. Look out for the bad ones.

Specials

9.1.3.  Bubbles

Figure 9.3: Bubbles

The goal of the game is to beat each level as quickly as possible by clearing the board of all bubbles. Bubbles are removed from the board when a cluster of three of more of the same type is formed. The game is over when any bubbles on the board extend below the bottom line. To make things more difficult, the entire board is shifted down every time a certain number of shots have been fired. Points are awarded depending on how quickly the level was completed.

9.1.4.  Chessbox

Figure 9.4: Chessbox

Chessbox is a chess game with computer AI. The chess engine is a port of GNU Chess 2 by John Stanback.

It also works as a PGN file viewer. Instead of executing the game from the plugin menu, look for any file with .pgn extension in the file browser and execute it. Chessbox will show the list of matches included in the file and allow you to select the one you want to watch. After that, you can scroll back and forth through the moves of the game. If the menu is invoked while in the viewer, the user is allowed to select a new match from the same file or quit the game.

When you quit the game the current state will be saved and restored when you resume the game. The menu also allows the user to reload the last game saved, save the current position and start a new game without having to quit the game.

Keys

9.1.5.  Doom

Figure 9.5: Doom

This is the famous Doom game.

Getting started

For the game to run you need .wad game files located in /.rockbox/doom/ on your player. Create the directory and save the following files there:

rockdoom.wad.

The Rockbox .wad, based on prboom.wad from prboom-2.2.6

Your wad files.

Copy all Doom wads you wish to play into that directory.

The needed files can be found at http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginDoom

To play addon wads create the addons directory within the doom folder. Place wad files in this directory. Currently doom only supports a maximum number of 10 addons in the directory.

A free alternative for Doom 2 is FreeDoom (http://freedoom.sourceforge.net). This can be used in place of doom2.wad, or it may be used as an addon in Doom, by placing it in the addons directory.

Menus

Rockdoom Menu.

The Rockdoom menu is shown when Doom is first launched. This is the only time it can be accessed (before starting the game). To re-adjust Rockdoom options, you will need to quit your current game and restart the plugin.

Main Menu.

The Doom plugin has a main menu, which is brought up before a game is started. It has the following entries:

Game. Select which (official) wad to launch
Addon. Select which unofficial addon wad to launch (From /.rockbox/doom/addons directory)
Demos. Select which demo file to play on game start
Options. Configure low-level Doom options
Play Game. Launch the wad/addon/Demo chosen

Options Menu.

This menu has the following options:

Sound. Enable or Disable sound in Doom
Set Keys. Change the game key configuration
Time Demo. Run a timed demo, to test game speed on a player (Only runs on Doom Shareware)
Player Bobbing. Enable or Disable player up/Down movement
Translucency. Enable or Disable sprite translucency (Fireballs, Plasma...)
Fake Contrast. Enable or Disable modified game lighting
Always Run. Make the player always run
Headsup Display. Show the player status when in fullscreen
Statusbar Always Red. Disable color response statusbar

InGame Main Menu.

This menu can only be accessed from within a running game, and is displayed by pressing Power

New Game. Start a new game
Options. In game options
Load Game. Load a saved game
Save Game. Save the current game
Quit. Quit the game

InGame Options Menu.

This menu has the folloing options:

End Game. Ends the current game
Messages. Enable or Disable in game messages
Screen Size. Shrink or Enlarge the displayed portion of the game
Gamma. Change the brightness (Gamma) of the game
Sound Volume. Change the sound, music and system volume

Note: In game music is not currently supported

Keys

Playing the game

After installation of the wad files is complete you can start the game. more description is needed

9.1.6.  Flipit

Figure 9.6: Flipit

Flipping the colour of the token under the cursor also flips the tokens above, below, left and right of the cursor. The aim is to end up with a screen containing tokens of only one colour.

9.1.7.  Jewels

Figure 9.7: Jewels

Jewels is a simple yet addicting game which involves swapping pairs of jewels in order to form connected segments of three or more of the same type.

The goal of the game is to score as many points as possible before running out of available moves. Higher points are awarded to larger combos. The game advances to the next level after every one hundred points and randomly clears several jewels.

9.1.8.  Minesweeper

Figure 9.8: Minesweeper plugin

The classic game of minesweeper. Use the Play and Submenu keys to select the required percentage of mines to set the difficulty then press the Select key to begin.

The aim of the game is to uncover all of the squares on the board. If a mine is uncovered then the game is over. If a mine is not uncovered, then the number of mines adjacent to the current square is revealed. The aim is to use the information you are given to work out where the mines are and avoid them. When the player is certain that they know the location of a mine, it can be tagged to avoid accidentally “stepping” on it.

9.1.9.  Pacbox

Figure 9.9: Pacbox

Pacbox is an emulator of the Pacman arcade machine hardware. It is a port of PIE – Pacman Instructional Emulator (http://www.ascotti.org/programming/pie/pie.htm).

ROMs

To use the emulator to play Pacman, you need a copy of ROMs for “Midway Pacman”.

These need to be stored in the /.rockbox/pacman/ directory on your player. In the MAME ROMs collection the necessary files can be found in pacman.zip and puckman.zip. The MAME project itself can be found at http://www.mame.net.

Keys

9.1.10.  Pong

Figure 9.10: Pong

Pong is a simple two player “tennis game”. Whenever a player misses the ball the other scores.

9.1.11.  Rockblox

Figure 9.11: Rockblox

Rockblox is a rockbox version of the classic falling blocks game. The aim of the game is to make the falling blocks of different shapes form full rows. Whenever a row is complete it will be cleared and the game score will increase. For every ten lines completed the game level increases, making the blocks fall faster. If the pile of blocks reach the ceiling the game is over.

9.1.12.  Sliding Puzzle

Figure 9.12: Sliding puzzle

The classic sliding puzzle game. Rearrange the pieces so that you can see the whole picture, or switch to number tiles if you like it a little easier

Key controls:

9.1.13.  Snake

Figure 9.13: Snake

This is the popular snake game. The aim is to grow your snake as large as possible by eating the dots that appear on the screen. The game will end when the snake touches either the borders of the screen or itself.

9.1.14.  Snake 2

Figure 9.14: Snake 2 – The Snake Strikes Back

Another version of the Snake game. Move the snake around, and eat the apples that pop up on the screen. Each time an apple is eaten, the snake gets longer. The game ends when the snake hits a wall, or runs into itself.

In game A, the maze stays the same, in game B after an increasing number of apples eaten the maze is replaced by a new one.

9.1.15.  Sokoban

Figure 9.15: Sokoban

The object of the game is to push boxes into their correct position in a crowded warehouse with a minimal number of pushes and moves. The boxes can only be pushed, never pulled, and only one can be pushed at a time.

Sokoban may be used as a viewer for viewing saved solutions and playing external level sets with the .sok extension. Level sets should be in the standard Sokoban text format or RLE (Run Length Encoded). For more information about the level format, see http://sokobano.de/wiki/index.php?title=Level˙format

Some places where can you can find level sets:

• http://www.sourcecode.se/sokoban/levels.php

• http://sokobano.de/en/levels.php

Note that some level sets may contain levels that are too large for this version of Sokoban and are unplayable as a result.

9.1.16.  Solitaire

Figure 9.16: Klondike solitaire

This is the classic Klondike solitaire game for Rockbox. This is probably the best-known solitaire in the world. Many people don’t even realize that other games exist. Though the name may not be familiar, the game itself certainly is. This is due in no small part to Microsoft’s inclusion of the the game in every version of Windows. Though popular, the odds of winning are rather low, perhaps one in thirty hands.

For the full set of rules to the game, and other facinating information visit
http://www.solitairecentral.com/rules/klondike.html

9.1.17.  Spacerocks

Figure 9.17: Spacerocks

Spacerocks is a clone of the old arcade game Asteroids. The goal of the game is to blow up the asteroids and avoid being hit by them. Once in a while, a UFO will appear – shoot this for extra points.

9.1.18.  Star

Figure 9.18: Star game

This is a puzzle game. It is actually a rewrite of Star, a game written by CDK designed for the hp48 calculator.

Rules: Take all of the “o”s to go to the next level. You can switch control between the filled circle, which can take “o”s, and the filled square, which is used as a mobile wall to allow your filled circle to get to places on the screen it could not otherwise reach. The block cannot take “o”s.

9.1.19.  Sudoku

Figure 9.19: Sudoku

Sudoku in Rockbox is implemented as both a plugin and a viewer. When you start Sudoku in plugin mode from the Browse Plugins menu, a random game will be generated automatically, and an estimate of its difficulty (very easy, easy, medium, hard or fiendish) will be displayed on the screen. New games can be generated from the Generate menu option.

When you use Sudoku as a viewer for playing pre-generated Sudoku games. You need sudoku games stored (one game per file) in text files with the .ss extension (see links below). You then browse these games using the normal File Browser, and open the file to launch Sudoku.

You can create and save your own grids under the New menu option. Enter the menu (as described in the key table below) when you have finished and enter the full path to save to including the .ss extension (e.g. /sudoku/new.ss).

The thing on the left (AKA the scratchpad)

When you play Sudoku on paper most people like to mark numbers in cells that are possible candidates for the cells. This can be done with the column on the left. Change the number under the cursor to a number which might be valid and press the scratchpad button, the number will then be added on the left. The column is stored seperatly for every cell on the board. These are NOT saved when saving the game.

Some places where can you can find .ss files:

• Simple Sudoku (Advanced Puzzle Packs 1 and 2 located near the bottom of that page): http://www.angusj.com/sudoku/

• Kjell’s Sudoku generator/solver: http://kjell.haxx.se/sudoku/

9.1.20.  Wormlet

Figure 9.20: Wormlet game

Wormlet is a multi-worm game on a multi-threaded multi-functional Rockbox console. You navigate a hungry little worm. Help your worm to find food and to avoid poisoned argh-tiles. The goal is to turn your tiny worm into a big worm for as long as possible.

Menu controls:

Game controls:

The game

Use the control keys of your worm to navigate around obstacles and find food. Worms do not stop moving except when dead. Dead worms are no fun. Be careful as your worm will try to eat anything that you steer it across. It won’t distinguish whether it’s edible or not.

Food.

The small square hollow pieces are food. Move the worm over a food tile to eat it. After eating the worm grows. Each time a piece of food has been eaten a new piece of food will pop up somewhere. Unfortunately for each new piece of food that appears two new “argh” pieces will appear, too.

Argh.

An “argh” is a black square poisoned piece - slightly bigger than food - that makes a worm say “Argh!” when run into. A worm that eats an “argh” is dead. Thus eating an “argh” must be avoided under any circumstances. “Arghs” have the annoying tendency to accumulate.

Worms.

Thou shall not eat worms. Neither other worms nor thyself. Eating worms is blasphemous cannibalism, not healthy and causes instant death. And it doesn’t help anyway: the other worm isn’t hurt by the bite. It will go on creeping happily and eat all the food you left on the table.

Walls.

Don’t crash into the walls. Walls are not edible. Crashing a worm against a wall causes it a headache it doesn’t survive.

Game over.

The game is over when all worms are dead. The longest worm wins the game.

Pause the game.

Press Select to pause the game. Press Select again to resume the game.

Stop the game.

There are two ways to stop a running game.

• If you want to quit Wormlet entirely simply hit Power. The game will stop immediately and you will return to the game menu.
• If you want to stop the game and still see the screen hit Rec. This freezes the game. If you hit Rec button again a new game starts with the same configuration. To return to the games menu you can hit Power. A stopped game can not be resumed.

The scoreboard

On the right side of the game field is the score board. For each worm it displays its status and its length. The top most entry displays the state of worm 1, the second worm 2 and the third worm 3. When a worm dies it’s entry on the score board turns black.

Len:

Here the current length of the worm is displayed. When a worm is eating food it grows by one pixel for each step it moves.

Hungry:

That’s the normal state of a worm. Worms are always hungry and want to eat. It’s good to have a hungry worm since it means that your worm is alive. But it’s better to get your worm growing.

Growing:

When a worm has eaten a piece of food it starts growing. For each step it moves over food it can grow by one pixel. One piece of food lasts for 7 steps. After your worm has moved 7 steps the food is used up. If another piece of food is eaten while growing it will increase the size of the worm for another 7 steps.

Crashed:

This indicates that a worm has crashed against a wall.

Argh:

If the score board entry displays “Argh!” it means the worm is dead because it tried to eat an “argh”. Until we can make the worm say “Argh!” it’s your job to say “Argh!” aloud.

Wormed:

The worm tried to eat another worm or even itself. That’s why it’s dead now. Making traps for other players with a worm is a good way to get them out of the game.

Hints

• Initially you will be busy with controlling your worm. Try to avoid other worms and crawl far away from them. Wait until they curl up themselves and collect the food afterwards. Don’t worry if the other worms grow longer than yours - you can catch up after they’ve died.
• When you are more experienced watch the tactics of other worms. Those worms controlled by artificial stupidity head straight for the nearest piece of food. Let the other worm have its next piece of food and head for the food it would probably want next. Try to put yourself between the opponent and that food. From now on you can ’control’ the other worm by blocking it. You could trap it by making a 1 pixel wide U-turn. You also could move from food to food and make sure you keep between your opponent and the food. So you can always reach it before your opponent.

9.1.21.  Xobox

Figure 9.21: Xobox

Xobox is a simple clone of the well known arcade game Qix. The aim of the game is to section off parts of the arena with your trail in order to remove that section from the game. Be careful not to get in the way of enemy balls because, if they hit you or your trail, you lose a life. To finish a level you have to section off more than 75%.

9.2.  Demos

9.2.1.  Bounce

Figure 9.22: Bounce

This demo is of the word “Rockbox” bouncing across the screen. There is also an analogue clock in the background. In Scroll mode the bouncing text is replaced by a different one scrolling from right to left.

Available options are:

Xdist/Ydist.

The distance to X axis and Y axis respectively

Xadd/Yadd.

How fast the code moves on the sine curve on each axis

Xsane/Ysane.

Changes the appearance of the bouncing.

9.2.2.  Credits

The credits plugin scrolls the entire list of the names of all the Rockbox contributors after displaying the Rockbox logo and version. This plugin is called when selecting Rockbox Info from the Info section of the Rockbox main menu.

9.2.3.  Cube

Figure 9.23: Cube

This is a rotating cube screen saver in 3D.

9.2.4.  Demystify

Figure 9.24: Demystify

Demystify is a screen saver like demo.

9.2.5.  Fire

Figure 9.25: Fire

Fire is a demo displaying a fire effect.

9.2.6.  Logo

Demo showing the Rockbox logo bouncing around the screen.

9.2.7.  Mandelbrot

Figure 9.26: Mandelbrot

This demonstration draws fractal images from the Mandelbrot set .

9.2.8.  Mosaique

Figure 9.27: Mosaique

This simple graphics demo draws a mosaic picture on the screen of the player. Press Power to quit.

9.2.9.  Oscilloscope

Figure 9.28: Oscilloscope

This demo shows the shape of the sound samples that make up the music being played. At faster speed rates, the player is less responsive to user input and music may start to skip.

Keys

9.2.10.  Plasma

Figure 9.29: Plasma

Plasma is a demo displaying a 80’s style retro plasma effect.

9.2.11.  Snow

Figure 9.30: Have you ever seen snow falling?

This demo replicates snow falling on your screen. If you love winter, you will love this demo. Or maybe not.

9.2.12.  Starfield

Figure 9.31: Starfield

Starfield simulation (like the classic screensaver).

9.2.13.  VU meter

Figure 9.32: VU-Meter

This is a VU meter, which displays the volume of the left and right audio channels. There are 3 types of meter selectable. The analogue meter is a classic needle style. The digital meter is modelled after LED volume displays, and the mini-meter option allows for the display of small meters in addition to the main display (as above). From the settings menu the decay time for the meter (its memory), the meter type and the meter scale can be changed.

9.3.  Viewers

Viewers are plugins which are associated with specific file extensions. They cannot be run directly but are started by “playing” the associated file. Viewers are stored in the /.rockbox/viewers/ directory.

9.3.1.  Chip-8 Emulator

Chip8 is a kind of assembly language for a long-gone architecture. This plugin runs games written using the chip8 instructions. To start a game open a .ch8 file in the File Browser

There are lots of tiny Chip8 games (usually only about 256 bytes to a couple of KB) which were made popular by the HP48 calculator’s emulator for them. The original Chip8 had 64x32 pixel graphics, and the new superchip emulator supports 128x64 graphics.

The only problem is that they are based on a 4x4 keyboard, but since most games do not use all of the buttons, this can easily be worked around.

To do this, one may put a .c8k file with the same name as the original program which contains new key mappings (for BLINKY.ch8, one writes a BLINKY.c8k file). That .c8k file contains 16 characters describing the mapping from the Chip8 keyboard to the default key mapping (that way, several Chip8 keys can be pressed using only one Rockbox key). For example, a file containing the single line:

would correspond to the following non-default mappings:

3 → 2, 6 → 8, 7 →4, 8 → 6.

The default keymappings are:

Some places where can you can find .ch8 files:

• The PluginChip8 page on www.rockbox.org has several attached: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginChip8

• Check out the HP48 chip games section: http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/chip/
• PC emulator by the guy who wrote the HP48 emulator: http://www.pdc.kth.se/~lfo/chip8/CHIP8.htm
• Links to other chip8 emulators: http://www.zophar.net/chip8.html

9.3.2.  JPEG viewer

Open a JPEG file in the File Browser to view it .

Note: When an audio file is playing the size of the image is limited as the decoding process needs to share memory with audio tracks. To be able to view a bigger file you may need to stop playback.

The menu has the following entries.

Quit.

Quits the viewer and returns to the File Browser.

Toggle Slideshow Mode.

Enables or disables the slideshow mode.

Change Slideshow Timeout.

You can set the timeout for the slideshow between 1 second and 20 seconds.

Show Playback Menu.

From the playback menu you can control the playback of the currently loaded playlist and change the volume of your player.

Return.

Returns you to the image

Note: Progressive scan and other unusual JPEG files are not supported, and will result in various “unsupported xx” messages. Processing could also fail if the image is too big to decode which will be explained by a respective message.

9.3.3.  MPEG Player

The Mpeg Player is a video player plugin capable of playing back MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video streams with MPEG audio multiplexed into .mpg files.

To play a video file, you just select it in the Rockbox File Browser. If your file does not have the .mpg extension but is encoded in the supported format, you will need to use the Open With... context menu option and choose mpegplayer.

The menu has the following entries.

Show FPS

This option displays (once a second - if your video is full-screen this means it will get overwritten by the video and appear to flash once per second) the average number of frames decoded per second, the total number of frames skipped (see the Skip Frames option), the current time (in 100Hz ticks) and the time the current frame is due to be displayed.

Limit FPS

With this option disabled, mpegplayer will display the video as fast as it can. Useful for benchmarking.

Skip frames

This option causes mpegplayer to attempt to maintain realtime playback by skipping the display of frames - but these frames are still decoded. Disabling this option can cause loss of A/V sync.

See this page in the Rockbox wiki for information on how to encode your videos to the supported format. http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginMpegplayer

9.3.4.  Rockboy

Figure 9.33: Rockboy

Rockboy is a Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy Color emulator for Rockbox based on the gnuboy emulator. To start a game open a ROM file saved as .gb or .gbc in the file browser.

Default keys

Rockboy menu

Back to Game.

Takes you back to the game.

Load State…

Loads a previously saved state.

Save State…

Saves your current state.

Options…

Frameskip.

Change frameskip setting to improve speed.

Sound ON/OFF.

Toggle sound.

Stats ON/OFF.

Toggle showing fps and current frameskip.

Set Keys (BUGGY)

Select this option to set a new keymapping.

Quit RockBoy.

Quits the Rockboy plugin.

9.3.5.  Search

This plugin can be used on playlists. It searches through the playlist that it opened on looking for any occurrences of the string entered by the user. The results of this search are saved to a new playlist, search_results.m3u, within the same directory as the original playlist.

9.3.6.  Sort

This plugin takes a file and sorts it in ascending alphabetical order. Case is ignored. This is useful for ordering playlists generated by the Create Playlist menu option (see section ??).

9.3.7.  Text Viewer

This is a Viewer for text files with word wrap. Just open a .txt file to display it. The text viewer features controls to handle various styles of text formatting, has top-of-file and bottom-of-file buttons. You can view files without a .txt extension by using Open with from the File Menu (see section 4.1.2).

Mode settings

Word mode

toggles between Wrap and Chop.

Wrap

breaks lines at white space or hyphen.

Chop

breaks lines at the maximum column limit.

Line mode

cycles through Normal, Join and Expand.

Normal

breaks lines at newline characters.

Join

ignores unpaired newline characters (i.e., joins lines). Useful for adopting the orphans that occur with e-mail style (i.e.,pre-wrapped) text files.

Expand

doubles unpaired newlines (i.e., adds a blank line). Useful for making the paragraphs clearer in some book style text files.

View mode

toggles between Narrow and Wide.

Narrow

sets maximum column to the screen width.

Wide

sets maximum column to 114. Useful for navigating large files. (Currently, Wide and Join cannot be selected together.)

Page mode

toggles between Normal and Overlap.

Normal

sets page-down/page-up to one full screen.

Overlap

tells page-down/page-up to retain one line from previous screen.

Scrollbar mode

toggles scrollbar for the current View mode.

Narrow mode

has no scrollbar by default, until toggled.

Wide mode

has a scrollbar by default, until toggled.

Settings are not remembered after the viewer has been exited.

Compatibility

• Correctly reads plain text files in Unix, Win/DOS, or Macintosh format. Latin-alphabet Unicode files are almost readable.
• Currently prefers fixed-width fonts. With proportional fonts, pretends all characters are the width of a lower-case ‘o’.
• Currently messages are in English
• Does not currently support right-to-left languages.

9.3.8.  VBRfix

This function scans a VBR (Variable Bitrate) MP3 file and updates/creates the Xing VBR header. The Xing header contains information about the VBR stream used to calculate average bit rate, time information and to more accurately fwd/rew in the stream. This function is especially useful when the playback of a file skips, fwd/rew does not work correctly or the time display is incorrect.

Note: VBRfix can only run when music is turned off (since it uses the same memory as the player) and can take a while to complete if run on big files.

9.4.  Applications

9.4.1.  Battery Benchmark

The Battery Benchmark Plugin enables you to test your battery’s performance, while making normal use of your player. Once loaded it will run in the background (TSR plugin), reading various info about your battery while you use it. Once you finish your session you can find the benchmark output data in a file on your player /battery_bench.txt. Please submit your results to the Rockbox wiki. http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/BatteryRuntime

How it works

After you load the plug-in the operation of your player continues as normal. You can do whatever you could do before loading the plugin except loading another plugin. If you happen to load a plugin while benchmarking, a splash screen will inform you about the termination of the benchmark. While you operate it will log various battery related information every time the disk is activated by external causes, (buffer refill, open folder, USB mode) or an hour passes without updating the log file.
The plugin will continue to log info until:

• Another plugin is loaded.

• The player is shut down.
• The battery is empty.

Between disk activity (or an hour), it will log info in memory (every measurement is captured when the voltage changes). If there are too many measurements older entries will be deleted and the log file will inform the user about the interval where entries were lost. Benchmarks can be resumed if you accidentally load a plugin, or turn off your player, as long as the log file /battery_bench.txt is not deleted.

Information explained

On the top of the file you will see various info on how to use the plugin.

Time

This column reports the total time of operation of the player. It is not the time that you started the plug-in. If you have your player on for 5 minutes and then start the plugin, it will start measuring from 5 minutes.

Seconds

As time, it shows time passed in seconds. Nothing special, it is there because it is free and maybe someone might want to make graphs with seconds.

Level

The percent level of the battery estimated by Rockbox. This is an estimation and not an accurate result. Using the real percentage (current battery voltage / top battery voltage) * 100) we can calculate the difference between the estimation. Goal of this column is to make the estimation algorithm of Rockbox more accurate.

Time Left

It shows the estimated (by Rockbox) remaining time until shutdown. Again, as with Level(above), this column can be used to see differences between real time left and estimated time left. This could help make time left more accurate.

Voltage

The battery voltage, the moment the measurement was captured. Measurements are captured when this number changes while benchmarking. This column can be used to give quite interesting graphs in a spreadsheet program. (Excel, Calc, e.t.c)

M/DA

(Measurements per Disk Activity) The number of measurements stored temporarily in memory, before written on the log file. This can give you an idea of how many voltage changes there are between disk activity (or one hour).

C

Stands for Charger. An ”A” in that column shows if there was the power adapter attached to the unit, at the time of the measurement.

S

The ”S” column shows the state of the device (Charging, or not). The ”C” indicated that the unit was charging when the measurement was captured.

U

USB powered. Only for targets that support this. A ”U” will indicate if the unit was using the USB port for powering.

Making graphs

While you can tell how long your battery lasted, with a single look at the last line of the battery log (/battery_bench.txt), the most useful purpose of Battery Benchmark is to make graphs using a spreadsheet program like Excel or Calc. The battery log (/battery_bench.txt) is in CSV format (comma separated) so you can quite easily import it to a spreadsheet program.

9.4.2.  Calculator

Figure 9.34: Calculator

This is a simple scientific calculator for use on the player. It works like a standard calculator. Pressing the “1st” button will toggle between other available maths functions on the right hand side.

9.4.3.  Chess Clock

Figure 9.35: Chess Clock

The chess clock plugin is designed to simulate a chess clock, but it can be used in any kind of game with up to ten players.

Setup

• First enter the number of players (1–10)
• Then set the total game time in mm:ss
• Then the maximum round time is entered. For example, this could be used to play Scrabble for a maximum of 15 minutes each, with each round taking no longer than one minute.
• Done. Player 1 starts in paused mode.

While playing

The number of the current player is displayed on the top line. The time below is the time remaining for that round (and possibly also the total time left if different).

Keys are as follows:

From the menu it is possible to delete a player, modify the round time for the current player or set the total time for the game. When the round time is up for a player the message “ROUND UP!” is shown (press NEXT to continue). When the total time is up for a player the message “TIME UP!”is shown. Then player will then be removed from the timer.

9.4.4.  Clock

Figure 9.36: Clock

This is a fully featured analogue and digital clock plugin.

Key configuration

Clock Menu

View Clock

Exits the menu and returns to the current clock mode display.

Mode Selector

Opens a menu from which you can select a clock mode to view.

Counter Settings

Opens a menu from which you can adjust settings pertaining to the counter.

Mode Settings

Opens a menu from which you can adjust settings pertaining to the current clock mode.

General Settings

Reset Settings

Reset all settings to their default values.

Save Settings

Save all settings to disk.

Show Counter

Toggle Counter display.

Save

Choose whether to disable automatic saving, saving to disk on exit, or saving to disk every settings change.

Backlight

Choose whether to disable the backlight, use the user’s timeout setting, or keep the backlight on.

Idle Poweroff

Toggle Idle Poweroff.

Note: This setting is not saved to disk.

Help

Opens a brief help screen with key mappings and functionality.

Credits

Displays a credits roll.

Analog mode

Small, round, analog clock is displayed in the middle of the LCD. Time readout, if enabled, is displayed at the upper left. If Time readout is in 12-hour (“12h”) mode, AM or PM will be displayed at the upper right. The Date readout, if enabled, is displayed at the lower left. The Counter, if enabled, is displayed at the lower right. The second hand, if enabled, is displayed along with the hour and minute hands. Digit display, if enabled, places “12”, “3”, “6”, and “9” around the face of the clock in their respective positions.

Digital mode

An imitation of an LCD, this mode shows a Clock comprised of digital “segments”. The Date readout, if enabled, is displayed at the bottom, center. The Second readout, if in “Text” mode, is displayed at the top, center; if in “Bar” mode, is displayed as a progress bar at the top of the LCD; if in “Invert” mode, will invert the LCD left-to-right as the seconds pass (a fully-inverted LCD means the entire minute has passed). The Counter, if displayed, is shown at the upper left. The Blinking Colon, if enabled, blinks the colon once every second. 12-hour mode, if enabled, will display the time in a 12-hour format.

LCD mode

Based on the Digital Mode, the LCD mode is another imitation of an LCD. The settings available in this mode are exactly the same as Digital Mode, but they are independent of Digital Mode. For example, you can have the Date Readout enabled in Digital Mode and disabled in LCD Mode.

Fullscreen

A Fullscreen clock is displayed. Show Border, if enabled, will draw a small box at every hour position (1 through 12). Invert Seconds, if enabled, will invert the LCD as the seconds pass. Second Hand, if enabled, will draw a second hand among the hour and minute hands.

Binary mode

This mode shows a Binary clock. The hour is displayed on the top line, the minute is displayed on the middle line, and the seconds are on the last line. Circle mode, if enabled, draws empty and full circles, instead of zeros and ones. For help on reading binary, please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary˙numeral˙system

Plain mode

This mode shows a “plain” clock in large text that takes up nearly the whole LCD.

9.4.5.  Dice

Dice is a simple dice rolling simulator. You can select number and type of dice to roll, it shows individual numbers as well as the total of the rolled dice.

9.4.6.  Disk Tidy

Disk Tidy deletes junk files left behind by Windows or OS X after a USB connection. Select the OS’s files you want to delete in the ’Files to Clean’ menu and select ’Start Cleaning’ to begin to process.

Available Options

Both

deletes both OS X and Windows files.

Win

deletes Windows files, Thumbs.db, /Recycled and /System Volume Information.

Mac

deletes OS X files, ._⋆, .DS_Store and /.Trashes.

9.4.7.  Metronome

This plugin can be used as a metronome to keep time during music practice. Adjust the tempo through the interface or by tapping it out on the appropriate button.

9.4.8.  Stats

Figure 9.37: The stats-plugin

The stats-plugin simply counts the number of files and folders on your player. Press to exit the plugin.

9.4.9.  Stopwatch

Figure 9.38: Stopwatch

A simple stopwatch program with support for saving times.

9.4.10.  Text Editor

This plugin allows you to view and edit simple text documents on your DAP. You can view files by using Open with from the File Menu (see section 4.1.2).

Usage

If you start the Text Editor from the plugin browser you will be greeted with a blank screen. When started from the Open with menu item your file should be shown on the screen. You can now edit the file. The Text Editor is line based. This means you can edit one line at a time using the Virtual Keyboard (see section 4.1.3).

• Move the selection bar to the line you want to edit.

• Edit the highlighted text line or insert a new one using the Item Menu.
• When finished editing exit the Text Editor. You’ll be shown a list of save options.

Note: When you haven’t changed the file the Text Editor will quit immediately.