I agree, the new crane game is in a very annoying and inconvenient place for ITG players.

Bill! That new crane game is a tad obnoxious as you guys well know, and to quote a particular player, it's like playing with a spotlight on you on ITG now. Can we maybe put a machine between it and the ITG machine, keeping careful of the overhead heat-lamp issue that we had to resolve the last time we moved the machine? I think it would be greatly appreciated by most!

Also, was there any possibility of the Acme-Narrows-Daffodil  Extreme-SN2-SN respectively rotation we kind of talked about for a while? I think the general consensus is that it would be cool to have Extreme at Acme for a while.


Thanks as always for your consideration and for your continued diligent upkeep of the machines and support of the community!

Don't remember the exact count, but it's closer to 1700 total, ignoring duplicates.

Yes it's on there a long with a few hundred more songs. Enjoy!

Been wanting to go for a while but have a quick question, is Crazy Loop added? I haven't been to Acme in a few years 

If there are any files that anyone wants to put on the machine, send them my way and I'll add them next time I go.

USB may finally be resolved soon - Debian seems to be more cooperative with regard to USB configuration (it suffers the same core problem as Ubuntu, but Ubuntu did some very strange things when I changed the configuration, whereas many people have gotten Debian to handle USB just fine).  I've ordered up a second boot drive which I'll get set up with Debian soon after it arrives, then I'll swap it out for the current one and bring it up to date as well.  I ordered a pair of USB extension cables to replace the hub, so we should be getting more reliable performance once USB is up and running again.

USB is currently not working on the machine.

I guess I'll just ask since I can't really find the information relevant to me buried amidst computer speak.

Can I bring a USB stick for scores and customs or not?  If not I might just make a bunch of files and have them put on the machine or something

Ubuntu doesn't break from the various UNIX standards significantly more than any other Linux distro does - they've swapped out some underlying parts (like many distros do), but the standards don't specify anything about implementation, so that's not a break from compliance.  That said, the way that fsck is handled is particularly annoying, since it makes Ubuntu unsuitable for anything but a desktop deployment; it's supposedly meant to be a viable server option, but who has a monitor and keyboard hooked up to each of their servers so that they can press a key to finish the boot process?.

I've thought about nightly cron reboots with the original computer (since USB performance worsened with each mounted drive until a reboot - unfortunately, Roxor uninstalled cron and pretty much anything else that the game didn't need to save space), so that's definitely an option, but I think it's safer to just make the switch to Debian, which has also been used successfully for OITG, and with it being Ubuntu's parent, it shouldn't be particularly confusing to maintain.

Another option might be to turn off the boot fsck.  Then run a manual fsck after ACME closes at night.  You can create a cron job to automatically run fsck, hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly.

The cron job can be configured to turn off the machine at night as well.  (Assuming that the machine is turned off every night)

Ideally the fsck would create a log and someone will periodically check the logs.

Getting a different distro is a good idea too.  As a desktop Ubuntu seems good, but they seem to have broken some linux functionality.

Did some research regarding the fsck (filesystem check) errors which were blocking the boot sequence and it turns out we're in a pretty awkward situation.  Ubuntu intentionally implements fsck-on-boot such that there's no way to automatically respond to such an error.

This leaves three options: completely disable fsck-on-boot and risk HD corruption, leave it on and deal with the occasional error (fsck-on-boot runs every 30th boot by default, but that's configurable), or switch to a different distro.  I definitely don't want to leave it as is, so I'm going to disable fsck next time I'm there - I've set up the filesystems so that the OS partition has almost nothing written to it (just some logs), and the only data ITG is able to change lives on a dedicated partition, so any errors should be restricted to non-essential files.

That said, I'm also going to start looking into the appropriateness of different distros, since that will hopefully side-step the problem entirely.

Good ideas Tony.  If you end up buying any of this crap to throw on the game, please PM the amount so we can get you reimbursed.  :-)
Thanks for all your hard work that has gone in to this whole project.

I was hoping to be able to identify the specific part, but knowing that it's from Infotech means that it's just an off-the-shelf hub which happens to be relatively easy to mount inside the machine, which does actually tell me a lot - most USB hubs run pretty slowly (compared to the maximum USB datarate) and many break pretty easily.

Next time I'm working on the machine, I'll take a closer look at how everything is set up internally - now that we have spare USB ports on the computer itself, it might make more sense to run a pair of USB extensions to the front ports, rather than a hub - it'd be a cheaper arrangement to maintain, probably less prone to failures (a hub can have the external ports, the circuitry, or the extension cable fail), much simpler to diagnose, and it would run at full speed.  This is mostly a moot point until I get USB support up an running again, but it'll definitely be a huge help in the long run.

Hello,First time posting here and I am using MVCO's handle and not my own. We obtained the USB hub that is being used in the machine now from INFOTECH in Federal Way.Hope this helps,Mark from Masterman vending.

Made it down there yesterday, the error message is just the filesystem integrity check.  Pressing F to let the OS automatically Fix the errors made the message stop coming up on subsequent reboots.  It'll probably happen again, and I will see if there's a way to make the fix command automatic (there almost certainly is, since Ubuntu is meant to be used in a wide variety of situations, including those where there would be no way for someone to ever see this message).

Additionally, most of the issues at hand are OITG issues, not Linux issues, so grabbing a random Linux expert won't actually help too much.  The issues that can be fixed with a bit of Linux hacking are extremely low-level fixes out of the scope of most people's experience - I'm not saying that other's can't help (I don't have the appropriate low-level experience either), but having someone new start hacking around at it without a solid understanding of everything involved could just as easily cause new problems, since OITG can be pretty temperamental about random things.


I have a potential fix (all of the variously build problems are now resolved), just haven't had the time to go work on it, because the setup and testing is - and this is from experience - going to take several contiguous hours.  I also have some ideas which could eliminate the setup process with a more thorough fix to the game logic, and would prefer to do that, since it'd be almost immediately obvious if the fix works or not.

As stated before, this is a problem across every build of OITG.  I've talked to people about possible causes, we've determined that the crashes are due to the craziest combination of minor circumstances (for example, nothing crashes if you use that exact computer with it's current settings and play with a keyboard).  Nobody who isn't well versed in the innards of OITG's code is going to be figuring out the exact cause here, which is why I haven't been trying to figure it out.

I've restored everything requested and tried to make sure that packs are running correct versions, if something is still missing, explicitly request that I dig it up from the old drive (be as specific as possible, knowing which pack can be very important, for starters) or find a way to send to the correct file, otherwise I have no way of knowing what I'm even looking for.

As for new content, I've been adding this as I come across it or when requested.  Turns out I haven't come across too many packs which seem to have much potential (to me) and few people have been asking me to add anything.  If there's a pack you want, send it my way, preferably with a working download link so that I can actually get it.

Temporarily fixed, longer term fix pending.

Well if you don't mind, since it's been giving this error upon every shutdown for several months now and I had to put a downright obnoxious note on the machine to keep people from breaking it, could you please end your period of not working on or caring about the machine since you're kind of supposed to be the one who wanted to be in charge of fixing it, and you've rejected offers I've given you to have other extremely experienced Linux programmers look at it with you or in your stead.

I know the job situation is difficult, and believe me when I say I empathize with financial strain of late, but if you want to be the one in charge of maintaining the machine, could you please do something to fix

-the USB interface

-the crashing on certain songs (such as Where Have You Gone or Whiteblue), this of course being a bigger problem with #4 below being the case as well...

-the need for new custom songs, including replacing some you deleted off the machine (Such as Fly High, or a couple others you deleted as "repeats", but they had different charts, and in some cases you deleted the 'better' version...). This would of course be handled by fixing the USBs but worth mentioning...

-and the inability to boot up...

I and those others who still play at Acme would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!

I'm not sure where our lead tech Mark got the hubs.  I have sent him the question, and he may come here to this thread and post the info.   If not, I will find out more Monday.

Ditto. I'd like to know what I should look for in case mine ever dies.

Sorry for disappearing for two months - I stopped checking the boards when I was laid off at the beginning of Decemeber, and never started checking after I got a new job.

As mentioned above, ITG profiles don't work because the OS and OITG don't yet play nicely with one another.  Other than that, the front ports do work, but can be a little finicky; I've found that I sometimes a keyboard plugged into the front with only work after two reboots for some reason.  Furthermore, if I plug a drive into the front and try to copy data off of it (with the OS, which can mount drives just fine), the data rate is ridiculously low (less than 1 Mb/s) and larger transfers (for example, full song packs) tend to freeze half way, whereas everything runs fine if a drive is plugged into the machine directly.  The front USB hub may have some issues, but I'll need to do some testing to make sure.  Bill, can you let me know where you get those hubs?  I'd like to look up the part just so I should know what to expect of them performance and reliability wise.

Regarding the the machine locking up while booting, I personally haven't seen the error message in question, unless it's just a disk check being run after an "unclean shutdown" (since ITG blocks access to the OS, we never shut it down cleanly, since the only option is flipping the power switch).  I don't know why a disk check would be completely locking up the system, though, so I'm inclined to say it's something else.  Next time I have a chance to do some work on the machine, I'll see if I can reproduce the problem.

FYI regarding ITG3.  Last night, our tech was unable to get the game up when in error, using the keyboard from the desk.  He added another keyboard directly to the computer, and it is behind the machine in case any of you need to use it to clear a error.  Not sure why the USB keyboard did not work last night?

Hitting the ITG3 cab up in a couple hours...

-EDIT-
Acme was closed for a party. Never seen that happen before.

WOW I could've fixed it then because I asked the front if they had a USB keyboard and they said yes. I thought those slots were unusable.

The problem with the USB ports is entirely software related, and has to do with how the OS Tony put on the new machine and OpenITG both handle USB. When you boot the machine, the OS isn't loaded yet, so you can use a keyboard with those ports just fine.

I thought that thing was fried? Unless it just doesn't work for flash drives then ok it makes sense

You can plug in a keyboard directly into the USB ports on the front of the machine.