Rick's b.log - entry 2025/11/23

Mamie Fletcher's House for Linux!

Mamie Fletcher's House in Linux.

You have three prerequisites:

• You are running something based upon Ubuntu "Noble" (24) or later.
  Other distributions may work, but you're on your own.
• You are able to install some extra libraries.
• It's a 64 bit x86-64 machine.

This should count for current versions of Ubuntu and Mint. I am using Linux Mint 22.1 Xia.

If you are using a different version of Linux (like Debian) or you aren't sure, then you will need to go to your package manager and ask it to show you what version of the SDL2 mixer library is installed.
For Ubuntu/Mint, you would do this as follows:

rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Coding/mamie$ apt show libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0
Package: libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0
Version: 2.8.0+dfsg-1build3
Priority: optional
Section: universe/libs
Source: libsdl2-mixer
Origin: Ubuntu
[...blah blah blah...]

The version shown must be 2.6.x or later. Here it is 2.8.0+blahblah which is fine. Older versions of Ubuntu (such as Jammy 22) would install an older version of the library which is too old for our purposes.

Once you know your system is recent enough to install the correct libraries, you should do so.

rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Coding/mamie$ sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-image-2.0-0 libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0
[sudo] password for rick:         
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
[...blah blah blah...]

If these libraries are installed and up to date, it'll tell you and do nothing. Otherwise it will install or update them as necessary.
You probably have the SDL2 base library already, and whether or not you have the other two depends upon what other programs you have installed (if something else already needed it).

Yes, this would all be sorted if I packaged my game and let the packager sort out the dependencies for me. But I don't know how to do that, so we'll just use the manual method.

Next, grab a copy of this archive:

Extract it to where you like. Maybe something like ~/Games/Mamie ?

If you want a desktop shortcut to run the game, go into the Desktop folder within Mamie and right-click the file within that is probably called Mamie, open it in your text editor.
Edit the paths as applicable for where you have put the game.

Editing the desktop file.

Then save the file, and finally copy it over to ~/Desktop in order to have it appear as a desktop shortcut.

To run the game, either double-click on the shortcut if you did that just above, or go to the command line and enter:

rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Games/Mamie$ ./mamie

This will run the game scaled to fit the current display resolution. It will also spew some junk to the terminal and block the terminal while the game is running.
This won't be a big deal if the program is running full-screen, but might be less desirable if it is running in a window.

You can dissociate the game from the terminal using something like:

rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Games/Mamie$ nohup ./mamie -w > /dev/null &

In the terminal, press Enter to get the command line back.

Mamie takes one of four command line options:

rick@Rick-E200HA:~/Games/Mamie$ ./mamie ?
Syntax: mamie [ -fullscreen | -scaled | -window ]
          -fullscreen  = Switch to 1280x720 mode.
          -scaled      = Use desktop resolution and scale it (DEFAULT).
          -window      = Run in a window.

The fourth option is "-audioinhibit". This was added because sometimes my sound system keels over dead, and when this happens the game freezes at shutdown and needs to be killed with prejudice; but then at least Mamie will otherwise work iat state, which is more than can be said for Audacity...
With audio inhibited, no sound is loaded or played. This might also be useful if you want to play in a situation where the "Oh, yes! would be...undesirable.

Protip: The parser only looks at the first letter, so -f or -s or -w and/or -a will be fine.
If you specify multiple methods, for whatever reason, don't. The last one read will be the one used, so ./mamie -f -s -w will run in a window.

Limitations:

• Keys are not reconfigurable. There are no plans to change this due to the differences between RISC OS and SDL/Linux.
• Joysticks are not supported. This may be looked into in the future.
• Window events are not currently supported (other than closing the window). So if you switch to another task, Mamie will keep running.
• No game state is saved, so there's no ability to resume from the level you stopped at. This will be looked at in the future.
• There may be bugs. There shouldn't be, but... ☺

An extra keypress in various places:

• Pressing F1 will show some help or info.

Extra keypresses (when playing the game):

• Pressing Pause (may be "Break" or "Attn") will instantly abort the game.
• Pressing PrintScreen will take a screenshot (called screenshot_hhmmss.png where "hhmmss" is the time) and save it. It will be saved to the folder 'current' when the game starts. If using a desktop shortcut, this will probably be your home folder.
• Pressing ^H will show you a hint.
• And, finally, pressing F8 will set the ghost counter to zero ending the level, so you can skip ahead for levels you have already played.
  But, note, this sets the "cheater" flag, so don't do this when state saving/scoring is implemented. ☺

Bread maker

Appliances! This is peak adulting, isn't it?

Keeping warm

A spooky dinner.

I remember in my childhood because town gas is common in the UK, houses had gas central heating and it didn't cost your internal organs so heating a place, even with single glazed windows, wasn't seen as a big deal.
Out on the other side of the cave there is a defunct long-rusted oil fired boiler for central heating here. That was kaput when we weren't here and the radiators froze. The radiators that had been drained froze. But since it's cast iron the expansion of just a tiny bit of water was enough to break them. When the bedrooms were done, the radiators were taken out to simplify things.
I guess it might be nice to have some form of central heating, but how would it work? Gas and oil will be too expensive to run, and I don't know if a heat pump would be powerful enough to make a radiator hot, just warm, in this setup.
So I think the best current approach is localised heating like a heated blanket for me, and a "warm room" that can be heated so it is not unpleasant.

As I am used to the cold, for me the good weather arrives earlier than most. People have been lighting their fires for a few months already - when it started to be not-warm at night. I have only thought about heating as of last weekend when the temperatures nosedived to -3 at night and maybe +3 in the day. It is 11°C outside right now, and chucking it down. I can't open the windows to let the warm air in as the cold walls attract condensation from the humidity in the air. Ask me how I know... I had it all open for about half and hour earlier today, but when there was water dripping off the frying pan's solid base, I had to close the windows and run the fan heater for a while to dry out the air.
Still, I only have maybe three to three and a half months of ugh to get through. Come the end of March, it'll be warming up (by my standards) and I can come home to a tea and sit out in the sunshine with a book.

Your comments:

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C Ferris, 23rd November 2025, 23:37

Interesting - any ideas about getting it to work on Android?

Rick, 24th November 2025, 06:09

No plans for Android, iOS, or Windows...

C Ferris, 24th November 2025, 10:12

Five Ras Pies :-)

C Ferris, 29th November 2025, 12:15

What sort of Sound commands do you use on Linux?    Gerph has given some ideas of how to get Sound working on Linux RO.

Rick, 29th November 2025, 13:00

Depends on the Linux I'm afraid.  Talking about PulseAudio with recent versions of Mint is completely wrong - they use PipeWire nowadays. I fell into this trap as all of the old forum posts talk about PulseAudio and, well, that's an easy way to mess things up.    So, Gerph probably should have said "depending on your Linux...". But, then, the same goes for the window manager, systemd or not, and a load of other things too... 🤦

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