There's quite a bit I can do without access to the service buttons, and it should be possible to get by without a key, but having it would guarantee that we can make the necessary changes.  I know for a fact I can't change the machine volume without a key and I'm pretty sure the machine will be too loud if the volume hasn't been changed since Sunday (and I think we had it turned up higher than normal for the convention), so having access to the coin door would be a good idea regardless, since the machine would probably have to be turned back off until someone could come by to drop the volume.

The boot failure should not be an issue.  If I'm right, the machine is failing to boot OpenITG, and the underlying OS is booting fine - if so, I can get into the machine via laptop (which is we added songs over the weekend).  If the failure is killing the OS, rather than just OpenITG, I have a bootable USB drive and keyboard, so I can load my own OS, then look into ITG's drive afterward); unfortunately, if the error is severe enough to prevent the OS from loading, it's probably not just a full HD and I'll mostly be there to take down notes.

It looks like Laura and I will be getting down there around 7:00.  We could either have a tech meet us shortly after (I'd probably only need about 15 minutes to get the machine up and running if deleting some songs will fix it) or I can see if BlueSS is available tonight.  I'm trying to find out if he is, but for now, I'd assume we'll need a tech to meet up with us.

FYI, if this is the error you're getting. Try reseating the graphics card.

In the Groove 2 AC "Out f Range" startup error

NEWS!
It is up and running!  Our tech found something disconnected from moving the cabinet.  Up and running now, off free play, and volume hopefully where it should be.  I know you will all advise on that later.  He also attempted to get the song time limits set.  Please let us know how that turned out as compared to before.  And if it's way off, and you can get in the menu from back, please feel free to get the settings corrected.  If Acme staff has any questions, they can phone me personally, but I doubt they will as they know you guys also look after that machine.

Let me know how it's looking down there, hoping all is well.

Gerrak just texted me regarding the machine - apparently it's booting into an alternate theme from what we've been using, but otherwise does seem to actually work.  I'll still take a look tonight and tweak anything that needs to be tweaked.

Thanks, Tony!

We are here right now, and holy hell there are a lot of people playing SSIV.  Like, seriously, there's gotta be at least ten of them.

Everything seems to be running smoothly with ITG - not sure why it switched over to the IIDX Empress theme, but everything else is fine.

Since the machine came back up on it's own, DDR Encore has not been removed.

I tweaked a few settings - long versions and marathons are back down from the con settings, Amore (ITG2) is the default song, and we now have 1.25x, 1.75x, 2.25x, 2.75x, 3.25x, 3.5x, 3.75x, and 4.5x (and maybe 5.5x, I can't remember if I added it or not) on the machine regardless of theme.  I thought I found the right config file to change the theme back to ITG3, but it's still Empress and changing back will really be made easier by going through the service menu.

That said, the Empress theme took me a few songs to get used to, but overall is much, much cleaner and lags on the song wheel less frequently than ITG3.  It also has an extremely clear indicator of whether you are stepping early or late.  Most importantly, it doesn't have that loud scrolling sound blasting in your ear every time you move through the song list (the mode select music is less annoying too).  Also, it doesn't reset your noteskin every time you load the options menu.  In general, I'd be happy to stick with it if other people were fine with it - anyone want to give their input?

And yeah, SSIV (and SSII Turbo next to it) were extremely busy tonight.

I'd like to keep it at the Empress theme for awhile, I'm tired of seeing itg3

I hope Empress works for you guys. I know it causes a lot of weird issues on Tom and my machine.

What kinds of weird issues?  If it's anything that happened consistently, we can try to reproduce the issues on the Acme machine and switch back if they come up - there was nothing wrong last night when Laura and I were playing, but we weren't trying to give it a thorough test pass.

Same here... Theme is gettin old to look at.

I say put on the 5th Mix theme! =D

I'll be going in today for a hour or so to practice some more ItG :] and ill most likely be coming in for a bit thursday or friday, are any of you planning to go those days? what times?

Ill be showing up friday. Not sure what time but probably evening.

Thank you Tony for the Empress theme. It looks so sick.

I did put that on the machine a while ago...it just ended up crashing almost all the time. I think the RAM addition might have fixed it TBH.

Hey Bill, not sure if it's already back at ACME , but will DM V3 be coming back ?

It should be coming back, the hihat died at Sakuracon (and the plastic panel actually snapped underneath the pad) so that needs to be fixed/replaced.

Yes, DM was broken, came to the shop Sunday night, drums rebuilt Monday morning, on location at Acme for opening at 3:00 Monday.  Ha!  How is that for turnaround?  :-)

The Empress theme tries to pull a lot of images in to float in the background, but it does a really poor job choosing those files. On the main menu screen the font images will cycle behind the logos.

Additionally, in the song select there are no song banners, most of the theme's descriptions are jokes and not real helpful descriptions, and the name entry screen isn't as good as the ones that show you the song banners again.

It's nice to see a change, but there are a lot of problems with that theme, especially for random new players.

Just so there's no confusion, most people I've talked to (as in, 100% of the people I've played with at Acme in the 4 days I've played since sakuracon), myself included, find the Empress theme waaaay too happy and pink for ITG and don't like it, plus the in-song graphics for grading and the combo got changed up and its been throwing off my timing significantly and generally doesn't look as good in my and others' opinion. My USB will also no longer load 3/4 of my songs like it did at and before sakuracon. Also some of the arrow modifiers are missing, and only the single mini option is now available (as opposed to the multiple types of mini/enlarge on ITG3, not that I use this but I've seen others use it). Point is, almost no one seems to like this theme at all and its buggy as hell so it needs to be changed.

In any case I've scoured the issue across those who know what's up with it and the general consensus is that KEVINDDR botched some installation and put the theme in some unknown directory that is making it impossible to remove. So I've been asked by everyone to tell Kevin to tell someone who can make the appropriate deletion where you put the files. Or else do it yourself if it isn't going to take 8 months like every change you've promised.

In any case I can make this one statement with confidence: ASK THE GOD DAMN COMMUNITY BEFORE YOU MAKE CHANGES TO THE ACME MACHINE. And by the community I mean people who ACTUALLY PLAY AT ACME. And Kevin you are god damn careless with the machine, you shouldn't make any more changes unless you're supervised by someone who gives a shit when you fuck it all up.

Look, it took a YEAR of my nagging to get the 10 second change to make custom long songs work like they do now. We STILL can't get hardly any custom songs on because people are so god damn lazy with it and we've been "suggesting packs" for years (and I already volunteered to spend my own money to make hardware upgrades when necessary). Every time we ever hold a tournament the volume gets fucked up and Acme complains and the machine is nigh-unplayable for days-sometimes weeks. The timing windows are still not standardized to "normal" machines so far as I know (yes, I haven't forgotten this minor change from over a year ago that was supposed to be made to fix this). Half the songs are offsync. Need I go on?

Please can I just supervise any changes to the Acme machine? I'll make the drive to make it happen if you want to make changes just for God sake there's been so much carelessness... It was my bad for not taking the initiative at Sakuracon to stay an extra day to supervise the changes, when I knew with absolute certainty that when I came to Acme on Monday that something would be fucked up and sure enough....

Or maybe just finally give me, and not just KDDR and Amber anymore, a key to the machine so I can access the service menu to fix the shit that's continually botched, since it's been me who's called in or called out every problem with the machine for 3 years anyway and nagging about it for months before it gets fixed, and these guys play like once a year.

I know this was a little angry, forgive me, but this continual tedium from others' carelessness is really quite frustrating.


And no I don't give a crap about the cost of playing so I wouldn't jank credits or make ridiculous (or any) changes without asking anyone. I would take very very good care of this machine.

oh man there's still problems with the theme. it looks so pretty too! =(

^ That leprechauns on acid!

Hehe

I don't really care that much about the general look it's just buggy and the in-song graphic changes are throwing my timing off still, even after days of trying to get used to it, and I just don't like how the layout is now with the combo counter all off center and the grading 'words' or whatever in a different spot (up and to the left of where it was). And more than any of those, the fact that most of my custom songs don't work anymore.

I mean, I haven't played Nemeton in days

Gerrak, CALM DOWN WE KNOW YOU LIKE ITG AND YOU PLAY AT ACME A LOT YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL US EVERY TIME KTHX.

I have a key to the machine, and was at Acme with Laura and Tony last night. Like you said, if the entire community (not just you) agrees to change something on the machine, we can make changes. As I said earlier, I think that the pink theme should be replaced, mostly because it's broken and unfinished.

Tony and I have also successfully SSH'ed in to the machine, and I believe Tony is the one who made all the Sakuracon pack updates via this method. That method lets us add/delete stuff.

And in terms of song packs, there are a lot that *you* want to put on, but I think this again should be a community decision, giving preference first to packs with the most votes.

I do think the machine should be updated, and on a more regular basis. We have a key now, and we can make the changes, but these changes aren't going to be every week.

To reiterate: Jon and I, who are routinely available and actually follow through when he says he'll do something, have a key to the machine and proper modding tools between us.  I can do everything short of a theme change without the key, and I can't explain why changing the theme via SSH didn't work.

Doing SSH-based updates affords us a lot more flexibility, is much more friendly when do things like syncing, doesn't depend on the theme working (or not working) correctly like UserPacks does, and apparently allows us to use more of the HD than UserPacks (though that won't be an issue once the new HD is ready to go), so I'd prefer to do it that way from now on.  It's honestly easier to do updates this way in the first place, too, as long as you know what you're doing.

That said, doing SSH based updates should be left to Jon and I as we both know the machine's credentials and routinely work in Unix command line environments - it's very easy to do very, very bad things when you have root access.


We didn't touch the machine on Sunday - we made all out changes on Thursday/Friday.  The machine was flipped over to Empress on Thursday for a set or two because people were curious about it, but then it was flipped back as to not mess up the tournament.  It can't really tell you why it flipped back to Empress during transport - the machine was rebooted a few times over the course of the weekend and always came back up in ITG3 mode.  OpenITG is finicky, that's all; nobody changes any settings while you we're looking on Sunday.  The only intentional change that has gone through without community input was adding a couple dozen songs for Sakuracon (that and picking Amore as the default song - it was known we needed to set it to something reasonable, but I don't think anyone actually cares what it's set to).

As for Empress, I took a quick look around for a final version of the Empress theme, and can't find convincing evidence that there have been significantly more stable revisions since ours was installed - as far as I can tell, there were only a couple revisions, all in rapid succession over the course of a week or so, followed by the creator saying "this was a lot of work, so unless it's crashing, I'm not doing anything else with it".  Empress does seem to take awhile to load from my USB stick, but not that much more than ITG3 did - the issue is that it's handling single/double/versus before mode select, so the machine gets less menu time to check your drive before it does through the strictly timed loading sequence, so that takes longer is is more likely to fail.

There are a couple buggy things about the Empress theme's actual appearance, as Jon noted, and it makes USB a little tricky because of the altered loading sequence.  Since I can't find a properly updated version, we should probably go ahead and switch it to something else.  I really don't want to go back to ITG3, since our ITG3 has its own bugs, and ITG3's menu sounds are really annoying, so if anyone has some theme suggestions (that is, actual download links, not just "this Youtube stepmania video uses a cool theme, can you try to find it?"), I'd be glad to take a look at them and see if they're practical.  If we can get a reasonable theme identified in the next day or two, we can switch to it without going back to ITG3, since it'll take a day or two for me to get back down there.