rickascii

A crazy command line “Never Gonna Give You Up” player. (Or anything else, I guess.) Specifically, this is aimed at running on Tiny Core Linux. Inspired by roll.sh. Apache License 2.0.

Putting it together

1. Have a copy of a video, any video.
2. Clone and compile hiptext.
3. Use it to generate the frames. Tiny Core appeared to not have 256 color support (either that or it does and I was too lazy to work out why it wasn’t working) so I used this command line:

   ./hiptext --width 80 --height 25 --nocolor rick.mp4 > rickascii.frames

4. I bzip2 compressed the frames since the file is massive and I wanted to keep the image as small as possible:

   bzip2 -9 < rickascii.frames > rickascii.bz2

5. Using Audacity, I imported rick.mp4, converted the audio to mono (Tracks → Stereo Track to Mono), set the project rate to 11025 Hz, and exported as unsigned 8-bit PCM to rick.wav. Click File → Export, set the format to Other, then set the format to an unsigned 8-bit PCM WAV:
   
   This was the best and smallest I could get on Tiny Core. On other systems, you should be able to use the even smaller GSM encoding - for me, 8-bit PCM was 2.3 MB, while GSM was 461 KB.
6. That was bzipped too:

   bzip2 -9 < rick.wav > rickascii.wav.bz2

7. Fairly obviously you need to compile rickascii.c. When testing on my Mac, I used this fairly simple clang command line:

   clang rickascii.c -DDEBUG -o rickascii

Running make will also do the same (warning: and run the program, so turn down your sound!)

When DEBUG is set, ^C is allowed, and OS X’s afplay is used instead of aplay.

On Tiny Core

To compile a binary usable on Tiny Core, I transferred the code to a Ubuntu machine and used gcc with some specific flags. First, I had to install gcc-multilib:

sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib

Then:

# Mac:
scp rickascii.c zoidberg:/tmp/rickascii.c

# Ubuntu:
cd /tmp
gcc rickascii.c -std=gnu99 -m32 -pipe -o rickascii

# Mac:
scp zoidberg:/tmp/rickascii .

make tinycore will do the same - set your Ubuntu machine’s user/hostname in the makefile.

Running

To run rickascii, you must place it in the same directory as rickascii.wav.bz2, and pipe it the contents of rickascii.bz2 via bzcat:

bzcat rickascii.bz2 | ./rickascii

Making a Tiny Core image

Before you start this, you’ll want to grab a copy of Core.iso and read up on remastering.

You can basically throw the three files anywhere you want in the filesystem (I chose /rickascii), and launch it from /etc/init.d/tc-config. Append this to the bottom of that file:

/bin/stty intr undef
/usr/bin/bzcat /rickascii/rickascii.bz2 | /rickascii/rickascii
/sbin/reboot

If you build this into an ISO and boot it, you’ll notice that there’s no sound. We’ll need to download alsa and friends:

• alsa.tcz
• alsa.tcz.dep
• alsa-config.tcz
• alsa-modules.tcz
• libasound.tcz
• libpci.tcz
• pciutils.tcz
• pciutils.tcz.dep

Place these in /tmp/tce/optional. I believe that tc-config will load these modules for you; if not, add these lines before the bzcat line:

/usr/bin/sudo -u tc /usr/bin/tce-load -i /tmp/tce/optional/alsa.tcz > /dev/null
/usr/local/tce.installed/*

Boom - that’s it.

Extra stuff

Since Tiny Core is fairly general-purpose, I spent a little too much time optimizing the system to remove extra stuff that wasn’t needed. Particularly, tc-config was reduced from a hundred or so lines to only 8.

I didn’t sort out how to delete unneeded drivers, which were taking a fairly large amount of space in the image. The .tcz packages could have also been unpacked into the system to prevent from having to do that at boot, but I encountered some problems I can’t really remember any more. On top of that, busybox could have been recompiled to remove the unneeded commands, or even just removed, with the C code handling tc-config’s job.