Topic: Droid Does what Nintendon't (Read 5790 times)

Classic · « **Reply #20 on:** October 01, 2012, 11:38:04 AM »

I feel like that really depends on whether or not your phone can play Wind Waker.

Miss Cat Ears · « **Reply #21 on:** October 01, 2012, 12:25:15 PM »

I don't think it plays Gamecube games but I have one at my house anyway

Thad · « **Reply #22 on:** October 07, 2012, 11:43:47 AM »

Still sticking with Sense for now. But if I WERE to experiment with something else, what would I want to do to replace the various preinstalled Sense apps I use? Just basic stuff -- voicemail, contacts, texting, alarm clock, weather, music player (with AAC compatibility), Play Store, off the top of my head, though there may be others.

I also find that my current ROM sucks battery pretty hard when I'm doing something as innocuous as reading an ebook; that juice seems like it's just going into the backlight. Should I consider a white-on-black theme, or just turn down the backlight when I'm running on battery?

Miss Cat Ears · « **Reply #23 on:** October 07, 2012, 12:51:34 PM »

I usually do both, especially if I'm reading for a long period of time. I also got a couple of spare batteries to keep with me on longer trips.

TA · « **Reply #24 on:** October 07, 2012, 01:11:28 PM »

When reading a book in Aldiko, I used white-on-black and adjusted the backlight to suit the room, yeah.

Most of those apps you mention aren't particularly Sense things - Play Store and probably Music definitely aren't. But any ROM you put on there will have those, the Sense version if it's a Sense-based ROM and the Google ones if it's AOSP.

Royal☭ · « **Reply #25 on:** October 07, 2012, 01:25:31 PM »

I know you don't want Google running your life, but Google Voice is a fairly strong voicemail and texting client. Though you do lose MMS that way. For just texting, though, I recommend Handcent SMS which is more robust than any default texting app. For my alarm I use Alarm Clock Plus, though I haven't really found an alarm clock app that I think is killer. It's just an alarm, really.

As for weather, I don't use a dedicated weather app, per se, just using a modified Beautiful Widgets that fits my minimalist theme.

For music, your best bet is to drop a little on Poweramp, which is robust and plays everything. If you're looking for free, I might suggest Winamp. My personal preference is to just Google Music and sync with my desktop. But again, Google.

Thad · « **Reply #26 on:** October 07, 2012, 03:32:35 PM »

Quote from: TA on October 07, 2012, 01:11:28 PM

Most of those apps you mention aren't particularly Sense things - Play Store and probably Music definitely aren't. But any ROM you put on there will have those, the Sense version if it's a Sense-based ROM and the Google ones if it's AOSP.

Cyanogenmod doesn't bundle the Play Store anymore. I've seen reference to doing a Google System Files backup/restore but it didn't work when I tried it last weekend, so I switched back to MikG because I didn't have time to troubleshoot.

I've seen it as just a package file on a few sites; I guess if it's signed by Google I can probably trust it regardless of where I get it.

TA · « **Reply #27 on:** October 07, 2012, 05:23:07 PM »

Quote from: Thad on October 07, 2012, 03:32:35 PM

Quote from: TA on October 07, 2012, 01:11:28 PM
Most of those apps you mention aren't particularly Sense things - Play Store and probably Music definitely aren't. But any ROM you put on there will have those, the Sense version if it's a Sense-based ROM and the Google ones if it's AOSP.

Cyanogenmod doesn't bundle the Play Store anymore. I've seen reference to doing a Google System Files backup/restore but it didn't work when I tried it last weekend, so I switched back to MikG because I didn't have time to troubleshoot.

I've seen it as just a package file on a few sites; I guess if it's signed by Google I can probably trust it regardless of where I get it.

They don't bundle it in the installer, but it's readily had, including from them. Especially if you install by way of ROM Manager, which you should - then it's just a checkbox.

Thad · « **Reply #28 on:** October 07, 2012, 07:19:35 PM »

Cool, thanks.

Thad · « **Reply #29 on:** October 15, 2012, 12:06:00 PM »

Man, the onscreen D-pad is really terrible. I mean, I thought it would at least work smoothly for stuff like Dragon Quest and Earthbound, but even there it's a chore.

Brentai · « **Reply #30 on:** October 15, 2012, 01:09:47 PM »

Virtualized gamepads are universally useless. I think you can Bluetooth sync a Wiimote though?

Thad · « **Reply #31 on:** October 15, 2012, 01:25:31 PM »

Yeah, but that tends to impact the portability of the device. May as well just bring my PSP at that point.

Ted Belmont · « **Reply #32 on:** October 15, 2012, 01:49:34 PM »

I think it also depends on whether the game itself has gamepad support. I may be wrong, though.

Miss Cat Ears · « **Reply #33 on:** October 19, 2012, 08:26:08 AM »

Quote from: Thad on October 15, 2012, 01:25:31 PM

Yeah, but that tends to impact the portability of the device. May as well just bring my PSP at that point.

carry a purse

Classic · « **Reply #34 on:** October 19, 2012, 08:31:18 AM »

When a man carries a purse it's called a "messenger bag".

Thad · « **Reply #35 on:** October 20, 2012, 09:09:58 AM »

Switched back to CM7.

Quote from: TA on October 07, 2012, 05:23:07 PM

They don't bundle it in the installer, but it's readily had, including from them. Especially if you install by way of ROM Manager, which you should - then it's just a checkbox.

For some reason I never got the checkbox. Is it only in the paid/pro version?

Thanks for the link, though; that did the job.

Reinstalling Sprint VVM turned out to be trickier than anticipated. The featureset of Google Voice is tempting, but yeah I really don't need them running their spiders all over my phone calls. (Even if, judging by the free preview Sprint gave me, they won't get any kind of intelligible information from them. My brother's messages are the best; Google's speech recognition cannot understand a damn word he says. I think my favorite was its transcription of "Aloha" to "Elohim".)

I really quite like the barebones CM look, except the animated wallpaper is irritating and I wish there were a percent on the battery icon. (I can replace it with the Gauge Battery icon but that breaks up the color scheme.) I've been unable to find a theme I like, though I've long found browsing through themes to be a pick-the-corn-out-of-the-shit exercise regardless of the system. Apparently most people do not like simple, straightforward themes.

Will probably stick with it a few days then try my hand at MIUI or something. And then maybe try screwing around with ICS and see what I can come up with.

TA · « **Reply #36 on:** October 20, 2012, 09:15:21 AM »

You should be able to change out the battery icon to have a percent. Pretty sure the CM7 settings contain that. Wallpaper, of course, can be set to whatever you like.

Thad · « **Reply #37 on:** November 10, 2012, 02:53:11 PM »

Giving MIUI a shot. It's pretty big but the stuff it comes with seems generally useful -- a file manager that will show all the images/apk's/whatever on the SD card, for example.

The default theme's too bright for my tastes, but its auto-brightness settings seem much dimmer than the previous ROMs I've used, so that's probably good for the battery. Tried to grab a dark theme but haven't had any luck yet (the theme manager crashed once, and now it's just downloading really slowly).

It's also really aggressive on security -- it's probably the most thorough, granular system I've ever seen as far as security permissions. It doesn't just tell you what information an app is going to ask for at install time, it does it at execution time, too, and offers you the option to prompt every single time it attempts to access private data. Trust the Chinese to bake that kind of paranoia into their OS.

The version of Sprint VVM I had crashed at runtime, which I found out is a known issue with ICS/Jellybean ROMs. I found an ICS version that works.

The absence of an app drawer is vexing, particularly the part about dragging-and-dropping launchers across different workspaces.

Anyway, not bad for a start. My favorite so far is straight-up vanilla CM7; I'll probably try out a modified-for-my-phone CM10 next, but I'm likely to stick with this for a few weeks anyway.

EDIT: Weather seems to think I'm in some place called Temperanceville. That's not a DYAC on me typing in "Tempe", either; that's what it automatically set itself to from my location.

I'm trying to fix it but it currently says

Quote

Hot city
no city that you want to query

I greatly appreciate the oriental wisdom but I still have to live here, phone.

EDIT 2: Still getting the "You haven't accessed the Google Play Store app on your device" error even though I've been using it for like an hour. Irritating; it's much quicker to queue app installations from my desktop.

Ziiro · « **Reply #38 on:** November 26, 2012, 04:16:38 AM »

I want to add in here my experience over the past week when tooling around with emulation on my tablet. Might be a bit redundant but I'll throw some stuff out there. I was mostly getting it all setup for a long car trip.

Apps:
Mupen64 Plus
"Snes9x EX" (.. This is no longer on the marketplace? Weird. I'm pretty positive I didn't side-load it.)
WiimoteController

SNES9X EX actually has Wiimote control scanning/mapping built in to the app itself. So the use of WiimoteController is for all non-SNEX9X gaming purposes. (Mupen64, other tablet games, etC). You reset it and scan it as if you're synching up to a new Wii, and it picks it up just fine. Responsive, good controls like this is what it was meant for. I actually use a classic controller plugged into the bottom of the thing just for that true classic experience. It's great, and because it's a table and not a phone - I don't have Thad's problem of storage. It all fits nicely in my ~~man purse~~ messenger bag

99% of the games on the SNES work fine. I have yet to run into one that gives me any problems but I doubt it's going to be an issue - that's a later emulation generation issue. Mupen64 for example, has some audio and video stuttering. It's not a lack of hardware, I'd think - I'm using an Asus Transformer TF101 which has some decent power behind it.

Then again this is one of those situations where I sit back and look at what I'm able to do with current technology and think "Holy shit." I'm going to dig into PS1(Dreamcast?) Emulation next. I'd look into the Generation previous to the one we're in (XBOX/PS2/GCN), but I have a feeling that won't be possible for at least a while longer.

Thad · « **Reply #39 on:** December 26, 2012, 03:24:29 PM »

Nexus 7 made it in; slapped a screen protector on it. (Xtremeguard; the guys at xda-developers said they were pretty good, and they had a sale going where I bought 2 for under $3. That coupon's expired but they seem to have deals like that pretty frequently; if anyone's looking for one I suggest doing a search first to see if there are any current codes). My first attempt with wet application. Looks...about like my previous attempts at dry application; I'm hoping the bubbles work themselves out better than they did on my DS.

I've also seen some warnings on Amazon reviews about water damaging components, so I'm going to let it sit for a day or so before I fire it up, just in case.

Meanwhile, Cyanogenmod 7 on my Evo 4G has developed the nasty habit of hanging on boot. I don't typically turn the thing off, but the last couple times I've gone to the movies I shut it down and just got the white boot screen when I powered it back up; had to pop the battery.

Decided to try another firmware; I went with the last AOKP milestone for the device (Milestone 6) but it was fucked up; windows rendered on top of each other and it didn't register my touches on most boxes.

The latest MIUI release is ostensibly much more stable than the last one I tried, but I've opted instead to stick with nice stable fast Gingerbread, so after a fair bit of poking around I settled on Deck's Reloaded. Will see how that goes. (If I were going JB, I'd probably check out the latest Evervolv; it's got pretty solid reviews.)

Meanwhile, SwiftKey's released a Swype-style keyboard called Flow; I'm going to give that a shot. I like Swype in theory but its suggestions fucking kill me; I'm hoping SwiftKey's are better. I've said before that I wish there were a setting between "Automatically replace whatever I typed with the first suggestion" and "Don't offer any suggestions whatsoever"; I would very much like to have suggestions for when I fat-finger it, but I would also very much like for the thing I actually typed to be the default entry. Will let you guys know how that goes too.

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Author Topic: Droid Does what Nintendon't (Read 5790 times)