NES Emulators and Applescript

One of the things I planned to do after leaving Google was port an NES emulator written in Java to JavaScript. With a JavaScript emulator, it would be possible to play Nintendo games on an iPhone via a web page. (The alternative would be to write an emulator in Objective-C and package it as an iPhone app, but that would be unlikely to make it through Apple's approval process.)

Fortunately, before I sat down to start coding, I did a quick Google search to see whether someone had already done this. In turns out that a few weeks earlier, a student named Ben Firshman released JSNES, a JavaScript NES emulator!

One of the most striking things about JSNES is that it runs at full speed in Google Chrome, but barely runs on Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4. This makes me think we've been going about browser benchmarks all wrong -- I don't care which one can calculate the nth Fibonacci number the fastest, I just care about which one lets me play Contra! (Though to be fair, this probably has more to do with performance differences with a browser's <canvas> implementation rather than its JavaScript engine.)

So there I was, all ready to write all this JavaScript code to find out that it had already been done. Duplicating it seemed like a bad idea, but I still had the NES on my mind, so I started looking around to see what other advances in emulation had come along since I last played around with it a couple of years ago.

I knew Craig had bought a kit some years back which, after some soldering, made it possible for him to plug a real NES controller into a USB port. Fortunately, technology has improved and now you can buy
an adapter with an NES port on one end and a USB port on the other. No soldering required! Since the "USB NES RetroPort" costs $19 and a used NES controller only costs $3, it seemed like a good idea to buy a couple of RetroPorts and a stack of controllers so I can just swap in new controllers when the buttons wear out.

I bought some hardware (the guy who runs retrousb.com was very helpful) and started playing with different emulators to see which ones would support my new controllers. I learned that many emulators do not let you configure your joystick directly; instead, you are expected to install JoyToKey to convert joystick input to keyboard input and then map your joystick to the key commands required for your emulator. Honestly, it worked fine, but I wanted an all-in-one solution.

On Windows, VirtuaNES worked quite well and had support for configuring controllers, but the web site was in Japanese, so it took me awhile to figure out how to do that. Once I confirmed that my controllers were working, I started looking at emulators for Mac because I wanted to rekindle my project from over two years ago of using a PowerPC Mac Mini as my NES emulation hub.

Emulator options are much more limited on Mac. I started out by looking for emulators written in Java, since those should be cross-platform. I took another look at NESCafe (which I reported did not support sound in 2007, but seems to now), but as far as I could tell, it only supported one controller, so that was a deal-breaker. Then I took a look at vNES, which seemed much more promising, except for this FAQ that claimed for reasons unknown, it would not work on a PowerPC Mac.

However, the code for vNES is open sourced under the GPL 3, so I thought I would take a stab at it. The bug turned out to be very simple (it seems like the type of thing that FindBugs should be able to pick out easily):

if(mixerInfo==null || mixerInfo.length==0){
  //System.out.println("No audio mixer available, sound disabled.");                                                                           
  Globals.enableSound = false;
  return;
}

mixer = AudioSystem.getMixer(mixerInfo[1]);

If you look carefully, you'll see that although there is a check to determine whether mixerInfo is empty, it uses mixerInfo[1] for no documented reason. When I looked at the mixerInfo array, I discovered it only had one value on my PowerPC Mac Mini, two values on my Intel Mac Mini, and nine values on my Vista Thinkpad! I changed the code to use mixerInfo[0] and all was well.

(Aside: Why is the code for every emulator I look at so messy? There are never any comments -- it makes me think one guy figured out how the NES worked and everyone else has just cloned it, so there aren't any comments because no one really knows what is going on. Also, all the classes are in the default package, there are println statements commented out all over the place, etc. In debugging vNES, I tried to clean things up a bit by putting the code in a com.virtualnes package, adding a build.xml file, and refactoring things so it could be run as either an application or an applet. I am making the zip with my changes to vNES 2.11 available on bolinfest.com. I would have tried to contribute a patch to vNES, but the Google Code project appears to be empty.)

Although I got vNES working on my PPC Mini, it was prohibitively slow. Since I had already been playing around with the source code, I considered trying to optimize it, but because of the "no comments in the source code" thing, I realized that could take days. Instead, I went back to Nestopia.

Richard Bannister's Nestopia is a solid emulator for the Mac. It runs at full speed on the PPC and looks great when output to my flatscreen TV. The sound works, both of my controllers hooked up via my RetroPorts work -- this is the real deal.

The only thing it doesn't do is take the path to the ROM as a command-line option, and this is what kept me up past 4am last night. You see, I want to build a Cover Flow UI on top of the emulator for selecting the game to play. To do that, I need to be able to programmatically open Nestopia with a particular ROM file.

If Nestopia were open source, I could have tried to fix it myself to support this feature. In the release notes bundled with Nestopia 1.4.1, the author notes

Martin Freij has generously agreed to license Nestopia to me under a closed-source license for the present. As soon as I have my API kit ready, a buildable version of Nestopia will be released with my shell library. The license for this has yet to be decided but most likely will be normal GPL with my shell excluded under section three of the license. This has been postponed repeatedly due to lack of time but will be released one day - honest!

That dates back to September 27, 2008, so I wasn't going to hold my breath waiting for the source to be released. Besides, from his list of projects, Richard seems to have a lot going on, so I can imagine that he doesn't have the time for this sort of thing.

Regardless, I want my Cover Flow! Because I couldn't change the code for Nestopia, I tried to automate it with AppleScript instead. This is when I should have put the coffee on. According to Google Web History, I did over 100 searches last night while developing my script.

The first thing I that I got to work (after much experimentation) was the following:

on run argv
  tell application "Nestopia"
    quit
  end tell

  tell application "Nestopia"
    activate
    delay 1
  end tell

  tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Nestopia"
      -- Click the "Maybe later" button when asked to register.
      click at {700, 350}
  
      delay 1
      -- Cancel the "Quick Start" mode using the Escape key.
      -- It's possible to disable Quick Start in Preferences,
      -- but it's useful to have when not using this script.
      key code 53
  
      -- Hit command+shift+G to get the "Open Folder" dialog.
      delay 1
      keystroke "g" using {command down, shift down}

      -- because the "Open Folder" dialog only deals with
      -- folders and not files, we put each .nes file in
      -- its own folder so we can open the folder and
      -- then reliably select the only item that comes up
      delay 1
      keystroke (item 1 of argv)
      key code 36

      -- use the down arrow to select the file and hit enter
      delay 1
      key code 125
      key code 36

      -- go into fullscreen mode using the keyboard shortcut
      keystroke "`" using {command down}
    end tell
  end tell
end run

The part of this script that is particularly gross is the logic with the "Open Folder" dialog. Nestopia displays what appears to be a standard "File Open" dialog, but I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to script it. As you can see, I resorted to using key and mouse events to type in the value I wanted, and had I relied on this, I would have had to have an individual folder for each ROM because Finder (at least on 10.4.11, which is what my PPC Mini runs) lets you type in folder names, but not path names. If there are any AppleScript masters out there, I'd be very curious to see how else you would do this.

Unfortunately, it was not until hours after I started this project that I rediscovered the code I wrote in 2007. Back then, I wrote a CGI script in Perl which would build up some AppleScript and run it from the command line. At the time, this was the easiest way to send a command via HTTP to my Mini to kick off Nestopia:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI qw(param);

# let's get this out of the way before we forget!
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

my $rom = param("rom");

# "/Library/WebServer/Documents/nintendo/roms/"
my $folder = 'of folder "roms" ' .
             'of folder "nintendo" ' .
             'of folder "Documents" ' .
             'of folder "WebServer" ' .
             'of folder "Library" ' .
             'of startup disk';

my $cmd = "osascript -e 'tell application \"Finder\"' " .
                   " -e 'open file \"$rom\" $folder' " .
                   " -e 'end tell' ";

system($cmd);
print $cmd;

One thing that you'll notice is that file paths in Finder are gross. I ended up doing the of folder thing because that was the code Script Editor produced when I used Record to help figure out the AppleScript I needed to write. The one good thing about this script, however, was that it reminded me that simply opening the file would trigger Nestopia because it is the application associated with ROM files on my Mac. This helped me clean up my current script considerably:

on run argv
  tell application "Finder" to open file ((POSIX file (item 1 of argv)) as string)

  delay 1

  tell application "Nestopia" to activate

  -- Make sure "Enable access for assistive devices" is enabled in
  -- Universal Access under System Preferences or else
  -- System Events won't work:
  -- http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/keycodes.php
  tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Nestopia"      
      -- click the "Maybe later" button when asked to register
      click at {700, 350}

      -- go into fullscreen mode using the keyboard shortcut
      delay 1
      keystroke "`" using {command down}
      end tell
  end tell
end run

It took me at least half an hour of Googling until I came across a solution for passing in the file path as an argument. Apparently AppleScript only deals with HFS paths instead of POSIX paths like everyone else. It is particularly frustrating that Script Editor allows you to write POSIX file "/Users/bolinfest/drmario.nes", but as soon as you compile the code, it becomes file "Macintosh HD:Users:bolinfest:drmario.nes". What kind of editor rewrites your code into some kind of unmaintainable equivalent when you compile it?

I'm exhausted, so I haven't even started working on the Cover Flow part of the project yet, but at least I've resolved one of the big issues. It looks like there are working examples of Cover Flow UIs in JavaScript, so I will likely set up a web server on my Mac Mini with a similar CGI script that will shell out to my compiled AppleScript to launch the ROM. That way, I'll be able to browse my NES catalog from Safari on my iPhone and kick things off from there!

Functional Testing for Web Applications

I put together an article on functional testing for web applications. In it, I argue that a solution for performing functional testing on modern web applications should have the following properties:

1. User input should be able to be simulated using native key and mouse events.
   
2. Tests should be able to be written in JavaScript.
   
3. Test code should be able to suspend execution while waiting for network
   or other events.
   
4. Tests should be able to run in multiple browsers and on multiple platforms.
   
5. Tests should not hardcode XPaths, element ids, or CSS class names.
   
6. Test suites should be able to be run via a cron job.
   

I discuss the properties in detail, give an example of a system that exhibits most (but not all) of the properties, and then ask browser vendors to come in and save the day.

What do I think about while running? Trapezoids!

Though I'm not particularly fast, I would still call myself a runner. Many non-runners wonder how runners can possibly entertain themselves over the course of a 5-mile run. To be honest, I don't normally remember what goes through my head, but today it was trapezoids.

Specifically, given trapezoid ABCD (where AB || CD), how can you prove that CA + AB + BD is greater than CD?


It seems obvious that the sum of the other three sides should be longer (even if CA and BD are really short), but that doesn't mean it doesn't merit a proof! Drawing a single diagonal lends itself to a simple proof using the triangle inequality:


This yields the following two inequalities:

(1) CA + AB > BC
(2) BC + BD > CD

If we add BD to both sides of (1) we have:

(3) CA + AB + BD > BC + BD

Combining with (3) we have:

(4) CA + AB + BD > BC + BD > CD

So this proves that CA + AB + BD > CD!

I was thinking about this while running around the Charles River this morning, wondering whether it would ever be shorter to run past a long bridge (CD) to cross the river at a shorter bridge (AB) and then come back, but now we've proved that is never the case!

I only used a trapezoid because that more closely matched the geometry of what I was running, but I think it's trivial to extend the proof to any quadrilateral (though ones that are not convex may not cooperate).

4 years, 2 months, and 1 day

Last week, I made a slight update to my blog. Specifically, the following disclaimer has been removed: "This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer." No, this is not a change in Google's employee blogging policy -- two weeks ago I decided that October 8, 2009 would be my last day at Google.

After 4 years, 2 months, and 1 day, it was finally time for me to move on. I remember spending hours on The GLAT and other puzzles Google advertised in MIT's student newspaper, hoping they would somehow increase my chances of getting the one SWE job I wanted so badly. When I finally scored an on-campus interview during my MEng, I read at least three books on software interviews and puzzles because I wanted to be prepared for anything.

Somehow I made it through the process and was given a job offer as well as the choice of which office to join. Without hesitation, I chose Mountain View because I wanted to be in the thick of it at Google HQ. On the survey we got asking about which areas we would most like to work on, I checked off a handful of boxes, but also wrote: "If Google is working on a calendar product, then I would prefer to work on that." On my first day of work, not only did I learn that Google had been stealthily working on a calendar product, but that I was going to be responsible for building much of its UI -- working at Google really did seem like a dream come true!

Eight months later, that little calendar product finally launched (which was my one, and only, all-nighter at Google). Shortly thereafter, we moved the company off of Oracle Calendar and onto GCal (and there was much rejoicing!). I really loved working on Calendar, but somewhere in there I had decided to move back to the east coast and because someone else had simultaneously come along and decided it was important that projects not span across offices, it was really hard for me to keep working on Calendar.

To solve that problem, I moved offices again, this time to the other side of the world in Sydney. There I met many friendly, upside-down people whose curious idiomatic expressions made their way into my weekly snippets. As a bonus, I also got a front-row seat to the inception of Google Wave (which was an exciting mix of rebellion, chaos, and AJAX).

But whatever, I wasn't distracted by the reinvention of communication because I was busy working on Tasks! It was sort of like working on Calendar in that it was the #1 feature request since it had launched, but it was a lot more like working on Gmail because that's what we actually integrated with first (you'll notice we did manage to take care of that Calendar integration thing later). Tasks was fun, but exhausting. One of the many things Google has taught me is that building simple things is often extremely complicated and Tasks was no exception. (I think I've spent at least one man-month trying to figure out the best way for the cursor to move up and down between tasks, but that's a topic for another post.)

After we had integrated Tasks with almost everything (Gmail, Calendar, iGoogle, iPhone/Android, XHTML mobile phones), I decided that I should take all of the knowledge I had amassed working on Apps and contribute it to the greater Apps good, so I joined the Apps Infrastructure team. I like to think I made some good contributions there, but only time will tell if the things I put in place will last.

It's only been a few days since I've left, but now that I'm on the outside, I already feel like a boy standing on his tiptoes, reaching up to to the display window of a toy store, desperately trying to get a glimpse of the exciting things that lie within. Every time I hit a lapse in web surfing, my first inclination is to open a new tab to check my work email, but I then I glumly hit ⌘-W and go back to whatever I was doing.

It's not so much that I miss going to work, but the feeling of being in the know. One of the main reasons I decided to leave Google was misgivings about it becoming such a big company, though admittedly, so far Google has continued to do innovative and disruptive things, such as the YouTube Symphony Orchestra and Chrome Frame. I just miss being able to preview what's in the pipeline.

At Google, I was able to work with many sharp people, launch cutting-edge products, and reach millions of users. My career there took me around the world, and my experiences there have shaped me as an engineer. I am grateful for my adventures at Google, but like college, after 4 years [2 months, and 1 day], it is time to graduate and move on.

The thrilling conclusion to "Do you remember SAT math?"

Two weeks ago, I posted two SAT-style Quantitative Comparison questions. This week, I am posting the solutions (sorry, I know it's a bit late).

If we let the radius of the inner circle be r and the length of segment BC be s such that the radius of the outer circle is r+s, then we can express all the quantities that we are interested in in terms of r and s.

The length of arc CE is:
¼(2π(r+s)) = ½πr + ½πs

The length of arc BD plus the length of segment DE is:
¼(2πr) + s = ½πr + s

The length of segment CB plus arc BD plus the length of segment DE is:
s +¼(2πr) + s = ½πr + 2s

When comparing each pair of terms, the ½πr cancel each other out. Because s is a length, we know that s>0, which means that ½πs is always greater than s, but is always less than 2s. In terms of answering the quantitative comparison questions, this means the answer to the first question must be A and the answer to the second question must be B.

Put another way, if you are walking around a 90 degree arc (such as from point C to point E), it will always be faster to walk around the outer arc than to walk to an inner arc, traverse it, and return to the outer arc. What is particularly interesting is that this is true regardless of the radius of the inner arc.

Now before you start taking the outside edge of every curve, note that this only holds true for arcs less than a certain size. For example, what if it you were traversing a semicircle instead?

The length of the outer arc would be:
½(2π(r+s)) = πr+πs

The length of the two straightaways plus the inner arc would be:
s +½(2πr) + s = πr + 2s

Because πs is greater than 2s, it makes more sense to walk to the inner arc when walking around a semicircle! So where is the breaking point? This can be determined by letting x be the fraction of the circle to traverse and setting the two path lengths equal to one another and solving for x:

x(2π(r+s)) = x(2πr) + 2s
2πxr+2πxs = 2πxr + 2s
2πxs = 2s
πx = 1
x = 1 / π

Plugging that into Google Calculator, we see that x is ~0.318, so once you're walking more than a third of the way around a circle, it makes more sense to move to the inner arc.

I thought that this would make a great SAT question for several reasons. First, and most importantly, this is a quantitative comparison question that does not have any numbers, yet its answer is not D! I'm pretty sure that most students hated geometry (so sad!), so when they come to something like this, it's pretty easy to throw up one's hands and declare the question unsolvable. Of course such a student would be incorrect...

Also, this question is resistant to some common SAT-solving techniques. For example, for geometry questions where the figure is to scale (such as this one), The Princeton Review will tell you to make small marks on your answer sheet so you can use it as a ruler, but because this problem involves arcs, that is of little help. Another common SAT tip is to redraw the diagram, exaggerating r or s, but if you play around with that, you can probably convince yourself that there are cases where one quantity is larger than the other, but it's hard to say conclusively that it holds true for arbitrary values of r and s.

That means the only ones who will be answering the question correctly are those who can do the math. Isn't that how it should be?

It's time to add baseball schedules to Google Calendar!

It's not very flashy, but I created a Google Calendar for each MLB team's 2009 schedule:

http://mlb.bolinfest.com/

Each calendar will be updated automatically – I have a script that runs twice an hour while baseball games are on (it gets a break from 3am-noon eastern time) to scrape the latest data and update all of the calendars. Unfortunately, I don't think the calendars will be re-indexed that quickly by Google Calendar, but it's better than nothing.

I actually wrote Chickenfoot code two years ago to scrape data from mlb.com for use with CalMap and wikicalendars.com. Unfortunately, I never quite got Chickenfoot working with cron (which meant I manually ran the Chickenfoot script every morning to update the calendars), so this year I actually decided to run my original JavaScript code using Rhino since it's easy to kick off a Java process using cron. It sounds a little crazy, but it works great!

Web Content Wizard is fixed!

My Web Content Wizard is fixed! Something must have changed on Google's side – I have not touched the code for the Wizard in years, but users have been writing in for some time now asking me to fix it.

I remember that setting up AuthSub the first time around was pretty miserable, so I was reluctant to sit down and try to debug it. I'm not sure what went wrong, but visiting https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageDomains to register bolinfest.com appeared to fix the problem.