Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Great Games for your NPower Fusion Media Player 2

Here's a new batch of games tested that work great on a NPower Fusion Media Player

Atari Legends 1 - Haven't found part 2, but you've got to play Combat.

Lego Racers - haven't played this one much, but it looks good so far.

Arkanoid - As long as you remember to exit at the main menu when you finish playing it will let you start on the level you quit on. I got up to level 77 before I had to reformat my device to find you all some more games.

Great Games for NPower Fusion Media Player 1

I've found a few games that work great on the NPower Fusion Media Player. Unzip and put both the jar and the jad files in the Java directory on your NPower Fusion while it's plugged in, as per the instruction in the manual:

Bomberman Deluxe - Awesome how well this game works. I don't play anything else at the moment. It saves your progress and everything. It's like it was made for this device.

Sonic the Hedgehog 1 - There are a few issues with the NPower screen being a resolution it wasn't made for specifically, as well as up being jump and a button used to look up. But it does work. The issues with the screen resolution make the first world unbeatable. I recommend you skip this one.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - Runs like molasses on the NPower, so I don't know if it has the same problem as the above.

That's the first batch. I have many more coming soon!

As I find more that work great I'll post them.

Formatting movies for your npower fusion digital media player

If you want to watch videos on your npower fusion digital media player the manual is very specific that they need to be a certain size (320x240) no more than 512Kbps, and wmv format. What they don't specify is how to do that. If you don't own a video conversion software, don't worry. Free programs exist that make everything the expensive video conversion software does possible.

The first thing you're going to want is Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder. This utility makes it easy to set up optimal settings to get the maximum from your wmv files. However the encoder is only good for one file at a time, which can be trouble when you're trying to convert the entire season of a show like Firefly or The Office.

For converting more files at once you'll need the Windows Media Encoder SDK (available at the same place). Generally speaking this is not for public use, but it does contain a batch encoder. You'll need to open up your hard drive and manually look for batchencoder.exe. This program isn't complete in any way, but it does effectively do what we're looking for. You may want to make a shortcut somewhere so you can find this program later. Batchencoder.exe wants a profile. Here's one that I've set up that'll do the trick. Save it in My Documents for easy access.

But then there's another problem. Fast Forwarding on the npower fusion doesn't cooperate for me. It seems that after Fast Forwarding 5 minutes the thing breaks. So my solution was to break the videos up into 5 minute segements. And for that I found ASFBin (thanks to the folks at the doom9.org forums). Okay, bear with me because I can't host the files myself, so you'll need to do this manually.
  1. Download ASFBin and unzip it c:\asfbin
  2. Open up c:\asfbin
  3. Replace the segments.lst file in c:\asfbin with this segments.lst file.
  4. Download Splitfile.bat and save it anywhere you want. (use c:\asfbin if you can't think of anywhere else.)
Now all you need to do to split a file up is drag the wmv into splitfile.bat and watch as your program is broken up into 5 minute segments. (5:02 technically, but a little overlap avoids gaps right in the middle of someone's clever dialog.) Remember when you sync that you do not need to sync the original file.

At this point all you have to do is open up Windows Media Player, click the sync tab, and drag and drop all the movie files you want to watch later and click the sync button. Movie's on the go.