Date: 2009-03-20 20:57:05 Created: 2009-03-20 16:53:14
First posted on Bob the pleo's discussion forum.
The basic premise is very simple:
A resource on your pleo's SD card will be used instead of one in the internal memory if they have the same identity. Every resource - motions, sounds, commands, scripts and properties - in your pleo have a name and an ID number. If you name a file either the name or ID of a resource and put it on an SD card which you put in your pleo, your pleo will use that file instead of the internal one. Essentially, whenever your pleo looks for something, it will first look on its SD card, then in its own memory. If it finds something going by the right name on the SD card, it will use that, otherwise it will use what it finds in its own memory.
What this means is that you can easily replace single elements of your pleo without changing anything else. And, whenever you want to undo the replacement, all you need to do is delete the modification from your SD card. As Ugobe has not yet released much information about pleo's internals commands, scripts and properties are effectively very difficult to create, but sounds and motions are pretty simple thanks to MySkit. I will focus the rest of this text on those two file types.
Here's the outline:
This whole section boils down to this: learn to use MySkit (or get someone else to do it for you, I guess :)). MySkit's website has plenty of information, and InmemoryofRomeo has also written an extensive guide on the application.
The same thing pretty much goes for sounds. MySkit has a good sound editor built in which allows you to easily open wave files (or record a new sound) and save it in the format pleos like. If the file you want to use is not a wave file (they usually have the extension .wav to their file name) there are many programs out there which can convert sounds for you, so no need to give up if your ideal sound happens to be an mp3 or something like that.
Here's one way to create a wave file from a sound in a different format. This method uses Apple's iTunes jukebox, so it has the advantage for this tutorial of being a freely available solution available (and working the exact same way) on both Windows and Mac OS. But there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of alternative ways for both operating systems. I'm using iTunes in Swedish, so I may not have the exact words right in the below description. Do correct me if you find errors!
Anyway, here's the process if you have Apple's iTunes:
Once you have the file, all you need is to know what to name it. You could enter your pleo using Dinomite and look at the list, but it struck me that it could save eveyone a bit of work if I just went in an did that once and for all. So, here's the full list of motions and sounds. It's 428 sounds and 495 motions, so I decided to put it in a separate file to make this text a bit easier to handle.
Each line has this format:
sound: ID=4511, name=startup
To get shadowing to work properly, you want to rename your file so that it's named like what's after the equals sign after either ID or name. So, to shadow the startup sound, either name your file 4511 or startup. You want to leave the file extension intact. The file extension is the dot and last letters of the file name, .usf for sounds. Depending on how your computer is set up you may not even see this extension. So don't worry if you don't see ".usf" at the end of the file names to begin with, but leave it in place if you do.
Nothing bad happens if you accidentally remove the extension, but the file won't be found by your pleo either, so everything will be as if it wasn't there at all.
Drag your freshly renamed file to your SD card, insert the SD card into your turned off pleo, start your pleo and enjoy the change!