Tried some (Integer) Speedtest, some people asked me about. Of course I’m also interested if my feeling (double 060/50 speed). I used some code from Benchmarks Game. Especially the tests: fannkuch 10 and BinaryTree 15. (68060/50Mhz= A1200 with Blizzard 1260, MorphOS = MacMini 1.4Ghz, UAE/AROS/Linux = Athlon FX 8120 3.16 Ghz)
machine
BinaryTree
fannkuch
Time [s]
Speed rel. to 060
Time [s]
Speed rel. to 060
68060/50Mhz
42.9
1.0
59.6
1.0
VampireA600
23.4
1.8
28.3
2.1
MorphOS 68k emul
3.0
14.3
33.0
1.3
WinUAE OS3.9
1.4
30.6
2.0
29.8
MorphOS PPC
1.3
33
2.3
25.9
AROS i386
0.6
71.5
0.7
85.1
Linux x86_64
0.3
143
0.2
298
So my feeling was more or less right, it’s around double speed to 060, so it’s a nice step but far far away from UAE. More interesting for me would be FPU processing but at this point the comparison would be very dramatic and a little bit unfair because Vampire still have no FPU support (even it’s everywhere announced, but seems even next version will not have FPU).
I bought a neat eat toy for me. An A600 already equipped with an Vampire processor card. A Vampire is an FPGA based CPU card for Amiga 500 and Amiga 600. A while ago I thought already about to buy a Vampire card. The delivery times for it are very uncertain and seems in the order of 6 Month. I even would need to buy an A600 first, I was really to lazy to do such step with uncertain future. But I found an ready to use one one ebay. Maybe a little bit more expensive but thats fine by me, still much cheaper than a 68060 or PPC card. 😉 The capacitors are exchanged but the audio sounds strange, but not a big problem for me. Mainly I’m not interested in the speed but but in the GFX Card which comes with the FPGA on Vampire. Its the only way to get a 24bit GFX card into a keyboard Amiga (except the very seldom BVision for A1200). Of course my for me very interesting if freepascal and it’s programs work with it and good news on this side, it’s working nicely. The only problem (like on my A1200) is the slow harddisk which makes it much slower then UAE but as I read the next firmware should improve that a lot. Of course a screenshot (done with a screenshot program I wrote in FP-IDE directly on my A1200 some weeks before)
Didn’t have much time today, so I only show a cute little program to learn typing, out of the box compiled for AROS TappyTux, also with Mathematics. still not perfect, needs a little bit work, (sometimes the text is outside), it throws 2 hammers and so on.. but even so very neat.
Playing a little bit with loading routines for vector formats and found the amazing fpvector package. It contains also a nice test program to test loading of files. It works already very nice loading of .svg and .dxf Files. For example .odg files does not work some string to float problem. Also the drawing works rather nicely but also shows some problems with the filled polygons. Worth to try to compare with the Linux version.
Still playing with raytracing (so 3D calculations without GL or so) and other 3D Stuff. Magorium converted a nice little raytracing program from C to Pascal. It creates a random scene and calculate it with high precision. It makes a nice pictures. It is using SDL for display and threading, it seems the SDL Threads do not work, so I changed that to use Pascal Threads and now it is working nicely. Again a nice program for SMP 😛 already ready to use multiple threads (at Linux it runs fine with 8 Threads)
After long time I did again a little bit raytracing stuff, magorium found some source, I reviewed some of my old sources. I would be a perfect thing for the coming AROS SMP, ok I guess it will not appear so soon but it’s really a nice thing.
Notice the multicolor shadows and the multiple refelections.
I never worked with SDL before so I searched for a little tutorial for it and came across a YT video showing SDL game making with freepascal YouTube Link.
I tested the source and applied the special changes for AROS (basically to initialize the SDL and other link libs) and it works really a nice tiny game. I will look more to source to understand the SDL behind it. But first of course a little video
At Amigacoding.de FreePascal got a own Subforum inside the Language Section. Currently the Freepascal@Amigasystems fans are scattered over different Forums (mostly the Platform forums, like morph.zone, aros-exec, amiga.org, lazarus forum). But there are not much so it would be nice to centralize them to one Forum. Amigacoding.de is a nice idea to have a developer forum for ALL Amiga Platforms, sadly it’s not much in use or known. I wish this would change (even a little doubt). So if you are reading this, step by at the forum a leave a little message, what do you want for FPC, ideas, projects, help.. whatever or just hello world 😉
I started to make a tutorial for FreePascal on Amiga System, it should not be a Pascal tutorial but an Amiga with Pascal experiment. First one only cares about how to use FP-IDE, write and compile an Hello World. Next one would be about Intuition Window and drawing. Later maybe some MUI. There are some such Tutorials for C but mostly they only show how to do, my plan is more to really create a program. I plan to make the Tutorial in german and english.
Found a bug that the FP-IDE does not save it’s settings, like the last used size, recent files or Clipboard. All this Data are saved into the fp.dsk file in the same folder where the fp executable resists. I checked it and the file was just zero. I remember that I fixed that problem already once, but It could be that this was before FPC entered the official FreePascal repository and this change did not make it.
I checked on the old branch and really found it. The problem is that a seek behind the end of the file does not work on Amiga systems. The FreePascal Seek documentation does not define what should happen if you seek behind the end of the file. But it seems FP-IDE assumes it fills the File with zeros from the end of file to the new position. I included a fix for it and it nicely work on Amiga m68k. But on AROS it stays 0 bytes after some more debugging I noticed it writes the file successfully, but then at the end it gets reseted to 0 bytes. The call doing that is truncate, which resolves to SetFileSize() on the AROS size. It seems this function does not work as expected or I misunderstand it. Wrote a little test program and really if you write 4096 bytes to a file and try to SetFileSize to a 1024 bytes you get a 0 byte file. a Retest on Amiga results into a 1024 bytes files, as expected. Strange that such a basic function should be non functional in AROS and nobody noticed. The bug seems to be present for ABIv0 and ABIv1 as well. So nothing to do for me here.
This days I used the FP-IDE a lot on a native AGA-Amiga1200 and it is really usable, but I noticed the FPC archive for m68k-amiga is very big for a real Amiga. The download and unpacking needs ages so I got an idea to make a small Release for Amiga which only contains the most important RTL and Amiga units. Today I found some time to create such an archive. It is 6 MB download and around 20 MB after unpacking (the complete archive is around 52MB and 305MB after unpacking). Both archives are available on the nightly page.
