Just to finish that (for me the program and services around are now more or less finished) I will publish this AmiTube program which you can use to watch short YouTube videos on your ordinary Amiga 68k.
As one can notice in the last video I changed my setup from MultiView to AGABlaster, which is much better to play the CDXL videos, faster and smoother, also the palette switching works better. (you can change the default player in Preferences)
If you use that program, remember the conversation is done on my Server, please do not overdo it (try to convert a 2 hour video or convert hundreds of videos) other (and myself) need that Server for other things as well 😉
And please do not share or publish this program, anywhere! If one want to have it, here its free download it from my page. Thanks!
I tried the YoutTube client now on my real A1200 (with a 68060) and it works nicely, of course the network speed is much slower than that in UAE. But it’s still ok, not too long waiting times. (with that short videos). It depends very much on the video how good they look in 160 px width and only 32 colors, of course such Eric Schwartz videos are nice they had only very little colors. But I also found different ones like this „Seed“ looks very nice even so small.
I played around with different settings and noticed that not the conversation to CDXL is here the slow bit (its only 3-4 seconds, because it’s not HAM but just 32 colors) but the download speed from youtube. It seems that YouTube throttles downloads of the movies… hmm of course they want you to force to watch them on the page. But hey what can you do, it’s just for fun.
You thought it would be impossible to let an m68k Amiga play YouTube videos, you are surely mistaken, lets have a look:
You remember the CDXL stuff I showed before? Of course with that you can create a relatively low quality video from an YouTube video, and if you do that on a server and just download the converted video file you can watch youtube videos on your amiga.
The search and downloading is done via youtube_dl the conversation to CDXL using the docker container I showed earlier.
Sorry for the bad sound, but it seems to be my UAE setup is a bit strange in sound settings, never really used the sound there, also other sounds sounds a bit crackly. I should try that video on a real Amiga and with other players than Multiview to see, or better hear, if its better, or the conversation is so weak.
I remember I had some problems with the sound in big bug bunny movie as well, the sound was not loud enough and the 8 bit conversation made it really bad.
I use my bicycle regularly, drive every day to work and nearly every day a little round as training just for fun. Having and iPhone and Apple Watch, it’s very easy to record the tracks with that (I use an app called „Trailes“) of course would be even nicer to have some statistics about it, sadly the App does not really have that.
Therefore I coded my own little tool to show some statistics about my last rounds, as always for the last programs I did I coded it with Free Pascal for Amiga and it worked quiet nicely and easy, most of the stuff is already there in MUIMapparium (reading GPX files and calculating track properties)
So here it is:
2 hours of work and it loads the GPX data and shows them in a nice little table with settings to choose the columns and sort them by it. Free Pascal power at its best.
Working a little bit on the Workbench 1.x compatibility of Free Pascal compilation. A lot of important calls are missing for 1.x which makes it a bit difficult to compile the same program for OS3.x and 1.x especially all the TagList calls are missing. I implemented some of them by hand (like OpenScreenTags, OpenWindowTags) to make it a bit easier. As a test I chose the Free Pascal IDE, I do not really expect it to be usable, because of the huge DOS mode chars und FreeVision emulation, which is needed. But after some days of coding, finally it somehow works (without any changes inside of the IDE source code). In the DOS Mode emulation I changed it to be always on a own 16 color screen and always use the smaller font, everything is unchanged. so very nice.
A little video:
Sadly I still can’t upload the changes because Free Pascal is still on the move to GitLab and it’s not finished.
It’s very common on 68k Amiga to turn off the operating system and directly write to hardware registers to get maximum speed. Many games and demos does it this way. Usually they are written in assembler, but of course this is also possible with Free Pascal for Amiga.
I got that idea because Charlie did a little test how small a program in Free Pascal on Amiga can be. (I guess it can be even smaller than that, when replacing the DosWrite(Output()) by PutStr() and compile for 68020).
So I took his source and tried to make a little bit more useful example out of it and remembered my time doing Amiga 68k Assembler (in ASM-One, I was never good with that, but hey I can learn a bit now)
So I did a little copper list example and it’s 700 bytes long, not bad, as second I tried some bit-plane manipulation. The program became around 3kbyte (most of that is because of the huge sinus table included).
And it runs very nicely on my A1200.
The Source with compiled executable is available on Gitub.
New Release of Free Pascal is done. It’s a bug fix release for 3.2.0 it has also some bug fixes for the Amiga systems, especially structures and functions are checked against official SDKs (especially for MorphOS with its latest SDK Version). For changes that break compatibility you can check official changes document.
Someone asked me to try a CDXL converter (agaconv) but I did not get to work until i compiled it for myself on Linux. CDXL if you don’t know, was an very early movie format invented by Comodore to use for the Amiga CDTV, so it aimed at a 68000 with 7 MHz with a Single speed CD Rom (150 kb/s).
I tried to create some little movies with it and it works quite nicely, especially the agablaster is very good and fast for viewing on a native Amiga (if you have AGA I guess from the Name? I do not own an OCS or ECS Amiga so I can not try). To really get the movie to the small size (to meet the 150kb/s target) you really have to tweak the options. You need to lower den resolution to 160×100 (or lower) and the colors to 5bit (32 colors) or 6bit (HAM6) reduce the number of frames per second to 12 and recalculate the audio to mono 11025 kbit/s.
For me it was interesting to see how the movie would look like with such low quality, as example I took the OpenSource Big Bug Bunny Movie, which is nicely short and free to use without any legal problems.
For a faster Amiga (like a A1200) with a normal HD (around 1 MB/s) you can make the movie in something like 320×200 in 256 colors or even HAM8 and looks rather decent texts still readable sound is ok (just the 8 bit sound conversation is a bit weak, I increased the loudness a bit) and you get a nice movie result, just a bit big (around 500 MB for 8,5 minutes movie). Not all CDXL player can show this format (agablaster does it very nicely)
If you go to the original CDXL format description (as above), it becomes hard, it’s really tiny and greasy you can easily see the dithering and color reduction, texts (except Main Title) not readable at all, back in the days maybe nice (in 1991 or so, when CDTV came out) to at least see a movie but its much worse than CD-i (1990) or VCD (1993).
Because the agaconv is not directly running, need FFMPEG and java (if you want convert to HAM and it it needs a X Server) I created a docker container where all is installed inside working. I created two little scripts (one for Linux and one for Windows) to start the agaconv using the docker, all you need is installed docker and this script and of course the movie.
for example to create the standard movie format as decribed before you need to start it with (linux example):
And a little Bugfix for Ask Your Amiga, especially on AROS, the images would not load properly, fixed that very quickly. Download as always at the AYA Page
I added assumptions to Ask Your Amiga. Assumptions are the way the different meaning of one word are separated from each other in Wolfram alpha. For example if you ask for „Berlin“ it will show you information about the capital of germany, but also shows you a list of other cities (mostly in USA) named Berlin and also other meanings like Berlin as a name or a music band (never heard that before) and so on.
Like on the web page I put these assumptions to at the top of the results to select from a cycle widget.
AYA 0.5 with Assumptions
Download latest AYA at hte AYA Page or use the build-in Update Version
