to everyone who read this 😉 I hope you have a nice christmas meal and some quiet time with the family, I will certainly have.
As Greeting to everyone I wrote a little program, nothing special, just a christmas tree and some falling snowflakes (needed 10 minutes to write in lazarus, I watched the clock).
You can download this little program for:
Amiga, AROS, MorphOS and if someone is interested the Source
Since MorphOS works rather nicely I tried to compare with Amiga 68k some more things have to be changes, especially drawing is much more difficult. AmigaOS3.x does not have the concept of RPTAG_FGColor to set directly the forground color with 24 bit values instead you have to use ObtainBestPen and so on. And there it is difficult to find out how long this Pen should stay before it can be released again. A little bit helping here is the Pen and Brush concept but for Background color and Text color its not really helping. But finally its working. But the picture looks very strange. After some testing I noticed that the GfxMove command make something strange, Even I call it with GfxMove(RastPort, 120, 130); the point is somehere in the negative region for X and Y. But Draw(RastPort, 120,130) for example work. Ok MY GfxMove call looks not like this but more like
GfxMove(RastPort, GetOffset.X + X, GetOffset.Y + Y); (Getoffset is a function which returns a TPoint) It seems that the m68k compiler have a problem with this construct because if I calculate an NX := GetOffset.X + X; and NY := GetOffset.Y + Y and then Call GfxMove(RastPort, Nx, Ny); it work. really strange. Besides it seems sometime it does not update the background and you get something like a ghost pattern hmm still much things to investigate. But for now I’m very happy that it already somehow work.
LCLTests on Amiga, MorphOS, AROS, Linux, Windows
I compiled the two test programs Button (Source) and PaintBox (Source) on every platform I have available.
There we have:
Upper line, Left Linux, Right Windows (via Wine)
Lower line from left, AmigaOS3.9 (WinUAE), MorphOS (via VNC), AROS (Linux hosted)
All programs compiled from the same source without a single ifdef, as you can check at github. Amazing isn’t it :-D.
I got my two 128 MB EDO RAM pieces for my Blizzard 1260 (with SCSI Kit), therefore I have now 256 MB RAM. Why I need so much RAM, easy, even a very simple LCL Program need more than 150 MB RAM to compile, of course I can compile in UAE but thats not the same 😉 Ok it needs 5 minutes to compile, but who cares, it works.
Compile a LCL program on a native Amiga
The flickering is much better, the picture was painted too often and the message loop was polled too seldom. Optimized this a little bit, now it happens very seldom. When I started this tests first I implemented a simple Speedtest which does the same calculation for one second and then count the successfully calculated pixels.
So of course would be nice to have it also in this graphical server and optimize the number of pixels requested from each client. I noticed the Amiga 1200 with 68060 50Mhz only finished 3-4 Pixels per second, I know it is slow, but that slow. (Besides this I’m surprised how fast the MacMini with MorphOS is, nice :-)) But then I remembered that the m68k freepascal does not use the FPU. By default it uses softfloat routines, which of course are very slow. But my automatic compiler server also compiles the FPU version of all units (enable at compiler with -Cf68881 and use FPU compiled units). The fpu compiled version is much, much faster now 200 px/s. Wow now the amiga really add some pixels to finished image. (Before also some, but less than a line ;-))
Speed test of the „Amiga Cluster“
It should be noted that the 192.168.0.122 (and 127.0.0.1) is a Computer with eight cores but only one is used here (in fact, two because 127.0.0.1 is AROS hosted on the same computer), I didn’t implement multicore threading.
I played again a little bit with networking things, especially on different platforms. Very nice that the most sources now compile out of the box at Linux, AROS, Amiga and MorphOS only very little ifdefs inside, and even they could be omitted by extending the Amiga-like-RTLs with some unix functions.
I wrote a little Lyapunov calculation program which sends the pixels to calculate via network to other computers to let them calculate. Lyapunov is very good for such things because it has very little inputs and results but rather long calculation time per point.
I compiled and run the client for all platforms I have available currently:
All compiled from the same source.
The Server and Image Viewing is done at AROS.
The power of Freepascal/Lazarus at its very best.
The white pixels are already send to some client but the result is not arrived.
The image is flickering a little bit (therefore in the movie sometimes no image to see) because I didn’t care much about the image plotting. I’m not sure why the image is flickering maybe the network communication take too much time so not enough time to draw the image.
I created a archive of my complete LCL for m68k AmigaOS 3.x. Much things already working (all PaintEvent things does not work, so Labels, Panels and so on does not appear, but should also not crash).
So if anyone want to try Lazarus LCL on a real Amiga or UAE here is the archive, be careful its 55Mb and you will need at least 16 Mb to compile the examples, for bigger programs you might need even more.
Download Amiga LCL 0.1 alpha
for more informations read the „ReadMe“ inside the archive.
I found out why some elements at Amiga/MorphOS are not shown (like the scrollbars and comboboxes) it seems that MUI has very tight size constraints usually MinHeight = MaxHeight. And MUI is rather picky, if you give a bigger place at layout hook, it does not paint anything. I do not understand why a Button needs this tight size constraints, maybe I want bigger buttons.. but ok, not a big thing.. I will try to implement that also in the AROS LCL and maybe should check how to use the LCL constraints.
Amiga LCL with working size constraints
The second good thing is that the crash at close is disappeared at Amiga OS, but at MorphOS its still there, so I guess the issue is not solved. I will write an other test program to test the dynamically creation and destroying of MUI elements. But in principle one could think about a lcl AmigaOS release (its already much more than the first AROS lcl release 😉 )
I played again a little bit with Lazarus/LCL and I was able to get the thing compile on a real AmigaOS 3.9 with MUI 3.8. The result looks rather the same as my previous tries in MorphOS.
But different from the one from m68k AROS it makes the double strange that all windows in the m68k AROS are fullscreen. A bug in Zune? Who knows. The size calculation seems to be different as in i386-aros LCL, the windows are smaller.
MorphOS use ELF for its binaries so the resources can be linked directly into the executeable. But Amiga uses Hunk format for executable and fpc is not prepared to link them into the executable so Charlie configurated them as external resources. I was curious if this is working. So I had to compile a new fpcres and bring lcl to compile for Amiga. After preparing some things for MorphOS this was not a big thing.
And on the first try it works already, but it looks wierd, the Window is full screen without any window decorations or button, even I limit the size. I deactivated the layout hook and it looks exactly the same. I have no idea whats wrong there. Same as MorphOS its crashing on Exit, I guess with the same reason.
Besides this its working nicely, even rather fast, at least faster than I expected.
Native Amiga OS sadly does not have the Parent/Child window concept, which I need to implement fpGUI for it (every widget is an own Window). But the m68k AROS of course have this concept so it should be rather easy to bring it to at least a classic machine 😉 . I guessed it will be slow but I had no idea how slow 😛 the compilation of fpgui needs around 10 minutes (in my i386-aros some seconds, even my slow Server with Atom processor only needs around 10 seconds 😉 ).
The only „new“ thing I needs for AROS is the Parent/Child windows, which all reside in intuition unit. So I copied the intuition.pas of Amiga and copied the TWindow structure from AROS into (and renamed it to arosintuition). Some hlper function/constants are needed as well (NP_PARENT, to assign the parent on creation, IS_CHILD(), HAS_CHILD() function for status checking) and finished.
I had to deactivate some String things (mostly path/assign/drive checking, because they use BSTR)
And it worked on nearly the first try.
Problems appeared on Filerequesters, first of course because I did remove the BSTR2String conversion which was easy to reintroduce, but It seems the TDosList structure in Amiga unit is wrong, at Least I do not get the right output if using this one. I copied the one from AROS over, and it works. hmm maybe I have to check the original Amiga SDK, or some kind of alignment problem again?. The second problem in Filerequester was that the file were not visible… the height of every entry was something like one pixel 😐 strange problem. After a while testing of other programs I noticed that every picture is missing (in the screen shot there should be a picture on the Stop Button). SO I tried to trace back whats the problem, the BMP reading routine is just not Big endian compatible, its only little endian. SO I had to add some endianess conversion routines.
And finally it works and looks good.
The next logical step would be to try to compile LCL/Lazarus with m68k-aros and this fpGUI implementations as I did on i386. But BAD News from this side, this is not possible, and maybe it will be not possible soon. The problems appear from a rather unexpected side. LCL need resource Files, but this resources are not implemented for m68k-amiga and as long the file format is not ELF I’m not sure I can use the same resource compiler as for i386-aros, ok let’s say I’m rather sure I cannot use it ;-). That means LCL moves very far away for Amiga or even MorphOS, even I try again to implement a MUI-LCL interface.