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.
The integration of AROS into FPC trunk works very nicely already, I decided to make the first binary release of freepascal for AROS. I changed the installation a bit, introduced the package system to freepascal, so you only need to copy the folder to the harddisk and make sure the Envarc:sys/packages/freepascal points to this directory. (Which can be done by executing install script in the freepascal folder.) The package-Startup will then create all assigns ans pathes needed to operate fpc.
Until now the trunk fpc, the latest fpgui (1.2) are included, lcl/lazarus I didnt try with the new trunk version, I think later I will try also to update to the latest lazarus release and try to compile, which will need again much work I guess. As long as there are still things missing, I will supply both versions for download.
For the trunk integration I always need to check if this things also work at Amiga/MorphOS. I’m very happy that Amiga is working again. Its not so easy to cross compile it, until now I only got it to work on a i386-linux, but not at my x64 machine, the binutils does not want to compile currently.
Thats the reason I also prepared a freepascal m68k-amiga version. This should also work on a m68k-aros machine. At the moment I can not try, as long AROS vision and the nightly AROS iso seems not to work at e-uae at linux. Because its an amiga release (and not AROS) it only contains the Amiga functionality, so no FPGUI (there I need AROS special functions) but the FP-IDE is included.
There is a dedicated page for fpc-amiga:
FPC Amiga/AROS m68k
The AROS (i386) can still be found at:
FPC AROS
