For quite a long time I have a Vampire V2 in my Amiga600, to be honest I never was really satisfied with it. The main purpose was to give RTG to a transportable Amiga and this was back in the days the only reasonable option (besides the BVision card for A1200 with PPC which is way too seldom and expensive). But sadly the Vampire V2 never worked really well, regularly it crashed even after a complete overhaul of the fitting and grounding and so on. Sometimes it wont boot sometimes it will just crash after some minutes. I often let my Amigas play mods with Delitracker, and if that specific Amiga is not able to do that for 2 hours straight (even better whole day of course) without crashing it’s just useless to me. My A1200 with Blizzard 1260/1230 and now TF1260 is perfectly able to do that all day long. My Draco is a bit difficult in that matter. Sometimes it runs a whole day without problems other times it crashes 2 times in a row in an hour. (I guess some AHI problems, because there are also other sound related issues).
But the A600 with the Vampire, that was a complete different story, it never managed to do a half hour Delitracker playing without crashing. After the card and Amiga600 was completely redone, better grounding, some stuff on the Vampire exchanged (or added?) i had the feeling it became a bit better, but just a bit. Still it never managed to make even 2 hours playtime without crashing. That was the main reason the Amiga600 with the Vampire V2 was never used and finally end up in a pile of stuff in the cellar.
Some weeks before I read some interesting articles about PiStorm and that there is a PiStorm hardware to connect a RaspberryPi to an Amiga600 (PiStorm600). I thought that would be a good chance to revive that poor Amiga600, so I took some garlic, a cross and went to the cellar to rescue the Computer.
Luckily I have a lot RasPis laying around (different Versions), bought them when they were cheap and easy to get 😉 sadly I don’t have a RasPi 3A but I have multiple RasPi 3B which should also work, just the USB port is in the way. I use a short extender cable to place the raspi a bit away from the adapter, therefore the additional USB port does not need to be removed. Until now I did not see and negative effects from the cable.
The software installation was quite easy, and after a little bit try and error I got finally the CF card to boot and to crash…. of course I need to de-vampirize the Workbench on there, which was not that difficult.
I bit difficult was the installation of RTG for some reason it did not work the first time I tried only got a nasty crash directly on bootup. Some days later I tried it again and this time it worked. I’m not sure what I did different but now it works. And this is the really good part. PiStorm shows the RTG screen on the HDMI output of the RasPi so you have a VERY clear and stable picture with for example 720p, (something I was never able to setup for the Vampire to work reliably)
It emulates a 68030 and 68881 in the RasPi. It’s not lighting fast or so, it’s around double speed of an 68030/50Mhz I would guess but the RTG is rather fast, so it feels much faster. But the usual Suspects work, so FreePascal and many of my programs, even MUIMapparium the FPU version works nicely.
Network seems to work, but it is rather slow, my PCMCIA card is much faster, but this is also described as still in development, so no surprises there.
Sound AHI via the HDMI from the Raspi, I never got to work, it seems it plays but I do not hear anything, maybe it’s still going to the headphone jack, I did not try. But this AHI is also not very important to me, for me the Amiga Chinch out is enough to play MODs.
And YES I tried it, let play Delitracker several hours random mods from the HD and it worked flawlessly not a single crash, very nice.
Of course it’s not all nice and shine, of course the Bootup needs rather long (around 30 s, it needs to Bootup the RasPi first) and for shutdown, you should shutdown the RasPi first before turning off the Amiga to prevent the sd-card in the Raspi to corrupt.
Also it seems at the moment it has some problems with the ROM mapping, if I use that Kickstart ROM and not the internal ROM, it has big problems rebooting the Amiga, usually it’s easier to shutdown everything and start fresh. Also the Bootmenu is somehow broken and mostly crash. All that do not happen if I use the internal hardware ROM.
At the moment the RasPi inside the Amiga case becomes rather hot and starts to clock down so I will need to a add a heat sink of some sort, but there should be enough space and I should think about additional power to the Raspi because it complains about undervoltage which also causes clocking down of the speed.
But overall not too bad and a good idea to emulate the 68k on the Raspi. I’m rather satisfied.
A little bit stuff is happened in the last week, I want to report a bit about it.
The first very nice development is a bugfix in the 68k Free Pascal compiler, there was a long standing bug inside the PNG-loader. I noticed it with MUIMapparium, but it only showed on some computers, namely my Draco. Charlie tried to look into the issue long time ago, but not really found anything to fix.
But now he looked again into the issue and finally was able to track down the problem. The problem is not really fixed but there is a workaround included so now MUIMapparium works on my Draco, very nice.
MUIMapparium on Draco
MorphOS added an OpenSSL3 Amiga style library a while before, as soon that was available I started to try it to get it to work with Free Pascal on MorphOS. Sadly it did not work, always was crashing already when I tried to use even the simplest function, so I was lost. Charlie mentioned that there must be a change in our linker script of some sort to make it work and he will later care about it. But as often too much other stuff happened and this got delayed. Finally I started to implement the stuff via AmiSSL also on MorphOS. I implemented that for Amiga68k already so the switch to MorphOS is just not a big thing. But then Charlie said I should better use the openssl3.library instead and he will fix the problem with the linker script. And he did and it seemed there was even an easier solution for that and finally openssl3.library does work together with Free Pascal for MorphOS.
Get a webpage via HTTPS using the openssl3.library on MorphOS
Charlie tried MCAmiga on his „new“ build Amiga2000. It only has a 68030 with 25 MHz and he noticed that the load is rather high (around 30%) when the program is doing nothing just waiting for the key. That is the case because it is based on old DOS behavior, therefore the key events and so on must be polled and not fired via events as it is common today. But he showed me a special function in the keyboard unit called WaitForSystemEvent() which is only available for Amiga system to be able to really wait for events and not poll them. That reduces the load when the program waits for input (to under 10%) which is nice of course.
„Alex R“ found a AmiTube problem on Amiga OS4 and reported it to me. (some days before already) I tried to implement that AmiTube remembers the splitter position. Sadly I made a big error there resulting in a very small barely recognizable List on the left side of the window. I only tested it on m68k-Amiga where it did not happen, but after a bit of trying I found the culprit and fixed it.
Originally I planed to release that fix with the next version, but now I got some more bug reports about the exact same thing (hmm, nobody of the beta testers reported it). It seems that it is not only an OS4-problem but also happens on at least MorphOS and some 68 Amigas. Therefore I will release this new version now, with bugfixes only, no functional changes.
Sorry for the trouble, if you are affected by this bug.
Thanks to „Alex R“ for the report and the members of the AmiTube Discord channel and of course Amix for the constant support and feature ideas (even if I can’t implement them all)
Another wish for AmiTube was to have multiple movie directories for easier sorting of movies. I implemented a possibility to do that, now you can add MOVIEDIR1, MOVIEDIR2 and so on to the icon to have multiple movie directories. In the Project menu one can choose which movie directory should be used for next download or loading of local files.
A little preview for the next AmiTube Version, one wish was a play list like feature to play the downloaded movies automatically or by random or in a loop.
I thought about that feature, the main problem, would be how to stop the actual playing, because when you just start AGABlaster one after the other, how to stop the actual playing, therefore I decided to add a little announcement Screen for 5 seconds where you can stop the current play list.
So stay tuned and look forward to the next release.
I finished some bug reports (most related to the fancy list), big thanks to the beta testers, especially „HANsolo“ who found the most bugs, thanks very nice work.
One thing I changed, The „Auto icon load“ setting in prefs will now also set the fancy list to auto load the icons or not, that way I guess it is maybe also usable on slower Amigas as well. I tried out on my real A1200 (with TF1260, AGA 32 color screen) and even with the icon preview on, it’s not that bad, certainly fast enough to work with it. I like it.
So the changes for this Version are quite short:
Fancy movie list
updated translation for italian and french
encoding bug fixes (should show now umlauts and other non ASCII chars in title and description)
smaller bugs fixes related downloading movies
Download as always via the Updater in the Program or on the AmiTube page
Finally I found some mood to work on the new list feature in AmiTube, the so called fancy list, including the title, description and preview image directly in the list.
For that I use a background task to download and load the images, usually such things I use a Thread with Event system behind it. But it seems not to work, most of the time it works fine but then from time to time it locks up completely, total dead lock. After some debugging I found the culprit in my TEvent implementation for Amiga systems in AThreads, the two cases when the Event is already set when you start to wait for it (or the Even is already destroyed) are not covered properly and it leaves the routine with the semaphore locked, easy fix but hard to find.
But back to the list, one can switch to the fancy list, but that also means it auto loads the images, so it will be only good for faster Amiga/RTG or NG Amiga or so.
Working quiet nicely already. Also I got some updated localization for AmiTube which will be released with the next version.
Finally here it is the 1.0 of AmiTube a lot of changes. As shown before now it contains a Download queue to start more than one conversation/download job which are processed one after the other. A Typical Amiga thing is the AREXX interface, all good programs have it, therefore AmiTube needs that as well. There are commands to search and to start a convert job and play a movie.
For this new Version I will also supply a Version for AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS due to popular demand.
Next to the search bar is now a Button which opens the search history.
AmiTube 1.0 with AREXX script
Changes:
History for search
AROS64 ABIv11 bit version
MorphOS Version
Amiga OS4 Version
Download more Amiga-like audio only formats: mp3 and 8svx
A new feature will be included in the next AmiTube Version, a Download Queue, so if you have a conversation/download job running you can continue browsing and add an other one which will be performed after the first one is finished.
This should be especially useful for slower network system. You can simply select some videos you like to have and then let the program work without supervision
