There is a physics engine written in Pascal its named Kraft and really easy to use. The example gui is written in LCL with OpenGL component which I did not implemented it.
I wrote a own little application with Zune to show the scenes and interact with the items there.
If you want to try that: KraftSandBox for i386-aros ABIv0.
and again a little Video about it.
A crazy idea came up to me. Would it be possible to create a webpage with a nice javascript Editor which could directly compile FreePascal sources for all our beloved Amiga Platforms. The answer is certainly yes, I googled around to find a small package without too many nodejs, npm and such things, which always fails on my old server ;-). I found ACE which seems rather nice an easy to use. The rest is just some little php magic and of course the cross compilers, which I know already long time how to create and use and voila, ready to use webpage to create a simple (one file) Pascal application for all amiga platforms. I tried it on MorphOS, AROS and even native on an Amiga 600 with Vampire using iBrowse. Of course in iBrowse the editor does not work. I included a special page with a simple HTML textarea for such old browsers.
The compilation speed is much faster as a native compilation.
On MorphOS it runs much better of course the MorphOS OWB is even capable to show the editor, very nice.
It’s a little bit slow because it’s recorded via VNC, in reality it feels rather fast.
AROS was a little bit of disappointment for me. I downloaded the latest Icaros 2.2 especially to test this webpage. But sadly the editor does not show up. No Error message shown. I guess it’s some missing font problem, because when I change the theme the background color changes, only the text is not visible. It’s a pity. I had to switch to the old Browser interface which works nicely but I expected more.
A yes, you will ask where can I try this: here
With Javascript Editor e.g. for MorphOS
With HTML Editor e.g. for Amiga 68k
Compiled Besen for Amiga and MorphOS, some more small changes needed (mostly because for both CPUs no jit compiler is available). On MorphOS the it fails with a senseless error message: expected identifier found “”. when checking the position, no error to be found in middle of a parameter definition. Increasing the stack before compiling make it work, little bit strange, thats the first time fpc compiler need a bigger than normal stack (which is 256k defined inside the fpc code). It works nicely.
On Amiga the compilation was much less problematic, but the Exe do not work completely already gives error message on boot up about not initialized variable… most example sources only give this uninitialized variable error message, only this number guessing “game” works. Little bit strange, maybe some m68k compilation problem?
ECMAScript 5 on MorphOS
Today I found Besen by random 😉 “Complete ECMAScript Fifth Edition Implemention in Object Pascal”. If you do not know what ECMAScript is: usually it’s called JavaScript.
With very little changes it runs it compiles with FPC for AROS. 😉
BESENShell on AROS
Working more on the Trackview to show the height and speed track, added a simple Popup Menu and a Data Reader. In the beginning I wanted to use the Bubble function of MUI to show the coordinates, but it flickers like hell if you move it over the map (because you have to destroy and recreate every time) and it makes very bad redrawing errors. On AROS for example when the bubble is over an other part of the window, the background behind it will not repaint, when the bubble disappear. On Amiga the background of the window is visible on the edges instead of my curve background. Also added a fine grid for better visibility of Values and heights, still fixed but maybe later can be disabled via menu.
I implemented a on screen (on-map) menu for zooming and to show the side panel, so do not need use the menu. I did that already for Mapparium but there only released for the special ARM version. There is also a key control available, the + and – keys can be used for zooms and cursor keys for movement.
I guess it will need one or two more version for MUIMapparium to reach the features of Mapparium but I guess it will be MUIMapparium will takes the Mapparium place (and Name) in the end.
MUIMapparium 0.3:
Reminder you can use the Example GPX file from the Mapparium page also.
MUIMapparium 0.4 with track view
Still playing with locale settings on Amiga systems. FreePascal offer a possibility to care about international settings like decimalseparator, date formats and currency symbol. So I looked a little bit into and the system is comparable, still much work, so I’m not sure if really put to every start of a program, or maybe it would be better to put it to a separate unit and you have to include and invoke it by hand. We will discuss that.
Testprogram with Germany, USA and UK Locale Setting
Starting the same test program 3 times and changed the Locale Country setting in between. (For me rather funny that the currency format for positive and negative Values are so different not so nice if you have them in a table) But so far it works very nicely.
LCL has powerful packages for example the Chart component (or the Edit component with Highlighter). MUI already have some, but not so powerful and not available for all platforms (especially ARM-AROS and AROS64). I try to keep on the included basic classes to keep it compatible.
I used the very powerful TAChart component in Mapparium to show the Height/Speed trace of a track. Of course for MUIMapparium I also want to have that, so I started to implement a plot class for MUI. Not so powerful but already very nice with two Y-Axes, Zoom and Autoscale.
MUI Plot component start
It already works rather nicely, as first approach can be used like this.
I designed it already in a very abstract way in principle a TPaintBox for MUI and based on that the Plot class, that means I can use them in other programs as well.
Activated the localization for MUIMapparium currently only for english and german (of course ;-)) implemented also the local library unit for AmigaOS4 so localization is available on all platforms.
I also activated the AREXX interface currently only two commands are implemented: goto lat lon [zoom] to jump to a position and addwaypoint lat lon “Name” to create a waypoint. The Portname is the same as for Mapparium an example script can be found in rexx folder. The AREXX port does not work for AROS, Zune has no AREXX support currently.
I tried to compile it on AROS64 sadly the program did not work, it just freeze. Little bit strange sometimes it start but crash directly. I tried some other programs on AROS64 and they work rather nicely so why MUIMapparium not. The difference was easy it uses threads, finally I found the solution, the Critical Sections in FreePascal are mapped to SignalSemaphores of Amiga. In contrast to other OS the SignalSemaphores are not just simple pointers but a complicated structure. The given size there was ok for 32 bit Systems but for 64 bit the structure is much bigger. I included it for that release maybe someone want to try it 😉
MUIMapparium 0.3:
Reminder you can use the Example GPX file from the Mapparium page also.
MUIMapparium 0.3 on AROS x64
Working on a very old bug. I’m not sure if someone noticed it, at least nobody reported it. The coordinate to pixel conversation was not very precise because it used a average resolution for every tile. This works well for higher zoom levels where the resolution does not change much inside a tile. But for lower zoom levels, especially the whole world picture this is certainly not right any easily visible when using way points. See for example Mapparium 0.6 on the right side of the image, all way points are (and tracks) are shifted to north. The solution was not very difficult but needed some thinking, basically a rounding error and precision problem.
MUIMapparium (Left) and Mapparium (right) Waypoint position comparison and german locale
I also start to play with localization. I never did that before, especially not in FreePascal but it’s not very complicated, just diligent work to replace all strings. So next version will also be available in german (and maybe later some more languages, at least I got an offer for french localization). There is one small problem with that, there is no locale library unit in FreePascal for AmigaOS4 so either I make some defines to turn it off for OS4 or implement the library unit.
Had some time to work a little bit on MUIMapparium, mainly implemented way points and tracks including loading and saving, same formats as Mapparium. Due to multiple requests I created a OS4 version again, but I have no way to test it. Still it’s only a very early version of MUIMapparium.
MUIMapparium 0.2:
MUIMapparium 0.2 for Amiga