Last weekend I tried to bring the AROS 64 interface of Free Pascal up to the current level. Some might remember, I created a special automatic checker which you can use to check the records in the pascal units against the structs in the official C includes. An it ensures that all the records and field there is have the same name across all Amiga-like platforms. I already used it for AROS ABIv0 and MorphOS and a bit on Amiga 68k (there are some problems with structs inside structs).
With this tool on hand it was rather easy to check where my AROS units must be changed to be 64-bit and ABIv11 compliant, I tested it and it worked well.
As next step I thought about to update my distribution (0.3.1?) I checked out the latest AROS version and tried to compile for myself. Good thing it works much better than before, bad thing it tries to download a bunch of stuff from the internet (like binutils, gcc and so on) but the server referenced there seems to be offline (sure why one should use the official GNU source, better use some weird 3rd party server which does not work), so I had to get them from the official GNU webpage by hand, annoying!
I tried to compile the native boot-able variant, it compiles, but it does not work, directly after grub when you try to start the kernel it crashes (tried in qemu/vmware, no difference) so still nothing new here. Fall back like last time to Linux hosted. BUT whats that some of my programs crash at very unusual places, on running Threads, hard to debug actually. It seems like a structure has changed.. So I got out my automatic checker again and, yes it found that there is a change in the structure, old T100pUAD 0.3 programs cannot work anymore (or only by random).
The reason I decided to publish „The 100% useless AROS distribution Version 0.3“ was that the ABI, so the binary interface is promised to be fixed now.
component
kept stable
Application Binary Interface (ABI)
YES
OS 3.1 API (examples: exec.library, input.device)
YES
3rd party public libraries API (example: muimaster.library)
YES
Classes, gadgets, datatypes API (examples: png.dataype)
YES
AROS driver system (HIDD, oop.library)
NO
AROS kernel components (example: kernel.resource)
NO
This was in January, now not even three(!) month later that promise is already broken, void, not existing anymore. What a big disappointment. Of course no developer, let alone User will use such a system.
This is especially annoying when you notice, that the structure change is 100% unnecessary and useless (and 100% incompatible with original 68k code).
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
AmiTube 1.0 will be available for all, from 68000 to 68060, from PowerPC and i386 to x64 and ARM, for all the modern OS Workbench 3.0 to 3.9, including 3.1.4 and 3.2, AmigaOS4 line and MorphOS up to 3.15, AROS ABIv0 and ABIv11.
As I said last time AmiTube on AROS64 is kind of useless because no player for MPEG or CDXL available, but actually there is. There is an MPlayer available, so I added it to the distribution and linked it in AmiTube and got a crash. Mplayer needs a lot of stack and it is too small, even I set the stack higher when calling Mplayer still the same, debugoutput suggests the stack is not properly given to the app called by AmiTube. I filed a bug report, lets see how fast that is handled.
As workaround I created a script to call mplayer with the right stack and voila it plays as it should be.
Time for a little video
Two things to notice, first when loading the remote list the list is totally destroyed, this is what I meant with the font size calculation is wrong, because what it does is to draw all the text over each other and also the column lines suggest that it calculated the font width as zero, but when you select the entries it cures the problem, I heard that it also happens on 68k AROS.
the second thing some people told me they are unable to place the movie directory into RAM and then play with MPlayer from it, as you see it works smoothly without any problems.
As mentioned yesterday it’s time to make a new AROS 64 release with the new ABI-V11. So here it is. As far as I know, still the only x64 AROS distribution.
As always I included some of my programs like MUIMapparium, LEU, AYA, AmiTube, Hex2, MUIPlot, MCAmiga. All work reasonably well, certainly usable. There are some problems of course. There seems to be a bug on Font size calculation, therefor some size calculations fail, resulting in strange effect, for example ListViews of Zune (like in MUIMapparium or AmiTube), but one can see that also in AYA, where I calculate the size of text for myself. a rescale of window and selecting of entries often cures it. AmiTube works well, shows preview images and downloads all the movies, but there is no working player for CDXL or MPEG installed atm.
As always the warning, the x64 AROS is still a very early alpha Version, most non Free Pascal applications crash so be careful, but as test bed for Free Pascal on a 64bit Amiga-Platform it certainly a good test.
I wrote already some times about the AROS64 stuff, I find it very interesting definitely a way forward for AROS, but seems not really many interested. Even I supply most of my programs for 64bit AROS they never gets downloaded, or even used. Now there is a new Version after ABI_V1, SMP now it’s called ABI_V11, whatever that means.
I wanted to make the needed changes to Free Pascal that we can use fpc on it but I really do not understand how this syscall stuff works, so I had to ask charlie. Finally today he finished the work on it and I was able to tests some thing. The good thing is that this ABI_V11 leave out that nasty SMP stuff which made the structures huge and hard to align, so basically it was a recompilation of most of my programs.
There are some problems, the keyboard for example has some problems, most special chars do not work (in Linux hosted), like „:“, „/“ and some more hard to do anything without them in Amiga-style systems.
But here we are, nicely have some of my programs running on x86_64-aros ABI_V11.
I guess it is time to fire a new Version of „The 100% useless AROS Distribution“ with this new ABI_V11, Free Pascal works, so that should be the new basis
Some people asked me (email and also here on the page) if it is possible to get the YouTube audio as MP3 or other Amiga-friendly formats, usually in the audio formats provided by YouTube are rather modern, mostly „mp4a“ and „opus“ (there are some older videos with different settings) both are too recent to be supported on a m68k Amiga. But you can use that to create your MP3 (or just any format you want) with it.
Download an Audio only with mp4a-codec and download that.
then wait a while 😉 done. You have your video as MP3, works great with Delitracker for example.
And from there you can get to any format you want, I guess, also 8svx for example. The old FFMpeg available for Amiga is not capable of saving 8svx but there should be some tools to make an 8svx from an MP3 (even Delitracker can do that, with the Filesave noteplayer).
Finished today the Version 0.8 of AmiTube. I reworked the whole network code (at my A1200 the download speed nearly doubled with that). You can sort the video list by any column present by double clicking on en entry (MUI doesn’t allow to click onto the title as it seems) or by using the menu items for it. Also new is the AmigaGuide help, you might want to try pressing Help from time to time.
Most of the other changes are bugfixes, thanks to all the diligent tester and bug reporters out there.
Changes List:
Faster download speed
bugfix download speed display
bugfix invalid moviedir
bugfix load icon when a download is running
bugfix start a download when one is already running
bugfix clipboard device
sort results in list by name, duration or size
choice to ask for a path everytime a conversation job is started,
if canceled the default moviedir is used
italian and polish translation
alternative more colorful icons for AmiTube and folder
AmigaGuide Help
Download on the AmiTube Page or use the build in Update check to get the latest AmiTube archive.
