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 😉
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:
Tried some (Integer) Speedtest, some people asked me about. Of course I’m also interested if my feeling (double 060/50 speed). I used some code from Benchmarks Game. Especially the tests: fannkuch 10 and BinaryTree 15. (68060/50Mhz= A1200 with Blizzard 1260, MorphOS = MacMini 1.4Ghz, UAE/AROS/Linux = Athlon FX 8120 3.16 Ghz)
machine
BinaryTree
fannkuch
Time [s]
Speed rel. to 060
Time [s]
Speed rel. to 060
68060/50Mhz
42.9
1.0
59.6
1.0
VampireA600
23.4
1.8
28.3
2.1
MorphOS 68k emul
3.0
14.3
33.0
1.3
WinUAE OS3.9
1.4
30.6
2.0
29.8
MorphOS PPC
1.3
33
2.3
25.9
AROS i386
0.6
71.5
0.7
85.1
Linux x86_64
0.3
143
0.2
298
So my feeling was more or less right, it’s around double speed to 060, so it’s a nice step but far far away from UAE. More interesting for me would be FPU processing but at this point the comparison would be very dramatic and a little bit unfair because Vampire still have no FPU support (even it’s everywhere announced, but seems even next version will not have FPU).
Didn’t have much time today, so I only show a cute little program to learn typing, out of the box compiled for AROS TappyTux, also with Mathematics. still not perfect, needs a little bit work, (sometimes the text is outside), it throws 2 hammers and so on.. but even so very neat.
Playing a little bit with loading routines for vector formats and found the amazing fpvector package. It contains also a nice test program to test loading of files. It works already very nice loading of .svg and .dxf Files. For example .odg files does not work some string to float problem. Also the drawing works rather nicely but also shows some problems with the filled polygons. Worth to try to compare with the Linux version.
Still playing with raytracing (so 3D calculations without GL or so) and other 3D Stuff. Magorium converted a nice little raytracing program from C to Pascal. It creates a random scene and calculate it with high precision. It makes a nice pictures. It is using SDL for display and threading, it seems the SDL Threads do not work, so I changed that to use Pascal Threads and now it is working nicely. Again a nice program for SMP 😛 already ready to use multiple threads (at Linux it runs fine with 8 Threads)
After long time I did again a little bit raytracing stuff, magorium found some source, I reviewed some of my old sources. I would be a perfect thing for the coming AROS SMP, ok I guess it will not appear so soon but it’s really a nice thing.
Notice the multicolor shadows and the multiple refelections.
