A long time before when I was working on the LCL for AROS I tested out some 3rd Party LCL application code to compile for AROS with the newly created LCL. It worked quite nicely. On of them was LazSokoban a Sokoban clone written by a russian guy which worked nicely on AROS.
Some Texts in the GUI where in russian and I translated them to english for the AROS release, some I had forgotten or mistyped a bit. Now I got a request to fix that problem, first there was the big problem to find such and old source code, but luckily it’s included in the archive I published (it’s GPL2, so I had to 😉 ) but I also found in on my Harddisk in the backup.
The changes where not to difficult to make, but the curious thing was if it would still work with the latest LCL. One thing I remember that I need to add the AThreads unit (like Linux CThreads) to make any LCL application work, back in the days that was not needed. And it still works, I checked out the original source and I noticed that they added some kind of skin system (different graphics for the tiles) and also supplied some which looks much nicer than the original one. So I added that as well the the AROS system, it will be available on the next Version of AROS One or here on my page of course.
The other thing that changed since then, we can now compile for MorphOS and OS4 as well (and for Amiga68k, but it will be much to slow for that, I tried) and it also seems to work, not everything, the Buttons images are missing but as far as the game goes not too bad. So I created a Version for all 3 Platforms, AROS, MorphOS and AmigaOS4
„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.
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
