Some days before I made a Video how AmiFox and AmiTube/MUIMapparium will work together in the next AmiFox version. But that would not work for AROS, simply because the AROS MUI, named Zune does not support an AREXX Port as MUI does. But when I thought about, it should be not too hard to create an AREXX port yourself, in principle what you need to do:
Create an Message port (CreateMsgPort)
Name that Message port for example „AmiTube.1“, MUI/Zune already supplies such a name in the Base property of the application class (ln_Name)
Register that named Message port to the system (AddPort)
Read Messages from the port (GetMsg)
check if that message is a commando (RXCOMM)
Handle that Message (RexxMsg)
Reply the message to the sender (ReplyMsg)
Thats all, (of course in destroy you need to remove the msgport from the system and destroy it). But overall very simple. I tried it for i386 AROS and it works very nicely I can send AREXX messages from AmiFox to AmiTube as in Amiga. Now I really think why they did not implement that in Zune, if it’s that simple, maybe I forget something.
I got a new AmiSSL Library for AROS i386 ABIv0 and this time it works smoothly. The httpstest worked without a problem.
So I created a new Version of AmiFox for AROS with SSL enabled and it also worked. That went almost a bit too smoothly. noticed already that the images (logo and lock icon) looks wrong in AROS, it seems the TImage does not work properly, the lock is only shifted a bit, but the logo is completely destroyed. What to do about it, I want at least the lock look right, that the user can see if they are on a secure connection. So the easiest way it to bring in the images as iff and load them with Datatypes. The difficult part here is that you cannot load files from memory before Datatypes library V44. So I never do that for m68k Amiga, I always put a file to HD or RAM and load that one. But, here on AROS there must be a datatypes v44+, easy. And yes the datatypes library is v45 so it should work, spoiler, it does not, it does not even give a error message. The object is nil and the error code is 0, nice, a little bit grepping in the AROS code revealed, it seems it is still not implemented. Ok back to field one, I implement that save to T: as file and load that, not nice but it works, and for AROS it’s not too bad to put some stuff into Ram disk, it had enough RAM. But so finally it works, SSL with AmiFox on AROS ABIv0 makes a nice secure connection to the server, visible by the little lock in the lower right corner.
Don’t ask me… AmiFox is a nice workaround for Amiga, even it’s slow.. but for a highend computer as AROS (Intel/AMD CPUs)? Why would you ever use it? Especially when there is OWB which can show the webpages in real without the image server in between. And even OWB is not up to date it still shows most of the pages without problems.
But still I got „some“ (2 actually 😉 ) requests for AmiFox for AROS, maybe thats just… hey Amiga has a new Program, we also need it, if it is useful or not is not important. *sigh*
So I compiled it for AROS i386 and AROS 64bit ABIv11 but it has some strange effects… first of course AmiSSL is still missing so no SSL downloads, no SSL connection to Server. 2nd the images are quite disturbed, seems AROS has some problems with real Amiga bitplanes… I mean the lock looks somewhat right… just shiftet? But the logo? not even recognizable. 3rd The Scrollbar in AROS Zune seems really does not like to be hidden/shown in runtime.. it makes crazy stuff, so now it’s visible the whole time on AROS. Join Discord to get the beta.
I worked a bit on AmiTube, I guess soon we can make a new release. For the next release I improved the handling of shorts and lists. Added a special window where one can paste a youtube URL into and it extracts the IDs from it.
A big problem with shorts is that they are saved in portrait mode means the height is much bigger than the width. until now I always only scaled by the width. I worked nicely for the small sizes, OCS and AGA but failed spectacular for AGA+. So now I read out the sizes from the move and scale differently when there is a portrait video. On that I notice that the agablaster has a curious restriction, the CDXL movie must be at least 128 pixels wide. is that a general restriction in CDXL or just for agablaster? I’m not sure.
Also the VCD-MPEG1 showed some strange effects because it tried to scale it, resulting in fat faces, no I added a padding.
I noticed, now there is an AmiSSL for AROS. So I took out my old test code I created for Amiga AmiSSL (and which is now an important part of AmiFox). But sadly it does not work at all, open library works also the InitSSL() routine seems to work (special AmiSSL stuff). But the first real openssl function SSL_CTX_new() Create a new context crashes 🙁
Funny that it works for Amiga but on AROS it behaves strange again. Yeah so AmiFox would work but only without SSL so no secure connection and nearly no downloads (most of them need SSL)
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.
