I like to play video games, especially open world games, my daughter also loves to play video games, some video game we like both, like Horizon Zero Dawn or Forbidden West. For this fathers day my daughter gifted me a special present a Lego set from the Horizon world, a Tallneck.
Of course I played with Lego when I was little, but I never build any of these Lego sets (only used the custom default blocks). This weekend we started to build it and it is quite funny actually to do it together, especially because some parts must be created twice. Therefore once one search for the correct pieces the other one build them together, and for the second part (mostly mirrored part) one can switch the jobs. It has 1222 pieces and we needed around 4 hours to build it. To be honest, I expected a a longer time, but the manual is quite good really shows every single step very clearly.
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.
I bought a new bike, which I will use mainly for training (and keep the other bike for my daily way to work). Because my usually training round has a lot of rough streets in it I decided against a racing bicycle, but I do not go too rough terrain so a mountain bike was also not suitable. I found something in between called gravel bike, still very light but it will not break directly when you jump a curb or drive a forest path. It should be very light so I search for a full carbon frame. Finally I found a very nice one and noticed there is even a shop nearby where I could test it.
It’s a Cannondale Topstone Carbon 6 in abyss blue and drives very nicely you can easily notice the weight difference when driving.
It comes with a build in wheel sensor which connects to iPhone via Bluetooth LE to increase precision of speed and distance recording parallel to GPS. But to record my training I still prefer the Trails app. The cannondale app is free and works fine but has no export to GPX feature (it has no way of exporting the recorded tracks as it seems, only as picture) which I need to load the track to MUIMapparium.
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
