For quite a long time I have a Vampire V2 in my Amiga600, to be honest I never was really satisfied with it. The main purpose was to give RTG to a transportable Amiga and this was back in the days the only reasonable option (besides the BVision card for A1200 with PPC which is way too seldom and expensive). But sadly the Vampire V2 never worked really well, regularly it crashed even after a complete overhaul of the fitting and grounding and so on. Sometimes it wont boot sometimes it will just crash after some minutes. I often let my Amigas play mods with Delitracker, and if that specific Amiga is not able to do that for 2 hours straight (even better whole day of course) without crashing it’s just useless to me. My A1200 with Blizzard 1260/1230 and now TF1260 is perfectly able to do that all day long. My Draco is a bit difficult in that matter. Sometimes it runs a whole day without problems other times it crashes 2 times in a row in an hour. (I guess some AHI problems, because there are also other sound related issues).
But the A600 with the Vampire, that was a complete different story, it never managed to do a half hour Delitracker playing without crashing. After the card and Amiga600 was completely redone, better grounding, some stuff on the Vampire exchanged (or added?) i had the feeling it became a bit better, but just a bit. Still it never managed to make even 2 hours playtime without crashing. That was the main reason the Amiga600 with the Vampire V2 was never used and finally end up in a pile of stuff in the cellar.
Some weeks before I read some interesting articles about PiStorm and that there is a PiStorm hardware to connect a RaspberryPi to an Amiga600 (PiStorm600). I thought that would be a good chance to revive that poor Amiga600, so I took some garlic, a cross and went to the cellar to rescue the Computer.
Luckily I have a lot RasPis laying around (different Versions), bought them when they were cheap and easy to get 😉 sadly I don’t have a RasPi 3A but I have multiple RasPi 3B which should also work, just the USB port is in the way. I use a short extender cable to place the raspi a bit away from the adapter, therefore the additional USB port does not need to be removed. Until now I did not see and negative effects from the cable.
The software installation was quite easy, and after a little bit try and error I got finally the CF card to boot and to crash…. of course I need to de-vampirize the Workbench on there, which was not that difficult.
I bit difficult was the installation of RTG for some reason it did not work the first time I tried only got a nasty crash directly on bootup. Some days later I tried it again and this time it worked. I’m not sure what I did different but now it works. And this is the really good part. PiStorm shows the RTG screen on the HDMI output of the RasPi so you have a VERY clear and stable picture with for example 720p, (something I was never able to setup for the Vampire to work reliably)
It emulates a 68030 and 68881 in the RasPi. It’s not lighting fast or so, it’s around double speed of an 68030/50Mhz I would guess but the RTG is rather fast, so it feels much faster. But the usual Suspects work, so FreePascal and many of my programs, even MUIMapparium the FPU version works nicely.
Network seems to work, but it is rather slow, my PCMCIA card is much faster, but this is also described as still in development, so no surprises there.
Sound AHI via the HDMI from the Raspi, I never got to work, it seems it plays but I do not hear anything, maybe it’s still going to the headphone jack, I did not try. But this AHI is also not very important to me, for me the Amiga Chinch out is enough to play MODs.
And YES I tried it, let play Delitracker several hours random mods from the HD and it worked flawlessly not a single crash, very nice.
Of course it’s not all nice and shine, of course the Bootup needs rather long (around 30 s, it needs to Bootup the RasPi first) and for shutdown, you should shutdown the RasPi first before turning off the Amiga to prevent the sd-card in the Raspi to corrupt.
Also it seems at the moment it has some problems with the ROM mapping, if I use that Kickstart ROM and not the internal ROM, it has big problems rebooting the Amiga, usually it’s easier to shutdown everything and start fresh. Also the Bootmenu is somehow broken and mostly crash. All that do not happen if I use the internal hardware ROM.
At the moment the RasPi inside the Amiga case becomes rather hot and starts to clock down so I will need to a add a heat sink of some sort, but there should be enough space and I should think about additional power to the Raspi because it complains about undervoltage which also causes clocking down of the speed.
But overall not too bad and a good idea to emulate the 68k on the Raspi. I’m rather satisfied.
A little bit stuff is happened in the last week, I want to report a bit about it.
The first very nice development is a bugfix in the 68k Free Pascal compiler, there was a long standing bug inside the PNG-loader. I noticed it with MUIMapparium, but it only showed on some computers, namely my Draco. Charlie tried to look into the issue long time ago, but not really found anything to fix.
But now he looked again into the issue and finally was able to track down the problem. The problem is not really fixed but there is a workaround included so now MUIMapparium works on my Draco, very nice.
MUIMapparium on Draco
MorphOS added an OpenSSL3 Amiga style library a while before, as soon that was available I started to try it to get it to work with Free Pascal on MorphOS. Sadly it did not work, always was crashing already when I tried to use even the simplest function, so I was lost. Charlie mentioned that there must be a change in our linker script of some sort to make it work and he will later care about it. But as often too much other stuff happened and this got delayed. Finally I started to implement the stuff via AmiSSL also on MorphOS. I implemented that for Amiga68k already so the switch to MorphOS is just not a big thing. But then Charlie said I should better use the openssl3.library instead and he will fix the problem with the linker script. And he did and it seemed there was even an easier solution for that and finally openssl3.library does work together with Free Pascal for MorphOS.
Get a webpage via HTTPS using the openssl3.library on MorphOS
Charlie tried MCAmiga on his „new“ build Amiga2000. It only has a 68030 with 25 MHz and he noticed that the load is rather high (around 30%) when the program is doing nothing just waiting for the key. That is the case because it is based on old DOS behavior, therefore the key events and so on must be polled and not fired via events as it is common today. But he showed me a special function in the keyboard unit called WaitForSystemEvent() which is only available for Amiga system to be able to really wait for events and not poll them. That reduces the load when the program waits for input (to under 10%) which is nice of course.
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.
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 use my bicycle regularly, drive every day to work and nearly every day a little round as training just for fun. Having and iPhone and Apple Watch, it’s very easy to record the tracks with that (I use an app called „Trailes“) of course would be even nicer to have some statistics about it, sadly the App does not really have that.
Therefore I coded my own little tool to show some statistics about my last rounds, as always for the last programs I did I coded it with Free Pascal for Amiga and it worked quiet nicely and easy, most of the stuff is already there in MUIMapparium (reading GPX files and calculating track properties)
So here it is:
2 hours of work and it loads the GPX data and shows them in a nice little table with settings to choose the columns and sort them by it. Free Pascal power at its best.
I updated the AROS64 source I had to the new stabilized ABIv1 AROS64 introduced by deadw00d (see source on github). At the start I had some tiny problems, e.g. collect-aros was crashing here as well. But in contrast to the main SMP AROS64/Icaros64 after my bug report, it was fixed very fast. Therefore I was able to compile at 64 bit AROS again using FreePascal, very nice. I also tried some of my old programs and all work rather nicely, some tiny problems of course but overall not bad. I will try to investigate what of these programs are from my code or fpc code and what comes from AROS64 itself. I’m not sure if more bug reports are wanted (because I guess deadw00d aims more to the AxRT) but maybe I will try it.
The 100% useless AROS distribution Version 0.2 with some of my programs and freepascal
Because that worked so flawless, I decided to create a new version of my AROS64 distribution „The 100% useless AROS distribution“ this time already much more stable and much more useful than before.
I added some more programs, (not only my own) the FP-IDE does work, but sadly the compilation still crash, so you have to use the shell to compile. I even got the network to work and MUIMapparium shows the map nicely and search also works, so maybe the name is somewhat wrong now, it’s only 99% useless, after all? Nevertheless have fun with it.
I uploaded some of my sources to my github account. With it also Leu and MUIMapparium. MUIMapparium is 100% written by me, therefore it is now under CC0 License. Leu contains fpspread and some files from LCL therefore it is modified LGPL as the original. Have fun with the code. 😉
I had some interesting and intense discussions the last days. Mainly about my programs and vampire. As you might know I did not want to have my programs on the highly illegal distribution Coffin. You cannot detect Coffin, but it’s a distribution especially made for Vampire, therefore if I block Vampire they will not include my software anymore. Besides the Vampire users could push the Vampire team to condemn this distribution and stop to promote it. All of that did not happen, they still added my stuff, even with the Vampire block and the people became mad about me, not about the Vampire team (or the coffin team). I’m not good at being the bad guy.
Basically the people tell me that I’m an idiot and an asshole because I blocked Vampire, so I give up. The people always told me that Coffin is not illegal because it contains abandon-ware only. Ok, if that’s the case I transform my programs to exactly that and put them all to github, then it is legal and everything is solved.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not have a grudge with the Vampire team. I always hear that, that I’m mad about them because of the FPU issue, which is not true, maybe disappointed, but not more, I use my Vampire mainly as RTG-GFX card for A600, the only one currently available and the FPU I can turn off and use femu (which still works and is rather good).
Currently FreePascal on Amiga systems cannot use SSL currently, at MUIMapparium I went around it by proxy it on my own server. The reason for this is that usually at AROS the coder use a static linked OpenSSL, which we cannot use directly in FreePascal. But there is also a normal Amiga-style Library for it called AmiSSL. I started to write a import unit for FreePascal and it works.
Download a page via HTTPS using AmiSSL with FreePascal
There is one tiny hick up, the Library is not available for AROS and also no other possibility on AROS to use SSL for other languages than C. And it seems the devs are not willing to change that, because …. reasons… or just don’t like it… or don’t like the maintainer of AmiSSL, who knows, maybe just „fuck you, who cares about other languages“, as usual.
I tried to run MUIMapparium on the Draco, but sadly it does not work, mostly it just freezes on start, sometimes it starts but the PNG images are distorted. Seems the PNG Reader has some problems on the Draco, it’s a little bit strange. I while before I created a MUIMapparium using Datatypes instead of the FreePascal PNG reader and do not use CyberGraphics functions anymore, but plain graphics library function. Therefore it also works on a standard AGA Amiga.
And this Version also works on the Draco, it’s really only the PNG image reader which has some problems, maybe I should debug this and really think about to move the Datatype MUIMapparium to the standard option, the only problem with that, you need a good PNG Datatype installed to have it working. WarpPNG for best results, but most do not have that I guess
I used the function parser for a function plotter before when testing the TAChart for LCL. Now I gave my Plot component I use for MUIMapparium a little bit of reshape and fit it into MUIClass components and created a new function plotter.
I little video to show how it works:
Running on a Amiga 1200 with 68030 50 Mhz and 68882 50 Mhz on a 32 color AGA Screen. For Hex2 the floating point calculation speed is not very important, because it’s just a single function. But for calculating the full curve it needs a little bit more floating point calculations. Therefore a FPU is included. Also you should limit the number of Points to calculate to for example 100. For NG Amiga systems of course you can increase it to higher numbers.
