Pimp my Amiga
Just playing around a bit, with color and sound. RGB fits onto the keyboard inside the case without any change to the original stuff. React to the sound and with a little GUI to change the config, of course in FreePascal.
LibreOffice Amiga
Long time before some people started to port OpenOffice/LibreOffice to Amiga OS4 (sadly only OS4). I saw some screenshots but that is also already a long time ago, seems that is a bit of a too big fish to fry.
Maybe a smarter way would be to just implement something like LibreOffice which can read files from LibreOffice. I gave it a go, and it was not that complicated as I thought it would be, at least if you are using the right language (FreePascal) and the right GUI set (MUIClass). The biggest problem is no usable table component in MUI (at least I know of, for all systems available). I had to implement one from scratch.
And this being FreePascal, of course it works on all Amiga Systems (not only OS4). I implemented only some styles/options (no font size and font name) but color and font styles are there, also left,center and right alignment. It even calculates cells. Funny tool, one could make a real LibreOffice Calc Viewer out of this.
MUIMapparium AGA on a native Amiga
I tried the MUIMapparium on my real Amiga 1200 with 680030 50 Mhz (With 68882 FPU). Good news, it works somehow, of course it is slow but once the images are loaded, it moves ok. Unitl now it freezes a little bit when release the mouse button… maybe I should try to find the reason for that.
I also tried on a 16 color screen, much faster… but looks awful 😉 so I decided to make the Video with a 256 colors screen 😉 even it’s slower.
Amiga Future
Do you read journals…? I’m not. I seldom read such things and if it happens then science related. But there is still an Amiga related journal the Amiga Future. I saw it once or twice at the Amiga meeting here in Berlin but never actually cared about. But maybe the next issue would be something worth to buy 😉 Especially the one article which already has a preview there.
Amiga 3D with AGA
Just playing around with some 3D Mathematics on a real Amiga 1200 with Blizzard 1230 IV with 68882 (50 Mhz). But the main problem is not the calculation but the drawing. I only use graphics.library functions to be system and RTG compatible. (It uses a a MUI Interface).
I know, not really impressive 😉 but I like it, interesting to learn some 3D stuff. And even a Hires Lace screen with 32 colors, fast enough to use.
Source
Executable for Amiga with FPU
Amiga Linux the next day.
Of course the freepascal compilation did not work, still needs some link library and stuff. (Hint for later at least libc6-dev and libgcc-5-dev is needed) I restarted first a plain compilation and hmm it still runs 😉 the tests will need to wait a little bit. Besides that of course I played more with the system, of course its even slower that way because the compilation is running in parallel. Installed some packages I need on there, telnetd for example, sshd just slows the poor 68030 to much down. For file transfer I want to join it the normal NFS network I have already. But when installing nfs-common I was really shocked it has python as recommend, really? Python for NFS? On my normal computer I do not care it’s usually there already but on Amiga, space (and more important installation time) is short 😉 so need to with „–no-install-recommends“ But my personal opinion is when a simple network file protocol from the early years of Unices pull the most hyped script language monster (15.5 MB additional crap!) then there is clearly something wrong in your package system.
IPv6 on an Amiga
As you can see the compilation still runs 😉 (the Assembler as runs currently on other TTY) and even IPV6 works! An Amiga doing IPV6, welcome to 21. century (no Amiga OS is currently able to do that). The system runs rock stable (uptime already 28 hours) even I stress it with parallel installation and other changes and let the compilation run. Very nice and stable just a little bit slow.
ALB goes crazy episode 9842: Linux on 68030 Amiga
To help ChainQ with the FreePascal for m68k compiler bug finding I installed a qemu-m68k on my server together with a chroot environment to let the FreePascal testsuite run. An ChainQ really found a lot of bugs. I also improved the chroot environment. The number of fails falled down from 160 to 34 which is a good value more than i386 (around 20) but better than PowerPc (around 40) 😉 already a nice achievement. But I thought it would be even cooler to start the test suite directly natively in a m68k Linux environment. (also qemu-m68k maybe has some bugs :-P) The only real hardware I have available for that is my Amiga 1200 with 68030, luckily it has a MMU so Linux will be possible. (The Amiga 600 with Vampire does have no MMU therefore Linux is not possible to use) Informations about this topic are very hard to get and most of the links are dead today. So in the end I compiled the kernel (3.16.7) on my own and created a initramfs by hand. For initial root I used the chroots debian environment I use already for the fpc tests. But systemd made me much headache, it was much easier to write a own little init script. Finally the systems boot and even the PCMCIA card works, I can SSH to that server.
Linux on a Amiga 1200 with 68030
The next is installing FreePascal and try to run the compilation and finally the test of course. There are some unexpected problems here. Usually the latest FPC from trunk requires the latest stable FreePascal version, that means at the moment 3.0.0 or 3.0.2 but both can’t compile the trunk because some features missing in 3.0. I tried to merge them from the trunk but failed to many things missing and not easy to identify which else should be merged. So I will use the 3.1.1 as starting compiler (and ignore the warning that this is not supported 😛 yeah I’m a real outlaw) sadly it also have some problems I have to check later. For first try I just start the testsuite with the compiler cross compiled on my other Linux (x64) computer. The testrun started today at 22:15 will it run completely and if yes how long will that need? a week? 🙂 We will see.
Compiling/Testing FPC on m68k Linux
ECMAScript 5 MorphOS/Amiga
Compiled Besen for Amiga and MorphOS, some more small changes needed (mostly because for both CPUs no jit compiler is available). On MorphOS the it fails with a senseless error message: expected identifier found „“. when checking the position, no error to be found in middle of a parameter definition. Increasing the stack before compiling make it work, little bit strange, thats the first time fpc compiler need a bigger than normal stack (which is 256k defined inside the fpc code). It works nicely.
On Amiga the compilation was much less problematic, but the Exe do not work completely already gives error message on boot up about not initialized variable… most example sources only give this uninitialized variable error message, only this number guessing „game“ works. Little bit strange, maybe some m68k compilation problem?
ECMAScript 5 on MorphOS
I downloaded the conformity test for ECMAScript 5 and let it run on AROS and the result is not bad: „Total tests: 1221 Passed: 1140 Failed: 80 Could not load: 1“ to put that into perspective my current Firefox (52.0.2 64-Bit Linux) gets following result: „Total tests: 1236 Passed: 1098 Failed: 135 Could not load: 3“.
Amiga LCL goes official 2
The MUI LCL widgetset also got accepted for the official Lazarus repository.
That means the next official Lazarus release will also contain the support for all Amiga Systems and the MUI Widgetset. Sadly the only one usable with the released 3.0.0 FreePascal is i386-AROS. m68k-Amiga has a serious bug, for MorphOS the resource support is missing. Both problems will be fixed for next FPC release 3.0.2. All Other platforms (OS4, ARM-AROS, x86_64-AROS) have to wait until 3.2 because their support was added after 3.0 split. Of course one can use the 3.1.1 compiler for all platforms already, as I usually do and release to public.
But it would be very nice to just install Lazarus via your default package system (deb, rpm, whatever) install your Amiga cross-compilers and binutils(with vasm and vlink it’s really easy) and one is able to use the lazarus as IDE for your Amiga LCL programming.
Today I also got write access to the Lazarus repository, that means I can continue to work on the implementation directly on the official repository.
Already tested and fixed some tiny problems. I will continue to test it on week end, seems there are some new problems inside, at least some of my test codes does not work.
Amiga LCL goes official
As explained in the 2016 summary I started to try to introduce the MUI LCL Interface to the official Lazarus subversion repository. I started with the basic compilation nogui LCL, which is a rather small patch (when compared to the complete new MUI widgetset). Today I got answer (after posting that as Bug in the lazarus bug tracker) and the patch got accepted to the official repository. That was my introduction, so now I would like to also include the MUI LCL which will be my next target. It would make the development so much easier. Especially because they change a lot in Lazarus over the time. My branch at github is again so outdated that it means again a new implementation to bring it to latest status (for the 4th time). If it is in the official repository I will directly notice if something change which need my attention. And the people will see the HASAMIGA defines everywhere and maybe care about to not break it 😉