@Karlos

AMiniMiga allows the use of Deluxe Paint and other creative apps on THE A500 Mini.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: An Amiga without user creativity is like a broken pencil. Pointless.

What exactly does Amiga NG bring to the table creatively anyway above 68k? Blender?

We had Candy Factory PPC in the Cyberstorm PPC days but we haven't got PPC versions of Scala, Lightwave or anything that interesting IMHO!

At least aTHE A500 Mini users can mess around with creative apps with a simple distribution!

Last edited by BigD on 03-May-2022 at 08:32 PM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

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What exactly does Amiga NG bring to the table creatively anyway above 68k? We had Candy Factory PPC in the Cyberstorm PPC days but we haven't got PPC versions of Scala, Lightwave or anything that interesting IMHO! At least THE A500 Mini users can mess around with creative apps with a simple distribution!

With "creativity" being the apparent keyword here, and given all those great 68K creativity apps you mention, why don't you tell us what exactly you have created using your Amiga in the past ten years?

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@BigD

What do NG bring?

A reasonably modern development toolchain, for one. The only way to get that for 3.x these days is using a cross compiler. And while doing it remotely over the network is good for ones inner nerd, it's also a ballache of you just want to sit at the one machine for a coding session.

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@Trixie

Quote:

what exactly you have created using your Amiga in the past ten years?

Do wiring complications and a reduction in desk space count?

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Karlos Quote:

What do NG bring? A reasonably modern development toolchain, for one. The only way to get that for 3.x these days is using a cross compiler. And while doing it remotely over the network is good for ones inner nerd, it's also a ballache of you just want to sit at the one machine for a coding session.

Plenty of 68k programmers have used a 68k Amiga environment for programming. In the past, AmiDevCpp worked well enough for a surprising number of developers like NovaCoder even though it was only based on GCC 3. There were ports of GCC 4 available but the 68k code generation quality had deteriorated so far that they were avoided to such an extent that the bugs didn't get fixed. GCC for the 68k eventually improved and now GCC 6.2 is available (Bebbo could move up to a more modern GCC version but it is a moving target).

https://github.com/bebbo

Some programmers use vbcc which is not as advanced as GCC but usually has adequate support for C99 provided C++ is not needed. It is slow to compile but most large projects are developed in WinUAE using JIT with GCC as well. I believe many 68k programmers would prefer to program on a 68k Amiga rather than cross compile but that is not practical for larger projects on real hardware. I expect the majority of Raspberry Pi owners compile on a Pi rather than cross compile on x86-64 as well. Of course, 68k users don't have the luxury of real Amiga hardware in the price range of a Raspberry Pi even though it should be possible.

Is AmigaOS 4 still based on GCC 4 while the current version is GCC 12? Is it faster to compile on PPC NG hardware than using a high end WinUAE JIT environment?

Last edited by matthey on 04-May-2022 at 12:13 AM.

@matthey

The last time I used GCC on OS4 was around 2020 (machines are currently decommissioned after taking the disks out to image and just never getting round to put them back in). It was version 8.3 if memory serves, which was relatively current at the time. It was a bit impractical on the BlizzPPC though. The last version I used on the A1 before I died may have been 6.

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Karlos Quote:

The last time I used GCC on OS4 was around 2020 (machines are currently decommissioned after taking the disks out to image and just never getting round to put them back in). It was version 8.3 if memory serves, which was relatively current at the time. It was a bit impractical on the BlizzPPC though. The last version I used on the A1 before I died may have been 6.

The AmigaOS uses C and there isn't much change after C99 and C11. Newer versions just have more bloat and GCCisms. C++ has C++14, C++17 and C++20 extensions after 2011 though.

@matthey

I tend to use C++ for application code though. Unless it's something very trivial. Regardless of any changes to C support, there are still bugfixes and optimisation improvements.

Last edited by Karlos on 04-May-2022 at 10:25 AM.

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@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: Quote: 4.X is not legal to be ported to anything else than PPC if the comments from one former amigaos developer is true. I only recall Hans-Joerg commenting that they didn't have a license to port to x86 so shut up or something like that.

I remember reading similar things back in the day, but when I corresponded with Ben several years ago, he was adamant that there is no legal/contractual prohibition of porting AmigaOS to x86.

What I think he omitted to say, and in truth it wasn't germane, is that a port of AmigaOS to x86 would contractually not be able to be branded as AmigaOS 4 or 5, or any number in the series. Potentially not even AmigaOS.

Furthermore, Ben said that they had at one point looked into an x86 port, and it was just too large of an undertaking. Which makes sense when you sneak a peek behind the curtain and see just how small the Hyperion operation is.

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@matthey

Quote:

Is AmigaOS 4 still based on GCC 4 while the current version is GCC 12?

I doubt many OS4 devs still use GCC 4. I'm on 8.3.0, for example. The soon-to-be-released new OS4 SDK will have a much more recent version. I think 11.3.0.

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SAM440ep-flex @ 667MHz / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9250 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition

@Trixie

Since the question was about NG in general, I think MorphOS has GCC 11 and Clang too. Very easy to discount the improvements and benefits of OS4 and MorphOS if you are partisan or have an axe to grind.

Last edited by Karlos on 04-May-2022 at 10:35 AM.

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As more of an end user of Os4, I found it to be a great small evolution of the AmigaOs, things where layout how I expected them and the look, design and function I thought where all perfect evolution of the OS.

Blender, Gimp, the ppc games where nice to have and other ppc exclusive app, but the two main apps I found I was using on os4 was odyssey and Hollywood designer, I must of admit to being a bit of idiot and thought it didnt run on 68k platform.

2019 when I first got fed up with my x1000 crashing and loosing some work, i went back to exploring emulation and tried Amikit XE with a bit of tweaking I felt I could have a very similar os4 experience and when I found it ran Hollywood designer nearly as good as os4 it’s become my choice of platform, add the rabbit hole features I feel like I have found the best replacement and really does show me how much the classic Os could be pushed.

Last edited by amigang on 04-May-2022 at 11:16 AM.
Last edited by amigang on 04-May-2022 at 11:14 AM.

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Tons of OS4 code is “backported” to 68k these days - so how is that “legal” then?

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@kolla

Almost as if someone knows something we don't...

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@amigang

Quote:

2019 when I first got fed up with my x1000 crashing and loosing some work, i went back to exploring emulation and tried Amikit XE with a bit of tweaking I felt I could have a very similar os4 experience and when I found it ran Hollywood designer nearly as good as os4 it’s become my choice of platform, add the rabbit hole features I feel like I have found the best replacement and really does show me how much the classic Os could be pushed.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. The X1000 represents some of the most powerful hardware available run OS4 today. It's no stretch of imagination to predict how well a backport to 68K could run under emulation. Particularly on something designed to dedicate the full resources of the hardware the emulation runs on to that one job.

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@Karlos

Yeah, the fork() method is somewhat depreciated. And given processes on AmigaOS share memory, apart from private memory, I thought they may have added a threading mechanism. A lot of Linux software expects threads. There was some game I compiled with help, I forget what but it may have been a cover version of some sim like commercial game, that once compiled would run faulty. The game was designed to run as a client/server model. I never found why it was fautly but I suspected it was because of threading and how threads were faked OS4 in the pthread model. Or perhaps I missed usinjg clib-ts. Don't know.

It's interesting the project you shared. Years ago I started testing my own idea of threads in AmigaOS on my A1200 in the 68K days, at least I think it was,. My main idea was that threads would share with the same process context, and when that parent process gave up its time by waiting, each thread would then have its turn. The task quatum would be shared with all threads. And it was really a single core thread model which still wouldn't be a problem. Each thread would still need a seperate stack instance and would execute like some kind of subroutine. But the subroutines would be indepdant. Able to access global data but each having their own local space. I planned to put it in a library if it worked which would patch the Switch() vector in each task.

I really only did some basic experiments. Manually changing the code to enter another subroutine. I just found code and it looks like I tried to simulate a fork() at first by creating a new process and then copying the global and local data pointer across. I recall it was faulty in my OS4 testing. LOL. No wonder why. I used the same local space in two different routines from two different processes. But different stack.

@Karlos

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n a different note, as I'm sure everyone is tired of me harping on about 68K as the future...

I have my own 68K hang ups. Around 2006 I really started writing OS4 software, some 68K, that brought OS4 closer to 68K with games and applications.

The Maestrix was a simulation of the MaestroPro Maestix driver so OctaMED could play modules again on OS4 but in 16-bit mix mode. It wasn't a new idea, but based on simulating a sound driver which redirected to AHI, and doing a Tocatta one was the most favoured. Perhaps because it was the most supported. I looked into that as well as Defina. I chose Maestix as it was the simplest to implement, used a messaging system, so I just needed middleman code and built a theme around it. Tocatta was slightly more complicated and Delfina the most complicated using an interupt mechanism. But, to this day, I still don't know what else uses the Maestix driver.

There there was CIAgent to simulate CIA resources and hardware. Off to a good start during the early versions, featuring a CIA monitor with basic mouse clicks and keys emuated, it unfortunately got stalled by other projects and no not by A1 Linux, yet. In 2018 it finally could emulate CIA timer interrupts fully including running 68k module interrupts. But not play them with audio. Yet. Since that is even more work, which I had planned to be working years ago, and hope to complete in a future release this year.

@matthey

Quote:

Plenty of 68k programmers have used a 68k Amiga environment for programming.

Now I read they mostly use a PC or Mac. Integrating developer tools and editors to work with 68K code. That is launched through UAE transparently with a VM like setup. A real Amiga being the last resort or last block in the chain at release.

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Is AmigaOS 4 still based on GCC 4 while the current version is GCC 12? Is it faster to compile on PPC NG hardware than using a high end WinUAE JIT environment?

Mine is still GCC 4.2.4. Mostly because I don't compile much C code on OS4 and it works fine. I have a newer GCC with the OS4 cross compiler on my laptop and in the next SDK update I can update GCC then.

Regarding your WinUAE question, I would say it's faster on PPC NG, as doing so would require emulating GCC as well which would still be slower as it would need to emulate PPC code on an Amiga. Faster than a real CyberStormPPC 240Mhz maybe, but I doubt it would be faster than my X1000, though a Ryzen would get it close.

I any case, using an emulator is not needed, as a cross compiler would be used. Since most configure scripts break in AmigaOS shells you really want to avoid that so a Linux shell works best by comparison. So, a cross compiler will run at full speed and faster than everything, including an X5000 quad compiling on Linux, on a Ryzen ot similar.

@Hypex

The Maestrix is your work? Kudos. I used that a lot on my A1 with OctaMED SoundStudio. I used to get a bit of a desynchronisation bug if I flipped screens, so I just used to open other utils on the OctaMED public screen. Problem solved.

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It's interesting the project you shared

Looking at this include section and remembering how much of the code is lost forever gave me a sad: https://github.com/0xABADCAFE/ancient-amigaos-exng2/blob/69c07dc1fcc215c81c2bf5ea7e25a83ca6a1d9e4/include/xbase.hpp#L49

Last edited by Karlos on 04-May-2022 at 08:11 PM.

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