@fishy_fis

Quote:

Many people knew and tried to warn people, but it didnt stop getting people scammed into paying for his Sam system. What ever happened to the guy?

He's working on ExecSG

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@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

?DjNick? did some work for me on Excalibur, the work was nice, but I had to do lot of work myself, problem was graphic has to cut into tiles, to be placed around menus, that?s long time ago, it was before AmigaOS4.1 FE.

Was that the one that was uploaded somewhere? I downloaded some theme made in Photoshop format. I loaded it into GIMP but also I got was one picture. It seemed to have other layers but I couldn't let them to show up. After being used to DPaint and the like I just can't get used to these other programs. Simple things in GIMP like sticking two photos beside each other are too complicated. There may be a wizard buit all guides tell you to do this stuff by hand. In any case the one picture I got wasn't suitable for creating a theme out of.

I don't know how hard it is to put a GUI theme together. But it's been done before. I did read developers were sought out to convert it into a theme but not enough came forward. And apparrently no OS4 developers came to assist enough to do anything with the graphics.

Also, I would expect "DjNick" to produce music, not graphics. A DJ that is being a graphic artist and not a music artist; well that's confusing.

@Hypex

You can’t use DPaint it has to be ARGB format, Excalibur loads PNG images, gimp is not a requirement, you can use Paint.Net or any other program that has support transparency. You need new version of Excalibur I think one on OS4Dpeot.net is broken really bad. I think do from scratch and only use part of the old code, if it makes sense, and if I where to do it again.

Everything be completely different, Excalibur was first written in Blitz Basic that translated and converted to C, and tryd to modernize bit by bit. I think it was one of the first programs I wrote for AmigaOS4.x after coming back to AmigaOS.

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@Hypex

Quote:

I don't know how hard it is to put a GUI theme together. But it's been done before. I did read developers were sought out to convert it into a theme but not enough came forward. And apparrently no OS4 developers came to assist enough to do anything with the graphics.

I remember that too, I have no clue about way that was need, or if can’t be done by using the GUI prefs.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: “DjNick” did some work for me on Excalibur, the work was nice, but I had to do lot of work myself, ....

I saw some og his works and it was not bad. I was more shocked about the bounty of buying him a Sam460 and seeing that he had absolute no clue what tools he will get.

The Amiga tools where great when it came to ECS but they could not compete with tools for 24-Bit pictures on a Windows PC, something he had to learn in the hard way after he got his Sam.

Re:PolymorphVM

Belxjander tried to describe his emulation method to me. It involved a shared library with all the x86 boilerplate mapped to every 16-bit opcode combination the Amiga could manage. I doubt it would have worked on anything more advanced than a 486 instruction set. I think the downfall was actually the OS4 interface mechanism that made every function table lookup more complicated than multiplying the opcode by -6 and add -30 to find the lookup in the library. Interfaces added too much overhead.

@Samurai_Crow

The bigger downfall is that it was nothing more than a flight of fantasy that was *never* going to amount to anything. Something anyone with even half a clue could see from a mile off.
There's zero need to try to discuss it as anything else.
Only those with similar inclinations to Belxjander would even try.

@fishy_fis

Quote:

fishy_fis wrote: There's zero need to try to discuss it as anything else. Only those with similar inclinations to Belxjander would even try.

QUICK SOMEONE SUMMON TREVOR!

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@OneTimer1

Quote:

I saw some og his works and it was not bad. I was more shocked about the bounty of buying him a Sam460 and seeing that he had absolute no clue what tools he will get.

Not that DJ Nick lacked talent. But you really can't go like "buy me a computer and see if I can produce something; if I don't, well, don't blame me, good-bye and thank you for your contribution." This is why I didn't take part in the bounty.

In fact, no bounty was needed because at that time, A-EON still had their loaner system in place; if you had a particular project in mind, it was enough to contact them, describe the project, define the goals and expected results, and A-EON would lend you an OS4-capable machine. I can say that because I made use of it myself. During my studies in Liverpool, I applied for the loaner and A-EON sent me a Sam440, which I could keep for the entire academic year. This allowed me to take over the ADRipper application, modernize the code and write a few more encoder plugins.

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@Samurai_Crow

any C++ program uses methods inside class, this similar to function pointer into structs, actually struct is public list in class in C++, the interfaces in AmigaOS is also not slow, they are C language eccentric. It’s not table you need do for etch loop on something like that, do not need to lookup function names or anything, its indirect jump bases on reference address. If you disassemble it you see it’s the table offset stored in the assembler code, so it’s really not that dissimilar from EVO’s, it’s just that it compiler that does the magic, of course they are not store at 6 byte offset but a 4 byte offset, because just address pointers (32bit CPU). And does not contain the “680x0” JMP instruction. It’s up to the C compiler if table is stored in a register or if has to pull it from memory.

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@Hypex

Quote:

I would expect "DjNick" to produce music, not graphics. A DJ that is being a graphic artist and not a music artist; well that's confusing.

He was a musician, too. On the Amiga he used OctaMED, producing mainly electronic music.

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@Samurai_Crow

If you think that's the only issue with his grandiose idea, then you should read some posts from his extensive library of technobabble, for example:
https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=35268&forum=49&start=60&viewmode=flat&order=0#662257
It sounds impressive on the surface just like when faith healers talk about "harmonizing the quantum vibrations in your aura", but it's just a bunch of malarkey. Can someone who not so long ago had difficulty producing a simple makefile create this incredible virtual machine, that bridges the gap between every architecture known to mankind? I have to press X to doubt it.

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@BSzili

Karlos puts it pretty well here.

https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=35268&forum=49&start=80&viewmode=flat&order=0#664093

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @Samurai_Crow any C++ program uses methods inside class, this similar to function pointer into structs, actually struct is public list in class in C++, the interfaces in AmigaOS is also not slow, they are C language eccentric. It’s not table you need do for etch loop on something like that, do not need to lookup function names or anything, its indirect jump bases on reference address. If you disassemble it you see it’s the table offset stored in the assembler code, so it’s really not that dissimilar from EVO’s, it’s just that it compiler that does the magic, of course they are not store at 6 byte offset but a 4 byte offset, because just address pointers (32bit CPU). And does not contain the “680x0” JMP instruction. It’s up to the C compiler if table is stored in a register or if has to pull it from memory.

I'm familiar with C++ and it's VTable implementation of inheritance. C++ and its object-oriented implementation are not terribly fast due to double-indirection in the VTable. It suffers the same problems as AmigaOS 4's shared library interfaces. Rust, in contrast, uses a macro-substitution method of interfaces which are inherently much faster than C++ (at the cost of no direct single or multiple inheritance support).

Re:Belxjander

He's quite the card. He had friended me on Facebook for a while but I unfollowed him with out unfriending him after I saw the frequency of posting pictures of scantily clad Asian women. After a while I got on his wall to see what he was up to. He had a post "Let this be the year that noone says that atheism is a religion." I think you see where this is going. He blocked me and deleted my post so fast his OWN head had to be spinning.

@Samurai_Crow

macro-substitution is normally done by precompile normally, sure it be improved on when the Exe file is loaded, that’s how JMP to absolute addresses work in hunk files, because loadSeg know where fix the addresses. same with ELF loader by the way.

move.l #4,A6
JSR -148(A6)
-- table
JMP routine.
--
.routine
moveM.L d0-d7/a0-a7,-(sp)
…
moveM.L (sp)+,d0-d7/a0-a7
RTS

We don’t have Rust on Amiga, but I know some 680x0 programmer are take sort cut's, like assuming that a routine is at a location, this is really bad when someone decides to update or make changes to exec.library. If you jump directory to a address in ROM ignoring Execbase, if the rom is not same anymore the address is not the same, and your out of luck, and you won’t get the speed up from relocating ROM into FAST RAM. Anyway this are bad micro optimizing tricks.

I assume most of time is not spendt on calling API’s but instead doing something useful like calculating something. Or writing something into some memory block.

Sure, you you can lookup the address, and store it somewhere, but you only have 8 address register some of this registers are already in use. If you have to store it in your own table it defeats the point. still uses indirect addressing.

You take address and modify your code, again bad because of instruction cache, probably way many 68000 programs do not work on 68030 and up. Self modification code is considered bad practice.

Anyway none of tricks described here will work vbcc or any of C compilers anyway, its kind useless to argue about if you ask me.

How the .so objects work I'm not sure about, but I know the .so objects can be loaded and unloaded, so I assume they can’t be using absolute addresses. therefor I wonder how Rust handles .so objects, maybe something worth looking up.

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@Samurai_Crow

Quote:

He had a post "Let this be the year that noone says that atheism is a religion."

He's correct. Atheism isnt a religion.
The very definition/meaning of the word says so.
Much like the word "atypical" means not typical, "atheist" mean "not a theist".

Religious nutjobs seem incapable of understanding this however and always get on the defense to the point of attack about it, so the idea that there'll ever be a year that people don't call atheism a relgion is just as stupid as the meanings some religious people try to apply to the word.

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@fishy_fis

It looks like the fun Belxjander thread is turning into a religious discussion thread. Oh well...

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@BSzili

Nah, just a quick sidebar on the off chance Samurai_Crow was of the opinion athiesm is a belief system.
Im also not a big fan of people dismissing others ideas, even Belxjander's, if a person happens to be (in the ballpark of) right about something.
Credit where it's due, whether the credit is negative or positive in my opinion.

Back on topic however,....

One of my favorite Belxjander stories was the one where he said he was contracted for roughly 1million $ to build a dual cpu 680x0 accelerator card. Beyond the dirth of the Amiga's heyday when the writing was on the wall about it's "future".

That one always tickled my funny bone