[HN Gopher] Amiga Systems Programming in 2023
___________________________________________________________________
Amiga Systems Programming in 2023
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 180 points
Date : 2023-09-05 08:53 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.markround.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.markround.com)
| mark_round wrote:
| Author here, thanks for posting! Happy to answer any questions or
| chat Amiga stuff in general. Bear in mind - as I said in the
| article - I'm more-or-less a total newbie when it comes to all
| this stuff. I have been involved in the Amiga scene since I got
| my first A600 in the 90s, but really just observed the coding
| side of things from the sidelines although I did enjoy a brief
| stint as a Graphics Artist using DeluxePaint for a UK Scene
| group. My C code will probably make your eyes bleed, and I'm sure
| I've got some factual details wrong but diving back into this
| platform again (and discovering all the little details that made
| it so advanced for the time) after a long absence has been a lot
| of fun!
| Lucretia9 wrote:
| Use AmigaE, far nicer than C. Never tried Chris Handley's
| "Portabl E" compiler.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Hm. Your link to the Apollo meanwhile points to something else,
| I guess?
|
| Try this one? http://www.apollo-computer.com/
|
| Err... this? http://www.apollo-computer.com/v2legacy.php
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| How do you feel about the Amiga 500 as a platform for teaching
| systems programming? These are a lot more accessible to kids
| and the like, than the fully loaded A600 that only a few of us
| have stashed in the attic/atop the retrocollection ..
|
| Kids really love retro-computing (I'm a curator at such a
| museum, also) and the #1 request is - how do I get some
| hardware to get started?
|
| What of the new-school platforms do you consider a viable
| answer to that question, Amiga systems-hacking wise?
| glimshe wrote:
| Having done system programming on retro platforms, my
| recommendation for this specific purpose is to use a great
| emulator, and the Amiga happens to have UAE which is one of
| the best emulators around. Debugging will be a lot easier and
| you deal way less with the grind of using an old piece of
| hardware. I understand if you want the full retro experience,
| but the full experience won't necessarily be conducive to
| better learning.
| bluescrn wrote:
| This. One day I'd like to revisit Amiga coding. I did a
| fair bit of Blitz Basic and a little bit of 68K ASM back in
| the day, but learning it was challenging as a teenager in
| the pre-Internet era.
|
| I'd definitely rather edit+compile/assemble code on a
| modern PC and do most testing in UAE. I don't need the
| nostalgia of slow reboot cycles and reloading things from
| floppy disks when my code inevitably crashes/hangs, let
| alone editing blurry code on a 14" CRT TV...
| Lucretia9 wrote:
| The books are all available now, archive.org and other
| places including this one which is also hosting the wip
| RKM https://www.retro-commodore.eu/rkrm-wip.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Even people targeting the real hardware often compile
| these days on a Mac or PC.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The tricky bit is deployment to the Amiga. My only way to
| put files onto my Amiga at present is a CompactFlash card
| (or 3.5" floppies)
|
| I don't have ethernet hardware on my Amiga (and may not
| have enough RAM for that approach), but maybe there's a
| slower-but-simpler solution with a parallel/serial port
| link?
|
| UAE makes that deployment easy, making a PC folder
| accessible as an Amiga drive. The downside is the lack of
| smooth 50Hz (PAL) display. Although I do have a g-sync
| monitor, so maybe that's a solveable problem these
| days...
| MagerValp wrote:
| There are lots of options for parallel and serial
| transfers, check out this article for some good options:
|
| http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/vc/amiga_transfer.html
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I think it's perfect.
|
| It's semi modern, it has everything a modern system has, only
| less of it. (Except a GPU.) It's nevertheless very simple,
| and it's _thoroughly_ documented.
|
| This means you can treat it as an embedded target and code it
| without any operating system, or you can take advantage of
| the OS. (AROS m68k if you are putting together a course,
| rather than the original proprietary ROM files.)
| mark_round wrote:
| Modern systems ? I dunno. I wouldn't use anything like Linux,
| Mac or Windows - there's just way too much indirection and
| the system as a whole is just too opaque for a beginner. I
| think the A500 could make a fantastic platform for systems
| programming teaching. I mean, it's probably going to be
| AmigaOS 1.2/1.3 so very basic compared to later releases but
| there's enough in there to hold attention and create
| something interesting. Plus it's always nice to have
| something like the original beige "wedge" to hack on, it's a
| lot more interesting and "real" than working on an emulator.
|
| I think the thing that would hold you back on an un-expanded
| A500 would be choice of programming language; a C compiler is
| probably just too heavyweight to use on a basic machine,
| particularly if you don't have a hard drive fitted. Assembler
| would be OK, although possibly a little too low-level.
| Something like AMOS would fit the bill perfectly though:
| Would run find on older systems and very quick to create
| something that would hold the attention like a game or demo.
| Although that's not really "systems programming" as such.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The best way to develop systems software for the Amiga will
| probably be cross-development from a more modern platform
| and programming language. LLVM is getting m68k support
| which ought to make this feasible in the future, including
| some recent feature updates
| https://m680x0.github.io/blog/2023/05/may-updates.html .
| Though some basic pieces are still missing, such as support
| for the Hunk format in the LLVM linker.
| MarcusE1W wrote:
| I used to do some systems programming with then M2 Amiga
| Modula-2 compiler. They had a complete mapping to the
| systems libraries and I suppose for the general learning
| experience M2 is more pleasant than C, although that works
| as well, of course. There was quite a lot of M2 public
| domain software at that time on the Amiga so that it should
| be possible to find good examples.
|
| That said, system programming on the Amiga is for good or
| bad much closer to the hardware than e.g Linux, so prepare
| to see a lot of guru meditations along the way when you
| have slightly mishandled a pointer or a data type, and
| there are a lot of pointers ;-)
|
| Great fun though.
| christkv wrote:
| The vampire v4 is great for this as well.
| tralarpa wrote:
| Do I see there an A1200 with a case that doesn't close properly
| because you put a 3.5" HD in it instead of the more expensive
| (and less capacity) 2.5" HD? :)
|
| Edit: Ah, no. I just read the article. It's the accelerator, I
| suppose.
| mark_round wrote:
| Ha, good eye :) Nah, you see an A1200 that I am constantly
| fiddling with, and I frequently take the SD and CF cards out
| to clone! I do have a set of backup scripts that clone
| content to a CF card in a PCMCIA adapter but I always feel
| safer with a full "dd" backup or similar. Because I keep
| opening it up I just leave the screws removed for easier
| access and make sure it's kept dust free every so often.
| danby wrote:
| If you're willing to mod the case (or buy a new case you're
| willing to mod) I can strongly recommend a CF2IDE relocator
|
| https://retroready.one/collections/adapters-
| interfaces/produ...
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Very interesting article, I've only vaguely heard of the more
| modern Amiga computers. Looking at https://www.hyperion-
| entertainment.com/index.php/where-to-bu... the latest versions
| of the OS run on the 1200+ with an accelerator, I assume then
| the A500 isn't really supported any more?
|
| I've got an A500 I bought second hand that I need to play with
| more, it came with some interesting looking software such as
| AMOS 3D. Just wondering if you have any recommendations to
| obtain a HDMI output. I just found -
| https://www.retropassion.co.uk/product/rgb2hdmi_amiga_500/.
| Also it sounds like I should probably dismantle it to remove
| the battery?
| Lucretia9 wrote:
| Put in a pistorm and the new roms.
| danby wrote:
| Ok so it's worth noting that the AmigaOS has two completely
| separate branches in use today: 3.x and 4.x
|
| 4.x is targeted to amigas with PPC CPUs or PPC based
| accelerators (mid to late 90s accelertors and some newer
| things like the X5000)
|
| 3.x is targeted to amigas with m68k CPUS (all the commodore
| era machines)
|
| Both 3.x and 4.x are under active development today. The
| latest 3.x is AmigaOS 3.2.2. The latest 4.x is AmigaOS4.1
|
| With regards support, the A500 is still the best supported
| Amiga. Its install base and current user base dwarves that of
| all the other models and accelerators. There were just so
| many more A500s sold than any other type of amiga. I would
| not be surprised if you told me that there 2 or 3 orders of
| magnitude more A500s than PPC amigas out there. So if you are
| developing for the amiga and want your software used by lots
| of folk then targeting the A500 will get it infront of the
| most eyeballs.
|
| Today though most people buy some kind of accelerator for
| their amiga and the Terrible Fire (TF536) or Individual
| Computers (ACA500plus) accelerator cards seem to be the most
| favoured modern choices. Neither of these choices are PPC
| based cards and the amiga community still favours m68k CPUs.
|
| WRT the battery, the standard A500 did not ship with a
| battery on the motherboard, only the A500+ did. Some RAM
| upgrade cards do have a VARTA battery and those could still
| damage the RAM upgrade card and should be removed.
|
| Sidenote: AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 are actually a kinda separate
| abandoned branch but features of these have been backported
| to the 3.2 branch.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Not the cheapest option, but the OSSC (Open Source Scan
| Converter) may be a worthwhile investment if you're into
| retro gaming/computing:
|
| https://videogameperfection.com/products/open-source-scan-
| co...
|
| You'll need an Amiga RGB SCART cable to connect the Amiga to
| it.
| mark_round wrote:
| OS 4.x runs on PowerPC processors, and there are a bunch of
| dedicated systems like the X1000, X5000 or SAM460EP. You can
| also run a "classic" OS 4.x version in emulators or on
| classic Amigas fitted with PowerPC accelerators. You could
| always snag a used Mac Mini PPC and run MorphOS on it for a
| similar experience; MorphOS is a sort of "off-shoot" from the
| Amiga family tree but has very active development including
| up to date browsers like https://wayfarer.icu.
|
| Hyperion have also released updated and bug-fixed versions of
| "classic" AmigaOS, and you can purchase the ROM sets and
| disks for e.g. OS 3.2 to use with an original machine like
| your A500.
|
| For HDMI output, I use an Indivision card. It's a little
| fiddly to fit (has to clip in over the top of some other
| chips) but gives a great stable and crystal-clear DVI or HDMI
| output. There are also external "flicker fixer" boxes or
| scandoublers that turn the Amiga 15KHz video output into
| something useable by modern displays, but in my experience
| they tend not to give as good quality output or have lag
| issues when playing games.
| vidarh wrote:
| To add to the MorphOS option, there's also AROS which aims
| for more Amiga compatibility, but also runs natively on x86
| PCs or hosted under Linux (you get a window with the full
| AROS desktop) w/out a VM if you want.
|
| (At one point I had a AROS setup that booted straight into
| FrexxEd with my Linux home directory made available, and
| Linux-hosted AROS "booted" the entire OS and started
| FrexxEd faster than my admittedly bloated Emacs setup would
| start....)
| floor_ wrote:
| I remember hearing a gamedev saying the last time he was happy
| programming was on the Amiga where he had total control.
| anta40 wrote:
| I'm not old enough to actually use Amiga in the past. My 1st PC
| was... IBM PC something running MS DOS.
|
| But definitely want to learn system programming on retro machines
| (beside GBA, Nintendo, etc. Just installed FS-UAE and FS-UAE
| launcher on my Mac. It asked you to provide the ROM of various
| Amiga machines (A500, A500+, A600, A1000, A1200 etc). I assume
| pick A500?
| vidarh wrote:
| A500 has broadest compatibility of those listed. A1200 is the
| most capable of those listed (A1200 and A4000 had the upgraded
| "AGA" graphics chipset) but for emulation it doesn't matter so
| much as the emulators tends to offer expansions (like e.g.
| emulated "Picasso" graphics cards for something closer to
| modern resolutions and colours).
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Wow blast from the past :D
|
| I must say, I'm thoroughly impressed that the Amiga community
| sticks with and improves the standards that were already set in
| the early 1990's (AmigaGuide, the Lisp-y installer scripts, LHA,
| and probably also things that are not mentioned in the article,
| like AREXX and datatypes) instead of reinventing the same wheel
| over and over.
| mark_round wrote:
| There is a fantastic article which I've linked to before that
| goes into a lot of that: https://datagubbe.se/ltmag/
|
| Datatypes in particular are amazing! I really wish some of
| these features (see also: ASSIGNs) made it over to other
| platforms. Which makes me think... A really nice hack (after I
| finally port SetCmd back to 68k and then bring it to more
| platforms) would be to add an ARexx port. Rexx itself is a
| pretty decent scripting language and the ubiquity of it on
| later-day Amiga systems meant that glue-ing components together
| and automating big chunks of platform behavior was very simple.
| Off down the rabbit hole again ;)
| vidarh wrote:
| I detest Rexx, but love having the Arexx port, but more Linux
| software and the like than people think have Dbus ports. If
| only dbus just wasn't so overengineered (ubus is an
| alternative)...
|
| Also have a long list of projects to make my Linux desktop
| more Amiga-like again...
| daneel_w wrote:
| Great article. Some petty nitpicking:
|
| _> "Just use LHA format archives. It's the standard compression
| tool on Amigas and even though there are modern (and technically
| better) alternatives ..."_
|
| LZX had supplanted LHA already by 1994.
|
| _> "a 7Mhz 68000 16-bit CPU"_
|
| It's a "16/32"-bit CPU, since it provides 32-bit
| operations/immediates and 32 bits worth of data- and address
| registers. For all practical accounts of _programming_ the CPU it
| 's a 32-bit machine, no matter the bus shoveling data 16 bits at
| a time behind the scenes.
|
| _> "... but all of what follows is in the context of developing
| a systems tool in C as that's the language of AmigaOS"_
|
| Not sure how to interpret this. You're in no way locked to C if
| you want to program for AmigaOS. You can load and interact with
| all of the libraries etc. of AmigaOS in Pascal, E and what-have-
| you, since there are headers available for almost any language
| you may want. Even assembly, which for the Amiga is/was a far
| more common choice for OS-friendly applications than people
| think.
| amiga386 wrote:
| > LZX had supplanted LHA already by 1994.
|
| Firstly - no it didn't. Sorry for nitpicking the nitpick, but
| the first public release of LZX was February 5, 1995.
|
| Secondly, "LZX supplanted LHA" is an opinion with varying
| levels of support.
|
| LZX _did_ take the Amiga community by storm, with its higher
| compression ratios, solid archiving and built-in support for
| unpacking LhA files, faster than LhA could. Many people started
| recompressing their archives with LZX... but also many people
| didn 't. Some Amiga magazine coverdisks (e.g. AUI) started
| using DiskSpare and LZX to get as much on a disk as possible...
| others stuck with normal disks and LHA.
|
| The majority of Amiga software archives are on Aminet, which is
| still getting uploads today. Aminet standardized on LhA, not
| LZX.
|
| Just as a random non-Aminet example, the WHDLoad homepage
| offers you its software in either LHA or LZX format, your
| choice. Wouldn't it be LZX only by now if LZX supplanted LHA in
| 1994?
|
| What the OP said rings true; LhA files are _ubiquitous_ on the
| Amiga, and also it 's possible to portably unpack _and_ create
| them on other systems. LZX is very popular, but I wouldn 't
| personally say it _supplanted_ LHA, even though I have hundreds
| of LZX archives.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > _It 's a "16/32"-bit CPU, since it provides 32-bit
| operations/immediates and 32 bits worth of data- and address
| registers._
|
| Eh, you're getting into some real crafty wordplay here. If you
| want to be _technical_ it 's a 16-bit processor with compound
| operations at 32-bit, in the same way a Z80 is an 8-bit
| processor that does 16-bit compound operations.
|
| Yeah, if you redefine the terms, you can make it mean exactly
| what you want. This is exactly what Atari did to label the
| Jaguar a "64-bit" machine, after all. It doesn't change what
| people meant at the time when they used the nomenclature (the
| native operating size of the ALU).
| daneel_w wrote:
| How is it "real crafty wordplay"? 16/32-bit is Motorola's own
| designation, and that's the width of the registers and the
| ISA's immediates. When programming the 68k you work directly
| with 32-bit longwords instead of having to manually herd
| multiple 16-bit words to achieve the same. Register-combining
| instructions like those in the Z80 do not exist in the 68000,
| nor are they necessary. Your comparison is invalid. Perhaps
| you have no experience programming the m68k family.
| deaddodo wrote:
| I literally wrote an m68k emulator core, along with
| multiple z80 variants. I'm intimately familiar with the
| internals of both, thanks.
|
| To reiterate my point, with sourcing (to counter your glib
| dismissals):
|
| > The design implements a 32-bit instruction set, with
| 32-bit registers and a 16-bit internal data bus.[4] The
| address bus is 24 bits and does not use memory
| segmentation, which made it easier to program for.
| _Internally, it uses a 16-bit data arithmetic logic unit
| (ALU) and two more 16-bit ALUs used mostly for
| addresses,[4] and has a 16-bit external data bus._ [5] For
| this reason, Motorola termed it a 16/32-bit processor.
|
| Highlighted portion italicized, source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000
|
| When people refer to bit-width around the generation
| aforementioned (8-bit to early 32-bit), _this_ is what they
| are referencing. This is because _many_ CPUs operated on
| different bus sizes throughout the architecture. What
| people using the term care about is it 's _native
| arithmetic_ capabilities. Unless you want to run around
| calling ARM11s "16-bit CPUs" because they support THUMB.
|
| As to what _Motorola_ opted to call it, I couldn 't care
| less about marketing speak regarding notoriously fuzzy
| buzzword CPU-capabilities; I care about technical
| capabilities and consistency.
| mark_round wrote:
| Nitpick away, always glad to include corrections!
|
| > _LZX had supplanted LHA already by 1994._
|
| True, but LHA always felt like more of the standard and tools
| were readily available and present on most systems. Sort of
| like how Bzip2/XZ and so on are technically far superior, yet a
| gzipped tarball is still the universal standard on Unix
| systems. A quick glance through AmiNet shows the majority of
| packages there are still using LHA as standard. Even stuff
| targetting a "modern" Amiga tends to use LHA - grepping the
| Os4Depot full package list shows: grep -c
| '.lha' FULLINDEX.readme 4110 grep -c '.lzx'
| FULLINDEX.readme 37
|
| > _For all practical accounts of programming the CPU it 's a
| 32-bit machine_
|
| True. I'll update the article to include that - I guess I'm
| really thinking of things like the 68020 processor (and CD32
| which proudly proclaimed "32-BIT" in big letters on the case :)
|
| > _You 're in no way locked to program for AmigaOS in C._
|
| Also true. From what I can see, calling & opening the libraries
| from Assembly is remarkably similar to e.g. C, but from
| browsing the leaked OS source (not that I'd ever advocate for
| that sort of thing ;) ) it was all originally in C. I wanted to
| dive in and get a better understanding of the code as it was
| originally written hence my experiments targeting C. Plus, I
| knew enough C from my old University days to get up to speed in
| a short enough timespan. With no memory protection, crashing my
| Amiga because I forgot to free some DOS object or other was a
| common occurrence - if I was attempting this in Assembly, I'd
| probably still be working on a basic proof-of-concept! Although
| I really admire the skills of those developers who did choose
| that language to write system utilities, not to mention the
| magic of the demo-scene. It's just a bit beyond my
| abilities/time constraints at the moment!
| vidarh wrote:
| It wasn't all originally in C. AmigaDos infamously was
| originally BCPL, hence the nasty legacy of BPTR and BSTR
| types all of the places.
|
| EDIT: To those unfamiliar, which I'm guessing is most people
| here, BPTR's are regular pointers shifted two bits down...
| BSTR's are BPTR's to a BCPL string, more commonly known as a
| "Pascal string" (single byte length as the first byte).
|
| The reasoning for this is language simplicity (too much... I
| hate it, to be clear):
|
| What in C would be array[index] is famously pretty much
| syntactic sugar for *(array + index). In BCPL it's
| !(array+index) or array!index. But whereas C is typed enough
| that C knows that (array + index) requires scaling index to
| the size of the elements of the array, BCPL is type-less. So
| if "index" is 1, array + index _will add 1 to the address_
| even if "array" holds 32 bit values.
|
| Since every value is typically the size of a pointer
| (otherwise the typeless goes straight out the window), on
| M68k the elements are 4 bytes.
|
| So to make (array + index) work, pointers needs to be left-
| shifted two bits. Then you can right-shift them two bits for
| any operations explicitly treating them as pointers (like
| "!")...
|
| And then everyone having to ever interface with your code
| from any other language will hate you for all time.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Just to add some more flavour:
|
| AmigaDOS in AmigaOS 1.x was a port/adaption of TRIPOS [0]
| to 68000 by MetaComCo. This was because the intended disk
| OS/API, "CAOS", was nowhere near ready for the Amiga's 1985
| launch. [1]
|
| It's the conventions of TRIPOS that commands go in "c" /
| "C:", libraries go in "l" / "L:" and scripts go in "s" /
| "S:", which is why these directories and standard assigns
| are on Amiga disks... but AmigaDOS "libraries" are limited
| to filesystem handlers, real Amiga libraries are found in
| the "libs" / "LIBS:" directory.
|
| Even the standard filesystem was from TRIPOS. It had 488
| bytes of data and 24 bytes of metadata per 512-byte disk
| block!
|
| There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth trying to
| use AmigaDOS 1.x. Charlie Heath and others started the
| AmigaDOS Replacement Project (ARP, retroactively renamed
| "AmigaDOS Resource Project" to not sound so nasty) which
| rewrote all the standard C: commands in assembler and C,
| using a common arp.library, which also added one of the
| earliest "standard" filesystem requesters. [2]
|
| Commodore took this onboard.
|
| Commodore created FastFileSystem (FFS) to replace the
| retroactively-named "Old Filesystem" (OFS) in time for
| AmigaOS 1.3. FFS removed _all_ per-diskblock metadata and
| let you lay down contiguous runs of 512-byte blocks!
|
| Commodore rewrote AmigaDOS and its commands in C and
| assembler for AmigaOS 2.0, retaining BCPL only where
| absolutely needed to keep filesystem handlers working. They
| also added a new asl.library with a standardized filesystem
| requester.
|
| In short, ARP was completely successful in getting
| Commodore to ditch BCPL AmigaDOS for one written in C.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190420095854/http://www.t
| hule....
|
| [2] http://aminet.net/package/misc/antiq/ARP_13
| vidarh wrote:
| arp.library, asl.library and similar is another one of
| those things I miss. Having such rapid adoption of
| standard requesters everywhere was great.
| harel wrote:
| I've just got an A1200, installed the latest Amiga OS 3.2 (on CF
| card). It sits nicely next to my upgraded A500. But my resolution
| and UI in either of them is nothing like the one shown in your
| screenshots. I'm almost jealous. Are you using the Hyperion
| latest? I mean, look at those colours - they pop!
| mark_round wrote:
| The images from my A1200 are on a very customized OS
| 3.2/CoffinOS (legally "dubious" AmigaOS distribution favoured
| by Vampire accelerator users) hybrid system with Faenza PNG
| icons. But if you have a graphics card (or emulate one in e.g.
| WinUAE), you can run in high resolutions/bit depths like this.
| The X5000 screenshots are on a QHD 24-bit resolution as the
| X5000 is a far more modern machine and has a hardware-
| accelerated compositor and 3D stack running on a Radeon PCIe
| card.
| rsync wrote:
| Would you please elaborate on, and define most of the terms
| within, the first sentence of your comment?
| mhd wrote:
| Given how much Amiga users I knew in the past gushed about their
| allegedly stellar GoldEd and CygnusEd, I'm quite surprised that
| this uses Lite.
| throwaway92753 wrote:
| CygnusEd was first released in 1987. I don't think it's fair to
| compare with a modern editor that was released 30+ years later.
|
| I have not used either [1], but their choice was based on what
| was available at the time.
|
| Edit: [1] Actually I did use CygnusEd for simple text editing,
| but I was not into programming at the time. I don't have a
| basis to compare it to modern editors, other than the knowledge
| that choices needs to be seen in the proper context.
| mark_round wrote:
| CygnusEd was the absolute business back in the day. I still
| love it, but my muscle memory just isn't there anymore after
| years of PC/Mac editors! I guess I've also become too spoiled
| by modern conveniences. LiteXL runs on pretty much anything and
| writing extensions is also pretty easy. But maybe I should get
| back into the habit of using CygnusEd some more...
| unwind wrote:
| I was old enough back then that I remember actually paying for
| the shareware version of FrexxEd [1]. I just learned from that
| page that it's open source now, cool!
|
| [1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/opensource.html (yes, by the author
| of curl).
| vidarh wrote:
| FrexxEd is beautiful, and scripted with C-like programming
| language (FPL), or Arexx, and it has fun features such as
| giving access to the buffers of your running instance via a
| filesystem, so you can e.g. call the compiler directly on
| your open buffers (a lot more useful on a limited RAM system
| with floppies, granted)
| ithkuil wrote:
| TIL vamos (aka Wine for Amiga :)
|
| https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools/blob/master/docs/vamos....
| mark_round wrote:
| Wow! Starred and saved. Thanks for the tip, that will be so
| useful for testing and incorporating in my Drone pipelines.
| I'll have a play and post an update, it looks like it should
| work nicely with my simple utility. Nice find!
| bjourne wrote:
| How energy-efficient are old Amigas? I get the appeal of "limited
| computing" because it forces you to be smart about using the
| resources. But it becomes silly when an Amiga and crt draws more
| power than a modern server.
| vidarh wrote:
| Given most of them didn't have or need fans, I'd imagine they'd
| come out ok if you only ditch the CRT.
| daneel_w wrote:
| My A1200 power supply (Commodore original) is rated for a
| maximum consumption of 35 watts, which includes headroom for
| putting both an accelerator board with CPU+FPU+RAM and a 2.5"
| HDD inside the computer.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Efficient is the wrong word here, because the amount of
| computing work they can do for a given amount of electrical
| energy is pretty tiny compared with anything modern. They're
| pretty light in terms of energy usage though, and because of
| the elegant simplicity of the system you don't notice how
| underpowered they are until you ask them to do something CPU
| intensive. (Think several minutes to draw fractals that even
| 20-year-old PCs can draw in realtime.)
| mark_round wrote:
| I have mine connected to a modern flat-panel display as I use
| an Indivision adapter, and there are other solutions which is
| fortunate as CRTs are getting very rare (and fragile!) now.
| Would still love one for the retro appeal, but I just can't
| justify it! The power draw from the base system is pretty
| small, I just checked the power meter my A1200 is plugged into,
| and powering it on jumped the draw from around 1.6A at 240V to
| around 1.77A.
| jsight wrote:
| I bet it'd be rare to see more than 150W. Maybe not efficient
| compared to a modern laptop, but probably very efficient
| compared to most modern servers or desktops under load.
|
| Of course, a CRT is much worse, but using an LCD shouldn't be
| difficult.
| BearhatBeer wrote:
| CRTs don't use tons of power, biggest draw is right when you
| turn it on. After that they sip.
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