New AGA SDL Development

[nicholas]

@Nova

Excellent news, thanks for the hard work you've put into it.

[nicholas]

1.- What about those 15bit/16bit C2Ps? these aren't fast but could be useful for some of your ports. Kalms published some sources and there are more from Rune Stenslad
http://code.google.com/p/unitedstatesofamiga/
http://membres.multimania.fr/amycoders/opt/fasttruec2p.html

Bookmarked. Thanks!

[nicholas]

You know what your NetSurf will do to the Amiga classic community??  Especially for AGA? It will open abundance of NEW GAME libraries like no tomorrow and even applications. All these HTML 5 games or Apps that run on browser can finally run in the classic Amiga. NO more worry about porting..we can even have our very own MMORPG game in the classic Amiga. Maybe 95% of to 98% of them will not work on AGA Amiga...but if even 2% does work.....IT IS UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME!! Also it means for us Amiga classic users may need to seriously consider porting our Amiga hardware to RTG Amiga classic thus Amiga 4000 may sound way more appealing now...with that...we can have the 80% of the apps and games that comes from browser.

Am I wrong?

Yes you are wrong.

[nicholas]

* sigh * Oh well.

If you want HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript etc Netsurf is not the right tool for the job right now, what you need is a WebKit based browser such as Origyn/OWB to be ported to 68k Amiga OS.

It wouldn't be very usable though as the machines are so slow. It would be OK under emulation on a fast PC though.

Start here: http://aros-exec.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7745

[nicholas]

i see, same as bernd was. seems sdl has something to do with lazy coding;)

perhaps you can put your project up on a repository once n advanced stage. others might implement and improve it where you lack motivation. but first things first of course.

Speaking of Bernd, has anyone seen him about recently? He's not logged into here since last December.

[nicholas]

i think he has lost patience even with aros. ocassionally he still reacts if i point him to something or need some help, but i think he moved on realizing this all leads to nothing.

[nicholas]

just when a person gets mentioned... bernd has just requested me to test netsurf aga or real hardware. so not all is lost it seems..

Ah another case of the old Amiga addiction story I see.  It's like heroin or nicotine, it never leaves you!

Tell him "welcome back" from me.

[nicholas]

taking of lost people, has anyone seen piru on here in a long time ?

I believe he (and others) left because Pyro shutdown the domain for a day as a protest about something.

[nicholas]

http://aminet.net/package/dev/c/netsurf-morphos-src

Backporting Itix' Netsurf MUI source to 3.x might be easier, but it's not as up to date a Chris' Reaction port so it would need a fair bit of love and attention to bring it up to feature parity.

No, I'm not volunteering.

[nicholas]

A shared clib/POSIX lib and SDL lib for all AmigaOS flavors would be great but isn't so easy to do now. The incompatibility kills Amiga cross development and there aren't any easy answers.

An OpenJDK bounty. j/k!

[nicholas]

I had never read any of the MAME License until now.  interesting, basically open source but absolutely no distributing it for commercial uses.  

More on topic;

Awesome!  SDL for AGA should help make a lot of things that are open source be easier to port.

I'm probably going to be creating a separate post for this, but I'm working on some details.  But I have been thinking about ways in which we can improve the Amiga community as a whole and get more software written for the platform(s).  I'm wanting to dive into learning programming, and would prefer to do it on my Amiga, but there are so many road blocks to doing so.  Namely setting up a development environment isn't exactly easy.

I want a development environment much like Qt, where you can write once, and compile for multiple platforms.  How nice would it be to add AmigaOS 3.x, AmigaOS 4.x, AROS, MorphOS and others to the QtCreator, so that we can just select which OS to compile for, and push a button and let it build binaries.

Especially with SDL being available, it should be fairly simple to have a 'write once run everywhere' like Java attempted to accomplished.  (well okay, fairly simple is probably very subjective... but still... )

slaapliedje

http://www.softwareandcircuits.com/division/amiga/products/cubic/index.html and http://www.geit.de/eng_sdi.html

[nicholas]

I have no interest in SDL for AGA but an optimized SDL for RTG could be really nice!!!

In the olden days when I looked at SDL it called a subroutine for EVERY SINGLE PIXEL in a blit.  It was mind bogglingly slow.  So I threw it overboard like a dead body and forgot about it.  But that was 10 years ago and hopefully things have improved now?

Did you ever try the old WarpSDL?

http://www.algonet.se/~chaozer/warpsdl.shtml

[nicholas]

I think what he's asking is if there are some Arexx bindings that support SDL.  There are for other languages.  SDL is just an API, Arexx a scripting language.

There are perl bindings for it, so why not?  

What I'd like to see is Mesa ported to AGA...  of course that would probably perform horribly, but could allow for some other stuff to work.

slaapliedje

IIRC Brian Paul wrote the first version of MESA on his Amiga.

[nicholas]

Amiga 3000 - 1991 to 1995
3MB RAM, 16 MHz 68030, 10MB disk. The first bits of Mesa were written on this computer. Used HAM mode to approximate a normal RGB (non-indexed) framebuffer.

http://www.mesa3d.org/brianp/home.html