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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: Gulliver on April 16, 2010, 06:57:34 AM
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Good news again! :)
I emailed Chris Hames, the author of PC-Task, asking about making PC-task public domain.
This is what he replied to my emails
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Re: Requesting your permission for PC-Task to become Public Domain software
Friday, April 16, 2010 4:42 AM
From:
"Chris Hames"
Add sender to Contacts
To:
"Ignacio"
From: "Ignacio"
> freely available to everyone. I would also add if you think it is necessary, that you wont provide any suport whatsoever, and not be liable for any damage at all.
How about I declare Amiga users can freely use/distribute (completely at their own risk) the previously released versions of PC-Task, but not sell it (or obtain financial advantage) in any way.
Regards,
Chris
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Re: Requesting your permission for PC-Task to become Freeware software
Friday, April 16, 2010 5:55 AM
From:
"Chris Hames"
Add sender to Contacts
To:
"Ignacio"
From: "Ignacio"
xxx@yahoo.com>
> What you said sounds great to me, thank you! So if you have no objections, I will make your previous response public so that the community knows which are your conditions.
Sure.
Regards,
Chris
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You can find PC-Task 4.4 and version 3.1 archive at:
http://lilliput.host-cafe.com/Files/PC-Task.zip
Enjoy and have fun!
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You're on a roll dude, nice job!
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You can find PC-Task 4.4 and version 3.1 archive at:
http://lilliput.host-cafe.com/Files/PC-Task.zip
Enjoy and have fun!
Great news. I enjoyed PC-Task back in the 1990ies. Now I am using DOSBox on the AmigaOS 4, but will make PC-Task newer install.
Is there any chance of releasing the sourcecode as well?
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I am afraid that binaries only, I asked Chris for the sources, but then it is his own prerogative not to provide them.
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Wonder if Newtek will make Lightwave 5 available for free. Actually any lightwave 3 and above would be good..
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Excellent - I still use PC-Task occasionally! Heck, I completed Ultima VI on PC-Task, it has sentimental value. :)
It also runs under OS 4 - BUT you need to change the locale to one that doesn't use the euro-symbol. If you don't, it'll crash on the configuration screen. Weird, but there you go. :)
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I am afraid that binaries only, I asked Chris for the sources, but then it is his own prerogative not to provide them.
The sources would've been great to have, so we could continue developing it. None the less, PC-Task in PD is a great effort.
Good job.
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@gulliver
buen trabajo! / good job!
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I have to admit, I played with PC-Task and PCx demo versions, but to be honest, never actually used them for anything as they were just far too slow on my machine.
It's a pity a PPC version wasn't made. I imagine being able to prod the MMU into marking a wedge of RAM as little endian - or at least using the load/store byteswapped instructions, bigger caches and ample register space would have allowed for a quite usable PC emulation back in the day.
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Hmm and people said not to worry about software and basically pirate it, in reference to me asking software companies if we can ask to make certain software freely available such as Deluxe Paint V, Vista Pro, etc.
This is very good news, let's try and get some other software free on the Amiga platform that is no longer sold for the Amiga.
I ended up getting Deluxe Paint IV and V off ebay pretty cheap finally.
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I remember using PC-Task and Transformer on my A-500 w/ 1MB RAM to run DOS 6.22 + Borland Turbo Pascal 3 to compile Pascal source code for my computer science classes in High School. My other classmates all had PeeCees (286,386,etc.) and the couldn't believe that an Amiga was so capable. In fact, some of them still didn't believe it, until I showed them live as I was compiling. Good times!!
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Excellent job, thank you! Let us know if you make any headway with Holger Kruze ;)
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A big thank you to gulliver and especially Chris!
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Good news again! :)
I emailed Chris Hames, the author of PC-Task, asking about making PC-task public domain.
This is what he replied to my emails
----------------------------------------
Re: Requesting your permission for PC-Task to become Public Domain software
Friday, April 16, 2010 4:42 AM
From:
"Chris Hames"
Add sender to Contacts
To:
"Ignacio"
From: "Ignacio"
> freely available to everyone. I would also add if you think it is necessary, that you wont provide any suport whatsoever, and not be liable for any damage at all.
How about I declare Amiga users can freely use/distribute (completely at their own risk) the previously released versions of PC-Task, but not sell it (or obtain financial advantage) in any way.
I have to wonder, how in the world could anyone obtain financial advantage of it? I'm glad to see more old apps being released to public domain, even with restrictions, but I'm wondering what they are thinking on others making money off their code? At worst, just GPL it and don't worry about some nasty person selling it on a floppy disk to 10 or 20 people. Piracy happens and for this level and age of software, life is just too short to worry about the possibility of piracy.
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Hmm, I wonder how this runs in UAE with the CPU cranked all the way up.
Yes, I'm being serious.
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Hmm, I wonder how this runs in UAE with the CPU cranked all the way up.
Yes, I'm being serious.
It works just fine. I have Win 3.1 installed under PC-Task and the speed is acceptable. :)
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I have to wonder, how in the world could anyone obtain financial advantage of it? I'm glad to see more old apps being released to public domain, even with restrictions, but I'm wondering what they are thinking on others making money off their code? At worst, just GPL it and don't worry about some nasty person selling it on a floppy disk to 10 or 20 people. Piracy happens and for this level and age of software, life is just too short to worry about the possibility of piracy.
I read that as, I am releasing this for free, so no one should be getting ripped off buying it.
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It works just fine. I have Win 3.1 installed under PC-Task and the speed is acceptable. :)
Try running UAE on PC-Task within UAE on a real PC... :lol:
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Yikes, I haven't yet installed my purchased version of PC-Task, and now it's becoming free. At least I got the nice looking packaging :)
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Try running UAE on PC-Task within UAE on a real PC... :lol:
I dunno. The release notes say 4.3 supports Windows 95. That ought to be pretty interesting.
I wonder how 95 would run on my 060... heheheh
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Yikes, I haven't yet installed my purchased version of PC-Task, and now it's becoming free. At least I got the nice looking packaging :)
That reminds me, I have a 56k PCMCIA modem brand new in a box unopened for the last 15 years haha
This is great news, and the author should be applauded.
If memory serves me right, PC-Task is not PPC compatible so the fastest PC emulation is via 060 66mhz on real Amigas yes?
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I dunno. The release notes say 4.3 supports Windows 95. That ought to be pretty interesting.
I wonder how 95 would run on my 060... heheheh
I bought a "laptop" (more like a portable) clone at a thrift store recently for its plasma display - easy way to make a neon clock. Brought it home and booted it up, find out it's a 386 with a little memory. Then it starts loading Windows 95!?! I thought it was somebody's joke, but after 5 or 10 minutes, Windblows 95 was running - I was amazed.
Your 060 is at least 4 times faster than this 386, so even with emulation, it might actually work.
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I wonder how 95 would run on my 060... heheheh
Done. Slower than a snail; just booting takes 2.5 - 4 mins and you can see in which order the screen is refreshed.
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I have Win 3.1 installed under PC-Task
That line made me spit out my tea all over my laptop.
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Hmm.
I've run this before in WinUAE, and while it booted plenty fast, I couldn't mount a DOS disk image to get any flavor of Windows installed (and it doesn't support .ISO images so booting right off of, say, a Win98 install CD is out).
Any advice?
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That line made me spit out my tea all over my laptop.
So you never tried to run any Win version under PC-Task? This hardfile was created when I had 060@75Mhz.
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How fast is PC-taks's with JIT on a PPC with 68k JIT ?
(IIRC, PC-task had some kind of 386->68k JIT)
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Pc-Task was sure a piece of excellent software. I did use it for running som dos apps om my A4000 years ago and I was impressed with the emulation speed. Just for fun I even tried to install w95 on it. After many tries I finally got it running - but to slow to be useful for anything. And unstable as well, it usually would crash soon after the desktop apeared.
Its a nice gesture from Chris to release it for free. Also it would have been great to see a Aos4 PPC native version, so unless he have any plans for it, I hope he would consider releasing the source code as well some day.
Another option is Bochs, which source code is available as well. But it seems like its not updated since 2006. Also I have a feeling that Bochs will be much slower than a native PC-Task version would be.
Then there is Dosbox. Not made for running w95 at all, but it apears like people have successfully managed to run w95 on it. Not sure if the Amiga versions are up to it though.
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"Porting" is about as easy as rewriting from scratch. In order to get halfway decent performance, emulators either have to run on hardware which is orders of magnitude faster than the emulated device or the emulator has to be written in assembly language. In order to rewrite the x86 emulator for PowerPC, you might as well start from scratch.
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Thanks much, Gulliver! Not sure how long your luck can hold out, but please do what you can to get other Amiga software released to the public.
Although, I've had trouble doing much useful with the PC-Task version that came on some Amiga cover disk... maybe someone might want to make a tutorial, or have a hardfile available? (hint, hint...)
Again, great job!
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"Porting" is about as easy as rewriting from scratch. In order to get halfway decent performance, emulators either have to run on hardware which is orders of magnitude faster than the emulated device or the emulator has to be written in assembly language. In order to rewrite the x86 emulator for PowerPC, you might as well start from scratch.
And if you were to do that, you might start by examining something like this: QEMU (http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page)
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Great news and all, but any chance we could get a disk image of a non-cracked version as the "official" freeware version? I'm sure someone here's got one...
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Nice!
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Try running UAE on PC-Task within UAE on a real PC... :lol:
Yeah, I tried that... I'd love to see the original x86 source code and then what comes out after going through an x86->68k JIT -> x86 JIT :)
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I've used Fellow on pc-task on Amithlon a few times (in response to running uae in pc-task within uae on a real pc) . Runs surprisingly well, a heck of a lot faster than Bochs and Dosbox (only other 2 x86 emus Ive used on os3.x(I could never get pcx to work))
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The link to PC-Task 4.4 seems to be dead:
http://lilliput.host-cafe.com/Files/PC-Task.zip
Anyone know where to find it now? It's not on Aminet.
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The link to PC-Task 4.4 seems to be dead:
http://lilliput.host-cafe.com/Files/PC-Task.zip
Anyone know where to find it now? It's not on Aminet.
It looks like the whole site has moved to http://amigavideo.tripod.com. The link is now
http://amigavideo.tripod.com/Files/PC-Task.zip
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Hmm.....site says file is not available for downloading.
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I am sorry for the inconviniences, but I am a bit short of time at the moment, but hopefully will update my website and its downloads very soon.
Meanwhile:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/euy9mozd14lz9ke/PC-Task.zip
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Cool
I remember I used it on my A1200/030 in 97 or so, with Dos and some sort of PCB layout program, it worked well but slow though.. But it got the job done..
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Thanks Gulliver, much appreciated! :)
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...
You can find PC-Task 4.4 and version 3.1 archive at:
http://lilliput.host-cafe.com/Files/PC-Task.zip
Enjoy and have fun!
Unfortunately I cannot find the "files" folder/tab at lilliput.host-cafe.com - is this link still valid at all?
Does someone have a working download link?
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Post #39 ??
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I am sorry for the inconviniences, but I am a bit short of time at the moment, but hopefully will update my website and its downloads very soon.
Meanwhile:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/euy9mozd14lz9ke/PC-Task.zip
Could this be uploaded to Aminet? If the author allowed it there shouldn't be any problem, right?
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It should also be available at the English Amiga Board, in their Archives section:
http://eab.whdownload.com/
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Resurrecting this old thread... I have noticed that the full version of PC-Task has never been uploaded to Aminet. I'd upload it there if there's no objection, I think that this would make it much easier to find it.
Varthall
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Does anybody have an email address to Chris? Maybe he has changed his mind about the source code.
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Normally I'd say "well there's no point in trying to optimize the code, it won't go faster" but given what I've seen Novacoder pull off if we're not careful he'll be squeezing 486/100 speeds out of a 33mhz 030 ;)
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My 1200's are down atm, so I can't test my self, though I'd love to run this on my 80Mhz 060 and use a DOS program I have called "ckcpu" in order to see how fast it can go.
Here's a link to the program in case anyone else is curious.
http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/chkcpu.htm