owb on real amiga!!

[wawrzon]

here we go!! yesterday night i managed to get aros owb 68k version working on my aros68k test install on my miggy!

the config in question is
a4000d
mediator4000di (currently only zorro boards are usable under aros)
stock csppc060/50-128mb (ppc isnt being used under aros68k of course)
x-surf
cybervision64

the machine is attached to my router via x-surf lan running under copy of miamidx. arostcp stack doesnt seem to be functional on 68k yet, but miami is. browsers like aweb or netsurf work anyway.

owb in question is the genuine and actually abandoned aros owb port by szymczyk. its not the odyssey browser by fab, ported by deadwood.
the browser needs few minutes to load. if it takes ages then its likely parsing too many ttf fonts. the overall speed is not paricularly overwhelming but much better than i expected, simple pages load in few seconds, aorg has taken longer. complex pages like bbc.co.uk get stuck. many others like google do not load. the memory requirement is acceptable, ive been always left with more than 90 megs free when browsing. due to endian problems owb retrieves urls on a wrong port which has to be addressed every time a page is attempted to load. just append ":20480" to the url. also graphics are shown in wrong colors which is an endian issue. i guess there are quite few more of them..  

but so far i think its a great development.

edit: here is the appropriate thread on aros-exec:
http://aros-exec.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7745&post_id=75719#forumpost75719
thanks to toni willen and __amigan for instructions.

there is a particularity about the fonts installation before anybody tries to duplicate my achievement. read about it there.

[wawrzon]

endiannes problems corrected, here aros owb displaying bbc.co.uk on my a4k/060/xsurf/cv64:

[wawrzon]

owb must currently be set to handling images via datatypes. internal decoding causes illegal memory accesses and crash. there is possiblility to set usage of bmp, png, gif and jpg dadatypes in owb prefs. i have an impression that aros gif datatype is not finished, but as you see the web content usually is rendered correctly.

[wawrzon]

congratulations must solely go to jason mcmullan, who enabled compiling of c++ code for aros 68k, enabled owb and necessary libraries to build and fixed the endiannes errors.

[wawrzon]

@slaapliedje
it sounds like you let your application decide what screen to open. when using mediator you shouldnt use different endian resolutions at the same time, it doesnt necessarily crash your system at once but it might be risky.

aros doesnt currently support amiga pci bridges. it recognizes the devices on my mediator but thats it. what concerns stock a4000 processor whether you talk of 030 or 040 id consider them too slow to have fun, especially you are restricted to 16 mb slow fast ram on motherboard or similarly slow zorro card.

i would advise you to keep waiting till it has improved, except you have programming or debugging knowledge and can contribute to aros somehow.

[wawrzon]

so far i know jason demoed aros68k on fpga arcade on amiwest, but its nowhere to see. there is some incompatibility in ide implementation on fpga core, so it isnt available yet.

furtherly i can confirm that thanks to jason endian fix arostcp stack started working on my a4k with the genuine xsurf.device. it seems slower than miamidx, that ive installed to substitute it as long as it was broken, but it works now.

[wawrzon]

Nice to know we move closer to a day when we own the OS.

if you have aros in mind we already own the os, we just need to make it better than the original in all aspects which it isnt yet.

We kept this stuff alive, why shouldn't it be ours?

exactly.

[wawrzon]

@darrin: dont forget zorro bottleneck zo rtg board. btw i have not yet tried if aros owb works on amiga native screens, does fpgaarcade provides some sort of rtg emulation? if so the question would be and aros driver for it. winuae has its native p96 emu, and real amigas use a p96 wrapper under aros68k to access zorro rtg cards.