Native 68k Netsurf

[NovaCoder]

I would contribute also, could somebody who has a more experience to start it? It would also need lots of advertising.

Working web browser would be essential, I really don't understand why people are not more interested about this. They rather arguing and whining pointless things and spread their positive attitude all over them. <- sarcasm

Does the 68k port use the SDL and therefore need an RTG....is that about right?   If so it might be possible to remove the SDL requirement and code an AGA chunky mode instead.

[NovaCoder]

or you could code your c2p routines directly into bernds sdl library, in order to have a potential possibilty to run all sdl apps on planard screens. this will probably cost just too much performance for most games. is though a much desired feature ive observed. also i have suggested that before.

No sorry, I would never try and compile the SDL source code.   I'm currently using the 68k SDL library for audio and multi-threading (timer) and using native C2P AGA for graphics.   With a NetSurf port I'd probably just the SDL requirement (if possible).

[NovaCoder]

The OS4 one uses Reaction (things will need tweaking for OS3.9, but largely it should work unaltered)
The old MOS version uses MUI.  Note that the interface to NetSurf's frontends has changed significantly, so this frontend will not work "out of the box" with the latest core.



No, don't do that.  The framebuffer frontend (which is what the existing 68k port is) is not really suitable and should not be hacked around for this purpose.  The NetSurf core devs don't like it either.  Create a proper OS3/68k frontend.

@all
The only code you need to touch to modify my OS4 frontend is in the "amiga" directory.

Anything relating to graphics output is in the file "plotters.c".  Currently it uses a mix of graphics.library, (optionally Cairo) and Picasso96 calls.  The graphics.library part sets colours using new OS4 32-bit calls - that will need modifying to use FindColor() - or ObtainBestPen() if you can figure out a way of keeping track of which pens can be unlocked.

I've recently added back in direct to screen rendering, it's buggy atm but should work better for 8-bit modes.

A lot of functions could be stubbed out with #ifdef __amigaos4__ to get it compiled, and then gradually fix functions as they are needed.  There is a heck of a lot of code which is extra UI stuff which won't really matter for an initial porting effort.

I will help!  Ask me questions and I will answer them!

Hiya,

I assume you use GCC to compile this for OS4?

Direct screen rendering sounds interesting, not sure how that fits in though.

Ok so is it using Reaction to render the entire web-page?   I think that would be very slow under AGA, the only way to make a reasonable fast browser for AGA is to to native hardware 'direct screen rendering' and bypass the OS's API functions....that way it could be done using either C2P or even better the new chunky mode from the Indivision Mrk2. This kind of approach could only work if the underlying browser engine output the complete webpages to a chunky buffer ready for displaying to the user (including its own take on dialog boxes etc).

[NovaCoder]

Draw direct to the window via the window's RastPort (this is what my direct rendering does).  I wouldn't recommend hitting the hardware directly, you're probably not gaining much speed at the expense of extra complexity and hardware compatibility.

Yes, sorry that's exactly what I meant (draw directly to the window's RastPort).

[NovaCoder]

Ok... I haven't had a chance to go over the code in detail yet, but I'm going to see if it will be possible to compile the GTK version against the GTK-MUI includes from AROS.

Hopefully it shouldn't be too complicated or long-winded a process.

I'd like to have a go at a 68k AGA port but I'll wait till the new IndivisionAGA Mrk2 is released so that I can do direct 65k colors (no conversion or C2P needed).

[NovaCoder]

And i see in the output that all SDL calls are not listet, so teh consuming is below 10%

all higher time usage is netsurf non graphic core.

even if a wonder happen and speedup really is 30-50 % its too few to be usable

remember this inet site need on classic 37 sec.so 50% speedup is a time of 25 sec.

I really notice no diffrence if the inet page need show 25 sec or 37 sec.all is too long in compare to other AOS browsers.

on other side use a X86 and winuae, page show is around 4 sec.

Yes of course you are right, as the internet gets more demanding (almost by the day it seems), more processing power is required.  Even if 68k NetSurf rendered in AGA 'for free' it would still be slow compared to any browser running on x86.

I guess the 'fun' would be seeing just how fast/usable it could be on AGA 68k and there's obviously room for improvement.