Personal Paint 7.3 Bug thread

[kolla]

Again I am dumbfounded by how "important" developers lack hardware and test environments 

[broadblues]

@kolla

I did have arange of setups using amiga forever on my old windows XP hardisk but that died (the disk) and I have only just recently had time to investigate FS-UAE under linux.

Tester have other hardware but I guess nobody tried it on an A500!

I'm a Amiag OS4 dev, so 68k stuff is bit of a side effect to be honest!  I did approach PPaint with the intention to keep it backwards compatable but there sooo many variations in 68k setups it's not an easy task, not an excuse per seh just the way it is.

[kolla]

Maybe you should keep your "primed" clean disk images, kickstarts and setups on a remote filesystem (box, dropbox, whatever) or better yet, a git repo (github, gitlab...), from where you can pull them down when needed? That's what I do, anyways, and I'm not even a "developer"...

[10MARC]

I am glad you are fixing the documentation. I know that you are aware of this, but Amiga Forever is like $30 and will run fine on a cheap little throw-away netbook or any PC from the last 15 years. It literally took me about 25 seconds to find and launch a 68000 emulated A600, and another minute to transfer over PPaint 7.3 and test it. I will gift you a darn Amiga Forever if you want.
I am sorry that the 68k stuff is just not important enough to support. I may be looking at it from the wrong angle, but I really suspect the 68k software would be a larger market than the OS4.1 market today. I would recommend taking a second look at that potential income stream - it may even help fund the OS 4.1 software.
Yesterday I spent a few hours with a local guy helping him get his "New" Amiga 1200 set up with Amiga OS 3.1.4 and getting some great software installed. I put the free version of PPaint on there and explained how it works - he was thrilled. He has spent about $300 on hardware and software for his new A1200, much of it based on what he watched on my channel.  I was sad that I could not even mention that there is a new, paid version available, as I can't guarantee it would work properly. That sucks, my friend.

[kolla]

Amiga Forever is like $30 and will run fine on a cheap little throw-away netbook or any PC from the last 15 years

Or VirtualBox, VMWare etc under Linux.

I really don't use it much, but I do have a Windows10 image with AmigaForever on VirtualBox, on my macbook, and it works fine.

The main problem here is that the code is left in the hands of people who neither have time, nor interest, to do the development that is required. So it just lingers there.

[broadblues]

Or VirtualBox, VMWare etc under Linux.

I really don't use it much, but I do have a Windows10 image with AmigaForever on VirtualBox, on my macbook, and it works fine.

Really doubt my ancient HP compaq presario laptop is up such magic.  I had to drop back to xfce just got linux to perform acceptably once I'd upgraded to debian 9 to get chrome updates back.
 

The main problem here is that the code is left in the hands of people who neither have time, nor interest, to do the development that is required. So it just lingers there.

Perhaps, but without my efforts to port it to OS4 and get both it and OS4 fixed to make it work, PPaint would never have been updated at all. Other devs tried asnd simply lacked the needed degree of "stubourness".

Something has clearly broken with 3.1.4 and I will look into that, once I have the time.

[robuttley]

Just another voice here to say yes it's not working on an A500 (I have the ACA500Plus setup too, but even knocking up an A500 with 3.1 roms inside FS-UAE gets the same result). I bought it really just to show a bit of support but I do think that either it needs fixing on the 68000 chip, or A-EON remove the 'A500' bit from the website (sadly, I know which is easier to do!)

Happy to help test anything going forwards in terms of trial builds, patches etc. I'm a developer by trade myself, over 30 years, so I have some sense of collecting crash logs and writing meaningful bug reports etc.

[10MARC]

Hey, Rob! Great to see you here. Thanks for chiming in. The more people we report on the problem, the sooner something will get done, I am sure!
I have great plans to create some 16 color Hi Res images from 24 bit files, and I really want to test them on my A500. Deluxe Paint works fine, but if I can use a currently supported and sold package to do it, that is MUCH better! 

[broadblues]

WRT to the peculiar behaviour under 3.14 can you check if you are using the personal_agnus_blit.library or the personal_cpu_blit.library?

You can check this by looking at  menu->settings->Amiga Blitter  if that is chacked you are using agnus otherwise cpu.

Or you can look at the line

   BLITLIBS = "personal_agnus_blit.library", "personal_cpu_blit.library", 0

if there is 0 there the first lib is used.  if 12 the second.

When testing under 3.1.4 and using agnus I see the issues you describe (kind of).

1. Single pixel brush does not work
2. Curve tool renders as 'dots' rather than continuous line but does render the final line as long as the single pixel isn't used.
3. Freehand area tool doesn't work (might render corrupt stuff).
4. Text tool doesn't type text, though the red guide box / cursor displays in the correct place.

Some corruption occurs on the Workbench screen.

Switching to cpu_blit all symptoms dispappear for me except the single pixel brush not working. The single pixel brush is "special" so this is probably significant.

When running with cpu or with agnus on my 3.5 setup all features work.

[broadblues]

I may have that reversed it seems to work for agnus and not cpu.

[10MARC]

I will check on this tonight. It sure would make it much more useable, although that single pixel brush is pretty important!

[kolla]

Random-out-of-nowhere feature request: native support for .info icon formats (legacy planar icons, OS3.5+ colour icons, true colour OS4 icons and PNG icons) - load icon as brush, or two-frame animbrush, and likewise save animbrush (two frames) to new or existing .info files. This can already be done, sort of, using arexx (and third party tools), but it's not as trivial as it could be.

[10MARC]

Well, changing between agnus and the CPU certainly helped. When I tried to change it within the program it made things worse and caused a Guru, but when I changed it in the prefs file it fixed the issues you mentioned.
You mentioned putting a "12" in the line, and I think it is supposed to be "1"

"Or you can look at the line

   BLITLIBS = "personal_agnus_blit.library", "personal_cpu_blit.library", 0

if there is 0 there the first lib is used.  if 12 the second"

Error message if I put 12, works ok with 1.

The biggest stumbling blocks for me are the single pixel brush now and the inability to use it on my 68000 based machine. Thanks for the troubleshooting help!

For everyone else, edit the "startup_1.set" file in PPaint_Prefs folder as noted above to fix some of the 3.1.4 related issues.

[broadblues]

@Dynamic_Computing

I've now identified the issue (with the help some feed back from Thomas) the 3.1.4 thing was red herring just a coincidence of the bug reports surfacing at the same time as the users were trying out 3.1.4.

What is happening is that the detection of when it was safe to use fast memory for bitmaps had got lost at some point, and when using the personal_cpu_blit.library it was *always* putting bitmaps into fast memory.

I will fix this up with an improved test for when its safe (FBlit, RTG in place etc) but as an immediate work arround you could try installing FBlit or Picasso96.

Still working on getting the 68000 version working, realy not sure how to qwork out exactly what instruction is maing it crash, and in which bit of code it is, missing the GR window from OS4 here!

[broadblues]

@Dynamic_Computing

I've now got viable 68000 build (specs file in my gcc setup was promoting all 68000 code to 68010 for some unknown and ancient reason) I've tested on my 3.1.4 FS-UAE setup on a A500+ emulation and it seems to work. If you email your contact I will send you a test build andy@broad.ology.org.uk

[robuttley]

Happy to test it here on a 3.1 A500 - I can block off an evening in the coming week :-)