Since I use Virtual Box on my laptop to use Aros I don’t need the graphics and sound card any more that I took from my A1SE. So I placed them back in my A1SE and I tried to see if it still works. My experience is that if I don’t use it for some time and I fire it up again I will run in to some problems. This time was no different. After pressing the power button I was presented with the below error message.
Loadsector: error when reading from block 0
Loadsector failed
Found an HD
FLB: no SLB found in any of the designated boot sources; returning to u-boot.
Press any key to continue
First reaction was to boot from the install disc to install the boot loader again. After booting the disc the Workbench did not show my HD plus partitions. After this I checked the Amiga sites and read that more people came across this issue. I already had removed all the cables and connected them again. My optical drive is connected to the IDE port on the board and the hard drive is connected to the SIL card in my A1SE. I decided to just connect the hard drive to the IDE port on my A1SE and after firing it up I was presented with the Workbench screen. That was at least a step forward. This is currently the status and I am trying to get it back as it was before with the hard drive connected to the SIL card and the optical drive to the IDE port on the A1SE.
It felt really good to have OS4.1 running again. I still need to install update 5 and 6 and as soon as I have everything up and running again I will do exactly this. A lot of good utilities have been released lately. Back to my computer room and get my A1SE back to normal
I really enjoyed the interview with Petro Tyschtschenko in BoingsWorld episode 34. A lot of interesting stories from Petro and better yet he is working on a book about his work at Commodore. He hopes he can release it in April next year. This is a must have book. The stuff you will read in there will just blow you away.
Pietro Ghizzoni (owner of the Amos Pro sources) has released the Amos Pro sources into the public domain. The sources can be (direct link) downloaded here. By now they should also be available on Aminet. For Amos fans, me included, it is a great moment to look at the sources. It is written in 68k assembler and using the classic hardware a lot. For a nostalgic trip I probably reserve some time to browse through the sources.
It is that time of the year again. What I am talking about? Christmas of course. We just had our Christmas tree delivered this morning. Normally we pick it up ourselves with the car but with our new Mini that was just not possible. Not only would it not fit but I would also not put it in the car if it would fit. There is no way I will mess up the car. It was also really cheap to have it delivered. You just have to find the right seller.
Till today we had some nice snow which makes everything look really great. Not only that it makes you want to do Amiga stuff because of the nostalgic feelings it brings back. Sadly it started to rain late last evening and even now it is poring. But I am sure we will have some cold and snowy weather again soon. With some hot coco playing classic Amiga games and browse through other stuff as well. What better way to go through the Christmas period.
I ran into another (as it would seem) issue with Aros regarding the pen colour. You might have read about the issue with the syntax highlight regarding Annotate and C programming and I got the feeling it effects everything. I was playing around with Amiga Guide files and when I set the pen colour the text colour remains the same. That got me really worried. It would be a real issue for me if it effects everything. I am hoping it was my poorly coding attempt at tackling Amiga Guide files but I am afraid it is not. Hopefully I will find out soon if it is me or Aros.
When scrolling through my Facebook news feed I noticed that
AmigaOS 4.1 Update 6 was released. But at the same time I read this was announced by mistake. After going to the forums it seems it was put back on again. Apparently someone released it by mistake. I am still running with Update 4 so I would have to install Update 5 first before I can install Update 6. Besides that I need to put my A1SE back together first since I took the graphics card and sound card to use in my desktop for Aros. But since I use VirtualBox on my Acer laptop for Aros I can put the components back in the A1SE.
BoingsWorld episode 34 is also out. Always on time like promised and this time with Petro Tyschtschenko as guest. Sadly I did not see Ernie and Locke on the credits for this episode. I really hope they return in the next episode. I can’t wait to listen to episode 34.
Another great bit of news is that apparently MorphOS will run on the Sam460ex board. Suddenly such a board becomes an attractive piece of hardware. The fact that you can run both OS4.x and MorphOS kind of justifies the purchase of the board. No longer would you have to invest in two machines if you want both worlds. Even better, it will also run Aros.
Currently I am also working on an article about X-AMOS. Giving it a bit of a try to see if it is something you can work with. Another article I am working on involves games and their great memories. Plenty of stuff in the pipeline and let’s hope I find the time to get it done.
Last week was just insanely busy leaving me with really no time resulting in no blog postings including a column. I was just craving for the weekend. No work just relaxing. Well not entirely since we would stay at my mum and dad for the weekend. It was my mum’s 65th birthday so it was a rather important event so we decided we would stay. We would arrive on Saturday afternoon, eat/drink/sleep, and leave again on Sunday. We don’t live nearby but about 1 hour away but this time we really did not mind the travel because on Friday we picked up our new car.
Mini 1.6 Turbo 16v Cooper D
We are really loving it. It drives like you are floating in the clouds and all the cool stuff it has is just amazing. We really needed a proper car because we make a lot miles. I am really excited every time we need to use the car.
Another great thing about going to my parents is the great stuff I still have there. this time I had a look at the tabletop game Safari from Bambino. It crossed my mind while listening to the July 2012 episode of RetroGaming Radio which featured a section about handheld games. I really need to catch up with all the episodes of RetroGaming Radio which is what I am currently doing. If you have not listened to it before I really urge you to get started.
Safari – top view
Safari – bottom view
Safari – controls
Safari – instructions
I must have gotten this game from my nephew somewhere in the Eighties. What’s really strange is that he was also at my mums birthday. I got it like this without the box. It runs on batteries but it also had a power supply. This was a home made adapter and I did not wanted to plug it in afraid I would blow up the fuse box. It is not a really interesting game. You have to capture animals in a cage which becomes rather boring after a short while. It was a big nostalgic trip down memory lane while I took some pictures. I did play it for a couple of minutes last time I was at my parents.
Another week has passed and I finally managed to finish this column. It must have been such a long time already without running Aros. I want to play a bit with X-AMOS and write about it. It is really sad I am not able to produce as much articles as I did during my holiday. I have plenty of ideas for articles I just need to time to write them. I also love to do some more game reviews. Maybe I should ask Santa for time this year.
I did this for the first time last year August. You can read it again if you like. I thought it was time for a part 2. Week 45 experienced by me with you the reader in the front seat.
Monday 5-11-2012
My last day of my holiday before I have to return to work. I enjoyed a good 3 weeks of holiday which is about to come to an end. I had the opportunity to play a lot with Aros, writing for my blog and playing a lot of classic games. Sadly from tomorrow on I would have less time for all of this. Still I am determine to do as much coding for Aros as I can. I am currently trying to get the syntax highlight to work with Annotate. There is some kind of issue with Aros which causes issues with the pen colors. So if I set certain key words in the C syntax to certain colors it will be different the next time I reboot Aros.
Atari Flashback
Yesterday I came across the Atari Flashback for (I think) €17,50 but since I don’t know anything about it (except for it being a modern classic Atari device to play classic games) I did not pick it up. Anyone know this was a good deal or maybe has some nice, or not so nice, stories about this device? I did see newer versions of this device on the internet.
I had a few more coding attempts which was not bad. Still getting used to Zune (MUI clone) but I got to open two windows at the same time. I had some crashes at well bringing VirtualBox to a complete halt. But currently I got two windows open which will be the basis for my further attempts.
Tuesday 6-11-2012
Reality hits hard on your first day back at work after your holiday. What is noticeable right away is the lack of time again. I managed to have a quick peek at my e-mail and visit the Aros-Exec site around midnight. Not that I came back from work at midnight. It takes me one hour to drive to work and also (well yeah) one hour back home. Normally I am home a bit after 6:00pm. When I came back I had to hit the road with my wife for her business and we came back around 10:00pm. Still had to cook dinner so it got to be a long day. We grab something on the road of course but you want a decent dinner as well.
Wednesday 7-11-2012
Today I managed to catch up with the BoingsWorld podcasts. I finished both episode 32 and 33. As always great shows. It is in German so it is only for those who understand German.
Sadly there was no Ernie & Locke in episode 33. I do hope they return in episode 34.
Thursday 8-11-2012
Today was all work as I did overtime which left me with no free time at all. And that on the third day back after my holiday. It suddenly, like it was not already there, daunted on me that time is just going to be very limited for me to pursue my Amiga endeavours. Hopefully I can find some kind of solution that will leave me with enough time to work on my Amiga stuff. Fingers crossed!
Friday 9-11-2012
Weekend! As I thought and already reported the free time was just like I thought it would be, just about none. But it was not a bad week all together. Coincidence or faith, you decide, with the first Bucket Diary style column I was talking about the new car we got. I am going to do the same in this part. We won’t have a new car this week but we kind of sealed the deal so to the speak. Hopefully it will all happen next week so we got a really cool car.
We started with season 3 of The Walking Dead. Great start of the season and right away me and the missus are hooked. So much that we watch into the early hours of Saturday morning. Great start of the weekend if you ask me.
Saturday 10-11-2012
Saturday is always a busy day for the missus as she buys new products for he business. With me “tagging” along we have a very busy day. I “tag” along with her a lot and I enjoy it. Her business is growing so fast she is unable to supply all demands. Demand overshadows stock which is not a bad thing if you ask me. She is already thinking about expanding the business even further. Her wish is for me to join her business. I can’t tell you how excited I am about joining her.
With episode 4 of The Walking Dead finished we are left hungry for the next episode which will be broadcast tomorrow Sunday the 11th. Sunday, also known as the last day of the weekend. This Sunday I will clean the car and also the garage for this upcoming week when hopefully we have our new car.
Some time ago I wanted to use remote desktop so I could take over my Icaros desktop when I would be sitting downstairs with my laptop. The downside of course is that you have two computers on and also I found it to be a bit slow and also the resolution was not that great. With very little time I don’t want to sit upstairs in my office every day instead of sitting downstairs with my wife in the living room. Some of you might know how that is. You work all day and the few free hours you have in the evening are used upstairs (or a different room) which can lead to some issues with the missus. So better would be if you can do the work in the living room so you sit with the missus. My wife is never without her laptop for long so we are both busy but if I can join her in the living room it just works so much better. So remote desktop was not the solution so what now?
I can of course install Aros on my laptop but I need to use Windows so that is not an option for me. Also I don’t want a dual boot system. I suddenly remembered that in the past I ran Aros within Windows so after posting at the Aros-Exec site I was directed to the Windows hosted version. Soon it became clear that I could not run it in full screen so that was not the solution for me. I started to think about a virtual emulator like VMWare that will allow you to run a different operating system within Windows. I used VMWare before in the past. But it is not for free so I Googled for open source alternatives.
I came across VirtualBox from Oracle. (** The site seems to be not accessible for some days already) This just rocks and it turns out this is even discussed in the Icaros manual. The problem you will run in to is the resolution. You can’t set anything resolution in the Prefs settings for the screen mode. But as always there is a solution for this. Over at VMWAros you can find the solution for the screen resolution. I have the same resolution (1366×768) so I could just follow the instructions and now I am running it full screen. The speed is perfect and switching between VirtualBox and Windows a lot has no influence on the speed.
With having Icaros running hosted I thought about my issues with not having a C syntax highlight editor. What if I can have a shared folder available on both Windows and Aros? This way I can use a C syntax highlight editor on Windows and save it to that folder and right away compile it. I use SMBFS on OS4.x to mount these Windows shares to exchange files. Sadly due to the buggy network on my A1SE it is far from being the best solution. SMBFS can also be used on Icaros and again it is described in the Icaros manual. Sadly there is a problem with VirtualBox in combination with Windows 7. Files on Aros will be truncated in the first 49 bytes or so. Sadly this will prevent me from using this as a solution. I have not tested it yet but this would also affect a FTP connection. So using a FTP client on Aros to connect to a FTP server on my Windows 7 installation would also cause issues. I guess this is the first “major” issue I have found with Aros.
Currently I am playing with the syntax highlight settings of Annotate. You can change it to your liking. Sadly there are some issues with Aros when it comes to setting the colours. There is a solution that requires you to run a script that calls a utility that fixes the colours issues. I have done this but I am still experiencing issues. For example if I set something to yellow the next time I reboot it will have the colour red. When I reboot again it will have another colour. It could be, and I guess it is, that I am filling it in wrong in the syntax file since for example comment in my C source file keeps its colour. I hope this can be sorted soon. For now I am over the moon with VirtualBox and Icaros. It runs really great and I can switch between Aros and Windows 7 without everything coming to a halt. If I can have the syntax highlight issue with Annotate fixed nothing can stop me from doing some serious coding.
I am having a blast with my holiday. Sadly I only have about one week left. The time you have to do things and especially regarding Amiga stuff is just amazing. I got to write a lot so far and played endlessly classic Amiga games.
But currently most of my time is going in to Aros. Especially programming for it is getting a lot f my attention. I am still trying to get MUI experienced. 🙂 If you read some of my other Aros postings you know that I love the fact that it runs on cheap hardware. This is a deciding factor for me and for many others I guess in these times. I just don’t have the money to purchase OS4.x hardware and even if I saved up for it (that would take some time if possible) I could not justify this to the home front. Based on the purchase price for hardware you could line up the three OS’s as follow: Aros, MorphOS and OS4.x. I would love to be able to run all three to get some comparison done. So far I can with Aros and OS4.x but I would love to add MorphOS to it. I hope I could buy some cheap hardware next year to run MorphOS. I guess my best bet is a Mac Mini.
With Aros also becoming available for all SAM hardware one wonders what this will stir up. In the Amiga world cooperation and friendliness don’t really work as can be seen from the past. Aros is really (I know it has been there for some time already) getting some momentum at the moment. It is maturing, runs on several platforms and not to mention on cheap hardware. But now it is making it’s appearance on OS4.x PPC hardware and I cannot help thinking what will happen between those two “camps”. Sure no one will buy SAM hardware to just run Aros but having the ability to do so is a big plus. I can’t help thinking that the legality of Aros will be put up for discussion. You just know there will be trouble. It will be curious to see when the first signs surface and till what extend this will be pursued.
I am currently working on a series of articles under the topic “After the collapse”. These are articles about the collapse of Commodore. The build up to it and what happened after the liquidation. This will bring back some memories to us Amiga fans. I probably have the first article posted this coming week.
Since Aros uses Zune which is a MUI clone I had to get myself familiar with MUI. I know a bit about ReAction which is being used by OS4.x which does come in handy when using MUI. Since I knew nothing about MUI I probably will use up most of the coming time on getting myself familiar with it.
As you might know I prefer opening my own libraries instead of having it done by the compiler. I know it is extra work but it will teach you more about libraries. You can use libraries without even having to open and close them or even worry about the error handling (check if you manage to open them or not and what to do). I learned a lot from doing it myself and that kind of knowledge can be useful for other coding parts as well. When it comes to MUI we have to open the MUI library. Below are the code fragments we need to get this done. First the includes, setting up the pointer and finally opening the library.
#include <libraries/mui.h>
#include <proto/muimaster.h>
struct MUIMasterBase *MUIMasterBase;
MUIMasterBase = (struct MUIMasterBase *)OpenLibrary(“muimaster.library”, 39);
But when I compile it I get the error “Conflicting types for MUI MasterBase”. I am not sure but to me it seems to be the <proto/muimaster.h> include that is the culprit. I posted about this on the Aros-Exec forums in the hope of getting this resolved soon. I am taking a short break from it so maybe the solution might come to me.
It is Monday the day after the AmiWest 2012 weekend so I am looking for news from the AmiWest show. I had some peeks during the weekend I noticed there was not much news coming from the show except a few announcements.
A-EON Technology announced that development has commenced of the Warp3D driver for RadeonHD graphics cards. The much awaited 3D support has been exclusively funded by A-EON and is aimed at customers who have recently purchased the new RadeonHD driver.
A more important (if you ask me) announcement was the Libre Office port exclusively funded by A-EON Technology. Libre Office is an open source office suite which descended from Open Office. Next to a good browser a Office package is what many users want. I already use Open Office on my Windows laptop so having the same package, or a descended, would be a great step forward. But such a project is a massive one and I wonder how fast they will be able to get this done. There was no news on how far the project had gone already or any indication when it might be ready.
The above two announcements I had spotted already during the weekend but the next one I missed but is a rather important announcement. ACube Systems announced Aros for the Sam460. My first thought was that this must be a Linux hosted version but no it is a native version of Aros. And soon they will have it available for all their boards. It was shown on AmiWest and they will also show it at the upcoming Pianeta Amiga in Italy (30 nov. 1-2 dec, 2012).
The above three announcements is pretty much it when it comes to news from AmiWest. No news on the netbook which is rather disappointed since it was announced at the last show and one year has passed without any news whatsoever. Surely you would release some info (even if it is news about it being delayed) since that is what people expected. Now I am waiting for all the footage they shot to become available.
I left my Redhouse file manager project on hold for some time already. Started out on OS4.x I thought it was a good time to continue with it on Aros for now. I am getting myself familiar with Aros so what better way better than to involve Aros in to it. One thing I really miss, and “highlighted” already several times is a editor that supports C syntax highlights. Being used to CodeBench and Cubic IDE it is a big must for me. I really hope someone will create this. For now I am using the NoWinED editor. When the code is not that large yet it is fine but once it grows you just loose that great ability of oversight.
NoWinED
Programming on Aros is somewhat different compared to OS4.x. The approach to libraries and the GUI toolkit of choice are different. When it comes to libraries we will switch back to the old classic way of opening them. I actually like this since it is true to the classic way of doing things and since I invested a lot of time in Amiga OS libraries the classic way and new OS4.x way it is not really a problem to switch back to this way of opening libraries.
Instead of ReAction which is used on OS4.x we are using Zune on Aros. Zune is an object-oriented GUI toolkit. It is nearly a clone (at both API and Look&Feel level) of MUI, a well-known Amiga shareware product by Stefan Stuntz. I have no experience with MUI so for me this will be a bit of a hurdle. I always got the idea that there are more and better MUI classes one can use giving you a more easier way of getting your code done. So far I already have small example of a window that is being displayed with some control code that will close it again. That will be the basis from which I will continue. First I will start with a split window look which is the basis for each Amiga file manager if you ask me.
Coder's Blog 