New job, new office, new adventures

It’s been roughly 4 weeks since I posted a status report on Amibian.js. I normally keep people up-to-date on facebook (the “Amiga Disrupt” and also “Delphi Developer” groups). It’s been a very hectic month so I fully understand that people are asking. So let’s look at where the project is at and where we are on the time-line.

For those that might not know, I decided to leave Embarcadero a couple of months ago. I will be working out may before I move on. I wanted to write about that myself in a clean fashion, but sadly the news broke on Facebook prematurely.

Long story short, I have been very fortunate to work at Embarcadero. I am not leaving because there is anything wrong or something like that. I was hired as SC for the EMEA regions, which basically made me the support and presenter for most of europe, parts of asia and the middle east. It’s been a great adventure, but ultimately I had to admit that my passion is coding and community work. Sales is a very important part of any company, but it’s not really my cup of tea; my passion has always been research and development.

So, come first of June and I start in a new position at RemObjects. A company that has deep roots with Delphi and C++ builder users – and a company that continues to produce a wealth of high-quality, high-performance frameworks for Delphi and C++ builder. RemObjects also has a strong focus on modern languages, and have a strong portfolio of new and exciting compilers and languages to offer. The Oxygene compiler should be no stranger to Delphi developers, a powerful object-pascal dialect that can target a variety of platforms and chipsets.

Since compiler technology and run-time systems has been my main focus for well over a decade now, I feel RemObjects is a better match.

Quartex Components

Quartex Components has been an officially registered Norwegian company for a while now, so perhaps not news. What is news is that it’s now directly connected with the development of the Quartex Media Desktop (codename “Amibian.js”). While Amibian.js is an open source endeavour, there will be both free and commercial products running on top of that platform. I have written at length about Cloud Forge in the past, so I wont re-hash that again. But 2020 will see a paradigm shift in how teams and companies approach software development.

Company logo professionally milled and on its way to my new office

I will also, once there is more time, continue to sell and support software license components.

Quartex Media Desktop

The “Amibian.js” project is moving along nicely. The deadline is Q4 2019, but im hoping to wrap up the core functionality before that. So we are on track and kicking ass 🙂

More and more elaborate functionality is being implemented for the desktop

Here is an overview of work done this month:

• TSystemService application type has been created (node.js)
  • TApplication now holds IPC functions (inter process communication)
  • Running child processes + sending messages is now simplicity itself
  • Database drivers are 90% done. Delete() and DeleteTable() functionality needs to be implemented in a uniform way
• Authentication is now a separate service
  • Service database layer is finished (using SQLite3 driver by default)
  • Authentication protocol has been designed
  • Server protocol and JSON message envelopes are done
  • Presently working on the client interface
• LDEF bytecode assembler has been improved
  • Faster symbolic lookup
  • Smarter register recognition
  • Early support for stack-frames
  • Fixed bug in parser (comma-list parse)
• QTX framework has seen a lot of work
  • Large parts of the RTL sub-strata has been implemented
  • UTF16 codec implemented
  • QTX versions of common controls:
    • TQTXButton
    • TQTXLabel
    • TQTXToolbar
      • TQTXToolButton
      • TQTXToolSeparator
      • TQTXToolElement
    • TQTXPanel
    • TQTXCheckBox
    • .. and much, much more
• Desktop changes
  • Link Maker functionality has been added
  • Handshake process between desktop and child app now runs on a separate timer, ensuring better conformity and a more robust initialization
  • The Quartex Editor control has been optimized
    • All redraw calls are now synchronized
    • Canvas is created on demand, avoids flicker during initial redraw
    • Support for DEL key + behavior
    • Gutter is now rendered to an offscreen bitmap and blitted into the control’s canvas. The gutter is only fully rendered when cursor forces the view to change

I will continue to keep everyone up to date about the project. As you can understand, its a bit hectic right now so please be patient – it is turning into an EPIC environment!

Amiga Disrupt: talk from the heart

My previous article regarding the dreadful state the Amiga Kernel and OS finds itself in, primarily perpetuated by Italian company Cloanto, must have hit a nerve. My mailbox has been practically bombarded by people who are outraged by Cloanto (and Hyperion has got a fair bit of blame too). And indeed, there were errors made in that article (more about that below).

What I find strange, if not borderline insane, is how ingrained people are to their company or “team”. I have never understood people who watch soccer, who get physically upset over a game – or who demonstrate complete and utter loyalty to a team no matter how ridiculous that team might be. To me,  soccer is just 22 grown men running around in their underwear chasing an inflated dead animal.

Thankfully, “Amiga hooligans” are a minority in the community. And it doesn’t really matter what topic you bring to the table, because they will oppose it either way. It’s what they do. The majority of the community are grown men and women with families, jobs and a life that has nothing to do with shared memories of the Commodore Amiga. And despite our differences we have one thing in common: a desire to see the system we grew up with flourish; a system that never failed and that despite its age has features and mechanisms that modern system lacks. It was management that failed, not the product.

As a developer, having to watch the brilliance of Amiga OS “rot on the wine” as the saying goes, is heartbreaking. The potential in the OS, even if we were to do a clean re-write, is astronomical. The ease of use alone for education, or as a low-cost alternative to Linux on embedded systems, has practical value far beyond gaming; which tragically is the only thing some people associate the technology with.

Points of view

The initial point of my article was not to paint Cloanto as the villain and Hyperion as the hero. I think everyone that has kept an eye on the Commodore saga and aftermath knows full well that none of the companies, both present and past, are without flaw. People don’t start companies for fun, but to do business. And the moment money is involved – human beings can demonstrate both excellence and selfishness. It’s human to make mistakes, and what ultimately matters is how we deal with them.

It all boils down to vantage-point. If your only ambition is to play some retro-games, then you will no doubt be happy with Cloanto’s Amiga Forever. If you enjoy software development and have coding as a hobby, then a full UAE setup, including cross compilers and real hardware will more than cover your needs.

So from those points of view, where you have already parked Amiga OS in the past as a dead system and hobby, I fully understand that you don’t care who did what, or the motives behind various strategic moves. Nothing wrong with that, people are different.

But what both those viewpoints have in common is that they are looking backwards to the past, rather than forward to a potential future. If you recognize that, and you yourself look to the future, then your expectations will be higher. You will care about how the IP is maintained, and also how the legacy is cared for. Legally it’s ultimately nobody’s business what Hyperion or Cloanto does with their intellectual property, but they have to remember that they are responsible for a computer legacy stretching back to the very beginning of home computers.

David’s book about what went on inside Commodore is quite a wake-up call. Go buy it ASAP!

The reason people refuse to throw Amiga out after so many years, is because the product was cut down before it’s time. Some compare it to the Betamax tragedy, where VHS despite being a lesser product ended up as the standard. And just like with the Amiga, it was not the product that was the determining factor in the tragedy, it was the lesser qualities of human beings. VHS allowed porn to be shipped en-mass on their format, while Betamax stuck to their principles and family values.

Commodore was thankfully not involved in anything as base, but if you take the time to read David Pleasance’s book: Commodore the inside story; you will discover that there were some monumental mistakes made in the name of, shall we say, “the lesser instincts of man“?. If you havent read his book then please do, then spend a few hours finding your jaw on the floor. It is absolutely shocking what went on behind closed doors in the company.

Mistakes in my post

The source of the mistake I wrote about, namely that of Acer’s ownership, is rooted in a simple misunderstanding. My focus was initially not on the ownership of the Amiga alone, but rather where has the Commodore patent portfolio gone? Commodore had been in business since 1954, and entered the computer market in 1979 with a MOS 6504 powered chess machine. A company with the level of growth and production over so many decades must have racked up some valuable patents, be they mechanical or electronic. I have never met Jack Trammell in person, but with regards to what I have read about the man, he would not miss an opportunity to make money or be whimsical about patents. So where did it all go?

Prior to my talk with Trevor Dickinson, I looked around to see who ended up with said portfolio (the proverbial needle in a haystack), I talked to several individuals in the community about this, googled, read articles  – and was left with 3 potential candidates: HP, Acer and Asus.

While searching I came across the following video, and the ingress underlines Acer as the patent owner:

Acer is again mentioned as owning patents

When I then had a quick chat with Trevor and the name Acer turned up a third time, I saw no reason to question this. It was ultimately not the point of my post anyway.

The next question was to determine the relationship between said owner and those running the Amiga side of things (Cloanto and Hyperion). There were two logical possibilities: either these companies owned, in the true sense of the word, different parts of the legacy — or they functioned under a branding franchise. Meaning that they have been granted the right to evolve, sell and/or represent the Amiga name and technology with obligations of royalties. This is a pretty common business model, IBM being the archetypical example, so it would not be uncommon.

And that is ultimately the mistake. In retrospect I should have known there was no large company involved, because a stable corporation would never have allowed their IP to be mangled and dragged through the gutter like the Amiga have endured.

Having said that, it doesn’t really change much. I got an email saying that Cloanto have indeed given the authors of UAE money, which I hope is true because without the developers of UAE, the Amiga community would be abysmal. They have done 90% of the lifting, yet receive little praise for their work. But again – I was unable to find anything online where this could be confirmed.

It has also been stated that Amiga Inc was both tricked, abused and bullied by Hyperion. Yet the escapades of Amiga-Inc seem to have vanished into thin air:

“later that year, Amiga Inc. used some sleight of hand to escape a pending bankruptcy. Amiga sold its assets to a shell company called KMOS—a Delaware firm headquartered in New York—then renamed KMOS back to Amiga Inc. It tried to use these shenanigans to get out of the clause in its contract with Hyperion that would revert ownership of OS 4 if Amiga Inc. ever went under. Then, to top it off, Amiga sued Hyperion for not delivering OS 4 on time and demanded the return of all source code.” –Source: Ars Technica

Oh and then there was the “death threat” email. Where my post was said to be so diabolically crafted, so insiduius and evil – that i was responsible for possible death threats. I don’t even know how to respond to that, because the poo-nami that Cloanto is experiencing is the result of 15 years of silence; where the only communication has been to threaten Amiga users who accidentally shared a 512kb rom-file from the late bronze age with legal action. I think you gravely over-estimate my influence in the matter.

Right now Cloanto seem to run around pretending to be Santa. With promises of open-source and a future for their Amiga OS 4.1 (yes you read right) and that 3.1.4 is also theirs. First of all, Hyperion got that source-code as a part of the settlement with Amiga Inc (the quote above from ARS-Technica demonstrates how Amiga Inc treated Hyperion, not the other way around).

From a video posted by the 10 minute amiga retro-cast

Secondly, the Amiga OS 3.x source code has been available on the pirate bay for 4 years now? So if Cloanto indeed are so secure in their role as rightful heir to the Amiga throne, they can open source the code in a matter of hours. Just download, slap a GPL license on the files and push it out.

To nullify a 15-year-old settlement bound by contract, which is what must happen for them to have rights to their claims — that is something I wont hold my breath waiting for.

A viable business model

After my initial post people have dragged poor Trevor Dickinson into the debate, complaining to him about statements made by me. That is unfortunate because Trevor is not involved in our opinions at all. He even corrected me about mistakes I made in the previous article – and have absolutely not been a catalyst (quite the opposite!).

The Amiga history after the Commodore era is so convoluted, that his article series on the subject ended up spanning 12 issues of AF Magazine (!) Compare that to my two page brain fart. I also underlined that I had left out most of the details because rehashing the same tragedy over and over is paramount to explaining Game Of Thrones backwards in Sanskrit.

If we push all the details and who said what to the side for a moment, and look at the paths we have – it begins with a simple choice: you can look to the past and stick to “retro” computing. If that is the case then you will have no interest in anything I have to say, and that is fine. High five and enjoy.

If you look to the future, then suddenly we have some options before us: you have FPGA, like the FPGA-Arcade, the Vampire, MISTer and other, similar FPGA based systems. They have one thing in common and that is the 680×0 CPU.

Then you have software emulation, WinUAE being the trend-setter and various forks like UAE4Arm, FS-UAE and so on. This is perhaps the most versatile solution since it can do things difficult to achieve under real hardware.

Then we have the next generation and re-implementations. This is where Aros and it’s variations (AEROS, ARES et-al), Amiga OS 4.x and Morphos comes in.

I can’t see that we even need the legacy systems for much longer

And last but not least, cloud implementations like Amibian.js.

But in order for there to be any future where the core technology can grow, the technology has to serve a function in 2019. It doesn’t matter if the IPC layer is awesome, or that Amiga OS had REXX support 20 years before Mac OS. A modern system have to give users in this decade a benefit — otherwise there is no business model to talk about. And that is also my point. If we exclude web tech for now and look at the different paths, only two of them have the potential to deliver modern and unique functionality; and in my view that is Amiga OS 4 and Morphos.

FPGA will disrupt everything at some point

Vampire could perform a miracle and optimize their 68k architecture to the point where it can serve as a good embedded system, but even if possible, they are still held back by their dependency on classic Amiga OS. A partnership between Hyperion and Apollo would indeed be interesting, who knows. Although I would love to see the Apollo team fork Aros and shape that into what it could become with a bit of work.

Morphos is rumored to be moving their codebase to x86. This is just a rumour and I havent seen any documentation around that. If this is true then I feel it is a mistake, because NVidia and roughly 100 other major players are about to attack Intel on all fronts with RISC-V – and ARM is set to replace x86 in consumer electronics faster than most expected. Apple just announced that ARM based laptops are in the making.

I should add that this is also why I decided to write Amibian.js using web technology, because regardless of which CPU or architecture that becomes dominant in the next decade, web tech will always be there. So it allows us to abstract away the costly dependency on hardware, and instead focus on functionality.

PPC for the win?

In an interesting twist of fate, PPC could actually come out far better than anticipated – but not in the way you might think. Work is being done to make PPC a first class FPGA citizen. FPGA is fantastic in many ways, but it’s the intrinsic abillity to “become” whatever technology you describe that is revolutionary.

While it’s still in its infancy, the potential is there to render instruction-sets and architectures a preference rather than a requirement. If anything, the Vampire IV is a demonstration of just that.

So code currently bound to PPC could use FPGA as an intermediate solution while the codebase is ported to more viable platforms.

So whats the problem?

The next question then becomes: what exactly is stopping the owners from moving forward? Why dont the companies that hold the various IP’s roam silicon-valley in search of funding? And it’s here that we face the situation I briefly painted a picture of in my last post: they are in a perpetual stale-mate.

And in my view (as a developer looking forward) Cloanto, whose primary focus is to provide for the legacy market, is constantly getting in the way of Hyperion – which is looking at the future. As far as innovation and managing the legacy of Commodore is concerned, Cloanto has been asleep at the wheel for over a decade. They only woke up when it could cash-in on its C64 assets. I have no number as to how many c64 mini’s have been sold around the world, but its been a massive success. And it would be foolish to think that they have no plans to repeat the success with an Amiga model — effectively hammering the final nail in the coffin. After that, the Amiga is forever a legacy system.

Well. This case is already boring the hell out of me, so I will just leave them to it.

But looking at the various paths forward, from where I stand Hyperion and OS 4.x is the only viable business model. Providing the goal is to bring the technology back into the consumer-market and evolve the technology as an alternative to Windows, OS X and Linux. If the goal is just milk the system one final time, then I would say they are already there.

I honestly could not care less at this point. They have been asleep for so long, that they have become irrelevant. The future is in cloud, clustering and hardware abstraction — and Amibian.js is already far more interesting than anything cloanto has on offer.

But make no mistake: If the parties involved dont get their shit together, come 2022 and we will implement a native OS ourselves and open source it through torrents. The Quartex consortium is deadly serious about this. The new QTX is made up of members from various established groups back in the day, now in our 40s and 50s. Like all amiga users we have tolerated this for two decades, but enough is enough. Unlike the average gamer most of us are professional developers with decades of experience.

They have until 2022, if nothing has changed, we will finish this for them

And that was my five cents on that matter, and the last post I will do on this dumpsterfire of a topic.

Leaving Patreon: Developers be warned

As a person I’m quite optimistic. I like to think the glass is half-full rather than half-empty. I have spent over a decade building up a thriving Delphi and C++ builder community on social media, I have built up a rich creative community for node and JavaScript on the side — not to mention retro computing, embedded tech and IOT. For better or for worse I think most developers in the Embarcadero camp have heard my name or engage in one of the 12 groups I manage around the world on a daily basis. It’s been hard work but man, it’s been worth every minute. We have so much fun and I get to meet awesome coders on a daily basis. It’s become an intrinsic part of my life.

I have worked very hard for my MVP title

I have been extremely fortunate in that despite my disadvantage, a spine injury in 2012 – not to mention being situated in Norway rather than the united states; despite these obstacles to overcome I work for a great American company, and I get to socialize and have friends all over the planet.

The global village is the concept, or philosophy, that technology makes it possible no-matter where you live, to connect and be a part of something bigger. You don’t have to be a startup in the san-francisco area to work with the latest tech. Sure a commute from Burlingame to Redwood beats a 14 hour flight from Norway any day of the week — but that’s the whole idea: we have Skype now, and Slack and Github; you don’t have to physically be on location to be a part of a great company. The only requirement is that you make yourself relevant to your field of expertise.

Patreon, a digital talent agency

Patreon is a service that grew straight out of the global village. If the world is just one place, one great big family of human beings with great ideas, then where is the digital stage that helps nurturing these individuals? I mean, you can have a genius kid living in poverty in Timbuktu that could crack a mathematical problem on the other side of the globe. The next musical prodigy could be living in a loft in Germany, but his or her voice will never be heard unless it’s recognized and given positive feedback.

“The irony is that Patreon doesn’t even pass their own safety tests. That should make you think twice about their operation”

My examples are extremes I agree, most people on Patreon are like me, creative but absolutely not cracking math problems for Nasa; nor am I singing a duet with Bono any time soon. But that’s the fun thing about the world – namely that all things have value when put in the correct context. Life is about combinations, and you just have to find one that works for you.

The global village, the idea of unity through diversity

The global village is this wonderful idea that we can use technology to transcend the limitations the world oppose on us, be they nationality, color, gender or location. Good solutions know no bounds and manifests wherever a mind welcomes it. Perhaps a somewhat romantic idea, if not naive, but it seems the only reasonable solution given the rapid changes we face as a species.

In my case, I love to make software components in my spare time. My day job is packed and I couldn’t squeeze in more work during the weekdays if I wanted to, so I only have a couple of hours after-work and the weekends to “do my thing”. So being a total geek I relax by making components. Some play chess, the guitar or whatever — I relax by coding something useful.

Obviously “code components” are completely useless to anyone who is not a software developer. The relevance is further clipped by the programming-language they are written for, and ultimately the functionality they provide. Patreon for me was a way to finance the evolution of these components. A way of self motivating myself to keep them up to date and available.

I also put a larger project on Patreon, namely the cloud desktop system people know as “Amibian.js” or “Quartex Web OS”. Amibian being the nickname, or codename.

Patreon seemed like the perfect match. I could take these seemingly unrelated topics, Delphi and C++ builder specific components and a cloud architecture, and assign each component and project to separate “tiers” that the audience could pick from. This was great! People could now subscribe to the tier’s they wanted, and would be notified whenever there was an update or new features. And I could respond to service messages in one place.

The Tier System

The thing about software is that it’s not maintained on infinite repeat. You don’t fix a component that is working. And you don’t issue updates unless you have fixed bugs or added new functionality. A software subscription secures a customer access to all and any updates, with a guarantee of X number of updates a year. And equally important, that they can get help if they are stuck.

“when you are shut down without so much as an explanation, with nothing but positive feedback, zero refunds and over 1682 people actively following the progress — that is utterly unacceptable behavior”

I set a relatively low number of guaranteed updates per year for the components (4). The things that would see the most updates were the Rage Libraries (PixelRage and ByteRage) and Amibian.js, but not until Q3 when all the modules would come together as a greater whole — something my backers are aware of and have never had a problem with.

Amibian.js running on ODroid XU4, a $45 single board computer

The tiers I ended up with was:

• $5 – “high-five”, im not a coder but I support the cause
• $10 – Tweening animation library
• $25 – License management and serial minting components
• $35 – Rage libraries: 2 libraries for fast graphics and memory management
• $45 – LDef assembler, virtual machine and debugger
• $50 – Amibian.js (pre compiled) and Ragnarok client / server library
• $100 – Amibian.js binaries, source and setup
• $100+ All the above and pre-made disk images for ODroid XU4 and x86 on completion of the Amibian.js project (12 month timeline).

Note: Each tier covers everything before them. So if you pick the $35 tier, that also includes access to the license management system and the animation library.

As you can see, the tier-system that is intrinsic to Patreon, solves the software subscription model elegantly. After all, it would be unreasonable to demand $100 a month for a small component like the Tweening library. A programmer that just needs that library and nothing else shouldnt have to pay for anything else.

Here is a visual representation, showing graphically why my tiers are organized as they are, and how they all fit into a greater whole:

The server-side aspect of the architecture would take days to document, but a general overview of the micro-service architecture is fairly easy to understand:

Each of the tiers were picked because they represent key aspects of what we need to create a visually pleasing, fast and reliable, distributed (each part running on separate machines or boards) cloud eco-system. Supporters can just get the parts they need, or support the bigger project. Everyone get’s what they want – all is well.

The thing some people don’t grasp, is that you are not getting something to just put on Amazon or Azure, you are getting your own Amazon or Azure – with source code! You are not getting services, you are getting the actual code that allows YOU to set up your own services. Anyone with a server can become a service provider and offer both hosting and software access. And they can expand on this without having to ask permission or pay through the nose.

So it’s a little bit bigger than first meets the eye.

I Move In Mysterious Ways ..

Roughly 3 weeks ago I was busy preparing the monthly updates.

Since each tier is separate but also covers everything before it (like explained above) I have to prepare a set of inclusive updates. The good news is that I only have to do this once and then add it as an attachment to my posts. Once added I can check of all the backers in that tier. I don’t have to manually email each backer, physically copy my songs or creations onto CD and send it – we live in the digital age as members of the global village. Or so i thought.

The LDEF assembler was made available on the 8th of february

So I published two of the minor cases first: the full HTML5 assembly program, that can be run both inside Amibian.js as a hosted application — or as a solo program directly in the browser. So here people can write machine-code in the browser, assemble it to bytecodes, run the code, inspect registers, disassemble the bytecodes and all the normal stuff you expect from an assembler.

This update was special because the program contained the IPC (inter process communication) layer that developers use to make their programs talk to the desktop. So for developers looking to make their own web programs access the filesystem, open dialogs (normal system features), that code was quite important to get!

Although published, none of my backers could see them due to the suspended status

The second post was a free addition, the QTX library which is an open-source RTL (run time library) compatible with the Smart Pascal Compiler. While not critical at this juncture, several of my backers use Smart Mobile Studio, and for them to get access to a whole new RTL that can be used for open-source, is very valuable indeed.

I was just about to compress the Amibian.js source-code and binaries when I got a message on Facebook by a backer:

“Dude, your Patreon is shut down, what is happening?”

What? hang on let me check i replied, and rushed into Patreon where the following header greeted me:

What the hell Patreon? I figured there must be some misunderstanding and that perhaps I missed an email or something that needed attention. I get close to 50 emails a day (literally) so it does happen that I miss one. I also check my spam folder regularly in case my google filters have been careless and flagged a serious email as spam. But there was nothing. Not a word.

Ok, so let’s check the page feedback, has there been any complaints? Perhaps a backer has misunderstood something and I need to clear that up? But nope. I had nothing but positive feedback and not even a single refund request.  In fact the Amibian.js group on Facebook has grown to 1,662 members. Which shows that the project itself holds considerable interest outside software development circles.

Well, let’s get on this quickly I thought, so I rushed off an email asking why Patreon would do such a thing? My entire Patreon page was visibly marked with the above banner, so my backers never even saw the updates I had issued.

Instead, the impression people would get, was that I was involved in something so devious that it demanded my account to be suspended. Talk about shooting first and asking later. I have never in my life seen such behavior from a company anywhere, especially not in the united states; Americans don’t take kindly to companies behaving like bullies.

Just Contact Support, If You Can Find Them

To make a long story short it took over a week before Patreon replied to my emails. I sent a total of 3 emails asking what on earth would have prompted them to shut down a successful campaign. And how they found it necessary to slander the project without even informing me of the problem. Surely a phone call could have sorted this up in minutes? Where I come from you pick up the phone or get in contact with people before you flag them in public.

Sounds great, sadly it’s pure fiction

The response I got was that “some mysterious activity had been reported on my page”, and that they wanted my name, address, phone number and credit card (4 last digits). Which I found funny because with the exception of credit-card details, I always put my name, address, phone numbers and email etc. at the head of my letters.

I’m not a 16-year-old kid working out of a garage, im a 46-year-old established software developer that have worked as a professional for close to 3 decades. Unlike the present generation I moved into my first apartment when I was 16, and was working as an author for various tech magazines by the time I was 17. I also finished college at the same time and went on to higher-education (2 years electrical engineering, 3 years arts and media, six years at the university in oslo, followed by 4 years of computer science and then certifications). The focus being, that Patreon is used to dealing with young creators that will go along with things that grown men would not accept.

But what really piss me off, was that they never even bothered to explain what this “mysterious behavior” actually was? I write about code, clustering, Delphi, JavaScript and bytecodes for christ sake. I might have published updates and code wearing a hoodie at one point, in a darken room, listening to Enigma.. but honestly: there is not enough mystery in my life to cover an episode of Scooby-Doo.

Either way, I provided the information they wanted and expected the problem to be resolved asap. Two days at themost. Maybe three, but that was pushing it.

It’s now close to 3 weeks since this ridiculous temporary suspension occurred, and neither have I been given any explanation to what I have done, nor have they removed the ban on the content. I must have read their guidelines 100 times by now, but given the nature of their ruling (which are more than reasonable), I can’t see that I have violated a single one:

• No pornography and adult content
• No hate speech against minorities or forms of religious extremism
• No piracy or spreading copyrighted material
• No stealing from backers

Let’s go over them one by one shall we?

Pornography and adult content

Seriously? I don’t have time to loaf around glaring at naked women (i’m a geek, I look weird enough as it is), and after 46 years on this planet I know what a woman looks like nude from every possible angle; I don’t need to run around like a retard posting pictures of body parts. And if you are talking about me — good lord is there a marked for hobbits? Surely the world has enough on it’s plate. Sorry, never been huge on porn.

And for the record, porn is for teenagers and singles. The moment you love someone deeply, the moment you have children together — it changes you profoundly. You get a bond to your wife or girlfriend that makes you not want to be with others. Not all men are into smut, some of us are invested more deeply in a relationship.

Hate speech and religious extremism

Hm, that’s a tough one (sigh). Did you know that one of my best friends is so gay – that he began to speculated that he actually was a liquid? He makes me laugh so bad and he’s probably the best human being I have ever met. I actually went with him on Pride last year, not because i’m gay but because he needed someone to hold the other side of the banner. That’s what friends do. Besides, I looked awesome, what can I say.

As for religion I am a registered Tibetan Buddhist. I believe in fluffy pillows, comfy robes, mother nature and quite frankly I find the world inside us far more interesting than the mess outside. You cant be extreme in Buddhism: “Be kind now, or ill hug you until you weep the tears of compassion!”. Buddhism sucks as an extreme doctrine.

So I’m going to go out on a limb and say nuuuu to both.

Piracy and copyrighted material

Eh, I’m kinda writing the software from scratch before your eyes (including the run-time-library for the compiler), so as far as worthy challenges go, piracy would be the opposite. I am a huge fan of classical operating-systems though, like the Amiga; But unlike most people I actually took the time to ask permission to use a OS4 inspired CSS theme-file.

The Amibian.js project is well organized and I have worked systematically through a well planned architecture. This is not some slap-dash project made for a quick buck

Most people just create a theme-file and don’t bother to ask. I did, and Trevor Dickinson was totally cool about it. And not a single byte has been taken or stolen from anyone. The default theme file is inspired by Amiga OS 4.1, but the thing is: the icons are all freeware. Mason, the guy that did the OS icons, have released large sets of icons into GPL. There is also a website called OS4Depot where people publish icons and backdrops that are free for all.

So if this “mysterious activity” is me posting a picture of a picture (not a typo) of an obscure yet loved operating-system, rest assured that it’s not violating anyone.

Stealing from backers

That they even include this as a point is just monumental. Patreon is a service established to make that impossible (sigh); meaning that the time-frame where you deliver updates or whatever – and the time when the payout is delivered, that is the window where backers can file a complaint or demand a refund.

And yes, complaints on fraud would indeed (and should!) flag the account as potentially dubious — but again, I have not a single complaint. Not even a refund request, which I believe is pretty uncommon.

And even if this was the case, shutting down an account without so much as a dialog in 2019? Who the hell becomes a thief for 600 dollars? Im not some kid in a garage, I make twice that a day as a consultant in Oslo, why the heck would I setup a public account in the US, only to run off with 600 bucks! I have standing offers for projects continuously, I havent applied for a job since the 90s – so if I needed some extra money I would have taken a side project.

I even posted to let my backers know I had a cold last month just to make sure everyone knew in case I was unavailable for a couple of days. Truly the tell-tell sign of a criminal mastermind if I ever saw one ..

Sorry Patreon, but your behavior is unacceptable

Hopefully your experience with Patreon has not been like mine. They spent somewhere in the range of 5 weeks just to register me, while friends of mine in the US was up and running in less than 2 days.

We are now 3 weeks into a temporary suspension, which means that most of my backers will run out of patience and just leave. It sends a signal of being whimsical about other people’s trust, and that people take a risk if they back my project.

At this point it doesn’t matter that none of these thoughts are true, because they are thoughts that anyone would think when a project remains flagged for so long.

What should scare you as a creator with Patreon though, is that they can do this to anyone. There is nothing you can do, neither to prove your innocence or sort out a misunderstanding — because you are not even told what you allegedly have done wrong. I also find it alarming that Patreon actually doesn’t have a phone-number listed, nor do they have offices you can call or reach out to.

The irony is that Patreon doesn’t even pass their own safety tests. That should make you think twice about their operation. I had heard the rumors about them, but I honestly did not believe a company could operate like this in our day and age. Especially not in the united states. It undermines the whole spirit of US as a technological hub. No wonder people are setting up shop in China instead, if this is how they are treated in the valley.

After this long, and the damage they have caused, I have no option than to inform my backers to terminate their pledges. I will have to relocate my project to a host that has more experience with software development, and who treats human beings with common decency and respect.

If I by accident had violated any of their guidelines, although I cannot see how I could have, I have no problem taking responsibility. But when you are shut down without so much as an explanation, with nothing but positive feedback, zero refunds and over 1682 people actively following the progress — that is utterly unacceptable.

It is a great shame. Patreon symbolized, for a short time, that the global village had matured into more than an idea. But I categorically refuse to be treated like this and find their modus-operandi insulting.

Stay Well Clear

If you as a developer have a chance to set up shop elsewhere, then I urge you to do so. And make sure your host have common infrastructure such as a phone number. Patreon have taken the art of avoiding direct contact to a whole new level. It is absolutely mind-boggling.

I honestly don’t think Patreon understands software development at all. Many have voiced more sinister motives for my shutdown, since the project obviously is a threat to various companies. But I don’t believe in conspiracies. Although, if Patreon does this to enough creators on interval, the interest rates from holding the assets would be substantial.

It could be that the popularity of the project grew so fast that it was picked up as a statistical anomaly, but surely that should be a good thing? Not to mention a potential case study Patreon could have used as a success story? I mean, Amibian.js didn’t get up and running until october, so stopping a project 5 months into a 12 month timeline makes absolutely no sense. Unless someone did this on purpose.

Either way, this has been a terrible experience and I truly hope Patreon get’s their act together. They could have resolved this with a phone-call, yet chose to let it fester for almost a month.

Their loss.

Hyperion vs Cloanto, the longest running lawsuit in the history of computing?

Delphi and C++ builder developers will probably not have much interest in this, but as far as general IT news goes, this one is attracting interest far and wide due to the sheer absurdity involved. To be honest I also think that the case itself serves as a warning to companies and developers in general, because this truly is the best example of how bad things can go if you don’t manage your patents and rights properly.

So while I’m loving Delphi’s 24th birthday festivities, I find the ongoing lawsuits so amazing that I have to write a few words.

[Edit]: To make the case even remotely understandable for people that have never read about it before, I have left out a ton of details. The whole Amiga Inc scandal (which I believe ordered production of OS4 to begin with?), Eyetech, H&P, the loss of the Amiga OS 3.9 source code. The gist of the post here is not to dig into the details (also known as “the rabbit hole” in the community), but to give a short recount of the highlights leading up to the present situation – and to underline that people who still care for the system, the Amiga community, is beyond fed-up with this. I hope all parties get their act together and find a way to co-exist.  For those that want to dig into the gory details spanning three decades, there is always the Amiga documentation project.

Some context

Long story short, back in the early 90s Commodore, a company that for close to two decades ranked as a giant of computing, collapsed. Years of mismanagement, poor leadership, if not outright shameful, had taken its toll on the once fierce giant; And as the saying goes: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And boy did Commodore fall.

Commodore ranked side-by side with the biggest names in the industry

What people often forget is that tech-companies have two types of currencies. The first is what consumers consider valuable; things like the products they make, how much money is in the bank, the state of their inventory, good partners and retailers — all points of importance when running a business.

Major players though couldn’t care less about these factors, not unless they align with their own needs. So from a PC company’s perspective, getting rid of the Amiga and butchering Commodore for patents was a spectacular win. Because, and here we get into the nasty parts: for an already established competitor, a dead tech company has one asset and one asset only: namely their patent-portfolio.

So all that buying and selling we saw in the 90s, with Amiga changing hands left and right, had nothing to do with saving the Amiga. The Commodore legacy was reduced to a piece of meat and thrownto the wolves, each ripping into its patents left and right. So while graphic, the piece of meat in this analogy held an estimated value of a billion dollars.

Patents are valuable because they represent repeated income and a level of financial security unline ordinary currency. Large companies use patent portfolios in combination with their insurance. IBM is more or less the archetypical example of this. They remain one of the richest companies in the world, but spend their time tinkering with super-computers and science experiments. “Big Blue” haven’t “worked” in the true sense of the word since they started licensing out PC as a platform. They own the patents for pretty much everything we know as a PC today, and don’t need to compete. They make a fortune just sitting there.

Climbing up the rabbit hole

Gateway and Escom both tried to save themselves using the Amiga patents, but they failed

When Commodore fell, the vultures moved in quickly. People have focused so much on the Amiga computer and branding aspect of Commodore, that we often neglect that the true value of such a giant was never the end-product, but the intrinsic values of their patents and technological inventions.

Very few knew the identity of the party now in possession of the Commodore patent portfolio until quite recently. It caused quite a stir online when I published the name of the owner last year (both on this blog and Amiga Disrupt on Facebook).

Just to underline: this information have never been secret or anything of the sorts. It’s just a type of information ordinary people wouldn’t know where to find (myself included). You have to know where to look and what to look for. And while I have some experience with copyright cases and intellectual property – I would never have found it without a heart to heart with Trevor Dickinson. The major shareholder in Aeon, which produces the Next Generation Amiga system (x5000 and the upcoming A1222). He kindly helped me through the avalanche of older court documents and pointed me to an article series in AF Magazine that I had no idea even existed.

I should also stress that I have no special friendship with Trevor. I have talked to him on various occasions and we share a passion for the Amiga system. He has always been very kind, but I don’t know him personally. Nothing I write here is done in his favour or out of some form of loyalty. I simply find that A-EON and Hyperion’s plans and products makes the most sense in 2019.

When the mysterious owner of Commodore and Amiga turned out to be Acer my jaw dropped. They had been sitting on the patents for all these years without making a sound. From Acer’s point of view the Amiga computer is worthless and they wouldn’t give a cup of coffee for the Amiga name or its legacy. So the Amiga name and legacy code was sold off long ago. Acer handles technological patents that commodore deviced, from PET to 3A no doubt. Amiga as a platform is uninteresting to them.

How Acer got a hold of the portfolio can only be speculated on, but I would imagine they snapped them up when Escom went under. How much of the original portfolio remains intact is anyone’s guess. The classical Amiga OS source-code was, as we know, acquired by Hyperion from Amiga Inc years ago. That was the 3.1 version. Interestingly the 3.9 version was bought by H&P (a german company) and was sadly lost when they existed the Amiga market permanently.

Workbench and hipsters

For those that haven’t read or followed up on the “Commodore case”, the license holders mentioned above (A-EON, Hyperion, Cloanto), have been at each other’s throats since the brits annexed India. Which is why this case has become interesting for others as well.

Nobody under 33 years of age would associate this with Commodore or Amiga.

To give you some examples of the epic battles at hand: they have argued in court over the right to use a checkered bathing ball, you know those you can buy almost anywhere and that resemble a french table-cloth? Oh yes I kid ye not.

They have gone to court over the misuse of said bathing apparatus, the misrepresentation of the ball, who owns the ball, it’s buoyancy – and let us not forget trademarking the word “Workbench” (the name of the desktop system the Amiga uses). A word today only used by hipsters in meth-labs and tool-time-tim wannabe’s on YouTube. The absurdities are so dense you could bottle them.

If we look at the many struggles since Commodore went under from a bird’s eye perspective, we are essentially seeing the same lawsuit on infinite repeat (with a few variations here and there). I got married, I had kids and 15 years later I got divorced. And when I got back they were still at it! Good god guys, what a complete and utter waste of time, resources and talent (The lawsuits not my marriage. Well maybe both), not to mention counter productive! If anything these frequent lawsuits are destroying what both parties are trying to protect. Although I question if one of them indeed are.

If I was to go back to school and re-invent myself, I would become an author. All I had to do to was take the Commodore story and place it in middle-earth, give the people involved pointy ears, brutal weaponry and silly names and voila! A tale that would make Tolkien himself weep; because great as his imagination was, never could he have concocted such a story. Not even Keith Richards if we let him loose in a pharmacy on “take all the drugs you can carry day” – could make up a timeline as insane as the Commodore aftermath.

Lawsuits 1-0-1: Que bono?

To catch you up with the present events, let’s just go through the basics first.

It can be difficult to distinguish between Hyperion and Aeon, so lets start with a few words about that. Hyperion is ultimately a software company. They started (if I recall correctly) as software house porting PC games to the Amiga platform.

I previously wrote that Trevor was the major shareholder in both companies, that was actually wrong, he holds a very small role in Hyperion. But who owns what here is ultimately pointless. The relationship between Hyperion and A-EON is that Hyperion represents the software branch, and A-EON is the hardware branch. And combined they make out the owners and producers of what is commonly called “Next Generation” Amiga machines.

A-EON and Hyperion hold the rights to develop Amiga OS, covering both the classical 68k version and the NG models which are PPC based. Cloanto have only sales rights, which are limited to the legacy 68k ROM kernel files, and workbench. That is ultimately what separates these two groups. So even though there are 3 companies involved, it’s easier to regard them as two separate entities.

And yes we could argue that OS4 was instigated by Amiga Inc earlier, but i’m trying to keep this readable for people that haven’t read anything about this silliness before, so i’m skipping all of that.

Amiga OS is loved by many, but to be frank it’s reached the point that fighting over it has long since passed. A teenager today knows PSX, XBox and completely different brands

Until recently Aeon and Hyperion have focused completely on their Next Generation system. Aeon creates the hardware and Hyperion does the software. Hyperion also offers the older legacy roms and Workbench in their webshop. But until recently they have been more interested in selling next-generation software and machines.

Cloanto have been exclusively about legacy. They have no license that involves software development, and are for all means an purposes a retro retailer (or undertaker if you will). They sell old Commodore stuff, and that’s it. So while they have argued like cats and dogs over absolutely everything, like that worthless boing ball and the name “workbench”, they at least managed to co-exist somehow.

That was, until Hyperion listened to the Amiga Community and released an update for the 68k platform. Which is perfectly within their rights to do. They have a license that covers both 68k and PPC. Acer has set a clause (from what I can tell) that they are not allowed to touch x86, but as far as 68k and PPC is concerned — Hyperion is well within their rights to issue an update. After all they own the source-code for Amiga OS 3.1 which I mentioned above, Cloanto does not.

The response from the community was quite frankly outstanding. Finally a proper update for both Workbench and the kernel! Everyone was ecstatic and the whole scene was filled with positive hopes that things were finally moving forward. This was after all the first real update since Napoleon was in office!

Cloanto however, not so much. Because even though they share the sales license with Aeon, they have no rights to the new software created. They don’t make a penny on the new 68k kernel (rom files) or the new Workbench. They can continue to sell the older variations of Amiga OS, but they have no legal right to software written and issued in 2018. Cloanto responded like they always have, by issuing a lawsuit.

So the reason Cloanto took Hyperion to court for the 13th thousand time, has nothing to with open-source (a rumour that was planted before Xmas). It is motivated purely by greed and the fear that the Amiga might actually spring back to life.

And this is where we get to the nasty parts

Legacy software undertakers

Legacy software is not unlike the undertaking business

First of all, and I want to make this crystal clear: Cloanto’s entire business model rests on the Amiga remaining dead. In a bizarre twist of irony, the self-proclaimed caretakers of Amiga actually face financial ruin if the Amiga ever became popular or rose from the grave. Stop and think about that for a moment: They make money on the Amiga remaining a dead system.

The only product Cloanto have actually produced, is a pixel paint program called PPaint, which was awesome back in the previous century.

The state of affairs for the past 18 years, is that Cloanto depends completely an emulator, UAE, short for “The Unix Amiga Emulator”, when it comes to the Amiga . Which ironically is not Cloanto’s work at all, but an emulator created by Bernd Schmidt, Toni Wilen and Mathias Ortmann; neither have received a penny despite Cloanto profiting on their work for close to two decades (!)

The selling of legacy Commodore software I have no problem with at all. But what bakes my noodle is forking UAE and selling it for profit without giving something back to its original authors? I have yet to see the source-code for Amiga Forever on Github for example? The laws of GPL are pretty straight forward. I’m not saying that the source code does not exist, i’m simply saying that Cloanto has gone out of their way to keep it hidden.

Sure it may be legal but I find it somewhat tasteless. profiting on UAE for all those years, and not even a symbolic sum for the guys that keep UAE going? I mean, had they actively participated and contributed to the UAE codebase I would have applauded them for it. Sadly Cloanto presents itself as a blatant opportunist more than a preserver. They say one thing, but their actions speak of something else entirely.

And don’t get me wrong, Hyperion and Aeon have more than enough mistakes on file. But when comparing Hyperion’s mistakes against Cloanto, remembering that these two have an obligation to represent the Amiga legacy to the best of their ability — you cannot help notice that they are worlds apart. Hyperion is producing new software, Aeon new hardware, and they have even given the much loved 68k systems a do-over.

This where I get a bit worked up – because Cloanto have nothing to do with software or hardware development. It is quite frankly none of their business (in the true sense of the word). They have licensed the old kernel and Workbench; they have also bought the C64 roms – and that is where their role ends. Yet they spend more time trying to obstruct Hyperion (and by consequence, Aeon) at every step of the way.

While I have no idea who sits on the c64 rights these days, the c64-mini has sold in good numbers around the world. Since Cloanto is the only company with c64 rights I presume they have cashed in on that? Like always it’s hard to tell, because there are more than one company that claim to sit on pieces of the true Commodore legacy.

So to sum up: we have one side producing new hardware, new software and doing updates which is their obligation and right. And we have another party who has created nothing, including the heart of their business, demanding a cut of something they shouldn’t even be involved in (!)

Greed, the mother of invention

Cloanto’s motives should be pretty obvious by now, but let’s hash through it.

With a new Workbench and kernel out in the wild, Cloanto find themselves in a difficult position. Who would want to buy an older kernel or Workbench when there is a newer, 2018 version available? Well, I would like all of them to be honest, but yes I obviously want to use the new versions as much as possible.

The A1222 was due out Q1 2018. It remains on hold until the lawsuits are finished. Keeping Hyperion and Aeon in court is a matter of survival for Cloanto at this point

But that alone is not enough to explain Cloanto’s panic-stricken behavior. They could welcome the new update and simply license it, like they should because they have no right to another companies work.

Instead they run out and buys the remnants of that company I mentioned earlier, Amiga Inc, which is a straw company that has a terrible reputation involving fraud and investor scams. A company that for some magical reason had the right to the name “Amiga” (like that holds any value in 2018, good lord what are you people doing) and sat on the source-code for the OS. This is the same source-code that Hyperion ended up buying, which is no doubt the foundation for the update before xmas.

Why would they go to such lengths as to secure a superficial paper-tiger like Amiga Inc? Trying to reverse the process? Looking to hijack the Amiga names? What gives? It’s almost like Cloanto is looking for something to fight over, desperate to keep Hyperion in court for as long as possible.

And why would they refuse to sell 2000 roms to myself and Gunnar to make ready-to-use Amiga “mini” machines? If I didnt know better, they are brewing on something. The market is just ripe for retro, and their behavior towards us hints that they are not very happy about Amibian’s existence.

It makes even more sense when you factor in the long-awaited A1222. A whole new Amiga that Aeon and Hyperion is 100% invested in bringing to market.

The Amiga A1222 is a Next Generation PPC Amiga that should retail at around USD 450. This product was supposed to reach the market in Q1 2018, but with the lawsuit(s) and drain on funds, getting the product out the door has been impossible. So much so that Cloanto is now damaging Hyperion (and Aeon) by proxy.

Around Xmas 2018 Cloanto began spreading the rumor that they were fighting to “open source Amiga OS”. That is a blatant lie and I was tempted to write a piece there and then, but I have been busy with work. I also thought Amiga users wouldn’t fall for such an evident lie, but some people actually cheer Cloanto on — believing that Cloanto can somehow “help” the Amiga platform. For Christ sake, Cloanto doesn’t even have the source-code – much less the right to open source Hyperion and Acer’s intellectual property. Buying the remnants of Amiga Inc might be an attempt to buy credibility, but its 20 years too late.

The present legalities are, to be blunt, nothing more than a diversion designed to keep the A1222 out of the marketplace. The question is: why and will they try to replace it with something?

Although the motives are now painfully visible, so much so that it might as well be lit up in neon – I think Amiga fans should be very careful where they place their trust. I am sorry but I would not trust Cloanto with a stick of gum, much less the computing legacy of a giant like Commodore. And they are brewing on something, either directly or indirectly, mark my words.

Normally I don’t take sides, but I seriously hope Cloanto wakes up and realize that they are right now, and have been for some time, the spearhead that is keeping the platform in limbo. I have nothing against them personally, but we have now passed the point of no return. You are now risking the codebase of a system that thousands of people care for.

I think I speak for quite a few when I say: Enough! Put that energy, time and money into making something – because whatever you guys started arguing over, is long gone.

There is a whole generation that has grown up without any knowledge of Amiga. Who have no clue what Commodore was and represented. So while you guys have been fighting about who gets to sit where, the boat has left and you missed it.

Final words

You know why I find the most annoying about the situation Cloanto have created? Hear me out here.

Sun Microsystems spent a fortune drumming up support for Java, selling people on a lofty dream where a whole operating-system would be written as bytecodes. And that in special hardware would be made so that bytecodes could run anywhere. Because said bytecodes would be portable between platforms even, and solve the problem with platform bound software once and for all. Companies pumped billions into that dream, yet for all their wealth and power, they failed.

Meanwhile Cloanto, and by extension Hyperion, have had access to UAE since the 90s. A system that embody all the traits that Sun Microsystems attempted to create, and all they have done is to add a menu to it. They have wasted close to two decades without realizing that UAE is that holy grail that Sun Microsystems failed to deliver.

68k machine-code is bytecodes if you execute it on another system. And the distinctions between “virtual machine” and “emulator” are ultimately conceptual – not factual. UAE could have been adjusted as a virtual machine. There you have the compilers, the ecosystem and all the pieces you would need to deliver a portable, blistering fast software deployment system that is truly platform independent.

So, Cloanto, you have been sitting on a gold mine. And you didn’t recognize it because you were too busy arguing over balls, chicken-lip logos, old roms and god knows what else.

You have had solid gold for ages, but you were too busy arguing over names to see it

I sincerely hope Acer takes an active role in their licensing, because as far as I can see, Cloanto is not acting in Acer’s financially best interest (nor Hyperion’s for that matter, which last time I checked can withhold all and any changes to their OS, leaving Cloanto with the dry bones from the past) – and they have become, unless they perform a complete makeover before their next lawsuit, unfit to manage the intellectual property and licenses they have acquired.

You don’t have a developer license, so stick to the legacy stuff and stop getting in the way of those that do.

And for christ sake give the guys who make UAE a percentage, it is tasteless and ugly to watch this level of greed. Seriously.

Amibian.js under the hood

Amibian.js is gaining momentum as more and more developers, embedded systems architects, gamers and retro computer enthusiasts discover the project. And I have to admit I’m pretty stoked about what we are building here myself!

In a life-preserver no less 😀

But, with any new technology or invention there are two common traps that people can fall into: The first trap is to gravely underestimate a technology. JavaScript certainly invites this, because only a decade ago the language was little more than a toy. Since then JavaScript have evolved to become the most widely adopted programming language in the world, and runtime engines like Google’s V8 runs JavaScript almost as fast as compiled binary code (“native” means machine code, like that produced by a C/C++ compiler, Pascal compiler or anything else that produces programs that run under Linux or Windows).

It takes some adjustments, especially for traditional programmers that havent paid attention to where browsers have gone – but long gone are the days of interpreted JavaScript. Modern JavaScript is first parsed, tokenized and compiled to bytecodes. These bytecodes are then JIT compiled (“just in time”, which means the compilation takes place inside the browser) to real machine-code using state of the art techniques (LLVM). So the JavaScript of 2018 is by no means the JavaScript of 2008.

The second trap you can fall into – is to exaggerate what a new technology can do, and attach abilities and expectations to a product that simply cannot be delivered. It is very important to me that people don’t fall into either trap, and that everyone is informed about what Amibian.js actually is and can deliver – but also what it wont deliver. Rome was not built-in a day, and it’s wise to study all the factors before passing judgement.

I have been truly fortunate that people support the project financially via Patreon, and as such I feel it’s my duty to document and explain as much as possible. I am a programmer and I often forget that not everyone understands what I’m talking about. We are all human and make mistakes.

Hopefully this post will paint a clearer picture of Amibian.js and what we are building here. The project is divided into two phases: first to finish Amibian.js itself, and secondly to write a Visual Studio clone that runs purely in the browser. Since it’s easy to mix these things up, I’m underlining this easy – just in case.

What the heck is Amibian.js?

Amibian.js is a group of services and libraries that combined creates a portable operating-system that renders to HTML5. A system that was written using readily available web technology, and designed to deliver advanced desktop functionality to web applications.

The services that make up Amibian.js was designed to piggyback on a thin Linux crust, where Linux deals with the hardware, drivers and the nitty-gritty we take for granted. There is no point trying to write a better kernel in 2018, because you are never going to catch up with Linus Torvalds. It’s must more interesting to push modern web technology to the absolute limits, and build a system that is truly portable and distributed.

Above: Amibian.js is created in Smart Pascal and compiled to JavaScript

The service layer is written purely in node.js (JavaScript) which guarantees the same behavior regardless of host platform. One of the benefits of using off-the-shelves web technology is that you can physically copy the whole system from one machine to the other without any changes. So if you have a running Amibian.js system on your x86 PC, and copy all the files to an ARM computer – you dont even have to recompile the system. Just fire up the services and you are back in the game.

Now before you dismiss this as “yet another web mockup” please remember what I said about JavaScript: the JavaScript in 2018 is not the JavaScript of 2008. No other language on the planet has seen as much development as JavaScript, and it has evolved from a “browser toy” – into the most important programming language of our time.

So Amibian.js is not some skin-deep mockup of a desktop (lord knows there are plenty of those online). It implements advanced technologies such as remote filesystem mapping, an object-oriented message protocol (Ragnarok), RPCS (remote procedure call invocation stack), video codec capabilities and much more — all of it done with JavaScript.

In fact, one of the demos that Amibian.js ships with is Quake III recompiled to JavaScript. It delivers 120 fps flawlessly (browser is limited to 60 fps) and makes full use of standard browser technologies (WebGL).

Click on picture above to watch Amibian.js in action on YouTube

So indeed, the JavaScript we are talking about here is cutting edge. Most of Amibian.js is compiled as “Asm.js” which means that the V8 runtime (the code that runs JavaScript inside the browser, or as a program under node.js) will JIT compile it to highly efficient machine-code.

Which is why Amibian.js is able to do things that people imagine impossible!

Ok, but what does Amibian.js consist of?

Amibian.js consists of many parts, but we can divide it into two categories:

• A HTML5 desktop client
• A system server and various child processes

These two categories have the exact same relationship as the X desktop and the Linux kernel. The client connects to the server, invokes procedures to do some work, and then visually represent the response This is identical to how the X desktop calls functions in the kernel or one of the Linux libraries. The difference between the traditional, machine code based OS and our web variation, is that our version doesn’t have to care about the hardware. We can also assign many different roles to Ambian.js (more about that later).

Enjoying other cloud applications is easy with Amibian.js, here is Plex, a system very much based on the same ideas as Amibian.js

And for the record: I’m trying to avoid a bare-metal OS, otherwise I would have written the system using a native programming language like C or Object-Pascal. So I am not using JavaScript because I lack skill in native languages, I am using JavaScript because native code is not relevant for the tasks Amibian.js solves. If I used a native back-end I could have finished this in a couple of months, but a native server would be unable to replicate itself between cloud instances because chipset and CPU would be determining factors.

The Amibian.js server is not a single program. The back-end for Amibian.js consists of several service applications (daemons on Linux) that each deliver specific features. The combined functionality of these services make up “the amibian kernel” in our analogy with Linux. You can think of these services as the library files in a traditional system, and programs that are written for Amibian.js can call on these to a wide range of tasks. It can be as simple as reading a file, or as complex as registering a new user or requesting admin rights.

The greatest strength of Amibian.js is that it’s designed to run clustered, using as many CPU cores as possible. It’s also designed to scale, meaning that it will replicate itself and divide the work between different instances. This is where things get’s interesting, because an Amibian.js cluster doesn’t need the latest and coolest hardware to deliver good performance. You can build a cluster of old PC’s in your office, or a handful of embedded boards (ODroid XU4, Raspberry PI’s and Tinkerboard are brilliant candidates).

But why Amibian.js? Why not just stick with Linux?

That is a fair question, and this is where the roles I mentioned above comes in.

As a software developer many of my customers work with embedded devices and kiosk systems. You have companies that produce routers and set-top boxes, NAS boxes of various complexity, ticket systems for trains and busses; and all of them end up having to solve the same needs.

What each of these manufacturers have in common, is the need for a web desktop system that can be adapted for a specific program. Any idiot can write a web application, but when you need safe access to the filesystem, unified API’s that can delegate signals to Amazon, Azure or your company server, things suddenly get’s more complicated. And even when you have all of that, you still need a rock solid application model suitable for distributed computing. You might have 1 ticket booth, or 10.000 nation wide. There are no systems available that is designed to deal with web-technology on that scale. Yet 😉

Let’s look at a couple of real-life scenarios that I have encountered, I’m confident you will recognize a common need. So here are some roles that Amibian.js can assume and help deliver a solution rapidly. It also gives you some ideas of the economic possibilities.

Updated: Please note that we are talking javascript here, not native code. There are a lot of native solutions out there, but the whole point here is to forget about CPU, chipset and target and have a system floating on top of whatever is beneath.

• When you want to change some settings on your router – you login to your router. It contains a small apache server (or something similar) and you do all your maintenance via that web interface. This web interface is typically skin-deep, annoying to work with and a pain for developers to update since it’s connected to a native apache module which is 100% dependent on the firmware. Each vendor end up re-inventing the wheel over and over again.
• When you visit a large museum notice the displays. A museum needs to display multimedia, preferably on touch capable devices, throughout the different exhibits. The cost of having a developer create native applications that displays the media, plays the movies and gives visual feedback is astronomical. Which is why most museums adopt web technology to handle media presentation and interaction. Again they re-invent the wheel with varying degree of success.
• Hotels have more or less the exact same need but on a smaller scale, especially the larger hotels where the lobby have information booths, and each room displays a web interface via the TV.
• Shopping malls face the same challenge, and depending on the size they can need anything from a single to a hundred nodes.
• Schools and education spend millions on training software and programming languages every year. Amibian.js can deliver both and the schools would only pay for maintenance and adaptation – the product itself is free. Kids get the benefit of learning traditional languages and enjoying instant visual feedback! They can learn Basic, Pascal, JavaScript and C. I firmly believe that the classical languages will help make them better programmers as they evolve.

You are probably starting to see the common denominator here?

They all need a web-based desktop system, one that can run complex HTML5 based media applications and give them the same depth as a native operating-system; Which is pretty hard to achieve with JavaScript alone.

Amibian.js provides a rich foundation of more than 4000 classes that developers can use to write large, complex and media rich applications (see Smart Mobile Studio below). Just like Linux and Windows provides a wealth of libraries and features for native application development – Amibian.js aims to provide the same for cloud and embedded systems.

And as the name implies, it has roots in the past with the machine that defined multimedia, namely the Commodore Amiga. So the relation is more than just visually, Amibian.js uses the same system architecture – because we believe it’s one of the best systems ever designed.

If JavaScript is so poor, why should we trust you to deliver so much?

First of all I’m not selling anything. It’s not like this project is something that is going to make me a ton of cash. I ask for support during the development period because I want to allocate proper time for it, but when done Amibian.js will be free for everyone (LGPL). And I’m also writing it because it’s something that I need and that I havent seen anywhere else. I think you have to write software for yourself, otherwise the quality wont be there.

Secondly, writing Amibian.js in raw JavaScript with the same amount of functions and depth would take years. The reason I am able to deliver so much functionality quickly, is because I use a compiler system called Smart Mobile Studio. This saves months and years of development time, and I can use all the benefits of OOP.

Prior to starting the Amibian.js project, I spent roughly 9 years creating Smart Mobile Studio. Smart is not a solo project, many individuals have been involved – and the product provides a compiler, IDE (editor and tools), and a vast run-time library of pre-made classes (roughly 4000 ready to use classes, or building-blocks).

Writing large-scale node.js services in Smart is easy, fun and powerful!

Unlike other development systems, Smart Mobile Studio compiles to JavaScript rather than machine-code. We have spent a great deal of time making sure we could use proper OOP (object-oriented programming), and we have spent more than 3 years perfecting a visual application framework with the same depth as the VCL or FMX (the core visual frameworks for C++ builder and Delphi).

The result is that I can knock out a large application that a normal JavaScript coder would spend weeks on – in a single day.

Smart Mobile Studio uses the object-pascal language, a dialect which is roughly 70% compatible with Delphi. Delphi is exceptionally well suited for writing large, data driven applications. It also thrives for embedded systems and low-level system services. In short: it’s a lot easier to maintain 50.000 lines of object pascal code, than 500.000 lines of JavaScript code.

Amibian.js, both the service layer and the visual HTML5 client application, is written completely using Smart Mobile Studio. This gives me as the core developer of both systems a huge advantage (who knows it better than the designer right?). I also get to write code that is truly OOP (classes, inheritance, interfaces, virtual and abstract methods, partial classes etc), because our compiler crafts something called a VMT (virtual method table) in JavaScript.

Traditional JavaScript doesn’t have OOP, it has something called prototypes. With Smart Pascal I get to bring in code from the object-pascal community, components and libraries written in Delphi or Freepascal – which range in the hundreds of thousands. Delphi alone has a massive library of code to pick from, it’s been a popular toolkit for ages (C is 3 years older than pascal).

But how would I use Amibian.js? Do I install it or what?

Amibian.js can be setup and used in 4 different ways:

• As a true desktop, booting straight into Amibian.js in full-screen
• As a cloud service, accessing it through any modern browser
• As a NAS or Kiosk front-end
• As a local system on your existing OS, a batch script will fire it up and you can use your browser to access it on https://127.0.0.1:8090

So the short answer is yes, you install it. But it’s the same as installing Chrome OS. It’s not like an application you just install on your Linux, Windows or OSX box. The whole point of Amibian.js is to have a platform independent, chipset agnostic system. Something that doesn’t care if you using ARM, x86, PPC or Mips as your CPU of preference. Developers will no doubt install it on their existing machines, Amibian.js is non-intrusive and does not affect or touch files outside its own eco-system.

But the average non-programmer will most likely setup a dedicated machine (or several) or just deploy it on their home NAS.

The first way of enjoying Amibian.js is to install it on a PC or ARM device. A disk image will be provided for supporters so they can get up and running ASAP. This disk image will be based on a thin Linux setup, just enough to get all the drivers going (but no X desktop!). It will start all the node.js services and finally enter a full-screen web display (based on Chromium Embedded) that renders the desktop. This is the method most users will prefer to work with Amibian.js.

The second way is to use it as a cloud service. You install Amibian.js like mentioned above, but you do so on Amazon or Azure. That way you can login to your desktop using nothing but a web browser. This is a very cost-effective way of enjoying Amibian.js since renting a virtual instance is affordable and storage is abundant.

The third option is for developers. Amibian.js is a desktop system, which means it’s designed to host more elaborate applications. Where you would normally just embed an external website into an IFrame, but Amibian.js is not that primitive. Hosting external applications requires you to write a security manifest file, but more importantly: the application must interface with the desktop through the window’s message-port. This is a special object that is sent to the application as a hand-shake, and the only way for the application to access things like the file-system and server-side functionality, is via this message-port.

Calling “kernel” level functions from a hosted application is done purely via the message-port mentioned above. The actual message data is JSON and must conform to the Ragnarok client protocol specification. This is not as difficult as it might sound, but Amibian.js takes security very seriously – so applications trying to cause damage will be promptly shut down.

You mention hosted applications, do you mean websites?

Both yes and no: Amibian.js supports 3 types of applications:

• Ordinary HTML5/JS based applications, or “websites” as many would call them. But like I talked about above they have to establish a dialog with the desktop before they can do anything useful.
• Hybrid applications where half is installed as a node.js service, and the other half is served as a normal HTML5 app. This is the coolest program model, and developers essentially write both a server and a client – and then deploy it as a single package.
• LDEF compiled bytecode applications, a 68k inspired assembly language that is JIT compiled by the browser (commonly called “asm.js”) and runs extremely fast. The LDEF virtual machine is a sub-project in Amibian.js

The latter option, bytecodes, is a bit like Java. A part of the Amibian.js project is a compiler and runtime system called LDEF.

Above: The Amibian.js LDEF assembler, here listing opcodes + disassembling a method

The first part of the Amibian.js project is to establish the desktop and back-end services. The second part of the project is to create the worlds first cloud based development platform. A full Visual Studio clone if you like, that allows anyone to write cloud, mobile and native applications directly via the browser (!)

Several languages are supported by LDEF, and you can write programs in Object Pascal, Basic and C. The Basic dialect is especially fun to work with, since it’s a re-implementation of BlitzBasic (with a lot of added extras). Amiga developers will no doubt remember BlitzBasic, it was used to create some great games back in the 80s and 90s. It’s well suited for games and multimedia programming and above all – very easy to learn.

More advanced developers can enjoy Object Pascal (read: Delphi) or a sub-set of C/C++.

And please note: This IDE is designed for large-scale applications, not simple snippets. The ultimate goal of Amibian.js is to move the entire development cycle to the cloud and away from the desktop. With Amibian.js you can write a cool “app” in BlitzBasic, run it right in the browser — or compile it server-side and deploy it to your Android Phone as a real, natively compiled application.

So any notion of a “mock desktop for HTML” should be firmly put to the side. I am not playing around with this product and the stakes are very real.

But why don’t you just use ChromeOS?

There are many reasons, but the most important one is chipset independence. Chrome OS is a native system, meaning that it’s core services are written in C/C++ and compiled to machine code. The fundamental principle of Amibian.js is to be 100% platform agnostic, and “no native code allowed”. This is why the entire back-end and service layer is targeting node.js. This ensures the same behavior regardless of processor or host system (Linux being the default host).

Node.js has the benefit of being 100% platform independent. You will find node.js for ARM, x86, Mips and PPC. This means you can take advantage of whatever hardware is available. You can even recycle older computers that have lost mainstream support, and use them to run Amibian.js.

A second reason is: Chrome OS might be free, but it’s only as open as Google want it to be. ChromeOS is not just something you pick up and start altering. It’s dependence on native programming languages, compiler toolchains and a huge set of libraries makes it extremely niche. It also shields you utterly from the interesting parts, namely the back-end services. It’s quite frankly boring and too boxed in for any practical use; except for Google and it’s technology partners that is.

I wanted a system that I could move around, that could run in the cloud, on cheap SBC’s. A system that could scale from handling 10 users to 1000 users – a system that supports clustering and can be installed on multiple machines in a swarm.

A system that anyone with JavaScript knowledge can use to create new and exciting systems, that can be easily expanded and serve as a foundation for rich media applications.

What is this Amiga stuff, isn’t that an ancient machine?

In computing terms yes, but so is Unix. Old doesn’t automatically mean bad, it actually means that it’s adapted and survived challenges beyond its initial design. While most of us remember the Amiga for its games, I remember it mainly for its elegant and powerful operating-system. A system so flexible that it’s still in use around the world – 33 years after the machine hit the market. That is quite an achievement.

The original Amiga OS, not bad for a 33-year-old OS! It was and continues to be way ahead of everyone else. A testament to the creativity of its authors

Amibian.js as the name implies, borrows architectural elements en-mass from Amiga OS. Quite simply because the way Amiga OS is organized and the way you approach computing on the Amiga is brilliant. Amiga OS is much more intuitive and easier to understand than Linux and Windows. It’s a system that you could learn how to use fully with just a couple of days exploring; and no manuals.

But the similarities are not just visual or architectural. Remember I wrote that hosted applications can access and use the Amibian.js services? These services implement as much of the original ROM Kernel functions as possible. Naturally I can’t port all of it, because it’s not really relevant for Amibian.js. Things like device-drivers serve little purpose for Amibian.js, because Amibian.js talks to node.js, and node talks to the actual system, which in turn handles hardware devices. But the way you would create windows, visual controls, bind events and create a modern, event-driven application has been preserved to the best of my ability.

But how does this thing boot? I thought you said server?

If you have setup a dedicated machine with Amibian.js then the boot sequence is the same as Linux, except that the node.js services are executed as background processes (daemons or services as they are called), the core server is initialized, and then a full-screen HTML5 view is set up that shows the desktop.

But that is just for starting the system. Your personal boot sequence which deals with your account, your preferences and adaptations – that boots when you login to the system.

When you login to your Amibian.js account, no matter if it’s just locally on a single PC, a distributed cluster, or via the browser into your cloud account — several things happen:

1. The client (web-page if you like) connects to the server using WebSocket
2. Login is validated by the server
3. The client starts loading preferences files via the mapped filesystem, and then applies these to the desktop.
4. A startup-sequence script file is loaded from your account, and then executed. The shell-script runtime engine is built into the client, as is REXX execution.
5. The startup-script will setup configurations, create symbolic links (assigns), mount external devices (dropbox, google drive, ftp locations and so on)
6. When finished the programs in the ~/WbStartup folder are started. These can be both visual and non-visual.

As you can see Amibian.js is not a mockup or “fake” desktop. It implements all the advanced features you expect from a “real” desktop. The filesystem mapping is especially advanced, where file-data is loaded via special drivers; drivers that act as a bridge between a storage service (a harddisk, a network share, a FTP host, Dropbox or whatever) and the desktop. Developers can add as many of these drivers as they want. If they have their own homebrew storage system on their existing servers, they can implement a driver for it. This ensures that Amibian.js can access any storage device, as long as the driver conforms to the driver standard.

In short, you can create, delete, move and copy files between these devices just like you do on Windows, OSX or the Linux desktop. And hosted applications that run inside their own window can likewise request access to these drivers and work with the filesystem (and much more!).

Wow this is bigger than I thought, but what is this emulation I hear about? Can Amibian.js really run actual programs?

Amibian.js has a JavaScript port of UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator). This is a fork of SAE (scripted Amiga Emulator) that has been heavily optimized for web. Not only is it written in JavaScript, it performs brilliantly and thus allows us to boot into a real Amiga system. So if you have some floppy-images with a game you love, that will run just fine in the browser. I even booted a 2 gigabyte harddisk image 🙂

Click here to watch a video of Amibian.js running BlitzBasic in a window on YouTube

But Amiga emulation is just the beginning. More and more emulators are ported to JavaScript; you have Nes, SNes, N64, PSX I & II, Sega Megadrive and even a NEO GEO port. So playing your favorite console games right in the browser is pretty straight forward!

But the really interesting part is probably QEmu. This allows you to run x86 instances directly in the browser too. You can boot up in Windows 7 or Ubuntu inside an Amibian.js window if you like. Perhaps not practical (at this point) but it shows some of the potential of the system.

I have been experimenting with a distributed emulation system, where the emulation is executed server-side, and only the graphics and sound is streamed back to the Amibian.js client in real-time. This has been possible for years via Apache Guacamole, but doing it in raw JS is more fitting with our philosophy: no native code!

I heard something about clustering, what the heck is that?

Remember I wrote about the services that Amibian.js has? Those that act almost like libraries on a physical computer? Well, these services don’t have to be on the same machine — you can place them on separate machines and thus its able to work faster.

Above: The official Amibian.js cluster, 4 x ODroid XU4s SBC’s in a micro-rack

A cluster is typically several computers connected together, with the sole purpose of having more CPU cores to divide the work on. The cool thing about Amibian.js is that it doesn’t care about the underlying CPU. As long as node.js is available it will happily run whatever service you like – with the same behavior and result.

The official Amibian.js cluster consists of 5 ODroid XU4/S SBC (single board computers). Four of these are so-called “headless” computers, meaning that they don’t have a HDMI port – and they are designed to be logged into and software setup via SSH or similar tools. The last machine is a ODroid XU4 with a HDMI out port, which serves as “the master”.

The architecture is quite simple: We allocate one whole SBC for a single service, and allow the service to copy itself to use all the CPU cores available (each SBC has 8 CPU cores). With this architecture the machine that deals with the desktop clients don’t have to do all the grunt work. It will accept tasks from the user and hosted applications, and then delegate the tasks between the 4 other machines.

Note: The number of SBC’s is not fixed. Depending on your use you might not need more than a single SBC in your home setup, or perhaps two. I have started with 5 because I want each part of the architecture to have as much CPU power as possible. So the first “official” Amibian.js setup is a 40 core monster shipping at around $250.

But like mentioned, you don’t have to buy this to use Amibian.js. You can install it on a single spare X86 PC you have, or daisy chain a couple of older PC’s on a switch for the same result.

Why Headless? Don’t you need a GPU?

The headless SBC’s in the initial design all have GPU (graphical processing unit) as well as audio capabilities. What they lack is GPIO pins and 3 additional USB ports. So each of the nodes on our cluster can handle graphics at blistering speed — but that is ultimately not their task. They serve more as compute modules that will be given tasks to finish quickly, while the main machine deals with users, sessions, traffic and security.

The 40 core cluster I use has more computing power than northern europe had in the early 80s, that’s something to think about. And the pricetag is under $300 (!). I dont know about you but I always wanted a proper mainframe, a distributed computing platform that you can login to and that can perform large tasks while I do something else. This is as close as I can get on a limited budget, yet I find the limitations thrilling and fun!

Part of the reason I have opted for a clustered design has to do with future development. While UAE.js is brilliant to emulate an Amiga directly in the browser – a more interesting design is to decouple the emulation from the output. In other words, run the emulation at full speed server-side, and just stream the display and sounds back to the Amibian.js display. This would ensure that emulation, of any platform, runs as fast as possible, makes use of multi-processing (read: multi threading) and fully utilize the network bandwidth within the design (the cluster runs on its own switch, separate from the outside world-wide-web).

I am also very interested in distributed computing, where we split up a program and run each part on different cores. This is a topic I want to investigate further when Amibian.js is completed. It would no doubt require a re-design of the LDEF bytecode system, but this something to research later.

Will Amibian.js replace my Windows box?

That depends completely on what you use Windows for. The goal is to create a self-sustaining system. For retro computing, emulation and writing cool applications Amibian.js will be awesome. But Rome was not built-in a day, so it’s wise to be patient and approach Amibian.js like you would Chrome OS. Some tasks are better suited for native systems like Linux, but more and more tasks will run just fine on a cloud desktop like Amibian.js.

Until the IDE and compilers are in place after phase two, the system will be more like an embedded OS. But when the LDEF compiler and IDE is in place, then people will start using it en-mass and produce applications for it. It’s always a bit of work to reach that point and create critical mass.

Object Pascal is awesome, but modern, native development systems are quite demanding

My personal need has to do with development. Some of the languages I use installs gigabytes onto my PC and you need a full laptop to access them. I love Amibian.js because I will be able to work anywhere in the world, as long as a browser and normal internet line is available. In my case I can install a native compiler on one of the nodes in the cluster, and have LDEF emit compatible code; voila, you can build app-store ready applications from within a browser environment.

 

I also love that I can set-up a dedicated platform that runs legacy applications, games – and that I can write new applications and services using modern, off the shelve languages. And should a node in the cluster break down, I can just copy the whole system over to a new, affordable SBC and keep going. No super expensive hardware to order, no absurd hosting fees, and finally a system that we all can shape and use in a plethora of systems. From a fully fledged desktop to a super advanced NAS or Router that use Amibian.js to give it’s customers a fantastic experience.

And yes, I get to re-create the wonderful reality of Amiga OS without the absurd egoism that dominates the Amiga owners to this day. I don’t even know where to begin with the present license holders – and I am so sick of the drama that rolling my own seemed the only reasonable path forward.

Well — I hope this helps clear up any misconceptions about Amibian.js, and that you find this as interesting as I do. As more and more services are pushed cloud-side, the more relevant Amibian.js will become. It is perfect as a foundation for large-scale applications, embedded systems — and indeed, as a solo platform running on embedded devices!

I cant wait to finish the services and cluster this sucker on the ODroid rack!

If you find this project interesting, head over to my Patreon website and get involved! I could really use your support, even if it’s just a $5 “high five”. Visit the project at: http://www.patreon.com/quartexNow

Mirroring groups on the MeWe network

Following my Administrator woes on Facebook post I have had a look at alternative places to run a forum. I realized that Facebook is getting pretty intrinsic in society around the world, so I know everyone won’t be interested in a new venue. But honestly, MeWe is very simple to use and have an UI experience very close to the Facebook app.

This picture was flagged as “hateful” on Facebook, which has rendered my account frozen for the next 30 days. While I agree to the strict rules that FB advocates, they really must deploy more human beings if they intend to have success in this endeavour. And that means really investigating what is flagged, reading threads in all languages etc. Because the risk of flagging the wrong guy is just too high. Admins get flagged all the time for kicking out bullies, and the use of reporting tools as a revenge strategy *must* carry a penalty.

MeWe is thankfully not like G+ which (in my personal opinion) was counter-intuitive and damn right intrusive. We all remember the G+ auto-upload feature, where some 3 million users had their family photos, vacation photos and .. ehrm, “explicitly personal” photos uploaded without consent.

Well, the MeWe app is very simple, and registration is as easy as it should be. You make a user name, a password, and type in your email; then you verify your email and that’s it!

Besides, my main use for Facebook or MeWe is to run the groups – I spend very little of my time socializing anyways. With the amount of groups and media i push on a daily basis it’s quite frankly their loss.

The MeWe group functionality is very good, and almost identical to Facebook

The alternative to MeWe is to setup a proper web forum instead. I have bought 6 domains that are now collecting dust so yes, I will look into that – but the whole purpose of a social platform is that you don’t have to do maintenance beyond daily management – so MeWe saves us some time.

So head over to MeWe and register! Here are the two main groups I manage these days. The main groups are on facebook, but i have now registered the same groups on MeWe.

• Delphi Developer on MeWe
• Amiga Disrupt on MeWe

MeWe doesn’t cost anything and takes less than 5 minutes to join. Just like G+ and Facebook, MeWe can be installed as an app for your phone (both iOS and Android). So as far as alternatives go, it’s a good alternative. One more app wont do much harm I imagine.

Note: I will naturally keep my Facebook account for the sake of the groups, but having experienced this 4 times in 9 years, my tolerance of Mr. Suckerberg is quickly reaching its limits. If I have blurted something out I have no problems standing for that and taking the penalty, but posting a picture of software development? In a group dedicated to software development? That takes some impressive mental acrobatics to accept.

Nano PI Fire 3, part two

If you missed the first installment of this test, please click here to catch up. In this installment we are just going to dive straight into general use and get a feel for what can and cannot be done.

Solving the power problem

Like mentioned in the previous article, a normal mobile charger (5 volt, 2 amps) is not enough to support the nano-pi. Since I have misplaced my original PI power-supply with 5 volt / 3 amps I decided to cheat. So I plugged the power USB into my PC which will deliver as much juice as the device needs. I don’t have time to wait for a new PSU to arrive so this will have to do.

But for the record (and underlined) a proper PSU with at least 2.5 amps is essential to using this board. I suggest you order the official Raspberry PI 3b power-supply. But if you should find one with 3 amps that would be even better.

Web performance

The question on everyone’s mind (or at least mine) is: how does the Nano-PI fire 3 perform when rendering cutting edge, hardcore HTML5? Is this little device a potential candidate for running “The Smart Desktop” (a.k.a Amibian.js for those of you coming from the retro-computing scene)?

Like I suspected earlier, X (the Linux windowing framework) doesn’t have drivers that deliver hardware acceleration at all.

Lubuntu is a sexy desktop no doubt there, but it’s overkill for this device

This is quite easy to test: when selecting a rectangle on the Lubuntu desktop and moving the mouse-cursor around (holding down the left mouse button at the same time) if it lags terribly, that is a clear indicator that no acceleration exists.

And I was right on the money because there is no acceleration what so ever for the Linux distribution. It struggles hopelessly to keep up with the mouse-pointer as you move it around with an active selection; something that would be silky smooth had the GPU been tasked with the job.

But, hardware acceleration is not just about the desktop. It’s not some flag you enable and it magically effect everything, but rather several API’s at either the kernel-level or immediate driver level (modules the kernel loads), each affecting different aspects of a system.

So while the desktop “2d blitting” is clearly cpu driven, other aspects of the system can still be accelerated (although that would be weird and rare. But considering how Asus messed up the Tinkerboard I guess anything goes these days).

Asking Chrome for the hard facts

I fired up Google Chrome (which is the default browser thank god) and entered the magic url:

chrome://gpu

This is a built-in page that avails a detailed report of what Chrome learns about the current system, right down to specific GPU features used by OpenGL.

As expected, there was NO acceleration what so ever. So I was quite surprised that it managed to run Amibian.js at all. Even without hardware acceleration it outperformed the Raspberry PI 3b+ by a factor of 4 (at the very least) and my particle demo ran at a whopping 8 fps (frames per second). The original Rasperry PI could barely manage 2 fps. So the Nano-PI Fire is leagues ahead of the PI in terms of raw cpu power, which is brilliant for headless servers or computational tasks.

FriendlyCore vs Lubuntu? QT for the win

Now here is a funny thing. So far I have used the Lubuntu standard Linux image, and performance has been interesting to say the least. No hardware acceleration, impressive cpu results but still – what good is a SBC Linux distro without fast graphics? Sure, if you just want a head-less file server or host services then you don’t need a beefy GPU. But here is the twist:

Turns out the makers of the board has a second, QT oriented distro called Friendly-core. And this image has OpenGL-ES support and all the missing acceleration lacking from Lubuntu.

I was pretty annoyed with how Asus gave users the run-around with Tinkerboard downloads, but they have thankfully cleaned up their act and listened to their customers. Friendly-elec might want to learn from Asus mistakes in this area.

QT has a rich history, but it’s being marginalized by node.js and Delphi these days

Alas, Friendly-core xenial 4.4 Arm64 image turned out to be a pure embedded development image. This is why the board has a debug port (which is probably awesome if you are into QT development). So this is for QT developers that want to use the board as a single-application system where they write the code on Windows or Linux, compile and it’s all transported to the board with live debugging back to the devtools they use. In other words: not very useful for non C/C++ QT developers.

Android Lolipop

I have only used Android on a pad and the odd Samsung Galaxy phone, so this should be interesting. I Downloaded the Lolipop disk image, burned it to the sd-card and booted up.

After 20 minutes with a blank screen i gave up.

I realize that some Android distros download packages ad-hoc and install directly from a repository, so it can take some time to get started; but 15-20 minutes with a black screen? The Android logo didn’t even show up — and that should be visible almost immediately regardless of network install or not.

This is really a great shame because I wanted to test some Delphi Firemonkey applications on it, to see how well it scales the more demanding GPU tasks. And yes i did try a different SD-Card to be sure it wasnt a disk error. Same result.

Back to Lubuntu

Having spent a considerable time trying to find a “wow” factor for this board, I have to just surrender to the fact that it’s just not there. . This is not a “PI” any more than the Tinkerboard is a PI. And appending “pi” to a product name will never change that.

I can imagine the Nano-PI Fire 3 being an awesome single-application board for QT C/C++ developers though. With a dedicated debug port making it a snap to transport, execute and do live debugging directly on the hardware — but for general DIY hacking, using it for native Android development with Delphi, or node.js development with Smart Mobile Studio – or just kicking back with emulators like Mame, UAE or whatever tickles your fancy — its just too rough around the edges. Which is really a shame!

So at the end of the day I re-installed Lubuntu and figure I just have to wait until Friendly-elec get their act together and issue proper drivers for the Mali GPU. So it’s $35 straight out the window — but I can live with that. It was a risk but at that price it’s not going to break the bank.

The positive thing

The Nano-PI Fire 3 is yet another SBC in a long list that fall short of its potential. Like many others they try to use the word “PI” to channel some of the Raspberry PI enthusiasm their way – but the quality of the actual system is not even close.

In fact, using PI in their product name is setting themselves up for a fall – because customers will quickly discover that this product is not a PI, which can cause some subconscious aversion and resentment.

The Nano rendered Amibian.js running some very demanding demos 4 times as fast as the PI 3b, one can only speculate what the board could do with proper drivers for the GPU.

The only positive feature the Fire-3 clearly has to offer, is abundantly more cpu power. It is without a doubt twice as fast (if not 3 times as fast) as the Raspberry PI 3b. The fact that it can render highly demanding and complex HTML5 demos 4 times faster than the Raspberry PI 3b without hardware acceleration is impressive. This is a $35 board after all, which is the same price.

But without proper drivers for the mali, it’s a useless toy. Powerful and with great potential, but utterly useless for multimedia and everything that relies on fast 2D and 3D graphics. For UAE (Amiga emulation) you can pretty much forget it. Even if you can compile the latest UAE4Arm with SDL as its primary display framework – it wouldn’t work because SDL depends on the graphics drivers. So it’s back to square one.

But the CPU packs a punch that is without question.

Final verdict

There are a lot of stable and excellent options out there, take your time

I was planning to test UAE next but as I have outlined above: without drivers that properly expose and delegate the power of the mali, it would be a complete disaster. I’m not even sure it would build.

As such I will just leave this board as is. If it matures at some point that would be great, but my advice to people looking for a great SBC experience — get the new Raspberry PI 3b+ and enjoy learning and exploring there.

And if you are into Amibian.js or making high quality HTML5 kiosk / node.js based systems, then fork out the extra $10 and buy an ODroid XU4. If you pay $55 you can pick up the Asus Tinkerboard which is blistering fast and great value for money, despite its turbulent introduction.

Note: You cannot go wrong with the ODroid XU4. Its affordable, stable and fast. So for beginners it’s either the Raspberry PI 3b+ or the ODroid. These are the most mature in terms of software, drivers and stability.

The Amiga ARM project

This has been quite the turbulent week. Without getting into all the details, a post that I made with thoughts and ideas for an Amiga inspired OS for ARM escaped the safe confines of our group, Amiga Disrupt, and took on a life of its own.
This led to a few critical posts being issued publicly, which all boiled down to a misunderstanding. Thankfully this has been resolved and things are back to normal.

The question on everyone’s lips now seem to be: did Jon mean what he said or was it just venting frustration? I thought I made my points clear in my previous post, but sadly Commodore USA formulated a title open for interpretation (which is understandable considering the mayhem at the time). So let’s go thrugh the ropes and put this to rest.

Am I making an ARM based Amiga inspired OS?

Hopefully I don’t have to. My initial post, the one posted to the Amiga Disrupt comment section (and mistaken for a project release note), had a couple of very clear criteria attached:

If nothing has been done to improve the Amiga situation [with regards to ARM or x86] by the time I finish Amibian.js (*), I will take matters into my own hand and create my own alternative.

(*) As you probably know, Amibian.js is a cloud implementation of Amiga OS, designed to bring Amiga to the browser. It is powered by a node.js application server; a server that can be hosted either locally (on the same machine as the html5 client) or remotely. It runs fine on popular embedded devices such as Tinkerboard and ODroid, and when run in a full-screen browser with no X or Windows desktop behind it – it is practically indistinguishable from the real thing.

We have customers who use our prototype to deliver cloud based learning for educational institutions. Shipping ready to use hardware units with pre-baked Amibian.js installed is perfect for schools, libraries, museums, routers and various kiosk projects.

Amibian.js, here running Quake 3 at 60 fps in your browser

Note: This project started years before FriendOS, so we are not a clone of their work.

Obviously this is a large task for one person, but I have written the whole system in Smart Mobile Studio, which is a product our company started some 7 years ago, and that now has a team of six people behind it. In short it takes object pascal code such as Delphi and Freepascal, and compiles this to JavaScript. Suitable for both the browser and NodeJS. It gives you a full IDE with form designer, drag & drop visual components and a wast and rich RTL (run-time library) which naturally saves me a lot of time. So this gives me an edge over other companies working with similar technology. So while it’s a huge task, it’s leveraged considerably by the toolchain I made for it.

So am I making a native OS for ARM or x86? The short answer: I will if the situation havent dramatically improved by the time Amibian.js is finished.

Instead of wasting years trying to implement everything from scratch, Pascal Papara took the Linux kernel and ran with it. So Aeros boots by virtue of the Linux Kernel, but jumps straight into Aros once the drivers has loaded

If you are thinking “so what, who the hell do you think you are?” then perhaps you should take a closer look at my work and history.

I am an ex Quartex member, which was one of the most infamous hacking cartels in europe. I have 30 years of software development behind me, having worked as a professional developer since the age of 17. I have a history of taking on “impossible” projects and finding ways to deliver them. Smart Mobile Studio itself was deemed impossible by most Delphi developers; It was close to heresy, triggering an avalanche of criticism for even entertaining the idea that object pascal could be compiled to JavaScript. Let alone thrive on JSVM (JavaScript Virtual Machine).

Amibian.js runs javascript, but also bytecodes. Here showing the assembler prototype

You can imagine the uproar when our generated JavaScript code (compiled from object pascal) actually bested native code. I must admit we didn’t expect that at all, but it changed the way Delphi and object pascal developers looked at the world – for the better I might add.

What I am good at, is taking ordinary off the shelves parts and assembling them in new and exciting ways. Often ways the original authors never intended; in order to produce something unique. My faith is not in myself, but in the ability and innate capacity of human beings to find solutions. The biggest obstacle to progress is ultimately pride and fear of losing face. Something my Buddhist training beat our of me ages ago.

So this is not an ego trip, it’s simply a coder that is completely fed-up with the perpetual mismanagement that has held Amiga OS in captivity for two decades.

Amiga OS is a formula, and formulas are bulletproof

People love different aspects of the same thing – and the Amiga is no different. For some the Amiga is the games. Others love it for its excellent sound capabilities, while some love it for the ease of coding (the 68k is the most friendly cpu ever invented in my book). And perhaps all of us love the Amiga for the memories we have. A harmless yet valuable nostalgia of better times.

Amiga OS 3.1 pimped up, running on Amibian [native] Raspberry PI 3b

But for me the love was always the OS itself. The architecture of Amiga OS is so elegant and dare I say, pure, compared to other systems. And I’m comparing against both legacy and contemporary systems here. Microsoft Windows (WinAPI) comes close, but the sheer brilliance of Amiga OS is yet to be rivaled.

We are talking about a design that delivers a multimedia driven, window based desktop 10 years before the competition. A desktop that would thrive in as little as 512 kb of ram, with fast and reliable pre-emptive multitasking.

I don’t think people realize or understand the true value of Amiga OS. It’s not in the games (although games is definitively a huge part of the experience), the hardware or the programs. The reason people have been fighting bitterly over Amiga OS for a lifetime, is because the operating system architecture or “formula” is unmatched to this very day.

Can you imagine what a system that thrives under 512 KB would do to the desktop market? Or even better, what it could bring to the table for embedded and server technology?

And this is where my frustration soars up. Even though we have OS 4.1, we have been forced to idly stand by and watch, as mistake after mistake is being made. opportunities that are ripe for the taking (some of them literally placed on the doorstep of Hyperion), have been thrown by the wayside time and time again.

And they are not alone. Aros and Morphos has likewise missed a lot of opportunities. Both opportunities to generate income and secure development as well as embracing new technology. Although I must stress that I sympatize with Aros since they lack any official funding. Morphos is doing much better using a normal, commerical license.

Frustration, the mother of invention

When the Raspberry PI was first released I jumped of joy. Finally a SBC (single board computer) with enough power to run a light version of Amiga OS 4.1, with a price tag that everyone can live with. I rushed over to Hyperion to see if they had issued a statement about the PI, but nothing could be found. The AEON site was likewise empty.

The PI version 2 came and went, still no sign that Hyperion would capitalize on the situation. I expected them to issue a “Amiga OS 4.1 light” edition for ARM, which would put them on the map and help them establish a user base. Without a user base and fresh blood there is no chance in hell of selling next generation machines in large enough quantities to justify future development. But once again, opportunity after oppertunity came and went.

Sexy, fast and modern: Amiga OS 4.1 would do wonders on ARM

Faster and better suited SBC’s started to turn up in droves: The ODroid, Beaglebone black, The Tinkerboard, The Banana PI – and many, many others. When the SnapDragon IV CPU’s shipped on a $120 SBC, which is the same processor used by Samsung Galaxy 6S, I was sure Hyperion would wake up and bring Amiga OS to the masses. But not a word.

Instead we were told to wait for the Amiga x5000 which is based on PPC. I have no problem with PPC, it’s a great platform and packs a serious punch. But since PPC no longer sell to mainstream computer companies like it used to, the price penalty would be nothing short of astronomical. There is also the question of longevity and being able to maintain a PPC based system for the forseeable future. Where exactly is PPC in 15 years?

Note: One of the reasons PPC was selected has to do with coding infrastructure. PPC has an established standard, something ARM lacked at the time (this was first established for ARM in 2014). PPC also has an established set of development platforms that you can build on, with libraries and pre-fab modules (pre fabricated modules, think components that you can use to quickly build what you need) that have been polished for two decades now. A developer who knows PPC from the Amiga days will naturally feel more at home with PPC. But sadly PPC is the past and modern development takes place almost exclusively on ARM and x86. Even x86 is said to have an expiration date now.

The only group that genuinely tried to bring Amiga OS to ARM has been the Aros team. They got their system compiled, implemented some rudimentary drivers (information on this has been thin to say the least) and had it booting natively on the Raspberry PI 3b. Sadly they lacked a USB stack (remember I mentioned pre-fab modules above? Well, this is a typical example. PPC devtools ship with modules like this out of the box) so things like mouse, keyboard and external peripherals wouldn’t work.

Aeros, the fastest Amiga you will ever play with. Running on the Raspberry PI 3b

And like always, which is the curse of Amiga, “something came up”, and the whole Raspberry PI / ARM initiative was left for dead. The details around this is sketchy, but the lead developer had a personal issue that forced him to set a new direction in life. And for some reason the other Aros developers have just continued with x86, even though a polished ARM version could have made them some money, and helped finance future development. It’s the same story, again and again.

But then something amazing happened! Out of the blue came Pascal Papara with a new take on Aros, namely AEROS. This is a distro after my own heart. Instead of wasting years trying to implement everything from scratch, Pascal took the Linux kernel and ran with it. So Aeros boots by virtue of the Linux Kernel, but jumps straight into Aros once the drivers has loaded. And the result? It is the fastest desktop you will ever experience on ARM. Seriously, it runs so fast and smooth on the Raspberry PI that you could easily mistake it for a $450 Intel i3.

Sadly Pascal has been more or less alone about this development. And truth be told he has molded it to suit his own needs rather than the consumer. Since his work includes a game machine and some Linux services, the whole Linux system is exposed to the Aros desktop. This is a huge mistake.

Using the Linux kernel to capitalize on the thousands of man hours invested in that, not to mention the linux driver database which is massive, is a great idea. It’s also the first thing that came into my mind when contemplating the issue.

But when running Aros on top of this, the Linux aspect of the system should be abstracted away. Much like what Apple did with Unix. You should hardly notice that Linux is there unless you open a shell and start to investigate. The Amiga filesystem should be the only filesystem you see when accessing things from the desktop, and a nice preferences option for showing / hiding mounted Linux drives.

My plans for an ARM based Amiga inspired OS

Building an OS is not a task for the faint of heart. Yes there is a lot of embedded / pre-fab based systems to pick from out there, but you also have to be sensible. You are not going to code a better kernel than Linus Torvalds, so instead of wasting years trying to catch up with something you cannot possibly catch up with – just grab the kernel and make it work for us.

The Linux kernel solves things such as process contexts, “userland” vs “kernel space” (giving the kernel the power to kill a task and reclaim resources), multitasking / threading, thread priorities, critical sections, mutexes and global event objects; it gives us IPC (inter process communication), disk IO, established and rock solid sound and graphics frameworks; and last but perhaps most important: free access to the millions of drivers in the Linux repository.

Early Amibian.js login dialog

You would have to be certified insane to ignore the Linux Kernel, thinking you will somehow be the guy (or group) that can teach Linus Torvalds a lesson. This is a man who has been writing kernel’s for 20+ years, and he does nothing else. He is surrounded by a proverbial army of developers that code, test, refactor and strive to deliver optimal performance, safety and quality assurance. So sorry if I push your buttons here, but you would be a moron to take him on. Instead, absorb the kernel and gain access to the benefits it has given Linux (technically the kernel is “Linux”, the rest is GNU – but you get what I mean).

With the Linux kernel as a foundation, as much as 50% of the work involved in writing our OS is finished already. You don’t have to invent a driver API. You dont have to invent a new executable format (or write your own ELF parser if you stick with the Linux executable). You can use established compilers like GCC / Clang and Freepascal. And you can even cherry pick some low-level packages for your own native API (like SDL, OpenGL and things that would take years to finish).

But while we want to build our house on rock, we don’t want it to be yet another Linux distro. So with the kernel in place and a significant part of our work done for us, that is also where the similarities end.

The end product is Amiga OS, which means that we need compatibility with the original Amiga rom libraries (read: api). Had we started from scratch that would have been a tremendous effort, which is also why Aros is so important. Because Aros gives us a blueprint of how they have implemented these API’s.

But our main source of inspiration is not Aros, but Amithlon. What we want to do is naturally to pipe as much as we can from the Amiga API’s back to the Linux kernel. Things like device detection, memory allocation, file IO, pipes, networking — our library files will be more thin wrappers that expose Amiga compatible calls; methods that calls the Linux Kernel to do the job. So our Amiga library files will be proxy objects whenever possible.

Amithlon, decades ahead of it’s time

The hard work is when we get to the window manager, or Intuition. Here we can’t cheat by pushing things back to Linux. We don’t want to install X either (although we can render our system into the X framebuffer if we like), so we have to code a window manager. This is not as simple as it sounds, because our system must operate with multiple cores, be multi threaded by design and tap into the grand scheme of things. Things like messages (which is used by applications to respond to input) must be established, and all the event codes from the original Amiga OS must be replicated.

So this work wont be easy, but with the Linux kernel as a foundation – the hardest task of all is taken care of. The magic of a kernel is that of process management and task switching. This is about as hard-core as you can get. Without that you can almost forget the rest. But since we base our system on the Linux kernel, we can focus 100% on the real task – namely to deliver a modern Amiga experience, one that is platform independent (read: conforms to standard Linux and can thus be recompiled and run anywhere Linux can run), preserves as much of the initial formula as possible – and can be successfully maintained far into the future.

By pushing as much of our work as possible into user-space (the process space where ordinary programs run, the kernel runs outside this space and is thus unaffected when a program crashes) and adhering to the Linux kernel beneath the bonnet, we have created a system that can be re-compiled anywhere Linux is. And it can be done so without any change to our codebase. Linux takes care of things like drivers, OpenGL, Sound — and presents to us a clean API that is identical on every platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s ARM, PPC, 68k, x86 or MIPS. As long as we follow the standards we are home free.

Last words

I hope all of this clears up the confusion that has surrounded the subject this week. Again, the misunderstanding that led to some unfortunate posts has been resolved. So there is no negativity, no drama and we are all on the same page.

Early Amibian.js prototype, running 68k in the browser via uae.js optimized

Just remember that I have set some restrictions for my involvement here. I sincerely hope Hyperion and the Aros development group can focus on ARM, because the community needs this. While the Raspberry PI might seem too small a form-factor to run Aros, projects like Aeros have proven just how effective the Amiga formula is. I’m sure Hyperion could find a powerful ARM SOC in the price range of $120 and sell a complete package with profit for around $200.

What the Amiga community needs now, is not expensive hardware. The userbase has to be expanded horizontally across platforms. Amiga OS / Aros has much to offer the embedded market which today is dominated by overly complex Linux libraries. The Amiga can grow laterally as a more user-friendly alternative, much like Android did for the mobile market. Once the platform is growing and established – then custom hardware could be introduced. But right now that is not what we need.

I also hope that the Aros team drops whatever they are working on, fork Pascal Paparas codebase, and spend a few weeks polishing the system. Abstract away the Linux foundation like Apple have done, get those sexy 32 bit OS4 icons (Note: The icons used by Amiga OS 4 is available for free download from the designer’s website) and a nice theme that looks similar to OS 4 (but not too similar). Get Lazarus (the freepascal IDE) going and ship the system with a ready to use Pascal, C/C++ and Basic development environments. Bring back the fun in computing! The code is already there, use it!

Aeros interfaces directly with linux, I would propose a less direct approach

Just take something simple, like a compatible browser. It’s actually not that simple, both for reasons of complexity and how memory is handled by PPC. With a Linux foundation things like Chromium Embedded could be inked into the Amiga side of things and we would have a native, fast, established and up-to-date browser.

At the same time, since we have API level compatability, people can recompile their Aros and Morphos applications and they would run more or less unchanged.

I really hope that my little protest here, if nothing else, helps people realize that there are viable options readily at hand. Commodore is not coming back, and the only future this platform has – is the one we make. So people have to ask themselves how much they want a future.

If the OS gains momentum then there will be grounds for investors to look at custom hardware. They can then choose off the shelves parts that are inexpensive to cover the normal functionality you expect in a modern computer – which more resources can go into custom hardware that sets the system apart. But we cant start there. It has to be built up brick by brich, standing on the shoulders of giants.

OK, rant over 🙂

PNG icons on Amiga OS 3.X

A couple of days back I posted a couple of pictures of my Raspberry PI 3b based Amiga setup. This caused quite a stir on several groups and people were unsure what exactly I was posting. Is this Amiga OS 4? Is it Aros? Scalos? Or perhaps just a pimped up classic Amiga 3.x?

The more the questions arose the more I realized that a lot of people dont really know what the PI can do. I dont blame them, between work, kids and mending a broken back it probably took me a year before I even entertained the idea of setting up a proper UAE environment. And as luck would have it, two good friends of mine Gunnar kristjánsson and Thomas Navarro Garcia, had already done the worst part: namely to produce a Linux distro that auto-boots into Workbench (or technically, into a full screen UAE environment).

Taking advantage of speed

Purists might not be happy about it, but the PI delivers some serious processing power when it comes to Amiga emulation. The version of UAE Thomas and Gunnar opted for is UAE4Arm, which is a special version that contains a hand-optimized JIT engine. This takes 68k code and generates ARM machine code “on the fly” and is thus able to run Amiga software much faster than traditional UAE variations like fs-uae.

But what should we do with all that extra speed? I mean, there is a limited number of tasks that benefits from the extra processing power of the PI (or an acellerator for that matter). Well, being a programmer the process of compilation is one aspect I really love the extra grunt. When using modern compilers like freepascal 3.x on a classic 68k amiga, there is no denying we need all the cpu power we can get. So compiling on the PI is a great boost over ordinary, real Amiga machines.

Freepascal is great, although the old “turbo” ide is due for an overhaul

The second aspects is the infrastructure. And this is where we get to the pimping part. By default Workbench is optimized for low-color representation. Meaning that icons and backdrops will be 4-8 colors, fixed palette and fairly useless by modern standards. Since UAE4Arm has built in support for RTG (re-targetable graphics), which means 15, 16, 24 and 32 bit screen-modes (the same as any modern PC) then surely we can remedy the visuals right?

Well, I had a google around and found that there is an icon library that supports the latest png based icons. These are icons that contain 32bit graphics with support for alpha blending (transparency). This is the exact same icon system that is used in Amiga OS 4.

So what I did was download  the versionb 46.x icon library from Aminet. Since the PI emulates (in my config) a mc68040 cpu, i was able to use the 040 optimized binary. And in essence i just copied that into my “libs” folder (and removed the old one first just to be sure).

And voila, my Workbench was now able to show 32 bit png icons just like OS 4 is!

Getting some bling

With OS 4 style icons supported, where do I get some icons to play with? Well, again I went on Aminet and downloaded a ton of large icon packs. I also visited OS4Depot and downloaded some cool background pictures and even more icons.

Then it was the time consuming process or manually replacing the *.info files. All files that you can see via Workbench has an associated .info file with the same name. So if you have a program called “myprogram”, then the icon file will be “myprogram.info”.

And that’s basically it! I spent a saturday replacing icons and doing some mild tweaking in VisualPrefs (again on Aminet), and suddenly my old, grey workbench was alive with radient colors.

I love it! It might not be perfect but i have seen Linux distros that looks worse!

What I find amazing is that even after 30 years the old Amiga OS 3.x can still suprise us! If nothing else it’s a testament to the flexible architecture the guys at Commodore knocked out, an architecture that thrives in extremely low memory situations – yet delivers in spades if you give it more to work with.

Doing some modern chores

One of the first things I installed on my PI was a copy of freepascal. This has been updated to version 3.1, which is just one revision behind the compiler used on Windows and OSX. This is a bit too nifty for standard Amiga machines. You need at least an A1200 with 64 megabyte ram to work with it. Although the size of the binaries is reasonable small if you stay clear of the somewhat bloated LCL framework.

So I was able to use my object pascal skills to create a unzip/zip command-line program in 15 minutes. Doing this on my Amibian box felt great, and I really enjoy the fresh new look of Workbench. In a perfect work OS4 would be 68k and the CPU’s would all be fpga’s that ran close to Intel i7 speeds, but alas – a humble PI will have to do for now.

Amibian

If you want to re-create my experiment then start by downloading Amibian. This is a clean Linux Distro and doesnt contain workbench. So after you have made an sd-card with Amibian you need to copy over workbench. I suggest you copy over the raw files and mount a linux folder as a drive. Using harddisk images is possible, but I dont trust them. And should an error occur you lose everything. So yeah, stick with folder-mounted drives if you want less frustration.

You can visit Amibian here: https://gunkrist79.wixsite.com/amibian

Why buy a Vampire accelerator?

With the Amiga about to re-enter the consumer market, a lot of us “old timers” are busy knocking dust of our old machines. And I love my old machines even though they are technically useless by modern standards. But these machines have a lot of inspiration in them, especially if you write code. And yes there is a fair bit of nostalgia involved in this, there is no point in lying about any of this.

I mean, your mobile phone is probably 100 times faster than a vintage Amiga. But like you will discover with the new machines that are about to hit the market, there is more to this computer than you think. But vintage Amiga? Sadly they lack the power to anything useful [in the “modern” sense].

Enter the vampire

The Vampire is a product that started shipping about a year ago. It’s a FPGA based accelerator, and it’s quite frankly turning the retro scene on its head! Technically it’s a board that you just latch onto the CPU socket of your classical Amiga; it then takes over the whole machine and replace the CPU and chipset with its versions of these. Versions that are naturally a hell of a lot faster!

The result is that the good old Amiga is suddenly beefy enough to play Doom, Quake, MP3 files and MPG video (click here to read the datasheet). In short: this little board gives your old Amiga machine a jolt of new life.

Emulation vs. FPGA

Im not going to get into the argument about FPGA not being “real”, because that’s not what FPGA is about. Nor am I negative to classical hardware – because I own a ton of old Amiga gear myself. But I will get in your face when it comes to buying a Vampire.

Before we continue I just want to mention that there are two models of the vampire. There is the add-on board I have just mentioned which is again divided into different models for various Amiga versions (A600, A500 so far). The second model is a completely stand-alone vampire motherboard that wont even need a classic Amiga to work. It will be, for all means and purposes, a stand alone SBC (single board computer) that you just hook up power, video, storage and mouse – and off you go!

This latter version, the stand-alone, is a project I firmly believe in. The old boards have been out of production since 1993 and are getting harder to come by. And just like people they will eventually break down and stop working. There is also price to consider because getting your 20-year-old A500 fixed is not easy. First of all you need a specialist that knows how to fix these old things, and he will also need parts to work with. Since parts are no longer in production and homebrew can only go so far, well – a brand new motherboard that is compatible in every way sounds like a good idea.

There is also the fact that FPGA can reach absurd speeds. It has been mentioned that if the Vampire used a more expensive FPGA modules, 68k based Amiga’s could compete with modern processors (Source: https://www.generationamiga.com/2017/08/06/arria-10-based-vampire-could-reach-600mhz/). Can you imagine a 68k Amiga running side by side with the latest Intel processors? Sounds like a lot of fun if you ask me !

Amiga 1000, in my view the best looking Amiga ever produced

But then there is emulation. Proper emulation, which for Amiga users can only mean one thing: UAE in all its magnificent diversity and incarnations.

Nothing beats firing up a real Amiga, but you know what? It has been greatly exaggerated. I recently bought a sexy A1000 which is the first model that was ever made. This is the original Amiga, made way back before Commodore started to mess around with it. It cost me a small fortune to get – but hey, it was my first ever Amiga so I wanted to own one again.

But does it feel better than my Raspberry PI 3b powered A500? Nope. In fact I have only fired up the A1000 twice since I bought it, because having to wait for disks to load is just tedious (not to mention that you can’t get new, working floppy disks anymore). Seriously. I Love the machine to bits but it’s just damn tedious to work on in 2017. It belongs to the 80s and no-one can ever take away its glory or it’s role in computer history. That achievement stands forever.

High Quality Emulation

If you have followed my blog and Amiga escapades, you know that my PI 3b based Amiga, overclocked to the hilt, yields roughly 3.2 times the speed of an Amiga 4000/040. This was at one point the flagship Commodore computer. The Amiga 4000’s were used in movie production, music production, 3d rendering and heavy-duty computing all over the world. And the 35€ Raspberry PI gives you 3.2 times the power via the UAE4Arm emulator. I don’t care what the vampire does, the PI will give it the beating of its life.

My retrofitted Raspberry PI 3b Amiga. Serious emulation at high speed allowing for software development and even the latest Freepascal 3.x compiler

Then suddenly, out of the blue, Asus comes along with the Tinkerboard. A board that I hated when it first came out (read part-1 here, part-2 here) due to its shabby drivers. The boards have been collecting dust on my office shelf for six months or so – and it was blind luck that i downloaded and tested a new disk image. If you missed that part you can read the full article here.

And I’m glad I did because man – the Tinkerboard makes the Raspberry PI 3b look like a toy! Asus has also adjusted the price lately. It was initially priced at 75€, but in Norway right now it retails for about 620 NKR – or 62€. So yes, it’s about twice the price of the PI – but it also gives you twice the memory, twice the graphics performance, twice the IO performance and a CPU that is a pleasure to work with.

The Raspberry PI 3b can’t be overclocked to the extent the model 1 and 2 could. You can over-volt it and tweak the GPU and memory and make it run faster. But people don’t call that “overclock” in the true sense of the word, because that means the CPU is set to run at speeds beyond the manufacturing specifications. So with the PI 3b there is relatively little you can do to make it run faster. You can speed it up a little bit, but that’s it. The Tinkerboard can be overclocked to the hilt.

The A1222 motherboard is just around the corner [conceptual art]

Out of the box it runs at 1.5 Ghz, but if you add a heatsink, fan (important) and a 3A PSU – you can overclock it to 2.6 Ghz. And like the PI you can also tweak memory and gpu. So the Tinkerboard will happily run 3 times faster than the PI. If you add a USB3 harddisk you will also beef up IO speeds by 100 megabyte a second – which makes a huge difference. Linux does memory paging and it slows down everything if you just use the SD card.

In short: if you fork out 70€ you get a SBC that runs rings around both the vampire and the Raspberry PI 3b. If we take height for some Linux services and drivers that have to run in the background, 3.2 x 3 = 9.6. Lets round that off to 9 since there will be performance hits by the background services. But still — 70€ for an Amiga that runs 9 times faster than A4000 @ MC68040 cpu ? That should blow your mind!

I’m sorry but there has to be something wrong with you if that doesn’t get your juices flowing. I rarely game on my classic Amiga setup. I’m a coder – but with this kind of firepower you can run some of the biggest and best Amiga titles ever made – and the Tinkerboard wont even break a sweat!

You can’t afford to be a fundamentalist

There are some real nutbags in the Amiga community. I think we all agree that having the real deal is a great experience, but the prices we see these days are borderline insane. I had to fork out around 500€  to get my A1000 shipped from Belgium to Norway. Had tax been added on the original price, I would have looked at something in the 700€ range. Still – 500€ for a 20-year-old computer that can hardly run Workbench 1.2? Unless you add the word “collector” here you are in fact barking mad!

If you are looking to get an Amiga for “old times sakes”, or perhaps you have an A500 and wonder if you should fork out for the Vampire? Will it be worth the 300€ pricetag? Unless you use your Amiga on a daily basis I can’t imagine what you need a vampire for. The stand-alone motherboard I can understand, that is a great idea – but the accelerator? 300€?

I mean you can pay 70€ and get the fastest Amiga that ever existed. Not a bit faster, not something on second place – no – THE FASTEST Amiga that has ever existed. If you think playing MP3 and MPG media files is cool with the vampire, then you are in for a treat here because the same software will work. You can safely download the latest patches and updates to various media players on the classic Amiga, and they will run just fine on UAE4Arm. But this time they will run a hell of a lot faster than the Vampire.

My old broken A500 turned into an ass-kicking, battle hardened ARM monster

You really can’t be a fundamentalist in 2017 when it comes to vintage computers. And why would you want to? With so much cool stuff happening in the scene, why would you want to limit your Amiga experience to a single model? Aros is doing awesome stuff these days, you have the x5000 out and the A1222 just around the corner. Morphos is stable and good on the G5 PPC — there has never been a time when there were so many options for Amiga enthusiasts! Not even during the golden days between 1989-1994 were there so many exciting developments.

I love the classic Amiga machines. I think the Vampire stand-alone model is fantastic and if they ramp up the fpga to a faster model, they have in fact re-created a viable computer platform. A 68080 fpga based CPU that can go head to head with x86? That is quite an achievement – and I support that whole heartedly.

But having to fork out this amount of cash just to enjoy a modern Amiga experience is a bit silly. You can actually right now go out and buy a $35 Raspberry PI and enjoy far better results than the Vampire is able to deliver. How that can be negative? I have no idea, nor will I ever understand that kind of thinking. How do any of these people expect the Amiga community to grow and get new, young members if the average price of a 20-year-old machine costs 500€? Which incidentally is 50€ more than a brand new A1222 PPC machine capable of running OS 4.

And with the Tinkerboard you can get 9 times the speed of an A4000? How can that not give you goosebumps!

People talk about Java and Virtual-Machines like its black magic. Well UAE gives you a virtual CPU and chipset that makes mince-meat of both Java and C#. It also comes with one of the largest software libraries in the world. I find it inconceivable that no-one sees the potential in that technology beyond game playing – but when you become violent or nasty over hardware, then I guess that explains quite a bit.

I say, use whatever you can to enjoy your Amiga. And if your perfect Amiga is a PI or a Tinkerboard (or ODroid) – who cares!

I for one will not put more money into legacy hardware. I’m happy that I have the A1000, but that’s where it stops for me. I am looking forward to the latest Amiga x5000 PPC and cant wait to get coding on that – but unless the Appollo crew upgrades to a faster FPGA I see little reason to buy anything. I would gladly pay 500 – 1000 € for something that can kick modern computers in the behind. And I imagine a lot of 68k users would be willing to do that as well. But right now PPC is a much better option since it gives you both 68k and the new OS 4 platform in one price. And for affordable Amiga computing, emulation is now of such quality that you wont really notice the difference.

And I love coding 68k assembler on my Amibian emulator setup. There is nothing quite like it 🙂

Where is PowerPC today?

Phase 5 PowerUP board prototype

Anyone who messed around with computers back in the 90s will remember PowerPC. This was the only real alternative for Intel’s complete dominance with the x86 CPU’s and believe me when I say the battle was fierce! Behind the PowerPC you had companies like IBM and Motorola, companies that both had (or have) an axe to grind with Intel. At the time the market was split in half – with Intel controlling the business PC segment – while Motorola and IBM represented the home computer market.

The moment we entered the 1990s it became clear that Intel and Microsoft was not going to stay on their side of the fence so to speak. For Motorola in particular this was a death match in the true sense of the word, because the loss of both Apple and Commodore represented billions in revenue.

What could you buy in 1993?

The early 90’s were bitter-sweet for both Commodore and Apple. Faster and affordable PC’s was already a reality and as a consequence – both Amiga machines and Mac’s were struggling to keep up.

The Amiga 1200 still represented a good buy. It had a massive library of software, both for entertainment and serious work. But it was never really suited for demanding office applications. It did wonders in video and multimedia development, and of course games and entertainment – but the jump in price between A1200 and A4000 became harder and harder to justify. You could get a well equipped Mac with professional tools at that range.

Apple on the other hand was never really an entertainment company. Their primary market was professional graphics, desktop publishing and music production (Photoshop, Pro-tools, Logic etc. were exclusive Mac products). When it came to expansions and ports they were more interested in connecting customers to industrial printers, midi devices and high-volume storage. Mac was always a machine for the upper class, people with money to burn; The Amiga dominated the middle-class. It was a family type computer.

But Apple was not a company in hiding, neither from Commodore or the Wintel threat. So in 1993 they introduced the Macintosh Quadra series to the consumer market. Unlike their other models this was aimed at home users and students, meaning that it was affordable, powerful and could be used for both homework and professional applications. It was a direct threat to upper middle-class that could afford the big box Amiga machines.

The 68k Macintosh Quadra came out in October of 1993

But no matter how brilliant these machines were, there was no hiding the fact that when it came to raw power – the PC was not taking any prisoners. It was graphically superior in every way and Intel started doubling the CPU speed exponentially year by year; Just like Moore’s law had predicted.

With the 486-DX2 looming on the horizon, it was game over for the old and faithful processors. The Motorola 68k family had been there since the late 70’s, it was practically an institution, but it was facing enemies on all fronts and simply could not stand in the way of evolution.

The PowerPC architecture

If you are in your 20’s you wont remember this, but back in the late 80’s early 90’s, the battle between computer vendors was indeed fierce. You have to take into consideration that Microsoft and Intel did a real number on IBM. Microsoft stabbed IBM in the back and launched Windows as a direct competitor for IBM’s OS2. When I write “stabbed in the back” I mean that literally because Microsoft was initially hired to create parts of OS/2. It was the typical lawsuit mess, not unlike Microsoft and Sun later, where people would pick sides and argue who the culprit really was.

As you can imagine IBM was both bitter and angry at Microsoft for stealing the home PC market in such a shameful way. They were supposed to help IBM and be their ally, but turned out to be their most fierce competitor. IBM had also created a situation where the PC was licensed to everyone (hence the term “ibm clone”) – meaning that any company could create parts for it and there was little IBM could do to control the market like they were used to. They would naturally get revenue from these companies in the form of royalties (and would later retire 99% of all their products. Why work when they get billions for doing nothing?), but at the time they were still in the game.

Motorola was in a bad situation themselves, with the 68k line of processors clearly incapable of facing the much faster x86 CPU’s. Something new had to be created to ensure their market share.

The result of this “marriage of necessity” was the PowerPC line of processors.

The Apple “Candy” Mac’s made PPC and computing sexy

Apple jumped on the idea. It was the only real alternative to x86. And you have to remember that – had Apple gone to x86 at that point, they would basically have fed the forces that wanted them dead. You could hardly make out where Microsoft started and Intel ended during the early 90s.

I’m going to spare you the whole fall and rebirth of Apple. Needless to say Apple came to the point where their branch of PowerPC processors caused more problems than they had benefits. The type of PowerPC processors Apple used generated an absurd amount of heat, and it was turning into a real problem. We see this in their later models, like the dual cpu G5 PowerMac where 40% of the cabinet is dedicated purely to cooling.

And yes, Commodore kicked the bucket back in 1994 so they never finished their new models. Which is a damn shame because unlike Apple they went with a dedicated RISC processor. These models did not suffer the heating problems the PPC’s used by Apple had to deal with.

Note: PPC and RISC are two sides of the same coin. PPC processors are RISC based, but naturally there exists hundreds of different implementations. To avoid a ton of arguments around this topic I treat PPC as something different from PA-RISC which Commodore was playing with in their Hombre “skunkworks” projects.

You can read all about Apple’s strain of PowePC processors here, and PA-RISC here.

PPC in modern computers?

I am going to be perfectly honest. When I heard that the new Amiga machines were based on PowerPC my reaction was less than polite. I mean who the hell would use PowerPC in our day and age? Surely Apple’s spectacular failure would stand as a warning for all time? I was flabbergasted to say the least.

The Amiga One came out and I didn’t even give it the time of day. The Sam440 motherboards came out, I couldn’t care less. It would have been nice to own one, but the price at the time and the lack of software was just to disproportionate to make sense.

And now there is the Amiga x5000 and a smaller, more affordable A1222 (a.k.a “Tabour”) model just around the corner. And they are both equipped with a PPC CPU. There are just two logical conclusions you can make when faced with this: either the maker of these products is nuttier than a snicker’s bar, or there is something the general public doesn’t know.

What the general public doesn’t know has turned out to be quite a lot. While you would think PPC was dead and buried, the reality of PPC is not that simple. Turns out there is not just one PPC family (or branch) but several. The one that Apple used back in the day (and that MorphOS for some odd reason support) represents just one branch of the PPC tree if you like. I had no idea this was the case.

The first thing you are going to notice is that the CPU in the new Amiga’s doesn’t have the absurd cooling problems the old Mac’s suffered. There are no 20cm cooling ribs and you don’t need 2 fans on Ritalin to prevent a cpu meltdown; and you also don’t need a custom aluminium case to keep it cool (everyone thinks the “Mac Pro” cases were just to make them look cool. Turned out it was more literal, it was to turn the inside into a fridge).

In other words, the branch of PPC that we have known so far, the one marketed as “PowerPC” by Apple, Phase5 and everyone back in the 90’s is indeed dead and buried. But that was just one branch, one implementation of what is known as PPC.

Remember when ARM died?

When I started to dig into the whole PPC topic I could not help but think about the Arm processor. It’s almost spooky to reflect on how much we, the consumer, blindly accept as fact. Just think about it: You were told that PowerPC was the bomb, so you ended up buying that. Then you were told that PowerPC was crap and that x86 was the bomb, so you mentally buried PowerPC and bought x86 instead. The consumer market is the proverbial cheep farm where most of us just blindly accept whatever advertising tell us.

This was also the case with Arm. Remember a company called Acorn? It was a great british company that invented, among other things, the Arm core. I remember reading articles about Acorn when I was a kid. I even sold my Amiga for a while and messed around with an Acorn Archimedes. A momentary lapse of sanity, I know; I quickly got rid of it and bought back my Amiga. But I did learn a lot from messing around in RISC OS.

The Acorn Archimedes, a brilliant RISC based machine that sadly didnt make it

My point is, everyone was told that Arm was dead back in the 80’s. The Acorn computers used a pure RISC processor at the time (again, PPC is a RISC based CPU but I treat them as separate since the designs are miles apart), but it was no secret that they were hoping to equip their future Acorn machines with this new and magic Arm thing. And reading about the power and speed of Arm was very exciting indeed. Sadly such a computer never saw the light of day back in the 80’s. Acorn went bust and the market rolled over Acorn much like it would Commodore later.

The point im trying to make is that, everyone was told that Arm died with Acorn. And once that idea was planted in the general public, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Arm was dead. End of story. It doesn’t matter that Acorn had set up a separate company that was unaffected by the bankrupcy. Once the public deem something as dead, it just vanish from the face of the earth.

Fast forward to our time and Arm is no longer dead, quite the opposite! It’s presently eating its way into just about every piece of electronics you can think of. In many ways Arm is what made the IOT revolution possible. The whole Raspberry PI phenomenon would quite frankly never have happened without Arm. The low price coupled with the fantastic performance -not to mention that these cpu’s rarely need cooling (unless you overclock the hell out of them) has made Arm the most successful CPU ever made.

The PPC market share

With Arm’s so-called death and re-birth in mind, let’s turn our eyes to PPC and look at where it is today. PPC has suffered pretty much the same fate as Arm once did. Once a branch of the tech is defined “dead” by media and spin-doctors, regardless if the PPC is actually a cluster of designs not a single design or “chip”, the general public blindly follows – and mentally bury the whole subject.

And yes I admit it, I am guilty of this myself. In my mind there was no distinction between PPC and PowerPC. Which is a bit like not knowing the difference between Rock & Roll as a genre, and KISS the rock band. If we look at this through a parallel what we have done is basically to ban all rock bands, regardless of where they are from, because one band once gave a lousy concert.

And that is where we are at. PPC has become invisible in the consumer market, even though it’s there. Which is understandable considering the commercial mechanisms at work here, but is really PPC dead? This should be a simple question. And commercial mechanisms not withstanding the answer is a solid NO. PPC is not dead at all. We have just parked it in a mental limbo. Out of sight, out of mind and all that.

Playstation 3, Nintendo WII U and Playstation VR all use Freescale PPC

PPC today has a strong foothold in industrial computing. The oil sector is one market that use PPC SBC’s extensively (read: single board computers). You will find them in valve controllers, pump and drill systems and pretty much any systems that require a high degree of reliability.

You will also be surprised to learn that cheap PPC SBC’s enjoy the same low energy requirements people adopt Arm over (3.3 – 5.0 V). And naturally, the more powerful the chip – the more juice it needs.

The reason that PPC is popular and still being used with great success is first of all reliability. This reliability is not just physical hardware but also software. PPC gives you two RTOS’s (real-time operating system) to choose from. Each of them comes with a software development toolchain that rivals whatever Visual Studio has to offer. So you get a good-looking IDE, a modern and up to date compiler, the ability to debug “live” on the boards – and also real-time signal processing protocols. The list of software modules you can pick from is massive.

QNX RTOS desktop, This is a module you can embed in your own products

The last part of that paragraph, namely real-time signal processing, is extremely important. Can you imagine having an oil valve with 40.000 cubic tons of pressure failing, but the regulator that is supposed to compensate doesn’t get the signal because Linux or Windows was busy with something else? It get’s pretty nutty at that level.

The second market can be found with set-top boxes, game consoles and tv signal decoders. While this market is no doubt under attack from cheap Arm devices – PPC still has a solid grip here due to their reliability. PPC as an embedded platform has roughly two decades head start over Arm when it comes to software development. That is a lifetime in computing terms.

When developers look at technology for a product they are prototyping, the hardware is just one part of the equation. Being able to easily write software for the platform, perform live debugging of code on the boards, and maintain products over decades rather than consumer based 1-3 year warranties; it’s just a completely different ballgame. Technology like external satellite-dish parts runs for decades without maintenance. And there are good reasons why you dont see x86 or Arm here.

Playstattion 3 and the new PSX VR box both have a Freescale PPC cpu

As mentioned earlier, the PPC branch used today is not the same branch that people remember. I cannot stress this enough, because mixing these is like mistaking Intel for AMD. They may have many of the same features but ultimately they are completely different architectures.

The “PowerPC” label we know from back in the day was used to promote the branch that Apple used. Amiga accelerators also used that line of processors for their PowerUP boards. And anyone who ever stuffed a PowerUP board in their A1200 probably remember the cooling issues. I bought one of the more affordable PowerUP boards for my A1200, and to this day I associate the whole episode as a fiasco. It was haunted by instability, sudden crashes and IO problems – all of it connected to overheating.

But PPC today as delivered by Freescale Semiconductors (bought by NXP back in 2015) are different. They don’t suffer the heat problem of their remote and extinct cousins, have low power requirements and are incredibly reliable. Not to mention leagues more powerful than anything Apple, Phase 5 or Commodore ever got their hands on.

Is Freescale for the Amiga a total blunder?

Had you asked me a few days back chances are I would said yes. I have known for a while that Freescale was used in the oil sector, but I did not take into consideration the strength of the development tools and the important role an RTOS system holds in a critical production environment.

I must also admit that I had no idea that my Playstation and Nintendo consoles were PPC based. Playstation 4 doesn’t use PPC on its motherboard, but if you buy the fantastic and sexy VR add-on package, you get a second module that is again – a PPC based product.

It also turns out that IBM’s high-end mainframes, those Amazon and Microsoft use to build the bedrock for cloud computing are likewise PPC based. So once again we see that PPC is indeed there and it’s playing an important role in our lives – but most people don’t see it. So all of this is a matter of perspective.

The Nintendo WII U uses a Freescale PPC cpu, not exactly a below-par gaming system

But the Amiga x5000 or A1222 will not be controlling a high-pressure valve or serving half a million users (hopefully); so does this affect the consumer at all? Does any of this hold any value to you or me? What on earth would real-time feedback mean for a hobby user that just want to play some games, watch a movie or code demos?

The answer is: it could have a profound benefit, but it needs to be developed and evolved first.

Musicians could benefit greatly from the superior signal processing features, but as of writing I have yet to find any mention of this in the Amiga NG SDK. So while the potential is there I doubt we will see it before the Amiga has sold in enough volume.

Fast and reliable signal dispatching in the architecture will also have a profound effect on IPC (inter process communication), allowing separate processes to talk with each other faster and more reliably than say, windows or Linux. Programmers typically use a mutex or a critical-section to protect memory while it’s being delivered to another process (note: painting in broad strokes here), this is a very costly mechanism under Windows and Linux. For instance, the reason UAE is still single threaded is because isolating the custom chips in separate threads and having them talk – turned out to be too slow. If PPC is able to deal with that faster, it also means that processes would communicate faster and more interesting software can be made. Even practical things like a web-server would greatly benefit from real-time message dispatching.

There is no lack of vendors for PPC SBC’s online, here from Abaco Systems

So for us consumers, it all boils down to volume. The Freescale branch of PPC processors is not dead and will be around for years to come; they are sold by the millions every year to great variety of businesses; and while most of them operate outside the traditional consumer awareness, it does have a positive effect on pricing. The more a processor is sold the cheaper it becomes.

Most people feel that the Amiga x5000 is to expensive for a home computer and they blame that on the CPU. Forgetting that 50% of the sub total goes into making the motherboard and all the parts around the CPU. The CPU alone does not represent the price of a whole new platform. And that’s just the hardware! On top of this you have the job of re-writing a whole operating system from scratch, add features that have evolved between 1994 and 2017, and make it all sing together through custom written drivers.

So it’s not your average programming project to say the least.

But is it really too expensive? Perhaps. I bought an iMac 2 years back that was supposed to be my work machine. I work as a developer and use VMWare for almost all my coding. Turned out the i5 based beauty just didn’t have the ram. And fitting it with more ram (it came with 16 gigabytes, I need at least 32) would cost a lot more than a low-end PC. The sad part is that had I gone for a PC I could have treated myself to an i7 with 32 gigabyte ram for the same price.

I later bit the bullet and bought a 3500€ Intel i7 monster with 64 gigabytes of ram and the latest Nvidia graphics card. Let’s just say that the Amiga x5000 is reasonable in context with this. I basically have an iMac i have no use for, it just sits there collecting dust and is reduced to a music player.

Secondly we have to look at potential. The Mac and Windows machines now have their potential completely exposed. We know what these machines do and it’s not going to change any time soon.

The Amiga has a lot of hidden potential that has yet to be realized. The signal processing is just one of them. The most interesting is by far the Xena chip (XMOS) that allow developers to implement custom hardware in software. It might sound like FPGA but XMOS is a different technology. Here you write code using a custom C compiler that generates a special brand of opcodes. Your code is loaded onto a part of the chip (the chip is divided into X number of squares, each representing a piece of logic, or “custom chip” if you like) and will then act as a custom-chip.

The Amiga x5000 in all her glory, notice the moderate cooling for the CPU

The XENA technology could really do wonders for the Amiga. Instead of relying on traditional library files that are executed by the main CPU, things like video decoding, graphical effecs, auxiliary 3D functionality and even emulation (!) can now be dealt-with by XENA and executed in parallel with the main CPU.

If anything is going to make or break the Amiga, it wont be the Freescale PPC processor – it will be the XENA chip and how they use it to benefit the consumer.

Just imagine running UAE almost solely on the XENA chip, emulating 68k applications at near native speed – without using the main CPU at all? Sounds pretty good! And this is a feature you wont find on a PC motherboard. Like always they will add it should it become popular, but right now it’s not even on the radar.

So I for one do believe that the next generation Amiga machines have a shot. The A1222 is probably going to be the defining factor. It will retail at an affordable price (around 450€) and will no doubt go head-to-head with both consoles and mid-range PC’s.

So like always it’s about volume, timing and infrastructure. Everything but the actual processor to be honest.

Last words

Its been a valuable experience to look around and read up on PPC. When I started my little investigation I had a dark picture in my head where the new Amiga machines were just a waste of time. I am happy to say that this is not true and the Freescale processors are indeed alive and kicking.

It was also interesting to see how widespread PPC technology really is. It’s not just a specialist platform, although that is absolutely where it’s strength is financially; it ships in everything from your home router to your tv-signal decoder or game system. So it does have a foot in the consumer market, but like I have outlined here – most consumers have parked it in a blind-spot and we associate the word “PowerPC” with the fiasco of Apple in the past. Which is a bit sad because it’s neither true or fair.

Amiga OS 4.x is turning out to be a very capable system

I have no problem seeing a future where the Amiga becomes a viable commercial product again. I think there is some way to go before that happens, and the spear-head is going to be the A1222 or a similar product.

But like I have underlined again and again – it all boils down to developers. A platform is only as good as the software you can run on it, and Hyperion should really throw themselves into porting games and creativity software. They need to build up critical mass and ship the A1222 with a ton of titles.

For my personal needs I will be more than happy just owning the x5000. It doesn’t need to be a massive commercial success, because Amiga is in my blood and I will always enjoy using it. And yes it is a bit expensive and I’m not in the habit of buying machines like this left and right. But I can safely say that this is a machine that I will be enjoying for many, many years into the future – regardless of what others may feel about it.

I would suggest that Hyperion lower their prices to somewhere around 1000€ if possible. Right now they need to think volume rather than profit, and hopefully Hyperion will start making the OS compatible with Arm. Again my thoughts go to volume and that IOT and embedded systems need an alternative to Linux and Windows 10 embedded.

But right now I’m itching to start developing for it – and I’m not alone 🙂

Amiga OS 4, object pascal and everything

Those that read my blog knows that I’m a huge fan of the Commodore Amiga machines. This was a line of computers that took the world by storm around 1985 and held its ground until 1993. Sadly the company had to file for bankruptcy after a series of absurd financial escapades by its management.

The original team before it fell prey to mismanagement

The death of Commodore is one of the great tragedies in computing history. There is no doubt that Commodore represented a much-needed alternative to Microsoft and Apple – and the death of Commodore meant innovation of technology took a turn for the worse.

Large books have been written on this subject, as well as great documentaries and movies – so I’m not going to dig further into the drama here. Ars Technica has a range of articles covering the whole story, so if you want to understand how the market got the way it is today, head over and read up on the story.

On a personal level I find the classic Amiga machines a source of great inspiration even now. Despite Commodore dying in the 90’s, today 30 years after the fact I still stumble over amazing source-code on this awesome computer; There are a few things in Amiga OS that “hint” to its true age, but ultimately the system has aged with amazing elegance and grace. It just blows people away when they realize that the Amiga desktop hit the market in 1984 – and much of what we regard as a modern desktop experience is actually inherited from the Amiga.

Amiga OS is highly customizable. Here showing OS 3.9 [the last of the classic OS versions]

As I type this the Amiga is going through a form of revival. It’s actually remarkable to be a part of this because the scope of such an endeavour is monumental. But even more impressive is just how many people are involved. It’s not like some tiny “computer cult” where a bunch of misfits hang out in sad corners of the internet. Nope, we are talking about thousands of educated and technical people who still use their Amiga computers on a daily basis.

For instance: the realization of the new Amiga models have cost £ 1.2 million, so there are serious players involved in this.

The user-base is varied of course, it’s not all developers and engineers. You have gamers who love to kick back with some high quality retro-gaming. You have graphics designers who pixel large masterpieces (an almost lost art in this day and age). And you have musicians who write awesome tracks; then use that to spice up otherwise flat and dull PC based tracks.

What is even more awesome is the coding. Even the latest Freepascal has been ported, so if you were expecting people hand punching hex-codes you will be disappointed. While the Amiga is old in technical terms, it was so far ahead of the competition that people are surprised just how capable the classic systems are.

And yes, people code games, demos and utility programs for the classical Amiga systems even today. I just installed a Dropbox cloud driver on my system and it works brilliantly.

The brand new Amiga

Classic Amiga machines are awesome, but this post is not about the old models; it’s about the new models that are coming out now. Yes, you read right: next generation Amiga computers that have finally become a reality. Having waited for 22 years I am thrilled to say that I just ordered a brand new Amiga 5000! (and cant wait to install Freepascal and start coding).

It’s also quite affordable. The x5000 model (which is the power system) retails at around €1650, which is roughly half the price I paid for my Intel i7, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 workstation. And the potential as a developer is enormous.

Just think about the onslaught of Delphi code I can port over, and how instrumental my software can become by getting in early. Say what you will about Freepascal but it tends to be the second compiler to hit a platform after GCC. And with Freepascal in place a Delphi developer can do some serious magic!

Right. So the first Amiga  is the power model, the Amiga 5000. This can be ordered today. It cost the same as a good PC (1600€ range depending on import tax and vat). This is far less than I paid for my crap iMac (that I never use anymore).

The power model is best suited for people who do professional work on the machine. Software development doesn’t necessarily need all the firepower the x5000 brings, but more demanding tasks like 3d rendering or media composition will.

The next model is the A1222 which is due out around x-mas 2017 /slash/ first quarter

The A1222 “Tabour”

2018. You would perhaps expect a mid-range model, something retailing at around €800 or there abouts – but the A1222 is without a doubt a low-end model.

It should retail for roughly €450. I think this is a great idea because AEON (who makes hardware) have different needs from Hyperion (who makes the new Amiga OS [more about that further into the article]). AEON needs to get enough units out to secure the foundation – while Hyperion needs vertical market penetration (read: become popular and also hit other hardware platforms as well). These factors are mutually exclusive, just like they are for Windows and OS X. Which is probably why Apple refuse to sell OS X without a mac, or they could end up competing with themselves.

A brave new Amiga OS

But there is more to this “revival” than just hardware. Many would even say that hardware is the least interesting about the next generation systems, and that the true value at this point in time is the new and sexy operating system. Because what the world needs now more than hardware (in my opinion) is a lightweight alternative to Linux and Windows. A lean, powerful, easy to use, highly customizable operating system that will happily boot on a $35 Raspberry PI 3b, or a $2500 Intel i7 monster. Something that makes computing fun, affordable and most of all: portable!

My setup of Amiga OS 4, with FPC and Storm C/C++

And with lean I have to stress that the original Amiga operating system, the classic 3.x system that was developed all the way to the end – was initially created to thrive in as little as 512kb. At most I had 2 megabytes of ram in my Amiga 1200 and that was ample space to write and run large programs, play the latest games and enjoy the rich, colorful and user-friendly desktop environment. We have to remember that Amiga had a multi-tasking, window based OS a decade before Microsoft.

Naturally the next-generation systems is built to deal with the realities of 2017 and beyond, but incredibly enough the OS will run just fine with as little as 256 megabytes. Not even Windows embedded can boot up on that. Linux comes close with distributions like Puppy and DSL, but Amiga OS 4 gives you a lot more functionality out of the box.

What way to go?

OK so we have new hardware, but what about the software? Are the new Amiga’s supposed to run some ancient version of Amiga OS? Of-course not! The people behind the new hardware have teamed up with a second company, Hyperion, that has believe it or not, done a full re-implementation of Amiga OS! And naturally they have taken the opportunity to get rid of annoying behavior – and adding behavior people expect in 2017 (like double-clicking on a window header to maximize it, easy access to menus and much more). Visually Amiga OS 4  is absolutely gorgeous. Just stunning to look at.

The Amiga OS 4 Website

Now there are many different theories and ideas about where a new Amiga should go. Sadly it’s not just as simple as “hey let’s make a new amiga“; the old system is literally boiled in patent and legislation issues. It is close to an investors worst nightmare since ownership is so fragmented. Back when Commodore died, different parts of the Amiga was sold to different companies and individuals. The main reason we havent seen a new Amiga until now – is because the owners have been fighting between themselves. The Amiga as we know it has been caught in limbo for close to two decades.

My stance on the whole subject is that Trevor Dickenson, the man behind the next generation Amiga systems, has done the only reasonable thing a sane human being can when faced with a proverbial patent kebab: the old hardware is magical for us that grew up on it – but by todays standard they are obsolete dinosaurs. The same can be said about the Amiga OS 3.9. So Trevor has gone for a full re-implementation and hardware.

The other predominant idea is more GNU/Linux in spirit, where people want Amiga OS to be platform independent (or at least written in a way that makes the code run on different hardware as long as some fundamental infrastructure exists). This actually resulted in a whole new OS being written, namely Aros, which is a community made Amiga OS clone. A project that has been perpetually maintained for 20 years now.

Aros, a community re-implementation of Amiga OS for x86

While I think the guys behind Aros should be applauded, I do feel that AEON and Hyperion have produced something better. There are still kinks to work out on both systems – and don’t get me wrong: I am thrilled that Aros is available, I just enjoy OS 4 more than I do Aros. Which is my subjective opinion of course.

New markets

Right. With all this in mind, let us completely disregard the old Amiga, the commodore drama and instead focus on the new operatingsystem as a product. It doesn’t take long before a few thrilling opportunities present themselves.

The first that comes to my mind is how well suited OS 4 would be as an embedded platform. The problem with Linux is ultimately the same that haunts OS X and Windows, namely that size and complexity grows proportionally over time. I have seen Linux systems as small as 20 megabytes, but for running X based full screen applications, taking advantage of hardware accelerated graphics – you really need a bigger infrastructure. And the moment you start adding those packages – Linux puts on weight and dependencies fast!

The embedded market is one place where Amiga OS would do wonders

With embedded systems im not just talking about head-less servers or single application devices. Take something simple like a ticket booth, an information kiosk or POS terminal. Most of these run either Windows embedded or some variation of Linux. Since both of these systems require a fair bit of infrastructure to function properly, the price of the hardware typically start at around 300€. Delphi and C++ based solutions, at least those that I have seen, end up using boards in the 300€ to $400€ range.

This price-tag is high considering the tasks you need to do in a POS terminal or ticket system. You usually have a touch enabled screen, a network connection, a local database that will cache information should the network be down – the rest is visual code for dealing with menus, options, identification and fault tolerance. If a visa terminal is included then a USB driver must also be factored in.

These tasks are not heavy in themselves. So in theory a smaller system if properly adapted for it could do the same if not better job – at a much better price.

More for less, the Amiga legacy

Amiga OS would be able to deliver the exact same experience as Windows and Linux – but running on more cost-effective hardware. Where modern Windows and Linux typically need at least 2 gigabyte of ram for a heavy-duty visual application, full network stack and database services – Amiga OS is happy to run in as little as 512 megabytes. Everything is relative of course, but running a heavy visual application with less than a gigabyte memory in 2017 is rare to say the least.

Already we have cut cost. Power ARM boards ships with 4 gigabytes of ram, powered by a snappy ARM v9 cpu – and medium boards ship with 1 or 2 gigabytes of ram and a less powerful cpu. The price difference is already a good 75€ on ram alone. And if the CPU is a step down, from ARM v9 to ARM v8, we can push it down by a good 120€. At least if you are ordering in bulk (say 100 units).

The exciting part is ultimately how well Amiga OS 4 scales. I have yet to try this since I don’t have access to the machine I have ordered yet – and sadly Amiga OS 4.1 is compiled purely for PPC. This might sound odd since everyone is moving to ARM, but there is still plenty of embedded systems based on PPC. But yes, I would urge our good friend Trevor Dickenson to establish a migration plan to ARM because it would kill two birds with one stone: upgrading the faithful Amiga community while entering into the embedded market at the same time. Since the same hardware is involved these two factors would stimulate the growth and adoption of the OS.

The PPC platform gives you a lot of bang-for-the-buck in the A1222 model

But for sake of argument let’s say that Amiga OS 4 scales exceptionally well, meaning that it will happily run on ARM v8 with 1 gigabyte of ram. This would mean that it would run on systems like the Asus Tinkerboard that retails at 60€ inc. vat. This would naturally not be a high performance system like the A5000, but embedded is not about that – it’s about finding something that can run your application safely, efficiently and without problems.

So if the OS scales gracefully for ARM, we have brought the cost down from 300€ to 60€ for the hardware (I would round that up to 100€, something always comes up). If the customers software was Windows-based, a further 50€ can be subtracted from the software budget for bulk licensing. Again buying in bulk is the key.

Think different means different

Already I can hear my friends that are into Linux yell that this is rubbish and that Linux can be scaled down from 8 gigabytes to 20 megabytes if so needed. And yes that is true. But what my learned friends forget is that Linux is a PITA to work with if you havent spent a considerable amount of time learning it. It’s not a system you can just jump into and expect to have results the next day. Amiga OS has a much more friendly architecture and things that are often hard to do on Windows and Linux, is usually very simple to achieve on the Amiga.

Another fact my friends tend to forget is that the great majority of commercial embedded projects – are done using commercial software. Microsoft actually presented a paper on this when they released their IOT support package for the Raspberry PI. And based on personal experience I have to agree with this. In the past 20 years I have only seen 2 companies that use Linux as their primary OS both in products and in their offices. Everyone else uses Windows embedded for their products and day-to-day management.

So what you get are developers using traditional Windows development tools like Visual Studio or Delphi (although that is changing rapidly with node.js). And they might be outstanding programmers but Linux is still reserved for server administrators and the odd few that use it on hobby basis. We simply don’t have time to dig into esoteric “man pages” or explore the intricate secrets of the kernel.

The end result is that companies go with what they know. They get Windows embedded and use an expensive x86 board. So where they could have paid 100€ for a smaller SBC and used Amiga OS to deliver the exact same product — they are stuck with a 350€ baseline.

Be the change

The point of this little post has been to demonstrate that yes, the embedded market is more than open for alternatives. Linux is excellent for those that have the time to learn its many odd peculiarities, but over the past 20 years it has grown into a resource hungry beast. Which is ironic because it used to be Windows that was the bloated scapegoat. And to be honest Windows embedded is a joy to work with and much easier to shape to your exact needs – but the prices are ridicules and it wont perform well unless you throw at least 2 gigabyte on it (relative to the task of course, but in broad strokes that’s the ticket).

But wouldn’t it be nice with a clean, resource friendly and extremely fast alternative? One where auto-starting applications in exclusive mode was a “one liner” in the startup-sequence file? A file which is actually called “startup-sequence” rather than some esoteric “init.d” alias that is neither a folder or an archive but something reminiscent of the Windows registry? A system where libraries and the whole folder structure that makes up drivers, shell, desktop and service is intuitively named for what they are?

Amiga OS could piggyback on the wave of low-cost ARM SBC’s that are flooding the market

You could learn how to use Amiga OS in 2 days tops; but it holds great depth so that you can grow with the system as your needs become more complex. But the general “how to” can be picked up in a couple of days. The architecture is so well-organized that even if you know nothing about settings, a folder named “prefs” doesn’t leave much room for misinterpretation.

But the best thing about AmigaOS is by far how elegant it has been architected. You know, when software is planned right it tends to refactor out things that would otherwise be an obstacle. It’s like a well oiled machinery where each part makes perfect sense and you don’t need a huge book to understand it.

From where I am standing, Amiga OS is ultimately the biggest asset the Hyperion and AEON have to offer. I love the new hardware that is coming out – but there is no doubt in my mind, and I know I am right about this, that the market these companies should focus on now is not PPC – but rather ARM and embedded systems.

It would take an effort to port over the code from a PPC architecture to ARM, but having said that – PPC and ARM have much more in common than say, PPC and x86.

I also think the time is ripe for a solid power ARM board for desktop computers. While smaller boards gets most of the attention, like the Raspberry PI, the ODroid XU4 and the (S)Tinkerboard – once you move the baseline beyond 300€ you see some serious muscle. Boards like iMX6 OpenRex SBC Ultra packs a serious punch, and like expected it ships with 4 gigabyte of ram out of the box.

While it’s impossible to do a raw comparison between the A1222 and the iMX6 OpenRex, I would be surprised if the iMX6 delivered terrible performance compared to the A1222 chipset. I am also sure that if we beefed up the price to 700€, aimed at home computing rather than embedded – the ARM power boards involved would wipe the floor with PPC. There are a ton of factors at play here – a fast CPU doesn’t necessarily mean better graphics. A good GPU should make up at least 1/5 of the price.

Another cool factor regarding ARM is that the bios gives you a great deal of features you can incorporate into your product. All the ARM board I have gives you FAT32 support out of the box for instance, this is supported by the SoC itself and you don’t need to write filesystem drivers for it. Most boards also support Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems. This is recognized automatically on boot. The rich bios/mini kernel is what makes ARM so attractive to code for, because it takes away a lot of the boring, low-level tasks that took months to get right in the past.

Final words

This has been a long article, from the early years of Commodore – all the way up to the present day and beyond. I hope some of my ideas make sense – and I also hope that those who are involved in the making of the new Amiga perhaps pick up an idea or two from this material.

Either way I will support the Amiga with everything I got – but we need a couple of smart ideas and concrete plans on behalf of management. And in my view, Trevor is doing exactly what is needed.

While we can debate the choice of PPC, it’s ultimately a story with a long, long background to it. But thankfully nothing is carved in stone and the future of the Amiga 5000 and 1222 looks bright! I am literally counting the days until I get one!

Amibian.js on bitbucket

The Smart Pascal driven desktop known as Amibian.js is available on bitbucket. It was hosted in a normal github repository earlier – so make sure you clone out from this one.

About Amibian.js

Amibian is a desktop environment written in Smart Pascal. It compiles to JavaScript and can be used through any modern HTML5 compliant browser. The project consists of both a client and server, both written in smart pascal. The server is executed by node.js (note: please install PM2 to have better control over scaling and task management: http://pm2.keymetrics.io/).

Amibian.js is best suited for embedded projects, such as kiosk systems. It has been used in tutoring software for schools, custom routers and a wide range of different targets. It can easily be molded into a rich environment for SAD (single application devices) based software – but also made to act more as a real operating system:

• Class driven filesystem, easy to target external services
  • Ram device-type
  • Browser cache device-type
  • ZIPfile device-type
  • Node.js device-type
• Cross domain application hosting
  • Traditional IPC protocol between hosted application and desktop
  • Shared resources
    • css styling
    • glyphs and images
  • Event driven visual controls
• Windowing manager makes it easy to implement custom applications
• Support for fullscreen API

Amibian ships with UAE.js (based on the SAE.js codebase) making it possible to run Amiga software directly on the desktop surface.

The bitbucket repository is located here: https://bitbucket.org/hexmonks/client

 

Smart Pascal: Amibian vs. FriendOS

This is not a new question, and despite my earlier post I still get hammered with these on a weekly basis – so lets dig into this subject and clean it up.

I fully understand that for non-developers suddenly having two Amiga like web desktops can be a bit confusing; especially since they superficially at least do many of the same things. But there is actually a lot of co-incidence surrounding all this, as well as evolution of the general topic. People who work with a topic will naturally come up with the same ideas from time to time.

But ok, lets dig into this and clear away any confusion

You know about FriendOS right? It looks a lot like Amibian

Custom native web servers has been a part of Delphi for ages, so it’s not that exciting for us

“A lot” is probably stretching it. But ok:  FriendOS is a custom server system with a sexy desktop front-end written in HTML5. So you have a server that is custom written to interact with the browser in a special way. This might sound like a revolution to non-developers but it’s actually an established technology; its been a part of Delphi and C++ builder for at least 12 years now (Intraweb being the best example, Raudus another). So if you are wondering why im not dazzled, it’s because this has been there for a while.

The whole point of Amibian.js is to demonstrate a different path; to get away from the native back-end and to make the whole system portable and platform independent. So in that regard the systems are diametrically different.

Custom web servers that talk to your web-app is old news. Delphi developers have done this for a decade at least and it’s not really interesting at this point. Node.js holds much greater promise.

What FriendOS has done that is unique, and that I think is super cool – is to couple their server with RDP (remote desktop protocol) and some nice video streaming for smooth video chat. Again these are off the shelves parts that anyone can add once you have a native back-end, it’s not really hard to code but time-consuming; especially when you are potentially dealing with large number of users spawning threads all over the place. I think Friend-Labs have done an exceptional good job here.

When you combine these features it creates the impression of an operating system like environment. And this is perfectly fine for ordinary users. It all depends on your needs and what exactly you use the computer for.

And just to set the war-mongers straight: FriendOS is not going up against Amibian. it’s going up against ChromeOS, Nayu and and a ton of similar systems; all of them with deep pockets and an established software portfolio. We focus on software development. Not even in the same ballpark.

To be perfectly frank: I see no real purpose for a web desktop except when connected to a context. There has to be an advantage beyond isolating web functions in one place. You need something special that your system does better than others, or different than others. Amibian has been about UAE.js and to run retro games in a familiar environment. And thus create a base that Amiga lovers can build on and play with. Again based on our prefab for customers that make embedded systems and use our compiler and RTL for that.

If you have a hardware product like a NAS, a ticket system or a retro-game machine and want to have a nice web front-end for it: then it makes sense. But there is absolutely nothing in both our systems that you can’t whip-up using Intraweb or Raudus in a few weeks. If you have the luxury of a native back-end, then adding Active Directory support is a matter of dropping a component. You can even share printers and USB devices over the wire if you like, this has been available to Delphi and c++ developers for ages. The “new” factor here, which FriendOS does very well i might add, is connectivity.

This might sound like criticism but it’s really not. It’s honesty and facts. They are going to need some serious cash to take on Google, Samsung, LG and various other players that have been doing similar things for a long time (or about to jump on the same concepts) — Amibian.js is for Amiga fans and people who use Smart Pascal to write embedded applications. We don’t see anything to compete with because Amibian is a prefab connected to a programming language. FriendOS is a unification system.

A programming language doesnt have the aspirations of a communication company. So the whole “oh who is best” or “are you the same” is just wrong.

Ok you say it’s not competing, but why not?

To understand Amibian.js you first need to understand Smart Pascal (see Wikipedia article on Smart Pascal). Smart Pascal (smartmobilestudio.com) is a software development studio for writing software using web technology rather than native machine-code. It allows you to create whatever you like, from games to servers, or kiosk software to the next Facebook clone.

Our focus is on enabling our customers to quickly program robust mobile applications, servers, kiosk software, games or large JavaScript projects; products that would otherwise be hard to manage if all you have is vanilla JavaScript. I mean why spend 2 years coding something when you can do it in 2 months using Smart? So a web desktop is just ridicules when you understand how large our codebase is and the scope of the product.

Under Smart Pascal what people know as Amibian.js is just a project type. There is no competition between FriendOS and Amibian because a web desktop represents a ridicules small piece of our examples; it’s literally mistaking the car for the factory. Amibian is not our product, it is a small demo and prefab (pre fabricated system that others can download and build on) project that people use to save time. So under Smart, creating your own web desktop is a piece of cake, it’s a click, and then you can brand it, expand it and do whatever you like with it. Just like you would any project you create in Visual Studio, Delphi or C++ builder.

So we are not in competition with FriendOS because we create and deliver development tools. Our customers use Smart Pascal to create web environments both large and small, and naturally we deliver what they need. You could easily create a FriendOS clone in Smart if you got the skill, but again – that is but a tiny particle in our codebase.

Really? Amibian.js is just a project under Smart Pascal?

Indeed. Our product delivers a full object-oriented pascal compiler, debugger and IDE. So you can write classes, use inheritance and enjoy all the perks of a high-level language — and then compile this to JavaScript.

You can target node.js, the browser and about 90+ embedded devices out of the box. The whole point of Smart Pascal is to avoid the PITA that is writing large applications in JavaScript. And we do this by giving you a classical programming language that was made especially for application authoring, and then compile that to JavaScript instead.

Amibian.js is just a tiny, tiny part of what Smart Pascal is all about

This is a massive undertaking that started back in 2009/2010 and involves a high-quality compiler, linker, debugger and code generator; a full IDE with a ton of capabilities and last but not least: a huge run-time library that allows you to work with the DOM (document object model, or HTML) and node.js from the vantage point of a programmer.

Most people approach web development as a designer. They write html and then style them using a stylesheet. They work with colors, aspects and pages. Which means people who traditionally write programs falls between two chairs: first they must learn about html and css, and secondly a language which is ill equipped for large scale applications (imagine writing adobe photoshop in nothing but JS. Sure it’s possible, but wouldnt you rather spend a month coding that than a year? In a language that actually makes sense?).

With Smart you approach web development like you do writing programs. You work with visual controls, change properties, write code in response to events. Even writing your own visual controls that you can re-use and inherit from later is both fun and easy. So rather than ending up with a huge was of spaghetti code, which sadly is the fate of most large-scale JavaScript projects — Smart lets you work like you are used to. In a language better suited for the task.

And yes, I was not kidding when I said this was a huge undertaking. The source code in our codebase is close to 2.5 gigabytes. And keep in mind that this is source-code and libraries. So it’s not something you slap together over the weekend.

The Smart source-code is close to 2.5 gigabytes. It has taken years to complete

But why do Amibian and FriendOS both focus on the Amiga?

That is pure co-incidence. The guys over at Friend Labs started out on the Amiga just like we did. So when I updated our desktop project (previously called Quartex Media Desktop) the Amiga look and feel came natural to me.

I’m a huge retro-computing fan that loves the Amiga. When I sat down to rewrite our window manager I loved the way Amiga OS 4.x looked, so I decided to implement an UI inspired by that.

People have to remember that the Amiga was a huge success in Scandinavia, so finding developers that are in their late 30s or early 40s that didn’t own an Amiga is harder than you think.

So the fact that we all root our ideas back to the Amiga is both co-incidence and a mutual passion for a great platform. One that really should have survived the financial onslaught of fat CEO’s and thir minions in the board.

But Amibian does a lot of what FriendOS does?

Probably. JavaScript is multi-tasking by default so if loading external URL’s into window containers, doing live resize and other things is what you refer to then yes. But that is the nature of web programming. Its like creating a bucket if you want to carry water; it is a natural first step of an evolutionary pattern. It’s not like FriendOS is copying us I would imagine.

For the record Smart started back in 2010 and the media desktop came in with the first hotfix, so its been available years before Friend-Labs even existed. Creating a desktop has not been a huge part of what we do because mobile applications, building a rich and solid run-time-library with hundreds of classes for our customers – and making an IDE that is great to use, that is our primary job.

We didn’t even know FriendOS existed. Let alone that it was a Norwegian product.

But you posted that you worked for FriendOS earlier?

Yes I did, very briefly. I was offered a position and I worked there for a month. It was a chance to work side by side with legends like David John Pleasance, ex head of Commodore for europe; and also my childhood hero Francois Lionet, author of Amos Basic for the Amiga way back in the 80’s and 90s.

We never forget our childhood heroes

Sadly we had our wires crossed. I am an awesome object pascal developer, while the guys at Friend-Labs are awesome C developers. I work primarily on Windows while they work mostly on Linux. So in essence they hired a Delphi developer to work in a language he doesn’t know on a platform he havent used.

They simply took for granted that I worked in C/C++, while I took for granted that they used object pascal. Its an easy mistake to make and its not the first time; and probably not the last.

Needless to say the learning curve would be extremely high for any developer (learning a new operating-system and programming language at the same time as you are supposed to be productive).

When my girlfriend suddenly faced a life threatening illness the situation became worse. It was impossible for me to commute or leave her side for the unforeseeable future; so when you add the six months learning curve to this situation; six months of not being able to contribute on the level I am used to; well I am old enough to know how that ends. So I did what was best for everyone and resigned.

Besides, I am a damn good Delphi developer with standing invitation to many companies; so it made more sense to just take a step backwards. Which was not fun because I really enjoyed the short time I was there. But, it was not meant to be.

And that is basically all there is to it.

Ok. But if Smart is a development tool, will it support Friend-OS ?

This is something that I really want to do. But since The Smart Company is a proper company with stocks, shareholders and investors – it’s not a decision I can take on my own. It is something that must be debated by the board. But personally yeah, I would love that.

As they grow, so does the need for proper development tools

One of the reasons I hope FriendOS succeeds is because it’s a win-win situation. The more they expand the more relevant Smart becomes. Say what you will about JavaScript but writing large and complex applications is not easy by any measure.

So the moment we introduce Smart Pascal for Friend, their users will be able to write large applications rapidly, with better time-to-market and consequent ROI. So it’s a win-win. If they succeed then we get a bigger market; If they don’t we havent lost anything.

This may sound extremely self-serving, but Friend-Labs have had the same chance as everyone else to invest in Smart; our investor plans have been available for quite some time, and we have to do what is best for our company.

But what about Amibian, was it just a short thing?

Not at all. It is put on hold for a few months while we release the next generation RTL. Which is probably the biggest update in the history of Smart Pascal. We have a very clear agenda ahead of us and Amibian.js is (as underlined) a very small part of what we do.

But Amibian is written using our next generation RTL, and without that our customers cant really do much with it. So it’s important to get the RTL out first and then work on the IDE to reflect its many new features. After that – Amibian.js development will continue.

The primary target for Amibian.js is embedded devices and kiosk systems, coupled with full-screen web applications and hardware front-ends (NAS and backup devices being great examples). So the desktop will run on affordable, off the shelves hardware starting at $40 and all the way up to the most powerful and expensive x86 boards on the market. Cheap solutions like Raspberry PI, ODroid XU4 and Tinkerboard will deliver what you today need a dedicated $120 x86 board to achieve.

Our desktop will run on many targets and is platform independent by design

This means that our deskop has a wildly different modus operandi. We will not require a constant connection to a remote server. Amibian will happily boot up on a single device, regardless of processor type.

Had we coded our backend using Delphi or C++ builder (native like FriendOS have done) we would have been finished months ago. And I could have caught up with FriendOS in a couple of months if I wanted to. But that is not in our agenda. We have written our server framework for node.js as we coded the desktop  – which means it’s platform and OS agnostic by design. If node.js runs, Amibian will run. It wont care if you are running on a $40 embedded board or the latest Intel i9 cpu.

Last words

I really hope this has helped and that the confusion between Amibian.js and our agenda, versus what Friend-Labs is doing, is now clearer.

From Norway with love

I wish Friend-Labs the very best and hope they are successful in their endeavour. They have worked very hard on the product and deserve that. And while I might come over as arrogant at times, im really not.

Web desktops have been around for a long time now (Asustor is my favorite) through Delphi and C++ builder and that is just facts. But that doesn’t mean you can’t put things together in new and interesting ways! Smart itself was first put together by existing technology. It was said to be impossible by many because JavaScript and object pascal are unthinkable companions. But it turned out to be a perfect match.

As for the future – personally I don’t believe in the web-desktop outside a specific context, something to give it purpose if you like. I believe for instance that Amibian.js will be awesome for Amiga users when its running on a $99 ARM laptop. Where the system boots straight into a full-screen desktop and where UAE.js is fully integrated into the core, making retro-gaming and running old programs close to seamless. That I can believe in.

But it would make no sense running Amibian or FriendOS in a browser on top of a Windows desktop or a full Ubuntu X session. Unless the virtual desktop functions as your corporate window with access to company mail, documents and essentially what every web-based intranet already does. So once again we end up with the fact that this has already been done. And unless you create a unique context for it, it just wont have any appeal. This is also why I havent pursued the same tech Friend-Labs have, because that’s not where the exciting stuff is happening.

But I will happily be proven wrong, because that means an even bigger market for us should we decide to support the platform.

Freepascal online, awesome work!

Freepascal is, with the exception of gcc – the gnu c/c++ compiler toolchain, probably the most versatile and adaptable compiler in the world. Unlike most compilers outside the C camp – Freepascal is complete toolchain, and it has more than a few similarities to c/c++ in that it’s largely self-reliant.

Freepascal scales from the old mc68000 family to the latest Intel i7, impressive!

FPC is easy to port over to new (or old) platforms, and as far as languages go – object pascal has a level of productivity that I have yet to find in other languages.

Now I have no interest in language wars or fanboy stereotyping, all languages have aspects that are unique and beneficial. So this is not an attempt to promote A over B.

Targeting both old and new from a single codebase

While mainstream and work related topics never brush into this – there is actually a healthy group of people still using older platforms. Naturally this is well within the “hobby” range – where passion and curiosity are the prime motivators rather than cash. But still, it is interesting to see how little of modern software is capable of scaling back to processors 10, 15 or 20 years out of date.

Alb42 is the nickname of a very industrious individual who has taken it on himself to port freepascal back to his roots. Which just happens to be the Amiga line of computers.

Some of the best arcade games ever made are “vintage” by nature

But he has also done a lot of work for modern systems. A new Amiga was actually released this year (although most people havent noticed it) – and finding development software for a brand new platform is not easy. You have a variant of C/C++ naturally – but the honest truth is that C/C++ is not the language most people use to create desktop productivity software in. That is left to object pascal, C# and variations of Java. Delphi alone is responsible for a huge portfolio of popular software on Windows for instance. Only surpassed recently by monoliths like C#.

So getting freepascal running on Amiga OS 4 (which is the latest and modern operating system shipping with the new Amiga x5000 model) is very important to the market share of the platform.

Do it online!

Alb42 has setup an online compiler testbed where you can type in your freepascal snippets and compile to executable code on the spot. You can choose between MorphOS, Classic 68k, Aros (x86) and Amiga OS 4 (ppc). It’s a very simple setup yet it’s possible to do ad-hoc compilation and play around with the system 🙂

While humble, Alb42 has setup an interesting online kitchen sink that demonstrates how flexible and powerful object pascal really is

To give it a go, head over to: https://home.alb42.de/fpamiga/

And as always, visit his blog for both VMware images with cross compilation and binaries for your favorite retro system.

But perhaps even more important, your new x5000 (!)

Dont forget to join us at Amiga Dispatch on Facebook.

Cheers!

A day with the Tinkerboard, part 2

Please read the first article here before you continue.

Having gone through a wealth of alternative boards, alternative to the Raspberry PI 3b that is; I have to admit that I am really, really disappointed by the results. Not just with the Tinkerboard but also boards like the ODroid XU4 and the whole fruit-basket of banana, orange and pineapple PI clones.

What a waste

And please keep in mind that I have not been out to discredit anyone. I have been genuinely interested in these alternatives for many reasons, not just emulation or multimedia. I have no problem paying that extra 15£ for a system that delivers twice the power of the PI, in fact I even paid close to 150£ for the UP board. Which is also the only board that so far has delivered on its promise. Microsoft Windows and the horrors of eMMC storage considered.

Part of what I work with these days include node.js and full screen browser views, often touch enabled for POS (point of sale) type machines. This is an exciting field because for the first time in history we can now create rich, responsive and rock solid solutions using off the shelves web technology.

So while emulation of older systems is interesting for hobby purposes, the performance of vital technologies like the browser – and consequently the performance of JavaScript and the underlying JIT compilation, is naturally paramount for what I do.

So I was really looking forward to the extra power these boards advertize. Both CPU, number of cores, extra memory and last but not least – the benefits of a fast GPU. The latter directly impacts the effects we can use in our user-interface. And while effects may seem superficial, its important for touch feedback and the customers experience.

We have all come across touch devices that give little or no visual feedback. We all know what its like when you type something and the UI just hangs while talking with a server. This is why web tech is so important today. In many ways Html5 and websocket is re-defining what we think of as software.

So while I bring little pie-charts and numbers to the table, I do bring honesty and perspective. It’s not all fun and games.

Was it really fair?

It has been voiced by a couple that perhaps my way of testing things is unfair. Like I mentioned in my previous article the PI has a healthy head-start and a rich community that not only consumes and demands, but also contributes substantially to the value of the product. A well established community around a product is worth its weight in gold. The alternative boards have yet to establish that and when it comes to the Tinkerboard, it’s pretty much just getting started.

Secondly, as far as emulation goes, we have to remember that those who make these products rarely have emulation in mind (and probably not Amiga which by any standard is esoteric compared to Nintendo and Sega consoles). If we look at what people use gadgets like the Raspberry PI for, I think products like Kodi, Apache and various DIY programming experiments out-rank all the retro systems combined. And it’s clear that the people behind Tinkerboard is more media oriented than anything else; it ships with hardware support for 4k video playback after all.

Having said that, I do feel I gave both the ODroid and Tinkerboard a fair trial. I did not approach these boards as a developer, but rather as a consumer. I have focused on the experience of familiar things – like using a browser and how well JavaScript runs, does the UI lag under stress; things that any customer will face after purchase.

UAE4Arm vs FS-UAE

As far as UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator) there is one thing that might be unfair. Amibian is based around something called UAE4Arm which is a highly optimized version of the Amiga emulator. I would even go so far as to say its THE most optimized UAE version on any platform – Windows and OSX included.

The Amiga was a lot more than just a games machine, it was way ahead of both Windows and OS X for a decade

Comparing that with FS-UAE is perhaps unfair. FS-UAE is based on the older, non optimized codebase. It’s known for stable emulation and good JIT performance. Sadly the JIT engine only works on x86 and is thus disabled on ARM systems. So to be honest it can’t hold a candle against UAE4Arm. The latter uses lookup tables for everything, fast switch cases instead of long sequences of “if then else” code (easier for the compiler to optimize), and it benefits from hardcore llvm level 3 optimization. So I agree, comparing FS to UAE4Arm is like comparing a tiger with a kitten. It’s not even in the same ballpark.

Optimization on this level is almost a lost art these days. People are used to languages like C# and Java – which are hopelessly bloated (for those that have seen what raw assembler and hand optimized pascal can deliver). On the Amiga we learned how to shave off a clock-cycle here and there – and the end result really made a huge difference.

The same type of low-level, every cycle counts, type optimization is used throughout UAE4Arm. FS-Uae is safe, slow and can hardly deliver A500 speed on a Raspberry PI. Yet UAE4Arm spits out 3.2 times the power of an Amiga 4000 with a 68040 cpu. That was the flagship power machine back in the day, and this little $40 card delivers 3 times the power under emulation.

Its like comparing a muffled 1978 Lada with a pissed off 2017 Lamborghini.

Fair is fair

Having tested just about every distro I could find for the Tinker, even back-tracking to older releases in hope that the drivers there would be better suited for the board (perhaps the new drivers were released in a hurry, or a mistake was made) the last straw really was Android. My hope was that Android could have better drivers since it sees a lot of development. It has giants like Google and Samsung behind it – so the last glimmer of light was that Asus had focused on Android rather than Linux.

Will Android save the say and give the Tinker it’s due credit?

I downloaded the latest image, burnt it and booted – thinking that this should finally put things right. Well it didn’t. Quite the opposite.

The first boot took almost an hour. Yes, an hour. I suspect this is because it did a network restore – downloading packages and requirements from the Internet. But that is still no excuse. I have tried Android on the PI it and it was up and running in less than 10 minutes; and that includes having to set some initial user information.

When the Android desktop finally came into view, it was stripped down with no repository package manager. In other words you would have to manually install packages. But that would have been OK had it not been for the utterly sluggish performance.

Android on the PI is no race-car, but at least it doesn’t freeze and lock-up every five second. Clicking on a link in the browser froze the whole system, and you were asked if you wanted to terminate the process again and again while Android figured out the meaning of life or whatever. Every single time.

I’m sorry but this is the worst experience I have ever had with a board. The ODroid XU4 at least tries to deliver a good experience. I had no problems finding Linux editions that ran well (especially gaming systems, Kodi and some homebrew distros) – and the chrome build for the ODroid gave far better results than both the PI and Tinkerboard. It was not the power-house it had been hyped up to be, but at least it delivered a normal desktop experience (even the PI locks up when facing demanding tasks, but the Tinker has an 8 core cpu, twice the ram and a supposedly superior GPU. With the capacity of running 8 threads and doing task scheduling in batches of 8 – the Tinkerboard should remain both stable and interactive under pressure).

I am sorry but I cannot recommend the Tinkerboard at all. The ODroid gives you a slight edge over the PI and if someone baked a more optimized Linux distro for it (it ships with a variant of Ubuntu) then ODroid XU4  would kick serious ass. But the Tinkerboard is a complete disaster.

Do not waste your money on the Tinkerboard. It may have the hardware but the software to utilize and express that power is simply not there! It has been the most pointless purchase I have done this year.

A common waste

The common denominator between these alternatives is the notion that more power equals more stuff. Which ultimately results in biting over more than they can chew. A distro like Pixel is lightweight, optimized and the PI foundation has spent a considerable amount of time making sure the drivers run as fast as possible.

Saying it doesnt make it so, except in Weird Science

What these alternative hardware suppliers don’t seem to get is that – what is the point of having a cpu that is twice as fast as the PI, when you waste it on a more demanding version of Linux? Both the ODroid and Tinkerboard ship with Ubuntu clones. And while Ubuntu is wonderful to work with on a high-end x86 machine, 32 gigabytes of ram and a i7 CPU growling away under your desk, it is without a doubt the worst possible OS you could pick for a tiny ARM board.

To put things into perspective: The Tinkerboard has the “theoretical” cpu power of a Samsung Galaxy S4 mobile phone (2012). Yet in their infinite wisdom they decided Ubuntu is what is really going to show off this fart of a device.

It makes absolutely no sense from a consumer’s perspective. As a user you want that extra power for running programs. You want to use the extra power on your stuff. Yet these guys seem to think that wasting all the extra power on infrastructure is going to score points.

So if anyone from the Tinkerboard or ODroid camp reads this, please remember the old saying “If you cannot innovate, emulate”. Make a fast, stable and small Jesse distro like Pixel. Focus on optimization. Compile whatever you can with maximum optimization. Shave off every clock cycle you can. Hand carve the drivers in assembler if that’s what it takes.

Because the sad result is, that right now the Raspberry PI is outperforming you with lesser hardware. There is no point in buying a Tinkerboard because it actually delivers a worse experience. It has bitten off more than it can chew and it’s trying to be something it’s not.

A day with the Tinkerboard, part 1

Anyone into IOT mini computers, be it as a hobby or professionally – have no doubt heard about the Tinkerboard. The Tinkerboard is an alternative to the Raspberry PI (aren’t they all) produced by hardware giant Asus. Everything from its form-factor (size) to its color coordinated GPIO pins is more or less the same as the PI. What separates the two is that the Tinker gives you double the CPU power, double the ram and pretty much double of everything. If we compare it with the Raspberry PI 3b that is.

But you don’t get double for free. The Tinkerboard retails on Amazon for USD 60 which means something in the ballpark of 55£ for those that live in the UK. For the rest of us that live in far-away places like Norway, prices and taxes may vary.

Before I continue I want to write a few words about pricing. The word “expensive” is one I keep hearing when it comes to the Tinkerboard, but that is extremely unfair considering what you get for your money.

The Raspberry PI 3b is an awesome product and packs a lot of goodies into a credit-card size computer. The same is true for the Tinkerboard, but they have packed even more stuff into the same space! The difference in price is just 15£ – but those 15£ gives you the power to emulate demanding platforms like Nintendo Wii, Sega Dreamcast and Playstation (if you are into retro gaming). Platforms the Raspberry PI 3b dont stand a chance emulating (at least not smoothly).

For serious applications all that extra cpu power can be the difference between success and failure. In many ways the Tinker feels a bit like working on a low-end laptop. If you are building a movie server for your living-room the Tinkerboard will ble able to convert and stream movies much smoother and better than the PI. And if you are looking for a device to power your next kiosk system or POS device, again the extra memory and cpu power is going to make all the difference. And with just 15£ between the two models, I cannot imagine why anyone would pick the PI if gaming or movie streaming is on the menu.

Oh and it has built-in wi-fi and bluetooth support! Here are the specs as listed on Amazon:

• High performance Quad Core ARM SOC 1.8GHz with 2GB of RAM -The Tinker board features the Rock chip RK3288 Soc with Mali – T764 GPU and 2GB of Dual Channel DDR3 memory
• Non shared GBit LAN, Shielded Wi-Fi with upgradable antenna support
• Highly compatible PCB & Topology, Tinker board offer extensive compatibility with SBC accessories & chassis
• HD Audio & HD & UHD Video Support – Tinker board supports HD audio 192/24bit audio along with accelerated HD & UHD ( 4K ) video playback support* requires use of Rock chip video player in TinkerOS
• DIY Friendly Design – Tinker board features multiple DIY friendly use features including a color coded GPIO header, silkscreen PCB and color coded pull tabs

That sounds pretty nice doesnt it 🙂

One does not simply take on the mighty PI

Being an alternative to the Raspberry PI is not as easy as it sounds. You would imagine that it all boils down to the specs right? So if you beef up the cpu, ram and gpu everyone will throw away their PI’s and buy your stuff? If only that was true. In which case the Tinkerboard would be awesome since it outperforms the PI on every level.

But it’s not that simple. There is more to a product than just raw power.

One of the cool things about the Raspberry PI is the community. The knowledge base of the product if you like. In order to build a community and be a success, everything has to click. I mean just look at the third-party eco-system that exists around the PI; all those companies selling add-ons and widgets, sensors and remote controls. The PI itself is quite dull. It’s all that extra stuff that makes it so fun to play with. And then you have things like excellent customer service, a forum where people help each other out, well written documentation — the value of the product suddenly exceeds whatever you paid for it to begin with.

And the Tinkerboard is not alone in trying to get a piece of the action. It competes with boards like the ODroid XU4, the x86 based UP boards, Latte Panda, The Pine boards and a whole fruit-basket of banana, orange and whatever PI clones. All of them trying to get a bite of the phenomenon that is the Raspberry PI.

So Asus got their work cut out for them.

First impressions

Having unpacked the board and plugged in all the cables (which is exactly as dull as it sounds) the first thing you do is look for software. Which naturally should be a one-click operation on their website.

Well, the first thing that annoyed me was exactly that: the Asus website. The Tinkerboard is not something that belongs on a sterile, streamlined corporate site. It belongs on website that should be easy to navigate, with plenty of information that hobbyists and “tinkers” need to get started. The Asus website simply lacks the warmth and friendliness of the PI foundation website. I even had to google around a couple of times just to find the disk images. These should be readily available on the site, on the first page even – to make sure customers can get up and running quickly.

It’s a little bit clangy and a little bit jammy

The presentation of the board was ok, but you really shouldnt have to use an external search engine to locate essential data for something you just bought. Unlike the PI foundation, Asus seem to have put little effort into what customers get once they have bought the board. As for community I dont even know if there is one.

When you finally manage to find the bloody download page, these are your options (there are 17 downloads in total, counting older OS images, config files and schematics):

• TinkerOS 1.8
• TinkerOS 1.6 Beta (my initial download)
• Android, also beta

And don’t expect a polished Linux distro like Pixel either. You get a clean distro with some typical stuff pre-loaded (python, perl for some reason, and various tidbits) but nothing close to the quality of Pixel.

Note: Why they would list older beta releases in their downloads is beyond me. It only adds to the confusion of a sterile list of items. And customers who just got their boards will be eager to try it out and hence make a mistake like I did. Beta and unstable releases should be in a separate category, while the stable and up-to-date images are listed first.

The second thing that really irritated me was something as simple as adjusting the keyboard layout and setting the locale. These are simply not present in preferences at all. Once again you have to google around until you find the terminal commands to manually set these things, which utterly defeats booting into a desktop environment to begin with. This might seem trivial for someone who knows Linux well, but to a novice it can take hours. Things this fundamental should be available in preferences or at the very least as a script. Like raspi-config on the PI.

But OK. If we look away from these superficial things and focus on the actual board, things are not half bad.

It’s the insides that counts

The first thing you are going to notice is how much faster the system is compared to the PI. When you start an application on the PI that is demanding, like libre-office or Lazarus, the whole system can freeze-up for a few seconds while the CPU go through the roof. I was pleased to find that this is not the case here (at least not as disruptive). You can start a program and the system continues to be responsive while things load.

What made me furious though was the quality of the graphics drivers. Performance wise the Tinkerboard is twice (actually a bit more) as fast as the PI on all fronts – and the GPU is supposed to deliver a vastly superior graphics experience. Yet when I ran Amibian.js (the Smart Pascal JavaScript desktop system) in Chrome – the CSS hardware effects were painfully slow. I even questioned if GPU was used at all (Note: which I later confirmed was the case, so much for downloading a beta image by mistake). I was amazed at the cpu power of the Tinkerboard because despite having to do everything purely with the CPU (moving pixels in memory, allocating device independent bitmaps, rasterizing layers and complex compositions in X) and it was more than usable.

But it sure as hell was not the superior graphics experience I was hoping for.

I also noticed that when moving a normal desktop window (X window that is) rapidly around the screen, it would lag behind and re-trace your steps until it caught up with the mouse pointer. This was very odd since most composition engines would have eliminated these movements as much as possible – and the GPU would do all the work. Again, I blame the drivers and pondered what could possibly make a GPU perform so badly.

Im supriced it booted at all, nothing is working

So while the system is notably faster than the PI, I get the sense that the drivers and tooling is not really polished. The hardware no doubt got juice but without drivers being carefully written for the board – most of the extra juice you pay for is wasted.

In the end I opened up chrome and typed “chrome://gpu” to see what was going on. And not surprisingly I was correct. It wasnt using the GPU at all and I had wasted hours on something that should have been clearly marked “Lacks hardware acceleration” in bold, italic, underlined big red letters. Like the PI foundation did when they shipped Raspberry PI 2 without GPU drivers. But they promptly delivered and it was ok, because you were informed up front.

 

Back to scratch

After a trip back to google I downloaded the right (or at least working) image, namely the TinkerOS 1.8 stable. It booted up, resized the partition to fill the whole SD card automatically (and other boring bits).

The first thing I did was start chrome and use the “chrome://gpu” to get some statistics. And thankfully most of the items were now working and active.

Thats better, although i ponder why GPU DIB’s are not active

Emulation, the name of the game

While I have serious tests to perform there is no doubt that what I was most eager to play with was UAE (the Unix Amiga Emulator). Like most retro-heads I have a ton of Raspberry PI’s and ODroid’s around the house with the sole purpose of emulating older game or computer systems. And I think everyone knows that my favorite computer in the whole wide world is the Commodore Amiga.

On the PI, Gunnar’s native Amibian distro gives you awesome performance. If you overclock the ram, gpu and cpu using safe numbers – the PI 3b spits out roughly 3.2 times the power of a Mc68040 based Amiga 4000. In other words 3 times the power of a high-end Amiga from the early 90s. That is quite an achievement for a $40 board. You can only imagine my expectations for a board running more than twice as fast as the PI does (and costing that 15£ more).

Boots fine but you can forget about using it. The PI is 100 times faster than this

One snag though was that UAE4Arm which is the highly optimized version of the Amiga Emulator doesnt exist for the Tinkerboard. In theory it should compile without problems since the latest version uses SDL exclusively. So there is no odd, deprecated UI toolkit like the old UAE4Arm used.

The only thing available was fs-uae. And while that is a very popular emulator on Windows and Mac, it’s sadly not optimized as much as UAE4Arm is. The latter uses lookup tables to the extreme, all if, then, else statements have been replaced by fast switches — and it’s just optimized beyond anything else running on ARM.

The result on the PI in phenomenal, but sadly fs-uae was all I could play with. I will try to compile UAE4Arm on the Tinkerboard later though. But right now im to busy.

Not optimized at all

It is hard to pinpoint exactly where the problem is, but I suspect the older codebase of fs-uae combined with poorly written drivers is what resulted in the absolutely sluggish behavor.

Dont get me wrong, if all you want to do is play some A500 or A1200 games the Tinker is more than capable. But if you want to run the same high-performance desktop as Amibian gives you on the PI – you can pretty much forget it.

I set the system to emulate an A4000, activated the JIT engine and set my desktop to match the display of the desktop. This should run like hell — yet it was slow as a snail. You could literally see the mouse-pointer slowly trying to keep up as I moved it across the desktop.

One interesting thing though. When I ran fs-uae on the first image, the beta image where everything was crap, it actually ran exceptionally well. But here on the so-called stable and “up to date” version, it was useless for anything but clean floppy gaming.

There are many factors involved in this. The drivers sits at the bottom just above the kernel and exposes the hardware so it can be used through a common API. On top of this you have stuff like OpenGL and on top of that again you have SDL which simplifies typical gaming or graphics tasks. This may sound like a long road for code to travel, but it’s actually very fast. If the drivers expose the power of the GPU that is.

I can only conclude at this point that the Tinkerboard has the firepower, I have seen the result of tests performed by others (and tested a retrogaming image) – and you feel the difference almost immediately when you boot the device. But the graphics drivers seems.. crippled somehow. It’s easy to point the finger at Asus and say they have done a terrible job at writing drivers here, but it can also be a bottleneck elsewhere in the system.

This is something Raspberry PI has got so right. Every part of the system has been optimized for the hardware, which makes the PI feel smooth even under a lot of stress. It delegates all the hard graphical stuff to the GPU – and the GPU just deals with it.

Sadly this is not the case with the Tinkerboard so far. And it really is such a shame because the specs speak for themselves.

Android

Next time: We will be giving Android a test and hopefully that will have drivers that are more up to date than whatever we have seen so far..

Smart-Pascal: A brave new world, 2022 is here

Trying to explain what Smart Mobile Studio does and the impact it can have on your development cycle is very hard. The market is rampant with superficial frameworks that promises you the world, and investors have been taken for a ride by hyped up, one-click “app makers” more than once.

I can imagine that being an investor is a bit like panning for gold. Things that glitter the most often turn out to be worthless – yet fortunes may hide beneath unpolished and rugged surfaces.

Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, yet they are now the
biggest taxi company in the world. -Source: R.M.Goldman, Ph.d

So I had enough. Instead of trying to tell people what I can do, I decided I’m going to show them instead. As the american’s say: “talk is cheap”. And a working demonstration is worth a thousand words.

Care to back that up with something?

A couple of weeks ago I published a video on YouTube of our Smart Pascal based desktop booting up in VMWare. The Amiga forums went off the chart!

For those that havent followed my blog or know nothing about the desktop I’m talking about, here is a short summary of the events so far:

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Smart Mobile Studio is a compiler that takes pascal, like that made popular in Delphi or Lazarus, and compiles it JavaScript instead of machine-code.

This product has shipped with an example of a desktop for years (called “Quartex media desktop”). It was intended as an example of how you could write a front-end for kiosk machines and embedded devices. Systems that could use a touch screen as the interface between customer and software.

You have probably seen those info booths in museums, universities and libraries? Or the ticket machines in subways, train-stations or even your local car-wash? All of those are embedded systems. And up until recently these have been small and expensive computers for running Windows applications in full-screen. Applications which in turn talk to a server or local database.

Smart Mobile Studio is able to deliver the exact same (and more) for a fraction of the price. A company in Oslo replaced their $300 per-board unit – with off the shelves $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computers. They then used Smart Pascal to write their client software and ran it in a fullscreen-browser. The Linux distribution was changed to boot straight into Firefox in full-screen. No Linux desktop, just a web display.

The result? They were able to cut production cost by $265 per unit.

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Right, back to the desktop. I mentioned the Amiga community. This is a community of coders and gamers that grew up with the old Commodore machines back in the 80s and 90s. A new Amiga is now on the way (just took 20+ years) – and the look and feel of the new operating-system, Amiga OS 4.1, is the look and feel I have used in The Smart Desktop environment. First of all because I grew up on these machines myself, and secondly because the architecture of that system was extremely cost-effective. We are talking about a system that delivered pre-emptive multitasking in as little as 512Kb of memory (!). So this is my “ode to OS 4” if you will.

And the desktop has caused quite a stir both in the Delphi community, cloud community and retro community alike. Why? Because it shows some of the potential cloud technology can give you. Potential that has been under their nose all this time.

And even more important: it demonstrate how productive you can be in Smart Pascal. The operating system itself, both visual and non-visual parts, was put together in my spare time over 3 weeks. Had I been able to work on it daily (as a normal job) I would have knocked it out in a week.

A desktop as a project type

All programming languages have project types. If you open up Delphi and click “new” you are greeted with a rich menu of different projects you can make. From low-level DLL files to desktop applications or database servers. Delphi has it all.

Delphi offers a wide range of projects types you can create

The same is true for visual studio. You click “new solution” and can pick from a wide range of different projects. Web projects, servers, desktop applications and services.

Smart Pascal is the only system where you click “new project” and there is a type called “Smart desktop” and “Smart desktop application”. In other words, the power to create a full desktop is now an integrated part of Smart Pascal.

And the desktop is unique to you. You get to shape it, brand it and make it your own!

Let us take a practical example

Imagine a developer given the task to move the company’s aging invoice and credit system from the Windows desktop – to a purely web-based environment.

The application itself is large and complex, littered with legacy code and “quick fixes” going back decades. Updating such a project is itself a monumental task – but having to first implement concepts like what a window is, tasks, user space, cloud storage, security endpoints, look and feel, back-end services and database connectivity; all of that before you even begin porting the invoice system itself ? The cost is astronomical.

And it happens every single day!

In Smart Pascal, the same developer would begin by clicking “new project” and selecting “Smart desktop”. This gives him a complete desktop environment that is unique to his project and company.

A desktop that he or she can shape, adjust, alter and adapt according to the need of his employer. Things like file-type recognition, storage, getting that database – all of these things are taken care of already. The developer can focus on his task, namely to deliver a modern implementation of their invoice and credit software – not waste months trying to force JavaScript frameworks do things they simply lack the depth to deliver.

Once the desktop has the look and feel in order, he would have to make a simple choice:

• Should the whole desktop represent the invoice system or ..
• Should the invoice system be implemented as a secondary application running on the desktop?

If it’s a large and dedicated system where the users have no need for other programs running, then implementing the invoice system inside the desktop itself is the way to go.

If however the customer would like to expand the system later, perhaps add team management, third-party web-services or open-office like productivity (a unified intranet if you like) – then the second option makes more sense.

On the brink of a revolution

The developer of 2022 is not limited to the desktop. He is not restricted to a particular operating system or chip-set. Fact is, cloud has already reduced these to a matter of preference. There is no strategic advantage of using Windows over Linux when it comes to cloud software.

Where a traditional developer write and implement a solution for a particular system (for instance Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X or Linux) – cloud developers deliver whole eco systems; constellations of software constructed from many parts, both micro-services developed in-house but also services from others; like Amazon or Azure.

All these parts co-operate and can be combined through established end-point standards, much like how components are used in Delphi or Visual Studio today.

The Smart Desktop, codename “Amibian.js”

Access to products written in Smart is through the browser, or sometimes through a “paper thin” native host (Cordova Phonegap, Delphi and C/C++) that expose system level functionality. These hosts wrap your application in a native, executable container ready for Appstore or Google Play.

Now the visual content is typically the same, and is only adapted for a particular device. The real work is divided between the client (which is now very much capable) and your server back-end.

So people still write code in 2022, but the software behaves differently and is designed to function as a group (cluster). And this requires a shift in the way we think.

Above: One of my asm.js prototype compilers. Lets just say it runs fast!

Scaling a solution from processing 100 invoices a minute to handling 100.000 invoices a minute – is no longer a matter of code, but of architecture. This is where the traditional, native only approach to software comes up short, while more flexible approaches like node.js is infinitely more capable.

What has emerged up until now is just the tip of the ice-berg.

Over the next five to eight years, everything is going to change. And the changes will be irrevocable and permanent.

The Smart Desktop back-end running as a system service on a Raspberry PI

As the Americans say, talk is cheap – and I’m done talking. I will do this with you, or without you. Either way it’s happening.

Nightly-build of the desktop can be tested here: http://quartexhq.myasustor.com/

Smart Desktop: Inter frame communication

What is a process in a web desktop environment? Been thinking a bit about this, and it’s actually not that easy to hang the reality of an external script or website running in a frame as a solid “concept” (I use the word entity in my research notes). Visually it appears as a secondary, isolated web application – but ultimately (or technically) it’s just another web object with its own rendering context.

What I’m talking about is programs. Amibian.js or Smart desktop can already run a wealth of applications – which ultimately are just external or internal web-pages (a very simple term in some cases, but it will have to do). But when you want complex behavior from an eco-system, you must also provide an equally complex means of communication.

And this brings me neatly to the heart of todays task – namely how the desktop can talk to running web-applications and visa versa. And there are ultimately only two real options to choose from here: pure client, or client-server.

Unlike other embedded / web desktops I want to do as much as possible client-side. It would take me five minutes to implement message dispatching if I did this server-side, but the less dependent we are on a server – the more flexible amibian.js will be in terms of integration.

The first Desktop-Application type running in the desktop! And its aware that it is running under Amibian. This frame/host awareness helps establish parent/child relationship

Turns out that the browser has an API for this. A message API that allows a main website to talk with other websites embedded in IFrames. Which is just what we need.

But its very crude and not as straight forward as you may think. You have commands like postMessage() and then you can set up an event-handler that fires whenever something comes through. But you also have security measures to think about. What if you interface with a web-application designed to kill the system? Without the safety of an abstraction layer that would indeed be a very easy hack.

The Smart message API

This has been in the RTL for quite some time but I havent really used it for much. I had one demo a couple of years back that used the message-api to handle off-screen rendering in a separate IFrame (sort of poor mans thread), but that was it.

Well, time to update and bring it into 2017! So I give you the new and improved inter-frame, inter-window and inter-domain message framework! (ta da!)

It should be self-evident how to use it, but a little context wont hurt:

• You inherit from TW3MessageData and implement whatever data-fields you need
• You send messages using the w3_SendMessage() method
• You broadcast (i.e send the message to all frames and windows listening) messages using the w3_broadcastMessage method

But here comes the twist, because I hate having to write a bunch of if/then/else switches for messages. So instead I created a simple subscription system! Super small yet very efficient!

In other words, you inform the system which messages you support, which then becomes your subscription. Whenever the local dispatcher encounters that particular message type  – it will forward the message object to you.

Here is the code. Notice the helper functions that deals with finding the current domain and so on – this will be handy when establishing a parent/child relationship.

Also note: you are expected to inherit from these classes and shape them to your message types. I have implemented the bare-bones that mimic’s Windows message API. And yes, please google inter-frame communication while testing this.

unit SmartCL.Messages;

interface

uses
  w3c.dom,
  System.Types,
  System.Time,
  System.JSON,
  Smartcl.Time,
  SmartCL.System;

const
  CNT_QTX_MESSAGES_BASEID = 1000;

type

  TW3MessageData         = class;
  TW3CustomMsgPort       = class;
  TW3OwnedMsgPort        = class;
  TW3MsgPort             = class;
  TW3MainMessagePort     = class;
  TW3MessageSubscription = class;

  TW3MessageSubCallback  = procedure (Message: TW3MessageData);
  TW3MsgPortMessageEvent = procedure (Sender: TObject; EventObj: JMessageEvent);
  TW3MsgPortErrorEvent   = procedure (Sender: TObject; EventObj: JDOMError);

  (* The TW3MessageData represents the actual message-data which is sent
     internally by the system. Notice that it inherits from JObject, which
     means it supports 1:1 mapping from JSON.
     This is why Deserialize is a member, and Serialize is a class member. *)
  TW3MessageData = class(JObject)
  public
    property    ID: Integer;
    property    Source: String;
    property    Data: String;

    function Deserialize: string;
    class function Serialize(const ObjText: string): TW3MessageData;

    constructor Create;
  end;

  (* A "mesage port" is a wrapper around the [obj]->Window[]->OnMessage
     event and [obj]->Window[]->PostMessage API.
     Where [obj] can be either the main window, or an embedded
     IFrame->contentWindow. This base-class implements the generic behavior.
     You must inherit or use a decendant class if you dont know exactly what
     you are doing! *)
  TW3CustomMsgPort = Class(TObject)
  private
    FWindow:    THandle;
  protected
    procedure   Releasewindow;virtual;
    procedure   HandleMessageReceived(eventObj: JMessageEvent);
    procedure   HandleError(eventObj: JDOMError);
  public
    Property    Handle:THandle read FWindow;
    Procedure   PostMessage(msg:Variant;targetOrigin:String);virtual;
    procedure   BroadcastMessage(msg:Variant;targetOrigin:String);virtual;
    Constructor Create(WND: THandle);virtual;
    Destructor  Destroy;Override;
  published
    property    OnMessageReceived: TW3MsgPortMessageEvent;
    Property    OnError: TW3MsgPortErrorEvent;
  end;

  (* This is a baseclass for window-handles that already exist.
     You are expected to provide that handle via the constructor *)
  TW3OwnedMsgPort = Class(TW3CustomMsgPort)
  end;

  (* This message-port type is very different from both the
     ad-hoc baseclass and "owned" variation above.
     This one actually creates it's own IFrame instance, which
     means it's a completely stand-alone entity which doesnt need an
     existing window to dispatch and handle messages *)
  TW3MsgPort = Class(TW3CustomMsgPort)
  private
    FFrame:     THandle;
    function    AllocIFrame: THandle;
    procedure   ReleaseIFrame(aHandle: THandle);
  protected
    procedure   ReleaseWindow; override;
  public
    constructor Create; reintroduce; virtual;
  end;

  (* This message port represent the "main" message port for any
     application that includes this unit. It will connect to the main
     window (deriving from the "owned" base class) and has a custom
     message-handler which dispatches messages to any subscribers *)
  TW3MainMessagePort = Class(TW3OwnedMsgPort)
  protected
    procedure HandleMessage(Sender: TObject; EventObj: JMessageEvent);
  public
    constructor Create(WND: THandle); override;
  end;

  (* Information about registered subscriptions *)
  TW3SubscriptionInfo = Record
    MSGID:    integer;
    Callback: TW3MessageSubCallback;
  end;

  (* A message subscription is an object that allows you to install
     X number of event-handlers for messages you want to recieve. Its
     important to note that all subscribers to a message will get the
     same message -- there is no blocking or ownership concepts
     involved. This system is a huge improvement over the older WinAPI *)
  TW3MessageSubscription = class(TObject)
  private
    FObjects:   Array of TW3SubscriptionInfo;
  public
    function    ValidateMessageSource(FromURL: string): boolean; virtual;
    function    SubscribesToMessage(const MSGID: integer): boolean; virtual;
    procedure   Dispatch(const Message: TW3MessageData); virtual;
    function    Subscribe(const MSGID: integer; const CB: TW3MessageSubCallback): THandle;
    procedure   Unsubscribe(const Handle: THandle);

    Constructor Create; virtual;
    Destructor  Destroy; override;
  end;

  (* Helper functions which simplify message handling *)
  //function  W3_MakeMsgData:TW3MessageData;
  procedure W3_PostMessage(const msgValue: TW3MessageData);
  procedure W3_BroadcastMessage(const msgValue: TW3MessageData);

  (* Audience returns true if a message-ID have any
     subscriptions assigned to it *)
  function  W3_Audience(msgId: integer): boolean;

  (* This returns true if the current smart application is embedded in a frame.
     That can be handy to know when establishing parent/child relationships
     between main-application and child "programs" running in frames *)
  function AppRunningInFrame: boolean;
  function GetUrlLocation: string;
  function GetDomainFromUrl(URL: string; const IncludeSubDomain: boolean): string;

implementation

uses SmartCL.System;

var
_mainport:    TW3MainMessagePort = NIL;
_subscribers: Array of TW3MessageSubscription;

function AppRunningInFrame: boolean;
var
  LMyFrame: THandle;
begin
  // window.frameElement Returns the element (such as <iframe> or <object>)
  // in which the window is embedded, or null if the window is top-level.
  try
    // Note: attempting to read frameElement will throw a SecurityError
    // exception in cross-origin iframes. It should just return null,
    // but not all browsers play by the rules -- hence the try/catch
    asm
      @LMyFrame = window.frameElement;
    end;
  except
    on e: exception do
    exit;
  end;
  result := not (LMyFrame);
end;

function GetUrlLocation: string;
begin
  asm
    @result = window.location.hostname;
  end;
end;

function GetDomainFromUrl(Url: string; const IncludeSubDomain: boolean): string;
begin
  url := Url.trim();
  if url.length < 1 then
  begin
    asm
      @Url = window.location.hostname;
    end;
  end;
  asm
    @url = (@url).replace("/(https?:\/\/)?(www.)?/i", '');
    if (!@IncludeSubDomain) {
        @url = (@url).split('.');
        @url = (@url).slice((@url).length - 2).join('.');
    }
    if ((@url).indexOf('/') !== -1) {
      @result = (@url).split('/')[0];
    } else {
      @result = @url;
    }
  end;
end;

//#############################################################################
//
//#############################################################################

procedure QTXDefaultMessageHandler(sender:TObject;EventObj:JMessageEvent);
var
  x:      Integer;
  mItem:  TW3MessageSubscription;
  mData:  TW3MessageData;
begin
  mData := TW3MessageData.Serialize(EventObj.Data);
  //mData := new TW3MessageData();
  //mData.Serialize(EventObj.Data);

  for x:=0 to _subscribers.count-1 do
  Begin
    mItem := _subscribers[x];

    // Check that the message is subscribed to
    if mItem.SubscribesToMessage(mData.ID) then
    begin
      // Make sure subscriber validates the caller-domain
      if mItem.ValidateMessageSource( TVariant.AsString(EventObj.source) ) then
      begin
        (* We execute with a minor delay, allowing the browser to
         exit the function before we dispatch our data *)
        TW3Dispatch.Execute(procedure ()
        begin
          mItem.Dispatch(mData);
        end, 10);
      end;
    end;
  end;
end;

{ function W3_MakeMsgData: TW3MessageData;
begin
  result := new TW3MessageData();
  result.Source := "*";
end;      }

function W3_GetMsgPort: TW3MainMessagePort;
begin
  if _mainport = NIL then
  _mainport := TW3MainMessagePort.Create(BrowserAPI.Window);
  result := _mainport;
end;

procedure W3_PostMessage(const msgValue:TW3MessageData);
begin
  if msgValue<>NIL then
  W3_GetMsgPort().PostMessage(msgValue.Deserialize,msgValue.Source) else
  raise exception.create('Postmessage failed, message object was NIL error');
end;

procedure W3_BroadcastMessage(const msgValue:TW3MessageData);
Begin
  if msgValue<>NIL then
  W3_GetMsgPort().BroadcastMessage(msgValue,msgValue.Source) else
  raise exception.create('Broadcastmessage failed, message object was NIL error');
end;

function  W3_Audience(msgId: Integer): boolean;
var
  x:  Integer;
  mItem:  TW3MessageSubscription;
begin
  result:=False;
  for x:=0 to _subscribers.count-1 do
  Begin
    mItem:=_subscribers[x];
    result:=mItem.SubscribesToMessage(msgId);
    if result then
    break;
  end;
end;

//#############################################################################
// TW3MainMessagePort
//#############################################################################

Constructor TW3MessageData.Create;
begin
  self.Source:="*";
end;

function  TW3MessageData.Deserialize: string;
begin
  result := JSON.Stringify(self);
end;

class function TW3MessageData.Serialize(const ObjText: string): TW3MessageData;
begin
  result := TW3MessageData(JSON.parse(ObjText));
end;

//#############################################################################
// TW3MainMessagePort
//#############################################################################

constructor TW3MainMessagePort.Create(WND: THandle);
begin
  inherited Create(WND);
  OnMessageReceived := QTXDefaultMessageHandler;
end;

procedure TW3MainMessagePort.HandleMessage(Sender: TObject; EventObj: JMessageEvent);
begin
  QTXDefaultMessageHandler(self, eventObj);
end;

//#############################################################################
// TW3MessageSubscription
//#############################################################################

Constructor TW3MessageSubscription.Create;
begin
  inherited Create;
  _subscribers.add(self);
end;

Destructor TW3MessageSubscription.Destroy;
Begin
  _subscribers.Remove(self);
  inherited;
end;

function TW3MessageSubscription.Subscribe(const MSGID: integer; const CB: TW3MessageSubCallback): THandle;
var
  LObj: TW3SubscriptionInfo;
begin
  LObj.MSGID := MSGID;
  LObj.Callback := @CB;
  FObjects.add(LObj);
  result := LObj;
end;

procedure TW3MessageSubscription.Unsubscribe(const Handle: THandle);
var
  x:  Integer;
begin
  for x:=0 to FObjects.Count-1 do
  begin
    if variant(FObjects[x]) = Handle then
    Begin
      FObjects.delete(x,1);
      break;
    end;
  end;
end;

function TW3MessageSubscription.ValidateMessageSource(FromURL: string): boolean;
begin
  // by default we accept messages from anywhere
  result := true;
end;

function TW3MessageSubscription.SubscribesToMessage(const MSGID: integer): boolean;
var
  x:  Integer;
begin
  result:=False;
  for x:=0 to FObjects.Count-1 do
  Begin
    if FObjects[x].MSGID = MSGID then
    Begin
      result:=true;
      break;
    end;
  end;
end;

procedure TW3MessageSubscription.Dispatch(const Message:TW3MessageData);
var
  x:  Integer;
begin
  for x:=0 to FObjects.Count-1 do
  Begin
    if FObjects[x].MSGID = Message.ID then
    Begin
      if assigned(FObjects[x].Callback) then
      FObjects[x].Callback(Message);
      break;
    end;
  end;
end;

//#############################################################################
// TW3MsgPort
//#############################################################################

Constructor TW3MsgPort.Create;
begin
  FFrame:=allocIFrame;
  if (FFrame) then
  inherited Create(FFrame.contentWindow) else
  Raise Exception.Create('Failed to create message-port error');
end;

procedure TW3MsgPort.ReleaseWindow;
Begin
  ReleaseIFrame(FFrame);
  FFrame:=unassigned;
  Inherited;
end;

Procedure TW3MsgPort.ReleaseIFrame(aHandle:THandle);
begin
  If (aHandle) then
  Begin
    asm
      document.body.removeChild(@aHandle);
    end;
  end;
end;

function TW3MsgPort.AllocIFrame: THandle;
Begin
  asm
    @result = document.createElement('iframe');
  end;

  if (result) then
  begin
    /* if no style property is created, we provide that */
    if not (result['style']) then
    result['style'] := TVariant.createObject;

    /* Set visible style to hidden */
    result['style'].display := 'none';

    asm
      document.body.appendChild(@result);
    end;

  end;
end;

//#############################################################################
// TW3CustomMsgPort
//#############################################################################

Constructor TW3CustomMsgPort.Create(WND: THandle);
Begin
  inherited Create;
  FWindow := WND;
  if (FWindow) then
  begin
    FWindow.addEventListener('message', @HandleMessageReceived, false);
    FWindow.addEventListener('error', @HandleError, false);
  end;
End;

Destructor TW3CustomMsgPort.Destroy;
begin
  if (FWindow) then
  begin
    FWindow.removeEventListener('message', @HandleMessageReceived, false);
    FWindow.removeEventListener('error', @HandleError, false);
    ReleaseWindow;
  end;
  inherited;
end;

procedure TW3CustomMsgPort.HandleMessageReceived(eventObj:JMessageEvent);
Begin
  if assigned(OnMessageReceived) then
  OnMessageReceived(self,eventObj);
End;

procedure TW3CustomMsgPort.HandleError(eventObj:JDOMError);
Begin
  if assigned(OnError) then
  OnError(self,eventObj);
end;

procedure TW3CustomMsgPort.Releasewindow;
begin
  FWindow := Unassigned;
end;

Procedure TW3CustomMsgPort.PostMessage(msg:Variant;targetOrigin:String);
begin
  if (FWindow) then
  FWindow.postMessage(msg,targetOrigin);
end;

// This will send a message to all frames
procedure TW3CustomMsgPort.BroadcastMessage(msg:Variant;targetOrigin:String);
var
  x:  Integer;
  mLen: Integer;
begin
  mLen := TVariant.AsInteger(browserAPI.Window.frames.length);
  for x:=0 to mLen-1 do
  begin
    browserAPI.window.frames[x].postMessage(msg,targetOrigin);
  end;
end;

finalization
begin
  if assigned(_mainport) then
  _mainport.free;
end;

end.

Amibian.js and the Narcissus hack

Wow, I must admit that I never really thought Amibian.js would become even remotely as popular as it has – yet people respond with incredible enthusiasm to our endeavour. I was just told that an article at Commodore USA mentioned us – that an exposure to 37000 readers. Add that to the roughly 40.000 people that subscribe to my feeds around the world and I must say: I hope I code something worthy of your time!

This is going to look and behave like the bomb when im done!

But there is a lot of stuff on the list before it’s even remotely finished. This is due to the fact that im not just juggling one codebase here – im juggling 5 separate yet interconnected codebases at the same time (!). First there is the Smart Mobile Studio RTL (run time library) which represents the foundation. This gives me object-oriented, fully inheritance driven visual controls. This have roughly 5 years of work behind it.

Still #1 after all these years

On top of that you have the actual visual controls, like buttons, scrollbars, lists, css3 effect engines, tweening, database storage and a ton of low-level stuff. The browser have no idea what a window is for example, let alone how it should look or respond to users. So every little piece has to be coded by someone. And well, that’s what I do.

Next you have the workbench and operating-system itself. What you know as Amibian.js, Smart Workbench or Quartex media desktop – take your pick, but it’s already a substantial codebase spanning some 40 units with thousands of lines of code. It is divided into two parts: the web front-end that you have all seen; and the node.js backend that is not yet made public.

And on top of that you have the external stuff. Quake III didn’t spontaneously self-assemble inside the desktop, someone had to do some coding and make the two interface. Same with all the other features you have.

The worst so far (as in damn hard to get right) is the Ace text editor. Ace by itself is super easy to work with – but you may have noticed that we have removed it’s scrollbars and replaced these with Amiga scrollbars instead? That is a formidable challenge it its own right.

Aced it! Kidnapping signals was a challenge

Whats on the menu this weekend?

I noticed that on Linux that text-selection was utterly messed up, so when you moved a window around – it would suddenly start selecting the title text of other elements around the desktop. This is actually a bug in the browser – not my code; but I still have to code around it. Which I have now done.

I also solved selection for the console window (or any “text” container. A window is made up of many parts and the content region can be inherited from and replaced), so that should now work fine regardless of browser and platforms. Ace theming also works, and the vertical scrollbar is responding as expected. Still need a few tweaks to move right, but that is easy stuff. The hard part is behind us thankfully.

Selection – works

Right now I’m working on ScummVM so that should be in place later today 🙂

Thats cool, but what motivates you?

Cult of Joy

Retro gaming is important, and we have to make it as easy for people to enjoy their retro gear without patent trolls ruining the fun. Im just so tired of how ruined the Amiga scene is by these (3 companies in particular).. thieves is the only word I can find that fits.

So fine! I will make my own. Come hell or high water. Free as a bird and untouchable.

So I have made some tools that will make it ridiculously easy for you to share, download and play your games online. Whenever you want, hosted where-ever you need and there is not a god damn thing people can do about it. When you realize how simple the hack is it will make you laugh. I came up with this ages ago and dubbed it Narcissus.

To understand the Narcissus hack, consider the following:

PNG is a lossless compression format, meaning that it doesn’t lose any information when compressed. It’s not like JPEG which scrambles the original and saves a faximile that tricks the eye. Nope, if you compress a PNG image you get the exact same out when you decode it (read: show it).

But who said we have to store pixels? Pixels are just bytes after all. In fact, why can’t we take a whole game disk or rom and store that inside a picture? Sure you can!

This tool is now built into Amibian.js

It’s amusing, I came up with this hack years ago. It has been a part of Smart Mobile Studio since the beginning.

You have to remember that retro games are super small compared to modern games. The average ADF file is what? 880kb or something like that? Well hold on to your hat buddy, because PNG can hold 64 megabyte of data! You can encode a decent Amiga hard disk image in 64 megabyte.

Can you guess what the picture on the right contains? This picture is actually ALL the Amiga rom files packed into a single image. Dont worry, I converted it to JPEG to mess up the data before uploading. But yes, you can now host not just the games as normal picture files, but also roms and whatever you like.

And the beauty of it – who the hell is going to find them? You can host them on Github, Google drive, Dropbox or right your blog — if you don’t have the encryption key the file is useless.

Snap, crackle and pop!

RSS Filesystem

You know RSS feeds right? If you sign up for a blog you automatically get a RSS feed. It’s basically just a list of your recent posts – perhaps with an extract from each article, a thumbnail picture and links to each post. RSS have been around for a decade or more. It’s a great way to keep track of news.

The second hack is that using the data-to-image-encoder you can store a whole read-only filesystem as a normal RSS feed. Always think outside the box!

Let’s say you have a game collection for your Amiga right? Lets say 200 games. Wouldnt it be nice to have all those games online? Just readily available regardless of where you may be? Without “you know who” sending you a nasty email?

Well, just encode your game as described above, include the data-picture in your WordPress post, and do that for each of your games. Since you can encrypt these images they will be worthless to others. But for you its a neat way of hosting all your games online for free (like WordPress or Blogger) and play them via Amibian or the patched UAE4Arm (ops, did I share that, sorry dirk *grin*) and you’re home free.

You know what’s really cool? For this part Amibian doesnt even need a server. So you can just save the Amibian.js html page on your phone and that’s all you need.

Drink up me hearties yo ho!