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.

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.

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

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.

Nano-pi Fire 3: The curse of Mali

Being able to buy SBCs (single board computers) for as little as $35 has revolutionized computing as we know it. Since the release of the Raspberry PI 1b back in 2012, single board computers have gone from being something electrical engineers work with, to something everyone can learn to use. Today you don’t need a background in electrical engineering to build a sophisticated embedded system; you just need a positive spirit, willingness to learn and a suitable SBC starter-kit.

Single board computers

If you are interested in SBC’s for whatever reason, I am sure you have picked up a few pointers about what works and doesn’t. In these times of open forums and 24/7 internet, the response-time from customers are close to instantaneous; and both positive and negative feedback should never be taken lightly. It’s certainly harder to hide a poor product in 2018, so engineers thinking they can make a quick buck selling sloppy-tech should think twice.

I have no idea how many boards have been released since 2016, but some 20+ new boards feels like a reasonable number. Which under normal circumstances would be awesome, because competition can be healthy. It can stimulate manufacturers to deliver better quality, higher performance and to use eco-friendly resources.

But it can also backfire and result in terrible quality and an unhealthy focus on profit.

The Mali SoC

The MALI graphics chipset is a name you see often in connection with SBC’s. If you read up on the Mali SoC it sounds fantastic. All that power, open architecture, partner support – surely this design should rock right? If only that were true. My experience with this chipset, which spans a variety of boards, is anything but fantastic. It’s actually a common factor in a growling list of boards that are unstable and unreliable.

I don’t have an axe to grind here, I have tried to remain optimistic and positive to every board that pass my desk. But Mali has become synonymous with awful performance and unreliable operation.

Out of the 14 odd boards I have tested since 2016, the 8 board that I count as useless all had the Mali chipset. This is quite remarkable considering Mali has an open driver architecture.

Open is not always best

If you have been into IOT for a few years you may recall the avalanche of critique that hit the Raspberry PI foundation for their choice of shipping with the Broadcom SoC? Broadcom has been a closed system with proprietary drivers written by the vendor exclusively, which made a lot of open-source advocates furious [at the time].

You know what? Going with the Broadcom chipset is the best bloody move the PI foundation ever did; I don’t think I have ever owned a SBC or embedded platform as stable as the PI, and the graphics performance you get for $35 is simply outstanding. Had they listened to their critics and used Mali on the Raspberry PI 2b, it would have been a disaster. The IOT revolution might never have occurred even.

The whole point of the Mali open driver architecture, is that developers should have easy access to documentation and examples – so they can quickly implement drivers and release their product. I don’t know what has gone wrong here, but either developers are so lazy that they just copy and paste code without properly testing it – or there are fundamental errors in the hardware itself.

To date the only board that works well with a Mali chipset, out of all the boards I have bought and tested, is the ODroid XU4. Which leads me to conclude that something has gone terribly wrong with the art of making drivers. This really should not be an issue in 2018, but the number of bankrupt mali boards tell another story.

Nano-PI Fire 3

When reading the specs on the Nano-pi fire 3 I was impressed with just how much firepower they managed to squeeze into such a tiny form-factor. Naturally I was sceptical due to the Mali, which so far only have ODroid going for it. But considering the $35 price it was worth the risk. Worst case I can recycle it as a headless server or something.

And the board is impressive! Let there be no doubt about the potential of this little thing, because from an engineering point of view its mind-blowing how much technology $35 buys you in 2018.

I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old coder, but when you have been around as many SBC’s as I have, you tend to hold back on the enthusiasm. I got all worked-up over the Asus Tinkerboard for example (read part 1 and part 2 here), and despite the absolutely knock-out specs, the mali drivers and shabby kernel work crippled an otherwise spectacular board. I still find it inconceivable how Asus, a well-respected global technology partner, could have allowed a product to ship with drivers not even worthy of public domain. And while they have updated and made improvements it’s still not anywhere near what the board could do with the right drivers.

The experience of the Nano-PI so far has been the same as many of the other boards; especially those made and sold straight from smaller, Asian manufacturers:

• Finding the right disk-image to download is unnecessarily cumbersome
• Display drivers lack hardware acceleration
• Poor help forums
• “Wiki” style documentation
• A large Linux distro that max out the system

More juice

The first thing you are going to notice with the Nano-pi is how important the power supply is. The nano ships with only one usb socket (one!) so a usb hub is the first thing you need. When you add a mouse and keyboard to that equation you have already maxed out a normal 5v 2a mobile power supply.

I noticed this after having problems booting properly when a mouse and keyboard was plugged in. I first thought it was the SD card, but no matter what card I tried – it still wouldn’t boot. It was only when I unplugged the mouse and keyboard that I could log in. Or should we say, cant log in because you don’t have a keyboard attached (sigh).

Now in most cases a Raspberry PI would run fine on 5v 2a, at least for ordinary desktop work; But the nano will be in serious trouble if you don’t give it more juice. So your first purchase should be a proper 5 volt 3 amp PSU. This is also recommended for the original Raspberry PI, but in my experience you can do quite a lot before you max out a PI.

Bluetooth

A redeeming factor for the lack of USB ports and power scaling, is that the board has Bluetooth built-in. So once you have paired and connected a BT keyboard things will be easier to work with. Personally I like keyboard and mouse to be wired. I hate having to change batteries or be disconnected at random (which always happens when you least need it). So the lack of USB ports and power delegation is negative for me, but objectively I can live with it as a trade-off for more CPU power.

Lack of accelerated graphics

It’s not hard to check if X uses the gpu or not. Select a large region of the desktop (holding the left mouse button down obviously) and watch in terror as it sluggishly tries to catch up with the cursor, repainting every cached co-ordinate. Had the GPU been used properly you wouldn’t even see the repaint of the rectangle, it would be smooth and instantaneous.

SD-card reader

I’m sorry but the sd-card reader on this puppy is the slowest I have ever used. I have never tested a device that boots so slow, and even something simple like starting chrome takes ages.

I tested with a cheap SD-card but also a more expensive class 10 card. I’m really trying to find something cool to write about, but it’s hard when boot times is worse than Raspberry PI 1b back in 2012.

1 gigabyte of ram

One thing that I absolutely hate in some of these cheap boards, is how they imagine Ubuntu to be a stamp of approval. The Raspberry PI foundation nailed it by creating a slim, optimized and blistering fast Debian distro. This is important because users don’t buy alternative boards just to throw that extra power away on Ubuntu, they buy these boards to get more cpu and gpu power (read: better value for money) for the same price.

Lubuntu is hopelessly obese for the hardware, as is the case with other cheap SBC’s as well. Something like Pixel is much more interesting. You have a slim, efficient and optimized foundation to build on (or strip down). Ubuntu is quite frankly overkill and eats up all the extra power the board supposedly delivers.

When it comes to ram, 1 gigabyte is a bit too small for desktop use. The reason I say this is because it ships with Ubuntu, why would you ship with Ubuntu unless the desktop was the focus? Which again begs the question: why create a desktop Linux device with 1 gigabyte of memory?

The nano-pi would rock with a slim distro, and hopefully someone will bake a more suitable disk-image for it.

Verdict so far

I still have a lot to test so giving you a final verdict right now would be unfair.

But I must be honest and say that I’m not that happy about this board. It’s not that the hardware is particularly awful (although the mali drivers renders it almost pointless), it’s just that it serves no point.

In order to turn this SBC into a reasonable device you have to buy parts that brings the price up to what you would pay for a ODroid XU4. And to be honest I would much rather have an ODroid XU4 than four nano-pi boards. You have plenty of USB ports, good power scaling (ODroid will start just fine on a normal charger), Bluetooth and pretty much everything you need.

For those rare projects where a single USB is enough, although I cannot for the life of me think of one right now, then sure, it may be cost-effective in quanta. But for homebrew servers, gaming rigs and/or your first SBC experience – I think you will be happier with an original Raspberry PI 3b+, a ODroid XU4 or even the Tinkerboard.

Modus operandi

Having said all that .. there is also something to say about modus-operandi. Different boards are designed for different systems. It may very well be that this system is designed to run Android as it’s primary system. So while they provide a Linux image, that may in fact only be a “bonus” distro. We shall soon see as I will test Android next.

Next up, how does it fare with the multi-threaded uae4arm? Stay tuned for more!

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 🙂

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 🙂

The Tinkerboard Strikes Back

For those that follow my blog you probably remember the somewhat devastating rating I gave the Tinkerboard earlier this year (click here for part 1, and here for part 2). It was quite sad having to give such a poor rating to what is ultimately a fine piece of hardware. I had high hopes for it – in fact I bought two of the boards because I figured there was no way it could suck with that those specs. But suck it did and while the muscle was there, the drivers were in such a state that it never emerged for the user. It was released prematurely, and I think most people that bought it agrees on this.

The initial release was less than bad, it was horrible

Since my initial review those months ago good things have happened. Asus seem to have listened to the “poonami” of negative feedback and adapted their website accordingly. Unlike the first time I visited when you literally had to dig into recursive menus (which was less than intuitive in this case) just to download the software – the disk images are now available at the bottom of the product page. So thumbs up for that (!)

They have also made the GPIO programming API a lot easier to get; downloading it is reduced to a “one liner” for C developers, which is the way it should be. And they have likewise provided wrappers for other languages, like ever popular python and scratch.

I am a bit disappointed that they don’t provide freepascal units. A lot of developers use object pascal on these board after all, because Object Pascal gives you a better balance between productivity and depth. Pascal is easier to learn (it was designed for that after all) but avoids some of the pitfalls of C/C++ while retaining all the good things. Porting over C headers is fairly easy for a good pascal programmer – but it would be cool of Asus remember that there are more languages in the world than C and python.

All of this aside: the most important change of all is what Asus has done with the drivers! They have finally put together drivers that shows off the capabilities of the hardware and unleash the speed we all hoped for when the board was first announced. And man does it show! My previous experience with the Tinkerboard was horrible; it was the text-book example of a how not to release a product (the whole release has been odd; Asus is a huge, multi-national corporation. Yet their release had basement 3 man band written all over it).

So this is fantastic news! Finally the Tinkerboard delivers and can be used for real life projects!

Smart IOT

At The Smart Company we both create and use our core product, Smart Mobile Studio, to deliver third-party solutions. As the name implies Smart is a software development system initially made for mobile applications; but it quickly grew into a much larger toolchain and is exceptionally good for making embedded applications. With embedded applications I mean things that run on kiosk systems, cash machines and stuff like that; basically anything with a touch-screen that does something.

The Smart desktop gives you a good starting point for embedded work

One of the examples that ship with Smart Pascal is a fully working desktop embedded environment. Smart compiles for both ordinary browsers (JavaScript environments with a traditional HTML5 display) but also for node.js, which is JavaScript unbound by the strict rules of a browser. Developers typically use node.js to write highly scalable server software, but you are naturally not limited to that. Netflix is written 100% in Node.js, so we are talking serious firepower here.

Our embedded environment is called The Smart Desktop (also known as Amibian.js) and gives you a ready-made node.js back-end that couples with a HTML5 front-end. This is a ready to use environment that you can deploy your own applications through. Things like storage, a nice looking UI, user logon and credentials and much, much more is all implemented for you. You don’t have to use it of course, you can write your own system from scratch if you like. We created “Amibian” to demonstrate just how powerful Smart Pascal can be in the right hands.

With this in mind – my main concern when testing SBC’s (single board computers) is obviously web performance. By default JavaScript is a single core event-driven runtime system; you can spawn threads of course but its done somewhat different from how you would work in Delphi or C++.  JavaScript is designed to be system friendly and a gentle giant if you like, which has turned out to be a good thing – because the way JS schedules execution makes it ideal for clustering!

Most people find it hard to believe that JavaScript can outperform native code, but the JavaScript runtimes of today is almost a whole eco system in themselves. With JIT compilers and LLVM optimization — it’s a whole new ballgame.

Making a scale

To give you a better context to see where the Tinkerboard is on a scale, I decided to set up a couple of simple tests. Nothing fancy, just running the same web applications and see how each of them perform on different boards. So I used the same 3 candidates as before, namely the Raspberry PI 3b, the Hardkernel ODroid XU4 and last but not least: the Asus Tinkerboard.

I setup the following applications to compile with the desktop system, meaning that they were compiled with the Smart project. We got plenty of web applications but for this I wanted to pack the most demanding apps in our library:

• Skid-Row intro remake using the CODEF library
• Quake 3 asm.js build
• Plex

OK let’s go through them and see where the chips land!

The Raspberry PI 3b

Bassoon ran well, its not that demanding

The Raspberry PI was aweful (click here for a video). There is no doubt that native applications like UAE4Arm runs extremely well on the PI (which contains hand optimized assembler, not exactly a fair fight)- but when it comes to modern HTML5 the PI doesn’t stand a chance. You could perhaps use a Raspberry PI 3b for simple applications which are not graphic and cpu intensive, but you can forget about anything remotely taxing.

It ran Bassoon reasonably fast, but all in all you really don’t want a raspberry when doing high quality IOT, unless its headless code and node.js perhaps. Frameworks like Johnny #5 gives you a ton of GPIO features out of the box – in fact you can target 40 embedded systems without any change to your code. But for large, high quality web front-ends, the PI just wont cut it.

• Skid-Row: 1 frame per second or less
• Quake: Can’t even start, just forget it
• Plex: Starts but it lags so much you can’t watch anything

But hey, I never expected $35 to give me a kick ass ARM experience anyways. There are 1000 things the PI does very well, but HTML is not one of them.

ODroid XU4

The ODroid packs a lot of power!

The ODroid being faster than the Raspberry PI is nothing new, but I was surprised at how much power this board delivers. I never expected it to give me a Linux experience close to that of a x86 PC; I mean we are talking about a 45€ SBC here. And it’s only 10€ more than the Raspberry PI, which is a toy at best. But the ODroid XU4 delivers a good Linux desktop; And it’s well worth the extra 10€ when compared to the PI.

Personally I don’t understand why people keep buying PI’s when there is so much better options on the market now. At least not if web technology is involved. A small server or emulator sure, but not HTML5 and browsers. The PI just cant handle it.

• Skid-Row: 4-5 frames per second
• Quake: Runs at very enjoyable speed (!)
• Plex: Runs well but you may want to pick SD or 720p to avoid lags

What really shocked me was that ODroid XU4 can run Quake.js! The PI can’t even start that because it’s so demanding. It is one of the largest and most resource hungry asm.js projects out there – but ODroid XU4 did a fantastic job.

• Click here for video #1
• Click here for second video (Quake)

Now it’s not a silky smooth experience, I would guess something along the lines of 17-20 fps. But you know what? Thats pretty good for a $45 board.

I have owned far worse x86 PC’s in my day.

The Tinkerboard

Before i powered up the board I was reluctant to push it too far, because I thought it would fail me once again. I did hope that something had been done by Asus to rectify the situation though, because Asus really should have done a better job before releasing it. It’s now been roughly 6 months since I bought it, and roughly 8 months since it was released here in Europe. It would have been better for them to have waited with the release. I was not alone about butchering the whole board, its been a source of frustration for those that bought it. 75€ is not much, but no-one likes to throw money out the window like that.

Long story short: I downloaded the latest Ubuntu image and burned that to an SD card (I actually first downloaded the Debian Jessie image they have, but sadly you have to do a bit of work to turn that into a desktop system – so I decided to go for Ubuntu instead). If the drivers are in order I have a feeling the Jessie image will be even faster – Ubuntu has always been a high-quality distribution, but it’s also one of the most demanding. One might even say it’s become bloated. But it does deliver a near Microsoft Windows like experience which has served the Linux community well.

But the Tinkerboard really delivers! (click here for the video) Asus have cleaned up their act and implemented the drivers properly, and you can feel that the moment the desktop comes into view. With the PI you are always fighting with lagging performance. When you start a program the whole system freezes for a while, when you quit a program the system freezes – hell when you move the mouse around the system bloody freezes! Well that is not the case with the Tinkerboard that’s for sure. The tinkerboard feels more like running vanilla Ubuntu on a normal x86 PC to be honest.

• Skid-Row: 10-15 frames per second
• Quake: Full screen 32bit graphics, runs like hell
• Plex: Plays back fullscreen HD, just awesome!

All I can say is this: if you are going to do any bit of embedded coding, regardless if you are using Smart Mobile Studio or some other devkit — this is the board to get (!)

Like already mentioned it does cost almost twice as much as the PI, but that extra 30€ buys you loads of extra power. It opens up so many avenues of code and you can explore software far more complex than both the PI and ODroid combined. With the tinkerboard you can finally deliver a state of the art product built with off the shelves web components. It’s in a league of its own.

The ‘tinker’ rocks at last

When I first bought the tinker i felt cheated. It was so frustrating because the specs were so good and the terrible performance just came down to sloppy work and Asus releasing it prematurely for cash (lets face it, they tapped into the lucrative market established by the PI foundation). By looking at the specs you knew it had the firepower to deliver so much, but it was held back by ridicules drivers.

There is still a lot that can be done to make the Tinkerboard run even faster. Like I mentioned Ubuntu is not the racecar of distributions out there. Ubuntu is fat, there is no other way of saying it. So if someone took the time to create a minimalistic Jessie image, recompile every piece with maximum llvm optimization and as few running services as possible — the tinkerboard would positively fly!

So do I recommend it? I am thrilled to say that yes, I can finally recommend the tinkerboard! It is by far the coolest board in my collection now. In fact it’s so good that I’m donating one to my daughter. She is presently using an iMac which is overkill for her needs at age 10. Now I can make a super simple menu with Netflix and Youtube, buy a nice touch-screen display and wall mount it in her room.

Well done Asus!

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.

FMX4Linux is coming, and we cant wait!

When Embarcadero announced Linux support for their Tokyo release of Delphi, my soul literally left my body for a moment. Could it really be true? After all these years have Embarcadero done what many said would be impossible?

I must admit that people saying something is impossible has lost its sting for me. Over the past 3 years I have one of these impossible things on a weekly basis, yet people are just as shocked every single time. But this time – I was the one in a state of excitement.

As an outspoken (an understatement perhaps) active blogger, my skin has grown thick over the years. I also get to see a lot of cool tech long before it’s commercially available and mainstream – so it takes more for me to be swayed and dazzled. And you grow a healthy instinct for separating bullshit from true technical achievements too.

Delphi Tokyo is probably one of the finest Delphi editions to date

But yes, I admit it – this time Embarcadero surprised me in every positive way imaginable. If you follow my blog you know that I call it as I see it and hold little back. But this was a purely positive experience.

No I know what you are going to say; everyone knew about this right? Yeah me too. But my mind has been elsewhere lately with work and projects, so I didn’t catch the release buzz from the closed forums (well, “closed” is a matter of perspective, I have friends from Russia to the United States, and from china to the Sudan) and for the first time since the Borland days – Embarcadero got the drop on me.

I’m the kind of guy that runs on passion. Delphi, Smart Pascal and even object pascal as a general language is not just work for me – its something I love to use. I relax and enjoy myself when coding. So you can imagine my reaction when my boss sent me a message with “Download Tokyo and give me a report”. It was close to midnight but I was out of that bed faster than bacon on toast, ran into my home office wearing nothing but boxers and a Commodore t-shirt – and threw myself into Embarcadero Developer Network’s download section.

From hero to zero in 2 seconds

I think it was around 07:00 the next morning, one hour before I was due for work that the magic phrase “command line and system services [daemons] only” hit home. And yes I “kinda” knew that before – but maybe, just maybe Embarcadero had thrown in visual applications in the 11th hour. I even had a friendly bet with Jim McKeeth that a FMX UI solution would appear less than 24 hours after release (more about that later).

Now that is a beautiful thing

Either way, it was quite the anti-climax after all that work in VMWare installing Delphi from scratch, waiting, hoping and praying. First of all because I remember watching an in-depth technical review about Firemonkey by David Intersimone a few years back; the one where he describes the Firemonkey architecture in detail. Especially how the abstraction layer between the visual control framework and the actual os made it possible for FMX to quickly adapt to new environments. Firemonkey is a complex and highly adaptable framework, but its biggest strength is paradoxically enough its simplicity. A simplicity achieved through abstracting the UI from the rendering functionality. At least as much as possible, you still have to deal with OS level windowing, security and all of that – so it’s no walk in the park either.

In the presentation (sadly I don’t have a link to this one) David went to great lengths to explain that regardless of operating system, as long as someone implemented a driver class that exposed the set of features FMX needs – Firemonkey would run as long as the compiler supported the instruction set. Visual engines could be DirectX, OpenGL, Cairo or whatever makes sense on that particular platform. As long as the “bridge class” talking with the operating system is there – Firemonkey can run on a toaster if so be.

So Firemonkey has the same abstraction concept that we use in the VJL (Visual JavaScript Component Library) for Smart Pascal (differences not withstanding). If it’s Windows you are running on, DirectX is used; If it’s OS X then Apple’s implementation of OpenGL runs the show – and if you are on Linux you can pick between OpenGL and Cairo. I must admit I havent looked too closely at Cairo, but I know it was designed to make advanced composition and UI rendering more efficient.

Why it Tokyo didn’t ship with visual application support is beyond me, but considering the timing of what happened next, I have made my own conclusions. It doesnt really matter to be honest – the point is we got it and it rocks!

FMX4Linux to the rescue!

Remember the wager I mentioned with Jim McKeeth? It wasnt a serious wager, I just commented and said “a Linux FMX solution will appear within 24hrs, you can bet on it” and added a smiley. I had no idea who or how, I just knew it’s going to turn up.

Because one thing that is a sure bet – it’s that the Delphi community is a group made up of highly resourceful, inventive and clever people. And I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t take many hours before someone came up with a patch or framework to fill the void. And right I was. Less than 24 hours later and it was fact rather than conjecture.

This is just a must have. There is no debate.

So less than 24 hours after Delphi Tokyo hit the shelves. Eugene Kryukov and Alexey Sharagin presented “FMX for Linux”. Giving you both the missing rendering back-end that talks to the system – and some kind of “widget mapping” (as far as I can understand, I wont pretend to know how they did it) that renders your UI according to GTK. So it’s not just a simple “patch”, theme or class that calls a handful of external routines; it’s a full visual implementation of FMX for Linux. Impressive? Oh yeah, and then some!

Let us explore!

Over the next few days I will be giving you an in-depth look at how this system works. I’m also going to test drive Html Components and see if we can get that running under Linux as well. Since FMX for Linux is still in development we have to take height for that – but being able to target Ubuntu is pretty cool! And Remobjects, glorious Remobjects SDK, if that works out of the box I will dance the jig and upload it to YouTube, I swear to cow!

Linux is about to feel the full onslaught of object pascal

There is little doubt what the next Smart Pascal IDE will be based on, and when you combine FMX for Linux, HTML components, Remobjects SDK and TMS into one – you got serious firepower to play with that will give even the most hardened C/C++ QT developer reason to be scared. And that is before the onslaught of Data Abstract and Remobjects C# native compiler.

Oh man next weekend is going to be the best ever!

Let’s not forget ARM targets

The “PI killer” has arrived!

On a second note we will also be looking at the my latest embedded toys – namely the Asus Tinkerboard. I just got two of them in the mail today. Its going to be exciting to see how it fares against the Raspberry PI, ODroid XU4 and the Intel Atom based UP board.

We will also be testing how these two cards can be clustered together using node.js to work as one – and see how that impacts performance for our node.js based Smart Desktop project. These are exciting times indeed!

To make things even more interesting I will be pitching the Tinkerboard against the ODroid XU4 (original version, not the pussy passive save the environment unicorn they push now) against both the x86 UP v1 and Raspberry 3b. Although I think the Raspberry PI is in for the beating of its life when the ODroid and Tinker is overclocked to blood lust mode!

The Smart desktop has a powerful node.js back-end that packs a punch

So, when LLVM optimized JavaScript runs Mc68040 machine-code at 4 times the speed of a high-end Amiga 4000, I will be content.

So let’s do another “that’s impossible” shall we 🙂

Smart Pascal, the next generation

I want to take the time to talk a bit about the future, because like all production companies we are all working towards lesser and greater goals. If you don’t have a goal then you are in trouble; Thankfully our goals have been very clear from the beginning. Although I must admit that our way there has been.. “colorful” at times.

When we started back in 2010 we didn’t really know what would become of our plans. We only knew that this was important; there was a sense of urgency and “we have to build this” in the air; I think everyone involved felt that this was the case, without any rational explanation as to why. Like all products of passion it can consume you in a way – and you work day and night on turning an idea into something real. From the intangible to the tangible.

It seems like yesterday, but it was 5 years ago!

By the end of 2011 / early 2012, Eric and myself had pretty much proven that this could be done. At the time there were more than enough nay-sayers and I think both of us got flamed quite often for daring to think different. People would scoff at me and say I was insane to even contemplate that object pascal could ever be implemented for something as insignificant and mediocre as JavaScript. This was my first meeting with a sub-culture of the Delphi and C++ community, a constellation I have gone head-to-head with on many occasions. But they have never managed to shake my resolve as much as inch.

 

 

When we released version 1.0 in 2012 some ideas about what could be possible started to form. Jørn defined plans for a system we later dubbed “Smart net”. In essence it would be something you logged onto from the IDE – allowing you to store your projects in the cloud, compile in the cloud (connected with Adobe build services) and essentially move parts of your eco-system to the cloud. Keep in mind this was when people still associated cloud with “storage”; they had not yet seen things like Uber or Netflix or played Quake 3 at 160 frames per second, courtesy of asm.js in their browser.

The second part would be a website where you could do the same, including a live editor, access to the compiler and also the ability to buy and sell components, solutions and products. But for that we needed a desktop environment (which is where the Quartex Media Desktop came in later).

The first version of the Media Desktop, small but powerful. Here running in touch-screen mode with classical mobile device layout (full screen forms).

Well, we have hit many bumps along the road since then. But I must be honest and say, some of our detours have also been the most valuable. Had it not been for the often absurd (to the person looking in) research and demo escapades I did, the RTL wouldn’t be half as powerful as it is today. It would deliver the basics, perhaps piggyback on Ext.js or some lame, run of the mill framework – and that would be that. Boring, flat and limited.

What we really wanted to deliver was a platform. Not just a website, but a rich environment for creating, delivering and enjoying web and cloud based applications. And without much fanfare – that is ultimately what the Smart Desktop and it’s sexy node.js back-end is all about is all about.

We have many project types in the pipeline, but the Smart Desktop type is by far the most interesting and powerful. And its 100% under your control. You can create both the desktop itself as a project – and also applications that should run on that desktop as separate projects.

This is perfectly suited for NAS design (network active storage devices can usually be accessed through a web portal on the device), embedded boards, intranets and even intranets for that matter.

You get to enjoy all the perks of a multi-user desktop, one capable of both remote desktop access, telnet access, sharing files and media, playing music and video (we even compiled the mp4 codec from C to JavaScript so you can play mp4 movies without the need for a server backend).

The Smart Desktop

The Smart Desktop project is not just for fun and games. We have big plans for it. And once its solid and complete (we are closing in on 46% done), my next side project will not be more emulators or demos – it will be to move our compiler(s) to Amazon, and write the IDE itself from scratch in Smart Pascal.

The Smart Desktop – A full desktop in the true sense of the word

And yeah, we have plans for EmScripten as well – which takes C/C++ and compiles it into asm.js. It will take a herculean effort to merge our RTL with their sandboxed infrastructure – but the benefits are too great to ignore.

As a bonus you get to run native 68k applications (read: Amiga applications) via emulation. While I realize this will be mostly interesting for people that grew up with that machine – it is still a testament to the power of Smart and how much you can do if you really put your mind to it.

Naturally, the native IDE wont vanish. We have a few new directions we are investigating here – but native will absolutely not go anywhere. But cloud, the desktop system we are creating, is starting to become what we set out to make five years ago (has it been half a decade already? Tempus fugit!). As you all know it was initially designed as an example of how you could write full-screen applications for Raspberry PI and similar embedded devices. But now its a full platform in its own right – with a Linux core and node.js heart, there really is very little you cannot do here.

The Smart Pascal compiler is one of our tools that is ready for cloud-i-fication

Being able to login to the Smart company servers, fire up the IDE and just code – no matter if you are: be it Spain, Italy, Egypt, China or good old USA — is a pretty awesome thing!

Clicking compile and the server does the grunt work and you can test your apps live in a virtual window; switch between device layouts and targets — then hit “publish” and it goes to Cordova (or Delphi) and voila – you get a message back when binaries for 9 mobile devices is ready for deployment. One click to publish your applications on Appstore, Google play and Microsoft marketplace.

Object pascal works

People may have brushed off object pascal (and from experience those people have a very narrow view of what object pascal is all about), but when they see what Smart delivers, which in itself is written in Delphi, powered by Delphi and should be in every Delphi developer’s toolbox — i think it should draw attention to both Delphi as a product, object pascal as a language – and smart as a solution.

With Smart it doesn’t matter what computer you use. You can sit at home with the new A1222 PPC Amiga, or a kick-ass Intel i7 beast that chew virtual machines for breakfast. If your computer can handle a modern website, then you can learn object pascal and work directly in the cloud.

The Smart Desktop running on cheap embedded hardware. The results are fantastic and the financial savings of using Smart Pascal on the kiosk client is $400 per unit in this case

Heck you can work off a $60 ODroid XU4, it has more than enough horsepower to drive the latest chrome or Firefox engines. All the compilation takes place on the server anyways. And if you want a Delphi vessel rather than phonegap (so that it’s a Delphi application that opens up a web-view in full-screen and expose features to your smart code) then you will be happy to know that this is being investigated.

More targets

There are a lot of systems out there in the world, some of which did not exist just a couple of years ago. FriendOS is a cloud based operating system we really want to support, so we are eager to get cracking on their SDK when that comes out. Being able to target FriendOS from Smart is valuable, because some of the stuff you can do in SMS with just a bit of code – would take weeks to hand write in JavaScript. So you get a productive edge unlike anything else – which is good to have when a new market opens.

As far as Delphi is concerned there are smaller systems that Embarcadero may not be interested in, for example the many embedded systems that have come out lately. If Embarcadero tried to target them all – it would be a never-ending cat and mouse game. It seems like almost every month there is a new board on the market. So I fully understand why Embarcadero sticks to the most established vendors.

Smart technology allows you to cover all your bases regardless of device

But for you, the programmer, these smaller boards can repsent thousands of dollars worth of saving. Perhaps you are building a kiosk system and need to have a good-looking user interface that is not carved in stone, touch capabilities, low-latency full-duplex communication with a server; not much you can do about that if Delphi doesnt target it. And Delphi is a work horse so it demands a lot more cpu than a low-budget ARM SoC can deliver. But web-tech can thrive in these low-end environments. So again we see that Smart can compliment and be a valuable addition to Delphi. It helps you as a Delphi developer to act on opportunities that would otherwise pass you by.

So in the above scenario you can double down. You can use Smart for the user-interface on a low power, low-cost SoC (system on a chip) kiosk — and Delphi on the server.

It all depends on what you are interfacing with. If you have a full Delphi backend (which I presume you have) then writing the interface server in Delphi obviously makes more sense.

If you don’t have any back-end then, depending on your needs or future plans, it could be wise to investigate if node.js is right for you. If it’s not – go with what you know. You can make use of Smart’s capabilities either way to deliver cost-effective, good-looking device front-ends of mobile apps. Its valuable tool in your Delphi toolbox.

Better infrastructure and rooting

So far our support for various systems has been in the form of APIs or “wrapper units”. This is good if you are a low-level coder like myself, but if you are coming directly from Delphi without any background in web technology – you wouldn’t even know where to start.

So starting with the next IDE update each platform we support will not just have low-level wrapper units, but project types and units written and adapted by human beings. This means extra work for us – but that is the way it has to be.

As of writing the following projects can be created:

• HTML5 mobile applications
• HTML5 mobile console applications
• Node.js console applications
• node.js server applications
• node.js service applications (requires PM2)
• Web worker project (deprecated, web-workers can now be created anywhere)

We also have support for the following operating systems:

• Chrome OS
• Mozilla OS
• Samsung Tizen OS

The following API’s have shipped with Smart since version 1.2:

• Khronos browser extensions
• Firefox spesific API
• NodeWebkit
• Phonegap
  • Phonegap provides native access to roughly 9 operating systems. It is however cumbersome to work with and beta-test if you are unfamiliar with the “tools of the trade” in the JavaScript world.
• Whatwg
• WAC Apis

Future goals

The first thing we need to do is to update and re-generate ALL header files (or pascal units that interface with the JavaScript libraries) and make what we already have polished, available, documented and ready for enterprise level use.

Why pay $400 to power your kiosk when $99 and Smart can do a better job?

Secondly, project types must be established where they make sense. Not all frameworks are suitable for full project isolation, but act more like utility libraries (like jQuery or similar training-wheels). And as much as possible of the RTL made platform independent and organized following our namespace scheme.

But there are also other operating systems we want to support:

• Norwegian made Friend OS, which is a business oriented cloud desktop
• Node.js OS is very exciting
• LG WebOS, and their Enyo application framework
• Asustor DLM web operating system is also a highly attractive system to support
• OpenNAS has a very powerful JavaScript application framework
• Segate Nas OS 4 likewise use JavaScript for visual, universal applications
• Microsoft Universal Platform allows you to create truly portable, native speed JavaScript applications
• QNap QTS web operating system [now at version 4.2]

All of these are separate from our own NAS and embedded device system: Smart Desktop, which uses node.js as a backend and will run on anything as long as node and a modern browser is present.

Final words

I hope you guys have enjoyed my little trip down memory lane, and also the plans we have for the future. Personally I am super excited about moving the IDE to the cloud and making Smart available 24/7 globally – so that everyone can use it to design, implement and build software for the future right now.

Smart Pascal Builder (or whatever nickname we give it) is probably the first of its kind in the world. There are a ton of “write code on the web” pages out there, but so far there is not a single hard-core development studio like I have in mind here.

So hold on, because the future is just around the corner 😉

Embedded boards, finally!

I was about to conclude that this day horizontally sucked beyond measure, but just as I thought as much -the door bell rang. It was FedEx (ta da!) with not one package, but two packages of super nerdy goodness. And here I was sure these puppies wouldnt arrive until after Xmas!

Top the x86 UP board, left bottom a Raspberry PI 3, bottom right the ODroid XU4

The ODroid XU4

A while back I ordered the very exciting “Raspberry PI 3 killer” ODroid XU4. It’s a bit of a unicorn, said to be roughly 10 times faster than the Raspberry PI 3. Honestly, having looked at the specs I can’t imagine it being more than 3 to 4 times faster; depending greatly on what your application is doing and the operative system in question. Here is the full spec sheet:

• Samsung Exynos 5422 Cortex™-A15 2 GHz and Cortex™-A7 Octa core CPUs
• Mali-T628 MP6(OpenGL ES 3.0/2.0/1.1 and OpenCL 1.1 Full profile)
• 2 Gbyte LPDDR3 RAM PoP stacked
• eMMC 5.0 HS400 Flash Storage
• 2 x USB 3.0 Host, 1 x USB 2.0 Host
• Gigabit Ethernet port
• HDMI 1.4a for display

As you can see the ODroid comes armed with 8 CPU cores while the Raspberry PI 3 (RPI3) has only 4. It also comes with twice the RAM (which really impacts performance), and tests have shown the ODroid disk/IO speed is roughly double that of the RPI3. But the cores is what caught my eye, because 8 cores means 8 simultaneous threads. This means code written for node.js, apache [php] or indeed custom, natively compiled Free Pascal servers will be able to handle twice the payload straight off the bat. For stateless protocols like http, I am guessing a performance factor of 3 to 1 compared to an RPI3.

Having said all this, there will be exceptions where the PI3 performs equal of better. The RPI3 SoC have better HD video functionality, so the ODroid have to work harder to produce the same.

For those of you thinking the ODroid will solve all your Amiga emulation problems, the answer is yes. It is significantly faster than the RPI3. But never forget that single threaded applications like UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator) involves a high degree of chipset synchronization. If the chipset performs out of sync (for instance if the blitter finishes faster than it should), all manner of problems will occur. So all that synchronization causes some parts to wait. Meaning no matter how fast your computer is (even my Intel i7 CPU) UAE will never reach peak performance. It will never use the full capacity of a single core due to synchronization.

A small note is also popularity, which means less updates. ODroid has a somewhat slower update cycle than Raspberry. It has thousands of users, but it’s not even close to getting the attention of the Raspberry PI project. And where the Raspberry website has been community oriented, with inspiring graphics, free tutorials and a huge forum from day one – the ODroid has nothing that even compares.

From what I read and hear the biggest problem has been kernel updates. But, seriously, that is often a Linux fetish. Unless it’s a super important update, like going from 32 to 64 bit or patching a really terrible security flaw – most users are not going to be bothered by a 2 versions old kernel. You still have access to the proverbial library of Alexandria that is aperture package manager (apt-get command) and compiling a few programs from code is not that hard. It’s typically download, unpack, configure, make and install – and that’s it.

Naturally, considering the faster CPU of the ODroid, double the ram, double the IO speed – emulators like UAE will be awesome. ODroid is also the only ARM SoC out there in this price range that plays Sega Saturn and PSX 2 games without any problems. And it will also be far better suited for servers, be it natively compiled freepascal servers, mono ASP.net or Smart Pascal [node.js] work.

The UP x86 board

The second package contained another embedded board, this time the x86 based UP board. I bought the most expensive model they had, containing 4 gigabytes of ram and 64 GB EMMC on-board storage. The board sports a 64 bit Intel® Atom™ x5 Z8350 processor, running as high as 1.92 GHz. Between Raspberry PI 3, ODroid XU4 and UP – let there be no doubt which model will come out on top.

• Intel® Atom™ x5 Z8350 Processor 64 bit – up to 1.92GHz
• Intel® HD 400 Graphics ,12 EU GEN 8, up to 500MHz Support DX*11.1/12, Open GL*4.2, Open CL*1.2 OGL ES3.0, H.264, HEVC(decode), VP8
• 4GB DDR3L
• 64GB eMMC
• 4 x USB2.0 external connector
• 2 x USB2.0 port (pin header)
• 1 x USB 3.0 port
• 1 x Gb Ethernet (full speed) RJ-45
• HDMI (DSI / eDP)
• MIPI-CSI Camera interface
• 5V DC-in @ 3A 5.5/2.1mm jack

Where the ODroid is rumoured to be 10 times faster than a RPI3, that is a statement closer to an urban myth rather than fact; The UP board on the other hand IS without a shadow of a doubt 10 times faster (and then some), no question about it. Since this is essentially a vanilla x86 SoC PC, the world is your oyster. The full onslaught of x86 software is at your disposal, be it Windows or Linux you chose as your base.

x86 UP board, same size as the PI3 but packing a hell of a punch!

The board has no problems running Windows 10, Ubuntu (full 64 bit version) and Android. And it’s actually more responsive than a few laptops on sale. I wanted a cheap laptop for dedicated Amiga Emulation – but having tested both the low-end Asus and Dell models it just left me wanting. The problem with cheap model laptops is often the absurd memory they ship with (1 to 2 gigabyte). The devices spend more time swapping data back and forth between ram and disk than they do running your code!

This is not the case for the UP board thanks to the on-board 4 gigabytes of ram.

Being a Embarcadero Delphi and Smart Mobile Studio (object pascal for JavaScript) developer this board is perfect for my needs. It has so much more to offer than the cheap ARM boards and is something I can use to create custom hardware projects and avoid many of the adaptation problems associated with ARM Linux.

While I love Raspberry PI 3, Linux takes some getting used to. There are things that takes me days to figure out on Linux that I completed in minutes on Windows (I have been using Windows since the beginning after all). This will change as my skill and insight into Linux matures, but if I can choose between the RPI3 and the UP board, I would pick the UP board every time.

Price is a factor here. RPI3 sells for between $35-40, the ODroid retails for $99 while the x86 UP board can be yours for $150. But you can also buy a cheaper model with less ram and EMMC storage. The UP provider has the following options:

• $99 – 2 gigabyte memory, 16 gigabyte EMMC storage
• $109 – 2 gigabyte memory, 32 gigabyte EMMC storage
• $129 – 4 gigabyte memory, 32 gigabyte EMMC storage
• $150 – 4 gigabyte memory, 64 gigabyte EMMC storage

If you’re thinking “oh, for that price I could get 2, 3 and 4 PI’s respectively!”, keep in mind the level of CPU power, graphics speed and available software here. The fact that you can install and run Windows 10 and just copy over your Delphi or Smart applications is really sweet.

And if you are into emulation then naturally, Windows has the latest and greatest. Things like EmulationStation is going to run so much better on this device than anything else at this price out there, especially if you get the x86 Linux edition. You can run the latest WinUAE on Windows, giving you full PPC emulation and essentially booting straight into Workbench and OS4.1. $150 for an OS4.x capable SoC that is x86 based makes a hell of a lot more sense than forking out $489 for the A1222 low-end PPC based Amiga NG board planned for 2017. I mean, who the hell buys PPC in 2017 (!) Emulation will always be a little bit slower than the real thing, but we are talking negligible.

And with the UP board you can also re-cycle the hardware when you get bored with OS 4. I mean, there are only so many things you can do with a modern Amiga. It is great fun for enthusiasts like myself, but I would much rather run a juiced up version of OS 3.9 with my massive collection of WHDLoad software, cd32 software and modern compilers (like Free Pascal 3.1 which work brilliantly on an emulated, classic Amiga).

Programming

For the developer the UP board gives you the same choices you enjoy on your Windows development machine in general. You can use it to deliver your Delphi, C++ builder or Smart Pascal solutions. If you happen to own a Microsoft Embedded license its performance will be greatly enhanced since you can drop a lot of the “standard” stuff that has to ship with Windows. Remember, a standard Windows  installation is written to work on millions of PC’s and equal number of different hardware configurations. For customized, single purpose applications (like a kiosk system, information booth, cash machine type system) you will be able to cut out quite a lot. Do you need support for printers? Do you need driver-collection for hardware that is not there? Windows embedded allows you to cut the disk image down to the bones, and it’s also written to run on slower CPU’s than what people in general own – so the performance is much better.

• Run your Delphi projects, it’s a normal PC after all
• Run your node.js Smart Pascal projects with ease
• Make use of nodewebkit for Smart Pascal to create full screen, desktop oriented software, enjoy the full scope of GPU powered CSS
• Enjoy the debugging tools you already know
• Run familiar databases like MSSQL, MySQL and Firebird with a more friendly and developed editors and tools
• Use the more friendly backup solution that ships with Windows rather than some cryptic Linux solution (although some Linux versions that have desktop control-panels are just as great!)
• Use GPIO ports from Delphi and C++ builder (!)
• Just hook your UP board into your network and install/setup via remote desktop. It saves a lot of time.

If you are a Delphi programmer looking for a reasonable embedded board to ship your killer Windows-based product, the UP board is by far the best option I have seen (and I have tested quite a few board out there!).

The problem with high-end boards is not just the initial price, which can be anything from $300 to $400. Sure, these boards Intel i2 or i3 processors (much faster), but you end up paying extra for everything. Need a new ram module? That will set you back a pretty penny! Want GPIO? Again we are talking $100+ just to get that.

By the time you sum up the expenses, you realize it would have been cheaper to just visit the local computer store and bought a mico-atx board with more ram and a faster processor (!). Micro-atx is not that big, perhaps 2 times larger than the UP board (if you place them into a square). The micro-atx is often to high to be practical embedded boards where you want to cram as much hardware as you can into something the size of a router or set-top-box. The heat sink hovers over the motherboard like the eye of london.

Here is what you should have in mind:

• Is size a factor?
  • No
    • Buy a cheap mico-atx pc
  • Yes
    • Take a look at the boards listed below
• Do you need Windows support?
  • No
    • Get a ARM based device
  • Yes
    • Get the affordable UP board
• Do you need an i3 or i5 CPU?
  • No
    • Get the affordable UP board
  • Yes
    • Get an Intel Nuc
• Do you need GPIO built-in?
  • No
    • See options above
  • Yes
    • Take your pick between the boards out there
      • UP board
      • Jaguar board
      • Udoo X86
      • Minnowboard

Note: The UP project is presently busy working on their second kickstarter, which is cleverly called “Up 2” (sigh). This board is slightly larger, being dubbed “UP squared”, but there is a good reason for that. First of all it ships with the more powerful Intel® Pentium™ N4200 2.5 GHz CPU, up to 8 gigabyte of memory and 128 gigabyte emmc storage. Just like the present UP board you will be able to pick a configuration that matches your wallet, but they are aiming at roughly the same price-range as they have now. Head over to the UP project and have a peek at the specs!

Negatives

So far the only negative thing about the UP board is the speed of the emmc storage. As you probably know, emmc is a storage medium designed to be a cheap alternative to SSD. But when it comes to speed it can be anything from SD card to USB 3 in actual performance. This is very vendor spesific and obviously the cheaper models are going to be the slowest. So the first thing you are going to notice is that even though this is a PC, installing things takes a lot longer.

You can however enter the bios and boot from a USB 3 stick. For homebrew projects that shouldnt matter much, and these days a sexy and small 128 or 256 gigabyte (you know, those tiny usb storage devices that is barely the USB socket and little else) is affordable.

I find myself having to look for negatives here. I do think the UP organization should do something about the startup of the device. When you boot the UP logo is displayed, but they should have added a line of text about what key to press for the bios. I ended up going through the typical ones, F1, F2, F8 and F10 which did nothing. The next key was printscreen, before i finally hit DEL and the bios editor came up.

Insignificant, but a small detail that would make their product more polished.

A far worse notion is how they charge money for branding. When the product boots the UP logo comes into view for a couple of seconds (in full-screen). If you want to replace that, the minimal fee is $500 (for a small picture). This is something that simply infuriates me, because you cant change it.

When you buy an embedded board for production purposes, hidden costs such as this for something as simple as a picture – is completely unacceptable. I sincerly hope they drop this practise, because I will not use a board with a fixed boot picture in the embedded systems I deliver. There are plenty of other boards about there with similar specs at competitive prices. Being able to brand your own system is considered normal in 2016 and it has been common for years now.

At least an option in the bios for removing or hiding the UP logo should be in place.

 

The test

For the next few days before and after Xmas, I’ll be playing with these boards as much as time allows. I have already installed the latest Ubuntu on the UP board – and it performed brilliantly. I am presently giving Windows 10 a test drive, and my primary aim will be Smart Mobile Studio graphics demos and UAE running Amiga OS 4.1 final edition. I will also test how emulators work. This is especially exciting for the ODroid since that is the one most people will pick as an alternative to Raspberry PI 3.

If you are a dedicated retro-gamer or just love all things Amiga then again, the UP board should be of special interest to you. It will set you back $150, but considering that it has the exact same form-factor as the Raspberry PI (except its components go a few mm. higher) is considerably faster (in a league way beyond both the PI and ODroid) – this could be your ticket to get a cheap “next-gen” emulated Amiga. It will run OS 4.1 final without problems under WinUAE and it will be a pleasant experience.

I will give you updates as the frame rates, execution speed and overall performance comes in. Oh and the tests will obviously use the RPI3 as the baseline.

Cheers guys!