Beginner AmigaOS 4 based Programming Language

@Daedalus

Downloaded and tinkering with 3.6.1 beta of AmiBlitz3.

Had to locate and grab reqtools.library from OS 4 Depot to get past the error, and some font error for GUI that I was able to just select a different font.

I have it running at 2560x1440 on a 32" display and the whole IDE fills the whole screen and is nicely visually.

It seems a tad wonky at times I will get slowing of the cursor and jitters every now and then but so far been OK. Or I get oddball guru errors at 1st launch but then do it a 2nd time and she runs. Dragging a window around makes other apps running stutter, like AmigaAmp playing music stutters while I am in AmiBlitz and reading help file and resized the help window... the music went wonky a second.

It has some help files I will read through and tinker.

Wondering if this ends up working for me if older AmiBlitz books for older versions would be good for a novice like myself.

TJ

@AmigaSociety

Look on Aminet, there's 377 archives in dev/basic/ found when searching for 'blitz'. There are also the contents of the blitz mailing list and a blitz faq in docs/help.

Quote:

This is sort of correct, The extensive support is for OS3, The many changes in system libraries in OS4 have broken some things and compiled blitz code does do a bit of hardware hitting so some of AGA/GFX functions won't woirk

On the other hand Blitz has very easy access to system libraries so if you use them even though you're compiling 68k code you'll be using native functions but again only the ones from OS3 times.

Another good point is AmiBlitz to completely wriiten with AmiBlitz and the entire source code is on SourceForge so hopefully we might eventually get an OS$ native compiler and some fixes.

@Rob
Quote:
Ooh, that's excellent news, I'll check it out!

@AmigaSociety
Quote:
Hmmm, not ideal, but glad you could sort it out anyway. As for the 3.6.1 release, it's a little old at this stage and a few things have been fixed and changed since then. I recommend downloading the latest snapshot (https://sourceforge.net/p/amiblitz3/code/HEAD/tree/) and copying the files over to the 3.6.1 installation. Development has stagnated recently - I think a new package of the current builds would be a good thing...

Quote:
That shouldn't be the case really. It's a big screenmode, but I can't imagine you're running out of video RAM. Nevertheless, it might be worth trying a lesser screenmode. I suspect that the instability and other issues could be related to the 68k JIT compiler - certainly the debugger needs to be blacklisted, and maybe the editor too. In fact, I'm not wholly sure the debugger will work on the X5000 - it does work on the A1-XE G4 but not on the SAM440, apparently due to the specifics of handling traps on the different CPUs. But there's no jittering, slowdown or random gurus on the A1-XE.

Quote:
Yep, the help files are a good starting point, and don't forget you can also jump right to the relevant part of a help file by placing the cursor on any keyword and pressing Shift+Help. Pressing Help by itself will give a quick syntax guide in the screen's title bar.
The older guides and the Blitz packages Severin pointed to will help too as AmiBlitz is still Blitz 2.1 at its core, but often these will contain hardware-dependent code. Luckily, this is highlighted in red in the editor so you know there's a good chance it won't work under OS4.

For system-friendly programming, you can access the standard OS libraries easily (and AB3's help system also includes the Autodocs which document these library calls), but it will be much easier to look at the Includes. These are new to AmiBlitz, and contain lots of code to let you very easily access OS routines in a system-friendly manner, in most cases taking away the need to worry about things like pointers etc. See the Includes guide in the Help menu, and you can also load the include directly into the editor to have a look at it - at the bottom of most of them there's a built-in example code segment that you can compile and run to see what the include can do.

Finally, I have built up quite a good range of reference and example material on amigacoding.com, but it appears to be having difficulties at the moment. I notified the site owner a few days ago, but no joy so far.

@Severin
Quote:
True, you're limited to the OS3 functions, but provided you use them properly, they should all still work fine under OS4. As for the hardware hitting, that's true, but that's why I pointed out the highlighting that AB3 does - if the command is red, it hits the hardware and can't be expected to work under OS4. Those commands often aren't particularly system-friendly even on a classic machine however. For full system-friendliness, the AB3 includes are the way to go, allowing you to handle 24-bit graphics modes and objects, use AHI, stream MP3 audio from hard disk and so on. They also provide updated replacements for the old ASL commands, allowing much greater flexibility, Intuition commands that fix some compatibility issues, and so on.

Quote:
That would be awesome, sadly development has more or less stalled in recent times so it's not really likely in the near future... :(

@Daedalus

Quote:

This code might be ported to use retroMode.library,
RetroMode used a more AMOS like commands, but BlitzMode is kind like AMOS if don't remember wrong. OpenSource is nice thing some times, rewriting retroMode.library is possible, as well, this can be solved.

I don't think its possible to call RetroMode library from 68k program, I think it lacks the 68k stubs.

Quote:

You need to write a new compiler to fix this.

using library's is another way solve some of it, so part can be ported over without changing everything.

Slower parts or buggy parts, or hardware banging parts.

@Daedalus

Quote:

Ok. I tried that, Now I get the reqtools requester and it complains about an old version of PED_Beta. All I'm left with is a 'starting ide' window..

I agree that a new package would be a 'Good Thing' but it might have a problem or two.

Edit: Ignore that, just ran it from Ram: and it's working fine apart from the reqtools problem but that's probably because my reqtools.library is in Libs: not SYS:Libs/