Doesn't Seem to be Any Programing Languages for AOS4 for the Average Person

@BrandonLee

Sidewinder doesn't have AmigaOS 4.x yet. Those tutorials are for AmigaOS 3.x .

@Samurai_Crow

Oooops, sorry. Seems I've lost myself in this thread. :)

Hi salass00,

Replying to post 149.

I have all those support files in the right place and have tried:

mountdiskimage drive icd0: Hollywood3_1.iso
mountdiskimage drive icd0:Hollywood3_1.iso
mountdiskimage drive icd0:


And they all pop up this requestor
"Please insert volume icd0: in any drive"

and it gives me the option to make an assign somewhere for "icd0" (there were 3 other options).


Hi nbache,

To get AOS4.0 final I'd probably need to make an ISO, and I'm not able to do that and get Hollywood up and running, but I'm so close I can taste it, as probably some variant of what salass00 is showing me how to do should work.

Hi salass00,

Ooopsi, was an accidental double post, but I'll throw this in

9.RAM Disk:Devs> mountdiskimage drive icd0: :holly/Hollywood3_1.iso
MountDiskImage: Device 'diskimage.device' could not be opened!

Even though I'm in the Devs: directory, and "diakimage.device" is right there it's saying it can't open it!

@Atheist

As you have a CDRW drive, do this;

1. download MakeCD
2. choose Edit=>Append Image Files...
3. select the ISO
4. click Write Tracks
5. ensure the gadgets are set to Test mode _off_ and CD-R
6. insert a blank CD and click Start

You'lll probably need to select your CDRW drive at some point. That's under Settings=>Settings, click on the pop-up next to Writing Drive and select it. Click Save.

Chris

@Atheist
I don't use mountdiskimage, instead I use the
diskimage GUI, but unless you have ICD0 in Devs/Dosdrivers
you must mount it before use the mountdiskimage command.

The GUI it's so nice and usefull why not use it?
Anyway before using the GUI or the mountdiskimage command
be shure the drive ICD0: it's mounted, if in a shell you type
'assign', you can see in the Devices section (the last one) ICD0 listed

It's a long story, BUT, success, at least theoretically.

I got MakeCD to make a CD but it wrote it at 64 Meg increments stopping and asking if I wanted to proceed to the next 64 Megs block, and I'm not sure if it was truly a successful transfer to a CDRW disc, but Hollywood seems to be working.


Well, I must say, I haven't used AMOS Pro for a long time, so I'm rusty, and as well, Hollywood offers some new quite different features.... Although, it wasn't like I grasped AMOS Pro inside and out.

I have to say, for the way syntax is handled, I still say AMOS Professional is the ABSOLUTE CHAMPION at it!!!

I offer my highest praise possible to Francois Lionet (and these other programmers working with him (but I imagine not necessarily limited to); Chris Payne, Richard Vanner, Stephen Hill, Ronnie Simpson, Mel Croucher) for his efforts and achievements!!!!!

I spent $135 Canadian in ~1991 on his program, and it gave me easily over 10 years of enjoyment.

Some may think it's too high, but I rank it as high as I give accolades to Eyetech for making the AmigaOne XE that I'm using possible, as well as all behind the efforts of AOS4.x in and connected to Hyperion Entertainment (the rightful and only owners of AmigaOS SW and IP!!!!)


-edit-

There's just something about AMOS that really clicks with me, it's no nonsense syntax made for the "Average Person".

I've been using Hollywood for about 2 hours, and there are some interesting features that I don't think AMOS Pro had, like Layers (are these the same layers as in C?). I could see that for graphics being extremely useful, and I was constantly clearing sentences in AMOS by measuring string length and printing that many blank characters over them, that was a nuisance. But in exchange for that, I'd imagine that possibly a lot of resources are used?

I'm in total shock that a 3 line stand alone compiled program for AOS4/PPC which only prints "Hello World" and waits for a mouse press to finish comes out to 970,000 bytes!!!

The same program for AOS3.x is 511,000 bytes!!!!!

Since it accepts no input, it could have been easier to make a JPeg and display it!

I found it surprising and was amazed that it offers arrays that can be increased in size,... as you need them to!!!!

I'll have more to say in the future, probably should open some other thread about that.


A major thank you to everyone that's offered advice and recommendations of alternatives as well (we covered many subjects), as it's finally gotten me to the point where I can use this darn thing!!!!!!

I hope it may have been constructive to anyone that went through the large amount of posts here as well.

Now to see if I can spin anything out!

@Atheist
Quote:

These are both compilers for the language Modula-2. The first one generates M68K code, the second generates native PPC code, using "as" from the SDK to assemble, and "ld" to link to an executable.

So far as I know, anyone can download the AOS SDK from Hyperion's site (as soon as it is back up), and installation is easy as double clicking on an icon. After that, you can not worry about it as AgletM2PPC invokes "as" and "ld" for you. Besides, even if you program in Basic you will want to be able to read the latest AOS "AutoDocs" to get a good idea of what the Amiga and Amiga OS4 is and can do.

As for the pros and cons of various languages, it is hard to argue about simple programs; the difficult part of programming that can be help or hindered by the chosen language is how to handle the complexity of a significant program or package, and the amount of difficulty involved in finding bugs, extending features, breaking into reasonably independent modules that can be worked on without the fear of changes introducing problems in other parts of the package. This is where most Basics are very weak, and I believe Modula-2 outshines C and C++.

Building large, reliable, extendible programs is something you can't expect to be able to do without spending a great deal of time and effort learning, considering, and revising.

Modula-2 has a proud Amiga history, as at one point there were 3 or 4 good implementations for AOS2 and AOS3 (at least one of which is now freely downloadable). It is also available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Check out my current Aglet Manual at
http://home.ntelos.net/~tbreeden/AgletM2PPC.pdf

and a good site with tutorials and examples
http://www.modula2.org/

and a shareware full textbook on Modula-2.
http://www.csc.twu.ca/rsbook/index.html

@ChrisH
Quote:

Modula-2 is what the Pascal designer, Niklaus Wirth, came out with as the production language to be the successor to Pascal. Since then an ISO Standard has extended it somewhat, without introducing the chaos of C or C++. I don't know much of other modern Pascals, but I suspect they have attempted to do the same thing (while retaining the name everyone recognizes).

regards,

Tom

@pvanni

Quote:

Otherwise correct but IMHO the Info command is more convenient for this purpose.

@Atheist

Quote:

I'm developing ScuiLib, a huge library with Hollywood (around 12.000 lines) and I can say that the size of the executable isn't scaring at all, it's around 1,2M (OS4 version).
That's because Hollywood link to your executable a platform-specific player with your compiled code.

I don't have precise data but seems that when you compile your projects you have about 800/900K for the player and the rest for your code.

@Atheist

Internally, Hollywood uses a custom parser of the LUA scripting engine. That'll bloat the code somewhat but it should save on the compile times.

Also, since SCUI doesn't require much underlying GUI code, that tends to take some memory also. (As opposed to an OS4 specific version that would use Reaction.) Furthermore, doing things this way is necessary to maintain portability.

On Free Pascal:

Holy sssshhhh... I didn't expect my Free Pascal OS4 port to be mentioned after so long time here... If anyone is interrested, it could be updated to current FPC SVN trunk version quite easily. Only the M*rphOS version was developed since, but nearly all changes in the sources were made with OS4 (and a theoretical OS3) version in mind.

Recent advancements include working FPC IDE, and tons of bugs fixed. Actually, the screenshot in the link shows the - to my knowledge - very first really integrated development enviroment for any PowerPC Am*ga-like system. (Fixme on this tho', if i'm wrong.) It means, it doesn't call an external command line compiler to build the sources, but the compiler is inside the IDE (inside same executable). Note the syntax highlighting, and other goodies too... Heck, it even could have full source-level debugging on OS4, since there's a GDB (and libgdb) port, IIRC.

So to sum it up, if someone is interrested, i could help having all the above for OS4, and it's really not a hard task for someone who is familiar with OS4 development. I don't have the time nowadays tho', to do it myself, sorry.

@Chain-Q

It looks like it runs in DosBOX :-/

Pascal In general is good languages for beginners, but it can get confusing if you learn C afterwards.

do you have many extension modules for AmigaOS/MorphOS for it?x

@LiveForIt
It's not DOSBox. But indeed, this is originally a Text Mode application, but it uses a fully native subsystem on M*rphOS, to render the display contents. For now, for the ease of the port (and for speed) it uses a VGA bitmap font, to render the window contents. That's why it looks like DOSBox. But it's not hard to modify the code to render with whatever font, and even to support Unicode & co. And the window is freely resizeable, supports mouse events, and has clipboard support, so it's quite well integrated with the OS, even if it doesn't look like it.

And i don't think Pascal is confusing after you learn other languages, recent Pascal compilers can do almost all the pointer-magic of C, it has quite good OOP, and its good runtime support (for string management for example) helps you keep your code clean and bugfree. And there are other advantages... I know about half a dozen other languages, not counting the various flavours of assembly, use and had to use them for work, but still Pascal is my favourite language. Well, you can call that being confused tho', if you're a C lover, but hey...

About OS-specific stuff, since Free Pascal (and related toolchain) is developed in itself, to be able to compile the IDE, i had to support every fundamental libraries and some of the devices of the OS, starting with dos, intuition and graphics.library, timer and clipboard.device, and more. There are bindings for OpenGL and SDL too. Also, basic MUI stuff is available, so like AHI, and more. Just too many to list here. Just browse the screenshots on my site, to see more. However, most of this only for M*rphOS at this time. (And OS3 has its own bindings from previous FPC version, but since 2.x compiler doesn't exist for 68k, the support is theroetical at this time.) But i have somewhat advanced versions of fd2pragma, and other tools, so it shouldn't be that hard to get all this running on OS4, since the headers could be easily converted from the C SDK. It just takes some time, and needs someone to do it... But the possibility is there.

@Chain-Q
I kind of feel that those "Pascal Advantages" are mostly available for E too (with AmigaE/ECX/PortablE) :
* Very clean language.
* No Makefiles. (Only with PortablE, not AmigaE/ECX.)
* E compilers are Fast with a big F. (Applies to AmigaE/ECX, but not yet true about PortablE, as I have not done much optimisation so far.)
* Each unit has it's own identifiers.
* High speed, low memory use. Being a language that is compiled into fast machine code by a modern compiler.
* Great integration with assembler. (Applies to AmigaE/ECX, but not true for PortablE since it has different aims.)
* Object oriented programming
etc

@ChrisH
Sure. I know that. I was also using E (and PowerD) for a while. In fact, i still use it if i want to do some 68k stuff. (Unfortunately, very rarely happens nowadays, due to lack of time.) It's a quite nice language to programm on Amiga.