another release candidate

As there were some problems with the last release candidate, there is another one here.

The following things are different:
- mouse sync in overscan modes should work now (please test!)
- a lot of new and bigger picasso screen modes added
- janusd-draggable for those who want to use j-uae without coherence (this is just a quick work-around)

Mouse sync for non-picasso screens was written from scratch, it took quite some time (much more as you might think). The result is a small and clean code segment, which hopefully works now for all weird overscan settings.

For the bigger screen modes: you need to have an at least so big wanderer screen to use them and assign enough ram to the picasso96 emulation in the memory tab.

I am waiting for your bug reports, either here, by e-mail or on aros-exec.

For all news sites: This is still no news you should put on your site. You may publish it next week, when the 0.4 is uploaded to the official servers. Thanks.

For the brave

As you all wanted a new version, I compiled a release candidate for a 0.4 j-uae. If you don't find any bigger problems with this version, I'll upload it to the aros archives next week.

I have not tested it very much, it is more or less just a current build of the SVN.

But I've added the GUI buttons to enable and disable all the new features:



You can download the release candidate archive here.

Keep in mind, this is not a 1.0 version. This is not even a 0.4 ;). And read the readme.txt in the archives docs section.

Please report severe bugs by e-mail or here in the comments section.

Well, reports of a great and working version are welcome here, too. Although more unlikely to happen ;).

For all news sites: This is not a news you should put on your site. You may publish it next week, when the 0.4 is uploaded to the official servers. Thanks.

Mouse in sync

After quite some fiddling with a lot of parameters, it seems, that the AROS and amigaOS mouse pointers are now in sync both on amigaOS native and Picasso96 screens, both if j-uae is run full screen or in window mode. Of course, janusd needs to be running.

ScanDoubled and Overscan screen modes are not working, could be done of course. If somebody really needs those, well, he might add them himself (or beg me).

I wanted to show you a screen shot, but you could only see one mouse pointer on it ;).

During movement of the mouse, the amigaOS pointer may lack behind, but it is tolerable I think.

I really should release a new version, as j-uae now has clipboard support and mouse sync, it should be useful, even if you do not use the coherence mode..

Do you want one?

Small steps

Spare time is still an issue, but at least there were a few commits by me.

I am trying to get the pointers in sync on non-Picasso96 screens. For P96 screens this is rather trivial, as I know, where the upper left corner of the amigaOS screen in compared to my AROS mouse coordinates.

It all comes down to coordinates conversion from AROS to amigaOS.

WinUAE does this different, it just hides the windows pointer and so the amigaOS mouse is the only one existing.

Somehow I don't like this. I take the AROS mouse coordinates and try to move the amigaOS mouse exactly below the AROS mouse. For P96 this works perfectly.

For OCS/ECS/AGA screens, there is some kind of border around the screen, which (for me) is hard to calculate. But I seem to be getting there.

But as life goes, I triggered quite a bug in the Gtk GUI. It uses arrays to store the widget pointers, for example an array, which hold all sound option widgets (One widget for "mono" and so on).

Those arrays were not NULL terminated, so it was hard to say, how many elements were in there. And there were quite some code parts like that:

while(array[i++]) {
  do_sth(array[i]);
}

Which of course terminates not really on the end of the array. So I ended up, NULL terminating all arrays. Still some crashes. So I ended up recounting all possible elements of those arrays and correcting the size of them. Boring work, but now it stopped crashing.

Bad thing is, that I also found a too small array in code written by me ;).

So what is the lesson for today: C arrays are evil. Sometimes.

Progress? What progress?

At the moment, I have nearly no time to code for j-uae. 1h/week does not bring you much further, sorry. I have a lot of "day-job work" to do and the remaining time gets my family and friends.

What is the current bounty status?

1. Must be able to run some classical software which must include: WordWorth 6, Organizer 2, Datastore 2 and Money Matters 4.

WordWorth works on a public screen. Other programs not tested/available, but I see no reason, why the should fail.

2. Must provide support for window and screen based apps so they appear to be running on the host system - including access to public screens.

Public Screens are fine. You can have aros windows on amigaOS public screens and vice versa (still needs some debugging, but will work).

3. Doubling-clicking a 68k application in Wanderer will cause that application to be run in the emulation.

Missing (not started)

4. Each instance of emulation will be a commodity that can be shut down via Exchange.

As you wish. But I don't see the point in here, one instance is enough. But it is a commodity, you can start more than once.

5. Port over a Zune based UAE prefs application.

Done.

6. UAE to use AROS clipboard.

Done.

7. separate directory (for 68K files) dictated by the chosen config.

Not really sure, what this means. UAE handles it this way already.

So what is still missing?

- custom screen support

Should be trivial, as j-uae already can run in full screen mode. But e-uae was never designed to switch between windowed/fullscreen mode on the fly. Opening a custom screen works already, but the closing/switching part is missing completely. I am working on that at the moment, whenever I find some time.

- wanderer start

I will keep that simple and just launch the program without any parameters etc. Should be quite easy. Fancy features like parameters etc can be added later, otherwise this bounty will never be done.

What next?

Vacation. One week. Then we see any further ;).

emulation heaven

Nothing happened to my code for quite some time, sorry. No spare time -> no code.

So this blog entry is the best I can do for you ;).

Did you ever wonder, how my development machine looks like? I'll give you an impression.

The only native operating system is Windows XP. It runs two things:
- an X Server (Xming) and
- VMWare

In VMWare I run Debian (and sometimes IcAros). Debian opens quite some xterms on the X Server (rootless).

In those xterms, tirc is running as my irc client and I can start AROS from there. So AROS is running on Xming, too.

Now inside AROS, I can run j-uae (rootless of course).

It's a pity, AROS can not run rootless, otherwise I would really loose the overview, which window runs where ;).

And this is where it ends (this is just one X11 window):



This is m68k-ffplay (new version from aminet) running rootless inside j-uae, which is running on x86-aros running linux hosted running in VMware on Windows XP.

Any further questions?

Btw, the video runs quite smooth, fascinating.

The only remaining question is, which DS9 episode is being played ;)?

"screenshot of cut and paste in action with e.g. Wordworth"

For Manu: