Saturday 23 August 2014

AmigaOS4.1 Classic on WinUAE Part 3

Having completed all the AmigaOS Updates 3 to 6 on my AmigaOS 4.1 Classic install on WinUAE Beta 12, I now have a system ready for the next steps in Part 3!


Next is installing the AmigaOS4.1 SDK. This can be downloaded from Hyperion's website. I then created another CD ISO using ImgBurn, containing the SDK and plenty of other software to try out. I extracted the SDK archive to the hard disk and then I was ready to start the installation:


Once the installer has started, there is not much to configure really, other than where you want the SDK installed...I picked SYS:, a directory called SDK is created automatically...
  

This installation takes a long time - I suggest going to eat lunch/dinner, head out for a bit because it takes over an hour.


Installation eventually completes successfully:


I then Press F12 and restart the emulation. I then extracted the Codebench software (available from here) which is a development environment for AmigaOS4.1 and hooks into the SDK we just installed. Here is the Codebench installer:


I chose to install it into Sys:utilities - a directory called Codebench is created automatically:


Final confirmation of the installation before it begins:


The installation doesn't take too long fortunately:


Install done. Another F12 and restart needed:


Once the emulation has restarted I then added Codebench to Amidock and launched it. As per below I then created a new project as a test:


When I pressed OK it asked me if I want to generate the dictionary - when I said OK it froze as below:


Tried a few times but same result everytime.

Hmm, having my X1000 helped here. I already have Codebench installed on it, so I zipped up the Codebench folder on the X1000, and created an iso with the zip folder. I then extracted it on to the AmigaOS4.1 Classic emulation.

After doing this Codebench worked properly! I opened my example Hello World with GUI I had on the X1000 in the emulation:


I then compiled the program, which according to the program took 5 seconds (see screenshot), but in reality took 5 minutes! Certainly isn't very fast:


I then ran the executable generated on the Workbench:


You can also run it from the project folder where the executable was built, and the result is below:


So Codebench does work, but the speed is pretty slow. I imagine for a complex project compilation could take a long time...

I tried a game (Ace of Hearts) but it was really slow just to load the title screen - over 5 minutes and still no screen! At the moment I would stick to simple non cpu intensive applications in the emulation...

That's as far as I plan to go with this AmigaOS4.1 Classic emulation build for the time being - I am keen to get back to my A600 build now.

However, I look forward to trying out the improvements to this AmigaOS4.1 Classic emulation in the months and years ahead.

This BETA of WinUAE with PPC support is just the start, and when performance of the PPC emulation is closer to normal PPC performance this solution will be great for all Amiga users - those who want to use AmigaOS4.1 Classic on the go on their laptop, and for those users who have a PC and can't afford to buy the X1000 to run AmigaOS 4.1 at the fastest speed possible.

For me of course, I am happy to run AmigaOS4.1 on my X1000, but this development in emulating AmigaOS4.1 on PC's is very exciting indeed!

1 comment:

  1. Hi Epsilon :)

    I ran into the same problem with CodeBench as you did : it freezes when I accept to create the dictionary. As this program is free, do you think you could share your zipped Codebench archive so UAE users could bypass this problem ?
    PS: you probably know it already, but the PPC emulation has gone a long way since you wrote this review : now WinUAE and FS-UAE are using QEMU, which JIT works marvels : the raw speed is even greater than the X1000's, at least for MIPS. (MFLOPS are still awful.)

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