Tuesday, October 13, 2015

A forced break

With the breakdown of the Voodoo3 card I was forced to take a break from coding for a while. A vacation and the Witcher III also didn't help :-)

It took a while for a Voodoo3 card to show up on any of the online market places and when it did, it came in two. With the help of my partner in crime from Poland, I even got a third one, so I guess that problem is solved for the time being. I also saw some Sonnet cards on Ebay for $35-50 even with 256MB of memory installed. Too bad they only shipped to the US.

Early September, I set out for 2 goals to be achieved before the Neuss event in Germany. The first one was a working wosdb. It is a debugger made by Frank Wille for WarpOS back in the days. I also wanted to show some eye-candy on Neuss, being a picture decompression datatype or a working AmigaAMP PPC MP3 plugin or dnetc client. The Amsterdam came too early to show something, but the Neuss event should have given me enough time to get somewhere, or so I thought.

Getting wosdb working took longer than expected. The program relies on a number of WarpOS functions I hadn't implemented yet or not tested yet, but if it could be made working, a lot of functionality of the sonnet.library would be shown to be working. Like exception-handlers, memory functions, message functions and task-switching.

There were a couple of obstacles. No implemented pool memory functions yet. This was fixed by code from the AROS project. No implemented exception-handler code. These were written from scratch. A bug in one of the library node manipulation routines and an access to Amiga memory, specifically the memory list.

That last item forced me finally to implement some MMU page table code to intercept calls to Amiga FAST memory. But in the end this was the result:



Next time something about the Neuss Amiga 30 Years event in Germany.


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