So I picked the 040 optimized library file and copied that to my “Libs” folder.Ī quick reboot later and voila, my Workbench was now able to show 32 bit png icons just like OS 4! In fact after giving it a nice background and cleaning it up a bit, a lot of people were unsure if this was indeed Amiga OS 3.x or 4.x (!) Getting some “bling” This is important because when you download libraries you can often pick different builds based on your machines CPU. On the PI this means a MC68040 cpu with the Amiga 4000 model. When emulating a desktop environment like I do, you naturally want the very best settings UAE can provide. So what I did was download the version 46.x icon library from Aminet (Note: I type 46.x because this library is seeing some heavy development so what version will be the latest when you read this is hard to say. This is the exact same icon system that is used in Amiga OS 4. These are icons that contain 32bit graphics with support for alpha blending (transparency). Well, I had a google around and found that there is an icon library that supports the latest png based icons. Since UAE4Arm has built-in support for RTG (re-targetable graphics), which means 15, 16, 24 and 32 bit screen-modes (the same as any modern PC) then surely we can remedy the visuals right? Meaning that icons and backdrops will be 4-8 colors, fixed palette and fairly useless by modern standards. By default Workbench is optimized for low-color representation. And this is where we get to the pimping part. The second aspects is the infrastructure.
Freepascal is great, although the old “turbo” ide is due for an overhaul So compiling on the PI is a great boost over ordinary, real Amiga machines. When using modern compilers like freepascal 3.x on a classic 68k Amiga, there is no denying we need all the cpu power we can get. Well, being a programmer the process of compilation is one aspect I really love the extra grunt.
This takes 68k code and generates ARM machine code “on the fly” and is thus able to run Amiga software much faster than traditional UAE variations like fs-uae.īut what should we do with all that extra speed? I mean, there is a limited number of tasks that benefits from the extra processing power of the PI (or an accelerator for that matter). The version of UAE Thomas and Gunnar opted for is UAE4Arm, which is a special version that contains a hand-optimized JIT engine. Purists might not be happy about it, but the PI delivers some serious processing power when it comes to Amiga emulation.
And as luck would have it, two good friends of mine Gunnar kristjánsson and Thomas Navarro Garcia, had already done the worst part: namely to produce a Linux distro that auto-boots into Workbench (or technically, into a full screen UAE environment). I dont blame them, between work, kids and mending a broken back it probably took me a year before I even entertained the idea of setting up a proper UAE environment. The more the questions arose the more I realized that a lot of people don’t really know what the PI can do. Is this Amiga OS 4? Is it Aros? Scalos? Or perhaps just a pimped up classic Amiga 3.x? This caused quite a stir on several groups and people were unsure what exactly I was posting.
A couple of days back I posted a couple of pictures of my Raspberry PI 3b based Amiga setup.