Please open source all the things

[copse]

Here's a guy who didn't let the lack of opened source code get in his way. His only mistake was that he should have done it for the Amiga, not that also ran platform I forget the name of.. just kidding - remarkable accomplishment!

[wXR]

@copse

That's awesome. Also that huge repo of Atari ST sources posted earlier is incredible. Grab it while you can!

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by copse

Here's a guy who didn't let the lack of opened source code get in his way. His only mistake was that he should have done it for the Amiga, not that also ran platform I forget the name of.. just kidding - remarkable accomplishment!

Holy kangaroo. This is an incredible thing. I think this even deserves its own "news" thread.

Note that he is also working on the Amiga versions: http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/...=29805#p148387.
His work was even quoted on Quora by Doug Bell himself : https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible...ts-source-code

[kamelito]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Holy kangaroo. This is an incredible thing. I think this even deserves its own "news" thread.

Note that he is also working on the Amiga versions: http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/...=29805#p148387.
His work was even quoted on Quora by Doug Bell himself : https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible...ts-source-code

I wrote a post about it already there when I found out aim to Meynaf who is not say a beginner regarding DM/CSB.
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...0&postcount=73
Kamelito

[copse]

Originally Posted by kamelito

I wrote a post about it already there when I found out aim to Meynaf who is not say a beginner regarding DM/CSB.
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...0&postcount=73
Kamelito

Yes, I just posted the link around, including in the reverseengineering subreddit. Thanks for the link. Looking forward to seeing the v3 release he's preparing, hopefully my request for it on the DM forum prompted it along.

That said, the code is pretty terrible. It's intended for his benefit - with names still resembling those provided by a disassembler. But still, it's great work.

[wXR]

Just a quick post to point out that Sakura's "Decelerator 4030" accelerator board is also open source:

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/decelerator4030

Anyone else know of Amiga hardware projects like this?

[strim]

Originally Posted by wXR

Just a quick post to point out that Sakura's "Decelerator 4030" accelerator board is also open source:

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/decelerator4030

Anyone else know of Amiga hardware projects like this?

• All other Sakura projects: https://github.com/Sakura-IT/
• tnt23's awesome Z3SDRAM board: https://github.com/timtashpulatov/z3sdram
• Matthias Heinrichs GitHub account is full of all kind of goodness: https://github.com/MHeinrichs
• Martin Aberg's GRETA board: https://github.com/endofexclusive/greta (never really completed, but still interesting)

[wXR]

Wow, that z3sdram project looks amazing. Is it still in development?

[strim]

Originally Posted by wXR

Wow, that z3sdram project looks amazing. Is it still in development?

It's done. tnt23 even sold some through AmiBay. I have one too .

[wXR]

Source code of Amiga game "Blaze", no license specified.

http://pastebin.com/MrA0EtXf

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80345

[wXR]

ReWarp:

"This project is a reimplementation of WarpOS for AmigaOS 4 (work in progress).

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/ReWarp

[wXR]

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=56098

Here's an excellent idea about preserving game sources. It would be great to see more support to those kinds of efforts.

[Locutus]

I noticed that the OpenPCI and more interesting a set of stubs for a GPL'd DDK for 'some RTG System' were posted on github.

Both pretty nice, although license wise for the DDK LGPL would make more sense.

[wXR]

@locuts Sounds interesting indeed, got a link?

[Locutus]

Here it is: https://github.com/jeperk/OpenVIdeoDDK

Note that this is just 1 include file. But seeing the current drama around the DDK this is nice enough, Thomas is already replied to the Amiga.org post about it in the expected way ;-)

[Heiroglyph]

I fixed the typo in the project name, so now that link is invalid. Lower case i in video now. https://github.com/jeperk/OpenVideoDDK

I'm going to add much more once the code is cleaned up and completed, but given the current slew of new graphics drivers, I wanted to drive home a point about legality and get some info available to the general public.

I'm also behind the release of OpenPCI. https://github.com/jeperk/OpenPCI

As for GPL/LGPL in OpenPCI, I don't want to encourage closed source drivers at this point in time. I think it's severely counterproductive to a tiny retrocomputing community. Once the developers are tired of the project, users are stuck with a black box they can't open.

The license of the library doesn't change the license of the already available driver SDK. You can license drivers as you wish, but I'd highly encourage GPL.

Mainly you'd want this new OpenPCI.library if you want to develop a new PCI backplane, CPU card that includes a PCI device or fix bugs in the library itself.

This gives backplane developers a quick start in that they make the library work with their hardware and in return get existing and future PCI card drivers for free.

Users get well documented hardware that can be updated without the need for the original developers help, Aros, NetBSD, etc get well documented hardware that they can support either by a variation of OpenPCI or their own APIs.

It's a win-win situation for the community as a whole IMHO.

[Locutus]

Oh I agree with you, I wasn't actually thinking from the perspective of leaving the possibility open for non-free drivers but more about license compatibility with other code which is easier with LGPL. Think BSD/MIT/WTFPL etc drivers.

Then again, seeing the acceptance of open source and Amiga at all, that might have been a silly thought :-)

[Heiroglyph]

I just changed the license of both projects to LGPL at Jason McMullan's suggestion.

There are serious issues with GPL libraries on Amiga-like OSs. They're a little too viral for their own good.

[wXR]

Heiroglyph, you're awesome.

[strim]

I like what you did there. But honestly, this OpenPCI release, at this point of time... does not change much for the existing solutions. Of course it is great, if potentially someone decides to create a new PCI bridge (no point in implementing 12th or so PCI API in Amiga land).

However, using binary "backend" drivers is problematic. They are full of bugs. In theory you can write a single driver using OpenPCI API and have it work with G-REX, Mediator, Prometheus etc. But in reality try to write a more complex driver... and you'll discover really, really ugly stuff. In my opinion the next-generation of OpenPCI should completely dump the bugged vendor drivers and reimplement them from scratch. Of course the only vendor that provided documentation was Matay for their Prometheus, but G-REX and Mediator were sufficiently reverse engineered by now. Just 3 cents from someone who did that awful reverse engineering work .

Btw. if you want some examples of breakage in vendor drivers, check out various issues in SonnetAmiga project (which uses Elbox's pci.library) and search forums for threads related to Ratte's OpenPCI Radeon driver.