Port to Linux

[Enverex]

Just out of interest, how hard would it be to port WinUAE to Linux? I used WinUAE all the time in Windows, but having almost completely scrapped Windows now I was forced to seek other emulators, mainly e-UAE but, well, e-UAE just doesn't seem to work at all and has very few features.

What would be involved to port WinUAE to Linux? (I may take this on myself if it isn't impossible and if Tony doesn't mind).

[MrZammler]

Well, e-uae is just what you are talking about. WinUAE on linux, or more precisely, parts of winuae code backported to the linux version. The author's goal is to make it up-to-date with WinUAE code.

But maybe instead of getting chunks of code from WinUAE on top of existing e-uae, getting the complete WinUAE 1.x code under linux might be worthwhile.

(and btw, e-uae seems to work ok on my setup.)

[kriz]

Then you should offer you help to the E-UAE team, if youre seriuos about this..

[Enverex]

Originally Posted by kriz

Then you should offer you help to the E-UAE team, if youre seriuos about this..

I wanted to port the entire thing, not bits of it...

[Jerry]

I don't think that it's possible to completely port Winuae to linux as some parts heavily rely on the various Windows subsystems (eg. video-capture, direct access of hds...). So these parts would have to be rewritten from scratch and specifically for the targeted os.

[lostfriend]

when you look at the CVS for EUAE on sourceforge you will see that evilrich is currently working on E-UAE.
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/uaedev/uae/

When you have skills why not join him!

[Enverex]

As I already said once in this thread, I wanted to port the whole thing, or as much of it as possible... and why is evilrich?

[lostfriend]

i meant the author of E-UAE "evi1rich", rcdrummond.
Since WinUAE uses DirectX the way through SDL is the only possible right now,
maybe just talk to the author of E-UAE, he knows more.
Maybe most functions are ported but just dont show up in the GUI.

[forumbase]

WinUAE is already opensource it shouldn't be hard to port.

if you now both windows and linux programming you could do it i think.

[_ThEcRoW]

E-UAE works well under linux, what's the problem with it?. Most of the advantages of winuae are direct x apis and layers that made the life easier to programmers, on linux they are nonexistant, so a direct port i think that simply, it's impossible.
Why not have a win partition exclusive for winuae, and other linux part. for daily usage?.

[Enverex]

Originally Posted by _ThEcRoW

E-UAE works well under linux, what's the problem with it?. Most of the advantages of winuae are direct x apis and layers that made the life easier to programmers, on linux they are nonexistant, so a direct port i think that simply, it's impossible.
Why not have a win partition exclusive for winuae, and other linux part. for daily usage?.

Because that means buying Windows and having a 3GB partition purely for WinUAE not to mention having to reboot into the other OS every time I want to use it. A little extreme, heh. Linux has its own APIs, they aren't nonexistant, heh. I agree though with it being heavily DX based will make it hard to port.

E-UAE doesn't work for me at all, the moment I "unpause" it it just freezes (the main Amiga window appears, but just black) and the program stops responding. This is true for both my x86 laptop and AMD64 main PC using the latest version of e-UAE.

[woody57]

Perhaps this is a question of looking backwards to when WINuae was in its early stages in 1999 & linux APUS was being investigated as a possible OS for PPC amiga's future workbench OS,s.

As it has progressed WINuae has embraced the changes in the native windoze OS versions , so just maybe there is a clear seperation point in it's development that is the real startpoint for your port version, as opposed to it's current distribution.

I would hope Toni will be able identify any "now abbandoned" research material concerning this possibility.


And yes Enverex I KNOW it's a longshot !

[_ThEcRoW]

I have amigasys under e-uae on my linux partition and work with it without problems. Even playing emulators like amimsx under it go very well, and this emulator isn't a rtg one, it's aga.
On a amd64 i can't believe that e-uae doesn't work well, mine is a Athlon XP 3000+(32 bit) and works very fast and responsive!!

[Enverex]

Originally Posted by woody57

Perhaps this is a question of looking backwards to when WINuae was in its early stages in 1999 & linux APUS was being investigated as a possible OS for PPC amiga's future workbench OS,s.

As it has progressed WINuae has embraced the changes in the native windoze OS versions , so just maybe there is a clear seperation point in it's development that is the real startpoint for your port version, as opposed to it's current distribution.

I would hope Toni will be able identify any "now abbandoned" research material concerning this possibility.


And yes Enverex I KNOW it's a longshot !

That would be kinda pointless as it's all the features and compatability of the latest WinUAE that I was hoping to translate...

[Enverex]

Heh, well, when trying to use e-UAE on my desktop now (v0.8.26) it just segfaults after it does the startup tests when the windows should appear.

[mtb]

e-uae 0.8.26 is ways too old, where did you found it?

It's not e-uae i guess, it's the "original" uae.

Look here:

http://rcdrummond.net/uae/test/20060...28-CVS.tar.bz2

For instructions, look here:

http://giuliogiuseppecarlo.interfree.it/uae/index.html

if you want to improve euae, contact Richard Drummond, or join the ml and ask him. For example i know for sure he wants to use opengl for gfx.

[Enverex]

I'm already using 0.8.28, have been for ages and it's well, crap to be honest. It lacks basic features like pixel doubling so everything is interlaced, the sound stutters and breaks, it doesn't save most my settings if the application is closed despite clicking "Save Settings" etc etc.

[mtb]

I'm already using 0.8.28

Here i don't understand. Before you said you were using 0.8.26

Now you write:

I'm already using 0.8.28, have been for ages

But in the previous message... you wrote

it just segfaults after it does the startup tests when the windows should appear.

I just don't understand.

Anyway if you think it's so crap, just do your version without even letting the author know about your problems and offering him help, when it will be ready, after eons of hours, linux users will test your version.

This is the way to go with open source program, or am i missing something???

Or if you are a skilled programmer ( don't you want to port winuae? ) take a look at the code of winuae, take a look at the code of e-uae, then improve e-uae with what you want, after having fixed your problems.

[agent_jdh]

Originally Posted by Enverex

I'm already using 0.8.28, have been for ages and it's well, crap to be honest. It lacks basic features like pixel doubling so everything is interlaced, the sound stutters and breaks, it doesn't save most my settings if the application is closed despite clicking "Save Settings" etc etc.

Errr .... pixel doubling works just fine here with e-uae and Gentoo. You really need to manually edit your config files though, and launch e-uae with the -f switch to call out a particular config file, e.g.

e-uae -f a1200rc

where a1200rc is your config file.

The GUI doesn't save all your options, fair comment, and doesn't even offer all of the config options available. It saves your config to ~/uaerc btw, so you can make the basic changes in the GUI, save it, and then copy ~/uaerc to your config file of choice (e.g. a1200rc), and manually edit to fine tune the config. It's pretty simple really.

I'm not actually in Linux atm so I can't post the exact configs I use, but believe me it works just fine. The documentation is improving, so maybe you should read up in the docs folder, most of the important options are now documented.

There's a mailing list link on Richard's website - maybe you could subscribe to the list, and if you're having problems e.g. segfaulting, and general config, Richard (and others, including me), are usually pretty good at responding to problems, if you can post precisely what the problem is.

If you think you're sufficiently good at coding to consider porting WinUAE (which is essentially what Rich is doing, within the bounds of the archs/OS's it is targetted for), maybe you could assist him, as it's basically a one-man job.

[Konrad]

To me it rather sounds as if you didn't take a deeper look in eUAE. Others use this port without problems and you seem to have a few. Instead of trying to port WinUAE yourself you should take a better look at eUAE, you config and, when you're still running in problems, your system.

BTW:

Originally Posted by Enverex

I wanted to port the entire thing, not bits of it...

What do you expect ? You take the whole sourcecode, change a few things, compile and you're done or what ? Of course you first have to take parts of the source code, port and test them before you advance. There's no way you can port WinUAE in one big step. It sounds to me that you didn't programm that much already, otherwise you'd know that. How much experience do you have ? You'll need alot.