Another day, another crazy idea.. decentralised Web page rendering..

[eXeler0]

You may remember me from such crazy ideas like "hey let's use the Philips CDI mpeg decoder in cd32 etc.. ;-)

here's another one.. Its about web-surfing on a 68 Amiga.. Even though we are about to enter a new era of nice WB on the small box Amigas (vampire v2 with hdmi out) websurfing is still going to suck because of the miserable web browsers for 68k.. And porting something like Odyssey apparently isnt happening. So...

Would it be possible to use something like a Raspberry Pi 2 (running a good linux distro or whatever) as a "proxy server", send a webpage render request from an Amiga "browser" to the Pi and the receive the resulting webpage (page rendering + javascript, java ) etc.. And display it on the Amiga?

And yes I have about 7-8 devices in my house that can already do it better but that's not the point here :-)

[Shatterhand]

I know Fudebrowser, an old Browser for MSX computers, did something similar. All requests were first sent to a PC server in Sao Paulo that would render the page then send it to the MSX.

I don't know if this still works because I am not sure the server is still up (Last time I saw this working was like 10+ years ago). It was even more hardcore because the server was on internet and sending stuff through the internet, not at your house

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Would it be possible to use something like a Raspberry Pi 2 (running a good linux distro or whatever) as a "proxy server", send a webpage render request from an Amiga "browser" to the Pi and the receive the resulting webpage (page rendering + javascript, java ) etc.. And display it on the Amiga?

Short answer is Yes - you can imagin RPi as flicker fixer + video card + CPU accelrator + storage controller + network interface + (add whatever you want) - problem is that you need to glue Amiga with RPi (doable - video from Amiga overlayed trugh digital camera interface on RPi graphical plane).

VNC may be used to push graphical data to Amiga... but as there is no software then... it is another ideal that will never be alive.

[ptyerman]

Closest thing to it at the moment is to set up a "forwarding proxy" on your internal network. In the process of doing this myself, just need to decide on software.
Doing this you can remove ads and scripts from web pages and reduce images and banners and stuff, it can also recode the HTML sent.
Squid is the main proxy software available on Linux for this, on Windows I've been looking at Privoxy mainly, but there are others.

The easiest way to accomplish this would be to use VNC or some other remote desktop sharing software and simply make it send the browser window from the remote machine (i.e. the Raspberry Pi) to the Amiga to display. There are variations of VNC that lets you send just a single application instead of the entire desktop.

There is a VNC viewer port for the Amiga, but I have no idea how functional it is.

Someone could probably do their own VNC port and tweak it a little to make it look like it's a browser running on the Amiga, even thought it's actually not.

[rare_j]

You could vnc onto a PC running winuae with ppc emulation and so use an Amiga os4 web browser on your 68k Amiga.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by rare_j

You could vnc onto a PC running winuae with ppc emulation and so use an Amiga os4 web browser on your 68k Amiga.

Haha. but no... ;-)
If VNC on 68k Amiga worked well enough to do *that* why use a sub-par OS4 browser? And the PC would need to be turned on.. And I'd need an OS 4 License...
Raspberry Pi is super-cheap and (for me) an "always on" -device. And it's small enough to sit next to the Amiga.. (or even inside it).

[Jope]

Not a bad idea, but you need quite a bit of code that doesn't exist to parse the html + css into something the Amiga browser can stomach. A huge gif or jpg is naturally the easiest way, but takes up a lot of RAM on the amiga side.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Jope

Not a bad idea, but you need quite a bit of code that doesn't exist to parse the html + css into something the Amiga browser can stomach. A huge gif or jpg is naturally the easiest way, but takes up a lot of RAM on the amiga side.

Ye solution 1 where we parse HTML etc is probably a lot more work but would suit most Amigas. But no matter how you look at is, surfing the Web in 2016 on a 32MB 030 Amiga in 64 colors (or something like that) in 640x480 is never going to be particularly enjoyable anyway.

However the VNC solution is probably more realistic and the target platform would probably be Amigas with Picasso96 that can display at least 800x600 @ 16-bit and 060 (or Vampire v2 which has 128MB RAM and Picasso96 support in progress.)

Of course, if we had a good VNC solution, all kinds of new cool stuff could be done with the Amiga - Raspberry Pi 2 combo... not just Web browsing. ;-)

[Paulso]

Instead of Vnc, hacking the Amigas genlock feature came to mind, but its an awful idea :-p
Going the proxy route seems the most practical way for the Amiga & other classic machines to browse since web standards have shifted and bloaty pages are the norm.

Rewriting pages on the fly usually requires some regex scripting, check out Squid proxy webserver and mogrify. Mogrify requires ImageMagick which is used to process images, heres a prank guide that could be modified for example:
https://www.funkypenguin.co.nz/how-t...-proxy-server/

Features such as adblocking, blaklisting junk sites, pre-spoofing the browser as googlebot etc. should produce lighter pages. Does anyone run a home proxy just to filter junk beforehand instead of waiting for your (modern) browser to do it & can you post a page load times on an Amiga with/without your proxy for benchmark/comparison.

[TenLeftFingers]

If javascript can be dumbed down enough so just the trigger/event areas are labelled but not much more and the evemts are sent back to the model on the R Pi then that would take the lions portion of the work away from the Amiga browser. I dont know if thats doable with squid et al and I'm no JavaScript guru either. I like the sound of this approach more than VNC I have to say.

[Daedalus]

The Opera Mini browser used to do that - all heavy decoding was done on their servers and the browser itself ended up with a table, basic animation and lots of image maps that it was fed by the Opera server. It allowed some basic feature phones to load pretty complicated websites easily when the internal browser hadn't a hope. I wonder if it's open source now...

[Samurai_Crow]

If you are going to use a RasPi, just get hosted AROS on Linux instead.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

If you are going to use a RasPi, just get hosted AROS on Linux instead.

I don't get it, how would that help?
(It's not that I don't already have a zillion devices that can run the latest version of Chrome or Firefox. ;-) )

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

(It's not that I don't already have a zillion devices that can run the latest version of Chrome or Firefox. ;-) )

Then why even try to load a webpage on the Amiga???

Fail to see the point. Is it possible? I guess. Is it worth it? No.

[TenLeftFingers]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

If you are going to use a RasPi, just get hosted AROS on Linux instead.

That's like saying that we shouldn't upgrade our Amiga's but run AROS instead. If people can spend hundreds on accellerator cards then a 30 euro upgrade that makes the Amiga browsing behaviour better is a great idea.

I like AROS. I'm keeping an eye on it in a VM and hope to run it on my laptop at some stage as my main OS, but it's different not better.

[LuMan]

Originally Posted by Akira

Then why even try to load a webpage on the Amiga???

Fail to see the point. Is it possible? I guess. Is it worth it? No.

In essence, you are correct, Akira. But I think the point here is whether it can be done, and not whether it would be advantageous in any way. It's certainly not worth it as a 'useful' solution, but as a challenge, it does have merit for a bit of fun

As for the approach, the Opera Mini Browser (or whatever it was called), mentioned by Daedalus, is possibly the way to go.. Or a mixture of that and something that just squirts an image to Amiga. Remember, clicking links for downloads will need to be taken into account, too.

Another approach (for waht it's worth):
At any point, for an A1200 running at 640x512 interlace, the Pi will only need to shove an image of that size to the Amiga. When the user scrolls the page, the Pi will offset and send the updated image. This cuts down on the RAM requirements for the Amiga, but requires a new 'browser' to be written, which just sends commands to a purpose-written app on the Pi. Effectively this turns the Amiga into a dumb terminal (crikey, remember them things!!). The outputted image could even be an OS-friendly ILBM IFF image, so the Amiga has even less processing to do.

Of course, you'll need to find someone who can be bothered to write a new Amiga browser app, interface protocol and Pi webserver app

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by Akira

Then why even try to load a webpage on the Amiga???

Fail to see the point. Is it possible? I guess. Is it worth it? No.

@Akira you have over 14.000 posts on these forums, have you not picked up yet that not everyone sees things like you ;-)
Why did the US put a man on the moon? Was it worth it? It was a cool thing to do, - what was it the man said.. "we will do this, not because it's easy but *because* it is hard "...
And in this case, apart from being an interesting challenge it could potentially save us some CF card shuffling.

[Amiga1992]

Oh yeah the US put a man on the moon "because it was cool".
Gonna leave your threads alone, don't worry.

[Samurai_Crow]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

That's like saying that we shouldn't upgrade our Amiga's but run AROS instead. If people can spend hundreds on accellerator cards then a 30 euro upgrade that makes the Amiga browsing behaviour better is a great idea.

I like AROS. I'm keeping an eye on it in a VM and hope to run it on my laptop at some stage as my main OS, but it's different not better.

The point I was making is that a RasPi ISN'T an Amiga upgrade. The Vampire 2 should be able to keep up with the RasPi if not go faster than the RasPi. To get the most out of a RasPi, use ARM native code. To get the most out of a 68k Amiga, produce optimized 68k code.

The saddest state of affairs about making an Amiga browser is that none of them have been written in Assembly. They are all written in C or C++. Amiga 68k C compilers suck compared to modern C compilers on other systems. This is why I don't like people trying to bootstrap their Amiga by tethering it to some ARM-based thing just because it's easier. The problem with 68k is it is unsupported not that it is incapable.