'AmiLFS' system build ~ inspired by AmiDeb

[giantclam]

..."pretty handsom pretty, doctor smith"...

Said the girl from the green dimension ...set about making the ice-wm desktop reflect it's purpose in life...did you know, the ice-wm main config file is 42.5k of textfile?...goodgrief.. it helps to be able to speak xdg... there's no gnome, gtk, or kde suites, but anything else qt5 is on the cards...

....links in graphical mode, is almost attractive when navigating aminet....




...I think it's the fonts ; they're really clear and crisp. This gets plugged-in to the xdg menu tree as the 'web browser' .. there's only one =) I think alsamixer in ncurses is fine for console, but in the ice-wm userland I installed 'qastools' which makes volume control kinkyqt5 easy...



...added menu entry for midnight commander, to make it easier to find... same as before, cut ice-wm back to one desktop ...and I'm not sure the menubar at top with ice-wm, actually gets along with fs-uae during runtime ; I think if you just stick to kbd navigation when fs-uae is running, this isn't a problem...
also there's network traffic/ram/system stats in the menubar I'm undecided about (user can turn them back on in ice-wm settings anyhow)....ummm...and just the fs-uae-launcher menu entry (user doesn't need anything else, arcade mode is in the launcher)...

...it's around this stanza in the build that you're doing 'window dressing', that you're within the field of 'builder distraction'. That is to say, deciding to 'dress' alsamixer with the qasmixer GUI, means you're adding something extra for user convenience, nothing more ; alsamixer works fine by itself...

...but mc in terminal mode looks the same as alsamixer, so I figure that surely someone has done a mc-like qt5 GUI clone, and it looks like that target is 'qtfm'.....

...then you see that a possible dep for qtfm is ffmpeg...what, this has a builtin vidplayer?....

....then you realize if you're going to compile/install ffmpeg, then you want to grab libopenmpt first, so ffmpeg can link against that, and do amiga music mod files-2-mp3, oog or whatever soundfile format you choose transcoding in one command line....

......and then I realize, I've totally ignored the optical drive unit all this way, and if I said buying Amiga Forever was going to be a good idea, then buying the premium version with DVD would be 'nicer' to be easily played on the emulator, and of course I've forgotten about all of my Amiga magazine coverdisks lurking safe in the darkness of of my relics closet...and then I immediately wonder, does fs-use support /dev/loop devices, because if it did, you can use up that empty drivespace, and copy iso files of the diskmags to localdrive, and hoist them on /dev/loop# for fs-uae to mount as cdrom..I wonder if that works...(it's what I do for the 1990 edition of the nissan (e)FAST cattledog to pipe it thru wine)...it'd be nice if it did work, I'll find out...

...lol...it's like all the hard work is behind you, but there's all this fiddly stuff you've got to patch and weave together, and it seems never ending for a time. For myself, me, I can live with the system just fine as it is, without the window dressing... however... the moment you think about deploying a linux instance like this, is the moment you need to be considerate towards others that might also use the stuff 8)

Like, even now I'm questioning the sanity of having any usage instruction of "to turn off the unit, momentarily depress power button"... it's not that it sounds too simple, it's just that users of desktop environments are used to having point&click reboot/shutdown/hiberate/suspend targets, so must maybe perhaps sortof I should add those things as well....

......and THEN you think, well...it is a dvd burner...do we need a simple burner GUI?....and while I'm tipping towards 'no', I notice a possible dep for imagemajik is an old program I used to play around on the Amiga with, so just for fun that gets built into the system as well..

...currently toying with this bootsplash image...




... what business are we in?... [ Show youtube player ]

[giantclam]

M'kay....

...I managed to dig myself out of the builder distraction zone...(similar to and aka 'feature creep') ... wherein you know you've got a system that will compile just about anything thrown at it, and one is unsure when/where to stop adding 'user conveniences'. This gets really bad, when you start musing "Hmm, how many ppl would like a cross-compiler all setup for amiga-m68k?"....<grin>...

...did a bunch of fs-uae testing ; ClassicWB, my old AIAB installset, and AmigaForever (v10).. all install and run fine, games, demos, music-disks ... have yet to find anything it'll bork at (caveat: using Amiga roms), so it's all seemingly 'working as expected'. Indeed it runs really really well ; it'd be with some melancholia that I can use the setup, and mutter to myself 'if only the Amiga had kept going as a machine and reached this level of performance by Y2K'... granted it's a huge waste of computing resources to achieve it...ie; I'm very aware it's using 1.2 cores worth of a 4core haswell @ 3.4ghz to achieve a near equal runtime to my A1200/030/882 @ 33mhz ... but... the emulator of course can be configured to A4000 spec with the click of the mouse, and make my A1200 setup appear 'antique' and slow in a moment.

One thing I was hoping to achieve here, was an easily discernible visible difference between running fs-uae on a 'general purpose' linux instance, compared to a purpose built linux instance to run fs-uae, and now I know I can setup the Sony camera on the tripod in front of the monitor, and record that scrolling text top-left of the Andromeda.DOS demo, and you can see the difference (once I have these files, I'll diff them side by side in Lives to get some tacit measurements)... and if there's any caveat here, it's likely one is also seeing the result of a very 'deliberate' linux RT kernel build.

Started to look around at other machines like the Dell 9020USFF which this build would work on ... HP EliteDesk 800 G1/G3 would be one, so I've got a HP 800 G1 Core i5 machine on the way here to check it out. A Lenovo M93p Tiny PC should also work fine going by the specs. It would also work on other Dell 9020 constructs (MT & SSF), but no support (yet) for any nvidia/radeon GPU that one can stick in the pcie slot of these (needs a different mesa/Xorg build).

The zebede build is officially 'toast' ..and as we know, you can't turn toast back into sliced bread. I included a few deps to explore the 'all' qtfm had on offer, which ropes in a lot of stuff that I really didn't need, and bits of it (cgroups) requires kernel level support....not to mention other configurata wrt polkit, shadow, elogin..etc and blabla....almost mandatory stuff these days for a desktop daily drive ; not particularly useful here...

...I kinda look at doing this, as I did look at those old 'maze' screensavers, with the computer drawing snakes to travel down every maze path, making coin toss decisions before eventually finding the way out...exploring every possible route, to find out if it's part of the (a) solution path. Everytime you (re)build the system, you learn from the previous attempt..do this, don't do that ...and although qtfm might end up part of the build, it'll be a reduced feature set compile, and won't have the stuff included I didn't need/want...ie; other system binaries already do what qtfm-tray does.

I'll butter this slice of toast (finalize bootsplash and sysvinit paths), image it off to backup, and blow it all away again =) As the saying goes, 'third time's the charm' ...1st time failed due to $base having a closeted amd fetish, which never lived to earn a name ; 2nd try (this build) is operationally fine, it's just not exactly what I was aiming for..but at least it got to the name of zebede, and when I see the machine boot to grub splash (above image), and quickly autoload to, say, classicwb Amiga environment ontop of fs-uae, I can save out all those config files to save myself time on the next build...

Did some more RTFM on ice-wm ...if you throw it the 3 finger salute on desktop, it'll do the xdg dance and pop the user the 6 option menubox giving the usual logout/restart/shutdown/hibernate/sleep/suspend selections... (sanity unraveled..why am I doing this? just tap the freaking power button ffs)... and in that BOFH moment, I realized you could drive the user nuts with this (logout took you out of X and to a Workbench screen, killing the emulator restarts X and put you back at the point you started from =) ... hmmm...one could hack that, one could...seems feasible to pivot off these hooks, to call telinit to switch runlevels...ie; goto retroarch mode, AROS mode.. might take a little peekboo at that..

I have been typing textfiles for github on the side, which I'll upload later after some sanity checking ~ most of that will happen this next build.

I created 2 backup points when the zebede build reached chapter 7.4 in the LFS book, and at the same level of functionality provided by the initial Debian host installation...ie; sshd, mc, wget along with everything required to build a/the system...ie; it can rebuild itself. Seems I did everything 'right' ...I restored the latter to USB drive & checked usb boot off uefi worked (it did =), so it's as easy as restoring to the mSATA drive, and it should boot from uefi via bios bootdrive selector...which saves at least 8 hours of build time 8) Thus, the 3rd build will be based on 'zebede' ... I'm still contemplating it's name...

..oh, and the Dell bios sux for this, m'kay... talk about 'feature creep'...pffft!, I'm an amateur in comparison...ie; from grub boot, it can go kernel load -> init -> autologin -> startx -> launch fs-uae -c a4000.config and be at fullscreen Workbench in under 10 seconds ... it takes the dell bios freaking 5 seconds to get to grub boot..lol.. can drive a sane person crazy, unlike this [ Show youtube player ]

[giantclam]

The HP 800 G1 Core i5 USDT ... is a different duck to the 9020usff, but still based on the intel Q87 chipset, and roughly the same CPU/GPU cores. Like the Dell thin-client, these HP units are customer spec builds, and I suppose YMMV buying these things off ebay and the like. This one has a 135w external power brick, which brings back memories =) It has both mini-pcie & msata sockets (it's not entirely clear what the msata limits are, with mention of intel cache drive support which might be limited to 32gb) The HP bios is not as GUI dressed, but still a bit more usable at the same time...ie; didn't take me too long to find the 3.9ghz turbo widget 8) It's got 10 USB ports...lol ...and a mobile pcie slot for MXM type GPU card (AMD Radeon HD 7650A is cited, but at a guess any MXM 3.0 compliant card's going to work)...VESA mount points in the top cover. At a cost of AU$65, it's pretty good bang for your buck as a general duty desktop machine.

The reason I bought it, was to actually test exactly how the system image deployed on a 'like' machine (basically intel haswell+Q87 constructs)... for real. I always tend to use 'clonezilla' for this purpose (and have done for years), I think mostly from the advent of (u)efi style bios, which rendered the 'dd' command into a no longer sufficient process =) It's still a bit of a muck about to prepare an uefi clonezilla USB stick, so it's actually easier (for the user) to prepare the USB clonezilla stick in the easiest, normal fashion, and anytime after installation user can choose to move to uefi bios booting instead... ie; have the filesystem setup and necessary software as part of the image...

....that process caught me by surprise, as the HP800 booted up flawlessly after the image restore...not a single error. This bodes well...

I started entertaining thoughts of what the 'minimal usage context' might be. By that I mean... the possibility the machine may be used without any network connection... and then being used by someone without any/much computing experience, and then perhaps without any linux exposure at all. This would not be unlike the way it was when the A500 came out ~ you could plug it in, turn it on, insert a floppy disk, and you were good to go =)

There's a snapshot release of the build of everything up to/including Xorg & ice-wm, but no Amiga emulator(s) ~ if you've got an i5/Q87 based thin desktop machine, it'll likely work fine -- read the file EYNBNYE.txt on the github page if you're interested in trying a non package managed armed linux system with all the user comforts of a bedful of nails ..lol ...but I've taken that base-point towards an x86-64 build of amiberry, just to see how that UAE engine is coming along (knowing it's not really angled towards ix86 hardware perse), but at the same time you don't have to go out of your way to compile it (sans libserialport), so it's neither here nor there to have a look at it ... and it's best to know the following is version 1 of a paid presentation.. [ Show youtube player ]

[giantclam]

Time for an update, and this might well be heading towards something other than FS-UAE in the end result. I've come dwell on Amiberry. Initially/primarily aimed at ARM based SoC hardware & handhelds, a x86_64 build target was added back mid 2022, which pretty much opens this up to the x86-64 linux distro (desktop) environment, and there's also some OSX build support as well, but dunno how that goes...Mac users would have to suck it and see B)

The binary release pkgs may work as well, but with 'developing' projects I tend to compile & run locally (as unprivileged user) from source, and with that comes the liberty to muck about with boats, because the amiberry SDL2 GUI interface is a bit lack luster is stock trim, and I prefer a pastel motif and 'groovier' looking font...(if you look at amiberry github discussions/1083 you can do likewise)..



That's just a bit better on the eyes imho, and that's subjective but I say better that, than being obliged to a particular look, that subjectively, looks 'bad' to the user. I dunno... it kinda reminds me of back in the 90's and the tcl/tk GUI toolkit in a way, with everything nicely packed in a (resizable) 800x600 window, in a no fuss minimalist way. The emulation engine itself is based upon the winuae core, and for the most part after futzing around with it for a few months now, it seems a pretty stable and light weight Amiga emulator on X86_64....

...of course some things are a tad broken or don't work...ie; I don't think JIT works yet on x86_64 target, and the --autoload <some-whdload>.lha cmdline arg flips a pancake (works fine in GUI), and I think menuboxes not displaying symlinks is a pita...and there's some really deep and meaningful quirks that make me do the Mr Spock raise one eyebrow look =)

Trying to pull off generic USB wifi device support, is currently a minefield of device driver supports, fractioned out of github trees and/or coming to a future kernel release sometime soon[tm]. Even if you were basing upon debian, 'on the fly' you'd have to rope in build-essentials & dkms, and my image doesn't entertain carrying a build toolchain with it. That sortta leaves me at the end of a linear equation which reads ...what's the most prevalent, likely to buy, cheap USB wifi dongle gunna be on ebay? Answer: probably a realtek.

Putting that to the test (I've got 6 now =)...buying such off ebay, advertised as having linux support, plug them in to find out that's true, provided user can git clone the driver repo, compile & install for current kernel, and blablablah. Thus, looking in the mirror of reality, the best statement you can achieve is "supports most realtek wifi dongles"...(and grab all those trees, compile/install them all to be included on the image),

I grabbed a mini_pcie wifi card for the HP 800 G1 because I can dodge all the above para on that machine, but be it known a 15cm long u/fl to SMA cable isn't long enough on this HP model -- you need a 24cm cable to reach the back panel for antenna mount....hint: I'm still waiting for the post to get here.

The system itself is stable and clockwork,,,if I had to stop just here, it would be enough, and you leave the user 'exposed' to alsamixer/mc and the xterm itself. 'You probably don't want that', he muses to himself...and after chatting with the amiberry maintainer and he intimating that perhaps Qt might be a better base for an amiberry 'desktop app', I end up looking at it all and concluding it's worthwhile roping in just Qt5 base/widgets and friends, and then you can do qtfm, qastool..and SDDM as display manager for runlevel5.

In theory ('cos it's currently broken), this would allow a usage workflow of being able to launch links2, navigate to <some-Amiga-title>.adf|dms|lha online, download the file(s), and then quit links2, create custom mime-types & default action for x-{adf|dms|lha} files, and if real Amiga kickrom images are there, you can for example double click/run a downloaded whdload.lha archive, and (providing the archive works) have a default action of 'amiberry -G --autoload %F' and the title starts directly...

...in a perfect world[yatm] , if one launched a whdload.lha archive, and it required some specific uae tweaks after hitting F12 and changing/resetting the emulator, you'd like to somehow save those changes, matched against the whdload.lha archive name, so next time you launched the title from desktop like that, you don't have to change anything...

...and then you think, well...if you could obtain that configurata, it could be used as a reference file for amiberry itself, so others didn't have to go through the tweaking process.

.mmmmmm, chocolate.... [ Show youtube player ]

[pixie]

Imagine if you had a Linux distro where you uae was running on MUI... That day might not be that far away off..

[giantclam]

Originally Posted by pixie

Imagine if you had a Linux distro where you uae was running on MUI... That day might not be that far away off..

These days, I'd need ask you to define 'MUI' (there's 2 =)

[giantclam]

One of my engineer mates asked me, 'why are you doing this?' ...thinking along the lines of it being a 'waste' of a computer, you could be using it as a desktop. I had to point out, it could still be used for that, but at it's crux it had a lot to do with the target user audience.

Last weekend, my 10 year old grand-daughter was here for a visit ~ she's hopeful I'll get this all finished, by the time this year's xmas presents come round =) She needs a computer for her school-work etc, and these little thin-client boxes are more than capable of that, and all that's needed is a Debian current desktop install to meet requirements there.

However....even with win10 installed, playing (popular) modern games on the IGP in the Haswell core, means you won't be doing very much of that, and there's no expansion route to fit dedicated GPU, so you're stuck with it. Modern gaming on a stock thin-client is no fun.

Same hardware is more than ample for Amiga emulation...as I've mentioned previously in this thread, seeing a demo running that on real Amiga hardware would've taken it to it's knees, you see the emulation engine breeze through using 25% of 1core... in a 4 core CPU ...it borders on being ridiculous at times =)

IRL, if I'm old enough to be a grand-father, then I'm old enough to have many nieces and nephews, and essentially speaking 'the younger they are, the more likely it is they'll be entertained by the old Amiga games' ...it is what it is.

Older cheloviks like myself, play Amiga games for the nostalgia ...to relive the having been there, to remember how we did that, and what stirred in us by doing so. It's a very ephemeral thing - "you had to be there" kind of effect. In the young of today, playing old Amiga games is 'a new experience' as it were ~ doing so on a dedicated machine that's also their desktop workstation = bonus. The fact these thin-client boxes are so portable, plug into teevee displays...remind you of something? =)

M'kay...her mousing skills aren't lacking, the mouse was on a varnished wooden table top, no mouse mat..blame grandpa =) We're on the very minimalist ice-wm desktop, no desktop icon support. Right mouse click to get desktop menu, start qtfm file-manager and send it to tray. Start links2 from desktop menu (preconfigured to go that website @start), navigate to and download The Addams Family game archive, quit links2 browser, pop qtfm window again, right mouse to click Run with amiberry, et voila ..title starts using local customized .uae config file sourced by amiberry ..all working as expected now...

...except I forgot to plugin the USB joypad, had to do that and Alt-tab to grab the added input device focus (weird, I'll have to look into that, but typically USB pad is connected before start a/the game), but then all good and she went on to play the game fine for half an hour, then wanted to play something else...download another title, wash rinse repeat.

[ Show youtube player ]

Search for the string '26/05/23 severed' and listen..

[giantclam]

I had this thread moved here, as it's more amiberry and less fs-uae

....amiberry crossing the streams .... [ Show youtube player ]

[giantclam]

M'kay.... someone else besides me, may have noticed Amiberry v5.6.1 was released several days back. This fixes a couple of things that were bugging me getting amiberry to play nicely on the linux desktop, and includes a lot of improvements all round : kudos to midwan.

In the meantime, I did a bit more polishing wrt qtfm ~ I compiled/installed the unlikely named 'Notepad-DOT-Qt' for the obvious purpose of simple desktop text file editing (*.uae files, *.conf...anything {text/plan} ), and double-click on these icons pops the notepad window with file loaded. There seems to be some discontinuity (between progs) wrt what filetype a *.lha is... especially in links, a lha archive may identify as application/x-lzh-compressed or application/x-lha (and I've yet to figure out why =)

I haven't actually captured the YT vid I link to below as I type this ~ what I'm doing now is typing my own script to follow, so that what I describe now, is going to be what you seen in the vid..m'kay? FTR, I'm using the Dell Optiplex 9020USFF (i5-4570S CPU @ 2.90GHz / HD4600 IGP & 8GB DDR3), and we're running a native display resolution of 1280x1024@60. Besides kbd/mouse input, there's also a USB SFC d-pad connected.

So if you're going to do a YT vid, you're going to need a title ...lets go with "Web-browsing with links using amiberry on AmiLFS linux to the Sounds of Gnome"... might not be what you expect.

Still got that black minimalist ice-WM theme going, but I did clean up the menus a bit, and added an amiberry taskbar launcher icon...lets start there ...

...now that Amiberry is where it is now, our ever intrepid user has another way of browsing the internet for Amiga titles. Since he can remember, he's always had a penchant for Sounds of Gnome, so that gets fired up and resized to a small window, acting as a background muzak machine...

...next, the links web-browser is launched, and at startup it loads that whdownload page. It's kinda old school browser, and most sites that are Amiga friendly, tend to be friendly to links as well...but as always, YMMV. For reasons best known to the user, they want to play Arkanoid, so they search for it in the webpage list, and click on the link...

...this invokes Amiberry in whd autoload mode, and the game title is launched based on params held in Horace the Spider's XML file. This works, but user immediately notices the bat cannot be seen, so we have to correct that ...thus hit the F12 key to get to the amiberry GUI, go to the display panel and change the vertical height, and then click on reset or resume (setting is applied immediately), and start playing the game, flick to fullscreen (using ice-wm), back to windowed, and finally quit the emulator/game ..

...that was because IRL, that lag in the video encoding is a real killer playing games, but we decide to use the links bookmarks panel to open a site full of Amiga floppy disk title, and just like before, find something you want to see/try, click on the link.. and away we go...

...before things get far too close to billy the mountain, user quits the Sounds of Gnome muzak machine (although just minimizing it's window pauses it, and resuming the window resumes the emulation as well)...and the user plays on towards epic points status trying to load and run the thousands of Amiga titles 'out there' ..

We're doing all this without actually keeping/saving the files themselves. I've configured links' file associations, to action/invoke amiberry as the default handler. The files are downloaded to $TMP, and lost on reboot... ie; this is a handy strategy if you're booting off say a 4GB USB stick, and only want to keep copies of particular favorite titles...like building your own collection sort of things.

It's a really easy simple Amiga emulator to use as akin to a desktop appliance ~ everything has this tunnel visioned facility towards providing Amiberry usage, and pretty much nothing else...caveat web-browsing as you would at home, using links instead ... it can be quite the humorous time in it's own right =)

Vid quality suxxors, again.. I might have to try DPORT -> HDMI -> HDMI capture instead, I'll just have to get such a device, so we're stuck with this ; doesn't do it justice, IRL things are much smoother than they appear here. Floppy drive sounds are off (I should actually check if they work tbh =), but I do have the visual status bar running -- the kdb LEDs are what I'd normally use to keep track of disk activity, but that's of no use to the vid, and it's a tad broken in X atm... now, on with the show......

[ Show youtube player ]


....

[giantclam]

...So one place I haven't gone yet with amiberry, would actually be it's preferred environment...on the console, tossing SDL straight at the framebuffer device, and not running a Xserver at all. In practice a lot of the configurata holds true for console usage, just as it works in X ... and I was thinking this'd be one of the easier routes to 'boot to Workbench' so to speak....

...just for testing, I set all this up in the user's .bash_profile to call the helper script 'ClassicWb' which launches amiberry with the associated config file...login ; hello classicwb.

Then I start doing typically bad things like the equivalent of hot-swapping hard-drives on a real Amiga ..I've actually hit F12 to get to the amiberry GUI, and if you keep an eye on the 'Resume' button bottom-right, you'll notice it greys out just after I mount the hard-disk ; that's the emulator crashing =)

Not to worry, hit F12 again and classicwb boots up again, with the new drive present, and we have a quick look at it...figured it out yet? <grin> ... /dev/sdc is a 16gb USB flashdrive on the linux host --> in the Amiga guest, it's a 500mb removable drive...in fact, in the emulator it sort of appears as a bootable floppydrive .... you see when I open the drive, that's exactly what I've been using it for...ie; lha disk archives on aminet with C/ S/ dirs meant to be copied to bootable floppy. It's a deplorable waste of drivespace, but I've got a whole bunch of 256/512mb usdcards, and I was just looking at the idea of being able to put a whole bunch of disk archives on a drive like this, with an menu so you can select which sus to use...and it looks like it'd work...

...anything links can do in X it can do on console...one just has to remember to toggle the run in console widget (but not save the change as it messes with X...unless you do console all the time =) This all works, you can launch from midnight-commander as well. In the HDF directory, I have the Cannon Fodder cd32 cue/iso files ~ so easy to deal with..

[ Show youtube player ]

[giantclam]

Had a bunch of kids over on the weekend, 2 SFC controllers with long leads, DisplayPort to HDMI on the 52" Soniq teevee...bit of a pita having to route audio with 3.5mm audio patch cable, but the 9020USFF has no DisplayPort+ thus no audio over HDMI...

...kids are willing guinea pigs when there's games involved ~ I decided to test how they'd get along in a 'holding pen' environment ~ it's a bit of a kiosk mode running on the back of links as per previous vid...this is runlevel 2 in effect...

...machine boots, auto-login the amiga user, and (re)spawn links to the whdownload landing page..if you quit links, it respawns. There's only 1 tty active, and the only way to shutdown the machine is via the Amiberry GUI shutdown button, or pressing the machine power switch..so it's play Amiga games or die (I suppose you can still browse the web with links, which can sort of be a game in itself =)

I had thought they'd find it a rather lack luster experience ~ after all, how exciting does this look, relative to modern times?



Not very, huh...and yet, if you can just look at that through the eyes of seeing name to click on in the left = play some Amiga game (you never heard/knew of before), it starts to look like a smorgasbord...oops, sorry... more like a lolly shop really 8) Apart from one of my nieces breaking the game controller config at some point, nothing went wrong... aside from normal factors like not every title actually works, and some games are worse than others, but practically speaking there's soooooo many titles to choose from, and it'd take you literally hours to check them all out, and of the small number you end up trying, better than 90% are going to work, so that's not too bad really.

Got a message this morning, that one of the parents wants to buy one as a present for their daughter, as (apparently) she thought it was great. It's one of those 'social anomalies' that not all of the younger generation like the older, simpler look/style of computer games, but those that do like it really get into it...much like I did nearly 40 years ago.

It's an interesting aspect for me, to know when I played these games, we were near the cutting edge, but when kids play these games, they're reliving the past ...for many of us, we can realize this by thinking about how average life was, before/after the advent of mobile phones ..<grin>..but they didn't mind putting down their phones to pick up a gamepad... to be able to play from thousands of titles ...lol, it's a bit like the Steam Store having an 'everything for free day' ...

....I've got another 9020USFF ...this'll give me impetus to peel off a working cut of system + console only amiberry emulator atop the LFS base system, no toolchain, no headers, just what's required...that'll be a small image ; I should rebuild base to the amd64 target on Pilot, so it's more applicable to other x86-64 hardware...

...more stuff ... [ Show youtube player ]

[giantclam]

....next target.... ARM...(RPi4)...