Well, I just returned from the Post Office this afternoon with three more 1.5GHz G4 MacMini's in my hands and have all 4 (including mine) in front of me ready to repartition for dual boot MacOSX & MorphOS2.7 installations. Then I can re-box them and send them off to their new owners. One if destined for big_dan, who asked for my assistance in buying it from eBay, as the seller apparently did not wish to sell internationally. The other two are going to be donated to new MorphOS programmers. Granted one of the two programmers is not too experienced, but will make up for lack of experience with enthusiasm, so I am sure it will be money well donated in the future. The other is a very experienced programmer with experience on Amiga projects and a history of completing what he starts.

This will tap me out for a few months as far as donating systems to new developers, but I will be back at again before the 4th quarter of this year begins.

Have to admire your enthusiasm and devotion. Good to have people like you in the community. Partly because of you I donated some money last month, will do again this month and hopefully make it once a month in the future aswell :)

Thanks for the compliment, but I admire the guys that can actually do some coding and contribute that way. I am just starting to learn how to program and it is very slow going, but I will get there eventually. Not to their level, but at least to a level where I can do something that some people will want to use once in a while.

Thanks for making your donations to support this place. If everyone does a little to help out our community, no matter how small, it will make it better for all of us.

I do what I can and will continue to do so, even after my X1000 arrives and I start sharing my time on the wrong side with the evil doers.

Big Kudos Dave,

Your commitment to the Amiga and MorphOS Community has been remarkable.

If there is anything you need or desire yourself let me know, I have some Amiga classic stuff in storage that I would be happy to send your way.

Again, a big thank you to your dedication.

Enjoy the x1000, would love to see how it stacks up against MOS 3 on your 1139. Let us know.

Regards,

Matt

@AmigaDave,

It's about javascript but it's interactive, try it out.

http://codeyear.com/

Kamel

@kamelito,

Thanks for that link. I signed up to see what it is like. One of my ex-wives is a Java programmer and gave me a book about learning Java a few years ago when she found out I was interested in learning to program. Too bad there was never a good Java implementation for the Amiga or MorphOS. It is still used in a lot of places, even when there are probably better alternatives.

Someone else suggested I learn Ruby, as he said that there is a great demand for good Ruby programmers right now with several companies and they are willing to pay high salaries for coders that are excellent writing Ruby code. He said he might try to restart and update the Amiga version of Ruby.

I think that AmigaE and PortablE are my best choices for right now, but I might play around with a bit of AMOS Pro on the original Commodore Amigas as well, just because it is easy to make something fun quickly on that language and I just set up my Grandson with his first Amiga over Christmas. I gave him an A500 w/Supra XP500 sidecar, external CDROM drive, extra floppy, Miracle Piano Keyboard and a ton of software. If he is still interested in using and learning about an Amiga by next Christmas, I will trade him an A1200 for his A500 and see if he is ready to start learning how to program with me. He is only 9 right now, but I have heard many stories about Amiga users starting their programming studies at that age. AMOS Pro would probably be an easier choice for my Grandson to start with, if he shows any interest in learning how to program on the Amiga.

It is hard to get any kids to show interest in the Amiga after they own, or have used the Wii, X-Box360, or Playstation, but he seemed to like playing some of the old games on the A500 while I was visiting with him.

@amigadave

Someone else suggested I learn Ruby, as he said that there is a great demand for good Ruby programmers right now with several companies and they are willing to pay high salaries for coders that are excellent writing Ruby code. He said he might try to restart and update the Amiga version of Ruby.

Well, I cannot resist to "sell" my favourite Lua to you. When we talk about job demand and salaries it may be not the best choice, but:

1. It has very well integrated MorphOS port.
2. It has ARexx interface, so you can control/use other applications from Lua easily.
3. It has source level, graphical debugger on MorphOS.
4. There are many tutorials and learning material on the net.
5. It is not MorphOS/Amiga specific language, and has wide use outside (not as wide as PHP, or Python, but anyway).
6. It will have MUI interface, so native GUIs can be built easily.
7. PowerPC JIT engine for Lua exists and may be integrated in MorphOS port.
8. Finally I need some Lua users to motivate me to work on it more .

While 0.5 Lua port is not complete (misses many standard modules), version inside MorphOS 3.0 has almost all of them (some functions in os.module are missing).

> PowerPC JIT engine for Lua exists and may be integrated in MorphOS port.

I just had a look and it's nice to see that they've extended the PPC JIT engine from inconvenient e500v2 PPC to also cover standard PPC (tested on e300c4) as used by MorphOS. If that can be integrated into MorphOS Lua port I wouldn't mind seeing PPC JIT engine integrated into MorphOS Python port :-)

@Krashan,

Yes, if I were going to learn a different scripting language, it would be Lua, not Ruby, as I am not learning to try to find employment, I am only learning to better contribute to my favorite hobby.

I already have purchased all of the Hollywood products, which I understand is built on, or depends on Lua.

Getting a PowerPC JIT engine will be a very good thing for MorphOS, specially if it can be used in connection with E-UAE, for old Amiga software that cannot run without E-UAE.

Where should I look to find out more about Lua for MorphOS?

> Getting a PowerPC JIT engine will be a very good thing for MorphOS,
> specially if it can be used in connection with E-UAE

A JIT compiler that translates Lua code into PPC machine code would be of no use for translating m68k machine code into PPC machine code.
As for E-UAE, a PPC JIT compiler for that is already in the works:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7476&forum=9&start=24

> Where should I look to find out more about Lua for MorphOS?

https://morph.zone/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1851
https://morph.zone/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1870

Quote:

Dave, speaking of AMOS Pro, it's my understanding, though I only ever used AMOS BASIC, that it supports graphics cards. This feature means the resulting programs are more likely to run on MorphOS. I've often thought that there must be "safe" commands that one may use in AMOS to achieve a program that compiles to a program that runs in MorphOS. The thing is, one doesn't know which commands are safe.

I wouldn't dream of asking you, except in the case where you've said you're going to muck around with AMOS anyway, but perhaps you could identify the "safe" commands and make a list and share that. Any other tips that might come to you, those too. All of this at your own convenience and timing, or not at all.

BASICs: AMOS BASIC (it's up to 1.3) was released to the public domain like eight years ago. Perhaps AMOS Pro (2.0 and later) has been by now as well. I tried AmiBlitz on MorphOS quite some time ago, and while it didn't crash right away, neither was it much functional. MorphOS could use a good BASIC. Don't know if there are other possibilities.

> AMOS BASIC (it's up to 1.3) was released to the public domain like eight years ago.

More like 11 years ago.

> Perhaps AMOS Pro (2.0 and later) has been by now as well.

According to this message on the AMOS mailing list it has been a legal free download for many years.

@Velcro_SP,

As Andreas noted, I think AMOS Pro 2.0 and beyond is now free to download and use.

I don't think it is a good choice to try to use on MorphOS and even the guys (like Samurai_Crow) who were working on trying to re-write an AMOS like replacement (it was called Matthais, or something like that), have given up on it.

I agree that it would be great to have a really good Basic for MorphOS (and there might be one that I don't know about), but from what I have read and been advised, I think AmigaE and PortablE are the best choices for me to learn with thoughts of programming for MorphOS. That plus Hollywood should be good for most programming projects that I am likely to be qualified to work on for a couple of years, until I am a better programmer.

The only reason I would mess around with AMOS Pro is because I have two complete copies of it with all the manuals, plus a lot of add-on floppy disks and CD's. There was so much PD software written with it and there are tons of source code around to look at, plus the main reason of all is that I just gave my Grandson an A500 that can run AMOS Pro and I would learn it with him, if he takes an interest in programming.

AMOS Pro would just be a help for me to learn some programming principles and do some fun stuff faster, but AmigaE and PortablE are what I see as more productive for anything I want to produce software for MorphOS, or any other Amiga flavors, since PortablE is supported for several different platforms and it is still actively being worked on my ChrisH.

One thing I have learned about myself is that I am extremely slow at getting started with any kind of programming lessons, so it is going to take a lot of time before I produce anything useful. Oh well, we all have to start somewhere at some time.

Way to go David.
I don't have much that will work in a Mac Mini, but if you need a 512MB memory strip I have one sitting around.

Krashan,
Quote:

That sounds interesting, when?

amigadave,
Quote:

It was called Mattathias, and the biggest problem to implementing a Classic Amiga-style BASIC on NG hardware is that modern graphics chipsets use floating-point (aka scientific notation) math practically everywhere. The Classic Amiga chipset was completely integer and boolean values and had absolutely no floating-point math. I wanted to make a GLSL-based Copper-list and sprite substitutes but it seems that there is not sufficient backward-compatibility in modern desktop graphics chipsets to support it.