The latest thing to try. A Cleanto Amiga Forever OS 3.1 install to SD card in the Amazon Fire 7. Is it the way to get a low power portable development system? Put an OS on an SD and save main memory? An efficient OS from times of sub 20 MHz, and 50 MB hard drives.
Is it relevant in the PC age? Yes. All the source code in Pascal or C can be shuffled to PC, and I might even develop some binary prototype apps. Maybe a simple web engine is a good thing to develop. With the low CSS bull and AROS open development for x86 architecture becoming better at making for a good VM sandbox experience with main browsing on a sub flavour of bloat OS 2020. A browser, a router and an Amiga.
Uae4arm is the emulation app available from the Playstore. I’m looking forward to some Aminet greatness. Some mildly irritated coding in free Pascal with objects these days, and a full GCC build chain. Even a licenced set of games will shrink the Android entertainment bloat. A bargain rush for the technical. Don’t worry you ST users, it’s a chance to dream.
Lazarus lives. Or at least Borglaz the great is as it was. Don’t expect to be developing video realtime code or supercomputer forecasts. I hear there is even a python. I wonder if there is some other nice things. GCC and a little GUI redo? It’s not about making replacements for Android apps, more a less bloat but a full do OS with enough test and utility grunt to make. I wonder how pas2js is. There is also AMOS 2.0 to turn AMOS source into nice web apps. It’s not as silly as it seems.
Retro minimalism is more power in the hands of code designers. A bit of flange and boilerplate later and it’s a consumer product option with some character.
So it needs about a 100 MB hard disk file located not on the SD as it needs write access, and some changes of disk later and a boot of a clean install is done. Add the downloads folder as a disk and alter the mouse speed for the plugged in OTG keyboard. Excellent. I’ve got more space and speed than I did in the early 90s and 128 MB of Zorro RAM. Still an AGA A1200 but with a 68040 on its fastest setting.
I’ve a plan to install free Pascal and GCC along with some other tools to take the ultra portable Amiga on the move. The night light on the little keyboard will be good for midnight use. Having a media player in the background will be fun and browser downloads should be easy to load.
I’ve installed total commander on the Android side to help with moving files about. The installed BSD socket library would allow running an old Mosaic browser, or AWeb but both are not really suited to any dynamic content. They would be fast though. In practice Chrome and a download mount is more realistic. It’s time to go Aminet fishing.
It turns out that is is possible to put hard files on the SD card, but they must be placed in the Android app data directory and made by the app for correct permissions. So a 512 MB disk was made for better use of larger development versions. This is good for the Pascal 3.1.1 version.
Onwards to install a good editor such as Black’s Editor and of course LHA and some other goodies such as NewIcons. I’ll delete the LCL alpha units from Pascal as these will not be used by me. I might even get into ARexx or some of the wonderfull things on those CD images from Meeting Pearls or a cover disk archive.
Update: For some reason the SD card hard disk image becomes read locked. The insistent gremlins of the demands of time value money. So it’s 100 MB and a few libraries short of C. Meanwhile Java N-IDE is churning out class files, PipedInputStream has the buffer to stop PipedOutputStream waffling on, filling up memory. Hecl the language is to be hooked into the CLI I’m throwing together. Then some data time streams and some algorithms. I think the interesting bit today was the idea of stream variables. No strings, a minimum would be a stream.
So after building a CLI and adding in some nice commands, maybe even JOGL as the Android graphics? You know the 32 and 64 bit restrictions (both) on the play store though. I wonder if both are pre-built as much of the regular Android development cycle is filled with crap. Flutter looks good, but for mobile CLI tools with some style of bitmap 80’s, it’s just a little too formulaic.
