Ghostscript ‘gs850’ is also installed on AROS One 32Bit, but it is an old version. Ghostscript available on Aros Archive is much more recent, v10 for x86_64 (ABI_WIP)
In any case, since the source code is available, perhaps someone could compile Ghostscript for 64Bit. I am attaching some links where you can find the various versions.
Ghostscript ‘gs850’ is also installed on AROS One 32Bit, but it is an old version. Ghostscript available on Aros Archive is much more recent, v10 for x86_64 (ABI_WIP)
In any case, since the source code is available, perhaps someone could compile Ghostscript for 64Bit. I am attaching some links where you can find the various versions.
Agreed 8.50 is very old but still works, and as mentioned verison 10 in the archives is for ABI1.0 so will not work on the 64 bit distribution we are using; I think it was principally built for compiling to 68k to support the FinalWriter release on the A1200GS.
I tried the Hollywood compiler; unforunately both from the GUI and command line it locks up the system in a similar manner to Ghostscript (no error message).
The other two tests are for a couple of programs I've written for work. Neither is currently released; Simple_Whiteboard_MUI is an electonic whiteboard program that's currently missing too many features to distribute (although I'm having to use the Windows compile of it as work as the electronic whiteboard proram we used to have has not been installed on our new Windows 11 machines, so its currently the only way to use our smartboards...) Crossboard_Live is an educational game, teams compete to answer multiple choice questions to work their way across the playing board. This one is compelete but I need get on and write instructions for it Anyway, the errors...
Simple_Whiteboard_MUI - crashes on startup with the attached error.
Crossboard_Live - starts, you can elect the number of questions but when the reuester comes up to select them, in navigating to a folder you cannot pull the scroll bar down to view all of its contents. You can move down using the cursor keys, but then you can't select a further folder either by th enter key or double-clicking on it.
I've included the Hollywood app versions of both programs if that will be of any help.
Cheers,
Nigel.
P.S. another test, just tried my View_Pubscreen program - crashes on startup with a Hollywoodplayer error rather than system, saying 'XML declarations are not balanced', so I'm guessing the emulation has an issue with the MUIRoyale plugin when trying to create the GUI.
Edited by ntromans on 28-11-2025 15:13, 2 months ago
Another Hollywood test; this program tries to open a USB serial device. Unfortunately it crashes on startuo - please see attached. I imagine not in current scope but I though I'd posy it up in case it's of any use.
For the 3 applications, I added them to invastigation list.
For the application accessing USB serial.device - applications touching hardware are essentially out of scope of emulator, because support for them needs to added almost one by one. If this application is critical for you when using AROS then I might find space to look into it. Please let me know if this is critical for you.
PS. If the serial.device application is a simple one, I can help you rewrite it to C. Actually it's possible that if that application is simple, if you paste it's Hollywood code into some coding-oriented ChatGPTs it might translate it C in form of something that almost work and something that we could use as a base.
For the 3 applications, I added them to invastigation list.
For the application accessing USB serial.device - applications touching hardware are essentially out of scope of emulator, because support for them needs to added almost one by one. If this application is critical for you when using AROS then I might find space to look into it. Please let me know if this is critical for you.
PS. If the serial.device application is a simple one, I can help you rewrite it to C. Actually it's possible that if that application is simple, if you paste it's Hollywood code into some coding-oriented ChatGPTs it might translate it C in form of something that almost work and something that we could use as a base.
Many thanks for looking into these
For the serial device one, believe it or not I'm using an old laptop running AROS to control our central heating; the serial connection is used to communicate with the system's control box, so pretty specific to myself, but generally being able to communicate via serial is very useful for control applications (robotics, communicating with microcontrollers etc.) Could a command line tool be wriiten to pass communications to and from a chosen serial device? That way any application (shell, Hollwood, Python...) could make use of it. Of cuurse on the Amiga we had the ser: device but I've neve rhad any luck using that on AROS.
Tested other Hollywood applications that do not work, for example ‘slideshow’ does not start when run from Emuv0, no error and no Guru.
It seems that ‘slideshow’ like ‘iconeditor’ look for the necessary libraries in the system in use, ignoring the Emiv0 path:
A couple of thoughts on the emulator; quite possibly utter rubbish but I thought I'd mention them in case they were of any worth.
Hollywod apps - rather than testing full applications would it be easier if specific aspects of Hollywood were tested using simple demo programs, e.g. just graphics library or just dos library or just the MUIRoyle plugin? If so, are there any particular bits to focus on?
More complex programs - it was mentioned earlier in this thread that it might not be possible for EmuV0 to run complex programs. For those, would a solution be a port of QEMU to run a stipped-down 32 bit installation for such programs? Not as neat solution as EmuV0 but it wold let the softwar be used, with the memory space of 64 bit it's not like we're tight on resources and of course this is how Janus operates.
Anyway, as mentioned just a couple of random thoughts,
Cheers,
Nigel.
Edited by ntromans on 02-12-2025 13:02, 1 month ago
Thanks for sharing those idea. While there is nothing software-wise stopping anyone from enhancing EmuV0 to run even complex software, the limitation I put it more resourced based. I could spend next year or so just working on EmuV0, but there are in my opinion more valueable things to deliver. Thus I opted for making EmuV0 to support only tools which people actually use and which are not re-compilable. So in other words I'm cutting down the scope to what is strictly important for people like you (and what can be reasonably achieved within the time frame of this quarter)
There hasn't been much progress with EmuV0 in recent weeks as I'm working behind the sceenes helping other developers with their work on some interesting projects which should be a great benefit to the community. Once that support is done, I will go back to updating EmuV0 for some of the issues reported in this thread.
I've included the Hollywood app versions of both programs if that will be of any help.
Can you explain me what to do which the attached files? Normally Hollywood applications are regular AROS executables that can be started right awaty, but these files have ".hwa" extension and don't seem to be regular executables.
Changes:
- Fix to allow passing arguments within quotes or programs paths with spaces (within qoutes)
- Ghostscript 8.50 now starts and exits. Not tested beyond that.
For the last couple of days I'm trying to locate an emulator issue with SimpleWhiteboard. There is a crash that happens on emulator when closing the whiteboard window that does not happen on 32-bit. Can you send the source codes for SimpleWhiteboard (via PM or email)?
For the last couple of days I'm trying to locate an emulator issue with SimpleWhiteboard. There is a crash that happens on emulator when closing the whiteboard window that does not happen on 32-bit. Can you send the source codes for SimpleWhiteboard (via PM or email)?
Sorry for the delay in getting this back to you. Please see attached a zip of the relevent code. Inside it is:
_UI.hws - class containing common methods for Hollywood displays, MUI windows and MOAI windows.
_window.hws - super-class of _UI, cotains methods specific to MUI and MOAI windows.
SW_actions - functions specific to the SimpleWhiteboard program.
The methods/functions to look at are:
_UI:close_document() - processes reponse from pop-up menu (please note you can ignore the _object[self.d.docname] call as this is currently just a stub which returns TRUE
p_action:close_document() (in SW_Actions.hws) - removes document entries from main menu
_window:close() - closes MUI window
Cheers,
Nigel.
P.S. I've looked through the Hollywood compiler options and unfortunately there are no debug options to set aside from those within the Hollywood system itself (e.g. enabling debugprint() or listing which Hollywood function is being called), i.e. there's no low-level debug options
Edited by ntromans on 06-01-2026 08:11, 11 days ago
Can you give me "data" file for Crossboard_Live so I have something to select in requester?
Once again, many apologies for taking so long to get back on this. Please see attached for a zip file with 37 questions cards in ilbm format. It's the Amiga 40th anniversary quiz I made for the last Midland's Amiga Enthusiasts meeting.
Cheers,
Nigel.
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