Raspberry Pi

[programandala.net]

Has anyone made any progress installing a QL emulator on the Raspi yet?

Still trying here. No way to compile uQLx yet. I use Raspbian with the Raspberry Pi. I didn't succeed with standard Debian in the Pandora either.

[RWAP]

I was searching for an update on this - and then found the binary on Dilwyn's site -

http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/emu/

Look for uQLx for ARM systems - couldn't see it listed on the forums anywhere!

[robheaton]

Just had this up and running on the pi, seems to work quite well!

[robheaton]

My only issue is, I can't get the emulator to produce a decent size display.

Anyone got any pointers?

[tofro]

My only issue is, I can't get the emulator to produce a decent size display.

Anyone got any pointers?

Rob,
even if your screen shot looks completely garbled here, I think I know what you're referring to.

uqlx has no features built in at the moment to scale its display on hi-res screens. Admittedly, on the RPi's full HD display this looks ridiculous
And if uqlx can't scale, well the RPi can - You need to scale down the RPi's display to like 800x600 (works perfectly on my HDMI monitor) and everything looks fine again.

Tobias

[robheaton]

Cheers tofro!
I'll have another play.

I've also reuploaded the image of the Pi desktop, not sure what happaned there.

[XorA]

From memory adding a 2x scale to uqlx would be very simple!

[pjw]

Hi guys,

I got my 16 year old son a Raspberry Pi kit for Christmas. He believes he hates computers (but I believe I know better After playing around with it for a while, I realised how dauntng it is to start from scratch. Afterall, its not just a matter of plug and play, as, if you were lucky, the QL was out of the box in its day. Theres Linux and bash to get through for starters, and getting Python to go isnt as easy as booting in to SuperBASIC. The upshot is that I bought one for myself so that I could (hopefully) offer him some telephone support should he get stuck.

However, all that is my problem, and off-topic here. Being a dyed-in-the-wool QLer, my first concern is whether some version of QL could be made to run on the Pi. I had a uQLx installation once (or a few times) but that was a long time ago. Besides, I used bog standard Intel <spit> equipment for that. The Pi sports a 700MHz ARM processor, with 512Mb RAM. Its native video format is HDMI at 1920x1080, so physically, it should be able to emulate a QL+ at, as a minimum, the same speed as the original 7.5MHz machine. And it can only get faster, as the hardware develops.

A few hours after unpacking I had uQLx running my (heavily redacted, but otherwise standard) boot file. Hooray! (Brag photo included below

uQLx on Pi

Its heavy going away from the light and ease of QPC; lots of missing bits, and of course colours. Its not fast: QPC on a Wintel box at 2.26 GHz ran my standard test program (just to get a general idea) in 19 seconds with 10k iterations. QPC/Wintel did 100k in 9s, ie its about 20x faster.

Code: Select all

cls: t = date
for i = 0 to 9999
 at 0,0: print i,
endfor i
print\\ date - t; 's'

How fast is this on some standard QL configurations?

Visualise a tiny Raspberry Pi running uQLx with Smsq/e. Perhaps it could even be made to do something useful, like control real-world events via the Pi's GPIO (General Purpose I/O) port? Would that be a nice community project to work on (until and during retirement ?

In the mean time Im stuck with two big issues: I cannot rename files on the QXL.win drives, nor can I create directories on them. Anyone know of a cure?

Per

[tofro]

A few hours after unpacking I had uQLx running my (heavily redacted, but otherwise standard) boot file. Hooray! (Brag photo included below

Great!. Did you use the image that is on Dillwyn's site?

Its heavy going away from the light and ease of QPC; lots of missing bits, and of course colours.

Well - It's trying to emulate a real QL, which is kindof more difficult than what QPC is doing. QPC can rely on a heavily adapted SMSQ/E that suits its specific needs, while uQLX needs to be able to run stock QL ROMs. Seen from this side, it would be actually be a much fairer comparison to compete against Q-Emulator in terms of speed than QPC2.

Its not fast: QPC on a Wintel box at 2.26 GHz ran my standard test program (just to get a general idea) in 19 seconds with 10k iterations. QPC/Wintel did 100k in 9s, ie its about 20x faster.

The RPi as such isn't exactly fast either But uQLX on the RPi is still much faster than the original BB. Even with a GoldCard.

Visualise a tiny Raspberry Pi running uQLx with Smsq/e. Perhaps it could even be made to do something useful, like control real-world events via the Pi's GPIO (General Purpose I/O) port? Would that be a nice community project to work on (until and during retirement ?

Actually, uQLX could look a lot different (rather: a lot simpler) if it were allowed to run a tailor-made SMSQ/E. And it could also be a lot faster, as pointed out above. But I'm not sure if I would start such a project - Actually, there' s quite a lot of well-made Emulators "on the market" already.

With regards to connecting to RPi hardware, it's maybe simpler to do a lot of useful stuff than you think: uQLX can either be called from Linux using a SuperBASIC program as a script (see command line parameters in the manual) or can call out into Linux from QDOS through the pty device that allows you to start Linux programs or scripts from QDOS and retrieve the results. You should be able to do quite some interesting things with these features already without starting from scratch.
In addition to that, there's full access to the Linux filesystem as well as the TCP/IP networking, which should give you quite some interesting options....

In the mean time Im stuck with two big issues: I cannot rename files on the QXL.win drives, nor can I create directories on them. Anyone know of a cure?

Simple answer: It's just not implemented. Both the RENAME and the MAKE_DIR support is not implemented in the QXL.WIN code in uQLX as of today. Both would probably be quite easy to program given the amount of example code that is around. The simplest cure would be not to use QXL.WIN but instead the "native" Linux file system - which is what I do, that has both functions implemented (and a number of other interesting features like long filename support), if I recall right.

Tobias

[pjw]

Thanks tofro, for your comprehensive response. It all makes sense

Ive had a few questions privately about how to get uQLx up and running on the RPi. Well, thats not hard:

Basically I started by searching QL Forum - this site - for 'raspberry', and then following the trail down the rabbit hole! It was that easy, thanks to you and the others who helped prepare the current port/adaptation! Very little pre-knowledge of Linux required, IIRC. Downloading, unpacking, installing, and editing of the configuration file, can all be done via the RPi GUI. No Bashing about until you get to the final command: qm.

And help is not far off should it be needed, Im sure My main bother was configuring the QL side, once installed, as uQLx/Minerva and QPC/smsqe have diverged considerably.

Happy QL-ing in 2015!

Per