SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Discussion and advice about emulating the QL on other machines.
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Sparrowhawk
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SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by Sparrowhawk »

NormanDunbar wrote:You missed cd from opt before unzipping.
Thanks, fixed.


a.k.a. Jean-Yves
Tinyfpga
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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by Tinyfpga »

Thank you Sparrowhawk, NormanDunbar and Derek_Stewart for your replies. With your help I finally managed to run SMSQE on my Pi 400 at full HD resolution. The PI's display is fuzzier and much slower than my laptop's SMSQmulator output but it still runs at a usable speed. It feels slightly slower than the same setup on my Q68 but runs 4 bouncing balls in HD colour whereas the Q68 can't.

Camera picture and sceenshot of 4 bouncing balls (generated in real time) bouncing simultaneously below.
smsinpi1.jpg
smsinpi2.jpg
How time flies; I looked at Derek_Stewart pictures taken five years ago, the difference is the greater performance and utility of the PI 400. The next thing I will try is Ubuntu MATE 64bit to see if this runs SMSQmulator faster. Does uQLx run SMSQE, and if it does, can it display SMSQE at HD resolutions?

I now have Idenditcal setups running, natively or emulated, in or on, 6 different computing systems as follows:
SMS2(PEROM) in Atari STs
SMS2(PEROM) in MIST
SMS2(PEROM) on PC
SMSQE in Q68
SMSQE on PC
SMSQE on PI
SMSQE on an industrial mini PC booting directly into SMS, via DOS and QPC1 (my favourite emulation because it starts up SMS instantly).

My SMSQE setup uses the old SMS2 apps and the SMS2 Basic parser such that the all system and application software is run without modification on all the above.

My preferences are SMS2 over SMSQE, native installations, instant booting and high resolution display output. I am less interested in speed and high colour display output.
My favourite compromise is the Q68 because it is native and instant-on and because I can imagine a future for SMS type systems in FPGA.

I would like to run QPC2 and SMSQumulator such that they load directly to SMS (like my DOS setup) giving the illusion of a native OS installation. This might be possible with something like Windows PE and for the PI some kind of minimal UNIX

Who would have thought all those years ago when SMS2 was created that it would provide QLers with so much choice. It is an extraodinary achievement by those who dedicated so much time to the development of the support platforms. What is needed is a beginners' manual for non-QLers.
I say onwards and upwards towards Tony Tebby's Stella.


Derek_Stewart
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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by Derek_Stewart »

Hi,

Just shows how good the Q68 is:

Q68: 40Mhz single core CPU, 32Mb ram
Pi-400: 1.8Ghz Quad Core CPU, 4Gb ram

No real comparison, except the Pi-400, requires a SMSQ/E emulator, whereas the Q68 has a 68000 CPU implemented in FPGA code and runs SMSQ/E natively.

But saying all this, I have them both...


Regards,

Derek
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bwinkel67
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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by bwinkel67 »

I haven't used either SMSQemulator or uQLx but would the latter run faster on a Pi-400 since it's not run under the Java Runtime Environment?


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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by Derek_Stewart »

bwinkel67 wrote:I haven't used either SMSQemulator or uQLx but would the latter run faster on a Pi-400 since it's not run under the Java Runtime Environment?
Hi,

SMSQmulator is aJava application, so needs Java installed.

UQLX, SuQLx are C compiled so will run natively on the PI-400, only supports QDOS, Minerva, but not SMSQ/E.

I mainly the PI for Riscos


Regards,

Derek
Tinyfpga
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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by Tinyfpga »

My son uses Apple laptops at work. He currently has a Air i7 and is about to get an Air M1. I thought I would send him a portable version of my Pi400 SMSQmulator installation to see how fast a Mac can run an SBASIC program. I copied (with difficulty) the SMSQmulator files to a folder on a USB key and edited the startup file as follows:-

[Desktop Entry]
Name=SMSQmulator
Comment=SMS
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=gnome-remote-desktop
Exec=java -jar /media/pi/USB DISK/SMSQmulator/SMSQmulator.jar
path=/media/pi/USB DISK/SMSQmulator

When I try to "run" this on the Pi, it does nothing. I read the user guide section titled "Making SMSQmulator Portable" but could not understand it.

Does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong?


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NormanDunbar
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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by NormanDunbar »

To try and identify the problem with running the desktop file, do this instead:

Open a terminal session aka command line.
Execute the "exec" commands in yoru desktop file, viz:

Code: Select all

java -jar /media/pi/USB DISK/SMSQmulator/SMSQmulator.jar
That should, because you are in the terminal, report back if there are errors detected. One thing though, there are spaces in the path given so I would be thinking that you'll need to wrap the path in double quotes, like this:

Code: Select all

java -jar "/media/pi/USB DISK/SMSQmulator/SMSQmulator.jar"


otherwise the command line interpreter will assume that the jar file is called "/media/pi/USB" and that "DISK/SMSQmulator/SMSQmulator.jar" is a command line option to be passed to the main function in the jar file. Probably not what you want.

Further questions:

Did you copy the configuration file SMSQmulator.ini to the user's home directory? It MUST be located there according to the UserGuide.pdf file. Mine, on Linux, is /home/norman/SMSQmulator.ini. On Windows this will be something similar to c:\Windows\users\YOUR_NAME\SMSQmulator.ini or whatever Windows is using for home folders these days.

What version of Java do you have? Running the command:

Code: Select all

java -version
will report back. Mine is Java 11 and for that, I needed to download the latest version of SMSQmulator, there is another version on the downloads page for Java version 8, but I have no idea how up to date that is and it is flagged as being pretty much unsupported.

HTH

Cheers,
Norm.


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Author of Arduino Software Internals
Author of Arduino Interrupts

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Tinyfpga
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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by Tinyfpga »

I have just returned from a birthday party for my mum, so I have had a drink or two. Superlatives are thus in order.
Norm is a genius. I edited the text file and put the the jar command in quotes and now SMSQmulator works. God knows why, especially as I didn't even try to put the .ini file in the "user's directory" (what ever that means!)

I did this whilst listening to youtube.com/watch?v=didKppY1Lj0 (Afrocubism) a rather exuberant fusion of African and Cuban music. I am a happy man, good music and a portable version of SMS-on-Pi that actually works. Both running simultaneously on my Pi
Last edited by Tinyfpga on Sat Nov 13, 2021 6:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.


Tinyfpga
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Re: SMSQE on Raspberry pi 400

Post by Tinyfpga »

How do you find out which version of Java is installed on a Pi? All this is "happening" in the "dreaded Rulebook", which is all wrong.

What a numpty I am. I have just realised that you probably meant typing "java _version" in the Pi terminal. The answer to that question is:- openjdk version "11.0.8" 2020-07-14


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