Multimedia quality (was) One disk OS + REBOL Re:(4)

I still live in excitement while playing with /View - very nice product. Just a small note - do you know Scala is more than just a tool? Have you seen any emails from Dave Haynie describing Scala as an multimedia OS (it seems to actually have own kernel running upon windoze one). Scala is very nice product, well thought out, scriptable, sadly, we will probably never be able to compare to their smooth multimedia quality presentations. REBOL (product) doesn't seem to care about such quality of presentation. REBOL slideshow dialect was very nice example, but try to move a few faces around the screen - too slow, too jerky, etc. Maybe it's just question of some regularly implemented /Media component integrating in some way with /View? I don't know. In my opinion, while others see REBOL future in turning into some scripting agent number one with packed in mysql etc support, I still see REBOL/Core's future in providing just infrastructure for clever communication (improving parts as parser, protocols, simply means of communications) and APIs. Remember - even /View is just component upon /Core. We should be able to unplug /View than, and plug another one, if there is some other component available. In real - if REBOL/Core will not turn in some 5 years into something described above and will stay just nicely implemented scripting technology, it lost my credit, as I can see REBOL technology capable of becoming much more than it's today ;-) PS: Steve, where are you all the time? I can see you posting only very sporadically here :-) Cheers, -pekr-

Yes, I know - as Dave Haynie said - he left mainly because Scala got too much tied to Windows. It uses DirectX IIRC. But do you remember those glory days of Amiga and its chipset? Scala running very very smoothly on such underpowered (by today standards) piece of hw. And what? Was it bigger than 500 kb? And scala presentation was just script. And it had network capabilities too. I miss REBOL trying to participate in area of multimedia .... sad today topic of discussion is just big boys and "e" stuff ... People forgot having fun ;-)

It lacks slightly more :-) - We can't change mouse pointer e.g. From days of beta2 I suggested possibility of hiding mouse pointer, or having it replaced by two faces - one defining area of cursor, while second one (inside) area of sensor .. - We haven't solved yet how to display-during-downloading. (sometimes its boring to wait till all the stuff is downloaded) ... - It lacks proper datatypes as we know it from Amiga. RT is so much scared about REBOL multiplatform issues one can't believe it. Move /shell and /library into free REBOL version (/Core, /View) and let people implement various additions. It would allow to start open-source projects of multiplatform REBOL support libraries. But who's gonna do it for free once we will have to pay for /Command? - RT business model (although not publicly presented) seems to prefer end-solution instead of technology excelence (as Carl mentioned his love for proper modularisation etc etc. Components are not currently freely pluggable unpluggable, can't load /View to /Command etc etc.), but that's the world I don't understand, once you are not on your own (venture capital), you have to take some intermediate steps to get money back ... I can understand it, it just makes life more difficult :-) ... I just wish history would repeat and Carl would announce "back to the roots" scenario once again, the same way as he did when he announced REBOL2 Contra project, getting REBOL back where it should be - small, efficient, faster - an engine (no place for not abstracted hardwired solutions) Cheers, -pekr-

The script was a 'dialect' called Lingua It is the best practical example of what a 'dialect' is that I can think of.

Ahh, but not nearly as cool as Rebol's... Hey, with serial: support, it is possible to make a platform-independent dongle for high-value products... Steve Shireman (maybe Steven Wright knew lisp...) ...when I talk and sometimes you can't here me, it is because sometimes I am in parentheses... Steven Wright

REBOL internally keeps data in 32-bit chunky format (image! datatype). This is efficient on pretty much every hardware architecture, with the exception of the somewhat obsolete planar bitmap format the Amiga chipset uses. Planar bitmaps were great in the late 80's when it was important to use as few bits as possible per pixel (fewer than 8 typically), in order to achieve high resolutions with little memory. Things have changed since then though, and today everyone is using 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits per pixel. For that chunky formats are more efficient, in particular when manipulating individual pixels. What makes REBOL/View relatively slow on Amigas with the native graphics chipset is the necessary chunky-to-planar conversion. We are using optimized Assembler code for that, but it is still a bottleneck. On Amigas with graphics boards REBOL/View is reasonably fast (often faster than under Unix/X running on the same hardware). REBOL/View cannot directly use planar bitmaps for its internal images, not only because that would require some rewrites, but also because the up to 8 planes the Amiga hardware supports would not be sufficient to support the various effects View provides (blending, colorization etc.). Those effects need to operate on 32-bit images throughout, and quantize colors down to the requirements of the display hardware only as the last step. This makes chunky-to-planar conversion inevitable. If REBOL stored all internal bitmaps in 8 or fewer bits then errors would add up when processing effects and the resulting images would look "ugly". -- Holger Kruse [holger--rebol--com]

But still dog slow, even on my [P3--650MHz] linux box I find it annoyingly slow, and I often end up clicking on buttons twice, or more. On the Amiga (060/PPC/CVPPC) dragging subwindows inside rebol windows is like running a macemul in HAM on a lowend A1200, faster than X doesnt really say much as X is per def a slow memory greedy dog, no matter what hardware ;) -- kolla

This is interesting, I haven't seen anyone mention speed problems on Linux before. I must set up a linux version to test on. I've tested View on my old faithful Celeron 333, under Win 98, Win2000, BeOS and Amiga (under emulation). My general observations of platform differences... The Amiga was slow, but it sounds like it was running faster under emulation than the older native machines. Win platforms speed is quite good, except for iterated faces and large area scrolling. Timer events seems have a better resolution on Win2000 than Win98. BeOS has the fastest smoothest scrolling of all of the above. Font rendering/display seems to be best/clearest on Windows. Cheers, Allen K

-- Bohdan "Bo" Lechnowsky REBOL Adventure Guide REBOL Technologies 707-467-8000 (http://www.rebol.com) Download the REBOL Messaging Language The Official Source for REBOL Books (http://www.REBOLpress.com)

I don't think the Akiko chip can handle 32 bit per pixel chunky pixel format, just 8 bits per chunky pixel (palette based). Julian Kinraid