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Stone Oakvalley's Real WHDLoad GUI (SORWG) - Sneak preview!
in Software | Monday, December 04, 2017 | 23:12


Time to bring out the Christmas jingles an alternative for all WHDLoad fans on the Amiga!


As there surely exists other alternatives for a GUI for WHDLoad, I want to take a shot at it myself, my way, so I started creating one.

All coded from scratch (PureBasic for Windows, and AmigaE for Amiga).

The software suite is a 3-part system:
1: A tool on the PC side to scan, organize and prepare the cached textual data for the Amiga side of available .slave files (Games, Demos etc). Screenshot below.

2: A tool on the Amiga side to scan, organize and prepare the list of WHDLOAD .slave files.

3: The main tool that loads whatever database is available and displays a GUI with buttons, search functions and performs execution part on the Amiga side.

Watch this space for updates towards Christmas eve and most likely beyond :-)


Update January 2019:

Time flies when you are busy and having fun at the same time (ref: my todo list posted below in February 2018!

Anyway, since my ENDGAME project after 8 months of focus can now just live on its own ripping through 102millions files to scan for more Amiga Music to record, I had some time to get back into my version of how a WHDLOAD File Launcher is supposed to look like for the Amiga (in my opinion) without bells and whistles or requirements beyond standard a block standard Amiga Workbench setup.

Currently working further on the WHDLOAD scanner for the Amiga, but also to actually finish up the 90% version of the main GUI (see 2nd screenshot below) so hope 2019 will be the year this program can finally be released. It will be 100% free without nags or any distribution rules, its simply FREE as in REAL FREE like all my other software ever produced and released to the public.



Update February 2018:

As you may have seen Christmas and New Year has passed us already and getting SORWG ready has been delayed. Reason is that I do have alot of other interresting projects going on which take my time. I can quickly mention:

1: SOASC= SID Recordings (already finalized, next update towards summer).

2: SOABS (Amiga Based Editing System) - which is how I develop SORWG, and updates have been posted on that too. In fact, SORWG is just part of a 3-part research project. a) How to make a cross compiling editing suite for PC/WinUAE/Amiga. b) Learn to code again in AmigaE personally. c) Use a,b to develop SORWG as a proof of concept :-)

3: Other related Commodore mini-projects (like Type-ins) - already posted on my website.

4: Light Pen testing on Commodore 64 (just to bring out some updates for creating own lightpen and better "first-test" suite. More on that later this year

5: Updated SOTDS (AmigaFileDatabase) search functionaility which now includes checksums for all files in that database, we're talking several hundred millions!

And finally, a small update on SORWG below. Got NUMERIC search/filter to function now via the "#" button. Left now is sorting on characters beyond Z (if any game exists) and "*" show all games in listview. Finally the most important part is "SEARCH" and "PLAY GAME" and we should all be set with that project. Also, an Amiga Scanner for .SLAVE files will be created (as the groundwork was done earlier in 2017 anyway). It was loosely programmed in Blitz/PureBasic (which is also included in my SOABS project), but probably gonna re-code it in AmigaE as I'm getting a "small" hang of it again, ohh about 25 years later :-).
Update 02 January 2019: Started piecing together my own WHDLOAD .slave scanner too. The PC Windows version will be reworked slightly too.

Currently the Amiga version in an emulated environment are able to scan 2500 files just under 2 minutes. For now, WHDLOAD versions 4 to 18 are more or less supported (meaning Game Title extraction must work 100%). I have about 3087 .slave files stored already from an many years old archive.

Updates to follow :-)




 3rd of February 2018: Finally the NUMERIC sort is working. It ignites on "#" and finds all characters below a certain ASCII value to perform that search and list them.



In fact, the idea for my own WHDLOAD GUI/Scanner came much earlier than just Novemeber/December 2017. In fact early in 2017 I started thinking about wondering what I would code in.

Should it be AMOS or Blitz Basic, or even PureBasic?

Well, AMOS was never used to write any code, but both Blitz Basic and PureBasic was started on, and here's the PureBasic version from April 2017. Looks pretty close to what SORWG programmed in AmigaE has turned out, heh :-)

Anyway, the most interresting part of this is that in PureBasic and Blitz Basic I started coding a .slave scanner that would run on Amiga. So, probably I'm gonna use part of that code to even add a "Amiga-Side" version of scanning WHDLOAD directories (as opposed to just the newly planned PC-Side version).

If you are wondering what "SOABS" is, well, that is another cool project I've been working on for the past months which is technically just a "editing-on-pc-execute-winuae-and-compile-any-programming-language-compiler-on-the-amiga" type of setup. In fact, all of my recent PureBasic, AmigaE and Blitz Basic including AMOS have been tried out on this system and it works like a charm!

The SOABS system will be worked upon also the time ahead and should be ready for release before summer 2018. Watch my other news on the frontpage for that!



Update 4 January 2018: Some minor tweaks to GUI again, and this time the filtering of games are working (got listview to work), and thus memory usage is only limited to what is seen inside the listview. The entire database isn't read in, as I simply fileseek to where I want and stop reading into memory when the main sorting letter changes.

Left now is to get search/filter to work (will only search in contents of listview not entire database, naturally if you want to load the entire database simply press the "*" button and everything will be read inside listview).

Additionally the PLAY GAME and ABOUT SORWG is to be coded.



26th of December 2017: Minor redesign of GUI since I got the processing of game title (directly from .slave files), along with the slave name itself in a proper listview.

The GUI is pretty much done, as I do not intend to add anything more for such a simple idea of "WHDLoad" interface.

Next up is to get filtering by letter to work, reduce memory-usage (but seeking in database file instead of loading the entire shit into memory), along with actual execution of a game, get the filter/search input field to work (I haven't coded AmigaE in about over 20 years).

Probably gonna add some string fields in the bottom to show minor info such as "path" and "amount of games" (either by filter or by search results).





 22th of December 2017: Progress in GUI design and programming. Went with EasyGUI (for AmigaE) instead of GadToolsBox 2.0c + SrcGen v0.5 way of design and coding the interaction for GUI elements.

This is pretty much a finished GUI and its all we need to act as a very lightweight, standard GUI for loading WHDLoad Games.

Single letter boxes are naturally for sorting games starting with that letter. # = numeric and chars BEFORE "A". ~ (tilde) is everything beyond "Z".
4th of December 2017: The PC side in Windows. A quick scanner to create a database of .slave files. The resulting database as plain text will be loaded and used when selecting games on the Amiga side.



5th of December 2017: Just a quick look of how the GUI might end up. Using GadToolsBox 2.0c, then using SrcGen v0.5 to convert .GUI file into AmigaE .e source code where the rest will be programmed and stitched together.






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