I'm not sure about the single core stuff. I thought that Engine BASIC used two cores? From what I've read, as far as raw type horsepower, the Pi4 would score 800 to 1,000 on the PC version of Passmark. It is considerably more powerful than the H3 devices we use. It will be interesting to see how well some of the newer processors perform with the new LT variant, considering the IPC in the new Ryzens and the 10th gen and later Intel chips (I really want a 12th gen Intel CPU laptop, but the other one I keep in the car here has an I7-11800H - so it makes no sense).

I keep a couple of laptops in my SUV. The one I am messing about with is a Lenovo T540p, with an I7-4600M (2 cores/4 threads). I cloned the 250GB SSD with a 500GB SSD, so the 500GB SSD is now the main "C" drive and the 250GB drive is the "D" drive. The "D" drive is partitioned with 200GB for emulator ROMs and similar stuff, and 48GB for BASIC Engine LT.

I just put the new alpha release image onto a USB drive, booted from it....and got some errors 😆 Will try it again when we get home in an hour or so. If my knowledge of Linux stuff was better, I'd just do a standard dual boot Windows and Linux, and install Engine BASIC, but not sure how to do that. If someone sees this and can give me a pointer or two, I would be very appreciative.

  • uli replied to this.
  • Hawk likes this.

    I booted an old Lenovo T540p laptop (i7-4600m with integrated graphics, 16GB RAM) with V0.90-424 firmware x64 edition of uli's latest work and ran the same simple test as above. The average time to draw the image was .049 seconds. I hope to try it out on something with much better IPC tomorrow (i7-10750h laptop; my 11800h laptop is at my cabin and I don't think there is very much difference per core IPC improvement between 10th and 11th gen).

    Thanks again, uli!

    painintheworld I thought that Engine BASIC used two cores?

    It uses two threads, which in the absence of a task scheduler run on two different cores on the bare metal system. On Linux, they run on whatever happens to be there. (SDL itself runs another bunch of threads for various things.)

    painintheworld dual boot

    On PC, all data is contained in a single partition. You could write the contents of that partition (not the whole disk image!) to a partition on your hard drive, delete the not-very-smart-and-potentially-highly-destructive file /etc/init.d/S30part to keep it from messing up your partitioning, create and format a FAT32 partition with label BASIC for the data and then install some sort of bootloader somewhere that boots /boot/bzImage using the appropriate parameters (see /boot/grub/grub.cfg).

    And then do the same thing every time there is an update... 😀

          uli 😆 I think for right now I will just use a USB thumb drive 😁 I am using one of the really short ones that only sticks out enough to barely grab it. In the next week or two there will be a used laptop procured, just for playing with your new LT variant, and hopefully finish a couple of simple games that I started (Breakout type game being the easiest to finish ) 🙂

            ...forgot to publish the code used for testing above, so here it is 🙂

            5 CPUSPEED 100
            10 DIM RR(320)
            15 FOR I=0 TO 320:RR(I)=193:NEXT I
            50 SCREEN 4:FONT 2:PALETTE 0
            60 XP=144:XR=4.71238905:XF=XR/XP
            65 OT=TICK()
            70 FOR ZI=64 TO -64 STEP -1
            75 ZT=ZI*2.25:ZS=ZT*ZT
            80 XL=INT(SQR(20736-ZS))
            90 FOR XI=0 TO XL
            95 SXT=SIN(SQR(XI*XI+ZS)*XF)
            100 YY=INT(SXT*(123.2-89.6*SXT*SXT))
            105 X1=XI+ZI+160:Y1=90-YY+ZI
            110 IF RR(X1)>Y1 THEN
            115 RR(X1)=Y1
            120 PSET X1,Y1,Y1
            125 ENDIF
            130 X1=-XI+ZI+160
            135 IF RR(X1)>Y1 THEN
            140 RR(X1)=Y1
            145 PSET X1,Y1,Y1
            150 ENDIF
            160 NEXT XI
            170 NEXT ZI
            200 NT=TICK()
            205 ET=(NT-OT)/1000
            210 LOCATE 0,0
            215 PRINT ET;" SECONDS"
            300 PLAY "O3G>E>C4 R8 O3E>CG4 R8 O3CG>E4"

            7 days later

            Ahoy again,
            I have a cool all-in-one computer I bought cheap:
            Cybernet ZPC-5D Intel Atom D525 Pineview 1.8gHz (no burst) 2c GPU GMA3150 4Gb LPDDR3
            Originally it came with Win7 but when I bought it it had Win10. It runs pretty slow and the graphics are horrible. On Youtube, not full-screen@ 480p, it skips about 25% of frames (!!) 😧

            I backed up the hard drive, sector to sector, so I have two bootable Win10 drives to interchange just in case.

            Does this sound powerful enough to run EB LT? If so I'll try it there first. This Cybernet is good enough for utilities to copy sd cards etc but not even good enough for an internet cruizer. Since it's all-in-one maybe EB LT would be a good 2nd use for it?
            daveyb

            • uli replied to this.
            • Hawk likes this.

              I’ve been playing with other things lately, and really need to give EB LT a try and see how it performs.

              Do we have any indication of what the minimum specs might be for EB LT?

              Minimum specs, at least on the X64 side, would have to be pretty low. The old laptop I've been playing with has a Passmark score of nearly 4 times of a Pi4 or Pi400. This same laptop (I7-4600M, 16GB RAM) runs the fedora hat Archimedes spiral above only 4 times better than an Orange Pi H3, which itself is quite a bit less powerful than a Pi4 or Pi400.

              I've got some much older laptops (Win95,98,ME,2000, and XP), but they are all 32 bit, so they are a no go.

              I did buy a used Beelink Gemini T34 (Intel J3455 8GB RAM) , just to use for the LT version....but ran into some issues. There was a previous installation of Windows 10 on it, so we slapped a flash drive in it, and was going to do a fresh install. Come to find out there are errors in the inbuilt EMMC 🙁 Will get it back out and try some tools to get stuff back on track.

              Fwiw, the experience on the Orange Pi is VERY acceptable, in my opinion.

              MC10Guru GPU GMA3150

              That ought to be supported by the i915 driver, so this system could work.

                Ahoy,
                I burned EB LT onto an SMI 128Gb Thumbdrive. After messing with the BIOS on the Cybernet to turn-off the HDD I went to the boot menu and booted the Thumbdrive. It brought up a GRUB menu and I booted the only option, something like "buildroot". After 10 secs it began to boot then this:
                kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unkown block(8,1)
                it does a trace then ends with:
                ---[ end kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unkown block(8,1) ]---
                and a blinking cursor...

                So any ideas on why this is happening? Is the 128Gb Thumbdrive too large? Or is there an incompatibilty with the Intel chipset? Something else? Should I try a uSD card instead (only have 128Gb uSD)? TIA for any help or suggestions.

                BTW 8 mos. ago I quit using Twister OS on a RPi because after an update it suddenly kernel paniced and I never could solve it. That is one thing way beyond my ability to evn diagnose. So I soured on Twister OS.
                Ta, daveyb

                EDIT1: The Cybernet booted a thumbdrive with Debian 10 and RPi desktop from USB2. It was slow but it all worked even WiFi, sound and a VGA->HDMI adapter for 1080p. So I know it can run some linux. So I'm still not sure why EB LT won't boot.

                EDIT2: Well I'm 0/3 on EB LT. I tried the X64 version on my Promethean Connect Cherry Trail and the BIOS sees the USB drive but Win10 Boot menu won't add it. Then I tried it on the thumbdrive & uSD in a reader w/RPi400 and it boots, goes thru lines 1.X, 2.X, 3.X then lines 32.X. Then it jumps to either line 150 or 255 and has a message about Random: init crng done IIRC then cursor. I waited as long as 10 mins and it never goes further. So I'm stumped...am I missing a step?

                EDIT3: Success on one: the RPi400. I had to use the uSD card in the uSD card slot and it booted right up. Super crisp display too. So finally a use for the RPi400, as a BASIC all-in-one computer. I got the complete new RPi400 kit including tax& ship for $87.00 a few months ago on eBay. The (non-scalper) seller had 4 and sold them out in less than 4 hrs!
                db

                  MC10Guru kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unkown block(8,1)
                  it does a trace then ends with:
                  ---[ end kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unkown block(8,1) ]---
                  and a blinking cursor...

                  Might be lacking a USB host driver.

                  MC10Guru The Cybernet booted a thumbdrive with Debian 10 and RPi desktop from USB2.

                  Can you post a dmesg dump of that? (edit: and lsmod, while we're at it)

                  MC10Guru lines 1.X, 2.X, 3.X then lines 32.X. Then it jumps to either line 150 or 255

                  w0t? I have no idea what you are referring to there.

                        Ahoy,
                        @uli

                        lines 1.X, 2.X, 3.X then lines 32.X. Then it jumps to either line 150 or 255

                        Those numbers are called a timestamp: The numbers between brackets represent the number of seconds passed since your operating system started. They can sometimes be useful in debugging.

                        I'm going to try booting the Cybernet with a small 4Gb SD card directly in the slot in a bit as that was the only way it worked on the RPi400. As far as the thumbdrive, it was acting a bit flaky so I did a deep check and repartition/format in FAT32. I'll try it again also. If I have more trouble I'll try to send the info for you.

                        Happy Pi day!
                        daveyb

                        @MC10Guru When/if you have the opportunity, please let us know how the performance of the Pi400 is as the host for BASIC Engine LT. There is still one sitting in my Amazon cart, waiting on me to pull the trigger 😆

                          Ahoy,
                          painintheworld I copied the cpuspeed program above. This weekend I'll copy it to the RPi400 EN LT uSD card and run it there. Then I'll post the results for you.
                          HTH, daveyb

                            Ahoy,
                            painintheworld I ran the test program on my RPi400 running EB LT. It was almost instantaneous at 0.043 Seconds everytime. I'd say the RPi400 passes the test.

                            BTW, got a new notebook computer at Micro Center on Sunday. It's an Evolve III Maestro E-Book 4+64 with a 4-Core Celeron N3450 running Win10Pro Educational. It was $80+tax but I bought new open box (cardboard flap torn) and got it for $69.10 out the door. I may try the X64 version on it if I can get it to boot from thumbdrive or uSD.

                            Now to try my other EB programs on the RPi400...
                            daveyb

                                MC10Guru Thank you for the test results! This is ~ the same result I am seeing on each machine that I've tried with Intel integrated graphics. My only remaining x64 desktop is boxed up and in storage (dead GPU), so I haven't had the opportunity to have it running on a dedicated GPU. If you know how to force it to run on an Nvidia GPU in a laptop, instead of the Intel integrated graphics, that would be awesome 🙂

                                That 11.6" laptop will be perfect for projects like BASIC Engine LT!

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