Anyone Done Anything With BASIC Engine LT

painintheworld

Good evening, everyone! Life has gotten in the way over the last couple of weeks and prevented me from getting any retro time in of any sort, so I haven't got my hands dirty with the new LT variant. That will change Wednesday, and especially this coming weekend.

In the meantime, has anyone made any videos, written any programs to compare versions, etc?

Hawk

painintheworld Sorry, I haven't taken the time to give it a try yet. It's on my wish list, but hasn't made it near the top yet. I'm glad to see that you're giving it a workout.

painintheworld

...finally got a little bit of time to try it out on an H3 device. Works great....but the H3 seems a bit underpowered. For example, the BASIC Engine original version of Sine Fedora (a version of an Archimedes' spiral) takes ₂.96 seconds, BASIC Engine NG on H3 is ~ .165 seconds, and BASIC Engine LT on the H3 was ₄.36 seconds. I need to stop and pickup an SSD or two and try it out on something much more powerful than an H3.

uli

painintheworld BASIC Engine NG on H3 is ~ .165 seconds, and BASIC Engine LT on the H3 was 4.36 seconds.

That's clearly a bug. Can you please post the code here?

uli

I think I have found and fixed the issue.

painintheworld

uli Thank you, uli! Please understand that I wasn't complaining 🙂 Will try out the newer alpha 🙂

As far as the code, I am on the road and it isn't on my Github at the moment. It is available in video format on my YouTube channel here > [](https://)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm8qG2s8CAg
Just an hour ago I picked up a larger capacity SSD, so that your new software will have its own partition (an older Lenovo T540p, using an i5-4600...look forward to trying it on a much more powerful machine).

painintheworld

The program mentioned above now runs MUCH faster on the Allwinner H3 version (firmware 424), at ~ .221 seconds.

painintheworld

It looks and feels the same 🙂 I'm not getting audio through HDMI, but that may be my fault. I ran alsamixer and cranked everything up to 100. Will try it via the regular line out via headphones a litter later (I suspect this will rectify the issue).

My biggest problem is that I never took the time to learn much Linux stuff. I just finished cloning the SSD in this old laptop, putting the new one in, and putting the old one in a hard drive tray thing that goes in the optical drive bay. A partition is ready for BASIC Engine LT. Maybe I won't mess things up too bad. Here it goes 🙂

Hawk

painintheworld So you're experimenting with the PC version, replacing the existing internal drive with a new SSD?
I have an old PC laptop that may be perfect for this. (I have many old PC laptops, but this one in perticular is seriously underpowered or with it is running.
The H3 has four cores. How does BASIC Engine LT go on a single core INTEL chip...Celeron, P4? Is that too old?

painintheworld

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

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... 😀

painintheworld

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

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 ) 🙂

painintheworld

...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"

MC10Guru

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

MC10Guru GPU GMA3150

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

Hawk

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?

painintheworld

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

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

uli

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.