Merry Christmas! 🎄

Dmian

I want to send everyone my best wishes for these holidays, and that you have a nice time with your loved ones. Cheers!

uli

Merry Christmas, everyone! Thanks for sticking it out here, you all are truly an inspiration.

(BTW, thanks(?) to contracting COVID I am currently confined to my office, so I used the time to get something running on the H616. I'm getting all the way to the BASIC prompt, but I just cannot get the UI scaler to work, so don't hold your breath...)

Dmian

uli Merry Christmas and I wish you a speedy and complete recovery! 🤗

davegardnerisme

Merry Christmas. Thank you for making BE! It has brought me many hours of joy.

Dmian

This year is almost over! Thank you everyone for a wonderful 2023, specially to @uli for this amazing project that gave us lots of joy. Let hope for a better 2024. Cheers!

uli

Here's something to get the new year started:

Running on this:

I still advise against holding your breath. This has:

no sound
no input. Or maybe it does. Didn't have time to check.
no anything, except graphics
boot times around half a minute
Linux kernel panics on every other reboot
Engine BASIC starting two out of three times
a platform that is infinitely more finicky than the H3

That said, even at this point I have learned a lot about porting the BASIC Engine RX system to another platform:

Jailhouse works on ARM64 and can run ARM32 payloads there.
There is a Linux kernel and u-boot that is doped up enough to run on various H616/313/618 systems, cobbled together by this guy: https://github.com/warpme/minimyth2/
The H616 et al.'s Display Engine 3.3 is similar enough to the H3's DE 2.0 that a lot of the code can be reused. It is also entirely undocumented.
The DE doesn't like to be reconfigured while it's on. Resetting the whole device, turning it off and then turning it on bit by bit after setting the configuration fixes the scaling artifacts that I've been battling with.
While it appears to be possible to pull the rug from under a Linux DRM driver without big issues (the driver at some point complains that it doesn't get any interrupts anymore) it is probably a good idea to do all the setup for hardware owned by Engine BASIC in Engine BASIC, lest one wants to run into problems like the one described above. Having working Linux drivers is nevertheless very helpful for figuring out how to initialize a device.
Some IPs on the H616 and friends are completely different. (the TV encoder, for instance)
Buildroot doesn't support 64-bit kernels with 32-bit userspace. 🙁
Most importantly: it's possible.

The similarities between the H616 and the H3 help a lot in making it possible; porting it to a different manufacturer's platform would probably be a lot harder.

Dmian

uli Still, it's fantastic! 😊
Using the H616/H618 chipset may open the door to a lot of boards and STBs, some of which are really cheap.
Wonderful. Really glad of the work you're doing. (And I hope you're now fully recovered.)
Cheers!