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Ghostown & Whelpz 2021

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

"Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." - Albert Einstein

How to run and debug effects?

This tutorial should work on macOS and Linux. It may be possible to reproduce all steps also on Windows, but it will be likely an order of magnitude more difficult. I assume you have some former experience with Unix-like command line.

IMPORTANT! Each time I push a commit to the repository a preconfigured virtual machine is started and builds libraries and effects. The repository contents is guaranteed to successfully build in well defined environment that is provided by VM image prepared with Docker! If you have some problems on your local machine it's yours responsibility to fix it, unless following icon does say that build failed: Build status

Setting up build environment

You need to reproduce the build environment I mentioned above. Fortunately Dockerfiles list all commands required to do so, at least on Debian 10 (Buster) for x86-64 architecture. This is a good starting point for most of you. Please only consider lines starting with ADD and RUN – please refer to Dockerfile documentation if needed.

  1. Start with demoscene-toolchain Dockerfile. When the toolchain is built you must set up your PATH environment variable correctly. If you installed the toolchain in ${HOME}/amiga then add export PATH=${PATH}:${HOME}/amiga/bin to your favorite shell initialization file (.bashrc, .zshrc, etc.). To validate your setup, please issue which m68k-amigaos-gcc command which should print where the compiler has been installed.

  2. Follow up with demoscene Dockerfile. If you haven't had Git LFS installed previously, you'll have to issue git lfs install command. Then clone demoscene repository once again to pull in binary files, otherwise you'll get links instead of real data – which you can fix by issuing git lfs pull command.

The Amiga emulator

You need an emulator to test Amiga binaries. Luckily, demoscene-toolchain provides fs-uae emulator. Now, important thing – vanilla fs-uae doesn't provide features that are required for full experience. The emulator has been patched, which enables Amiga programs to efficiently output diagnostic messages using UAE traps and provides various fixes for debugger integration. The emulator is installed in the same directory as the compiler. Since this directory has already been added to your PATH environment variable you should be able to use it without troubles. To verify that, please issue which fs-uae command and confirm that it prints correct installation path.

Compiling source code

Navigate to the demoscene repository you've just cloned and issue make command. If you build process fails, please verify that you have performed all steps listed above correctly. If make happens to complain about missing command – find the software package and install it. You cannot expect us to help you set up your environment!

Running the effect under emulator

At first, you have to provide Kickstart ROMs for the emulator to operate. fs-uae will automatically find the correct kickstart ROMs for all Amiga models if you have copied the .rom files into its kickstart-dir.

After that, navigate to any effect's directory and issue make run command. run make target prepares all files in data directory, builds executable file, creates ADF floppy image from binary files, adds custom bootloader to ADF and runs the launcher tool, which in turn spawns the fs-uae emulator, extends UAE built-in debugger (press F10 key to trigger it), and redirects messages from Amiga parallel port to Unix terminal.

Debugging the effect under emulator

Sometimes you need to tune your effect or fix some bugs. Depending on the complexity, you can use either console logging or low level UAE built-in debugger. But for your utmost convenience, in addition to those ancient debugging techniques, the toolchain comes with AmigaHunk executable debugger!

The debugger is nothing more than well known GDB: The GNU Project Debugger. It's a very powerful tool (believe me!) but the default interface is not the most user friendly one! Too soothe the experience you should install great GDB overlay gdb-dashboard. In root directory of cloned repository issue a command wget -O gdb-dashboard https://git.io/.gdbinit and you are done! Now, you can quite comfortably debug your effects in a terminal.

Now, just navigate to a directory with given effect and issue make debug command. debug make target behaves the same way as run make target. It prepares all the prerequisites and launches the effect in the emulator. But, in addition, it runs a GDB process, so all you need is to know how to talk with it. After playing with some basic GDB commands like breakpoint, step, next and continue, you should be able to see a terminal view similar to given below. It looks massive! Isn't it?

gdb-dashboard

Setting up Visual Studio Code IDE

Terminal based approach is more productive when you are low-level geek. But what if you're not GDB aficionado? Fortunately there's option for you as well. Though we still encourage you to learn GDB – it will pay off eventually ;-)

In such a case the provided Visual Studio Code integration should help. Oh yes! You can use modern IDE with all its advantages for Amiga development!

First of all, you have to install Visual Studio Code for your favorite platform. Then, using its extension explorer install following extensions:

The first one is required, but others are recommended for your convenience.

Having the installation done, navigate to root directory of cloned demoscene repository, type code . and Visual Studio Code IDE will open the current directory as a workspace. Go to the .vscode folder and open settings.json in the editor view. Among other settings you can see "effect": "anim" setting which tells the IDE that all operations like clean/build/run/debug have to be performed on the anim effect. You can change it to any other effect located in effects folder or use a special variable "effect": "${fileDirnameBasename}" which means that current opened file's folder name will be used to identify the effect for all operations mentioned above.

Now, open the .vscode/keybindings.json and copy its contents. Press Shift+Cmd+P and start typing Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON). When this option appears on the list - choose it. It will open user's key bindings configuration file where you have to paste already copied contents.

Since now, you can use following keyboard shortcuts:

  • Shift+Cmd+C - Clean output files of single effect
  • Shift+Cmd+B - Build single effect
  • Shift+Cmd+R - Run the effect without debugging
  • Shift+Cmd+D - Start debugging the effect
  • Shift+Cmd+A, Shift+Cmd+C - Clean all output files
  • Shift+Cmd+A, Shift+Cmd+B - Build all effects

These shortcuts are macOS specific. For other operating systems please refer to Visual Studio Code documentation for information which key to use instead of Cmd.

All these actions are handled by Tasks defined in .vscode/tasks.json. You can also press Shift+Cmd+T or use Terminal->Run Task... menu item to call any of the above actions.

Let's check how it works. Open the effects/anim/anim.c source code file and set the breakpoint somewhere in the Render function. Press Shift+Cmd+D and... enjoy how modern Visual Studio Code IDE is supporting Amiga demoscene development!

vscode

If you managed to get through the steps successfully, congratulations! You have probably the most sophisticated cross development environment for Amiga 500 at your disposal!