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Can IntyBASIC be run in a "Cloud" environment?


fsuinnc

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I know so little about this stuff that I am not sure just how stupid this question might be.

 

I am tired of my Windows PC constantly locking up since the Windows 10 debacle and it seems like it would be so nice to run IntyBASIC (and the IntyBASIC SDK) in the cloud in Chrome or something like that. I have a Android base Remix Mini (kickstarter) coming next month.

 

naturally I have no skills that would help make this happen but figured if I mentioned it here either I will be told it is possible and how I set it up or I will be told it isn't currently possible.

 

knowing you guys, if it is the latter, there is a good chance there will be a working version by the weekend.

 

 

This would also make it easier for me to play with it from the office. :D

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Well, the "cloud" is just a remote computer. So yes, assuming that you have the rights to install and run software, and some way to display the emulator session.

 

ie: a shell-only cloud VPS would let you write and compile stuff, but the emulator might be tricky (start discussion about X forwarding that puts everyone to sleep). A remote desktop environment of any sort would let you do everything.

 

I haven't tried all of it, but there's no reason you can't do it all within any Android device. The emulator certainly works - I have it on my phone to demo to people. Just never bothered writing code... on a 3" screen... with a touchscreen keyboard :P

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I haven't tried all of it, but there's no reason you can't do it all within any Android device. The emulator certainly works - I have it on my phone to demo to people. Just never bothered writing code... on a 3" screen... with a touchscreen keyboard :P

 

My previous phone was a Nokia N900, which had a slide out keyboard, and it came with 'xterm' as a pre-installed app. I was able to compile jzIntv and SDK-1600 on that, and actually did programming while stuck on airplanes and other places. I got pretty good at vi on a 3-row slide out keyboard. :D

 

 

I've been thinking in converting intyBASIC to Javascript, and already there is a pretty good emulator written in Javascript http://atariage.com/forums/topic/240222-ot-javascript/

 

 

What about compiling it with Emscripten? I guess the file I/O becomes the "interesting" part. The compiler algorithms should translate painlessly.

Edited by intvnut
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There are versions of jzIntv for DOS, right? If the rest of the IntyBASIC stuff could be made for DOS then DOSBOX becomes an option.

 

I think it's a Win32 console application. Joe Z. can provide more details.

 

About 17-18 years ago, there was a jzIntv for DOS, using DJGPP, a 32-bit DOS extender and Allegro. :-)

 

These days, it's a Win32 application using SDL. It's not a pure console application, though. Technically, I've built it as a windowed application, but hacked some of the SDL initialization to keep the console link, so it's a bit of a hybrid.

 

If you can find a copy of Intellivision Lives! for Windows, it includes Carl Mueller's excellent INTVPC. It's a DOS executable, and it runs just fine without all the Macromedia user interface that's layered over it. Just find INTVPC.EXE, exec.bin and grom.bin, and off you go!

 

EDIT: I don't remember, but you may be able to extract it from the Intellipack downloads, too. http://www.intellivisionlives.com/download.shtml

EDIT2: Hmmm... these seem to be rather different than the original downloads they offered a long time ago. :-)

Edited by intvnut
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My previous phone was a Nokia N900, which had a slide out keyboard, and it came with 'xterm' as a pre-installed app. I was able to compile jzIntv and SDK-1600 on that, and actually did programming while stuck on airplanes and other places. I got pretty good at vi on a 3-row slide out keyboard. :D

 

 

 

What about compiling it with Emscripten? I guess the file I/O becomes the "interesting" part. The compiler algorithms should translate painlessly.

 

Pretty interesting!

 

There are versions of jzIntv for DOS, right? If the rest of the IntyBASIC stuff could be made for DOS then DOSBOX becomes an option.

 

The difficult thing would be to find a C++ compiler with STL that could generate executables for DOS.

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The difficult thing would be to find a C++ compiler with STL that could generate executables for DOS.

 

It may be less difficult than you think. It appears there's a recent DJGPP release... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.os.msdos.djgpp/O4kITfKkGYk/e_soHIyKtQQJ

 

I haven't checked to see whether it comes with the latest C++ libraries. I imagine, though, it supports nearly everything G++ 5.1.0 does. ftp://ftp.delorie.com/pub/djgpp/beta/v2gnu/gcc510.README

Edited by intvnut
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Other than the sheer technical joy of ridiculousness, why in the sweet christ would you want to run this in DOS? :haha:

 

Just run it in Android. Android is Linux. All of this stuff already works there.

 

Also - I honestly didn't know, or maybe forgot, that Keith put some of the ROMs for free download. Pretty cool of him.

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Other than the sheer technical joy of ridiculousness, why in the sweet christ would you want to run this in DOS? :haha:

 

...says the person in a forum dedicated to programming a 40 year old processor in a 35 year old game system. The Intellivision is older than MS-DOS! icon_rolling.gif

 

Technical joy of ridiculousness is what we do here. :)

Edited by intvnut
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...says the person in a forum dedicated to programming a 40 year old processor in a 35 year old game system. The Intellivision is older than MS-DOS! icon_rolling.gif

 

Technical joy of ridiculousness is what we do here. :)

 

I meant in the context of the original question post:

 

Q: "Hi, I'm having difficulty keeping a Windows system stable, and I'm not terribly skillful at making this stuff work. Any ideas?"

 

A: "Sure! Just install a DOS virtualization environment, and hopefully someone can find the correct libraries so that we can get actual binaries for you. Haven't done it in 20 years, but why not?"

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I am not 100% sure at what you want to do, but both MS Azure and Amazon AWS have environments can run for free or really low cost. It would take some configuration and creation of bits that don't exist now but... I could imagine say a cloud-hosted website with a really really rich text control on a page, "save" on the webpage would actually store the source to a temp disk location on the web server (the whole Intv compilation environment is really small in terms of storage and CPU). Saved bits would go to a cloud storage bucket for safekeeping. The webserver would then launch the compiler; if there are errors they show in a webpage and if success then an emulator launches in the browser which has a URI to fetch the server-housed .rom to play the game.

 

There would be some workflow to add in there (eg version control among other things), but I could imagine that running on an Azure website in the free/shared tier. The Intv development and emulated runtime enviroment could fit with no problem.

 

An good facet of this would be that there would not have to be Windows/Mac/*nix versions of the compilation environment and configuration of paths, etc. would all be done. Just update the server-side container/package and let the developer use any OS they want. Another plus is when someone is sharing what they are doing (eg "please look at my code, I'm stuck!"), they would only have to give out a URL for across-the-globe-pair-programming.

 

 

 

 

 

I know so little about this stuff that I am not sure just how stupid this question might be.

 

I am tired of my Windows PC constantly locking up since the Windows 10 debacle and it seems like it would be so nice to run IntyBASIC (and the IntyBASIC SDK) in the cloud in Chrome or something like that. I have a Android base Remix Mini (kickstarter) coming next month.

 

naturally I have no skills that would help make this happen but figured if I mentioned it here either I will be told it is possible and how I set it up or I will be told it isn't currently possible.

 

knowing you guys, if it is the latter, there is a good chance there will be a working version by the weekend.

 

 

This would also make it easier for me to play with it from the office. :D

Edited by First Spear
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Ok, so how exactly do you set things up to run it on an android device?

 

I honestly can't remember exactly how I did it, but I found an Intellivision emulator on the Google Play store, if memory serves.

 

As for the rest (IntyBASIC, the SDK, etc) - I'd have to think that copying some files into Android isn't *that* tricky? So long as you can get to a command prompt all the tools should run right off the bat. But I'm no expert - I don't really play in these walled gardens very often. As much as the thought of writing code on a tiny device appeals to me, I usually manage to work around it.

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I meant in the context of the original question post:

 

Q: "Hi, I'm having difficulty keeping a Windows system stable, and I'm not terribly skillful at making this stuff work. Any ideas?"

 

A: "Sure! Just install a DOS virtualization environment, and hopefully someone can find the correct libraries so that we can get actual binaries for you. Haven't done it in 20 years, but why not?"

 

I had gotten the impression that the suggestion for DOSBOX was due to the fact it's been ported to run entirely in a browser, so that setup could be done once by someone knowledgeable, and then you could run that wherever you had access to a reasonably modern browser.

 

Sure, the way you put it sounds entirely unreasonable. But, given that DOSBOX has been used to great effect preserving other DOS-era games for average web users over at the Internet Archive, I don't think the suggestion was unreasonable at all, provided that someone knowledgeable sets up the DOSBOX to begin with, so that many others can come and use it. Of course, not everyone knows about the DOSBOX port, so there's that.

 

I do wonder, though, how you get files in and out of the "box." All of the DOS-era games on Internet Archive are self contained so far as I can see.

Edited by intvnut
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I had gotten the impression that the suggestion for DOSBOX was due to the fact it's been ported to run entirely in a browser, so that setup could be done once by someone knowledgeable, and then you could run that wherever you had access to a reasonably modern browser.

 

Sure, the way you put it sounds entirely unreasonable. But, given that DOSBOX has been used to great effect preserving other DOS-era games for average web users over at the Internet Archive, I don't think the suggestion was unreasonable at all, provided that someone knowledgeable sets up the DOSBOX to begin with, so that many others can come and use it.

 

I do wonder, though, how you get files in and out of the "box." All of the DOS-era games on Internet Archive are self contained so far as I can see.

 

People do that for "average web users" because making DOS games work on modern gear is hard. Damned hard in some cases. You basically have to create your own virtualized DOS environment just to get many of these games to run (I kinda suspect I'm teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here though ;) ).

 

Making IntyBASIC/jzintv run on a modern machine isn't the hard part. The hard part for some people is usually command prompt unfamiliarity, which DOS doesn't exactly solve. Or weird OS/library issues, which this probably makes much worse (barring a fairly non-trivial effort on the part of the 2 or 3 experts here who'd understand everything required). It'd probably be a lot less work to just statically compile a win32-ish binary that has "everything", and runs in any Windows environment from 95 up to 10 (or Linux version X), than make all of these tools work in DOS.

 

I'd think a LiveCD/USB Linux image (with the tools already installed and configured) would be a heck of a lot easier than trying to get a full GUI environment running in a browser - or some frankenbox where you're running lord knows what for editing, a DOSBOX image for compilation, and a Javascript page for emulation (I haven't benchmarked it, but I am highly suspicious that jzintv in DOSBOX in web-based emulation might suffer performance problems - how well does it run on a 486, anyway?). Or heck, set up a Virtualbox image with everything good to go, if we want to run it on "any" machine and not have to reboot to use the tools.

 

Although I still suspect that just getting something running in Android is probably the simplest approach, in terms of the original question. I honestly don't know much about it - people hint at "rooting" and whatnot whenever they're doing fancy stuffs. Not sure if that's actually required. Or if we could just build an apk with the SDK etc pre-configured. I know I got an emulator working with pretty much zero knowledge of Android. I've just never tried to get an actual terminal going for the rest of it.

 

I honestly don't know how a person goes about using these tools if they're not at least semi-comfortable with a) copying files, and b) running commands at a prompt. None of the tools in existence work if you can't do both of those. And working around that is gonna require someone to create a full-blown IDE with emulator integration (which I'm entertaining how to do, but it won't be terribly cross-platform at first).

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I would think Android needs a good deal of jailbreaking to put random Linux binaries - assuming they've been compiled for the particular hardware - and run. Of course if IntyBASIC one day becomes an app in Google Store, things would be different but that is not where we are at the moment.

 

However the question of Linux is interesting from another point of view. If the original poster fsuinnc is having major issues with his PC running Windows 10, wouldn't it be an option to blow the hard drive and install a different operating system on the computer? Or perhaps the problems are on a hardware level so the whole computer would need replacing, and that is why we're discussing the tablet option. Personally, I find those flat USB keyboards a bit cumbersome to type on so in the choice of a real computer (desktop or laptop) and a tablet with add-on keyboard, I would really aim for setting up a real computer if I'm doing some development.

 

Ok, I noticed the comment that the tablet is easier to take to the office and use in the spare time so that would be a reason to find a solution to the particular question.

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Personally, I find those flat USB keyboards a bit cumbersome to type on so in the choice of a real computer (desktop or laptop) and a tablet with add-on keyboard, I would really aim for setting up a real computer if I'm doing some development.

 

I actually take development entirely out of the picture when this question is asked (as it has been, in various forms, many times now). I don't understand how anyone in this day and age can survive without ready access to some sort of stable PC. Sure, there's a lot of stuff that's been web-ified and/or app-ified, but still - the only way I could survive without at least one of the "big 3" in a desktop/laptop setting is if I did very little - paid some bills, checked email, listened to some streaming music, played some Angry Birds.

 

Kinda like my retired mother. Which is why this regular discussion of people wanting to write, compile, assemble, and test games all within a web browser mystifies me. I GET the technical challenge - I've ran Linux shells in a browser for shits and giggles many times. I just don't see an actual point in expending the effort required to create (and especially maintain) something like this. Because it's non-trivial and the end result will (at least with current technology) leave much to be desired.

 

But just as my mother is from a different generation, and therefore does little with a computer, maybe this is just the latest generation doing the same thing. Growing up never actually installing software, copying files, or really doing anything but using appliances.

 

I DO wish there was a cheap option to set up something like an RDP session for people. I'd gladly offer the 5 minutes it takes to get IntyBASIC installed and working for someone. I'm just not aware of anyone doing this (at least not cheap) - VPS stuff always seems to be terminal-based. Or we get into X forwarding, and other stuff that is just tiny bit more complicated than running a command in a DOS prompt.

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I DO wish there was a cheap option to set up something like an RDP session for people. I'd gladly offer the 5 minutes it takes to get IntyBASIC installed and working for someone. I'm just not aware of anyone doing this (at least not cheap) - VPS stuff always seems to be terminal-based. Or we get into X forwarding, and other stuff that is just tiny bit more complicated than running a command in a DOS prompt.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_Remote_Desktop

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Neat :) But I meant in terms of a hosting service. I'd be happy to remote into someone's VM and help setting it up.

 

I can already remote into any PC - that makes me much more uncomfortable. As it should, them. I'm not fond of just opening up a computer for remote access - especially to a stranger. A throwaway VM? Sure!

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I had gotten the impression that the suggestion for DOSBOX was due to the fact it's been ported to run entirely in a browser, so that setup could be done once by someone knowledgeable, and then you could run that wherever you had access to a reasonably modern browser.

 

Sure, the way you put it sounds entirely unreasonable. But, given that DOSBOX has been used to great effect preserving other DOS-era games for average web users over at the Internet Archive, I don't think the suggestion was unreasonable at all, provided that someone knowledgeable sets up the DOSBOX to begin with, so that many others can come and use it. Of course, not everyone knows about the DOSBOX port, so there's that.

 

I do wonder, though, how you get files in and out of the "box." All of the DOS-era games on Internet Archive are self contained so far as I can see.

 

I use DOSBox to keep my DOS games alive. How do you get files in and out of the box? Easy: you mount images and folders as drives! :)

 

I ripped my old Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest collection CD-ROMs into ISO images, then I mount them. I configure DOSBox appropriately for each one with an INI file, and I created a COMMAND.COM batch menu to launch them. I can even play Space Quest IV on Windows by installing my old copy of Windows 3.11 from floppies! (ripped into images, of course). :)

 

I did the same for Phantasmagoria, The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour, and plenty of other games I still have from my old DOS/Windows days. The beauty of it is that most games made for Windows 95 during its early days had a version that could run entirely in DOS for refuseniks that wouldn't upgrade.

 

DOSBox is much more than the packaged stuff they use for games. That's like when I created a self-contained installer package for Christmas Carol with emulator and ROM inside: it's a convenient way to package a single game for distribution. However, it is also a full-fledge environment.

 

The one thing it won't run is Windows 95, since it is not an emulated PC. It is just an emulated DOS environment. Windows 3.11, however, runs just fine. :)

 

-dZ.

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P.S. In the Mac, there is a DOSBox packager called "Boxer." It's very slick in that you just drag-and-drop the image or executable into a container, and it will try to detect the necessary configurations and run the installer, if any. It does it all for you, and most of the time it works great.

 

After all the trouble I went through setting up DOSBox manually years ago for most of my games, I just use Boxer now and it does it for me. :lol:

 

I love DOSBox. :) I think the Intellivision and DOSBox should get together and go bowling some day. :lol:

 

-dZ.

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