samos - pre-emptive scheduling progress

I've spent most of today - well OK this evening - writing a driver for the OPIC timers to use in pre-emptive scheduling of the Kernel. I've got it counting down and generating an Interrupt but that isn't getting into the OPIC controller yet, no doubt some configuration bit on a register I've forgotten about.

Either way, once timer based interrupts can be generated and handled with an ISR the Scheduler can dump the register state into the Processes memory and chose another process to run - i.e. pre-emptive scheduling.

Of course at the moment I don't have any Processes except the Idle processes but I guess two programs that print "Hi" and "Bye" could run and should switch between them if they're set at the same priority.

Once I have pre-emptive scheduling in I can start to look at getting newlib setup correctly with CRT0 so I can write some proper test apps. It'd also be nice to abstract the PowerPC page tables in RAM so I can make best use of the MMU for proper process memory protection.

Winamp OpenAL 0.9 Beta 5

I'll be working on Beta 5 over the weekend (Beta 4 is available here) to fix the MP3 VBR (Variable Bit rate) issue.

If you have any bugs with any release please post it here rather than on the blog as it's easier to track!

Ta

Update:

Well I've fixed it and it's only 11am, cracking. I'll run some tests through my collection and make sure it stands up and then do some cleaning and hopefully will check it in today.

YAU (Yet Another Update)

It's ready for download here

Winamp OpenAL 0.9 beta 3, plug-ins?

Thanks to the various people who've submitted bug reports and comments for the new 0.9 beta for the OpenAL plug-in for Winamp.

I know it's been a bit of a pain but the benefit is, to some extend if you're a purist like me, worth the hassle of sorting the few issues out. On my Laptop (software rendering) and Waveout Winamp uses 3-4% but with the 0.9 Beta 3 build its virtually nothing - but that isn't me that's all down to OpenAL.

I've added a bit more info about XRAM to the configuration page so people can see why the XRAM tick is disabled. If its greyed out and you have XRAM let me know and I'll investigate.

I'm also wondering if anyone would think about extending the Plug-in (plug-ins for a plug-in?) in regards to things like Effects? I don't really have the time to invest in it but I could quite easily add a new interface for extra DLLs to be loaded in with extra functionality.

If anyone's interested and wants to write any kind of Effects plug-ins (and has a knowledge of C (you might be able to get away with VB :s, not sure though) for the DLLs then let me know.

Beta 3 is out on SourceForge for breaking... err testing.

Arduemu opcodes

Nothing like writing Arduino opcodes on a bank holiday Monday! Rich is taking a break to work on his Jailbreak project but should be able to have a bunch more opcodes done today.

Update:
Lots of new opcodes added, about 46 or so in total now giving us about 35% of all the opcodes done.