ClearView hypertext reader -- now in 32-bit!

If R-Comp have updated the playback library, I’d be quite interested in adding TCA support to ClearView. With that said, I’d probably have to beg, buy or borrow a copy too — all I have is the PC version.

Hi Phil
I bought a copy of The Complete Animator yesterday and I would be happy to buy you a copy if it will help with continuing development of ClearView. Being able to read TCA files would widen the use of ClearView. R-Comp might even provide you with a development copy since it would enhance the usefulness of TCA as a teaching aid.

The Complete Animator

And perhaps you could help making a 32bit version too :)

IIRC the problem with TCA is that the original programmer (Neil from Iota) was half-way through creating a v2 when he died, so the source code wasn’t in a suitable state for straightforward 32bit build. I do have the code here, I think (yes, found), although what state it is in I cannot say.

I believe we did do some work when we re-released it (so there are some 32bit safe components in the version on !Store) but I think the main program is still 26bit because the C code doesn’t produce a working executable. In the end it was better to add transparent Aemulor usage than spend months of dev time on it.

When we acquired the Iota products, I expected Animator to be quite popular, but in reality it is by far the least used Iota program.

I am quite happy to support anyone keen to work on it, but realistic offers only please – it is largely C with a few short-ish assembler files (maybe 8?). Neil generally wrote with a version of RISC_OSLib because he had close affiliations with Acorn, although he did rather do his own spin on it! We have 32bit safe versions of all the supporting libraries, I believe.

Phil looks like 32 bitting The Complete Animator is a very large project, but the offer to buy you a copy of TCA still stands as I think that it would be a good plus for ClearView to read TCA files.

clearview.initapp is crashing my armv7 pi2 hard if run more than once. It gets as far as starting an error window (draws a rectangle, adds a title bar, then sits there redrawing “error” in the title bar in a tight loop that can only be broken with ctrl-break). removing “run !boot” from !run lets clearview run.

I wonder if my sprite space is full?

Also this started after updating !packman to 0.95… coincidence?

I’ve removed the need for InitApp in the latest development branch, but I haven’t made a release of that version yet. I wanted to try and get rid of the “licensed owner” stuff before I did the next release.

I’m surprised it’s taking two-plus runs to break it. With that said, on my Pi (original) I was running with Aemulor and one of the less-strict CPU modes.

Sounds good! I await the next offical release! :-)

I converted the manual for (a port of) DEC’s old FOCAL language to clearview. A bit tedious but it did teach me a lot about clearview.