Oricutron on the Web

[ibisum]

Oricutron basically can be built to serve up a virtual Oric on the web now.

The work to do this was done previously, but today I kind of brought it up to date and made it a bit more functional.

If any devs want to try this out, you can test my PR here:

https://github.com/pete-gordon/oricutron/pull/203

This is primarily tested so far on MacOSX .. so you should be able to "make package-osx" and get a .zip'ed up .app bundle in build/, *BUT ALSO - if you set to rigorously following the directions in www/Readme.txt* it is possible to build and package the www/ target (WebAssembly) and come up with an Oricutron that can be used to serve up Oric on the web.

This work was done previously by Patrice. T,. but I have updated it today to make the SDL2 build work properly on all build environments.

Some work needs to be done to make the construction of the assets/ folder (which contains the Oricutron filesystem with .TAP/.DSK/.ROM/.CFG files, etc) automated - perhaps by passing in ORICUTRON_ASSETS="/some/path" - I will do this in a subsequent PR, so that "make package-www" is a first-class target alongside the other package-targets in the main Oricutron Makefile.

But first, if someone could confirm they too can create a servable www/Oricutron.htm build product, that'd be cool .. (oh, this PR also contains some updates to make it possible to build Oricutron with Github Actions, for anyone that feels like trying that out as well...)

(Will publish an example shortly, gotta find the keys to the web server..)

[dreamseal]

Cool! Good work. I'll take a look later on. I'm still debugging my JOric web build at the moment.

One thing I've done previously that I plan to do with JOric soon is use Github Actions to automatically publish to Cloudflare Pages on commit to the main/master branch. Github Pages is how I usually publish my client side web apps, such as my js13kgames entries, but that won't work for JOric, because I'm using JavaScript features (mainly the SharedArrayBuffer) that require special response headers. Github Pages doesn't support adding custom headers in, but I've found Cloudflare Pages to be really good for that. That's how I did it for AGILE.

[jbperin]

That looks very very very interesting.

Is that a continuation of this marvelous project: Oricutron.js Launcher ?

Having Oric stuff running in a web page is very cool. It certainly is one of the best way to demonstrate things to people not having an Oric or an emulator.

[ibisum]

Yes, this is Patrice T''s project, which I guess he did some years ago now .. all I've done is clean it up and bring it up to date a bit in terms of how it builds and integrates the SDL2 library - which previously, was a little clumsy, and might have been a stumbling block for other devs who don't have the patience to work it out - this is now much smoother, once you have the emscripten tooling installed.

In a few days or so I'll add a new target to Oricutrons' main Makefile "make package-www" that will give Oricutron the 'www' target, so that basically anyone that wants to, can build an Oric for the Web and host their works that way. Something like "ASSETS=/dir/to/assets make package-www", and then Oricutron_web.tar.gz will be built for hosting somewhere...

[Hialmar]

Thanks for this.

I am the Patrice T

[ibisum]

Great to have you in the thread! I hope you don’t mind the small progress I’ve made .. and that you’ll catch up and we can see if we can get Oricutron caught up with J’Oric. Would be awesome!

Let’s maybe do some analysis and get some issues written up in the repo, so we can track each others work? I’ll put some hours into this later in the week .. I have three Oric projects on the workbench at the moment: Oricutron-on-web, my soundtoy synth project, and adding support for Oric to the OSCAR64 C compiler - each of these are getting a bit neglected, so I’ll have some time soon to put a few hours on each.

[dreamseal]

Great to have you in the thread! I hope you don’t mind the small progress I’ve made .. and that you’ll catch up and we can see if we can get Oricutron caught up with J’Oric. Would be awesome!

I would definitely encourage you both to continue working on the web version of Oricutron. If there is anything web related that isn't quite working on the web version as well as it is in JOric, then I'd be more than happy to comment on how I did it in JOric.

[ibisum]

Yeah I will keep working on Oricutron, as I have done so for years with ports and things, it’s a very complete emulator. Btw, big props to J’Oric though also - it has been a real joy to have my iPad turn into an Oric almost instantly, and with with the iPad keyboard it’s quite a nice user experience. If we get Oricutron up to a similar state as J’Oric, it’ll be even better because Oricutron provides somewhat of a better development experience, all things considered. But yeah, so fun to have a portable Oric setup!

[Hialmar]

Thanks for your work ibisum.
I will try to work on Oricutron for the web as well and do issues as you told.

On the ipad I have problems tied to the GUI and I think that remaking a web GUI like dreamseal did in JOric is the way to go.

[ibisum]

Awesome, lets work together through the repo issues .. I'll have time for it this week too.