Half baked pipe dream questions - hardware and os

[Parkland]

Howdy all, 

I was just having one of my "moments" where I don't know if I thought of something extremely awesome or totally stupid, and that's the reason for this post. 

I've long been stuck on qb programming as it's all that makes sense to me, and qb64pe has allowed me to keep at it. 
Most of the programs I've made are calculation type spread sheet style programs, or sensor and control programs. So I haven't got into the opengl graphics yet. I have my subs and stuff for buttons and that's about it for graphics. 

Lately I've been doing a lot of work on pi boards, orange pi specifically, and it's been a great time. Qb64 needs 2gb to compile, but after that things go quick and smooth. 
Some of the latest programs I have fifo buffers and programs written in c to pipe data from analog to digital boards into qb for further processing and stuff. 

Anyways, I got to thinking, I know qb64pe won't run on android, but does anyone know specifics? Just asking because I've gotten by on the desktop linux versions thus far, but started wondering if it would be possible to either use an android image or stripped down linux specifically for using qb64pe on arm boards. 

Is it possible qb64 programs can run without a desktop using the $console option? 

I'll leave my thoughts there for now. 

So far I made uart ports (serial) work on orange pi, and seems like most I/O can be handled with little workarounds or helper programs and buffers so it would be neat if there was some common libraries to use pi boards with qb or maybe a stripped down linux just for qb.

[SMcNeill]

Try this solution: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winlator-...on-android

[madscijr]

Try this solution: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winlator-...on-android

Very interesting. I don't suppose there's a version of that, which will run QB64PE on older Androids (like REALLY old, Android 2.3.4 or Android 4) ? 

Or what about through a DOS Box type emulator? Would a 32-bit QB64PE run under a DOS environment? This old Androind 2.3.4 device has Free Box on it, for running DOS apps (though I'm not sure how truly compatible it is). 

I expect we are coming to the point with ai where it won't be too long before you could feed it the QB64PE source code, and ask it to make a native Android version that compiles your BASIC programs to Java bytecode or whatever runs on Android (or any platform)...

[Parkland]

The problem is, and admittedly I don't know android much, but Java is slow right? 
Dosbox maybe could work for all I know, but then it's an issue of making dosbox compatible with pi board i/o

[madscijr]

I'm no Java expert - it is interpreted, that's true, but slowness would depend on a few things - i including the hardware it's running on, what your program is doing, etc. I wouldn't know anything about how to make the Pi board compatible with DosBox - it's possible someone out there has made Pi device drivers for DosBox or maybe not, you'd just have to ask around?

[a740g]

QB64-PE will not run on DOSBox, unless sometime has the time and patience to port it to something like HX. Even if someone did, I think the performance would not be great on low-end / old hardware.

I once saw this, but never tried using it because I do not have an Android device to test - https://atha.io/blog/introducing-bababasic

[Parkland]

In hindsight of my little rant, maybe the ticket would be just to look into stripping down an existing desktop linux os. 
The benefit I was thinking of android was just the speed, but maybe a stripped down version of ubuntu or other could perform similar with the right modifications done. 
Qb64 programs on a pi board are fantastic could even make control systems with a touch screen.

[madscijr]

The Linux is out of my experience completely, so I'll let others reply to that, but your mentioning touchscreen has me wondering:

how might we get QB64PE to read multitouch input on a regular Windows  PC?