Introducing Gabrielle - Xena's companion

I’ve had this project ongoing for years now, and now I finally managed to get something working. Meet Gabrielle — the friend of Xena!

Gabrielle is a script that’ll let you use a remote server to compile your .xc Xena sourcefiles. So now it’s way easier to at least try to do something with Xena.

I’ve tested it on my X1000, but I would love to hear from you X5000 owners!

Read more and get the archive, with some examples and a handy test console at my blog: https://jaokim.github.io/amiga/2025/10 ... ntroducing-gabrielle.html

And needless to say — I’m not responsible if you break your amiga using this software.

@jaokim

it looks like great application. Thanks!
Do somebody know some tutorial for Xena?
Any howto which helps with basic steps on AmigaOne? I.e. howto send data between Xena, CPU and peripherals, etc..

@sailor
I’ve been trailing the webs for stuff like that. There’s Lyle's buffer example on the AmigaOS wiki, and I also found some posts in the Hyperion forums with more info. I’ve been thinking of trying to summarise that info into something, we’ll see if I ever get to it.

But in general on the X1000 it seems the local bus have some severe limitations. But there are ways to send data to the chip in a slow way using the jtag. But hopefully being able to compile on the amiga will make it less awkward to test things out.
Also, there are some old Xmos resources for our chip that explains the basics. So those are rather good.

@jaokimQuote:

I know, time is short.
But it would be great to have at least all the links in one place.
Plus advice on what type of applications Xena is suitable for.
And a few simple examples. Then even a moderately knowledgeable programmer could get started with Xena programming.

In any case, thanks for Gabrielle. I will try for sure.

@jaokim

That's a nice surprise. I always hoped that someone would do something useful with Xena. It looks like it Gabrielle makes it easier to experiment with it.

Hans

@jaokim
I was surprised as well for seeing that someone works with Xena. I completely forgot this chip. Thank you for helping devs by creating this tool.

I can confirm that the interface between the chip and the bus is different on X1000 and X5000.
It's fair to call the X1000 interface "broken", at least in one direction.

I could get deeper on exactly what and why, but I'm at work right now.

This looks like an excellent resource. I would love to dig deeper if I can find the time.. Time for me is always the most difficult part.

Also worth mention is the purpose and intention of the "Haze-Xorro" pins on the X5000 boards. these should allow you to catch debug output at rates that would normally be impossible. I had put together a card to do this on X1000.. Having this on the X5 series makes it MUCH easier. All that's left is some sort of storage to save it on to. I was using an SD card.

But I'm not here to rehash an old project. This is good news, and I'll offer whatever help I can if asked to do so.

Lyle