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

@sailor
Quote:

intuitionbase maybe ?

@Joakim : welcome back and great project !

@jaokim

thanks! It would be great for us X1000 owners to find a useful way to use XENA

Thanks guys! I have a few ideas on some stuff I’d like to try out and experiment with.

I’d really like some feedback on how it works/if it works. I’ve got some response from an X5000 user where there seems to be some issues.
General question: has anyone tried any Xena stuff on the X5000? Like the wiggle demo in the XTools drawer?

Hmm.
I wonder; does this thread indicate the XTools doesn’t work on the X5000?
https://www.amigans.net/modules/newbb/ ... id=143867#forumpost143867

I mean, when the effort was taken to make the X5000 better wrt to Xena, yet no-one bothered to port the tooling? Is there even some documentation surrounding the details?

@jaokimQuote:

Quote:

The XTools were originally written be Segher Boessenkool. (I always misspell that, sorry!) from the community around those chips. I ported the tools to the X1000. As I mentioned before, the X5000 had to completely change the way the Xena chip is attached to the localbus.
As far as I know, the XTools were not ported to the X5000 platform.

The port was not at all difficult. I had only the "Technical Reference" of the X1000, I suspect the X5000 manual has the necessary information. If you look over the source code of the XTools, all the Amiga specific stuff is in a single file, and hopefully easy to understand.

The nature of the difference: The X chips were "designed" to be connected directly to a localbus, but were never used that way before the X1000 came along. Possibly due to "die shrinks", where silicon is reduced to the smallest working footprint for production, the transistors driving the localbus are not strong enough to drive the bus load. This means on the X1000 we can write TO the chip, but reading FROM it requires way too much time to be reliable (and a few other ugly tricks as well)

So, my limited understanding of the X5000 is that some other chip is now between the two, and we read and write from registers of that device, no direct connection to the Xena chip.

All these years, and I never had an X5000 to work on, so I couldn't really figure it out. I got an X5040 just a couple months ago. At this time I'm not able to take on any new projects, but I can test or advise anyone who doesn't mind waiting a few days between replies.

To be honest I've only JUST got it up and running, I still spend most of my limited Amiga time on the X1000.