Is Scratch really viable on Raspberry Pi?

Scratch on RISC OS is coming fairly soon. The sound is almost functional now.

@timrowledge:

I was wondering how fast Scratch is running on Risc OS. I tried Scratch on Raspian, and then on RISC OS hoping that it would be faster. (I had never used RISC OS before this exercise.) For RISC OS I downloaded Squeak3-9b-RISCOS.zip and followed your instructions, and then downloaded Scratch sources separately. It seems to work to some extent, but the GUI is very slow and the image is a bit unstable. I didn't keep notes, but certain Scratch actions would cause errors. I recall that numeric entry wouldn't work. So I'm hoping that you are getting much better results.

I've had other audio problems, like glitches when starting programs such as some of the games that you can get through !PackMan. So I wouldn't be surprised if development isn't easy for you.

I had other stability problems in Raspian, and if I remember correctly sounds are a problem there as well. (I'm using DVI plus analog audio out.)

Anyways I was hoping to use this with the kids, but maybe it's better to try using it for some other purpose for now, unless there are some quick breakthroughs.

Scratch on RISC OS is nowhere near complete yet but it is getting there. I've got sound output working pretty well - I can play a midi file of Tubular bells with 30+ tracks without stuttering or losing samples. You don't want to know what playing the midi version of 'losing my religion' with all tracks set to a relentlessly cheerful oboe is like… who needs drugs?

I still have the actual scratch support plugin to build - I'm not even convinced the source is properly available yet. It supports a few odd things like changing the window title to match the running project (which these days in Squeak is done via the 'Ariethfa Ffenestri' HostWindow interface anyway). One of the practical problems is that scratch is built in a *really* old version of squeak which can make life a bit harder when trying to support it with a new VM. Sigh.

I'll put out a release with the sound support soon, say a day or two.

Looks like scratch works ok on the pi. A bit slow I have to admit but cats meow, circles honk like geese, saving a project changes the window title, trying to record sounds doesn't crash (somebody made a right mess of the sound record code in that ancient image) and loading new image and sound samples works.

@timrowledge: thanks for the update. Is all of the RISC OS graphics processing (e.g. even BitBlt) being done by the ARM right now? So maybe we'll see large improvements in the future?

Right now all BitBLT etc is done on the ARM.

It's hard to imagine a great deal of work ever getting done on changing that *for RISC OS* because it's just too small a niche.

I *can* imagine someone offering me large amounts of money to try to do something about it for more mainstream OS's and perhaps, just perhaps, being able to find a way of using (some?) it from RISC OS. For linux/Windows/OSX there is a Squeak based system called Croquet that makes heavy use of the platforms OpenGL hardware/software to do some fairly impressive immersive 3d shared world stuff, so there is a demonstration proof that it can benefit Smalltalk.

It may be a good thing I had been reading this thread before even trying Scratch in RPi (on Raspbian)... I tried Scratch (just a bit basic scripting to get the cat spin and move in loops) yesterday and to me it seemed to work faster than many other things on LXDE - especially the xscreensaver settings app was really dragging and lagging

See viewtopic.php?p=271839#p271839 for a testable RISC OS Scratch release. Probably in need of a bit more work but it seems to run ok on my Pi.

[dom]

See viewtopic.php?p=271839#p271839 for a testable RISC OS Scratch release. Probably in need of a bit more work but it seems to run ok on my Pi.

Would be great to film a side by side comparison of scratch on linux and raspbmc to prove which is faster.

@timrowledge

Make sure you modify your Scratch image as per http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=104467 to remove the constant screen updates if variables are displayed.

regards

Simon

A new version of RISC OS Scratch is now available - it includes the improved scratch image, better install info and all the OS modules required. Please give it a try.

http://www.rowledge.org/tim/squeak/Scratch_RISCOS-2.zip

Would be great to film a side by side comparison of scratch on linux and raspbmc to prove which is faster.

[/quote]

raspbmc _is_ linux, is it not?

I think they meant to say said Linux (e.g Raspbian) vs RISC OS
Simon

To resize the window, don't maximise- resize it from the corners!

Would be great to film a side by side comparison of scratch on linux and raspbmc to prove which is faster.

raspbmc _is_ linux, is it not?[/quote]
Actually that was Dom, not me, and I'm fairly sure he meant RISC OS rather than raspbmc.