Who likes manga?

I started this in 2014, forgot about it, then did some more work on it over the last few days.

It’s buggy, but it works.

What, you ask? It’s a manga reader. A RISC OS GUI way of reading what’s on store at Mangareader.net. It’s a brilliant way of not getting work done. :-)

(full size 1280×1024)

At this time, it is only available from my private server. It is pre-alpha. It does work, but may be quirky. I’ve used it this afternoon.
A lot.
(^_^)

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/manga20170715.zip (~40KiB)

Notes:

• Only tested on my Pi.
• Is NOT release quality.
• May behave really weird if you don’t have an active internet connection (but since you’ll need that for this software to be in any way useful…).
• Is NOT release quality.
• Check your ISP hasn’t blocked mangareader.net prior to use. If you live in The Land Of The Free, there’s a good chance they have…
• Is NOT release quality.
• I’m not responsible if you find something awesome and don’t go to sleep until 5am. But do share your finds, there’s 4462 mangas and I don’t have time to look at them all.
• Is NOT release quality.
• Not to be uploaded, hosted, or distributed anywhere else.
• Is NOT release quality.
• Read the !Help file. Maybe the “Stuff” file too if you’re a geek.
• Is NOT release quality.

Have fun!

It works OK with the Rcomp ARM6X

It works OK with the Rcomp ARM6X

That’s one check, but IIRC the current RComp ARMx6 OS build is a low vector build. Might be issues that come up on a high vector build.
From recent evidence¹ I think RComp are heading that way.

Nice bit of niche software Rick.
Not something I have a use for, but I’m weird so that’s no guide to usefulness.

¹ Flurry of Zero page fixing on RComp releases.

It works on a Pandaboard with the latest 5.23 16th July 17 ROM.

I caveat that by saying it will if installed on the SDFS card as trying it from a Ramdisc gives and error message about “Don’t run it directly from it’s zip file…”. OK I agree it might be stupid trying it from a RAMDisc and it is Alphacode but he users do stupid things.

Also agree on niche but there is a real market out there for Manga just not a typical RISCOS user age profile thing though I open to be proved wrong on that as I often am.

Thanks anyway Rick for something interesting on RISCOS.

Also agree on niche but there is a real market out there for Manga just not a typical RISCOS user age profile thing

That was the niche I was thinking of and bending the current age profile is a good idea.

Not something I have a use for, but I’m weird so that’s no guide to usefulness.

My weirdness is exactly why I wrote this software. ;-)

I caveat that by saying it will if installed on the SDFS card as trying it from a Ramdisc gives and error message about “Don’t run it directly from it’s zip file…”.

Works fine of RAMdisc for me. Did you mean running it FROM the zip file on RAMdisc?

The big bit of bold at the top of !Help tells you likewise – to unpack it.

Why? Simple. The program currently saves the manga index into itself (yes, I know it should be Choices, I’ll fix that one day…) and you might prefer not to wait while SparkFS tries to compress a ~800K file…
That’s why it will look to see if the parent is an image object, and complain if it is.

Also agree on niche but there is a real market out there for Manga

It is… semi-legal in the sense that much of the freely available manga is scanlations (this counts for pretty much everything on sites like MangaReader), however quite a lot of it is not so likely to get a complete release in the West (a lot is unavailable, some is started but only finished if it is seen as commercially viable (hence why Translucent have five volumes, but you’ll only find three on Amazon (the 4th is unavailable and the 5th seems never to have been translated). Additionally, “licenced” manga is often available only via special apps, such as Crunchyroll. May also have swathes of DRM just because they can…

It’s a lot like animé in that respect. Those who like tend to like a fair few things, but only the major hits make it through to official Western releases (DVD and the like). Crunchyroll is a start, but it is streaming only and the only thing CR streams well are their own adverts… :-/

Example? You can buy Madoka or Haruhi in pretty much any language. I’m pleased to see a DVD release of Noragami. But as yet no Chihayafuru DVD (even in French where the manga seemed quite popular!).

just not a typical RISCOS user age profile thing though I open to be proved wrong on that as I often am.

If you think manga is like comic books and animé is like cartoons, you’re in for a hard awakening. It covers all sorts of genres, from the cute fluffy magical schoolgirls with kitten ears to zombie apocalypse. We go from sickly cute to outright horror. Try “I Am A Hero” or “Gyo” to see what I mean. Or “Elfen Lied” (and if you like the manga, it was made into an animé too).

If you like reading graphic novels, you’re sure to find something of interest. You might just need to go Google for genre suggestions as Manga presents a big long list of four and a half thousand titles.
That said, if you like horror/psychological then today’s version of the “Stuff” file has some of my suggestions at the bottom (to save me looking up the titles over and over – though no need now I’ve done the history!).

If you prefer something less hard, but worth investing in, then I’d suggest Koe no Katachi (A Silent Voice) and Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso (Your Lie in April). Have hankies ready…

New version available:

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/manga20170716.zip (~42KiB)

The changes are…

• Extended MANGAMAX to 8000, as the current count (4462) was getting close to the original limit (5000). Back in 2014, there were ~3500 entries!
• Hardened the manga parser so if the limit should be crossed, it will give up gracefully and not Epic Fail. :-)
• Index array now holds the length/CRC used to generate the “MangaID” which is used to refer to files in Scrap. As the array has changed, the program will reject the older index file and cause a new one to be generated from fresh data. As this happens anyway >24 hours, this is no big deal. ;-)
• The “index” file now only saves the information for the available mangas, instead of dumping the entire array.
• A shortcut added to the page fetcher that if an image matching the desired MangaID and chapter/page exists, it will immediately be loaded instead of requesting page information first. Big speed-up on going through pages already read/cached.
• Now should ask you to retry if something went wrong while fetching the chapter information. This is hard to test as server response faults are essentially random…
• A new file will be created in Scrap, called “_index”, it will just list the MangaIDs against the titles. It’s for you, so you can look up what each ID relates to.
• Now implements a history. When you click “Go!”, if a manga is successfully loaded, an entry will be added to the history. This is available at the top of the big menu, to make it easier to get to things you’ve been reading.

Have fun!

Some additional notes:

• Extended MANGAMAX to 8000, as the current count (4462) was getting close to the original limit (5000). Back in 2014, there were ~3500 entries!

It is not a linked list, so referring to manga can use an index offset and not have to keep walking the entries to find stuff. It is also a large allocation as there’s a lot of stuff to remember, and what do you think would happen if we add ~100K to an 1000K index, given there’s no fancy moveable heap or anything like that. A big fixed array isn’t a great solution, but it’s the one with the least number of unwanted side effects. It’s done for speed, not space efficiency.

• Hardened the manga parser so if the limit should be crossed, it will give up gracefully and not Epic Fail.

In testing with artificially reduced, it would overshoot. Likely trample on some of the UI workspace, and next thing you know there’s an abort at &FCxxxxxx (something in ROM) and the machine stiffs. Epic Fail indeed.

• The “index” file now only saves the information for the available mangas, instead of dumping the entire array.

Logical.

• Now implements a history.

Best Feature Ever. Fed up with trying to find stuff in the Big Menu? Don’t be – it’s in the history once you’ve started reading. :-)

Excellent work. Looking forward to trying this out later when I get home.
That’s my night sorted.

I already can’t find any time to work on anything. What have you done to me?!?

I’m goind to download this shortly.

Please let me know how it works for you, and on what sorts of machines… Thanks.

Another day, another update. :-)

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/manga20170717.zip (~43KiB)

Here’s what’s new (and you’ll want this if your manga reading was interrupted by a bunch of 404 errors):

• Overzealous caching meant that the fetcher kept returning the SAME chapter information file when looking up chapter information. This showed up in “I Am A Hero” as the first chapter has 46 pages, the rest… less so.
  If you hit a bunch of unexpected 404s, this is why. Ooops! :-/
• Fixed redraw issue when loading a new manga with the main viewer window open.
• There’s code to receive/send cookies. It isn’t compiled at the moment, but it’s there should the source tighten up on things.
  [note to self – it looks like the “Referer” is the chapter, not the page (snooping headers in Firefox WebDev)]
• History cross-references to determine the appropriate manga reference when Manga loads. Those that do not reference a manga (this’ll be due to source being taken down) will be greyed out in the menu.
• Manga now responds to a Manga URI, in the format “manga:xx-xxxx” where “xx-xxxx” is the MangaID. Note that “manga:” must be lower case.
• Fixed the issue with the clipped title bar text. Overlong manga titles will be clipped with an ellipsis, so the chapter/page numbers always appear.

To demonstrate the Manga URI handling, start up Manga. Works with NetSurf.

Note: Manga goes directly to the first page of manga links, so any you click on will go into History.

…

Now if you’d like something intelligent, try Eve no Jikan (Time of Eve).

If you want a guy that’s even more messed up than me (by several orders of magnitude), enjoy I Am A Hero. It’s apparently a zombie apocalypse, but the first coupla-hundred pages are basically the protagonist being off-the-scale nuts. Probably NSFW.
[if you can watch the live action movie, do so, it’s pretty epic]

For a vampire story where the humans are worse, try Shiki (if it’s anything like the animé, it’s a slow burn getting progressively NSFW).

If you thought the film Azumi was cool, there’s an Azumi manga, 156 chapters and still going. A historical action drama with a samurai…girl… for those who know that such things as a female Doctor is really not a big deal. ;-)

This is Schrödinger’s Manga. It may or may not be available depending on whether my private server is on (good weather) or off (thunderstorms likely or happening). You won’t know until you look…

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/manga20170719.zip (~45K)

What’s new? In a nutshell your reading progress is tracked so it’s now really simple to pick up where you left off. :-)

• Now records the “last page read” in the history, which updates as you read the manga.
  Note that the FIRST page that you read does not update the history. This is because an entry is not added to the history until something has been successfully fetched (in case links broken, etc); and as such there will be no history reference for that manga until after it has been loaded. Subsequent pages will be recorded, however.
• The “You have read…” will tell you if you have read this manga or not, and if you have, how far you got (chapter and page).
• By default, if you HAVE read a manga, the last chapter read will be highlighted as the default. However, there is a new icon which says “Where left off” that – if ticked – will override the chapter setting (which always defaults to page 1) and will instead take you DIRECTLY to the last page you looked at.
  As this makes it really easy to pick up where you left off earlier, this option is always ticked by default.
• If you have a history file from an earlier version of Manga, it will tell you that you read up to chapter 1 page 1; any further reading will be recorded correctly.

Raspberry Pi B. Seems to work well. Already seems way more usable and way less buggy than any offerings I’ve seen on PC or Android. Nicely done!

Thanks Tristan!

Here’s a tidy-up release, to deal with those quirks and annoyances:

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/manga20170721.zip (~46K)

I would have uploaded this a while ago, but I’ve been reading lots and lots of Azumi (manga link).

Here’s what’s different (in version 0.01!):

• A version bump at last, now this program appears to be behaving nicely. Maybe time to consider it more beta than alpha? Or have I jinxed things? :-)
• This is mostly a tidy-of-annoying-quirks release.
• It is possible to have the manga selection window open at the same time as the manga viewer. Now choosing a different chapter number in the selector won’t mess up what you’re reading in the viewer.
• Using the up/down toggles on the chapter number to read will automatically untick the “Where left off” option, on the basis that if you’re manually choosing a chapter, you don’t want to resume where you left off…
• Fun was to be had if you had the viewer open at the same time as the manga selector, and you chose a new manga from the Big Menu. Now choosing a different manga will forcibly close the viewer.
• Ctrl-Adjust goes back ten pages (to match Ctrl-Select going forward ten).
• Ctrl-Select beyond the end of a chapter will go to the first page of the next chapter.
• No longer tries to fetch beyond the last chapter before telling you that there is no more to read.
• No longer closes the viewer upon having no more to read, it isn’t a serious error that warrants closing the viewer!
• Clicking Adjust to go back a page (or ten) on the first page of a chapter will go back to the last page of the previous chapter.
• Now records the chapter/page number for the very first page loaded.
• MangaDump now always displays the history, even if no manga is currently being read.
• The page fetcher now interlocks, so clicking the viewer window repeatedly won’t fire off as many incremental fetches as clicks… it did actually work but the result might not have been what was expected. :-) Now it does strictly one page fetch at a time.
• Removed initial one-time warning, as the program seems fairly stable now. :-)
• Now registers itself as supporting manga URIs to auto-start Manga if the user clicks on a “manga:” link without Manga running. The command line parameters are “-u ”.
• The “Clear cache” entry now deletes the cache contents (after asking for confirmation prompting with number of files and their total size).
  [mine’s 806 files, 129MB – it adds up!]
• Because it was useful to poke around in the cache (or is that just me?), there is a separate entry in the iconbar menu to open the cache. It’s <Wimp$ScrapDir>.Manga…in case you’re interested.
  (at start-up, Manga copies the file “!ScrapFiles” there, which explains what all the files are and their purpose…in case you’re interested)

This seems like a good program. Sasuga Rick Murray. Unfortunately I won’t be able to try it out since I have no internet connection on my Pi – my home network relies on wifi, which doesn’t seem to be possible with RISC OS at the moment.

Got my allocation from ROOL (on Sunday evening! Jeez guys, go watch telly or something, it’s Sunday!) so I’ve made a few changes and finally put together an “official” release. :-)

I contacted R-Comp about the possibility of putting Manga on PlingStore over week ago (2017/07/16.21:58) but have heard nothing yet.

While Manga is designed upon and aimed at RISC OS 5 on modern systems, I did get it running on an emulator (once I updated CLib – System Resources at https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/common), so it will work on the older systems; however on actual hardware I can’t imagine it’d be particularly quick at downloading a ~350K web page and parsing it to extract data into a ~800K array. As per my policy, is no support for machines prior to RISC OS 5, however it does appear to work. Cool.

So, without any further ado, the web page for this is:

https://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/manga/

But if you want the freshest copy (!), it’s here too:

http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/manga_0-02.zip (47.3K)

What’s new? This:

• “index” and “history” now stored in Choices:Manga.
• If you have “index” and “history” within the application (any previous installation) then these files will be automatically moved to Choices.
• Removed the warning if you try to run Manga from an archive. No longer wants to place a BIG file there, so it’s okay.
• Removed the WarnOldOS prompt.
• As a feature against possible file corruption, the history file is copied if it’s been more than three days since the last time. The copy is held within Choices:Manga with the filename “history_yyyy-mm-dd”.
  Note that the datestamp of the Choices:Manga directory is what is used to determine when to create the backup.
• There’s no provision for backing up the index file, it is recreated if it’s older than 24 hours, and if there is any doubt about the file’s contents, just wipe it. It’ll be recreated from freshly fetched data.
• Manga will report “Manga is already running.” and quit if… guess what… if Manga is already running. :-)
  This is because having multiple instantations of an application each writing to their own copies of the SAME files could be messy.
  What happens to the history, for instance?
• Licence amended now that the software is fit for posting on my site.

Not instant as on the BB -xM but it works OK on a real Risc PC under RISC OS 4.39.

Frederick, thanks for the feedback. Good to know it works okay on real hardware.

Okay, here’s possibly the last notification you’ll see:

https://www.heyrick.co.uk/software/manga/

or:

http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/manga_0-03.zip (48.7KiB)

Why the last notification? Because…

• Changed HTTP request to use the correct “\r\n” style of line ending (instead of just “\n”).
  Ironically, the only server to have complained so far about the wrong terminator was heyrick.co.uk. ☺
• Added some code to link into DADebug if it is present (and DEBUGCODE is defined). This will aid with development.
  [note: your releases probably won’t have this code included]
• When Manga starts, it will check for updates. This works by fetching a small file describing the current version and comparing the version available with the current version. If there is an update, you will be asked if you want to download it. If you reply “Yes”, the update archive will be downloaded and then ‘run’ (which should open it in SparkFS, if you have that running).
  A better update mechanism will be considered for a future release.
• You can disable the update check by setting the system variable Manga$NoUpdateCheck (doesn’t matter what – it’s the presence that matters).
• Setting Manga$BetaTrack will look for updates on my private server rather than the “properly released” updates.

That’s why. Manga will notify you at startup if/when there is an update available, so I won’t need to spam the forum any more. :-)

For the paranoid, you can turn the update checking off. Look in the !Run file. Note, however, that Manga does NOT send any identifying information (if you look in the executable for User-Agent, you’ll see it pretends to be Firefox on an Android phone). The most that the update check will incur is an entry in the server log, and trust me – life is too short to bother looking at that. Even WebJames on my private server, it’s Yandex.ru or loads of Chinese sites looking for phpMyAdmin…

Now something that might be worth explaining is the Beta Track. When a version of Manga is available, I would have dropped it on my private server and posted a link here. However with Manga on my main server (heyrick), this is a more involved process involving syncing a web page so the data matches up (edit: you’ll notice I forgot to change the version on the panel on the left of the main site page – bugger, it’s 2017 I ought to build this stuff with PHP not write it by hand…), plus the need to start up the PC in order to use WinSCP to transfer the data to the server in the first place. Well, if I’m working on RISC OS and then going to watch some animé, I’m not going to turn on the PC for five minutes.
As such, the version on heyrick will be updated periodically – defined as “when the PC is on and I remember”.

Because of this, you can elect to join the Beta Track, and Manga will continue to look on my private server for updates. These updates will be more frequent than the official ones on heyrick (because setting this up means dropping a file into a directory, simple!). The downside is that your version may contain debugging messages/code, but the upside is that you’ll get to try out new features sooner.
If you are interested in this, set the variable Manga$BetaTrack (see !Run file).

Okay. As of this, version 0.03, Manga will tell YOU – so I won’t need to post any more messages like this. :-)

Hi Rick,

Thanks for an excellent addition and the improvements.

So far tried a few chapters at random just to see and dip my toes in as they say.

One thing I have noticed is if you shutdown RISCOS with Manga still on the iconbar then the desktop doesn’t fully shutdown and Manga is still shown on a iconbar until manually quit.

Thanks for an excellent addition and the improvements.

You’re welcome. I’m glad people are enjoying it.

So far tried a few chapters at random just to see and dip my toes in as they say.

Have you any preferred genre?
I’m really enjoying Azumi, and with something like 156 chapters, there’s lots to read.

if you shutdown RISCOS with Manga still on the iconbar then the desktop doesn’t fully shutdown and Manga is still shown on a iconbar until manually quit.

Okay, now that is weird. DeskLib’s Event library is supposed to trap and deal with Quit messages (it works when Quit from Task Manager…?).

Okay, I finally saw this – but had to Shutdown from the TaskManager icon (I have a custom Ctrl-Shift-F12 handler (Restart, Switch off, Cancel) that kills off the desktop more thoroughly :-) ). Weird how manual TaskManager Quit works but shutdown doesn’t…

Ah… just looked at DeskLib and Switcher source – I see what went wrong. Something that is only mentioned in small text (PRM 3-229 IIRC) is that the shutdown sequence sends both PreQuit and Quit as recorded messages (why, for Quit? that’s never supposed to be acknowledged!). When I created a message handler to respond to the URL message, it only deals with recorded messages. Quitting a task from TaskManager sends a regular (non-recorded) Quit message, so Manga would have always responded to these (DeskLib’s fall-back behaviour). But the Desktop shutdown sends recorded Quit messages, so my handler would need to deal with these too as there’s no fall-back behaviour for handled events.
[I’m not sure the PRM actually makes the distinction between recorded and non-recorded Quit messages!?]

Hmmm – sending Quit as a recorded message gives one the ability to object (which you shouldn’t ever do) while failing to have any method of notifying the TaskManager if a task actually failed to quit … and the TaskManager seems to determine success upon return of its message instead of waiting for the active task count to reach zero – if that’s why it was done this way, that’s really lazy!

Anyway. It’s been fixed now. Thanks for that report. If you have Manga set to look for the beta track releases, you’ll be notified of the update when you restart Manga. If not, you can pick it up directly from the server: http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/manga_0-04.zip

Anyway. It’s been fixed now.

Sadly, I know you’re referring to a “fix” of Manga rather than Task Manager.

Have you any preferred genre?
I’m really enjoying Azumi, and with something like 156 chapters, there’s lots to read.

Well I’ve not read that much yet as just sampling some and enjoying the artwork/dialogue.

Anyway. It’s been fixed now. Thanks for that report. If you have Manga set to look for the beta track releases, you’ll be notified of the update when you restart Manga.

Well it didn’t work by just quiting from the iconbar and re-running Manga as I had to reboot the Pandaboard as well but now ok and running 0.04 thanks.