Help with lha files on compact flash

[gbasource]

I have the required files that are supposed to get my compact flash thats inserted in my pcmcia adapter to show up. Ive got fat95.lha, cfd.lha, cardreset.lha and cardpatch.lha. As far as I know thats everything I need in order to get the pcmcia with inserted flash to show up everytime i boot into workbench. The only way I can boot into workbench at the moment is by inserting the actual workbench floppy because i do not have anything set as an hard drive inside the amiga. Apparently, you can still get your compact flash in the pcmcia to show up without an hard drive in the amiga. What im struggling with is what to do with the .lha files ive got. Where exactly do they go? Do I have to actually extract there contents? How do I change the startup sequence and what is it I have to type into the start up sequence and where? Im new to all this stuff. My amiga is a amiga 1200 and my compact flash card and adapter are known to work and be compatible. I tried the amiga kit easyadf disk installation but that still only shows my pcmcia when booting the disk. I want it to show up without having to keep using that.

[Jope]

Sure you need to extract them. Just like you can't run anything off a zip file in Windows. The files you need are inside the archives.

From cfd.lha: devs/compactflash.device goes into devs of your boot floppy and cf0 + cf0.info go into devs/dosdrivers of your boot floppy.
From fat95.lha: l/fat95 goes into l of your boot floppy

You can forget about cardreset and cardpatch for now.

Make a copy of your workbench disk first and modify that.

[gbasource]

Ive made that disk now and when inserted, it boots and my compact flash shows up. Now I want the compact flash to be auto detected whenever the amiga is switched on without the need for a boot floppy or an hard drive. I want to install workbench on it so that I can put monitor drivers into the drivers drawer and get my amiga monitor working correctly. Is it possible to get it to detect the compact flash in the pcmcia without the boot floppy and is it possible to have workbench installed and running on it?

[indigolemon]

Unfortunately not, as far as I am aware you cannot boot from the PCMCIA slot.

I suggest you investigate a CompactFlash to IDE solution to be able to boot from a CF card.

[gbasource]

If I change the monitor display in prefs and click save, will those settings go back to default on next boot?

[indigolemon]

Assuming your Workbench boot disk is writeable, the prefs should be saved to disk yes.

[gbasource]

And if I boot a game straight from switching the amiga on the monitor setting will be remembered too?

[Jope]

It is possible to make a boot disk which transfers the system assigns to the CF card. It is even possible to make a small reset resident ram drive which does this for you.

Fat32 is not necessarily the best possible filesystem to run AmigaOS off of, but I guess it should mostly work.

Mount CF0:
Assign SYS: CF0:
Assign C: SYS:C
Assign L: SYS:L
Assign FONTS: SYS:Fonts
Assign S: SYS:S
Assign DEVS: SYS:Devs
Assign LIBS: SYS:Libs
Assign T: RAM:
Execute S:Startup-Sequence

[gbasource]

Originally Posted by Jope

It is possible to make a boot disk which transfers the system assigns to the CF card. It is even possible to make a small reset resident ram drive which does this for you.

Fat32 is not necessarily the best possible filesystem to run AmigaOS off of, but I guess it should mostly work.

Mount CF0:
Assign SYS: CF0:
Assign C: SYS:C
Assign L: SYS:L
Assign FONTS: SYS:Fonts
Assign S: SYS:S
Assign DEVS: SYS:Devs
Assign LIBS: SYS:Libs
Assign T: RAM:
Execute S:Startup-Sequence

I take it that has to be entered using notepad on the startup-sequence file found in S on the compact flash? Now I just need to know where about in the file to type it and if this will make the flash load up my workbench settings whenever Its inserted and booted up. Thanks for your help up til now. Very much appreciated

[gbasource]

This is what the startup-sequence file says for me at the moment if this helps. Just need to know where abouts to copy and paste the info you gave me.

; $VER: startup-sequence 39.9 (9.8.92)

C:SetPatch QUIET
C:Version >NIL:
C:AddBuffers >NIL: DF0: 15
FailAt 21

C:MakeDir RAM:T RAM:Clipboards RAM:ENV RAM:ENV/Sys
C:Copy >NIL: ENVARC: RAM:ENV ALL NOREQ

Resident >NIL: C:Assign PURE
Resident >NIL: C:Execute PURE

Assign >NIL: ENV: RAM:ENV
Assign >NIL: T: RAM:T
Assign >NIL: CLIPS: RAM:Clipboards
Assign >NIL: REXX: S:
Assign >NIL: PRINTERS: DEVS:Printers
Assign >NIL: KEYMAPS: DEVS:Keymaps
Assign >NIL: LOCALE: SYS:Locale
Assign >NIL: LIBS: SYS:Classes ADD
Assign >NIL: HELP: LOCALE:Help DEFER

IF NOT EXISTS SYS:Fonts
Assign FONTS:
EndIF

BindDrivers
C:Mount >NIL: DEVSOSDrivers/~(#?.info)

IF EXISTS DEVS:Monitors
IF EXISTS DEVS:Monitors/VGAOnly
DEVS:Monitors/VGAOnly
EndIF

C:List >NIL: DEVS:Monitors/~(#?.info|VGAOnly) TO T:M LFORMAT "DEVS:Monitors/%s"
Execute T:M
Celete >NIL: T:M
EndIF

SetEnv Workbench $Workbench
SetEnv Kickstart $Kickstart
UnSet Workbench
UnSet Kickstart

C:IPrefs

C:ConClip

Path >NIL: RAM: C: SYS:Utilities SYS:Rexxc SYS:System S: SYS:Prefs SYS:WBStartup SYS:Tools SYS:Tools/Commodities

IF EXISTS S:User-Startup
Execute S:User-Startup
EndIF

Resident Execute REMOVE
Resident Assign REMOVE

C:CardPatch
Run >NIL: C:CardReset TICKS 50

C:LoadWB
EndCLI >NIL:

[Jope]

Originally Posted by gbasource

I take it that has to be entered using notepad on the startup-sequence file found in S on the compact flash?

No, leave the one on the compact flash alone for now. The stuff in my post was for the startup-sequence on your bootdisk!

I would probably use the ed editor myself as it needs to be a text file.

Now I just need to know where about in the file to type it and if this will make the flash load up my workbench settings whenever Its inserted and booted up. Thanks for your help up til now. Very much appreciated

Make a boot disk that has this as its startup-sequence and then you will have the system running off the CF card, and all settings will be saved there too.

[gbasource]

Does that mean the system will only run off the CF card with the boot disk in future or will it load up the CF card without the boot disk? If it doesnt load up the CF without the boot disk then I dont see the point because at the moment im using a boot disk to boot up the CF anyway. I take it your method just makes changes be saved to the CF rather than the disk.

[Jope]

Yes, you will need the boot disk. The whole point of the exercise is to have a useful workbench setup on the PCMCIA CF card for you. If you do not move the system assigns, the system will not work properly, using the installer to install new programs will not work properly and so on. So it is not just for saving settings to the CF, it is having your system run off the CF so that you can remove the boot floppy once workbench is running, without the system asking for it to be inserted again all the time.

All your libraries, fonts, etc would be coming from the boot floppy instead of the CF card if you do not move the assigns, so it is quite relevant!

I recommend learning a bit of AmigaOS and investigating how you would modify your boot disk to create a reset resident RAD: drive that is just large enough to hold the required files to do the mount cf0: + assign handover + execute for you when you reset. Then you only need the boot disk from cold start or if the software crashes real hard.

[ajk]

Was there a particular reason you don't wish to get a CompactFlash to IDE adapter and install the card internally? The adapters are quite inexpensive and then you wouldn't need a boot floppy. You could still use the PCMCIA adapter (with a second CF card) for the purpose of transferring files to the Amiga.

Also for your question in post #7, unfortunately almost no game is going to honor
monitor settings you have made in Workbench; they will default to the standard PAL/NTSC lo-res mode.

[gbasource]

I tried 3 different compact flash to ide adapters and all 3 compact flash cards were ones that were proved to work in a compatibility thread on here. I followed tons of videos for each compact flash. Some had me using the sfs file system, some had me using one call psaio (or something like that). After following the videos over and over to make sure i did everything correctly with all 3 compact flash cards, they still would not boot up into custom workbench so in the end i thought im opening my amiga way too much here and i hadnt long spent a lot of money on getting this boxed and complete near mint amiga so the last thing i wanted to keep doing was poking around in the insides. My main aim from day 1 of getting the amiga was to play backups. Failing with the ide route, i thought the pcmcia option was worth a try. it worked for me even though I had some trouble creating my own custom boot disk at first. Thats when I bought the boot disk from amiga kit. I would have to insert that, then workbench then the boot disk again to get the pcmcia to show up which was annoying but thanks to Jopes reply in this thread I made a boot disk that boots the pcmcia up quicker. I needed the boot disk off pcmcia anyway in order to get and install the easyadf program off it. So now ive achieved what I wanted to do and playing backups. Only downside is theyre all on floppies but nothing sounds better than hearing the floppy drive reading the disks. It adds to the nostalgia for me. As for my monitor, i tried every monitor driver on workbench and i have dark grey borders over lapping the screen image down the sides. Its better playing it on my lcd tv anyway. The reason i was all for playing the amiga games on a monitor was i thought it would get rid of the black border thats on 95% of amiga games. Im guessing you cant get rid of that though?

[Hewitson]

I assume your monitor is not a 15khz monitor, as if it was it would be far better than an LCD TV.

I'm not sure what you mean by the black border, if it's the big ugly black strip down the bottom of the screen, this can often be fixed by setting the NTSC tooltype in WHDLoad. This will have the side effect of making the game run faster, but many of these games were designed for NTSC machines anyway.

Alternatively you can set NTSC in Early Startup, but some software will override this setting.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I'm not sure what you mean by the black border, if it's the big ugly black strip down the bottom of the screen, this can often be fixed by setting the NTSC tooltype in WHDLoad. This will have the side effect of making the game run faster, but many of these games were designed for NTSC machines anyway.

I'd say "many" and qualify that as "some" instead. The majority of games came from Europe, especially post-1989, and there was a period where a huge proportion of PAL games only used 200 lines but still had graphics that were PAL aspect ratio and ran properly at 50Hz.

Having the bottom fifth of your screen just be a black bar was pretty normal. It was effectively widescreen gaming. xD

[aeberbach]

I use a Mac with a CF card reader next to my Amiga. The CF card that goes in the reader and from there to the Amiga's PCMCIA slot. CF is formatted in the Mac as FAT so both systems can read it, after CFD133 and FAT95 are installed on the Amiga. New files are always unpacked on the Mac because even a big archive takes next to no time. The program that does this is free and is called The Unarchiver. Unpacked files go on the CF card, then the CF card goes onto the Amiga, then copied to an Amiga internal drive if necessary. You definitely want to get an Amiga internal hard drive of some kind - booting without a floppy makes all the difference. Waiting on floppies is no fun at all.