New here with a question about .info files

jobro · 21 November 2005, 22:43

First of all: Hello to everybody here. Johan Brodd from Stockholm, called Jobro, is here to try to get my hands around some amiga related issues.

I'm working on a project called WinAmInfo that will help the users who uses ut to create info files for the folders in Windows. If you, like me, uses WinUAE and uses a folder on your harddisk as an amiga hd then I could need some of your knowledge:

How is the .info files constructed, any offset tables etc etc that I can use?

Can I pick any .info and rename it to the folder and it will open up with that .info?

What about the .info file named ".info", anything specific about it?

Any info can be sent to my email adress:

VSTMAN

AT

FADMAIL

DOT

COM

Doc Mindie · 22 November 2005, 01:35

the .info is kinda like the "index" for the drawer, it's not an actual #?.info file. (#? is the Amiga equivalent of doog ol' DOS' * )

And yes, you can take any drawers .info and rename into anything else, keep the .info and it'll work just fine.

To create your own .info, use IconEdit from SYS:Tools under the Amiga environment (Workbench) (Normally, AmigaOS is installed on the Workbench partition, but whichever disk you boot from, will become SYS: for that session, untill the next reboot)

jobro · 22 November 2005, 04:16

Ah thanks for the .info man

, will certainly be simplier for me to just snatch an info file and just rename it. THX!!

Hey uh, this is OT but maybe you might be able to help me with this one as well. I'm installing OS30 from ADF files and whenever I start the install it requires the ENV: disk. Any info on this issue somewhere? Searched but found null.

Codetapper · 22 November 2005, 04:54

jobro: I seriously think you need one of the pre-made kits like ClassicWB as you sound like you don't know what the hell you're doing (no offence but you've posted very confusing messages about icons, ADF editors that eat your CPU, and now ENV is missing!)

Grab this and forget all your setup problems: http://classicwb.abime.net/

Doc Mindie · 22 November 2005, 12:16

Quickfix for the ENV: problem:

press Right-Amiga+E, in therequester that pops up, type "Assign ENV: RAM:"

Problem solved

if it pops up with command not found, insert the Workbench ADF and type "DF0:C/assign env: ram:"

(Substitute "df0" with the diskslot in WinUAE you inserted Workbench into )

AMIGAZ · 22 November 2005, 12:29

@Jobro

have you abondoned your Amiga 500?

jobro · 22 November 2005, 14:37

Never had one, I had an A1200 waaaay back in the mid 90's.

Thanks for the helping hands, and yeah I'm still quite new to the Amiga OS. Had it to play games with.

AMIGAZ · 22 November 2005, 22:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by jobro

Never had one, I had an A1200 waaaay back in the mid 90's.

Thanks for the helping hands, and yeah I'm still quite new to the Amiga OS. Had it to play games with.

Isn't your name Johanna? maybe it was your brother or something who had an A500 or maybe I dreamt it all

jobro · 23 November 2005, 11:30

Nooooo.

My name is Johan Brodd.

AMIGAZ · 23 November 2005, 12:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by jobro

Nooooo.

My name is Johan Brodd.

Lol, ok

There's a girl with your nick which I helped transfer some amiga games in adf format back to floppy disks so she could play them on her brothers A500.

Doc Mindie · 23 November 2005, 14:28

So, JoBro.

I guess a little explanation is in order, about the assign command

uhm....as you know, from the very first day, the Amiga was designed to use diskettes, and to differentiate about which file was on which diskette, they didn't just use the df0: df1: and so on for the drive. They made it so you could type "cd mydisk:" in the shell, and you went to the disk called "mydisk" no matter what drive it was in.

Commodore (and the employers that designed the Amiga before Commodore bought it) then thought "Wouldn't it be cool if could make the computer believe this and that directory was a disk by itself?" So they invented Assign.

Which, effectively, can be used to "fool" the Amiga into thinking drive ENV: is inserted, when in reality it's a directory in RAM:

So that when you (in Shell) type "cd env:" you happened to end up in RAM:Env

Assign can of course be used to make any number of "disks" appear to be inserted.

disknames on the Amiga is not limited to A: B: C: ..... Z: like on some other "computer" we all love to dislike. A disk's name can be anything up to 30 (?) characters.

"A_Very_Long_Disk_Name" is a valid name for your diskette, actually. And.....what's more: insert the disk into any of you 4 available diskette drives, type "cd A_Very_Long_Disk_Name" and there you are. Put it into another one, and type the same....... Amiga Magic at it's peak :P

jobro · 24 November 2005, 06:56

Definitly Amiga magic at the peak.

Firstly thanks for the helping hand. Will help me out a bit at least.

Oh and about the girl you helped, well the world is large enough for us two to have the same name. JoBro is rendered from JOhan BROdd.

AMIGAZ · 24 November 2005, 12:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by jobro

Definitly Amiga magic at the peak.

Firstly thanks for the helping hand. Will help me out a bit at least.

Oh and about the girl you helped, well the world is large enough for us two to have the same name. JoBro is rendered from JOhan BROdd.

Her name is Johanna Brolund

Doc Mindie · 24 November 2005, 14:37

JoBro, several shortcomings of (especially) DOS was fixed and corrected with AmigaDOS, even in 1985, with the first A1000.

I mean, long-ish filenames (DOS had 8.3, AmigaDOS 31 characters, even UNIX was limited to 16, if I remember correctly)

The ability to "Assign" a drive to a directory. Novell's "Search drive mapping" was okay....but if you changed directory under one of the mapped drives, the computer was totally confused, whereas devs: no matter what you did, always points to "SYS

evs"

The ability to access a drive with several names. Like....your startup-disk, can be accessed by typing Workbench: SYS: or DH0: for example (this depends a little bit on what you have actually named the drive, and what the actual partition is called, but the theory is the same)

have you ever worked with DOS, and had to format several drives at the same time? in DOS you'll have to format one drive at the time. On the Amiga, the sentence "run format drive df0: name empty" causes the prompt to return, and you can type "run format drive dh0: name silly" and voila, two drives are formatted at the same time.

In my mind, it's too bad Commodore never knew what they had their hands on....... because if they did, the world would likely look different today

jobro · 24 November 2005, 22:48

Yeah I know a whole lot of sh*t about that so called MS-DOS, and by damn I love-hate this OS.

Thanks for your helping hands!

And if you want to know what I'm gonna do with the info's then just check out the WinAmInfo thread.

21 November 2005, 22:43	#1
jobro Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Age: 52 Posts: 129	New here with a question about .info files First of all: Hello to everybody here. Johan Brodd from Stockholm, called Jobro, is here to try to get my hands around some amiga related issues. I'm working on a project called WinAmInfo that will help the users who uses ut to create info files for the folders in Windows. If you, like me, uses WinUAE and uses a folder on your harddisk as an amiga hd then I could need some of your knowledge: How is the .info files constructed, any offset tables etc etc that I can use? Can I pick any .info and rename it to the folder and it will open up with that .info? What about the .info file named ".info", anything specific about it? Any info can be sent to my email adress: VSTMAN AT FADMAIL DOT COM

22 November 2005, 04:16	#3
jobro Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Age: 52 Posts: 129	Ah thanks for the .info man , will certainly be simplier for me to just snatch an info file and just rename it. THX!! Hey uh, this is OT but maybe you might be able to help me with this one as well. I'm installing OS30 from ADF files and whenever I start the install it requires the ENV: disk. Any info on this issue somewhere? Searched but found null. Last edited by jobro; 22 November 2005 at 04:21.

24 November 2005, 14:37	#14
Doc Mindie In deep Trouble Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Manchester, Made in Norway Age: 51 Posts: 841	JoBro, several shortcomings of (especially) DOS was fixed and corrected with AmigaDOS, even in 1985, with the first A1000. I mean, long-ish filenames (DOS had 8.3, AmigaDOS 31 characters, even UNIX was limited to 16, if I remember correctly) The ability to "Assign" a drive to a directory. Novell's "Search drive mapping" was okay....but if you changed directory under one of the mapped drives, the computer was totally confused, whereas devs: no matter what you did, always points to "SYSevs" The ability to access a drive with several names. Like....your startup-disk, can be accessed by typing Workbench: SYS: or DH0: for example (this depends a little bit on what you have actually named the drive, and what the actual partition is called, but the theory is the same) have you ever worked with DOS, and had to format several drives at the same time? in DOS you'll have to format one drive at the time. On the Amiga, the sentence "run format drive df0: name empty" causes the prompt to return, and you can type "run format drive dh0: name silly" and voila, two drives are formatted at the same time. In my mind, it's too bad Commodore never knew what they had their hands on....... because if they did, the world would likely look different today

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22 November 2005, 01:35	#2
Doc Mindie In deep Trouble Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Manchester, Made in Norway Age: 51 Posts: 841	the .info is kinda like the "index" for the drawer, it's not an actual #?.info file. (#? is the Amiga equivalent of doog ol' DOS' * ) And yes, you can take any drawers .info and rename into anything else, keep the .info and it'll work just fine. To create your own .info, use IconEdit from SYS:Tools under the Amiga environment (Workbench) (Normally, AmigaOS is installed on the Workbench partition, but whichever disk you boot from, will become SYS: for that session, untill the next reboot)

22 November 2005, 04:54	#4
Codetapper 2 contact me: email only! Join Date: May 2001 Location: Auckland / New Zealand Posts: 3,182	jobro: I seriously think you need one of the pre-made kits like ClassicWB as you sound like you don't know what the hell you're doing (no offence but you've posted very confusing messages about icons, ADF editors that eat your CPU, and now ENV is missing!) Grab this and forget all your setup problems: http://classicwb.abime.net/

22 November 2005, 12:16	#5
Doc Mindie In deep Trouble Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Manchester, Made in Norway Age: 51 Posts: 841	Quickfix for the ENV: problem: press Right-Amiga+E, in therequester that pops up, type "Assign ENV: RAM:" Problem solved if it pops up with command not found, insert the Workbench ADF and type "DF0:C/assign env: ram:" (Substitute "df0" with the diskslot in WinUAE you inserted Workbench into )

22 November 2005, 12:29	#6
AMIGAZ Amiga-Mad Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Sweden Age: 46 Posts: 1,286	@Jobro have you abondoned your Amiga 500?

22 November 2005, 14:37	#7
jobro Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Age: 52 Posts: 129	Never had one, I had an A1200 waaaay back in the mid 90's. Thanks for the helping hands, and yeah I'm still quite new to the Amiga OS. Had it to play games with.

23 November 2005, 11:30	#9
jobro Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Age: 52 Posts: 129	Nooooo. My name is Johan Brodd.

23 November 2005, 14:28	#11
Doc Mindie In deep Trouble Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Manchester, Made in Norway Age: 51 Posts: 841	So, JoBro. I guess a little explanation is in order, about the assign command uhm....as you know, from the very first day, the Amiga was designed to use diskettes, and to differentiate about which file was on which diskette, they didn't just use the df0: df1: and so on for the drive. They made it so you could type "cd mydisk:" in the shell, and you went to the disk called "mydisk" no matter what drive it was in. Commodore (and the employers that designed the Amiga before Commodore bought it) then thought "Wouldn't it be cool if could make the computer believe this and that directory was a disk by itself?" So they invented Assign. Which, effectively, can be used to "fool" the Amiga into thinking drive ENV: is inserted, when in reality it's a directory in RAM: So that when you (in Shell) type "cd env:" you happened to end up in RAM:Env Assign can of course be used to make any number of "disks" appear to be inserted. disknames on the Amiga is not limited to A: B: C: ..... Z: like on some other "computer" we all love to dislike. A disk's name can be anything up to 30 (?) characters. "A_Very_Long_Disk_Name" is a valid name for your diskette, actually. And.....what's more: insert the disk into any of you 4 available diskette drives, type "cd A_Very_Long_Disk_Name" and there you are. Put it into another one, and type the same....... Amiga Magic at it's peak :P

24 November 2005, 06:56	#12
jobro Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Age: 52 Posts: 129	Definitly Amiga magic at the peak. Firstly thanks for the helping hand. Will help me out a bit at least. Oh and about the girl you helped, well the world is large enough for us two to have the same name. JoBro is rendered from JOhan BROdd.

24 November 2005, 22:48	#15
jobro Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Age: 52 Posts: 129	Yeah I know a whole lot of sh*t about that so called MS-DOS, and by damn I love-hate this OS. Thanks for your helping hands! And if you want to know what I'm gonna do with the info's then just check out the WinAmInfo thread.

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