Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[DamienD]

To check things on disks I usually just load my ClassicWB Lite 3.1 .HDF and insert the desired disk (and hope it's not NDOS)

[Jope]

Originally Posted by emufan

dir instead of cd/echo, since you can start sys:c/example,
but with cd/echo you have no clue what's on the disk

Yeh.. Judging by the ROM residents in 2.x+ they were mainly looking to optimize startup times for floppy users. :-) Many startup-sequence related commands are in ROM.

[emufan]

back in time, with only an A500 it was no fun, and so it's today using emulators

for sure I would have bought a flash kickstart module to make some additions,
if those thing were available in the old days

[nogginthenog]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

Does compression of data on Amiga DD disks gives loading speed advance versus the same data written uncompressed on disk?


For example what is the difference between 128 KB data loaded, vs 64 KB loaded and then decompressed to 128 KB (assuming 50% compression effectiveness and fast depacking algo, like PowerPacker)?

I imagine so. Floppy disks are very slow.

You need extra RAM though. In your example you need 64KB+128KB+the size of the decompression routine.

There are probably some tricks to reduce RAM, like using 1 buffer of 128K and decompressing 'backwards'.

[jolly11]

HARD DISK (2 partitions, Work & System): 692459 graphics mem, 0 other mem

CF (1 partition System): 710698 graphics mem, 0 other mem

[MajicMushroom]

What the hell is Bogo RAM?

[-Acid-]

TO use ide0 as the hd controller in WinUAE is it just a case of disabling JIT and enabling A600/1200 IDE?

[Jope]

Originally Posted by MajicMushroom

What the hell is Bogo RAM?

Guessing someone's funny name for $C00000 RAM?

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Jope

The 256k ROM space of 1.x was so tight that they had to leave all the ROM resident commands out.

It's worse than that actually, they waited until the beginning of the month to get single digit dates!

[Jope]

Heh, got any link to that anecdote? :-)

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by Jope

Heh, got any link to that anecdote? :-)

"The Amiga Years" book IIRC.

[TuKo]

Some questions that will make me look very stupid but I'm too lazy to create a fake account to post them :-)

1) What's the need for "Version >NIL:" and "FailAt 21" at beginning of a stock Startup-Sequence ?
2) Which *%ç%* hardware really needs drivers to be loaded with BindDrivers ?

Thanks in advance

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by TuKo

1) What's the need for "Version >NIL:" and "FailAt 21" at beginning of a stock Startup-Sequence ?

I've seen when you quit some games it fails with a returncode:



If you use / set "FailAt 21" then you don't see the message.

[TuKo]

Thanks DamienD, my question wasn't maybe precise enough. Why did Commmodore/AmigaTech/Escom/whatever did put this one in their Workbench Startup-Sequence ? Were they expecting something failing with Error 20 ?

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by TuKo

Thanks DamienD, my question wasn't maybe precise enough. Why did Commmodore/AmigaTech/Escom/whatever did put this one in their Workbench Startup-Sequence ? Were they expecting something failing with Error 20 ?

No, failat sets the level at which the script will halt and not continue.
So with FailAt 21 it means that any error below 21 will not halt the whole startup-sequence, it will just fail at that line and go on. I don't think they did it to expect something failing, rather to make the startup-sequence work through even if something you add fails.

http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaOS...ference#FAILAT

>NIL: redirects anything the command outputs to the null device. This is so nothing is shown on a shell window. It's useful in the beginning of the startup-sequence, because it will not open a Shell window until there's some output. There could be tiny memory implications on this (opening a screen with a Shell window uses memory) but mostly, it will mean your boot will go almost directly to WB without showing a Shell window (unless other stuff throws output).

It also cleans up the startup, otherwise everything would be verbose.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by TuKo

Some questions that will make me look very stupid but I'm too lazy to create a fake account to post them :-)

1) What's the need for "Version >NIL:" and "FailAt 21" at beginning of a stock Startup-Sequence ?
2) Which *%ç%* hardware really needs drivers to be loaded with BindDrivers ?

Thanks in advance

1)
"version >NIL:" does not much, if it is not followed by something like:
"version >NIL: exec.library 45 20"
this would test the version of exec and return 20 if it is too low, but be quiet if it is all right.

if you put "FailAt 21" before that, the script would continue even with the error code 20 thrown.

2)
E.g. the A2088 (XT) Bridgeboard needs BindDrivers

[idrougge]

I think the A2090 also uses BindDrivers, and the Oktapussy replacement firmware for Oktagon/Alfadata controllers can be loaded using BindDrivers.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by TuKo

2) Which *%ç%* hardware really needs drivers to be loaded with BindDrivers ?

It's a nice cost reduction feature. You need a ROM, traces, interfacing logic and such on the card to handle this, but with the driver on file you can do without. It is obviously not the best solution for something that you would use to start up the machine, but for other purposes, why not?

And AFAIK the ROM driver is copied to ram in the same fashion as would a BindDrivers version file so you can make both version with a few build time switches.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Akira

No, failat sets the level at which the script will halt and not continue.
So with FailAt 21 it means that any error below 21 will not halt the whole startup-sequence, it will just fail at that line and go on. I don't think they did it to expect something failing, rather to make the startup-sequence work through even if something you add fails.

Basically if you intend on using the If command's WARN/ERROR/FAIL parameters, 21 is the minimum FailAt level you can run at, so it is set in there for you.

http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaOS...d_Reference#IF

[Daedalus]

Version >NIL: might not look useful, but it does actually do something - it opens version.library and also sets two environmental variables with the version information of Kickstart and Workbench. Other parts of the startup sequence can then check Kickstart or Workbench versions without having to run the Version command again.