25 January 2021, 13:17 | #21 | |||||||||||
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BTW Amiga books often refer to different ways of newer and older Workbench versions. So it was quite normal that some people continue to use older systems. And this is more true for ROM versions. Quote:
The Amiga memory is split into Chip RAM (memory used by the custom chipset to store graphics and sound) and Fast RAM (memory which is used only by the Processor). The Amiga A500 can come with 512K or 1M of memory. You can increase Chip RAM up to the maximum of 2Mb and Fast RAM up to 7Mb or 8Mb (depending if you have 1Mb or 2Mb of Chip RAM) to a total of 9Mb. You can increase RAM by adding memory via a new memory board into the expansion slot underneath the Amiga behind a trapdoor or via the Expansion Port on the left hand side, sometimes as part of another device such as the A590. Is there anything about Slow RAM? Quote:
Anybody can check this issue using an emulator. Just open WB 1.3 CLI and enter Code:
setenv test 123 echo $test I can even imagine that Commodore just published information about new features in WB 1.3 but they didn't implement them. I remember that many new shell features were claimed by Microsoft in 1995 for Windows 95 but they were actually realized only after maybe 2010. Why do you react this way? I am just seeking your help. If you know how to use return codes please help me. Quote:
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25 January 2021, 14:13 | #22 | |||||
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Now, Are the terms a bit confusing? Yes, maybe. Is it an actual problem, as you seem to think? No, not really - no one really expected Fast RAM to speed up their system as Commodore didn't claim it would in their consumer oriented documentation. Quote:
I've attached a screen shot of a script that shows that WB1.3 supports the use of $var just fine. Again, this was no more than a couple of minutes of work. I almost never write scripts, but I could get this to work very easily. Last edited by roondar; 25 January 2021 at 14:22. Reason: Corrected: system vs CPU |
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26 January 2021, 10:44 | #23 | |
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This changed under 2.04 in the sense that it is now up to the shell to expand the variables, and pass the expanded variables into the commands. This has the advantage that more or less all commands now support variable expansion transparently, though the disadvantage of the shell syntax becoming more intransparent and not fully backwards compatible - consider for example how to print a $ sign with "echo". However, leaving all this alone, there seems to be a serious misconception about the actual hardware, and the operating system. Most of the things you listed here are related to the 1.x Os release series, not to the actual hardware. |
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26 January 2021, 10:47 | #24 | |
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I agree with you that the old Amiga's can run the newer OS just fine and that you can choose to simply upgrade them, but there it is. |
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27 January 2021, 09:30 | #25 | ||||
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I have made the next improved list of the Amiga drawbacks:
1) no system functions for working with wildcards - these functions was provided only in ROMs available since 1990; 2) incomplete information about types of Amiga memory: they told us only about Fast and Chip RAM but there also was Slow RAM; 3) no way to use program return codes, only few "standard" return codes are allowed (exactly 0, 5, 10, 20) until WB 2.0; 4) iconx doesn't allow SKIP, IF, LAB, ... until WB 3; 5) the absence of kill-kind command in Amiga DOS worsened impression about Amiga preemptive multitasking OS; 6) no variables in CLI until WB 1.3 and very limited variable support until WB 2; 7) poor expandability of the A1000/500/600. I also made I list of some Amiga quirks: 1) Amiga OS periodically reset its timer which doesn't allow its direct use for longer than 21 minutes. This was fixed in KS 3 (maybe even in KS 2); 2) standard utility `ask' provides only two return codes and there is no any other standard utility to get information from a user even in WB 3; 3) Basic has only 25 KB free when it starts while even the Commodore 128 has 120K, Commodore +4 has 60K, and Commodore 64 has 38K for Basic. Of course, it is possible to ask for more memory later but the initial low number could shock. Quote:
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Last edited by litwr; 06 February 2021 at 11:25. Reason: a correction |
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27 January 2021, 11:29 | #26 | |||
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Sheesh. What's next, a quirk of the OS is that accessing the Blitter directly will likely crash the system? Because that's the exact same thing as what you're doing, just a different hardware resource. By this standard Windows 10/Linux are horrible systems, you can't directly access any hardware on them without running into problems. Quote:
Note here that at least two of the problems/quirks on your list are issues I've never heard anyone else complain about - and I've been reading mailing lists/news groups/magazines and forums about the Amiga for around 30 years now. Also note that at least one of them has been denied to be true by several other users, but you keep claiming it's a thing anyway (the return code stuff). Last edited by roondar; 27 January 2021 at 12:16. Reason: Clarified it a bit |
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27 January 2021, 12:20 | #27 |
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What do you expect...
He doesn't understand the difference between system calls/functions and shell commands. Complains that the car doesn't do what he wants it to do and is therefore broken, while both he and passenger are using the steering wheel at the same time (had to put it this way so he hopefully undestands). Complains about the lack of modern features in 30+ years old software, instead to comparing it to what was available at the time and trying to understand the context and concepts. Makes uneducated and bogus claims and then fabricates conslusions. Either trolling or lacking... in some human aspects. |
27 January 2021, 14:50 | #28 | |
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I am leaning towards trolling, but yeah it can be both. |
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28 January 2021, 02:45 | #29 |
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You should keep in mind that from AmigaOS 2.0 onwards, ARexx is part of the system.
Shell scripts are awful on all operating systems, and AmigaOS has avoided going down the ill-advised path of implementing a really bad programming language in its shell, like Bash, by integrating a proper programming language instead. That also means that the primitive Ask command can be left as is, since if you need more features than that, you have ARexx at your disposal. |
28 January 2021, 11:35 | #30 | |||
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If there was one thing 'wrong' with the A2000 that made it bigger it was those PC bus slots, but then I used them to run a PC hard drive controller so... Quote:
The PC's 'open' architecture resulted in massive compatibility problems, particularly with games. If you bought a game for a C64 you knew it would run on it no matter when it was made, whereas with a PC it was hit and miss. Quote:
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28 January 2021, 16:11 | #31 | |
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It's possible that has changed by now, but it was the normal state of affairs back in the day. Last edited by roondar; 28 January 2021 at 16:31. |
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28 January 2021, 18:47 | #32 | |
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On today's unixoid systems, wild card expansion is part of the shell, and the command gets the expanded patterns passed in. This has the drawback that the command line of a command could get very large (if many files match), and that commands need to use some sort of convention for its arguments such as to assign the expanded arguments to the right slot. This certainly has some drawbacks in generic argument parsing. There were also older system (Atari Dos) that expanded arguments as part of the file system functionality. On the amiga, it is up to the called command to do so. On Kick 1.3 and below, command were written in BCPL, the pattern matching was compiled into each command that needed it ,though it came from the same source ("PATTERN"). Then came "arp", which provided C versions of what was PATTERN, and then came Kick 2.0 which integrated arp functions into the dos.library. So pattern matching was not really system supplied, but the patterns were just a convention a subset of commands followed. |
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28 January 2021, 20:29 | #33 | |
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I think the break command works around the Wait() call, so if the program is looking to receive a Wait() with a SIGF_BREAK_CTRL_C then the break command will stop it. I would like to see what the other OS's for 16bit processors and a 256K ROM is like. MS-DOS by then had about 4 years development and no GUI, Atari TOS has less then 1 year in development (CPM was longer), Unix V7 was released in 1979 so BSD and SYS V had more experience. But the main problem with those models is that they did not sell enough. I still love my A500 had great fun with it |
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29 January 2021, 09:25 | #34 |
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29 January 2021, 11:48 | #35 |
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What's weird here is listing OS issues as tied to a hardware model. From an operating system standpoint the A500 and A1200 are near identical. The only difference is due to driver issues you can't really run AmigaOS 1.x effectively on the A1200 since drivers are missing for stuff like the IDE controller.
Nothing ties you to 1.x on the A500. AmigaOS 3.x runs just fine on it. |
29 January 2021, 16:27 | #36 | |
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However, both commands only operate on processes in the Tripos "process table", which is the "list of all CLIs" in the sense of AmigaOs. If a program was run from workbench, the Tripos subsystem (aka "AmigaDOS" aka "dos.library") does not notice, and does not have that in the process table, so the comamnds do not see them and do not operate on them. It is just another part where Tripos duplicates AmigaOs structures. For AmigaOs, we have the exec task list. For dos, we have the process table "status" lists. Actually, this table is a mostly useless legacy. It would be considerably more useful if all processes (not just shells) would populate it, or if that table would be removed completely and the dos.library would operate on the exec lists instead. |
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29 January 2021, 17:34 | #37 | |
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29 January 2021, 19:24 | #38 |
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Nothing is perfect, and indeed, "unzip *.zip" will do exactly that on Linux - multiple zip files passed in as arguments. The shell cannot know the conventions of the called program.
The AmigaOs method has other drawbacks. You cannot safely pass a filename into an unknown command since you do not know whether it takes wildcards or not. If it does take wildcards, you need to escape the characters: *,?,#,... and anything else the wildcard pattern matcher takes with an apostroph, i.e. a file with the (admittedly wild) file name # would then become '#. If it does not take wildcards, you must not do that or otherwise the file names will be wrong. The output of a "list LFORMAT=..:" is thus not generally usable in case you have files with file names that re-essemble pattern wildcards. There will be some improvements in 3.2 on this as there will be a difference between %s and %S: One escapes wildcards, the other not. |
29 January 2021, 22:06 | #39 | |
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Thank you for the answer Thomas |
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30 January 2021, 21:22 | #40 | |
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void chkabort(void) ; void Chk-Abort(void) ; These functions force immediate checking for the Control-C and Control-D break characters. Normally, this check only occurs when level 1 I/O is performed. The chkabort function provides a mechanism for detecting the break characters at other times, an important function for programs that do little or no I/O processing. If the break key is detected, the break trap is executed. The break trap is simply a function that gets called whenever the user enters Control-C. If the break trap returns a zero value, control returns to the calling function; otherwise, the program terminates. If the program is invoked from the Workbench, the default handler displays a requester allowing the user to abort the program; otherwise, the default handler prints a message to the Command Line Interpreter (CLI) and aborts. The chkabort function ignores the break characters Control-E and Control-F. The chkabort function may be replaced with calls to the onbreak or signal functions. To turn off Control-C checking, you can compile with the nochk abort option, or you can include the following prototype and function definition in your code: void regargs — chkabort (void) ; void regargs — chkabort (void) { This code replaces the function normally called for a Control-C with a function that does nothing. |
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