WB 2.05 install on A3000

[Sequencer]

Hello...
From about 1993 to 2002, I had an A3000T-040 that I absolutely loved. When Commodore fell apart, I decided the Amiga had no future, sold my system, and went to Linux/FreeBSD on x86. Then a few years ago, I found that FS-UAE wasn't quite enough to cure my obsession with the Amiga (that never really went away!), and now I have a hardware desktop version A3000 (no accelerator...yet). It's nice just having an Amiga around again.



I'm ready to start over. I imaged a set of Workbench installer disks (images obtained from various places, more on that later), and additionally bought Vesalia's enhanced copy of 3.1 on floppy. (I especially did this because of the FFS 45.9 included right off the installer disks.) I have used HDToolbox from the Vesalia disks to update the filesystem on the Amiga's hard drive, and reformatted System: and Work:


Since there are certain programs (like the voice synthesis library/handler), and certain fonts, that A3000's came preinstalled with which, for license reasons, didn't quite make it into Workbench 3.1, my intent was to reproduce the same installation history my previous A3000 in the 90's experienced: I wanted to start by installing Workbench 2.05, then upgrade to 2.1, then 3.0, then finish by installing Vesalia's enhanced 3.1. The idea was to make sure what was installed afterward was pretty much my Workbench installation from before, except with the Vesalia bugfixes/upgrades.


The first obstacle I ran into was pretty easily solved: The 2.05 installer refused to boot because it mistakenly thought the Kickstart 3.1 in the machine was too "old"; actually if anything, it was too new, but the script logic was dumb. I just kludged the startup-sequence on the installer disk to not check Kickstart version.


But now I'm running into another problem: It's saying I'm on an A600, and it can't find my hard drive (the same one I just prepared in HDToolbox using the Vesalia disks). Is there actually a strain of Workbench 2.05 out there that was so customized for A600 OEM use that it can't conceive that you're not on an A600, or did my Vesalia filesystem update make my system confuse the 2.05 installer? Is it even worth it for me to be going through all this trouble to have the pre-3.1 installations done beforehand? I really would like the old utilities, speech synthesis, and fonts. Would it have sufficed to just go back to 2.1 instead of all the way back to 2.05? I think that version might be a little more agreeable to Amiga's that have new kickstarts/filesystems than 2.05 probably is.


I'm especially interested in knowing if there really is an A600-specific installer for 2.05, because it's acting like that might be what I've got from these floppy installer images I found. Surely there's got to be another strain of 2.05 than that though, because A3000's came with 2.05 out of the box if I remember correctly.

[Matt_H]

Welcome! See here for details on 2.05. The short version is yes, it is A600 specific, more or less. A3000s shipped with 2.04 (and the earliest ones shipped with 1.3 and 2.0).

There's no need to install anything prior to 3.1. Basically, the only things you'll want to copy from your Workbench 2.0x disk(s) are:
Utilities/Say
Utilities/Say.info
Libs/translator.library
Devs/narrator.device
L/speak-handler
the SPEAK: lines of Devs/MountList to convert into a DOSDriver
Optionally, Tools/Colors and Tools/Colors.info (there's really no point to these)

I'm not aware of any 2.x/A3000-exclusive fonts, nor any other pre-3.1 files that are not obsoleted by 3.1 components that provide the same functionality.