write-ups/books/etc for re-noobs?

[theslownorris]

A little background... I left the Amiga way back in like 95 or so, when C= went away. I'm trying to get back into it.

I'm working with an Amiga 2000. I bought WB3.1 and ROM3.1 from Amigakit and 3.9 from a local guy.

Star struck buy the Vampire 500v2 I had to get one. My first notion was support efforts of the community; buy Workbench/ROM 3.1, WB3.9 and go from there... rather unsuccessfully. I made an Apollo OS 32gb CF and was able to enjoy some neato stuff Vampire-related. This distro is a bit deep for a guy that left the Amiga scene so long ago.

I also bought an x-surf-100 w/ Easynet Pro from Amiga kit. It's not very "Easy"

Firstly, Apollo will not mount the CD-ROM(slave on the Vampire's IDE). The floppy has files that are invisible through the WB GUI. I can use lha to decompress them to my working drive via CLI/Shell, but the readme.txt says the driver is not compatible with Roadshow. I thought Easynet had a GUI??? Maybe it's on the CD? I heard report of SCSI cards not working with the Vampire so I haven't gone that route yet.

Anybody know of a good write up taking a guy from; mass storage device, floppies, and CD-ROM drive (SCSI or IDE) up to 3.9/whdload/saga drivers etc...? Or clue me in on Apollo? Or recommend another way to go, so as one might "Learn as they go?"

The Amiga world is amazing in that there seems to be so many OS alternatives and even contentious factions of the community. In lurking trying to get my Amiga footing back again, it would seem these numerous alternatives are a bit confusing and the factions divisive.

I just wanted to play some classic games and maybe fall back in love with the machine I spent my youth gaming and doing homework on. And maybe join an active retro community.

Even just a good bare bones write up of the sys directory structure, start-up sequence, filesystems, etc... would be tremendously helpful.

Any insights? Links? Tutorials? Advice?

Thx all!

[daxb]

Some useful stuff: http://www.thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/ search the English parts.

[Daedalus]

I have this book somewhere stored away, along with the magazines it came with I'm sure... It's a good guide to a lot of the aspects points of using the Amiga, including making bootable disks, a complete list of Workbench files, and so on: https://archive.org/stream/Get_the_M...e/n71/mode/2up

It's quite outdated in some parts, and is mostly aimed at 2.x users, but still contains some good info.

As well as that, there's a Wiki for OS 4 that includes some good introductions to Workbench and its files, as well as online versions of the Workbench and AmigaDOS manuals. These are mostly based on the OS 3 manuals, so will be by and large relevant for OS 3 as well: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/UserDoc:Main

Finally, for any directory (including a disk's root directory) that has files invisible in Workbench, simply use the Window->Show->All Files menu item to see them. These files don't have their own icons so this option gives them default icons instead. You can save this setting using the Window->Snapshot->Window menu item.