Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[wiz12]

Would CacheCDFS be the best to use?

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Marle

Ok here's one that's bugged me and before I hunt down my Amiga 500 manual, why is Clean Up always ghosted out on the Special menu in Workbench 1.3?

Whatever I do, I can never clean up the icons. This is having booted a 1.3.2 disk, shift click the icons to tidy up or no icons at all, always ghosted!

What gives?

You need to select (click once) the parent drawer or disk icon, before clean up works. This is also the way you can snapshot a window.

[Marle]

Originally Posted by Jope

You need to select (click once) the parent drawer or disk icon, before clean up works. This is also the way you can snapshot a window.

D'oh! Thank you Jope! I think as I never started with an Amiga with 1.3 back in the day but my 2.05 A600, I never figured it out as Clean Up works a bit different on 2.0

Thank you!

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by wiz12

Would CacheCDFS be the best to use?

CacheCDFS is fine, I've been using it for many years without any issues. But I haven't used them all so I can't say whether any of them have any advantages.

[Cobe]

While we're at it. Is cd.device part of installations of cd-roms in Amigas?

[Daedalus]

Not really, no. It's the device driver for the CD drive in the CD32, but that's a custom interface whereas most other Amigas use a more standard SCSI or IDE interface. In these cases, the device used would relate to the hardware, e.g. scsi.device, squirrelscsi.device, atapi.device, buddhaide.device...

The CDTV and IIRC the A570 use the cdtv.device for accessing their CD drives.

[Cobe]

So there isn't universal way to play cd track?

How does this player from aminet claims to work on all cd-roms while it seems to me that its sending ios to cd.device?
http://aminet.net/package/disk/cdrom/DCPlayer17

Also I found this http://aminet.net/package/driver/media/Atapi_PnP300

[Daedalus]

Most CD drives use pretty standard commands for every CD drive. It's only the physical interface that differs, and that's what the #?.device takes care of. So playing CDs is pretty universal - just tell the CD player software which device and unit your CD drive is and it will send the commands through. The CD32 is a little different with its non-standard CD drive, and so cd.device uses its own commands for controlling CD audio.

It looks like your first link only works with the CD32's drive, as any other machine needs an emulation layer set up which will translate the cd.device commands into standard CD-ROM commands.

Your second link appears to be a cd.device emulation layer / wrapper that does this job of translating cd.device commands into standard CD-ROM commands.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Cobe

So there isn't universal way to play cd track?

Correct. There are approximately 30 different ways. No, really, not kidding. The 3.1.4 CDFileSystem attempts to try all of them and only fails if none succeeds.

[Cobe]

So from my point of view if I wrote a game for cd32(pad sharing, cdxl, cdda) its not worth figuring out how to send io to all devices in existence, it would be better that if other aga users if want to play it just use some cd32 emulator.

[Daedalus]

Yep, if you target the CD32, you can always specify a wrapper like you linked to before as a requirement for playing on other systems. Or, include the CD32 commands and the standard ATAPI & SCSI commands, which should cover pretty much any setup out there.

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Correct. There are approximately 30 different ways. No, really, not kidding. The 3.1.4 CDFileSystem attempts to try all of them and only fails if none succeeds.

On this note, what's the best way to run CD32 games on 3.1.4? Is it still with IDEfix97?

[slaapliedje]

What is the best method for getting all your icons to look similar?
I prefer the MagicWB ones, and it seems most projects provide a MagicWB icon set, but getting them all in place manually certainly seems like a labor of love!
How does everyone manage these?

[Jope]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

What is the best method for getting all your icons to look similar?
I prefer the MagicWB ones, and it seems most projects provide a MagicWB icon set, but getting them all in place manually certainly seems like a labor of love!
How does everyone manage these?

For directories/drawers you can easily script it using a command line tool that replaces the icon image, but for other software it's a more manual process. I strangely prefer to do the manual process with a workbench info replacement, where I can just drag drop the image I desire, and then it gets written to the .info file when I save.

[slaapliedje]

So I recently wanted to go the light weight way of setting up 3.1.4 instead of my 3.9 custom ROM version. One thing I noticed missing is the ability to check the version of a file by going to Icon > information.
Is this one of the random features they added in 3.5/3.9? What other little things did they change vs the bundled in things (like TCP stack / browser and CD support)?

[kolla]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

Is this one of the random features they added in 3.5/3.9?

Correct, only available via the commodity RAWBInfo (ReAction WorkBench Info). There are other WBInfo replacements around that do the same. Like SwazInfo (http://aminet.net/package/util/wb/SwazInfo18b)

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

On this note, what's the best way to run CD32 games on 3.1.4? Is it still with IDEfix97?

Frankly, I do not know, but you don't need IDEfix anymore to connect an (ATAPI) CD-Rom to the built-in IDE bus of the (later) Amigas.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

Is this one of the random features they added in 3.5/3.9? What other little things did they change vs the bundled in things (like TCP stack / browser and CD support)?

A lot of the 3.1.4 Workbench features (clean up by name/date/size/type, improved menu shortcuts, cancel during long operations, ARexx support, closing parent window on opening a child window option etc.) all come from 3.9. Some didn't make the transition, such as the improved icon information windows, asynchronous Workbench operations, the Find tool etc., but I guess you could class most of them (including the icon information window) as bundled things anyway, since they were add-on commodities rather than built into Workbench. But whether built-in or simply enabled as default, they're some of the most important improvements that OS 3.9 made from a usability perspective.

[slaapliedje]

I have 3 questions pertaining to the A4000.
1) what are the screw holes on the front of the metal frame for and why are they off alignment. I am talking about the ones that are right by the floppy drive bays. If you look at the one right under the 5.25" bay, there is a screw hole off to the left, and one on the right. The bottom 3.5" bay has two screw holes that one would think are in the appropriate spot. Any idea what is supposed to be mounted to these?

2) whhat is the purpose of that magnet behind the front plastic, it just makes a mess of the cables and makes it more annoying to put the front back on.

3) Why does my hard drive light stop working once I have an accelerator board with SCSI installed? I am still using my FastATA until I can get a properly sized SCSI drive.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

I have 3 questions pertaining to the A4000.
1) what are the screw holes on the front of the metal frame for and why are they off alignment.

I don't know off hand, but they are possibly to allow for slightly different configurations of the chassis. Perhaps a different drive cage was planned, or they're left over on the design from when the case was intended for PC use.

2) whhat is the purpose of that magnet behind the front plastic, it just makes a mess of the cables and makes it more annoying to put the front back on.

That's not a magnet, but a ferrite core. Its purpose in general is to absorb electrical spikes in the cables. In this case I would expect it's to meet emissions regulations, as the cables to the LEDs and key switch all pass out of the metal casework, meaning that any electrical noise they carry could be radiated out and interfere with other equipment. It will work fine if you remove it.

3) Why does my hard drive light stop working once I have an accelerator board with SCSI installed? I am still using my FastATA until I can get a properly sized SCSI drive.

The HD LED on a 4000 (and 600 & 1200) is linked directly to the relevant pin on the internal IDE port. If you don't use the internal IDE port, the LED won't be used. Most add-on controllers have their own separate header to use for activity LEDs, so you can disconnect the LED from the motherboard and connect it to the controller instead to get activity there.