Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[Jope]

WB1.x does ship with an "Empty" drawer that you can copy via the menus. This is the makedir equivalent on the Workbench side.

For deletion, you must have a trashcan. :-)

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by Zarchos

Why do most Amiga owners despise the Acorn Archimedes, when they never owned one, never saw one, have no clue whatsoever of the hardware, applications, utilities and games these computers had ?

I used them at school for years. BBC micro, Acorn Archimedes, Acorn 2000, 3000, 5000. Wonderful machines.

Eventually my school got rid of them and "upgraded" to PCs. I saved a 3000 plus monitor from a skip (with permission). Memory expansion, econet card. Unfortunately my parents encouraged me to donate it to a computer-less friend.

Same story with an Atari I scavenged once. Went to a "good home".

I wish I'd kept hold of them. Even my beloved Amiga 500 and vast boxed games collection went in the dump when I moved out. Only found out when I came to pick it up a few years later.

Sigh.

In summary - loved the Acorns, wish I still owned one.

[E-Penguin]

Back on topic ; I need an A500 plus, to complete my collection. If I put trapdoor RAM in, does it show up as slow or chip ram?

[Amiga1992]

Pretty sure it'd be Chip RAM. I thought that was the whole point of the Plus, full ECS chipset + ability to expand to 2MB Chip.

[E-Penguin]

Do I want / need something in the $C0,000 range for compatibility? I sort of wanted to pair it with an Hc508, because I don't have one of those either.

[Cego]

Why is Amiga the best computer in the world?

[Jope]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

Do I want / need something in the $C0,000 range for compatibility? I sort of wanted to pair it with an Hc508, because I don't have one of those either.

I'm willing to bet that ranger fast software would fail with the hc508 anyway, so probably you don't have to worry about that.

It would be interesting to see a list of games that absolutely requires memory at that address.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Cego

Why is Amiga the best computer in the world?

Because: [ Show youtube player ]

SorryNotSorry

[IvanEBC]

Finally - a place built fo rme.
Well here my thing i've never known and hated to ask.

I wondered what exactly is the purpose of Setpatch.
Some people say certain systems need certain versions.
I just run it then in shell and mine says it is 44.38, and lists a heap of stuff under that about certain features, rom updates, what does it do and is it capable of doing other patches if run from startup-sequence to improve the system abilities?..... always been a bit of a black hole of information for me.

Thanks.

[demolition]

Setpatch applies patches to the components inside the kickstart ROM. After shipping a product they cannot change the code inside the kickstart ROM, so setpatch is a way to supply the user with bugfixes for the OS. Setpatch could be updated much more often than the physical ROM chip and can be installed by the user without voiding the warranty.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by IvanEBC

I wondered what exactly is the purpose of Setpatch.

SetPatch is a program for fixing OS ROM bugs. AFAIK (someone correct me here) C= didn't make ROM chips with known bugs in them, but as time went by they received bug reports - some of these from internal developers or beta-testers - and code was corrected. However, making ROM chips is both expensive and timeconsuming and instead of issuing new chips with the code fixes in, they made patches for the bugs and rolled them into the SetPatch command. Chip manufacture has a long lead time so from the cut-off point for a major release supported by new ROMs to the time the floppy content was frozen there is plenty of time to find and subsequently correct bugs in SetPatch.
C= continously made new versions of SetPatch and updated versions of the disk files, but these were not so well distributed (I think I have a 1.3.3 release from an issue of Amiga Computing) and mostly ended up on program disks where they were installed or used along with the application you had bought.

The OS is easily patched with the SetFunction() function call so there are plenty of provisions for either a complete replacement of the buggy part, or hanging on a pre and post call code snippet.
One of the 3.1 fixes actually goes one step further: It looks back at the code where it was called from and sees if it was compiled using a known bad link library (from C=), and if so takes steps to correct what it does. So not only ROM code is fixed.

Since 2.x it has also gotten other duties, such as initiating the CPU and system to maximum performance, the idea being that the ROM dumbs it down to stay compatible with software (nee games/demos) that take over the hw, and it is up to SetPatch to turn on caches, caching modes, AGA screenmodes and load CPU support libraries.

In modern parliance it is equal to kernel fixes, but not the part that includes new functionality. For that you got a new ROM which reset what SetPatch was fixing and started all over again. (Well, IIRC that is not entirely true as I think the 1.3.x versions catered for 1.2 and 3.1.x for 3.0.)

[IvanEBC]

Wonderful, a simple view is .. its like windows updates Don't worry i feel dirty just saying it.
OK Cool, so just run the latest version you can (i think the 44.38 comes from OS3.9) once in your SS and you're always set as the setpatch will adapt to your system? (I noticed it saying stuff about 060 patching etc).
Wow all these years i never asked

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by IvanEBC

you're always set as the setpatch will adapt to your system?

I would advice keeping the odd eye out for potential new SetPatch versions (but the last one was 15? years ago). SetPatch doesn't know how to go somewhere on the internet and ask for updates...
The 3.5(?)/3.9 releases also has SetPatch depend on an external "ROM Update" file which probably can be updated independently.
But yes, SetPatch will evaluate your system and do the best it can, assuming you are using a matching release.

Note that there are many hackers(in the good sense) out there that have made fixes to bugs that aren't corrected by any SetPatch versions. These can often be worth installing.
Note also that there are many hackers(in the good sense) out there that have made patches that are meant to directly modify a Kickstart ROM file to incorporate their fixes or the fixes that SetPatch do. Depending on what hardware you have in your machine you might be able to use such a Kickfile and skip parts of the extra boot cycle, simplify your startup-sequence and have less things that can go wrong. This depends on if your machine has 'MapRom' functionality (first introduced with the A4000 and the A3640 cpu card).

What we _don't_ have (AFAIK) is
1) a tool to automatically dissect Kickfiles and splice in patched versions, nor
2) an "update" tool that can scan AmiNet, or similar (look out for the un-official BoingBags), for updated versions of OS (or other!) files/patches you have installed.

[IvanEBC]

Thanks for all the help with setpatch - i have a NEW too embarassed to ask question.

I was thinking of some new fonts for my Workbench 3.9 ..... and hit up aminet and was like ... oh there are TT Fonts, and B fonts and Vector Fonts and Outline Fonts and Deco Fonts and Compugraphic fonts, and all that was just within the first 20-30 search results for "fonts" at Aminet.

So for Workbench use ... what type of fonts can i use? They will not be used for any other purpose but i expect they would work in something like Final Writer?

[thomas]

Bitmap fonts(*) can be used out of the box, just copy them to the Fonts directory.

Intellifonts (.type files) need to be added by the Intellifont utility from the System directory.

Truetype fonts (.ttf files) can be used if you install ttf.library and add them using the included TTFManager.

All other font types can only be used by Programs supporting the specific type of font.

(*) the definition of a bitmap font is a bit ambiguous. A bitmap font can also be a picture of a font to be used in demos or intros. The kind of bitmap font you can use with Workbench is a .font file along with a directory containing one or more sizes of that font.

For example:

XHelvetica.font
XHelvetica/9
XHelvetica/11
XHelvetica/13

Note that the important part is the directory. The .font file can easily be recreated with the FixFonts program.

[IvanEBC]

Originally Posted by thomas

Bitmap fonts(*) can be used out of the box, just copy them to the Fonts directory.

Intellifonts (.type files) need to be added by the Intellifont utility from the System directory.

Truetype fonts (.ttf files) can be used if you install ttf.library and add them using the included TTFManager.

All other font types can only be used by Programs supporting the specific type of font.

(*) the definition of a bitmap font is a bit ambiguous. A bitmap font can also be a picture of a font to be used in demos or intros. The kind of bitmap font you can use with Workbench is a .font file along with a directory containing one or more sizes of that font.

For example:

XHelvetica.font
XHelvetica/9
XHelvetica/11
XHelvetica/13

Note that the important part is the directory. The .font file can easily be recreated with the FixFonts program.

Wonderful - thank you Thomas... Bitmap Fonts it is....

[Daedalus]

To add a little more information: there are two basic types: bitmap types which describe each character in pixels, meaning they are fixed in size, and vector (also called scalable) fonts which describe characters in mathematical terms and so can be scaled to any size. Intellifont and Truetype fonts are both vector fonts. Normally you would use bitmap fonts as they are much faster to load and are generally hand crafted to look as well as they can at their given sizes. However, if you need a size that isn't one of the provided sizes, the system will scale one of the other sizes to suit, which usually looks terrible. Vector fonts can be used at any size you like, but are very slow to load because the system has to convert each character to a bitmap of the desired size before the font can be used. A fast CPU can help this situation (and under emulation or on a "modern" machine it might even be bearable), but if you do want to use them regularly, you can also use the Intellifont tool (or TTFManager for TTF fonts) to create bitmap versions at a given size. Once that's done, selecting the size created will use the bitmap version so loading will be essentially instant.

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by Cego

Why is Amiga the best computer in the world?

To some it isn't, to me it is !! Although it wasn't really the World back in the day, it was the UK and Europe that saw the biggest following. The USA really did themselves no favours not wanting Amiga, in fact it got threw out of one state altogether? < Crazy I know!

Even Canada wasn't that big on it to begin with. Now the Americans can't get enough of them. Got to say, I cannot blame them for wanting Amiga's now, can you?

PAL or NTSC

[DamienD]

...you've forgotten my home country i.e. Australia.

Both the C64 and Amiga were pretty big; and yes there was the usual Amiga vs. Atari ST war happening also

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by DamienD

...you've forgotten my home country i.e. Australia.

Both the C64 and Amiga were pretty big; and yes there was the usual Amiga vs. Atari ST war happening also

My apologies DamienD, yes you are correct the Amiga and Atari were both massive in Australia, which also helped both machines cover just a little more of the World.

As for the Commodore 64 < the machine I first owned, what a piece of kit that was! Would all agree that the C64 is the greatest 8BIT computer of all time?