Amiga Day - 3

Tonight I learned/re-learned a little bit more about OS 3.9

My full report behind the click...



1) Although I had successfully played Dungeon Master for an hour or so the other day, most games are apparently fairly incompatible with the new versions of the ROM that my A1200 has. Unlike PCs which just have a very minimal ROM BIOS, the Amiga has a huge chunk of the OS in the ROM including the kernel. I guess this harks back to when RAM was expensive so you didn't want to clock up all your 256k or 512k of RAM with OS code.

So tonight I learned that you can "kick"(ala kickstart) your Amiga's ROM to use an older version. You basically need the original ROM files. In my case the v1.3 from my A500 system. It then loads the ROM into RAM and remaps something in memory and reboots the system. You then have a A1200 running with the older kickstart ROM.

2) This guy named Thomas Richter is this super programmer who up until about 2000 was making some amazing utilities and apps for the Amiga. One of these utilites is called VinceD which is a shell replacement giving you all those great features you'd expect like command/file completion via TAB and all sorts of other amazing improvements. It is nice and customizable through a dialog window. I DID however manage to mess things up pretty nicely so I had to track down the original installation files and redo it. It's ok though because my original installation was missing the help files.

3) This stuff is pretty complicated. I need a refresher course on AmigaDos because I keep messing simple things up like COPY and RENAME. I accidentally made a file called "?" and I have no idea how to get rid of it because "?" displays info when you do a "DELETE ?" - I'm sure there is a way to quote it or something.

4) The Amiga fonts are pretty bad. It could just be that the fonts look poor on my LCD panel because the same fonts look great when I run them in UAE (The Amiga Emulator). I may end up using a 19" CRT as an experiment. I think the LCD tends to make lower, non-native resolution very ugly. Try it on your PC. Go ahead and set your WSVGA++ LCD panel to something weird like 1024x768 and see how great that looks. Hint: It don't.

5) Even though I had successfully run Dungeon Master off my original (ahem) disk, that's not the preferred way to do things these days. The you really want to do it is by using a program called WHDLOAD which allows you to make a hard-disk version of your games. But it's not quite that simple (I haven't gotten it to run as this I'm still getting stuck on things like COPY). It also requires that somebody (smarter than me) creates a custom WHDLoad configuration file for that specific game. There's a huge list of configuration files on the WHDLOAD site itself so it's more than likely that the game you want to play is on it.

6) I can't figure out how to set the date/time on my battery backed up clock. Yes yes, RTFM.