I have an Amiga emulator and would really like to be able to get around in AmigaOS well enough that if that were what I had on my desk, I could use it the way I can use a Mac or PC.
I checked out from the NY Public Library system the only Amiga-related book they seem to have and was quickly swamped in explanations about how the new Fat Agnus chip, by handling 1024 MB chip RAM address space, allows for more flexibility as shown in the following 14 pages of C programming which demonstrate the wonderful architecture of the blitter and how you can bypass the CPU and write directly to the video scan at interrupt from the copper which enables your sprites to spline in 3-D at an incredible number of lines per pixel in Hi-Res mode or something like that
I wasn’t looking for that. I was hoping for something more along the lines of “This is a mouse. See the little red arrow on your screen? …OK, now insert a diskette in DF0 and you’ll notice a disk icon appears… Here is what the program is expecting when it pops up a command line and asks what you want it to do when you double-click on it… Here is how you would set up a network between your Amiga and another computer to share files or printers… To format a hard disk, you would open this Tools folder, and… This is what you do if you want your computer to start up from an internal hard drive… Here is how you set up a TCP/IP connection… Here is a review of the most commonly used word processors, spreadsheets, browsers, emailers, raster image drawing programs, vector drawing programs, sound editing programs, etc., including basic instructions and tips and tricks…”
OK, Amiga folk, be nice to me. I know what you probably think of someone who would use an emulator instead of a real Amiga computer, but it’s not like I own a bunch of AmigaOS games or know my way around in DeluxePaint or anything…I want to learn AmigaOS as well as I learned Windows, i.e., well enough to get around in it, and I don’t own a PC either.
So could you recommend a Compleat Idiot’s Introductory Guide to the Amiga kind of book (or alternative resource) for me?
Compute! had some good guides like that. If you want to spend money you can buy the upgrade to OS3.0 which comes with manuals. The CD for 3.5 (probably a little cheaper) has most of the docs in pdf format, though there is not a pdf reader for the amiga. (go figure!)
These manuals, one for WorkBench, AmigaDos and AREXX, are pretty well written and cover things from the basics to pretty technical info.
OK…
How would I go about acquiring this CD? I, uh, don’t seem to have a current 800 number for Commodore in my Rolodex…
And what format is the CD in, ISO 9660? High Sierra? If it is in a proprietary Amiga filesystem structure, it’s going to be a chicken-vs-egg problem…
To be sure, I need a copy of the full-fledged OS; but to use it, I’ll need a better understanding of the Amiga and how to make it walk and talk just a bit because…
a) The emulator boots from an ADF file, i.e., from what it regards as a floppy. It can ACCESS (and think of as a hard disk) any designated Macintosh folder, but can’t boot from it, as far as I know.
b) I have been told that there are ::trying to remember the terminology:: …uh, “assign” commands, I think? That are clever ways of telling the Amiga “OK, I know there is only so much you can cram into 880K of floppy space, but see that drive over yonder? I want you to pretend that the 17MB worth of files in this folder on that drive are actually here at this path on this floppy”, so that booting from what can fit on a floppy need not mean running from a pared-down bare-bones OS.
c) But I don’t know how to do that, nor do I have what I once had: access to the full OS on diskettes. Aside from which they weren’t doing me any good because they were 880K diskettes and, guess what? Macs and PCs can’t read them! But…on a CD, you say? This could be a very good thing…
PS – I’m running Workbench 40.42 on Kickstart 40.63 and the ROM is 3.1 so…what is OS3.0??? I’m having a little difficulty following the numbering scheme here…
