Hi! Reporting back in with significant (although not total) success.
a) Installation from scratch works considerably better with a full set of diskimages, which I now have. I now have a bootable Workbench 3.1 environment, booting from a folder masquerading as a hard disk! At least some applications downloaded from aminet (eons and eons ago) will now run. It's the first time I've been able to boot from anything besides the Workbench 3.1 Install disk! Yay!
b) I did, however, heed you folks' advice and downloaded amikit.
(After all, it's going to be a somewhat challenging and prolonged task to acquire whatever files and settings enable TCP/IP on WorkBench 3.1 and then install as I was advised by a friendly helpful person named Adam Atkinson in, ummm, 1996 :eek: , -- acquire and deploy a package called "Miami". And AWeb for browser, and AmFTP for FTP purposes. Not to mention various possible UI customizations, ideal general-use settings, and whatnot that one would wish to apply to a completely vanilla new installation of WB 3.1);
However, I have amikit issues as follows:
c) Booting the WinUAE environment from the hardfile "System_ADVSP.hdf" puts me in AmigDOS and I follow the prompts. I have made 3 attempts to use the option of upgrading the amikit environment to Workbench 3.1 since it recognizes that my WB diskettes are indeed WB 3.1 and when I do so, it asks for (in this order) Workbench, Extras, Fonts, Install, Locale, and Storage, then sits there forever (> 24 hours no more dialogs) and when I finally opt to kill it and attempt to start up from the hardfile again it says "SOFTWARE FAILURE": "C:StackAttack / Program failed (error #8000004), Wait for disk activity to finish"" with options of Suspend and Reboot. So something's apparently going off the rails after it has accessed each and every one of the Workbench 3.1 diskettes but before it finishes setting up the environment.
d) Same scenario except this time saying "N" to the option of updating to 3.1 and letting it authorize amikit but leave 3.0 as the os, it churns away without asking for additional disks (after the initial request for the Workbench disk) and then these two windows pop up:
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e) Returning to the install-from-scratch project (which boots etc and didn't throw error messages at me), I can run AmigaDOS manual by Peter Bagnato (sort of; it crashes or at least the mouse became unresponsive), SplatterPaint, MED, FreePaint; something called Mod2MiDi complains about some missing files, says "we can do without
trying such-and-such", ends up on an empty screen; ArtPro says it simply can't run without ReqTools library something-or-other; hmm, and I don't seem to understand how to quit out of a program I no longer wish to use, what with not being an Amiga user etc. All of the above-mentioned programs were downloaded circa 1996 from aminet. What else? I have no sound, I have a window roughly the size of a postage stamp, and I'm obviously clueless.