FS: Amiga Guru Book by Ralph Babel

[Pat the Cat]

Might help if you cleared out your PM drawer?

I would buy it, but there is a problem if it is what I want. The full version.

Ralph Babel saved my ass back in the day. I am not about to disrespect him now by buying a copy of his work, not without him getting a cut.

I doubt he remembers talking, but a couple times when I had an issue reviewing GVP kit, he was at the end of a phone ready to talk me through it. He did that for a lot of journalists and end users at the time, I remember.

I think I will buy the German version and struggle with that instead.

Nothing personal here, but that's the way I feel.

[Pat the Cat]

AFAIK R Babels book, the 700 odd page one, was withdrawn from publication in English, but was published in German. Am I wrong about that?

[Pat the Cat]

There was never a newer edition because some freak had nothing better to do than to pirate the book and provide a copy in PDF in the net, which resulted in Ralph quitting the project. Thanks, folks!

That bit I'm confused at. His website states that he stopped publication a few days before the due date and withdrew the English edition from sale to suppliers. The German edition went ahead...

... So it's not that the 2nd edition wasn't ever printed in English, just that the books didn't hit the open market. The German ones did, but are all sold out now anyway.

As for "The AmigaDOS manual", I think the Bantam books one was done by Mark Smiddy? I don't think the intention was for it to be a developer resource, but rather a public resource. There was a clear distinction at the time, so I doubt he could access material on the DOS Library, or a lot of other developer issues. He certainly was not happy at gaps in the content, but I doubt he ever really thought it would be used as a resource for development. Maybe he did and I just didn't notice.

I never pointed developers at Mark Smiddy's book, it was for end users trying to find a definitive reference for just using the Amiga. I pointed them at the RKM and CATS and said "They know. I don't, and they can't tell me." For software, anyway. For hardware I pointed people at the HRM.

I didn't know anyplace else to point them, and the web didn't exist. The internet did, but I didn't have any kind of access to it, and was dimly aware of things like Compuserve and email addresses as things other people could use, but I didn't have much access to, for obvious reasons. I had no connections TO anybody by email, having zero university background. I could chat on BBS, that was about it.

[Pat the Cat]

OK, that clears most things up. If nobody has paid cash to you in 1 week, I'll buy it. No postage, I'll be checking it with a loupe. You can have either cash or Paypal.

That gives me a chance to check into a few things - like I said, the guy treated me very well. Not just me, a helluva lot of people.

Oh yeah, the Mark Smiddy thing. He wrote something else, more of a users guide, handy for seeing when commands appeared and disappeared. "Mastering AmigaDOS", Bruce Smith books. My mistake.

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL12081193M/Mastering_AmigaDOS_3

[Pat the Cat]

Yeah, I can see why that would upset him. Designers spend years getting  pages looking right, good thick use of true colour, arrange things  perfectly so there's depth in the visual presentation. Page layout is an  art. So is technical writing, although maybe it doesn't look that way.

So,  he spends years getting it looking just perfect, then some rotten so  and so uploads a 256 colour scan that looks OK on a screen, and terrible  when printed out in the real world. I'm fine with people doing similar  with stuff I wrote, but I don't own copyright on that, and it wasn't  that accurate to begin with. Ralph is way off the other end of the scale  on Amiga technology. No wonder he was upset. Still is, by the sound of  it.

I do use scanned works, but I scan them from originals I am  interested in. I do not distribute them. I don't even leave them around  on machines with internet access so they cannot be hacked. This is  legal, they really ARE for personal study. And they are never as easy to  use as a printed work.

I can guarantee you, it won't be in  pristine condition by the time I'm done with it. That might sound like  sacrilege of a holy relic, but books are tools, as well as beautiful  objects.

[Pat the Cat]

Thank you for your honourable behaviour sir.

[Pat the Cat]

...So I can trap exec library calls.

The executable I am using as my test is the AmigaDOS 1.3 command "Type", perhaps not the best example, but it is small and should only call the exec.library and dos.library.

(I will be ignoring overlay hunks).
...

I think you might be on to something there. I did try hacking into some 1.3 commands once with a cartridge dissassembler, single stepping etc, and was completely baffled by the amount of system activity going on for just very simple commands.

Your approach seems much more level headed... it was like a spaghetti waterfall, trying to track what on earth the processor was doing or which bit of ROM it was looping around. :confused:

And I certainly didn't have a clue how headers worked, that was an education. :rtfm: I guess largely designed 32 bit from very early in AmigaOS. Made adding fully 32bit CPUs a lot easier.

[Pat the Cat]

Please note that 1.3 is a horse of a different color... Commands from 2.0 onwards were plain C, did not depend on any arcane BPCL magic, used C linkage and the plain HUNK format without the higher level structure that was defined by the Tripos loader.

Yes, AmigaOS started as a port. PL1 was a bit like that arcane magic stuff. Idea was you ran a programme in a sliced mainframe environment. Not stuff I ever really used, except to understand strictly defined data structures, pointers, other stuff.

Arrays have their uses, but for the finer definition of metrices and dimensional spaces, you definitely get advantage from more flexible means of defining data structures. I only realy experienced 1.2-3.1 Commodore era releases, much more the earlier. It all  started as BCPL and gradually got recoded into C, partly in the UK at first I think. Amiga INC did a lot of C coding, but just enough to make it the Amiga boot, and a lot of other people have recoded it since. Of course.

1.3 commands seem both more bulky and clunky than their later descendants. A couple paradoxically seem quicker, or perhaps that is just my imagination... I haven't witnessed enough of the later releases to comment really.

[Pat the Cat]

Amiga Corporation wrote all their code in C or assembler, when commodore bought them it was still pretty much smoke and mirrors...
They had a design for an operating system (called CAOS) but didn't have the time... looking for existing solutions and TripOS was very similar to what they wanted and it would be easy to make it run on top of exec. TripOS was re-branded, a small amount of development was done and they had dos, a file system and commands.

Well... I had a little brush contact at the time all that was going on,  with "Metacomco" associates of Dr Tim King. I was in the neighbourhood,  so I kind of twigged he was a heavyweight in designing and implementing  dev and operating systems.

I didn't really understand how  important all that would be to me later, it was enough of a shock seeing  Dr King on TV talking about the Amiga and Boing demo. I just saw his  name and "Metacomco" on a stack of dev source code for a 6502 dedicated  system.

I didn't work with him, but one of his graduate students,  Masters I think. Guy was like Steve Wozniak, could view a page of hex  and translate it into a program listing, in his head. Interesting days  for a 16 year old as I was at the time, about 1985. Somebody told me  later I made him nervous for his job. I thought that was a silly idea,  he could code in his sleep. I fumbled for hours getting things right. Ian Culls, I think he was called.

Yes, looks like exec and intuition, file system, basic commands were  done in UK. Amiga Inc probably did most of the hardware drivers,  libraries, handlers. In whatever they could, including the first Basic,  which they got off Metacomco to write Boing demo. This was the guy who  did the first drafts, I guess. 6 months or more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXGFqKjc9AY

[Pat the Cat]

Yes, looks like exec and intuition, file system, basic commands were done in UK. Amiga Inc probably did most of the hardware drivers, libraries, handlers. In whatever they could, including the first Basic, which they got off Metacomco to write Boing demo. This was the guy who did the first drafts, I guess. 6 months or more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXGFqKjc9AY