Stupid Amiga Tricks...

[EDanaII]

While, ummm... "evangalizing" over on Commodore-Amiga.org, I got to thinking about some of the reasons why I still remain a fan of the Amiga computer and remembered some of the slick things I used to be able with the machine. I started this thread over there, but thought it would also be fun to start it here as well.

23 years ago, I was playing around and experimenting with my A1000 and after studying the DOS commands I wondered if it was possible to run my Amiga from a recoverable ram disk. So, using only the AmigaDOS manual, I decided to do some tinkering. First, the ramdisk that was stored in the MountList file was a little small to run Workbench 1.3 in, so I expanded it. Didn't need a manual for this, I just simply studied the mountlist and was easily able to figure out how to do this.

Next, I simply issued these DOS commands:

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MOUNT RAD:
COPY SYS: RAD: ALL QUIET
ASSIGN SYS: RAD:


Then I just rebooted my machine and "Viola!" I'm running in ram and a hell of a lot faster than normal.

Now, I know you can do this in Linux and Windows, but I'll bet you it's a lot harder to figure out.

Another interesting trick, that I was unaware of but found on Wikipedia:

Code: [Select]


INFO >SPEAK:


So, got any stupid Amiga tricks that demonstrate how remarkable this machine was? Feel free to contribute. Don't limit yourself to DOS if you have a few other tricks.

Post your tricks here, or if you like, pop over to Commodore-Amiga.org and post them there. Gives us some examples of what made the Amiga computer so remarkable.

[EDanaII]

Eh... if you're Amiga can do that, it's anything BUT stupid.

Continuing my little "crusade" on why I prefer the AmigaOS over other OSes, here's something I do currently on my emulated Amigas. For starters, I maintain multiple drives, as with the standard Amiga emulation, I have a System drive and a Work drive. In addition to that, I maintain a Development (Devl) drive for software development.

Because I maintain separate drives, I maintain different software configurations. System software should be obvious, although it varies from which emulated Amiga I boot: 1.3 - 3.9, Amikit, etc... Work, however, is often shared between the various versions. This presents a problem, as my user startup is located on my system drive.

I solve this problem by simply adding this code to any user-startup for my system:

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IF Exists Work:s
    LIST >T:Work-Startup Work:s/#?-startup LFORMAT="EXECUTE %P%N"
    Execute T:Work-Startup
ENDIF

IF Exists Devl:s
    LIST >T:Devl-Startup Devl:s/#?-startup LFORMAT="EXECUTE %P%N"
    Execute T:Devl-Startup
ENDIF

I maintain an 's' directory on each of those drives and within it I locate startup-sequences required by the software stored on that particular drive. This way I don't get errors like "Volume: not found" and I can include (or not) the drive as I need it.

I can find a similar solution in Linux that looks something like this:

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while read line;
    do run -sh $line;
done <<< `ls -d */ `

One can make arguments that the Linux version is just as effective as the Amiga version, but I'll admit my prejudice and ask if anyone can move their software from drive to drive as easily.

[EDanaII]

Hmmm... Good tip. I'll have to give that a try one of these days. When I first tried it, 1.3 (I believe) was first out so I don't think LZX was available back then. Could be wrong though...

For the other "trick" I tried to do it like this:

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C:Mount >NIL: DEVS:DOSDrivers/~(#?.info)
but, apparently, the EXECUTE statement doesn't do that. Would have been pretty nice (and consistant) if it did. Still, that kind of flexibility is still one of the things that make Amiga DOS pretty nice.