A few newbie AmigaDOS questions

[joken]

Good evening folks!

I recently got my first Amiga, and am thrilled to add it to my collection of platforms. Its a 1200 with an internal harddrive, and nothing particularly special. When I boot it, it boots off the harddrive to an amiga dos CLI. However, when I type commands like "dir" for example, it says Unknown command. Some commands like set and cd appear to work though. Any thoughts on why some commands work but not others? How should I upgrade the OS, without any other amigas around. Thanks in advance for any help!

--Joken

[jeffimix]

This one recommends typing in 'List'

[Hyperspeed]

The best thing to do is to get a cheap bundle of Amiga magazines and a
set of Workbench disks.

Strange there's a hard disk and no Workbench though...

Try pick up some Amiga manuals too such as the 2x big ones that come
with the A1200 - Amiga Users Guide and AGA Supplement.

eBay and Amibench might be a good start.
http://amibench.org/

:-)

[Amigadude]

Some commands are included on the Kickstart ROM (it is sort of the Amiga version of a BIOS), type "Resident" to see which commands are available.

If you require any help feel free to drop into the #amihelp IRC channel on de3.arcnet.vapor.com

JohnN

[leirbag28]

 It sounds to me like he is booting the A1200 with no Startup Sequence. Are you holding the 2 mouse buttons down and selecting "Boot with No StartUp Sequence?

If you are, dont............also check if there is a floppy disk in the disk drive......if there is, Remove it as its not allowing the computer to boot.  You can Reboot it by simply pressing a combination of keys at the same time...the Keys are:

CTRL Left AMIGA, RIGHT AMIGA  (these keys are keys with letter "A" sybols on them on opposite sides of the space bar.............not the letter "A" of the regular keys.

Hope that helps.

[huxley]

come on now -i'm sure u can do more than that wiv it!!!!

just goes to show who's using wot most of the time these daze... doesnt take long to forget some basic 3.0+ (32bit OS) fundamentals...


...

[ent0mbed]

>by huxley on 2004/7/23 23:17:12
>
>come on now -i'm sure u can do more than that wiv it!!!!
>
>just goes to show who's using wot most of the time these >daze... doesnt take long to forget some basic 3.0+ (32bit OS) >fundamentals...

I'm not sure that he has forgotten his fundamentals.  It sounds like he has just gotten his first Amiga and never had the knowledge to begin with.  I know I haven't used CLI (which for the person that asked the questions benefit stands for: Command Line Interface) in a long time and would probably have a hard time remember a lot of the commands.  I'm just guessing here, but I think you're going to need to get your hands on some version of an Amiga Workbench (3.0+) and install it on your hard drive.  I'm just getting back into the Amiga scene though so I might be mistaken.  I'm sure someone on here is going to get you straightened out though.

[elendil]

I'm certain you're having a freshly formatted bootable partition on that harddrive. When something bootable (floppy, hd partition, whatever) is completely empty, you'll just be given the cli with only resident ROM commands to use, as someone already pointed out.

So, as someone else already pointed out (, you're going to need a set of workbench disks. Alternatively you could download amiga in a box (AIAB) which includes OS3.1 afaik and fix that up to work on your system... but then again, with absolutely no amiga software or other amigas transferring data to the amiga isn't going to be pleasant.

So I'll do the obvious and suggest finding a user group near you

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[joken]

Thanks for all the great help. Now I atleast know what I have to do. My question is, I have a full set of workbench adfs, is there any operating system/platform combination that can properly write amiga disks? Linux, sunos, etc. I know that PC hardware evidently cant, but can something like Sun hardware? Also, is there anyway to do this using an external amiga floppy drive (ie parallel port) on a PC? Thanks again,

--Joken

[SamuraiCrow]

The Catweasel floppy drive controller works under Linux and Windows on a PC.  You just have to do some recabling.

[joken]

Would it be possible to pull the harddrive out of the 1200 and image/format/copy files on in Linux on a PC?

[elendil]

Yes, you can use winUAE for that. I haven't tried, but I know it's able to read/write to an amiga formatted harddrive. I'm sure it's not too complicated - probably like adding a hardfile.

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

EDIT: eh, I should learn how to read properly... winUAE is for windows, obviously. Have no idea if a similar thing works on linux uae.

[joken]

ahhhh using winuae worked like a charm, thanks all! i have it setup properly now

[joken]

One other question, now that I have it all setup. Its running on my NTSC tv, but everything is black and white. I have ntsc highres mode set in workbench, with 256 colors selected, but it all still comes up black and white. I tried running some demos, but they always seem to be black and white and the gfx look messed up/corrupt. Any thoughts?

[SamuraiCrow]

It sounds to me that you are trying to run PAL demos on NTSC which often doesn't work.  Also it sounds as if your TV is getting lumanance but no chromanence.  Are you using the RF modulator or the composite outputs?  If you are using the RF modulator try hooking up through the composite hookups (maybe though an old VCR if your TV doesn't have composite video).