Good to be back....

[rebbi_1]

Howdy,

Well, I used to post on this site under the "rebbi" nick, but for some reason, I can't get that one to work after a long hiatus, so here I am, reconstituted as "rebbi_1."

I'm in Austin, Texas, and have had an Amiga 1200 since 1993. Over the years, it's morphed into this:

*Ateo Tower case with Ateo Bus board and Pixel-64 gfx card (P96), with internal SCSI Zip 100 drive, internal SCSI CD-ROM drive, fast serial port, Eyetech CD audio-Amiga audio mixer, flicker fixer, Eyetech video switcher, P5 Blizzard '060 board, 48 MB Fast RAM... hooked up to a Yamaha CD burner and a SCSI scanner. Whew! Oh, and two internal hard drives: an IBM 15 gig'er and a second, 8 gig drive for backups.

To be honest, I hadn't booted the thing very often since getting my flat-panel iMac nearly three years ago. But I fired the old girl up on a whim yesterday, and to my shock, it booted perfectly. I started mucking around with it, and, well, you might say the magic's back.

In my time on the Miggy scene, I was a reviewer for AmigActive magazine (UK) and for the late, great Amiga Informer.

What else? I do have one question: I am running OS 3.9, up to BB1, but never installed BB2. Should I? Is it worth it? I'd hate to screw up a perfectly stable system if I don't have to.  :-o

Take care, y'all...

Steve

[Jeff]

I have 3.9 on 1 of my 4000's and BB2 was an improvement over both plain 3.9 and BB1 for me. I think it solved some problems I was having with Setpatch loading the KS Rom updates properly.  Been a while, sorry can't be more specific, but I remember it as a good thing:-)

Welcome Back:-D

[doctorq]

I am running with BB2 and no problems here, even though I can't give you any differences between a OS3.9BB1 setup and a OS3.9BB2 setup, as I always install both Boingbags on my systems.

I think you should try it out anyway. Just make a backup of your current setup and if something goes wrong you can always restore the setup.

If you decide to go on with the installation of Boingbag2 and decide to install the new ROM update, there is a risk that the computer goes into a reboot loop. At least my old setup with a Blizzard 1260 and SCSI controller did that. It apparently didn't like some parts of the new ROM update, but don't know if it was because of my IDE controller, or it was a problem related to the Blizzard 1260 board. Adding SKIPROMMODULES "scsi.device" in the SetPatch line cured that :-)

[rebbi_1]

Yes, that's why I'm tempted to leave well enough alone. Not only do I have the Blizzard 1260 with the SCSI module, but I also have the Ateo Bus, and that needs to be initialized during the startup-sequence, too. In fact, the way my Amiga currently starts up is this:

1) Power up
2) Allow Amiga to soft-reset when it hits setpatch (I guess)
3) Allow Amiga to boot and soft reset AGAIN, and
4) Do a hard reset from the keyboard -- this is necessary because of some weird interaction between the Blizzard boards and the Ateo Bus -- Ateo had promised (while they were still in business) to sort this problem out, but they never did. As it is, you need to do a hard reset from the keyboard to properly initialize the Ateo Bus.

So, on a system with such an odd mixture of components, I'm a little reluctant to mess with what works.

By the way, isn't there a good OS 3.x FAQ online somewhere?

Steve

[doctorq]

I can see your point of view, but installing BB2 will not give you an extra reboot since the ROM update will replace your current ROM update. The first reset is when SetPatch is launched, but I can't figure out why it resets twice. Have you some Mac emulator installed?

Have you tried BlizKick? It will allow you to split up the ROM update file, and install them as modules. It removes at least one reset on my machine (BPPCFix). Maybe it will help on your problem as well.

[rayt]

Didn't BB2 introduce asyncwb? Or was it BB1? don't really know as I also alwas install both..

[doctorq]

AsyncWB was introduced in BB1, but I think BB2 has an update for it.

[MasterOfReality]

The only really noticeably useful thing that BB2 did was to add an autoupdate hack for iconless files. Before BB2, if you opened a WB window and selected "Show All ...Files" from the WB menu, it wouldn't keep track of any changes you made to the files or any new files you added since opening the window. BB2 was supposed to be able to autorefresh WB windows so that the window always displayed the correct directory contents. It worked intermittently.

[rebbi_1]

doctorq wrote:
I can see your point of view, but installing BB2 will not give you an extra reboot since the ROM update will replace your current ROM update. The first reset is when SetPatch is launched, but I can't figure out why it resets twice. Have you some Mac emulator installed?

Have you tried BlizKick? It will allow you to split up the ROM update file, and install them as modules. It removes at least one reset on my machine (BPPCFix). Maybe it will help on your problem as well.

Golly... I'd have to look at my Startup-Sequence to remember, and I'm currently on the Pee-Cee at my office, not at home.

I do have the Fusion Mac Emulator running, but I'm not sure that's the extra reboot. Instead, if I remember correctly (and I'll have to look to verify this) it's a little programming widget called StartAteoBus that's called in S-S and causes the other reboot as it initializes the Ateo Bus board. I even think that StartAteoBus offered some sort of "prepare Mac emul" flag that was supposed to supplant the need for those extra Mac emulator reboots. But now I'll have to go home and check. It's amazing how quickly you forget all the Amiga techie stuff when you haven't been at it for awhile.  ;-)

Steve

P.S. -- Is Scalos still maintained? I used to muck around with that from time to time, too.

[Doobrey]

rebbi_1 wrote:
Is Scalos still maintained? I used to muck around with that from time to time, too.

Just found this thread as I was searching for Scalos myself..every link from google turns out bad

Managed to find it though http://scalos.noname.fr/