Latest Update October 10, 2010

A Beginner's Guide to the
AMIGA Personal Computer

Written By Shane Monroe
(C) 1994 By Dark Unicorn Productions. All Rights Reserved.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction and Terminology

A. Introduction and Welcome

B. Terminology

Basic System Terms - WorkBench

Devices, Memory, and Disks

II. Amiga Internals

III. Amiga Basic Capabilities

IV. Devices, Libraries, 'C' Directory, and Fonts

V. Using The WorkBench

VI. Understanding the Shell

VII. "Let's Do It" Tutorials

A. Preparing and Formatting Disks

B. Configuring Your System and Workbench

C. Using PAL and NTSC; How to switch your system!

D. File Manipulation Using DirWorks

E. Virus Prevention and Information, Protect Yourself

F. Installing Programs to Hard Drive Install Without year



I. Introduction and Terminology

A. Introduction and Welcome

Congratulations! You Own The Most Powerful Home
The computer world has yet to see. As With All Things, With
Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Will this guide
assist you in learning your way around this incredible
computer. If You Have Been frightened about sitting down
and Playing With your Amiga, now is the time to do it. We
Will Take You By The Hand and Lead You Down The Path to
Becoming an Amiga guru. This Guide Intended for WAS
Such as beginners and Will Probably boron Those of You Who
Have Had an Amiga for a Few Years. "If you are very familiar
With Some Aspects Of The Amiga, feel free to skip thesis
Part of the guide. Learn at your own pace and do not get in
a hurry. You Will Be knowledgeable soon enough! Happy
computing!

B. Terminology

As With Any profession, hobby or pastime, personal
computing has Its Own 'jargon' or 'lingo', a language you must
learn if you are to Become an Accepted Part of This World. This
Section Will Teach You Some Of The Specific terms regarding The
Amiga computer. Many Of These Will Be Explained in terms more
Detail Later On, If They sound so Confusing, Hopefully They Will not
When you are finished With This Guide.

BASIC SYSTEM TERMS - WORKBENCH

ICON - A small picture Displayed On The Workbench That
Represents a file. Usually double Clicking It Will cause it to
be Executed. There are SEVERAL types Representing SEVERAL Kinds
of programs. They Are DISK TOOL PROJECT, trashcan, and DRAWER.

TITLE BAR - The dark bar is the top Of The Workbench is gold
Year Opened top of window. Usually this contains The Title Of The
window (drawer) and others relevant information like free space
On the left disk, etc..

GADGET - This button-like object Appears Usually have a box
With A circular arrow On The left hand part of the box. Clicking
Usually this box exchange icts happy to Something Else; Usually
year option. Repeated Will Clicking 'toggle' through All the
possible selections. Any interactive 'button gold screen area IS
Often Called GADGET Such has got a gold SLIDER SIZER.

REQUESTER - Almost Every modern piece of Amiga software uses
Some sort of a REQUESTER. A requester Usually Does Just That;
Something requêtes Then Asks you to click the OK When gadget
ready. There has est aussi FILE REQUESTOR Which Is Used to input a
filename. With this request, you can 'browse' through all your
Simply drives and devices and click to select The File.

Trashcan - This Is A deposit icon for unwanted files. It Is
really just a special directory Used to hold thesis files. When
you 'throw away' files here, They Are Moved to this directory and
Physically Until You Kept Them Or select DELETE EMPTY TRASH from
The WorkBench pull downs. If you really want to get rid of a
Simply file it INSTEAD OF DELETE physician before Since The Trashcan
Trashcan Will not free up space by "any use icts.

CLICK - Pressing a mouse button. LEFT CLICK means specified in the left
mouse button (Usually Used to select or highlight) and RIGHT
CLICK means specified in the right mouse button (Usually Used to Activate the
pull down menus Workbench On The gold inside a program. Many items
Like the Workbench require a DOUBLE CLICK to activate Something.
When you see DOUBLE CLICK, It Means The left mouse button click
Twice Quickly you your selection.

DRAG - This Is Used to move icons Around the screen, copy
files, and deposit items In The Trashcan. To this effect, Simply
click your left mouse button and hold it Down on the icon. The
icon Will Then follow your point Until You let it go. We'll
consider this procedure more Later.

TOGGLE - Like a light switch, Many Gadgets Have A SELECTED
Deselected gold text. Some menu options Can Be Turned Off And On
BACKDROP Such As The Workbench On The pull down menus. These Are
Sometimes denoted by a check mark by Gold Highlighting The Options
In Another Color. In Any Event, This Is Called The Toggling
command / option; Changing it to icts Other value.

SLIDER - Sliders are Used On The sides and bottoms of
windows to show When There Is more information available. Theys
aussi allow you to scroll around to see this The Window
information. You May Either Drag the small box filled Inside the
The information to show slider or click In The slider area WHERE
The filled box and the box isn't will travel'm his direction.
To see this in effect, you open Workbench and Use The Icon SIZER
In The lower right hand corner of The Window The Window to SHRINK
Small size has to. When you are finished, The Will sliders
Indicate That There Are icons to see more.

SIZER - This allow you to size The Window. This gadget IS
Located At The bottom right of Almost Every window and Can Be
DRAGGED To The proper size.

CLOSE WINDOW GADGET - The gadget Located in the top left
corner looks like a little box inside a box. This Will Close the
current window. "If you are in a Shell, press CTRL-You May \ to
Close the window.

WINDOW BACK TO GADGET - Located in the top right corner of a
window, it puts all The Current window BEHIND The Other windows
So You May Have Access to Them. It looks like Two box
overlapping Each Other. You May Also use LEFT AMIGA-M has to push
back window.

SHRINK WINDOW GADGET - This Is Located To The gadget
immediate left of the Window BACK TO GADGET. Will it shrink or
The Window to expand icts Smallest size or original size
respectivement. It Is A Toggling gadget.

GRAPHICS MEMORY - Displayed On The Title Bar Of The
Workbench Screen (AmigaDOS 2.0 +) Show the Amount of current CHIP
RAM You Have Remaining. Will you notice That Every Time You Open
a window It Takes a Little Bit of CHIP RAM away. When The window
SI closed, it Gives it back. More on CHIP RAM Later.

GUI - (letters are spoken aloud, not as 'gooey') Graphic
User Interface. The technical term for operating system That year
uses a mouse, windows, icons, and gadgets.

WORKBENCH - The Programs that Manage your files and Allowances
Interaction with your em. Considered a GUI. This Is the
Operating mode to native Amiga is NOT required to Amiga pour la
function. It Is a small program located in. your 'C' directory is
your boot disk.

PULL DOWN MENUS - Commands You Can select by holding down
your right mouse button and moving The Pointer To The title bar.
While Holding the mouse button down You May browse Through the
choices. If a command IS Highlighted With Your point (denoted
Usually in reverse text), You May Simply select it by releasing
your button. Some Items May Be On The Menu 'ghosted' or very
light in color / dotted. Will not Be thesis selectable items.
These Are Usually 'activated' when Another condition exists, Such
Being selected as an Icon. To see example of this year, you use
Workbench pull down menus and look Under ICONS. Most of thesis
commands Will Be ghosted. To see 'em unghosted, select an icon
On The Workbench by Clicking IT ONCE Then go back and look At The
pull down menu again. Most of Them Will Be selectable now.


That Concludes The Basic Workbench terminology. Now let's
move on to The More Complicated Side of the operating system.

DEVICES, MEMORY, AND DISKS

DEVICE - Anything You Can send and / or Receive Information
to / from Such as disk drives, modems, printers, CD-ROM drives,
digitizers, etc.. Events The screen was regarded DEVICE IS, As Is
The Keyboard. We Will Look At The Most Used devices Later.

MEMORY - An area Where the computer stores information.
Some of It Is available to you to use, Some of It Is For The
computer only. Every computer (and Nearly Every Modern Day
Such electronic device as wrist watches and microwave ovens) has
at least SOME memory. There are MANY different types On Some
systems, The Amiga Is One of Them.

ROM - Read Only Memory. This Is That Can Only Be memory
Written but not read from to. The actual Computer Operating
system (Kickstart sincere Called It Is Actually required to 'start'
your system) was replaceable IS Contained Inside the chip
computer. This ROM contains permanent information The System
Needs to run.

RAM - Random Access Memory. Memory That You Can Load
Programs, graphics, and sound for Into The Computer to use. It
Which Means That IS volatile When The computer shut off IS (gold
rebooted using CTRL-LEFT-RIGHT AMIGA AMIGA) this Memory is reset
and (most of the Time) lost. There Are Some Ways That around
Which We Will look at Later When We Talk About viruses. There
SEVERAL types of RAM are using In The Amiga, Each One With A
different purpose.

RAM (Fast) - Fast RAM IS Used to store Programs Used By The
central processor (The Heart of the computer: a Motorola 68000
series). In MOST Amigas This Is Often 16-bit memory (more is
That later) Since The 68000 Is A 16-bit processor. The Sega uses
Sami chip in Their Genesis game console and Their Sega CD. If
your IS machine Equipped With An Accelerator (68020, 68030, gold
68040 CPU) then you Have A 32-bit processor runs Which
Faster considerably thats the 68000. This CPU Requires
(Obviously) 32-bit Fast RAM to run "at its optimum performance.
If You Only Have 16-bit Fast RAM and a 32-bit processor, you
May not SEEM machine as fast as it should ", Since The processor
Can not operate at the Speed You Paid For. 16-bit Fast RAM IS
Called occasionally SLOW RAM. You Can put up to eight megs was
16-bit processor (With Some Exceptions) and pretty much unlimited
(Based On The Weight of your pocketbook) on a 32-bit processor.
Usually this RAM CAN BE sticking added by plugging in a gold board
in a box is the Computer. In Any Event, The custom chips (more
That is later) Can not use "any form of FAST RAM for storage.

RAM (Chip) - Since The Amiga Is the only true multitasking
machine, it has SEVERAL custom processors (or Called The Custom
CHIPSET) to handle Almost Every function of The Computer, Leaving
The CPU free to do number crunching and The Basic Program
execution. Thesis custom processors require memory to Their Own
Programs in Their Own store. The memory They Are Designed to use
Called IS (Appropriately enough) Chip RAM. In older Amigas it
Was Set at 512K (one half a megabyte). Then, a modified cam
out to let you Have One megabyte of chip RAM. The latest Amigas
Have Two megs of RAM chip. Since All the graphics and sound are
Stored here, It Is Easy to See Why 'The More the Merrier' is
Quite true When It Comes to Chip RAM. Chip RAM * CAN * Be Used by
The CPU if no Fast RAM est disponible. Purpose, This Is Not Desired
Since Chip RAM Is About 20% Slower Than The 16-bit Fast RAM.
Chip RAM est très Costly and Difficult to add. It has a aussi
little flaw in it Called FRAGMENTATION. More On That Later On.

DISK - A disk device (or drive) Comes in Many Forms With
lots of different names. All drives require a CONTROLLER to talk
Between Them and the Computer. The disk drive built in That Is
to all Amigas Is A 3.5 "floppy disk drive. Note: Although The
3.5 "Disk Is Hard plastic casing, tea Inside the actual media
casing so it IS floppy Is Still regarded a floppy disk. The
computer has a built in floppy drive controller That Will allow
floppy drives up to oven to Be Connected and Accessed at one
time. Hard Disk Drives Actually use rigid plastic disks to store
data is. These Are Inside the hermetically sealed box and you
Will Probably Never See what a platter (the disk Itself) Actually
looks like. Theys hold a great deal more Than Their floppy
Counterparts And Also require a controller to Operate. Most
Amigas do not Have This controller built in so It Must Be
Purchased With The drive to use. A CD-ROM drive works The Same
way, Basically. It aussi Requires a controller to blinds icts
Information On The pits in little disc. Thesis of pits are
Which Represent numbers differ Depths thats the computer Cdn
Actually change Into a program to run. All devices controlled
need a software program 'patch' or device file to allow 'em to
From The Talk To The computer controller. These Are Located in
DEVS your directory is your Workbench Golden Disk hard drive
partition. Floppy drives are denoted as DF0 - DF3 and hard
Usually drives are denoted as DH0 - DH?. The Amiga internal disk
drives are all double density (with The Exception Of The A4000)
and hold 880K of data When formatted. There Are some utilities
Out There That Will allow you to Increase this number to 936K gold
na.

RAM DISK - This is a special device. It allocate your
memory as a 'mini disk drive' to allow temporary storage of files
and data. On your workbench, you should "see an Icon That Says
RAM DISK or RAM. This Is just like a disk drive and You Can Copy
to, delete from, Program to install, and it just like MANIPULATORS
The disk drive Counterparts. Its limited capacity to your IS
Total available memory (Displayed On The title bar of your
Workbench disk). It Does not Need to be 'formatted' to Be Used.
It Is Ready as soon as you see icts icon. WARNING! It uses RAM
What is in to hold it so if you reset your computer, crash it,
power failure of rolling stock, etc.. Anything There Will Be Lost! There Is
You Can create a device has RAD Which Is Called like a RAM DISK goal
Anything but it will survive Turning the computer off (or power
loss). You-can crash it, reset it, etc.. and It Will Still Be
There When Your Workbench loads. More On The RAD Later.

PRT - Printer device. You Can Specify Which device to send
has to queue in MOST Amiga programs. For instance, if you are
was working database and you want to save it to The Internal
floppy drive, you enter a filename Might Called DF0: DATABASE.
With The Amiga, You Can Send It To The right printer! Simply
enter RRP: DATABASE and It Will Send the file to your printer!
Since you feel your printer type In The PREF (more later), all
Programs Can Make Use of the special features of That printer.

SER - Serial device. This Is The Device That Lets You Talk
To The serial port (used by modems and printers Mostly). Like
The PRT device you just Need to use SER as the Device name.

PAR - Parallel device. Talk to the parallel port. This Is
The Most Common Port Used by printers. UNLESS you are talking to
Another Amiga via a cable Parnet, The PRT Would Be Better to use
if you want to send Something To The Printer.

CON - Console device. The Computer Itself! If you send a
File To The console device, It Will display it using your screen
your CON: device parameters.


If a lot of this Does not Make Sense right now, be patient.
Rome wasn't built in a day, nor Was Your Amiga. Give yourself
Some Time to Learn.

II. Amiga Internals

We Have Touched Lightly On The internals Of The Amiga
Computer In The Last Chapter. Now we are going to get a little
Deeper And A Little More Technical What we do These Things.
Let's take a look at THE BASICS Of The schematic exacts The Amiga
Major chips. This will represent the Non-AGA Amigas (A500, A1000,
A2000, A600)


VIDEO INPUT / OUTPUT SOUND
+--------------------------|-----------|---------| -------------+
| | | | |
| +----------+ +----------+ +------+ +-------+ |
| | |---- CPU | DENISE | | GARY | | PAULA | |
| +----------+ | +----------+ +------+ +-------+ |
| | | | | | | |
| | | | |----------------------| |
| | | | | |
| | | | +-------+ |
| +---+ | | | AGNUS | |
| | K | | | +-------+ |
| | I | | | | |
| | C | | |-------------| | |
| | K | | +----------+ +----------+ |
| | S | | | FAST RAM | | RAM CHIP | |
| | T | | +----------+ +----------+ |
| | A | | |
| | R | | |
| | T | | +------------------------------+ |
| | | --- | 32-BIT FAST RAM IF AVAILABLE | |
| | R | +------------------------------+ |
| | O | |
| | M | |
| +---+ |
| * SCHEMATIC DRAWN FOR CLARITY NOT FOR ACCURACY * |
+------------------------------------------------- -------------+

As You Can See, There Are Some Serious chips in this
machine capable of doing Things That Other platforms STILL
cannot do. Let look at thesis in a little more depth.

CPU - As Mentioned Before, it Is the family from 68000
Motorola. In non-accelerated Amigas, The CPU runs at a speed of
7.16 MHz. Now That Does not sound like a lot, I know. When you
read about IBM PCs running at 66 MHz, it sounds like You May Be
Living in the Dark Ages With Your Amiga. Not so. If you look at
The schematic Closely, very few "functions are done by this 'slow'
CPU. The video, audio, and input / output are all Handled
Independently Of The CPU. One thesis Pcs 66 MHZ, Every function has
to tear a chunk out of The CPU processing time. That Is Why has
'Slow' Amiga Cdn Often outrun and outperform a PC of double gold
The triple MHZ (also called Set CLOCK SPEED). Imagine Having a 50
MHZ Amiga! Wow! The CPU uses all Three RAM memory banks for purpose
The Memory is Used in this order: 32-bit Fast RAM, Fast RAM, and
finally Chip RAM. That way, it uses Always First and The Fastest
The Most precious last. The CPU May Have A Math Coprocessor aussi
Which Takes Care of All the heavy duty math functions, Leaving
The CPU Even More Free Of Burden. When you get right down to it,
The CPU Does very little. On an information note, Many of you
Probably are thinking "Well, If The CPU has nothing to do, how
MOST flight simulators come run so SLOW on my Amiga? "Good
question. Here Is Why. Most Of These games are 'ported' over
From The land of IBM Pcs Where They Have No custom chips.
Therefor, All the routines depends on CPU speed to be Strictly
exploiter. The programmers do not recode the game to make use of
The Power of the Amiga graphics and just Rely On The CPU. So
Naturally a flight sim made to run good on a 33 MHz PC isn't
worth going to run beans is a 7 MHz Amiga. Solution? Get a
Faster processor or get a flight sim That Was Written pour la
On the Amiga Amiga (like F/A-18 Interceptor) and see how well it
runs!

KICKSTART ROM - This is the 'brain' of The System. Without
this chip, you can not Even get a screen up. This Holds All the
Programs for Making the system work; icts internal functions.
Use kickstart to Be on disk (just like IBM PC people Do It With
And The IBMBIOS.SYS COMMAND.COM files) With The very first
Amigas. Before You Could Even boot up Workbench You Had to stick
With The disk was in kickstart information on it. The version of
Kickstart WAS 1.1 through about 1.3. Then, They Made the middle
Amigas With The Kickstart ROM chip was as It Is now. They Made
Fairly easy to change it out (amen). The WAS version 1.3.4 more
The final gold less 'old' Kickstart ROM. Then Came the 2.0 ROMS
Which Were pretty flaky and more or less beta. Some old A3000's
HAD this beta ROM. It Was With fixed soon 4.2 Which Is Now
The pretty much standard. With The Addition Of The PCMCIA slot
and high-density floppy drives To The Amiga, Another update WAS
Needed N 02.05 Was released. 5.2 est très old is unstable
machines and "should not Be Used with older A500. The 5.2 IS
Primarily pour la A600 Which Has the PCMCIA slot.

DENISE - This Is The graphic Heart of the Amiga. It has
Some fantastic features not found On Any Other graphic processor
anywhere. The Most incredible feature of this chip Is That It Is
Already synchronized video signals to everyday like your TV and
VCR! Video That Comes Out Of The Computer Be my feeling to your VCR
and Recorded With No Specialized equipment. To do this on a PC
Would cost SEVERAL EXTRA Hundred dollars. Other features include
mode has blitter and copper list. The blitter, simply put, Is The
Ability to move around portions of The Screen at unbelievable
speeds. Great for animation. The copper lets you alter "any
Individual Line on the screen independent of the Other. This Is
Why You Can open multiple screens at resolutions With Different
the Same Time. Of course, You Can Also for this awesome feat
special effects for games and video production. There are Two
incarnations of The Denise chip. The original & the DENISE
Super DENISE. The Super DENISE Does Very Little More Than Give
Additional screen mode and you Called Super User Productivity,
Which Is 1280x400 resolution to only 4 colors. Really only good
for business / productivity software.

GARY - This chip controls All the input / output Of The
system. Printers, disk drives, serial port, etc.. This chip
The Computer Gives The Ability to multitask REALLY sincere you-can
The output to printer, access your hard drive, and copy Two
floppies at the Same Time WHILE YOU ARE WITH YOUR DOWNLOADING
MODEM. Try That With Any PC!

PAULA - This Is The Sound Drive for the Amiga. As it is,
you have 2 channel, 4 voice, hi-fi stereo sound With Any Amiga
computer. It Is The Standard. Some very clever programmers Have
hacked six events 16 voices out of this chip. The sound coming
With Out is standard RCA type plugs attach to Any Which Canon
unbelievable sound quality for stereo. Even with the New
Technology, PC computers do not Have the fidelity That Comes Out
Of The Amiga.

AGNUS - This Is The memory manager pour la CHIPSET. To
EACH direct chip to The Right area of memory, The Agnus SITS
Between the chips and chip RAM. There are Three incarnations of
this chip. The original Agnus, the Fat Agnus, And The Fatter
Agnus (also called Set by Some Super Agnus). Thesis chips decides how
Much Chip system RAM you CAN HAVE Actually Not Necessarily have.
The original Agnus Would only address 512K max. The Fat
Access One meg version, and the Super Two Cdn address megs.
The Amiga 3000, 1200, 4000, and 600 Have the Super Agnus chip in
it. Only the first Three Actually Have the full megs of Two Chip
RAM in it. The 600 Can Be expanded to make use of the extra chip
RAM. The Other Amigas require a special board called Set The
MegaChip 2000 to get Two megs of RAM chip. The 2000 has one meg
of Chip RAM standard (Fat Agnus) and Some newer 500s Have the Fat
Agnus aussi, can not access to The Memory Without A special
To The amendment therefore motherboard. The MOST important part of
the Fat and Super Agnus Agnus Is The Ability to switch to PAL
video mode. This alone Requires Some explanation.

Europe uses a different type of Power Than We Do here. Theys
50 hz power use INSTEAD of 60 hz like us. That Means That Their
Power cycle IS slow. Malthus, It Takes Their computer has little
bit longer to Update the screen display, it does it Every 50th of
Every second versus a 60th of a second With Bears. In Other Words
THEY CAN draw more Before It On The screen has to start over
again. In layman's terms, THEY CAN display 256 On The Line
200 lines per screen is bears. The Canon Truly this UNSYNC
graphics and sound on games and In Some boxes not to cause 'em
work at all if timing is Critical to the Program. By using a
special program, we can change screen displays o Into PAL (Bear
Called IS NTSC) mode so That We Can Use The wealth of European
Software That Is available to us. This Reason Alone is good
Enough to warrant upgrading this chip if you Have the old
original one.

FAST RAM - We Discussed This Is So We Will Detail Above only
touch on it here. Again, This Is The Memory That Is Used By The
CPU to store data and programs et is NOT useable by The Custom
CHIPSET. It worth noting That May Be When You Fast RAM to add
The System and It Is autoconfigure it immediately available. We
PC computers, you are required to run a memory manager program to
Access the Memory & Events Then It Is Difficult to arrange right.

CHIP RAM - This is a topic Which Discussed Earlier weekends, so I
All That Will not recap information here. Instead, let's talk about
The Liabilities of Chip RAM. Aside from HAVING very little of it
to start off with (UNLESS you own gold A4000 A1200 AGA year) and
Having It Costly & Difficult to upgrade, There Is Another problem
Called FRAGMENTATION. This CAN get sticky, to try to follow me
is this one. Chip RAM IS Allocated in 'chunks' by The Custom
Requires CHIPSET it did it. The chip DENISE May grab a chunk 200K
to open up a screen. Think of RAM as-a-Chip Whole pie, one has
megabyte pie. When a chip needs some memory, it Asks to Agnus
allocate it a piece of pie. Agnus checks to see if The Pie is Big
Enough est disponible piece and then 'Slices' a piece out and
'Gives it' to the chip Requesting it. When the Chip Is Done With
it, it Gives It Back In The Same Size it Took It. Agnus' puts
The Pieces' Back Into the pie and it est disponible pour la next
request. Unfortunately by, Oz The Pie is 'sliced up' from All the
requêtes, All the IS Remaining are Thousands of 'little slices'
of pie. Now, a chip for a large chunk requêtes of Chip RAM.
Agnus checks to see if EACH slice it CAN cut a big piece Enough
out of it to Meet the Demand. After searching all the Pieces, it
Could not find a big piece Enough, So It Tells The chokes
There Is OUT OF MEMORY error year and dened the Chip The Memory,
Even though the 'pie pan' is full of pie slices! This Is Called
fragmentation and It Is One Of The Leading 'cryptic' Reasons Why
your Amiga Will Give you an OUT OF MEMORY error When You
WorkBench Shows You Have Plenty. The worst part of the deal IS
Thats the only way to defragment The Memory Is To The reset
gold machine OFF then turn it back on. There Are A Few Programs
That out there claim to 'force' a re-fragmentation of memory, goal
They Are genuine hacks and not available commercially. While
this problem sounds bad (and it is) and frequent (it isn't)
There Are a Few Things You Can Do to Help Reduce the frequency.
"If you are going to use a paint program, stick in one resolution
if possible. Or If You Know You Will Be Needing to use multiple
resolutions, use 'em in order Highest to lowest. You May Also
Reset your machine from time to time. The Bottom Line Is, do not
RAM Chip consciously worry about UNLESS you start HAVING Problems
With It. Most of us run one meg RAM chip machines and very
Rarely Have Any Problems with fragmentation. This paragraph WAS
Written to Educate You On One Of The idiosyncrasies of your
machine, not to scare or worry you.

Of course, There Are Many More inside you share computer
CIA chips like (your floppy drive and mouse / joystick controllers)
Most Of Them purpose are Beyond the scope of this guide. If you want
to learn more about thesis units, I would recommend Contacting
ABACUS books and getting one of Their advanced guides.

III. AMIGA BASIC CAPABILITIES

Now That We see all this cool hardware and Operating awesome
system, let's really talk about What You Can Do With It. Most
Thats the Amiga people Believe Is A 'game engine' and not
Suitable for 'professional' applications. On the contrary sir,
The Amiga for EVERY COMPUTER IS capable NEED You May Have. This
Why Will explain chapter and recommend to Meet Some Programs
Needs thesis.

First, let's talk about graphics, Where the really Amiga
excelsa. While newer PCs Have A Better With resolution 256
colors, More Than The Amiga Makes Up For It With special icts
graphic patterns & the weekends Mentioned Earlier Denise specialties.
Here Is A Breakdown Of The Amiga display resolutions:

Name Size (in pixels) Maximum Colors
-------------------------------------------------- -----------
320x200 Low Resolution 4096 (HAM)
Interlaced 320x400 Low Res 4096 (HAM)
High Resolution 640x200 16
High Res Interlaced 640x400 16
4 * Super Productivity 1240x200
Interlace * Super Prod 4 1240x400

* Requires a Super Denise chip.

Please note That this is for up to AGA Amigas. The AGM
Amigas Have Much Better resolutions and colors, Since The purpose
Majority of Amiga users reading this guide Have older thesis
systems, We Will Stick With this. To Make Things Easier, let
define a couple more terms. Is the old OCS chipset. This Means
Half meg Agnus and Denise No Super. ECS (Enhanced Chip Set) Is A
One or Two and a Super meg Agnus Denise. The only computer That
Comes With The A600 Is The ECS installed. The AGA machines Have
Their Own AGA chipset. The ECS, of course, Can Be Installed in
Any lesser Amiga.

The possible colors for a resolution Depends on the mode you
are Operating in. In Low Res, you have 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32
Access over 4096 colors to color HAM (On That more later) as well
have a special mode called Set Brite Extra Half (FSA) Which allow for
64 colors in a special way. You May have 2, 4, 8 or 16 colors
for High Resolution screens. Super Productivity IS mode Used
only for business applications requiring a huge screen it sincere
only supports 4 colors.

Brite Extra Half Is A Fashion That Makes special 64 colors out
of 32 colors. Here Is How It Works. The first 32 colors are
definable & the second set of 32 colors are derived from The
first 32 colors by dimming to half as bright Them (The Malthus
name). So Now You Have 64 colors out of 32. When you exchange
color, its 'half bright partner' est aussi changed.

HAM IS Very interesting indeed. It Is Quite aussi
complicated. HAM stands for Hold And Modify and, as The Name
Might Imply, is Not very good for animation. HAMS real power
Comes Out When displaying stills photographic quality images, Such
gold people have real life picture. HAM 4096 Gives You colors are
The Screen Versus the 256 colors of a PC. Granted, The
Resolution Must Be Low or Low Interlaced, to believe me Color Is
more important Than When It Comes to resolution images displaying
de ce type. HAM is Nothing More Than has clever hardware 'hack'
That Was Originally Planned Even When The Amiga WAS designed.
The Biggest liability method of HAM IS a 'glitch' Called HAM
Fringing. This is what you see On Some HAM pictures if you try
to modify 'em With A paint program. It Is a color bleed,
Basically. The process aims est très Detailed let's just say That
IS EACH pixel color pixel's color is dependent to The Left of It.
So, if you change a pixel's color, it CAN effect up to Three
The Right of pixels to it. This causes the 'bleed' effect you
see. HAM est très neat goal very restrictive, Which Is Why MOST
Software Does not Use It, Especially Which games require a lot of
action and movement. Most games use Low Res 32 or 64 colors for
Their display.

Using The Amiga for games Is an excellent choice. The
Powerful graphic commands Of The Denise (copper & blitter) GIVE
this machine the Edge for fast hardcore arcade games like Mortal
Kombat. The ease of Adding Memory To The Amiga make it a good
platform for in depth simulation memory hungry games too. The
Fact That Every Amiga has a built-in mouse and inexpensive
aussi joystick adapters make it cheap for games. The rich built-
Generates sound chip in arcade quality stereo soundtracks and
sound effects as well as "Providing digital speech and sound
capability. The Fact That the video signal coming out of The
Computer Can Be feels straight to a TV puts it in good competition
for console games like Nintendo and Sega. Although The Amiga WAS
Originally Designed not for games, it Certainly Does a good job
playing of 'em.

Productivity On The Amiga est aussi quite good, although in
Different Ways Than The PC. The PC has tons of productivity
titles available Not Even On The Amiga Amiga But The Does Have A
Few Things thats the PC and it Does not really swing The Canon
Towards the pendulum if Amiga thesis Things Are What You Need.
The advantages to hand work productivité On The Amiga Is The True
pre-emptive multitasking operating system. This operating system
(OS) IS by far The Best OS On The home computer platform. PC
Have users Windows and OS / 2, to The Power of the Amiga OS has to
Be Explained Before You Can Really See the superiority of it.

First, it Requires very little memory to run. Workbench
Itself IS only 14K! The Amiga OS Will Run on Year of only Amiga
256K! Try running Windows or OS / 2 On Any PC with Less Than 16
megabytes of memory and see how you like it! Since The OS IS
pre-emptive, You May Actually assign a priority to Task That EACH
Is Running to insure thats the processor Gives attention it Before
Any Other task. For instance, If You Were Running a spreadsheet
That Was doing calculations Major, You May Set The task at a
N / A High Priority That When You are writing a letter on your
word processor (at the Same Time, of course), Will Give The CPU
The spreadsheet The Attention When It calls for it to do
calculations. In this respect, if a task crashes, It Can Usually
Be Suspended and allow you to finish Up the work you are doing
with Other Programs Before You reboot crashed to Clear the task.

The OS has a ton of aussi Other little gems for Productivity
That set it aside from The Other lesser OSes. Overall, The
Environment IS incredibly simple and easy to learn as you Will
see In The tutorials. In WorkBench 2.1 and Above all You Can Do
Things like lots of read and write to IBM formatted disks
(Double Density, of course) So You Can take files to and from
work and use 'em On The PC You May Have There. Since The Amiga
Programs that Will has productivité share data with IBM
Productivity, You Can Do a Lot of Work at Home Using The Amiga OS
And Then Take the data back to work. Here Is a quick list of
Popular Programs & the Amiga PC Programs that Will exchange
With data em.

IBM Program Amiga Programs
-------------------------------------------------- ---------------
Word Perfect Transwrite, Wordsworth, Word Perfect
Lotus 1-2-3 Professional Calc
dBase III, IV (. dbf) Superbase Pro, SBAS IV dB Man

Of course, standard text (ASCII) files are fully-moveable
from platform to platform.

Another gem Is The Ability to set default preferences for
Major peripherals So You Do not Have to Set Them for Individual
programs. For instance, There Is a PREFS editor for all versions
of AmigaDOS. From There, You Can Set The default printer type to
use. Once It Is Set, All Programs Grab the printer driver from
That preference Specify INSTEAD of making you one Inside the
program. You Can read this have NO MORE PROGRAMS THAT DO NOT
SUPPORT YOUR PRINTER! The driver IS ounce set, you No Longer Need
to set it inside your programs. If You Have a strange printer
and a PC, you know The frustration of getting expensive piece year
That of software subsequently assembled Heavily On The printer only to find out
That it does not support your printer. Then You Spend Your Whole
Trying to find a afternoon driver That Is Close Enough to Get the
printer working. Come to find out That half of Special
Bought your printer features for you Will not Work With This Other
driver. Not a Burden for us Amiga owners.

You Can customize your Workbench to look and act EXACTLY The
Including way you want colors, sound effects, backdrops, custom
animated icons, screen resolution, Even Redefine the shape of
your mouse pointer! All This Is SUPER easy to do, too.

Now, how about video production? If You Have Ever Wanted
hand in making movies, Will this computer help you out. Since
IS the video output synchronized to normal video, you-can-make
scrolling credits for your home movies, animate your own cartoon
gold do wild special effects like morphing and 3D Rendered
animation like in SeaQuest DSV. All done your little one 'game
computer '. With inexpensive hardware device year you can 'scan'
your pictures onto The Screen 'em and modify. You CAN record
'Mini-movies' and play' em back. Scan in your logo and business
alter it then print it back out to your laser printer. Grab a
frame of your favorite TV show and could have a backdrop it is your
Workbench. The sky is the limit and Most Of You Already Have
What You Need to get there; Amiga year. "If you are seeking" to
Become a professional video, You Will Have No Doubt heard about
the Video Toaster. This all in one card pour la Amiga (only, I
Might add) Will Give You The Power Of A $ 100,000 television
studio right in your house. SeaQuest DSV and Babylon 5 are just
Two Major Programs that Utilize Their special for The Toaster
effects. The Video Toaster Costs under $ 2000 and Is A Real
steal. It requires an encrypted A2000, A3000, A4000 Gold to work. With year
Called a cheap device GENLOCK, You Can overlay computer graphics
and live video like The Weatherman and historical map, or make your own
'Roger Rabbit' movie using your own Amiga generated cartoon
characters with You're The Star.

Personal software Such as address books, calendar planners,
CD databases, organizers, and Much More are Abundant In The
Shareware Realm Of The Amiga. Great Software You Can Get for $ 5
or $ 10. Some of it you CAN get for FREE! You May Never Have to
Spend The Cash On Another high priced piece of software again!



IV. Devices, Libraries, 'C' Directory, and Fonts

Now That You Have Seen The Power of the Amiga computer, it
Is Time to discover a little more about Where It Comes From and
allow you to broaden your knowledge about your system. Anyone
Canon uses a computer, to It Takes Something Special to REALLY
Understand What is happening inside.

As year Amiga owner, chances are you know about Twice As Much
MOST have your PC system owners know about theire. Because That Is
The Amiga OS let's you get as deep as you want Into The System
Without FORCING you to. You Can Operate year for Amiga Years and
Shell has never oz open (more later) or learn about Anything What
I am about to share. Purpose The More You Know, The More Power of
Will you get your system. There are a MASSIVE number of Things
You Can Do With Your Amiga Workbench Than What the Will allow.
In order to use this power, you need some to Keep the KM
power under control.

DEVICES

As We Stated Before, a piece of hardware has DEVICE Such as-a
modem, printer, or hard drive. Each device has a controller of
Some Kind to allow it to talk to The Computer. In order pour la
Amiga to talk to it, it Requires a small program to tell it 'how'
to talk. Think of this program as an 'interpreter'. This
Called a program DEVICE DRIVER IS. The Drivers Can Be Recognized
By The extension. DEVICE. The printer driver IS Called
Printer.device, The serial port driver IS Called SERIAL.DEVICE,
etc.. Since drivers are thesis Programs, They Can Be modified and
updated by programmers to take advantage of new technology
Easier. Most drivers are included That Are Used With Workbench.
Some special hardware Such as CD-ROMs or video scanners, etc.. May
Their use That You require special driver. Most of the Time,
though, The Software That Comes With The Hardware Will Have an
Easy Installation Programs that Will Do it all for you. As a new
Power Amiga user, You Need to Know Where These Are. All the
Drivers are Kept in a drawer Called DEVS is your Workbench disk
gold score. If You Were to look in this directory, you Would
see lots of drivers for lots of different devices. For the MOST
First, You Will Not Even this leaflet drawer contents and standards icts
Even More Rarely Will You Ever Have to Interface With It.

LIBRARIES

This Is Where You Can Get Yourself Into disorder. Not Being
knowledgeable in this area CAN cost you a lot of time and
disorder. Purpose, in a few "minutes You Will hot to trot it
libraries.

A LIBRARY IS a program file. Kept all your libraries are in
Called a drawer LIBS is your Workbench disk or partition. Theys
Can not Be Run, per se, are more like a goal RESOURCE For Other
Program to draw information out of Commonly Used. This Makes
Smaller and more efficient Programs. Take this example. You are
a worker for a construction site. Now, you are building a house
here and arent sure EXACTLY What You Are Going To Be required to
Work on That Particular job, it could "Depends on the weather, how
Before long a job takes, etc.. You Have to be decided Something.
What tools are you going to bring-out from your truck To The
actual site? Carpenter tools? Electrical tools? Plumbing
tools? You do not really know. You could "drag your toolbox Whole
out there just in case, or You Could Get What You Needed just out
When You Of The truck required That Particular type of tool.
Your truck is Right There and That Way You Do not Have a lot of
Up the tools cluttering up.

This Is the way libraries work. Let's say you write a
Programs that Might Be By The required user to load up a picture
and display it. Chances are He Will not, he Might goal. Are you
The routines to include going inside your program to load The
picture? Well, you could ", There Is a goal out there That library
Has the routines in it for you. All You Have to DO IS call for
it and it Will Do the job for you. If you want to do heavy math
Inside your program, You Can call a different library to do it
For You So You Do not Have to include a 'calculator' inside your
program. That Is Why So Many Amiga Programs are so small; THEY
use libraries to do MOST of The Dirty work. Libraries are
Information common to lots of programs (math, graphics,
input / output, etc.).

So, Why CAN thesis guys get you in trouble? Well, Almost
Every big program out there has a couple of special libraries
That it Requires to run. Now you've installed a lot ounces of
Program on your hard drive, You May Have A HUGE LIBS directory
(You Should see mine) and Some software uses special The Same
Such libraries have ARP.LIBRARY Which Is The Popular was very nice
File requester routine. While The programs work fine May be your
hard drive, if you put it on a floppy and try to run it, It May
That not find library and crash. Should you go there LIBS drawer
deleting spree, You May Find That a Lot of Your Program
(Including Workbench) Might work now "any more. Another problem
You Might Run Into SI When You install a new piece of software
That year contains UPDATED version of an Existing library. If The
old library IS overwritten, The Program That Used it Before May
not run anymore. This Happens With A Lot of 1.3 vs. 2.0 Programs
That wears very different libraries With The Sami name. Be very
Careful about overwriting Existing libraries with New ones.

You Will Need To Be aussi Familiar With This directory if you
Trying to plan we ever coax a non-hard drive installable program
onto your hard drive. More about this Later.

'C' DIRECTORY

Ah, The nerve center of your OS. "If you are a PC user aussi,
IS this drawer comparable To The DOS directory in MS-DOS. Simply
could, MOST of your shell commands are here. Commands like copy,
delete, dir, MakeDir, etc.. are all found right here. Again, this
Is A Directory That a regular user May Never Look at, to have a
Power user, You Will Learn About Intimately.

LIBS next to your directory, This Will Probably Be Your
Biggest draw in terms of number of strands. Mine has over 300
files (commands) in it. After you are your Amiga computer for a
Few Years Will you build up a great collection of little contention
'Utilities'. Things like text viewers, picture viewers, file
archivers, searchers filename, file converters, etc.. Can Be
Stored here. The best part of this drawer Is That The System
Will Always check here for a command No Matter Where in the
system you end it. "If you are on device DF1: The Copy and use
command, The command Will Work Because although it is Not On The
disk in DF1: It Is In Your 'C' directory. Take a look at this
directory sometime and see How Many There Are goodies here. Like
The LIBS directory, if you go chopping away files out of this
drawer, Things like your Workbench (and other programs) May Not
work anymore. This Is Another directory That You Will Utilize in
Learning to install non-installing software to your hard drive.

FONTS

Possibly One Of The Coolest Thing About your Amiga OS IS
The Font directory. This is a drawer of Fonts That You Can Use
inside of word processors, paint Programs, and Any Other programs
That Might Support Them. The fonts are Stored in a strange
format. It May not look like it from inside a well behaved
Thought-out program, if you aim Looked At The directory Would you
see Something Like this:

TOPAZ <DIR>
DIAMOND <DIR>
topaz.font
diamond.font

The. Is the font file's are identified. This is what you
Might look at paint program To Tell What fonts you have. The
Corresponding Contains the actual font directories and Themselves
That Contain filenames are numbers like 8, 16, 32, 48, etc..
Thesis numbers Represent The Point Of The sizes are That Are
Being available 8 and 48 Being small width.

There are Two major types of fonts, and Bitmapped
Compugraphics. WE Are the Ones bitmapped see above. They Are
Limited To The exact sizes That Are Listed in the Directory.
Compugraphic fonts are What We call SCALABLE Which Means That
THEY CAN BE any size you desire Them To Be. Where have bitmapped
fonts are drawn and saved, Compugraphic fonts are Stored as
Mathematical Functions That Tell the computer How to Draw Them;
Size Means Nothing. It Is similar to Postscript For Those
Familiar With It. Thesis fonts are bigger and take Much Longer to
load, But The End Result is worth it. If you try to Manually
scale has bitmapped font With Your paint program, You Will Find It
choppy and jagged. Compugraphic fonts look good No Matter What
size. Fonts are like lots of Libraries. They Are Called it
INSTEAD of demand included inside The Program Themselves. As
You May Have guessed, this directory is relevant to aussi
Installing non-installing software to your hard drive.


V. USING THE WORKBENCH

Up to this point We Have Covered a lot of in depth stuff
about your Amiga. Now let's go back to the easy stuff and take a
Break Before We Get into the intricacies of the Shell & the
tutorials.

We talked a lot about The Windows, icons, and physician before
mouse. The manual cam With Your Amiga That Can Explain Most Of
The WorkBench to you. Instead of Reviewing the same old stuff
You Probably Already Know About, I am going to take you-through
Some Of The Lesser Known Things About the WorkBench. Things that
Even Some Of The veterans know about May Not. Oh, one thing
Before We Get Started, this chapter Will Discuss Workbench V2.1
Since It Is Probably The Most Widely used. Some Things Will Work
for v2.04 and V1.3 and V3.0 MOST should "work it.

Take a moment right now to look at your pull down menus are
your Workbench. Record The Far Right menu item That says TOOLS
& the only command Under RESETWB It Is? That menu could WAS
There For programmers Who wanted to add menu items to Their Own
The pull downs. You Can Utilize it for your own use! You Can
make menu items That Will Launch Programs, copy disks, gold
Anything You Might Want! There are SEVERAL public domain
Programs like ToolsDaemon Manager and Tool That Will Help You do
this. Each program has ITS own way of doing business so check
The Documentation That Comes With The Program to find out how to
Things set up. It Is A Lot Easier That A Hundred opening windows
to get to your favorite programs.

Being In The WorkBench environment IS Rather limited, goal
You Can access a lot of power here All the Same If You Know What
you are doing. As you know, not queue Every year has to icon
activate it. What Gives a year file icon Is Another tiny file
Called the. info file. Actually this little Holds the queue
graphic Information That You see Displayed On Your WorkBench. It
aussi Holds the coordinates of your screen On The WHERE IS icon
When Placed Displayed. As You May Already Know, You May change
How the icon looks and how it looks When It Is selected gold
clicked on. The program is called Set ICON EDIT your WorkBench disk
Partition Gold Will Help You Do the deed. There are SEVERAL aussi
PD Programs that Will Do It Even Better ICON EDIT is pretty ace
basic.

Any Programs that has an Icon Can Be Manipulated With The
Mouse On The Workbench by Simply Clicking On The icon and ounces
Using The pull down menu Under ICONS to DELETE, RENAME, etc..
Programs Most, though, Contains More Than Simply One program file.
Most of Them Have Many data files That Go Along With It.
Many programmers are kind Enough to put related files together in
a single directory for ease of moving, deleting, etc.. If for
Some Reason This Is Not the box and you find yourself With A
directory of twenty or thirty Programs, Here Is a little trick
You Can Do.

Although It Is Documented In The manual, Many People do not
Think about it. You Can Make the Workbench show you All the files
in a directory, not Just the ones with icon. All the files ounce
Displayed are, You Can MANIPULATO Them In The standard way. Look
we pull down the Window for a command SHOW FILES and says That
SELECT ALL. All the files now I'm his window (drawer) are now
visible with 'pseudo' icons. Play away! Another Little Known
Is The Ability to command multiple select icons for The Purpose
of deleting, copying, etc.. to save time. That You Will record
You Can only select one icon at a time. That problem to rectify,
Hold down your SHIFT key while Selecting icons. You Will Be Able
Many have to highlight as you want. Now, you-can delete or select
drag All the files for copying to Another drawer. Pretty neat.

Another very basic function That goes unnoticed for The Most
Is the hand EXECUTE COMMAND menu item. With this option, You May
send a command to DOS Just Like You Were In A Shell, but not
Actually open a Shell window. This Could Be Useful if you are
memory is very tight or just wanted to do one single command and
Spend the extra time not opening in Shell. When activated, it
Will open up a requester and You In The Simply type command. It
Is A good way to open a Shell From The WorkBench If You Do not
Have Another fast Means to do so. This command aussi Would Be
Handy For Those With removable media hard drives Such The Syquest
Where They Have to drive executes a command When They DISKCHANGE
swap cartridges. This Way Much Easier Than IS opening a SHELL
and doing it.

Many people like To Have Running On The Custom Program
Such as a clock Workbench, Tool Manager, a virus checker, etc..
Now in The Old AmigaDOS There Was No real easy for accommodation
this. If you wanted to do this, you Would Have to Learn to use
the Shell (CLI back then). Now with 2.0 or better, You Have a
neat little drawer WBStartup Called On Your Workbench disk gold
partition. Any file you 'drop' or copy in There Will
Automatically be Executed For You When Your Workbench loads up!
So if you wanted to run on startup VirusZ, just drop the icon in
this drawer and it Will Be Done. A great tool for Those Who Do
not want to learn The Ways Of The Shell.

In the tutorials coming up, We Will Discuss How to customize
just about everything about your Workbench Including colors,
screen mode, & the event The point system beep. For now,
Experiments with your Workbench. Get Comfortable With It. The
AmigaDOS OS Is The MOST advanced easy-to-use GUI out there.
Enjoy Every aspect of it!


VI. UNDERSTANDING THE SHELL

We Have Seen The Workbench how Powerful is. With it, we can
do just shades of Things. Goal, The Workbench WAS Designed To Be
Easy and elegant, not omni-potent. Many functions while Can Be
therefore from it, There Is A Much More Powerful (and more Therefor
dangerous) way around AmigaDOS: the SHELL.

The Shell Is A direct non-GUI method of commanding AmigaDOS.
This interface (formerly called Set The CLI for COMMAND LINE
INTERFACE) opens up on ITS own window and has no gadgets, icons,
or pull down menus. Of street and You Have Been Unlucky Enough To
Have owned gold WORKED With PCs and MS-DOS in the Past, You Will
Feel right at home here. Many commands of MS-DOS and Shell are
or similar events the Sami. SHELL When Is Open, It Will Look Like
this:

Workbench:> _

Now you must type in commands to Physically Interface With
The System. The Label Before the> character is The Current
volume (or device) Name That you are 'in'. There are a number of
basic commands and Principles are you going to Need to Know to Be
Safe With The SHELL. First, We Need to look at a device's
structure, so you know how to navigate around using THE SHELL.

The Workbench Is Like a filing cabinet, right? Before you
Any gold disks open drawers, It Is like an unopened file cabinet.
When you click open a disk icon you are opening One Of The
cabinet drawers. When you open a drawer (or directory) On That
disk, It Is like opening a file folder I'm his office drawer.
Then opening drawer Within Another That Is Like opening a drawer
file in that file folder In The cabinet drawer, etc.. This Is
Called a DIRECTORY STRUCTURE Gold In The PC World TREE. Here Is
a possible example of a "tree" Using the Workbench disk As The
'File cabinet'.

WORKBENCH
|
| - C
| - DEVS
| |-DOS DRIVERS
| |-PRINTER DRIVERS
| |-STANDARD
| |-LASER
|
|-FONTS
| |-DIAMOND
| |-TOPAZ
| |-RUBY
| |-GARNET
|
|-LIBS
|-S
|-SYSTEM
|-UTILITIES
| |-DISK
|-WBStartup

All the names recreational or Representative Director (gold
drawers) and All Have files 'under' em. Some You Might we see
The Workbench, Most Of Them to You Will not (UNLESS you select to
show all files). In the Shell, There Is Never Anything really
'Hidden' from view. That IS part of The Power of the Shell. How
you get from the 'current directory' to the directory you want to
Work with IS Called the 'path'. For instance, if you wanted to
See What Files Were In The LASER directory, you Would Have to
'Go' there first, Then look gold at least tell you WHERE THE SHELL
wanted to look. That Is What The PATH is for. A path should "
Always Be Followed by a device name or designation IS AVOID
confusion. For instance, In Our Above example, The Path To The
LASER directory is WORKBENCH: DEVS / PRINTER DEVICES / LASER gold yew
your Workbench disk is in. The internal drive uses DF0 You Could:
in place of WORKBENCH. Using device designations like DF0: is
Not Only Faster goal if by chance you Some strange Have Two
Devices of the Same name There Is No Question What device you are
working there.

Navigating around using SHELL AmigaDOS in 2.0 + is Quite
Easy. Easier, In Fact, Than with MS-DOS and Much Easier Than
With The old gold CLI SHELL. To 'move' somewhere only You Need
The standard path to move to. If You Were In Our Above example, you
Would Need only type DEVS / PRINTER DRIVERS / LASER to move to That
directory. If You Were On Another device Workbench Other than gold
In a Different Directory On The Workbench disk, you Would Have to
Use The full path Including the Device name (WORKBENCH:)
Preceding The Path. You May Also want to navigate a single
directory at a time. Here Is What Might look a sample session
like:

WORKBENCH:> devs

WORKBENCH: DEVS> printer drivers

WORKBENCH: DEVS / PRINTER DRIVERS> Laser

WORKBENCH: DEVS / PRINTER DRIVERS / LASER>

-OR-

Workbench> Workbench: Devs / printer drivers / laser

WORKBENCH: DEVS / PRINTER DRIVERS / LASER>


NOTE: If you are using V1.3 Gold Of The lower OS, Then You
Will Need to precede The Path With The CD command (for CHANGE
DIRECTORY). Will it work for V2.0 + aussi purpose It Is optional.

Now you are in position to see What is in this directory.
Now we are ready to look at file manipulation commands. Here we
Will you touch The Most Used Commands in the Shell. Each command
Will Be Followed By The Necessary parameters to make it work. If
The parameter IS OPTIONAL It Will Be in brackets []. If required
It Will Be in <>.


DIR [path]

The Most Used In The SHELL command, This Will display a list
All the directories of files and spécifié In The Golden Path The
current directory if NOT specified. You Can get a more expanded
Listing Of The queues by using INSTEAD OF LIST directory.


COPY [from path] <files> [path to]

Will this command copy files from the 'path from' to the 'to
path '. If no 'to path' is spécifié, The Will Be Copied files to
The Current Directory. WILDCARD Can Use this command, special
symbols to tag multiple files:
#? = All Files Without Extensions #?.#? = All files
? Replaces one character =

Use the '? " When You Have A Number Of Files With The Mostly
Sami letters and just one or Two That Are The Same in different
lease. For instance, if You Had Three In The queues RAM DISK
Called ATRAIN1, ATRAIN2, and ATRAIN3, and you wanted to copy all
of 'em to a floppy disk, Here Is The command:

COPY RAM ATRAIN? DF0:

Feel free to experiment by copying multiple files to your
Then using ram disk command to delete The Next 'em.

DELETE [path] <files>

This Will remove The files specified. You May Also Use The
optional path to delete files in a directory you are not
Currently in. Example, to Delete the files in The Above example:

DELETE RAM ATRAIN?


TYPE [path] <filename>

Will this command display The Content Of A Text File To The
SHELL window. Make Sure That You open up your Windows Shell
Completely to See the Maximum Amount of text.


MAKEDIR [path] <name>

Makes a directory called Set At The <name> spécifié path. It
Will not create year. info file so You Will not Be Able to see it
From The Workbench. Workbench if access is what you Need, use
CREATE DRAWER From the pull-down menus On The Workbench.


ED [path] <filename>

Start the Amiga's built-in text editor. This Is Like a
mini wordprocessor. Will this allow you to alter a text file and
save it back again. Very useful in customizing your system.
More On That Later.


AVAIL

Tells you lots of information about your system Including
How Much Memory You Have / have left.


CLS

Clear screen. While You Can Directly call this command, it
SI Much More Useful in a series of commands Called a 'script'
queue. For MS-DOS users, This Is Called a batch file. We Will
talk more about scripting a little Later.


ASSIGN <device:> <device:> [path]

This Is Going To Be One Of Your Most Used commands as you
get deeper Into the Amiga. Will you allow this command to
'Redirect' access of one device to Another, Allowing you to put
files just about anywhere you want 'em and stills access. For
example, You Have a backgammon game was floppy disk 'GAMMON'.
All the files you copy a directory you Into your hard drive so you
Can Play it From There INSTEAD of The Slow floppies. You could
DH0 it is: "under the directory GAMES. So, you try and Run the
game and after it loads The Main game it tries to load The Data
files required for play. Since the game was KNEW IT WAS disk
Called GAMMON, it tries to look at That disk pour la files and
Give you a requester tell you to put back in. The disk GAMMON Any
drive. Well, You Could Put The disk back in and let it load The
data files, but thats Would Be The Purpose defeating. Instead,
The letter's request to redirect the Directory On The HD Where the
Actually game is.
ASSIGN GAMMON: DH0: GAMES /

Now, all Subsequent calls for GAMMON The Disk Will Go To The
right place. As You May Have guessed, This Is One Of The Hand
tricks for getting to Work Programs On The Hard Drive That Were
Intended to not installed There.

That information is Enough SHELL to get you started. There
Hundreds of commands are literally execute From The You Can
SHELL and You Could see 'em if you get a directory Of The
directory named 'C' on your Workbench partition. Now, look in
your manual for more commands.

The Shell Is A Powerful Alternative To The Workbench. The
SHELL and your 'C' directory are tightly interwoven and It Is
Useful to add your own special commands To The system by copying
The command over to the 'C' directory so you May use 'em
anywhere. Put all your Programs like LHA compression and DMS
here "as well as your own text editors, icon editors, etc..


VII. "LET'S DO IT" TUTORIALS

A. Preparing and Formatting Disks

This May SEEM like a trivial tutorial purpose There are SEVERAL
Things You Can Do to customize a Newly formatted disk to read
YOUR NEEDS.

First, insert formatted The disk-to-Be. An icon Will Appear
Either you telling The Old disk name if it has been "formatted
Before, or question marks formatted for If It Was Some Other
computer or not formatted at all. Click it and select ounces
DISK FORMAT From The ICONS pull down menu. If you format it from
The Workbench This Way, You Will not Be Given "any custom options
to set. If order to Have Some Control Over The Formatting,
The Format utility you select your Workbench disk or partition.
Select the Drive to format. Then You Will Be Presented With A
Asking requester Some relevant information you like The Disk
name, whether you want a quick format, international fashion, fast
file system, and if you want a Trashcan icon attached.

International Fashion IS Something You Will Likely Never Need
n Leaves That unselected. "If you are using 2.0 + of AmigaDOS, you
May format floppies In The Fast File System Which Makes your
Slightly Faster floppies and hold more data. Make Sure That You
do not intend "to use this disk was 1.3-version Of The OS
Because It Will not Be Able to read it. "If you are not sure, do
not select FFS. We Already Know That IS worthless The Trashcan,
so do not select That. If you formatted disk has been "On Your
Before and Amiga you Know That It Is standard with No errors you
May select The Quick format option. This Does not Erase The
Entire contents of The Disk, And The Just the bootblock directory
track (track 40) Where the names Of The files are stored. This
Makes Formatting very quick sincere it only has to format Two
INSTEAD of 80 tracks. Purpose, Any errors or bad tracks On The disk
Will not Be Discovered this way. Also, disks That Are not
standard DOS Can not Be quick formatted. You Can not has determined
By The standard DOS disk disk name When inserted and read from
The Workbench. The name Will read DF0: NDOS for example,
DEPENDING ON Which you insert it in drive.

Now That You Have all your options set, go ahead and begin
The Format. If you do not do a quick format, this CAN take a
couple minutes. Any errors That Will Occur abort The Format
process. Should this Occur, You Have a couple of options. You
The diskette Cdn discard As It Is Probably bad. You May Also
elect to use a program to 'tag' the bad blocks out of commission.
Will this allow you to use The Disk to hold information, not just
Use The bad blocks. Obviously, This Will The Effect of Amount
your disk space Cdn hold. It Is A Personal Thing, The Right to
answer IS to discard it. Chances are good That more bad blocks
Will Develop Quickly as you use it, Since The media inside Itself
The Disk is Likely defective.

Now That You have a nice clean disk, You May Want to tailor
it up a little. First Things You Might Want to Make the DO IS
bootable diskette. To Do That We Need to command from one end
The use EXECUTE COMMAND SHELL Gold From The Workbench:

INSTALL DF0:

Will this command INSTALL has bootblock On The disk's
bootblock (track 0) track. Now, When You Reboot your system,
Will this disk 'boot' up over your hard drive or Any Other
devices. This contains information bootblock The OS Need to Know
to start up using The System That disk.

Should you try and boot from this disk now, you Would Be
dumped right to a speedy SHELL As Soon As The Disk booted. Since
There Is No 'C' directory, LIBS directory, DEVS directory, etc..
There Is Really Nothing You Can do from this prompt.

We Have Discussed The File Called STARTUP-SEQUENCE Before
(Located in your 'S' directory) Now It Is Time "to apply it. If
Have you boot your system off this new disk, reboot using your
Workbench disk or partition. We Will Need the utilities There to
do this tutorial. Once booted, enter a SHELL. Insert your new
Into DF0 diskette. Now make a new directory On The diskette
Called S.

MAKEDIR DF0: S

Will this make a new directory pour la STARTUP-SEQUENCE
queue. We Will Also need a directory to hold Some C commands for
us to use.

MAKEDIR DF0: C

Now let's over-the copy commands That We Need:

COPY C: DF0 TYPE: C /
COPY C: LOADWB DF0: C /
COPY C: ECHO DF0: C /
COPY C: DF0 AVAIL: C /

Will this copy over-the-oven Necessary commands we are going
to use to make your disk. All Of These commands are 'stand
alone 'ie They Do not require "any libraries or devices to work.
How We Record Copied files from the 'C' directory using C: As the
device name? That Works with only a few "Such directories as 'C'
'S', 'LIBS', and 'DEVS'. Basically, The System Used directories
by AmigaDOS.

Now That We Have at least a FEW commands to work with, "let's
Make the disk Do Something. From the Shell we are going to make
a startup-sequence file in the 'S' directory of our new disk:

ED DF0: S / startup-sequence

In a moment load and ED Will Be Ready for you to input
text. Ed Is like a miniature word processor. "If you are running
V1.3 Of The OS-ED is Not very friendly. Consult your user's
manual for more information on ITS commands.

Take a moment to look through The pull down menus. You Will
That find MOST Amiga Programs that use pull downs keep common
Things In The Same basic rent. For example, MOST Programs
Have the load and save options In The Menu On The Far Left.

As We Said Before, The STARTUP-SEQUENCE Is A script file.
Basically, It Is A Text File With A list of individual "commands.
Let's now enter the Command Into ED.

ECHO "HERE IS WHAT HAS YOUR SYSTEM AVAILABLE:
AVAIL
TYPE S: welcome.txt
LOADWB

Now, select to SAVE the document Using The pull down menus.
Your Light Will Come drive it and in a moment, The File Will Be
saved. Now We Have A Workable disk With one exception. Do you
Know What It Is? Hint: Look in The Text Entered weekends pour la
STARTUP-SEQUENCE.

That's right. The command TYPE (Which displays a text file)
IS looking for a file called Set welcome.txt to display "during the
startup. That let's rectify problem. Exit by ED physician before
appropriée pull down menu. Now, re-enter ED:

ED DF0: welcome.txt

Once again, You Will Find Yourself in ED With An empty
screen. Enter Some little message like:

NOW LOADING ... PLEASE WAIT WORKBENCH

Save it as you did "before. Now Your Disk is Ready for the
test. Go ahead and boot it up and revel in the magic you just
Created!

Now That You are at a Workbench (and saw how fast it
booted), You May Wonder Why It Takes So Long for Your Own
Workbench to start up. A good question Which Is Easily
explained. In Fact, you know yourself and how to do it Already
Possess The Knowledge to do it. How? Look at your Workbench
STARTUP-SEQUENCE disk's file and see What It Does for a startup
and You Will Understand Why It Takes So Long. USE THE TYPE
command or Even better, a new command called Set MORE.

MORE S: STARTUP-SEQUENCE

This Will load up a 'text reader' Which Is Slightly bigger
Than TYPE, goal aussi Gives you more options like Pausing at EACH
page, searching for text, etc..

In the next part, We Will Discuss customizing features like
The Point, icons, colors, and Much Much More.

B. Configuring Your System and Workbench

We Have delved pretty deep Into the workings of AmigaDOS by
now. You Have Lots Of The basics of Knowledge. Now let's do
some 'aesthetics'. There are a Million or More Things You Can Do
Workbench to your environment to customize it. We are going to
Discuss Some Of The finer points. Those That Make The Most
difference.

One Of The Easiest Ways to customize your Workbench IS
Through the incredible built-in preference utilities included
With Workbench. This chapter Will Deal With Strictly V2.0 + goal
There Are Things similar 1.3-in. Almost in all Of The
preference utilities, You Will Be Given The final option to SAVE
USE, or CANCEL The Utility. Saveing IS permanent. The Things
you are to make exchange more or less permanent (not for us,
though!). USE it you select, The Item Will Be Changed Only Until
The next re-boot. Therefor, you can 'Try Before You Buy'.
CANCEL of course, Negate the exchange you just made.

Colors. The First Thing Is To Change the system colors.
This Is Done Through the program PALLET In The drawer of PREFS
your Workbench. It is pretty self explanatory ounce you get it
running.


Pointer. You May Change the Colors of the appearance and
Using The point Point Program In The PREFS drawer. Again,
this is pretty self explanatory. Note: You can not change The
'Busy' pointer from this utility. A program called Set-NICK PREFS
(Widely available) Will allow you to do this and Some Other
really neat alteration to your workbench.

Screen mode. You May Change the Workbench to Any legal
resolution available Including Low Res, Hi-Res, Interlace, and
Even Super Productivity as well as "Change the number of colors
available to you to alter. Remember, though, That Higher
resolutions and more colors eat more memory and tends to slow aussi
Down the system.

System Beep. The utility Called SOUND PREFS in your drawer
Will allow you to Change What Happens When your system gets a
requester or error. You May Make the screen flash, make a beep,
Even gold could sample your own Digitized sound There in Place of the
beep. My Workbench Butthead Does a 'huh huh huh' when i laugh
Get an error.

You May Change the font aussi That All the text Workbench
uses to display drawer names, filenames, and Much Much More. All
You Have To Do Is Go Through the PREFS drawer and Play With The
Utilities That Are There. You Can Set The system time and date
here, change your printer drivers, set up your serial port for
your modem, tones and more. "If you are ever confused by one of
The PREFS utilities, just CANCEL out of it and reseal To The
manual. Most of em are far too easy to use and really Cdn
Change the way your system looks, acts, and functions. Make use
of 'em and tailor your system like no loser IBM can.

Now That You have got your system JUST the Way You Want It,
You Might want to make a 'snapshot' of it to save in case of a
copy to disk crash or thesis prefs to Another bootable disk (like
The One You just made). The Magic Is So Easy You May Not Believe
it. There Is a File That SINGLE Keep the magic. It Is Located
In The DEVS directory am and is called Set-SYSTEM CONFIGURATION. As You
May Have Already guessed, You Need The File copy only To The
destination disk's directory DEVS and You Will Have The Same now
Workbench prefs have your normal disk. Enter a SHELL, insert your
bootable disk, made in the last tutorial Into DF0. Now you should "
Know What to do, we'll go to it anyway-through.

MAKEDIR DF0: DEVS
COPY DEVS: SYSTEM-CONFIGURATION DF0: DEVS /

It Is Done! Re-using your new boot disk and You Will See
That All the preferences of your Workbench now is this new resident
disk!

Now That We are On the subject of making copies of important
files on your Workbench disk or partition, let's go a step
Furth. "If you are using a floppy version of Workbench, It Is
just plain smart to make a copy of it and use The Copy. When you
alter it, make a copy of The ALTERED version and Leave the
original Workbench disk alone. Now You Will Have Two Extra
Workbench disks, one ORIGINAL and One Of The altered. If you
Want To Use The default preferences, you Simply copy over-the-
SYSTEM-SETUP file from The Original to your copy of
Workbench. If you disk crashes, you only make Need A Copy Of The
Altered Workbench disk and use it.

If you use a hard drive, You Have a bigger task ahead of
you. You Will No Longer Need the floppy disk of Workbench oz
It Is Installed On Your System (of course Will you keep it in
box of a hard drive crash). Purpose, With A hard drive, a new task
Comes to bear down. Making a backup of your system files.

It Is important thats the Workbench System Has Its Own
we partition your hard drive. I recommend a 10 meg partition if
You Have 40 or more megs of space. "If you are using a 20
megabyte drive, you CAN get by with 5 megs or so. If you do not
Have Your hard drive partitioned, you should ". By The HAVING
drive 'cut' into Small Pieces SEVERAL It Is Easier to group
files, make backups, optimize, and more. Refer to your hard
drive manual for more information is partitioning. You Will Find
That got time goes on, your Workbench partition Will grow like a
weed. It Is Best to backup partition That Every couple weeks or
so using a special program to do so like gold Quarterback Ami-Back
(Both commercial) gold MRBackup (public domain). Most of thesis
Programs require one disk per meg of hard drive to back up so
Would require your Workbench partition about 10 floppies if full.
HAD I Have mine for a LONG time and Have not Filled The Whole 10
megs yet. You May Also Use The Shell to elect to copy important
Like the lines and STARTUP-SEQUENCE SYSTEM CONFIGURATION and
Those large fonts, libraries (Like the ARP.LIBRARY), and 'C'
commands to a floppy. Believe me, It Is Much Easier to use a HD
backup program.

Did you install to your hard drive Programs, Many of Them
Will copy over Necessary libraries, 'C' commands, fonts, etc..
This Is how your score grows. When you remove a program from
your hard drive, you forget to remove Often thesis 'support' files
(Even If You Can remember What They Were!). As it stands, most is
thesis of media files Can Be Used by You In Other Ways Either
Through the Shell ("C" commands), Other programs (libraries), gold
word processing / graphics packages (fonts). Therefor, They Are
not really wasted space. Sometime, When you are bored, look
Through Your Workbench directories and see just How Much Stuff Is
really in there!


C. Using PAL and NTSC; How to switch your system!

We Discussed What are PAL and NTSC, Now We Need to look a
Little Bit Deeper Into It.

First, how to change. The Easiest Way, Overall, Is To
install a toggle switch Into your machine to let you boot up in
One Of The Two modes. Commodore WAS smart this time and actual
The capabilities Built Into the FAT AGNUS chip. To Make the
PAL system, You Need Only One Of The ground out pin is the Chip.
If You Needed year NTSC machine, Simply Fail to Make the
alteration. This made it ten times Easier to get the Machines
into Europe. Since this goes Beyond the scope of a beginner's
guide (any authorized dealer Can Make The Adjustment "as well as
Many Amiga hobbyist) We Will skip this option for now. It May Be
Nice to Know That If You Have an AGA Amiga (A1200, A4000) You May
select to boot your system by holding down in PAL Both mouse
When your machine boots buttons. A special menu Will Come up and
The option you get. "If you are using V2.0/2.1, Holding Down the
mouse buttons are bootup Will allow you to disable certain drives
gold exchange to boot from the Drive.

Now IS The Other Way Through the use of software. Note: You
must have a FAT AGNUS gold FATT AGNUS to make this work. There
Programs are Many popular to do this. First There Are the 'C'
Written by Nico Francois commands Called PAL and NTSC Which Will
Switch the system for you When You Run the respective program
From The EXECUTE COMMAND SHELL Gold From The Workbench menu item.
There Is Another Version Of The command to exchange PAL Which Will
PAL or NTSC if yew run Run With The left mouse button down. I
prefer "latter thesis of Two. IS another way Through the use
Special Called PALBOOT of commands and NOSPAL. Will write thesis
PAL bootblocks to diskettes so That When They boot, They exchange
PAL to right away. One is for standard disks and the Other IS
for non-standard disks like European Demos. I use a lot NOSPAL
Since it works is just about Every demo I Have and It Will NOT
kill the current bootblock (UNLESS instructed to) to append
Itself to it. Invaluable. Oh, by the way, MOST of thesis
Programs Can Be Found in collections DB Gold On Most Major BBSs
That Support the Amiga. Another little program from The Old
Amiga IS PALCON Which Will Change the PAL system Into The Next
time you reboot. This tend not to Work with newer Amigas. The
Final Way (And The best way in my opinion) IS Through the use of
A Program Called DEGRADING. This little gem Will not only control
PAL / NTSC goal aussi Will allow you to fool Into The Computer
Thinking You Have a different memory configuration than you do
(No FAST RAM, MEG has HALF OF CHIP RAM) in order to allow older
games to work right, turn off accelerator caches, change disk
drive configurations, and more Than I care to type. Needless to
Say, it is More Valuable Than Words. If it will survive reboots
required and Can Change The System IMMEDIATELY Without resetting
the Machine.

I highly recommend picking up one or more of excellent thesis
shifting utilities for your system Into PAL, sincere Of The MOST
Best Amiga edible stuff from Europe. If You Can Find Someone to
Put That PAL switch in for you, fantastic. You will love it.
Remember, With thesis Programs You Can Further customize your own
disks by Adding One Of The PAL commands to your 'C' directory and
Adding The command PAL in your disk's startup-sequence. You Can
do this for Euro Demos / Games That Are Not Non-standard DOS.


D. File Manipulation Using DirWorks

UNLESS You Have Laying around $ 60 to buy Directory Opus,
Then You Probably are in possession of this fantastic program
Called WORKS DIR (DW). This utility IS Invaluable to Every Amiga
use am and is just as Powerful as it's expensive cousin. Will DW
set you back $ 15 if you pay for the Man and His Work Highly I do.

Since it Is So configurable Yours May Not Even Be Close to
mine. Goal, We Will go over Some Of The basics to get you going.

Let's start with The Pull downs. There Are Some That Are
very self explanatory. The configuration editor We Will Get Into
in a minute. The rest are pretty easy. A Couple of Things to
draw your attention starts With The DISK command OPS gold
operations. Here Is a nice fast way to copy and format disks.
Now That You Know the hard way to do it, now you can do it "The
easy way. DW Will allow you to format aussi That One more disk at
a time. Simply select the Source drive (on top) & the
destination drive (on bottom). You May select Many have
destination drives as needed / available. If you format a disk, it
Will All the selected destination format disks. If you DISKCOPY,
It Will Copy The selected disk SOURCE To All the selected
destination disks. The gadget reads BLANK That Can Be Changed to
a new name Which Will Be the Name of all disks formatted. Note:
"If you are using a newer OS, the Installation Command (used to make a
bootblock) Will not write to The Disk cooked properly. Do This From The
SHELL Which Is On The option year aussi pull downs.

As You Can See, There Is Already a vast array of
utilities here and We Have not Even Gotten To The meat of around
The Program yet. Let's talk about The Two Windows on the broad
screen.

Where the contention windows are functions take place, copying,
moving, etc.. May gold right now There May Not Be Anything in 'em.
Each window Holds a directory. To bring up a directory On The
left window, click left mouse button The device was "under the
window like DF0: Gold RAM. The contents of Device That Will
APPEAR in the Window, sorted alphabetically Probably With
subdirectories on top (probably in blue) and files underneath (in
black). The queues Will Have Their size in bytes next to 'em.
to bring up a directory window in The Other, You May click The
left mouse button was THAT Device Under window, or click your
RIGHT mouse button was LEFT device "under the window. You Can
Either device use set of buttons to bring up the Device in Either
window. Just remember to use The Mouse That Correlates button
With The window you want to bring up the Device buttons arent yew
Under the window. Play around with this concept for awhile Until
You are Comfortable With It. Now bring up your device Workbench
On The Left And The window in The Right RAM device. We are going
to Use Them Both.

May you enter a directory in windows by One Of The Simply
Double Clicking the Directory. In A Moment You Will See the
contents of the New directory. There Will Be a Little Gadget
window (probably underneath or above-the-hand window) That Will
Show You the current window's path. You Can click in this gadget
Manually enter a path and to bring it up if you do not want to
Manoeuver around with The Mouse. You Can Go Back One Directory
The Gadget by Clicking labeled '/'. To go back to the ROOT
directory, Simply click the Device gadget gold again keep Clicking
the '/' gadget.

DW Is What Some of us call year self-launcher. In Other
words, DW determined What Kind of file and It Is Automatically
Know What To Do With It. If It Is a picture file (IFF / HAM) it
Will display it. If It Is A Digitized sound, It Will play it.
If It Is A text file, It Will display it. If It Is A
compressed / archived file like LHA, LZH, DMS, LZ, etc.. It Will
Show the contents of the Archives unarchive it To The Gold
destination directory. If It Is a program, It Will Ask You if
you want to run it. Pretty neat. Without this it Does ANY
interaction from you double click The Exception to filename. Some
functions, like gold DMS unarchiving year LHA File That You require
The Right mouse button click On The filename. In Any right
button evolution, The output of The Action Is Sent to The Other
Highlighted in The Other directory window, As Is Any Other
Such command as copy, move, etc..

Let's practice a little bit. You Should Have Your Workbench
directory in one window and in The Other RAM. Now, highlight a
couple of files (or directories for that Matter) and select COPY
With The left mouse button. The directories (and Their contents)
and All the files you selected are Copied to The Other window!
It IS that simple. If You Were To Have The selected MOVE
directories and files would've Been Highlighted Then Copied
Automatically DELETED. Be very Careful With The MOVE and DELETE
commands. If You Had selected DELETE, Then All the Highlighted
directories and files would've been deleted. Delete the
directories & the files you just Copied out of your RAM disk.

There Are Some Other GREAT Such commands have AdIcn Which Will
add icon Year To All the selected files. This Will aussi add icons
To The directories selected as well. EScpt Which Will execute a
Highlighted script file. PLAY Will Play All the Highlighted
sound samples. Will SHOW Highlighted show All the picture files.
A LHA Will Take All The Highlighted files and directories and
make Them Into a compressed archive (LHA if You Have In Your 'C'
directory).

It Is a very simple program thats just Takes a little getting
Used to. I Have gone over-the simple & the Most Powerful
commands. Feel free to copy files over Some To The RAM and disk
experiment. "If you are going to be driving disks, uses The Write
Protect tab to keep your data safe. This program est aussi Widely
available and Should Be Part of Your Collection if it isn't
already.


E. Virus Prevention and Information, Protect Yourself

Possibly One Of The Most Important Parts of this guide (and
The Most Interesting) it is this chapter and virus prevention
information. Many people know what a virus IS FEW know how to
THEY work and subsequently do not know how to stop 'em. We Need
A Few Things to Know Before We Get Into the Depths of viruses.

Let's begin With A Little History of viruses. Have Viruses
Been Around Since The Beginning Of The personal computer age.
There Have Been Some Truly vicious viruses and for Created Quite
awhile, celebrities Lived in fear of trading software and downloading
files from computer bulletin boards afraid THEY Would Be Infected
Losing Their unknowing and data. Soon, more people Learned
Developed about 'em and Programs Designed to scan your system
for viruses and remove em WAS AFTER The Damage Already Done.
Finally, They Came Up With Ways of catching viruses in the Act,
Since There Is Only A Couple of Ways THEY "could spread.

Early On The Amiga viruses Were Relatively harmless. Ounce
The First Major of viruses to hit this computer Was The FCC
(Swiss Association Crackers) Virus That, at a random point, Would
take over-the computer and say "SOMETHING WONDERFUL HAS Happened!
YOUR AMIGA IS ALIVE AND HAS BEEN INFECTED WITH A VIRUS ". It DID
Have the habit of Destroying your goal bootblocks That Was the Way
it spread. It didn't erase your disks or trash your hard drive.
Later on, When people started "getting wise To The bootbloack
virus, They Invented That virus has Themselves Attached to Any File
Executed you. Would your files grow EACH time you ran it, did it
Continued to tag Another Copy Of The Virus Has The End. Some file
Actually viruses Replaced The Last Part of the File with
Themselves. Some Programs "could survive, goal MOST DID NOT.
Followed Others, Some Called Them TROJANS the after the famous horse
Disguised army. Thesis Would Do Nothing Until Given a date (the
programmer's birthday for instance) then Do Something ugly. In
The Late 80's Called a Virus Took the world by Michaelangelo
storm. On the famous artist's birthday, a picture of the Man and
a story popped up On The Screen. While You Were Reading the
book, The virus proceeded to erase your hard drive. Gruesome,
eh? This Was a computer virus made it to USA TODAY and The slapped
world in the Face. Some People Saw The virus a day early (their
Gained over time clocks HAD The Years And They Gained a day) and
Warned people. That day, Thousands of people Refused to turn on
Their computer. Even Years Later, Still people left Their
On That Day off computers. Other viruses are not so kind. Year
erased hard drive Can Be Recovered (now) to a broken one can not.
One virus tricked Into The Computer That thinking your hard drive
WAS bigger than it really WAS and Send the hard drive in search
of a track That did not exist. After banging away for a couple of
seconds searching for a phantom file, The Hard drive Would Die.
That IS brutal, folks. Now let's get back to the present, more
Learned Society.

First, The Definition Of A virus. Any program That Is
Written icts continues to Life After the computer shut off by IS
Itself am and is replicating Usually Created to damage or OTHERWISE
adversely effect the Computer. There You Have It. Better than a
text book, eh? (Grin) That Sums it up, though. It HAS To Be
Able To Survive When The Machine is Turned Off. We Already Know
That a live virus after a reboot Cdn. Purpose, as "any computer guru
will tell you, a virus cannot survive if shut IS The Computer
Off. That IS HALF true. If The virus has NOT yet Begun to
replicate, yes you can kill it this way. Most Of The programmers
That create viruses know this and make it as replicate Itself
soon as it Enters The System. More About That in a minute. Just
remember, There Is No magic behind viruses. They Are Just
Programs coded by a program. Since They Are coded, THEY CAN
That BE IDENTIFIED BY code. That Is One Way We Can find and kill
it, based on it's 'fingerprint'.

Now That We Know What It Is, let's look at HOW THEY work.
This Is Universal Knowledge for ALL computers. Work the viruses
Sami is all computers. Some just HAVE MORE Ways of Getting the
virus.

There are Two major types of viruses to replicate in THEY
different ways. Thesis types and Viruses Are Called bootblock
FileLink Viruses. Each spread has a different way and Survive
different way. The common element Which Makes It Almost
IMPOSSIBLE for viruses to infected machines it thats the protected
virus must patch Itself Into the OS in order to spread and / or
survive. A bootblock viruses Must Be Able To Tell When A disk has
Been inserted so it patches Itself Into the floppy device. The
Virus Must Be Able to restart after a reboot Itself, So It Makes
The reboot vectors (Areas That Are updated after a reboot) point
to re-enable THEM to The virus in addition to The Restarting
system. You Can Be 100% protected as long as NO EXCHANGE PROGRAM
ARGUMENT Vectors! Modern day virus checkers checked SEVERAL times a
second to see if thesis vectors Have Been Altered. If so, it
intercepts and Tells You That Have Been Altered the vectors and
Asks you if you want to clear 'em. A simple yes Will stop the
viruses on the spot. Even year unrecognized virus cannot take your
machine without you letting it. If It Is reconnu, The checker
Will Kill it. Let's Look at the causes and effects of Both
viruses.

Viruses spread bootblock and Live On The bootblocks of your
diskettes. Remember We Said Thats the container has bootblock "could
Small Amount of code? Well, It Is Enough For A virus. Once you
The boot disk, The Virus Enters memory and waits for you to reset
The Computer Another gold insert disk. When you do, it checks to
Another see if disk is in. The Drive. If It Is, It copies Itself
To The bootblock, Effectively Destroying Any Other Code That Is
There. If The program was required to load custom bootblock The
disk (non-standard DOS disks require this), The Disk Is Now
Completely worthless UNLESS You Have Another copy somewhere.
Malthus, The chain goes on. Every disk inserted gold gets booted
infected. Even if you catch the virus in your machine it Cdn
Still live on your disks. The Virus IS ounce caught, Every disk
Suspected of containing It Must Be checked and cleaned.
Fortunately, Most Of The Modern Day Will check virus checkers
Every disk inserted while it is 'on duty'. The only real way
That a virus CAN sneak back Into the System is If You Do not Use
The Disk Is Running While The checker by booting off of it
INSTEAD Of The disk With The Check On It. Even After It Is
caught, chances are thats the disk bootblock SI's unrecoverable.
The solution, though, Is What They Call That a bootblock Lab
let's you make copies of all your disk and restore bootblocks's
em If You Need Them. Most bootblock viruses are caught Easily
Once They Enter the system, But Can it exist for your floppy disks has
LONG Time Before you put 'em in Is Running While The checker
(Disks unusable That Are From The Workbench, for example). I
virus has been found disk SEVERAL YEARS That Was old and never
caught it. The Reason Is That in order for a checker to catch
The Virus Before It Enters memory, it must Know What to look for
On The bootblock. It must have a fingerprint to compare With.
These Are Known as bootblock 'brains', queues That Contain What
The Virus looks like. When you insert a disk, tea checker
Compare the bootblock With The brainfiles and If They match, The
checker alerts you and Asks if you want to have of it. Many
Times, The Will Destroy The removal bootblack, Possibly rendering
The disk inoperable, Even If It Was The virus operable while WAS
There. Better Than cette Spreading the virus. My problem WAS
At The Time That I got the disk, my brain's checker Did not Have
An Image of That compares to bootblock With. Now, though, most is
checkers know What is a normal and bootblock What is a foreign
one. If It Does not Recognize it, it tells you so and Asks if you
want to overwrite it With A normal one. If you do, and It Was A
non-standard DOS disk, say good-bye to the Program. Some
checkers are SMART event Enough That You Can Tell It To memorize
Year Of The bootblock image and remember it so next time you That
Put It In, It Does not cry over it. Neat eh?

The second type IS FileLinks Called a Virus. This has attacks
Directly and file attachments Either Itself To The End Up Takes Gold
Enough room Within The queue to restart Itself When The file IS
run. So, When you shut off the machine, Then turn it back there
(Virus gone, eh?) And Run the file, it is back and ready to be
corrupt. Most viruses attach to files That Are Themselves
DEFINITELY Going To Be Run When The computer starts up (like,
Say, ANY file in your startup sequence?). Now, Every Time You Run
a queue (or your home system), The Virus Itself to tie it.
Now You Give a copy to a friend, put it on floppy, etc.. and it
gets away. You Get The Idea. Most of the Time, viruses thesis
Are The Ones That format your hard drive or your system could be
The blink. Theys May aussi Enough eroded away little of your file
by little so That It works for a couple of 'virus attachments'
Then dies mysteriously. The only way to catch this one Without
letting it into memory Is To do a file scan on the Disk That Are
Suspected of containing a virus. Again, picture a year in the Brain
That Must Be Available for viruses to Be Identified and removed.
In This Case, The checker cannot say 'Unknown bootblock gold in
this box, 'Unknown file' Because Every File On Your Disk is
different, not like standard bootblocks are Supposed To Be. That
New Virus Is Why Must Be Reported and Analyzed right away so
Thats the coders of The Checkers The Cdn add image to Their
'Brains'. Again, not to fear Because Even Though your checker
May Not Be up to date to Identify The Virus, When It Will Stop!
it Attempt to take control of your system.

As You Can See, viruses are a very little Threat if You Have
The Right Protection. Fortunately, checkers are unbelievable
In The Shareware available right field and right for little or no
cost. The ones I recommend (in this order) are VirusZ II
VirusZ, and Virus Checker. For the MOST part, These Are the
full-featured big boys. Theys handle just about Every Virus Known
to man and are updated Quite often. Personally I use VirusZ II.
Add this program to your system and place it in your Either
STARTUP-SEQUENCE or just drop a copy of it in your WBStartup
It Will Be drawer and run automatically at startup. It Is
Protection you can not live without.

Other Ways You Can Protect Yourself include file scanning
all you get from New Programs BBSs gold, If The Disk is not
Standard put it in the Drive while your checker is running. Do
thesis Before You Run the program. Do The Same With Any files or
Brought to you from disks Other suspected sources. Urge your
friends to use a check. Encourage your local BBS to install
That software checks incoming files for viruses. Then, Leave the
To The rest checker. Using thesis Principles, I Have Remain virus
free for Years. You Can Too!


F. Installing Programs to Hard Drive Install Without year

Some People Might Have gotten this guide for this section
alone. Up Until Now, We Have Learned Some Tricks of the STAFF
trade & Events Lightly Touched this topic has little bit. Now, you
are going to learn The Knowledge of Years of experience in a few "
minutes. We are going to learn how to take Those pesky, no hard-
drive install havin 'Programs and put' em On the hard drive.

One Of The Very Few Things The PC world has over us Is The
Fact That EVERY program released Can Be Put on the hard drive.
Not so In The Amiga world and I will tell you why. Most quality
products come from Europe, up Where They Have Very Little
money for buying toys for Their computers. This Is the hand
Reason THEY Bought Amiga year to Begin with. No sound cards, video
cards, game cards, etc.. to buy, It Was built in all. Since MOST
of the Early Amigas didn't come with hard drives, could "very few"
Afford to buy 'em. Therefor, The Market for Hard Drives
installability WAS low. In addition to That, programmers found
That out by Rewriting the DOS system to Their Own specifications,
THEY "could get incredible speeds off loading of a diskette as
well as "The compressed data immensely. Malthus The non-standard DOS
disk Was Born. The wait times for the game to load up levels, one
etc.. Were Dramatically Lessened. What the programmers found aussi
Out is an optometrist could "Implement A Whole New Breed of copy
protection with this system. Since THEY "could encode the Disk
Any way THEY wanted (and justify It With speed increase) THEY
Could aussi copiers encrypts it so That Could not copy it. The only
Way It Could Be The pirated WAS disk to decompress, decode The
disk, remove The protection checks, Then release it to the World
That in a format anyone could "copy. (This is in violation of
Copyright law Therefor am and is illegal purpose It Is Quite a way of
LEGAL your getting one backup copy. Of course, it is for your
own use and May Not Be Slow gold wears out by anyone else). Anyway,
this Tended to Increase the number of disks it Occupied, goal When
You are not Paying for The Software, What difference does it
make? Anyway, The System That Became popular social Almost All the
ADOPTED THIS game market standard. As We all know after reading
The Guide to this point, non-standard DOS disks Can not Be Run
From the hard drive. Some companies changed over To The PC
Popular 'code word' protection The User That required to look up
A Word In The Accompanying manual and type it in. Before the
Would program continues. Now, you could "transfer thesis FEW
Programs over, to the Majority of the World continued to use
non-standard DOS. Some hackers / pirates Have Created event Another
way to not only copy the Non-standard DOS disks to allow you to
Them is to install your hard drive. What They DO IS make year
The image of all disks and load 'em all your RAM to Be Into
Executed. Sure it works fast and It Is, But It Also Requires you
Have a meg of RAM foreach disk it loads and you cannot cleanly
break out of it back to your workbench. Again, this Is Illegal
if you do not own a copy of Purchased the game. Still, it Is an
Alternative To The Lack of a hard drive install.

Another problem exists aussi. The disks That Are Standard
AmigaDOS For Some Reason disks to include year didn't install
and Will not Seem To Run From The hard drive if you copy files The
Manually over. Ah, now Here Is Something We Can Do Something
about.

Let's start with What We CAN NOT do. We cannot take non-
To The standard DOS disks hard drive. Period. End of
discussion. Finished. The only option for running this You Have
kind of program IS to get a copy of it from the Underworld of
Pirates Gold hackers. The insert first disk drive and Into the yew
You Get The Old DF0: NDOS name, forget it.

Here Is Another 'no way' deal. If The Disk is standard
format and You Can Get a directory, look for a file with no name
and a small size (size of gold has zero bytes). If you see this
phantom line, forget it. It Is protected by a copy protection
chokes We Can not Fix here. In this case, I recommend you
buy one copy Of The Programs Designed to take this kind of
off scheme. The Only One I Know of That Will Do This Kind of
work program called Set Is A MAVERICK Which Is rumored to specialize
Taking in disks like this and making 'em hard drive installable.
The one disk That Comes to Mind Is the old Broderbund game STAR
WARS. That HAD this exact protection scheme on it. Your only
Other options here, again, Is To seek unprotected copy from a year
pirate. It May or May Not Go On The Hard Drive.

Okay, now you are thinking "What the hell I put on my CAN
hard drive? "Well, fortunately, most is newer Of The Games That
require More Than One or Two disks Come With very friendly
installers. Many That Do not CAN Still Be Easily Copied over and
Forced to work. Here Is The step by step guide for HD
installation. Keep doing 'em in order Until One of Them Works
Until gold directed to skip to a different step. In order to make
Things more clear, We Will Say That The Name Of The Game Is
Sinistar and it has Called Three disks to it named SINI1, SINI2,
and SINI3. It Does not Have a 'phantom file'.

Step 1 - Insert Into The first disk in the Drive and open up
On Your Workbench. Is There an Icon for a year or INSTALL INSTALL?
Use it and install the program on screen The followings
instructions. Stop here.

Step 2 - Enter a Shell (or use DW) and Look at the happy
of disk 1. Is There a File That Is Called INSTALL or INSTALL?
If so, go to the Shell (If Not Already There) and "go to the disk
Using The CD command or just typing the Name of the Drive (ie
DF0:). Type EXECUTE EXECUTE INSTALL gold <The filename>.
The Programme Sometimes forget to add an Icon to the Installation
or just forget to mention That One In The instruction exists.
This Is not uncommon. If not, continue.

Step 3 - Make a new directory is your Hard Drive for the
program and make sure you add an Icon using DW (Use The gold
NEW DRAWER Workbench command). If you do not know how to do this
yet, You Had Better go back and read some more! Now using <grin>
DW, Workbench, or the Shell, Copy All the files and directories
Into All the disks from this one drawer. Put The disks away in a
safe place, We Will not Need 'em anymore.

Step 4 - Open this new drawer. Is There an Icon pour la
program there? If so, go on to the next step. If not, you must
Which determines file Start the program icon and add to it annually.
Guess how? CHECK THE 'S' directory for a startup-sequence and
See What it reads. If it contains more Than one lane, Then Copy
The STARTUP-SEQUENCE WITH ALL Into the directory The Other files
and directories. Use DW to add icon Year To The Newly Placed
STARTUP-SEQUENCE queue. From Workbench, select and use The Icon
The pull down menu and select INFORMATION Under ICONS. In the
marked-box gadget DEFAULT TOOL Put The text

C: iconx

Will this cause this icon to Execute The file as a script,
Running All the commands in it. We Discussed scripts and Earlier
The STARTUP-SEQUENCE IS a script, after all. If The STARTUP-
SEQUENCE Only Had a single command (filename), add icon to year
That filename using DW. If The File You Just Added year icon to SI
a script (double click it from DW and see if it displays text)
too, Then You Will Have to Change the DEFAULT TOOL as Described
Above to C: iconx So It Will execute right.

Click The Icon (The One That Existed Or The new one you just
Created) it and see What Happens. Follow the chart below based
What Happens Next is:
- Did you get error year From The Workbench That Said THIS
DEFAULT ICON HAS NO TOOLS? You didn't add the C: iconx command to
The Icon cooked properly. The Above recheck using paragraphs.
-Does The Program Run Properly? End here.
-Did you get a requester Saying INSERT INTO ANY <name>
DRIVE? If so go to step 5.
- Did error message come up a year COULD NOT FIND <name> Saying
Gold FILE MISSING UNABLE TO OPEN <name> gold FONT <name> or Something
similar? Go to step 6.
- Did The Program just lock up and stop running With No
explanation? Go to step 5.

Step 5 - You must try to ASSIGN the Disk To The Directory
You Made The Copied files and to. We Described how this works
Earlier In The guide to Using Our example Stated Above, enter a
SHELL and thesis type lines:

ASSIGN SINI1: <path of new directory>
ASSIGN SINI2: <path of new directory>
ASSIGN SINI3: <path of new directory>

Now go back to step 4 and try it again. If it all works,
You Need to type thesis Line Before You Run the program or you
Need to add 'em to your startup-sequence or The User-STARTUP
queue. We Have not Mentioned Before this, But The USER-STARTUP IS
Also Located In The S MOST directory and put Their Own Programs
ASSIGN commands here. It Is a perfect place to put yours now
Since it Is Always Executed on startup, too. This is a 2.0 + OS
thing.

Step 6 - There Are directories required by The System in
this new directory like C, S, DEVS, LIBS, FONTS, etc..? If so,
All the copy files from directories to thesis Their respective
directories are YOUR Workbench partition. The program Probably
Needs a make, library, or command from One of These directories
Finding it and it isn't. Therefor, You Need to copy files Those
YOUR to directories. Return to Step 4 and try it again. Should
all go well, you are set. The program IS ready to play! If it
Fails again for The Same Reason, try doing step 5. Should it
Still Fail, There Is one more thing to try.

Step 7 - If You Have Tried everything and are "still getting
Saying a requester INSERT INTO DRIVE <name> DF0: (it Is The DF0:
That Is important) then the Device Is Hard Coded Into the program
year and isn't going to assign Take Care of That. The program code
Will HAVE To Be changed. You must use a hex editor to change all
occurrences of DF0 Inside the program to Something Like gold NNN JJJ
or Something Other Than a device name. Then, Use The ASSIGN
as recreational or command:

ASSIGN NNN: <path>

There Is a great program called Set KILLDFX From The MAVERICK
disk copy. It Is hard to find, But It Does EXACTLY What We
Described just Automatically.

Well, there's You Have It. The Amiga in a nutshell. I hope
That You Have gotten all at least SOMETHING out of this guide and
Will continue to expand your knowledge with time and practice.
There are Several Sources of Knowledge That You Can tap into.
Here Is A Few of Them:

o An Amiga User's Group. Locate thesis by guys hanging out
Amiga dealer in your nearest shop or Asking Them If There Is A
support group. The guys in the shop Cdn Probably Tell You
EXACTLY WHERE to go.

o Your local Amiga BBS CAN help, too. If you can not find
local one (again, talk to your dealer), try calling a pay service
like Compuserve and GEnie or getting information There. You Can
Also call the Dark Unicorn Productions Support BBS (Secret
BBS) at (803) 766-2050 and There are lots of people there
Online There That Can Help You Out.

o Get a copy of Amiga Amiga World Amazing Gold and Some order
self-help books are AmigaDOS ou autres pour la Specialty Programs
Amiga. There are disks for AmigaDOS aussi tutorial, dpaint IV
And Many Others That work in conjunction With The programs and
offer you help Whenever You Need It. Many back issues of AW gold
AA aussi Will Have tutorials and help columns. See If You Can
Some find back issues at your local library.

Remember, have fun and feel free to experiment. Lots of
Information Obtained Through this WAS experimentation. Enjoy the
best computer ever made!