1 The Operating System

This chapter handles questions concerning the operating system, Kickstart as well as the Workbench.

1.1 Can I use another Kickstart than the builtin?

First let’s drop some words on the Kickstart’s Copyright: This belongs to Commodore, you must not use Kickstarts, without the right to do it! Especially it isn’t allowed to make an image of anyone else’s Kickstart and run this on your own Amiga. (I even doubt that it is allowed to do this on your own Amigas, if you have more than one.)

But of course it is possible and allowed for some people, developers for example. There are two different ways, a hardware solution and a software solution. The former is to buy a card which can hold two or more Kickstart ROMS and allows to select between when the System is booting.

The software solution needs a program (softkicker) and an image of the ROM. The softkicker allocates RAM, loads the ROM image into the allocated memory and reboots. Of course you have less RAM after the Reboot: 256Kb when running Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 and 512Kb for Kickstart 2.0 or higher.

There are different Softkickers, some of them needing a MMU (@pxref{68EC0xx, MMU,MMU}). I recommend SKick 3.43 (Aminet, directory ‘util/boot’) because it doesn’t need a MMU and supports many different Kickstarts. It is rather easy to create the ROM image using the following program:

    #include <stdio.h>

    #define kickorig 0xf80000   /*  0xfc0000 for Kick 1.2 und 1.3   */
    #define kicklen  0x080000   /*  0x040000 for Kick 1.2 und 1.3   */

    void main(int argc, char*argv[])
    {
        FILE *fh;

        if ((fh = fopen("kickstart.file", "w"))  !=  NULL) {
            result = fwrite(kickorig, kicklen, 1, fh);
        }
        fclose(fh);
    }

1.2 What is the Amiga equivalent of . (Current directory)?

The AmigaDOS equivalent for the . representing the current directory on Unix and certain non-reentrant interrupt handlers is the empty string, which is written as "".

Example:

    COPY S:Startup-Sequence ""

copies your Startup-Sequence to the current directory.

There is some FD software available to patch a Unix-like interpretation of . and .. into the AmigaDOS, including, but not limited to, Martin Scott’s UnixDirs. (Aminet, ‘os20/util/UnixDirsII.lha’ or Fish-disk 837)

Arno Eigenwillig (arno@yaps.dinoco.de)

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