CU Amiga Super CD-ROM 3/CU Amiga Magazine's Super CD-ROM 03 (1996)(EMAP Images)(GB)(Track 1 of 3)[!][issue 1996-09].iso/mat.readme

Text File | 1996-07-26 | 30KB | 569 lines

>date
Monday 08-Jul-96 15:43:05

Start of the 'woes' file for CUCD3. This really should have started
sooner but truth be told material has started actually being written to
the CD image late in the show.

Conceptually this CD would be similar to the last one though hopefully
with the problems fixed and improvements where possible. At this point
I'm still umming and ahhing over the icon-set choice. Iconographics
has not seen and never will see any further development. While it's
nice to use for the CD (response was positive last time) I'd like to
be able to show a set that's worth while installing onto your machine.
The main contender is NewIcons now. Again I'm not keen on MagicWB for
reasons stated elsewhere.

Sadeness Software's material came in on Zip. Just a shovel job though
I'm not sure what to do with those horrible huge MagicWB * icons. <sigh>
They asked for the Zip back to put some more material on it which is
good news, so long as I can find the Zip of course. Mmmm, sure it's
around here somewhere. :-)

* Save them out as NewIcons of course

AESculapes NewIcons packs 1-8 were a little silly split up. Spent an
hour sticking on one drawer after sorting and re-classifying. Much
better now.

Decided to stick on every freely distributable WWW Browser so the
reader can make a choice. AWeb for MUI Moaners ® TM etc and Voyager
and IBrowse for the rest. MUI 3.3 was shovelled on, yes I remembered
the Install script and icon this time. Doh.

Darn it all but if this time I decided to make the CD Image FFS
instead of AFS as last time. Reason being I worried that if something
Really Bad TM were to happen, at least I could call upon the services
of some top class salvage utilities. So for a week I put up with FFSes
usual thrashing, invalidations and disk fragmenting. Finally got an
unrecoverable error. Oh stuff this for a lark, back to AFS. Whatever
faults AFS might have, I have to say in a years use, I've lost less
from AFS than I have from FFS. Lets just hope that something Real Bad
TM doesn't happen. Mmm, must remember to get that extra Gig in so I
can keep a backup. Image just sailed over what a Zip holds. <warning
bells>. Ahh OK so it's Diavolo backups from now on. Nice one, that
programs so nice it's great to have an excuse to use it. :-)

What else? Oh yes, Vista just came in. Vista lite on floppies and a
shit (can I say that here? Oh what the hell, no-one's reading) load of
DEMs and other stuff. Oh goody, shovel shovel shovel. Just lurve it
when the MB counter goes up on the CD. :-) Nice Iconographics icon
sorted. Oh dear, I'm swaying to not wanting to use NewIcons... Better
go back onto IRC and get re-convinced by RMerlin and AESculape to use
it.

Considering dropping 2.x support from the Support drawer. That'd mean
I can lose that horrible-but-was-good-in-it's-day ViewTek and stick
something nice in like Visage. Mmm? More pondering. Play16 is now
included for playing those luvely gubbly (don't you just love the UKs
contributions to the English language :-) 16-bit samples Tony annoyed
Lisa with making last week. Actually here's some CU gossip, he used
bringing in his 'Decks' and other fancy DJ equipment in as an excuse
to order a taxi on the morning of a tube strike. Darn clever that
Tony, I must remember to come up with an equally sinister plan come
the next day our illustrious train drivers decide they aren't paid
enough to push a button to move forwards, and another to stop.

Did I mention the 'CU Needs You' campaign yet? No, I didn't. You lot
are lucky I'm in a typing mood. Um, well maybe not. Anyway, there's
two boxes of envelopes and padded bags of disks from readers for the
compo and obviously the CD. You DID know about the CU Needs You
campaign didn't you? Of course you did, some of your stuff is in that
box. It's not? Oh. Confirms everyone skips past the front of the
mag for the juicy bits at the back. Oh yes, your game is busted. Yeah
well this leads to the first official 'woe' of the CUCD3, it goes as
follows;

Last month we took delivery of a nice 'lil A4000T right? The one we
reviewed and stuff. Anyway, this one doesn't have a HD floppy drive.
This is more than a little bit of a bugger as I NEED a HD drive to
pass Mac formatted stuff, generated in ShapeShifter, to the other
folks on the mag. Yes, unfortunately we have to use Macs to make the
magazine. Ugh, not me mate. No dirty Mac going to litter my desk let
me tell you. Anyway, so I take the opportunity to obtain a nice little
HD internal replacement unit from Power Computing. Fun stuff, only it
fried the A4000T's floppy drive interface. Of course, Escom took this
as an excuse (let me subscribe to the conspiracy theory on this
occasion) to sell Amiga Technologies to VIScorp. John Smith deserts to
PIOS, 90% of the AT staff in Germany are sacked or also desert to PIOS and
Phase 5 which leaves me with a sum total of zero individuals to
negotiate with to have the unit fixed. Um, I can't afford the time or
having the machine away from here (trusty A3000 which created CUCD -
The Original, was sold to a gentleman to fund my Greek Sunburn).

So currently, I have a bin full of contributions for CUCD3 all with
one glaring problem. A problem of such insurmountable magnitude that I
toss and turn at night, trying to formulate a solution during my
unconsious hours (which isn't much when compiling CUCD). A problem
to end all problems, and I could go on for a paragraph but you get the
idea. Oh yes, what is the problem? The problem is that all the
material is on floppies only I don't HAVE a floppy drive. Something
you can take for granted let me tell you. Countless times in the last
week people have handed me floppy disks, I've inserted them into the
useless-as-breasts-on-a-bullock floppy drive. The staff are so trained
now that they have come to recognise the slap of my hand on forehead
and automatically reach out to retreive the disk.

AND I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO ESCAPE PARNET FOR CUCD3!

Oh no, it KNOWS. Somehow the planets dark forces have aligned, the
dark power of Macintosh, Micro$oft, (L)AMOS and MagicWB have come together
to infiltrate these offices with Parnet. Parnet - The Son of Satan. The
networking solution which can turn into the most POWERFUL VACUUM CLEANER.

Nay, I say NAY! One E-mail blasted to [e-mail],
should hopefully arouse the good Gods of Diavolo, ImageFX, SAS/C and AmIRC
to postively influence the repair of one A4000T. Hopefully. Very
hopefully I might add.

Um, as if this wasn't enough, just spoken to Official CUCD Moral
Support Officer Vikki Jacobs (we should find some excuse to stick her
photo in the magazine *) and, oh dear, she says the deadline for the
CD is soon.

Um, sheesh, better go make a CD. Haven't got time to sit here gabbing.
Stay tuned for the next exciting installment to the CUCD3 - The
Shampoo Opra.

* A large fluorescent tube flickers to life above my noggin; How
about I stick a pic of self same Moral Support Officer on the HTML
that's allegedly supposed to grace CUCD3. Oops, better make that HTML
hadn't I. Darn, busted again.

>date
Monday 08-Jul-96 18:49:21
>

Darn it if Algo Music isn't going on. We stuck the early one on as a bit of
a cackle on a floppy disk but folks loved it. This 1.6 is something wicked.
In the Sound drawer. Gotta find some funny icon for it.

>date
Thursday 18-Jul-96 21:41:39

Lots of stuff has happened. Oh my lord it has. Shame I haven't had time to
update this regularly. Firstly I faced the culmination of that A4000T floppy
drive problem. It just HAD to be fixed so it went off to Fast Computer
Repairs in London Bridge. Nice guy Peter, the bulk of their trade is still
Amigas so they know a thing or two. Unfortunately they hadn't seen an
A4000T. Least of all 'Bitch' which is my A4000T. Yes, it's really called
Bitch. Shhh, not even the team on CU know that. Anyway, cutting a long story
short, he spent all day on it and got no life. Basically he thought it
should boot from HD. Not likely mate since I've got the kick-ass HD right
here with the CD image on it. I clue him up a bit on what the situation is.
He informs me that the floppy drive is WORKING. HALELUJA! I go round in a
taxi, it boots from floppy. HALELUJA!

Unfortunately, I think him or I said something to upset Bitch and she
stopped working altogether. Totally. Nada. We ponder the situation. He
agrees that she is a moody Bitch and he's never seen an Amiga like it.
Eventually we decide it's time to kickus buttus with Amiga Technologies and
their UK repair agents etc. Actually I'd been in touch with them to make
sure I could get parts in a hurry. It's not happening. Oh dear. No A4000T.
Oh darn dear. You can imagine the panic levels. Pete's already worked on
this machine for a day, I'm not keen to have him spending more time on it
and getting nowhere so I take Bitch and stick it in the back of the Taxi.
Taxi driver quite chuffed as he's just been paid 3/4 hour waiting time.

I get Bitch home (the office, same same during CD month). I stick her back
together neatly. Make sure everything is plugged in and seated nicely.
Cards, drives and the works. I stroke her and whisper some soothing words
like, 'You're back home now. I'm sorry I said those things. Come on baby.'
and press the power switch.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!

Bitch boots from HD as normal and the floppy drive works. Yus!

So that problem was resolved.

Unfortunately that started the saga of having to shovel the buckets full of
floppies readers have sent in. Oh yes, one by one, inch by inch, floppy by
floppy I painstakingly loaded all the floppies onto the CD. THIS is when you
realise how much is ON a CD. There's a LOT. Quite a bit in fact. An AWFUL
lot of SPACE on a CD yes siree. Add to that the fact that most everyone had
sent in self booting floppy disks for some reason. HELLO! It's a CD folks!
CD owners don't LIKE floppy disks. <sigh> Oh yes, at least 3/4 of the disks
were OctaMED modules. I blame Tony and his darned SoundLab. No more SoundLab
for him. Another interesting trait of OctaMED authors is that they find new
and interesting things to call modules. Usually involving spaces after the
filename and weird prefixes like 'OctaMed Modules Deeewd. mod 1    ' or
something. I kid you not. Hell, one guy sent in a huge box of floppy disks,
used two rolls of tape when packing it. ONE mod on each disk. <sigh> I could
go on. Like how I discovered another flaw with the A4000T. Sure HD disks
written with DD drives WORK in the hacked up HD floppy (wired for DD access
all the time) but UNLESS you put a tape over the HD hole, it uses HD floppy
bias to read. This is rather like the Chrome/standard switch on a walkman.
Net result is that I have to tape up each and every floppy hole on the HD
disks and these days about half of the folks sent in HD floppies. Arrrghhh!

I could write as much as you've read so far AGAIN about the weird and
wonderful things people have done sending things in. Shall I tell you about
the fact that Amiga users, bless their hearts, don't enjoy file type
postfixes. Often I'll get a disk with 10 files on it. Spaces, commas and
whatknows else in the files but NO identification postfix. They've been
postscript, guide, module, WordWorth, Imagine Objects, executables,
XPKno-oneHasEvenHeardOfTheLibraryBefore.library compressed files, you name
it. <sigh> Anyway soldier on I do.

I load them ALL on. There's only 200MB left. CD previews are cocked up, I
put the wrong one on. Gotta sort this out before I can go home. Of course
it's a tube strike. Oh dear. :-(

>date
Friday 19-Jul-96 09:55:12

Back in early Friday. Urgent stuff to organise. Have to try and get a mate
of mine to come in on the weekend to help do the Web stuff. We are well and
truly at panic stages now. Removed the Magic Workbench Enhancer CD preview,
added the Workbench Add-On CD preview. Good lord this is an excellent CD.
I'd never seen it before but it's a veritable goldmine of coolness. If you
only buy one commercial CD based on the previews on CUCD-III, I highly
recommend Workbench Add-On, the preview has only touched the surface of the
goodies inside.

Making full use of Amiga multitasking. Getting DCCed NewIcons 3 updates from
the author, shovelling CD preview onto the CUCD3 image, downloading mods
from SideWinder for the competition (should be interesting as some of these
feature on his own album which never made it to the UK). He still uses
Protracker 1.3 or something outrageous like that. Wouldn't it be something
if his stuff won against the myriads of modules sent in tracked by the
obviously superior OctaMED. Time will tell.

Oh dear. Better start download the Colour Fountain CD preview from the FTP
site. It's another 20MB or so of really cool colour Fonts. Yum yum this is
one kick butt CD.

Tony has just arrived in to work and I'm reminded that we have to judge the
module competition TODAY. Listen to some 40MB of modules so we can decide
which one will have the honour of getting the remix and burn to an Audio
track. Hoo ha. I'm a busy laddie, I am.

>date
Saturday 20-Jul-96 15:14:52

OK, today I plan to basically fix the disk. Put stuff where it's supposed to
go. Set up the icons, drawers etc. Been working on this since this morning.
Brought in my PC <spit> with the idea of leeching the various Amiga WWW
sites and sticking those on the CD. Got a friend of mine to come in and work
on the HTML stuff since I'm largely running out of time, Peter 'Dr_PhuQt'
Mills, has brought in his beast A1200 featuring a 1260 accelerator and an
attitude so it should get on with Bitch just fine after we've parnetted the
two in holy matrimony.

Discovered that the Amiga program GetURL wasn't happening since it bombed
out on Mail-To: links *. Darn. It's Arexx but I haven't time to hack it up so
Pete's shoved off to the PC <spit> and found a neat application to leech
pages. As usual, firing up the 16MB P75 and running NetScrape 3.0 Gold it
starts swapping virtual memory. Rather puts Amiga users moaning about MUI
using Amiga WWW browsers into perspective don't you think?

* Found out later it didn't bomb out at all. I suspect Pete just wanted to
use the PC so he could do something useful with his Amiga the evil bugger.

NewIcons sorted. Init script seems to work. Icons created for all the
readers mods. Typed in the results of the module contest etc. This is
another delima. Tony has a rather nifty module which he's output as a
massive 16 bit digital audio file to stick on the CD. However if I the
winning module on AND that I've only got about 35MB left on the CD for the
WWW pages... We've started the massive leech on the PC, now it's just a
matter of carrying on with the rest of the work and seeing how large the
resulting massive site is. Over 35MB and the Mod dies.

Mmm, maybe I should stick the Storm C 1.1 demo on as well as GNU C in the
Misc drawer? Hmmm... I'm still thinking of stuff to put on at this late
stage.

Of course, disaster struck. The PC had all the web site stuff on it but
chose this time to die. See it's ALWAYS a hardware problem. Just as last
time, the vast bulk of insurmountable problems have been hardware. This was
my pretty newish PC so I wasn't a happy camper. Stripped the bugger down and
tried to find out WHY the PCI bus didn't work any more. Without the SCSI
card working, I can't stick the Web stuff onto Zip. Pete was keen to try
another avenue by using Twin express. I'd rather fix it since 30 odd MB via
serial is not a factor I'd like to contemplate. Eventually I smell the
coffee and realise the PC is just not going to work. <insert scream here> so
it's serial. We try a direct PC to A4000T (GVP serial card) link. In theory
we could use a serial rate of over 230K, in practice Windoze decides this
isn't for the great benefit of Old Billy Gates and anything over 115K
crashes the PC instantly. <sigh> More dramas which eat all into Sunday and
finally the web stuff is over on Pete's 1200 From Hell. <- You should see
his A1200, the only other thing I saw encrusted in more crap was submerged
50 feet down off the cost of Saint Lucia during a scuba dive. Fortunately
he's got a Biohazard sticker on it so it's probably legal so long as he
declares it during transport.

Finally HTML on his A1200. Pete goes, 'Um Mat, how you feel like lashing up
some Arexx?'. <Horror> 'Um, why Pete?', I say. 'Um DOS you know, it um, uses
back slashes for dirs.' <The Full Horror hits me> Oh yes, we'd convinced the
grabber on the PC to NOT chop all the filenames into the lame 8.3 standard
(what WOULD Octamed authors do on the PC :-) but we'd forgotten that the PC
uses a backslash. Cutting a long story short, it's NOT going to work on the
PC without some Arexx to re-write ALL of the HTML with Amiga/Unix style
file-names. I think, no sweat, just do a replace of every backslash to a
slash. Um, then I realise HTML tags have slashes in them. Oh dear. Turns out
the easiest way to write the script was to convert everything to a slash
then seek out '</' and turn them back into '<\' or something like that. It
worked which was great. Unfortunately later on when I was using GetURL on
the Amiga, things did not work with such thrift...

>date
Tuesday 23-Jul-96 10:12:43

Sheesh, we're at Tuesday. I was supposed to have had the CD burned and
tested by then. This still isn't done. I spent all of Monday finishing up
the HTML on the CD and leeching a few more sites to fill more space. Space
filling was again on the agenda since I realised I had a bogus 90MB anim
sitting in a dir. The Synbrain anim wasn't worth the space, I've seen demos
doing more in real time so it was nuked. Now Tony's audio mod, which he's
extremely keen to get on the CD, takes up about 50 of that which left me
40MB in the red.

Last night I remembered that for the original CD, the author of Murder was
going to give us a version on Zip but we/I basically didn't get off our/my
butt and do it. So, how's about an all night FTP leech and stick that on the
CD. The FMV Monster Game is about 40MB so it'd do the job nicely. I set it
to leech and went home, at last (11pm).

Back in to work and of course, the machine had gone down or something on the
FIRST file. Oh dear. Start the leech again. Supposedly a Capital Punishment
demo is coming in today. I'm madly trying to tidy stuff up so I can BURN the
thing for testing purposes at least. The graphics drawer was still looking
sad so I throw in some nice stuff like Image Studio, Alien attributes, the
old but cool Rend 24 (if you don't have ImageFX) and a load more.

Oh yeah, you COULD miss it if you weren't looking but Photoshop EXISTS on
the Amiga! Check the ArtEffects demo in the graphics drawer. It was JUST
released and only has docs in German but the package is in English. Oh boy O
boy O boy you may well be surprised, I was.

Gotta burn the CD, Gotta burn the CD.

There's too much on it. Arggh!

Gotta delete some of the stuff from CD Previews to make enough room.

Gotta burn the CD, Gotta burn the CD.

>date
Wednesday 24-Jul-96 16:32:21

Ho ho. I should have know. Those previous 'woes' were really nothing
compared to the previous CUCD. Something big and BAD had to come and it
came all right.

Basically I tried to burn the CD so we could test some Gold CDs. Suddenly
nothing works. MasterISO is guruing, I move drives so they're all on the
A4000T's kick-butt controller but not before something screws up the root
block of my Workbench partition. First time I've lost real data to AFS.
Normally I can copy it off but this time it's having none of it. As fortune
would have it, the Workbench partition was a duplicate. I reverted to the
older one and had hassles updating some timed out software present on it
such as the 24-bit datatypes etc.

After investigating the matter more thouroughly, I found a problem with
MasterISO and really long file names. I also found a couple of set-up
problems but finally, I discovered the CD Writer was stuffed.

Oh yeah just wonderful. Hour ZERO and I discover the CD Writer doesn't work.
It refuses to acknowledge inserted disks as either CD-ROMs or CD blanks.
This is not a good situation. This morning I placed an emergency call to
First Computer center in Leeds. Hopefully they can courier me down a
replacement burner in time...

Naturally everyone else is nonchalant while my entire life falls appart
around me and I spend even longer in the office. <sigh>

There's not much I can do now but wait. At least I'll get home early tonight
since I'm useless sitting here as the CD only needs testing, it's virtually
complete.

STILL waiting for IBrowse and Miami though. <sigh> What is it about
programmers and deadlines.

I'm not in a very good mood, I'll stop writing now.

>date
Thursday 25-Jul-96 15:26:59

Things have gone better. Tinkered with the CD and fixed this 'n that.
Discovered I'd not added default icons for the readers graphics. Did that
only discovered, of course, that all the Arexx scripts I'd written to do
this were lost along with that Workbench partition. Re-written and icons
applied.

FINALLY got Holger to tell me it was OK to put Miami 0.512 Beta on the CD.
Excellent, no space to really document what it is for folks but if they
tinker they can find they can get on the Internet in minutes with it. Cool.

IBrowse still hasn't turned up. I've removed the main icon and left the
latest 8a demo in a drawer. It'll time out but that's their tough cookies
for not sending me a proper demo. :-/

Basically everything is being finalised slowly. What's here is here type
stuff.

New CD-R turns up and YES it's confirmed the old one is stuffed since this
one works perfectly (I thought it could have possibly been a software fault
but this was unlikely). Burnt a test disk right away. Audio tracks sound
AMAZING. Tony's one is absolutely fabulous. He doesn't write too many mods
these days but with all these 16 bit samples and direct to disk stuff lying
around he found the time and lashed up this absolutely stonking 12 channel
tune.

Capital punishment doesn't work. <sigh> Have to get an earlier public demo
and put it on. Tony found buncha other games 'n stuff that didn't work.
Quickly fixed tooltypes and assigns. Hopefully it should work OK. remembered
to copy Voyagers specific MUI bits into the MUI installation on the CD.

Gotta bail to replace Capital Punishment and finalise the rest of the CD.

Hoo boy, the end is in sight.

>date
Thursday 25-Jul-96 17:46:36

Found out Capital punishment has to go on. The CD artwork already has it
written on it. :-/ Had a phone call with the boss of Click Boom about this,
turns out there's almost no chance it'll run from Workbench as the bugger
needs 1.93MB of Chip memory before it gets out of bed apparently. Sheesh. OK
emergency plans. Implemented a test for right mouse button (or left? I
forget) on boot which will launch Capital Punishment demo. Fine. Still how
about folks who have crap CD32 emulation or who don't boot CDs. Gonna be
nasty. I better delete the icon since people will click on it and not read
the readme. Then they'll call us. We'll say 'Did you read that?' and they
start telling us about 'Our Martha and her knee which is giving her gip'.

Yep, delete icon now.

>date
Friday 26-Jul-96 18:06:21

This is pretty much closing comments now as the fourth Beta disk has been
output and it appears to be functioning fine. I'm totally exhausted from the
weeks of late nights with this final day being a mad rush. CD problems and
documenting the disk in the magazine too. I'll tell you the last minute
hitches which are quick amusing and then take off home for an early night at
last.

Firstly, the bizarre LoadWB bombing out with 'Invalid Resident Library' on
Bitch, didn't go away on other machines. Oh dear. Meanwhile I tried to get
Capital Punishment working on my machine again. It was having none of it.
The new version Click Boom stuck on their FTP site got even less further
along. Then it struck me that it COULD be a just Bitch who doesn't like
games much. OK, slap the two versions on Zip, haul it to Tony's machine and
try it there. It works fine with some nasty green alien chewing his head off
in 10 seconds to prove it.

No doubt Lisa hasn't seen the topless player yet. Hehe, darn. :-)

So it works huh, good I just rig it up for the left mouse button while
booting etc. Discover Tony stuck a LOAD of Audio tools on the CD and I
didn't know. So they weren't extracted, iconed up or anything. Oh dear, did
that quickly, found myself a little short on space, nuked a couple of Vista
DEMs to make space. Oh come ON, 48MB of the buggers will do! :-)

Spent an eternity tracking down this LoadWB that wont play ball. It really
had me bushed. I even jumped on IRC at one stage and hassled out Olli Wagner
(author of Voyager, AmIRC etc) to see if he could come up with a reason.
He's paranoid about hacks and tried to prove it was NewIcons and for a
second I believed him until I disabled the entire user-startup and found
that didn't work either. OK, let's fire up SnoopDOS in log mode at the start
of the ss and see what happens.

I should point out here that for some reason the A4000T takes AGES to work
out what drives are what. Could have been the Octagon so I pulled that out
in frustration, nope. Still takes a minute or so for me to get to early
start-up screen, disable all the drives and then boot the CD image. Wait
another minute for it to do that. Arrrgg.

Anyway, the log was BIZARRE. So far I'd not had an attack of the Amiga's
mystical nature but here it is;

If I boot the CD image without disabling the other drives, it works fine.
There's NO assigns, paths or anything to the other drives, as proved by the
fact the CD doesn't care if it boots when them disabled.

If I boot the CD with all the drives disabled, LoadWB bombs out with that
error. Turns out it asks for workbench.library, gets version 40.x or
whatever from ROM since that's where it is and isn't having any of it.
Stupid considering it asks for workbench.library V39. Arrrgg

So, the thing to do is run Snoopy WITHOUT the drives disabled and see what's
happening. This I do and what do I find?

Bitch loads workbench.library from an old backup of my Workbench (remember
how it was trashed earlier?) on one partition. There it was for all to see,
RAMLIB loading workbench.library from Workbench2/libs. Now WHY would RAMLIB
load it, WHY is there a workbench.library on that Workbench when there isn't
on any other machine.

Now I'm a bit of a perfectionist so normally I'd ponder this for an hour or
two to get to the bottom of it. With this I could SEE there was no reason.
It was sheer calma. You see that old Workbench partition had booted Bitch
since before Bitch was. It's a Workbench partition that booted my crusty old
A3000 and an beat up A4000 desktop before that and an even more beat up
A1200 before that. This, dear readers, was after the Ancient One reached
these green shores of Great Britain. Before that the Ancient One resided on
the Northern Territory University A3000, before that on my beat up (see the
theme here?) A500 and well even before THAT on a brand new A1000 (which now
powers my A1200). You see the Ancient One is old enough to have inherited
some of the magic of the Lorraine Amiga. The magic that enabled the original
bread board prototype to function before it was proved that it never COULD
function. This has been passed down from country to country, machine to
machine, Workbench to Workbench and while every executable and every file
and every font and every icon has been replaced, the Power still remains.

I tell you this on your word of honour not to repeat it. Only the most
devout of Amiga users will have read mat.readme until the end. It is YOU who
should know what that blue painted epoxy in your CD-ROM drive REALLY is. You
are now entrusted to this knowledge. YOU must SWEAR on your very life not to
let any mere PC owner to know these things. Read on if you agree...

Oh yes, that Workbench had been places. It was a Workbench that had seen
the world, knew it's ways and learn an arcane trick or two about forcing
errant code to bend to it's will, just like it did with that Lorrain
prototype back in the 1980s.

Lest any of ye forget, this is what had occured; Ye Old Workbench when
enabled (on it's drive) would excerise it's will on Bitch and force her
to load the workbench.library but not from her ROM but from Ye Old
Workbench. Once done Bitch was possessed of the spirit of Ye Old Workbench
and thereafter the mere laws of computing and physics do not apply.

<***> Much earlier in Mat.readme, you may remember the tale of Bitch who
would not work at Fast Computer Repairs. Nay not a flicker of life. You
might recall there was a HD out of the 4 missing which is required for
booting. Would it surprise you to learn this was the drive that housed Ye
Old Workbench? Would it surprise you that upon reconnecting said drive,
Bitch miraculously fired back into life?

Would it suprise you to learn the following?

>list Workbench2:libs/workbench.library
No information for "Workbench2:libs/workbench.library": object not found

Oh yes, it never DID exist.

So as my final gift to you, dear reader, I have given you the best thing I
can do. I have infused CUCD3 with Ye Old Workbench. The ancient one now
lives on underneath all the new fangled modern NewIcon fancy stuff.
Underneath all those MB of fancy applications and such forth. UNDERNEATH all
that is a small peice of the Ancient One's mana suffused into c:, libs: l:,
devs: and untold neather regions which hide between those spaces that
mundane dir commands can not reach.

Naturally now CUCD3 boots just lovely. Oh and by sheer co-incidence (me
thinks not), it boots faster and uses less memory than it did before.

Keep CUCD3 in a safe place long after you've plundered it's treasures and
raped it's directories. Keep it near your amiga. Keep it underneath but in
close contact and the Power of the Ancient Workbench will be with you
always. Oh and you'll score the best god damned CD I could make into
the bargain.

Peace and Harmony dear friends.

Mat Bettinson - CU Amiga Magazine Friday 26-Jul-96 18:26:50