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Amiga Collections: MegaDisc
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MegaDisc 45 (1996-03)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)(Disk 1 of 2)[WB].zip
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MegaDisc 45 (1996-03)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)(Disk 1 of 2)[WB].adf
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articles
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zkick.txt
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zkick.txt
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Text File
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1996-01-22
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15KB
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269 lines
Zkick ROM reallocation, 1.3ROM, and hard-drives
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Woe and sufferance, I still haven't bought my 2.04ROM yet, but, as
a lot of stuff [nearly all nowadays] is WB2/3, I use Zkick to access
these things. My old DF0: in nearly knackered though, and it is a bit
of a pain having to put the Zkick-disk in, then the WB2.04-disk in...
and, like, hard-drives are much quicker loaders, eh?!
First step, was to put the 2.04ROM-file on my h'drive. This sped
things up, but it still necessitated me putting the WB2-disk in, to pull
up that 'bench... but having the 2.04ROM-file patched-in via zkick,
doesn't knock-out your 1.3-workbench stuff, I should point out. You're
1.3 setup will still start and run under 2.04... has a few snazzies to
boot, but does rob you of .5 Meg of chip-ram which, in my mind, isn't
easy to justify without having Workbench2 going to make full use of the
patch.
I figured there must be a way to put WB2 on my non-booting partition,
and have my normal startup-sequence check to see whether the 2.04ROM had
been patched-in by Zkick, and branch the startup-sequence if this was
so.
The 1.3=command 'version' seemed capable of this small feat,
but you gotta know what to ask for. Originally, I just put; version 37,
as the first line of my SUS, with a if/endif argument following that.
In theory, this setup should've defaulted to my 1.3-SUS if the version
was lessthan 37, or jumped to a label, where the WB2 SUS had been
appended to the end of my normal SUS.
This didn't work, because regardless of
whether Zkick had patched-in the 2.04ROM-file or not, the 1.3 command
'version' returns the answer 34.blahblahblah anyhow. It doesn't see
what Zkick has done... .and the WB2=command 'version' don't work under
1.3.
The 1.3 version=command will check for the version >OF< a library
though, so the most obvious library to check for would be the
ROM-resident exec.library. This works fine. Now, if I've stuck the
Zkick-disk in, and read the 2.04ROM-file into CHIP [where it's gotta go,
so it seems], the first line of my normal SUS checks the version of
exec.library, and does the conditional branch in the appropriate manner.
The bits of my SUS are below, for those who might still be like me under
Kickstart1.3.
version exec.library 37 ;check exec version
if warn
;continues with my 1.3 SUS
else ;goes to here if version returned 37 or >
skip wb2sus ;skips to the label wb2sus, which is where
endif ; the WB2 startup-sequence begins
chippatch >nil: -i -p ;This is the beginning of my 1.3-SUS
////the rest of my 1.3 SUS in here////
endcli ;and this is the end of my 1.3-SUS
lab wb2sus ;the label to skip to
dh1:c/setpatch >NIL: ;the beginning of the WB2 startup-sequence
dh1:c/assign c: dh1:c ;a whole swag of assigns to the other
cd c:
;partition with WB2 installed on it
assign devs: dh1:devs dh0:devs ;S: is assigned later, after I've finished
assign fonts: dh1:fonts dh0:fonts ;with it... [not shown]
assign l: dh1:l dh0:l
assign utilities: dh1:utilities
assign libs: dh1:libs dh0:libs
assign system: dh1:system
assign sys: dh1:
execute s:setpath ;'setpath' is a script setting the paths to
;the programs on the now non-system partition
////The rest of the WB2 SUS in here////
execute dh1:s/user-startup ;you do know what this is for, don't you?
endcli >NIL: ;the end of the WB2-SUS
Couple of things to note, if you go about this. Any assigns that you
usually have for your 1.3 setup, will have to be included [I stick them
in my user-startup]. Likewise, any aliases that live in your
shell-startup, will be blah-blah to the CLI, unless you remember to
append them to the partition that has the WB2 s:shell-startup file.
Also, note the use of the WB2 assign command, which allows more
than one directory to be assigned a logical device name. This is a very
useful addition to this command's scope, as it allows you to keep, say,
libraries of the same name but different under the two kickstarts, in
two differing LIBS: drawers, both considered as the logical LIBS: I've
not yet found a prog. that can't find what it's after, using this
arrangement. Some progs. can't seem to find their config.files. Must
have something to do with where they're launched from... dunno... but
either finding and copying these config.files to the relevant drawers,
or just running the programs and re-saving the prefs/env of the program
again, fixes the glitches.
[and yes, there's probably a better way of doing it, but I'm still
learning WB2, ok!? 8^]
A bit of a blurb about Zkick;
I originally tried this, to mainly
access the various 'cover-disks' that get stuck on all those glossy,
expensive, and terrifically useless printed-magazines that emanate from
[specifically] the U.K. OK, ok... so it's my opinion, uh-huh... but I
have to wade through 70% worth of advertizing to get anywhere near an
article, that's usually not worth reading anyhow... and the notion of
transcribing programming tutorials from the printed-page to machine????
View this against Megadisc, and I really think they've lost the plot
over there. However, some of the cover-disks are worth the
investment... [the glossy pages make really excellent paper-planes
too.]
Away from this small quibble, I thought too that Zkick would give
me a feel of, and chance to, learn some of Workbench2's new tricks and
so forth, and help me decide whether to keep my 1.3ROM or not, when I
finally upgraded. Confused?
Well, I was. I'd seen first-hand the
incompatibility threshold effecting some programs that were Kickstart1.2
only, and wouldn't work under 1.3... and similar stories were about
concerning things that were only 1.3-compatible, and wouldn't go under
2.04+. The strange twist to all this, is that 1.3ROMs are still worth
money for some reason... $40 to be precise, and they're also becoming
increasingly rare. [1.2ROMs aren't worth anything, and there's HEAPS of
them about!] So, $40 is a fair trade-in on a $60 2.05ROM, but it'd be
pitiful if I did this, to then find out that I really needed my old ROM
back for one thing or another.
Now, as for Zkick, it has it's drawbacks. One of these I mention
above, is sorrowfully reliquishing half of your 1meg chip-ram-block.
Oh, whilst I think about it... if you've got an Obese-Agnus (8372A),
and have configured your board for 1Meg-chip, remember to switch things
back to 512K chip-ram before you run Zkick, or else your machine will
hang on a gastly red-screen.{ROM-fault} With things patched with Zkick,
the screen is very jerky and slow to respond... this is most noticeable
using the menu-bar, or closing a window whilst still moving the
rodent... who's pointer will reappear in the weirdest of spots.
There's a couple of tricks around this, and one of these [for the
menus], is to use SiliconMenus. As for the windows and rodent probs,
either don't close them [hard to comply with watching the chip-ram
count], or wait that second or two longer when you do. I also found
that fooling with the mouse-accelerator settings helps too; having
Autocli at maximum-mouse-accel and prefs similarly set, nearly renders
the mouse useless I found... you slow things down, and it becomes
bearable.
[If you don't know what SiliconMenus is, it's a small program
(16k) that runs as a background task, and to get to your menus, you just
prod the rodent's right-ear, and bingo!!... your menus appear right at
your pointer's position in the screen. No more going to the top of the
screen to get them, you don't have to hold-down the button either! It
doesn't work on some graphics-programs, but apart from that, it's
absolutely 'triffic. Get it! It's on UT-336 in Megadisc's
PD-library... works on 1.3 too!]
Another thing to note, is that Zkick can hold on to the patch
after you've finished using it. It usually requires a cold-boot to get
it to give the chip-ram back for your 1.3ROM to use.
As for Zkick's usefulness, well, that .5Meg chip-ram block will
frustrate you time and again... after all, it should probably be seeing
2Meg of chip. Most everything on those cover-disks works, with the
exception of a couple of things [one game & a screen-blanker], which
reported they couldn't get something called 'screensplice' [or something
like that]... whatever that may be? [if anyone wants to make me
wiser... ?] And as for checking-out my 1.3 programs compatibility with
WB2... well, I haven't been able to find one that wouldn't go
program-wise, but a few small screen-hacks refuse. I thought this
rather surprizing, in view of what I'd heard... but I temper this with
the fact that I'm not big on playing games, and as I recall, games give
the most strife in this respect. So if you are gamer, checkout your
stuff real thorough like, before you say bye-bye to that ever-faithful
1.3ROM. This, in itself, may be hard to do, due to the lack of chip-ram
to play with, so games that require 1meg-chip will remain a mystery..
Epilogue:
Now, I wrote all of the above some 3months ago, and it's
all probably pertinent still for those with 1.3 ROMs, however, since
then, I've managed to save my pennies and purchase my 2.04ROM proper...
[oh boy, oh girl, oh Meegee] Having a Rev.7 A500 board myself, this is
just a plain unplug old, plug in new refit. So in view of things I've
written above, how does it shape up really??
I'm only [still!] finding all of WB2's tricks, but believe me, it
blows the old 1.3workbench to pieces! Shortcomings I mention above
about slow screen-reponse, hasn't disappeared entirely... but has
improved to the point where I can appreciate that most of this now due
to my lowly 68000 [even though I've got it tweeked to 15.57Mhz,
according to SysInfo], and maybe even due to the fact that I'm running
the old Denise... dunno.. perhaps the fattest Agnus might help too??
[I'll find out 1 day]
As for the mysterious 'screensplice', well, it must live in ROM,
cause all things that complained about it not being there are now
behaving themselves. I still don't know what it is... doesn't matter.
And as for the compatibility thang, I don't think much has changed.
What didn't work under the Zkick-patch, still don't. Now having my
in-place 1meg chip-ram-block back though, enabled me to try some things
I couldn't before... for example, Octamed 1.00b is highly fractious
under the 2.04ROM, to the point of crashing in fact, but that's OK,
because the aforementioned magazine cover-disks offered Octamed v.5
[told you the disks were worth it sometimes], and it's a big improve
over previous versions and downwardly compatible with earlier version
formats, so I use it instead now.
Of course, I'm way behind times... a long way. Remember I said the
1.3ROMs where still fetching money for some reason? Well, I'd
formulated that statement around my assumption that they'd be worthless
[just like the 1.2ROMs are], because let's face it, there's been 2
system-upgrades since 1.3... and viewed as analogous to how worthless
the 1.2ROMs became after 1.3 was released, I'd thought that 1.3ROMs
would suffer the same depreciation in the light of 2.04.
This is true to a point... [I'd never quite figured out why one
would spend $30-40 on 1.3, when you could get 2.04 for $20 more.], but
at the time of writing the first bit of this passage, 1.3ROMs where
fairly scarce, very... in fact, but in the space of 3 short months,
this is no longer the case. Now, there's quite a few about [s'pose
everyone's upgrading now], and so too the 2nd hand price has about
halved... so there you go. I'd love to see some accurate figures
expounding just how many Amigas are out there, running the various
kickstarts. I feel it would be interesting. [How about it Tim? Want
to run a census over the Megadisc audience to see what the figures are
here??]
However, I've still got my old 1.3ROM... and this is due to
some light shed on the compatibility thang as far as games are
concerned. I arranged for a friend to come over, soon after I fitted
the 2.04ROM. Unlike me, this friend is a game-junkie, and has literally
100s of disks full of games that were originally developed in the days
before 2.04... and as I had suspected, at least 40% of these fail to
load-up under the 2.04ROM. So again, if you're a bit of a gamester, I
suggest you start thinking about putting that 1.3ROM in a position where
you'll still have it, to either put it on a ROM-switching board, or
hacking it atop of the 2.04ROM, so all those games don't become useless
to you.
If you're still running 1.3... don't kid yourself... Zkick is not a
solution, it's just a stop-gap measure. [I could extend that, I think,
to read 'if you're still running an ECS-board, don't kid yourself, a
2.04ROM is only a stop-gap measure 8^] WB2 is really brilliant, miles
and away from 1.3, and it's said that Workbench3 is better again?? My
mind boggles... especially so, having just come back from a mate's
place, trying out his latest acquisition for his DX4-100... [yes, you
guessed it!]... Windows'95.
Don't worry... I was only there to see if Mr. Gates had
accomplished anything with Win'95... .I really don't think so... it's
still a case of Workbench being lots easier/intuitive to use, any
version. My mate, [who's as staunchly PC-biased as I am Amigan], still
has to concede the same thing... and painfully so for him... his wife
and children have no problems coping with the Amiga's workbench and
enjoy using my system when they visit.
They never touch his machine... it's too complicated for
them to use.
<DBM>
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