home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
-
- Hard Drive Startup
-
-
- Well finally!! Jeez, can you believe that bunch of lunatics I been
- dealing with?? Remember when that dumb, pimply kid in the back raised his
- hand and asked "Uh, just where IS the Audio.device, Mr. BenchMaster?".
- Haw haw haw..thought I'd die! And what I particularly liked was the drool
- on the blond kid's face in the front row when I uttered that most magical
- of computer incantations..."ceee deee..deee hayytch zzeerroooo..."
-
- *
-
- Well, the first thing to do is to throw away everything you've read so
- far. The old Primary Objective of getting the buffers up and running is
- obsolete..FaccII will now get loaded down in the middle with the rest of
- the gang. Primary Focus is now: Get the hard drive recogized! We
- want to "CD dh0:" as soon as possible, of course, but it's not necessary.
- We can still be on df0 and run things from the hard drive using the full
- pathnames.
-
- Standing in front of that objective is the fact that one of our Select
- files has to be "df0", so we can pop up just in df0 and not bother with the
- time needed for BindDrivers and Mount, like if we quickly want to Ed
- something in df1. Also, since BindDrivers and Mount use up their fair
- share of memory, there would be the odd game or animation that would
- require every little oodle. You'll also want it for misc. testing.
-
- So your s file "startup-sequence" would still read something like:
-
- Select df0 Bench dh0 RamBench BareBench Paint
- EndCLI > nil:
-
-
- The "df0" file reads "NewCLI". The rest start off with the following:
-
- BindDrivers
- Mount dh0:
- dh0:c/CD dh0:
-
- Note how we used the hard drive's CD command by using the full pathname.
- We need to do that until we've safely got the c directory assigned to the
- hard drive. So next would be "dh0:c/Assign c: dh0:c". At that point you
- should be able to drop the full pathnames for the commands as it'll be
- looking in dh0's c directory instead.
-
- The Select scriptfile "dh0" is composed of the above three lines then a
- "dh0:c/NewCLI" to pop up a window, and that's it.
-
- My hard drive came with a program call DefDisk that did the five major
- assigns for me; yours might have come with something similar. Throw it away
- if it did, it does more harm than good. Conversely put, Assign, no matter
- how many of them, with a fat AddBuffers or FaccII in front of it, just
- blows the doors off DefDisk. On top of that, DefDisk is about 6,000 bytes
- if I remember right, whereas Assign is 2,500, and I'll take the difference,
- thank you. And it only does the five main directories so you STILL have to
- use Assign command anyways! Sigh.
-
- I tend to cram LoadWb up near the front of the startup so as to get the
- disk accessing over with as quickly as possible. After a year of floppies,
- there's just nothing like that quiet purr that follows those first few
- commands...
-
- *
-
- Well, guess that's about it. Hope you picked up a tip or two along the
- way..it's really a shame Commodore didn't give the st-seq HALF the attention
- they gave, for instance, the IconEd. The DOS books aren't to be blamed, of
- course; to them it's just another scriptfile. I mean heck, it only
- completely makes or breaks the entire system..why does it need more than,
- say, half a paragraph at best??
-
- It probably doesn't. I made it all up.
-
- I just felt like writing.
-
- *
-
-
- Stay loose.
-
-
-
- ** The BenchMaster **
-
-
-
-