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1995-03-19
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468 lines
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Amy Info
A text-file magazine for all Amiga lovers
Volume 5, Issue 1 Jan. 3, 1990
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Editor : Matt McNeil
Writers: Blaine Gardner
Sam Katon
Edwin Hoogerbeets
Address all correspondence to: "Amy Info"
c/o Matt McNeil
GEnie address: M.McNeil1 4019 B Otono Dr..
Santa Barbara, CA 93110
(805) 964-4074
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Contents:
1. A Message From the Editor Matt McNeil
2. Distributing "Amy Info" Matt McNeil
3. Amiga Happenings Matt McNeil
4. FCC Regulation of Modems? Sam Katon
5. Features of Various Amiga Shells Edwin Hoogerbeets
6. Hardframe vs. A2090A Blaine Gardner
7. Advertising Information Matt McNeil
8. Amy Info Advertising Matt McNeil
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A Message From The Editor:
Happy New Year! You will notice that, along with the usual Amiga
information and news, I've included something of a more political nature,
but one which I think could affect many of you. It is a letter regarding
proposed FCC regulation of modem use through extra fees and surcharges.
Please take the time to read -- and perhaps respond to -- this. On a
more upbeat note, this issue contains some news about VirusX 4.0, a
comparison of the Hardframe and A2090A harddrive controllers, as well as
a look at various Amiga shells. (Also, you'll now find Amy Info in ZOOed,
rather than the somewhat archaic ARCed form.)
Enjoy the issue,
Matt McNeil
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Amy Info is a file-based magazine which has been copyrighted by Matt
McNeil. I am allowing everyone to freely distribute it as long as s/he
gives credit to Amy Info for anything taken from the magazine. I am also
requesting that the magazine itself remain "AS IS" when being distributed.
Please do not modify it in any way if you are going to distribute it.
About Distributing: Please upload Amy Info EVERYWHERE! This magazine
simply will not flourish if it is not uploaded whenever possible. Every
issue is kept near 15,000 bytes ARCed so that upload/download time should
never be a problem. So, please, if you have the chance, spread the
magazine around the country! Give a copy to your friend! Keep Amy Info
alive and going strong!
A great way to spread Amy Info to non-modem users is to put the textfile
on your monthly user group disks. Please do this. Full permission is
granted!
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AMY INFO WELCOMES ALL COMMENTS, QUESTIONS, CRITICISMS & ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS!
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Amiga Happenings:
(Matt McNeil)
>>> VirusX Message from Author Steve Tibbett
"VirusX 4.0 has one problem, that has been causing all the other ones that
people have been reporting. VirusX 4.0 will, as part of its checking
RAM continually for your running an infected executable, mistakenly use
location $0 as a pointer.
Normally location 0 is NULL anyway, so it doesn't make any difference...
but it seems that some programs mistakenly write to location 0 (Null
pointers and such), and just writing #1 to location 0 (as a long)
will make it odd... causing VirusX to generate an address error.
Apparently some versions of Commodore's A590 hard disk driver do this,
and I've heard HardFrame does also, though haven't verified it. I'll
try and take care of this problem in the next version of VirusX.
Also, for V4.0, I changed the WAY I check disks to see if they are
viruses I recognize - I changed which longwords of the bootblock I
look at, for no real reason other than that it was easier to do it
this way. Anyway, VirusX 4.0 recognizes MY copy of all the viruses
that people have been saying 3.2 recognizes but 4.0 doesn't
(Lamer Exterminator of some form, and one of the SCA variants).
If you have a bootblock that 3.2 recognized and 4.0 doesn't, Please
get it to me somehow: Plink=STEVEX, Bix=s.tibbett, my BBS (613-731-3419),
etc.)."
>>> Joe Larson Picture Disks 14, 15 and 16 Released
According to Larson, these new disks contain some "*great* animations" by
Jim Robinson:
#14: Flight
#15: TooMuch3D
#16: Twilight
All of these use ShowAnim, contained on 14 and 15. 16 is full -- sorry.
(Don't order 16 without 14 or 15 unless you own a copy of showanim yourself.)
Disks may be obtained by sending $5 per disk to:
Joe Larson
6121 St. Croix Ave. N.
Golden Valley, Minnesota 55422
(612) 591-1037.
Amiga Happenings is a column dedicated to giving you current information on
what is happening in the Amiga community. As with all early information,
there is a chance that it may turn out to be incorrect, although I'll try
to verify anything I print.
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PROPOSED FCC REGULATION Of MODEM USE
(Sam Katon) <from the Prodigy Computer Club Bulletin Board>
* * *
A new regulation that the FCC is quietly working on will directly affect you
as the user of a modem. The FCC proposes that users of modems pay extra
charges for use of the public telephone network which carries their data.
In addition, computer network services such as Prodigy, Compuserv, Tymnet, and
Telenet would also be charged up to $6.00 per hour per user for the use of the
public telephone network. This charge would most likely be passed on to the
users (you).
What should you do?
First, take the time to download this textfile and the letter herein (if you
haven't already captured it) and post it on three BBSs which aren't already
carrying it.
Second, send three copies of the following letter to the addresses provided
here.
It is important to act now. The bureaucrats already have it in their heads
that modem users should subsidize the phone company. Let's stand up and make
it clear that we won't accept any government restriction of any type on the
free exchange of ideas and information.
* * *
A D D R E S S E E S :
Chairman of the FCC 1919 M Street N.W. Washington, D.C. 20554
Chairman, Senate Communications Subcommittee SH-227 Hart Building Washington,
D.C. 20510
Chairman, House Telecommunications Subcommittee B-331 Rayburn Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Sir:
Please allow me to express my displeasure with the FCC proposal which would
authorize a surcharge for use of modems on the telephone network.
This regulation is nothing more than an attempt to restrict the free exchange
of ideas and information.
end of letter
* * *
I don't yet have any more informantion on this matter. If you have any info at
all, please give me a call and post a message. It is imperative that we have
complete information.
Let's rally and make sure that the gov't never places undue and unfair
restrictions on this grass-roots, user controlled, interactive form of mass
communication!
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Summary of Features of Various Amiga Shells
(Edwin Hoogerbeets) <from Comp.sys.Amiga>
In an effort to stop the shell wars that sometimes crop up, (although
they are not raging now) I have made up this chart that lists the
features of 4 common Amiga shells. The list of features of two popular
Unix shells are also put in to throw the Amiga shells into sharp relief.
(sounds poetic, eh?)
[Numbers] in square brackets indicate footnotes. (see below)
Summary of Shell Features
=========================
Amiga Shells----------------- Unix Shells
Dillon Hawes CBM/ARP Koren
shell WShell Shell Sksh csh sh
------- ------- ------- ----- ----------
scripting yes yes yes yes yes yes
[3] [1] [2] [2,3]
file name yes no no yes yes no
completion [4] [5]
aliases yes yes yes yes yes no
history real conman newcon yes yes no
conman
multiple command yes no no yes yes yes
lines
auto directory no yes no no no no
change (input
directory name
to cd to it)
builtin versions yes yes yes yes yes yes
of external [12] [6]
commands
resident list no yes yes soon n/a n/a
shared text no yes yes yes done by OS
(ie. residentable)
own path yes yes no yes yes no
[7]
`backtick` type no no yes yes yes yes
mechanism [12] [8]
pipes faked conman conman faked yes yes
[12]
line editing yes conman newcon yes no no
redirection yes yes yes yes yes yes
< and > [9]
append >> yes yes yes yes yes yes
take from << no no no yes yes yes
wildcarding yes no no yes yes yes
shell variables yes no no yes yes yes
setable prompt ascii yes yes yes yes ascii
[10,11] [10] [10,11] [10]
setable titlebar no yes no yes n/a n/a
[10,11] [10,11]
auto-startup .cshrc Startup-WShell .skshrc .cshrc .profile
script Shell-Startup
Footnotes:
1. Recognizes ARexx (ADOS 1.4) or Execute scripts
2. Includes #! mechanism for scripts of other shells
3. Executable ascii text (sometimes needs script bit set)
4. Only some custom versions have file name completion, however
5. Rumoured to be coming soon
6. Large version does have builtins and small version doesn't
7. special bonus -- comes with PathMan
8. Backtick mechanism handled by $(command) replacement to be able to
nest commands
9. Somewhat restrictive in the placement, however
10. Setable with special restricted symbols (which expand to specific things)
11. May insert a command into string which outputs new prompt
12. Only the ARP version
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Hardframe vs. A2090A Comparison Review
(Blaine Gardner)
Since I've recently switched from the Commodore A2090A controller to the
Microbotics HardFrame, here's a short comparison of the features of the
two. (See below for speed benchmark details, here I'll just say the
HardFrame is considerably faster than the A2090A.)
A2090A
I've owned the A2090A for close to a year. It was the only DMA controller
available at the time, and it supports both ST506 (IBM style) and SCSI (Mac
style) interfaces. This was nice because ST506 drives are cheaper than
SCSI (though the SCSI drives are coming down in price now).
The A2090A is a bit odd in its requirements for device names. DH0: and
DH1: MUST be the names for the two possible ST506 drives. DH2: to DH8:
MUST be the names for the seven possible SCSI drives. If you mount a
partition with a device name (DHn:) that matches a possible physical drive,
the A2090A gets VERY confused. It took me a while to figure this one out,
since the manual does not make much note of it. In plain English: DO NOT
NAME ANY PARTITION WITH A DHn: DEVICE NAME. Once you've got that figured
out, things work ok. I named my Fast File System partitions FF0: and FF1:
(for FastFilesystem).
The A2090A will autoboot under 1.3, but it cannot boot the Fast File System
because it has to load the FFS before it can use it. So the typical setup
is to make the first partition that MUST be the Old File System (OFS) very
small. Mine was 2 cylinders on the ST4096, and that gave me about 300K.
More than enough to boot from. (The 1.3 Enhancer Manual section on the FFS
is very helpful with this, it gives a list of the minimum files required to
boot OFS and pass control to a large FFS partition.)
So now the setup is:
DH0: OFS 300K Boot partition
FF0: FFS 40M SYS: partition
FF1: FFS 40M Additional space
There is still one little gotcha. A number of slightly brain dead programs
have their file requesters hard coded with "DH0:", but DH0: is just a tiny
boot partition, not something suitable for working on. My "fix" was to use
NewZap (a binary file editor) to edit "DH0:" to "FF0:".
So now life is great, I've got an autobooting hard drive system, with a
fast ST506 drive. Not as fast as some of the SCSI setups, but worlds
better than floppies!
A2090A SCSI
I found a great deal on a very fast SCSI drive (CDC Wren III), so I bought
it and sold my ST506 drive (Seagate ST4096).
Now some annoyances start showing up. The A2090A can't cold boot the Wren
III. The Wren has a rather lengthy spinup and self-test sequence (actually
only about 20-25 seconds). And the A2090A has quit looking for a drive
before the Wren is ready. Reboots work fine, but a cold start from
power-on will always fail. (The Seagates suffer the same problem, and the
excuse has been that Seagate did it "wrong". Did a company like Control
Data also do it "wrong" or is the A2090A really at fault here?)
The drive activity LED connection on the A2090A has some problems. There
are two jacks, one for ST506 drives, and one for SCSI drives. The manual
only mentions J5 for the ST506, not J4 for SCSI. So you can only have one
drive light the LED on the front of the 2000. Also, with the Wren III
installed, the LED just barely lights. You can only see drive activity
when the room lights are out. The right voltage is there, but the pulses
are too short to light the LED up. It does light brightly during the reset
sequence though.
Now the killer. There is a bug in the A2090A's SCSI interface. With a
hires 16 color picture displayed, DMA contention causes the FIFO (First In,
First Out) buffer RAM to get overrun. So it has to retry, and then it gets
overrun, and has to retry, and gets overrun, and has to retry, and.......
The bottom line is that wonderful 500K/second transfer rate drops down to
about 30-50K/second. Nearly floppy speeds in other words. OUCH!
Commodore has acknowledged the problem, and promised a fix, but nothing has
been released as of August 1989. There is a program called Patch2090 that
attempts to bandaid this problem by cutting down the MaxTransfer value when
a hires image is displayed so that the FIFO doesn't get overrun. It does
work, but not as well as fixing the problem would.
HardFrame
The HardFrame is a SCSI only controller, and since it doesn't have all the
ST506 interface circuitry, it's both smaller (1/2 card length) and cheaper
than the A2090A. There is an aluminum frame mounted to the card, and a 1/2
height 3.5" hard drive can be mounted to the frame. The card can supply
power to the drive with a small adapter cable that is included. There is
no external connector on the back edge of the card (the A2090A provides a
Mac compatible DB-25 connector on the back of the computer) so any external
connections are up to you. Also, the frame didn't quite line up with the
mounting holes on the back of the computer, so a little bending and cussing
was required to get it to fit.
The HardFrame is billed as the fastest controller available for the Amiga,
and my results back that up. Just switching from the A2090A to the
HardFrame boosted reads from 570-650K/sec to 750-870K/sec, writes from
400-430K/sec to 430-480K/sec, and directory scans from 131/sec to 227/sec.
The Wren III was formatted at 1:1 interleave on both controllers.
The HardFrame setup is much easier than the A2090A. Instead of messing
with mountlist entries, the RDprep program queries the hard drive to see
what it is, then presents you with a list of parameters that you can accept
for a 1 partition setup, or modify as you wish. (It did goof on the blocks
per cylinder on the Wren III, it reported 36 instead of 35.) It stores all
the information in a Rigid Disk Block in a reserved area on the drive. And
all partitions defined in the Rigid Disk Block are automagically mounted
when the computer is booted.
Also the HardFrame can boot the Fast File System because it copies the FFS
into the Rigid Disk Block. Now I boot directly into a 60M FFS partition
called DH0: instead of having to mess with an OFS boot partition.
The Rigid Disk Block can be easily modified at any time with RDprep. I
decided that I didn't want my four floppy sized partitions mounted every
time I booted, so I just re-ran RDprep and deleted them from the Rigid Disk
Block. RDprep could be more intelligent about defaults, I had to re-enter
the same info several times because it persisted with its own defaults
instead of echoing what I'd used for the last partition. But that's nit-
picking, it's still far easier than setting up the A2090A.
The 2000's HD activity LED lights up nice and bright with the HardFrame
too, compared to the A2090A, I almost need sunglasses!
The crippling hires slowdown of the A2090A is not a problem on the
HardFrame either. The HardFrame does slow down a bit, but it's not
very noticable.
Lest you think I've sold my soul to Microbotics, the HardFrame is not
perfect. I've got a couple of very real problems, though at the moment
they don't matter at all.
The low level format program hung on the Wren III. It queried the drive,
and correctly reported the drive's type and size, and that it was already
formatted with a 1:1 interleave. But then it hung when it tried to do the
low level format. I have no idea why, but since the drive was already
formatted correctly I just skipped the low level format. This could be a
real problem in other circumstances.
I've got an A2620 card in my 2000, and I run in 68020 mode all the time.
But when I switched back to 68000 mode after installing the HardFrame I got
a continuous string of random Gurus at random times during the boot. As it
stands now the hard drive is completely unusable in 68000 mode. Since I
only use 68000 mode to play some brain-dead games that won't run on the
68020, this doesn't really affect me, but I will be contacting MicroBotics
to find out what the problem is. [Note: This was traced to other software
in the system, my mistake! BSG 12-25-89]
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Amy Info Advertising:
How would you like your own custom-made advertisement to be spread
throughout the land travelling from computer to computer--printed from
printer to printer!? Amy Info brings advertising to you at low, low
prices. Just think of the number of readers you will reach with your ad!
For more information on our low-cost ads call or write:
Amy Info Advertising
4019 B Otono Dr.
Santa Barbara, CA 93110
(805) 964-4074
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"Amy Info" is copyright 1989/90 by Matt McNeil. Portions of the magazine
may be reprinted but the content of this magazine may NOT be changed without
the expressed consent of Matt McNeil. Yet everyone, however, is encouraged
to distribute it AS IS. Please give credit to "Amy Info" as well as to the
individual author when reprinting material. "Amy Info" as well as any of
its authors are not responsible for any damages that occur because of errors
or omissions. Articles reprinted from other newsletters, as noted, are not
property of Amy Info but are under the control of their original authors.
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