Amiga Developer CD, an good.

[srg]

Hi

The Amiga Developer CD for AmigaOS3.x, it is supposed to have the Amiga ROM kernel manuals etc. Is it any good for the likes of us that write at the lowest level. (I would like to, one day, at least attempt to adapt my OS, or what I have of it at the moment to the Amiga, just for fun).

srg

[Solar]

The Rom Kernel Reference Manuals - RKM's for short - describe the API and overall architecture of the Classic Amiga, for people who want to employ the Amiga operating system.

They do not describe the hardware, for people who want to port their OS to the Amiga hardware.

And be aware that the RKM's are describing the Classic (i.e., 680x0-based) Amiga, the last of which are the A1200 and A4000, of 1992 vintage. Those beasties have been kept alive with accelerator boards, PCI bridges and other such examples of how far you could push an architecture, but "outdated" doesn't begin to describe it. (Although there are PPC accelerator boards available, that basically gives you a 233 MHz PPC 604e as slave processor.)

Later efforts focussed on a PPC-native rewrite of the AmigaOS (AmigaOS 4 PPC), including a PPC-native hardware - the AmigaOne, with 933 MHz G4 topping the scale AFAIK. Those are currently in beta testing; no Developer CDs for OS 4 are available ATM. (And again, they'll only describe the AmigaOS, not the hardware.)

There might be hardware information available elsewhere, but the Dev CD's aren't what you're looking for.

[srg]

So far I've not been able to find anything, there did the people who wrote UAE and the Amiga port of NetBSD fund their information?

srg

[Solar]

There might be tidbits of information on the Dev CD's outside the RKM's; other than that, Commodore did release hardware spec's on the Amigas... I honestly never delved into the subject, but I'll forward your question to amiga-news.de, where someone should know.

[Solar]

One thing I can tell you up front: Stock Amigas don't have an MMU - either you make an MMU-equipped accelerator a requirement, or you'll have to handle physical addresses.

Most halfway-decent Amigas have such an accelerator, but just so that you're prepared.

[srg]

One thing I can tell you up front: Stock Amigas don't have an MMU - either you make an MMU-equipped accelerator a requirement, or you'll have to handle physical addresses.

Most halfway-decent Amigas have such an accelerator, but just so that you're prepared.

Yeah I know. I remember after getting my 030 accelerator running a program that gave me a swap file (wow I've got an MMU!).

BTW Which is better in your oppinon, WinUAE or WinFellow (I've noticed that Fellow has something enchroaching on a debugger/monitor.


srg

[Solar]

I never tried WinFellow, so I can hardly judge. UAE is the more prominent of the two, and I had very few grievances with it. Then again, the software I used under UAE was never very hardware-dependent to begin with.

[srg]

I've run Softwood's Final Writer 5 on it and it worked well (IMHO the best Amiga Word processor). DPaint IV AGA didn't work well, I'm going to try it again with a different setting.

I'd love to be able to get an run Flashback on it, I have the DOS version and the sound it awful, the Amiga version had nice mods for the Music.

UPDATE: I have dpaint running at 1024x768 at 8-bit colour and I run out of chip ram for 256 colours haha. The trouble is, I try to run it at PAL High Res and I end up with non square pixels, not surprising at 1280x256 haha.
Anyway, 800x600 seems nice - untill WinUAE crashed.

UPDATE: 800x600 is nice, but 640x480 nicer.

srg

[Solar]

Hmm... initial response indicates that the Developer CD's are your best bet. Most of the Commo docs are simply unavailable by now...

If DPaint keeps giving you trouble, try PersonalPaint (PPaint) by Cloanto. A very good package, and IIRC with the 6.4 freely available from Aminet.

[srg]

Hmm... initial response indicates that the Developer CD's are your best bet. Most of the Commo docs are simply unavailable by now...

If DPaint keeps giving you trouble, try PersonalPaint (PPaint) by Cloanto. A very good package, and IIRC with the 6.4 freely available from Aminet.

Personal Paint comes with AmigaForever, I just liked DPaint. BTW he nice HAM modes don't work at all.

srg

[Solar]

One of the RKM's was on Hardware: Amiga Hardware Reference Manual. Note that it only includes ECS architecture Amigas (the later AGA architecture Amigas A1200 and A4000 are not covered).

I have no idea whether the Developer CD includes the hardware RKM, and it's long since out of print and unavailable.

[srg]

The Developer CD is supposed to have revised versions of the RKM's, they may have the AGA chipset in them. I'll just have to order the cd and find out.

BTW nice find on that link, is it the whole book or just a taster?

srg

[Solar]

As far as I can judge, it's complete. Since I don't know how *legal* it is, though, I'd advise downloading it while it's there.

[srg]

The Devices RKM is good as well, explaining the floppy boot prcess among other things.

Another thing it seems to miss is the A1200 and A4000 IDE controller (it seems that Amigas were all SCSI machines when this was written.

srg

P.S. Did you have the Microvitec 1438 montor? I wanted it for years and when I eventually was allowed to have one they had gone out of production. The replacement was the Amiga branded one but it's screen controls were for verticle only, I ended up with a black border in order to have a square picture on DblPan modes.

[Solar]

Another thing it seems to miss is the A1200 and A4000 IDE controller (it seems that Amigas were all SCSI machines when this was written).

The A3000 was SCSI; previous machines didn't have inbuilt controllers at all.