As with any profession, hobby, or pastime, personal computing has its own ’jargon’ or ’lingo’; a language you must learn if you are to become an accepted part of this world. This section will teach you some of the specific terms regarding the Amiga computer. Many of these terms will be explained in more detail later on, so if they sound confusing, hopefully they won’t when you are finished with this guide.

As we stated before, a DEVICE is a piece of hardware such as a modem, printer, or hard drive. Each device has a controller of some kind to allow it to talk to the computer. In order for the Amiga to talk to it, it requires a small program to tell it ’how’ to talk. Think of this program as an ’interpreter’. This program is called a DEVICE DRIVER. The drivers can be recognized by the extension .DEVICE. The printer driver is called PRINTER.DEVICE, the serial port driver is called SERIAL.DEVICE, etc. Since these drivers are programs, they can be modified and updated by programmers to take advantage of new technology easier. Most drivers that are used are included with Workbench. Some special hardware such as CD-ROMs or video scanners, etc. may require that you use their special driver. Most of the time, though, the software that comes with the hardware will have an easy installation program that will do it all for you. As a new Power Amiga user, you need to know where these are. All the drivers are kept in a drawer called DEVS on your Workbench disk or partition. If you were to look in this directory, you would see lots of drivers for lots of different devices. For the most part, you will not even notice this drawer nor its contents and even more rarely will you ever have to interface with it.

This is where you can get yourself into trouble. Not being knowledgeable in this area can cost you a lot of time and trouble. But, in a few minutes, you will hot to trot on libraries.

A LIBRARY is a program file. All your libraries are kept in a drawer called LIBS on your Workbench disk or partition. They cannot be run, per se, but are more like a RESOURCE for other programs to draw commonly used information out of. This makes programs smaller and more efficient. Take this example. You are a worker for a construction site. Now, you are building a house here and aren’t exactly sure what you are going to be required to work on that particular job; it could depend on the weather, how long a job before takes, etc. You have to decide on something. What tools are you going to bring from your truck out to the actual site? Carpenter tools? Electrical tools? Plumbing tools? You don’t really know. You could drag your whole toolbox out there just in case, or you could just get what you needed out of the truck when you required that particular type of tool. Your truck is right there and that way you don’t have a lot of tools cluttering up the place.

This is the way libraries work. Let’s say you write a program that might be required by the user to load up a picture and display it. Chances are he won’t, but he might. Are you going to include the routines inside your program to load the picture? Well, you could, but there is a library out there that has the routines in it for you. All you have to do is call for it and it will do the job for you. If you want to do heavy math inside your program, you can call a different library to do it for you so you don’t have to include a ’calculator’ inside your program. That is why so many Amiga programs are so small; they use libraries to do most of the dirty work. Libraries are information common to lots of programs (math, graphics, input/output, etc).

So, why can these guys get you in trouble? Well, almost every big program out there has a couple of special libraries that it requires to run. Now once you’ve installed a lot of programs on your hard drive, you may have a HUGE LIBS directory (you should see mine) and some software uses the same special libraries such as the popular ARP.LIBRARY which is a very nice file requester routine. While the program may work fine on your hard drive, if you put it on a floppy and try to run it, it may not find that library and crash. Should you go on a LIBS drawer deleting spree, you may find that a lot of your programs (including Workbench) might not work any more. Another problem you might run into is when you install a new piece of software that contains an UPDATED version of an existing library. If the old library is overwritten, the program that used it before may not run anymore. This happens with a lot of 1.3 vs. 2.0 programs that use very different libraries with the same name. Be very careful about overwriting existing libraries with new ones.

You will also need to be familiar with this directory if you ever plan on trying to coax a non-hard drive installable program onto your hard drive. More about this later.

Ah, the nerve center of your OS. If you are also a PC user, this drawer is comparable to the DOS directory in MS-DOS. Simply put, most of your Shell commands are here. Commands like copy, delete, dir, makedir, etc. are all found right here. Again, this is a directory that a regular user may never look at, but as a Power user, you will intimately learn about.

Next to your LIBS directory, this will probably be your biggest drawer in terms of number of files. Mine has over 300 files (commands) in it. After you computer on your Amiga for a few years you will build up a great collection of these little ’utilities’. Things like text viewers, picture viewers, file archivers, filename searchers, file converters, etc. can be stored here. The best part of this drawer is that the system will always check here for a command no matter where in the system you issue it. If you are on device DF1: and use the COPY command, the command will work because although it is not on the disk in DF1: it is in your ’C’ directory. Take a look at this directory sometime and see how many goodies there are here. Like the LIBS directory, if you go chopping files away out of this drawer, things like your Workbench (and other programs) may not work anymore. This is another directory that you will utilize in learning to install non-installable software to your hard drive.

Possibly one of the coolest things about your Amiga OS is the FONTS directory. This is a drawer of fonts that you can use inside of word processors, paint programs, and any other program that might support them. The fonts are stored in a strange format. It may not look like it from inside a well behaved thought out program, but if you looked at the directory you would see something like this:

TOPAZ      <DIR>
DIAMOND    <DIR>
topaz.font
diamond.font

The .font file is the font’s identifier. This is what your paint program might look at to tell what fonts you have. The corresponding directories contain the actual fonts themselves and contain filenames that are numbers like 8, 16, 32, 48, etc. These numbers represent the point sizes of the font that are available 8 being small and 48 being large.

There are two major types of fonts; Bitmapped and CompuGraphic. Bitmapped are the ones we see above. They are limited to the exact sizes that are listed in the directory. Compugraphic fonts are what we call SCALABLE which means that they can be any size you desire them to be. Where as bitmapped fonts are drawn and saved, Compugraphic fonts are stored as mathematical functions that tell the computer HOW to draw them; size means nothing. It is similar to Postscript for those familiar with it. These fonts are bigger and take much longer to load, but the end result is worth it. If you try to manually scale a bitmapped font with your paint program, you will find it choppy and jagged. Compugraphic fonts look good no matter what size. Fonts are sort of like Libraries. They are called on demand instead of included inside the programs themselves. As you may have guessed, this directory is also pertinent to installing non-installable software to your hard drive.

This may seem like a trivial tutorial, but there are several things you can do to customize a newly formatted disk to suit your needs.

First, insert the disk to be formatted. An icon will appear telling you either the old disk name if it has been formatted before, or question marks if it was formatted for some other computer or not formatted at all. Click it once and select FORMAT DISK from the ICONS pull down menu. If you format it from the Workbench this way, you will not be given any custom options to set. If order to have some control over the formatting, select the FORMAT utility on your Workbench disk or partition. Select the drive to format. You will then be presented with a requester asking you some pertinent information like the disk name, whether you want a quick format, international mode, fast file system, and if you want a Trashcan icon attached.

International mode is something you will likely never need so leave that unselected. If you are using 2.0+ of AmigaDOS, you may format floppies in the FAST FILE SYSTEM which makes your floppies faster and hold slightly more data. Make sure that you do not intend to use this disk on a 1.3- version of the OS because it will not be able to read it. If you are not sure, do not select FFS. We already know that the Trashcan is worthless, so do not select that. If your disk has been formatted on your Amiga before and you KNOW that it is standard with NO errors you may select the quick format option. This does not erase the entire contents of the disk, just the bootblock and the directory track (track 40) where the names of the files are stored. This makes formatting very quick since it only has to format two tracks instead of 80. But, any errors or bad tracks on the disk will not be discovered this way. Also, disks that are non- standard DOS cannot be formatted quick. You can determine a non- standard DOS disk by the disk name when inserted and read from the Workbench. The name will read DF0:NDOS for example, depending on which drive you insert it in.

Now that you have all your options set, go ahead and begin the format. If you do not do a quick format, this can take a couple minutes. Any errors that occur will abort the format process. Should this occur, you have a couple of options. You can discard the diskette as it is probably bad. You may also elect to use a program to ’tag’ the bad blocks out of commission. This will allow you to use the disk to hold information, just not use the bad blocks. Obviously, this will effect the amount of space your disk can hold. It is a personal thing, but the right answer is to discard it. Chances are good that more bad blocks will develop quickly as you use it, since the media itself inside the disk is likely defective.

Now that you have a nice clean disk, you may want to tailor it up a little. First thing you might want to do is make the diskette bootable. To do that we need to issue one command from the SHELL or use EXECUTE COMMAND from the Workbench:

INSTALL DF0:

This command will INSTALL a bootblock on the disk’s bootblock (track 0) track. Now, when you reboot your system, this disk will ’boot’ up over your hard drive or any other devices. This bootblock contains information the OS need to know to start up the system using that disk.

Should you try and boot from this disk now, you would be dumped right to a SHELL prompt as soon as the disk booted. Since there is no ’C’ directory, LIBS directory, DEVS directory, etc. there is really nothing you can do from this prompt.

We have discussed the file called STARTUP-SEQUENCE before (located in your ’S’ directory) now it is time to apply it. If you have boot your system off this new disk, reboot using your Workbench disk or partition. We will need the utilities there to do this tutorial. Once booted, enter a SHELL. Insert your new diskette into DF0. Now make a new directory on the diskette called S.

MAKEDIR DF0:S

This will make a new directory for the STARTUP-SEQUENCE file. We will also need a C directory to hold some commands for us to use.

MAKEDIR DF0:C

Now let's copy over the commands that we need:

COPY C:TYPE DF0:C/
COPY C:LOADWB DF0:C/
COPY C:ECHO DF0:C/
COPY C:AVAIL DF0:C/

This will copy over the necessary four commands we are going to use to make your disk. All of these commands are ’stand alone’ i.e. they do not require any libraries or devices to work. Notice how we copied files from the ’C’ directory using C: as the device name? That only works with a few directories such as ’C’, ’S’, ’LIBS’, and ’DEVS’. Basically, the system directories used by AmigaDOS.

Now that we have at least a FEW commands to work with, let’s make the disk do something. From the SHELL we are going to make a STARTUP-SEQUENCE file in the ’S’ directory of our new disk:

ED DF0:S/STARTUP-SEQUENCE

In a moment, ED will load and be ready for you to input text. ED is like a miniature word processor. If you are running V1.3- of the OS, ED is not very friendly. Consult your user’s manual for more information on its commands.

Take a moment to look through the pull down menus. You will find that most Amiga programs that use pull downs keep common things in the same basic location. For example, most programs have the load and save options in the menu on the far left.

As we said before, the STARTUP-SEQUENCE is a script file. Basically, it is a text file with a list of individual commands. Let’s enter the commands now into ED.

ECHO "HERE IS WHAT YOUR SYSTEM HAS AVAILABLE:"
AVAIL
TYPE S:WELCOME.TXT
LOADWB

Now, select to SAVE the document using the pull down menus. Your drive light will come on and in a moment, the file will be saved. Now we have a workable disk with one exception. Do you know what it is? Hint: Look in the text we entered for the STARTUP-SEQUENCE.

That’s right. The command TYPE (which displays a text file) is looking for a file called WELCOME.TXT to display during the startup. Let’s rectify that problem. Exit ED by using the appropriate pull down menu. Now, re-enter ED:

ED DF0:WELCOME.TXT

Once again, you will find yourself in ED with an empty screen. Enter some little message like:

NOW LOADING WORKBENCH...PLEASE WAIT

Save it as you did before. NOW your disk is ready for the test. Go ahead and boot it up and revel in the magic you just created!

Now that you are at a Workbench (and saw how fast it booted), you may wonder why it takes so long for your own Workbench to start up. A good question which is easily explained. In fact, you know yourself how to do it and already possess the knowledge to do it. How? Look at your Workbench disk’s STARTUP-SEQUENCE file and see what IT does for a startup and you will understand why it takes so long. Use the TYPE command or even better, a new command called MORE.

MORE S:STARTUP-SEQUENCE

This will load up a ’text reader’ which is slightly bigger than TYPE, but also gives you more options like pausing at each page, searching for text, etc.

In the next part, we will discuss customizing features like the pointer, icons, colors, and much much more.

We have delved pretty deep into the workings of AmigaDOS by now. You have lots of knowledge of the basics. Now let’s do some ’aesthetics’. There are a million or more things you can do to your Workbench environment to customize it. We are going to discuss some of the finer points. Those that make the most difference.

One of the easiest ways to customize your Workbench is through the incredible built-in preference utilities included with Workbench. This chapter will deal strictly with V2.0+, but there are similar things in 1.3-. In almost all of the preference utilities, you will be given the final option to SAVE, USE, or CANCEL the utility. SAVEing is permanent. The things you make changes to are more or less permanent (not for us, though!). If you select USE, the item will only be changed until the next re-boot. Therefore, you can ’try before you buy’. CANCEL of course, negates the changes you just made.

Colors. The first thing is to change the system colors. This is done through the PALETTE program in the PREFS drawer of your Workbench. It is pretty self explanatory once you get it running.

Pointer. You may change the appearance and colors of the pointer using the POINTER program in the PREFS drawer. Again, this is pretty self explanatory. Note: You cannot change the ’busy’ pointer from this utility. A program called NICK-PREFS (widely available) will allow you to do this and some other really neat alteration to your Workbench.

Screen mode. You may change the Workbench to any legal resolution available including Low Res, Hi-Res, Interlace, and even Super Productivity as well as change the number of colors available to you to alter. Remember, though, that higher resolutions and more colors eat more memory and also tend to slow down the system.

System Beep. The utility called SOUND in your PREFS drawer will allow you to change what happens when your system gets a requester or error. You may make the screen flash, make a beep, or even put your own digitized sound sample there in place of the beep. My Workbench does a Butthead ’huh huh huh’ laugh when I get an error.

You may also change the font that all the Workbench text uses to display drawer names, filenames, and much much more. All you have to do is go through the PREFS drawer and play with the utilities that are there. You can set the system time and date here, change your printer drivers, set up your serial port for your modem, and tons more. If you are ever confused by one of the PREFS utilities, just CANCEL out of it and refer to the manual. Most of them are far too easy to use and can really change the way your system looks, acts, and functions. Make use of them and tailor your system like no loser IBM can.

Now that you have got your system JUST the way you want it, you might want to make a ’snapshot’ of it to save in case of a disk crash or to copy these prefs to another bootable disk (like the one you just made). The magic is SO easy you may not believe it. There is a SINGLE file that keeps the magic. It is located in the DEVS directory and is called SYSTEM-CONFIGURATION. As you may have already guessed, you need only copy the file to the destination disk’s DEVS directory and you will now have the same prefs as your normal Workbench disk. Enter a SHELL, insert your bootable disk made in the last tutorial into DF0. Now you should know what to do, but we’ll go through it anyway.

MAKEDIR DF0:DEVS
COPY DEVS:SYSTEM-CONFIGURATION DF0:DEVS/

It is done! Re-boot using your new disk and you will see that all the preferences of your Workbench now reside on this new disk!

Now that we are on the subject of making copies of important files on your Workbench disk or partition, let’s go a step further. If you are using a floppy version of Workbench, it is just plain smart to make a copy of it and use the copy. When you alter it, make a copy of the ALTERED version and leave the original Workbench disk alone. Now you will have two extra Workbench disks; one ORIGINAL and one of the altered. If you want to use the default preferences, you simply copy over the SYSTEM-CONFIGURATION file from the original to your copy of Workbench. If you disk crashes, you need only make a copy of the altered Workbench disk and use it.

If you use a hard drive, you have a bigger task ahead of you. You will no longer need the floppy disk of Workbench once it is installed on your system (of course you will keep it in case of a hard drive crash). But, with a hard drive, a new task comes to bear down. Making a backup of your system files.

It is important that the Workbench system has its own partition on your hard drive. I recommend a 10 meg partition if you have 40 or more megs of space. If you are using a 20 megabyte drive, you can get by with 5 megs or so. If you do not have your hard drive partitioned, you should. By having the drive ’cut’ into several smaller pieces it is easier to group files, make backups, optimize, and more. Refer to your hard drive manual for more information on partitioning. You will find that as time goes on, your Workbench partition will grow like a weed. It is best to backup that partition every couple weeks or so using a special program to do so like Quarterback or Ami-Back (both commercial) or MRBackup (public domain). Most of these programs require one disk per meg of hard drive to back up so your Workbench partition would require about 10 floppies if full. I have had mine for a LONG time and haven’t filled the whole 10 megs yet. You may also elect to use the SHELL to copy important files like the STARTUP-SEQUENCE and SYSTEM-CONFIGURATION and those important fonts, libraries (like the ARP.LIBRARY), and ’C’ commands to a floppy. Believe me, it is much easier to use a HD backup program.

As you install programs to your hard drive, many of them will copy over necessary libraries, ’C’ commands, fonts, etc. This is how your partition grows. When you remove a program from your hard drive, you often forget to remove these ’support’ files (if you can even remember what they were!). As it stands, most of these support files can be used by you in other ways either through the SHELL (’C’ commands), other programs (libraries), or word processing/graphics packages (fonts). Therefore, they are not really wasted space. Sometime, when you are bored, look through your Workbench directories and see just how much stuff is really in there!

We discussed what PAL and NTSC are, now we need to look a little bit deeper into it.

First, how to change. The easiest way, overall, is to install a toggle switch into your machine to let you boot up in one of the two modes. Commodore was actual smart this time and built the capabilities into the FAT AGNUS chip. To make the system PAL, you need only ground out one of the pins on the chip. If you needed an NTSC machine, simply fail to make the alteration. This made it ten times easier to get the machines into Europe. Since this goes beyond the scope of a beginner’s guide (any authorized dealer can make the adjustment as well as many Amiga hobbyist) we will skip this option for now. It may be nice to know that if you have an AGA Amiga (A1200, A4000) you may select to boot your system in PAL by holding down both mouse buttons when your machine boots. A special menu will come up and get you the option. If you are using V2.0/2.1, holding down the mouse buttons on bootup will allow you to disable certain drives or change the drive to boot from.

Now the other way is through the use of software. Note: You must have a FAT AGNUS or FATTER AGNUS to make this work. There are many popular programs to do this. First there are the ’C’ commands written by Nico Francois called PAL and NTSC which will switch the system for you when you run the respective program from the SHELL or EXECUTE COMMAND menu item from the Workbench. There is another version of the command PAL which will change to PAL if run or NTSC if run with the left mouse button down. I prefer the latter of these two. Another way is through the use of special commands called PALBOOT and NOSPAL. These will write PAL bootblocks to diskettes so that when they boot, they change to PAL right away. One is for standard disks and the other is for non-standard disks like European Demos. I use NOSPAL a lot since it works on just about every demo I have and it will NOT kill the current bootblock (unless instructed to) but append itself to it. Invaluable. Oh, by the way, most of these programs can be found in PD collections or on most major BBSs that support the Amiga. Another little program from the old Amiga is PALCON which will change the system into PAL the next time you reboot. This tends not to work with newer Amigas. The final way (and the best way in my opinion) is through the use of a program called DEGRADER. This little gem will not only control PAL/NTSC but will also allow you to fool the computer into thinking you have a different memory configuration than you do (no FAST RAM, a HALF MEG OF CHIP RAM) in order to allow older games to work right, turn off accelerator caches, change disk drive configurations, and more than I care to type. Needless to say, it is more valuable than words. It will survive reboots if required and can change the system IMMEDIATELY without resetting the machine.

I highly recommend picking up one or more of these excellent utilities for shifting your system into PAL, since most of the best Amiga stuff comes from Europe. If you can find someone to put that PAL switch in for you, fantastic. You will love it. Remember, with these programs you can further customize your own disks by adding one of the PAL commands to your ’C’ directory and adding the command PAL in your disk’s STARTUP-SEQUENCE. You can do this for Euro Demos/games that are not non-standard DOS.

Unless you have $60 laying around to buy Directory OPUS, then you are probably in possession of this fantastic program called DIR WORKS (DW). This utility is INVALUABLE to every Amiga user and is just as powerful as it’s expensive cousin. DW will set you back $15 if you pay the man for his work and I highly do.

Since it is so configurable, yours may not even be close to mine. But, we will go over some of the basics to get you going.

Let’s start with the pull downs. There are some that are very self explanatory. The configuration editor we will get into in a minute. The rest are pretty easy. A couple of things to draw your attention starts with the command DISK OPS or operations. Here is a nice fast way to copy and format disks. Now that you know the hard way to do it, now you can do it the easy way. DW will also allow you to format more that one disk at a time. Simply select the source drive (on top) and the destination drive (on bottom). You may select as many destination drives as needed/available. If you format a disk, it will format all the selected destination disks. If you DISKCOPY, it will copy the selected SOURCE disk to all the selected destination disks. The gadget that reads BLANK can be changed to a new name which will be the name of all disks formatted. Note: If you are using a newer OS, the INSTALL command (used to make a bootblock) will not write to the disk properly. Do this from the SHELL which is also an option on the pull downs.

As you can see, there is already a large arsenal of utilities here and we haven’t even gotten around to the meat of the program yet. Let’s talk about the two large windows on the screen.

These windows are where the functions take place; copying, moving, etc. Right now there may or may not be anything in them. Each window holds a directory. To bring up a directory on the left window, click the left mouse button on a device under the window like DF0: or RAM:. The contents of that device will appear in the window, probably sorted alphabetically with subdirectories on top (probably in blue) and files underneath (in black). The files will have their size in bytes next to them. to bring up a directory in the other window, you may click the left mouse button on a device under THAT window, or click your RIGHT mouse button on a device under the LEFT window. You can use either set of device buttons to bring up the device in either window. Just remember to use the mouse button that correlates with the window you want to bring up if the device buttons aren’t under the window. Play around with this concept for awhile until you are comfortable with it. Now bring up your Workbench device on the left window and the RAM device in the right. We are going to use them both.

You may enter a directory in one of the windows by simply double clicking the directory. In a moment you will see the contents of the new directory. There will be a little gadget window (probably underneath or above the main window) that will show you the window’s current path. You can click in this gadget and enter a path manually to bring it up if you don’t want to manoeuver around with the mouse. You can go back ONE directory by clicking the gadget labeled ’’. To go back to the ROOT directory, simply click the device gadget again or keep clicking the ’’ gadget.

DW is what some of us call an auto-launcher. In other words, DW determines what kind of file it is and automatically knows what to do with it. If it is a picture file (IFF/HAM) it will display it. If it is a digitized sound, it will play it. If it is a text file, it will display it. If it is a compressed/archived file like LHA, LZH, DMS, LZ, etc. it will show the contents of the archive or unarchive it to the destination directory. If it is a program, it will ask you if you want to run it. Pretty neat. This it does without ANY interaction from you except to double click the filename. Some functions, like unarchiving an LHA or DMS file require that you click the right mouse button on the filename. In any right button evolution, the output of the action is sent to the other directory highlighted in the other window, as is any other command such as copy, move, etc.

Let’s practice a little bit. You should have your Workbench directory in one window and RAM in the other. Now, highlight a couple of files (or directories for that matter) and select COPY with the left mouse button. The directories (and their contents) and all the files you selected are copied to the other window! It is that simple. If you were to have selected MOVE the directories and files highlighted would’ve been copied then DELETED automatically. Be very careful with the MOVE and DELETE commands. If you had selected DELETE, then all the highlighted directories and files would’ve been deleted. Delete the directories and the files you just copied out of your RAM disk.

There are some other GREAT commands such as AdIcn which will add an icon to all the files selected. This will also add icons to the directories selected as well. EScpt which will execute a highlighted script file. PLAY will play all the highlighted sound samples. SHOW will show all the highlighted picture files. LHA A will take all the highlighted files and directories and make them into a compressed archive (if you have LHA in your ’C’ directory).

It is a very simple program that just takes a little getting used to. I have gone over the simple and the most powerful commands. Feel free to copy some files over to the RAM disk and experiment. If you are going to practice on disks, use the write protect tab to keep your data safe. This program is also widely available and should be part of your collection if it isn’t already.

Possibly one of the most important parts of this guide (and the most interesting) is this chapter on virus prevention and information. Many people know what a virus is, but few know how they work and subsequently do not know how to stop them. We need to know a few things before we get into the depths of viruses.

Let’s begin with a little history of viruses. Viruses have been around since the beginning of the personal computer age. There have been some truly vicious viruses created and for quite awhile, people lived in fear of trading software and downloading files from computer bulletin boards afraid they would be infected unknowing and losing their data. Soon, more people learned about them and developed programs designed to scan your system for viruses and remove them AFTER the damage was already done. Finally, they came up with ways of catching viruses in the act, since there is only a couple of ways they could spread.

Early viruses on the Amiga were relatively harmless. One of the first major viruses to hit this computer was the SCA (Swiss Crackers Association) Virus that, at a random point, would take over the computer and say “SOMETHING WONDERFUL HAS HAPPENED! YOUR AMIGA IS ALIVE AND HAS BEEN INFECTED WITH A VIRUS”. It DID have the habit of destroying your bootblocks but that was the way it spread. It didn’t erase your disks or trash your hard drive. Later on, when people started getting wise to the bootbloack virus, they invented a virus that attached themselves to any file you executed. Your files would grow each time you ran it, as it continued to tag another copy of the virus at the end. Some file viruses actually replaced the last part of the file with themselves. Some programs could survive, but most did not. Others followed, some called them TROJANS after the famous horse disguised army. These would do nothing until a given date (the programmer’s birthday for instance) then do something ugly. In the late 80’s a virus called MICHAELANGELO took the world by storm. On the famous artist’s birthday, a picture of the man and a story popped up on the screen. While you were reading the text, the virus proceeded to erase your hard drive. Gruesome, eh? This was a PC virus, but it made USA TODAY and slapped the world in the face. Some people saw the virus a day early (their clocks had gained time over the years and they gained a day) and warned people. That day, thousands of people refused to turn on their computer. Even years later, people still left their computers off on that day. Other viruses are not so kind. An erased hard drive can be recovered (now) but a broken one can’t. One virus tricked the computer into thinking that your hard drive was bigger than it really was and send the hard drive in search of a track that didn’t exist. After banging away for a couple of seconds searching for a phantom file, the hard drive would die. That is brutal, folks. Now let’s get back to the present, more learned society.

First, the definition of a virus. Any program that is written to continue its life after the computer is shut off by replicating itself and is USUALLY created to damage or otherwise adversely effect the computer. There you have it. Better than a text book, eh? (grin) That sums it up, though. It HAS to be able to survive when the machine is turned off. We already know that a virus can live after a reboot. But, as any computer guru will tell you, a virus cannot survive if the computer is shut off. That is HALF true. If the virus has NOT yet begun to replicate, yes you can kill it this way. Most of the programmers that create viruses know this and make it replicate itself as soon as it enters the system. More about that in a minute. Just remember, there is no magic behind viruses. They are just programs coded by a programmer. Since they are coded, they can be identified BY that code. That is one way we can find and kill it; based on it’s ’fingerprint’.

Now that we know WHAT it is, let’s look at HOW they work. This is universal knowledge for ALL computers. Viruses work the same on all computers. Some just have more ways of getting the virus.

There are two major types of viruses but they replicate in different ways. These types are called Bootblock Viruses and Filelink Viruses. Each spreads a different way and survives a different way. The common element which makes it almost IMPOSSIBLE for viruses to infect protected machines it that the virus must patch itself into the OS in order to spread and/or survive. A bootblock virus must be able to tell when a disk has been inserted so it patches itself into the floppy device. The virus must be able to restart itself after a reboot, so it makes the reboot vectors (areas that are updated after a reboot) point to THEM to re-enable the virus in addition to restarting the system. You can be 100% protected as long as NO PROGRAM CHANGES THESE VECTORS! Modern day virus checkers check several times a second to see if these vectors have been altered. If so, it intercepts and tells you that the vectors have been altered and asks you if you want to clear them. A simple yes will stop the virus on the spot. Even an unrecognized virus cannot take your machine without you letting it. If it is recognized, the checker will kill it. Let’s look at the causes and effects of both viruses.

Bootblock Viruses spread and live on the bootblocks of your diskettes. Remember we said that the bootblock could contain a small amount of code? Well, it is enough for a virus. Once you boot the disk, the virus enters memory and waits for you to reset the computer or insert another disk. When you do, it checks to see if another disk is in the drive. If it is, it copies itself to the bootblock, effectively destroying any other code that is there. If the program required a custom bootblock to load the disk (non-standard DOS disks require this), the disk is now completely worthless unless you have another copy somewhere. Thus, the chain goes on. Every disk inserted or booted gets infected. Even if you catch the virus in your machine it can still live on your disks. Once the virus is caught, every disk SUSPECTED of containing it must be checked and cleaned. Fortunately, most of the modern day virus checkers will check every disk inserted while it is ’on duty’. The only real way that a virus can sneak back into the system is if you don’t use the disk while the checker is running by booting off of it instead of the disk with the checker on it. Even after it is caught, chances are that the disk’s bootblock is unrecoverable. The solution, though, is what they call a Bootblock Lab that let’s you make copies of all your disk’s bootblocks and restore them if you need them. Most bootblock viruses are easily caught once they enter the system, but can exist on your diskettes for a LONG time before you put them in while the checker is running (disks that are unusable from the Workbench, for example). I found a virus on a disk that was several YEARS old and never caught it. The reason is that in order for a checker to catch the virus BEFORE it enters memory, it must know what to look for on the bootblock. It must have a fingerprint to compare with. These are known as bootblock ’brains’, files that contain what the viruses look like. When you insert a disk, the checker compares the bootblock with the brainfiles and if they match, the checker alerts you and asks if you want to dispose of it. Many times, the removal will destroy the bootblack, possibly rendering the disk inoperable, even if it was operable while the virus was there. Better this than spreading the virus. My problem was that at the time I got the disk, my checker’s brain didn’t have an image of that bootblock to compare with. Now, though, most checkers know what is a normal bootblock and what is a foreign one. If it doesn’t recognize it, it tells you so and asks if you want to overwrite it with a normal one. If you do, and it was a non-standard DOS disk, say good-bye to the program. Some checkers are even smart enough that you can tell it to memorize an image of the bootblock and remember it so that next time you put it in, it doesn’t cry over it. Neat eh?

The second type is called a Filelink Virus. This attacks a file directly and attaches itself either to the end or takes up enough room WITHIN the file to restart itself when the file is run. So, when you shut off the machine, then turn it back on (virus gone, eh?) and run the file, it is back on and ready to corrupt. Most viruses attach themselves to files that are DEFINITELY going to be run when the computer starts up (like, say, ANY file in your startup sequence?). Now, every time you run a file (or start your system), the virus attaches itself to it. Now you give a copy to a friend, put it on floppy, etc. and it gets away. You get the idea. Most of the time, these viruses are the ones that format your hard drive or put your system on the blink. They may also erode enough of your file away little by little so that it works for a couple of ’virus attachments’ then dies mysteriously. The only way to catch this one without letting it into memory is to do a file scan on the disks that are suspected of containing a virus. Again, an image in the brain must be available for that virus to be identified and removed. In this case, the checker cannot say ’Unknown Bootblock’ or in this case, ’Unknown file’ because every file on your disk is different; not standard like bootblocks are supposed to be. That is why new viruses must be reported and analyzed right away so that the coders of the checkers can add the image to their ’brains’. Again, not to fear because even though your checker may not be up to date to identify the virus, it will stop it when it attempts to take control of your system.

As you can see, viruses are a very little threat if you have the right protection. Fortunately, unbelievable checkers are available right in the Shareware and PD field for little or no cost. The ones I recommend (in this order) are VirusZ II, VirusZ, and Virus Checker. For the most part, these are the full-featured big boys. They handle just about every virus known to man and are updated quite often. I use VirusZ II personally. Add this program to your system and place it in either your STARTUP-SEQUENCE or just drop a copy of it in your WBSTARTUP drawer and it will be run automatically at startup. It is protection you can’t live without.

Other ways you can protect yourself include file scanning all new programs you get from BBSs or, if the disk is non- standard, put it in the drive while your checker is running. Do these BEFORE you run the program. Do the same with any files or disks brought to you from other suspectable sources. Urge your friends to use a checker. Encourage your local BBS to install software that checks incoming files for viruses. Then, leave the rest to the checker. Using these principles, I have remain virus free for years. You can too!

Some people might have gotten this guide for this section alone. Up until now, we have learned some MAJOR tricks of the trade and even lightly touched THIS topic a little bit. Now, you are going to learn the knowledge of years of experience in a few minutes. We are going to learn how to take those pesky, no hard- drive installer havin’ programs and put them on the hard drive.

One of the very few things the PC world has over us is the fact that EVERY program released can be put on the hard drive. Not so in the Amiga world and I will tell you why. Most quality products come from Europe, a place where they have very little money for buying toys for their computers. This is the main reason they bought an Amiga to begin with. No sound cards, video cards, game cards, etc. to buy; it was all built in. Since most of the early Amigas didn’t come with hard drives, very few could afford to buy them. Therefore, the market for hard drive installability was low. In addition to that, programmers found out that by rewriting the DOS system to their own specifications, they could get incredible loading speeds off of a diskette as well as compress the data immensely. Thus the non-standard DOS disk was born. The wait times for the game to load up levels, etc. were dramatically lessened. What the programmers also found out is that they could implement a whole new breed of copy protection with this system. Since they could encode the disks any way they wanted (and justify it with speed increase) they could also encode it so that copiers could not copy it. The only way it could be pirated was to decompress the disk, decode the disk, remove the protection checks, then release it to the world in a format that anyone could copy. (This is in violation of Copyright law and is therefore quite illegal but it is a way of getting your LEGAL one copy backup. Of course, it is for your own use and may not be lent out or use by anyone else). Anyway, this tended to increase the number of disks it occupied, but when you are not paying for the software, what difference does it make? Anyway, the system became so popular that almost all the game market adopted this standard. As we all know after reading the guide to this point, non-standard DOS disks cannot be run from the hard drive. Some companies changed over to the PC- popular ’code word’ protection that required the user to look up a word in the accompanying manual and type it in before the program would continue. Now, you could transfer these few programs over, but the majority of the world continues to use non-standard DOS. Some hackers/pirates have even created another way to not only copy the non-standard DOS disks but to allow you to install them on your hard drive. What they do is make an image of all the disks and load them all into your RAM to be executed. Sure it works and it is fast, but it also requires you have a meg of RAM for each disk it loads and you cannot cleanly break out of it back to your Workbench. Again, this is illegal if you don’t own a purchased copy of the game. Still, it is an alternative to the lack of a hard drive installer.

Another problem also exists. The disks that ARE standard AmigaDOS disks but for some reason didn’t include an installer and won’t seem to run from the hard drive if you copy the files over manually. Ah, now here is something we can do something about.

Let’s start with what we CANNOT do. We cannot take non- standard DOS disks to the hard drive. Period. End of discussion. Finis. The only option you have for running this kind of program is to get a copy of it from the Underworld of Pirates or hackers. Insert the first disk into the drive and if you get the old DF0:NDOS name, forget it.

Here is another ’no way’ deal. If the disk is standard format and you can get a directory, look for a file with no name and a small size (or a size of zero bytes). If you see this phantom file, forget it. It is protected by a copy protection system that we cannot fix here. In this case, I recommend you buy one of the copier programs designed to take this kind of scheme off. The only one I KNOW of that will do this kind of work is a program called MAVERICK which is rumored to specialize in taking disks like this and making them hard drive installable. The one disk that comes to mind is the old Broderbund game STAR WARS. That had this exact protection scheme on it. Your only other option here, again, is to seek an unprotected copy from a pirate. It may or may not go on the hard drive.

Okay, now you are thinking “What the hell CAN I put on my hard drive??” Well, fortunately, most of the newer games that require more than one or two disks come with very friendly installers. Many that don’t can still be easily copied over and forced to work. Here is the step by step guide for HD installation. Keep doing them in order until one of them works or until directed to skip to a different step. In order to make things more clear, we will say that the name of the game is called SINISTAR and it has three disks to it named SINI1, SINI2, and SINI3. It does NOT have a ’phantom file’.

1. Insert the first disk into the drive and open in up on your Workbench. Is there an icon for an INSTALL or INSTALLER? Use it and install the program following the on screen instructions. Stop here.
2. Enter a SHELL (or use DW) and look at the contents of disk 1. Is there a file that is called INSTALL or INSTALLER? If so, go to the SHELL (if not already there) and go to the disk using the CD command or just typing the name of the drive (i.e. DF0:). Type EXECUTE INSTALL or EXECUTE <the filename>. Sometimes the programmer forget to add an icon to the installer or just forget to mention in the instructions that one exists. This is not uncommon. If not, continue.
3. Make a new directory on your hard drive for the program and make sure you add an icon using DW (or use the Workbench NEW DRAWER command). If you don’t know how to do this yet, you had better go back and read some more! <grin> Now using DW, Workbench, or the SHELL, copy all the files and directories from all the disks into this one drawer. Put the disks away in a safe place; we won’t need them anymore.

4. Open this new drawer. Is there an icon for the program there? If so, go on to the next step. If not, you must determine which file starts the program and add an icon to it. Guess how? CHECK THE ’S’ directory for a STARTUP-SEQUENCE and see what it reads. If it contains more than one file, then copy the STARTUP-SEQUENCE into the directory with all the other files and directories. Use DW to add an icon to the newly placed STARTUP-SEQUENCE file. From Workbench, select the icon and use the pull down menus under ICONS and select INFORMATION. IN the gadget box marked DEFAULT TOOL put the text

   C:ICONX
   

   This will cause this icon to execute the file as a script, running all the commands in it. We discussed scripts earlier and the STARTUP-SEQUENCE is a script, after all. If the STARTUP- SEQUENCE only had a single command (filename), add an icon to that filename using DW. If the file you just added an icon to is a script (double click it from DW and see if it displays text) too, then you will have to change the DEFAULT TOOL as described above to C:ICONX so it will execute right.

   Click the icon (the one that existed or the new one you just created) it and see what happens. Follow the chart below based on what happens next:

   • Did you get an error from the Workbench that said THIS ICON HAS NO DEFAULT TOOLS? You didn’t add the C:ICONX command to the icon properly. Recheck using the above paragraphs.
   • Does the program run properly? End here.
   • Did you get a requester saying INSERT <name> INTO ANY DRIVE? If so go to step 5.
   • Did an error message come up saying COULDN’T FIND <name> or MISSING FILE <name> or UNABLE TO OPEN FONT <name> or something similar? Go to step 6.
   • Did the program just lock up and stop running with no explanation? Go to step 5.

5. You must try to ASSIGN the disks to the directory you made and copied the files to. We described how this works earlier in the guide, but using our example stated above, enter a SHELL and type these lines:

   ASSIGN SINI1: <path of new directory>
   ASSIGN SINI2: <path of new directory>
   ASSIGN SINI3: <path of new directory>
   

   Now go back to step 4 and try it again. If it all works, you need to type these lines before you run the program or you need to add them to your STARTUP-SEQUENCE or the USER-STARTUP file. We haven’t mentioned this before, but the USER-STARTUP is also located in the S directory and most programs put their OWN ASSIGN commands here. It is a perfect place to put yours now since it is always executed on startup, too. This is a 2.0+ OS thing.

6. Are there directories required by the system in this new directory like C, S, DEVS, LIBS, FONTS, etc.? If so, copy all the files from these directories to their respective directories on YOUR workbench partition. The program probably needs a font, library, or command from one of these directories and it isn’t finding it. Therefore, you need to copy those files to YOUR directories. Return to Step 4 and try it again. Should all go well, you are set. The program is ready to play! If it fails again for the same reason, try doing step 5. Should it still fail, there is one more thing to try.
7. If you have tried everything and are still getting a requester saying INSERT <name> INTO DRIVE DF0: (it is the DF0: that is important) then the device is hard coded into the program and an assign isn’t going to take care of that. The program code will HAVE to be changed. You must use a HEX editor to change all occurrences of DF0 inside the program to something like NNN or JJJ or something other than a device name. Then, use the ASSIGN command as listed above:

ASSIGN NNN: <path>

There is a great program called KILLDFX from the MAVERICK copier disk. It is hard to find, but it does exactly what we just described automatically.

Well, there you have it. The Amiga in a nutshell. I hope that you have all gotten at least SOMETHING out of this guide and will continue to expand your knowledge with time and practice. There are several sources of knowledge that you can tap into. Here is a few of them:

• An Amiga User’s Group. Locate these guys by hanging out in your nearest Amiga dealer shop or asking them if there is a support group. The guys in the shop can probably tell you exactly where to go.
• Your local Amiga BBS can help, too. If you cannot find one local (again, talk to your dealer), try calling a pay service like GEnie or Compuserve and getting information there. You can also call the Dark Unicorn Productions support BBS (Secret Service BBS) at (803) 766-2050 and there are lots of people on line there that can help you out.
• Get a copy of Amiga World or Amazing Amiga and order some self-help books on AmigaDOS or other specialty programs for the Amiga. There are also tutorial disks for AmigaDOS, DPaint IV, and many others that work in conjunction with the program and offer you help whenever you need it. Many back issues of AW or AA also will have tutorials and help columns. See if you can find some back issues at your local library.

Remember, have fun and feel free to experiment. Lots of this information was obtained through experimentation. Enjoy the best computer ever made!

Taken from English Amiga Board, up to post 82, 12 june 2016

From https://oagd.net/reports/multiplayer-games

From https://oagd.net/reports/multiplayer-games

Resources for setting up WHDLoad on a compact flash card.

• https://johan.driessen.se/posts/Setting-up-a-Compact-Flash-card-with-Classic-Workbench-and-WHDLoad-for-Amiga-600-1200/#fnref:1
  • You will need a copy of the Kickstart ROM and Workbench disk images, version 3.0 or 3.1.
  • You probably want to use the PFS3 file system
  • Hard disk images: Classic WB. For an Amiga 600 use 68K version.
  • You will also need kickstart files for WHDLoad
  • Start WinUAE as Administrator
• Nostalgia nerd has an exhaustive write-up: Install a Flash Hard Drive with Classic Workbench & WHDLoad in an Amiga 1200
• Updated WHDLoad Demos/Games pack on English Amiga Board

• “Little Things That Made Amiga Great - A deep dive into a selection of ingenious AmigaOS features”
• Different versions and revisions of Amiga 1200