Tag Archives: amiga

The lost art of the ramdisk

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You don’t hear anything about ramdisks these days. What with intelligent OS file cacheing, we don’t really need them. Back in Amiga days, though, the RAM: drive was blisteringly fast. You’d put your small files there, and you could move them around really quickly.

Third-party ram disk drivers added features like the ability to survive a reset, and be more dynamic than C-A’s offering. The ASDG Dynamic Ram Disk was written by Perry Kivolowitz, who went on to win an Oscar for digital rendering techniques.

beacoup fish

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I just downloaded the first 1000 Fish Disks from Aminet. Back in the day, that would have cost me £3000, and would have involved serious floppy storage. As is, it took just a couple of hours.

I used to write for short-lived PD Shopper magazine. There was one flaw in the business plan; trying to sell a magazine to people who were naturally inclined to be cheap. As soon as shovelware CD-ROMs became available, PD Shopper vanished.

actually quite happy to see this

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Dammit, E-UAE is fiddly to set up. I finally got hard disk images working, by doing something like this:

  1. For an 160MB image, create the blank file: dd if=/dev/zero of=blank160.hdf bs=1M count=160
  2. Add the file specification to your .uaerc, something like: hardfile2=rw,DH2:$(FILE_PATH)/Amiga/blank160.hdf,32,1,2,512,-12,
    (Yeah, linux e-uae doesn’t allow you to add in HDF images. Annoying.)
  3. I found I had to put the amiga system executable FastFileSystem in with my ROM path. Your path may vary – look at the UAE log output for something like ‘RDB: fakefilesys, trying to load ...‘, and see where you want it to go.
  4. Pop into UAE, start a CLI or Shell, and issue this command: format DRIVE DH2: NAME hd160 FFS QUICK

I’ve updated the drive images from yesterday, so you probably won’t need to format them.

amiga: blank hdf images

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I’m trying to get running an Amiga again, to see if I can remember what was rocking my computer world twenty years ago. I want to run that code, swim with the Fish disks, and generally muck about with what was my life back then.

Emulation is interesting. Variants of UAE (which came with an Amiga Forever CD set I bought in 1997 or so) rule the roost. Quality is variable – on Windows, WinUAE is very comprehensive, even making grink-gronk noises as the floppy spins. On Mac, E-UAE is really not worth the bother kinda okay – it doesn’t want to emulate anything above a 68000, and falls over quite often but has decent sound. On Linux, it’s plain and stable, and I happen to have an old Thinkpad going spare I can dedicate to emulation.

I would have expected all the old disk images to be readily available for download. It seems that the current owners of the Amiga name (this week, at least) still cling on to the old IP as if it has real value. The Amiga games market (which was the market) basically collapsed with Commodore in 1994. I really wonder who is buying the PowerPC based, vastly overpriced new hardware? For now, I’m relying on good old-fashioned torrent sites for my data.

I want to emulate two machines; the A500 I had for all my cringe-worthy magazine writing running Workbench 1.3, and a fast thing maxed out with all the processors and RAM I never had, probably running 3.1. While I did have Amiga[D]os 2.04 (can’t remember if they’d dropped the D by then), it wasn’t the main focus of my interest by then.

The biggest problem I have is getting hard disk image, even blank ones. UAE is picky. Here are a couple I formatted under WinUAE, both blank.

I wonder if they’ll work under 1.3?

Update: yes, they should. I formatted them FFS under AmigaDos 1.3.