INSTALLING AND USING MESSYDOS 

                               Daniel Rutter


    Ed: MessyDos is a Public Domain utility which allows you to read and
  write to MS-DOS disks. References to disks such as UT155, etc. are to
  disks in Megadisc's Public domain collection - check the PD_UPDATE
  drawer for info on how to get them.


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    This tutorial aims to give some instruction to the less than
  immaculately competent concerning the installation of the
  MessyFileSystem, MessyDos, on the Amiga to allow you to read and write
  IBM format 720K 3.5" disks. [If this is your first venture into the
  horrors of the Command Line Interface, I'd advise you to get the
  AmigaDos Manual, or, better still, MegaDos. The latter is far more
  comprehensible, but harder to refer to while working, even if you do
  reams of printouts. The official manual, on the other hand, is
  reasonably well organised and OK for ready reference, but I wouldn't
  wish it as bedside reading on my worst enemy. And, of course, it's
  considerably more expensive.]

    A working knowledge of AmigaDOS is necessary for the installation
  process (if you want to use icons, forget it right now...), and a copy
  of Zoo (Fish 164) or a Zoo file unarchiver like Booz (UT205).  Anyway,
  what you need is MessyDos (UT155) on your Amiga (and this is ALL you
  need if you just want to transfer files from an IBM), and a similar file
  transfer program on your Mac (Apple File Exchange is the only one I know
  of; I'm not a Mac person, but it seems to do everything worth doing).

    In order to set up MessyDos, you'll do best with twin drives,
  otherwise life can become painful, as you'll see. Messydos piggybacks
  one of your standard Amiga drives, turning it into a hybrid 880K
  Amiga/720K IBM monster, which checks each disk inserted to see if it's
  Amiga or IBM format (or something else, in which case you get the usual
  error messages along with complaints from the MessyDos operating
  system). What this means is that no matter what you stick in the drive,
  one or both of the OS's (operating systems) running isn't going to like
  it. If you insert an Amiga disk, the IBM section will make nasty noises
  and give you a requestor concerning the disk being unreadable, while the
  Amiga section will burble along perfectly happily. Insert an MS-DOS
  disk, however, and AmigaDOS won't give you a whinge box, but will still
  make the unhappy sounds. You can see why this would become a major pain
  if you had only one drive; much copying to RAM: and mucking about
  cancelling requestors would transpire.

    In any case, you have to give the phantom IBM drive a name, to
  distinguish it from the Amiga drive. I call mine DH1:, which is the
  designator for the second hard drive, if you're lucky enough to have
  two. The only reason I do this is that many directory utilities
  (DUIII+ is the one I use, from force of habit and lack of disk space
  more than anything else) have a button for DH1:, which makes it easier
  to work with it. You could just as easily call it Fred: or Hendrix: if
  you wanted to - but if I were you I'd keep it short, for sanity
  protection reasons. You could go back to IBM nomenclature and call it
  a:, for simplicity.

    Anyway, to set it up you basically follow the instructions in the file
  msh.man (archived with some other stuff in the file docs.zoo), which is
  reasonably straightforward if you ignore the stuff aimed at programmers.
  You needn't bother with the dev.man file - this concerns the technical
  specifications of the messydisk.device which you just have to copy into
  your devs directory to make it work; then unzoo the other files, put
  messydisk.device in your devs directory, MessyFileSystem in l, adjust
  your mountlist and you should be ready to rock and roll.

NO HASSLES
    You'll notice there are very few hassles with MessyDos operation - in
  fact I've never had a disk stuff up. Directories appear faster, files
  list more easily, copying's effortless. In fact, the only snags I've
  run into are products of the IBM operating system. For example,
  filenames. Every IBM file or directory can have only eight characters
  in its name (or fewer), and a three letter suffix to tell you what sort
  of file it is. This can cause problems when converting Amiga files with
  long names, especially those for the same program that are called
  things like "spreadsheeta, spreadsheetb" and so forth. All of these
  would try to turn into "SPREADSH"; not a wise move. However, this isn't
  often a problem since files with names like this tend to be data or
  similar non-readable hangers on for programs, which you wouldn't be
  porting to IBM format since they won't run there. You might be giving
  them to someone to disassemble and study, of course, in which case the
  hassle might arise.

SOUNDTRACKER
    Another interesting bungle surfaces when transferring SoundTracker
  modules (tunes for a popular public domain music composition package,
  which can be played by several interpreters on the IBM, using sound
  cards and producing quite good output). These are the only files I've
  ever seen which have PREFIXES - all the older ST modules have "mod." in
  front of the file name, to make them identifiable to the program. Later
  versions don't need the prefix, but there are still a lot around with
  it. What you get when you translate these through to the IBM format is
  a three letter filename, MOD, followed by a nonsense three letter
  suffix, the first three letters of the actual song title. This makes
  very little sense to any poor IBM users you're trying to get the files
  to. So just rename the files to have the MOD bit at the end, after the
  full stop, and MessyDos will obligingly crop the filename to 8
  characters for you, and transplant the .MOD onto it for free, a
  responsible bit of programming.

    MessyDos doesn't disagree with any of the programs that stuff about
  with trackdisk.device (if you don't know what this relates to, never
  mind), since it uses its own messydisk.device. Thus things like
  TrackSalv, DFC, FSDirs and suchlike cause no hiccups with the
  pseudo-IBM OS, which is more than I can say for some Amiga
  applications...

    Oh, I almost forgot. The only remaining thing to worry you is
  formatting and copying IBM disks. This is explained as well on UT155,
  in the PCPatch directory. TO quote: "PcPatch is a bunch of utilities to
  enable PCCopy and PCFormat from the Extras 1.2 ( or Extras 1.3) PCUtil
  drawer to read, write and format any kind of MS-Dos style disks,
  including 720k/3.5" diskettes. Included is a format editor, so everyone
  can customize PCCopy to fit his needs."

    The docs are comprehensive and reasonably easy to follow, even if the
  resultant copying and especially formatting is painfully slow. Still,
  whaddaya want from public domain?


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