HINTS & TIPS  <> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <>   The CD-ROM confusion  Both CDTV and the A570 share the industry-standard ISO-9660 CD-ROM format, and any CD-ROM which conforms to that standard can be read by either of these units. Audio CDs, CD+G, and CD+MIDI formats can also be used in the A570, which can also read font, graphic, sound and text files from Mac- and PC-specific CD-ROMs. But you can't run PC or Mac software onteh Amiga without installing some form of emulator, either software or hardware. Similarly the CD-ROM unit we sell at Megadisc does all that the A570 does. By the way, I'm told you can upgrade the CDTV to 2 meg of chip ram using the DKB Mega-A-Chip board, and you can use the Blizzard board to add not only 6 MB of ram but also double the speed of the machine.  Using iconx to play music in a custon CON: window (see MUSIC drawer)  Check out the Icon information (by selecting Info from the Workbench menu)of the icon in the Music drawer this issue to see how we've run a music (.mod) file with a program called "prop" which crashes if used as the default tool in an icon in the usual way. Iconx not only executes a script file, but also has a number of tooltypes you can add, such as WINDOW for the size and placement of the window that comes up.  WB2 CLI ToolType (undocumented!)  There is a new tooltype which can be used with all project and tool icons under WB2 - the single word 'CLI'. If you put this into the Information of such an icon, and double-click on the icon, you'll get the Execute Command requestor asking for arguments, with the icon's name appearing as the default string in the requestor. And the program will be run as a CLI process rather than as a Workbench one. So you can run anything from Workbench, do multiple copies or formats, diskcopies, you name it. [Thanks to Peter Hughes for this info, in Cursor, AUGWA's magazine.]  CGFonts and Final Copy II  For CG fonts you need WB2.1, and for Type 1 fonts you need WB1.3 or later. To load up a Type 1 Postscript font into Final Copy (ie, has a .pfb and .afm extension) just click on it. FC will automatically download the font to a postscript printer, if you are using such a device.  Prefs/Presets in WB2  Use these to rapidly change your screen., presets, etc. Join up with AutoCli or Addmenu (both of these are on our NicWilson_Utilities disk) or ToolManager from Fish disk 752....  Changing your system when you change a drive name:  I changed the name of one of my hard drives SDH0: to D: and had a bit of trouble with a number of assigns and default program settings which I had set up long ago, using the name SDH0:. ProPage 4 is a particular offender in this case, because it has a .DFLT (default) file, a .INI file, and so on. It would be nice to have a simple way of finding all the various ways in which a program is connected by name to the system, including the various assigns and shortcuts you create yourself via programs like AutoCli, Addmenu, ToolManager, etc. Has anyone got any suggestions? This could make a good project for a programmer.  If you have an IBM emulator, use Syquests  We installed PC-Task, the software emulator by Chris Hames, on someone's system, and realised that a very useful addition to the whole system would be a Syquest drive - you could have a bunch of different cartridges configured for different setups, both Amiga and IBM. For example, on the IBM side you could have one each configured for DOS, Windows, and for games. All you need is a SCSI interface on your system. For simple file conversion, you'll find that CrossDos (included in WB2.1 and higher, or available separately) can read MS-Dos formatted syquest disks. Incidentally, the new Syquest 88 MB can read and write both 88MB and 44MB cartridges, and the prices are lower - e.g. an external one will cost you $876 at present. There are also 3.5" 105 MB versions available but they have a little difficulty at present talking to Amigas. By the time you read this, however, that should be fixed. Speed of the Syquest drives is just about the same as say the A3000's SCSI hard drive. One little problem is that the A4000 will not let a Syquest fit into its bay, so beware of that glitch. Speaking of emulators - Emplant which already handles the Mac very well will also soon be emulating IBM as well. Could be the way if you want 3 operating systems working together seamlessly for little overhead.  Viewtek is THE graphics displayer  Viewtek is a good thing to have on your system if you do any graphics - it displays the popular GIF format in HAM8 mode without prior conversion. In fact, it shows most ILBM's (including 24-bit ILBM's), most Compuserve GIF format images, most JFIF format JPEG images and most ANIM Op-5 format ani- mations, with support for different palettes for each frame. Supports SHAM, CTBL, and PCHG images, full support of ECS/AGA display modes (ie. show 256 color GIF's directly, show 800x600 HAM animations, etc.). Supports viewing contents of clipboard. Iconifies to a Workbench AppIcon. Includes a version written for GVP's Impact Vision 24, to support true 24-bit display. Version 1.02, requires Workbench 2.04 Find it on Fish 787 and on the Extras disk this issue.  Re VGAonly in the Monitors drawer (WB3?)  If you have a multiscan monitor which has the irritating habit of displacing the position of the screen so that you just don't use say the left hand side with some video modes, then VGAOnly is for you, if you have an AGA machine. According to Spencer Shanson, an Amiga engineer, you just copy the sys:storage/monitors/vgaonly file into devs:monitors, delete envarc:sys/overscan.prefs and reboot. This will centre your screen better, but may produce artifacts on the LHS of the display if your workbench screen is wider than the visible area, so that you are horizontally dragging the screen. Seems to make a difference in some systems.  SCSI addresses  On a standard Amiga, the original hard drive is at 6 usually with a CBM card, and it's a good idea to put your next one at 0 where the system looks next. In early versions if you weren't connected at 6 first, the drive could often not be found. GVP hard drives are set to look first at 0 and 1, which complicates the issue somewhat.  Use ARexx instead of IconX or Xicon  USE a tooltype such as: CMD=xx where xx is a one-line script, either Dos or ARexx. If a Dos script, make sure that you put quotes around the lines. This is good because then you don't need a file attached, only the icon. Also because ARexx handles paths better than IconX does. And of course all the commands that ARExx uses are in libraries available - and since any library remains resident oce it's used once, this means the process will be much faster. Thanks to M. Stapleton for this info.  ADPro's Splitz & Joinz  If you need to transfer large files (of any sort) between computers and indeed platforms then the Splitz and Joinz utilities supplied with ADPro are just what you need. I (Steve Bolton) was faced with the task of designing a "poster" for Megadisc with lots of colours and detail with the idea of transfering it to a slide or negative for reproduction. So off I went that night and knocked up a picture in 24 bit. I then found out that the local business who were going to transfer the picture onto film required a TIFF file (they use only PCs and the software didn't support JPEG). So I converted my IFF to a TIFF and ended up with a 4 MB file! The problem I now had was how to get it to the PC. The solution: Splitz and Joinz! Splitz and Joinz is supplied with ADPro and comes with several different platform executable. There are two versions for IBM (a windows version and an MS-DOS version) and a version for the Mac. Splitz simply takes a large file and chops it up into pieces of a particular length (which the user can define) so that it can be spread over several disks (in this case, using CrossDOS to copy the pieces onto MS-DOS disks). The files are then put back together again using the Joinz program on the other computer. This method is great for larger files which cannot be archived to fit on a single disk. This also eliminates the need to "download" the files directly via modem  Using Rad on an A3000  Someone wrote in suggesting that RAD: could not be mounted on an early A3000, but the confusion was simply that AmigaWorld had started the rumour early on when they couldn't find a handler in the system directories. In fact, from WB2, Rad is written into the kickstart. Here's how I set it up on my A3000, in the user-startup sequence (of course you need a mountlist entry in the devs:mountlist file - see below): assign >nil: RAD: exists if warn mount rad: endif DIR RAD: The mountlist entry, giving you a Rad which is as big as a floppy (change the highcyl to something smaller to get a smaller sized Rad): RAD: Device = ramdrive.device Unit = 0 Flags = 0 Surfaces = 2 BlocksPerTrack = 11 Reserved = 2 Interleave = 0 LowCyl = 0 ; HighCyl = 79 Buffers = 5 BufMemType = 1 #  A4000/3000 CPUs  >Can anybody confirm or deny that the A4000 CPU slot it compatible with >the A3000 CPU slot? The A4000 CPU slot is a superset of the A3000 CPU slot. It has a few signals added , mainly to support things other than plain old CPUs. The mechanical size of the A4000 CPU card is considerably less than that of the A3000.  Downloads - hints from Dave Haynie, Amiga guru   The A3000 Ramsey bug  The A3000 RAMSEY has a bug which prevents a special "page- detect" mode of RAMSEY from working in conjunction with DMA. The problem is that, if DMA hits just right, RAMSEY ends up occasionally running 40ns rather than 80ns precharge cycles, for page-detect mode only. Burst mode works just fine, though not all 68040 boards support burst to the A3000 local bus. The A4000 version of RAMSEY fixes the page-detect problem.  Slot Compatibility  In article u894601@postoffice.utas.edu.au (Peter Gee) writes: >Are the Zoro III slots in the A4000 backwardly compatible with >the A2000 slots? Yes. >I was wondering if a A2091 SCSI controller would work in the >A4000 Maybe. There are some firmware problems with most versions of the A2091 ROM. The old ones just plain fail, there's a intermediate level that works, but very slowly (uses the FileSystem's block-sized buffer with DMA into Chip RAM), and the final version that's just slow (uses programmed I/O). Ed: Scram boards and GVP boards do work in the A4000. -- >I have heard that it is possible to use a 2000/3000 keyboard on the 1200. Possible, I suppose, easy, no. The A1200 has its keyboard controller CPU mounted on its motherboard, making the keyboard's serial bus rather inaccessible. You would also have the same problem you get adding an external keyboard to an A500 -- the C-A-A reset doesn't work, since this is handled differently on external keyboards. >How do I build an interface to accomplish this? Does anyone know the >pin-outs for the 1200 keyboard ribbon connector? The signals you would need are not on the ribbon connector. >I'd also like to make an interface that would extend the "local bus" 150 >pin card edge connector to provide a few Zorro III slots. That can't be done. The Zorro III bus requires more address lines than you have in an A1200, and a Zorro III controller is too complicated to build with TTL/PAL logic. It's technically feasible to build a combination backplane/ 68030 accelerator for the A1200 if you could get hold of Fat Buster chips. However, that's starting to sound like the tail wagging the dog. First of all, you don't have to have a SCSI-2 device to get better performance with our new SCSI-2 stuff. SCSI-2 really isn't the point of all this, though of course folks who dwell on stat sheets (marketroids, as their job, and geeks who don't have enough work to do with the equipment to keep them busy), or the few who have SCSI-2 drives like Q240s and those nice Maxtors, really care about "SCSI-2". The rest of you care that the new SCSI chip is much more efficient than the old SCSI chip. The old SCSI chip, the WD33C93, wasn't very efficient at the SCSI protocol, and being a relatively dumb chip, it needed lots of CPU time to support its operation. The DMAC chip that hooks it into the A3000 systems is a good enough DMA chip, the bottleneck has always been the SCSI chip. With the NCR53C710, we have a one-chip SCSI/DMA solution (for motherboard use; some glue logic was of course necessary on the A4091 to get Zorro III bus protocols out of an '040-ish SCSI chip bus). This chip has its own processor and instruction set, which lets it intelligently react to a variety of SCSI events without having to involve the host CPU. This increases the throughput of the SCSI bus and decreases the CPU load on the Amiga it's attached to. -- Dave Haynie / Commodore Technology,  Just what is a DSP chip?  The DSP can probably thought of as a new Amiga custom chip without a name like the others. I guess, in order to have a name like Alice Agnus Gary, you must be standard on machines and not an add-on. The DSP is not only capable of real-time compression, utilizing 16-bit 8 channel audio, but it is also a decent coprocessor (like the other custom chips) but has a few extra punches. With a DSP, rendering times will be GREATLY increased. By exactly how many times, I'm not sure. But this is what has been noted in magazines as some of the specs. As for what else it does, no one is truly sure except for Commodore at the moment. They liked the AT&T device because it can compress and decompress 16bit samples in real time while playing them, most other 16-bit boxes will leave you with samples that take up so much memory that you will probably just resort to recording high quality 8-bit samples. This device (as I was told) can have its own memory but I wasn't told how much it would come with. But the fact is you can store 16-bit samples that don't necessarily have to clean out your harddrive space in no time. So the DSP isn't just sound, it is like a new multi-purpose coprocessor. -- Hope this helps. Mike Bromery.  Subject: HD drives and Dos2.04  To all those that wondered about the High Density drives and 2.1 I just ran my setpatch and got this: Amiga Operating System Copyright @ 1985-1992 Commodore-Amiga, Inc. All Rights Reserved. SetPatch (V38.31) has already been installed. Patch list: Released extra A2024 buffers Moved CIA handlers to priority 0 Console CMD_CLEAR Console Bell DOS Flush() Blitter interrupts 150RPM HD floppies <------------------ * Important * Intuition IAddress change Fixed Line-A exception vector Monitor database NMI Hardware patch DOS Open() Shared Semaphores Graphics Set/LoadRGB4 Fix for old A1010 drives Enabled data cache This is with a newer setpatch. I had an older one but I dont know if it had the HD floppies patch. If you have any doubt just type 'setpatch' and see if your version is the newest and if it is newer than mine please let me know! Also, I remember someone saying that their A1010 worked under 1.3 but not under 2.04. Notice the next to the bottom line? Maybe this is your problem, an old setpatch??  Chip Memory requirements  As to the amount of chip memory needed for various screens, here is a small formula you can use : Width * Height * Depth = bits per screen. bits per screen DIV 8 = Bytes per screen. ex : 640 * 400 * 4 DIV 8 = Bytes needed for a 16 color screen (Hi res Interlace) As to the new AGA Screen modes, the maximum depth is 8 bit planes, giving 256 colors, or all colors w/ HAM-8 mode. Also remember the audio chips need chip memory too. Which Kickstart is which? From the AmigaFAQ (Frequently asked questions): KS1.0 v30 KS1.1 NTSC v31 KS1.1 PAL v32 KS1.2 v33 KS1.3 v34 v35 KS1.4 KS2.0 v36 KS2.04 v37 KS2.1 v37 WB2.1 v38 KS3.0 v39, v40  An interesting fact  ->You DO NOT need to be a developer to obtain V3.0. I have sent C= ->Australia a cheque for $65 ($25 + $40) for V39 Includes, Autodocs ->and Kickfiles + V39 Release set. You will receive 9 disks, but no ->printed documentation. This only includes developer material, ->but you do not need to be registered. Give C= Australia a ring.  <> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <%> 34 <>