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{subhead} Amiga OS version 3.5: The Review...{def}{p}
Article by Mark A. Tierno
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I come home to see the UPS truck pulling away from my street; heart
pounding I go racing up to the house, hoping.  Is it?  Yes it is. At
long last version 3.5 of the Amiga OS has arrived!
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But, has it been worth the wait? This is the very question on your
mind this very second or you wouldn't be reading this article. So,
without further ado, let the reviewing commence.
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Set-Up:  The software was tested on my system, which consists of an
A4000/060 with a Cyberstorm MkII, CyberSCSI module, Cybervision64, a
1 Gig harddrive, 4x Toshiba CD-ROM Drive, about 102 Megs of Ram, and
more hacks and utilities than anyone I know. So if there's an
incompatibility in there then I'll probably be the one to find it.
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The Package:
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A standard box with the standard 3.5 picture as shown on many a web
site. I'm still amused by the "Y2K Compatible" logo on it, seeing as
how the Amiga was Born Y2K compliant. Ant any rate, inside you'll
find a CD (with the facing of our favorite Boing Ball), small
installation pamphlet, and a registration card.  Documentation comes
on the CD in HTML format. This last is a small mark against it for
two reasons; first some of us like to have some hard-print for ease
of use, and two if you're going to go HTML then supply a good HTML
datatype for Multiview so we can read it as easily as Amigaguide
documents without having to bring up a full fledged browser.
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The installation manual is in English and German, complete with a
picture of Petro's smiling face. The CD itself comes with sectors in
several formats; Rock Ridge, ISO9660, RAW, and Unix; so there should
be something here for anyone to read.
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The one thing of note missing was mentioned in a readme on the disk;
the OEM version of Miami was not available in time for the CD but
should be available at the Amiga.com support site by now.  Until
then, the CD has a 30 minute timeout demo version.
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Price, in US Dollars, is $59.95 from Software Hut. Not too bad, but I
would like to see a retail price of no more than $50 US for this
upgrade.
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Installation:
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The new installer program apparently includes the ability to display
on it's own screen with it's own chosen background and the occasional
playing of sound files, because that's what I was treated to, along
with a non-Multiview built in text reader for the Licence Agreement.
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Installation itself is simple, even on Expert Mode. It first copies
all WBStartup and datatype files to "Disabled" subdirectories, so no
fear of something incompatible running during installation. After
that it runs the first part of the Install, copying some basic
necessary files over to SYS:. That done, it reboots the computer; the
computer is now ready for the second part of the Install. Run the
install again, only this time choosing the option for second install.
After that the rest is automatic.
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Most of the install process seems concerned with the preparing and
installation of the icons; and since it automatically installs them
all, if you have any favorites then you'd best back them up first.
Some basic system sound files are also installed to Prefs even in
Expert mode; I think there should be an option for putting in your
own chosen sound files if desired, and perhaps some freedom for types
of icons to install, but that's just me.
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The install program requires 20 Megs of freespace on your harddrive,
but I've found that if you're installing overtop of OS 3.1 then it
really only needs 1 or 2 megabytes. That little niggling insistence
of the Installer forced be to temporarily move as couple of
directories to a different partition to make enough room on my
crowded SYS: partition, and is a detail that should be addressed for
the install script.
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A complaint on the printer installation. When it asks for which
printer to install, I clicked on "HP- all types"... and got all 20 or
so drivers installed, one separate file for each type of HP printer
from the 100 series on up. The Install should be more selective on
this, allowing one to choose WHICH model HP to install so you don't
have to go into DEVS: and delete the 19 other drivers you don't have
printers hooked up for.
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Included on the CD is also the latest version of CyberGraphX,
complete with an installer script for new or update install; I
recommend you graphics board people use it. The new CGXMode GUI now
shows the 15 bit modes, allowing you to edit them like we've always
wanted to.
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Finally, the installer program includes an option for making an
Emergency_Disk. Stick in a floppy and it'll be formatted, enough
files moved over to it for a basic boot, and a startup script that
will transfer control and the SYS: assign to a special 15-megabyte
directory on the OS CD. This way, even in the worst of emergencies
you can boot to your CD and a proper OS set-up, complete with your
graphics board drivers and NewIcons displayed as they should be.
Definitely a bit better than a single ill-equipped Workbench floppy
to work from. Installation of this Emergency Disk through the Install
program is easy, but assumes that the disk to be formatted is in
DF0:, with no option (even in Expert Mode) to select an alternative
like DF1:. A minor complaint, but it IS always polite to ask
(especially for those of us that have a bum DF0: drive that tends to
eat disks instead of format them).
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First Boot:
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First thing you'll have to do after your first post-install bootup is
reposition all your drawer icons in SYS: since their old snapshots
are no more, though the volume icons on Workbench remain the same.
Net you'll notice that the boot up has two new features: a reboot and
a pause. The reboot is because now Setpatch loads in the ROM and
patches the file "AmigaOS ROM Update" to it; it then leaves it in
memory as it reboots.  The second time around Setpatch sees it's
there and continues on with the rest. A better solution than a new
ROM chip.
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Then there's the pause. Midway through the boot process- somewhere
before it hits IPrefs or user- -startup- it pauses for unexplained
reasons. No drive access, nothing. After several second it then
resumes. Don't ask me what it's doing, but the last thing I need is
another reason to draw out my boot process.
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The boot is where we find the first incompatibility. As noted in the
install manual, the new scsi.device in the update isn't compatible
with all versions of the built in IDE in some systems- like mine. If
nothing boots then this is the problem. The manual says you can
disable the patching of the new scsi.device by adding a
SkipRomModules option to Setpatch, but this is a misprint. To disable
loading of the new scsi.device, the command line option is
SKIPROMUPDATES. So, the line on your startup-sequence would be
something like:
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  SetPatch SKIPROMUPDATES "scsi.device"
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Your computer will now boot.  The other way is to move the file
"AMIGAOS ROM UPDATE" from Devs: over to Storage, disabling all ROM
patches completely (including the ones you might want).
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Some advice at this point. Since it seems that the ROMs are moved to
memory and then patched, I would disable patches like CyberMapper
which do something similar, as this might overwrite the newly patched
ROM with a copy of the old one from the chip.
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Also, once the new fastfilesystem is in there, don't forget to update
it on your harddrive partitions using HDToolbox.
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The New OS:
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First impression: slow disk access and fast redraws. The first I
noticed when I first opened up my DOpus screen; there was a
noticeable delay (beyond anything normal) as the listers read for the
mounted volumes. This seems to be only on the first access, but don't
quote me on that as I've had a report of more general harddrive
access. It could be a fault in the new file system.
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Reaction is the new GUI, one in the style of MUOI or Class Act as a
logical step towards a more modern, more configurable, GUI. In fact,
Reaction is derived from Class Act, and includes such features as
window background picture support. Why not MUI? Simple. As good and
thorough as MUI is, taken as a whole the package is too large for
easy inclusion into an OS update. By the time you'd finish with all
the MUI custom classes there would be a good case for OS bloat.
Reaction is good and lean and provides enough basic configurability
to operate with.  If you want MUI, feel free to use it as well.
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You've heard it and it's true; 3.5 has taken the route of NewIcons
style, supporting it in it's own new built in way without having to
have the palette information encased in the tooltypes. You can now
use the new 3.5 style icons, NewIcons, and the old style icons.
Beware though, this can cause some incompatibility with programs that
don't support it, most notable of which is DOpus (though there's a
new Magellan patch now which fixes this).
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The fast redraws are for the Workbench screen and come from the fact
that the OS now allows icon and picture data to be taken out of Fast
Ram if you have a graphics board. Yes, that precious Chip Ram of
yours can now be conserved a bit more if you're a CyberGraphX or
Piccasso user. Aside from saving Chip it also has the result of a tad
faster screen redraws for Workbench. A prefs program, named "WBC",
making use of this feature is included on the CD's Contributions (see
later for Contributions).
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The Workbench menus have one small addition. The
WB-->Window-->Cleanup now has a submenu with several options. You can
have your icons arranged by Name, Date, Size, or Type, or have them
arranged in neat columns. This affects all icons in a given window,
or all the Workbench volume icons if no window is opened or selected.
A rather nice little addition.
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The new IPrefs performs all the things that the popular FastIPrefs
done, so the latter is no longer needed but for one small difference.
FastIPrefs allows you to hide the Workbench screen titlebar when the
cursor is not over it; this feature was not included in the new
IPrefs.
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The new picture datatypes given are good, even the jpeg one seems
noticeably faster. The anim datatypes could use a bit of work though;
instead of taking the default speed of the given anim from the file,
the anim datatype seems to play things too slow, and the cdxl
datatype is way to fast. They should take the speed from the file
like my other players do for CDXL and Anims, or at least give
Multiview the ability to control playback speed at the touch of a key
or gadget. The one glaring omission in the lack of the new
IFF-RGFX-Format chunky picture datatype; a perfect successor to the
iff datatype, it's inclusion would seem to be a must.
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AREXX has probably the most change for the better of anything else in
this distribution. There are now commands that directly affect the
Workbench. Window manipulation commands , arexx versions of every
single Workbench menu option, and the ability to add both menu
shortcuts and Tools menu items, there are things here that will have
arexx scribblers churning out utilities just to see them work.
Basically, the Workbench now has a FULL AREXX interface.
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Printer support has improved a lot. First, the Printer and PrinterGFX
prefs have been combined into a single program and GUI. Next, we now
have multiple units; printer units numbers 0 to 10 can be separately
configured. Then there's the GUI itself. A small sample thumbnail
picture is there, one that changes whenever you change any of the
settings, be it for Limits, Shade, Scaling, Size, Pitch, ,Scaling,
and so forth, before you actually apply them. Add this to the fact
that the CD has drivers for specific Models and not just general
brands, and printer support is one of the shining items of this
upgrade.
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Serial support is about the same, just the GUI was updated.
Unfortunately this includes the same old Baud limit of 31,250,
despite the Amiga's capability to go to 115,000.  An obvious flaw
pointing to a lack of attention to the reality of 56K modems. So keep
on using those third-party Serial prefs out there that allow you to
set the Baud rate all the way up.
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CD Support seems pretty complete with the CacheCDFS, though specific
support for CD32 games is noticeably absent (just a small program to
get past the crashing of Freeanim used on some CD32 games would be
fine). I would add one thing though; at present, if something is
wrong with the CD (it can't read it, or the drive is goofing off) on
startup then it just pops up with a requester asking you to hit "OK".
They should change that to a "OK" or "Retry", allowing a second
chance at it.
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Multiple volume CDs has limited support. If there's a music volume
then that gets a mounted icons next to the main data partition icon,
and if you click on the music CD icon it will start playing, though
with no visible way to stop it.  CDs that have both PC and MAC
partitions, however, display only one volume (as dictated in Prefs),
and have no easy way of switching one to the other (go to the CD
prefs and change it there). What's needed is a Disk Changer like for
Asim.
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PlayCD works fine, but the sound will always plays out through the
speaker hooked up to the CD's external speaker and not through the
SCSI bus to the Amiga's own audio ports. It would be nice to hear the
CD through the main speakers since that's where most of us put our
really GOOD speakers (some don't even bother to hook a separate set
of speakers up to the CD Drive's external audio port). Unless they
fix this, you'll have to have a separate set of speakers hooked
directly up to your CD.
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{link fe3}Click Here{end} for the rest of the review...