ACAS, Amiga Computing, Media House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK, SK10 4NP or e-mail us: acas@idg.co.uk
I have just bought myself an Oktagon card and was wondering if you could clear up a little confusion I am having using the board. The manual refers to an oktagon.device but I have looked everywhere on the disk and cannot find the file anywhere. I would have thought I needed to copy this into my devs drawer to allow other device drivers to access the SCSI device.
Ian Bell, Richfield
The main reason you cannot find the device is that the file oktagon.device is not located on any disk, and does not have to be. Once you have put the Oktagon board in your computer, each time you turn on your machine the oktagon.device is copied from a ROM on the SCSI board into the computer's memory - this save you the trouble of having to copy any files onto your machine. The same applies to many other boards that have SCSI interfaces.
There is a downside to this in that you cannot easily replace the device driver at a later date. Whenever you have to set up any software to use the Oktagon board, you simply tell it to use this oktagon.device, but make sure everything is case correct because some programs such as SCSImounter require this.
I was wondering if you could help me. I am having terrible trouble getting my icons to stay put. If I leave an icon out on the Workbench and snapshot its position, when I restart the machine the icon has forgotten where it should have been. What am I doing wrong?
Neil Simpson, Chesterfield.
Three possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, Workbench does not like icons being too close together, so it may let you snapshot the icons in place at first but when you come to run Workbench again, certain icons will appear as they were before. All you can do in this case is to rearrange the icons and resnapshot them, restart Workbench and see if it likes the new positions.
Another possibility is that the icons on the Workbench are not actually icons. The icon may not exist on disk and Workbench has created it when you have selected show all files. Therefore, when you select snapshot icon the position data cannot be saved to the icon file. In this case, you will have to create an icon for the file using either IconEdit or another such program.
All the icons on the screen are stored in a special file called .info files. The name comes about from the fact that the icon file has the same name as its accompanying program, but has the added file name extension of .info which tells Workbench it is an icon file.
There is a particular problem associated with the RAM disk icon that can confuse beginners. When you snapshot a disk icon the icon file called disk.info is generated and can be seen using the shell or a directory utility such as DOpus. The problem occurs when you reset your machine as this info file is lost, so the RAM disk reverts back to the default image and position. You need to lock the RAM disk in place by:
From now on, every time you start your computer the disk icon you have set up will be copied into the RAM disk before Workbench loads. Therefore, when the Workbench does appear the RAM disk will be in the right place and have whatever icon image you like. Just remember that if you want to change the appearance or position of the icon you will need to copy the disk.info file into ENVARC again.
I have recently acquired a VGA monitor, and have connected it to my Amiga, but I am having problems in getting the display drivers to work. I have successfully used the PAL and NTSC drivers on my old monitor and TV, but when I try to set up drivers for the VGA monitor I have the following problems:
I have tried to use MonEd from the May issue of Amiga Computing but this will not change the size of the display, and also crashes my machine if I change the H-sync rate too much. Do you know what is wrong and what I need to fix it?
Richard, RICHARD@shuttletech.com
There is one thing you should do before you buy anything for your computer - check that it will work correctly with your hardware. If you go out and buy yourself any old VGA monitor, or printer for that matter, particularly if it is second hand and not a well known brand, the likelihood is that you are not going to have the correct drivers.
With monitors you need to check that the monitor drivers you have work at the correct horizontal and vertical sync rates. Generally, the Amiga monitor drivers have a vertical range of 45-80Hz and a horizontal range of 15-30KHz. The Amiga's vertical range is fine but the problem comes with the horizontal sync rate. Most new VGA monitors have a minimum horizontal scan rate of 31KHz, which is at the edge of the Amiga's ability, and really you need one that goes down to 29KHz to be able to use many of the AGA monitor modes. You can find out what scan rate a driver works at by loading the screen modes preference program and looking at the figures in the information box.
With reference to your questions the answers are as follows:
Unfortunately, there is not much else you can do. I would suggest you retry using MonEd and raise the horizontal scan rate, but this is always going to be a tricky thing to do without reducing the size of the existing screen. If the Amiga custom display chips are asked to start shifting screen data faster than they are able, all that will happen is that the actual screen width starts to be reduced as the DMA channels have to work harder.
I own an A1200 and have been using a Power Quad CD-ROM player for the last 11 months, having had no problems with it using both CD-ROMs and audio CDs. All of a sudden, and without any reason whatsoever, I started getting a message that no disk is present in CD0, even though there actually is. I have changed the original audio CD software with the MCDPlayer that comes with the AmiCDFS program (included on the May issue coverdisk), but this worked perfectly well with all the CDs I played. I have also tried, several times, to re-install the unit using the software that was provided with it, but although almost everything is copied in the right place, the problem will not go away.
I say almost because when the installation gets to the CD device preferences I get a highlighted 'squirrelscsi.device' in the 'installed devices' section, which I presume should be transferred to the 'CD ROM devices' on the right-hand side. However, all I get is a jittering pointer that will not respond, and a disabled save option, so I am forced to cancel out of the requester.
Could this be the problem? I do hope you can help me out as I do not want to end up with a £300 CD-ROM player in the bin!
Emmanuel Felici, Mosta Malta
You are right that you have to cancel out of the CD device preference program. This is probably the most important part of the installation process because at this point you are meant to tell the installer where on the SCSI chain your CD drive is located.
This is part of the Squirrel installer software, and has been written to make adding a CD drive as simple as possible. What would normally happen is that on the left side of the window in the CD device preference program you would have squirrelscsi.device highlighted, and on the right side you should have a list of all the CD-ROM drives connected to your SCSI interface. In your case, there should be just a single entry - that of the Power CD drive. When you press save, this automatically sets up the DOS device driver, so the CD-ROM is mounted each time you re-boot your machine.
The problem you have sounds like it is hardware related - either the CD-ROM drive or the Squirrel interface itself - because normally, if the CD preference program cannot find the Squirrel interface the mouse movement should not be affected. There are a couple of things you should check. Firstly, if you have removed and refitted the Squirrel recently it is possible you have damaged some of the pins in the PC slot. This is very easily done because the pins are very delicate, and if the interface is not completely flush when you insert it, the corner pins can be easily bent down under the interface.
If this is the case, get yourself a torch or bright lamp and a long jeweller's screwdriver and, with a bit of patience, realign the pins. The pins are fairly delicate and take very little pressure to bend back into place, so be gentle with them. Once you have done this, carefully insert the interface and recheck that all the pins are still aligned correctly.
One thing that would be worth checking is what the SCSI ID number of the CD-ROM drive is, and what the currently existing DOS driver is expecting. Normally, when you use the CD device preference program and press the save button, it writes out a small text file called cd.device.config to the devs directory. In the text file, one line tells the CD-ROM device what SCSI device to use and what SCSI ID the CD-ROM drive is. If you set the CD-ROM drive's SCSI ID to match the number in this text file, it may allow your machine to read the CDs again, and this would explain why you are getting the 'no disk in CD0' error message. Unfortunately, though, this does not explain why the CD device preferences is not working correctly, or why it makes the mouse pointer go all jerky.
One final check you could try is using SCSIMounter, which you should have got with the installation. This program allows you to check what is connected to any SCSI interface, even though the tool types should be set up for the Squirrel interface. If you run this and every entry comes up with 'no device present'. then I would think there is a problem with the CD-ROM drive. If, on the other hand, every entry reads 'inquiry failed' this would point to there being a problem with the Squirrel interface, or possibly the actual PC slot itself.
I too have had the same problems as Mr Trottier (issue 100). The solution is not to use a backup program! Any time I have tried to use a backup program to backup a complete hard drive and then restore it, I have had problems with commercial software.
What you can do instead is leave your original drive connected and get whatever cables and splitters you need to connect both the old and a new drive, making sure they have different addresses. Use HDToolBox to setup and format the new drive. Then using the Shell type copy "original disk": "new disk:" all and everything will be copied from your existing drive onto the backup drive. After checking your program to verify that they work, disconnect the old drive. This method also works for backing up to a Syquest drive.
Glen Feely, Kenosha USA
I suppose this is a reasonable way of going about things if you are upgrading to a larger hard drive, as long as you are the sort of person that is happy playing around with cables inside their machine. I would recommend the shareware program ABackup as one of the best hard drive backup programs around. It is now on to version five and has many years of development put into it.
I'm a young Spanish coder and have a problem I hope you can help me with. I want to protect a program I have written with some sort of pirate security. Can you explain how I can convert my DOS disks to a bootable NON DOS disk? I think it would be a good method to protect my program. What kind of program can I use to do it, and are there specific programs for the A1200?
Jose Manuel, Cartellon Spain
What you are wanting to do requires you to write your own track disk controller. This means you have to learn how to program the Amiga's custom chip which gives you control over the floppy disk drive, and this is no simple feat. If I remember right, the source code to such a track disk controller is available on Aminet, but I would not recommend you use this sort of copy protection.
Even though using NON-DOS disk does give you the benefit of protection against the casual pirate, your normal cracker - the major people involved with pirating and distributing the cracked copy of your program - will have no problems breaking your disk protection.
Using NON-DOS disks just creates more problems than are solved. Firstly, you are not going to make any friends from hard drive owners as they cannot install programs on NON-DOS disks onto their hard drives. The other downside is that if anything changes regarding how the Amiga accesses its disk drives, in the future your NON-DOS disk will not boot as the track disk controller you have written will not be able to cope with the new hardware.
Just look what happened when the A1200 first came out and, more recently with the new A1200s, with a floppy drive that had slightly different timing speeds. I have to say that at the end of the day, whether you use copy protection or not, people are going to pirate your software whatever you do.
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