obarthel

6 ms·

1.
by obarthel 8mo ago
Somebody definitely had the full source code back in 1995 when I tried my best to figure out who to contact. While I succeeded in making contact with the right person, it quickly transpired that the full source code was subject to proof of
2.
by obarthel 1y ago
The "Amiga ROM Kernel Reference" manuals were a set of books published by Addison-Wesley which detailed the Amiga operating system APIs, its data structures, purpose and architecture. Three editions were issued between 1985 and 19
3.
by obarthel 2y ago
The Amiga default file system was not quite that sophisticated. As used on floppy disks, it did well by offering more than one option to reconstruct the layout of the file system data structures. For example, the disk data blocks were chain
4.
by obarthel 3y ago
Yes, Olaf Barthel here. You're welcome :-) The Aztec 'C' overlay manager code is something of a clever hack which also needs support from the linker to pull it off. Unlike the original overlay manager (ovs.asm) provided by Me
5.
by obarthel 3y ago
Yes, Manx Software Systems lost out to the competition, with the last release being Aztec 'C' 5.0 (with patches) for the Amiga (they also sold the source code to their ANSI 'C' compliant runtime library). Version 5 is on
6.
by obarthel 3y ago
It is a complex, non-trivial operating system which has its merits in terms of design and prudent use of resources. All of this is well-documented and understandable. You can learn how everything works, top to bottom and back again, which i
7.
by obarthel 3y ago
No, this is a bug. The 'enginesize' data structure member is a float and not a pointer to a float.
8.
by obarthel 5y ago
Falling back onto default icons is, arguably, just as tricky, if not more so. Workbench cares about "real icons" because they are more likely to contain information relevant to the applications which created them (tool types, defa
9.
by obarthel 5y ago
This is very hard to fix because the Workbench has to find every single icon file in a drawer, match it up against any drawers or files, then load the icon file and display it. There is no icon cache or, for that matter, no "these are
10.
by obarthel 7y ago
The "Disk Doctor", as shipped with AmigaOS versions 1.2-2.04 was both a crude and cruel tool. Its primary purpose was to "restore" a damaged volume to a state which enabled read-access, allowing you to copy the data to a
11.
by obarthel 7y ago
If you want to try (and I would recommend trying, since even this early version of the program is an amazing design, with much to learn from), please be aware of the following: 1) The source code is incomplete; you will need the original EA
12.
by obarthel 8y ago
> As long as it's fast ram, it's pretty good for a next best thing. I wasn't aware. The ROM changes which shipped with the AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 updates all exercised the same mechanism by which operating system modules loa
13.
by obarthel 8y ago
The focus of AmigaOS 3.1.4 development work was on fixing bugs, integrating code which so far had been separate (e.g. the mass storage drivers last updated in AmigaOS 3.9) and generally making it easier for Amiga hardware developers to make
14.
by obarthel 8y ago
> Nobody is telling you to ditch the 512k rom. It's just it sucks not to have workbench.library and icon.library, when using a system that does maprom with 1mb support. The next best thing is to load both the workbench.library and i
15.
by obarthel 8y ago
ROM space is very tight for this release on account of the much larger mass storage drivers (SCSI, IDE) and the integrated OCS/ECS/AGA graphics.library. Commodore was already pushing the limits for the 1994 Kickstart 3.1 in the Am
16.
by obarthel 8y ago
Smaller than 512 bytes? I beg to differ. The file system data structure layout requires a minimum of 512 bytes per block. The Amiga OFS/FFS, etc. file system data structures scale with the block size (block sizes of 512, 1024, .., 6553
17.
by obarthel 8y ago
The AmigaOS 3.9 code was largely unavailable for development work. What remained and was availabie is material which was licensed for inclusion in AmigaOS4. What we got here is a mix of the AmigaOS 3.1 code (bug fixes galore, plus enhanceme
18.
by obarthel 10y ago
I agree that there is nostalgia involved, but it is only part of the picture. From a software developer's point of view the Amiga is worth resurrecting because the operating system design represents a promise that you can get great pow
19.
by obarthel 10y ago
The program was written mainly in 'C' (some 830 lines of main program, with about 300 lines for the sound code). A small assembly language snippet provided the sine/cosine calculation code (about 100 lines, most of which cont