Almathera Ten Pack 3: CDPD 3

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Wrap

Text File | 1995-03-19 | 29.4 KB | 587 lines

So let's begin: Well, I'd love to assume since you've got this file that you've got a modem..and since you've got a modem you no doubt have downloaded files before so you have Pkax and perhaps Arc, and from that I can infer you have Show and Less and probably Conman and Mackie, and thus PrefCh and Select... but I won't. You actually COULD be sitting there with the thing barely hooked together, boxes still scattered around, you've read the "manual" (I REALLY hesitate to use the word) a few times, maybe hauled up the Notepad and wondered why, or rather, how the book could not be giving you the right directions. Maybe you've actually typed DIR in a CLI window only to be confused by a bunch of gibberish rolling by on the screen. And you're still puzzled about them using icons from religion, menus from a restaurant, projects from the garage, the Notepad off your desk and tools from the.. workbench. It's called "Par for the course" in one language, "Welcome to the club!" in another. And then you get handed THIS by a friend. * Well, the bad news is that you still have to learn the manual. I'm only going to fill in stuff that they left out, or worded is such a way that they might as well as left it out. No offense to Commodore meant here; computer manuals are notorious for being poorly written. Somebody'll come along any minute now and tell me this one's one of the all-time greats. So, one of the first things we need is a stripped-down version of Work- bench 1.2. This will be a good chance to go through the various directories and make a few odd mentions. Rename this disk BlankBench, watch that byte gauge and hold on. First, some basic definitions to make sure we're on the same page: directory - Just like a drawer of a file cabinet, it holds stuff. drawer - Workbench name for a directory. Basically a drawer is a directory with an icon. file - Just a general term for anything that has bytes. program - A file that actually does something, like the Clock. command - A CLI instruction to do something to/for/with a file. tool - In general, any program. Specifically, a program that performs a certain, individual task, such as the IconEd. project - A file that needs a tool to run it, like a Notepad note needs Notepad (the tool) to be displayed. textfile - A text document like this one that you Type. scriptfile - A text file full of CLI commands that you Execute. Also called a Batch file 'cause it batches commands together, as well as a Command Sequence file, but that doesn't count 'cause it's two words. format - If I say something like "look in the Tool Types box for the correct format" I mean to check out exactly how the command or whatever is laid out; spaces, quote marks, capitals, etc. Format - The command in the System directory. Called Initialize by the Workbench, although no one knows why. Info - There are two Infos, you'll use them both. One's in the c directory with the rest of the commands, the other's from activating a program's icon and using the Workbench Info menu. You'll do a lot with this window. .info - Tagged on the end of a file name (tool, icon, disk, etc) means it's that file's icon. An icon is how you run a program from the Workbench; it doesn't need to be there for the program to run. Just type "clock" and up pops the clock, "bypassing", as it were, the icon. There will be programs you always run through the CLI and you'll delete the .info file (the icon). Other programs, mainly ones you download, you'll have to borrow or make an icon for because they were too cheap to include one. If you see JUST a ".info" when you Dir a directory, that's the drawer's "file marker" or something. Type "Dir Ram:" and it should be empty. Double-click the Ram icon to open the window. Close the window and Dir Ram: again. You'll see ".info" listed, the (newly-created) window's small claim to existence. * Basic assumptions: - You're using a backup copy of Workbench. I'm going to tell you to (gasp!) delete some stuff to make a little room, but don't worry, it's all faithfully there on your master. Actually, you're supposed to have a master backup of the master, even, so you never have to touch the original. Again, in theory, this holds true for EVERY good master disk you have; Bench, Paint, Processor, game, you name it. They're only a couple of bucks apiece. Can you see any OTHER part of your system that's that cheap? Live it up, buy lots and lots of disks. Put a master backup set of all the really good stuff in a closet somewhere away from the computer. I like the Sony 2DD disks; they're reliable, have colored labels, and, best of all, the labels actually peel off months down the road and don't leave all this crap behind. That kind of engineering marvel is enough to sell me on a product any day. - Whenever I give a command to type in a CLI window, I'll put it in quotes. There are very few times that you actually use quotes ANYwhere so I don't think we'll run into any confusion. If I list out a string of CLI commands, like so, I won't use quotes: Dir df0:devs Delete Trashcan.info Run Clock - When I capitalize the word "Type", it's the CLI command to type a docu- ment, or, more properly, a textfile. * The original Workbench disk 1.2: Demos: I've seen all kinds of "graphic hacks" now, and I rate these a "C-". Look at them, gawk in awe if you must, then delete the whole thing. You can either activate the Demos drawer icon then Discard with the Workbench menu, or type in the CLI "Delete demos all". Watch the little bar graph drop down a notch or two. Ah-h-h...elbow room. You also type "Delete Demos.info" to get rid of the needless drawer icon if you're using the CLI. Expansion: Blow that guy right out of the water. You won't need it until you get a hard drive and even then you won't want the drawer's icon hangin' around. The hard drive looks in the Expansion directory for its driver (a small file) but the Expansion.info file, the icon, is a separate thing and doesn't need to be there. Empty: You can keep it around for now; it's harmless and useful to make new drawers with. When you activate it then Duplicate it, it actually duplicates both files for you; the Empty directory and the Empty.info file, the icon. If you Dir in the CLI you'll see Copy Of Empty (dir) and down below the Copy Of Empty.info file. Trashcan: The general reason this doesn't have a place on the Workbench is this: Workbench is already jammed to the teeth, byte-wise, so if we've got something we just kind of want to let hang around awhile before we decide whether or not to dump it, we don't want it hogging up byte space. It's much more practical to simply store it on a separate disk named "Misc" or something. We won't delete friendly ol' Trashcan (there are lots of neat trashcan icons out there), we just won't use it. Sorry! Preferences: Rename this puppy "Prefs" so you won't have to type out "p-r-e-f-e-r-e-n- c-e-s" every time you want to open it. The book covers Prefs pretty well. When you Save in Prefs it saves the current screen/pointer/printer info to a tiny file called "system-configuration" in the devs directory. Make note of the difference between the SAVE and USE functions. When you get the program PrefCh you'll only use the USE box. Utilities: This drawer might be more appropriately named "Tools", although either's fine. You can also use "Utils" if you like. In it we find a couple of general tools, the Notepad and the Calculator. Notepad is only an example of a word processor; they make no claim to the contrary. ProWrite, the real word processor program, is made up of 143,624 bytes, whereas humble little Notepad is a paltry 54,548. You can use it to play around with, and I could spend a page on Notepad alone, but it would be a waste of both our times as you're definitely eventually going to buy a regular program like ProWrite if you're into writing at all. We don't want it on this particular disk so activate the icon and sayonara. What I will say about the Notepad is this: If you want more than one font in a document you have to have FLAGS=noglobal in the Info window's Tool Types. Also, check out a Notepad note's Info window for the layout of the font and window size formats in the Tool Types box. The Calculator is pretty straightforward if you've read the manual. It uses the "mathieeedoubbas.library" in the libs directory. We'll keep it around for now unless you know you don't want it, in which case...pow! System: This drawer should be named "Misc", or "Catch-all" or "WhoKnows?", the stuff they've got in here. The IconEd is just another tool, so, with both the Utilities window and the System windows open, grab the IconEd icon with the left mouse button, swing it over to the Utilities window and drop it in. Do the same with GraphicDump and CLI. System means system, like the whole deal, not just some isolated tool. I suppose the CLI would technically belong in the System drawer, but for now let's just treat it like another tool. The manual covers nice ol' IconEd surprisingly in depth. The only thing that took me a bit to catch onto was: Let's say you have a neat icon, but it's a Project icon and you want it to be for some utility/program/tool (the words all kind of blend together after a while...) and you need the icon to be a Tool icon. To see what type of icon it is, you activate it and pull down the Info menu, right? In order for the Info window to work an icon MUST have an accompanying file, be it a tool, textfile or whatever. So if you had a lone icon and wanted to see its Info, you'd have to use Ed to creat a text file with the icon's name (without the .info) first. The file doesn't have to say anything, there just has to be something there to back up the icon. So you fire up IconEd and Load up a tool icon, any one will do. Now move to the next editing window and Load your neat project icon. Go back to the first window, erase the sucker (Undo Frame), bring the good icon over (From Frame), Save as you will and there it is. It's a tool icon because you saved through the window you loaded up that original tool icon in. No prob. Well...actually, yes, problem if you're having trouble with the Load and Save business; spelling out the correct name to load an icon, looking through various drawers for ones you've saved, but don't know where... This little problem is called Paths and we'll get to it soon enough. GraphicDump works fine and doesn't need any further documentation. You won't use it after you get IFFEncode or Snapshot off a BBS. You don't have to jot the names down, there's a list later on. There's no need for it on this bench so give it the axe. Say is defintely a kick. The pitch controls, etc, are fun but remember you also have to enter the pitch when you change the voice to have effect. Experiment with different settings. example: -r-p85 default: p=110 s=150 I like: -p110-s120 I've decided Say has a Canadian accent, possible Western Quebec. GREAT phonetic practice is to make Say pronounce Spanish words. It's tough but can be done quite well. Future project: Make up about a hundred Say windows ready to say all kinds of things, hook up the audio output to the phone line somehow and CALL somebody! Ha! For now, give Say the heave-ho. CLI opens up a new CLI window. There's a similar command in the c directory called, oddly enough, "NewCLI". Type NewCLI in a CLI window and you've got another. I'm putting all these commands, etc, in capital letters for your benefit, remember. DOS doesn't give a hoot. Diskcopy is just that. Workbench proceedure is to pick up the FROM disk with the mouse and drop it onto the TO disk, and Diskcopy does the rest. It will go bye-bye after you get MarauderII, a much-needed disk-copying program. As far as store-bought software goes, MarauderII is first on the list, followed closely by FaccII. MarauderII, besides allowing you to make copies of most of your copy-protected disks, has an extremely impor- tant diskcopy Verification feature. We'll always use it for important disks. Format will be much-used, but not from an icon. You'll usually type in Format and the name of the drive the disk to be formatted is in. You, the budding Amigalite, don't want a stupid Trashcan on your clean disk as the Workbench's Initialize command demands on giving you, so the CLI allows you to format the disk clean. Handy little fella! Format drive df1: name Empty noicons Format is VERY particular as to corrent usage, so write it down. As a rule you usually format in drive df1, just to keep it away from Workbench. Don't want any nasty accidents! The name is up to you but you have to have the word "name" there in the command. To be technical, the subcommand "noicons" should actually read "notrash", as it's really keeping the Trashcan directory from being created, with, of course, its humble icon. I don't want to "be technical" in this tutorial, but there are definitely some things we want to pay attention to. When and where directories are being created is one of them. Especially, ahem, without our permission. InitPrinter: Don't have the slightest idea what it is and have never seen any documentation on it. All I know is my printer hates it. Send it to the great Byte God in the Sky. If your printer doesn't work, THEN try it. NoFastMem is a seldom-used command, but keep it around. Of the multitudes of progs, hacks and games I've run this last year, I have found exactly ONE program that used it, and it wasn't even documented, I discovered it by accident. If, or should I say, because you have a meg of Ram, the first Ram to be used up is FastMem, the expansion pack. It was only when I had a bunch of stuff up on the screen and a bunch of stuff stored in Ram that this certain program suddenly ran much faster. I made some room in Ram and sure enough the program was "slow" again. Having never had the chance/ opportunity/need to use NoFastMem, it took me a little while to figure out what was going on and try it out. Which brings us to... SlowMemLast, which I never HAVE used. We automatically, as far as I know, use our FastMem first, which, unless I've misplaced my physics book, means that SlowMem would come after, or "last". Good-bye. SetMap you definitely can bomb. Way way down the road on a rainy wintery day you can dust it off and try to make it do something besides goof up your keyboard. Don't, however, delete it until you've erased the SetMap command from the startup-sequence. More on that later. If there's nothing left if the System drawer you need an icon for (you don't need it for NoFastMem, Diskcopy and Format), you can clean things up a bit with "Delete System.info", which will erase the System's drawer icon. The System directory will still be there, just not cluttering up our Bench with a useless icon. Well, okay, if you really want to keep it, go ahead. * I love icons, by the way, have tons in storage. If you want to keep the icon around just for fun, but want the disk space from the program back, re- member just use the CLI and Delete the program file, but not the .info file. * Those are the directories that have/had icons attached. We'll make a small sidetrip experiment for a while and then come back to the Workbench and take a good look (haul out that eraser!) at the files in the other directories. Okay..feeling brave? We're going to take a tiny, hesitant step into the dreaded Interlace land.. Few dare to tread there! Few have survived to tell the tale... Turn down the lights and close the curtains. Pop open the Prefs (if you haven't renamed it "Prefs" by now, don't blame me), activate the Interlace box and Save that rascal. Now don't be scared..the first time I did this it only cost me $179 in the shop, a stiff warning from the store owner not to do it again and an afternoon in court due to the ensuing litigation from Commodore. Ready? Okay, upon re-booting open the Bench window and see what you think. Looks like hell, doesn't it? Open the Prefs and adjust the Bench colors with the color slide gadgets. They go from 0 to 15, with 0 being at the far left. Click in the slide box to move the pointers one at a time, move them so they read: blue - 0 white - 6 black - 0 gold - 7 0 7 0 5 6 7 0 0 Amazing, eh? #2's obviously the main reason for the Interlace jitter. Not fiddling with the colors is the main reason most people think Interlace is for the birds..they just boot it up, go "Yecch!", and that's that. The main reason you don't see it in the stores is because of the bright lighting. This is obviously a low light, non-glare situation. I ran #1 at 0,0,6 for a long time but recently moved it down to 0,0,5. The perfect Prefs setting just kind of evolves as you do. Okay, now for the fun: Pop open a few windows, your Directory Utility if you've got one, hey, twice the screen size! Room!! The Interlace mode, fairly unique, compliments of Commodore. If you've got bad eyes even the toned-down Pref colors may not be acceptable, in which case I'd suggest you start saving your money and look around for a high-persistance monitor that'll suit your needs. So now that we've got some room, drag the Workbench down to the bottom half of the screen and open up a nice big CLI window in the upper half. Type "Dir devs opt a". You'll see the keymaps (dir) and the files within, the printers (dir) and a bunch of printer drivers, the clipboards (dir) and nothing within (unless you used the Paste and Save features of the Notepad..this is where it saves them), a couple of misc devices, that little system-configuration (232 bytes) that Prefs saves, and the good ol' MountList, which you should Type just to see a classic example of computer- speak. MountList is used in conjunction with the CLI command Mount for hard drives. Now, (heh heh heh..) for the deletion part. You don't need any of the keymaps, this isn't Sweden, so: Delete devs/keymaps all and it's good-bye usefulllessness. Don't miss them if you possibly can! Again, stick with me 'til we do the startup-sequence or there's gonna be problems. SetMap looks for one of these keymaps. Next (wringing his sweaty hands..), the ("NO! NO!") printer drivers! In my case I have an Epson EX-800 and the manual told me a JX-80 driver would do, so I kept that one and blew off the rest. If you have a printer but haven't deleted the unnecessary drivers yet, it would probably be quicker just to "Delete Devs/Printers all" then "MakeDir Devs/Printers" then copy the driver over from the Workbench master. Unless, of course, you have a Directory Utility. For the rest of you lugs, just "Delete Devs/Printers all" and be done with it. We'll leave the Clipboards directory and device alone as other programs may want them. If you'll never have a printer you can bomb the printer.de- vice. Get rid of that terrible reminder of how much you DON'T know about computers by deleting the MountList and that's it for devs. Now "Dir l". We won't touch any of this stuff. A few programs down the road will kindly request we put some small handler file in our l directory. No problem, we're very generous and are glad to accomodate them. As long as they keep under, sa-a-ay, a thousand bytes. I run a subroutine called Conman which has a handler file of a whopping 184 bytes, but I, wishing to set a sterling example for all Amigakind, generously, no, benevolantly allow a file that size to clog up my heretofore unsullied l directory. Now it's lib's turn. Maathieeedoubbas can go if you don't want the Calculator or simply can't pronounce it. The directory t is a backup for the Ed program. That's why it takes Ed so long to write what seems like a relatively small text file, because it's writing it twice. Just leave it be, somebody may want it. "Dir s" and there's our new buddy, the startup-sequence. Delete the "startup-sequence.hd" to get rid of the suggested hard drive sequence. It's really bad, by the way. When you get a hard drive you'll look at this one, look at the manufacturer's suggested sequence, throw them both in the (real) trash and make your own like everybody else does. That's "everybody else" as in "Amiga owners", of course. "Everybody else" as in "everybody else" means people who just turn a switch on. We'll play around with the start-seq in a few minutes. By the way, the Clock is just another tool and can either be left where it is or dropped, literally, into the Utilities a.k.a. Tools drawer. There'll be times in the future when the tables turn and YOU'RE scratching for every last byte, and then you'll go back through these directories and blow away things like the translator.lib and the narrator.device, which Say- type programs look for, as well as lots of unnecessary c commands, etc. Now the Big Daddy of them all, the c directory: Now unless you KNOW you need any of the following commands, in the CLI type: Delete c/Ask Delete c/BindDrivers Delete c/ChangeTaskPri Delete c/DiskChange Delete c/Edit Delete c/FileNote Delete c/Join Delete c/Lab Delete c/Mount Delete c/Protect Delete c/Relabel Delete c/Search Delete c/SetDate Delete c/Skip Delete c/Sort Having a good time? The majority of those commands are advanced DOS commands which you might need as you progress in compuspeak. They're right there, safely tucked away on the master disk for immediate copyage, so don't hesitate to wipe them out. Again, make sure you don't re-boot until we streamline your st-seq or it'll look for BindDrivers and stop. So let's do it: Type "Ed s/startup-sequence" and there it is. See the Esc key on the upper left of your keyboard? That's our main key for Ed commands. The cursor moves with the arrow keys. Move to the line that starts with "echo A500...", etc, hit the Esc key then the "d" key, then Return. Goodby, advertisement! Do the same thing to worthless-unless-you- have-a-hard-drive BindDrivers. Now just to briefly pre-explain this next bunch of gibberish, "sys:" is like df0:, df1: and ram: except it's kind of a wildcard. The line could read "if exists df0:system", "df0" instead of "sys:", and it would also work perfectly. Use df0 until you understand Sys a little better. Anyway, we KNOW the System directory is on df0, so we don't need all this yak. And, may I remind you, the commands If and Endif have to be read off the disk, so it's basically time-consuming and well as needless. The idea is to issue the command "Path System Add" if the System directory exists, which we know does. The "Add" is also unnecessary so those six lines get con- densed to: Path System Path Utilities The command Path can accept an extended string, so the final command ends up: Path df0:System df0:Utilities Six lines down to one! When we get done you'll want to time our new startup versus the master disk. Next is Dir Ram:, a classic case of somebody-not-meeting-with-somebody. Documented in some DOS book is the mention that the Ram dir is created automatically whenever you call attention to it for the first time, like with a Dir command...or a...Path. And there it is right below, "Path Ram:", like that makes sense. So move the cursor back up to the Path command and add "Ram:" after "df0:Utilities". As far as my using the "df0:" there, I prefer to draw the whole path to it just so things are clear. Blast that "Dir Ram" the hell out of there and take SetMap along with it. You'll use AddBuffers until you pick up a copy, oops, excuse me, dirty word, pick up your FaccII disk down at the store and get it going. Briefly, when you run AddBuffers it takes storage out of Ram and allocates it for remembering the stuff that most recently took place. Then it calls it out of memory instead of having to re-access the disk, MUCH quicker. Using the Delete, backspace and arrow keys, change the 20 to 150 and delete all the rest of that crap. If you have a meg of Ram, change it to 300 or something (it won't hurt anything) and have fun. Make sure to leave that space after the colon before the number. Be incredibly generous and give grateful little df1 50 or so. The bad news about AddBuffers, and why it's quickly going to end up on the scrap heap, is that it can't be "turned off" so you can get the Ram back. FaccII is a sophisticated AddBuffers, complete with OFF switch. Compared to every other piece of good software you buy, it's about the least expensive at around $25-$30. And by far and away the most-used, if not appreciated. A great program. Next on the list is LoadWB, which is the one that makes all the racket as the disk icons are loaded. As you may know, LoadWb isn't strickly necessary. If you're running large animations, for instance, LoadWb isn't used. In that case we'd need a different st-seq but fortunately there's a great program out there in BBS/FredFish land called Select that will allow us to CHOOSE our st-seq at the very beginning of boot-up. Nice! You can blow Failat away. We left it in the c directory out of the goodness of our hearts, and may use it some day, but not now. Suffice to say if your SetClock needs Failat 30, your computer's broken. SetClock, perhaps amazingly, is fine just the way it is. You can puzzle out the differnce between opt load and opt save on your own. Scratch Date, like, who needs it. It just types out the date. Endcli > nil: is just fine too. That > nil: directs the "CLI task ending" message EndCLI flashes to zeroland. Same with the clock. Note how the ">" is next to the nil: in SetClock but a space away from it in EndCLI. It only shows that it doesn't matter. If and when you have problems with the st-seq, use the Echo command in front of every command to tell you what's coming next, so you'll be able to see where it fails. Something like Echo "Adding paths.." Path df0:System df0:Utilities Ram: Echo "Adding buffers.." AddBuffers df0: 150 df1: 50 So gee, uh, didn't leave much, did we? Looks to me like we've got Path df0:System df0:Utilities Ram: AddBuffers df0: 150 df1: 50 LoadWb SetClock > nil: opt load EndCLI > nil: Hate to say it, but that's all! Hit Esc, then "x", then Return to save it. * Reboot this puppy and check that startup time. And the semi-amazing thing is that it's the exact same startup result we had at the beginning, except that now we're, hopefully, in Interlace mode. We also, taking a glance at the "byte gauge", apparently have a little more disk space to work with. We're not keeping Notepad on this disk so: Dir fonts opt a ;to take a look, if you haven't Delete fonts all ;watch the byte gauge on this one! MakeDir fonts Wild, eh? It isn't that there's so many bytes involved, it's that whole bunch of subdirectories. When a directory is created, a certain byteage is kind of "assumed" for that directory, hence all the disk space needed for a bunch of truly bite-sized fonts. When you learn how to use the command Assign we'll get the space back AND save the fonts. For now get rid of them. If you're hooked on Notepad and want all the neat fonts, make yourself another copy of Workbench, call it NoteBench and use that disk for quote word-processing unquote. The font you see on the screen, like in a CLI window, is a default font residing deep in the darker recesses of the Amiga. Like the t directory, we may not use the font directory but we want it there just in case some program comes along looking for it. The font you see, by the way, can (naturally!) be changed with a BBS prog named NewFont. I'll mention it later when I list out the BBS/FredFish programs you'll need. * Okay! I'd say that's Step One; clearing some room on the Bench and straightening up the st-seq. Make a master copy of this disk named BlankBench. Whenever you make a master copy of something always boot it up just to make sure it works. This is especially true if you don't have MarauderII yet. Rename this disk Workbench and this is the one we'll use. *