User avatar
Mixel

Posted Wed Nov 20, 2019 6:13 pm

I say noob but really, sort of not.. everything I used to know about the Amiga was from magazines, word of mouth and figuring stuff out by myself.. and I’ve forgotten half of it anyway, haha. :D

Oh no I’ve added loads! Maybe I should have done multiple posts, sorry!

A) is there some sort of tool that’ll flush memory and reduce the screen mode colours.. (preferably a bunch of options for things like resolution..) a few whdload games need a little more chipram than I usually have, so I end up reducing the palette with alarming frequency. An exe for “gaming mode” would be awesome.. can something like that be done with arexx maybe?

B) if I was an idiot and installed everything on a 4GB CF card thinking that was definitely enough, then realised.. actually it kind of isn’t enough and it’d be much nicer to have more whdload games installed, thus needing a bigger cf card.. how would I go about copying the drive over? I’m lucky in that I have a pcmcia card reader too, so I could put a card in that and format it and just copy the contents from one CF card to the other.. ?Would that work? Would I still be able to mount that cf card in WinUAE when I take it out of the Amiga? (I formatted this one originally with WinUAE.. it’s all a bit of a blur tbh.)

C) icon management.. I’m using glowicons, but I still have a lot of old icons and newicons and everything under the sun really. Is there a recommended icon manager that makes swapping icons and so on more streamlined? Also the standard WB icon editor doesn’t even seem to fit most icons in its window, so that’s not much use.. is there a better one?

D) when you have a gotek, can you use the usb stick as mass storage? Or does it only work as a floppy emulator? If you can mount it normally I could turn off my pcmcia port and have more ram, and have a much nicer way to get data to/from the Amiga.

E) the grey border in the space around workbench.. I could swear back in the day I had some sort of tool for making that nonexistent/black.. damned if I can find it though. Would really like the grey border gone, if anyone has any ideas? :?

Ok, that’s (more than!) enough.. Thanks again.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Thu Nov 21, 2019 4:05 am

Hi,

these are quite interesting questions. Some I can answer, not all.

A) I am not aware of such a solution. You might consider booting without startup-sequence and start those games from console. Other than that, there are launchers like TinyLauncher http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/TinyLauncher or X-Bench http://www.jimneray.com/xbench.html.

Some people have solved this by creating a multi-boot environment, i.e. select a different boot partition (or drive) with the early boot menu. one such boot option could contain a very simple Workbench or start e.g. TinyLauncher.

B) yes. You might want to use the copy command with the "clone" option.

C) Check out BestWB (OS 3.1.4) or BetterWB (OS 3.1) for a nice distribution of additional tools for your OS. Does include a nice Icon changer.

D) If the Gotek can do this I am not sure. I do know that the HxC Floppy Emulators can access directories as some sort of virtual floppy.

E) Are you talking about the windowed WorkBench? There is a menu item in the Workbench menu to make the WB be a "backdrop" (afair). Or are you tallking about the borders of Icons? Icons can be adapted. PeterK's icon.library has some extensive options for this, check out the manual. It's included in BetterWB/BestWB iirc and also available on aminet https://aminet.net/package/util/libs/IconLib_46.4 .

Cheers,
McT

User avatar
Mixel

Posted Fri Nov 22, 2019 8:05 pm

Hi! Thanks for answering so many questions! :D
McTrinsic wrote:
Thu Nov 21, 2019 4:05 am
A) I am not aware of such a solution. You might consider booting without startup-sequence and start those games from console. Other than that, there are launchers like TinyLauncher http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/TinyLauncher or X-Bench http://www.jimneray.com/xbench.html.
Oh wow! X-bench looks nice. If I can install that to HDD but trigger it from a bootable floppy disk that would be kind of neat, I'll look into that. Thats a good set of things for me to play around with. :D
B) yes. You might want to use the copy command with the "clone" option.
Ah that's great! I have a slightly borked but almost perfect 16GB workbench CF now. So many odd icon issues, I've ended up manually changing a lot of them, but it's working at least! I think I might need to reduce the write speed or something though as it keeps getting checksum errors... Hmm. At least troubleshooting this is fun, comparatively. All this ancient data i have is very backed up so it doesnt really matter how long it takes to get everything just right.
E) Are you talking about the windowed WorkBench? There is a menu item in the Workbench menu to make the WB be a "backdrop" (afair). Or are you tallking about the borders of Icons? Icons can be adapted. PeterK's icon.library has some extensive options for this, check out the manual. It's included in BetterWB/BestWB iirc and also available on aminet https://aminet.net/package/util/libs/IconLib_46.4 .
I mean around the screen itself.. before the black frame (which likely doesn't exist for everyone!) I have seas of grey.. I can make it centred using overscan settings but i think I remember something removing the grey outside of the usuable screen entirely.. I might be misremembering though. :) I guess if I was using a CRT it'd be less of a problem but I'm stuck with a scart-HDMI converter, on a widescreen display, so it's kind of funny looking with big black bars at the side, then big grey ones, then workbench.

Off to tinker with it some more, ty again!

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sat Nov 23, 2019 4:33 am

Ah, you mean the Overscan area. I do remember POKEing with my C64 to change that.

For the Amiga I am not aware of a program to change that. Try browsing Aminet.

If you find something let me know please 😉🙂.





Return to “Software”