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Relearning Old Skills Blog
6th March 2022
Good grief, what a struggle it's been!

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Yesterday was spent almost entirely focused on the Amiga.
The A600 is a bog standard, unexpanded model, with only a Compact Flash card slapped into it's PCMCIA slot.
The software that came with the CF reader (EasyADF) allows you to boot up and access the drive, but requires a disk swap between the EasyADF disk and the Workbench disk before it's up and running.
Obviously, this is a little more wear and tear on the floppy drive/disk than I'd like. The system's not exactly getting any younger. So instead I set about making my own boot disk.

I grabbed the compact flash library, the fat95 library and a couple of other useful bits from the EasyADF disk, alongside a fresh copy of the Workbench disk, then sat trying to remember how to put everything together into one.
The Compact Flash loads as device CF0:, and I realised that if I mount that early enough in the boot, I can actually switch over to that to load everything else during boot.
Ooooh.
The Startup-Sequence then looks a little like this..
Mount CF0:
CF0:
Assign C: CF0:C
Assign SYS: CF0:


And then continues to assign all the Libs/L/Devs/etc folders, before continuing on through all the typical Workbench boot loading stuff.

It's MUCH quicker at booting, now, and as much as the floppy disk is still a regular looking Workbench disk, I could actually strip out 90% of its contents and leave it as just the Mount command, alongside a few devs and libs, and the Startup-Sequence.

My task now is to find suitable utils/games that work nicely from a folder, as opposed to a disk, and then work on somehow getting a quick and easy set of icons somewhere that I can access them without trawling through a "hard drive" full of files.

Oh, and also, I really could do with a tool to clean out all those nasty MacOS ._file's that end up strewn around the compact flash!!

Oh yeah, and I had to do all of that without a smegging mouse, and it was horrible!!! Bring on the new mouse!
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