Welcome to the latest set of patches and additions to Amithlon 1.0.1. LEGALESE ======== Recent disagreements over the legal status of patches released by me have unfortunately made the following necessary. While I personally regret having to do this sort of stuff, please read these rules carefully and follow them --- I _will_ enforce them if need be! The files in this archive are only to be used with correctly purchased versions of Amithlon. Any use in any other environment is strictly forbidden. All files are (C) Bernd Meyer, 2002. The files in this archive are provided to extend and improve your Amithlon experience. They explicitly are not part of Amithlon. To stress this point, any redistribution of individual files from this archive, as well as of the whole archive, is strictly forbidden, except where explicitly allowed. In particular, any mirroring on any web or ftp site other than www.amithlon.net requires the written permission of the author. Equally, any distribution on any other medium requires such a written permission. Furthermore, these files are made available free of charge as a service by the copyright holder, Bernd Meyer. Mr. Meyer retains all rights to the code contained in them. Mr. Meyer reserves the right to withdraw these files from distribution at any time, without prior announcement. It is strictly forbidden for third parties to make any representation of the files contained in this archive without written permission. WHAT'S IN THERE =============== This archive contains a number of previously unreleased patches, as well as not-officially-released patches, and updates to some patches currently available through other sources. Please read the descriptions to find out which patches you want to install, and then read the "INSTALL" section on how to do it. The following patches are included in this archive: patch1_fpp.o: This patch fixes a number of inaccuracies in the UAE FPU emulation. The most prominent example of this was the failure of brush mapping in Imagine 5.0. You want this! patch3_compemu_fpp.o: This patch fixes a number of inaccuracies in the JIT compiler's FPU emulation. This is an updated version of a patch distributed as part of Haage&Partner's official AmigaOS XL update. NOTE: This patch integrates the patch1_fucomi.o patch that was previously released for testing. Please do not use both, as they could possibly conflict! patch1_msdos.o: A simple patch that will repair the broken FAT support in Amithlon 1.0.1. Please note that this patch requires a reboot to become active. Also, there have been some reports that this patch causes problems in some configurations. Please see README.msdos for more details. patch1_parport.o: This is a bit of a hack. It will add emulation for the Amiga's original parallel port to Amithlon. Any accesses to that port are internally translated into accesses to a PC parallel port at address $378. If your setup is working fine with powerpar.device, you don't want this. If, however, you are one of the unfortunate users whose printer doesn't get along with powerpar.device, you can install this patch. You will then have to switch your printing back to AmigaOS's usual parallel.device. You will also need to set your PC's parallel port to address $378 in the BIOS. patch3_mouse.o: This is an updated version of the mouse/keyboard patch included in H&P's AmigaOS XL update. This one provides ways to inform the driver of the number of wheels on your mouse, and to prevent it from locking up the keyboard controller. More details in README.mousepatch Also included are amithlon_patcher and dumppatch. Dumppatch is a small utility which will print out information about the patches you have installed. Amithlon_patcher is a program that will apply patches to your system. PLEASE READ THE NEXT SECTION CAREFULLY! INSTALL ======= First of all, do get the official AmigaOS XL update from Haage & Partner. It contains a number of patches that were not included with this archive as they are considered part of Amithlon. Once you have that update installed, you will have a directory called S:amithlon_patches. You should also have a brand new executable in C:AmithlonC/AmithlonSetup, which should be 2876 bytes in size. You can install patches you want to load simply by copying them into the S:amithlon_patches directory. AmithlonSetup (which should be called as part of your Startup-Sequence) will then load all the patches it finds there. Unfortunately, AmithlonSetup does not check for outdated or obsoleted patches. So you will have to be especially careful not to have conflicting patches installed. As a rule of thumb, if you have a newer version of a patch, remove (or rather, archive) the old one. But for example in the case of patch1_fucomi, it isn't immediately obvious that patch3_compemu_fpp replaces it.... If you suspect that there is a conflict between some patches you have installed, simply run amithlon_patcher in a CLI window. It will output a lot of info, including warnings about patches that were obsoleted by other patches. If for some reason you'd rather load your patches with amithlon_patcher than with AmithlonSetup, you can run it in Startup-Sequence. However, you then need to a) make sure you have sufficient stack at that point. I.e. have a "stack 65536" before calling amithlon_patcher b) downgrade your version of AmithlonSetup to that included on the original AmigaOS XL CD, to avoid double-patching. Please not that, while having amithlon_patcher automatically check the module dependencies for you is a good thing, you really should keep your collection of patches properly cleaned up. Also please note that the version of amithlon_patcher included in this archive is considerably more advanced than any distributed previously. So please replace any already installed versions with this one! PATCHES FROM H&P UPDATE ======================= While the H&P update contained a number of patches, it didn't provide any information as to what they did, and also didn't include the dumppatch utility. So here is some info. Note that the files described here are *not* part of this archive! patch1_right_ctrl.o: This patch fixes a very silly problem where the right CTRL key would never send a release event. In effect, pressing it would permanently lock the keyboard in Control mode (at least until one pressed the left CTRL key once). You want this! patch1_shifting.o: This patch disables the JIT compiler for a very rarely used variant of the shift and rotate instruction. It produced wrong results for them. patch1_vec.o: There was a problem where some safety-net code miscalculated the length of some x86 instructions, and could in bad circumstances lead to the x86 CPU executing essentially random code. This fixes that miscalculation. CAUTION: ======== When playing around with this stuff, there is a chance that you may make your AmigaOS installation unbootable. So please be sure to have the original AmigaOS XL CD close by. If you happen to run into a situation where you can't boot into the OS3.9 on your hard drive anymore, simply boot from the CD, hold down both mouse buttons to get into the Early Startup Menu, and select HDH0 as the boot device. This should give you a system from which you can delete patches or edit config files on your hard drive installation.