Welcome to a second 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. 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 couple of previously unreleased patches, and an update to one previously available patch. At least one of those patches is highly experimental, so 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: patch2_vec.o: This is an updated version of the "safety net" patch included in H&P's AmigaOS XL update. This one makes pgp 2.6.3 work on Amithlon patch1_p4.o: This one will check for a peculiarity of the Pentium4 (which in one detail behaves different from any other x86 CPU I am aware of), and if it finds it, works around that peculiarity. Please note that this will slow things down a little bit on P4 machines, but without this patch, P4s may exhibit strange behaviour (like checksum errors) patch1_zip.o This is a highly experimental patch improving the handling of removable media (ZIP and LS-120 drives) in Amithlon. Note: Don't install this if you don't need it. The things it does are *not* nice. With this patch, you should be able to eject disks at any time. Also included is an executable called "p96changer" ZIP drive patch, caveats ======================== a) LS-120 support still sucks big time, due to the way the LS-120 handles single sector reads. There is only so much that can be handled with a runtime patch, sorry Thomas :( b) You need to have a medium in the drive when Amithlon starts; No after-the-fact detection c) No automatic disk change detection --- you will have to issue a "diskchange" command. Also keep in mind that all your ZIP disks need to be partitioned identically for this to work! d) This has only been tested with one IDE ZIP drive, and three ZIP media. It _should_ work on SCSI ones, too, but that's untested. e) IOTools won't work, sorry f) IDE ZIP drives will show up at somewhat unusual unit numbers in amithlon.device However, if you need ZIP drive support, this might be better than nothing. P96changer ========== p96changer is a program that makes using the VESA framebuffer driver a bit easier. It will detect if that driver is used, and if so, adjust the Workbench preferences to match the actual colour depth. It can be placed in your startup-sequence just before loading the P96 drivers (i.e. just before "C:LoadMonDrvs"). Once you have done so, you should be able to boot up with any (valid) parameter in the "vga=xxx" boot parameter, and Workbench will automatically adapt. INSTALL ======= First of all, do get both the official AmigaOS XL update from Haage & Partner, as well as the first Contrib collection from www.amithlon.net. Between them, they contain a large number of patches that were not included with this archive. 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. Of the patches contained in this archive, only one replaces an existing one; So please make sure to remove patch1_vec.o when you install patch2_vec.o 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. 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.