LAP - Workbench 1.3 HDD Installation

There is an obvious way to run Workbench 1.3 and that is by simply booting from the floppy disk like the vast majority of A500 users would have had to do. However, we are not so restricted with the emulator, and we have already set up a configuration with a hard disk. So let's install Workbench 1.3 to the hard disk.

This is tricky, because although we are only really copying two disks (the Workbench Disk and the Extras Disk), the a500 does not natively support a hard disk. What happened if you bought a hard disk for an a500 (such as the A590) was that it came with a some ROM software on it which allowed the disk to be recognised.

If you boot the A500HD system that we have configured, you won't see the Hard Disk. There is a work around for this, but it is a bit tricky, so lets take our time. What we are going to do is boot from a Kickstart 2.04 ROM (as found in the A500+) and use that to format the Hard Disk. We are then going to extract a file from the Workbench disk, and put it in our Roms directory. As best as I can guess this file effectively does the job of the ROM chip originally found on the A590.

So, what you need to do is put a Kickstart 2.04 ROM into the ~/amiga/roms directory. You then boot the A500HD...

uae -f ~/amiga/A500HD.uaerc

...but use the GUI to swap from the Workbench 1.3 ROM to the 2.04 ROM. You also need to load the Workbench 1.3 disk into df0:.

Once Workbench has started up, the hard disk should now show up, as an icon with a funny name: "dh0: ndos". You select that and then choose Icon->Format from the top of the screen (hold down the right mouse button, move to the word Icon, move to the option Format in the drop down menu that appears, and let go of the mouse button). Say yes a couple of times, and it should start formatting.

Once you are done, select the new disk (now called "Empty") and choose Icon->Rename at the top and call it System. You can now shutdown the emulator. If you restart the A500HD system now it should revert to the 1.3 ROM, meaning that once again the hard disk will no longer be visible.

Now is the trickiest bit. We need to extract the file system information from the Workbench disk, and store a copy in the ~/amiga/roms directory. To get at the ~/amiga/roms directory from inside the Amiga, we need to mount it. Start up the A500HD system, and in the GUI, go to the Hard Disks tab, and choose 'add'. Then, in the dialogue box that pops up, choose select and navigate INTO the /root/amiga/roms directory. Then click OK. The path box should now show:

/root/amiga/roms

Then in the 'device name' box, put dh1 (the disk we just formatted is set up as dh0). In 'Volume name' put temp. Click OK and start the emulation.

Once it is up and running, double click on the Workbench 1.3 disk, and double click on 'shell' in the window that opens. From there run the following command to copy the file system information to the temporarily linked roms directory:

COPY L:FastFileSystem temp:

This [COPY]s the file [FastFileSystem] from the folder named [L] directory to the folder named [temp]. Note that the Amiga system assigns names to folders. The [L] folder is on df0:, but can be referred to simply as [L]. Equally, we could have (I think) copied to [dh1:] instead of [temp:] and it should not have made a difference. Next, quit the emulator, exit the GUI. Apparently we should now get access to the hard disk using the 1.3 ROM and 1.3 Workbench. Did I get access? Did I fuck.

I restarted the emulation and got no fucking hard disk the first few times. I carefully checked the messages coming from the xterm window from which I had started the emulator. The messages indicated that the emulator was looking for the file "FastFileSystem". I had the file "fastfilesystem". Bugger. I realised I had typed:

COPY L:fastfilesystem temp:

And it turns out that this is very case sensitive. I sorted out my mistake with the following:

mv ~/amiga/roms/fastfilesystem ~/amiga/roms/FastFileSystem 

The next time I booted, I got a shiny new System disk on the desktop. With 1.3 you do not get a fancy HDD icon. To install Workbench, with the Workbench disk in df0: and extras in df1:, open the 'shell' program again, and run:

COPY DF0: System: ALL 
COPY DF1: System: ALL 

Which seems to be perfectly sensible commands to me. Then quit the
shell:

endcli

And reboot. It should boot straight to the Workbench from the HDD. To boot straight to the Workbench 1.3 desktop you would amend the line in .xinitrc to read:

exec /usr/bin/uae -G -f ~/amiga/A500HD.uaerc &

If you want to create a menu entry for openbox (assuming you installed it) you would add the following text to the [~/.config/openbox/menu.xml] file:

<menu id="euae-menu" label="Emulated Amigas">
<item label="A500HD">
<action name="Execute"><execute>/usr/bin/uae -G -f ~/amiga/A500HD.uaerc</execute></action>
</item>
</menu>

I would suggest sticking it between the Multimedia and System sections. You would then add the line...

<menu id="euae-menu"/>

... to the section at the end of the file, again between Multimedia and System.