Ian L. Pine wrote: > I have (on loan until its owner decides how best to dispose of it) an Amiga > 1200. There are no manuals and the only software a collection of disks - > mostly games - plus a couple of disks which appear to contain a minimal > X-Window style operating system which enables you to explore the files and > folders on the disk (but precious little else). There appears to be no > built-in software in ROM other than a BIOS and boot loader because the > system requires a boot disk to be inserted before anything will happen.
The Amiga has a bootloader in ROM (Kickstart) which is then used to load the actual operating system (AmigaDOS + Workbench). The "minimal X-Window style operating system" is just that. You will need this to be running before you can run any other programs, including the Amiga QL emulator. Mauny Amiga 1200s had an internal hard disk, yours doesn't seem to. Oh well, this means that you'll be swapping floppies a great deal and I'm not sure that QDOS4Amiga will actually fit on one and be usable. By the way, you can do some things in Kickstart. When you switch the machine on or reset it with Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga hold down both mouse buttons. You will now be brought into a settings menu where you can find s small amount of info about the machine and change settings (for that boot only) for the processor cache, video chip mode (old mode, new mode) and video format (PAL or NTSC.. and as the clock is based upon the frame rate, the machine in NTSC mode will run 1/5th faster than in PAL mode). Did you know... that most of AmigaDOS version 1 was written on Sinclair QLs using the Metacomco BCPL compiler by Metacomco. AmigaDOS is based upon Tripos, a little known operating system written in Cambridge. Steve _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
