(...continued from last article)
No guru appeared, but an alert with the same meaning was displayed at the usual place of the Guru. The message was : 'Software Failure - Press left mouse button to continue. (Next line) Error: 8000 0003 Task : 00ae24. That means the system crashes are (in this Alpha Version) still not removed. But I hope they will in the final version.
A new shell ?
After this 'Guru' test I played a bit with the mouse while using Xoper and accidently I pressed the left mouse button two times, and what happened ??? A second cursor appeared at this position. Now you can mark some text somewhere in your window and print it out at the currently position of the normal cursor. You do this with the right mouse button. I don't know for what this should be good for (do you ? ).
Workbench V1.4
Now I wanted to load the Workbench to see wether something is new or better. But after I typed Loadwb a requester appeared with the following text : "Could not find device or library (next line) (this requester will get better)". So I think in the new version the Workbench wont be in the Kickstart, but on disk. That means that the things which are important for the Workbench will be loaded from disk. The name of this library is "workbench.library". But I've found also some other things like some informations, that a (some) coprocessor(s) from Motorola will be supported (perhaps the 68881 and the 68882). I've found also some other things but I'm not sure for what they are, so I won't spread any rumours which aren't true.
Booting from external drives
Now I wanted to try out if you can also boot from external drives. I inserted a disk in df1: and ... the Amiga booted from this drive. But drive df1: rests df1: and not like some other programs, which make df1: to df0:. For example you booted from df1: and want to look at the contents of the disk you must type : 'dir df1:' and not 'dir df0:'.
Compatibility
System programs, which are programmed well (that means no jumps to absolute addresses ) run under Kick V1.4 perfectrly. But games, for example, often crash. Also some demos don't run. Most of the programs which load directly from the bootblock, don't work and cause a (not a Guru). An example : I wanted to copy a disk and loaded 'XCOPY V2.0' the screen got black and nothing happened... Then I pressed the left mouse button and the XCOPY user screen appeared. XCOPY worked, but the intro before didn't (It was only a scroll). So a message to all programmers : Don't use absolute jumps into the Kickstart, because if you do this under Kick V1.2 it will work, but under Kick V1.3 and V1.4 it wont because the things could be at some other addresses. ! USE ONLY RELATIVE JUMPS !
Viruses under Kickstart V1.4
No more problems with Viruses under Kick V1.4, because in this prerelease all vectors are set to zero after a reset. (I think only in the prerelease, because if all vectors are cleared after each reset, you can't use reset resident programs ( ramdisks, utilities ...). And resident programs are sometimes very useful, so I hope Commodore will solve this problem.
The last words
I hope now you know a bit more about the new Kickstart V1.4. It will appear somewhere in the next two years. (1991 !!) Special greetings go to all those happy A1000 owners, who can test pre- releases of new Kicks and who can use Antivirus Kicks.
This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #1" by Brainstorm 1989.
Some content may refer to activities that are illegal in some countries. BitFellas does not support such activity.
Addresses and other contact information were only valid when this magazine was originally published, in october of 1989.
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