djh@metaphor.metaphor.com (Dallas Hodgson) (06/26/90)
I've had the Abacus Disk Drives book for some time. Of all the Abacus books, this is arguably the most "hack-oriented" book with plenty of RKM disassembled source fragments, ROM-jumping, etc. I found it enlightening for raising your consciousness about how AmigaDOS handles certain low-leve disk aspects internally. For example, did you know that AmigaDOS doesn't make use of the hardware's index sync? The low-level MFM chapter is much too short, and there are many typos from the German translation - but, no body else has written anything like this, and for the curious programmer it's fine. P.S. I don't advocate jumping into ROM or grabbing hardware ports w/o resource allocation for commercial software!
a275@mindlink.UUCP (Travers Naran) (06/29/90)
> djh@metaphor.metaphor.com writes: > > Msg-ID: <1252@metaphor.Metaphor.COM> > Posted: 25 Jun 90 18:15:24 GMT > > Org. : Metaphor Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA > Person: Dallas Hodgson > > > I've had the Abacus Disk Drives book for some time. Of all the Abacus books, > this is arguably the most "hack-oriented" book with plenty of RKM > disassembled > source fragments, ROM-jumping, etc. I found it enlightening for raising your > consciousness about how AmigaDOS handles certain low-leve disk aspects > internally. For example, did you know that AmigaDOS doesn't make use of > the hardware's index sync? The low-level MFM chapter is much too short, and > there are many typos from the German translation - but, no body else has > written anything like this, and for the curious programmer it's fine. > > P.S. I don't advocate jumping into ROM or grabbing hardware ports w/o > resource allocation for commercial software! I noticed that about all Abacus books relating to the Amiga, but then again, that's what they were doing with the Commodore 64 too! In fact, as I recall, that was one of the selling points for the Abacus books on the Commodore 64 was their hacker style of looking at the operating system and the whole machine. :-) But unfortunately, when I read the Abacus Machine Language book I was forced to give it up for the RKM's. It was too hack oriented and it is still using 1.1 Kickstart and Dos! OldOpenLibrary? Get real! I also noticed that attitude in the Dos book too which made me choose to forget the book. Unlike the Commodore 64, which was basically a static machine in terms of ROM, etc. The Amiga is dynamic and there are no guarantees on the internal orginization of the Operating System, in the sense of what is actually happening behind the scenes, so that way the Amiga can continue to grow happily. :-) -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Travers "T'aran" Naran (I am male) Simon Fraser University, Computing Science Whovian, Prober, Treker, Quantum Leaper.... Mailing addresses: Usenet Travers_Naran@mindlink.UUCP or uunet!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!Travers_Naran ------------------------------------------------------------------