ScuzzBlog: Diaries December 2020
Entry 27th December 2020: Post 1: Amiga - Virus Protection.
Amiga - Virus Protection.
With the constant use of the floppy drive with the Amiga and the
ability to hold things in memory even after a soft boot it was
kinda important not to spread nasty viruses around your disks.
For the most part you would have some form of protection set up
through the 'user-startup'. This would involve a small menu header
appearing at the top of the Workbench which kicked into gear each
time you inserted a disk.
The problem I had with the checker was that no matter what disk
it seemed I inserted it identified a none-standard Bootblock and
gave me the option to learn or remove or both. I can imagine a lot
of authentic disks being destroyed this way.
In the decades I have been using the Amiga I only got this one
virus which came from an internet download for the game Bubble-
Bobble. You can read what happened in the blog I will attach.
Sadly without the virus checker being frequently updated it was
pretty pointless as an application. In the end it got to be a real
annoyance and so was removed. I didn't use the virus checker that
I feature in the first images but I did use the one on the PD disk.
So what did the virus checker do. It would analyse and check your
disks against a known virus database. And like I say it would
throw up a screen of the bootblock and advise if it was standard
or a none-standard form. The checker would learn new viruses along
with boot sectors of valuable software. In doing so it could repair
boot sectors that become contaminated or broken.
Most important virus checkers would protect you against ByteBandit,
Bytewarrior, Ellershaw, Lammer, Micromaster, Northstar, Pentagon
Revenge, SCA, VKill... the one I show is from Online Entertainment.
I have mentioned this before but there was a tradition in Amiga
and similar shops to have the jewel cased PD software on show at
the counter while you queued to pay for things. And trust me there
was always queues at the computor stores. I would often buy one of
the disks as they really were very cheap.
Hercules is a very powerful disk copying utility for making multiple
copies of disks. The ProTracker and OctaMed need no introduction.
Text Engine was so valuable in the day I have to say. With Reorg
being one of those programs you just always had available .
I made this blog cus someone reported a new virus doing the circuits.
This isn't a problem for me as I very rarely download software. I
only caught that virus cus of a download I used to feature in a
blog. I certainly learned my lesson. In truth if you purchase the
real deal and keep all your best stuff write protected you shouldn't
have a problem. It has never featured highly as being most needed.
Amiga - Virus Protection.
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