ScuzzBlog: Diaries September 2017 Entry 5th September 2017: Post: 1 It's Assign The msytery that is the Amiga ' ASSIGN '. Not so tricky in truth but the essential tool here is a text editor and knowing where your user-startup file is in the 'S' drawer So let me walk you through the process. First though a quick note to those that don't remember the days when there really was no hard drives. The Amiga was very much designed on the basis of using the floppy drive for its data. The Amiga 1000 even had its ROM on a Kickstart disk. So for those that used the Amiga in the early days they would have been confronted with endless disk swapping. Enter the hard drive and suddenly you were able to action all your programs from the Workbench on the hard drive. Sadly though most software was still disk based and without a hard drive installer built into the program disk, booting could prove a bit tricky as when you clicked the icon, it probably wanted the floppy disk. Without it you would get an error. The answer is the ASSIGN. This basically fools the Amiga into thinking the floppy exists on the hard drive. It is a simple as that. So a simple line or two added to the user-startup and you are good to go. Here is how. So prepare to set your faces to stun as Bart once said First you need a disk that you can copy. For this I use the excellent PD Game by Tobias Richter called Ultimate Star Trek To make this a little more challenging the game is on two disks. Note that many games would not boot into the Workbench screen so make sure you can see the disks on the screen You will need to make a note of the name of the disks. In this case STGAME and STDATA Just pop the disks in one at a time and check You will need to locate the S drawer on your Workbench . To do this use the drop down menu and show all icons as the drawer is often not visible. Click the S drawer and see if you can find the file called ' user-startup '. Do not edit the main startup file. I am showing this here just so you know which file we will be editing and where it is located This is what it will look like when we have edited the file. First though, create a drawer on your computer and simply drag the disk icon for each disk into that drawer and make a note of the full path to the drawer. ie Work:games/trek For the next part fire up a simple text editor If you haven't got one then go get one from Aminet. I use CygnusED but any will do Simply add the lines shown to the 'user-startup' file located in your S drawer.... Note that the file path is the path to the drawers you created Save and reboot and have a cuppa tea. Mine has gone cold. Never mind. Now when you click on the disk icons you created in your very own trek drawer... the magic begins The game will run from the hard drive Ahead full Mr Sulu Have fun The lights you see on the screen are from lamps in the room. And the images are from actual photographs simply taken of the screen Days when we had monitors with curved glass. The Amiga is an Amiga 1200 with a GVP Turbo running on a 1084 monitor. The Amiga also has a 4MB Amitek PCMCIA RAM card. I have set this machine to look as close as possible to how I remember things being in 1994 so I am using my first generation software and icons. And the screen isn't that curved, blurred or dark it is just that modern cameras are truly crap

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Last updated 05/09/2017

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