The Amiga Guru Book.PDF

The

Amiga

Guru Book

a reference manual

Ralph Babel

Falkenweg 3

D-65232 Taunusstein

Federal Republic Of Germany

Disclaimer: UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories

Some assembly required

The Surgeon General has determined that smoking is hazardous to your health

I was holding it for a friend

Product is sold as is with no warranty, either expressed or implied

- Mike Robinson, net.micro.amiga

Although I do contract work for Amiga-LosGatos, my opinions probably don't

represent those of Commodore or its management or its engineers, but I think the

world would be a better place if they did.

- Dale Luck, comp.sys.amiga, <326@boing.UUCP>

These vi,ews are my own and no one else's. They could be yours too, just call

MrgCop() and then RethinkDisplay()!

- Chuck McManis, comp.sys.amiga

Reading legal mush can turn your brain to guacamole!

- Amiga ROM KernelReference Manual: Includes €:J Autodocs, 2nd edition

in whole or in part, be copied, photocopied, reproduced, recorded, stored in a data base

or in a retrieval system, transmitted, distributed, or translated by any means or in any

form, electronic, machine-readable, mechanical, or otherwise, without prior consent, in

writing, of the author. Printed in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Babel, Ralph:

The Amiga Guru Book (Taunusstein, 1993);

based on the German edition Das Amiga-Guru-Buch (Taunusstein, 1989).

DISCLAIMER: THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,

EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES

OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE. FURTHER, THE AUTHOR

DOES NOT WARRANT, GUARANTEE, OR MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION REGARDING THE USE OF,

OR THE RESULTS OF THE USE OF, THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IN TERMS OF COR-

RECTNESS, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, CURRENTNESS, OR OTHERWISE; THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO

ITS QUALITY AND ACCURACY IS ASSUMED SOLELY BY THE USER. SHOULD THE INFORMATION

PROVE INACCURATE, THE USER (AND NOT THE AUTHOR) ASSUMES THE ENTIRE COST OF ALL

NECESSARY CORRECTION. IN NO EVENT WILL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT,

INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES RESULTING FROM ANY DEFECT OR INACCURACY

IN THIS PUBLICATION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. SOME LAWS

DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR LIABILITIES FOR

INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO THE ABOVE LIMITATION OR EXCLUSION MAY

NOT APPLY.

Ada is a registered trademark of the U.S. Government (Ada Joint Program Office). Amiga is a registered trademark, Amiga-

DOS, Intuition, Kickstart, and Workbench are trademarks of Commodore-Amiga, Incorporated. Apple and Macintosh are registered

trademarks of Apple Computer, Incorporated. ARexx and WShell are trademarks of Wishful Thinking Development Corporation.

Aztec C68k is a trademark of Manx Software Systems, Incorporated. Centronics is a registered trademark of Centronics Data Com-

puter Corporation. CodePRobe and Lattice are registered trademarks, LSE is a trademark of Lattice, Incorporated. Commodore,

CBM, and CDTV are registered trademarks of Commodore Electronics Limited. CrossDOS is a trademark of Consultron. Helios

is a trademark of Perihelion Software Limited. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a trademark of Douglas Adams. IBM is a reg-

istered trademark' of International Business Machines Corporation. If you cannot read this, you should consult an optometrist.

INMOS, occam, and transputer are trademarks of the INMOS Group of Companies. Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation. MCC

Pascal 68000 is a trademark of Metacomco pIc. Microsoft, Microsoft C, MS-DOS, and OS/2 are registered trademarks, Windows is

a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Motorola is a registered trademark of Motorola, Incorporated. PostScript is a registered

trademark of Adobe Systems, Incorporated. SAS/C is a registered trademark ofSAS Institute, Incorporated. Turbo Pascal is a

registered trademark of Borland International, Incorporated. 'UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T.

Preface

"What does the documentation say?" - "What, documentation?"

- Polytron Corporation, Dr. Dobb's Journal, May 1989

Even applications created by Commodore

may not comply with every idea in this book.

- Amiga User Interface Style Guide

I created everything in this book. I wrote it, I edited it, I drew all the figures, I

personally made the ink to print it, I chopped down the trees for the paper, I bound

every copy, I sold it, I shipped it. I thank no one.

- Scott Knaster, Macintosh Programming Secrets

Even though parts of the official Amiga documentation have improved considerably in

the course of the last three years since the original 1.3 edition of this book was published,

many topics are still not addressed adequately. The Amiga Guru Book has been written

as what is probably a foolhardy endeavor to fill this gap at least partially so as to

put a stop to the virtually endless circle of unconsidered, incomplete, and erroneous

information about the Amiga that is being passed around from one book or magazine

to the next.

It is intended as both a reference manual and a tutorial that attempts to give ad-

vanced programmers sufficient background knowledge in addition to pure programming

information in order to facilitate understanding of certain peculiarities l that have be-

come an intrinsic part of the Amiga's hard- and software, and even though certain side

effects documented as such in this book may,not be guaranteed and should not be relied

upon in production code, knowledge thereof may nevertheless prove to be very useful

during debugging.

This book has been distilled from many sources of inforIIlation, corrected, correlated,

and updated to reflect the latest state of the operating system and developers' software,

and is presented in what is, I hope, an easily understandable form without becoming yet

another of those numerous regurgitations of the official documentation that are doing

the rounds.

The reader will find detailed information on Exec, AmigaDOS, and related OS mod-

ules as of version 2.1, most of which - at the time of writing - was not to be found

elsewhere in this form: internal data structures of the dos.library, the structure of object

modules in their extended format, up-to-date packet documentation, and the organiza-

tion of on-disk data structures under the new 2.0 ROM filesystem. In addition, notes

on the development history of the Amiga, earlier versions of the system software, and

1 phonetic transcription: /klooj/ .

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