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From: djh@metaphor.metaphor.com (Dallas Hodgson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Abacus Book (was: Armchair programmer)
Message-ID: <1252@metaphor.Metaphor.COM>
Date: 25 Jun 90 18:15:24 GMT
References: <1990Jun12.215457.8720@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <14@sunrise.ec.usf.edu> <30937@cup.portal.com> <1990Jun19.211034.23756@warwick.ac.uk> <31034@cup.portal.com>
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Reply-To: djh@metaphor.metaphor.com (Dallas Hodgson)
Organization: Metaphor Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 12


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!