Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!ncrcan!hcr!edwin From: edwin@hcr.UUCP (Edwin Hoogerbeets) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: WorkBench 1.3 BUG! Message-ID: <4584@hcr.UUCP> Date: 15 Jan 89 04:44:02 GMT References: <521@jc3b21.UUCP> <1165@esunix.UUCP> Reply-To: edwin@hcrvx2.UUCP (Edwin Hoogerbeets) Distribution: na Organization: HCR Corporation, Toronto Lines: 85 In article <1165@esunix.UUCP> blgardne@esunix.UUCP writes: >How about a _real_ serious bug in the 1.3 Workbench? > >In 1.2 it says "Workbench release 1.2." in the Workbench title bar. > >In 1.3 it says "Workbench release." in the title bar. > >But most importantly of all, when is Commodore going to issue a bug fix >for this terrible deficiency? > >-- >Blaine Gardner @ Evans & Sutherland 580 Arapeen Drive, SLC, Utah 84108 >Here: utah-cs!esunix!blgardne {ucbvax,allegra,decvax}!decwrl!esunix!blgardne >There: uunet!iconsys!caeco!pedro!worsel!blaine >"Nobody will ever need more than 64K." "Nobody needs multitasking on a PC." Well.. as it turns out, this same little annoyance also caused me lots of lack of sleep. As we keep hearing, the only difference between 1.2 and 1.3 Kickstart is the autoboot stuff. This means that Kickstart still has '1.2' embedded within it as the text for the workbench title bar. The 1.3 loadwb program actually contains code to search for the string 'Workbench Release 1.2.' and clobber the 1.2 part. If you NewZap loadwb and change the string in question to anything else, it won't find what it's looking for in Kickstart and you'll have a workbench proudly claiming to be 1.2. Or... I played around with my Kickstart disk and changed the text to advertise 1.3. While there, I also changed the 'free memory' text to read 'bytes free'. Just because I like it better that way. Should anyone still be reading this, this is the method I used: 1) Use a program called Kick_snatch, part of a set of KickToys to read Kickstart (from disk or from RAM) and write it to a file (RAM:KS.BIN) I found KickToys in the CIS AmigaTech forum. 2) Use NewZap to search for the offending text. When found, all we're interested in is the offset. 3) Use Sectorama to actually edit the appropriate sector on kickstart, found by taking offset and dividing by blocksize. If I read my scribblings correctly, the offending text is around offset 0x2cd5e, and so is in sector 0x167. Unfortunately, it seems that Sectorama won't let you update the block on disk unless the checksum is correct. But since Kickstart is not a standard File System disk, we don't want to correct the checksum. So... 4) Dig up DiskEd. Docs for it are in the AmigaDOS manual. Modify the offending sector and write it out. DiskEd also warns about invalid checksums, but will oblige and write the sector anyway. Since DiskEd is a line-oriented thing, I found that the best way to see what one is doing is to run sectorama to view the sector, and make the mods using DiskEd running at the same time. Bit of a pain flipping back and forth between screens, but it works. 5) Run SumKick on the newly fixed Kickstart disk, so that when you warm boot after cold booting with the new Kickstart, you don't get sent all the way back to the Kickstart prompt anyway. 6) Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway :-) if you own a 500 or 2000, you needn't do any of this, but may instead kick yourself for not owning a real Amiga :-) :-) :-) 7) While doing this sort of thing, I found other goodies to fix: The invisible Debug menu on Workbench is no longer invisible, The initial CLI window has different dimensions, and since I don't keep format and diskcopy in the system drawer (I don't *have* a system drawer anymore, everything there is in C: where is really belongs) I changed all occurrances of SYS:System/[Format|Diskcopy] to C:[Format|Diskcopy] with no ill effects. This means that the Initialize and Duplicate menu items (as well as dragging disk icons over each other) works! 8) There is no number eight. Stephan Mueller stephler(); I'm not the dude in the header, but I'll get any comments/complaints/flames/sushi sent here.