Amiga OS 3.1.4

AmigaOS 3.1.4 arrived today! It's on 6 floppy disks and two Kickstart roms.

3.1.4 is a backport of features released for AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9, while maintaining full support for all classic Amiga computers (A500 and higher). More info here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_v…

Step 1: Open case and remove the old roms. It's not hard to lift out those chips with a flat screw driver, but it requires patience and constant switching between left and right.

Step 2: I did bend the pins of the new chips a bit to make them fit into the socket more easily. Btw, those black bars I've added cover up my serial number. With the s/n you can download adf-images of the disks but also a rom-dump in case you can burn(?) your own chip.

Success :) Sadly, the ball isn't animated.

Installation time! It's been a while since I had the pleasure of swapping multiple floppies to install something. Instant flashback to Strike Commander.

... and I've hit a roadblock. Disk #5 (Fonts) is corrupt. I cannot proceed and need to create my own copy from the adf-image downloads mentioned earlier.

I could of course just mount the Amiga hard-disk in WinUAE (Amiga Emulator for Windows) and prepare the installation this way. But I really want install this Amiga without any modern tricks and only rely on actual floppies and the PCMCIA port. No shortcuts!

Now, creating Amiga floppies on Windows (or DOS, macOS or Linux) is impossible*. PC disk drives cannot create the required format. You need to transfer the adf-images to the Amiga and create them from there.

(* there is a brand new solution, I'll get to this in a few days)

Amiga 600 and 1200 both got a PCMCIA slot on the left side. With a compact flash card transferring files is a lot easier. (Yes, I still got that 16MB card that came with my first digicam) The floppy with the label contains the AmigaOS CF drivers (I had to buy that disk on Ebay)

However adding native support for compact flash in AmigaOS requires some steps:

1. Boot from Amiga Workbench disk

2. Open the Amiga command line shell

3. Insert driver disk and copy contents to ramdisk:

   CLI> copy df0: ram: all

4. Create a copy to the workbench disk so we can add files:

   CLI> Diskcopy df0: df0:

5. Copy the drivers from ramdisk to the disk:

   CLI> Copy RAM:Devs/CompactFlash.device DF0:Devs/

   CLI> Copy RAM:L/FAT9S DF0:L/

   CLI> Copy RAM:Devs/CFO DF0:Devs/

   CLI> Copy RAM:Devs/CFO.info DF0:Devs/

7. Reboot

Now the FAT32 formatted compact flash card shows up on Workbench desktop!

With the CF card mounted, I can now easily add additional drivers and launch applications like TrackSaver (aminet.net is the primary source for legal Amiga software) to write adf-images to a real floppy disks, in my case the Fonts disk.

Finally, AmigaOS 3.1.4 installation was completed.