Amiga OS3.5

[R.P.Haviland]

Subject: Amiga OS3.5

 

My Amiga 3000 has 8 MB of memory, at 00000000-001FFFFF for chip and 0780000-07FFFFFF for exxpansion. It includes a CDROM, a ZIP drive, 2 floppies and 3 hard drives, one for linux.

 

According to SysInfo, OS35 loads all Libraries but kickstart and expansion into upper memory, together with all Drivers, Resources, Ports and Tasks. This assignment does not change when NOFast Mem is invoked, according to SysInfo, and confirmed by my own “NodeExplore”. It appears that NoFastMem set the available amount of fast memory to zero, forcing added programs into chip memory, but leaving libraries, etc unchanged.

 

As a result, it seems that some programs which were OK under OS2.0 will not work correctly.

 

The prime example of this is AmigaBASIC. MicroSoft in their great wisdom ignored the “telephone book” instructions not to use the upper 8 bits of address space, which were reserved for future expansion. Instead, they stuck a set of flags in these, limiting addresses. This was OK in the early machines, but limits memory expansion. Also, with OS3.5 a new factor shows, in that some BASIC instruction keywords no longer work. One such is LIBRARY, originally used to access the Amiga ML routines, and its associated keywords such as CALL. Others have shown up, but I havn’t tried to track down the problem involved.

 

Other programs also act up. For example,  the Analyze! spreadsheet locks unless NoFastMem is used. Strictly, this didn’t happen with 3.5 until the new routines of BoingBall1 were installed, so this is a recent problem. However, Analyze! cannot print to PRT:. It does print properly to disk, so this must also be a OS3.5 problem. EXCELLENCE! also has print problems, plus a strange screen jitter which showed up after BoingBall. The program is not frozen, though. And WordPerfect 4.1 sometimes shows up with a screen full of dashes.

 

It seems that there is work to be done to get compatability between OS2.0+ and OS3.5.
Have any of you Amigians found these problems, and especially, have you developed fixes?