Question

Following up on the "How do I code and compile an Amiga application?" question, which development library is required to boot an Amiga application from a floppy disk?

Update: (2012-04-10) To consider the question solved, I have edited the title and body to focus only on the library. Still missing are boot from floppy deployment tools that can be asked in another question.

Was it helpful?

Solution

Detailed description of how to write boot blocks on floppies

You'll need to learn how to use trackdisk.device. I strongly advise not bypassing trackdisk; the requirements to read floppies are tricky and you have to know the allowed mechanical variances; the trackdisk floppy code is really, really good and deals with errors better than anything anyone else did. Published books on how to "code at the bare-metal level" for the Amiga (and in particular the book on using the floppies directly) have so many errors and failed assumptions that my copy had a forest of stickies marking errors.

Note bene: I was the person at Commodore who totally rewrote trackdisk for AmigaOS 2.0.


If you're talking a normal AmigaOS application, you'd have a startup-script file on the disk to boot the disk and start the application (plus minimal set of AmigaOS files), and an icon/executable to start it if the Amiga booted off another disk or HD. Hunt around, and search for info on making a bootable disk for the Amiga.

Licensed under: CC-BY-SA with attribution
Not affiliated with StackOverflow
scroll top