Table of Contents

Quality of Life Settings with WHDLOpener

WHDLOpener is an AmiNET package that installs E-UAE along with many extras in order to be able to run games within Ambient, the MorphOS screen manager. The default settings are alright but they could be adjusted for a little better result and some QoL.

First, the E-UAE settings can be changed in order to make some important changes, namely getting the games that run in full screen to properly go fullscreen and also to stretch the E-UAE emulation window to match the entire monitor size as it is configured for MorphOS. The settings involve editing the E-UAE configuration file for the fullscreen mode.

Next, WHDLOpener is configured to start games directly in fullscreen but most of the time when browsing games it seems much more helpful to run the game windowed on the Ambient desktop by default rather than start in full screen mode. In order to change this, the mime settings must be amended for all files configured by WHDLOpener. This can be done by going to the Ambient desktop, right clicking and then following the menus Settings->Ambient...->Mime, expanding application and scrolling down to find x-amigaos-whdload. By clicking Edit, the Run in E-UAE (window) menu option ca be made the default on double click with the full screen Run in E-UAE still available using the right click menu when a WHDLoad slave is selected.

Using the Original Commodore Installer

The Installer program built-in to MorphOS is a fancy followup of the original installer but unfortunately it is not perfectly compatible with the original Commodore installer which leads to various errors when software packages are installed.

The solution is to use the original Commodore Amiga installer and given that MorphOS is able to run m68k code directly on the PowerPC via the bundled Trance emulator the original Commodore Amiga installer will work perfectly fine.

In order to use the original Commodore Amiga installer, rename the built-in MorphOS installer to something else, for example: 

rename MOSSYS:C/Installer MOSSYS:C/Installer_disabled

and then copy over the original m68k Commodore Amiga installer to SYS:C/.

GLQuake Error on Start

the original Quake, namely GLQuake might fail with an allocation error on MorphOS; specifically, Quake will report the following on the console: 

Starting Quake...
I_Error: Hunk_Alloc: failed on 1544814608 bytes

This is due to transferring the ID1 folder from one Quake implementation to GLQuake. To remedy the issue, the glquake and any file other than the PAK0.PAK and PAK1.PAK files should be removed from inside the ID1 folder. In fact, the ID1 folder should rather include just the PAK0.PAK file, the PAK1.PAK file and perhaps at most a configuration file named config.cfg depending on where the launcher puts the file.

Automatically Mounting a Network Filesystem on Boot

MorphOS has all the tools necessary to create a mechanism that would mount a network filesystem on boot but has no built-in way to create something like that using the user interface. With that said, a script can be written to mount the remote filesystem. Here is an example script: 

; Wait for Network
;Echo "Waiting for network: " NoLine
Lab CheckNetwork
Info Networks: >NIL:
If WARN
   Wait 1
;   Echo "." NoLine
   Skip CheckNetwork Back
EndIf
;Echo "ok"
 
; Wait for NetBIOS discovery
;Echo "Waiting for NetBIOS discovery: " NoLine
Lab CheckNetBIOS
; notice casing of network computer name
If Not Exists Networks:_NETWORK_COMPUTER_NAME
   Cd Networks:
   Dir >NIL:
   Wait 1
;   Echo "." NoLine
   Skip CheckNetBIOS Back
EndIf
;Echo "ok"
 
; Mount the filesystem in the background.
;Echo "Mounting filesystem."
RunFS Q WV INVOCATION C:Smb2Fs WORKGROUP=_WORKGROUP VOLUME=_VOLUME_NAME USER=_USER PASSWORD=_PASSWORD SERVICE=//_NETWORK_COMPUTER_NAME/_SHARE_NAME >NIL:

where:

and the rest of the parameters are Samba-centric parameters:

After editing the parameters, the script should be created in an empty file within WBstartup and then an icon generated for the script file with the Script permission bit set. The script should first be tested by double-clicking the WBStartup icon (the script should be reentrant-safe such that it can be executed multiple times without messing things u0). If the share is not mounted, it is recommended to uncomment the Echo lines in order to watch for errors reported by the script in order to amend them. If everything works out alright, the system can be rebooted.

The top part of the script first ensures that the network stack is properly started, then it checks that the computer exists on the network and is browseable (equivalent to Samba's "browseable" option) and only then finally attempts to mount the share. Omitting this part would result in errors being thrown at the user. For some reason, the RunFS command is a MorphOS command seem equivalent to executing a typical AmigaDOS Run command followed by the network filesystem mount command such that if the rest of the script above the RunFs line would not exist then when the Amiga boots, errors will be thrown at the user due to the network connection not yet being established.

Lastly, the script mounts a Samba share, due to using the Smb2Fs but the Smb2Fs command in the script can be substituted by the filesystem-mounting commands that MorphOS provides, namely:

For more information, a quick tutorial is provided one the MorphOS mounting network drives page.

Making a Rescue Partition

MorphOS runs on the principle that any operating system component can be overriden by adding the component in the root of the drive and with the MOSSYS: assignment containing the original and untouched MorphOS files. Depending on the workload, it sometimes makes sense to replace various components. For example in a previous section we explain how to replace the Installer file with the old Workbench installer in order to provide backward compatibility to software. The procedure involves messing around in MOSSYS:.

Messing around in MOSSYS: with the base-components might result in a system that does not boot, which is vastly annoying given that to recover, some external media, like a MorphOS CD or USB stick is needed in order to boot into the install medium and hopefully use the tools to rectify the problem.

As an Amiga system, MorphOS takes very little space, such that one cool thing that can be done is to create a small partition at the end of the drive, make it bootable with a low boot priority such that it will never be selected by the boot manager and then copy over the MorphOS installation CD to the drive.

First, the MorphOS CD is booted and then using the tool Tools/HDToolBox a partition is added at the very end of the drive. In the image illustrated above, the partition drive is DH3. Note that unfortunately, resizing DH2 will result in data loss and the DH2 partition will be wiped. When formatting remember to lower the boot priority to about -10 such that the DH3 partition does not boot first and ensure that the partition is bootable. The name of the partition can be anything.

With the DH3 partition created, the contents of the MorphOS boot CD is copied over: 

copy all clone MorphOSBoot:#? DH3:

The DH3 partition is now a bootable partition that can be booted in order to start the installation medium.

In case of an emergency, for example, if key-files have been wiped from MOSSYS, during MorphOS boot, the left-mouse button can be held down in order to start the Amiga boot manager. The Devices boot menu is chosen and the default boot drive, say DH1 is switch to Disabled. This will allow the "rescue" bootable medium to boot once the Amiga is started. With DH1 disabled in Devices, go back to the top-level menu with the selector between Boot and Boot Without Startup-Sequence and just pick plain Boot.

The DH3 partition should now boot the MorphOS installation medium from where the system hopefully can be recovered.