Commodore Amiga A4000 User Manual
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Commodore Amiga A4000 User Manual

Commodore Amiga A4000 User Manual

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The Complete Amiga 4000 User Guide
by Peter Hutchison © 2007
Revised: 21/08/2007

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Summary of Contents for Commodore Amiga A4000

  • Page 1 The Complete Amiga 4000 User Guide by Peter Hutchison © 2007 Revised: 21/08/2007...

  • Page 2: Table Of Contents

    Contents Introduction Page 3 Setting up the Amiga for First Time Page 4 Guide to Workbench 3.0 Page 6 Menus Page 6 Mouse Page 8 Programs Page 9 Preferences Page 13 Beyond Workbench 3.0 Page 19 Adding more Memory to the A4000 Page 19 Upgrading the Processor Page 20...

  • Page 3: Introduction

    Introduction Welcome to the Commodore Amiga A4000, one of the top Amiga models of its time. It was affordable and easy to use. It had a wide range of software, in particular, games which Jay Minor, the creator of the Amiga, had designed it for.

  • Page 4: Setting Up The Amiga For First Time

    Setting up the Amiga for First Time Before setting up the Amiga make sure you have the following items ready: Amiga A4000 Monitor or TV Set Mouse Power Supply Joystick (optional) Speakers (optional) External Disk drives (optional) Withe Amiga facing you, first plug the square end of the Power Supply cable to the Power socket at the back of the Amiga.

  • Page 5: Menus

    You can then insert either a Workbench disk or any other bootable disk such as a game into the floppy drive on the right-hand side of the Amiga (called DF0: - Disk Floppy Zero). Insert your Original Workbench disk and wait for the workbench screen to appear. Before continuing, I recommend that you make one or more copies of your original Workbench disks to use rather than the Original as that can become damaged over time and you may need to make other copies later.
  • Page 6 Guide to Workbench 3.0 Contents 1. The Menus 2. The Mouse 3. W B Program s 4. Am igaDOS 5. Com m on Problem s 1. The Menus At the top of the screen, there are three m enus which are accessible when you m ove the pointer to the top of the screen and click the Right Mouse Button.
  • Page 7 1.2.4 Update Update icons in the current window. 1.2.5 Select Contents Select all the icons in the current window. 1.2.6 Clean Up Tidy up the icons into a standard left to right and top to bottom layout. 1.2.7 Snapshot 1.2.7.1 W indow Save the current window size and position in icon inform ation 1.2.7.2 All Save the window and all icon size and position inform ation in their respective icon files.

  • Page 8: The Mouse

    1.3.6 Unsnapshot Rem oves positioning saved inform ation from a file. 1.3.7 Leave Out Places the file on the desktop but the file is still located in its original location. A backdrop file contains a list of files left out. 1.3.8 Put Away Returns a file left off the desktop back to its original location.

  • Page 9: Programs

    2.2.1 Clicking To select an icon, m ove the pointer over the desired icon and then click the LMB once. The icon will change to a reverse or an alternative im age to indicate it has been selected. W hen using gadgets such as those on windows (there are four gadgets on a window: Close, W indow-to-Front, W indow-to-Back and Resize) m ove the pointer over the desired gadget and click once to use that gadget.
  • Page 10 displays tim e in the window bar). You can also set the m ode (12 or 24 hour), display seconds or not, the date and whether to set an alarm for som ething. 3.1.1.2 Multiview This program can view pictures, anim ations, sound and other docum ents using W orkbench’s Datatype library which can be expanded to any num ber of file form ats from basic ILBM, 8SVX, Am igaGuide, FTXT, ANIM and CDXL to m odern types such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, W ave, Mpeg and other form ats.

  • Page 11: Preferences

    rectangles (outlined or filled), straight lines and the fill tool. Each icon has two im ages, norm al and selected, selected icons are used when a user selects an icon, and it usually displays a depressed icon rather than a raised icon (the shadow around the edge m akes the difference).
  • Page 12 3.3.1 ShowConfig This program displays system configuration about your Am iga including: a) Processor m ake and m odel b) Custom Chip set versions c) RAM type and sizes d) Expansion boards 3.3 Com m odities Drawer 3.3.1 Exchange This program lists the com m odity program s in m em ory and can control com m odities by displaying com m odity options, end a com m odity and so on.
  • Page 13 Translation. The DosDrivers for PC0 and PC1 need to be loaded. 3.4 Prefs W orkbench can be custom ised using Preference program s in the Prefs drawer. You can select Save to save changes and will be loaded when rebooted or clicking Use will save preferences in m em ory only and will be lost on next reboot.
  • Page 14 3.4.4 PrinterPS This preference set the options for PostScript printers. Driver Mode: Postscript, Pass Through Copies: 1 to 99 Paper Form at: US Letter, US Legal, DIN A4, Custom Text Options: Font, Pitch, Orientation, Tab Text Dim ensions: Margins, Point Size, Leading, LPI, LPP Graphics Options: Margins, Im age, Shading, Dithering Graphics Scaling: Aspect, Scaling, Centering, 3.4.5 Sound...
  • Page 15 3.4.6 Overscan Overscan sets the physical screen size, the m onitor driver is loaded on the let and list of dim ensions are shown and two buttons which can be used to resize the display for Text or Graphic displays by dragging one or m ore of nine handles to the desired size.
  • Page 16 3.4.9 Tim e This sets the current date and tim e and saves in a battery-backed clock (if provided) and in m em ory. 3.4.10 Input Input controls certain aspects of the keyboard and the Mouse: Mouse Speed - How fast the pointer m oves around the screen. Acceleration - Boosts m ouse speed when you m ove it around.
  • Page 17 3.4.11 Palette This preference allows you to change the default colours (shown at the top left) with new colours using either the colour wheel or the RGB sliders underneath for m ore fine control. The list of entries on the right determ ines which colour is used for what purpose, so you could use Blue or Green for text instead of Black.
  • Page 18 3.4.13 Serial The Serial preferences control com m unications through the serial port with the following settings: Input Buffer Size: Size of the buffer in bytes to store data Baud Rate: Speed of com m unication in bites/sec. Handshaking: XON/XOFF (Software), RTS/CTS (Hardware) or None Parity: Num ber or type of bits used for error checking Bits/Char: Num ber of bits used for data Stop bits: Num ber of bits used at the end of data...
  • Page 19 Beyond W orkbench 3.0 W orkbench has been upgraded three tim es since 3.0: 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9. W orkbench 3.5 and 3.9 have enhanced W orkbench a lot and com e on CD, they include: • Multim edia Program s •...

  • Page 20: Upgrading The Processor

    Upgrading the Processor The standard 25MHz 68030 processor in the Am iga A4000 is quite slow com pared to m ore recent processors and cannot cope with bigger applications and gam es. The processor is slotted on the m ain m other board.
  • Page 21 2. 68060 Accelerators Apollo 3060/4060 Supports the 50 or 66MHz 68060 and can have upto 128Mb of Fast RAM using 2/4 slots for Fastpage or EDO ram . The 060 includes an MMU and FPU. Am iga Tech 4060 Supports the 56MHz 68060 and can have upto 128Mb of Fast RAM using 4 slots for Fastpage or EDO ram .
  • Page 22 Upgrading Expansion on the A4000 The A4000 com es with 4 Zorro 3, 3 inactive ISA,1 CPU slot and a Video slot where you can add accelerators, graphics, network, SCSI, video and sound cards to your Am iga. The ISA slots can be activated using an additioal Bridgeboard such as the Golden Gate card.
  • Page 23 Upgrading the Kickstart and W orkbench The Am iga A1200 can be upgraded to latest Kickstart and W orkbench as follows: From Requirem ents W orkbench 3.0 W orkbench 3.1 Kickstart 3.1 W orkbench 3.0 or 3.1 W orkbench 3.5 / 3.9 Kickstart 3.1, 6M RAM, 68020 processor, Hard Disk, CD ROM...
  • Page 24 U175. Note the m arking and orientation of the installed ROMs, then rem ove them from the socket. 3. Align the ROMs with the sockets in their correct m arking and position. Press firm ly into place. W ARNING: Be cautious not to bend pins. 4.

  • Page 25: Jumpers

    The Motherboard The Am iga 4000 has had several revisions including B,D for A4000D and 4 for A4000T. This is the revision 1 m otherboard: Chips and Com ponents: IDE connector - Supports 3.5" Hard drives natively but can support larger 3.5" drives with a converter ALICE chip - Supports 2MB of Chip RAM, the Blitter and 25 DMA channels (large left hand chip) GAYLE chip - IDE controller chip (large m iddle chip) LISA chip - Supports AGA chipset, 256 colours, HAM8, Sprites etc (large right hand chip).
  • Page 26 J151 ROM Speed 200 ns 160 ns J213 Chip RAM Size 2 MB 8 MB (non functional) J351 Second internal floppy drive No second drive or second drive is 1.76MB Enabled 2 drive is 880K J352 Redirect DF0: Internal DF1: and DF0:. External DF2: and DF3: Internal DF1: and DF2:.
  • Page 27 Backward Com patibility Com patibility with older software can be done in two ways: Hardware and Software. Hardware: a) Install a Kickstart ROM Switcher to allow you to switch between Kickstart 1.3 and later Kickstart Software: a) Use a SoftKicker program to load old Kickstart into m em ory e.g Skick b) Use Disk to Hard disk program s such as JST and W HDLoad to copy the gam es to hard disk and em ulate the older system .
  • Page 28 Adding a Hard Disk to A4000 The Am iga 4000 supports IDE Hard disks, there is space for a 3.5" drive. W orkbench 3.0 or 3.1 can use upto 4GB Hard disks, due to lim itations of the 32 bit filesystem and the scsi.device that controls hard disks.
  • Page 29 Click on Partition Drive and you should get a screen som ething like this: Click on New Partition to create a new partition in the em pty space at the top of the screen. You can resize it using the blue arrow by dragging it across the screen. If the partition will have W orkbench installed, you can m ake it bootable by ticking Bootable.

  • Page 30: Installing Workbench Onto A Hard Disk

    Installing Workbench onto a Hard Disk 1. Boot off the Install disk and open the Install script for your language, the following languages are supported on W orkbench 3.1: English, French, Italian, Germ an, Denm ark, Netherlands, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish. 2.
  • Page 31 Installing a CDROM Drive On the A4000 desktop or tower you can slave a CD or DVD ROM drive from your hard disk, to access it you need to install and activate the CDROM drivers supplied with Am igaOS: L:CDFilesystem Devs:DosDrivers/CD0 Devs:DosDrivers/CD1 The provided CDROM file system will read som e but not all CDROM discs but not som e PC ones with...

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