Amiga Hardware Reference Manual 3rd Edition (1991) -> Amiga Hardware Reference Manual Third Edition (1991) Here is the output: Amiga Hardware Reference Manual Third Edition (1991)
Original: Amiga Hardware Reference Manual 3rd Edition (1991)
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The Amiga Hardware Reference Manual 3rd Edition from 1991 has resurfaced online, sparking nostalgia and curiosity among retro computing enthusiasts. Commenters are abuzz about the manual's comprehensive coverage of OCS and ECS chips, but note that it stops short at the A3000, leaving some to wonder if a 4th edition covering AGA was ever published - the consensus is that it wasn't. Instead, developers were encouraged to use libraries, and much of what is known about the hardware today was reverse-engineered. Meanwhile, others are sharing their own nostalgic experiences, with some even pointing out updated resources, like the ROM Kernel Reference Manual, available online.
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What is known (which is a lot by today) had to be reverse engineered. The classic document everybody references for this is RandyAGA[0].
0. https://github.com/rkrajnc/minimig-mist/blob/master/doc/amig...
The Amiga operating system is composed of libraries, devices and also resources, all of which provide APIs and data structures for shell commands and Workbench tools to make use of. The foundations on which everything else in the operating system rests are the Multitasking Executive (“exec.library”) and AmigaDOS (“dos.library”).
dos.library itself depends upon exec.library, it is “just” another operating system component after all. You might have expected that AmigaDOS plays a much greater part in the operating system, but the Amiga operating system is not constructed around its DOS component. Almost every Amiga program makes use of exec.library, such as for accessing libraries and devices, but not every Amiga program has need of what dos.library provides. Of course, also libraries and devices can make use of dos.library, such as by opening files on the context of the caller of a library function. Great care must be taken to verify that the caller is indeed a process.
AmigaDOS encompasses dos.library, the CON-Handler, the RAM disk implemented by the RAM- Handler, the default file system and the command line Shell, as well as the shell commands on disk. These components came, mostly, from TRIPOS (Trivially portable operating system) [11] where they were part of a much larger networked multitasking operating system . As one of the last pieces to fall into place in 1985, the components were specially adapted for the Amiga and were not written by the original Amiga and Commodore developers. Both the Amiga operating system and TRIPOS had in common that they were built around non-copying message passing in a shared memory space, which enabled AmigaDOS to work “hand in glove” with the architecture and the means provided by exec.library.
What was always absent from the "Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual" set was good coverage of the AmigaDOS component of the Amiga operating system. While documentation was available as part of "The AmigaDOS Manual" (published by Bantam Books), it barely scratched the surface. The "Amiga ROM Kernel Reference: AmigaDOS" volume you quoted from was not written by the Amiga and Commodore developers, but by Amiga operating system software developer Thomas Richter, quite recently. It is based upon earlier research conducted by Amiga software developer Ralph Babel and others, filling in the many blank spaces which the "The AmigaDOS Manual" did not even address.
Note well that this volume is not to be mistaken for the "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual, 3rd edition".
This is gonna get a bot stuck :)