Knowledge Base
 Description of Lister Toolbar icons:
LEFT mouse click:
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Go to parent directory
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Cycle the view between NAME and ICON mode (NOTE: Icon mode shows files with .info files only. To show all files, right click the top border of the window and select View As -> Show All)
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Rename selected files
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Copy selected dirs/files to clipboard
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Cut selected dirs/files to clipboard
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Paste dirs/files from clipboard to current directory
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Select all dirs/files of the current directory
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Get the size of all the selected directories
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Search for the file in the selected directories
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Edit the selected files in microgolded
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Show the thumbnails of all the pictures in the current directory
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Play the selected files with SongPlayer
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Move the selected dirs/files to GlobalTrash
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Delete the selected dirs/files
RIGHT mouse click:
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Show the root directory
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Show the advanced renamed tool (SRename)
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Paste AS dirs/files from the clipboard to current directory
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Clear the selection of dir/files
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Search for the string in selected files/dirs
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Show the selected pictures in fullscreen (PicShow)
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Play the selected files with AmigaAMP
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Undelete the files (PFS/SFS partitions only)
MIDDLE mouse click:
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Show all available devices
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Show the version number of selected files
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View the clipboard content
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Invert the selection of files
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Run SimpleFind3
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Show the selected pictures with MysticView
 AmiKit Tutorial Videos
The following collection of AmiKit Video Tutorials demonstrate various features of this environment based on Directory Opus Magellan II:
Directory Opus Magellan II Tutorials
Review of Directory Opus Magellan II can be found in Total Amiga 2 magazine, page 22. Tutorials are in Total Amiga 10 (page 40) and Total Amiga 11 (page 44).
AmiKit is too slow?
There are 5 usual possible slowdown causes:
- bad powersaving driver, it causes timer that WinUAE uses to return bogus values. Basically AMD-only issue, make sure bios is latest and Cool'n'Quiet driver is up to date, or disabled.
- CPU Idle setting in CPU-panel set too high. 1 or 2 step from left is good test setting.
- Priority in priority-panel set to High. In some cases Normal can cause similar problems, usually only when CPU Idle is disabled. Try "Low". (low does not mean low emulation speed)
- some realtime virusscanners can slowdown harddrive emulation (can also be related to priority setting)
- vsync, make sure vsync in display panel is disabled.
First 3 settings are very PC/Windows/driver version specific.
Recently it was reported that some antivirus software (like Norton or Webroot) might be the reason for huge slowdowns. Disable your antivirus before you start AmiKit to find out. If it helps, try to add some exception for WinUAE.exe process or whole AmiKit folder when you enable it again. Or use better antivirus software.
Installing the Live Update archives manually by Anbjørn Myren
First I would like to say that the Live Update for AmiKit works like a dream. So a big thank you to the author for that :)
However there might be situation where you are prevented from using the live update feature. If you want to run AmiKit on a machine without internet access or the PC is behind a proxy server that prevents Live Update from connecting properly.
Here is a short description on how to update manually:
NOTE that in the examples below the number suffix (eg. 142) represents the version number you want to download and install.
Now reboot the Amiga and the update should be executed. Check the AmiKit:Expansion for log files to verify the installation. Note that you can put more than one UpdateScript and LZX archive into AmiKit:Expansion drawer to install several updates at once. Just remember the first start of AmiKit will take more than usual because the update archives need to be extracted and installed. Check the disk activity and do not turn your AmiKit off until it boots into desktop.
AmiKit to Hardfile guide by Anbjørn Myren
IMPORTANT: As soon as you start using the AmiKit from a hardfile, the manual update archives (Windows executable installers) will not update your AmiKit anymore. This is because the AmiKit directory structure stored in the hardfile cannot be accessed from a PC side. The complex solution addressing this issue will be introduced in later AmiKit releases. However the automatic Live update archives (downloaded by AmiKit Live Update program) work even with the AmiKit installed on the hardfile. The instructions for manual updating could also be used on a hardfile setup. But if you want to go back to a directory setup later, you could always do revert this process back from the hardfile by creating av new directory harddisk in the WinUAE setup and copy the hardfile content back to it.
Using a hardfile instead of the directory has some benefits. Depending on your how fast a computer you have, you should notice some speed improvements when using a hardfile. Just try to do a file search in SimpleFind and I think you will see the difference. Also there are still some bugs left in the WinUAE filesystem handling that a hardfile will not suffer from. And lastly it's easier to copy the hardfile if you want to make a backup of your harddrive. Of course you could do that with the directory as well, but it is more time consuming.
How to make AmiKit run from a hardfile:
First you need to create and prepare a hardfile from the WinUAE configuration setup. Enter the configuration either by the "Configure WinUAE" button from the AmiKit startup interface, or by pressing F12 when the the emulation is running. Go to the Hardware / Hard drives section and press the "Add Hardfile..." button.
We start in the "New hard disk image file" section of the window. You will notice that the "Create" button is disabled, so to start you must fill in the desired size in MB for you new harddrive. AmiKit will take almost 350 MB as it is, so anything under 400 MB is NOT recommended. If you make it 650 MB it will be sufficient, and it will also fit on a CD if you want to make a backup later. You can also create much larger partition of course.
It's recommended that you select SFS in the Type selection field. OFS/FFS/RDB will work but will require you to do some changes in your s:startup-sequence in order to avoid some problems later. Not anything serious though, I will come back to that. But anyway it is also NOT recommended to use OFS.
When you have chosen the size and the Type, press the "Create" button. Name your hardfile, "AmiKit.hdf" could be a good choice, and press "Save".
Now in the "Settings" section, the Path should be filled in with the name of the created drive. For "Device" you could use AK1, or whatever you like. AK0 is used already as default by AmiKit, so just choose a different device name for now. Later, when your hardfile is used as the primary harddrive, you should rename its devicename to AK0. Now for the "Filesys" you need to browse into your AmiKit harddrive directory and locate the file named "SmartFilesystem" located in "..AmiKit/AmiKit/L/" folder. Its recommended that you copy this file to your "...AmiKit/WinUAE/Amiga Programs" directory, so that you can have the file avaiable from the Windows side even if you want to delete your "..AmiKit/AmiKit" directory later. You can leave the rest of the settings as they are.
Now is a good time to save your WinUAE settings as AmiKit_v1.uae. Note that if you have "Amiga Forever" installed, the WinUAE config window shows "Amiga Forever" configuration entries only. To save your AmiKit setting, click the "Save as..." button and save the file to "..AmiKit\WinUAE\Configurations\AmiKit_v1.uae".
Now start the Amiga, or if you entered the setup by using F12, just reset the Amiga.
Now the AK1:NDOS icon should apear on the Workbench. If you are very happy with using AmigaDos, you could locate the sfsformat command and use that, or simply select the disk icon and right click and select Format from the Icon menu.
Note that if you have not chosen the SFS type, the format command from the icon popup menu will be unavailable. But if you click on the Icon menu from the Titlebar, the Format command is available.
If you use SFS, you will see that the FFS option is unselectable in the Format requester window. Now just click format to make the disk ready. You may tick the Trashcan selector if you want. You can leave the volumelabel as is. Later this should be renamed to AmiKit, but if you do this at this point it might cause some problems. Now the drive should show on the Workbench as "Empty", unless you named it something else.
To make use of the hardfile, all the files from AmiKit must be copied to the new hardfile. I prefer using DirOpup 4 for this task. (AmiStart button -> Applications -> DirOpus 4). Select "SYS:" on the left side in Dopus4 and "Empty:" on the right side. Select all files on your SYS: side and press the "Copy" button.
Apart from one single file, the files should be ok to copy. The exception is one file located in the "S" drawer, named debug.out. You will see a file requestor telling you that this file is in use and could not be copied. Thats ok, just click the "Skip" button and the copy process will continue. Don"t worry about this file, the system will recreate it later anyway.
However if you have not chosen to use the SFS filesystem (Edit: or turned WBCtrl on), there will be one more problem unless you edit your s:starup-sequence: Enabling "C:WBCtrl IMT=FAST MNL=100" in the S:Startup-Sequence will cure these problems. The problems is due to one file name being too long. It is located in "Sys:Utilities/Expansion/MUI/Docs/English" drawer and is called "MCC_Betterstring_keybindings.txt.info". The error is because the file name is shortened by five characters, which gives the icon the same name as the file. So unless you apply the cahnges in startup-sequence and reboot, your choice in this case should be to keep the .txt file by clicking the "Skip" button. The .info file will be missing though. But if you feel you need it, you could always go back to the drawer later and shorten the filename and then copy the file.
Now you should have a full copy of your system harddrive and you can exit Dopus4. Select the new drive and rename it to AmiKit. Press F12 and in the harddrive settings to remove the old directory-drive. Note that all the PC drives that have been automounted by WinUAE will also apear on this list, so you might want to remove these too before saving the configuration (these PC drives are being added on each start of emulation anyway). Select the hardfile and click the properties button. In the settings, change the Device name to AK0. Check that the "Filesys" settings are still the same as you put them the first time and click OK. Save the WinUAE configuration and Reset the Amiga.
AmiKit should now be booting entirely from the hardfile. Isn't life wonderful? 
If you have registered your copy of MakeCD you might have to re-enter your serial number again after changing the hardrive. This is just like on a real Amiga:)
Troubleshooting
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If you have problems with downloading integrated AmiKit using the Amiga Forever 2009 Player, please check the following link for solution.
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If AmiKit refuses to start for whatever reason, try to use "AmiKit/S/Startup-Sequence.SAFEMODE" as a regular Startup-Sequence.
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If your AmigaOS CD is not recognized on Linux, make sure the scsi_device is set corrrectly in /configs/amikit-euaerc configuration file. Alternatively make a dir on your hard drive, copy the contents of the CD to that dir and in the E-UAE Control add that dir as a hard disk.
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If you have some slowdown (or other) problems, try to disable „Solid Window moving“ patch first in AmiKit:Prefs/MCPPrefs (in patches section).
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If Symphonie player isn't replaying the song correctly, you might add some CPU power to WinUAE by moving the „CPU Idle“ slider more to the left. If it doesn't help, you definitely need a faster computer.
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PicShow crashes in low-memory condition. Please increase the RAM size in WinUAE config. Or you might set PRELOAD 0 and CACHE 0 in S:PicShow.defaults, however this is not recommended for everyday use.
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Workbench screen cannot be re-opened while the BoingBall task is active… Run Exchange and quit it first.
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WinUAE starts the emulation in a very slow manner sometimes. If this is the case, press Control+F11 to quit WinUAE and start it again. Slowdown of WinUAE (and other software ofcourse) could also be caused by spyware. Try to check your computer for spyware by running eg. SpyBot – Search&Destroy. It's free.
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To play the games installed by WHDLoad, you"ll need to copy the appropriate ROM file to DEVS:Kickstarts/ and name it (for example) kick34005.A500 (if it is ROM1.3 for A500). Read the WHDLoad manual for more information.
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Reboot is recommended after the demos are run…
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If the "Cannot open 'uaescsi.device' unit 0" requester appears upon startup (which appears only if you don't have a CD-ROM drive installed in your computer), quit the AmiKit (press Ctrol+F11), enter the folder where your AmiKit is installed in and move the CD0 and CD0.info files from AmiKit\Devs\DosDrivers to AmiKit\Storage\DosDrivers folder. Now start the AmiKit again and the requester won't appear again.
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At last… if you really need help, enter DOpus CLI (by pressing the right mouse button -> Opus/Execute Command… -> hit the CLI button) and write „help me eliza!“ (without quotes of course)…or use the AmiKit Support Forum.
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