
ABOUT THE EXAMPLES
The examples in this book all demonstrate direct manipulation of the Amiga hardware.
However, as a general rule, it is not permissible to directly access the hardware in the
Amiga unless your software either has full control of the system, or has arbitrated via the
OS for exclusive access to the particular parts of the hardware you wish to control.
Almost all of the hardware discussed in this manual, most notably the Blitter, Copper,
playfield, sprite, CIA, trackdisk, and system control hardware, are in either exclusive or
arbitrated use by portions of the Amiga OS in any running Amiga system. Additional
hardware, such as the audio, parallel, and serial hardware, may be in use by applications
which have allocated their use through the system software.
Before attempting to directly manipulate any part of the hardware in the Amiga's
multitasking environment, your application must first be granted exclusive access to that
hardware by the operating system library, device, or resource which arbitrates its
ownership. The operating system functions for requesting and receiving control of parts of
the Amiga hardware are varied and are not within the scope of this manual. Generally
such functions, when available, will be found in the library, device, or resource which
manages that portion of the Amiga hardware in the multitasking environment. The
following list will help you to find the appropriate operating system functions or
mechanisms which may exist for arbitrated access to the hardware discussed in this
manual.
Copper, Playfield, Sprite, Blitter - graphics.library
Audio - audio.device
Trackdisk - trackdisk.device, disk.resource
Serial - serial.device, misc.resource
Parallel - parallel.device, cia.resource, misc.resource
Gameport - input.device, gameport.device, potgo.resource
Keyboard - input.device, keyboard.device
System Control - graphics.library, exec.library (interrupts)
Most of the examples in this book use the hw_examples.i file (see Appendix J) to define
the chip register names. hw_examples.i uses the system include file hardware/custom.i to
define the chip structures and relative addresses. The values defined in hardware/custom.i
and how examples.i are offsets from the base chip register address space. In general, this
base value is defined as _custom and is resolved during linking from amiga.lib. (_ciaa and
_ciab are also resolved in this way.)
Normally, the base address is loaded into an address register and the offsets given by
hardware/custom.i and hw_examples.i are then used to address the correct register.
- Introduction 7 -
Summary of Contents for Amiga A1000
Page 1: ...AMIGA HARDWARE REFERENCE MANUAL 1992 Commodore Business Machines Amiga 1200 PAL...
Page 20: ...Figure 1 1 Block Diagram for the Amiga Computer Family Introduction 11...
Page 21: ...12 Introduction...
Page 72: ...Figure 3 12 A dual Playfield display Playfield Hardware 63...
Page 87: ...Figure 3 24 Horizontal Scrolling 78 playfield hardware...
Page 101: ...92 Playfield Hardware...
Page 199: ...Figure 6 9 DMA time slot allocation 190 Blitter hardware...
Page 203: ...Figure 6 13 Blitter Block Diagram 194 Blitter Hardware...
Page 229: ...220 System Control Hardware...
Page 246: ...Figure 8 8 Chinon Timing diagram cont Interface Hardware 237...
Page 265: ...256 Interface Hardware...
Page 289: ...280 Appendix A...
Page 297: ...288 Appendix B...
Page 298: ...APPENDIX C CUSTOM CHIP PIN ALLOCATION LIST NOTE Means an active low signal Appendix C 289...
Page 302: ...APPENDIX D SYSTEM MEMORY MAP Appendix D 293...
Page 343: ...334 Appendix F...
Page 351: ...342 Appendix G...
Page 361: ...352 Appendix H...
Page 367: ...358 Appendix I...