Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Amiga project in progress - setcmd

Updated:

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my X5000 over the past few weeks (more blog posts to come!) but I’ve been working on something recently that I wanted to share. I’ve been enjoying re-learning AmigaDOS and as an exercise for myself, set about building a tool I plan on releasing in the near future. Inspired by some Linux distributions’ “alternatives” system, It’s called setcmd (short for “Set Command”) and lets you easily and quickly switch between different versions of a command while in the AmigaDOS shell.

NOTE : I’ve since published an updated article covering my development environment in 2023, check it out here.

It’s been particularly useful for me as I experiment with different versions of the UAE emulator. I wanted to share a quick “sneak peak” at my work so far, but bear in mind this is all a “work in progress” and I have a lot more to learn! Anyway, here’s the “usage” screen that provides an overview of the program options:

And here’s a quick walkthrough demonstrating how I use it: First, let’s add a new command under setcmd control. I picked “UAE” for this test, as I frequently want to switch between versions while I’m testing compatibility with my various emulated systems:

I added the command, and now setcmd list shows that there is a new uae command available (note that the setcmd script is also managed by setcmd, so I can easily test new versions!)

A setcmd show uae shows that it’s just a “stub” entry for now; As no versions have been added, if we try to run it we just get a message telling us to add some versions.

OK, so let’s do that - I have two main builds of UAE I switch between: the system-provided one, and the new UAE-1.0.0 I downloaded from OS4Depot:

I’ve now setup two “versions” of UAE, one called system, and another called 1.0 - versions in setcmd can be any format so it’s easier for you to label them according to your needs. So, let’s see it in action! First, let’s try setting the version to “system”, and run the which command to verify that it’s pointing to the correct location:

And now, let’s switch it to the “1.0” version and again verify the path has changed:

There you have it! I can now easily and quickly switch between multiple versions of tools. It’s been a really fun experience diving back into Amiga development again, and I hope to release setcmd on OS4Depot.net soon. First though, I have to tidy it up, remove some bugs and I also want to learn the AmigaGuide and Installer languages so I can provide documentation and an installer to turn this into a “proper” tool. I look forward to my first proper Amiga software release in decades!

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