CBoot

A small boot selector for AmigaOS. Hold a mouse button or an Amiga key while booting to jump straight into a different startup-sequence — no Early Startup menu, no manual boot-picking.

Currently at v1.5. Older releases are tagged in this repo's git history (v1.3, v1.4) rather than kept as separate source files — see Versions below.

Boot modes

Mode	Trigger
Default	No mouse button or Amiga key held at boot
LMB	Left mouse button held at boot
RMB	Right mouse button held at boot
LAmiga	Left Amiga key held at boot
RAmiga	Right Amiga key held at boot

If both a mouse button and an Amiga key are held at the same time, the mouse button takes priority.

Hold Ctrl (alone, or together with a mouse button/Amiga key) to enter the control center for that boot mode instead of booting it — lets you edit, replace, or test-boot a different script without installing it.

CBoot can also be started with an optional argument to only check a subset of modes:

run >nil: C:CBoot          ; checks all four (LMB, RMB, LAmiga, RAmiga) - default
run >nil: C:CBoot mouse    ; only LMB/RMB
run >nil: C:CBoot amiga    ; only LAmiga/RAmiga

Full behaviour and installation steps: cboot.readme.

Building

Compile cboot.e with the E-VO E compiler:

evo cboot.e

The result is an AmigaOS loadseg()able executable; name it CBoot to match the installation instructions in cboot.readme.

Testing — this is not a Shell tool

CBoot can't be smoke-tested by just running it from a Shell prompt. It's designed to run from S:Startup-Sequence during a reboot, reads mouse-button/keyboard state at boot time, and its control center is interactive (ASL file requester). Verifying a change means:

1. Building and copying CBoot to C: on a real Amiga or an emulator (e.g. FS-UAE) with S:CBoot/Default, S:CBoot/LMB, etc. set up per cboot.readme's installation steps.
2. Adding the run >nil: C:CBoot line to S:Startup-Sequence (see example-startup-sequence).
3. Actually rebooting while holding each mouse button/Amiga key/Ctrl combination you want to exercise, since there's no way to fake "boot-time key state" from a running system.

A clean compile only proves the source is syntactically valid, not that any boot mode actually works.

Versions

Tag	Notes
v1.3	First release with Amiga E source included; LMB/RMB + control center.
v1.4	Adds LAmiga/RAmiga boot modes and the mouse/amiga command-line argument; smaller filesize.
v1.5	Case-insensitive mode argument, empty bootscripts treated as missing, volume-root file picks fixed, synchronous ENV: cleanup, dated $VER.

Diff any two releases with e.g. git diff v1.3 v1.4 -- cboot.e.

Verification

cboot.e is boot-verified on an AmigaOS 3.2 install (FS-UAE): all four boot modes (LMB, RMB, LAmiga, RAmiga) and the Ctrl control-center entry have been exercised through real reboots.