Games - Guru Meditation

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Guru Meditation is the name of the error that occurred on early versions of the Amiga home computers when they crashed. It is analogous to the "screens of death" in other operating systems.

Description

When a Guru Meditation is displayed, the options are to reboot by pressing the left mouse button, or to invoke ROMWack by pressing the right mouse button. (ROMWack is a minimalist debugger built into the operating system which is accessible by connecting a 9600 bit/s terminal to the serial port).

The alert itself appears as a black rectangular box located in the upper portion of the screen. Its border and text is red for a normal Guru Meditation, or green/yellow for a Recoverable Alert, another kind of Guru Meditation. The screen goes black, and the power and disk-activity LEDs may blink immediately before the alert appears. In AmigaOS 1.x, programmed in ROMs known as Kickstart 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, the errors are always red. In AmigaOS 2.x and 3.x, recoverable alerts are yellow, except for some very early versions of 2.x where they were green. Dead-end alerts are red in all OS versions.

This error is sometimes referred to colloquially as a "trip to India" or just "alert".

The alert occurred when there was a fatal problem with the system. If the system had no means of recovery, it could display the alert, even in systems with numerous critical flaws. In extreme cases, the alert could even be displayed if the system's memory was completely exhausted.

The error is displayed as two fields, separated by a period. The first field is either the Motorola 68000 exception number that occurred or an internal error identifier (such as an 'Out of Memory' code). The second can be the address of a Task structure, a special error code, or a meaningless value. It is never the address of the code that caused the error.

The text of the alert messages was completely baffling to most users. Only highly technically adept Amiga users would know, for example, that exception 3 was an address error, and meant the program was accessing a word on an unaligned boundary. Users without this specialized knowledge would have no recourse but to look for a "Guru" or to simply reboot the machine and hope for the best.

Origins

The term comes from the early days of the Amiga corporation, and is partly an in-house joke. One of the early products produced by Amiga was the joyboard, a game controller much like a joystick but supposed to be operated by one's feet. It was sold with the skiing game Mogul Maniac for the Atari 2600 game computer. When the Amiga OS crashed, the programmer working with it would sit down cross-legged on the joyboard, trying to keep it in balance thus resembling an Indian guru.

The Guru Meditation error was removed from subsequent versions of the Amiga ROM (Kickstart), but some users chose to patch it back in.

Trivia

The blinking border of the original guru meditation number was created by writing the border in black 6,809 times and then writing it in red 6,809 times. This was in honor of the Motorola 6809, a popular CPU that was a favorite of the system designers.

Later versions of AmigaOS

Since version 4.0 (Beta) of the OS, many alerts are replaced by an error handler known as "The Grim Reaper". The Grim Reaper displays the task which caused an error and the nature of the error (illegal memory access etc.), whereupon it presents the user with several options such as suspending/killing the task, displaying more information such as a register dump or attaching a debugger (gdb).

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