Guru Meditation

It is analogous to the "Blue Screen of Death" in Microsoft Windows operating systems, or a kernel panic in Unix.

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.

ROMWack is a minimalist debugger built into the operating system which is accessible by connecting a 9600 bit/s terminal to the serial port.

Dead-end alerts are always red and terminal in all OS versions except in a rare series of events, as in when a deprecated Kickstart (example: 1.1) program conditionally boots from disk on a more advanced Kickstart 3.x ROM Amiga running in compatibility mode (therefore eschewing the on-disk OS) and crashes with a red Guru Meditation but subsequently restores itself by pressing the left mouse button, the newer Kickstart recognizing an inadvised low level chipset call for the older ROM directly poking the hardware, and addressing it.

There was a commercially available error handler for AmigaOS, before version 2.04, called GOMF (Get Outta My Face) made by Hypertek/Silicon Springs Development corp.

It was able to deal with many kinds of errors and gave the user a choice to either remove the offending process and associated screen, or allow the machine to show the Guru Meditation.

In many cases, removal of the offending process gave one the choice to save one's data and exit running programs before rebooting the system.

In most cases, it is possible to resume work and save files after a Recoverable Alert, while a normal, red Guru Meditation always results in an immediate reboot.