Amiga support and maintenance software
Encyclopedia
Support and maintenance software are those programs that perform service utilities on a computer. These services could be various ones, such as format media to be used with a specific filesystem, diagnose any failure that could occur on that media, recover the data after the failure of the media, et cetera. It may additionally be required to install new software on the machine or to archive and compress a file to be sent and received over a LAN
connection. The aforementioned activities (and others) are grouped under the name of "support and maintenance software". This software is generally considered to be vital when running any operating system
. This article has been written to show how various are the support and maintenance programs for the Amiga
platform. Similar articles are available for PC Windows, MacOS X and Linux
operating systems.
This article is a split of the main article Amiga software
and refers to any support and maintenance software that run on the Amiga line of computers.
Both update systems are not widely used by the Amiga community, because in order to update the AmigaOS, it is often the case that only a single file is required to be copied into one of the AmigaOS system directories, thus replacing the previous version. This is a very simple procedure and any user with a minimum of experience could perform it easily without the danger of harming the system.
The Utilities directory contains programs like IconEdit.
The Commodities directory (volume SYS:Tools/Commodities/ or SYS:Utilities/Commodities under AmigaOS4) contains executable applet
-like utilities which enhance system usability, like for example the ScreenBlanker, the default screen saver shipped with AmigaOS.
"Commodities" are usually loaded at system startup, and feature neither a GUI interface nor do they require any interaction. These "Commodities" could be controlled, stopped, reloaded, and tuned by a user via a system utility called Exchange.
features a standard centralized utility to partition and format hard disks, called HDToolBox. MorphOS uses an updated version of the SCSIConfig utility (since version MorphOS 2 HDConfig) implemented by third party vendor, Phase5
.
In spite of the name, "SCSIConfig" possessed a unique feature at the time, which was providing a consistent mechanism to manage all types of disk interfaces, including IDE, irrespective of which interface the disk(s) in question used.
activities.
Degrading tools: Degrader
utilities which allow the user to control the resolution of Intuition
screens of Amiga programs.
, a utility to install legacy Amiga games on a hard disk and load them from AmigaOS GUI instead of floppies, on which they were often delivered.
jst
, an older one which the developer abandoned in order to concentrate efforts on WHDLoad. Old jstloaders can be read with WHDLoad, and jst itself has some early level of WHDLoad compatibility.
alignment.
In the early days of the Amiga platform there were many disk copiers created in a little amount of time (1985/1989) which enabled copying Amiga floppy disks. There were about 16 disk copier programs: Nibbler, QuickNibble, ZCopier, XCopy/Cachet, FastCopier, Disk Avenger, Tetra Copier (which enabled the user to play Tetris
while copying disks), Cyclone, Maverick, D-Copy, Safe II, PowerCopier, Quick Copier, Marauder II (named "Marauder][" with the parenthesis symbol), Rattle Copy, BurstNibble, etcetera. Almost all of these utilities were used to pirate games.
Many of these disc copiers were perfectly legal in many countries, until the phenomenon of piracy was condemned and became illegal worldwide and these programs (like for example Marauder, X-Copy and Nibbler) were sold in normal packages complete with instructions, warranty and EULA as any normal productivity software.
There also were floppy disks with LED
track indicators to show if the disks were hacked by the original programmers to support up to track 82 of the disk, and copyimg solutions that included both hardware and software like Super Card Ami II, or Syncro Express I/II/III.
DFC5 could only copy standard AmigaOS formatted disks for backup purposes, however, it multitasked inside of the Amiga Workbench GUI.
X-COPY III and later the final version, X-COPY Pro was the most popular Amiga copy program, which was used to copy floppy disks. It was capable of bit-by-bit copying, also called "nibbling". Although incapable of true multitasking, the program was capable of taking advantage of Amiga configurations with multiple floppy drives; for instance, on Amiga systems with four floppy drives, X-COPY was capable of copying from a source drive to three other floppy drives at the same time. Coupled with excellent bit-by-bit replication capabilities, these features made X-COPY the defacto standard for copying floppy disks on the Amiga, especially on the software piracy scene.
Another popular copying program was D-COPY, by a Swedish group "D-Mob", which, in spite of some innovative features and better/faster copying routines, failed to gain dominance.
" (for the resurrected man in the New Testament
). As these features of DiskDoctor were undocumented, this fact led up an Amiga urban legend that there was a computer virus
spreading all around nicknamed Lazarus Virus, which final purpose was to make disks unreadable and renaming it with that name. With 2.0 it came the more useful DiskSalv utility, which was more often used just to validate Amiga filesystems in hard disks partitions.
Here follows a list of known Amiga repair tools:
Reference notes:
and LZX. Programs to archive ZIP
, Gzip
, Bzip2
, and RAR files are available but seldom used, and many of them also have an Amiga counterpart, such as 7-Zip
. There are also utilities for reading and writing archive formats such as ARC
, ARJ
(unarchive only), the CAB
files common in Windows installation, StuffIt
SIT archives from Macintosh, Uuencode
which is used for encoding binary attachments of e-mail messages, TAR
common on UNIX and GNU/Linux, RPM
from Red Hat and more.
Interesting phenomenon of the Amiga scene was the support for Amiga "packed" or "crunched" (meaning lightly or heavily compressed) executables, which were common in the age of floppy disks, when space and memory conservation was critical.
These were executable binary files which had a decompress routine attached to them, and which would automatically unpack or decrunch (decompress) the binary executable upon loading into memory. An interesting concept originated on Commodore 64 pirate scene, called "level depacking", and implemented on the Amiga by a utility called "Titanics Cruncher" enabled a binary executable to be decrunched as it was being loaded, requiring a very small amount of memory to do so.
In general, packing and crunching executables was a technology directly taken from the Commodore 64 cracking scene, so much so, that some crunchers, like for instance the Time Cruncher, were directly ported to the Amiga platform from Commodore 64. This went so far as to even display the same visual effects during decrunching as they would be displayed on the Commodore 64. As the CPU in the Amiga was completely different than the one in the Commodore 64, these were complete implementations from scratch.
Noteworthy of mention in this category were TurboImploder and PowerPacker, which was the most used utility for "crunching" files, as it was easy to use, with a very well designed GUI. Other popular crunchers were the DefjamPacker, TetraPack, DoubleAction, Relokit, StoneCracker, Titanics and CrunchMania crunchers. In the contemporary age, there are libraries such as explode.library to decrunch entire files and directories on the fly. The ability to compress and decompress single files and directories on the fly has been present on the AmigaOS since at least 1994.
A similar feature has been implemented relatively recently as a property in the ZFS filesystem
, enabling ZFS filesystems (and thus individual files inside of them) to be compressed and decompressed on the fly, by setting the "zfs set compression=on /dataset/..." property. It is even possible to choose between the LZJB
and Gzip
compression algorithms, just as it was possible to choose the crunch algorithm on the AmigaOS.
The packers and cruncher libraries on AmigaOS are actually centralized by using the XPK system of AmigaDOS device drives and pseudo devices (which talk to the various XPK libraries). The XPK system consists of a master library and several (de)packer sublibraries. Application programs only use the master library directly: the master library takes care of loading and using the sublibraries. Each sublibrary implements one type of (de)compression. There are different libraries for different types of data. When unpacking/decrunching, the applications do not need to know which library was used to pack or crunch the data. XPK is a wrapper for crunchers, to decrunch non-XPK packed formats requires XFD.
Another important invention on the Amiga platform was the creation of ADF
format for creating images of Amiga floppy disks, either AmigaDOS Standard floppies, or NDOS ones, for use in Amiga emulators, such as WinUAE. Not only Amiga emulators, but also AmigaOS can use these files as they were implemented as virtual floppy disks. Unlimited virtual floppies could be created on modern Amigas, although WinUAE on a real PC can handle only four of them at same time, which happens to be the maximum that the Amiga hardware could have connected at any one time.
Nowadays all the popular Amiga compression implementations and archive files are centralized and implemented by a single system library called the XAD, which has a front end GUI program named Voodoo-X, and included in AmigaOS 3.9 and up with UnArc.. This library is modular and can handle more than 80 compression formats.
compatibility and color selection. In AmigaOS 1.3, it soon evolved into a complete text-based shell called AmigaShell.
There were also created more improved shells from third-party developers thanks to the easy way to implement a new command line interface into Amiga by replacing the original Console-Handler standard command line device driver (or "handler" in Amiga technical language), the program that controls any kind of text-based interfaces into Amiga. The most famous Amiga replacement for the original Console-Handler was KingCON (also known with its "virtual device" name added with semicolon "KingCON:").
Due to easy to implement third-party developed shells, there were ported to Amiga some well known shells from other platforms, such as: Bash (Bourne Again SHell), CSH
(C-Shell), and ZSH
(Z-Shell). These shells taken from Unix and Linux were adapted into Amiga and improved with its peculiar capabilities and functions.
The MorphOS Shell is an example of Z-Shell mixed with the KingCON console handler, and originating as a Unix-like shell it is provided with all the features expected from such a component: AmigaDOS commands (more than 100 commands, most of which are Unix-like), local and global variables, command substitution, command redirection, named and unnamed pipes, history, programmable menus, multiple shells in a window, ANSI compatibility, color selection, and so on. It also includes all the necessary commands for scripting.
standard GUI
called Workbench, the Amiga interfaces were enhanced by third-party developers. So Amiga users are free to replace the original Workbench interface with these ones: Scalos
and Directory Opus
. The standard GUI toolkit, called Intuition, was enhanced in OS2.x with the introduction of GadTools and third parties created their own toolkits such as Magic User Interface
(MUI), which is the standard one on MorphOS systems, and ClassAct, which then evolved into ReAction GUI
which is the standard one on AmigaOS 4.0.
, EGS and Picasso96, which became a standard into Amiga.
original 3D
graphic engine for Amiga, StormMESA which was a 3D library almost all OpenGL compatible and was based on the latest MESA
implementation (MESA V2.5). StormMESA it is now obsolete. TinyGL and MiniGL
engines let Amiga use some capabiities of OpenGL
graphic engine from Linux world. X11 engine it is also available through Amiga version of Cygnix. Cairo
Vector Library it is available on AmigaOS 4.0 and so it is Anti-Grain Geometry
library. On Amiga it is also being developed a GTK_MUI wrapper, to map any existing graphical feature of GTK with standard Amiga MUI
graphic user interface system.
All Amiga modern systems widely support also SDL
(Simple DirectMedia Layer) cross-platform, multimedia, free software library written in C that creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on many operating systems.
through Ghostscript
and AmigaTeX. Ghostview is the foremost used graphical GUI for ghostscript in Amiga.
Since AmigaOS 2.1, in the Prefs (Preferences) system directory there is the printer preferences program called PrinterPS which pilots PostScript printers on Amiga.
from Commodore, then the subsystem of outline fonts was replaced by using most widely used TrueType fonts, using various libraries, such as TrueType Library I and II, and LibFreeType library
.
The standard diskfont.library also supported bitmap multicolour fonts (ColorFonts), such as those professional-looking Kara Fonts, or even animated fonts also created in origin from developer Kara Computer Graphics.
which was good for floppy disks usage, but it wasted disk space when used in Hard disks, and thus is considered obsolete. Amiga FFS
(Fast File System) that can handle long filenames up to 108 characters, has international settings (i.e. it can use filenames with accented letters) and could also being cached, if the users choosing to format the partition with cache option. Modern filesystem for Amiga are the SFS
Smart Filesystem, journaled filesystem, or PFS
(Professional Filesystem) that can use metadata, and defragments itself on the fly. The FFS filesystem evolved in FFS2. Actually the new standard Filesystem in AmigaOS 4.0 and more recent versions are FFS2 and JXFS, while in MorphOS it is used mainly SFS, and there has been developed ICE Filesystem.
MuFS (MultiUser File System) is a filesystem on Amiga capable of support multiutency. Using MuFS the owner of the system could grant various privileges on files by creating privileges for groups and users. It was available with Amiga ARIADNE multi ethernet card, and then as standalone. Professional Filesystem suite owns a utility to let PFS to be patched to support MuFS and MuFS features. latest version is 1.8, released in 2001.
CrossDOS
it is the Amiga standard utility to read MS-DOS formatted floppy disks in FAT12 and FAT16 filesystem, mainly either 720KB Double Density Floppy format or High Density Floppy at 1440KB (obviously only Amiga HD floppy drives can read 1440 MS-DOS disks, or also an external MS-DOS floppy drive connected to Amiga could handle it).
Partitions of various filetypes common in other systems such as those included into Windows as Fat16 and Fat32 are now recognized under a single library which is named into Amiga as FAT95 library, which reads not only partitions, but also MS-DOS Floppies, or even USB Pen-Drives formatted with Fat16 or Fat32.
Filesystems like ext2
for Linux or the well known NTFS
from Microsoft, and more are supported by third party developers.
MorphOS 2.4 and 2.5 support natively Fat16 and 32, NTFS, MacOS HFS, HFS+ and Linux Ext2 filesystems.
Any experienced programmer, following the Amiga Datatype programming guidelines, could realize new standard datatype modules for each kind of file it is required to be loaded or saved, and leave it visible to the whole Amiga System (this means also to all Amiga programs) by simply copying the datatype into system directory SYS:Classes/DataTypes/, and the descriptor (which is called to identify files) into DEVS:DataTypes/.
This fact allows Amiga programs to load and save any kind of files for which it exist the correspondent datatype (IFF. Datatype, Jpeg. Datatype, MP3.Datatype, AIFF.Datatype, etc.) without the necessity to embed file descriptors in its binary, or without the necessity of realizing an independent system of loaders any time it is created a new productivity software running on the Amiga platform. This fact thus keeps Amiga productivity software tools with a smaller size and a more clean design than similar programs running into other operating systems.
Here follows a brief example list of existing datatypes taken from big library of Amiga datatypes:
AIFF
, JPEG
, PNG, TIFF, IFF ANIM, CDXL
, BMP, GIFAnim, JNG
, HTML
, 8SVX
, HyperGuide, ILBM
, MPEGAudio, MPEGVideo, PBM
, Microsoft Word
, Photo-CDs, Protracker
, RGBx, Wav
, Word Perfect, WordStar
, XBM
, Sun .au, etcetera.
) could be associated with a program capable to handle it, and this feature improves and completes the capabilities of Amiga to recognize and deal with any kind of files.
Actually the modern USB support drivers for Amiga are: ANAIIS (Another Native Amiga IO Interface Stack) from Gilles Pelletier, the Poseidon USB stack by Chris Hodges and available for AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS, and Sirion USB stack of AmigaOS 4.0. Poseidon has a modular approach to USB and various hardware devices are supported by a certain number of HID
devices.
Amiga clone by Macrosystem.
Actually exists only one FireWire interface support into Amiga. It is named Fireworks
and it was created for the MorphOS system by programmer Pavel Fedin. It is still an early stage of development, but it is already freely downloadable.
, by German firm IrseeSoft it is the de-facto standard for advanced printing with Amiga, and it is also a modular program with a vast number of drivers which support the foremost known modern printers on the market. PrintStudio Professional I and II was another well known and appreciated printer driver system for the Amiga.
PrintManager v39 By Stephan Rupprecht, available into Aminet repository it is a printer spooler for the AmigaOS 3.x and 4.0.
, VidiAmiga real time digitizer, and for the Paloma module which could be purchased with Picasso IV Amiga compatible graphic card.
In 1994 GTDriver (Graphic Tablet Driver) was the most common used driver for serial port
tablets, like Summagraphics MM, Summagraphics Bitpadone, CalComp
2000, Cherry
, TekTronix
4967 and Wacom
. It was capable also to pilot some serial PC mice.
Actually the graphic tablets are mainly USB devices, and automatically recognized by Amiga USB stacks, but there are not so many drivers capable to pilot it. The most widely used driver for graphic tablets is FormAldiHyd. FormAldiHyd it is capable to pilot various Aiptek, Aldi
, Tevion and Wacom
IV (Graphire, ArtPad, A3, A4, A5 and PenPartner) graphic tablets.
In the recent times the scanner management system has been made independent from the single programs. The hardware interface it is now always USB and managed by Amiga Poseidon USB Stack which is capable to detect scanners from their signature, and loading the corresponding HIDD scanner module. The graphical interface it is managed by programs like ScanTrax and ScanQuix which became a de-facto standard for the Amiga.
(Great Valley Productions), an American hardware manufacturer, and Hama, Electronic Design, and Sirius Genlocks from Germany
.
Pegasos
Amiga Clone computers have an internal IrDA
port connector ready to pilot infrared devices, but there is no support for it in MorphOS
. The Internal IrDA port can be used installing any Linux
flavours supported on that computer model and using Linux IrDA drivers.
external routers connected physically through ethernet
cable and talk with remote WiFi devices. There are drivers available for Prism2 internal PCI
WiFi expansion cards, but no drivers to pilot Bluetooth
standard devices like mobile phones, Bluetooth Handsets, keybooards or mice.
There is an USB Class for Poseidon Stack to use "Wireless PC Lock" USB device by Sitecom Europe BV and engage its security functions. It is called simply Wireless PC Lock.
Freeze Frame Digital Camera System Polaroid Digital Palette CI-3000 and Digital Palette CI 5000, with the software created by Polaroid itself.
There were many professional drivers to pilot step-by-step video recorders to save on tape the 3D animations created by Amiga (Digital piloted Ampex
and Betacam
), and TBC devices (Time Base Correctors devices, which is a family of devices that correct timing errors which can cause unstable edits) in order to adjust Amiga TV output signal to a vast amount of broadcast video devices and link the signal to professional Betacam videorecorders, signal converters to change NTSC American TV system to PAL European TV system, and professional blue-screens used in broadcast productions. One of these products was Personal TBC series of programs for the Amiga.
Another example of a complete new line of products that Amiga helped to create and launch on the market, were the digital recorders, now widely available on the market, coupled with an internal hard disk and a DVD device, in order to transfer the recorded file. One of these products was Broadcaster Elite, one of the very first digital videorecorder, based on a SCSI system and a Zorro II Amiga expansion card.
There were also programs to pilot digital oscilloscope
s and even expansion cards to transform Amiga into an oscilloscope/vectorscope
changing the video interface and adapting it to a new GUI every time it should be changed the measurement system and the emulated device either oscilloscope or vectorscope.
Amiga Phonepak card from GVP Amiga Phonepak was an expansion card to transform Amiga in a complete professional integrated telephone switchboard, fax system, and answering machine for SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) market.
Amiga Also helped as a videotitler system in the High Definition TV standard first experimental broadcasting. A battery of three Amigas was used as videotitlers on Analog HDTV
experiments on HDTV NTSC 1125 lines standard, by channels like ESPN
, ABC
, NBC
.
Län
Län and lääni refer to the administrative divisions used in Sweden and previously in Finland. The provinces of Finland were abolished on January 1, 2010....
connection. The aforementioned activities (and others) are grouped under the name of "support and maintenance software". This software is generally considered to be vital when running any operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
. This article has been written to show how various are the support and maintenance programs for the Amiga
Amiga
The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...
platform. Similar articles are available for PC Windows, MacOS X and Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
operating systems.
This article is a split of the main article Amiga software
Amiga software
Amiga software covers a wide range of software for the Amiga computer, both productivity and games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist. The Amiga software market was particularly active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but has since the period 1996/1999 dwindled into almost only a hobbyist...
and refers to any support and maintenance software that run on the Amiga line of computers.
Original Amiga Feature Utilities
Amiga featured a number of utility programs embedded into the OS. Many of these are original features, and were then adopted into other systems:- Installer is a system tool developed by Commodore for the installation of Amiga software. It features a LISPLispA lisp is a speech impediment, historically also known as sigmatism. Stereotypically, people with a lisp are unable to pronounce sibilants , and replace them with interdentals , though there are actually several kinds of lisp...
interpreter to facilitate the installation procedure. It was not widely adopted by Amiga software vendors because on AmigaOS, it was often the case that the installation entailed copying a single executable to the floppy or the hard disk where the AmigaOS was installed. This ease of installation made the utility unnecessary in the Amiga community. Unlike sophisticated UNIX software management subsystems, the Amiga Installer didn't support dependencies or tracking of where the installed files were delivered; it simply copied them onto the target filesystem(s). See also this related external article which explains installation of programs on the AmigaOS.
- AmigaGuideAmigaguideAmigaGuide is a hypertext document file format designed for the Amiga, files are stored in ASCII so it is possible to read and edit a file without the need for special software.Since Workbench 2.1 an Amiga Guide system for O.S...
is a hypertext markup scheme and a browser for writing and reading web page-like documents. The AmigaGuide files are simple text files in a simple markup language, which facilitates easy editing and localization in any ASCII text editor. Commodore came up with the AmigaGuide format before the World Wide Web was even known. Consumers who bought Amiga computers in a store did not receive documentation on how to write AmigaGuide documents.
Utility Features borrowed from other systems
- Update tools – Since AmigaOS 4.0, a standard utility called AmiUpdate is provided to keep the system files and the installed programs up to date. MorphOSMorphOSMorphOS is an Amiga-compatible computer operating system. It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware, including the...
, an AmigaOS-like operating system, also has the MorphUP equivalent.
Both update systems are not widely used by the Amiga community, because in order to update the AmigaOS, it is often the case that only a single file is required to be copied into one of the AmigaOS system directories, thus replacing the previous version. This is a very simple procedure and any user with a minimum of experience could perform it easily without the danger of harming the system.
Commodities and utilities
Amiga features two standard directories in which the System Utilities are stored:The Utilities directory contains programs like IconEdit.
The Commodities directory (volume SYS:Tools/Commodities/ or SYS:Utilities/Commodities under AmigaOS4) contains executable applet
Applet
In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a larger program, often as a plug-in. An applet typically also refers to Java applets, i.e., programs written in the Java programming language that are included in a web page...
-like utilities which enhance system usability, like for example the ScreenBlanker, the default screen saver shipped with AmigaOS.
"Commodities" are usually loaded at system startup, and feature neither a GUI interface nor do they require any interaction. These "Commodities" could be controlled, stopped, reloaded, and tuned by a user via a system utility called Exchange.
Hard disk partitioning
AmigaOSAmigaOS
AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000...
features a standard centralized utility to partition and format hard disks, called HDToolBox. MorphOS uses an updated version of the SCSIConfig utility (since version MorphOS 2 HDConfig) implemented by third party vendor, Phase5
Phase5
Phase5 Digital Products was a computer hardware manufacturer that made boards for the Amiga computer. Their best known products were accelerator boards which replaced the CPU with a faster model...
.
In spite of the name, "SCSIConfig" possessed a unique feature at the time, which was providing a consistent mechanism to manage all types of disk interfaces, including IDE, irrespective of which interface the disk(s) in question used.
Diagnostic tools
AmigaOS diagnostic tools are usually programs which display the current state of Exec and AmigaDOSAmigaDOS
AmigaDOS is the disk operating system of the AmigaOS, which includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface, and file redirection....
activities.
- Active process explorer: Scout, Ranger
- System calls and messages: SnoopDOS, Snoopium
- Memory management: CyberGuard, Enforcer, MemMungWall, TLSFMem by Chris Hodges
- Virtual memory: GigaMem, VMM
- Benchmark Utilities AmiBench, AIBB
Degrading tools: Degrader
- These programs "degrade" modern Amiga systems to performance and hardware equivalents of legacy Amiga models.
Promoting tools
Promoter, ForceMonitorutilities which allow the user to control the resolution of Intuition
Intuition (Amiga)
Intuition is the windowing system and user interface engine of AmigaOS. It was developed almost entirely by RJ Mical. Intuition should not be confused with Workbench, the AmigaOS spatial file manager, which relies on Intuition for handling windows and input events.Users may remember the initial...
screens of Amiga programs.
Game loaders
WHDLoadWHDLoad
WHDLoad is a program for Amiga which has been created to easily install programs to a hard disk , allowing for better compatibility of Amiga programs, which can sometimes be difficult to run or emulate otherwise due to the widely varying hardware setups of Amigas across its history...
, a utility to install legacy Amiga games on a hard disk and load them from AmigaOS GUI instead of floppies, on which they were often delivered.
jst
JST
JST may refer to:*Beijing Jishuitan Hospital *Japan Science and Technology Agency*Japan Standard Time*Japan Solderless Terminal Manufacturing Corporation*One of two Jesuit Schools of Theology** Weston Jesuit School of Theology...
, an older one which the developer abandoned in order to concentrate efforts on WHDLoad. Old jstloaders can be read with WHDLoad, and jst itself has some early level of WHDLoad compatibility.
Disk copiers
During the 8 bit and 16/32 bit era copying software was not considered illegal in many countries, and the piracy was not even perceived as being a crime (as it is nowadays) by the large audience of users of home computers that were usually always young people and teenagers. Commodore C64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum software were copied by using normal audio cassettes and PC, Atari and Amiga software were copied by using special programs called Disk Copiers that were engineeered to copy any floppy disk surface byte by byte, even often using special, efficient and advanced techniques of programming and "Disk Track driving" for maintain Floppy Disk read/write headDisk read-and-write head
Disk read/write heads are the small parts of a disk drive, that move above the disk platter and transform platter's magnetic field into electrical current or vice versa – transform electrical current into magnetic field...
alignment.
In the early days of the Amiga platform there were many disk copiers created in a little amount of time (1985/1989) which enabled copying Amiga floppy disks. There were about 16 disk copier programs: Nibbler, QuickNibble, ZCopier, XCopy/Cachet, FastCopier, Disk Avenger, Tetra Copier (which enabled the user to play Tetris
Tetris
Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was released on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...
while copying disks), Cyclone, Maverick, D-Copy, Safe II, PowerCopier, Quick Copier, Marauder II (named "Marauder][" with the parenthesis symbol), Rattle Copy, BurstNibble, etcetera. Almost all of these utilities were used to pirate games.
Many of these disc copiers were perfectly legal in many countries, until the phenomenon of piracy was condemned and became illegal worldwide and these programs (like for example Marauder, X-Copy and Nibbler) were sold in normal packages complete with instructions, warranty and EULA as any normal productivity software.
There also were floppy disks with LED
LEd
LEd is a TeX/LaTeX editing software working under Microsoft Windows. It is a freeware product....
track indicators to show if the disks were hacked by the original programmers to support up to track 82 of the disk, and copyimg solutions that included both hardware and software like Super Card Ami II, or Syncro Express I/II/III.
DFC5 could only copy standard AmigaOS formatted disks for backup purposes, however, it multitasked inside of the Amiga Workbench GUI.
X-COPY III and later the final version, X-COPY Pro was the most popular Amiga copy program, which was used to copy floppy disks. It was capable of bit-by-bit copying, also called "nibbling". Although incapable of true multitasking, the program was capable of taking advantage of Amiga configurations with multiple floppy drives; for instance, on Amiga systems with four floppy drives, X-COPY was capable of copying from a source drive to three other floppy drives at the same time. Coupled with excellent bit-by-bit replication capabilities, these features made X-COPY the defacto standard for copying floppy disks on the Amiga, especially on the software piracy scene.
Another popular copying program was D-COPY, by a Swedish group "D-Mob", which, in spite of some innovative features and better/faster copying routines, failed to gain dominance.
Backup and recovery tools
In the first AmigaOS releases Commodore included a standard floppy disk recover utility stored in the directory of AmigaDOS commands and called DiskDoctor. Its purpose was to recover files from mangled floppy disks. Unfortunately this utility worked only with AmigaOS standard disks, and as major faults it did not saved the recovered data on different disks than original one and dangerously performed its operations directly on the original damaged disks. Also DiskDoctor wrote upon original disks and destroyed Amiga autoboot-non standard AmigaOS disks (mainly autobooting games), by overwriting their bootblock. DiskDoctor also renamed recovered disks with standard name "LazarusLazarus of Bethany
Lazarus of Bethany, also known as Saint Lazarus or Lazarus of the Four Days, is the subject of a prominent miracle attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus restores him to life four days after his death...
" (for the resurrected man in the New Testament
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
). As these features of DiskDoctor were undocumented, this fact led up an Amiga urban legend that there was a computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
spreading all around nicknamed Lazarus Virus, which final purpose was to make disks unreadable and renaming it with that name. With 2.0 it came the more useful DiskSalv utility, which was more often used just to validate Amiga filesystems in hard disks partitions.
Here follows a list of known Amiga repair tools:
- First generation (only floppies): Disk Mechanic, Disk Repair, Dr.Ami
- Second generation (floppies + HD) : Ami-Back Tools, Ami-Filesafe Pro, Quarterback Tools, Amiga Tools DeLuxe, Diavolo Backup
- Third generation (modern filesystems): The suite for recovering SFSSmart File SystemThe Smart File System is a journaling filesystem used on Amiga computers. It is designed for performance, scalability and integrity...
: SFS Recover Tool, SFSDoctor, SFSCheck 2, SFSResize 1.0
Reference notes:
Archives and compression utilities
The archivers most used on the AmigaOS and considered a defacto standard are LHALHA (file format)
LHA is a freeware compression utility and associated file format. It was created in 1988 by , and originally named LHarc. A complete rewrite of LHarc, tentatively named LHx, was eventually released as LH. It was then renamed to LHA to avoid conflicting with the then-new MS-DOS 5.0 LH command...
and LZX. Programs to archive ZIP
ZIP (file format)
Zip is a file format used for data compression and archiving. A zip file contains one or more files that have been compressed, to reduce file size, or stored as is...
, Gzip
Gzip
Gzip is any of several software applications used for file compression and decompression. The term usually refers to the GNU Project's implementation, "gzip" standing for GNU zip. It is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of Lempel-Ziv and Huffman coding...
, Bzip2
Bzip2
bzip2 is a free and open source implementation of the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It is developed and maintained by Julian Seward. Seward made the first public release of bzip2, version 0.15, in July 1996.-Compression efficiency:...
, and RAR files are available but seldom used, and many of them also have an Amiga counterpart, such as 7-Zip
7-Zip
7-Zip is an open source file archiver. 7-Zip operates with the 7z archive format, but can read and write several other archive formats. The program can be used from a command line interface, graphical user interface, or with Microsoft Windows shell integration. 7-Zip began in 1999 and is actively...
. There are also utilities for reading and writing archive formats such as ARC
ARC (file format)
ARC is a lossless data compression and archival format by System Enhancement Associates . It was very popular during the early days of networked dial-up BBS. The file format and the program were both called ARC...
, ARJ
ARJ
ARJ is a software tool designed by Robert K. Jung for creating high-efficiency compressed file archives. ARJ is currently on version 2.85 for DOS and 3.15 for Windows and supports 16-bit and 32-bit Intel architectures.ARJ was one of two mainstream archivers for DOS and Windows during early and...
(unarchive only), the CAB
Cabinet (file format)
In computing, CAB is the Microsoft Windows native compressed archive format. It supports compression and digital signing, and is used in a variety of Microsoft installation engines: Setup API, Device Installer, AdvPack and Windows Installer.Though Cabinet was originally called Diamond, its .CAB...
files common in Windows installation, StuffIt
StuffIt
StuffIt is a family of computer software utilities for archiving and compressing files on the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms: it was originally produced for the Macintosh. An old version for Linux and Sun Solaris 2.7 or later is also available...
SIT archives from Macintosh, Uuencode
Uuencode
Uuencoding is a form of binary-to-text encoding that originated in the Unix program uuencode, for encoding binary data for transmission over the uucp mail system.The name "uuencoding" is derived from "Unix-to-Unix encoding"...
which is used for encoding binary attachments of e-mail messages, TAR
Tar (file format)
In computing, tar is both a file format and the name of a program used to handle such files...
common on UNIX and GNU/Linux, RPM
RPM Package Manager
RPM Package Manager is a package management system. The name RPM variously refers to the .rpm file format, files in this format, software packaged in such files, and the package manager itself...
from Red Hat and more.
Interesting phenomenon of the Amiga scene was the support for Amiga "packed" or "crunched" (meaning lightly or heavily compressed) executables, which were common in the age of floppy disks, when space and memory conservation was critical.
These were executable binary files which had a decompress routine attached to them, and which would automatically unpack or decrunch (decompress) the binary executable upon loading into memory. An interesting concept originated on Commodore 64 pirate scene, called "level depacking", and implemented on the Amiga by a utility called "Titanics Cruncher" enabled a binary executable to be decrunched as it was being loaded, requiring a very small amount of memory to do so.
In general, packing and crunching executables was a technology directly taken from the Commodore 64 cracking scene, so much so, that some crunchers, like for instance the Time Cruncher, were directly ported to the Amiga platform from Commodore 64. This went so far as to even display the same visual effects during decrunching as they would be displayed on the Commodore 64. As the CPU in the Amiga was completely different than the one in the Commodore 64, these were complete implementations from scratch.
Noteworthy of mention in this category were TurboImploder and PowerPacker, which was the most used utility for "crunching" files, as it was easy to use, with a very well designed GUI. Other popular crunchers were the DefjamPacker, TetraPack, DoubleAction, Relokit, StoneCracker, Titanics and CrunchMania crunchers. In the contemporary age, there are libraries such as explode.library to decrunch entire files and directories on the fly. The ability to compress and decompress single files and directories on the fly has been present on the AmigaOS since at least 1994.
A similar feature has been implemented relatively recently as a property in the ZFS filesystem
ZFS
In computing, ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity verification against data corruption modes , support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management,...
, enabling ZFS filesystems (and thus individual files inside of them) to be compressed and decompressed on the fly, by setting the "zfs set compression=on /dataset/..." property. It is even possible to choose between the LZJB
LZJB
LZJB is a lossless data compression algorithm invented by Jeff Bonwick to compress crash dumps and data in ZFS. It includes a number of improvements to the LZRW1 algorithm, a member of the Lempel-Ziv family of compression algorithms.-External links:* * *...
and Gzip
Gzip
Gzip is any of several software applications used for file compression and decompression. The term usually refers to the GNU Project's implementation, "gzip" standing for GNU zip. It is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of Lempel-Ziv and Huffman coding...
compression algorithms, just as it was possible to choose the crunch algorithm on the AmigaOS.
The packers and cruncher libraries on AmigaOS are actually centralized by using the XPK system of AmigaDOS device drives and pseudo devices (which talk to the various XPK libraries). The XPK system consists of a master library and several (de)packer sublibraries. Application programs only use the master library directly: the master library takes care of loading and using the sublibraries. Each sublibrary implements one type of (de)compression. There are different libraries for different types of data. When unpacking/decrunching, the applications do not need to know which library was used to pack or crunch the data. XPK is a wrapper for crunchers, to decrunch non-XPK packed formats requires XFD.
Another important invention on the Amiga platform was the creation of ADF
Amiga Disk File
Amiga Disk File aka ADF is a file format used by Amiga computers and emulators to store images of disks. It has been around almost as long as the Amiga itself, although it was not initially called by any particular name. Before it was known as ADF, it was used in commercial game production, backup...
format for creating images of Amiga floppy disks, either AmigaDOS Standard floppies, or NDOS ones, for use in Amiga emulators, such as WinUAE. Not only Amiga emulators, but also AmigaOS can use these files as they were implemented as virtual floppy disks. Unlimited virtual floppies could be created on modern Amigas, although WinUAE on a real PC can handle only four of them at same time, which happens to be the maximum that the Amiga hardware could have connected at any one time.
Nowadays all the popular Amiga compression implementations and archive files are centralized and implemented by a single system library called the XAD, which has a front end GUI program named Voodoo-X, and included in AmigaOS 3.9 and up with UnArc.. This library is modular and can handle more than 80 compression formats.
Command line interfaces and text-based shells
The original Amiga CLI (Command Line Interface) had some basic editing capabilities, command template, and other features such as ANSIAnsi
Ansi is a village in Kaarma Parish, Saare County, on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia....
compatibility and color selection. In AmigaOS 1.3, it soon evolved into a complete text-based shell called AmigaShell.
There were also created more improved shells from third-party developers thanks to the easy way to implement a new command line interface into Amiga by replacing the original Console-Handler standard command line device driver (or "handler" in Amiga technical language), the program that controls any kind of text-based interfaces into Amiga. The most famous Amiga replacement for the original Console-Handler was KingCON (also known with its "virtual device" name added with semicolon "KingCON:").
Due to easy to implement third-party developed shells, there were ported to Amiga some well known shells from other platforms, such as: Bash (Bourne Again SHell), CSH
C shell
The C shell is a Unix shell that was created by Bill Joy while a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1970s. It has been distributed widely, beginning with the 2BSD release of the BSD Unix system that Joy began distributing in 1978...
(C-Shell), and ZSH
Z shell
The Z shell is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting...
(Z-Shell). These shells taken from Unix and Linux were adapted into Amiga and improved with its peculiar capabilities and functions.
The MorphOS Shell is an example of Z-Shell mixed with the KingCON console handler, and originating as a Unix-like shell it is provided with all the features expected from such a component: AmigaDOS commands (more than 100 commands, most of which are Unix-like), local and global variables, command substitution, command redirection, named and unnamed pipes, history, programmable menus, multiple shells in a window, ANSI compatibility, color selection, and so on. It also includes all the necessary commands for scripting.
Amiga WIMP GUI interfaces
Starting from original Amiga WIMPWIMP (computing)
In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows, icons, menus and pointers", denoting a style of interaction using these elements. It was coined by Merzouga Wilberts in 1980...
standard GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...
called Workbench, the Amiga interfaces were enhanced by third-party developers. So Amiga users are free to replace the original Workbench interface with these ones: Scalos
Scalos
Scalos is the name of a commercial desktop replacement for the Workbench Amiga original GUI, based on a subset of APIs and its own front-end window manager of the same name....
and Directory Opus
Directory Opus
Directory Opus is a popular file manager program, originally written for the Amiga computer system in the early to mid 1990s...
. The standard GUI toolkit, called Intuition, was enhanced in OS2.x with the introduction of GadTools and third parties created their own toolkits such as Magic User Interface
Magic User Interface
The Magic User Interface is an object-oriented system by Stefan Stuntz to generate and maintain graphical user interfaces. With the aid of a preferences program, the user of an application has the ability to customize the outfit according to personal taste....
(MUI), which is the standard one on MorphOS systems, and ClassAct, which then evolved into ReAction GUI
ReAction GUI
ReAction GUI it is the name of the widget toolkit engine that is used in AmigaOS 3.5-4.1.It is an evolution of ClassACT, which is an object oriented system of classes that enhanced the aspect of the Workbench 2.0 GUI of AmigaOS.- History :...
which is the standard one on AmigaOS 4.0.
Amiga Advanced Graphics Systems
Most used drivers for advanced graphics into Amiga, which let the AmigaOS capable to handle high resolution graphics, enhanced with million colors features, complete of Alpha Channel into programs and standard GUI interfaces are CyberGraphXCyberGraphX
CyberGraphX , is the standard ReTargetable Graphics API available for the Amiga and compatible systems. It was developed by Thomas Sontowski and Frank Mariak and later adopted by Phase5 for use with their graphics cards...
, EGS and Picasso96, which became a standard into Amiga.
Graphical engines
Into Amiga are available some graphical engines, and we remember Warp3DWarp3D
Warp3D was a project run by Haage & Partner in 1998, that aimed to provide a standard API which would enable programmers to access, and therefore use, 3D hardware on the Amiga....
original 3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
graphic engine for Amiga, StormMESA which was a 3D library almost all OpenGL compatible and was based on the latest MESA
Mesa 3D
Mesa 3D is an open source 3D computer graphics library that provides a generic OpenGL implementation for rendering three-dimensional graphics on multiple platforms. It was initially developed by Brian Paul in August 1993, and is still maintained by him today...
implementation (MESA V2.5). StormMESA it is now obsolete. TinyGL and MiniGL
MiniGL
The term MiniGL was applied to a wide range of incomplete OpenGL implementations provided by graphics card hardware companies including 3dfx, PowerVR and Rendition in the late 1990s. They owe their genesis to the computer game Quake....
engines let Amiga use some capabiities of OpenGL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
graphic engine from Linux world. X11 engine it is also available through Amiga version of Cygnix. Cairo
Cairo (graphics)
cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends...
Vector Library it is available on AmigaOS 4.0 and so it is Anti-Grain Geometry
Anti-Grain Geometry
Anti-Grain Geometry is a high-quality 2D rendering library written in C++. It features anti-aliasing and sub-pixel resolution.The library is operating system independent and renders to an abstract memory object. It comes with examples interfaced to the X Window System, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X,...
library. On Amiga it is also being developed a GTK_MUI wrapper, to map any existing graphical feature of GTK with standard Amiga MUI
Magic User Interface
The Magic User Interface is an object-oriented system by Stefan Stuntz to generate and maintain graphical user interfaces. With the aid of a preferences program, the user of an application has the ability to customize the outfit according to personal taste....
graphic user interface system.
All Amiga modern systems widely support also SDL
Simple DirectMedia Layer
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform, free and open source multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms' graphics, sound, and input devices....
(Simple DirectMedia Layer) cross-platform, multimedia, free software library written in C that creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on many operating systems.
PostScript
Amiga supports PostScriptPostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
through Ghostscript
Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format page description languages.- Features :...
and AmigaTeX. Ghostview is the foremost used graphical GUI for ghostscript in Amiga.
Since AmigaOS 2.1, in the Prefs (Preferences) system directory there is the printer preferences program called PrinterPS which pilots PostScript printers on Amiga.
TrueType fonts, color and anim fonts
Original Amiga outline fonts a.k.a vector fonts were Agfa Compugraphic fonts available since AmigaOS 2.1 with the standard utility FountainFountain
A fountain is a piece of architecture which pours water into a basin or jets it into the air either to supply drinking water or for decorative or dramatic effect....
from Commodore, then the subsystem of outline fonts was replaced by using most widely used TrueType fonts, using various libraries, such as TrueType Library I and II, and LibFreeType library
FreeType
FreeType is a software library written in C that implements a font rasterization engine. It is used to render text on to bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations.-Details:...
.
The standard diskfont.library also supported bitmap multicolour fonts (ColorFonts), such as those professional-looking Kara Fonts, or even animated fonts also created in origin from developer Kara Computer Graphics.
Font designer software
Personal Fonts Maker was the most widely used Amiga software to create bitmap fonts, while TypeSmith v.2.5b was de de-facto standard utility to create outline fonts.Filesystems
Amiga can handle various filesystems. Historical standard ones are Amiga Filesystem, then named Amiga Old FilesystemAmiga Old File System
On the Amiga, the Old File System was the filesystem for Amiga OS before the Amiga Fast File System. Even though it used 512-byte blocks, it reserved the first small portion of each block for metadata, leaving an actual data block capacity of 488 bytes per block...
which was good for floppy disks usage, but it wasted disk space when used in Hard disks, and thus is considered obsolete. Amiga FFS
Amiga Fast File System
The Amiga Fast File System is a file system used on the Amiga personal computer. The previous Amiga filesystem upon the release of FFS became known as Amiga Old File System . OFS, while fine on floppy disk, soon proved too slow to keep up with era hard drives...
(Fast File System) that can handle long filenames up to 108 characters, has international settings (i.e. it can use filenames with accented letters) and could also being cached, if the users choosing to format the partition with cache option. Modern filesystem for Amiga are the SFS
Smart File System
The Smart File System is a journaling filesystem used on Amiga computers. It is designed for performance, scalability and integrity...
Smart Filesystem, journaled filesystem, or PFS
Professional File System
The Professional File System is a filesystem originally developed commercially for the Amiga, it is now distributed on Aminet with a 4-clause BSD license. PFS tends to perform very well, due to the simplicity of design. Compatible successor of Ami-FileSafe....
(Professional Filesystem) that can use metadata, and defragments itself on the fly. The FFS filesystem evolved in FFS2. Actually the new standard Filesystem in AmigaOS 4.0 and more recent versions are FFS2 and JXFS, while in MorphOS it is used mainly SFS, and there has been developed ICE Filesystem.
MuFS (MultiUser File System) is a filesystem on Amiga capable of support multiutency. Using MuFS the owner of the system could grant various privileges on files by creating privileges for groups and users. It was available with Amiga ARIADNE multi ethernet card, and then as standalone. Professional Filesystem suite owns a utility to let PFS to be patched to support MuFS and MuFS features. latest version is 1.8, released in 2001.
CrossDOS
CrossDOS
CrossDOS is file system for AmigaDOS. It was bundled with AmigaOS 2.1 and later, though it did work under Amiga OS 2.04. Its function was to allow working with floppy disks formatted for PCs...
it is the Amiga standard utility to read MS-DOS formatted floppy disks in FAT12 and FAT16 filesystem, mainly either 720KB Double Density Floppy format or High Density Floppy at 1440KB (obviously only Amiga HD floppy drives can read 1440 MS-DOS disks, or also an external MS-DOS floppy drive connected to Amiga could handle it).
Partitions of various filetypes common in other systems such as those included into Windows as Fat16 and Fat32 are now recognized under a single library which is named into Amiga as FAT95 library, which reads not only partitions, but also MS-DOS Floppies, or even USB Pen-Drives formatted with Fat16 or Fat32.
Filesystems like ext2
Ext2
The ext2 or second extended filesystem is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system ....
for Linux or the well known NTFS
NTFS
NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7....
from Microsoft, and more are supported by third party developers.
MorphOS 2.4 and 2.5 support natively Fat16 and 32, NTFS, MacOS HFS, HFS+ and Linux Ext2 filesystems.
Datatypes
The Datatype system of AmigaOS is a centralized expandable modular system describing any kind of file (text, music, image files, videos) each one with a standard load/save module of its own.Any experienced programmer, following the Amiga Datatype programming guidelines, could realize new standard datatype modules for each kind of file it is required to be loaded or saved, and leave it visible to the whole Amiga System (this means also to all Amiga programs) by simply copying the datatype into system directory SYS:Classes/DataTypes/, and the descriptor (which is called to identify files) into DEVS:DataTypes/.
This fact allows Amiga programs to load and save any kind of files for which it exist the correspondent datatype (IFF. Datatype, Jpeg. Datatype, MP3.Datatype, AIFF.Datatype, etc.) without the necessity to embed file descriptors in its binary, or without the necessity of realizing an independent system of loaders any time it is created a new productivity software running on the Amiga platform. This fact thus keeps Amiga productivity software tools with a smaller size and a more clean design than similar programs running into other operating systems.
Here follows a brief example list of existing datatypes taken from big library of Amiga datatypes:
AIFF
AIFF
Audio Interchange File Format is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices...
, JPEG
JPEG
In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
, PNG, TIFF, IFF ANIM, CDXL
CDXL
CDXL is an obsolete motion video file format developed by Commodore in the late 1980s and early 1990s for the Amiga computer platform. It is notable for being one of the earliest formats created for motion video playback from CD-ROM .-Background:...
, BMP, GIFAnim, JNG
JNG
JPEG Network Graphics is a JPEG-based graphics file format which is closely related to PNG: it uses the PNG file structure as a container format to wrap JPEG encoded image data....
, HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, 8SVX
8SVX
8SVX is a subformat of the Interchange File Format. The subformat is for 8-bit sampled sounds, supports both mono and stereo streams as well as loops; commonly used as a basic audio sample format on Amiga computers for many years...
, HyperGuide, ILBM
ILBM
ILBM is a subtype of the Interchange File Format used for storing picture data. ILBM stands for InterLeaved BitMap which refers to the way the pictures are stored. The image data is stored as a varying number of bitplanes, each storing one bit of data for each pixel in the image...
, MPEGAudio, MPEGVideo, PBM
Portable pixmap
The phrase Netpbm format commonly refers to any or all of the members of a set of closely related graphics formats used and defined by the Netpbm project....
, Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS , the Apple Macintosh , the AT&T Unix PC , Atari ST , SCO UNIX,...
, Photo-CDs, Protracker
Protracker
ProTracker is a popular freeware tracker created by Lars Hamre, Anders Hamre, Sven Vahsen and Rune Johnsrud for the Amiga platform. It is amongst the programs that first allowed for widespread creation of music without studio equipment...
, RGBx, Wav
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format , is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs...
, Word Perfect, WordStar
WordStar
WordStar is a word processor application, published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M operating system but later ported to DOS, that enjoyed a dominant market share during the early to mid-1980s. Although Seymour I...
, XBM
XBM
In computer graphics, the X Window System uses X BitMap , a plain text binary image format, for storing cursor and icon bitmaps used in the X GUI.XBM files differ markedly from most image files in that they take the form of C source files...
, Sun .au, etcetera.
MultiView
MultiView is the standard Amiga universal viewer capable of loading and displaying any document or image file, or even playing any music or movie file for which a correspondent datatype exists.MIME types
Modern Amiga-like operating systems such as AmigaOS 4.0 and MorphOS can handle also MIME types. Any kind of file, due to its peculiar characteristics (thanks to filename extensions), or data embedded into file itself (for example into file headerHeader (information technology)
In information technology, header refers to supplemental data placed at the beginning of a block of data being stored or transmitted. In data transmission, the data following the header are sometimes called the payload or body....
) could be associated with a program capable to handle it, and this feature improves and completes the capabilities of Amiga to recognize and deal with any kind of files.
USB stacks
The only known historical USB stack for the Amiga is the one created for Draco Macrosystem Amiga clone. It supported only USB 1.0 and ceased with the demise of that platform.Actually the modern USB support drivers for Amiga are: ANAIIS (Another Native Amiga IO Interface Stack) from Gilles Pelletier, the Poseidon USB stack by Chris Hodges and available for AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS, and Sirion USB stack of AmigaOS 4.0. Poseidon has a modular approach to USB and various hardware devices are supported by a certain number of HID
Human interface device
A human interface device or HID is a type of computer device that interacts directly with, and most often takes input from, humans and may deliver output to humans. The term "HID" most commonly refers to the USB-HID specification. The term was coined by Mike Van Flandern of Microsoft when he...
devices.
FireWire stacks (IEEE 1394)
Again the only known historical Amiga support for FireWire IEEE 1394 was built for the DraCoDraco
Draco was the first legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece. He replaced the prevailing system of oral law and blood feud by a written code to be enforced only by a court...
Amiga clone by Macrosystem.
Actually exists only one FireWire interface support into Amiga. It is named Fireworks
Fireworks
Fireworks are a class of explosive pyrotechnic devices used for aesthetic and entertainment purposes. The most common use of a firework is as part of a fireworks display. A fireworks event is a display of the effects produced by firework devices...
and it was created for the MorphOS system by programmer Pavel Fedin. It is still an early stage of development, but it is already freely downloadable.
Printer drivers
Print Manager program TurboPrintTurboPrint
TurboPrint is a closed source printer driver system for Linux, AmigaOS and MorphOS. It supports a number of printers that don't yet have a free driver, and fuller printer functionality on some printer models. It integrates with the CUPS printing system....
, by German firm IrseeSoft it is the de-facto standard for advanced printing with Amiga, and it is also a modular program with a vast number of drivers which support the foremost known modern printers on the market. PrintStudio Professional I and II was another well known and appreciated printer driver system for the Amiga.
PrintManager v39 By Stephan Rupprecht, available into Aminet repository it is a printer spooler for the AmigaOS 3.x and 4.0.
Video digitizers
On Amiga there was a good software for digitizing videos, for example DigiView frame by frame digitizer, FrameMachine Zorro II (Amiga 16bit card standard bus connector) expansion card for A2000, 3000, 4000, Impact Vision IV24 from GVPGreat Valley Products
Great Valley Products is a former third-party Amiga hardware supplier.The company was mostly known for CPU-Accelerators and SCSI-Hostadapters for the Commodore Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000 computer series. The company liquidated itself in July 1995...
, VidiAmiga real time digitizer, and for the Paloma module which could be purchased with Picasso IV Amiga compatible graphic card.
Graphic Tablets
In the past SummaGraphics Tablets were the most famous in the eighties and were the most widely used into Amiga also. Summagraphics supported directly Amiga with its drivers, also some Amiga graphic programs provided their bundled drivers for some limited graphic tablets models.In 1994 GTDriver (Graphic Tablet Driver) was the most common used driver for serial port
Serial port
In computing, a serial port is a serial communication physical interface through which information transfers in or out one bit at a time...
tablets, like Summagraphics MM, Summagraphics Bitpadone, CalComp
Calcomp
Calcomp Technology, Inc., usually known as Calcomp, was a company best known for its Calcomp plotters, which it was founded to produce in 1959. It produced a wide range of plotters , digitizers, and other graphic input/output devices. It also produced IBM plug-compatible disk and tape products...
2000, Cherry
Cherry
The cherry is the fruit of many plants of the genus Prunus, and is a fleshy stone fruit. The cherry fruits of commerce are usually obtained from a limited number of species, including especially cultivars of the wild cherry, Prunus avium....
, TekTronix
Tektronix
Tektronix, Inc. is an American company best known for its test and measurement equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. In November 2007, Tektronix became a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation....
4967 and Wacom
Wacom
in Krefeld, Germany. Wacom is a Japanese portmanteau: Wa for "harmony" or "circle", and Komu for "computer". Wacom tablets are notable for their use of a patented cordless, battery-free, and pressure-sensitive stylus or digital pen...
. It was capable also to pilot some serial PC mice.
Actually the graphic tablets are mainly USB devices, and automatically recognized by Amiga USB stacks, but there are not so many drivers capable to pilot it. The most widely used driver for graphic tablets is FormAldiHyd. FormAldiHyd it is capable to pilot various Aiptek, Aldi
ALDI
ALDI Einkauf GmbH & Co. oHG, doing business as ', short for "Albrecht Discount", is a discount supermarket chain based in Germany...
, Tevion and Wacom
Wacom
in Krefeld, Germany. Wacom is a Japanese portmanteau: Wa for "harmony" or "circle", and Komu for "computer". Wacom tablets are notable for their use of a patented cordless, battery-free, and pressure-sensitive stylus or digital pen...
IV (Graphire, ArtPad, A3, A4, A5 and PenPartner) graphic tablets.
Scanner drivers
Usually Amiga programs have Scanner drivers embedded in their interface, and limited to some ancient scanner models, such as the program Art Department Professional, which has its own module to pilot scanners.In the recent times the scanner management system has been made independent from the single programs. The hardware interface it is now always USB and managed by Amiga Poseidon USB Stack which is capable to detect scanners from their signature, and loading the corresponding HIDD scanner module. The graphical interface it is managed by programs like ScanTrax and ScanQuix which became a de-facto standard for the Amiga.
Genlocks, Chroma-Key, signal video inverters
Amiga has a special circuitry to make its palette colours support Genlock signal, and Chroma-Key. In the past there were many programs and hardware interfaces to pilot Genlocks. Most famous were Genlocks from GVPGreat Valley Products
Great Valley Products is a former third-party Amiga hardware supplier.The company was mostly known for CPU-Accelerators and SCSI-Hostadapters for the Commodore Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000 computer series. The company liquidated itself in July 1995...
(Great Valley Productions), an American hardware manufacturer, and Hama, Electronic Design, and Sirius Genlocks from Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
InfraRed Devices and remote controls
It exists IRCom class for USB Poseidon Stack. It is a driver for IRCom standard to pilot infrared remote devices and has an interface called IRCom Remote to learn and assign commands and functions to any infrared device.Pegasos
Pegasos
Pegasos is a MicroATX motherboard powered by a PowerPC 750CXe or PowerPC 7447 microprocessor, featuring three PCI slots, one AGP slot, two Ethernet ports , USB, DDR, AC'97 sound, and FireWire...
Amiga Clone computers have an internal IrDA
IRDA
IRDA may refer to:* Infrared Data Association, in information and communications technology , a standard for communication between devices over short distances using infrared signals...
port connector ready to pilot infrared devices, but there is no support for it in MorphOS
MorphOS
MorphOS is an Amiga-compatible computer operating system. It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware, including the...
. The Internal IrDA port can be used installing any Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
flavours supported on that computer model and using Linux IrDA drivers.
WiFi and Bluetooth Devices
Amiga can pilot WiFiWIFI
WIFI is a radio station broadcasting a brokered format. Licensed to Florence, New Jersey, USA, the station is currently operated by Florence Broadcasting Partners, LLC.This station was previously owned by Real Life Broadcasting...
external routers connected physically through ethernet
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
cable and talk with remote WiFi devices. There are drivers available for Prism2 internal PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect
Conventional PCI is a computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer...
WiFi expansion cards, but no drivers to pilot Bluetooth
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a proprietary open wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks with high levels of security...
standard devices like mobile phones, Bluetooth Handsets, keybooards or mice.
There is an USB Class for Poseidon Stack to use "Wireless PC Lock" USB device by Sitecom Europe BV and engage its security functions. It is called simply Wireless PC Lock.
Special devices
For the Amiga existed in the past special drivers and hardware cards to pilot PolaroidPolaroid Corporation
Polaroid Corporation is an American-based international consumer electronics and eyewear company, originally founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land. It is most famous for its instant film cameras, which reached the market in 1948, and continued to be the company's flagship product line until the February...
Freeze Frame Digital Camera System Polaroid Digital Palette CI-3000 and Digital Palette CI 5000, with the software created by Polaroid itself.
There were many professional drivers to pilot step-by-step video recorders to save on tape the 3D animations created by Amiga (Digital piloted Ampex
Ampex
Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence...
and Betacam
Betacam
Betacam is family of half-inch professional videocassette products developed by Sony in 1982. In colloquial use, "Betacam" singly is often used to refer to a Betacam camcorder, a Betacam tape, a Betacam video recorder or the format itself....
), and TBC devices (Time Base Correctors devices, which is a family of devices that correct timing errors which can cause unstable edits) in order to adjust Amiga TV output signal to a vast amount of broadcast video devices and link the signal to professional Betacam videorecorders, signal converters to change NTSC American TV system to PAL European TV system, and professional blue-screens used in broadcast productions. One of these products was Personal TBC series of programs for the Amiga.
Another example of a complete new line of products that Amiga helped to create and launch on the market, were the digital recorders, now widely available on the market, coupled with an internal hard disk and a DVD device, in order to transfer the recorded file. One of these products was Broadcaster Elite, one of the very first digital videorecorder, based on a SCSI system and a Zorro II Amiga expansion card.
There were also programs to pilot digital oscilloscope
Oscilloscope
An oscilloscope is a type of electronic test instrument that allows observation of constantly varying signal voltages, usually as a two-dimensional graph of one or more electrical potential differences using the vertical or 'Y' axis, plotted as a function of time,...
s and even expansion cards to transform Amiga into an oscilloscope/vectorscope
Vectorscope
A vectorscope is a special type of oscilloscope used in both audio and video applications. Whereas an oscilloscope or waveform monitor normally displays a plot of signal vs. time, a vectorscope displays an X-Y plot of two signals, which can reveal details about the relationship between these two...
changing the video interface and adapting it to a new GUI every time it should be changed the measurement system and the emulated device either oscilloscope or vectorscope.
Amiga Phonepak card from GVP Amiga Phonepak was an expansion card to transform Amiga in a complete professional integrated telephone switchboard, fax system, and answering machine for SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) market.
Amiga Also helped as a videotitler system in the High Definition TV standard first experimental broadcasting. A battery of three Amigas was used as videotitlers on Analog HDTV
Analog high-definition television systems
Historically, the term high-definition television was first used to refer to a analog video broadcast television system developed in the 1930s to replace early experimental systems with as few as 12-lines. On 2 November 1936 the BBC began transmitting the world's first public regular...
experiments on HDTV NTSC 1125 lines standard, by channels like ESPN
ESPN
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
, ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
, NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
.
See also
- Amiga productivity softwareAmiga productivity softwareWith the term "productivity software" is usually intended a category of tools and programs aimed at producing results dedicated to a specific purpose or job and literally it is the kind of tools and applications that are used to produce documents, presentations, databases, charts and graphs,...
- Amiga music softwareAmiga music softwareThis article deals with music software created for the Amiga line of computers and covers the AmigaOS operating system and its derivates AROS and MorphOS and is a split of main article Amiga software....
- Amiga programming languagesAmiga programming languagesThis article deals with programming languages used in the Amiga line of computers, running the AmigaOS operating system and its derivatives AROS and MorphOS...
- Amiga Internet and communications softwareAmiga Internet and communications softwareThis article is a split of main article Amiga software and refers to any communication and internet software that run on Amiga line of computers.See also related articles Amiga productivity software, Amiga music software, Amiga programming languages, Amiga support and maintenance software for other...