Switching to Amiga

[benJamin]

Hi!

The only reason I don't currently use my 1200 as much as I used to is I still have to fix/replace the keyboard.

However, I used to do all the things you've been talking about regularly when I was on res. at Uni. a few years ago on pretty much the same setup (I have the SCSI option on the BlizIV).

MY HINTS
========

CD Burning - set it at 1x speed and walk away.  It will build an image and burn it in one process from either SCSI or IDE (only tried a SCSI burner, though) if you set it and walk away for 72 mins (the length of a CD).  It may work at faster speeds but I've yet to make a single coaster.

Mp3 - I was playing these last night.  Use DeliTracker and the Mp3 player genie.  Go direct from drive, do not have a large buffer (1sec or less delay) and set as mono with 22050 frequency.  Fiddle with the options a bit and you'll be able to use PPaint for general drawing at the same time with not-too-sluggish effect (for example).

Web - Turn the automatic loading of images OFF.  You DON'T NEED THEM.  I even turn them off in IE at work half the time, except useless PC browsers don't have a nice 'load all images' button, and make it a pain to right-click-'load image' like iBrowse, AWeb and Voyager!  This is a pain for PCs, but use on Amiga makes browsing MUCH more efficient.  ONLY VIEW THE IMAGES YOU WANT TO SEE.  Uh-hmm, excuse my yelling.  ;-)

Screenmodes - Max Overscan may give you a little extra space, but it causes the DMA to slow down noticably.  Consider changing the screen size to be larger than the actual display in multiples of 16 (eg, 640x512, try 704x576).  Then, put icons and calculators and DeliTracker on one of two edges which generally remain off-screen during use, and size your windows to fir the entire VISIBLE display: instant icon bars!   :-D

There are so many other things you can do which make the Amiga a joy to use, even if you do need a crowbar to coerce it in the beginning.  Once you figure it out, using a PC is an annoying, misguided process.

Be well!

benJamin


"I use a PC all day at work.  Why the hell would I want one in my home?"

[benJamin]

I was thinking more about this as I was working away from my terminal...

If you go to, say, Amiga.org and hit the 'load all images' button, all the images will load while you read the news headlines.  Then, because you have soooo much RAM, all the images are cached and any that have already been downloaded and decoded are put straight into the page, and only 'new' images appear missing (when you browse down to other pages on the same site).  This will save your bandwidth and download limit (should you have one) for whatever else it is that people use their service for (I have a huge limit + off-peak on Cable, yet I only average 64-100Mb of downloads per month, so it doesn't bother me  :crazy: ),

Overscan - Well, on a TV, say, you can have graphics appear in the border so the display goes 'right to the edge'.  I think it had no effect to Workbench (the viewable area is the same as the maximum overscan size) on the VGA monitor I recently installed (there was no room on my desk for a VGA and 1084, so I begrudingly stopped playing 'Settlers' for a while).

The DblPAL and DblNTSC drivers should be in your 'Storage/Monitors' directory on the 'Extras:' disk (IMMSMC).

You can still have larger-than-display screens by setting the size larger than the viewable zone in the ScreenMode prefs, but I don't know if it works with all screen modes...


benJamin

"Looking for a replacement keyboard..."

[benJamin]

Use the overscan prefs to set the position and size of the rectangular areas.

As you can see from the crappy WinPaint picture, the graphics overscan should appear outside the frame of your monitor (this is for games).  Workbench uses the text overscan setting to ensure that all text appears inside this frame.

 :-D

benJamin


Well, I don't know if Sesame Street will ever be the same again.  I can't believe the Cookie Monster would ever claim that "Cookies are a sometimes food".  He's a monsters!  Monsters do uncooth things, like pretending to eat cookies whilst crushing them and liberally distributing them over the kid(s) standing next to him.

[benJamin]

There are ways of making it a little more comfortable {crowbar.get()}:

I use the palette-locking tool recommended by VisualPrefs to lock in the 216 colour 'web palette'.  Select the low and high four colours (0-3 and 252-255) from this palette for your eight standard Workbench colours, and colours 16-19 for your mouse.  If you use certain images all the time, make sure they only use colours remapped from the 216 and optimise those colours to the lower-half of the palette (so that the higher-plains are zero-filled); this is good for background images that get redrawn frequently.  This should leave 40 colours free in the top-half of the palette for programs to get smoother gradients (like the colour wheel object, for example).

This will also improve the overall appearance of web pages as the spread of colours is more even, instead of ending up sepia-like after locking and unlocking various other colours and running out for future images.  This is good as most web colours will be picked by the colour allocator as they are close enough, and I find both jpegs and gifs remap quite well (especially if you use PPaint with FS remapping for static images).

I'm sure I could get the palette further optimised if I tried, but as soon as I found it acceptable, I stopped tweaking.

Moving large windows will always be like watching a house being built, but them's the breaks.

benJamin


It must be something in the air at my work, but I keep trying to spell 'palette' p-a-l-l-e-t, which is not what I want.