Top 5 essential Amiga apps and utilities?

[benJamin]

Okay, no matter what system I have setup (UAE-on-a-ZIP/3.1, my A1200/3.0 with no keyboard, my old A500/2.1 at home with the burnt-out hard drive from six years ago...) I just cannot live without:

   Ed          - It's small, fast and works, but needs 'Alias Ed "Run Ed <>NIL: "' in your 'S:shell-startup' to be really useful.
   KingCON     - Get it.  Now.
   VisualPrefs - I like to pretty things up at the pixel level and visitors to my screenside have said "Where can I get this OS for my PC?"
   ARexx       - If only it had a compiler, we could rid ourselves of all other languages (including English!).  I was working on a compiler at one point, and I'm doing Programming Language Implementation at Uni. next semester, maybe it's not too late?
   PPaint      - Decals don't make themselves.
   Cinema4D    - Neither do 3D renders.
   DeliTracker - Hooray for music whilst you work.
   OctaMED SS  - Damn fine package.
   HappyENV    - Very Happy.

Other things that are further down the tree, but none-the-less important (in no particular order):
Wordworth, FinalWriter, TurboCalc, gcc, javac, AmiTradeCentre, AWeb, Miami, YAM, TaskiSMS, Organiser, DOpus, MagicMenu, ToolsPrefs and others which I can't remember but may be just as important.

Games that are great:

   The Settlers
   Hired Guns
   Syndicate
   Dune 2
   Super Skidmarks
   Sensible Soccer
   WizKid
   Sim City 2000

And others that slipped the net.

I just had this sensation of Deja Vu that I've written a list similar to this before around here...  I wonder if it's changed much?


benJamin
"What does 'Give Up' mean?"

[ErrethAkbe]

Thanks for all the great replies! I have a shopping list now. :-)

For the record, my system is presently:

A2000 partial ECS, 3.1 ROMs
GVP Combo 030/40 w/4Mb (5 total, more soon)
2Gb HD with OS3.5 loaded
Commodore scandoubler
A2065 Ethernet w/regged Miami (What's "DX?" Will my regular key work for it?)

I will be forced to pull the scandoubler soon because I have a Video Toaster card that I plan to install. I might have to get a second A2000 because I will also want to be able to run a "real" video card! Or so it seems from the documentation, anyway.

(anyone? Video Toaster + Graphics card = impossible becuase both want the video slot, yes?)

Anyway I can't wait to go grab some of these goodies and check them out. All other suggestions welcomed!

Marc

[ErrethAkbe]

ErrethAkbe wrote:
(anyone? Video Toaster + Graphics card = impossible becuase both want the video slot, yes?)
Marc

To answer my own question, while I seemingly can't get a video card, at least I don't have to run a 1084 monitor. Software Hut has a toaster-friendly scandoubler coming soon: http://tinyurl.com/crat7

[mr_a500]

Beware of Software Hut scandoublers. I bought one a few years ago and was very disappointed. Images flickered and screen updates seemed very slow. It was like looking at WinUAE on an extremely slow computer. It cost something like $129 US but looked very cheap. It was my worst Amiga purchase ever. (I ended up trading it for TurboPrint - my second worst Amiga purchase ever)

Who knows - maybe the scandoubler will work fine on your computer. I'm just saying "beware".

[ErrethAkbe]

Hmmm....thanks for the tip. I hate making mistakes like that!

I guess my best bet is to find some toaster users and see what THEY are doing. I can't imagine there are a lot of people content running OldSk0ol video modes on their Amiga Toaster machines, but who knows?

Thanks again...

Marc

[leirbag28]

@ErrethAkbe
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I can't imagine there are a lot of people content running OldSk0ol video modes on their Amiga Toaster machines, but who knows?
----------------------------------------------------------

 Well I don't have a Toaster but I am still running OLDSKOOL  Video Modes on my AGA Amiga. Why?

Cuz the graphics look mighty cool! quite good for Video.

I look at some of the stuff Pentium 4 owners are putting out to Video and utterly amazed at the trash that comes out........nothing that my Amiga cannot do.

Funny thing is, I am really not a great artist in terms of Animating and painting.....and the stuf looks good.......so I imagine a professional animator, would massively improve the output. Plus you can always genrate animations on a Silicon Gfx or Mac and then import it into the Amiga giving it a higher quality in the final output.
 in many cases it looks alot better than if you had generated it on the Amiga.

a good Comparison would be Generating AntiAliases text on SCALA versus AntiAliased text on Montage24 (Much higher end software CG)

[fx]

Okay, I'll give this a shot ... 5 is too little though

System:
KingCON - How did we use our shells before it?
DOpus 4.x - My favourite Filemanager of all time
FBlit, BlazeWCP - Speeds up AGA Machines
MagicWB - My favourite Icons, speedy too

Networking:
AmiTCP - Best TCP/IP stack for the Amiga, IMHO
smbfs - To talk to my other computers
NapsaTerm - Only usable telnet client(?), comes with AmiTCP
IBrowse - Best Amiga webbrowser

Graphics:
Brilliance 2.1 - Awesome 2D Paint package for OCS/ECS/AGA
Visage - Fast viewer for most formats

Music
Quadra Composer - System friendly tracker
HippoPlayer - Great Music Player

Programming
AmosPro - Yes, I'm a basic fanatic
SAS/C - Just added this because I wanna learn C

*edit*
forgot to add:
ToolsDaemon - Add Apps to the Workbench menues, needs a patch to work with OS3.5/3.9 though

[AmigaPete]

Lots of nice choices here. If I had to pick 5 and only 5 they would be...

DOpus v4.x
CED
PPaint/DPaint
MUI (only because it is essential for so many other things)
KingCON

Of course, I don't currently have my A2000 networked so no net  utils listed here. So, like others have said, it depends on what you have, what you want to do, and so many other things.

Pete

[Legerdemain]

Never ever list Miami or Miami DX as a must... because it is not, unless one is to use one of the very very few options which is not to be found elsewhere...  it is slow and demanding... :lol:

Go for AmiTCP or Genesis instead.

[mr_a500]

Never ever list Miami or Miami DX as a must... because it is not, unless one is to use one of the very very few options which is not to be found elsewhere... it is slow and demanding...

Really? I've used it almost every single day for the last 3 1/2 years on my A500 and I never found it slow or demanding.

[ErrethAkbe]

The issue is that I already HAVE Miami, registered...and there's no way to register AmiTCP or Genesis, let alone get the most recent versions anymore. I'll try the AmiTCP I can get on AmiNet but it looks to be 3 versions out of date.

For that matter, I can't get a key for MiamiDX anymore either, it seems...after spending 2 hours searching for a way today. :-(

Of course, much the same could be said for a lot of the software mentioned on this thread. It's hard to understand why the author of a dead-ended product wouldn't release a key to the masses as a "thank you" to the community.

Legerdemain wrote:
Never ever list Miami or Miami DX as a must... because it is not, unless one is to use one of the very very few options which is not to be found elsewhere...  it is slow and demanding... :lol:

Go for AmiTCP or Genesis instead.

[leirbag28]

@fx

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Graphics:
Brilliance 2.1 - Awesome 2D Paint package for OCS/ECS/AGA
-----------------------------------------------------------


There's a Brilliance 2.1

I thought 2.0 was the last version?  what upgrades does 2.1 have? was it just some fixes?


Brilliance took over the DPaint crown a long time ago for some of you oldies who didnt know that.

[fx]

leirbag28 wrote:
There's a Brilliance 2.1

I thought 2.0 was the last version?  what upgrades does 2.1 have? was it just some fixes?

Sorry about this, I just checked and it was 2.0 I was using .. for some odd reason I was sure it was 2.1 ..

And yeah, Brilliance really took DPaint's crown away! It seems not much people have noticed that it did though.

If only it had supported RTG.