Your favourite Amiga software

[McVenco]

Since I've seen numerous threads on what your favourite Amiga model or piece of hardware is, but only one very old thread on software, I decided to ask around on this one one more...

So: what program, set of programs, or generally what type of software is you absolute favourite to use on the Amiga?

For me, in the nineties (some 10 years ago) it was my set of communication related software that kept me busy for months and months.
I browsed lots of BBSes in Holland back then and was a regular user/poster on quite a few. Spot, Term, AmyBW were my favourites to go into communication, while I used Tron (later called Trion) BBS a lot for setting up my own BBS. I also had lots of fun running my just-for-fun MaxsBBS (never been online - only local) which I tweaked with almost any BBS-door that was available for it.

Nowadays, I just like to fiddle with all kinds of small PD-packages which I find on my huge collection of old cover-CDs and Aminet. Favourites among those are lots of small WB-games, and little things to tweak the looks and functioning of the Workbench to make it look better and different everytime.

When I must name one single program that outstands any other program for usability and usefulness, it would be DirectoryOpus (v4.xx). I've been using it for over a decade and still am an absolute fan of the program...


Fire away, people! I'm curious what everyone likes...

[pVC]

Directory Opus Magellan2, it's absolutely the best value for the price I've ever bought. It's like the long awaited Workbench upgrade, which never came from official sources. People waited so desperately real upgrade to WB since 3.1, but they only got some cosmetics. Instead of waiting you have had Magellan2 for years

[skurk]

McVenco wrote:
So: what program, set of programs, or generally what type of software is you absolute favourite to use on the Amiga?

Asm-One.  Without a doubt.

Wish there were similar alternatives on other platforms.

[motorollin]

My favourite piece of Amiga software is Workbench :-) Seriously! It's a lovely OS.

Sitting on top of Workbench I love the following:

- WHDLoad
- PowerIcons
- VisualPrefs
- Fusion/ShapeShifter
- iBrowse

--
moto

[cpfuture]

As remembered from ye olden days, I spent most of the early 90s fooling around with:

ProTracker
DeluxePaint 3
AMOS

[mingle]

Here are my top 5:

1 - F/A 18 Interceptor - The most playable flight sim EVER!
2 - Directory Opus 4.12 - simple and much easier than Magellan
3 - Deluxe Paint III - No AGA, but the best DPaint version
4 - MCP - lots of patches and hacks in one package
5 - Term - the best terminal emulation package for the Amiga.

Cheers,

Mike.

[madsjm]

Back in the days, my favourites were:

1. Deluxe Paint III
It always felt less resource hungry than IV.

2. FileMaster
By Toni Wilen, the current WinUAE maintainer. Ran great on my humble A500.

3. CygnusEd

My brain has gone blank. At least I remembered three. :-)

[uncharted]

Personal Paint - Best pixelling package ever
YAM - Favourite Email program, never found anything that replaces it
Cinema4D - Easy 3D modelling, modern packages are just too complex for me
WebPlug - Great HTML authoring package
Scalos - Awesome modular workbench replacement, all in MUI
Voyager - Always prefered it to iBrowse, had a nice UI
Transwrite - Old school WP from 1.3 days, but still useful
Blitz Basic - Satisified my programming urges as a youth
TurboText - Nice text-editor that I tended to use for coding.

[Damion]

Shapeshifter -- Yay! A somewhat modern web browser on the A1200. It was *very* fast on an 060/AGA... plus plenty of cool games not available on the Amiga. (I played through the Marathon games and Warcraft II.) Others (like Wolfpack and Colonization) were simply nicer due to higher resolution. I was never a fan of classic MacOS, but it was pretty cool to watch your Amiga boot it up in mere seconds.

FBlit -- Nice, useful little hack

Blizkick -- Far too many hours spent tweaking the OS with this fun and useful program...

WHDLoad

[Varthall]

My list of favourites:

- DirectoryOpus 4.xx - couldn't live without it
- MPlayer - lots of formats supported, and quite fast now with the overlay support
- gcc 4.x - well, couldn't think of a more essential program ^^
- AmigaAmp - still my favourite despite TuneNet
- Quake 3 + mods (especially Bid For Power)

Varthall

[swift240]

For me I think:-

Dopus 4.17
AmiCad
SimpleMail
Newscoaster
Songplayer 1.3
AmosPro
HS-Pascal
Hi-Soft Basic
GoldEd

[Mallette]

I'll leave the venerable and beloved DPaint out as obvious.

As a training designer, two unmentioned programs come to mind.

One shipped with the OS for a while, and the name escapes for the moment.  It was an interactive design program that remains not only unequaled but completely unchallanged for flexibility, ease of use, and a GUI that was shear genius.  But for the death of Commodore it might well have become the standard for educators.  

It used a flowchart model to build interactive modules.  You'd start with a "Begin" icon and then add a decision diamond as though you were contructing a logic flowchart.  Objects, such as anims, narrations, or pictures were then added by drag and drop.  You could put an inactivity timer to work to loop back to the opening if a user wandered away.  

Lots more than that, but you get the idea (I hope).  Totally extraordinary program.  Nothing like it before or since on ANY platform.

The, there was CanDo.  CanDo was the industrial-strength version of the above.  It was written by a group of guys in Dallas.  Most of it was paid for by ARCO at the request of my programmers on the SimStation project referenced in the "Help Needed to Preserve Unique Amiga" three I opened with in this forum a few days ago.  It was object-based with no timelines allowing the contruction of real "free play" simulations.  The final code base of Production Safety Systems Training alone was 32mb, probably about as large (I am sure I'll be corrected if I am wrong) a code base for a single Amiga app ever.  It ran flawlessly under the most relentless pounding by roughnecks (offshore oil hands).  I think a number of Amiga apps (DOpus may have been one) were authored in it.

Those were GOOD times...

Dave

[drewz21]

Directory Opus!
I also liked ProWrite since I did some writing.  Also did many papers in college in ProWrite and printed them out on my Panasonic 1024.

Game wise the Wizardy and M & M games hooked me!

[B00tDisk]

Vista.

God I love doing landscape flyovers.  Still do, actually, using VistaPro 4 on the PC (and Vue 6 Infinite).

[GreggBz]

In order of childhood spent:

Dungeon Master I and II.
The Test Drive Games
BlitzBasic - Towards the teen years!
SimCity
Advanced Laser Chess (does anyone have a copy of this, from Compute! magazine?)