Download issue 11 - Total Amiga Magazine

Issue 11, Summer 2002 £4.00 

8.00Euro 

Three x86 Amiga 

Emulators Reviewed 

Plus... 

Also in 

this issue: 

News 

OS 4 Update 

AmigaOne News 

Reviews 

Charon 

News Coaster 

Cordless Mouse 

Tutorials 

Scala MM400 

PerfectPaint 

DOpus 5 

PageStream 4.1 MIDI on the Amiga 

Amiga Writer

Contents 

Issue 11 

Summer 2002 

Contents 

News 

Alt.WoA Show Report .... 3 

AmigaOne Update ......... 8 

Fleecy Moss Column ..... 9 

AmigaOS 4 Update........ 14 

Amiga, who’s the moron? 

Opinion piece ................. 12 

Features 

Cable Rounding ............. 13 

x86 Amiga Emulators..... 14 

Reviews 

Spacewaker Mini PC ..... 18 

PageStream 4.1............. 20 

Charon ........................... 26 

AmigaWriter 2.2 ............. 28 

Cordless Optical Mouse. 31 

NewsCoaster ................. 32 

Support 

Scala MM400 Tutorial .... 36 

Introduction to MIDI ....... 38 

PerfectPaint Tutorial....... 41 

DOpus 5 Tutorial Part 2.. 44 

Mailing List Details......... 47 

Next Issue ...................... 47 

Subscription Form.......... 47 

Gallery............................ 48 

Write On! 

We’d like to make Total Amiga 

more “interactive” so we need 

your input! 

Got a question you’d like 

answered or an opinion you’d like 

to share? Write to us and we’ll 

include it in a letters page. 

Got a tip for other readers or 

even an article up your sleeve? 

Send it in and you could very 

well see your name in print. 

Got a suggestion or comment 

on the magazine? Let us know 

and we’ll try and make Clubbed 

better for you. 

Editorial 

Welcome to another issue 

of Total Amiga. This issue 

is really packed, not only are we 

back to 48 pages thanks to a bit 

more advertising but we also 

have more pages of tutorials 

than ever before. In fact things 

got so tight that we had to drop 

our regular Top Tips and PD 

Paradise features, they will 

return in issue 12. 

Regular readers will know that 

we are aiming to move from 

quarterly to bimonthly publication 

during 2002. This issue has 

taken about three months to 

produce so we’re on time but not 

early as we had hoped. We are 

gradually getting more writers for 

the magazine (I think you’ll find 

this issue is already a bit more 

varied than previous ones) so we 

will try to get the next issue out 

in 10 weeks. Our aim is to be 

publishing bimonthly by the end 

of the year when hopefully there 

will also be some new Amiga 

hardware and software to write 

about too. 

On the topic of new software and 

hardware it has been a pleasant 

change to have a regular flow of 

information about OS 4’s 

development coming from 

Hyperion and Amiga. The new 

OS is sounding very exciting, 

you can read all about it in our 

update on page 10. On the 

hardware front we have an 

exclusive column from Alan 

Redhouse which will bring you 

up to date with news of the 

Total Amiga is published quarterly 

by South Essex Amiga Link. For 

subscription details please contact 

us at the address below or visit our 

website. 

Editor: Robert Williams 

Design: Robert Williams 

Contributors: Michael Carillo 

Elliott Bird 

Geoff Milnes 

Fleecy Moss 

Paul Quershi 

Alan Redhouse 

Mick Sutton 

Proof Reading: Sharon Sutton 

Cover Art: Robert Williams 

Amiga One and their plans for 

future versions. We also know 

the developers are hard at work 

readying MorphOS and the 

Pegasos for release but they’re 

keeping pretty quiet about it so 

maybe we’ll see something on 

that front soon too. 

Another interesting development 

since issue 10 is the release of 

the developer version of the first 

USB stack for the Amiga, 

Poseidon. This seems to have 

really caught the imagination of 

developers and drivers for 

several types of USB peripherals 

are already in development, 

other developers are working to 

make Poseidon work on a variety 

of USB hardware. Take a look at 

the news item on page 6 for 

more information. 

One of the biggest happenings in 

the Amiga market last year was 

the release of the AmigaOS XL 

package of two fast Amiga 

emulators for the x86 PC. 

Because no one in the core Total 

Amiga Team owns a PC up to 

running the emulators at a 

decent speed we weren’t able to 

look at the package in detail. 

However Eyetech very kindly 

loaned us a PC system at the 

Alt.WoA show so we have now 

been able to look at AmigaOS 

XL and Cloanto’s latest Amiga 

Forever 5 in detail. We found that 

each emulator has its pros and 

cons which one suits you is 

really down to your personal 

needs, skill and the equipment 

you have available. So in the 

Contact Us 

If you have any queries 

suggestions or want to contact us 

for any reason please use one of 

the following: 

EMail: editor@totalamiga.org 

WWW: http://www.totalamiga.org/ 

Post: Total Amiga, 

26 Wincoat Drive, 

BENFLEET, 

Essex, SS7 5AH, 

ENGLAND. 

Telephone: +44 (0) 1268 569937 

(19:00 - 22:00 

UK time only please) 

feature we’ve tried to give a 

good overview of each emulator 

so you can decide for yourself. 

When the feature was largely 

complete Bernie Meyer, the 

developer of Amithlon, made a 

statement about some potential 

legal problems with the 

AmigaOS XL distribution so 

please bear in mind the news 

item on page 7 when reading the 

x86 emulation feature. 

Well I think it’s about time for me 

to sign off, so I’ll close with my 

customary request for feed back 

and contributions. Please let us 

know what you think of the mag, 

in particular we’d like to hear 

what tutorials you would like to 

see in the future and what you 

think of the current ones. If you 

fancy writing an article for Total 

Amiga (which can be large or 

small and on any Amiga related 

topic) please get in touch. 

Enjoy the mag, 

Robert 

Only Amiga Made it 

Possible 

Total Amiga is designed and laid 

out using: 

Hardware: 

Amiga 3000 

CyberStorm PPC/060 

CyberVision PPC 

128Mb RAM, about 13Gb HDD 

space. 

Software: 

Amiga OS 3.9 by Amiga 

PageStream 4.1 by Softlogik 

TypeSmith 2.5 by Softlogik 

ImageFX 4.5 by Nova Design 

Photogenics 5 by Paul Nolan 

Contents 

2002 

Alt.WoA Show Report 

After last year’s successful 

Alt. WoA show (which was 

since WoA ‘99 we had Amigas 

running on the SEAL stand as 

opposed to our machines being 

systems up and running with 

TV cards and other interesting 

add-ons. Once again Matt 

Down on the main show floor 

many of the UK’s key Amiga 

dealers were represented. 

the first in the North of England used in the games arena. Mick Morris and the Blackpool Eyetech had the biggest stand 

for a long time) SEAL were ran Freespace on his A1200 Amiga Group came up trumps and seemed to be doing good 

looking forward to this years PPC/BVision and through the with loads of Amigas running business, they had a working 

show. Unfortunately this year day had many people tried different games, we noticed Amiga One motherboard on 

we could only muster three their hand at this fantastic Napalm and Payback amongst the stand but as it had only 

members for the trip to the game from Hyperion, the demo several others. Barry Riddiford arrived that morning they only 

show, never the less we tied in with Mick’s review in ran the ever popular Sensible managed to get it to the “BIOS” 

started out bright and early Total Amiga issue 10. Robert Soccer tournament projected screen (more on this later). 

(05:30!) for the show not used his A3000 to demonstrate on to a big screen. Also in the They also had an AmigaXL 

knowing about the severe Pagestream and ImageFX usergroups area were the system for punters to try and 

weather forecast (due to Mick’s which we use to produce the Scalos team who 

their usual selection of useful 

nonfunctional car radio!). magazine. When either Mick or demonstrated their Workbench hardware and software to buy. 

Fortunately apart from a minor Robert were busy or away from replacement system running on Mick bought a cool wireless 

snow blizzard or two we the stand the machines ran a a rather cool black TFT LCD optical mouse and EZMouse 

arrived unscathed, in plenty of slideshow about SEAL and monitor. 

adaptor which you will find 

time and even had time to stop Total Amiga. We sold many 

for a mega breakfast! 

subscriptions, single issues 

The venue had been laid out 

differently from last year’s 

show, as before the 

commercial exhibitors were on 

the lower level but the 

usergroups were moved to the 

first floor above the bar on the 

intermediate level. A new 

and back issues of the 

magazine and a large number 

of these were due to the hard 

work of Elliott Bird who often 

manned the stand while Robert 

and Mick were away on club 

and magazine business... 

honest! 

feature was a series of Other usergroups represented 

presentations which were held were ANT (Amiga North 

in the attic above the 

Thames) who were publicising 

usergroups. 

the forthcoming WoASE 2002 

On arrival the SEAL team 

(Mick, Robert and Elliott) set 

up our two tables, one for 

SEAL and one for Total Amiga. 

For the first time at a show 

show which SEAL will be 

helping to organise. The 

Mediator support team and 

GAG (Gloucestershire Amiga 

Group) had several Mediator 

Mick’s A1200 and Robert’s A3000 on the SEAL stand. 

About Total Amiga Legalese 

Final Writer 5 by Softwood 

Ghostscript 6.50 from Aladdin 

Enterprises 

There are also some essential 

utilities we couldn’t live without: 

Directory Opus 5, SGrab, MCP, 

Turbo Print 7, MakeCD. 

Our thanks to the creators of this 

and all the other great Amiga 

software out there. 

Total Amiga is entirely created on 

the Amiga, no other machines are 

used at any stage of the design or 

layout process. 

The views expressed in this 

magazine are those of the author 

of each piece, they do not 

necessarily reflect the views of 

the editor, other contributors or 

SEAL. 

Please Note: Total Amiga is 

produced by SEAL members in 

their spare time, while we will 

always strive to produce the 

magazine on time and include all 

the advertised contents this is not 

always possible due to other 

commitments. The price you pay 

for Clubbed covers our costs and 

nothing more, we don’t make a 

profit from it. 

If you wish to contact a contributor 

please send your message to one 

of the addresses in this section 

and we will pass it on. 

Amiga is a registered trademark 

and the Amiga logo, AmigaDOS, 

Amiga Kickstart, Amiga 

Workbench, Autoconfig, 

Bridgeboard, and Powered by 

Amiga are trademarks of AMIGA 

Inc. 

All other trademarks mentioned 

are the property of their 

respective owners. 

2 TOTAL AMIGA Summer 2002 

3 

Fonts 

The body text of Total Amiga is set 

in Triumvirate Normal as supplied 

with PageStream, the heading 

typeface is Forgotten Futurist by 

Ray Larabie. Take a look at Ray’s 

huge range of freeware fonts at 

http://www.larabiefonts.com and 

his commercial foundry at 

http://www.typodermic.com.

News 

reviewed later in this issue. 

Forematt Home Computing 

had their wide range of Amiga 

software and games and were 

demonstrating their CD-ROM 

based monthly magazine, 

100% Amiga. Ray from 

Kicksoft was up to his usual 

antics of “persuading” people 

to part with their cash for his 

ever growing range of software 

products. We saw him 

demonstrating PageStream 4.1 

and a number of other 

products. Also exhibiting were 

Weird Science, Classic Amiga, 

Stellar Dreams, Cartridge Club 

and Datatech DTP. 

Amiga Inc. Had a separate 

area of the show floor called 

the Amiga arena where several 

companies had a stand. 

Unfortunately Fleecy Moss was 

unable to attend due to the bad 

weather (he was turned back 

by the Police) as were 

Computer City from the 

Netherlands who were due to 

attend. However the Amiga 

arena still had three interesting 

exhibitors, Zeo Neo displaying 

their AmigaDE games, Cloanto 

with the latest version of Amiga 

Forever. Last but not least a 

representative of Hyperion 

demoed Quake II on a 

CyberStorm PPC/Voodoo III 

machine (unfortunately we 

didn’t catch the guy’s name), 

Mick had a go and says it kicks 

arse! 

There were several 

presentations during the show 

including sound with Don Cox, 

networking with Neil Bothwick 

and Amithlon with Bill Hoggett. 

Next was the presentation we 

had all been waiting for (for 

many months or even years!), 

Alan Redhouse on the 

AmigaOne! As we’ve 

mentioned there was a working 

system at the show, but 

Eyetech had only just received 

it from the developers. 

According to Alan they have 

run the system using Linux but 

with the limited time available 

at the show they were unable 

to get it running. So the system 

is ready and waiting for OS 4 

and Alan said that they could 

get it into production in about 

six weeks. 

Alan Redhouse gave a 

presentation that outlined that 

changes to the AmigaOne 

specification over the last few 

months. He called the current 

design the Amiga One point 

Five. The major change is the 

move from a custom chipset to 

using off-the-shelf north and 

south bridges (the north bridge 

is the chip that interfaces the 

processor with memory, PCI 

and AGP buses etc. And the 

south bridge is the chip that 

gives many basic services 

such as IDE, I/O ports, USB 

etc.). This means that the 

AmigaOne will have many 

more integrated peripherals 

including AC97 sound, 

Ethernet and legacy serial and 

parallel ports. Other 

improvements are a 133Mhz 

system bus and ATA100 IDE. 

Because of all the integrated 

peripherals there will now be 

only four PCI slots, but with the 

AGP (now 2x speed) slot for a 

graphics card we think that will 

leave ample room for 

The Mediator Support stand, 

these were just two of the many Amigas running at the show. 

Understandably Eyetech’s 

AmigaOne pre-production 

system was the highlight 

of the show. 

expansion. The A1200 

connection logic has been 

moved onto a separate PCI 

card that will now be an 

optional extra (about £50), the 

A1200 will be connected via a 

ribbon cable allowing a much 

wider choice of case. The first 

AmigaOne boards will ship with 

a 600Mhz G3 CPU soldered on 

to the board, a slightly more 

expensive version with a CPU 

socket will be available later 

allowing faster CPUs (including 

G4s) to be fitted. And finally... 

The price for the initial board 

including the CPU will be 

around £350 plus local taxes, 

which is certainly much less 

than we were expecting! 

For further information “from 

the horses mouth” take a look 

at Alan Redhouse’s column on 

page 8 of this very issue. 

The turn out for the show was 

considerably lower this year 

but it seems this was mostly 

(or maybe entirely) due to the 

adverse weather conditions, 

many roads were shut and the 

weather forecast advised 

people not to drive unless the 

trip was essential! However 

just like last year the show had 

a great friendly atmosphere 

and we all had a really good 

time. Thanks to HAUG for all 

their efforts! 

A Solid 

Mirage 

Elbox have added a new 

member to their range of 

popular tower cases sold in the 

UK as the Power Tower by 

Power Computing. The new 

Mirage 4000 Pro is a tower 

conversion kit for the A4000 

Desktop that includes a 

Mediator 4000 busboard, PCI 

logic card and the Multimedia 

CD with drivers for graphics, 

sound, TV and Ethernet PCI 

cards. The Mirage tower itself 

is a new design that is a bit 

more interesting than the 

normal beige box. It has three 

5.25” drive bays and seven 

3.5” bays one of which is 

externally accessible. The 

busboard has 6 Zorro II/III 

slots, 1 video slot and 5 PCI 

slots although the PCI slots are 

in-line with Zorro slots so a full 

length Zorro card will block the 

coresponding PCI slot. The 

tower is fitted with a 300W 

power supply to keep things 

running smoothly even with all 

those slots and bays filled! 

The Mirage 4000 system has a 

list price of 379.95Euro not 

including VAT so in the UK we 

anticipate it will be just under 

£300. 

The full specifications are 

available on Elbox’s website 

along with lists of compatible 

PCI cards: 

http://www.elbox.com 

Let’s Boing 

Again! 

Haage and Partner and Amiga 

Inc. have released another 

update for OS3.9 in the form 

of BoingBag 2. This time there 

are quite a number of tweaks 

to fix bugs and improve the 

functionality of the OS. 

Amplifier has been given a 

Reaction GUI and a number of 

minor improvements such as 

supporting ZIPed skin files. 

Other bundled utilities that 

have been improved include 

Find which gets an updated 

interface, new features for 

RAWBInfo, more archive 

formats are supported by 

UnArc and BenchTrash has 

been given a Reaction GUI 

too. Finally CDPlayer can now 

download the track names of 

your CDs from the CDDB 

database if the cddb.library 

(included in contributions) is 

installed. 

A really useful addition is that 

the sound datatype now 

supports AHI, this means the 

system beep and many other 

programs that play sounds 

using datatypes can now work 

on an AHI device such as a 

16bit sound card. To enable 

this function you have to set an 

Environment variable so be 

sure to read the docs. Another 

small but useful change is the 

addition of a command history 

to the Execute Command 

window so you can recall 

previous commands using the 

up and down cursor keys. 

A preferences program for the 

picture datatype has been 

added, with this you can set 

which programs support the 

new v43 features (chiefly 

greater than 256 colour 

support) and also disable 

dithering for 16bit screens 

Don’t Miss: 

which can slow down image 

rendering and is not really 

needed for photographic 

images. 

There have been many 

changes and improvements to 

the shell including: 

• Running programs in the 

background using “&” 

• *Job control 

• *Easy display of multimedia 

files 

• *Extended script support via 

#! and ;! 

• *New and improved shell 

commands: Ask, Path, 

PopCD and PushCD 

• *Many other bug fixes. 

The upgrade of the OS’s disk 

related tools has been 

completed with full support for 

disks greater than 4Gb across 

the system. HDToolBox’s 

reading of geometry data 

should now work properly on 

more large disks and the 

diskcopy command has been 

updated to support large disks 

too. 

In addition the main archive 

you can also download some 

new and updated contributions 

and locale archives for 19 

different languages: 

You will need OS3.9 BoingBag 

1 installed to perform the 

update which can be 

downloaded from: 

http://www.haage-partner.de 

/aos39/index-e.html 

An effort is under way to port 

Open Office, a popular open 

source office application suite, 

to the Amiga. Volker Grabbe 

recently posted a request for 

developers interested in 

helping him with the port. Open 

Office is an open source 

project based on Star Office 

which is a cross platform office 

suite that was bought by Sun 

Microsystems in 1999. Sun 

then decided to open the Star 

Office source allowing a wider 

community to contribute to the 

product, this lead to Open 

Office. Future official Sun 

versions of Star Office will be 

based on the Open Office 

source. 

Here are some of the key 

features of the Open Office 

Suite: 

• Compatibility with many file 

formats including Microsoft 

Office (including the latest XP 

version) for both import and 

export. 

• All the applications have an 

“Auto Pilot” features to help 

you with complex commands. 

• Writer - Word Processor 

• Mail merge support 

• Sophisticated layouts 

possible 

• Indexing and Bibliography 

functions 

• Calc - Spreadsheet 

Latest on OS 4: Page 10 

Exclusive AmigaOne News: Page 8 

News 

Amiga Office? 

• Natural language formulae 

• StarBasic macro language 

• Multiple worksheets 

• Draw - Vector drawing 

• Shape text 

• Quick creation of 3D shapes 

• Bitmap tools and effects 

• Impress - Presentations 

• All the effects and graphics 

tools from draw 

• Slide transitions 

If you have a computer running 

Linux, Windows or Solaris you 

can download a copy of Open 

Office and try it for yourself 

from: 

http://www.openoffice.org 

We don’t currently know the 

status of the port although 

given the short time elapsed it 

is sure to be in its very early 

stages. However Hyperion 

have mentioned that they hope 

to see it available for OS 4 in 

the future and Hans-Joerg 

Freiden, one of Hyperion’s key 

programmers, is acting as a 

technical consultant for the 

project. Given the importance 

of good office application to 

any computer platform this 

sounds like good news. 

For more information on the 

Amiga port of Open Office visit: 

http://openoffice.vgrabbe.de/ 

Calc, OpenOffice’s spreadsheet, running on Linux. 


5

News 

USB Stacks Up 

E3B have revealed that the 

stack for their imminent 

Highway and Subway USB 

cards will be a new 

development called Poseidon 

which has been written by 

Chris Hodges. But even better 

news is that the stack won’t be 

limited to the E3B cards, it has 

been designed so that drivers 

for all sorts of hardware can 

written. Poseidon is not a port 

from another platform and has 

been designed specifically for 

AmigaOS, a MorphOS version 

will also be available. The 

author has stated that there is 

no reason why Poseidon 

shouldn’t run on OS4 but 

Hyperion have confirmed that a 

different stack for the new OS 

is already well into 

development so they won’t be 

using Poseidon. 

As we’ve mentioned before a 

USB stack and supported 

hardware is no use if you don’t 

have drivers for USB 

peripherals . Fortunately 

Poseiden already includes 

drivers for several classes of 

Titan computer are porting 

Papyrus Office to the Amiga. 

Papyrus is a suite of office 

application programs 

developed by the German 

company ROM Logicware. We 

understand MacOS, 68k Amiga 

and MorphOS versions are 

planned, there hasn’t been an 

announcement about an OS4 

version yet. Papyrus is a well 

established product and is now 

on version 9 which is available 

for Windows, OS/2 and Atari 

TOS operating systems. The 

suite consists of an integrated 

Word Processor, DTP and 

Spreadsheet program and a 

separate database application. 

On the ROM Logicware 

website the developers are 

proud to point out that the 

complete Papyrus suite fits on 

three high density floppy disks 

without sacrificing functionality 

so it sounds like this should be 

a light weight Amiga style 

USB device. These include 

basic support for Keyboards 

and Mice, printers and mass 

storage devices. We guess the 

printer support will be in the 

form of a parallel device 

replacement so this may mean 

that you can hook up an 

existing printer that has an 

Amiga driver by its USB port. 

USB mass storage support is 

one of the most interesting 

developments because this 

standard is supported by many 

storage devices. For example 

some digital cameras support 

this standard as do most USB 

memory card readers. So we 

hope that without additional 

drivers USB mass storage 

support should enable us to 

access all kinds of different 

memory cards and other USB 

storage devices without 

needing specific drivers. 

Poseidon has already 

generated a great deal of 

interest from Amiga 

developers. Innovative (who 

have recently changed their 

name to IOSpirit) have 

Papyrus is the Future? 

application. 

Here are some of the key 

features of Papyrus Office: 

• Extensive DTP functions 

• Graphics import 

• Tables 

• Full spreadsheet functionality 

in tables 

• Powerful rich text format 

import and export for 

compatibility with other 

applications including table 

and image support. 

• Auto correct 

• Footnotes 

• Full relational database with 

multimedia functions 

The full version of Papyrus 

Office for other platforms costs 

129Euro, about £80, it remains 

to be seen what Titan will 

charge for the Amiga version. 

The ROM Logicware website 

has details of the suite’s 

features: 

http://www.rom-logicware.com/ 

With many digital cameras slot. To make the connection 

announced that they are 

abandoning the slow serial port you need a compact flash to 

developing USB drivers for 

connection for faster USB ports PCMCIA adaptor and an 

their VHI Studio package. 

it is becoming increasingly Amiga with a PCMCIA slot 

These will support USB web 

difficult to find current cameras (that’s an A600 or A1200 

cameras for video grabbing 

that are Amiga compatible. The folks)! As a compact flash card 

and USB digital cameras with 

sensible route has always is already very similar to a 

several Kodak models being 

seemed to be getting a PCMCIA card the adaptors are 

the first supported. Isreesoft 

memory card reader attached simple and inexpensive at 

have announced that they will 

to your Amiga and then any about £10. The package 

support Poseidon in future 

camera using the supported consists of 

versions of TutboPrint so there 

type of memory card would be compactflash.device and a 

is a chance we will start to get 

compatible. The problem with CF0 dosdriver, you will also 

drivers for USB only printers. 

Vision Factory development (of 

CyberGraphX fame) have 

developed a hardware driver 

that enables Poseidon to work 

with a PCI USB card in a G- 

Rex PCI bus board and a 

MorphOS driver for the built-in 

USB ports on the bPlan 

Pegasos motherboard. They 

have tested a USB webcam 

and USB Zip drive using the 

drivers supplied with Poseidon. 

Developer documentation for 

the stack is available, for more 

details visit the E3B website: 

http://www.e3b.de/usb/ 

Development was on hold for a 

long time but work is now 

continuing apace on a new 

version of IBrowse. 2.3 is 

expected to be a free upgrade 

for 2.x owners and Amiga have 

announced that a special 

version will also ship with OS4. 

The exact features of the 

upgrade have not been 

revealed but posts from the 

developers and beta testers on 

the mailing list suggest it will 

be quite substantial. In 

particular the Javascript engine 

is known to have been heavily 

improved greatly enhancing 

this idea is that only expensive need the freeware Fat95 file 

and difficult to source SCSI system (reviewed in the last 

readers have been available Total Amiga) installed as 

for the Amiga. 

compact flash cards use an 

MSDos style file system. Once 

That was until Torsten Jager 

these components are in place 

released cfd to Aminet, this 

you can read the image files 

package contains a device 

from you flash card using 

driver that allows your Amiga 

Workbench or a directory utility 

to read a compact flash 

just as if it was a hard disk. 

memory card via the PCMCIA 

Subway... Highway... 

Norway 

developer.html website compatibility. There 

E3B have been taking notice of networks. SANA2 drivers will 

have been many posts to the 

the survey they ran for 

be supplied so the card can be 

IBrowse mailing list saying 

potential users of their USB used with existing Amiga 

“this site doesn’t work in 

interfaces the Highway (Zorro TCP/IP stacks and other 

version 2.2” and the vast 

II) and Subway (Clock port). network applications. The 

majority of the time the answer 

The most popular add-on board has been tested with 

comes back that it now works 

requested for the Highway was 030, 040, 060 and PPC 

in 2.3. 

an Ethernet card and E3B accelerators. 

In a recent post Stefan 

Burström, the author of 

already have a 10Mb/s module 

in the works called the Norway. 

For further details including 

extensive compatibility testing 

IBrowse and the key 

The card will attach to the of the Highway card take a 

programmer, said that they 

expansion connector of the look at the E3B website: 

hope to have the new version 

Highway card. It features an http://www.e3b.de 

ready for release by the end of 

May. Currently the feature set 

is frozen and they are working 

to fix the major outstanding 

issues. To give an idea of the 

size of the upgrade Stefan 

mentioned that there have 

been over 220 changes, bug 

fixes and features added! 

NE2000 compatible Ethernet 

controller with 16Kbytes of 

buffer memory. The card is 

fitted with an RJ45 connector 

for the unshielded twisted pair 

cable used in most modern 

You can pre-order a Norway 

card from KDH, a German 

Amiga dealer at 59.90Euro 

(about £38), other dealers 

have not yet been announced: 

http://www.kdh-datentechnik.com 

Titan have a page on their site 

with some initial information on 

their ports: 

http://www.titan-computer.com/ 

ami/papyrus/index.html 

New 

IBrowse 

At Last 

Well I for one can’t wait, as 

there isn’t currently an IBrowse 

website the best way to keep 

in touch with developments is 

to join the IBrowse mailing list 

at: 

http://groups.yahoo.com/ 

group/ibrowse 

Getting Flash 

The Norway pre-production prototype. 

While compact flash is only 

one of the memory card 

standards available it is 

popular among manufacturers 

of cameras and other mobile 

devices and the cards are less 

expensive than the other types. 

If anyone out there has an 

adaptor for a different memory 

format to PCMCIA it would be 

interesting to try it with 

compactflash.device as I think 

there is a change other formats 

would work. However don’t go 

out and spend money as this is 

only a chance. 

You can download cfd from any 

Aminet mirror, 

disk/misc/cfd.lha, you’ll also 

need fat95.lha from the same 

directory. 

Icon 

Overload! 

Mason Icons is a 

project to create 

a common set 

of application 

images for Amiga 

programs based in 

the glow icons style. The auto 

Martin Merz has made a set of 

common images and then uses 

them to make new button bars 

for Amiga programs giving 

them a common look, rather 

than the icon sets which have 

been available for years these 

are images used for buttons 

and icons within a program. 

This is possible because many 

programs have customiseable 

toolbars or load the images 

they use from disks. Sets of 

icons are available for over 50 

applications and utilities from 

AWeb to Voyager! Martin 

releases new and updated 

image sets all the time and his 

work really does make your 

Amiga look more co-ordinated. 

To see if your favourite 

applications are supported 

visit: 

http://mason.home.bei.t-online.de 

News 

AmigaOS XL 

Legalities 

A recent statement from the 

main developer of the 

Amithlon, Bernie Meyer, has 

cast doubt on the legality of 

Haage and Partner’s Amiga 

emulator package AmigaOS 

XL. The emulators AmigaXL 

and Amithon are included in 

the package along with 

AmigaOS 3.9, 3.1 ROMs and 

other software. In his 

statement Bernie says he has 

received an EMail from Amiga 

Inc. and that they consider the 

distribution of AmigaOS XL to 

be in violation of their 

intellectual property rights and 

thus illegal. It seems that 

Amiga are in dispute with 

Haage and Partner over their 

right to distribute some or all of 

the Amiga owned components 

shipped with AmigaOS XL. 

Bernie has asked Haage and 

Partner to stop distributing 

Amithon as he is allowed to in 

his contract because he is 

personally responsible for 

settling any intellectual 

property disputes over the 

software he provided for 

AmigaOS XL. Bernie stresses 

that he has no way of knowing 

if Amiga’s claims are justified 

but he had to act to minimise 

his personal legal risk. 

As far as we are aware Haage 

and partner is continuing to sell 

AmigaOS XL. Although there 

has been no official statement 

from them one of H&P’s 

employees, Martin 

Steigerwald, has made several 

postings to the Amithon 

mailing list that they are trying 

to clear up the situation and 

that Haage and Partner 

guarantees that all users will 

get an officially licensed 

product. 

As Bernie has requested that 

H&P stops distributing Amithon 

this puts potential buyers in a 

difficult position which so far 

has not been clarified, 

hopefully there will news soon. 

You can read the full statement 

from Bernie on his Amithlon 

website at: 

http://www.amithlon.net 


7

News 

Amiga One Update 

By Alan Redhouse 

Here is the very latest news on AmigaOne straight from Alan Redhouse, managing director of Eyetech 

The first issue of Total 

Amiga was published just a 

few days before the Alt-WoA 

show at the end of February 

where the AmigaOneG3-SE 

made its first public 

appearance. We had been 

working on this new board for a 

considerable length of time 

under strict confidentiality 

wraps and the new 

AmigaOneG3-SE was clearly a 

surprise to show attendees - it 

must have been one of the 

best kept secrets in the Amiga 

community. And there’s been 

plenty more happening since 

then. But first, for those of you 

who missed the presentation I 

gave at Alt-WoA, here is a brief 

summary. 

The AmigaOneG3-SE 

The first model in our 

AmigaOne range is the 

AmigaOneG3-SE. This is in 

effect a 600Mhz G3 Amiga 

accelerator with built in 10/100 

ethernet, USB, PCI/AGP 

interface and memory slots for 

up to 2GB of SDRAM. As well 

as being many times more 

powerful and at 

(UKP350/USD500/Euro600*) 

around half the price of the 

previously most powerful 

Amiga PPC accelerator (the 

phase 5 Cyberstorm PPC 604 

240MHz), in my mind the most 

remarkable thing about the 

AmigaOneG3-SE is that it 

comes with a free, built in 

computer! This means that you 

no longer need an attached 

A1200 or special tower case if 

you only intend to run 

retargetable Amiga 

applications. (For hardwarehitting 

applications an interface 

card to connect an Amiga 1200 

motherboard to the A1G3-SE a 

PCI card interface will be 

available from Escena). The 

A1G3-SE also comes with a 

full range of legacy peripherals, 

and will run PPC Linux (and 

PPC UAE) in addition to 

running the new PPC-only OS4 

natively. 

In this new design we have 

opted to solder the cpu direct 

to the motherboard. This not 

only keeps costs down, but 

significantly increases reliability 

by minimising trace lengths 

between cpu and SDRAM 

memory, particularly in 

comparison to the original 

‘Slot-1 cpu module’ we 

proposed for the original 

AmigaOne-1200. 

We took orders for developer 

boards (for testing OS4, 

developing software and for 

dealers to demonstrate - the 

boards are actually the same 

as the end user versions) 

towards the end of March. 

Most of them should have been 

delivered by the time this issue 

hits the mailboxes. 

The board has also attracted a 

lot of attention from the Linux- 

PPC community, and we have 

had some of the best 

developers from that OS - and 

of course from the Amiga 

developer community - order 

the developer boards and 

subscribe to the closed 

developer mailing list. This list 

is moderated by Amiga and 

Linux-PPC developer Ole-Egil 

Hvitmyren, a name which will 

be familiar - if totally 

unpronounceable - to those 

subscribed to the AmigaOne 

mailing list at Yahoo Groups 

(www.yahoogroups.com/ 

group/amigaone). 

Finally it is important to note 

that the AmigaOneG3-SE is 

fully quality-validated and 

licensed by Amiga Inc to run 

OS4, with all licence 

fees/royalties paid. AI’s licence 

terms also stipulate that all 

boards capable of running OS4 

must ship with an OEM version 

of OS4 and must have built-in 

hardware protection to keep 

OS4 piracy to a minimum, and 

this has been built into the 

AmigaOneG3-SE from the 

outset. 

A list of dealers who have 

already ordered 

demonstration/familiarisation 

boards is posted on our web 

site (www.eyetech.co.uk/ 

amigaone/dealer). Don’t worry 

if your favourite dealer is not 

listed - several have either 

missed the ordering window or 

decided to wait until the end 

user boards and OS4 is 

shipping. These dealers will be 

added to the list on our website 

at the time they order end user 

boards from us. 

Although we are advertising 

the A1G3-SE as an entry-level 

machine, have no doubt with 

OS4 installed it will really fly. 

The 600Mhz 750CXe cpu that 

is shipped with it is effectively 

that fastest G3 cpu generally 

available and some PPC 

experts reckon it is likely to 

deliver several hundred times 

the performance of an ‘030/50 

with many applications. 

Whats next? 

Those of you will who have 

been paying attention will have 

noticed that I said that the 

A1G3-SE was ‘the first’ in our 

AmigaOne range. So what, I 

hear you asking, will be 

following, and when, what 

spec, how much and, 

inevitably, is it worth waiting 

for? 

Well I can’t answer all those 

questions definitively now, but I 

will give you a taster of what 

we have planned for an up- 

market (read more flexible but 

more expensive) addition to 

the AmigaOne range. One of 

the prime requirements is to 

provide a socketed cpu module 

so that user-upgradable 

performance enhancements 

can be made as and when 

faster and more complex chips 

- and operating system 

enhancements that use them - 

become available. I mentioned 

above that the Intel Slot-1 

socket is not really suitable in 

this context, and in fact both 

the Intel Slot-1 socket and the 

Apple ZIF cpu socket are now 

obsolete and no longer 

manufactured. 

So for the next version of the 

AmigaOne, the AmigaOne-XE, 

we have borrowed the latest 

cpu socket technology from 

Apple in the form of the 

purpose-designed ‘Megarray’ 

socket. This means that we 

can make low cost, tightly 

coupled cpu modules using 

either G3, G4, dual G4, (and 

possibly G5) technology - for 

use the same motherboard. 

Upgrading cpu power therefore 

only needs a simple module 

exchange. The prototype 

socketed AmigaOne-XE board 

and the associated plug-in G3 

and G4 modules hve already 

been built. Look forward to 

some more details in the next 

Total Amiga. 

But before you rush off and 

cancel your pending 

AmigaOneG3-SE orders to buy 

the AmigaOne-XE instead, 

bear in mind that this extra 

flexibility will come at a price, 

and until OS4 supports the 

G4’s Altivec coprocessor, 

without much performance 

benefit either. And at the 

moment, unless you are Apple, 

G4 cpu’s are on very tight 

allocation, which means that it 

will be several months before 

they are available to us at a 

reasonable price for use in the 

AmigaOne-EX cpu modules. At 

the moment the target price for 

the AmigaOne-XE board with 

the single G4 700MHz cpu 

module is around 

UKP200/USD300/Euro350 

more than the AmigaOneG3- 

SE - and possibly less if 

Apple’s demand for these 

cpu’s drops significantly. 

So does this mean you should 

cancel your existing 

AmigaOne-G3 order and wait a 

few more months? Not at all. 

We anticipate a high private 

resale value of used 

AmigaOneG3-SE boards, but 

to take the uncertainty out of 

the process, we, and the 

majority of other AmigaOne 

dealers, will underwrite a 

trade-in value of your 

AmigaOneG3-SE during a 

period of 6 and 12 months 

after its purchase against the 

purchase of a new AmigaOne- 

XE with single G4 cpu module. 

So if you’ve been sitting on the 

fence wondering whether to 

buy an A1G3-SE or to wait 

until an upgradable G4 

AmigaOne is available, you 

can now have the best of both 

worlds. Get a new, low cost 

AmigaOneG3-SE now and 

upgrade within 12 months. 

What are you waiting for? 

Full details of this upgrade 

offer will be posted on our web 

site shortly. 

Thats all for this issue. 

Not much seems to have 

happened in the many 

years since the demise of 

Commodore. We’ve all done 

it. Scouring the websites for 

news, reading the ever 

diminishing number of Amiga 

mags from cover to cover and 

becoming more and more 

depressed as promises have 

been made, deadlines have 

slipped, companies have 

vanished. 

Which is why it gives me great 

pleasure to share with you the 

wonderful news that has 

occurred in the time since the 

last issue of Total Amiga. 

Not only has the AmigaOne 

been seen (running PPC 

Linux) but by the time you 

read this 200 very lucky 

developers should have 

actual AmigaOne developer 

boards in their possession, 

with AmigaOne consumer 

systems only a few months 

away at most. 

Our partners at Hyperion have 

also been able to release 

actual screenshots of the new 

AmigaOS4.0. (I hope that they 

are in the magazine 

somewhere, but to see them 

in all their glory, surf over to 

the hyperion website 

(http://www.OS4.hyperionsoftware.com). 

Although most 

of the work for OS4 is under 

the hood, and we haven’t 

planned that much of a 

revamping in the interface 

arena, I’m sure you’ll agree 

that it looks very nice and will 

allow Amigans to put their 

new 40 inch plasma monitors 

up against OS X and XP 

users and feel pretty smug. 

More importantly, what all of 

this good news means is that 

the Amiga Power Platform is 

about to be reborn, a system 

of elegance and simplicity for 

those who need the power of 

a desktop and beyond to 

render their 3D movies, layout 

their publications, create their 

next music hit or destroy that 

alien spaceship and all its 

60,000 polygons. 

Whilst we are all excited as 

hell, we must also be realistic 

and realise that this just the 

first step in a long journey. 

The Amiga Power Platform is 

starting out in a very deep 

hole. Developers will only 

write new and compelling 

applications for our platform if 

they can see it makes 

commercial sense, which 

means seeing a sustainable 

market. Correspondingly, 

users will only come to the 

platform if they see the 

applications. It is a vicious 

circle and one in which 

community spirit is going to 

have to count like it has never 

counted before. 

We know we have the 

dedicated Amigans who will 

buy the new platform. Our 

next target after that must be 

all our Amiga friends, those 

who tried to stay with us but 

finally gave up the ghost a 

year or so ago. We all know 

many of these people and we 

need to get them interested 

and back into the community. 

This will start to bring 

numbers up, which will 

interest developers, which will 

allow Total Amiga to go to a 

monthly format, which will 

start to bring new users to 

user group meetings, and so 

on and so on. 

It won’t happen overnight. It 

will take time, but if Amigans 

are anything, we are patient. 

Sometimes we have been 

sorely tested, and I won’t 

pretend that we as a company 

haven’t made mistakes that 

News 

FleecySpeaks 

Amiga’s Chief Technology Officer gives us a taste of what to expect in AmigaOS 4. . 

has pushed many of you to 

the edge but we said that 

somehow, sometime, we 

would get a new Amiga to you 

and it looks like, working 

together, we are so close as 

to almost be able to taste it. 

Congratulations to us all. 

On a sadder note, my heart 

goes out to the people of 

HAUG, who worked so hard 

and tirelessly to put on their 

show, which was then 

decimated by the one thing 

not in their control, a monster 

of a snow storm that froze up 

the entire north of England. I, 

along with many others, were 

really looking forwards to the 

event. Don’t give up. We all 

want to see you next year in 

Huddersfield and they’ll be 

plenty of new additions. 


9 

Alan

News 

Since the last issue quite a 

lot of information has been 

made public about the 

development of OS 4, both by 

Amiga themselves and by 

Hyperion who are in charge of 

the OS development. In 

particular Ben Hermans of 

Hyperion has been active on 

Amiga news websites and 

discussion boards explaining 

aspects of the new OS and 

quashing the wilder rumours 

and speculation. In this article I 

will try to distil the numerous 

announcements and comments 

to give you an idea of what to 

expect from the new OS. 

The new OS 4 TCP/IP stack, 

being developed by Olaf 

Barthel, has been tested and 

benchmarks suggest it will be 

the fastest stack yet seen on 

the Amiga. The stack will also 

include SSL version 2 so 

secure connection support can 

be built into network programs 

easily without relying on a 

third-party solution like Miami 

SSL. 

As I mentioned in the last issue 

there will be a new PPC native 

version of the Amiga’s Fast 

File System which will support 

long filename and hard disks 

greater than 4Gb. Repair and 

data salvage tools will be 

shipped with the OS which will 

work on FFS2 and the popular 

freeware Smart File System 

(SFS). In addition to the new 

FFS2 there will also be PPC 

native CD-ROM filesystem this 

will support Rockridge and 

Joiliet extensions so CDs from 

Windows and other platforms 

should be fully readable. THE 

CDFS will also handle 

multisession, Video CD and 

CDDA (audio) discs. We don’t 

know yet whether the CDDA 

support means that the audio 

tracks will be presented as files 

on the disk for ripping. The 

developers also hope to 

support mixed mode and HFS 

(Macintosh) format CDs too. 

Reaction will remain the official 

GUI engine of OS 4 and work 

is being done to make it more 

flexible and powerful. Many 

new classes (these are the 

basic elements from which a 

GUI is built such as gadgets, 

windows etc.) are being 

developed, drag and drop 

support is being added 

throughout the system (the lack 

of d ‘n’ d has always been one 

of Reaction’s major failings). 

4 

AmigaOS Update 

The signs are good, OS 4 really seems to be on its way and the developers are even telling us about it! Robert Williams 

tries to sum up all the news since the last issue! 

In this shot you can see some custom window gadgets in use 

along with another menu style. 

The overall look and feel of the 

OS is being worked on by a 

team including the designer of 

GlowIcons, Matt Chaput. 

Amiga say they intend the OS 

to look “modern and unique” 

and we believe this make-over 

will include new system icons 

(in window borders) and 

probably much more. 

Massimo Tantignone, the 

author of the popular Visual 

Prefs package, is working on 

enhancements to Intuition the 

noticeable results of these 

changes will be configurable 

window boarders and a new 

menu system amongst others. 

The new system is said to 

incorporate the functionality of 

the popular utilities birdie 

(patterned window borders), 

Magic Menu (pop-up and 

customiseable menus) and 

Visual Prefs but built into the 

system rather than as hacks 

which can cause instability. 

The first screenshots of OS 4 

were published on the Internet 

recently and they show some 

of the changes to Intuition. The 

examples include pop-up 

menus some with transparency 

and several different window 

gadget design. When you look 

at these pictures remember 

that this is not the final default 

look that will ship with OS4 

(which will include the Matt 

Chaput designed graphics I 

mentioned earlier) and that the 

whole point of these changes is 

that you will be able to change 

to look of the OS to your taste. 

You can see some of the 

screenshots on this page and 

in colour on the back cover. 

One interesting fact to note is 

that the shots show windows 

overlapping the edge of the 

screen which is not possible on 

the current AmigaOS without a 

hack... whether this will be a 

feature of the new OS remains 

to be seen. 

Users of OS 3.9 will be 

pleased to hear that a PPC 

native version of AmiDock, the 

program launcher that rapidly 

gained favour with Amigans 

after 3.9’s release, is in the 

works for OS 4. Other areas 

that will be enhanced and 

made PPC native include the 

shell (we probably got a taster 

of the changes with OS43.9 

Boing Bag 2) and the 

Datatypes system. Oliver 

Roberts is working on PPC 

native datatypes which will be 

included with the OS. In the 

initial release the datatypes 

system will be an upgraded 

PPC native version of the 

existing system, but in 4.1 or 

4.2 a major overhaul is 

planned, Hyperion will to work 

with Amiga to take advantage 

of datatypes work done for 

AmigaDE. We anticipate that 

the 4.1/2 datatypes will include 

support for streaming media 

such as movie and music files. 

Amiga Input is a new feature 

for OS 4 which will provide 

software developers with a 

common way to access input 

devices such as joysticks, mice 

and keyboards however they 

are attached to the computer. 

This should prove a boon 

particularly to game developers 

who will be able to give users 

access to the myriad of 

available controllers without 

supporting each individually. It 

is also important for supporting 

new hardware which won’t 

have the standard Amiga 

joystick and mouse ports. On 

the new machines Amiga Input 

will be able to access USB 

devices via the stack 

previously announced. 

One of the weaker areas of the 

AmigaOS has always been 

font support, with the native 

system only supporting 

Comugraphic outline fonts 

many applications have gone 

An example of the enhanced menu system showing translucent 

pop-up menus with rounded corners. 

This will all be part of the OS, no hacks required! 

their own way for font support. 

In OS 4 TrueType (very popular 

as they are used by both 

MacOS and Windows) and 

OpenType fonts will be 

supported. The core libraries 

that make up the font system 

“diskfont.library” and 

“bullet.library” will also be reimplemented 

and reworked 

hopefully improving their 

speed. 12 TrueType fonts will 

be included with the OS4.0 

under a contract with Agfa, we 

understand some of these 

mirror the standard Windows 

fonts which should help in 

document Interchange. OS 4 

should also see the 

introduction of some Unicode 

support with full support 

planned for 4.1. Unicode 

enables a greater number of 

characters to be represented 

and should improve support for 

languages which don’t use the 

standard Latin characters used 

in western Europe. 

Some of the most interesting 

and surprising announcements 

of recent weeks have been 

about the software that will be 

bundled with OS 4.0 rather 

than parts of the OS itself. A 

new version of IBrowse, 2.3, 

will be included with the OS. 

The new version has been in 

development for some time 

and Ben Hermans has stated 

that it will be more stable and 

have much better JavaScript 

support than previous 

releases. According to the 

developers on the IBrowse 

mailing list a cut-down version 

of the full 2.3 release will be 

included with OS 4 but it will 

still be a useable browser. 

IBrowse 2.3 will still use the 

Magic User Interface and along 

with the 2.3 announcement 

came the news that a PPC 

native version of MUI will ship 

with OS 4. The OS 4 release 

will be compiled from the latest 

MUI sources and should have 

some new features over the 

current 3.8 release version, the 

shareware status of the 

included version has not been 

announced. It should be noted 

that this does not make MUI 

the GUI standard for OS4, 

that’s still Reaction as 

mentioned earlier but this move 

should mean that the many 

MUI applications available are 

all improved and accelerated 

under OS 4. Another surprise 

was that Hyperion have 

acquired the rights to further 

develop Directory Opus 5, a 

PPC port is expected but 

exactly how this will be 

included with the OS (or not) 

has not been announced. 

Finally OS 4 will also ship with 

a “lite” version of the sound 

editing application Audio 

Evolution. 

The development environment 

for OS 4 will be the open 

source GCC C and C++ 

compiler with full debugger 

support. It has also been 

announced that Olaf Barthel is 

working on a new edition of the 

ROM Kernal Manuals (RKMs) 

which were Commodore’s bible 

for Amiga developers but were 

last updated for AmigaOS 2! 

Another exciting development 

on the coding side of things is 

that Thomas Richter is working 

on a rewrite of AREXX which 

he calls PREXX, this is 

excellent news as AREXX was 

not developed by Commodore 

and there were rumours that 

C= did not own the source 

code to make an updated or 

PPC version possible. With a 

complete rewrite this should no 

longer be an issue. 

The 68k emulation that will be 

used to run existing Amiga 

applications and parts of the 

OS which have not been 

ported to PPC has been 

announced, it is called Project 

Petunia and is being developed 

by Álmos Rajnai. Some initial 

benchmarks for the emulation 

running on existing PPC 

hardware under WarpOS have 

been published and are 

already impressive with up to 

twice the speed of an 

060/50Mhz being achieved on 

a 233Mhz 604e. Bearing in 

mind that this is running on a 

CyberStorm PPC which has 

relatively slow RAM and is still 

suffering context switches to 

the 68k this is impressive and 

bodes well for performance 

when no 68k processor is 

available, it should really fly on 

a system like the AmigaOne 

which has a much faster 

processor and memory bus. 

In addition to the software 

announcements Amiga have 

been clarifying how OS4 will be 

distributed. While the OS will 

be available to buy for those 

with existing CyberStorm and 

Blizzard PPC accelerators in 

the main it will only be 

available with new hardware. 

Amiga have decided they must 

take measures to ensure that 

AmigaOS 4, the hardware it 

ships with and the support 

Wanna Know More? 

News 

provided by the supplier are of 

top quality. The support will 

include the delivery, 

replacement, repair and 

turnaround that the supplier 

can provide. Amiga Inc. will 

review the capabilities of the 

product and the supplier before 

granting them a license to ship 

OS4 with their product. 

To ensure that OS4 is not 

shipped with unapproved 

products and to reduce piracy 

Amiga will insist that OS4 

specific ROM extensions are 

included in the hardware’s boot 

ROM. All devices that ship with 

these ROM extensions will 

have to be sold with a copy of 

AmigaOS 4. That said it will be 

possible for manufacturers to 

omit the Amiga extensions and 

sell the same hardware into 

other markets without OS 4. 

Eyetech have said that they 

hope to sell the AmigaOne G3- 

SE (under a different name) to 

Linux users in this way, they 

say an OS4 and ROM pack 

may be available in the future 

to allow these users to 

purchase to OS4. 

The news about OS 4 is now 

getting really exciting and I 

know a number of Amiga users 

(including myself) who are 

feeling more confident than 

they have in a long time that 

something good is about to 

happen to our favourite 

platform. While things do seem 

to be taking a little longer than 

originally expected (which is 

hardly surprising given the 

scope of the work to be done) 

the regular updates mean that 

we can all see that things are 

happening and it will be worth 

the wait. 

For more information keep your eye on the Amiga news 

websites and take a look at these pages: 

Information about the Petunia 68k emulator and the 

benchmarks I mentioned: 

http://www.amiga.hu/amigos/rachy/petunia.html 

Bill McEwen’s executive updates on OS 4 progress: 

http://www.amiga.com/corporate/041202-mcewen.shtml 

Download the MP3 recording of a news conference with Ben 

Hermans of Hyperion at Amiga Expo in the USA: 

http://vgr.tc3net.com/hyperion/Amiga-Expo-2002-hyperion.mp3 


11

Features 

Amiga, who’s the moron? 

Does Amiga’s recent agreement with Microsoft spell the end of our favourite name in computing, Michael Carillo, Total 

Amiga’s new promo man, doesn’t think so! (and by the way, it’s not Gordon!) 

Many of you will have 

heard or read by now the 

shocking news that Amiga 

have jumped into bed with 

Microsoft. A company so 

reviled by the Amiga 

community at large that should 

a Microsoft Employee attend 

an Amiga show, nothing would 

be left of that person except 

perhaps a few blood stains. 

If like me, when you heard the 

news officially, your blood 

pressure must have jumped 

several points. Speaking for 

myself, I was so incensed I 

emailed Fleecy Moss and Gary 

Peake directly and uttered 

words of pure venom. (Well not 

quite, but you get the picture). 

As a result of the 

announcement a few not so 

well known Amiga related 

websites and user groups have 

decided that they no longer 

want to be associated with 

Amiga and have removed all 

links from their sites. 

It’s easy to see why, many 

Amiga users see that Amiga 

have decided to concentrate 

their “core” time and 

investment on their Amiga 

Anywhere (tm) products. 

For many in the Amiga 

community this is tantamount 

to a betrayal of the beliefs and 

the loss of the moral war 

against the mighty Beast from 

Redmond. It is a sacrifice too 

far for the Amiga community, 

i.e. us, who for years have 

suffered dwindling numbers, 

products, retailers, and more 

importantly the computing 

limelight. 

Thanks to the incompetent 

board of Commodore we are 

now perceived as the 

computing world’s equivalent 

of the Flat Earth Society. After 

having our hopes dashed by 

Escom and Gateway. Now all 

our hopes are pinned on the 

current Amiga owners, 

previously known as Amino 

developments. 

However, the current Amiga 

owners just don`t seem to give 

a damn about us, we are only 

getting the AmigaOne and 

AmigaOS4.0 via third party 

contractors. 

It’s with a big thanks to the 

Eyetech Group and Hyperion 

Entertainment, who have taken 

a huge financial risk by 

financing the projects 

themselves with no backing 

from Amiga at all. All Amiga 

are contributing temporarily is 

the licensing rights to the brand 

name, allowing these third 

party companies to produce 

the goods and for Amiga to get 

a cut from sales. Nice. 

Once upon a long ago, the 

name Amiga, was the byword 

for a fast and elegant, 

compact, multi-tasking 

machine. Sadly those days are 

long, long, gone. “What’s an 

Amiga?” Is the most common 

reaction I get when I am out 

shopping for a generic 

computing peripheral. Most 

annoyingly still, is the little 

smirk on some smart-ass shop 

assistant’s face when the word 

“Amiga” is brought up. 

Take the Amiga 500 and 500+ 

a wonderful ground breaking 

machine for the masses. In 

reality Joe Public only viewed it 

as a technological jump from 

the Commodore 64, Spectrums 

etc machines of the time. They 

didn’t know about it’s wonderful 

multitasking capabilities. All 

these machines were used for 

was to play floppy based 

games on. Face facts, to the 

vast majority of Amiga owners, 

the Amiga was only a games 

machine. The nearest they 

ever got to using the wonderful, 

multitasking Workbench was to 

format a floppy! 

When Sega and Nintendo 

brought out their instant 

loading mega licensing games 

to the public, the Amiga, thanks 

to Commodore (whose 

marketing was inept to say the 

least) was yesterdays’s news. 

Despite some successes with 

the A1200 (won’t mention the 

A600 disaster) and the CD32, 

users were won over by the 

games consoles and by the 

MS/PC alliance. 

Wisely perhaps, the new 

owners of Amiga looked at the 

current market and decided 

that, with the current amount of 

existing users, re-launching the 

Amiga into a virtual monopoly 

marketplace that is Sony- 

Playstation/Microsoft PC/X-Box 

is tantamount to suicide. Just 

to get the number of Amiga 

users to the same levels as, 

say, the Apple Mac or Linux 

Markets, would require more 

capital in advertising hype than 

the national debt of Mexico and 

possibly the whole sum worth 

of Imelda Marcus’s infamous 

shoe collection. - Which is way 

more than the tuppence and 

ha’ penny that Amiga currently 

have. 

Let’s talk candidly here, how 

many active Amiga users are 

there left in the world? You and 

me? 5,000? 10,000? 100,000? 

1m+? (If you said 1m+ please 

go and have a full frontal 

lobotomy right now.) No sadly, I 

don’t know the answer to that 

one myself, but I do know that 

most Amiga retailers and 

developers put the figure at an 

optimistic 10,000 active users, 

by that, they mean people who 

are willing to occasionally buy 

something. 

The gulling thing is that most 

companies, especially games 

companies, struggle to sell at 

least 1000 copies of any single 

product on the Amiga platform. 

For example it is widely 

believed that companies like 

Hyperion struggle to reach 

sales of 1000 copies on most 

of their products. How sad is 

that? Clearly from Amiga’s 

point of view, investing in the 

current Amiga market would be 

like buying shares in Enron or 

Marconi right now. 

Another indicator of how 

successful a computing 

platform currently is, are by the 

number of magazines available 

to buy at the moment in a 

shop. For the PC and 

Consoles -dozens, you can’t 

move for them, even the Mac 

and the Linux communities 

also have magazines on sale 

and on the shelves. The Amiga 

has none in the UK and at 

most, one in other non English 

speaking countries. The last 

world wide mass circulation 

Amiga magazine, Amiga Active 

had to change name and 

direction just so that the 

publisher could stay afloat. At 

the close, Amiga Active was 

losing monies on a mere 

circulation of around 4000 or 

less. 

Time to wake up and smell the 

coffee. 

Let’s be brutally honest, Amiga 

are not going to get rich or 

indeed turn a profit from the 

AmigaOne or AmigaOS4.0 

royalties, it’s not a sustainable 

market and anyone who thinks 

it is, is purely under a 

misapprehension. Having 

spoken to those in the know, if 

Amiga get between 20k-50k 

back from the current Amiga 

market for AOS4.0 and 

AmigaOne, they will be lucky. 

Amiga haven’t necessarily 

abandoned the Amiga we all 

know and love, they are using 

a two pronged attack to 

achieve their means to an end. 

By promoting their Amiga 

Anywhere product (which if you 

have seen the Bill McEwen’s, 

TechTV infommercial is very 

impressive) to the masses, it 

gains Amiga the advantage of 

brand recognition. This in turn 

will lead to more developers 

wanting to work with Amiga 

because they have been given 

the “royal” Microsoft ascension. 

Providing Amiga a very much 

needed revenue stream to 

develop OS4.x into the 

combined AOS5.0 and Amiga 

Anywhere (tm) technology. 

Deep down most of us, apart 

from a few idiots, realise that 

the classic Amiga architecture, 

with a few exceptions, is dead. 

It’s too old, too limited, and too 

tied down to what was once 

awe inspiring hardware. The 

Amiga zealots (myself 

included) who want a brand 

new dilithium matrix, 

holographic computer are 

leaving in dreamland. This is 

not to say that Amiga probably 

don`t have very radical plans 

for both Hardware and 

software, rather they need the 

money to develop them, and to 

move forwards with OS5, 

where both products, 

OS+Amiga Anywhere (tm) will 

be merged into one seamless 

environment. In other words, 

In the world of overclocking, 

people will do anything to get 

the last bit of speed out of their 

systems. The biggest problem 

they face is overheating, and 

so cooling becomes very 

important to them. In particular, 

air flow in a cramped and 

packed tower case can be a 

problem, not least because of 

all the large flat ribbon cables 

needed to run hard drives, 

floppy drives, CDROMs and 

more. 

To get around this problem, a 

few brave people started to 

round their ribbon cables off. 

This proved to be a reliable 

way of improving fair flow, so it 

soon became very popular. 

While the average Amiga user 

has far less to worry about in 

terms of heat, cable rounding 

is still useful for those of us 

running Voodoo cards and 

PPCs. Having rounded cables 

also looks quite neat and 

makes routing all those 

connections a bit easier. 

So, what do you need to create 

a rounded cable? Well, 

Amiga Anywhere (tm) will be 

merged so deep within the 

AmigaOS5 core that the 

difference will be unnoticeable, 

pretty much like clicking on an 

Icon in OS3.9 right now to and 

running Wordworth, 

DrawStudio, Photogenics etc. 

The plus point for Amiga and 

it’s users is that there should 

be plenty of ported applications 

for Amiga Anywhere (tm) and 

later, Amiga OS5, from the top 

names in computing, thanks to 

the Amiga/Microsoft tie up 

deal. Many of us may not like 

the tie up, but when you think 

about it, it’s a good idea, it’s a 

means to an end because as I 

have stated before, with Amiga 

getting the MS approval, other 

companies will talk to them 

directly without fear of 

reprisals. 

obviously you need a cable, 

and almost any will do, be it 

IDE, SCSI, floppy or almost 

anything else. You will also 

need a craft knife, and some 

cable ties. 

Start by straightening the cable 

out and laying it down flat. To 

make the cable round, you 

have to cut the ribbon into 

strands. It’s usually best to 

have two or three wires to a 

strand, but you can have more. 

Cutting out individual wires is 

not recommended, because 

the cable will then be prone to 

breaking and it’s also a lot 

more work! Carefully position 

the knife blade over the gap 

between two wires, and gently 

push down. The cable should 

split easily. Make a cut about 

one or two centimetres long, 

For now the path to a new 

future has been laid down with 

the eagerly anticipated PPC 

based releases of the 

AmigaOne and AmigaOS4.0. 

In the future Amiga will be 

looking to sell their products in 

pretty much the way Sun looks 

at Java and Solaris. The 

AmigaOS5 will be a standalone 

product that runs on many 

different types of 

desktop/workstation and 

servers - it won’t run on top of 

other OSs - just like Solaris. 

Amiga Anywhere (tm) will 

continue to be a total content 

solution - it isn’t designed to be 

a workstation or server capable 

product and Amiga don’t intend 

to mess with it. 

The trick here is to ensure that 

the “masses” i.e. Joe Public, 

will not think of Amiga 

Anywhere (tm) as another 

and you should then be able to 

remove the knife and pull the 

two parts of the cable apart 

with your fingers. Don’t split it 

all the way along just yet, but 

finish cutting all the other 

strands apart first. 

Once you have finished cutting, 

carefully look at the cable from 

both sides. Make sure you 

have not split the wires, if you 

can see any bare parts just 

cover them with electrical tape. 

With a little practice you should 

be able to do an entire cable 

Features 

“Games Machine” or 

environment, thus dooming 

Amiga to repeat the mistakes 

of it’s predecessors. 

So finally, we come full circle, 

who are the morons? The 

Zealots like myself who wish to 

see only an AmigaOS and a 

new Amiga machine, whilst 

anything else is blasphemy? 

Or is it Amiga for wanting to 

deliver us from all the mistakes 

the computing world has made 

in the last 15 years? 

Acknowledgements 

The author of this article would 

like to publicly thank the 

person(s) who contributed to 

this article. As requested 

names have been withheld. 

Cables, Cables all Around? 

Is your case congested with ribbon cables? Paul Qureshi 

has the answer. 

Splitting the cable is easy as long as you take care. 

The end result looks good 

and should improve air flow. 

without splitting one wire. Once 

you are sure everything is 

okay, pull the strands apart as 

described above, all the way to 

the ends of the cable where 

the plastic connectors are 

clipped on. At this point your 

cable will look like a complete 

mess, so use some cable ties 

to hold the strands together. 

What you do next is up to you. 

You could simply use cable ties 

to hold everything together, or 

you could try for a more 

pleasing look by using some 

tubing. There are two kinds 

commonly available, a wrap 

type and a split tube type. The 

wrap type is okay, but the tube 

type provides better protection 

and is my personal preference. 

It comes in various sizes and 

costs around 50p per meter 

from car audio shops. 


13

x86 

Features 

Amiga 

Emulators 

Amiga emulators are no longer a laughing matter, efficient JIT 68k CPU emulation running on fast 

inexpensive hardware is a compelling combination. Robert Williams finds it’s time to get serious! 

It wasn’t long ago that Amiga 

emulators running on x86 

based PC systems were seen 

by the Amiga community as a 

toy for retro gamers, and a bit 

of a joke for serious 

applications. At that time, 

emulations were so slow that 

the fastest PC system had 

trouble competing with an ‘030 

based Amiga. However with 

the release of a Just In Time 

(JIT) 680x0 emulation engine 

for the most popular emulator, 

UAE, all that changed. Put 

simply JIT emulation caches 

code which has been 

translated for the host 

processor so it only needs to 

be translated once. As most 

programs consist of similar 

blocks of code run over and 

over again this technique 

greatly increases the speed of 

the emulation. Even on 

relatively lowly and thus 

inexpensive PC hardware the 

JIT based emulators can 

achieve speeds several times 

that of an ‘060 based Amiga 

and in some cases can exceed 

the speed of PPC compiled 

software on the current 

PowerUP cards. 

Amiga Chipset Emulation 

There are two approaches to 

Amiga chipset emulation. The 

one that is used by UAE and 

most of the earlier emulations is 

to emulate the Amiga hardware 

as closely as possible. This 

enables most programs including 

those which access the 

hardware directly, avoiding the 

OS, to run under the emulation. 

However emulating the Amiga’s 

complex custom hardware is a 

time consuming business which 

steals CPU time away from the 

processor emulation. In UAE 

some of the more processor 

intensive emulation features, for 

example paula sound emulation 

can be disabled to speed up the 

processor emulation. The other 

approach is to only emulate 

those aspects of the Amiga 

hardware that are necessary for 

the OS to run, this is how 

Amithlon works. As graphics and 

sound can be supported by 

retargetable systems such as 

Picasso 96 and AHI respectively 

both these areas of the chipset 

emulation can be removed. This 

approach leaves more processor 

time to the emulation, speeding it 

up, but has the disadvantage 

that programs requiring the 

chipset, for example older games 

and video applications will not 

run. 

Emulation Approaches 

Getting the AmigaOS to run on 

generic PC hardware through 

emulation directly would be a 

major and continuing challenge 

due to the very large number of 

PC component manufacturers in 

the market. There are more 

producers of major components 

like motherboard chipsets, 

graphics cards and sound cards 

not to mention more minor 

peripherals than you can shake a 

stick at and to make matters 

worse new models are being 

released all the time. So all the 

x86 Amiga emulators run on top 

of an existing operating system 

and that deals with compatibility 

with the underlying hardware. 

UAE is an open source project 

that has been ported to many 

types of hardware and operating 

systems. Amiga XL and Amiga 

Forever which use UAE to 

provide their emulation run on 

top of QNX and Windows 

respectively. In this way they not 

only take advantage of the 

hardware support of the host OS 

but also allow users to access its 

native software. Again Amithlon 

uses a rather different approach, 

although it does run on a Linux 

operating system it only uses a 

modified kernal (the core of an 

operating system which 

interfaces the basic hardware 

and controls services like 

memory management), the only 

program running is Amithlon and 

you can’t run other Linux 

applications. 

The extent to which the host OS 

is used is one of the factors that 

controls how close the emulation 

comes to feeling like a real 

hardware Amiga. For example 

both Amiga XL and Amiga 

Forever don’t allow much direct 

access to the PC’s hardware. 

This means you can’t run Amiga 

scanner or CD burning software 

because they have to access the 

hardware they control (a scanner 

or CD writer) directly. Similarly 

Amiga XL and Amiga Forever let 

the emulated Amiga access a 

network or the Internet via the 

PC’s connection so you can’t run 

an Amiga TCP/IP stack like 

Miami or Genesis on them. 

Amithlon on the other hand 

allows all this Amiga software to 

be used so it feels much more 

like a real Amiga. However this 

also means it has some of the 

Amiga’s disadvantages, only 

hardware supported by Amiga 

drivers or drivers especially 

written for Amithlon will work well 

with it (there are some 

exceptions which I’ll discuss in 

more detail in the review). 

Graphics 

One of the key features that was 

added to UAE and helped it to 

become a useful product for 

serious Amiga users was support 

for Picasso 96. Before this 

support the emulator could only 

display Amiga chipset 

screenmodes, with Picasso 96 

the emulation can make full use 

of the host platform’s graphics 

card. With Amiga XL and Amiga 

Forever Amiga screens are 

displayed via the host OS’s 

graphics card drivers meaning a 

whole range of cards are 

supported, some far more 

powerful than those found on the 

Amiga. The only limitation is that 

there is no 3D support as the 

card isn’t being accessed 

directly. Again on Amithlon 

things are handled a little 

differently, for best performance 

you must have a graphics card 

that is supported by the 

emulation. Other cards will work 

but you are limited to one 

screenmode per session. 

Kickstart ROMs 

All Amiga emulators require a 

copy of the Amiga’s Kickstart 

ROM (which holds the basic 

routines needed to boot the 

machine, access floppy and hard 

disks etc.) in the form of a file. 

All the emulators we review in 

this feature include the ROMs 

you need as part of the package. 

If you download the free UAE 

then you can dump your ROMs 

from a working Amiga with a 

supplied utility. Also needed is a 

copy of the AmigaOS, just like a 

hardware Amiga you will need 

the correct ROMs for the version 

of the OS you wish to run. 

Floppies 

Amiga floppy disks use a format 

that cannot be read by standard 

PC floppy disk controllers so 

none of these emulators directly 

support reading Amiga floppies. 

They can read PC formatted 

floppies if a suitable file system 

is installed on the emulated 

Amiga. UAE and therefore 

Amiga Forever does allow floppy 

disk based programs can to be 

loaded, including those such as 

games distributed on bootable 

disks. This is achieved by 

converting the disk to a file 

called an ADF (Amiga DIsk File) 

on a real Amiga and transferring 

the file to the PC. The emulator 

then allows an ADF file to be 

associated with each floppy drive 

and the emulated Amiga will 

think the disk has be inserted. 

Because it doesn’t have so much 

of an underlying OS Amithlon 

does not support floppies in this 

manner but as it also doesn’t 

support the chipset which is 

needed for most programs that 

need to be booted from disk it 

isn’t so important. 

Features 


15 

Hard Disks 

UAE itself gives the emulated 

Amiga one or more hard disk 

partitions each of which maps to 

file on the PC’s drive. This 

approach is taken by Amiga 

Forever and Amiga XL. Amithlon 

requires you to setup a partition 

on the PC disk for the Amiga to 

use. Both Amiga XL and 

Amithlon also offer the option of 

plugging in an existing Amiga 

formatted hard disk and using it 

directly. One interesting point is 

that all the emulations benefit 

from the fast IDE interface built 

into modern PC’s so you can use 

inexpensive large hard drives at 

speeds unheard of on Amigas 

without a fast DMA SCSI 

controller and expensive SCSI 

drives. 

For other types of drive such as 

CD-ROMs Amiga Forever 

provides support through 

Windows, its host OS where as 

Amiga XL and Amithlon use a 

device driver and file system. 

Reviews 

So now we come to the review of 

the two commercial emulation 

packages, Amiga Forever 5 from 

Cloanto and AmigaOS XL from 

Haage and Partner. Eyetech has 

very kindly lent us one of their 

ultra compact SpaceWalker PC 

systems to review these x86 

emulators, it should be noted 

that while this system is fine for 

running Amiga Forever and 

Amiga XL it is not ideal for 

Amithlon as several of its 

components are not supported 

by the emulation. Fortunately by 

adding a compatible network 

card we were able to get it to 

work well enough to review, I 

have tried to take into account 

these problems in the Amithlon 

review. Take a look at our mini 

review of this system on page 

XX to get an idea of how it 

compares to your PC system (if 

you have one). 

Amiga Forever 5 

To describe Amiga Forever 5 as 

a bundle of the Windows port of 

the open source UAE emulator 

and a licensed copy of AmigaOS 

would be an injustice although 

those are the main parts of the 

package. The first thing that 

strikes you about AF5 is that it is 

very professional, from the slick 

packaging to the extensive online 

documentation. When you 

insert the CD into a PC running 

Windows an attractive launcher 

window opens allowing you to 

install the emulator or run it 

directly from the CD. 

The launcher reveals the first 

unique feature of Amiga Forever, 

it includes several versions of 

Kickstart and Workbench so you 

can easily boot the Emulator into 

a compatible version for the 

software you want to run. Four 

default configurations are 

available, 1.3, 1.3 without sound, 

3.1, and 3.1 without sound. The 

without sound configurations are 

available because sound uses 

lots of processor power to 

emulate. In addition to 1.3 and 

3.1 the package also includes 

OS versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 2.0, 

2.04, 2.1 and 3.0 which you can 

configure manually so whichever 

version you’d like to revisit or 

your software requires it will be 

here. Amiga Forever doesn’t 

include the latest 3.5 or 3.9 

versions of the AmigaOS but 

there’s no reason why these 

couldn’t be installed on the 

emulated Amiga. 

When you start AF in one of the 

3.1 configurations you are 

presented with an attractive 

Workbench pre-configured with 

Glow Icons, a backdrop picture 

and a Tool Manager toolbar for 

easy access to the pre-installed 

software and utilities. If you’re 

happy with this ready to roll 

configuration, fine, otherwise 

there are tips on moving an 

existing Amiga system to Amiga 

Forever in the documentation. 

The 1.3 configurations boot up 

from a Workbench 1.3 virtual 

floppy disk file (ADF), providing 

you with the standard 1.3 

environment. 

The WinUAE emulator used by 

Amiga Forever includes a wide 

range of options in an attractive 

configuration GUI. This allows 

you to tailor many aspects of the 

emulation to your requirements, 

for example the CPU type that is 

emulated, the amount of memory 

available and the trade off 

between accuracy of emulation 

(required for software that “hits 

the hardware”) and speed. An 

excellent feature of the GUI is 

that you can set up a number of 

saved configurations and then 

easily choose which one you 

wish to boot into when you start 

the emulation. This is how the 

Amiga Forever launcher provides 

its different OS version and 

performance options. 

WinUAE as used by Amiga Forever has a huge range of options. 

Luckily a number of preset configurations are supplied. 

Some options to be changed within the emulation. 

Once in the emulation a utility 

called UAE-Control is included 

which enables you to change a 

subset of the settings without 

dropping into Windows. These 

include the ADF file that is 

“inserted” into each of the 

Amiga’s 4 floppy disk drives, 

whether sound is enabled and 

what keymap is in use. There 

are also buttons to perform a 

hard reset within the emulation 

or quit it altogether. 

Directories on the PC’s hard disk 

can be made available as a 

device on the Amiga, for 

example Art: could map to 

C:\Graphics\Art\ on the PC, it is 

also possible to access PC 

removable devices in this way, 

for example CD-ROM: could 

map to D:\. However when 

devices are mapped you have to 

take into account the different 

limitations of the Windows and 

Amiga file systems. For example 

different characters are invalid 

for within filenames, some Amiga 

protection bits are not supported 

and the maximum filename 

lengths are different. If you want 

something more like a “real” 

Amiga hard disk you can make a 

hard file, this is a file on the PC’s 

hard drive that looks to the 

Amiga like a separate hard disk 

partition and thus does not have 

any foreign filesystem limitations. 

The disadvantage to this is that it 

is not so easy to access from 

Windows. All these issues are 

explained in detail in the 

documentation and most people 

will probably end up with a 

combination of the two types. 

Network access uses the uses 

the Windows TCP/IP stack so 

you can run Amiga network 

applications without launching a 

stack like Miami or Genesis on 

the Amiga. This means you can 

use network applications on 

Windows and within the Amiga 

emulation simultaneously, for 

example surfing the web in 

Internet Explorer while 

downloading EMail in YAM. The 

emulated Amiga can be 

configured to print directly to the

Reviews 

PC’s parallel port but it won’t 

take advantage of Windows 

printer drivers so you’ll still need 

the proper driver for your printer 

installed on the emulated Amiga. 

Amiga Forever includes a the 

very useful utility, Amiga 

Explorer. This is designed to let 

you access an Amiga connected 

to your PC from within Windows. 

As the name suggests the 

program uses an interface that is 

very similar to the Windows’ 

Explorer file manager with a list 

tree of the available disks (both 

local and on the remote Amiga) 

down the left hand side. Amiga 

Explorer can connect to the 

remote Amiga either via TCP/IP 

(over Ethernet for example) or 

via a null modem cable 

connected between the serial 

ports of the computers. One 

major problem for anyone with 

an Amiga with less than 

AmigaOS 2.1 is that they have 

no way to read PC disks, in that 

case how are they to get the 

Amiga parts of Amiga Explorer 

on to their Amiga? Very cleverly 

Cloanto have worked out a way 

to transfer the Amiga parts of AE 

to the remote Amiga without 

additional software, all that is 

needed is a null-modem 

connection and a Workbench 

disk for the Amiga. In addition to 

transferring files from the remote 

Amiga’s disks (floppies, hard 

disks, CDs etc.) Amiga Explorer 

can also create ADF files from 

the disk in the Amiga’s floppy 

drive, making the attached 

Amiga into a, somewhat 

complex, Amiga compatible disk 

drive for the PC. Another useful 

feature of Amiga Explorer is that 

it can connect to the emulated 

Amiga, allowing you to access 

the hard files that cannot 

normally be read from Windows. 

Running on top of Windows does 

seem to produce a few problems 

when working with Amiga 

Forever, as you might expect if 

you’re multitasking other 

applications and disk swapping 

occurs this can slow things 

down. One annoyance I found 

was that because Windows 

doesn’t support true “screens” 

when Amiga Forever is running 

full screen and you Alt-Tab back 

to Windows to run another 

application, closing that 

application will flip back to AF 

unexpectedly. This is just 

because Windows sees AF as 

the previous application and 

makes it active when the current 

app closes, it doesn’t care that it 

is running full screen. When 

installing some applications 

directly from CD-ROM I did find 

some problems due to the 

filesystem issues mentioned 

earlier, mainly with files having 

the incorrect protection bits set. 

In addition to UAE, AmigaOS 

and Amiga Explorer the AF5 

package includes a number of 

other goodies on the CD. There 

are full versions of Cloanto’s art 

program, Personal Paint 7.1, 

Directory Opus 5.5 and a 

number of useful utilities. A video 

interview with Jay Miner and 

Dave Haynie’s Death Bed Vigil 

video about the last days of 

Commodore are both supplied in 

MPEG format, both are great for 

anyone interested in the Amiga’s 

history. Although not supported 

by the launcher, versions of UAE 

are also provided for the Mac, 

PPCAmiga and 68k Amiga, basic 

setup instructions for these 

emulators are included. 

Overall Amiga Forever 5 is an 

excellent and very polished 

product, in particular the 

readable and detailed HTML 

documentation deserves a 

special mention. There are only 

a very few minor problems 

which, to be honest, are inherent 

in Windows and not something 

Cloanto could do anything about. 

The package adds a great deal 

to the basic open source UAE 

emulator, not to mention the all 

important licensed ROMs and 

OS. Although it seems much 

cheaper than Amiga XL it is 

important to remember that 

Amiga Forever does not include 

AmigaOS 3.9. Running on top of 

the most common OS in the 

world does have many 

advantages but it certainly won’t 

be for everyone. 

AmigaOS XL 

The AmigaOS XL package from 

Haage and partner contains two 

emulators, Amiga XL (note no 

“OS”) and Amithlon. The 

emulators are supplied on a 

single CD which also includes 

This Amiga prefs program 

controls several aspects of the 

emulation. 

AmigaXL in action looks just like any other Amiga. 

Notice all the screenmodes available in screenmode prefs. 

licensed copies of AmigaOS 3.9, 

Picasso 96, Amiga Writer 2.2, Art 

Effect 3 and Storm C 3. Also 

included in the package is a CD 

to install the QNX real time 

platform OS which is used with 

the Amiga XL emulator. 

Amiga XL 

For most people the first step in 

installing Amiga XL will be to 

install the QNX operating system 

on their PC. QNX’s support for 

PC hardware is somewhere 

between the pretty universal 

support of Windows and the very 

limited set that works with 

Amithlon, it should work with 

most systems and you can check 

the compatibility lists on the QNX 

website. If you have Windows 

installed on your PC QNX has 

the option to install its boot drive 

as a file within windows or on a 

separate partition. The 

installation instructions on the 

AmigaOS XL CD (supplied in 

PDF and AmigaGuide format) 

suggest that a separate partition 

should be used, this can be 

either on its own drive or 

alongside another OS. If you 

have a free partition you can go 

ahead with the installation, 

otherwise the hard disk must be 

repartitioned. As no partitioning 

tools are supplied the manual 

suggests buying a tool like 

Partition Magic which can resize 

existing partitions without 

deleting all their data. Once a 

partition is prepared the 

operating system can be 

installed from the QNX CD 

supplied in the package. This is 

performed by booting from the 

CD and following a on-screen 

prompts. Most of the installation 

is automatic, you have to choose 

which partition you would like to 

use, there is also the option to 

install a boot loader that will let 

you choose which operating 

system you want to boot if you 

have an existing OS installed. 

Once QNX is up and running you 

can install the Amiga XL 

emulator itself, the installation is 

carried out by QNX’s Package 

Installer utility which is the way 

all programs are installed on this 

OS. Once installed the emulation 

can be started from the shell, 

added to the Shelf (the QNX 

equivalent of AmiDock) and be 

set to run at start-up if required. 

The installation creates two 

Amiga partitions for the 

emulation, Workbench and Work, 

which are mapped to directories 

in the QNX file system. This 

means Amiga files can be 

accessed from QNX but you 

can’t access the QNX drive from 

the Amiga. According to Amiga 

XL’s developers the QNX file 

system is reliable a resistant to 

errors so using it in this way 

means that the emulated Amiga 

benefits from these advantages 

too. Amiga XL also supports 

normal RDB formatted Amiga 

hard disks connected to the PC 

via IDE (SCSI may also be 

supported but it isn’t mentioned 

in the docs) although you cannot 

boot from them as they are 

mounted by a special command 

(MountAmigaHDDs) in the startup-sequence. 

CD-ROM drives 

and the PC floppy drive are 

accessed via the standard 

Amiga DOSDriver and filesystem 

combination, this means that for 

example all the Amiga protection 

bits are supported on CDs. As I 

mentioned earlier Amiga floppy 

disks are not supported and the 

documentation warns that even 

PC floppy support is currently 

buggy with disk changes not 

being recognised properly. 

When you start Amiga XL for the 

first time it’s nice to see that it is 

fully setup with an OS 3.9 

installation on the System 

partition and the bundled 

programs installed on Work. A 

preferences program is provided 

which lets you alter several 

aspects of the emulation. The 

memory maximum available to 

the emulated Amiga can be 

changed, it is recommended you 

don’t set this to more than half 

the RAM in your PC unless you 

opt to use virtual memory. This 

lets the Emulator take advantage 

of QNX’s virtual memory system 

and swap unused areas of 

memory out to disk, however 

using virtual memory does slow 

the emulator down. Because 

virtual memory is handled 

outside the emulation it is 

completely transparent to Amiga 

applications. The accuracy of 

emulation of the Amiga’s Paula 

sound chip can be controlled to 

balance quality and speed, or 

even disabled if required. Amiga 

XL comes with an AHI driver 

which interfaces with the QNX 

audio drivers this uses minimal 

CPU and is preferable if you 

have software that supports AHI. 

Network access is via the QNX 

TCP/IP stack, this supports LAN 

connections via Ethernet cards 

and dial-up connections with a 

modem. Setup uses a GUI utility 

on the QNX side and simple 

instructions are provided for 

configuring a dial-up connection. 

Anyone who has setup 

networking before shouldn’t have 

any problems. Once the network 

is online, network and Internet 

programs work on the Amiga just 

as if you were running a native 

TCP/IP stack. 

A utility is provided on the 

emulated Amiga that can run 

programs under QNX, for 

example an icon is supplied that 

you double click to run the QNX 

web browser (which confusingly 

is called Voyager). QNX 

programs run in this way don’t 

appear on the Amiga screen 

within the Emulation, they open 

on the QNX desktop. However 

when Amiga XL is running an 

Amiga like title bar and screen 

depth gadget is added to the top 

of the QNX desktop so you can 

swap easily between the two, 

this is a neat compromise. 

Arguments can be passed to 

QNX programs called from the 

emulation enabling, for example, 

a movie file on the Amiga to be 

played using the QNX media 

player. The only limitation to this 

is that files must be on the 

emulated Amiga’s virtual hard 

disk (not a CD-ROM or directly 

connected hard disk) for the 

QNX program to access them. 

Compatibility with modern 

software seems to be very good, 

it ran all my commonly used 

programs. It is also possible to 

run programs like Scala and 

games that need the Amiga 

chipset. Unlike Amiga Forever 

you don’t have the choice of 

different ROM and OS versions 

and there is no way to boot from 

a virtual floppy so Amiga XL isn’t 

compatible with software that 

won’t run from a hard drive or 

won’t run on Kickstart 3.1. 

In use we found Amiga XL to be 

slightly faster than Amiga 

Forever but significantly slower 

than Amithlon. It also felt 

smoother and more Amiga like 

than AF which may well be down 

to the light weight, real time 

nature of QNX. One area that 

was disappointing was the speed 

of the graphics card display, 

which felt slower than AF5 and 

the CyberVision PPC on my 

3000. Moving large windows and 

scrolling graphics intensive web 

pages was a bit sluggish. I can 

only put this down to the QNX 

drivers for the graphics chip in 

the test PC not being as highly 

optimised as the Windows 

equivalents. 

Features 


17 

Amithlon 

Of all the emulators Amithlon is 

the easiest to get started, you 

just set your PC to boot from CD, 

pop in the AmigaOS XL disc and 

switch on, after a few seconds a 

bouncing boing ball appears and 

in a few seconds more 

(assuming your hardware works 

with the emulation) a fully 

installed Workbench 3.9 

appears. However at this stage 

the boot drive is located in 

memory so any changes you 

make will be lost with a reset. If 

you have an Amiga hard drive 

you can just plug it into the PC 

(both IDE and SCSI drives are 

supported) and it will be 

accessed by the virtual Amiga. If 

the hard drive has a bootable 

partition with a priority of 0 or 

greater the emulation will boot 

from that rather than the included 

RAM disk. If you want to boot 

Amithlon from hard disk rather 

than CD-ROM it rapidly goes 

from being the easiest to the 

most complex to get installed! 

Basically you need to end up 

with a bootable partition on the 

hard disk which will load the 

Linux kernal for Amithlon and 

then either a separate Amiga 

formatted hard disk or a partition 

on the main disk that is 

partitioned in such a way that 

Amithlon can use it as an Amiga 

disk. 

This setup process is made 

much harder because the 

AmigaOS XL CD is severely 

lacking in any documentation on 

Amithlon, there is a short 

introductory readme which is 

repeated in the PDF 

documentation but not much 

else. To get it installed on hard 

disk and to find out about the 

setconfig commands in the startup 

sequence which control many 

aspects of the emulation you 

need to visit the Author’s website 

at http://www.amithlon.net. Even 

with the information there you’ll 

need to be fairly confident with 

the Amiga and PC hardware to 

get it all working, the Amithlon 

mailing list on Yahoo Groups can 

also provide a lot of valuable 

assistance. 

Because Amithlon only uses the 

kernal of the Linux operating 

system it needs Amiga drivers 

for many pieces of hardware that 

are supported automatically by 

the OS underneath the other two 

emulators. On the graphics front 

two families of boards are 

directly supported with drivers 

inside Amithlon, nVidia gForce 2 

(gForce 3 isn’t currently 

supported) and Matrox cards. 

AGP, PCI and integrated 

versions all work. Most other 

graphics cards will work 

(technically the card must have a 

VESA 2 fall back mode for it to 

work with Amithlon at all) but you 

are limited to one screen mode 

per session, which can be 

limiting especially if you have 

software that requires a 

particular screenmode. 

Unsupported cards do not 

benefit from hardware 

acceleration so they don’t 

perform as well as supported 

cards either. 

In other areas what hardware 

works is more cut and dried, 

sound is only supported via AHI, 

two drivers are supplied one for 

Sound Blaster 128 PCI cards 

and the other for the AC97 audio 

that is built into many 

motherboards using a VIA 

chipset. Realtek 8029 chipset 

based Ethernet cards are the 

only ones supported, fortunately 

this is the chipset used on many 

inexpensive 10Mb/s network 

cards which are widely available. 

Drivers for the built-in parallel 

and serial ports are included so 

printers and external modems 

can be used with the emulation. 

A utility called NallePUH is 

supplied that routes paula sound 

through AHI. This works with 

most programs and is handy if 

you have sound software you 

can’t live without that doesn’t use 

AHI. However while NallePUH is 

running no programs can access 

AHI to give sound output so it 

really is only a work around and 

To run Amithlon all you need is to set your PC to boot from the 

AmigaOS XL CD. 

Installing it onto a hard disk is rather more difficult.

Features 

not something you would leave 

running all the time. On the 

Amithlon mailing list Bernie 

Meyer, the main author of 

Amithlon, has mentioned that a 

major update is being worked on 

that should include more drivers 

and better functionality on 

unsupported graphics cards. 

At this point in time you have to 

be careful when buying a PC to 

use with Amithlon, all the 

supported components are 

widely available but you have to 

be careful to buy the right things. 

Once Amithlon is up and running 

it feels very much like an Amiga 

with a graphics card, there is no 

sign of the underlying Linux 

kernal. Device access is 

available via the amithlon.device, 

Amiga software can “talk” 

directly to devices on the PC IDE 

ports or SCSI controllers. This 

means Amiga programs like 

MakeCD or ScanQuix will 

continue to work with Amithlon. 

You access your Internet 

provider or network via an Amiga 

TCP/IP stack with 

powercom.device for the PC’s 

serial port and powerne2k.device 

for the Ethernet card. Software 

that requires chipset 

screenmodes will not run but you 

can run a mode promotion 

program to force programs to run 

in the available screenmodes. 

Just like a real Amiga this 

process will work for some 

programs but not for those that 

“hit the hardware”. 

On our test system Amithlon was 

clearly the fastest emulator by a 

very noticeable margin and for 

all the processor intensive 

operations we tried it stomped all 

over an ‘060 based “hardware” 

Amiga using ordinary 68K 

applications with no changes. On 

the unsupported graphics card of 

our test system the display was 

the slowest of the three 

emulators but still useable. In 

fact some operations like 

opening and moving windows 

were very quick but others like 

scrolling large pages and depth 

arranging windows were quite 

sluggish. I’m sure these 

problems would be resolved on a 

supported card where hardware 

acceleration would be used. 

18 

Conclusion 

All the emulators we’ve reviewed 

here have their advantages and 

all of them run current Amiga 

applications very well, at speeds 

you won’t see on a real 

hardware 68k system. If you 

have a system with Windows 

and want an easy to install an 

emulator then Amiga Forever 5 

would be a good choice. It is a 

very polished product with an 

excellent install procedure and 

very thorough documentation. 

The Amiga Explorer utility is also 

excellent and the way it can 

connect to an Amiga without 

copying software on Amiga disks 

is almost magical! The fact that 

AF5 runs on Windows will be an 

advantage to some people and a 

problem for others, but if you 

need Windows compatibility this 

is a great way of keeping your 

tried and trusted Amiga 

applications to hand. Although 

according to our benchmarks 

AF5 is slightly slower than XL it 

is not a significant amount. 

Amiga XL is a fine emulator and 

works well and integrates better 

with QNX the AF5 does with 

Windows. The main problem is 

that QNX is rather like the 

AmigaOS in that it is limited in 

the software available, it seems 

to me that if you’re going to run 

on top of another OS it might as 

well be one that offers many 

additional applications you can’t 

get on the Amiga. 

Amithlon has several negative 

points against it, it doesn’t 

emulate the chipset, supports far 

less PC hardware than the 

others which run on top of 

another OS and it is also pretty 

complex to install from scratch, 

especially alongside another OS. 

One big problem is the lack of 

documentation supplied with 

AmigaOS XL but even following 

the amithlon.net site it’s pretty 

tough. However once you get it 

installed on supported hardware 

the speed blows the other two 

away, it really brings a smile to 

your face when your existing 68k 

applications burst into life! 

Amithlon is the most like a real 

Amiga running on x86 hardware 

so if you like your current Amiga 

software (and it runs on a 

graphics card) and just wish it 

were faster then this is the one 

for you. Just be prepared to spec 

a PC for Amithlon choosing 

compatible components and take 

your time getting it setup. 

SpaceWalker PC 

Mini Review 

We wouldn’t normally 

review PC hardware in 

Total Amiga but as Eyetech 

were kind enough to lend us 

one of their SpaceWalker PC 

systems for our x86 emulators 

round up we thought it was 

only fair to take a quick look at 

the system and its suitability for running these emulators. 

The first thing you notice about the SpaceWalker is its diminutive 

size, it is only 2cm wider than a CD-ROM drive and about three 

times as tall. The case is also much shallower than a normal 

tower. The case is made entirely from aluminium which looks 

attractive and is also relatively light, Even the front panel is solid 

metal, a pleasant change from most plasticky cases. 

Despite its size the system has a CD-ROM, floppy drive and a, 

3.5” hard disk all built in. It is also well supplied with connectivity, 

USB, Firewire, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, parallel and serial ports are 

all built-in to the motherboard as are the AC97 sound and S3 

Savage 4 graphics chips. The down side of the small size is that 

expansion is extremely limited. There is only one PCI slot which 

on our review system was filled with a modem. With no AGP slot 

it will be difficult to upgrade the graphics card. 

Emulator Compatibility 

Starting with Amiga Forever, as you would expect all the system’s 

features are supported by Windows and therefore there are no 

problems running AF5 on the SpaceWalker. For AmigaXL again 

things work very well, the underlying QNX operating system 

supports all the Motherboard features including graphics, sound 

and USB and the emulator benefits from this, for example you 

can use a USB mouse. As far as I know the only feature not 

supported by QNX is Firewire. As I mentioned in my review the 

QNX drivers for the on-board graphics do seem slower than their 

Windows equivalents. 

Amithlon is a very different kettle of fish, for a start the graphics 

chip is not supported meaning you can only have one 

screenmode per session. The sound is compatible but the 

Ethernet is not. With such limited expansion options it’s not even 

really possible to cure these problems by adding compatible PCI 

cards. Finally the review system was equipped with a Celeron 

processor when a full Pentium or Athlon is recommended for best 

Amithlon performance. 

If you need a PC that will take up minimum space and will run 

Amiga Forever and AmigaXL in addition to other x86 operating 

systems then the SpaceWalker works well. However it is not 

suitable for Amithlon. It looks very attractive and feels solid and 

well built. While it doesn’t have a very high specification it is more 

than enough to run the emulators well and to handle productivity 

applications and Internet browsing. 

Specifications 

Processor: Intel Celeron 800Mhz 

Memory: 256Mb SDRAM 

Graphics Card: S3 Savage 4 Integrated 

Sound Card: VIA AC97 Integrated 

Ethernet: Realtek 10/100Mb/s Integrated 

Hard Disk: 20Gb, 5400RPM 

SpaceWalker systems are available from Eyetech with various 

specifications, see their advertisment on page 25 for details. 

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Reviews 

20 

4.1 

long winded process especially 

.info PageStream 

Developer 

Grasshopper LLC 

www.grasshopperllc.com 

Distributor 

Kicksoft 

www.kicksoft.co.uk 

+44 (0) 1737 219280 

Price 

Full Version...........£199.00 

Upgrade from 4.0 ...£39.00 

Upgrade from 3.x....£79.00 

Version Reviewed 

4.1.3.4 

Compatibility 

Requires: 

Amiga OS 2 or later 

8Mb RAM 

Recommended 

040 or 060 processor 

32Mb RAM or more 

Graphics card 

Test System 

A3000 

CyberStorm PPC/060 

CyberVision PPC 

128Mb RAM 

OS 3.9 Boing Bag 2 

CyberGraphX 4.2pre11 

It’s been a long wait but Robert Williams can’t wait to get stuck into 

the latest version of the Amiga’s top publishing application. 

Total Amiga readers 

shouldn’t need an 

introduction to PageStream, 

the Amiga publishing program 

used to produce the magazine 

and also for many years now, 

the only one of its type in the 

Amiga market. It’s good to see 

that even though PageStream 

is now multi-platform the 

Amiga version is still heavily 

developed and right up to date 

with its PC and Macintosh 

counterparts. So here we are 

with the very latest version lets 

take a look at what it has to 

offer over 4.0 which we 

reviewed in issue 6. 

Turning the Tables 

The biggest new feature in 

version 4.1 is the tables tool. In 

earlier versions of PageStream 

you had to create a table of 

data by hand, either using 

tabbed text or many separate 

text frames, this could be a 

if you ever wanted to make any 

alterations such as adding a 

new column. To add a table 

with the new table tool you just 

drag out a box on the page, 

initially the table is a simple 4 

column by 4 row grid giving 16 

cells in all. Text is entered into 

cells using the text tool, each 

cell works very much like a 

standard PageStream text 

frame so all the program’s 

character and paragraph 

formatting options can be used 

within a table. 

If you select the table using the 

object tool (the standard 

pointer) changing the line and 

fill options changes the table as 

a whole. The line weight and 

colour is applied to the border 

of the whole table and not the 

gridlines between cells, the fill 

is applied to the whole table. 

However, the fill only shows 

through behind cells which 

don’t have their own fill colour 

Above: an example showing some of the powerful table features. 

Below: the edit palette in table cell editing mode, note the formula in the string gadget. 

set. Using the reshape tool you 

can select individual cells 

within the table, when a cell is 

selected the edit bar changes 

to a new table mode which 

displays the options for the 

selected cell. You can edit 

multiple cells by shift-clicking 

on them, but there’s no way to 

drag select a group which can 

make formatting large tables 

rather slow going. With one or 

more cells selected there are 

options to adjust the line style 

of each cell border individually 

and the cell fill. The line style of 

each side of the cells in the 

selection has to be edited 

individually, this is another 

factor that slows down table 

editing. A good tip I found here 

is only to set the left and top 

styles because the right and 

bottom borders are usually 

obscured by the adjoining cell 

borders anyway. Cell border 

and fill use PageStream’s 

standard line and fill requester 

with all its options available so, 

for example, you can have 

dashed cell borders and 

gradient fills if you so desire. 

In table mode the edit palette 

also offers options to change 

the layout of the table. To start 

with you can add rows and 

columns to your table adding to 

the initial size, of course rows 

and columns can also be 

deleted. The width or height of 

the column or row respectively 

containing the selected cell can 

be changed, but this is only 

possible by entering a width in 

the edit palette, you can’t drag 

the column borders with the 

mouse. Changing size of a 

column or row is 

accommodated by changing 

the overall size of the table, it 

doesn’t effect the rest of the 

table layout. The size and 

TOTAL AMIGA 

Multi-column text frames are more flexible than ever. 

position of the whole table can 

be manipulated with the object 

tool, in this case you can use 

the mouse or the edit palette. 

Changing the size of the whole 

table causes all the cells to be 

scaled equally, keeping their 

proportions. A powerful feature 

is the ability to merge any 

rectangular selection of cells 

so it becomes a single cell, a 

merged cell is treated just like 

any other and can be split back 

into its component cells. 

Finally tables can be used to 

perform calculations much like 

a simple spreadsheet. For 

calculations to work the values 

must be entered into each cell 

using a text field in the edit 

palette, the text tool can’t be 

used. You can then enter a 

formula in the text field for 

another cell. Formula begins 

with an “=” sign and the format 

will be familiar to anyone who 

has used a spreadsheet, for 

example the formula 

“=F1+F2+F3” would add 

together the values in the 6th 

column of the table on rows 1, 

2 and 3. Some functions are 

also available for more 

complex formulae, and you can 

specify ranges of cells using a 

colon so for example 

=sum(F1:F3) would be another 

way to write the formula 

mentioned earlier. Sadly the 

available functions are not yet 

documented, in addition to 

sum() I found that average(), 

min() and max() all work and 

there may well be others too. 

Again like a spreadsheet once 

the calculations are in place 

Summer 2002 

changing the values they use 

will cause the result to be 

recalculated. For this to work 

you must edit the values using 

the edit palette and not with the 

text tool, if you forget this it is 

possible for the values 

displayed not to match the 

calculations. The calculation 

engine seems to be the least 

developed aspect of tables 

support the main problem with 

it is that there is no way to set 

number formats, so you can’t 

choose a set number of 

decimal places or whether 

values should have a symbol. 

This makes calculations 

involving currency, probably 

one of the major areas where 

this feature would be used, 

impossible to layout properly. 

To sum up, the table editor is a 

very powerful feature and is 

streets ahead of any other 

Amiga program, if you’ve been 

disappointed with the limited 

tables in Final Writer or 

Wordworth then you’ll almost 

certainly find PageStream’s 

implementation will do what 

you want. I do feel more could 

be done to make it quicker to 

work with, currently formatting 

a large table is a rather 

laborious process, more mouse 

editing options would be a 

welcome start. That said it is 

still a big improvement over 

constructing the same layout 

by hand. The calculation 

features are a nice idea but for 

most uses I feel they need 

some further development, 

being able to edit values using 

the text tool would make it 

much quicker to work with and 

should remove a potential 

source of errors. 

Text Column Borders 

Text frames are used in 

PageStream to hold the main 

body text and therefore form 

the central part of any 

document, in fact the text 

you’re reading now is laid out 

in a text frame. PageStream’s 

text frames were already quite 

powerful, with multiple column 

support within a single frame 

but it’s nice to see them getting 

some more attention in this 

update. Text columns within a 

text frame can now have an 

Reviews 

internal margin so the text in 

the column is spaced away 

from the edge, the margins can 

be set independently for each 

side of the column. This 

feature allows a border and 

background to be added to a 

column of text much more 

easily, before this feature a 

separate box had to be used 

with the desired line and fill 

settings unless you were 

happy for the text to be right up 

against the border. Multicolumn 

text frames can now 

have a variable size columns 

and gutter (the space between 

the columns), previously all the 

columns were the same width 

and had the same gutter, this 

allows more complex layouts 

without using separate text 

frames which have to be 

manually linked. All these new 

features are accessed from an 

“FX” button in the edit palette 

when a text frame is selected. 

PDF 

Version 4.0 of PageStream 

was the first to offer Portable 

Document File export. PDF is a 

format intended to let 

documents be exchanged 

electronically while keeping 

their design and layout intact 

when viewed on a variety of 

computer platforms. The PDF 

exporter has been improved in 

version 4.1 to offer control over 

image compression so 

exported PDF files can be 

smaller with only a slight loss 

PDF Export: Compare the original PageStream file on the right to the 

generated PDF document on the left. Notice the missing gradient fills and special fonts. 

21

Reviews 

in the quality of images used in 

the document. The default path 

for the PDF output file can now 

be set in prefs saving some file 

requester work. Unfortunately 

some of the deficiencies of 

PageStream’s PDF export still 

haven’t been addressed. The 

biggest problem (for me at 

least) is that PageStream does 

not embed the fonts used in 

the document into PDF file. 

This means your document 

won’t look as expected if the 

person viewing it doesn’t have 

all the fonts you’ve used 

installed on their system. 

Another problem is that some 

objects are not included in the 

PDF file, these include gradient 

fills and EPS graphics. You can 

get over these problems by 

printing the document to a 

Postscript file and converting to 

PDF using an external utility 

like GhostScript of Acrobat 

Distiller (on a PC or Mac), but 

it’s a pity the export doesn’t 

support these features as it is 

much more straightforward. 

22 

Transformer 

The transform tool is used to 

make multiple copies of 

selected objects, you can 

choose how the copies made 

are arranged. For version 4.1 

copies can be made onto 

different pages so transform 

can be used to copy an object 

onto several document pages. 

You can now set the fill and 

line style of the last copy and 

PageStream will “fade” the 

colours in the intermediate 

copies. In combination with the 

new duplicate behind or in front 

option the fade allows you to 

make special effects using 

transform such as shadows 

and pesudo 3D. It’s worth 

experimenting with the various 

transform options and different 

shapes as you can come up 

with some interesting results. 

Mail Merge 

Mail merge, which up to now 

has been implemented as an 

AREXX script, is built into 

PageStream 4.1. Mail merge 

takes a database of information 

and allows you to print 

documents based on that data, 

the most common use is to 

take a database of names and 

addresses and to create 

personalised letters based on a 

single template. This feature 

has been implemented using 

PageStream’s variables 

system. First you create you 

template document and insert 

a variable wherever you want 

database information to 

appear, the variables can be 

named whatever you like. 

Once the template is ready you 

open the print window and 

select the new Mail Merge tab. 

Here you can choose the 

database file (I tried comma 

and tab separated files and 

both worked) and link the fields 

you want to include with the 

appropriate variable you 

created earlier. With that 

complete the document can be 

With the new “Fade To...” 

option the transform 

command can be used for 

special effects as well as 

making regular copies. 

printed and a copy will be 

generated for each record in 

the database. It is possible to 

limit the merge to a range of 

records in the database but 

you need to know the record 

numbers in the database file. 

One important advantage of 

having mail merge built in is 

that it can now use 

PageStream’s imposition 

features to print sheets of 

customised mailing labels, 

badges or business cards.. To 

do this you just set the page 

size to that of a single label (or 

card, whatever), setup the mail 

merge and then, on the 

Imposition tab of the print 

window, tell PageStream to 

print multiple copies across 

and down to fit the label sheet 

you’re using. One gottcha I did 

find in mail merge is that your 

database file must have a 

blank line at the end of the final 

record won’t be printed 

(someone almost didn’t get 

their magazine last issue!). 

Minor Marvels 

A number of more minor 

changes and improvements 

Results 

Pros 

+ Powerful Table Editor. 

+ Handy improvements 

to text frames. 

Cons 

- Table editing long 

winded. 

- PDF export still needs 

improving. 

have been made to 

PageStream in this upgrade. 

Text can now be selected with 

the keyboard using the arrow 

keys with shift held down. 

Undo has been improved so it 

now works on many more 

actions including deletion of 

complex objects, resizing 

grouped objects and moving 

pages in the document. 

Support has been added for 

character sets other than the 

standard Roman/Latin 

characters used in the UK, US 

and most of western Europe. 

Font encodings and keyboard 

mappings are supported and a 

number of mapping tables are 

now included and a new option 

in preferences allows you to 

select your character set. 

Conclusion 

Some of the new features in 

PageStream 4.1 are slightly 

rough around the edges but 

even so they are still useable 

and very useful. Both the table 

editor and the new text frame 

options add functionality that 

will probably be used by most 

PageStream users. Deron 

Kazamier at Grasshopper is 

actively working on 

PageStream and new versions 

with bug fixes and minor 

improvements are released 

regularly. Deron is also 

available on the PageStream 

mailing list and usually 

answers questions within a few 

days, there are also a lot of 

experienced users on the list to 

help out too. Altogether 

PageStream is one of the best 

supported Amiga applications. 

So to sum up this in my opinion 

this upgrade is already very 

worthwhile and there is a good 

chance that the minor 

grumbles I’ve had will be 

cleared up in the coming 

months. 

Pretty 

Good! 

TOTAL AMIGA 

Kicksoft 

PageStream 4.1 

The Premier DTP program on the Amiga. 

Mac & PC version also avaliable. 

£199.00 

PageStream Upgrade 

From pagestream 2.xx to 4.1 £95 

From pagestream 3.xx to 4.1 £79 

From Pagestream 4 to 4.1 £39 

Cross upgrade 

Upgrade from Amiga version 4.0. to PC or Mac 

version. 

£89.00 

If you don’t see what you want, just ask! 

Our range is always growing! 

Special offer!!! 

Still avaliable , fully boxed with manual 

£150.00 

PageStream Extras 

Warp and bend any text into any shape you want !! 

Text effect 2 £50.00 

Complete collection of 120 scalable borders 

Basic & Geo Borders £55.00 


Add £1.00 UK postage per item. Make cheques payable to Kicksoft Ltd. 

We accept Solo, Switch, Mastercard & Visa 

Kicksoft Ltd., 

30 Whitegate Way, 

Tadworth, 

Surrey, KT20 5NS 

Tel/Fax (01737) 219280 

sales@kicksoft.co.uk

Reviews 

Charon 

You don’t have to use the 

Internet for very long 

before you experience that 

sinking feeling when your 

connection drops ninety 

percent of the way through a 

large download! Most servers 

web (HTTP) and FTP servers 

on the Internet support 

resuming a download, this 

means a partially completed 

download can be continued 

from where it left off. Resume 

has to be supported by the 

downloading program as well 

as the server, on the Amiga it 

is supported by most FTP 

programs, on web browsers 

IBrowse 2.2 definitely resumes, 

I couldn’t get it to work in AWeb 

(and resume is not mentioned 

as a feature in the docs) and I 

can’t get the current beta of 

Voyager to download at all! 

Even if you have download 

software that supports resume 

there are still annoyances with 

big downloads, what if you 

.info 

Author 

Andrija Antonijevic 

Website 

http://www.bigfoot.com/ 

~TheAntony/Charon/ 

EMail 

TheAntony@bigfoot.com 

Price 

15 Euro (about £10) 

Registration 

On-line via “Share It!” 

Requirements 

MUI 3.8 

TCP/IP Stack 


1.98 

want to switch off the Amiga 

and continue downloading 

another day? To do this you 

have to find the original URL, 

get it into your software, start 

the download again and make 

sure it resumes. Wouldn’t it be 

easier if there were a utility to 

take care of this for you, a 

central downloader that 

remembers all your downloads 

and resumes them for you until 

they are done... Well there is 

and it’s called Charon! 

Interface 

Charon uses MUI for its 

interface so you will need to 

have it installed along with 

NList and NListTree custom 

classes. The main window 

contains a list of the current 

downloads, and information 

about their progress and 

status. Below the list is a 

toolbar of seven buttons for 

quick access to the common 

operations, like adding a 

download, starting, pausing or 

editing existing ones. Other 

features are available in the 

pull down menus. 

Starting a Download 

There are several ways to start 

a new download with Charon. 

Firstly you can enter the URL 

in the Edit URL window. If you 

have the URL of the download 

on the clipboard (for example 

from an EMail or webpage a 

button allows you to paste it in, 

there is even a menu option to 

start a new download from the 

contents for the clipboard 

without opening any additional 

windows. Probably the most 

common source for a download 

will be a link in a webpage, to 

make this as easy as possible 

an AREXX script is provided 

that can be configured in your 

web browser to add a selected 

URL to Charon’s download list. 

The script will start Charon if it 

isn’t already running. In the 

three most popular Amiga 

Charon continues where HTTPResume left off... 

it’s a full download manager for the Amiga. 

Robert Williams warms up his modem! 

browsers you can assign the 

script to a pop-up menu 

function so downloading with 

Charon is as simple as popping 

up the menu for a link and 

selecting “Download using 

Charon” (or whatever you 

decide to call the option). In the 

preferences window you can 

select the default directory 

where downloaded files will be 

saved, if you setup a download 

using the Edit URL window this 

default can be overridden for 

particular downloads. Although 

it isn’t immediately obvious 

Charon can be used to 

download files from FTP 

servers and websites that 

require authentication (log-on 

with a username and 

password). The username and 

password must be included in 

the URL as shown in this 

example: 

http://username:password 

@www.domain.com/file.lha. 

While this works well enough I 

think it would be clearer to 

have username and password 

fields in the Edit URL window 

and maybe a user/pass 

requester that pops up when a 

file cannot be downloaded due 

to authentication failure. 

If you have a partially 

downloaded file that you 

started with another program 

Charon can continue 

downloading it. Many programs 

store the URL of the files they 

download in the file comment, 

if this is the case you can 

select the file in the Edit URL 

window or drop the file’s icon 

over the Charon window and it 

will read the URL from the 

comment and resume 

downloading. If the URL is not 

in the comment then you will 

need to enter it by hand or 

paste it in from the clipboard. 

When you add a download to 

the list it can be either active or 

paused, active downloads start 

downloading straight away until 

the maximum number of 

simultaneous transfers you set 

are taking place then they are 

queued until one of the current 

downloads finishes. You can 

use drag and drop in the list to 

set the order in which the files 

will be downloaded. 

Downloads added to the list in 

the paused state have to be 

started by clicking a button in 

the tool bar before they start 

downloading. You can also 

pause a an active file, if it is 

downloading at the time the 

next active download in the 

queue will take over. This 

means you can pause a long 

download, quickly download a 

file you’re immediately 

interested in and then resume 

the big download. 

Charon can list the URLs in an HTML file for easy downloading. 

Reviews 


27 

Schedule 

Downloads can be scheduled 

to take place at a later date 

and time, the schedule window 

has a nice calendar display 

where you can choose a date 

(including year!) For the 

download to start, you can also 

specify the time (to the 

second!). I can see this being 

very handy for those with 

internet connections which are 

charged at different rates at 

different times of day or who 

would like to do their 

downloads when they are 

away from the computer. 

Groups 

A useful option is to organise 

downloads into groups, most of 

the settings can be set 

independently for each group. 

So you could make a group for 

downloads from a particular 

server that requires specific 

settings. When you start a new 

download and select a group in 

the URL Edit window the 

download picks up the group’s 

settings, if you move a 

download into a group you 

have the option of applying the 

group’s settings. Another 

advantage of groups is that 

they are shown in a list tree in 

the main Charon display, by 

selecting the group you can 

apply actions such as pause, 

start or edit to all the 

downloads in the group. 

Download Options 

As it is a tool purely for 

downloading files Charon can 

really go to town on download 

options, enabling you to tailor 

the process exactly to your 

needs. You can configure the 

number of attempts that will be 

made to download a file if it 

fails for any reason. The most 

The main Charon window with several downloads in progress. 

common reason for a 

download failing would be your 

ISP dropping the line but with 

Charon you can make the 

download fail and be retried for 

other reasons. For example if 

the download stops for over a 

set length of time or if it drops 

below a definable download 

rate. Different settings for time 

out and minimum download 

rate can be set for resumable 

and non-resumable servers, as 

you might not want to re-start a 

non-resumable download just 

because it had got a bit slow. A 

proxy server (a server usually 

run by your ISP that caches 

downloads by all their users to 

speed up downloads on 

commonly requested files) can 

be used and it is even possible 

to configure different proxies 

depending on the ISP you use 

to connect. On some Amiga file 

systems very long file names 

(greater than 30 characters) 

can cause a problem, so the 

option to limit filename lengths 

is welcome, you can also set it 

to automatically replace 

characters in a filename, so 

spaces become underscore (_) 

for example. 

Charon seems to be very 

compatible with different HTTP 

servers, I found a couple that 

IBrowse wouldn’t resume 

worked fine with Charon. If 

necessary the options are 

there for it to “spoof” as a web 

browser by changing the User- 

Agent header and you can also 

set the Referer header so it 

looks to the server as if the 

downloads are being requested 

from a webpage. On the FTP 

side Charon can use a passive 

connection (PASV) so it will 

work behind a firewall. 

If the built-in options aren’t 

enough you can get Charon to 

run a program of your choice 

when a download starts and/or 

ends and when the program 

itself loads and/or quits. As an 

example these options could 

be used to put your TCP/IP 

stack on-line at the start of a 

download, when all downloads 

are complete Charon can be 

set to quit automatically so the 

program quit command could 

then be used to take the stack 

off-line. In combination with the 

scheduling functions you could 

get Charon to do your 

downloading while you are out, 

or during cheap rate times. 

Extra Features 

Built into Charon is an Internet 

search facility which can use 

three different search engines 

to find files which can then be 

downloaded like any other file. 

Aminet search provides the 

ADT search found in several 

FTP clients although 

unfortunately it doesn’t include 

the description field so it can 

be tricky to tell what the listed 

files are. MP3Box searches for 

MP3 music files at the site of 

the same name. There is also 

a Lycos FTP Search option but 

I couldn’t get this to work so I 

think this service may have 

been stopped. Once you have 

a list of search results you can 

select those you want to 

download either using the 

mouse or by entering a wild 

card string based in the file 

name. 

+ Saves download list 

across sessions. 

+ Useful extra features. 

+ Excellent AREXX 

interface. 

Cons 

- No visual progress 

display. 

- Authentication handling 

slightly awkward. 

Results Pros 

The HTML links option will 

scan an HTML file on disk (so 

you would have to download a 

webpage first) and present you 

with a list of all the links on the 

page. Like the search you can 

then select the files you want 

to download and add them 

straight to the download list. An 

AREXX script is provided for 

use with AWeb that will perform 

this function on the currently 

displayed page. 

AREXX 

Charon has a particularly 

powerful AREXX interface that 

is ideal for linking to it from 

other programs, setting up new 

downloads and performing 

batch changes on existing 

ones. Some sample scripts are 

provided and I was able to 

quickly knock up a script to 

change the username and 

password on several 

downloads overcoming my 

minor quibble mentioned 

above. A useful addition would 

be an AREXX menu where 

user scripts could be added for 

easy access. 

Conclusion 

I’ve had Charon for a few 

months now and It’s been 

totally reliable and has 

integrated very well with my 

other Internet software. 

Anyone who downloads files of 

any size from the Internet 

would benefit from Charon, I 

used to think that IBrowse’s 

download options were all I 

would ever need but now I’ve 

got Charon I find downloading 

with IBrowse frustrating. For 

me the best feature is that I 

can select several files to 

download, then later turn off, 

go to bed, and continue 

downloading them the next 

time I’m on the ‘net with no 

bother. A tenner very well 

spent! 

Top 

Notch!

Reviews 

AmigaWriter 2.2 

Mick Sutton and Robert Williams find out whether the new commer has the form to take on the established favourites. 

.info 

Developer & Distributor 

Haage and Partner 

www.haage-partner.com 

Price 

45Euro (about £30) 

Test System 

A1200 

Blizzard PPC/060 

BVisionPPC 

AmigaOS 3.9 Boing Bag 2 

CyberGraphX 4 

Version Tested 

2.2 

It has been a long time since 

a new word processor 

package has been released on 

the Amiga, when AmigaWriter 

was announced back in (1999) 

I thought to myself “at last!” I 

have been using Final Writer 

version 5 since 1996 and it is a 

very good all round package 

(heaps better than Wordworth 

in my opinion) which I get on 

very well with, but it is always 

nice to try out something new. 

Also the benefits of Word 

document support was too 

much to pass up, whether we 

like it or not 95+% of the 

computer community use 

programs like Excel and Word 

and it is better to have some 

compatibility than none at all. 

One thing I have noticed 

recently is that I find it hard to 

keep a focus on screen text 

(must be getting an old git), 

and have found this program’s 

anti-aliased font display to be a 

real bonus. True type fonts are 

smoothed on screen and 

therefore easier to read! 

Installation 

The program comes on a CD- 

ROM and is installed via the 

standard OS 3.5+ installer and 

takes about 11 Mb of hard disk 

space. The spell checker of 

your chosen language is 

installed separately, the 

languages included are: 

English, German, French, 

Italian, Danish, Netherlands, 

Swedish and Czech. 

Interface 

By default Amiga Writer opens 

on the Workbench screen, if 

you want it to open on it’s own 

screen you will need to have a 

separate utility, Storm Screen 

Manager, running before you 

start Amiga Writer. You can 

either install this in your 

WBStartup drawer or run it 

before Amiga Writer (manually 

or with a script). When the 

program starts it opens a 

toolbar window that has 

buttons for opening or creating 

a document, various editing 

The AmigaWriter screen showing the formatting palettes. 

Note that this document is showing numbered footnotes at the bottom of the page. 

modes and opening formatting 

windows. When you create a 

new document or open an 

existing one the main editing 

window opens. Multiple 

document windows can be 

opened, each one has the 

document display, rulers and 

two toolbars with common 

functions (cut n paste, save, 

print, zoom and insert element) 

and formatting controls (font, 

size, alignment, bold italics and 

underline etc). 

The document display itself 

deserves a special mention, 

because Amiga Writer is the 

only Amiga word processor 

that anti-aliases it’s text 

display. Anti-aliasing uses 

shaded pixels between the fort 

and the background to smooth 

the text display removing 

jaggies. The end result is that 

text is much easier to read and 

the display looks even closer to 

the final (no pun intended) 

printed output. Anti-aliasing is 

only supported on Truetype 

fonts but as these are very 

common this isn’t a problem. 

File Formats 

AmigaWriter can import 

documents in FinalWriter, 

Wordworth, RTF, ASCII and 

Microsoft Word formats. With 

these formats AmigaWriter can 

usually load the text of the 

document and retain most of 

the formatting such as text 

styles, fonts and tabs. If the 

document contains fonts not 

available on your system 

AmigaWriter prompts you to 

choose and alternative. Some 

mappings for common fonts 

such as Arial in Word 

documents are already set but 

you can still install the correct 

font. No graphics or other 

objects are imported, and no 

text could be imported from 

one complex Word document 

we tried. On the other hand 

simpler documents, consisting 

mostly of text, came across 

very well and closely matched 

the original when the fonts they 

used were installed. 

Documents can be saved in 

AmigaWriter’s own format or 

exported as Rich Text Format 

or ASCII. RTF is supported by 

most word processors, it 

retains font and formatting 

information. 

Text Formatting 

Multiple page formats can be 

defined within a document, the 

page format controls the page 

margins, number of columns, 

and the size of headers and 

footers, a single page size is 

used for the whole document. 

Page formats can be applied 

on a page by page basis. You 

can also set the default page 

formats which will be used for 

each chapter, different formats 

can be selected for the left and 

right hand pages of a double 

sided document. The defined 

formats are listed in a palette 

so they can be quickly applied 

to the current page or pages. 

Basic formatting can be 

applied to the selected text 

from the document window 

toolbar, but for more advanced 

settings you need to open the 

Character Format window. 

Here you can select double 

underline, strike through and 

small caps styles and alter the 

height, width and slant of the 

font. A colours tab has options 

to change the colour of the text 

and underline. Colours are 

selected from a list but you can 

define your own. The window 

can be left open while you 

work, an Apply button is used 

to apply the settings to the 

currently selected text. 

A wide range of character formatting options are available. 

The Paragraph Format window 

contains settings that are 

applied to the paragraph that 

contains the cursor or the 

paragraphs in the current 

selection. Like the Character 

Format window it has font and 

colour tabs, in addition there 

are tabs (the window kind) for 

tab (the spacing kind) and 

paragraph specific settings. On 

the paragraph tab you can set 

the alignment, inter paragraph 

spacing and whether the 

paragraph should start a new 

page or chapter. The tab 

settings include the option to 

generate tab stops at a user 

defined interval and you can 

have tab leaders, where the 

tab space is filled with dots or 

dashes for example: 

Cheese Burger.......... £1.99 

Again the Paragraph format 

window can be left open while 

you work. 

Character and paragraph 

formats can be stored as a 

named style in the document 

so they can be quickly applied 

to different areas of text. The 

style can then be altered, for 

Text flow editing mode is easy and powerful. 

example the font size or the 

line spacing changed, and the 

changes will be applied to all 

the areas in that style. 

While you cannot save formats 

and styles and then load them 

into a different document, you 

can save a template document 

and base new documents on it. 

When you start a new 

document a list of the available 

templates is displayed, they 

can be organised into 

categories if you wish. A 

template holds all the details of 

a document including the 

styles, page size and layout, 

the only area not saved is the 

printer settings. This almost 

makes up for the fact that you 

can’t change the default 

document settings, styles etc. 

Looking at the configuration 

files it seems you should be 

able to change the defaults by 

editing them manually. 

As mentioned earlier, 

AmigaWriter supports Truetype 

fonts which are very widely 

available both free and 

commercially because it is the 

standard format used by 

Windows and Mac OS. It also 

supports both Compugraphic 

and Amiga bitmap fonts, the 

only major format you can’t use 

is Postscript. AmigaWriter can 

load fonts from multiple 

directories anywhere on your 

system, you can choose 

whether bitmap fonts are 

displayed in the list. 

The spell checker can check 

the current selection, chapter 

or the whole document. When 

an unrecognised word is found 

a small window opens where 

you can correct the error or 

Reviews 

choose from a pop-up list of 

suggestions. If the word is 

actually correct you can 

choose to skip it or add it to the 

user dictionary. A nice feature 

is that you can edit the 

document whilst the spell 

check window is open. We did 

find some oddities with the 

spell check. It doesn’t 

recognise words with an 

apostrophe (isn’t, doesn’t etc.) 

and you cannot add them to 

the user dictionary, the only 

work around is to add the part 

of the word before the 

apostrophe, for example 

“doesn” for “doesn’t” but this 

could mean as genuine typo is 

missed. A more serious 

problem is that on our test 

systems AmigaWriter 

sometimes hangs when the 

spell check reaches the end of 

a document. A grammar 

checker is not included 

although for many people this 

won’t be a great loss. 

DTP 

In AmigaWriter each page 

item, including text and 

graphics, is contained in a box, 

so by default a text box is 

created covering the whole 

page and if you only want to 

create a simple document you 

never even need to know it’s 

there. For more complex 

documents you can add 

multiple text boxes and choose 

how the text flows between 

them. There is one main text 

flow through the document and 

this can go through any 

number of boxes on the page 

allowing you to make any kind 

of layout. You can also have 

stand alone boxes for captions 

and boxouts, these can be 

linked in a separate text flow 

but the links cannot across 

onto another page. 

The text flow editor is 

particularly well designed, you 

link text boxes by dragging 

from one box to another in the 

direction of text flow, the link is 

then shown by an arrow. The 

main text flow in the document 

starts from an icon at the top 

left of the page, which is linked 

via any number of boxes on 

the page to another icon at the 

bottom right corner which 

passes the flow onto the next 

page. This is much more 


29

Reviews 

While AmigaWriter isn’t a DTP program you can make quite 

complex page layouts like this one. 

complex to explain than it is to 

do, it’s a really well 

implemented feature. 

The colour and thickness of the 

text box border can be set as 

can the background colour. 

The width of the margins inside 

the box can be independently 

set so the text is offset from the 

border. The combination of 

these features allows you to 

make easy boxouts. 

A picture box lets you add an 

image to your document, the 

image is held in an 

independent box that can be 

moved and resized (holding 

shift retains the aspect ratio 

while resizing). Images are 

loaded at 72dpi which sets 

their size on the page, as soon 

as the image has loaded a 

picture editor window appears 

where you can edit the image 

size by choosing a new dpi, 

size in cm or a percentage 

scale. Image loading uses 

datatypes so all formats for 

which you have a datatype 

installed are supported. There 

is no support for structured 

graphics such as EPS or CGM. 

As with a text box images can 

have a border, however it 

encroaches on the image so a 

thick border can cover a 

significant portion of the image. 

Both types of box can be 

stacked so one box overlaps or 

is hidden behind another, as 

the main body of the document 

is a text box you can easily put 

images or even text behind it 

(for example as a watermark). 

By default text runs around any 

boxes placed above it, you can 

override this so the text goes 

underneath all overlapping 

boxes. One limitation is that 

text always flows around both 

sides of a box, you cannot set 

it to flow only around one side 

or for the flow to break for the 

image. Boxes cannot be 

moved from one page to 

another (we tried drag and 

drop and cut and paste) which 

can be annoying if you have to 

make major changes to an 

existing document. A really 

annoying bug is that any text or 

picture boxes you add are 

removed without warning if you 

choose a new page format and 

this action can’t be undone! 

In addition to picture boxes 

images can be inserted into the 

text flow where they act as like 

a large character, for example 

the justification options can be 

used to set their alignment on 

the page. The picture editor 

can be accessed by double 

clicking on an inserted image 

so you can edit its size. 

All these features give you the 

ability to make quite complex 

page layouts but it’s no DTP 

program, in particular there are 

no drawing tools (lines, circles, 

polygons etc) whatsoever 

which is a basic requirement of 

a “proper” DTP program. Also 

there is no tables facility and 

because you can’t draw lines it 

is almost impossible to make 

up your own tables manually. 

The lack of structured drawing 

import compounds these 

problems as you can’t easily 

use an external program to 

produce the graphics. 

Advanced Word 

Processing 

AmigaWriter has some 

powerful features for more 

complex and technical 

documents. Multiple chapters 

allow sections of the document 

to have different master pages 

and page numbering styles. 

Footnotes or endnotes can be 

added to show a note on a 

piece of text on the page. 

Footnotes are shown at the 

end of the page, endnotes can 

be either at the end of the 

chapter or document. As you 

add footnotes they are 

automatically numbered 

relative to the other notes on 

the page and if the text linked 

to the note is moved to a 

different page the footnote 

goes with it. In the document 

settings you can choose the 

type of notes you want (only 

one type is allowed per 

document) and one of four 

numbering styles. 

Printing 

The OS 3.5/3.9 printer system 

and TurboPrint are directly 

supported by AmigaWriter for 

full 24bit printing. In our 

experience the print quality of 

text and graphics is excellent 

and the output is also very fast 

compared to Wordworth or 

FinalWriter using TurboPrint 

either directly or via 

Ghostscript. AmigaWriter does 

not support PostScript printing 

but as the direct output is so 

good this will only effect those 

people with true PostScript 

printers (mostly lasers). If the 

document is set to be double 

Results 

Pros 

+ Powerful document 

layout and formatting. 

+ Reasonable price. 

+ Good printing. 

Cons 

- Poor spell check. 

- Frustrating bugs. 

- Important features 

missing. 

sided you can choose to print 

the odd and even pages 

separately for manual double 

sided printing. On a negative 

note in the Print window your 

specify the page size in the 

printer, this defaults to A4 

(great for us Europeans) but 

you can’t save a different 

default if you usually use 

another paper size. 

There are a few other features 

missing from AmigaWriter that 

we should mention in case 

they are vital to you. There is 

no word count or document 

statistics which can be vital for 

some writers. The lack of an 

insert special character window 

could also be annoying if 

you’re writing technical 

documents. We also had a few 

hangs and lockups during 

testing which is unfortunate on 

a product that has had several 

releases to iron out the bugs. 

Conclusion 

AmigaWriter has some really 

excellent powerful features and 

feels as if it’s basic “engine” 

has been well thought out. The 

antialiased screen display is 

fantastic and makes 

documents much easier to 

read on-screen. One other 

factor to bear in mind is that 

AmigaWriter is the only Amiga 

word processor currently in 

development, it is also very 

reasonably priced. There are 

some fairly major limitations, 

which we have mentioned in 

this review, but whether they 

effect you will depend on your 

intended use of the program. 

We found it quite frustrating 

that AmigaWriter is only a few, 

fairly small, features short of 

greatness, but some of these 

features will be vital for certain 

users. So having read the 

review, we hope you’ll be able 

to decide whether it’s for you. 

Okay 

Cordless Optical Mouse 

Mick Sutton was fed up being tied to his desk, so he got errr... tailless! 

The Techie Bit 

Does It Work? 

It wasn’t that my old mouse 

(Logic3 pilot PS2) was broken 

or anything, it was just getting 

annoying to keep pulling on the 

lead every time when it got 

snagged on anything. Picture the 

situation, there you are working 

on an image in Photogenics, 

zoomed up to the hilt just putting 

the final delicate stroke of 

whatever brush or effect, when 

you go to move the mouse and 

it’s stuck! The damn chord has 

wedged itself under the edge of 

the printer again.....grrrrrrr! Due 

to the sheer lack of space on my 

desktop (the wooden variety) this 

seems to happen more often 

than I would like, so I decided to 

do something about it. 

What... No Tail? 

I was at the Alt WoA 2002 show 

when the RF (Radio Frequency) 

optical mice on the Eyetech 

stand caught my eye, these were 

being sold on the day of the 

show for £55 including the EZ 

Mouse adapter which is required 

to take advantage of the mouse. 

My last mouse was being used 

in conjunction with a Punchinello 

MK 1 which wouldn’t work with 

this rodent (is it a rodent if it 

hasn’t got a tail?) unfortunately. 

Now I know that £55 seems a lot 

to pay for a mouse but when you 

consider it’s the most interactive 

part (apart from a keyboard 

possibly) of a computer and 

tends to be a very personal 

choice of what suits you (sir!), 

then it’s worth paying out for 

something that you are really 

going to get on with well. 

.info 

Developer 

Maxxtro 

maxxtro.com.hk/info.phtml 

Distributor 

Eyetech 

www.eyetech.co.uk 

+44 (0) 1642 713185 

Price 

Cordless Mouse .......£44.95 

EZMouse w/mouse...£15.00 

EZMouse alone ........£18.95 

On arrival home from the show I 

couldn’t wait to try my new 

mouse, but after opening the 

packaging and reading the blurb 

I discovered that the mouse 

batteries required at least 8 

hours charge before use... 

bo**ocks! This is where I ran into 

a little problem, as on inspection 

of the contents of the packaging I 

realised that the mains charger 

unit was missing... bo**ocks 

again, I don’t believe my luck! A 

quick phone call to Eyetech who 

were very helpful and 

sympathetic and it arrived in the 

post the very next day, well done 

Eyetech. The mouse system 

which is made by a company 

called Maxxtro consists of 

several parts, the mouse, 2 Ni- 

MH rechargeable batteries, a 

USB to PS2 adapter (the mouse 

receiver is a USB device), the 

mains charger unit (or not in my 

case) and the receiver/base unit. 

The mouse itself is 12.5 cm long 

by about 6.5 cm wide, has a total 

of 5 buttons, a scroll wheel (that 

forms the middle button also) 

and a light source and optical 

sensor underneath to detect 

movement. The base unit (that 

receives your mouse signals via 

radio frequency) plugs into your 

Amiga mouse port via the 

EZMouse adapter which in turn 

has the USB to PS2 adapter 

plugged into it. The base unit is 

moulded into a shape that holds 

your mouse when not in use, it 

also has the power unit plugged 

into it, so that when you are not 

using the mouse it keeps the 

batteries (fitted inside the 

mouse) charged, with a neat little 

LED to let you know charging is 

taking place. 

The base unit can be pretty 

much wherever you want it to be 

as it does not need line of sight 

to the mouse to work. This is 

very useful to someone like me 

who has lots of clutter and no 

space on his desktop as I 

mentioned earlier, because you 

can for example place the base 

unit under the desk on top of the 

computer casing or wherever 

you want it. 

Before initial use of the 

mouse you have to 

select which of the two 

channels (the mouse 

transmits and the 

base unit receives) to 

use and press the 

initiate button on both 

the base and the 

mouse, this makes 

the green LED on the 

base unit flicker once it 

receives a successful signal. 

The mouse from here on actually 

works straight out of the box as 

an ordinary two button mouse, 

but if you require use of any 

other buttons or the scroll wheel, 

(and lets be fair, you will) then 

the supplied “WheelDriver” has 

to be installed (I put it in the 

WBStartup drawer). Also 

supplied is another utility called 

“FreeWheel” which lets you set 

up various options with your 

buttons and wheel usage but I 

found it to be a bit quirky with 

strange behaviour in some 

programs, in particular MUI 

based programs. There is a file 

on Aminet that you can 

download to fix scroll-wheel 

usage in MUI applications called 

MuiWheel that can be installed 

and it works a treat. 

Move That Mouse 

Okay we have the hardware and 

software installed how does it 

perform? The mouse is shaped 

well to fit the hand (both left or 

right) and feels comfortable to 

use, it glides freely across the 

mouse mat or whatever surface 

you use it on and seems very 

responsive. When moving the 

mouse itself, the scroll wheel or 

pressing any of it’s buttons a 

little green LED on the base 

flickers to indicate that a signal is 

active to confirm that something 

is happening. I must say from the 

very off I fell in love with this little 

device, it is absolutely brilliant in 

use. No more snagging cords or 

fluff to clean out of the under 

belly (button), it is quite smooth 

in operation (420 dpi) and can 

work up to about four or five 

metres away from the base unit 

believe it or not. After 90 

seconds or more of not using the 

Reviews 

mouse, it goes into sleep 

(hibernation) mode, and only the 

scroll wheel or mouse buttons 

re-activates it. When in this sleep 

mode the bright red light emitting 

from the under side of the mouse 

is extinguished to save power, 

this is handy as sometimes you 

may forget to put the mouse 

back into it’s charging base and 

therefore this prevents the 

batteries from totally discharging. 

But having said that the mouse 

works for several days without a 

charge, I know because I have 

been guilty of leaving it out 

totally disregarded (like I do with 

my clothes my wife tells me)! 


31 

Conclusion 

Other than the lack of a cable 

the mouse behaves just like any 

other and I must say that a scroll 

wheel is a very useful tool, 

especially when browsing the 

Internet and loading long pages 

on websites. Having used it for 

several weeks now I can’t 

imagine computing without it! 

The only down side I can think of 

is the price, I have no doubt that 

with time the price of these new 

generation of rodents will drop 

as I stated earlier it is a personal 

thing and down to whether the 

individual thinks it is worth it. 

Result 

Top 

Notch!

Reviews 

.info 

Developer 

Mark Harman 

WWW 

http://newscoaster.tripod.com 

Aminet 

comm/news/ 

License 

Freeware, source now 

available under the GPL 

Requirements 

MUI 

Custom Classes 

(supplied in full archive.) 

TCP/IP Stack 


1.50beta 

(1.51beta was released as 

we went to press) 

The read message window’s 

attachments tab lists all the 

message parts, you can view 

them in a user defined viewer 

based on their MIME type. 

News 

Coaster 

Robert Williams is pleased to find a news reader that is still in active development. 

In these days of mailing lists 

and web-based discussion 

forums good old Usenet doesn’t 

seem to get much of a look-in. 

However it does have many 

advantages over other nonrealtime 

discussion system, for 

one Usenet newsgroups tend to 

get a wider audience than 

mailing lists and unlike web 

based forums it allows you to 

use the software of your choice 

rather than on often slow and 

awkward web interface. The 

Amiga has been blessed with a 

wide range of newsreader 

software but many of these 

programs have been dropped by 

their authors or at least show 

very little development. An 

exception to this trend is 

NewsCoaster which has been 

constantly developed by Mark 

Harman over several years and 

although the program has 

recently changed from 

Shareware to Freeware status 

development continues. I’m 

reviewing version 1.50beta that 

was released in the middle of 

March 2002. 

Before I get into the nitty gritty of 

NewsCoaster some people may 

be wondering what this Usenet 

lark is all about. Usenet is one of 

the oldest Internet services, it 

emerged in the early eighties. 

Usenet is a system which allows 

users across the world to discuss 

a wide variety of topics. The 

system is split into a large 

number of newsgroups each of 

which discusses a particular 

topic. Groups are organised into 

a hierarchy with general subject 

headings at the top, for example 

“comp” for computer related 

groups and “rec” for recreation 

related groups. There is also an 

“alt” hierarchy which is less 

tightly organised for free 

discussion on many topics. An 

example of a typical newsgroup 

would be 

comp.sys.amiga.hardware, the 

name tells you that this group is 

related to computer systems and 

is particularly about Amiga 

hardware. In most groups 

anyone can post a message 

(which is sometimes called an 

article or a posting), or follow up 

(reply to) an existing posting. 

When people reply to a post this 

forms a thread on a particular 

subject. 

You access Usenet via an NNTP 

(Network News Transfer 

Protocol) server which is usually 

run by your Internet service 

provider, in all probability your 

server is called 

“news.yourisp.com” or something 

very similar. One interesting fact 

to note is that unlike mailing lists 

Usenet has no central server, 

new messages are passed from 

server to server across the 

Internet (or other networks) and 

gradually propagate across the 

world. 

I thought this was supposed to 

be a review... Get On With It! 

Setup 

Before you can start reading 

news there are a few simple 

settings that need to be made, 

NewsCoaster needs to know 

your name and EMail address 

and you need to setup at least 

one server for sending and 

receiving news. You can setup 

more servers if you wish, for 

example some organisations 

have an NNTP server for just 

their local newsgroups. One 

server is set as the default and 

this is used by all the groups you 

define unless you select 

otherwise. For each server you 

can download a list of the groups 

available and once this is done 

(it can take a while, my server 

has over 40000 groups) you can 

update the list, downloading just 

the new groups. NNTP 

authentication with a username 

and password is supported for 

those servers that require it 

although this is unusual. 

With the basic setup complete 

you can search for some 

newsgroups to read. If you know 

the name of the group you wish 

to add the New Newsgroup 

option lets you type it in and set 

some options. If you want to look 

for a group on a particular 

subject you can use the Groups 

Manager, this displays a list of all 

the groups on your server. 

Getting this window open can 

take some time (even on a fast 

machine) as the whole list has to 

be read in and displayed in a 

listview. Once it appears you can 

search for a word in the list by 

typing it in and pressing Return 

which scrolls to the first group 

containing that word. Although 

there is no button to “find next” I 

found that clicking in the text box 

and pressing return again does 

just that, finding the next group 

containing the selected word. 

This can be quite a long winded 

process so I think the group 

manager could be improved if a 

list were added to display all the 

groups found by the search. 

With a group selected you can 

set some options, this is where 

NewsCoaster starts to show 

some powerful features. You can 

set the maximum number of 

messages to download, skip 

messages which a longer than a 

certain number of lines and set it 

to automatically delete 

messages after a number of 

days to prevent disk space being 

used by an ever growing 

collection of messages. The 

most useful feature here are the 

download settings, firstly a group 

can be set for online or offline 

reading. Online mode is for 

groups you want to read while 

connected to the Internet in this 

mode NewCoaster downloads 

just the header of each article 

when you download news and 

only downloads the body when 

you go to read the article. In 

offline mode complete messages 

are downloaded so you can read 

them at your leisure without an 

Internet connection. These two 

reading modes are combined 

with a subscribe check box, 

when subscribed to a group its 

articles will be downloaded when 

you get news messages. If you 

don’t check subscribe then you 

must manually download 

messages for that group when 

you want to read it. 

I have found that this flexibility 

makes NewsCoaster ideal for a 

variety of groups, for example I 

have several groups that I read 

regularly so I subscribe to them 

and set them to offline so I can 

read them when I’m not on the 

‘net. I have other groups that I 

like to keep an eye on but only 

read them when I spot an 

interesting subject so I set these 

to offline but still subscribe so I 

see all the subjects that are 

The main window showing the threaded message view. 

discussed. Finally I have a few 

groups that I only look at very 

occasionally, by keeping these 

unsubscribed I can leave them 

setup but I don’t waste time 

downloading messages I won’t 

read. 

NewsCoaster supports multiple 

users, each with their own 

groups, folders and preferences. 

If multiple users are defined a 

username and optional password 

must be enter when the program 

starts. Each user’s data is held in 

a separate directory that you set 

in the User settings window. 

Reviews 


33 

Interface 

In the main NewCoaster window 

there are two list views, one 

which show the groups that you 

have configured and the other 

showing the messages in the 

selected group. At the top of the 

window is a tool bar with some of 

the more common functions such 

as fetch and send news, post or 

follow up to a message, and 

some message control functions. 

Both the lists can be viewed 

either as a flat list or a tree view. 

In tree view the messages list is 

properly threaded so you can 

see which post was a reply to 

others making it easier to follow 

conversations. On the other 

hand the flat view has the 

advantage that you can sort it by 

clicking the headers so it is 

easier to see the most recent 

messages or messages from a 

particular poster. One option that 

I miss is to be able to expand all 

the branches in the tree view, on 

a thread with many replies a lot 

of clicking can be needed to see 

the whole tree. Another limitation 

is that you cannot hide 

messages that you have read 

(although there are markers that 

show which messages have 

been downloaded and which 

have been read) so it can be 

hard to find new messages at a 

glance. One final oddity is that 

subjects in the main list are 

limited to about 60 character, 

most of the time this is 

unimportant but occasionally 

some useful information is 

trimmed, you have to open the 

message (and therefore 

download its contents) to see the 

full subject. 

Reading News 

When you double click on on a 

message or select Read the 

message is downloaded from the 

server, if it’s not already 

available on disk, and then 

displayed in a separate window. 

There is an option to read with 

one or multiple windows, with the 

former double clicking a new 

message opens it in the existing 

read window and with the 

multiple option a new window is 

opened allowing you to compare 

messages (I suppose, I prefer 

the one window mode myself). 

The read window has a section 

at the top for the message 

headers which shows a user 

definable selection of headers 

(for example Author, EMail 

address, Subject etc.), a menu 

item allows the full headers to be 

displayed if required. The main 

part of the window is the body of 

the message, any quoted 

material is can be shown in two 

colours which helps to show 

which parts are from which 

quote. Formatting symbols such 

as *bold* and /itallics/ are 

rendered as text styles in the 

window. Usefully these features 

can be turned off for messages 

such as those containing code 

snippets where the symbols 

have other meanings. Although 

they are not marked in the text of 

the message you can double 

click on a URL in the message to 

open it in your browser, the link 

uses an AREXX script called 

gotoURL.rx in the NewsCoaster 

directory which you must first 

edit to set the path and type of 

your preferred browser, AWeb, 

IBrowse and Voyager are 

supported. 

Reading many messages with 

NewsCoaster is quite a 

comfortable experience, once 

you’re in the read news window 

the cursor keys can be used to 

navigate through messages, with 

up and down scrolling the 

current message and left and 

right moving to the previous or 

next message respectively. 

When in threaded view stepping 

through messages follows the 

thread nicely, but the thread 

display doesn’t open up to reveal 

the message you’re currently 

reading. 

Follow Ups 

In the read window you have the 

option to follow up the current 

message on the news server or 

you can reply directly to the 

poster via EMail. Either option 

takes you to NewsCoaster’s 

write message window. Here you 

can type your reply, the 

signature of the poster is 

automatically removed so you 

don’t accidentally include it. You 

have the option to include any 

one of eight signatures of your 

The MIME section of the preferences window where 

viewers for different file types are defined.

Reviews 

own which are defined in the 

preferences window, each group 

can have a default signature 

related to its subject. One or 

more binary attachments can be 

added, they are encoded in the 

message in base64 format. You 

can set a unique reply to 

address for the message and 

choose for replys to go to a 

different newsgroup or to you by 

EMail using the follow up to 

option that pops up a list of 

groups to choose from. 

When the message has been 

composed it can be sent at once 

if you’re online or placed in the 

outgoing folder to be sent the 

next time you connect to the 

news server. While it’s waiting in 

the outgoing folder you can still 

edit the message. Outgoing 

messages can be put on hold so 

they are not sent, maybe while 

you find out some further 

information or decide if you really 

want to send that flame! 

Once sent messages are moved 

into the sent folder (surprise, 

surprise!) but even here you still 

have options. You can choose to 

supersede a sent message, i.e. 

send an updated replacement, 

you can also cancel a message 

which you have sent. It should 

be noted that due to the 

distributed nature of Usenet 

these features are not fool proof, 

for example a cancelled 

message may not disappear 

from every server, but it is nice to 

see them easily implemented. 

34 

Binaries 

Binary data is not allowed in 

posts to most newsgroups but 

their are some groups (mostly in 

the alt.binaries. hierarchy) which 

are intended for posting binary 

files such as images. 

NewsCoaster displays a list of 

the binary attachments to a 

posting on the Attachments tab 

of the read window. Attachments 

can be exported to disk or 

viewed in an external program 

by double clicking on them in the 

list. External viewers are 

configured from the MIME 

section in preferences, here you 

can select a different viewer for 

each file type. Also listed on the 

attachments tab are the entire 

message and its header and 

body sections, this allows you to 

examine them in a text editor 

(configured in the MIME prefs). 

Various methods are used to 

encode binary files into a news 

The Kill File can be used to highlight interesting messages too! 

posting which are limited to plain 

text, NewsCoaster can cope with 

uuencoding, base64 and has 

basic support for the more recent 

yenc format. In my experience 

this range covers the vast 

majority of Usenet postings, in 

fact I didn’t manage to find a 

complete attachment it couldn’t 

decode. For longer files (for 

example movie clips or MP3 

files) it is common for the files to 

be broken up across several 

postings. To deal with these 

NewsCoaster has an automatic 

join feature, you simply select all 

the messages that make up a 

multipart post then a window 

allows you to move them into the 

correct order (although it does a 

good job of sorting this out for 

you). Then a new message is 

created which is the sum of the 

parts and you can view the 

attachment in the normal way. 

For some reason the join 

process is rather slow, often 

taking several minutes to join 

messages totalling a few 

megabytes, another niggle is that 

it is also effected by the subject 

length limit which means 

occasionally the part number 

([2/10] etc.) is trimmed off. Even 

at its current speed this feature 

makes dealing with multipart 

messages much less tedious 

than the previous option of 

joining and decoding using 

external programs. 

Kill Kill Kill! 

There are many very interesting 

and intelligent people 

contributing to Usenet but as in 

any community there are also a 

minority who seem hell bent on 

having pointless arguments or 

being unnecessarily obnoxious. 

To help avoid these messages 

NewsCoaster has a kill file, this 

stops it downloading messages 

from selected people in all or 

certain newsgroups. A kill file 

entry can be based on any 

message header, so you could 

avoid a particular poster by 

searching for their EMail address 

in the FROM: header or a 

particular thread by searching for 

its subject in the SUBJECT: 

header. When a message 

matches an entry in the kill file it 

will not be downloaded so you 

never see it or waste connection 

time on it. Kill file entries can be 

manually created or generated 

from the current message, in that 

case NewsCoaster gives you a 

list of common headers you 

might want to select in that 

message. You can also use the 

kill file mark a message as 

important instead of ignoring it, 

this is handy if you want to 

highlight posts from, for example, 

a particular poster. Kill file entries 

can be set as permanent or so 

they are deleted in a certain time 

period, which can be fixed or 

after the last post that matches 

the criteria. This option is good 

for kill file entries based on 

particular subjects which you 

want to disappear once a 

particular discussion is over. 

Extra, Extra 

Apart from the basic news 

reading features I’ve talked 

about above NewsCoaster also 

has a couple of neat tricks up its 

sleeve. The first is an excellent 

search facility which can look in 

one or more news groups for 

messages with your search term 

in a particular header, the body 

or complete message. The 

messages found are displayed in 

the bottom of the search window 

and can be opened by double 

clicking, very slick. The second 

is the statistics window, here you 

can see the number of posting in 

a group or groups from each 

person, subject or newsreader, 

not really useful but quite 

interesting. 

Results 

Pros 

+ Simple and logical. 

+ Multiple Users 

+ Mixed on and offline 

reading. 

Cons 

- GUI could be improved. 

- Missing some advanced 

features. 

I should also mention that 

NewsCoaster comes with 

comprehensive AmigaGuide 

documentation and makes 

extensive use of MUI bubble 

help, it also has an AREXX 

interface for customisation and 

external control. 

Issues 

There are a few areas in which 

NewsCoaster could use 

improvement, one is the menus 

which don’t have the standard 

elipsis (...) to indicate items 

which open a window and are 

lacking in keyboard short cuts, 

this is especially noticeable 

when working with the groups 

and messages list in the main 

window as only a few menu 

items are replicated on the 

button bar. In threaded view 

options to expand and collapse 

the tree would be nice as would 

the different sort options that are 

already available in flat view. I 

have EMailed Mark regarding 

these ideas and he has replied 

saying he will consider them for 

a future version so hopefully I 

won’t have to grumble for long! 

Conclusion 

NewsCoaster is an excellent 

news reader for anyone who 

wants a simple program with all 

the important features but 

doesn’t want to get bogged down 

in too much complexity. Some 

people will find it missing the 

flexibility and power of programs 

like NewsRog but I think they will 

be in the minority, it certainly has 

everything I need in the 

newsreader. It is excellent if you 

want to mix online and offline 

reading in one program. The 

interface, in particular the 

threaded view and the menus 

could do with a bit of spit and 

polish, that would make the 

whole program feel slicker. 

Overall whether you’re new to 

Usenet or an old hand I 

recommend you give 

NewsCoaster a try! 

Pretty 

Good! 

TOTAL AMIGA 

Kicksoft 

Graphics 

Drawstudio 

This excellent Graphics package avaliable one again!! Comes on CD and 

includes Texture Studio & Image Studio. 

£35.00 

Photogenics 5 

This excellent Graphics package by Paul Nolan. Comes on CD. 

£70.00 

Image Engineer 

Great Image manipulation program. Add effects to images such as Jigsaw. 

£25.00 

Candy Factory Pro 

Create 3D Text from any standard font and use them on web pages etc. 

£35.00 

Art Effect 4 

Billed as “Photoshop® on the Amiga”. Excellent graphic package. Comes on 

CD. 

£39.99 

FxPaint NEW 

With over 70 effects this is a superb addition to any software collection. 

£60.00 

Image FX4 NEW 

THE image manipulation package !! 100s of effects. 

£99.00 

Games 

Misc 

NEW 

PayBack £35.00 

Freespace £35.00 

The Feeble Files £35.00 

TaskiSMS 

Send Text Messages to mobile phones from your Amiga! Comes on CD. 

£12.00 

FxScan 

The only Scanner software that offers OCR on the Amiga today!! 

£30.00 

NEW 

OS 3.9 

Latest operating system for the Amiga. Comes on CD. 

£30.00 

NEW 

Aminet NEW 

Latest Aminet disk or the latest series. Gigabytes of Amiga Software. 

Single £14.99 Series £29.99 

VHI STUDIO 

Connect digital Cameras to your Amiga and so much more 

!£30.00 

Amiga Forever 5 

Emulate a AGA based amiga on your PC. 

NEW 

Full Version £40.00 Upgrade £25.00 

If you don’t see what you want, just ask! 

Our range is always growing! 

Players 

Moovid PPC 

PPC version with both WARPUP and POWERUP versions. Comes on CD 

£18.00 

Moovid 

Play AVI, Mov and QT files on your Amiga©. Comes on CD. 

£12.00 

Frogger PPC 

PPC MPEG player. Comes on CDwith example MPEGs. 

£18.00 

Frogger 

68k MPEG player. Comes on CD with example MPEGs. 

£12.00 

Riva 

The fastest 68k MPEG player on the Amiga! Comes on CD with MPEGs. 

£9.00 

SoftCinema 

PPC AVI, QT and Mov player. On CD with example Movies. 

£9.00 

AMP 2 NEW 

PPC Mpeg, CD-i and DVD player. The only way to play DVDs on the AMIGA. 

£18.00 

Internet Inet Dial 

Home server on your Amiga©., includes Apache and Geek Gadgets. 

£40.00 

AWeb Upgrade 

Excellent web Browser. Upgrade from OS 3.5 or OS 3.9. Comes on Floppy. 

£30.00 

Utilities PFS 3 

The fastest and safest file system avaliable, up to 300 times faster than FFS. 

£35.00 

Metaview 

The best Clipart viewer on the Amiga©. Comes on CD with clip art images. 

£18.00 

Diavolo 

The best backup program on the Amiga©. Comes on Floppy disk. 

£50.00 

PhotoFolio V2 NEW 

The professional way to view, catolouge and manipulate your images. 

£30.00 

GoldEd 

The best Editor, Program Editor, HTML Generator on the Amiga. 

£30.00 

Turboprint 7.21 

Use modern printers with 24 bit output!! The quality is astounding. 

NEW 

Full £40.00 Upgrade £25.00 

Make CD (DAO version) NEW 

CD writing software.Compatibale with most CD writers/rewriters. 

£50.00 

Spitfire 2 

If you have a 3com Palm© or compatible then you need this program! Comes 

on CD. 

£25.00 

Mediapoint NEW 

multimedia presentation tool on your Amiga. 

£40.00 


Add £1.00 UK postage per item. Make cheques payable to Kicksoft Ltd. 

We accept Solo, Switch, Mastercard & Visa 

Kicksoft Ltd., 

30 Whitegate Way, 

Tadworth, 

Surrey, KT20 5NS 

Tel/Fax (01737) 219280 

sales@kicksoft.co.uk

Support 

An Introduction to: 

Scala MM400 

Our “Introduction to...” feature returns as Elliott Bird takes a look at the Amiga’s premier multimedia package. 

One of the Amiga’s main 

strong points for some 

time, has been its Multimedia 

capabilities, and one of the 

most well known applications 

on the Amiga that 

demonstrated this was Scala. 

Scala is the premier software 

package for creating your own 

multimedia presentations and 

slide shows, as well as the 

ability to add music and text to 

your own videos! 

This tutorial will introduce you 

to what Scala has to offer, and 

will help you to get started on 

creating your own simple, but 

perhaps effective multimedia 

presentations. 

What’s this I see? 

When you first launch Scala, 

you will be faced with pretty 

much an empty screen with a 

few buttons, this is where 

Scala will present you with a 

list of pages in your script, 

where you can shuffle your 

slides into any order you like! 

At the top, on the left is where 

you click if you want to quit 

Scala or clear the script you 

were working on, or had 

loaded up. The button on the 

right is where you flick screens 

to workbench, or any other 

applications you may have 

running on their own screen. 

Then at the bottom we have 

“New” (pretty self explanatory), 

this is where you click to start, 

more on this a little later. The 

next button looks like a bunch 

of cards, this changes the slide 

view that you are currently 

looking at. If you click it then 

Scala will change to a view 

where you can actually see 

what your slides actually look 

like (preview). When you have 

your slides you can actually 

drag them about to change the 

order in which they show when 

you come to running the script. 

You can do the same in the 

other default view. “Load 

script”, well that’s pretty self 

explanatory too, it loads an 

existing scala script. And the 

System button is the actual 

prefs, which I must add there is 

rather a lot that can be 

configured, all though 

everything works fine on the 

defaults. There’s three parts to 

the prefs, the user interface of 

Scala, here you can change 

the colours of the Scala GUI 

(nice!), how many colours you 

want to run Scala in and your 

presentations, the screen 

mode you want to run it in, 

depending on what you have in 

your “Devs:Monitors” drawer 

(AGA only unfortunately, and 

by default Scala uses a PAL 

screen mode, so have those 

15khz monitors or 

scandoublers on standby!), and 

there’s more you can configure 

too! The other two sections are 

“Scala EX” which adds more 

functionality to Scala, and your 

scripts (recommended for the 

professionals :) ) and “Scala 

Buttons” which adds the ability 

to use buttons within your 

Scala multimedia script, to link 

with either other slides, other 

scripts, or possibly even to 

launch an application. And over 

on the right you have Scala’s 

The main Scala interface in thumbnail mode 

gives you an overview of your presentation. 

three additional utilities: 

AnimLab, FixScript, and 

ScalaPrint. Below that we see 

(which is very handy) how 

much memory you have and 

how much is available, as well 

as how big your hard drive 

partitions are, and how much 

space is available. As well as 

the system information, you 

can also view the versions of 

each of the components Scala 

uses, and you can view who 

made Scala. :) 

Right let’s go! 

OK, as we said earlier, to start 

creating your script, you click 

on “New” and you will be asked 

to select a background page, 

although this is optional, you 

may want to have a plain 

colour background instead, you 

can do this by clicking on OK 

without selecting a 

background. But if you want to 

select a background, then you 

can click on the “backgrounds” 

button on the right hand side, 

which will take you straight to 

the directory where Scala 

keeps your backgrounds. 

(convenient or what?) and you 

can select your background 

there. You will also notice the 

buttons for your scripts, music, 

sounds, etc. so that you can 

get to these directories at the 

click of a button, without 

rummaging through directories 

to find another directory or file. 

Right, so Scala may ask you 

what screenmode you would 

like, how many colours to run it 

in, and whether you would like 

overscan or not. Once you’ve 

done this, you can start on 

your first slide. You can start 

typing in your text by just 

clicking wherever you want it, 

bearing in mind you can move 

it around, change the font and 

it’s size, style, as well as the 

colour at any time, just like a 

word processor. Not only that, 

but you can add special 

transition effects to your text, 

so you can have them fly or 

dissolve in (cool!). And so I 

think it’s time we had an 

example that we can put Scala 

to good use! Let’s use the 

SEAL info channel I run at 

certain SEAL meetings as it’s 

basic to follow and work from. 

So we click on “New”. We don’t 

need a background picture, so 

we’ll just click OK. Select a 

reasonable screen mode, 

along with colours (preferably 

in the region of about 64-256 

colours, depending on how 

much memory you have). And 

set the overscan to “Standard”, 

then click OK. And so you are 

presented with a colour palette, 

and various other buttons to 

edit your current slide. By 

default, Scala sets the 

background to blue if you 

haven’t set one already. You 

can change it by going to 

“Palette”, and change the 

background colour, by moving 

the RGB colour sliders, and it 

will change your background 

colour in real time. So if you 

wanted a blue background, you 

would put the red and green 

sliders at 0, and the blue slider 

to 255. If you wanted a red 

background, you would put the 

red slider to 255, and the other 

two sliders to 0. The same 

thing applies if you wanted a 

green background, the green 

slider would be set to 255, and 

the other two would be set at 0. 

And if you wanted a white 

background (as in this 

instance), you would set all 

three sliders to 255. However if 

you wanted a black 

background, you would set all 

three sliders to 0. You get the 

general idea! 

OK, so we now want to put in 

that lovely 3D SEAL logo. You 

can do this by clicking on the 

“Load” button, which will bring 

up a small lister. Click on 

“Brush”, then we select the 

SEAL logo from the 

appropriate location. (You can 

do this for any image you may 

want to insert). So now we 

need to place the image, 

preferably in the middle! Click 

on the area you want to place 

the image, if it isn’t quite in the 

place you want it, then don’t 

worry because Scala has 

alignment buttons (next to the 

text style buttons). Click on the 

center align button, and voila! 

You will notice that you can 

also resize the image too. 

Now we need to put in some 

text. Click on the area where 

you want to place it, and select 

a font by simply clicking on the 

font button. (Where it actually 

tells you what font is currently 

in use, and what size) A lister 

will appear, full of fonts in one 

column, and the sizes available 

in the other column. Once you 

are happy with your choice, 

click OK and you will see the 

changes take effect. Let’s put 

in some more text, this time 

with a stylish font, (Cascadia) 

and we’ll add a shadow to it to 

make it stand out more, by 

clicking on the “Shadow 

button”. You can change the 

colour of the main part of the 

text by clicking on the colour 

you want on the Palette, then 

clicking on the “Front” button. 

You can also do the same with 

the outline of the text, again by 

selecting the colour you want 

on the Palette, then clicking on 

the “Outline” button. You even 

have the option to add 3D to 

your text, even in different 

colours! 

Now let’s preview what we 

have so far, by clicking on 

“Show”. Bit boring isn’t it? Let’s 

add some effects to the text. 

Click on the text you want to 

add the effect to, then click on 

The list view shows more 

information at once. Here are the two pages we’ll build in this tutorial. 

the “in” button. A panel will 

come up with a large number 

of buttons, which are the 

effects of how the text come in 

on your slide. If you can’t make 

up your mind, you can make it 

select a random one each time. 

(The button with the question 

mark in it) Once you’ve 

selected an effect, as usual 

click on OK. You might want to 

add an effect to all of your text 

to make it all blend in. Not only 

can you add effects to your 

text, but you can do the same 

to your images as well! And 

you can also change the speed 

of the effects too. Now preview 

your slide again by clicking on 

“show”. Getting better isn’t it? 

OK let’s make another slide, 

the news page. Any font that’s 

readable will do, perhaps the 

Cascadia font will do for the 

“News” title. And then a 

reasonably plain font for the 

rest. OK let’s add a 

background to make it look 

more interesting and eye 

catching. That’s better! 

You get the general idea on 

how to create your slides, and 

a multimedia presentation out 

of it, bearing in mind there’s no 

limit to the amount of slides 

you can have in your 

presentation! 

OK let’s make the finishing 

touches to our presentation. 

Let’s add some transition 

effects (wipes) to each slide. 

You can do this by going to the 

third button from the right, 

labelled “Slides”, and it will 

bring up a panel (similar to the 

text effects one) full of various 

transition effects. Don’t forget 

to set the speed, the default 

speed should do. The next 

button, labelled “pause” allows 

Support 

you to set the time you want 

your slide to be displayed for. 

Then the next button labelled 

“Sound” allows you to add 

sound effects or music to your 

presentation! 

Once you’ve finished your 

presentation, and you’re happy 

with it, save it! I would also 

recommend you to save your 

presentation while your 

working on it, in case things go 

belly up! (Scala can sometimes 

consume a lot of chip 

memory). Now you’re ready to 

show your multimedia 

presentation off by clicking 

“Run!”. Now sit back and 

admire! :) 

Q: Can I use Scala to 

show off family, special 

occasion, or holiday 

photos too? 

A: You certainly can, make 

sure you’ve scaled your 

pictures down to about 

640x512, or thereabouts, so 

that they fit on the screen. 

Don’t forget you can also 

add text, so you could give a 

short description for each 

picture. 

Q: I want to add a 

countdown to my 

presentation, can I do 

this? 

A: Yes you can, in the Scala 

backgrounds directory there 

are backgrounds with a 

different number on each 

one (9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1), use 

a different one for each 

slide. You don’t have to add 

wipes for each one, but 

make sure you set them to 

equal pause time for each 

slide. If you’ve got any 

slides in the wrong order, 

you can easily drag them 

into the right order in the 

slide preview or slide lister. 

Then save what you’ve got. 

Q: Can I get any more 

backgrounds for Scala? 

A: Yes, you can either use 

your own you may have, or 

you could get the CD 

(available from most Amiga 

dealers), which contains a 

large number of 

backgrounds for Scala. 


37 

FAQs

AN INTRODUCTION TO MIDI ON THE AMIGA. 

MIDI 

Support 

Part The First 

An Introduction to: 

Geoff Milnes introduces us 

to the wonderful world of 

making music with the 

Amiga and MIDI instruments 

in the first part of this 

series. 

I have been interested in 

music since I was about 

seven years old. This was 

about the time when I asked 

my parents if I could take piano 

lessons as I was confident that 

after a week or two, I would be 

fully conversant with the 

keyboard and be able to 

amaze everyone with my 

undoubted talents. Over fifty 

years later I am still learning 

although this time, I am 

combining my knowledge of 

music and the Amiga to make 

music, using a full orchestra 

and turning out sounds which 

make me wish I listened more 

closely to my piano teacher all 

those years ago. Sometimes 

the sounds are fantastic - other 

On the Amiga 

times I switch off the 

equipment and go to bed to 

sulk! 

As my interests in computing 

range from Graphics through 

business applications - the ‘Net 

- Video - DTP - to Music, I have 

an application for every mood. 

They all give me great pleasure 

and satisfaction but none more 

so than drawing notes on 

screen and listening to them 

play back through my Yamaha 

keyboard. 

Several years ago, touch 

sensitive keyboards were so 

expensive you required a 

second mortgage to purchase 

one. These days, however, 

things are oh! so different! 

Technology has surpassed 

itself time and time again to 

produce cheap 

and efficient 

technology so 

that most of us 

can afford a little 

luxury now and 

then. The 

keyboard next to 

me cost just 

over 200 UKP and that was 

FIVE years ago - is general 

midi standard (I’ll explain that 

in a moment) incorporating 127 

different musical instruments 

and sounds PLUS a full drum 

kit - is touch sensitive ( the 

harder you hit a note, the 

louder it sounds) - has a 

rhythm section of it’s own - 

built in speakers with provision 

for piping through a hi-fi and it 

even works from batteries too if 

necessary! 

Attach this to the Amiga and 

you have your own orchestra 

ready to perform for you 

whenever you wish. 

You don’t even need musical 

knowledge to obtain fantastic 

sounds from it as the ‘Net is 

littered with midi sites 

containing literally thousands 

of ready made files to 

download. These you can load 

into a sequencer and as well 

as play them, you can take 

them apart to find out what 

makes them tick (or screech or 

clang!). 

Nor do you really need a 

keyboard or sound module as 

software such as GMPlay from 

the Aminet is capable of 

playing midi files using the 

Amiga’s built in sound chips. 

Most sequencers allow you to 

allocate samples to the 

channels too. 

Once obtained (or written by 

yourself), you can play these 

files along with graphics and 

animations in many of the 

multimedia programs available 

down the sound at the same 

time as the video track thus 

completing a set of titles all in 

one go. 

Before going on to explain the 

workings of a sequencer, a 

little bit of background about 

midi itself without going into too 

much detail and boring the 

pants off you. 

General Midi Standard. 

(M)usical (I)nstrument (D)igital 

(I)nterface is a way of passing 

digital information both ways 

between a computer and a 

sound producer . The sound 

producer itself can be a sound 

card actually IN your computer 

or a separate electronic 

keyboard complete with notes 

and buttons. 

At one time, all manufacturers 

of keyboards used their own 

settings for passing information 

via midi so a piece of music 

produced on, say a Roland, 

would sound totally differently 

on a Yamaha and vice versa. 

So, eventually, the 

manufacturers all got together 

and laid down a set of 

standards which meant that 

midi files could be used on 

different instruments but 

produce the same sound as 

the original. i.e. a piano on one 

instrument is also reproduced 

as a piano sound on ANY GM 

standard instrument. 

Now, let’s assume we are 

talking about an electronic 

keyboard rather a sound card. 

The keyboard is actually a 

dedicated computer built just to 

make sounds at the press of a 

key. By selecting a sound, all 

the keys will use that particular 

sound i.e. piano - strings etc. 

However, midi keyboards have 

what are called channels and 

each channel is capable of 

producing a DIFFERENT 

sound. The general midi 

standard states, amongst other 

things, that they have a 

minimum of 24 ‘voices’ 

(instruments) simultaneously 

available which includes 8 for 

drums. This is called a multitimbral 

instrument. (There is a 

possibility that some items I 

quote have changed as it is a 

year or two since I delved 

deeply into the realms of 

configuration, however the 

basics will still be the same.) 

Your keyboard will also be 

capable of playing a number of 

notes at the same time and this 

is where the word polyphonic 

comes in. Say, for instance, 

that your keyboard is 32 note 

polyphonic with 16 channels, it 

means that over all the 16 

channels you are able to play 

32 notes all at the same time. 

So you could have channel 1 

playing a piano sound using 

four notes, channel 2 playing 

strings using another four 

notes leaving you 24 notes to 

spread around the other 14 

channels. 

Strictly speaking though, this is 

not entirely true as one 

channel, usually channel 10, is 

dedicated to drum sounds 

effectively leaving you with 15 

channels for other instruments. 

These days a full size touch sensitive 

General MIDI keyboard is very affordable. 

for the Amiga. This is 

especially useful for video 

Mega hardware isn’t necessary for MIDI work all you need is 

applications as you can lay 

an Amiga, some software and a MIDI interface. 

Now for the other end. 

Your Amiga runs software 

called a sequencer which will 

send data through the serial 

port and the attached midi unit 

to the keyboard. This also 

works the other way round to 

enable the keyboard to pass 

data to your Amiga. The midi 

unit itself is not directly 

attached to EITHER end even 

though cables connect them 

together. This is because the 

unit uses a LED to physically 

separate the computer and 

keyboard and literally flash 

signals over a gap to the 

gubbins inside the midi unit - 

translate it and then flash the 

signal to the outgoing cable. 

This is known as opto-isolating 

and it is possible to disconnect 

the midi cables from the unit 

and the keyboard without 

causing damage. 

WARNING! This does not 

apply to the serial port - 

connection and dis-connection 

MUST be carried out with the 

computer switched OFF! 

Putting it together is very, very 

simple. The MIDI unit connects 

to your serial port. The OUT 

socket on the MIDI unit 

connects to the IN socket on 

your keyboard and the IN 

socket on the MIDI unit to the 

OUT socket on the keyboard! 

There are other extra sockets 

on some units but these are 

usually extra OUT or just Passthru 

- the latter are not within 

the scope of this article. 

What You Require 

An Amiga (even the humble 

A500 is capable) 

Some software.Quite a lot has 

been given away on 

Coverdisks over the years: 

Support 


39 

• Tiger Cub 

• Music-X 

• Sequencer One 

• Dr T’s KCS 

• Bars & Pipes (available from 

the Internet for free download 

- I’ve forgotten where but if 

you mail me, I’ll try and find 

out) 

• Octamed Sound Studio 

Hardware: 

• A midi interface (around 

25UKP) plus suitable cables. 

• A sound producer preferably 

a midi sound module or a 

keyboard. (general midi 

compatible if possible but not 

essential) 

Note: A sound module is a 

keyboard WITHOUT a 

keyboard! It is purely a sound 

producer and cannot be 

physically played. 

...and that’s it! 

The Process 

Before actually starting an 

article on MIDI and sequencers 

themselves, I thought I give 

you a run down of the way in 

which I produce an audio CD 

which, with a little adaptation, 

someone without keyboard 

knowledge could use to record 

their own audio CD. 

My MIDI setup consists of an 

A1200 with Blizzard 030 and 

FPU / 32 meg RAM and a hard 

drive. This is not my main 

Amiga and even the 

specification of this is way over 

the top for MIDI! You could use 

an un-expanded A500 without 

any RAM or hard-drive and it 

would still work with Tiger Cub 

on a boot disk.... I know ‘cos I 

used to do this years ago! 

Anyroadup - the MIDI unit is 

hooked into the serial port of 

the Amiga with cables 

connecting this to the Yamaha 

keyboard. MIDI out to MIDI in 

and MIDI in to MIDI out. The 

keyboard headphone socket is 

then connected via an audio 

lead to the Line In on the 

soundcard on my PC - and 

that’s it! 

The software I use on the 

Amiga is Dr T’s KCS and on 

the PC I use Soundprobe for 

recording audio. I used to use 

Soundprobe on the Amiga in 

both version 1 & 2 before it 

went PC so it is a little like 

welcoming an old friend. I 

would use my towered 060 

Amiga for this process but for 2 

reasons - one, it’s expensive to 

obtain a soundcard for the 

Amiga (and when I already 

have one plugged into my

Support 

droid it seems a little 

extravagant) and point two is 

that I already have so much 

hanging off the back of my 

tower, it would probably fall 

over more often than it would 

work. I also believe in the 

principle of using whatever 

does the job best (whilst taking 

account of SOME personal 

preferences obviously...). 

However, some halfway decent 

software and an Amiga ONE 

should change this setup 

radically but we will have to 

wait and see! 

So, here I am in my den, 

Amiga on, keyboard on and PC 

on. To do things the easy way, I 

could just load a MIDI file, click 

Record on Soundprobe, Play 

on the MIDI file and away we 

go. However, as I play 

keyboards myself, I make 

things a little more difficult by 

wanting to play along with the 

MIDI file and the way I do this 

is as follows: 

In my sequencer on the 

Amiga, I locate the track which 

contains the melody and delete 

all the notes! I could just delete 

the track itself but there is a 

reason for not doing this - I 

want to start playing a piano 

The End Result 

On the Total Amiga website 

are 2 audio (mp3) files and a 

MIDI file for you to download - 

a sort of “cover website” for 

the Mag ;-) and here is an 

explanation of them. 

The one entitled ‘Friends’ is 

an audio recording I made 

with my son, as I described 

earlier in this article, which 

uses a MIDI backing and a 

live recording of the audio. I 

picked the MIDI file up from 

somewhere on the ‘Net some 

years ago and it was quite an 

interesting experiment to 

produce this track - I am quite 

pleased with the result, 

although the original .wav file 

quality is superior to this, my 

first attempt at Mpegging. The 

original .wav file is around 34 

A MIDI interface like this one connects to the Amiga’s serial port. 

MIDI instruments connect to the 5 pin DIN ports. 

sound and later change to 

strings, then an Oboe and 

finally, back to Piano 

again.One way of doing this is, 

at a certain point, push the 

button on the keyboard which 

says ‘Strings’ etc but 

sometimes it is better and 

easier to automate things a 

little so that when that 

particular point is reached, the 

sequencer changes the 

instrument and I can just carry 

on playing. This is called a 

Program Change in MIDI and, 

although all the actual notes 

have been deleted, it is 

possible to send other 

instructions to the keyboard i.e. 

tell it to play using a different 

instrumental sound. 

meg in size so there is some 

advantage to compression! 

The MIDI file, Fantasy, and it’s 

equivalent Mp3 file shows the 

difference between file sizes 

particularly well with the MIDI 

weighing in at just short of 13k 

whilst the Mp3 is over 3 meg! 

Depending on the soundcard, 

the results can be either good 

on both or good on audio but 

rubbish as a MIDI file - the 

better the soundcard (and 

MIDI mapping) the more 

superior the results. Some 

soundcards are just not kind to 

MIDI files so I nearly always 

play them through my Yamaha 

keyboard which gives 

excellent results everytime. 

Just out of interest, I 

remember once going to see 

Back to my recording session 

now... I simply click Record on 

Soundprobe on the PC, Play 

on my Amiga and start playing 

music accompanied by a full 

orchestra! 

Never having had the 

opportunity to play with a 

group, band or orchestra in the 

past, playing with full orchestral 

accompaniment is brilliant and 

it is very possible to disappear 

into my own little world 

occupied by only myself and 70 

other musicians contained 

inside my Amiga! 

Just as an addendum to round 

off this article, my son 

Christopher is a singer and I 

the Syd Lawrence Orchestra 

in Huddersfield Town Hall and 

being told that Syd Lawrence 

had at the beginning of his 

career, re-written the original 

Glenn Miller scores by 

listening to original recordings 

and painfully transcribing all 

the band parts individually to 

gain the Glenn Miller sound! 

That, I thought, is dedication - 

or plain madness! 20 some 

years later I had searched the 

‘Net and all the other sources I 

knew for a Gerard Kenny song 

called Fantasy and couldn’t 

find it anywhere. Guess what? 

It was my turn to play the 

nutter and transcribe the parts 

into a MIDI sequencer - it took 

ages but once I heard the 

sound starting to come right, I 

HAD to carry on. There were 3 

have modified the above 

system to be able to record 

Christopher singing in addition 

to MIDI backing. The result is 

quite good, even though I do 

say so myself. With 

Christopher in another room 

with a microphone and wearing 

headphones, the audio from 

the mic is mixed with the MIDI 

and fed BACK through the 

headphones so he can hear 

himself as well as the backing 

track. Once balanced, this is 

fed into the PC and recorded. 

Although this can be done all 

on the PC, I still find it easier 

and more comfortable to use 

the Amiga for the MIDI side of 

things. Having tried to use 

Cubase at evening classes 

several years ago, I found it 

very cumbersome and 

overfacing compared to the 

Amiga software - a little like 

driving into town using a 

double decker bus instead of 

my car! So, I stick to KCS... 

parts I actually played on the 

keyboard - the electric piano, 

the oboe and the base guitar. 

Once these were done, I had 

to listen very carefully to the 

audio recording and piece 

together the rest of the 

arrangement but I have to say 

I am happy with the result. 

If you have the inclination to 

download the files, I hope you 

enjoy them - if not, tough! You 

could always write your own... 

So surf along to http://www.totalamiga.org Now! 

Because Perfect Paint is 

not a layers based 

package, you need to employ 

different techniques when 

creating a composition. In 

particular, it is more important 

to start with a clear idea of the 

end result you want to achieve 

because it is very difficult to go 

back and make changes to 

completed elements, 

particularly if they overlap other 

elements or the background. 

In this tutorial I will compose 

three different images onto a 

background, this will show you 

the basic process of 

composing images in Perfect 

Paint and some of the special 

effects you can apply. As usual 

I’ll try to point out some of 

Perfect Paint’s other features 

and throw in some tips along 

the way. Although I’ll be using 

all these techniques on one 

image in “real life” you’ll get a 

more professional look by 

sticking to one or two effects 

per image. 

As a theme for this tutorial I’m 

going to use some of the 

photos I took (with my trusty 

Olympus Camedia 920Z digital 

camera) while on holiday in 

Bruges last year. The end 

result will be the sort of photo 

montage often seen in tourist 

brochures and the like. 

Let’s get started, load up 

Perfect Paint and select a nice 

16 or preferably 24 bit screen 

(note that all recent versions of 

PerfectPaint require a graphics 

card). The first step is to find a 

suitable background, for this 

sort of image I wanted 

something not too obtrusive so 

the images composed over it 

would stand out. I chose a 

sunny picture of quiet wooded 

path. Most of Perfect Paint’s 

global functions such as load 

and save are found in the 

toolbox menu, this is accessed 

by clicking on the down arrow 

button in the title bar of the 

toolbox. Open this menu then 

choose Load and select your 

background image in the file 

requester. 

Tip: While you were in the 

menu you may have noticed 

that the keyboard short-cut for 

Load is “L”. Users of Deluxe 

paint will recognise that this 

short-cut and many others are 

the same as the Grandad of 

Amiga paint programs. 

The image is loaded and 

displayed in a window, notice 

that a thumbnail also appears 

in the image bar at the bottom 

of the screen. 

Support 

Composing Images 

in Perfect Paint 

Robert Williams creates a composition of images and discovers some cool features along the way! 

Toolbar 


41 

Quit, Menu, 

Depth 

Brushes 

Circle, Box, 

Line 

Curve, Fill, 

Freehand 

Ellipse, Text, 

Polygon 

Cut Brush, Anim, 

Zoom 

Spare, Effects, 

Stencil 

Process, 

Special, Antialias 

Swap, Pen/Back 

Colour, Rainbow 

Palette 

Symetry, Grid 

Clear, Undo, 

AREXX. 

Progress 

Script Progress 

Fade Away 

We’ll use the first composed 

image to get a feel for the 

general process of composing 

and just apply a simple fade 

effect, the next two will be a bit 

more complex. To compose a 

secondary image we need to 

load it at the same time as the 

first, Perfect Paint can load up 

to 10 images, each one is held 

in a buffer. The available 

buffers are shown in the image 

bar at the bottom of the screen, 

click in one of the empty 

spaces to select that buffer, the 

green bar indicates the 

selected buffer. The current 

image window disappears but 

that image is still held in 

memory. Now load the image 

you wish to compose using the 

L hotkey or Load command 

from the toolbox menu. A 

window with the new image 

appears and it is shown as a 

thumbnail in the image bar. 

When I loaded my image 

(which happened to be of a 

windmill), I thought it looked a 

bit washed out so before I 

composed it I decided to apply 

some colour correction. To do 

this click on the pen and 

background colour display in 

the middle of the toolbar with 

the right mouse button. From 

the pop-up menu select 

Effects/Colour Correction. A 

new window opens with sliders 

to alter the colour balance of 

the whole image. Notice the 

preview on the left hand side, 

you can drag this with your left 

mouse button to check the 

effect on different areas of the 

image. I found I just needed to 

increase the combined colour 

slider (the fourth from the top) 

slightly to make my image a bit 

The color correction window 

with its handy preview. 

more vibrant. When you’re 

done click OK to close the 

window and apply the effect. 

To compose the image onto the 

background we’re going to cut 

it as a brush, click on the brush 

cutter tool and ensure filled box 

is selected (it should be by 

default). If you want to cut a 

different shaped brush you can 

do so by selecting one of the 

other filled drawing tools (make 

sure you select the filled 

version or you’ll just cut an 

outline). Click on the image at 

the top left hand corner of the 

area you want to cut, drag to 

the bottom right and release 

the button. The brush should 

now be cut and follow your 

mouse pointer if you move it 

over the image. 

Tip: If you want to cut the 

whole image as a brush or get 

right up to one edge it is a 

good idea to re-size the image 

window a little larger than the 

whole image. You should then 

see a chequer board 

background, Start dragging out 

your selection on the 

background to ensure you get 

right to the edge of the image. 

Note: If you don’t see a 

brush when moving your 

pointer over the image check 

you do not have 

Prefs/Cursors/Precise enabled 

in the toolbar pop-up menu.

Support 

Now we have the brush switch 

to the background image (the 

first one we loaded) by clicking 

on its icon in the image bar. 

The background is displayed, if 

you move your mouse over it 

you should see the brush. You 

may need to scale the brush to 

fit in the composition, if so right 

click on the Cut Brush icon and 

in the pop-up menu select 

Custom from the Size sub 

menu. In the Picture Size 

window you can enter a new 

size either as a pixel value or 

as a percentage scale. 

If you wanted to apply the 

image straight over the 

background with no special 

effects, you could just position 

the brush and click the left 

mouse button now. But that’s 

boring, let’s apply a fade so the 

bottom third of the image 

gradually blends into the 

background. To do this we’ll 

use PerfectPaint’s excellent 

density mapping feature. This 

is accessed by selecting 

Misc/Density Mapping from the 

Cut Brush pop-up menu. With 

density mapping you can 

create all kinds of cool 

transparency effects, to get an 

idea of what is possible cycle 

through the Preset options. 

Note that the effect shown will 

be applied to the whole brush, 

light areas will be rendered 

solid and dark areas 

transparent. We’re going to 

base our effect on preset 8 so 

select that now. 

First we need to alter the effect 

so the it fades from white to 

black vertically, to do this click 

on the right hand point in the 

top section and drag it up so 

the line is flat along the top, the 

larger preview section should 

turn solid white. Now click the 

bottom point in the left section 

and drag it to the right so the 

line goes from the top left to 

bottom right corners. Now the 

preview should show a smooth 

vertical gradient. This gradient 

is even all the way down so 

almost all of our image will be 

translucent to some degree, 

what we really want is for it to 

fade in just the bottom third. 

We can achieve this by adding 

another control point to the 

line in the left section. Click on 

the Insert Poi. button then click 

on the left hand line about two 

thirds of the way down, a new 

point should appear. Click on 

the Move Point button then 

drag the point across to the left 

edge. Now the preview shows 

that the top of the image will be 

solid and the fade will only 

effect the bottom third. When 

you’re happy with the preview 

click OK to apply it to the 

brush’s stencil (you won’t see 

any effect until you paint the 

brush down). 

Tip: It’s easy to accidentally 

add more points than you 

need, to remove them just click 

the Delete Poi. button then 

click on the point you want to 

remove. 

Now position the brush over 

the background where you 

want to place it and click the 

The density mapping window is the key to lots of great 

transparency effects, make sure you have a look at the presets! 

left mouse button to paint it 

down, you should see the 

transparency now take effect. If 

it doesn’t quite come out how 

you want just click the Undo 

button and try again. If you 

want to change density 

mapping you need to choose 

Misc/Reset Transparency from 

the brush pop-up menu first, 

otherwise the new mapping will 

be added to your existing one. 

Note: Resetting 

transparency also wipes out 

any stencil that is applied to 

the brush (see the Crop section 

below for more information on 

stencils.) 

Shadow 

A nice simple effect for a 

composed image is a shadow 

so it appears to be floating over 

the background. Perfect Paint 

doesn’t have layers or a 

shadow effect while painting 

but it can apply nice soft 

shadows to the stencilled area, 

with a bit of ingenuity we can 

use this feature to get the 

effect we want. 

First load the image to be 

composed into a new buffer 

and cut it as a brush as we did 

before, this time I’m going to 

cut a round brush by selecting 

the filled circle tool after 

clicking the Cut Brush icon. 

When the brush is cut swap to 

the background image and 

scale the brush as required. 

Now position the brush where 

you want it to appear on the 

background but don’t click the 

mouse button just yet, instead 

press the J key on the 

keyboard. This swaps us to the 

spare page, this is another 

image exactly the same size as 

the background which can be 

used as a scratch pad or for 

certain effects such as 

rubthrough. Now without 

moving the mouse click the left 

button, this pastes the brush 

down on the spare page in 

exactly the right position 

relative to the background 

image. Now this is the clever 

part, the spare page shares its 

stencil with the background so 

we can set the stencil on the 

spare page, on an odd shaped 

brush like my round one this 

Adding a soft shadow is easy 

as long as you have a 

stencil setup. 

will be much easier as the 

spare page has a plain 

background. To do this choose 

Edit Stencil from the Stencil 

pop-up menu, make sure the 

magic wand is selected, drag 

the RGB tolerance slider down 

to 000 and click anywhere 

outside the composed image. 

After a few moments the 

background should be 

replaced by the chequer board 

pattern, now we need click 

Inverse so the background is 

protected. When you’re 

finished the image should be 

covered with a chequerboard 

pattern, click OK to exit from 

the stencil editor. 

Swap back to the background 

image by pressing J again. 

Now we need to reveal the 

image on the spare page, to do 

this right click on the Effects 

icon and select Spare Page 

from the Wrap submenu, this 

effect reveals (rubs through) 

the spare page where you 

paint. Select the filled box tool 

and ensure the stencil is 

switched on (the icon looks 

depressed). Draw a box over 

the whole area where the 

composed image will show 

through, don’t worry if it’s not 

that accurate just make sure 

you cover the whole of the 

composed image. When you 

release the left mouse button a 

Compose Requester may 

appear, if it does leave the 

opacity at 100% and click OK. 

If you want to take a look at the 

modes on offer by clicking the 

cycle gadget. Now we just 

need to add our shadow, first 

select the shadow colour you 

want by clicking on it in the 

palette with the left button. 

Select Add Shadow from the 

Stencil pop-up menu, in the 

window set the X and Y offset 

to get the size of shadow you 

want, the opacity and the flow 

(the higher the flow the softer 

the shadow will be). Then click 

OK to see the result. 

Remember you can always 

Undo and try again. If you want 

to carry on editing the image 

remember to turn the stencil off 

by left clicking the icon again. 

Note: If you want to apply 

a shadow to a rectangular 

composed image you don’t 

need to bother with the spare 

page, just make the stencil 

using the editor’s rectangle tool 

right on the main image. 

Tip: While you have the 

stencil switched on you can 

apply all kinds of effects just to 

the composed image, just 

switch on effect mode by 

clicking on the icon, right click 

to choose an effect from the 

menu and then draw over your 

composed image with the filled 

rectangle tool. You can set 

preferences for your chose 

effect by selection Preferences 

from the pop-up menu. 

Support 


43 

Crop 

Once again load the image you 

want to compose into a new 

buffer, to make life easier crop 

the image down so that there is 

only a small border around the 

subject you want to cut out, 

Crop is in the Effects submenu 

of the toolbox menu. 

Now we’re going to create a 

stencil for this image so the 

subject is protected from 

editing, select Edit Stencil from 

The background to my 

sclupture is too varied for 

the magic wand. 

the Stencil pop-up menu. We 

actually need to cover the 

background with the 

chequerboard pattern but I 

found it easier to cover the 

subject and then invert the 

stencil. The key to this job is to 

choose the right stencil tool for 

your combination of subject 

and background. For example 

if you have a fairly plain 

contrasting background you 

can use the magic wand to 

select it automatically. Just 

click on the background and 

then use the four tolerance 

sliders so the correct area is 

selected. You can add further 

areas with the magic wand by 

clicking again, the tolerance 

just applies to the area 

selected with the last click. In 

my case the background is 

very varied so I am using the 

“lasso” tool to select areas 

manually. To help you do this 

accurately you can zoom in 

using the + button at the top of 

the image window, switch on 

the cross-hairs by pressing 

Space and use the Amiga’s 

keyboard mouse control (hold 

down the left Amiga key, use 

the cursors to move the 

pointer, hold Left-Alt as well for 

a left button press). If you 

overspill and select more than 

you mean to set the Mode 

cycle gadget to SUB to remove 

areas from the selection using 

the tool of your choice. 

If you’ve stencilled over the 

subject rather than the 

background as I did now’s the 

time to click Inverse, then use 

Smooth which removes any 

stray pixels. Especially if you 

have inverted now is a good 

time to give the edges the once 

over and touch up any 

imperfections, the odd stray 

pixel will be Okay as we will 

blend the edges slightly later 

on anyway. 

Tip: A lot of work can go into 

a stencil like this so it’s a good 

idea to save it using Save 

Stencil in the Stencil pop-up 

menu, if you’ve cropped the 

original image remember to 

save that too or the stencil 

won’t line up if you need to 

reload it. 

Make sure the stencil is 

switched on, choose the Cut 

Zoom in and make use of the tools available to crop the image as 

cleanly as possible. I found inversing the stencil was helpful too. 

Brush tool and then the Filled 

Box tool and finally pick up the 

subject as a brush. You should 

notice that it has been cut 

away from the background 

using the stencil. Select the 

background image and scale 

the brush as required. If you 

need to you can flip the brush 

horizontally or vertically or 

rotate by ninety degrees using 

the commands in the Fast 

Rotation submenu of the Cut 

Brush pop-up. The keyboard 

short-cuts for these are X, Y 

and Z respectively again 

matching DPaint. To remove 

any pixelisation from the edge 

of the image we will now apply 

the Misc/Smooth Border option 

from the Cut Brush pop-up 

menu, I found that an Amount 

of 1 was enough to get rid of 

any jaggies without making it 

look too soft. To finish off 

position the brush over the 

background and paste it down, 

I have overlapped my cropped 

image with the other composed 

images, notice that the 

smoothing only takes effect 

when you paint the image 

down. 

Final Word 

Hopefully this tutorial has 

demonstrated three useful 

variations on a composing 

technique with Perfect Paint, 

many things can be achieved 

with this program even if it 

doesn’t have layers although 

they do require a bit more 

forward planning. I also hope it 

has shown you a few of 

PerfectPaint’s less obvious 

features so you can carry on 

and experiment with it in other 

ways. 

The end result, see it in colour on the back cover.

Support 

Directory Opus 5 

Robert Williams kicks off part two of his Opus tutorial with a 

look at script events and then progresses to the file type 

recognition options. 

Last issue I demonstrated 

several ways you could 

customise Opus to easily 

access internal and external 

commands, programs and 

scripts. Before we hit the main 

topic of this issue’s tutorial, file 

types, I thought it would be 

useful to mention another way 

of activating functions, scripts. 

This feature is somewhat 

confusingly named, what the 

scripts editor actually does is to 

define what functions should 

be executed when a certain 

event occurs. If you open the 

scripts editor using the Scripts 

option in the Settings menu 

you will see a list of all the 

events to which you can attach 

an action. If you’re not quite 

sure to which event each 

option actually refers, press 

“Help” on the keyboard while 

the window is active for a more 

detailed description. 

By default you will see that the 

Double-click event is 

highlighted in white, this means 

it has an action attached. 

Looking in the help we can see 

that Double-click means 

double clicking on the 

background of the main Opus 

window (which is the 

Workbench background in Wb 

Replacement mode). To view 

the function select Double-click 

and click the Edit button. The 

Function Editor (which should 

be familiar to anyone who read 

the first part of this tutorial) 

appears and you can see that 

the default command is the 

internal Opus command 

“DeviceList New”, this 

command displays a device list 

(a list of the volumes and 

assigns mounted on your 

system) and the “New” option 

causes it to be displayed in a 

new lister. If you never seen 

this feature in action before try 

double clicking on the 

background of the main Opus 

window, you should see a new 

lister appears and shows the 

device list for your system. If 

you wanted you could modify 

this function so something 

different happens when you 

double click. But rather than 

change this default let’s have a 

look at setting up a new Script. 

Goodbye Opus... Hello 

Workbench 

Sometimes it can be useful to 

load Workbench instead of 

Opus, for example you may 

have a problem and want to 

check that Opus is not the 

cause, or you might just want 

to try some of the new 

Workbench features that have 

been added in OS3.5 and 3.9. 

While you could always reboot 

and hold Shift to disable Opus, 

as I mentioned last time, 

another option is to set a script 

that automatically loads 

Workbench when you quit 

The Shutdown script is executed when you quit Opus. 

Tutorial 

This function restarts Workbench without 

running the WBStartup items. 

Opus using the “Quit” 

command in the “Opus” menu. 

Note: Sam Byford EMailed 

to tell me that when he has 

installed Opus recently he’s 

found that the installer has not 

backed up the original “loadwb” 

command to “loadwb_old”, so 

there is no way to load 

Workbench. To check this take 

a look in your “C:” directory 

and see if the command exists. 

If it doesn’t you can find the 

original loadwb on your 

Workbench floppy (OS3.1 and 

earlier) or CD in the OS- 

Version3.x/c directory (OS3.5 

and 3.9). Copy “loadwb” into 

your “C:” directory but don’t 

overwrite the existing file 

(which loads Opus) rename the 

version you’re copying to 

“loadwb_old”, you can do this 

in one step using Opus’ “Copy 

As” command, found in the 

Lister menu. 

If you scroll down to the end of 

the scripts list you should see 

an event called “Shutdown”, 

this is called when Opus quits, 

all we need to do is tie the 

“loadwb_old” command to this 

event. Select “Shutdown” and 

edit it, in the function editor 

window “Add” a new line and 

choose the “AmigaDOS” type 

in the cycle gadget. Click on 

the file button and find your 

“C:” directory in the file 

requester, then choose 

“loadwb_old”. If you have 

OS3.5 or later you can add the 

“SKIPWBSTARTUP” switch to 

the command; this will stop the 

programs in your WBStartup 

which have already been 

loaded by Opus being run 

again by Workbench. So the 

final command line should be: 

“C:loadwb_old 

SKIPWBSTARTUP”. When 

you’re happy press Return in 

the text box to accept the 

command then click “Use” in 

the Function Editor and “Save” 

in the Scripts editor. Now make 

sure that anything you’re doing 

in Opus is complete then 

choose “Quit” from the “Opus” 

menu, after you confirm the 

request you should find Opus 

closes and Workbench loads. 

Sounds Funky! 

On reading about scripts 

above, you might be thinking 

that it would be cool to add 

sounds to some of those 

events, for example when a 

disk is inserted or a lister 

opened. You could achieve this 

using the scripts window to 

assign a sound playing 

command to each event. 

However with Opus Magellan a 

new feature was added to the 

Environment window catering 

specifically for this function. 

Just select “Environment” from 

the “Settings” menu and go to 

the “Sound Events” page, here 

you can assign a sound to an 

event more quickly than setting 

up a function in scripts. There 

are also facilities to test the 

sound and adjust its volume. 

The “Exclusive 

Startup/Shutdown Sounds” 

check box is used to prevent 

other sounds you have 

configured being played while 

the startup and shutdown 

sounds are playing. 

Support 


45 

File Types 

One of Directory Opus’ most 

powerful features is the ability 

to recognise the format of a file 

and allow the user to 

customise how some actions 

will effect the file. The Filetypes 

editor is accessed from the 

“Settings” menu, in the window 

you can see a list of all the 

types currently active on your 

system. While you can define 

new file types yourself there 

are several sources you can 

check to see if there is already 

a predefined type available. 

The first is just to double click 

on a file of the type you want 

Opus to recognise. If Opus 

doesn’t recognise the file, it will 

open a requester where you 

can choose to “Sniff!” the file, 

this function tries to find a 

suitable filetype in storage. If 

one is found you can choose to 

install it, however check first 

that the type is suitable as it is 

possible for there to be 

erroneous matches. If a 

suitable type doesn’t come with 

Opus then there are some 

collections of predefined 

filetype which can be 

downloaded from the Internet 

(or found on magazine cover 

disks). Probably the most 

comprehensive is 

MagnumOpus, you can 

download this collection from 

http://www.magnumopus.co.uk. 

Magnum Opus contains 435 

filetypes and should cover 

pretty much everything you’re 

likely to come across. So here I 

will concentrate on the options 

you can give to a filetype rather 

than how to create a new one. 

Tip: Install only the filetypes 

you think you will need as each 

Opus offers lots of options to associate commands with a particular filetype. 

one you add causes Opus to 

take slightly longer identifying 

the type of a file. 

However, here is a quick guide 

to setting up a new file type. 

Open the filetypes editor and 

click “Add”, two windows open, 

one allowing you to configure 

the actions available for this 

type (more on that later) and 

the other where you edit the 

class. The class is the 

definition Opus uses to identify 

this type of file. First you need 

to enter a “Name” and “ID” for 

the file type at the top, the 

name is the short description 

that will be shown in the type 

column of listers and the ID is 

a unique code up to 8 

characters that Opus uses to 

internally identify this type. The 

“Pri” (Priority) option is used to 

resolve cases where a file 

matches more than one type, 

for example an AmigaGuide 

document is also an ASCII text 

file, as long as the AmigaGuide 

is set to a higher priority than 

ASCII (which defaults to -1) 

then it will “win” in the 

comparison. 

The main body of the class 

editor is a list of the checks 

Opus will perform to identify 

the file, as with the function 

editor you can add as many 

checks as you like. The most 

simple way to identify the type 

of a file is by its file extension 

(.zip, .mpg etc.), to do this add 

a check, click on the file gadget 

and choose “Match Name” 

from the list. Then you can 

enter the filename to match 

using wildcards in the string 

gadget, for example “#?.zip” 

would match all files ending in 

.zip. For file originating from 

Windows PCs and downloaded 

from the Internet where file 

extensions are almost always 

used this is fine, however on 

the Amiga and other systems 

extensions are not compulsory. 

For more reliable identification 

of filetypes it is better that 

Opus actually looks at the 

structure of the file itself to find 

the type. In the class editor 

Opus provides a “View File” 

button so you can take a look 

at the contents of a file and try 

to identify some common 

characteristics which identify it. 

Many filetypes start with a 

common identifier so the 

program loading them can 

recognise if it is valid, for 

example when I looked at 

several ZIP archives using 

“View File” it was clear they all 

started with the characters 

“PK”. To match in this delete 

the Match Name check and 

add a new one, this time 

choose Match and enter “PK”, 

Recognising files by their internal structure is more reliable 

than using the filename extension. 

this will look for those 

characters at the start of the 

file. If the common characters 

are a few positions into the file 

you can use “?” to mean any 

character, so if you found a file 

type which always had “ABC” 

as the third, fourth and fifth 

characters you could have the 

check Match ??ABC. 

Tip: When looking for 

common elements in files so 

you can define a file class 

make sure you check several 

files you know to be in that 

format, preferably from multiple 

sources, or you may create a 

class that only works on a 

subset of that filetype. 

As you can see in the 

command list Opus offers lots 

more ways to identify a 

filetypes and allows them to be 

combined with “And” and “Or” 

logical operators, however I 

think any more depth is really 

beyond the scope of this 

tutorial, so take a look at your 

Opus manual for more 

information. 

Click! 

Once you have found a 

suitable filetype or set one up 

you can then decide what 

actions you want to be 

available for files of that type, 

you can also set the default 

icon that will be used in the 

icon view modes if the file 

doesn’t have a filename.info. 

To edit the actions select the 

filetype in the editor and click 

“Edit”, in this example I’m 

going to add some actions to 

the Quicktime Movie file type 

(which I got from 

MagnumOpus). In the window 

that opens there are three

Support 

sections, Events, Icon Menu 

and Default Icon. First let’s 

have a nice icon, just click the 

“Select Icon” button and find a 

suitable icon on your system. 

You’ll find that some suitable 

ones are installed by OS3.5/9 

in the ENV:Sys/ directory, I 

chose def_anim.info. 

When you double click on a 

Quicktime movie it would be 

nice for Opus to launch it in a 

suitable player. To do this 

select Double-click in the 

“Events” list on the left, then 

click “Edit”, this opens the 

“Function Editor” where we can 

choose the program to view 

the file. I’m going to use the 

wonderful AMP2 reviewed last 

issue which has been 

upgraded in its latest beta 

versions to support Quicktime 

(grab them from amidog.com). 

So click “Add” and choose 

“AmigaDOS” as the type and 

then pick your chosen viewer 

using the file gadget. Use the 

variables button ({ }) to insert 

“{f}” which will be replaced by 

the name and path of the 

double clicked file, then add 

any command line options 

needed by the viewer program. 

My final command line is: 

“Work:Utilities/Graphics/AMP2 

/AMP {f} window overlay ahi”. It 

is also a good idea to check 

the “Run asynchronously” 

option in the “Flags” list, 

otherwise the lister containing 

the file will be locked until you 

close the viewer. 

Pop-up Menu 

For some filetypes there may 

be more than one action you 

want to define, for example 

sometimes you want to view a 

file and other times you want to 

edit it. For Quicktime Movies I 

have two viewers that I 

commonly use, SoftCinema 

and AMP2 so it would be 

handy if I could pick between 

the two. As you can see from 

the list of “Events” it is possible 

to run a different command by 

holding the Alt or Control key 

while double clicking on the 

file. However I know I would 

soon forget what functions I 

had assigned so a better option 

is to add the choices to the 

icon menu. This menu pops up 

when you right click on the file 

in a lister. 

First I’m going to add my 

default option, View with 

AMP2, to the menu. To add an 

item click “Add” in the “Icon 

Menu” section and define the 

function in the function editor, 

enter the title of the menu item 

in the string gadget at the top. 

For this item I can copy from 

the double-click function by 

opening its edit window and 

dragging the command line 

across. Add another menu item 

and this time set it up to run a 

different movie player, make 

sure you add the file variable, 

{f}, any command line options, 

and check the asynchronous 

flag. Another good use for 

these pop-up menus is to call 

the same viewer with different 

options, for example AMP can 

play the movie either in a 

window or on a new screen. 

Add another new menu item, 

then click on the View with 

AMP2 item and edit it, drag the 

command line from the AMP2 

function editor to the new 

function, close the AMP2 

function editor. Set the label on 

the new function editor to “View 

with AMP2 (screen)”. All we 

need to do now is adjust the 

command line so the movie 

opens on its own screen, in my 

case this just meant removing 

the “window” and “overlay” 

options. 

Set Name Mode PopUp to get popup menus in name mode listers. 

Tip: To get pop-up menus in 

name mode listers check the 

“Name Mode PopUp” box on 

the “Lister Options” page of 

“Environment” settings. 

Drag ‘n’ Drop 

Using the drag and drop 

filetype action on a movie file 

doesn’t really make sense so 

for this example I’m going to 

use the ZIP Archive filetype 

that is supplied with Opus. ZIP 

files are file archives which are 

very common on the PC. To 

extract files from a ZIP archive 

you need an unzip utility, I’m 

using unzip from the archive 

“Unzip512x.lha” which can be 

found on Aminet in the “util/arc” 

directory. The unzip command 

from this archive should be 

copied into a directory on your 

path, usually “C:”. Open the 

filetype editor and edit the ZIP 

Archive filetype. Select Drag ‘n’ 

drop in the Events list and click 

Edit. Add an AmigaDOS 

command and enter the 

following command line 

“C:UnZip {f}”. Now we need to 

tell the UnZip command to 

extract the files to directory 

where archive was dropped. 

UnZip doesn’t have a 

destination option, it extracts to 

the current directory, so to do 

this we just need to set the “CD 

destination” flag. We also need 

to set the “Do all files” flag so 

all the selected files will be dearchived 

if several are dragged 

at once, the “Rescan dest” flag 

so the destination lister will be 

updated to show the new files 

and the “Output to window” flag 

so we can see if UnZip reports 

any errors. Now drag ‘n’ drop 

will work on ZIP archives as it 

does by default for LHAs. 

A final useful action to add to 

the ZIP filetype is to set the 

Double-click event to produce 

a list of the files in the archive. 

To do this add the following 

AmigaDOS command to the 

Double-click event: “C:UnZip -v 

{f}”, set the Do all files, Output 

to window and Window close 

button flags. 

Open With 

If all that is too much trouble 

for you there is another trick up 

Opus’ sleeve that can make 

opening files in different 

applications and utilities easier, 

the “Open With” menu. To 

access this right click on the 

file in a lister and highlight 

“Open With”, if the program 

you want is already on the 

submenu just select it and your 

file will be opened in that 

program. If the program you 

want isn’t there select “Other” 

and find it in the file requester, 

then the file will be opened. 

Next time you go into the 

“Open With” submenu you will 

notice that the program you 

just picked is now listed. Once 

the maximum number of items 

allowed in the submenu is 

reached the first chosen one 

will be discarded, you can set 

the maximum on the 

“Miscellaneous” page of the 

“Environment” settings window. 

I received a few comments 

about the Opus tutorial in the 

last issue, all were positive, 

and a couple of old Opus 

hands even said they learnt 

something new. Thanks must 

go to Sam Byford for letting me 

know about the problem with 

loadwb not being backed up 

and for suggesting the Close 

Opus/Load Workbench tip. If 

you have any comments on 

this tutorial or suggestions for 

future instalments please let 

me know! 

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47 

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• Column from Fleecy Moss 

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I11

AmigaOS 4 First Screenshots 

Menus 

Intuition also controls the Amiga’s menu 

system. Here you can see that pop-up 

menus and a variety of display options 

have been incorporated into the system. 

These options will be part of the OS and 

won’t require third party utilities. 

These 

screenshots 

highlight some 

of the changes 

being made to 

intuition, the 

core of the 

AmigaOS user 

interface. In 

particular you 

can see some 

of the window 

customisations 

options that will 

be available.. 

Note that this is 

not the final 

default OS look 

just an example 

of what can be 

done. 

PerfectPaint Tutorial 

Here is the end result of 

the PerfectPaint which 

starts on page 41. 

http: /www.totalamiga.org

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