Amiga software

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Amiga software covers a wide range of software for the Amiga computer, both productivity and games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist. The Amiga software market was particularly active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but has since the period 1996/1999 dwindled into almost only a hobbyist scene.

During its lifetime, the number of applications made available for the Amiga was in excess of 2,000, with over 10,000 utilities[1] (these utilities are almost all collected into Aminet major repository). However, it was perceived as a games machine from outside its community of experienced and professional users. In fact, there were also more than 12,000 games available for Amiga[2][3][4]. Programs are being developed for the three existing Amiga-like operating systems[5] still nowadays, but generally new programs are portings from open source and mainly from Linux vast software-base.

Many Amiga software solutions or noteworthy programs, during the timeline were ported to other platforms or perhaps inspired new programs still used today, such as those aimed at 3D rendering or audio creations, e.g. LightWave 3D and Blender (whose development started for the Amiga platform only). The first multimedia word processors for Amiga, such as TextCraft, Scribble!, Rashumon, and Wordworth, were the first on the market to allow implement full-colour WYSIWYG (with other platforms still only implementing black-and-white previews) and even allowing the embedding of audio files.[citation needed]

Contents

[edit] History and Characteristics

[edit] From the origins to 1988

[edit] 1985

Amiga software started its history along with the hardware platform called Amiga 1000 that was born in 1985. Commodore International released the specifications for programming software for Amiga, and a certain number of development computers to various software house of that age, and mainly Electronic Arts, a software house which then realized some masterpiece software for Amiga (Deluxe Paint, Deluxe Music, etc.). The team at Electronic Arts developed also Interchange File Format file type container, to output the project files realized by Deluxe Paint and Deluxe Music. Thus IFF file format became de facto standard in AmigaOS. Historically speaking the very first programs to being shown to a vast public on Amiga were a digitizer software and the paint software ProPaint (that was still in early beta), and both were used by artist Andy Warhol to acquire a black-and-white photo of rock artist Debbie Harry, voice of musical group Blondie at Amiga Launch Gala at Lincoln Center, New York in July 1985[6]. To enhance the software base of Amiga, and show its hardware capabilities, in 1985 Commodore licensed also the software called Transformer from Simile Research and put it on the market in the first days of January 1986 bundled with external A1020 5,25" floppy drive. It was a software emulating 8086 Intel based PC-XT hardware. It was capable to run MS-DOS Operating System and thus MS-DOS productivity software like Lotus 123 or WordStar. This was an easy way to access the vast market of MS-DOS software, while waiting for native Amiga software beginning to be developed[7]. In 1985 Deluxe Paint was born and featured very powerful graphic features that were available in those times only on dedicated graphic computers. It was considered the first Amiga "Killer application".

[edit] 1986

1986 (the year of the launch of Amiga 2000) saw Amiga software do well in the market which contributed to the Amiga's success as a game and multimedia machine. In that year software like AmigaBasic from Microsoft, VizaWrite, Textcraft (word processors), Pagesetter (Desktop Publishing), Analyze! (Spreadsheet), Superbase Personal (Database), Moviecraft (animation), Deluxe paint II, Deluxe Music, Instant Music (a composition music program for non musicians) from Electronic Arts, and Graphichart again from Commodore were born. Graphicart was the software used by computer artist Jim Sachs to produce some Amiga masterpieces like Defender of the Crown and Centurion: Defender of Rome from Cinemaware and the Amiga porting of Saucer Attack. Graphicraft was the predecessor of Aegis Draw and AEGIS Animator[8][9], one of the first programs worldwide (if not the first) capable to create animation videos and cartoons complete with audio stereo, featuring a cel animation working paradigm interface and outputting files based on Delta-frame difference compression method which then were the lead for creating ANIM file type standard. Byte-by-Byte Software Inc. released Sculpt-3D. It is the first rendering tool available for the first time to a vast audience of public, and in October of the same year Impulse released TurboSilver.

[edit] 1987

In 1987 a new platform for home computing was released, the Amiga 500. The release of the A500 saw the Amiga software market move drastically in favor of entertainment software over professional software.

Titles like Maxiplan 500 (spreadsheet), Aegis Sonix a music program similar to Instant Music were produced. Another word processor called ProWrite was also born that year. [10].

1987 was also the year in which big names entered the Amiga market. In July Wordperfect created an "Amiga/Atari Division" and started selling a version of its famous word processor for the Commodore platform for US$ 400[11]. It could load and save Wordperfect files created on any platform, such as IBM, Macintosh and Apple II[12]. Wordperfect 4.1 for the Amiga was the first word processor in the world capable of opening infinite documents (limited by RAM), each one in its separate window[13].

In 1987 Andrew Tanenbaum released the Minix operating system for the Amiga. It was a free version of Unix with complete source code.

Year 1987 closed for Amiga with COMDEX Exhibit Show. NewTek shown for the first time a prototype of Video Toaster and Impulse released TurboSilver 2.0.

[edit] 1988

In 1988 Photon Paint was released. It allowed digital painting using HAM graphics mode and full 4096 colors palette of Amiga on a single screen. Maxiplan 500 become Maxiplan 1.x, Electronic Arts showed DeLuxe Photo Lab (photo editing software), Newtek demonstrated DigiView 3.0 hardware and software image digitizing suite, WordPerfect released the WordPerfect Library for the Amiga. At the Summer CES the Pro Draw graphic tablet with mouse emulation software was also announced, as well as Flash-Back and Quarterback hard drive backup software. Superbase Personal became Superbase Professional, Micro Illusions started shipping Music-X audio software for the Amiga, and Lattice released its C++ preprocessor for the Amiga. Cygnus Editor ubiquitous text editor, one of the most versatile text editors and best seller on Amiga since then was also released this year. It was one of the first Amiga programs featuring an AREXX port. Gold Disk released ComicSetter (comic creation) and Gold Disk released MovieSetter (32color cartoons with stereo sound animation software). In November, at the World of Commodore Show, ReadySoft demonstrated it's AMAX Macintosh emulator for the Amiga.

[edit] 1989-1994

1989-1994 could easily be considered the golden age of the Amiga. In 1990 AmigaDOS 2.0 was released. The interface of the Workbench GUI was changed to a fake 3D aspect using grey shades of colors. For the first time Commodore introduced a styleguide for developers on AmigaOS, because of this the majority of Amiga software developed for AmigaDOS 2.0 had a standardized GUI which improved usability. Programs like Imagine 3D, Lightwave, ImageFX, Scala continued using their own non-standard GUI. AmigaVision was also released and bundled free with any model of Amiga 3000. Directory Master, Directory Opus, TurboCalc, Photogenics, ImageFX, PC Task, Photogenics, Caligari, Final Calc, Cinema 4D, etc. all belong to this period. Productivity software development for the Amiga during this period seemed to be at its peak.

[edit] 1994 up today

After 1994, the demise of Commodore left Amiga to an uncertain doom. DOS and Windows based PC's, had a rapid evolution in processors and architecture which saw them become the standard in the home and the office. Many software houses that developed for the Amiga either left the Amiga market, or ran into their own financial troubles. The shrinking Amiga community (that was very compact and, even in the pre-internet era had strong capabilities to communicate worldwide and exchange public-domain software (Fred Fish Disks, containing public domain), drivers and know-how, and that was innovative for its activity to keep alive the Amiga brand) reacted by creating some noteworthy initiatives. For example in 1996 Aminet was created. Aminet was the first centralized internet repository of all Amiga public domain software and documents. It was the first internet experiment of a centralized software repository created and maintained by one community for the community itself. The Amiga was one of the platforms that pioneered the internet. It's browsers like AWeb, IBrowse and Voyager were advanced. Voyager was the first browser to adopt the technology of tabbed browsing. Mailers like YAM are still used. In the productivity software camp, programs like Candy Factory for image processing were still being developed. After 1999 the Amiga market had a rapid fall, and was practically reduced only to an hobbist market.

[edit] Usability

The software for Amiga is to be considered mainly "second generation" kind of software, as (unlike "so called" first generation software presenting only a text-based interface) it presents a complete graphical interface to interact with the user (GUI), following Amiga WYSIWYG "desktop paradigm" and native AmigaOS interface guidelines, that is to say the software is mouse driven and presents also pulldown "Menus" and "dialogue windows" in which to choose the current options ("Open", "Save", "Save As", "Preferences", "Cut", "Copy", contextual "Help", etcetera) just as it happens still nowadays in any software. As long as AmigaOS owns also a text-based Shell, many software could also present just a text-based GUI, or interact with the user just with "command line", such as early compressing-decompressing (inflate-deflate) utilities, like as Zip and Lha.

[edit] Cataloguing Amiga Software

Any computer could not exist without a vast range of software that covers the requests of the userbase, the software solves the necessities of the users and mainly elaborates user input data into a more intellegible and practical output result. Amiga do not miss this paradigm: "No software base, no user-base". As long as the software for Amiga (or Windows, or Macintosh) covers a vast range of targets of reference in any camp of problem solving or data-elaboration, it becomes necessary to split the catalogue in various Wikipedia articles. This is not a necessity for Amiga only, but it is common practice for cataloguing software on any platform, that is for example Windows software, Macintosh software, Linux software and so on. The main software categories to be catalogued are: Productivity Software (also called Application software); Support and Maintenance Utilities that are used for formatting hard disks, recover or backup data, etc.; Multimedia software (graphic, video, music); Communication software (including the software for dealing with Internet and any other net); Programming, that is one of the basics function on a computer and allows new software to being coded and released to users; some various other major or minor utilities that enhance the ease of use in any Operating System (that is for example Application Launching Docks) together with Software for Special Purposes (such as software for people who suffer of limitation of movements). Games are a separate kind of software that deals with entertainment for kids and adults. Emulation software is a very particular family of software that allow a computer acting as a different computer than the original one (even built with different classes of processors than the host computer that is capable to emulate it), it deals mainly with retrocomputing issues. Demos are another kind of separate software. Demos are often music videos or graphical hacks created for pleasure, to astonish spectators or to demonstrate the very limits of the hardware the run into. These are often being considered a modern form of art (see Demoscene). Here follows a brief list of major known software for Amiga organized by these categories.

[edit] Productivity software

Main article: Amiga productivity software

The article split section covers: Graphics, Video, Design and CAD Software, Graphic Utilities; Vector Graphics programs and converters; Amiga based Word Processors; some advanced Text Editors, with programming facilities and features for basic formatting of huge text files, lists of programs, advanced script programs; Database and Spreadsheets; Science, Entertainment and Special use programs: Entertainment for kids and adults; Fractals, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence; Route Planning; Personal Organizer, Notebook, Diary software; Personal Budget, Home Banking, Accounts; Software for special purposes.

[edit] Support and Maintenance Utilities

Main article: Amiga support and maintenance software

The article split section covers: Commodities and Utilities; Hard Disk Partitioning; Diagnostic Tools; Vga Promoting Tools for ancient Amiga Software with TV resolution graphic screens; Game loaders for storing and autoloading from Hard Disks the original Amiga, autostarting non standard Floppy Disks; Disk Copiers; Backup and Recovery Tools, Archives and Compression Utilities; Command Line Interfaces and Text-Based Shells; graphical GUI interfaces with WIMP paradigm; Amiga Advanced Graphics Systems; PostScript; TrueType Fonts, Color Fonts and Anim Fonts; Font Designer Software; Amiga Advanced Audio System; native, external, widely common used, and third party Filesystems; Datatypes; MultiView; MIME types; USB stacks; Firewire stacks (IEEE 1394); Printer Drivers; Video digitizers; Graphic Tablets; Scanner Drivers; Genlocks, Chroma-Key, signal video inverters; InfraRed Devices and remote controls; WiFi and Bluetooth Devices; Special devices.

[edit] Music

Main article: Amiga music software

The article split section covers: Sound Design; Audio Synthetyzing; Music software; Audio digitizing and sampling; Hard Disk recording; Speech synthesis; Audio Trackers; MOD music module filetype.

[edit] Programming

Although a large amount of programming languages and compilers were available for the Amiga, most development on the Amiga was done using C and C++, 680x0 assembler and various Basic dialects. To learn more, refer to main article Amiga programming languages.

Main article: Amiga programming languages

[edit] Multimedia

[Section to be developed -it requires an article of its own-]

[edit] Drivers for Multimedia Devices and Special Input Functions

[edit] Software for people suffering of diseases and limitations in movements
  • JakeBoard input software and hardware system emulating keyboard and mouse to be used by persons with physical limitations and/or problems of movements. Software and hardware schemes are actually freely downloadable at BlackBeltSystems Amiga Software page on their site.
  • Talkboard similar to jakeboard, is a speech-generation system for persons with severe handicaps of movements. It is also freely downloadable.

[edit] CD Filesystem

AsimCDFS, AmiCDROM, CDVDFS, Allegro CDFS, CacheCDFS

[edit] CD, DVD and Blue Ray Burning Programs

BurnIt!, Frying Pan, MakeCD, AmiDVD, DVDRecord, DVDAuthor

MakeCD is the first Amiga program to support DAO (Disk At Once). Frying Pan is the first Amiga program capable to create DVDs. Now both Frying Pan and BurnIt! are capable to handle DVD.

BlueHD from German programmer Carsten Siegner is a MorphOS program capable to authoring and burn HD-DVDs in these formats:

  • Normal Video-DVD (European PAL)
  • HD-Video-DVD HDTV (mkv-h264/AAC) (that are recognized by some newest BlueRay Player)
  • HD-Video-DVD HDTV (MP4-h264/AVC)
[edit] Disk Images and ISO files Management
  • ISO-o-Matic software is a CD Image converting software and supports: b5i, bin, CD-i, img (normal/CloneCD), mdf (Alcohol 120%), nrg (Nero Burning ROM), pdi and uif.
  • ISOMount mounts CD ISOs, PC floppy disk images and Amiga disk images. Supports: Amiga (ADF) 880KB either OFS and FFS, MS-DOS (IMG) from 360KB up to 2.88MB (Fat12), Atari ST 800KB (Fat12), MAC GS (file image of Mac has no extensions) 800KB (MFM encoded), CD (ISO) - every size, including floppy specific.
  • MountVirtual and DiskImage programs for AmigaOS and MorphOS that mount CD ISO images as standard Amiga devices. Supports CD ISO images and disk images such as ADF, DMS, IFS. MountVirtual requires DiskImage.
  • VirtualCD uses ISOs and CD-Images as virtual drives
  • mkisofs and Amkisofs are ports of MaKeISOFileSystem

(A complete list of ISO managements and converters is available on Aminet.)

[edit] Internet and communications

Main article: Amiga Internet and communications software

This section split article covers: Modem software, Direct Connect, BBS managing, Fidonet, Packet Radio; Prestel, Videotel, Videotex, Minitel; Teletext, Televideo, Viewdata; FAX, Answering Machine and Voice Mail; ISDN; Networking and Ethernet protocols; World Wide Web (TCP/IP Stacks, Browsers, E-mail programs, Newsreaders, Internet Radio, Proxy server support programs, PPP, Telnet, Podcasting, RSS Feed, Distributed Net, Google Services, Instant Messaging and Chat, FTP and FTP Server, Weather casting news, Webcam supporting, Clock Synchronization, SMS Short Messages, Web development & HTTP Server, Peer2Peer, VCast (Online VCR), YouTube, Flash player, Monitoring webpages, Remote Desktop, SSL, SSH, etcetera.); Communication Protocols.

[edit] Various Utilities

AmiDOCK is a utility that creates Application Launching Docks on the windows manager desktop in AmigaOS. Amiga users began to appreciate the software docking utility in 1989-1990 period, due to two factors: they considered with interest and sympathy the NeXT computer, from Steve Jobs that was based on 68030 processor by Motorola (the same processor that equipped Amiga 3000) and they were intrigued by graphic aspect and coherence of the NeXT interface, and due to the parallel occurrence that it existed also Acorn Archimedes RISC OS docking station utility. Archimedes computers were popular in Great Britain because they were adopted in Schools of all grades. Young Amiga users (there were 1,500,000 Amigas sold in the United Kingdom) spotted docks on Archimedes at school and asked for it on Amiga also. Various launch bars or docking utilities were born as 3rd party hobby utilities (many examples of early docking software for Amiga are still hosted in Aminet official net repository of all Amiga free software, in the "Utility" directory) and then Amidock was officially integrated in AmigaOS since version 3.9.

Directory Opus was a file utility program. When this software was released, the popular Amiga magazines proclaimed that it was the most important software ever released for the Amiga and "should be built into the operating system". Directory Opus went on to create a "replacement OS" for Workbench which overlaid itself upon the system. It started as a file manager, and then became a complete desktop replacement for AmigaOS alternative to official Workbench.

Much shareware and free software was written for the Amiga and could be obtained via the Fred Fish disk series or from the Aminet software archive.

Because the custom chipset shares RAM (and therefore the memory bus) with the CPU, the CPU's throughput increases measurably if the display is disabled. Some processor-intensive software, such as 3D renderers, would disable the display during calculation in order to gain speed.

[edit] Emulation

Main article: Emulation on the Amiga

During the years, Amiga was able to emulate other platforms or game machines, or to run directly a vast range of other operating systems. Noteworthy are:

[edit] Commercial

Medusa (Atari ST emulator), Fusion (Macintosh Emulator), AMax and AMax II, (Macintosh), GO64 (first Commodore C64 emulator), Transformer and PCTask (it was an Intel 8088 emulator, all software based, capable to emulate Intel PC based platforms ranging from PC XT 4,7 and 7 MHz on Amiga 500, up to 80486 running at 12 MHz on Amiga 4000 and other accelerated Amigas), A64 Package (C64), Amiga BBC Emulator (Acorn BBC emulator)

[edit] Freeware

Atari ST Emulator (AtariST), Hatari (Atari ST and STE), Basilisk II (Macintosh) classic, Frodo (C64), PSXE (Sony PlayStation), Hu-Go! (PC Engine, TurboGrafx-16), FunnyMu (Creativision, Funvision, Wizzard), AmiArcadia (Arcadia 2001, VC 4000, TVGC), etcetera.

VICE emulator it is modular based and capable to emulate all 8-bit machines made by Commodore: C64 (a patch of VICE it is capable to emulate also C64dtv), C128, PET including CBM II version (but excluding "non-standard" features of SuperPET 9000), Plus4, VIC-20, etcetera.

[edit] Games

Main article: Amiga games

Games were an obvious application for the Amiga hardware, and thousands of games were produced. It was common for games to be produced for multiple formats in the days of the Amiga. For example, a game might be produced simultaneously for Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and so on. Since the Amiga hardware was the most advanced of all, the games were usually developed on an Amiga, and the Amiga version would be the "gold standard" of the bunch.[citation needed]

[edit] Demos

Main article: Amiga demos

The Amiga was a focal point for the "demo scene". The Amiga thrived on public domain, freeware and other not-for-profit development. The demo scene spearheaded development in multimedia programming techniques for the Amiga, such that it was de rigueur for the latest visual tricks, soundtrackers and 3D algorithms from the demo scene to end up being used in computer game development.

[edit] Piracy

Because the Amiga was one of the first game oriented computers to feature a built-in floppy disk drive, which allowed for easy copying, it was also the scene of much software piracy. Many of the arguments pertaining to software piracy, intellectual property rights in software, the open-source movement, and so on, were well-developed in the Amiga scene by the early 1990s. It was not unusual for a demo group to be openly involved in software piracy.

Several anti-piracy measures were introduced during the Amiga's reign. One was the practise of distributing software on disks that contained secret "keys" on high-numbered tracks, which were officially unused. The Amiga disk drive officially only read tracks 0-79 from a double-density disk, but in reality it could easily read tracks 80 through 82. Official disk-imaging software would ignore these tracks, so that a duplicate of a boxed disk would not contain the key and the software would not work. A similar technique involved writing to sectors of the disk that would not normally be used. However, special copy software called "nibble" copiers appeared, which could exactly reproduce any disk an Amiga could read.

Publishers therefore turned to other methods. Hardware dongles were occasionally used for high-end software. An example would be AmigaHASP, used to protect Rashumon and was sold by HarmonySoft to Aladdin Systems. Some software manufacturers would force a user to type a word from a particular page number and line number of the manual, meaning that successfully pirating software included photocopying a large quantity of text. Sometimes the text from which the key was chosen was designed so that photocopiers would produce illegible copies, meaning that pirates had to retype or handwrite the text, or else give up.

These and other schemes lead to pirates "cracking" software by altering a copy of the code bypassing the copy protection completely. There was not a protection scheme that was not eventually broken. One almost exception was the scheme on the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair which became the holy grail of crackers Worldwide. Eventually it was released in a modified format that circumvented the copy protection.

Piracy has been cited as a reason for the death of the Amiga, however, piracy was just as prolific on other platforms. For example many games for the ZX Spectrum could be copied using nothing more than an ordinary cassette recorder, leading to a massive culture of playground game trading - that machine however lived a long and fruitful life nonetheless. The same happened with C64 again with cassettes, or with PC software copied on floppy disks by organized piracy, or finally, in more recent ages, it happened with PlayStation I and the enormous success it had due to the diffusion of pirated CD games even diffused as ISO images on early pirate sites on internet together with PC software. There was a vast amount of Amiga software available in the marketplace and Commodore's mis-marketing of the machine is well documented as the reason for its own demise.

[edit] "Decrunching"

A single frame of a typical decrunching screen.

The Amiga's floppy disk drive allowed 880 kilobytes on a single disk, which was comparable to the memory of most Amigas (usually 512 kilobytes, often 1 megabyte). In order to increase the yield, the Amiga was one of the first computers to feature the widespread use of compression/decompression techniques. Also, the disk drive had a slow transfer rate, such that using processor-based decompression could actually lead to faster loading times than loading uncompressed data from disk. Early implementations of decompression code would write rapidly varying values to a video display register, causing the screen's scan lines to break into multiple segments of colourful noise, which would become finer as the decrunching neared the end. This effect was psychedelic and very easy to implement, so it stuck; it was pioneered on the Commodore 64. The use of "decrunching" became so ubiquitous that the effect was a standard. The effect was commonly seen in pirated games or demos.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Aminet tree, Aminet Statistics
  2. ^ WHDload site download section reports that this program supports actually 1991 games (and it is far from creating a complete list of all Amiga games).
  3. ^ Lemon Amiga (a program that adds MAMElike interface to WinUAE Amiga emulator) reports in its statistics window section 3453 known Amiga games.
  4. ^ Obligement France reported in January 2009 a list of 13,528 known Amiga Games, as divided in 12,416 original games, 953 games extensions or data disks for original games, 125 level editors or game editors for existing games, 34 loaders to let Amiga run some games created on other platforms.
  5. ^ Ars Technica: '"A history of the Amiga, part 4: Enter Commodore"', By Jeremy Reimer. October 21, 2007
  6. ^ Existing AmigaLike Operating System are AmigaOS, AROS, MorphOS
  7. ^ Transformer Emulation Software article page at PC Museum of Brantford (South Western Ontario, Canada) online site
  8. ^ Interview by Jim Sachs in March 2009, from Amiga Polish Portal (Polskim Portalu Amigowym)
  9. ^ Jim Sachs presents himself on site of SereneScreen Aquarium screensaver program
  10. ^ Review of ProWrite on Compute! Magazine, issue 88, September 1987
  11. ^ Chronology of Amiga Computers at pctimeline.info
  12. ^ Advertising from Wordperfect on InfoWorld Magazine, issue 30, January 21, 1987, page 34 (retrieved from Google Books)
  13. ^ Brief history of Wordperfect at Cunningham & Cunningham Inc., object oriented programming consultancy firm based in Portland, Oregon, USA <http://c2.com/>, members of Wordperfect Universe User Group

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