EnigmA Amiga Run 1998 July/EnigmA AMIGA RUN 29 (1998)(G.R. Edizioni)(IT)[!][issue 1998-07 & 08].iso/earcd/ppaint64/faq.txt

Text File | 1998-06-17 | 35KB | 680 lines

 Personal Paint Frequently Asked Questions

 The following part was copied from the Amiga FAQ (Frequently Asked
 Questions) section on the Cloanto web site. For an updated version of
 this document, please refer to <http://www.cloanto.com/amiga/faq.html>.
 If you have a question which is not answered here, please refer to the
 Cloanto web site at <http://www.cloanto.com>.


 Upgrades

 Can I upgrade my copy of Personal Paint to the latest version?

 Yes. All commercial versions of Personal Paint can be upgraded to the
 latest version at a special price. A special upgrade offer from this
 version of Personal Paint to the latest version is available in the
 ReadMe.txt file, contained in the same directory as this text. Personal
 Paint included with the Personal Suite, and the Personal Paint bundles
 which are part of the Computer Combat and Amiga Magic packs can also be
 upgraded. All of these packages have a serial number on the software
 which must be indicated when ordering the upgrade. There are no other
 formalities: only indicate the serial number of the current version of
 Personal Paint when ordering the upgrade. The serial number can be found
 on the disk label for packages manufactured by Cloanto, on the inside
 cover of CD-ROMs like the Personal Suite and Personal Paint, or on the
 registration card for bundle packs and some other packages manufactured
 under license. Demonstration versions, free samples and cover disk issues
 of Personal Paint (which have no serial number) cannot be upgraded. The
 Kara Collection contains a free upgrade to Personal Paint 6.4 (and not
 the full program), but the serial number of the The Kara Collection
 itself cannot be used to upgrade to a higher version of Personal Paint:
 to upgrade again, please use the old Personal Paint serial number. Each
 serial number can be used to upgrade to a specific new version only
 once.


 Do all dealers and distributors who carry Personal Paint also offer the
 upgrades?

 No, because the upgrade procedure involves some additional overhead for
 the organizations handling it. The largest distributors of Cloanto
 products also sell Personal Paint upgrades. In particular, companies like
 Schatztruhe and Software Hut (see the Amiga Distributors section on the
 Cloanto web site) accept orders via mail, telephone, fax and E-mail,
 accept credit cards and ship upgrades worldwide.


 How much does the upgrade cost?

 Please contact our Distributors directly (contact information is
 available at http://www.cloanto.com/amiga/). Depending on your location,
 they will be happy to specify the exact upgrade and shipping costs. An
 upgrade of the Personal Paint software (main program, I/O libraries,
 blitting libraries, Rexx scripts and user interface languages) from
 version 7.0 to version 7.1 is available at no cost in the Amiga Download
 section of the Cloanto web site (it does not upgrade cover disk
 version).


 User Interface

 The "Pull-Down" and "Pop-up" options are shadowed. Why?

 These user interface features were introduced with Personal Paint 7, and
 are implemented in the "personal_req.library", which is used by Personal
 Paint, as well as by other Cloanto programs. Personal Paint 7 contains
 and installs the new library (in the local "libs" directory). If,
 however, an older version of the library is in use when Personal Paint 7
 is run, then the menu items associated to the new features remain
 shadowed. To correct this, terminate the other programs using the old
 library, force a "FlushLibs" (type "Avail FLUSH" in the Shell) and
 restart Personal Paint. You can safely replace the libraries used by
 other programs with the newer one, which is compatible with previous
 versions.


 I want to use NewIcons for my image icons, but the NewIcons menu item is
 shadowed. What can I do?

 This feature requires the "newicon.library", which is available from the
 Internet as well as from other free distribution sources such as Aminet
 CD-ROMs.


 Why do some user interface add-ons have no effect on Personal Paint?

 In Personal Paint, there are different contexts in which the available
 palette colors can change, at which parts of the user interface have to
 be redrawn in consideration of the new environment. Because the system
 functions that handle the drawing of certain user interface details like
 gadgets and borders do not support dynamic change of palette colors and
 drawing pens, Personal Paint has to use its own code to render many user
 interface objects. This means that, for example, if you have a tool like
 "CycleToMenu", it has no effect on Personal Paint (which, by the way,
 provides equivalent functionality through a specific option).


 Why doesn't Personal Paint use the system Locale library for the
 localization of the user interface?

 Personal Paint was already multilingual before this component was added
 to the operating system, so this was not an option. By using plain ASCII
 files, we give users full access to the user interface strings and
 shortcuts. Being able to make small or big changes with a standard text
 editor is in general very appreciated. Personal Paint uses the
 locale.library for other things, such as detecting the system default
 language when the program starts.


 Speed and Memory

 Does Personal Paint use the FPU? Do you have custom versions of Personal
 Paint for the different 680x0 and PowerPC microprocessors?

 Yes, Personal Paint detects and uses the FPU (floating point unit, part
 of optional mathematical processor hardware), if present, to do things
 like rotating objects. However, most calculations in a graphics package
 like this are done using integer mathematics rather than floating point
 functions. Therefore, a FPU has no impact on overall performance.
 Personal Paint, which ships in a single executable version, is also
 already optimized for different microprocessors. Critical parts are
 optimized for execution within the cache of a 68020+. Regarding other
 microprocessors, such as the 68040/60, it should be kept in mind that the
 major performance boost comes from the improved speed and efficiency of
 the newer microprocessors, and not from new instructions. We recompiled
 Personal Paint for these microprocessors, but noticed that there was no
 perceivable speed improvement. Indeed, it appears that having different
 versions of Personal Paint optimized for the various CPUs would in part
 increase user satisfaction. However, this mainly psychological advantage
 is challenged by a reality in which we have to do considerable
 maintenance, support and testing for each version which we ship, and
 which we want to be as reliable as possible. On the other hand, as you
 probably know, in Personal Paint 7 some of the most performance-critical
 code is now in external libraries, which can easily be replaced with
 versions compiled for different CPU and blitter architectures.
 Recompilation of code for a PowerPC processor rather than a 68K CPU which
 would otherwise have to be emulated does indeed provide significant speed
 advantages. While our default Amiga reference CPU remains the 68000, we
 are working with various emerging Amiga architectures, and have included
 different 68K and PowerPC versions of the main program and its libraries
 on the Personal Paint 7.1 CD-ROM. Some of these are also available in the
 Download section.


 On my Amiga, Personal Paint 7 is slower than the previous version. Is
 this right?

 No, and it can easily be corrected by changing some settings. Personal
 Paint 7 introduces for the first time support for different CPUs (68K,
 PowerPC, emulators, etc.) and blitter logic through external libraries.
 The program itself is more refined than the previous version, and is
 therefore faster. If you notice a performance degradation, you are most
 likely using a library which is causing some functionality to be
 emulated. For example, blitting on a 68020 Amiga is at least 50% slower
 if the 68K blitting libraries are used instead of the Agnus blitter
 library. Obviously, this setting is not recommended, although it may be
 automatically selected by the program if, for example, it detects that
 the host graphics system does not store bitmaps in a type of RAM
 accessible by the Amiga blitter. Please check the instructions included
 with the software, and the newest libraries available in the Download
 section.


 Why is image processing with some true color programs faster than with
 Personal Paint's palette-based image processing?

 One aspect that many graphics enthusiasts do not immediately appreciate
 is that palette-based graphics is much more difficult, in complexity and
 computation, than true color graphics. It comes natural to think that "It
 uses less memory, so it must be simpler and faster..." The palette-based
 algorithms of Personal Paint are very advanced, but still, whenever for
 example the programs does some processing on a pixel, it must first look
 up the value of that pixel in the palette, then modify the value, and
 then, for that new color, either search the palette for the most similar
 color entry available, or apply some type of dithering. This must be done
 for each pixel. In true color graphics, instead, all a program needs to
 do is to directly access and modify the pixel color value. If you
 consider that Personal Paint allows for real time editing of
 palette-based graphics on a plain 68000 computer, you can better
 understand what an achievement this is. Image processing in Personal
 Paint has another difference, compared to some other programs. All image
 processing effects in Personal Paint can be edited by the user and are
 interpreted on the fly during execution. Other programs have most effects
 hard-coded, maybe even in optimized machine language code. While Personal
 Paint's effects are faster than those of some other programs, they could
 indeed be even faster if we added some hard-coded effects.


 I have 20 Mbytes of Fast RAM, 1 Mbyte of Chip RAM and a graphics board:
 Why does Personal Paint still use some of my precious Chip RAM?

 Only Amiga makes it possible... Two crucial parts of the Amiga system
 require bitmap data to be stored in Chip RAM: the original (Agnus)
 blitter chip, and the Graphics library. Personal Paint uses both. By
 using its own virtual memory functions, Personal Paint limits the use of
 Chip RAM to the objects currently being processed (for example, graphics
 environments, brushes and animation frames other than the current one can
 be stored in Fast RAM, or even on disk). If you look at the documentation
 included with the program and with the blitter libraries available in the
 Download section, you will see that Personal Paint 7 can work without
 using Chip RAM for its bitmaps. This is done in two steps: first, a
 blitting library not using the Agnus blitter must be selected (turn off
 "Settings/Graphics/Amiga Blitter" in Personal Paint); second, all
 functions of the Graphics library which require Chip RAM must be replaced
 with compatible functions which can work on Fast RAM. The original Amiga
 graphics.library does not support this, but some of the newer third-party
 replacement libraries (e.g. original CyberGraphX from version 40.100
 upwards, with NOCHIPSCREEN and PLANES2FAST active) do. Click here for
 additional information.


 I disabled the Amiga Blitter option, but Personal Paint still seems to
 store some bitmaps in Chip RAM.

 Your graphics system probably does not provide for full graphics.library
 functionality in Fast RAM. Personal Paint would normally detect such an
 environment automatically. The use of Fast RAM for all bitmaps can
 however also be forced by setting the PBlit_ChipMem environment variable
 to No. Manually setting this variable to No can be dangerous: if the
 graphics system does not provide full functionality for bitmaps in Fast
 RAM, then the system may crash, or Personal Paint functions like the
 Rectangle and pixel Freehand tools, among others, may not work properly.
 In general, make sure that you have the latest Personal Paint program
 file and blitting libraries (available in the Download section), and that
 your graphics system replaces the original Amiga graphics.library in a
 way that all bitmap operations can be performed in Fast RAM. If you are
 using CyberGraphX, make sure that the NOCHIPSCREEN and PLANES2FAST
 CyberGraphX settings are active (=1), and that you are using at least
 CyberGraphX version 40.100. Please note that some CyberGraphX
 "compatible" systems may have higher version numbers but still not
 provide a fully Fast RAM-compatible graphics.library replacement. As an
 additional step, useful with certain RTG drivers, you may want to
 completely remove all original Amiga monitor files from the system (they
 are stored in "Devs/Monitors", from where they can be moved to
 "Storage/Monitors"), leaving only the modes associated to the drivers
 providing support for bitmaps in Fast RAM, and also disable the Amiga ROM
 video modes by switching off "Settings/Graphics/15 kHz Video" in Personal
 Paint.


 I am running Personal Paint on an Amiga with very little RAM. Are there
 any tricks to minimize the use of RAM? How can I know exactly how much
 free RAM is available for use?

 If you are installing the floppy disk edition of Personal Paint to a hard
 disk, make sure that you activate the "Decompress installed program
 files" installation option. On the floppy disk version, Personal Paint is
 compressed, and because of this it temporarily uses more RAM during load.
 To get the maximum possible amount of RAM for Personal Paint, boot from a
 default Workbench, with no utilities or commodities. Disable, or reduce
 to a minimum, the buffers and cache RAM assigned to floppy disks, hard
 disk partitions and other devices. Set the Workbench screen to the
 smallest possible size, using only two colors. The memory indication on
 the Workbench title bar is not very useful, as it does not account for
 memory fragmentation. If you need to know how much memory is available
 for bitmaps, for example, type "Avail" in the Shell, and see the
 "Largest" fields. Personal Paint's Memory Information requester provides
 both accurate memory information, and options to flush certain types of
 buffers. Section 11.1 of the User Guide lists several other suggestions.


 Animation

 Does animation require double-buffering, and what exactly is
 double-buffering?

 All native Amiga screen modes support double-buffering, which is a
 combination of hardware features and software functionality. Officially,
 on the Amiga, animation without double-buffering is not supported, but
 Personal Paint can do it nevertheless. This is especially useful, for
 example, to work with 256-color animations on older Amigas that do not
 support these screen depths, and using a display card that does not
 support double-buffering. Personal Paint can create and play animations
 even in screen modes which do not support double-buffering, although more
 complex animations might run more smoothly in double-buffering screen
 modes. We have determined that most third-party display cards would
 support some form of double-buffering in hardware. Unfortunately, in most
 cases the graphics drivers supplied with these cards do not provide
 double-buffering functionality. When creating animations in
 non-double-buffered modes, please keep in mind that in the IFF ANIM
 format, information on the default screen mode for the animation must be
 stored with the file. Personal Paint stores the Display ID of the current
 screen mode. If this is a non-double-buffering mode, some older players
 may fail to play the animation, especially if no other screen modes with
 the required number of colors are available on the target machine.
 Personal Paint displays a warning message to remind you of this, but the
 message does not indicate an error. For additional information on
 associating screen modes with your artwork, please refer to the document
 "Personal Paint for Authors" in the tutorial section.


 Once I have an animation, how do I copy or cut part of it to create an
 anim-brush?

 Click three times on the Define Brush tool (until a "+" sign appears).
 Sections 3.1.6 and 6.9 of the User Guide.


 Is there a way to automatically paste all frames of an anim-brush to
 consecutive animation frames?

 Yes, it works that way if <Caps Lock> on the keyboard is on when you
 paste. Make sure that there are at least as many frames in the animation
 as there are frames in the anim-brush. Section 6.8 of the User Guide.


 I experimented with fade-in, fade-out and multiple palettes, but the
 resulting animations tend to "flicker" whenever there is a palette
 change. Any suggestions?

 This usually happens in screen modes that do not support
 double-buffering, as well as in some particular combinations of hardware
 and software. Yes, we do have a few suggestions to correct this. The
 problem which you describe happens because for a brief moment the old
 frame is displayed with a new palette. In these cases, try to split the
 change in two frames. For example, let's assume that you wish your
 animation to start with a black frame, and slowly fade-in. We always
 recommend not to use an "all black" palette for the first frame, as this
 can make editing difficult. For the first frame, use a standard palette,
 having for example black as the first entry. Leave the frame completely
 black. Beginning with the second frame, you can already put the image as
 you want it to appear after the fade-in sequence, only that this time the
 palette would be completely black. Use the Storyboard to create
 intermediate frames, progressively revealing the fully-colored frames
 starting from the third frame.


 Is there a way to remap all frames of a multi-palette animation to a
 single palette?

 Yes, but it requires two steps. A "single palette" remap mode is
 activated by pressing <Shift> when requesting a color-reduction. In order
 to color-reduce an animation, the number of colors must first be
 increased ("Project/Image Format/Colors"), and then reduced again.
 Section 6.9 of the User Guide.


 Tips & Tricks

 I only have 64 levels of color accuracy on my graphics board. Is there
 any way of achieving a proper 24-bit palette?

 Yes: set REDBITS, GREENBITS and BLUEBITS to 8 in the "Startup_1.set"
 settings file. Section C.3 of the User Guide.


 Is it possible to change the Default Tool for the file that gets saved to
 something else, a picture viewer for instance?

 Of course: Personal Paint takes this data from a reference icon stored in
 the local "PPaint_Icons" drawer. Just change that icon. There is one for
 pictures, one for animations, etc. Alternatively, you can leave the
 preset "PPView" Default Tool, and reprogram PPView to use a viewer of
 your choice by using SetPPView ("Utilities" drawer).


 The Edit Palette requester contains only a row of colors. Instead of
 scrolling this row, can I see and access all colors at once?

 It was not possible to fit an extended color palette and the palette
 requester in the smaller screen resolutions. However, even when the Edit
 Palette requester is displayed, you can still select and pick colors both
 from the image and, most importantly, from the palette which is displayed
 under the tool bar.


 Troubleshooting

 Personal Paint sometimes opens a screen in a mode which my monitor cannot
 display. Can this be changed?

 Yes. Personal Paint queries the system Display Database to determine the
 best available screen mode when it starts, when the display settings are
 changed, and when an image is loaded. In theory, the system should
 neither contain information on screen modes that cannot be displayed, nor
 allow the use of such screen modes. Such a condition, if present, should
 be corrected by removing any inappropriate Monitor files. In general,
 even if you have a third-party display card which is fully supported by
 your monitor, and unless you explicitly remove the original Amiga Monitor
 entries, Personal Paint may still prefer some original Amiga screen modes
 because they provide a better color resolution, for example (the AGA chip
 set supports 24-bit palettes, whereas some display cards do not). Look at
 the monitor files in "Devs/Monitors": if there are any screen modes that
 are not supported by your hardware, move them to "Storage/Monitors". Some
 Amiga systems incorporate support for some 15 kHz screen modes in ROM (an
 not in a Monitor file). If this is the case, and your monitor cannot
 display these frequencies, disable the "Settings/Graphics/15 kHz Video"
 option in Personal Paint. If the problem affects the initial screen of
 Personal Paint, so that you cannot access this menu, edit the
 "Startup_1.set" settings file with a text editor. Personal Paint also has
 a "Lock Display Mode" option ("Project/Image Format") which is very
 useful if you prefer to always use the same screen mode, regardless of
 the format and screen mode information which may be best when loading a
 new image.


 The brushes and drawing tools are not aligned with the mouse pointer.

 This is a known bug of several third-party Amiga graphics libraries. It
 affects mouse pointers (of any program) having a "hot spot" other than
 0:0 (top left of the pointer), and only on AGA systems. The result is
 that the drawing pen is not aligned with the center of the cross-hair
 pointer, for example. If you experience this problem, try and boot in ECS
 mode, or upgrade your graphics drivers.


 When I clear the screen, it doesn't get cleared behind the tool bar and
 the screen bar. Certain drawing tools also seem to have no effect in
 those regions.

 It looks like you have "Settings/Graphics/Clip" active. Turn it off.


 GIF animations using transparency created with Personal Paint leave a
 "trail" when viewed with certain browsers.

 There are two possible reasons for this, and both are related to the use
 of transparency. The first involves the Amiga IBrowse software prior to
 version 1.11, and the second appears with some PC browsers displaying
 some very specific animation sequences generated by the original release
 of Personal Paint 7.0. In general, it can be said that not all aspects of
 GIF animation, especially when transparency is used, are covered by the
 GIF89a specification. The standards in this field are set and extended by
 companies like Netscape and Microsoft, which do not always fully
 implement the specifications. If you have Personal Paint 7.0, please
 refer to the update available in the Download section
 ("AnimGIF_Update.lha"). Along with other enhancements to the GIF
 animation modules originally released with Personal Paint, the update
 offers increased compatibility with some aspects of GIF animation which
 are interpreted in different ways by different browsers. The Amiga
 IBrowse software up to version 1.1 incorrectly displays some types of GIF
 animation with transparency (to be precise: those in which the frame size
 is not constant). This can be solved by upgrading the IBrowse software.
 In general, we make one recommendation: if transparency is not necessary
 in an animated GIF, it should be disabled ("Settings/Transparency/None")
 before creating the anim-brush, or removed on existing anim-brushes
 ("Settings/Transparency/None", then "Brush/Color/New Transparency"). This
 prevents ambiguities, and can also considerably reduce the file size.


 The Storyboard window sometimes "freezes", especially when the scroll bar
 is moved very quickly.

 The Storyboard, like other parts of Personal Paint and of the Amiga
 operating system, relies on a carefully-designed balance of tasks having
 different priorities, and which run in parallel to each other.
 Third-party utilities like "Executive" change this balance. We have seen
 that while this can improve the responsiveness of some applications, it
 can also create problems with multi-tasked programs like Personal Paint.
 The Storyboard problem described here is a typical symptom of this, but
 functions like loading an animation and changing screen environment may
 also be affected. If you are using a program like Executive, make sure
 that it does not modify in any way the task priorities of Personal Paint
 and its child tasks. The task name of Personal Paint is "PPaint".


 After a time-consuming task is completed, the mouse pointer remains in
 "busy" mode.

 This may happen if the "SleepingPointers" utility is installed without
 the associated "PatchPointer" program. When both tools are installed, the
 animated pointers work just fine.


 Some Rexx scripts give an "Error 37" (Not enough memory)

 This can easily happen with scripts like "Image Catalog", which need a
 lot of memory, if the "Work Directory" is set to a device using RAM (even
 indirectly, e.g. "T:", which is usually assigned to "RAM:T"). To use the
 hard drive instead of RAM, set the path accordingly (e.g. "Work:T" or
 "PPaint:T" instead of "T:") in the initial script settings.


 Certain Rexx scripts do not seem to produce any action or result, or even
 produce an error.

 So-called "tool" scripts can only be run from within Personal Paint,
 because they need some specific interaction which is only possible from
 the program screen. If they are launched from the Workbench, they are not
 be executed. Also, some tool scripts require an entry in the
 "Startup_1.set" file (as provided by default with the software), whereas
 for non-tool scripts this entry is in general optional. Make sure that
 the script is run from the program tool bar, and that it has a matching
 entry in the program startup file.

 Due to a bug in certain versions of the Amiga operating system, Rexx
 scripts executed with a path name longer than about 70 characters may not
 be executed (a "The file does not exist" error occurs). If this is the
 case, it is necessary to either shorten some of the directory names which
 make up the path leading to the scripts, or move the Rexx scripts to a
 higher level in the directory structure.

 Personal Paint 7.0 has a small inconsistency in the Rexx interface which
 does not impair the functionality of any known scripts, but might confuse
 developers of new scripts. It only affects "tool" scripts which require
 the user to define a rectangular area on the image as part of the usage
 of that tool ("%w" and/or "%h" parameters). For these tools, unlike other
 script tools, the mouse button ("%b") parameter is passed to the script
 in the 0-2 range, instead of the standard (and documented) 1-3 range.
 This can be corrected by inserting the following piece of code in the
 part of the script which processes the "button" variable (initialized
 with "PARSE ARG ..."):

     Version 'PROGRAM'
     PARSE VAR RESULT pver'.'prev
     IF pver < 7 | (pver = 7 & prev < 1) THEN
     button = button + 1


 Do you recommend a particular procedure for debugging Rexx scripts?

 Yes, and we advise to also use it before contacting us for support issues
 related to possible problems with the macros included with Personal
 Paint:

 - Load the script in a text editor, insert a "TRACE R" instruction
 (without quotes) on a new line immediately after the first comments ("/*
 ... */") and save the script

 - Type "TCO" in a Shell window to open the Rexx Tracing Console

 - Execute the script

 - When the problem occurs, go back to the Tracing Console, open it in
 full screen mode, select all the trace output with the mouse, and copy it
 to the clipboard (with <Amiga-c>)

 - Paste the trace output in your favorite text editor or E-mail
 software.


 I experience a system crash or Software Failure during the use of
 Personal Paint. What can I do?

 Please try if this also happens booting from an original Workbench floppy
 disk. If you do not have a "clean" Workbench disk to boot from, check the
 "S:startup-sequence" and the "S:user-startup" scripts and the
 "SYS:Wbstartup" directory to see what programs are launched from there.
 Try to remove as many programs as possible, especially commodities,
 screen promotion utilities and programs using DataTypes. Disable all
 system backdrop images. Set the printer driver to a standard system
 printer driver. Check the system with a good antivirus program. If you
 have the "personal _sview_io.library" in "PPaint/libs", but you have
 doubts about the functionality of your version of the SuperView software
 (older versions are known to cause problems), also remove that library
 from "PPaint/libs". Then reboot your system and start Personal Paint as
 the first program. If you use a third-party display card, manually
 activate the "Project/Image Format/RTG" option in Personal Paint. If you
 have Enforcer, run it with the "ShowPC" option. Does the problem persist?
 If not, try to restore, one after the other, the features that had been
 disabled, and see what was causing the problem. Neither Personal Paint
 6.4 nor Personal Paint 7 have any bugs known to be able to cause a crash,
 but it remains our goal to be compatible with all configurations around,
 so whatever happens, we would like to know about it. Of course, if there
 is something unexpected in our own software, we would like to fix it
 immediately. If the software error can be traced with Enforcer, please
 send us the first few "PC*" fields which are output by Enforcer. Please
 note that the 68060 CPU is supported only by Enforcer version 37.70 or
 higher.


 Other Information

 I read that there is a scanner plug-in for Personal Paint. I am very
 interested: where can I get it, and what does it do?

 It is available from RBM Computertechnik, telephone [phone], as
 part of the ScanQuix package. This component allows you to treat scans as
 direct loads in Personal Paint, without intermediate steps (scan, save,
 load). Parameters can be set through an interface provided by ScanQuix.


 General (All Products)

 Where can I get pricing information?

 Please contact our Distributors directly (see
 http://www.cloanto.com/amiga/).


 Installation fails with an apparent filing system error.
 Some AmigaGuide links do not work.
 Selecting Retrace in an AmigaGuide document does not work.
 Some files cannot be accessed.
 The selection of a configuration icon (e.g. "English") always results in
 a "ShowPath failed returncode 22" message.

 The majority of such reports are caused by problems of the CD-ROM filing
 system being used. We recommend that another filing system be tried, such
 as the excellent and freely distributable AmiCDROM (it is included in
 most Aminet and Fred Fish collections). AmiCDROM also solves certain
 problems specific to the original software of the CDTV, CD³² and A570
 CD-ROM drive. In case of difficulties with AmiCDROM up to version 1.15,
 it is recommended to try a newer version of AmiCDROM itself (at least v.
 2.x, available under the new name "AmiCDFS"), or the CD-ROM filing system
 included from version 3.1 of the Amiga OS. Users of Asim CDFS prior to
 version 3.5 may want to contact Asimware Innovations Inc. for an upgrade
 to the latest version of the Asim CDFS.


 ARexx programs do not run, and an error message such as "RexxMast:
 Unknown command" or "ARexx server not active" appears.

 The system does not have ARexx, or the RexxMast software was not started.
 RexxMast is a program normally stored in the "System" drawer of the
 Workbench (System) disk. It is usually launched automatically from the
 Startup-Sequence, or when executing ARexx scripts with the "RX" command,
 but it can also be started manually by double-clicking on the RexxMast
 icon. On older operating systems such as 1.3, ARexx must be installed
 separately.


 When a documentation file is opened with a double-click, the
 corresponding manual appears and everything works fine, but if the file
 is opened using "drag and drop" with ToolManager and MultiView, only a
 page with AmigaDOS commands appears.

 AmigaDOS command scripts are used to make sure that the AmigaGuide
 documents are loaded in the correct language and with the correct viewing
 software depending on the computer's configuration. If these scripts
 appear on the screen as a text page instead of being executed, it means
 that the system lacks the DataType which recognizes and executes AmigaDOS
 files instead of displaying them as text. Such a DataType (the Script
 DataType) is included in most Cloanto products, and is also available in
 the Download section.


 After manual hard disk installation, a few links in certain manuals
 appear to be "broken".

 The manuals were designed to be used from the original medium or a full
 installation, where all files are available at the same time. In order to
 preserve the complex hypertext cross-references which link together
 hundreds of different text and graphics files, it is necessary to install
 the entire CD-ROM.


 Some items installed to the hard disk do not work properly if the
 original product's CD-ROM is in the drive while the system boots.

 Under certain versions of the operating system, the presence of a
 specific storage volume interferes with an Assign command trying to
 assign or reassign the same name as the storage volume (e.g. "PPaintCD").
 Remove the CD-ROM while the system boots.


 After double-clicking on a configuration icon (e.g. English, Deutsch,
 etc.) to configure a program to run without installation, some programs
 which normally run from the hard drive begin to interact with the medium
 from which the configuration was run. While this is normally acceptable,
 there may be reasons for preferring otherwise.

 The floppy disk and CD-ROM configuration procedures are designed in a way
 that they do not interfere with existing installed programs. However, the
 simple fact that the configuration scripts add some references to the
 CD-ROM in order for the software to be able to run from there may be
 undesired in some cases. All programs on the CD-ROM also run properly
 without a prior configuration of the CD-ROM (i.e. a double-click on one
 of the language icons), although in that case it is not possible to
 guarantee a consistent environment (e.g. the operating system may not
 know where to find some viewers). With this in mind, the (uninstalled)
 software can be used without selecting any of the configuration icons.


 When the medium used to run a non-installed program is removed from the
 drive, the icon remains displayed on the Workbench screen. Using other
 programs, a system requester may appear asking the user to insert the
 medium again.

 Before removing the medium (CD-ROM, floppy, etc.) from the drive,
 double-click on the Reset icon which appears on the bottom right of the
 medium's Workbench window. This cancels any references (such as an
 AmigaDOS Assign to ColorFonts on the CD-ROM) that may have been
 associated to the medium during its use.



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