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Belgian Amiga Club - ADF Collection
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BS1 part 19.zip
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BS1 part 19
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Dutils II.adf
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1988-10-15
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KDV
---
KDV is a simple memory virus killer. It's meant to live early in the
startup-sequence file to ensure that no virus is active in memory. It will
be updated as new nasties come along.
--------------------------||---------------------------
Play
----
This doc was originally on MegaDisc 4. The Play program has been updated
since then and so have the docs. Sorry about the preliminary waffle.
Since my earliest involvement with microcomputers, sound generation has
been of great interest to me. Now with the Amiga (my 6th home computer), we
all have the tools to produce and process high quality sound effects, music
and synthesized speech.
When I took delivery of 'Perfect Sound', I was very impressed with the
whole product, and particularly the library of sound effects that are
included on the diskette provided with it. There is also a rather large
(60k) program that enables the user to digitize sound and manipulate samples
in a number of ways. While this is a useful piece of software it didn't
fulfill all of my requirements, hence 'Play'.
I wrote Play to fill the holes left by the Perfect Sound software. Play
is quite small at about 13000 bytes, and can be easily driven from Cli,
or included in the Startup-Sequence file. It can Play up to 3 sounds, IFF or
otherwise, and has a number of options to process the sample.
If Play is processing an IFF sound sample file it will extract a number
of parameters from that file and reproduce the sound accordingly, in stereo
if so digitized! Play can use a non-IFF file, regardless of its type.
It could be a dump format file, without playback rate information etc, an
executable file or any other odd file you may encounter on a disk. Play will
even play itself!
Now that I have whet your appetite let's discuss how to drive Play. Play
accepts up to 3 sample filenames as parameters. Each filename can have a set
of options also. The options are :-
'p'[num] for pause 'num' seconds before playing the next sound. p without
a num will give about 3 seconds pause.
'r'[num] for repeat this sound, this sound, this sound (get the idea!)
num specifies how many times to repeat.
'v'[num] for vary the playback rate. An IFF file has a playback imbedded
in the file, other types of files do not. If Play encounters a non-IFF
file it will default to reproducing the sound at 10000 samples/second.
That's 10000 bytes/second. My first 2 computers combined hardly had 1k
of ram between them!
The 'v' option allows you to override the playback rate. For instance
v5000 sets the playback rate to half of the usual, while v20000
doubles the playback rate.
'l'[num] for loop. This makes play loop back to either sound (and
parameters) 1, sound 2 or sound 3, although looping to sound 3 is the
same as repeat. Looping means to repeat the play command line from a
certain point. NB Control-c stops the looping.
's' for stop grovelling disables the 'Please send money' message from
appearing on the screen.
Now some examples to set you on you way.
If you have the Perfect Sound samples :-
Play yell -pv5000 chopper -pv20000 chopper -prv5000
(this plays a blood curdleing scream at half speed, pauses,
then plays a helicopter sound at twice normal speed (turbo chopper!),
pauses, then the same sound effect is played at a slower rate
repeating until you press control-c).
If you have 'Star Glider' try :-
Play sg ( this is the main file of Star Glider at around 260k. You may be
surprised to discover how much of is sounds).
Play sglider.snd
If you have 'Demolition' try :-
Play effects/titlesong -rv20000 ( Flashy isn't it! Sorry, my sick humour).
If you have 'Phalanx' try :-
Play Phalanx.sound
Play Phalanx.titlesong
If you have 'Quintette' try :-
Play qdata2 -p qdata3 -p qdata1 (nice, huh!)
N.B. Play loads the sound files into memory before playing them so that
the noise of the disk drive wont interfere. If you have expansion memory,
then all the better. Play can reproduce the sounds out of 'Fast' memory even
though the Amiga custom chips can't directly access expansion memory.
Remember sound reproduction, like graphics loves to chew up memory.
I'm sure you can find many more sounds on your favourite disks, now you
have another tool to Play with.
--------------------------||---------------------------
Whatis
------
Whatis is a tool that I have extracted from the DutilsII code. It grew
from the need to identify what certain files are, without the hassle of:
1) selecting the file
2) hex typeing it, with another keypress to specify the start of the file
3) then looking at the first few bytes to work out what it is.
Whatis does this for me. I must admit it works better in the DutilsII
environment, there you dont have to spell out the whole filename.....hmm now
if I add wildcard handling......maybe later.
Whatis can identify the following:
1) an executable file
2) an IFF picture
3) an IFF sound
4) a BASIC program
5) a protected BASIC program
6) a text file - although some odd ASCII characters may confuse it. I think
backspace is one.
I could incorporate detecting icons but they are easily identified by
the '.info' in their filenames.