Software

Last updated 981226

[GRAPHICS TOOLS] [MUSIC/SOUND] [UTILITIES] [GAMES]

GRAPHIC TOOLS

CandyFactoryPPC

One of the best program's available for PowerUP Amiga's. Most Graphics on this site was created with the help of CandyFactory. Candy Factory allows you to create great logotypes within seconds and it's VERY easy to use.

Problems

No problems on gfx cards.
On AGA you have to run the NewWPA8 otherwise it crashes and you get strange results.
More about this in the manual.

CandyFactoryPRO

CandyFactoryPRO is the commercial version of CandyFactory (It's rather cheap though). It is much better than the original and now supports antialias and textures, and it's even faster than the previous version. The antialias makes the images much better. Also you can now use any CG-Font to create a logotype direct in the program (the CD contains loads of CG-fonts). It loads images in 50 different graphicformats. This software really shows of what the PPC-chip can do.

Problems

There is a few small bugs, but nothing that is PPC related AFAIK.

PPaint

A very good paint package that follows the tradition of DeLuxePaint (but much faster), and it is very cheap too. There is a Plug-in that uses PPC. This Plug-in uses the PPC instead of the normal Amiga blitter. And it's a lot faster than the standard blitter in AGA/ECS.

Problems

Sadly it seems very unstable on my system (latest ppc.library). If anyone have suggestions why, please email me. The latest PPC plugin on Aminet is supposed to be stable, but not for me :(
Christian Nyl�n (at Syscom - a Swedish P5 dealer), said that his problems with PPaint disappeared when he installed a CyberVisionPPC.

WildFirePPC

This is an effects, image processing package for animations and still images. It can output the animations in different formats inCluding MPEG. The effects are very fast (on a 233 mhz 604e), and really spectacular. I've only tried the unregistered shareware version, but it's great. The unregistered version puts wildfire G. every image it creates. It has been released commercially now so I don't know if you can register it anymore. It's great for making transitions between animations.
It takes a while until you get used to the user interface, but when you do it's easy.

Problems

No problems with the unregistered version. And hopefully not with the Commercial version either.

Tornado3D

Wow.. version 2.0 of Tornado3D is really fast on PPC. Most images renders within a minute. And the photorealistic previews are great. Tornado is like a mix between Lightwave and Imagine. It has lots of nice features including soft particles and geometric lights. If you're into 3D graphics and have a PPC-card this is a must have. The rendering engine creates great pictures.

Here is an example of the speed increase. The rendered image was a tank object in a misty landscape. (The tank object is approx 2MB) The image was rendered without the use of Darkroom. I didn't use this since it still uses the 68k.

604e/233 mhz: 45.8 s
68040/25 mhz: 1069.8 s (17 min 50 s)

SpeedUP (PPC/68k): 23.35 times faster than the 68040

Here is a small mpeg anim of the Tankobject.

Problems

Sadly the current release suffers from a few bugs, and it has crashed a few times. One of the worst bugs makes Tornado hang when you load a previously saved project from disk. You can get around this by loading the project in a texteditor, and remove the lines from the line with EXTENDED to the line with Addobject (Don't remove the line Addobject though). Then it's no problem to load the project.

ElasticDreams

Elastic Dreams is an image manipulation software. You can wrap images in realtime and the results can be really amazing. Sadly I don't think it's possible to morph two images like with Morphplus or Cinemorph. Even though the program uses the PPC, I think it feels a bit slow :(

Problems

Solid as a rock.

Fantastic Dreams

Fantastic Dreams is the sequel to Elastic Dreams. I've only tried the demo but it seems much faster and this time you can morph two images. The also looks better than before. You can create a good morph in less than a minute. Very nice PPC-software.

Problems

No crashes.

Frogger

Frogger is a MPEG1/MPEG2 video player that is quite fast but not as fast as IsisPPC, it displays the mpeg video stream on workbench and only in 8bit. But it gives very good quality even though it's just 8 bit. It doesn't support sound.

Problems

Never crashed for me.

IsisPPC

IsisPPC is a very fast Mpeg video player with sound support (AHI) and high quality output. You can also view VideoCD's with IsisPPC. You'll need a CD (of course) with support for VideoCD's. Most SCSI CDROM's are supported, if you have a new (>24X) IDE CDROM it might work if you use the MMC driver.

Problems

Very Unstable! The latest version is a little bit better. Doesn't work to good with Picasso96, strange colors on my GVP Spectrum. :(

CreateMPEG

This is a very fast MPEG video encoder. On my 233 Mhz PPC it encodes more than 1 frame/sec. The input images must be in either YUV, YUV-split or PPM. There are convertors to this imageformats on Aminet. YUV-Split can be created with ImageFX. The GUI is quite straight forward and easy to use.

Problems

Never crashed.

MUSIC/SOUND TOOLS

Amiga AMP

This is one of the best MPEG audio players (mp2/mp3) for PPC using ppc.library. It has a skin feature that allows you to use the skin from WinAMP. It also has a realtime spectrum graph that looks very nice. The spectrum graph requires OS3.1.
The latest version of AmigaAMP (v2.3) requires ppc.library v46+.

Problems

Earlier versions of AmigaAMP had problems with interrupted sound when moving windows.
This is cured now, and it works flawlessly on my system.

MusicIn v1.4

This is a mp2/mp3 encoder. The sound/song you want to encode must be in WAV or AIFF. The program is cli-based, but you can download a GUI for it here. This program should be on the CD you got with your PowerUp-card.

Problems

I never had any problems with this one.

Mpega.libraryPPC

This is a mpeg audio decoder library that is used by many mpeg audio decoders. The sound output is very good. And there is loads of software that uses it.

Problems

I have strange lockups when programs uses mpega.library (the PPC version), and I don't know why. If anyone have any suggestions please email me.

UTILITIES

RC5-64PPC

This is the PPC client for cracking RC5-64 keys and it's very fast, on my 604e/233 mhz it cracks about 750kkeys/sec. This is the perfect program to have running in the background. If you're not cracking keys yet then now it's the time to start, and join the Amiga RC5 team. We are currently on the 7th place, we got past the win32 team a few weeks ago. And if more PowerUP users join we will soon be on 6th place. Since the PowerUP card is a multiprocessing card you can use one client on the 68k side and one on the PPC side cracking even more keys. If you have a 060 it cracks about 110 kkeys/sec. There is a nice GUI for the RC5-64 clients it's called Myzar. Get it now.

Problems

Some people have noticed that the PPC clients speed drops when you start the 68k client. The solution is quite simple, just check that the PPC client have higher priority than the 68k client. Good priority values for the clients are:

68k: priority -20
PPC: priority -19

With these priorities they don't interfere with the rest of the system.

LhaPPC

This is a PPC version of Lha, it's rather slow though. Standard 68k lha is faster on a 68060 than LhaPPC is on a 233 mhz 604e. This is due to a few things, first of all the 68k version is highly optimized in assembler while the LhaPPC version is a Unix port. Secondly lha loads and saves data frequently which means loads of context switches.

Problems

No problems (except for the speed issue)

Blizkick

This is a Maprom tool, that allows you to put your kickstart in fast-mem. It supports CyberstormPPC/BlizzardPPC and most other Phase5 boards. It includes lots of patches, for example a patch that speeds up IDE-transfers and lots of other handy stuff.

Problems

Earlier versions had problems with BlizzardPPC's but that is corrected now, and it works great.

ZipPPC

This is a zip and unzip program. Good to have when you come across zipped files on internet.

Problems

No problems!

TurboPrint7 (with PPC-support)

TurboPrint v7.01 replaces the standard printerdrivers with it's own fast routines. It support 24bit printing (Workbench only allows 12bit=4096 colors), and it supports most of the newest printers including the Canon, Epson and H&P range. The PPC support speeds up the program when you're printing pictures. If you have a good printer you really need this :)

Problems

No problems at all.

GAMES

QuakePPC

There are a few different PPC versions of Quake, the best and fastest one is called QuakePPC v10. This version has Network support, mouse support and works just great. You have to buy the original Quake (preferably from Clickboom) from the original you'll need the pak0.pak and pak1.pak and put these two files in ID1 directory in your Quake dir.

With the latest version you can use the standard stacksize. You should raise the buffer value of the partition you'll run Quake from "type addbuffers 3000" this is not necessary but Quake will load much faster. If you want a start script click here. Put the start script in your Quake dir.

Problems

Some users have had troubles getting FastQuake to run the first time. You have to enter the screenmode ID (You can use the program GetModeID to find out the ID of your prefered screenmode) in the config.cfg file in the ID1 dir. Add this line in the config.cfg file scrmode {screenmodeID}. Remeber that you have to start Quake and quit it again before the new screenmode will be used.

When you have quake running you can change screenmode by typing scrmode {screenmode ID} in the console. Remember that you have to quit and start quake again before the new screenmode will be used.

If you want you can get my settings file for Quake running on CGFX AGA click here Put this file in the ID1 dir.

MamePPC

M.A.M.E (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a great emulator which emulates lots of arcade games which you can download from the internet. This includes classics like Silkworm, Bubble Bobble, Donkey Kong, 1942, 1943 and so on. Very good speed. On my 233 mhz card the speed is just great, and on the 166 mhz card for the A1200 it works very well. You can find games for MAME on the following adresses:

GameQuest
MAME ROMS
Top 25 Emulation sites
Emulation Excitement - Just Great!!!

Problems

It sometimes hangs if you play a game, quit, and start another game again, but overall it's stable.

Questions, Suggestions etc. Press here to send an email

My configuration: (Machine used for testing)
A3000 with CyberstormPPC (604e/233mhz and 040/25mhz)
Kickstart v3.1
GVP Spectrum with Picasso96 v1.42
32MB RAM on the CyberstormPPC and 12MB RAM on the motherboard
Scala MD100 (also called Peggy+) MPEG hardware decoder
ppc.library v46.19

Also tested on:
A1200 with BlizzardPPC (603e/166mhz and 68040/25mhz)
BlizzardVision
32 MB RAM
Kickstart v3.0 (Softkicked to 3.1)
Latest Flashupdate (v46.21)

Last updated 981226