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Amiga Forever contains numerous preinstalled high quality software packages,
all under license of the respective publishers and authors. These packages,
inclusive of documentation, are installed in the "Software" directory, on
the "Work" partition. As the 1.3 environment includes separate
documentation in a ReadMe.txt file, the following sections cover the 3.X
environment only, plus some Cloanto programs which are installed in the
"Amiga" directory at the root of the Amiga forever CD, for use on any Amiga
computer.
This chapter includes the following sections:
The ToolManager Dock
The ToolManager dock, which by default is displayed on the Amiga Forever
Workbench screen, gives quick access to the most frequently used programs.
You can press Ctrl+Tab to display or hide the ToolManager dock (e.g. after a
change of screen mode).
While the individual programs are described in more detail in the
respective guides, the following is a short reference of the preinstalled
selections.
- AWeb: opens the AWeb browser, displaying this text as its default
page.
- PPaint: opens Personal Paint. If Personal Paint is already running it
is brought to the front, otherwise it is launched. Image and animation
files can be dragged-and-dropped onto the "PPaint" button.
- TurboText: opens a new TurboText editing window. Drag-and-drop is
supported. TurboText is very useful to edit the system startup files, but
it can also be used for professional programming tasks, and even as a
binary editor.
- MultiView: opens a new instance of the system MultiView viewer, which
is capable of displaying or playing any type of multimedia object
supported by the system DataTypes, including AmigaGuide, text, graphics
and sound. This button is very useful to view graphics files without
running the full Personal Paint, to drag-and-drop AmigaGuide files which
have no icon, or in general to use MultiView as the viewer instead of
another program which may be set as the Default Tool in a data file. If no
object is dragged onto the button, a file requester is opened to select a
file.
- Shell: opens an Amiga Shell window.
- DOpus: launches Directory Opus on the Workbench screen.
- LhA->RAM: LhA and LZH archives dropped onto this button are
automatically extracted to the "LhA" directory in RAM.
- DirDiff: runs DirDiff, which is a powerful tool to scan, compare,
synchronize and replicate files.
- ScreenMode: opens the Amiga Screen Mode Preferences, from where a
screen mode can be selected for the Workbench screen. Picasso96 screens
("uaegfx") allow for palette modes with up to 256 colors, as well as
different true color resolutions. Use Ctrl+Tab to reopen the ToolManager
window, which closes automatically to allow the system to reset the
Workbench screen.
- Clown.pic: uses MultiView to open a 256-color image of a clown. This
is very useful to test the settings of a new Workbench color depth (e.g. a
256-color or and true-color Picasso96 mode) set with ScreenMode. MultiView
remaps the image as necessary, depending on the number of available
colors.
- Input: opens the System Input Preferences, which are necessary to set
the Amiga keyboard layout, among other things.
- Exchange: launches the Amiga Commodities Exchange program (keyboard
shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+F1), which gives access to the controls of different
system "commodities", many of which are preinstalled in Amiga Forever.
- ToolManager: runs the user interface from where the ToolManager dock
itself can be customized. The keyboard shortcut to hide or display the
Amiga Forever ToolManager dock is Ctrl+Tab.
- AExplorer: starts or stops the Amiga (server) side of the Amiga
Explorer networking software. This is useful if the emulation is running
with TCP/IP enabled, in which case the client side of Amiga Explorer can
run under Windows, from where it becomes possible to access all the
resources of the Amiga emulation, including RAM and the contents of ADF
and HDF disk image files. If the Windows side of Amiga Explorer ("Amiga
Explorer" icon on the Desktop) is not installed, the Amiga Forever setup
can be run again to install only Amiga Explorer. WARNING: through TCP/IP,
Amiga Explorer can be accessed from other computers, potentially giving
access to all the files which are accessible to the Amiga emulation. If
the computer running the emulation is connected to a network (e.g. the
internet), you may want to change the default password on both the Amiga
and the PC side of Amiga Explorer before selecting this button. Please
refer to the Amiga Explorer documentation for additional information.
- UAE-Control: runs UAE-Control, which is an Amiga user interface to
certain emulation settings which can be changed at run time. To exit the
emulation, select Quit (this is equivalent to switching off the Amiga). To
close UAE-Control, click on the gadget on the top left of the window. On
WinUAE, press F12 for a more complete settings window.
System Enhancements
Amiga Forever includes numerous Commodities and other enhancements to the
default Amiga OS configuration. The following is a list of the shortcuts
which may be less familiar to users of a "vanilla" Amiga OS configuration.
- Double Click: double click any part of a window border to bring
a window to the front or to the back of other windows. This functionality
is provided by the FreeWheel commodity.
- Ctrl+Double Click: hold down Ctrl and double click any part of
a window to bring that window to the front. This is handled by the
ClickToFront system commodity.
- Mouse Wheel: use the mouse wheel to either move scroll bars, or
emulate cursor key events, depending on what the application supports.
Horizontal scroll bars can be controlled by moving the pointer over them
before using the wheel. This functionality is provided by the FreeWheel
commodity.
- Ctrl+Alt+F1: opens the Commodities Exchange window, from where
all running commodities can be configured.
- Ctrl+Tab: displays/hides the ToolManager dock window. This is
useful to hide ToolManager, to bring it to the front, or to re-open it
after the system has closed the dock window following a change of screen
mode.
- Shift+Cursor Up/Cursor Down: in a Shell window, these keys can
be used to quickly select those lines from the command history which match
the part of text which has just been typed.
- Tab: in a Shell window, Tab activates auto-completion of the
current path and file name.
- Left Alt+Left Click+Drag: instructs PowerSnap to grab the text
under the mouse pointer and copy it to the clipboard. Hold Shift down to
append multiple selections. This is an OCR-like feature which also works
on graphical window content. If PowerSnap does not appear to properly snap
a line with spaces, upper case letters or numbers, you can align it
manually by selecting some lower case letters on the same line, and then
repeating the procedure with the desired text.
- Left Alt+Right Click: instructs PowerSnap to paste text from
the clipboard by simulating keyboards events. This also works with some
programs that do not support clipboard copy and paste.
Personal Paint
Personal Paint 7.1 is a powerful and intuitive paint, image
processing, animation and 24-bit printing package. Stunning effects like emboss,
water-colors, transparencies and stereograms (as in "Magic Eye") are available,
while virtual memory and blitter emulation free precious Chip RAM by using other storage
resources. Personal Paint includes support for RTG graphics cards, different file formats
(IFF, GIF, PNG, PCX, JPEG, BMP, TIM, Photo CD, C source code, DataTypes, etc.), nine
brushes, two independent working environments, multi-level Undo/Redo, animation
storyboard, Bézier curves, autoscroll painting, Internet publishing features (GIF
animations, map editor, professional color reduction, transparency and progressive
display), superior text editor, color fonts, PostScript output, screen and window grabber,
181 ARexx commands...
Personal Paint 7.1 (release "c") is preinstalled in the
"Work" partition of the emulation environment, as well as in the
"Amiga" directory of the Amiga Forever CD, so that it can be used and
installed on any Amiga. The version in the "Amiga" directory on the
CD has
some additional artwork in the "Pictures" and "Animations"
directories, which by default is not installed, to save disk space. This artwork can
always be accessed directly on the CD.
The full program documentation is included in AmigaGuide format in
the "PPaintCD.guide" file in the Personal Paint program directory, and is
accessible from the Amiga side.
The full Personal Paint 7.1 software and documentation would have
made the Online Edition of Amiga Forever too large to be practical to download. For this
reason, the Online Edition includes short tutorials instead of the full manual.
For additional information, please refer to:
AmiToRTF
AmiToRTF is a utility which can extract text from a variety of Amiga
document formats, and save data in the Rich Text Format (RTF, ".rtf" file name
suffix) or as plain text (ISO 8859-1 "ASCII", ".txt" suffix). The
resulting files can easily be loaded by the most common programs under different operating
systems. AmiToRTF was written as an Amiga Rexx script which interacts with Cloanto's
Personal Write (version 4.2 or higher) word processor, which is included and launched
automatically by AmiToRTF.
AmiToRTF can extract texts from the following file formats:
- Amiga ANSI
- Amiga IFF-FTXT
- ASCII (Amiga, DOS, Mac, Atari, CBM, C-64, 7-bit ASCII and others)
- Cloanto Personal Write (FTXT, compressed, encrypted)
- Cloanto C1-Text (FTXT, compressed, encrypted)
- PowerPacker (compressed, encrypted)
- Documents created by ProWrite, FinalWriter and Wordworth
- Unrecognized formats
The software and the full program documentation are located inside
the "Work:Software/AmiToRTF" directory in the emulation environment, or in the
"Amiga/AmiToRTF" directory on the CD. Both are accessible from any Amiga,
hardware or emulated.
For additional information, please refer to:
DirDiff
DirDiff is a powerful tool to scan, compare, synchronize and
replicate files. It was originally designed for internal use at Cloanto for backup
management and to simplify the maintenance of software master disks. Over the years, new
features were implemented, the file comparison engine was enhanced and a graphical
interface was added.
DirDiff can be used to compare (and optionally update) two disks.
Several options can be set to finely tune this process.
DirDiff can be used to copy some files from hard disk to floppy,
then use the floppy on another computer (for example at home), and from time to time
automatically move the files which have changed to whichever medium contains the older
version.
DirDiff can be used to compare bootable disks against new versions
of the Amiga Workbench disks. It can selectively compare only the files used in both
disks, skipping icon files if desired. So only messages regarding relevant files are
generated. If desired, DirDiff can upgrade the system files on work disks in the same
process.
When copying tens, or hundreds of Mbytes from one device to another,
errors are more likely to occur and pass undetected than with normal, interactive use.
Using DirDiff, at Cloanto we discovered faulty I/O configurations which caused only one or
two bytes out of 100 million to be corrupt. We now always use DirDiff after each step in
the preparation of master disks, both for floppy disks and for CDs, to make absolutely
sure that no errors have occurred. When it finds certain errors, DirDiff does an
additional check to make sure that the storage medium gives consistent results. It even
double-checks the RAM locations it uses.
DirDiff is an invaluable tool to back-up a hard disk to a slower
device, such as a magneto-optical disk, because it can copy only the files which have
changed. Results can be achieved faster and in a less resource-consuming way. To make the
process bullet-proof, the source directory can be locked, and differing files can be
force-copied from hard disk to the optical disk even if they have an older date. Files
from older backups which become unused can be deleted in the process. The combined use of
these functions can deliver identical copies at a fraction of the time a standard
"Copy" procedure would normally require.
DirDiff can detect even subtle differences between two items, such
as a directory renamed from "WBstartup" to "Wbstartup". Before DirDiff
reports that two directories are identical, it checks not only the contents, but also the
attribute bits, file comments, dates and exact names of all items.
DirDiff can scan a directory or disk and give an electronic
signature (for example "DD5-A89CE287"), derived from the contents of all files.
This short code can then be used to refer to a particular disk or product release without
detailing the entire contents. For example, two distant offices which want to verify if
they have the same version of a disk can execute DirDiff separately, and then check the
signature in a phone call taking only a few seconds. Or the signature can be used as a
reference in a licensing agreement, as a confirmation of what is being licensed.
DirDiff includes additional checksum capabilities, and features such
as clearing of unused blocks on a device (useful when it is desirable that others do not
"undelete" data on a medium which was considered safe to give away).
The software and the full program documentation are located inside
the "Work:Software/DirDiff" directory in the emulation environment, or in the
"Amiga/DirDiff" directory on the CD. Both are accessible from the Amiga
side.
For additional information, please refer to:
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