Amiga software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amiga software covers a wide range of software for the Amiga computer, both productivity and games, both commercial and hobbyist. The Amiga software market was particularly active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but has since dwindled into only a hobbyist scene.
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[edit] Productivity software
The Amiga was originally supported by such prestigious software titles as WordPerfect, Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint, and Lattice C. Newtek's Video Toaster, one of the first all-in-one graphics and video editing packages, began on the Amiga. The Video Toaster was one of the few accessories for the "big box" Amigas (2000, 3000 and 4000) that used the video slot, and enabled users to turn their Amiga into the heart of an entire TV Production suite. The later addition of the Video Flyer by Newtek made possible the first non-linear video editing program for the Amiga. The Amiga made 3D raytracing graphics available for the masses with Sculpt 3D (before the Amiga, raytracing was only available for dedicated graphic workstations). Other raytracing software also included TurboSilver. The Amiga was well known for its 3D rendering capability, with many titles being added to the mix as the years went by. Some titles were later ported to Microsoft Windows and continue to thrive there, such as the rendering software Cinema 4D from Maxon, and LightWave from Newtek, which was originally part of the Video Toaster. The Video Toaster itself has even been ported to the Windows platform. Even Microsoft produced software for use on the Amiga. AmigaBASIC, an advanced BASIC software development environment, complete with an Interactive Development Environment (IDE), was written by Microsoft under contract. Most budget CGI relied on LightWave during the early 1990s, Babylon 5 being a notable TV-series rendered using LightWave.
While desktop video proved to be a major market for the Amiga; a surge of word processing, page layout and graphic software filled out the professional needs. Notable word processing programs included Excellence, Final Writer, ProWrite and Wordworth. The page layout software included Page Setter and Professional Page from Gold Disk, and PageStream by Soft-Logik. Only PageStream was ported to other platforms and continues to be developed and supported by the developers. Graphic software included vector drawing applications like Art Expression from Soft-Logik, ProVector by Taliesin, and Professional Draw from Gold Disk.
Devpac Assembler was a professional assembler program that became the de facto standard for assembly programming. It was also able to be used to program for any other Motorola 68k-based device, such as the Atari ST. It was common for programs to be jointly written for the Amiga and Atari using Devpac on the Amiga. However, since the Atari ST was closest to the 'lowest common denominator' of the two machines, programs would be tested on and built primarily for the ST.
Richmond Sound Design (RSD) created both show control and theatre sound design software which was used extensively in the theatre, theme park, display, exhibit, show and themed entertainment industries in the 1980s and 1990s and at one point in the mid 90s, there were many high profile shows at major theme parks around the world being controlled by Amigas. There were dozens at Walt Disney World alone and more at all other Disney, Universal Studios, Six Flags and Madame Tussauds properties as well as in many venues in Las Vegas including The Mirage hotel Volcano and Siegfried and Roy show, the MGM Grand EFX show, Broadway theatre, London's West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company's many venues, most of Branson, Missouri's theatres, and scores of theatres on cruise ships, amongst hundreds of others. RSD purchased used Amigas on the web and reconditioned them to provide enough systems for all the shows that specified them and only stopped providing new Amiga installations in 2000. There are still an unknown number of shows on cruise ships and in themed venues being run by Amigas.
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 overlayed itself upon the system.
Skypix, which many consider the first modern interactive online graphics-and-sound protocol, was introduced in 1987 as part of the Skyline (Atredes) BBS System. Years before the World Wide Web, Skypix for the first time allowed rich interactive graphics and sound, as well as mouse control, to be a part of the online experience, until then limited to text and ANSI graphics. Thanks to the thoughtful inclusion of the ability to write graphical programs and link them into the system, as well as the first "authoring program", Skypaint, Skypix created a large worldwide group of enthusiastic game and online application writers years before the World Wide Web made such features a common part of the online experience.
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] Mod music file format
Starting from 1987 with the release of a new generation of music programs like Soundtracker, Noisetracker, ProTracker and others such as Octamed and Oktalizer Amiga was enhanced with the creation of mod (module) audio file standard. The Mod audio standard is considered the audio format that started it all in the world of computer music.
In those times (and mainly in the period from 1987/88 to 1994/95) when Amiga audio was far superior than any other platform, PC compatible systems begun to be equipped with 8 bit audio cards inserted into 16 bit ISA bus slots. Soundtracker Module files were used in any PC computer and considered the only serious 8bit audio standard for creating music. The worldwide usage of these programs led to creation of the so-called MOD-scene which was considered part of the Demoscene. Later the PC world eventually evolved to 16 bit audio cards, and Mod files were slowly abandoned. Various Amiga and PC games such as Worms supported Mod as their internal standard for generating music and audio effects.
[edit] Speech synthesis
The original Amiga was launched with speech synthesis software, developed by Softvoice, Inc. [1] This could be broken into three main components: narrator.device, which could enunciate phonemes expressed as Arpabet, translator.library which could translate English text to American English phonemes, and the SPEAK: handler, which command-line users could redirect output to, to have it spoken.
In the original 1.x AmigaOS releases, a Say program demo was included with AmigaBASIC programming examples. From the 2.05 release on, narrator.device and translator.library were no longer present in the disks that came with a computer, but were available in the upgrade packs.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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 rigeur 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. 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, at the time there was a vast amount of software available in the marketplace and Commodore's mis-marketing of the Amiga is well documented as the reason for its own demise.
[edit] "Decrunching"
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 scanlines to break into multiple segments of colourful noise, which would become finer as the decrunching neared the end. This effect was psychedelic, very easy to implement, and impossible for any other computer's hardware, so it stuck. The use of "decrunching" became so ubiquitous that the effect was a standard, expected prelude to the start of almost any game or demo.
[edit] External links
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| Companies | Commodore International • Hyperion Entertainment |
| Computers | Amiga |
| Technology | Workbench • Intuition • AmigaDOS • ARexx • AmigaBASIC • Amigaguide • Software • Games • Demos |
| Operating systems | AmigaOS (versions) • AROS • MorphOS |
