- Amiga productivity software
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Amiga software and refers to any productivity software that run onAmiga line of computers.See also related articles
Amiga Internet and communications software andAmiga support and maintenance software for other information regarding software that run on Amiga.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 includedTurboSilver . 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 toMicrosoft 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. EvenMicrosoft 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".Graphics, video, design and CAD software
There exists a tremendous amount of graphic manipulation software for the Amiga. Some include;
Graphicraft ,Deluxe Paint ,Photon Paint ,Newtek TV Paint , Brilliance! (a program made upon the suggestion by the artistJim Sachs ),Aegis Image ,ArtEffects Personal Paint fromCloanto ,Photogenics ,Express Paint ,Digi Paint ,Perfect Paint .There is also a wide range of animation and video authoring software;
Aegis Animator ,Lights!Camera!Action! ,DeLuxe Video ,Disney Animation Studio , versions later than 3 ofDeluxe Paint , The Director (a BASIC-like language oriented to animation), Scala, Amiga Vision from Commodore itself,VisualFX fromClassX ,Adorage Multi Effect program fromPro DAD , Millennium fromNova Design .ImageFX , andArt Department Pro .3D rendering and animation software includes
Sculpt 3D ,TurboSilver , Aladdin 4D,Videoscape 3D , Caligari, MaxonCinema4D , Imagine,LightWave from Newtek,Vista Pro andWorld Construction Set 3D terrain rendering programs.There were also various CAD programs available for Amiga, such as
X-CAD , IntelliCAD,DynaCaDD ,MaxonCAD ,IntroCAD , and even programs to design and test electronic circuits, such asElektroCAD .There were videoediting programs for
desktop video with both linear and non linear editing with 4.2.2 capabilities as the ones from Newtek available with VideoToaster Flyer external module forVideo Toaster and just calledNLE! (Non Linear Editing), AmigaMainActor ,Broadcaster Elite ,MovieShop for the expansion Amiga cardsPAR ,VLab Motion , andVLab Pro .Comic Setter was an interesting tools to create printed comics by arranging brushes representing comic characters, joining it with background images and superimposing it the right frames and "ballons" with their own text speech and captions. It could then print in color the comics that were created.Graphic Utilities
There were many graphic utilities with peculiar features created in order to support main graphic programs. There are utilities for matte images, like
Cinematte . Cinematte utility allow the user to easily make complex photo-realistic composites of subjects that are photographed against a "bluescreen ", or green screen background. It uses the same sophisticated techniques used worldwide in motion picture technology for precise bluescreen compositing.CineMorph it is a program to automatically create morphing effects between two given original images, and create a compound third image, or even all the animation movie associated with the morphing effect.Morph Plus performed same effects as Cinemorph.Impact! createdPhysics Simulation in 3D scenes. Essence was a texture maker to apply textures on 3D surfaces of objects created by 3D tracing programs.Amiga Magic Lantern was a true color animation compressor and player for the Amiga,Pixel 3D Pro utility it was used to create models for 3D objects and save it in various 3D formats, or to transform any model object from a 3D file format to another one.Graphics applications
Amiga in the past had a stronger attitude for graphics than other PCs due to its peculiar hardware, and its multimedia chipset. The graphical chip Agnus could access directly
RAM and pilot it with DMA (Direct Memory Access) privileges, and featured BitBlitter and Copper circuits capable to move ranges of pixels on the screen and deal directly with the electronic beam of the TV set. Even if new Amigas have no embedded multimedia chipset, these computers could gain more power and perform graphics at high speed (More than original chipset of Amiga) because these new machine could useAGP graphic cards, have embedded audioAC'97 soundsystem anc could mountPCI audio cards, even some professional models. AmigaONE andPegasos II motherboards had inherited the same capabilities of AmigaOS in their new operating systems. The AmigaOS main features are small footprint, no resource consuming and no CPU stress. Also the subset of libraries dealing with graphics inherited from Amiga it is small in dimension, lightweight and performs graphics at high speed. These benefits allows the attitude of classic Amiga in graphics continuing on new machines. A new generation of graphic software was born for new Amiga machines. Hollywood is a multimedia and presentation program available for all Amigas (AmigaOS classic,AmigaOS4.0 ,MorphOS ,AROS ). It is able to load ancient Scala projects and MicrosoftPowerpoint ".PPT " files. Its moduleHollywood Designer is a modern multimedia authoring software which creates complete Amiga programs through a Visual approach at programming design, and saves executables in various formats for AmigaOS classic up to version 3.9 for68000 and 68xxx machines,WarpUP for AmigaOS classic equipped with PPC expansion cards, AmigaOS4.0 and MorphOS ELF for PPC processors, and alsoIntel X86 code for AROS. TV Paint is still a valid program and continues being used despite of its age. Programs likeCandy Factory for AOS 4.0 are designed to create special effects on images, brushes and fonts to create gorgeous internet objects and buttons used in designing web pages.Pixel image editor , formerlyPixel32 is available for MorphOS. Blender 3D is one of the bestOpen Source cross platform software. It is available also for MorphOS, and a first pre-release is running on AmigaOS 4.0 (available for AOS 4.0 developers only). Also a first pre-release ofGIMP is available on AmigaOS 4.0 through theCygnix X11 graphic engine.Vector graphics
Common widely used format for vector graphics in Amiga are EPS and IFF DR2D.It originated from the fact that Amiga was the first platform on which ran
GhostScript natively, and also IFF DR2D was the original standard for vector graphics generated by AmigaProfessional Draw .Foremost used Amiga drawing and vector graphics utilities are
Aegis Draw , ProDraw (Professional Draw ) fromGold Disk Inc. ,DrawStudio ,Art Expression ,Pro Vector , and for some basic vector graphics, also the tools ofProfessional Page andPageStream are useful. The most modern vector graphics program on Amiga is actuallyMindSpace 1.1, which is aimed mainly at design flowcharts, mindtables, UML and diagrams.SWFTools is a collection of command line programs to convert and save various raster(bitmap) image formats from and to FlashSWF vector animation format.On AmigaOS are available the widely used free distributable vector to graphics conversion facilities
Autotrace ,Potrace ,XTrace which can run also inAROS Amiga Open Source clone OS andMorphOS Amiga-Like system.The Desktop Publishing software
PageStream has a tracing utility as bundled software.Various programs can read
DXF (almost all Amiga CAD programs),EMF ,SVG ,CGM ,GEM ,WMF , an example of converting tool that reads many formats and output DR2D is the Amiga programMetaView .It exists also aSVG Datatype to support directly in the OS, on any program, the feature of loading and saving files in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format.Word Processing
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 starting from the first Amiga text program
Textcraft which was a mix between a real word processor and an advanced text editor, but capable to change page layouts, fonts, enlarge or reduce their width, change their colors and add even color images to the text.Notable word processing programs for Amiga included the then-standard
WordPerfect up to version 4.1, Shakespeare, Excellence,Final Writer ,Amiga Writer ,Scribble! ,ProWrite ,Wordworth and the littlePersonal Write byCloanto .The page layout software included
Page Setter andProfessional Page fromGold Disk , andPageStream bySoft-Logik , known today asGrasshopper LLC ). Only PageStream was ported to other platforms and continues to be developed and supported by the developers. Graphic software included vector drawing applications likeArt Expression from Soft-Logik,ProVector by Taliesin,Draw Studio , andProfessional Draw from Gold Disk.Amiga lacked of an
office suite as the term is meant now, butintegrated software was available.Pen Pal was a word processor integrated with a database and a form editor.Scribble! ,Analyze! andOrganize! were bundled together as theWorks! suite combining a word processor, spreadsheet and database. Despite the similarity in name, it had no connection toMicrosoft Works .The page layout language
LaTex was available in two ports:AmigaTeX , that is no longer available (the first LaTeX which can be edited with a front end program), andPasTEX , available onAminet repository.Modern software
AbiWord is available today onAmigaOS4.0 through theX11 graphical engine, andPapyrus Office pre-release is available forMorphOS .Text Editors
Most advanced Text editors available on Amiga are Vim,
Emacs andMicroEMACS , Cygnus Editor also known as CED, and GoldED, which then evolved intoCubic IDE .Database and Spreadsheets
In the first age of Amiga (1986-1989) there were cross-platform spreadsheet available for it, like
MaxiPlan , which was available also forMS-DOS andMacintosh .Logistix (real name LoGisTiX) was one of the first spreadsheets for Amiga,Microfiche Filer Plus was a database which gave the user the experience of exploring data as usingmicrofilms . SuperBase was one of the finest programs available forC64 . It was then ported onAtari , Amiga, and later on PC. But it was on Amiga that become a standard reference. Available in two versionsSuperbase Personal andSuperBase Professional It could handleSQL databases and had a query internal language likeBASIC . It was capable to create forms and masks on records and was capable of handling multimedia files into its records years before than Microsoft Access. Superbase also featuredVCR control style buttons to browse into records of any database.Softwood File II was another simple multimedia database which then evolved intoFinal Data good database available for Amiga fromSoftwood Inc. From the same firm there wasFinal Calc spreadsheet which evolved fromTurboCalc that Softwood bought from another software manufacturer.ProChart was a tool to draw flow charts and diagrams.Analyze! was a fairly full featured (for the time) spreadsheet developed for the Amiga.Organize! was a flat file database package.Gnumeric spreadsheet has also been ported on Amiga through anX11 engine calledCygnix .In the recent times
MUIBase was born and mainly cross-platformMySQL database language becomes a reference on Amiga also.cience, entertainment and special use programs
Maple V is one of the best general purpose mathematic software (a.k.a. Mathematic-CAD) that were ever made. It was available for Amiga also, and appreciated by many scientists using Amiga at its age.
Distant Suns , Galileo,Digital Almanac andAmiga Digital Universe (fromBill Eaves for the OS4) were stellar sky exploring program and astronomic calculators. During the age ofCDTV were available historic, science, and art CDs likeTimetable of Science, Innovation ,Timetable of Business, Politics ,Grolier's Encyclopedia ,Guinness Disk of Records ,Video Creator ,American Heritage Dictionary ,Illustrated Holy Bible ,Illustrated Works of Shakespeare , etc.Entertainment
For Amiga there were literally hundreds of entertainment software. Amongst those available for kids and learning, it is possible to mention:
Adventures in Math series of floppy disks, fromFree Spirit Software ,Animal Kingdom series of disks fromUnicorn Software ,Art School all the series ofBarney Bear software, theDiscovery series , includingDiscovery trivia ,Donald's Alphabet Chase ,Mickey's 123's andMickey's ABC's byDisney Software , theElectric Crayon andFerngully series of educational coloring book software (Ferngully was taken from the animation movie),Fun School series of disks,Kid Pix set of disks from the well knownBroderbund Software house, which was famous in the nineties,Miracle Piano Teaching System to teach music to kids, various tales ofMother Goose , andWorld Atlas byCentaur Software .Fractals, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence
One of the best
fractal experience programs ever made on any platform is the incredibleZoneXplorer fromElena Novaretti . In 1989 were created theX-Specs 3D Glasses fromHaitex Resources , one of the first interactive 3D solutions for home computers. On Amiga were created the multimedia interactive TV non immersiveVirtual reality exploring software Mandala fromVivid Group Inc.ref num|Vivid Group|1, and the Virtuality System Virtuality 1000 CS 3D VRML all-immersive simulator from W-Industries (then Virtuality Inc.)ref num|Virtuality Systems|2, for game entertainment in big arcade installations and theme parks, that was based on A3000.Magellan v.1.1 (Artificial Intelligence Software), not to be confused with Directory Opus Magellan, was a program to emulateArtificial intelligence responses on Amiga, by creating heuristic programmed rules based onmachine learning in its form ofsupervised learning . The user will choose intodecision tree s anddecision tables system of AI featured by the Magellan program, in which to input objects, and desired outputs and describe all associate conditions and rules which the machine should follow in order to output pseudo-intelligent solutions to given problems.Route Planning
AmiATLAS v.6, it is a completeRoute planner tool for Amiga computers. It provides worldwide interactive maps and find optimal routes for traveling from one place to another. It features also multiple map loading, and integrated CityGuide-System with information to interesting towns, places or regions, some even with pictures, and information about many parks and points of interest.Personal Organizer, Notebook, Diary software
Digita Organizer v.1.1 fromDigita International it the best Amiga program to let the user to note about dates, meetings, remember expiry dates, etcetera. [http://polymere.free.fr/orga_en.html PolyOrg] forMorphOS byFrédéric Rignault .Personal Budget, Home Banking, Accounts
Easy Banker ,Home Accounts ,Small Business Accounts ,Small Business Manager ,Account Master ,Accountant ,AmigaMoney ,Banca Base III ,HomeBank ,CashMaster , etc.oftware for special purposes
AVT (Amiga Video Transceiver), was a software and hardware
Slow-scan television system originally developed by "Black Belt Systems" (USA) around 1990 for the Amiga home computer popular all over the world before the IBM PC family gained sufficient audio quality with the help of special sound cards.Richmond Sound Design (RSD) created bothshow control (a.k.a. MSC or "MIDI Show Control ") and theatresound design software which was used extensively in the theatre, theme park, display, exhibit, stage managing, 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 through software simply calledStage Manager which then evolved into its Microsoft Windows version calledShowMan . There were dozens atWalt Disney World alone and more at all other Disney,Universal Studios ,Six Flags andMadame Tussauds properties as well as in many venues in Las Vegas includingThe Mirage hotel Volcano andSiegfried and Roy show, theMGM Grand EFX show,Broadway theatre , London's West End, theRoyal Shakespeare Company 's many venues, most ofBranson, 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.# Info on Virtuality at [http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=56 Amiga Hardware site]
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