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stevelord

Posted Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:17 am

What are your essential/favourite small 1.x tools you can't live without? I'm referring to things that aren't in the standard setup or that we haven't covered in some of the amazing threads on this forum. Lets assume that LHA, LZX etc. are a given. But what are the quality of life tools that make your 1.x experience even better?

To start with I'd like to nominate Jonathan Potter's Fullview on Fish disk 583. It's basically the DOpus text viewer without DOpus but faster (at least than DOpus 4). It's just a really nice full-width 80 column text viewer that has some nice features. Shift and arrow keys work a page at a time or you can click to scroll and use the mouse like in DOpus. Ctrl and arrow keys go to the top and bottom. Press s to open up a case insensitive search box and just tap r to cycle through results. You can also iconify the viewer. Finally, you can open new text and even image files with keystrokes. It also supports powerpacker. I've used it to open powerpacked text and then save it to disk.

What I like the most about fullview is that almost everything is done from the keyboard.

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McTrinsic

Posted Sun Oct 17, 2021 5:54 am

I’d like to throw in DirMaster as you sure need a file explorer. I forgot which version for 1.3 KS, though.

And of course JST :) .

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Crispy
Sunhillow

Posted Sun Oct 17, 2021 9:01 am

Disk Mimic! (shameless plug there. :D )

Actually, ARP (AmigaDOS Replacement Project) 1.3 is at the top of my list. It provides full * wildcard support, and that is really something that I cannot live without. The ARP shell would be perfect, but it suffers from some show stopping bugs, so ARP 1.3 coupled with WShell 2.0 makes for the best 1.3 CLI environment.

HandyIcons from Fred Fish Disk 148 adds a menu to the Workbench that can be configured to launch programs. I've been using this from the very early days of the Amiga, and I can't imagine being without it.

Matt Dillon's DMouse 1.20 is a mouse accelerator and blanker, and it's definitely another must have.

And finally, Snap 1.4 allows you to copy and paste text from just about anywhere. It removes the need for a lot of tedious typing, and really speeds up doing things in the shell.

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Beska

Posted Sun Oct 17, 2021 3:26 pm

Another vote for ARP. I really wish the source to that package could have been released. Then we could have fixed some of the bugs.

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stevelord

Posted Tue Oct 19, 2021 12:24 pm

Disk Mimic is definitely an awesome tool. And of course ARP is essential.

I've been playing with Mostra (Fred Fish 753, there is a Mostra 2.0 but I haven't tried it yet) as a picture viewer and I have to say I'm impressed. It pretty much displays every kind of IFF image I throw at it SHAM, Dynamic HAM, laced etc. It's pretty quick too.

Image

Please forgive the aspect ratio, this was on WinUAE and I didn't get a chance to fix it.

To make these IFFs for testing I've been using XnView to convert 24 bit images at different resolutions to PPM. These are then fed into Wasp (Fred Fish 716) which does a pretty good job of converting the images. I was surprised to see how many optimization methods there are for conversion (some I've seen in the more modern Java-based ham_convert).

I'm not sure Wasp will replace Hamlab or AdPro just yet, but it's definitely a tool worth having, as is Mostra.

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nullsleep

Posted Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:22 pm

zshell, ppmore, asmtwo, hippoplayer.

And of course, debug (as shipped with AmigaXfer. full disclosure: mine), since I use amigaXfer all the time.

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nullsleep

Posted Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:25 pm

stevelord wrote:
Tue Oct 19, 2021 12:24 pm
I've been playing with Mostra (Fred Fish 753, there is a Mostra 2.0 but I haven't tried it yet) as a picture viewer and I have to say I'm impressed. It pretty much displays every kind of IFF image I throw at it SHAM, Dynamic HAM, laced etc. It's pretty quick too.
It's totally not ready, and the published code is way off vs what I have locally, but amigagfxmangle might be right up your alley.

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stevelord

Posted Thu Nov 04, 2021 2:16 am

Looks cool and will work nicely on the Linux box I have connected up over serial!

I have gigs of space, but unpacking mods in Hippoplayer takes gives me longer gaps between mods packed with all kinds of different methods. Does anyone have any cool 1.3 unarchivers that use something like Xpk to transparently unarchive?

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nullsleep

Posted Thu Nov 04, 2021 5:02 pm

stevelord wrote:
Thu Nov 04, 2021 2:16 am
Looks cool and will work nicely on the Linux box I have connected up over serial!
As you have such a setup, try AmigaXfer and let me know how it goes. You'd be surprised how little feedback I got so far from people using my tool.
I have gigs of space, but unpacking mods in Hippoplayer takes gives me longer gaps between mods packed with all kinds of different methods. Does anyone have any cool 1.3 unarchivers that use something like Xpk to transparently unarchive?
I haven't used hippo in a while (been imp3-ing a lot lately) but I remember it as being able to preload next file. I guess unpack is delayed, and slow on 68k?

Transparently is scary. Powerpacker had a resident dos function patch thing that was able to do that, but it would be quite unorthogonal and cause problems with many programs.

If you have gigs of space, I would suggest simply unpacking all your mods and storing them unpacked. That's how it is for my collection, for that matter. It also ensures they'll load fine on trackers.

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stevelord

Posted Sat Nov 06, 2021 4:53 am

nullsleep wrote:
Thu Nov 04, 2021 5:02 pm
I haven't used hippo in a while (been imp3-ing a lot lately) but I remember it as being able to preload next file. I guess unpack is delayed, and slow on 68k?
Hippoplayer loads uncompressed Protracker tracks to fast ram. Compressed tracks are loaded to chip ram, uncompressed then moved to fast. I haven't seen anything in the docs showing a preload next tune function, but maybe I'm missing something?
nullsleep wrote:
Thu Nov 04, 2021 5:02 pm
Transparently is scary. Powerpacker had a resident dos function patch thing that was able to do that, but it would be quite unorthogonal and cause problems with many programs.
Sorry, I think I wasn't quite clear. I don't mean when the song is played, I mean a 1.3 compatible decompression tool using something like xpk.library that I can run across a directory of mods all packed using different packers.





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