By Michael Webb, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, See staff list for e-mail address
As editor of this here publication, I had the opportunity to read everybody else's segments of this feature before I sat down to write my own (although I had been thinking about what I would write for some time). I must say, it's very interesting to see the wide variety of opinions, especially when two staff members flatly disagree (or agree, as the case may be). I know I'm going to disagree with some of their choices, while agreeing with others. It all goes to show just how much one person's computing needs are bound to differ from another's.
I have also seen various ways of organizing these items, and have to conclude that for my purposes, the best approach is to just throw 'em all in!
GVP A530 Turbo: I think it would be fitting to mention first the device which truly brought me into a more modern age of computing. Although I haven't tried all such products, from what I know about their specifications as well as my own experiences with this device, I'd have to say the A530 was the best expansion ever designed for the Amiga 500. It was an amazing fountain of youth. My A500 had had a 68000, 1 MB RAM, and two floppy drives. The A530 added a 40-MHz 68EC030, 40-MHz 68882 socket, room for 8 MB of 32-bit 60-ns fast RAM, 16-bit SCSI controller, internal hard disk, and custom expansion slot, all in a small sit-on-the-side unit that even matched the A500 case's profile. (Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the only card ever released for the slot was the PC286, an adaptation of the ATOnce 286 hardware-based PC emulator, which would have been tremendously useful -- had its software been designed well!) Let me say that even today, when I have an A4000T with which to compare, the A530's performance continues to amaze me. It really takes full advantage of the 68030's capabilities. The A530 now has a full 68030 and new 2.1-GB Quantum Fireball internal disk, and certainly seems to have years of life ahead of it. Incidentally, GVP-M was said to be working on what appeared to be a 68040 version of the A530 (A540?), but I haven't heard anything about that project in at least a year. No doubt, it would have been interesting to see.
Final Writer: SoftWood's Final Writer was probably the first "modern" (i.e. "AmigaOS 2.x-and-above-specific") piece of softare I acquired for my Amiga, and as such, when I first tried it out, it simply blew me away. It was incomprehensibly far beyond its predecessor on my machine, WordPerfect, in almost every way. Naturally, now that I've used a great deal of modern Amiga software, Final Writer doesn't seem as revolutionary. Still, it is one of my favorites. My word processing needs are fairly simple, but Final Writer serves them powerfully and elegantly, all while handling any desktop publishing task I throw at it. Its extensive feature list, friendly and easy-to-use GUI, good performance, and excellent printed output place it at the top of my list. WordPerfect actually did have some advantages that I miss, and I'd like to see some features such as online help and iconification/"menuification" added to Final Writer, so I hope SoftWood continues development. For the record, I promised a review of Final Writer 97 ages ago, and even though it's not exactly a new development anymore, I will follow through on that (as soon as time allows...) !
ShapeShifter: I've been interested in emulation ever since I had an Amiga powerful enough to do it, and I particularly like emulators that run foreign OS's and software at (nearly) full-speed. On the Amiga, that essentially implies "Macintosh!" An Amiga user on CompuServe first pointed me towards ShapeShifter some time ago, as CompuServe is another one of those services that doesn't provide an Amiga version of its software. I never had a particularly easy time making progress with ShapeShifter, but I immediately recognized its incredible power. Of course, since I started out using it on a 5-MB machine and with a 1-MB ROM file, I could do little more than just fool around with it. But when I found a 512-kb Mac ROM and took the A500 up to 10 MB, a serious setup became more feasible. Kyle Webb provides more details on the ensuing situation in her segment of this feature, but suffice to say that the A500 now has the fully-registered SS running from its own hard disk partition, and it all works extremely well, to say nothing of the awesome level of integration between the Amiga and Mac operating systems. I've been fooling around with ShapeShifter on the A4000T lately too, and after some initial difficulties (short: don't use System 7.0.1 with a 68060 [see my A4000T review in the two previous issues for details]), it looks like I might be able to get a serious setup going there too. In summary, the Macintosh and Amiga complement each other nicely, and ShapeShifter does a particularly elegant job of allowing both to run on a single space- and cost-saving computer system.
CygnusEd Professional: When I first started publishing The Amiga Monitor, I used Final Writer to assemble the HTML documents. As excellent as it is at word processing and DTP, it's rather cumbersome to use as a text editor. Many thanks go to a couple of AM staffers (Sam and Paul, to be specific) for arranging to secure me a copy of CygnusEd Pro, and saving me unimaginable amounts of time and frustration. Most of my time at a computer is spent either tweaking the OS setup or processing text (and/or files), so just as graphics professionals might swear by ImageFX or Imagine, or digital musicians would hold in high regard, well, whatever they use these days, I have to A-List CygnusEd. It is REALLY FAST, and also extremely convenient to use. It's also FAST! Oh, did I mention how FAST it is? Okay, enough already.. You get the idea, I'm sure. Not surprisingly, I'm using CygnusEd at the moment to type this article.
Magic User Interface (MUI): Some of you might be surprised to see this one on my list, and understandably so. Why? Well, I've been pretty vocal about not just "throwing in" MUI as part of AmigaOS. So what's this? Webb's got a 68060, and suddenly he forgets that MUI can be a wee bit sluggish on slower systems? Well, you get what you pay for, and in some ways, MUI might be overkill. And I still believe that not all applications should rely on it, so much as integrate some of its ideas (somewhat of a job for a future AmigaOS there). But with MUI, we have seen outstanding consistency and configurability among various applications, and as the "SysOp/Power User sort," I greatly appreciate that level of power and control. I don't even care as much about how great most MUI software looks; I like the ability, for instance, to put a program on any screen I'd like, and stuff it into the Tools menu when I'm not using it. I'm also growing to appreciate the very thorough implementation of, for instance, drag & drop in various applications. If nothing else, MUI has at least paved the way for a truly modern level of user-friendliness in Amiga software -- something that could have existed before, and has at times, but never did on a wide scale, simply because some facilities were missing from the OS, or because programmers didn't see fit to follow the OS Style Guide. With MUI, it's automatic, and incredibly comprehensive. I am, incidentally, a registered user.
Aegis Sonix 2.0: Finally, an old one! I knew one would make it in here eventually... Sonix is actually pretty ancient, but I still use it. It's a great musical notation program with an ounce of MIDI support -- enough so that I can write four tracks of Amiga music, and have my Yamaha keyboard play along with four other tracks of its own. It doesn't come close to using all of my keyboard's capabilities (such as 27-note polyphony), but it does what it does well. I started out by just clicking notes onto the score in no particular order all those years ago, just for some random fun, and Sonix has grown with me since then. I have tried on various occasions to go "full-MIDI," but I never was terribly successful (which I will attribute in part to my ignorance of the subject), and I'm convinced that musical notation/recording is the area in which the Amiga software scene is most sadly lacking. Old as it is, however, Sonix still does the job well. And coming from somebody who not only dislikes the extreme quirkiness of older software, but also feels more at home in front of a Steinway Grand than a monitor and mouse, that's a pretty substantial rating.
F/A-18 Interceptor: I'm not much of a games person, but I have a reasonably sizeable and diverse collection, particularly of late 1980's titles. And of those, although many hours of MarbleMadness!, Crystal Hammer, GravAttack!, Torch 2081, The Duel: Test Drive II, and so on and so forth comprise fond memories, I have to pin my number-one-rating on Electronic Arts's F/A-18 Interceptor. I've always enjoyed flight simulators (probably the dominant type of 3D game before texture-mappers like Wolf/Doom/Quake came onto the scene), and had been logging many hours with Flight Simulator II on the old A500 when one day I encountered "F-18" (for short) at the local Amiga dealer (when there was one). Holy moley, it was fast! My perceptions would indicate that it took just about full advantage of the Amiga hardware's capabilities. It also offered good realism for the time, and engaging gameplay, including various missions, usually against somebody in a Soviet MIG (well, sign of the times). Even Free Flight mode was enough fun for me, though. I can't count the number of times I flew under the Golden Gate bridge at mach 2, probably bow-shocking numerous vehicles into San Francisco Bay (well...it's only a game! haha...). F/A-18 got a substantial boost from the 68030 in the A530, and even continues to run on the A4000T. It isn't extremely OS-friendly, but if I can run it without booting the A500 into AmigaOS 1.3 mode, it's got a sizeable jump on a lot of games from its era (i.e. 1988). It was interesting to see Rob Dinnerman, Moses Ma, and a few other familiar names from the F/A-18 team show up in the credits to (if I remember correctly) JetFighter II, an early 1990's MS-DOS game that bore an uncanny resemblance to F/A-18 in just about every way. I would have liked to see the non-existent Amiga equivalent, F/A-18 Interceptor AGA.
Mind Walker: I think I will mention one other game too. This one, strangely enough, has been receiving a ton of attention lately, even though it was released in 1986 (by Commodore, no less). Between my article on it in the Amiga Gaming Retrospective last year, Peter Olafson's recent story on its creator, Bill Williams, in Amazing Computing/Amiga Magazine, and an uncanny amount of e-mail I've been receiving on the subject lately, it just keeps coming up. Mind Walker is a complex multimedia/role-playing/thought adventure in which the player, an insane professor, has to work repeatedly in several realms in an attempt to reconstruct his or her sanity. The sound, music, and graphics are great (including some use of HAM mode), the game in engaging, and most interestingly, it runs on *any* Amiga, and even multitasks. This was a true pioneer in system-friendliness, and remember, it was released in 1986. Some of today's developers could learn a few lessons from Williams. Anyway, though, Mind Walker remains lodged in my memory (gotta watch out for those rogue shards of sanity) as a truly unique game concept that nicely showcased the Amiga's capabilities, and that I can still play on my top-of-the-line Amiga.
Scenery Animator: Occasionally, a piece of software impresses me as, well, extremely creative. When I read about Scenery Animator in AmigaWorld years ago, I knew I'd have a great time with it. I ordered it, and have given my Amigas untold hours of rendering work with it ever since. Scenery Animator draws realistic representations of natural scenes using a combination of real elevation data and fractal mathematics, and is simply a joy to use. As its name suggests, it can render animations, using a simple yet effective keyframe animation system, by which the user lays out a path, specifies various options, and then just lets it render away. Scenery Animator is a bit of an oddball on the OS side, insisting on using either NTSC or DblNTSC mode, but despite that and a few other quirks, I have a great deal of fun, and sometimes mental relaxation, with it. My Windows 95 backdrop, as it turns out, is a 256-color image of Yosemite National Park as created by Scenery Animator.
AmigaDOS/ARexx: I'm not referring to the entire AmigaOS here (which you probably all know I think is the greatest thing since sliced punchcards), but more specifically to the Disk Operating System part of it, i.e. file management and the like. For years, I got by on Workbench, but finally discovered the CLI and then Shell after getting the A530, and began to discover its true power. Just last month, I learned a few new things about AmigaDOS. To make a long story short, I am designing my own extensions to the Amiga Operating System using only scripting languages (currently AmigaDOS and soon, ARexx), in order to facilitate management of two people's files on two different Amigas, between which a 135-MB removable media drive serves as messenger. To put it bluntly, I could not do what I am doing using MS-DOS, Windows XX, or Mac OS. It all comes down to things such as logical assigns, use of stem variable concepts in AmigaDOS naming conventions, hard links (see "MakeLink" in your AmigaDOS manual), and so on. The amount of power at a user's disposal is unbelievable, and it's all somewhat hidden beneath the easy-to-use Workbench surface. As an example, my Amiga shocked me recently when I renamed the destination to which a hard link referred, and the hard link was automatically updated to reflect that. It did something similar with assigns. I could go on and on, but for now, I'll spare you the details; and let it suffice to say that when I have time to delve into ARexx, and can add its system-integration capabilities to AmigaDOS, the possibilities will be almost limitless. Incidentally, what I'm doing by way of AmigaDOS does not remain restricted to the Shell environment; I merely maintain it there. The benefits are system-wide.
Microvitec GPM 1701 17-inch Multiscan monitor: I went into great detail on this subject in my recent Amiga 4000 Tower review, so I'll keep this short. Even though the first two had serious problems, and the experience has been far from totally pleasant, I'd say this monitor has been worth the wait. It is by far the best monitor I have ever used. The display is large, sharp, and highly configurable; it supports all of the Amiga chipsets' modes; and it remembers entire sets of settings for 30-odd different video signals. As far as I'm concerned, it's the ultimate monitor for use with the OCS, ECS, or AGA chipsets.
Plextor 6-PleX 6-Speed CD-ROM Drive: I'm going to round out this list with some non-Amiga-specific items. When I finally decided to experience the world of CD-ROM's, I went with what was at the time the fastest thing available, Plextor's 6-PleX. The first one actually was faulty, but the second one has served extremely well for several years. It is one of the highest-quality pieces of computer hardware I have ever owned. It works well with both Amigas, runs quietly and quickly, and simply has a very solid feel to it. Plextor products are expensive, but once again, you get what you pay for. I'd rather have something work well and last a long time than annoy me and ultimately die an untimely death, so I'm probably going to buy a new internal Plextor for the A4000T before too long.
SyQuest EZDrive 135: Also on the non-Amiga-specific front is this little gem from SyQuest. I bought it several years ago after learning the hard way that backing up data is a really good idea, and it has served extraordinarily well in a variety of roles since then. The EZDrive was competing with iomega's Zip Drive, and unfortunately lost the fight, due almost completely to the way it was managed and marketed (sound familiar?). Indeed, the Zip drive is probably the choice to make if you want a great deal of interchangability, but frankly, I don't give a hoot about that. The EZDrive stores more on a cartridge than the Zip, is significantly faster, and can take any SCSI device number you care to assign to it. As far as I'm concerned, it's the superior drive, and I will probably buy SyQuest's EZFlyer (a 230-MB drive that reads and writes EZDrive cartridges) eventually.
Quantum Hard Disks: I can't neglect to mention a slowly-emerging brand loyalty I have developed over the years. I've had some bad experiences with some hard disks, but not one of them has been a Quantum. My A530 came with a 120-MB Quantum, and now holds the same 2.1-GB model that came with the A4000T. I also used an external Quantum as a Mac hard disk with ShapeShifter on the A500 for a time. Quantum disks impress me as fast, reliable, and very quiet! I can barely hear the drive in the A4000T, and unless you like hard disks that sound more at home driving food processors than storing your data, that's a godsend. I intend to buy Quantum for any hard disk needs in the future.
Honorable Mention: Well, I can't include my entire hardware and software collection here, but there are a few other items I feel deserve mention.
I started out with AMosaic when Internetting with Amigas was a new thing, and started trying the IBrowse demos when they became available. Almost instantly, I was hooked. Not too long after the program became available in commercial form, I bought it, and have eagerly downloaded updates ever since. IBrowse has been one of my primary tools for assembling this magazine since day one. I don't want to disparage AWeb and Voyager, even though the latter seems significantly faster than IBrowse; but neither has "grabbed" me the way IBrowse did, particularly in terms of the quality of the HTML display.
My TCP experience on the Amiga has been a varied one. I started with AmiTCP, briefly tried Miami, bought TermiteTCP, and now I'm back to AmiTCP! Seriously, the old AmiTCP demo was a pain in the anatomy; Miami worked well, but I had already ordered TermiteTCP by the time I had it set up. Today, I use the full commercial AmiTCP/IP, and it's really at home running on the fixed network connection. The one I want to "honorably mention" here, however, is TermiteTCP. It was simply easy to set up, small, efficient, and unobtrusive. There's not much I can say, other than that I still use it for modem connections. I was always simply quite impressed with my Amigas as Internet machines, and TermiteTCP served ably as the hub.
For a long time, my primary e-mail account was on CompuServe, and thus I had to use their proprietary software (which, at least in the Windows incarnation with which I am familiar, was actually extremely good). But I always looked forward to using my Amiga for mail, and now that I'm on the network, after a brief time with Voodoo, I have settled on YAM. It's just an outstanding application. And, starting with this issue of AM, we'll see how it stand up under the heavy use of AM mailing list management! I finally got all those names and addresses moved over from CompuServe's WinCIM (took long enough...).
I've used two database programs in my time: Microsoft Works, and Final Data. Not a huge group, I'll admit, but I really didn't like MS-Works, and for ages, promised myself I'd get Final Data. Sure enough, this summer, I did. Even I can tell it isn't as powerful as many modern database applications, but for what I wanted to do, it worked outstandingly well. Here's hoping SoftWood continues development.
Finally, I will include two items I didn't even buy extra. I always liked the old Amiga mouse, but when I got the A4000T, I was quite impressed. The new mouse is far better, and in my opinion, one of the best mice going. The A4000T keyboard I am using at this moment is also very nice; it's quiet, and has a good feel to it. Some people prefer the sledge-hammer-blast sound and feel of an older IBM keyboard's keys being depressed, but this one's right for me.