Meeting modern needs with classic Amiga.

[TenLeftFingers]

Hi folks,

It's early days yet but I'm interested in exploring present day uses for the Amiga (excluding gaming). I currently use it for word processing as plain text and sending it to my Ubuntu machine to convert to .odt before emailing, for example.

But after looking at some educational titles on gamescoffer.co.uk and any other mentions here: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=78252 I've become even more optimistic.

So I've started documenting my progress with videos upload to a channel I'm calling Amiga Today http://www.dailymotion.com/amigatoday and the goal is simply to find practical uses that justify the Amiga today as more than a mere games console with a keyboard that won't let go

I'm interested in feedback about how I'm achieving this. I already know the sound quality is average at best and I've discovered I have some ticks when speaking! I've been cutting thirty minute footage down to about three minutes in general and not going into too much depth - just really to show you if it's worth the trouble of downloading and copying to floppy/running on UAE and to hopefully generate interest in putting the PC / phone to one side and using the Amiga for these jobs instead.

Suggestions appreciated, especially if you think I'm wasting my time!

Thanks,
Ten

[crazyc]

Really like the idea and will be watching with interest

[JumpingJackson]

Great idea and I'm looking forward to watching them!

I've recently got back into the Amiga thing, originally so I can play Frontier Elite II on my new Amazon Fire TV. But now it's turned into something else. Installed Classic Workbench and have a proper production setup going.

I'm now learning pixel art using Deluxe Paint and tracker music with OctaMED. I know there are plenty of modern tools to accomplish the same thing but the Amiga is just so damn cool. Maybe you can look at these tools too?

[TenLeftFingers]

Thank you crazyc I can see from the view counts that the kids stuff is not as popular as the grown up stuff like psychology and history so maybe I will shelve the rest of those for a while and go rooting in the Education/App section of the ftp server next. I do have a young girl though so I'm interested in any school work we can do on the Amiga

NeonBible, I know what you mean. I was using FS-UAE Arcade to play some games I had as a kid but now I want to really *use* the Amiga.

I can certainly look at those tools, but my reviews mightn't be what you're looking for. The purpose of my channel is to say, 'look, this gem (or dud) exists and you mightn't have known it exists". I try to give a very quick overview so you can decide if you want to try it, although I admit I have gone into more detail on some than others. My purpose isn't to teach you how to use it really, but to give enough information so you can decide whether or not it's worth using.

Does OctaMed require any external hardware like a midi-keyboard? Also, does what are the hardware requirements? I love DPIII and will do a review of that at some stage, once I've gotten the less known titles out of the way. But it won't be as comprehensive as the manual.

[Sir_Lucas]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

Hi folks,

It's early days yet but I'm interested in exploring present day uses for the Amiga (excluding gaming). I currently use it for word processing as plain text and sending it to my Ubuntu machine to convert to .odt before emailing, for example.

But after looking at some educational titles on gamescoffer.co.uk and any other mentions here: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=78252 I've become even more optimistic.

So I've started documenting my progress with videos upload to a channel I'm calling Amiga Today http://www.dailymotion.com/amigatoday and the goal is simply to find practical uses that justify the Amiga today as more than a mere games console with a keyboard that won't let go

I'm interested in feedback about how I'm achieving this. I already know the sound quality is average at best and I've discovered I have some ticks when speaking! I've been cutting thirty minute footage down to about three minutes in general and not going into too much depth - just really to show you if it's worth the trouble of downloading and copying to floppy/running on UAE and to hopefully generate interest in putting the PC / phone to one side and using the Amiga for these jobs instead.

Suggestions appreciated, especially if you think I'm wasting my time!

Thanks,
Ten

In my opinion a very good idea. It's a great way to present Amiga in a very different light. Keep up the good work and keep the videos uploading.
I've just posted your video on our Amiga FB profile

https://www.facebook.com/Chelm.Amiga.Legion

[TenLeftFingers]

Hey, thanks for that! I was wondering who my 1 follower was I'm going to steer towards more grown-up and avoid things that aren't finished or don't have a full version so hopefully it will improve.

[Daedalus]

Sounds like a good idea, I'll check it out! OctaMED doesn't need a MIDI keyboard, but it can use one if you have it. It's perfectly possible to use the normal keyboard instead when you're building up your tracks.

An alternative to DPaint that you might look at is PersonalPaint, which is similar but supports many different formats and has an ARexx interface for loading plugins. Version 7.1 was released free years ago, version 7.3 is currently supported and still being developed and sold. I still use it to this day for doing some web graphics and the odd bit of icon drawing or what not - I find the flexibility and straightforward operation a refreshing change from Fireworks for example.

Also, HD-Rec is a very good music sequencer with MIDI support, and supports more modern hardware and techniques than OctaMED. Definitely worth a look!

[TenLeftFingers]

Thanks for the suggestions Daedalus, I looked at an old version of Personal Paint and even that looked quite good ( [ Show youtube player ] ) so I will get around to doing a summary and maybe link to somewhere else for anyone that wants the more in depth tutorial.

I will check out the sequencer also, although Im not very experienced with those tools. Maybe I should consider doing a 'roundup' style video which compares the main features of the main ones?

Sent from my awesome Ubuntu Touch device using the Forum Browser app

[jPV]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

Thanks for the suggestions Daedalus, I looked at an old version of Personal Paint and even that looked quite good ( [ Show youtube player ] ) so I will get around to doing a summary and maybe link to somewhere else for anyone that wants the more in depth tutorial.

I love PPaint too. It has really nice features to manage and combine palettes... remap and merge them for different images etc. Very useful when you want to prepare and combine different images into same palette for using them on demo/game coding or Scala presentations etc.

I also use it always when I need to tune some web gfx or GUI gfx on your own systems etc. It can even make gif animations etc.

[Mrs Beanbag]

i suggested to Alex that we use an Amiga for something in the office, but we haven't thought of anything yet

[TenLeftFingers]

For bringing other applications to the surface, I've made a list of all the entries on the ftp site and exported to a text file - over 225,000 lines long :0

So I've removed games and any pre-Amiga titles (eg, C64 software) and now I have a list about 25,000 lines long. If anyone wants to suggests removals I've put the reduced list here: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/11767758/ The shorter the better because I plan to try as many as possible.

But keep the suggestions coming, especially if you think the title is something that someone could use for practical/educational purposes today.

[TenLeftFingers]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i suggested to Alex that we use an Amiga for something in the office, but we haven't thought of anything yet

It's tricky, especially if a lot of your work involves interfacing with modern websites.

For a student, preparing large documents is a treat and I'll be doing my end of year report on mine. I think with Samba, the options open up even more because you can have a linux machine with a print and file server.

But I've seen on gamescoffer.co.uk that a new entry that shows you how to expose photos in a darkroom has just been put up. Very cool! Some of the kids educational stuff is not just passable but actually still useful (even if there are better modern alternatives out there).

email and IRC are also workable from what I've read, but I haven't tried them yet. The problem is that modern emails come with attachments that the Amiga generally won't recognise so maybe the fulcrum of making the Amiga more relevant today is having datatypes for more modern filetypes.

[Daedalus]

Speaking of Email, there are certain emails that I get forwarded to me regularly (travel documents). They're forwarded as an email attached to an email, and neither GMail, nor Outlook, nor Outlook Express, nor Eircom.net, nor Windows Live can actually properly open the attached email to let me print it. But guess what can? YAM on the Amiga So I open them and forward them back to my GMail account for printing.

YAM is excellent if you wanna try it, its limitations however are that it can't display HTML mails (though it can open them in a browser for you), and it has no IMAP support so it's POP3 only. But other than that it works great and has a huge list of features that give it quite a lot of power. As for attachments, it depends on what they are. Things like images and sound files are no problem, though large images are slow to decode on a classic machine, and video is generally ruled out for the same reason. Where you have the problem is things like Word documents and Excel sheets, and that's more than just a datatypes problem - you really need an office package with support for modern file formats to be able to open them.

[Mrs Beanbag]

i didn't necessarily mean as a desktop machine... could be used to control something, maybe a display

[TenLeftFingers]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Speaking of Email, there are certain emails that I get forwarded to me regularly (travel documents). They're forwarded as an email attached to an email, and neither GMail, nor Outlook, nor Outlook Express, nor Eircom.net, nor Windows Live can actually properly open the attached email to let me print it. But guess what can? YAM on the Amiga So I open them and forward them back to my GMail account for printing.

YAM is excellent if you wanna try it, its limitations however are that it can't display HTML mails (though it can open them in a browser for you), and it has no IMAP support so it's POP3 only. But other than that it works great and has a huge list of features that give it quite a lot of power. As for attachments, it depends on what they are. Things like images and sound files are no problem, though large images are slow to decode on a classic machine, and video is generally ruled out for the same reason. Where you have the problem is things like Word documents and Excel sheets, and that's more than just a datatypes problem - you really need an office package with support for modern file formats to be able to open them.

Well that's very interesting! I've just tried iBrowse but you need to expand your machine to use it. I must give YAM a try. The documents are a pain, and really you must be the author and not need to export it regularly.

It's tantalising really. The Amiga does _everything_ I need from a modern machine. It's just not compatible with some of the filetypes and protocols. I can do graphics, 3D, audio, mail, internet, office documents and run educational software. The barrier is frustrating!

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

i didn't necessarily mean as a desktop machine... could be used to control something, maybe a display

Ah, I see. If we had a good ssh client, I'd be using my Amiga 24/7.

[Daedalus]

Ah, well you won't be doing much with big files if you haven't got your machine expanded. Not being able to run IBrowse means your machine is pretty limited, and working with large images and audio files is probably going to be tricky too.

Documents are the single biggest issue for me too. I wrote my thesis on my Amiga back in the day (2003!), exported it as RTF and did the final formatting in Word. It worked for the text, but all the images had to be re-inserted.

As for controlling stuff however, I've used Amigas in a Raspberry Pi sort of capacity in the past - running small LCD modules and using custom hardware to automate things. Sure, you could use an Arduino and it would be cheaper and smaller, but where's the fun in that

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

As for controlling stuff however, I've used Amigas in a Raspberry Pi sort of capacity in the past - running small LCD modules and using custom hardware to automate things. Sure, you could use an Arduino and it would be cheaper and smaller, but where's the fun in that

Where indeed! Also we have two A600s just sitting around not doing anything

[jPV]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

Ah, I see. If we had a good ssh client, I'd be using my Amiga 24/7.

AmTelnet is a pretty good SSH client, I did use it for years. Unfortunately it only suppots SSH1, but if you can live with that, then it's very ok

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Ah, well you won't be doing much with big files if you haven't got your machine expanded. Not being able to run IBrowse means your machine is pretty limited, and working with large images and audio files is probably going to be tricky too.

Although some programs provide their own swapfiles to get around the memory limitations, like ArtEffect for example. It won't be fast on unexpanded machine, but still.

And then there are some virtual memory hacks for general use too.. VMem and GigaMem etc. If you're really desperate

Documents are the single biggest issue for me too. I wrote my thesis on my Amiga back in the day (2003!), exported it as RTF and did the final formatting in Word. It worked for the text, but all the images had to be re-inserted.

It depends hugely if you have to provide original document as a file, or is it enough to provide printed version to others. When you only need printed papers, Amiga's office programs are quite enough for the most cases. I remember even having some equation expansion for FinalWriter use to have all the mathematical symbols and formatting etc...

[MrFluffy]

Originally Posted by TenLeftFingers

It's tricky, especially if a lot of your work involves interfacing with modern websites.

That is because the web has lost its way with adhering to standards. My main machine is locked down, no flash, adblock pro etc, and it doesn't work with lots of websites either. As most of the functionality broken is for tracking and other undesireable side effects of the "modern" web, I consider that a feature not a problem.

For a student, preparing large documents is a treat and I'll be doing my end of year report on mine. I think with Samba, the options open up even more because you can have a linux machine with a print and file server.

Its a linux server, I use nfs. My amiga mounts my file shares over nfs and the mounts show up in wb as a drive. It predates the smb "standard" by years and works better unless your in a mixed with windows machine environment. I stream 1080p over nfs every day.
The irony is different versions of windows struggle with talking to each other because of the way microsoft altered smb over the years to break linux compatibility and if you must use smb, then a linux pdc gives you more compatibility than a microsoft one, but I digress...

email and IRC are also workable from what I've read, but I haven't tried them yet. The problem is that modern emails come with attachments that the Amiga generally won't recognise so maybe the fulcrum of making the Amiga more relevant today is having datatypes for more modern filetypes.

What, you mean the amiga with its non x86 arch and not having typhoid mary of email clients installed (outlook) means you can no longer open phishing and general malware attacks? say it isnt so.
Someone sends me a email, it should be compatible with the actual email standard or spam assassin on the inbound mail server will have eaten it already. If I'm on a crap link (out the office on a laptop tethered to a phone thats struggling to maintain edge let alone 4g for eg) I often use pine to cut down on the bandwidth to sift through my inbox on a mailserver, and if pine running under a text only ssh session can cope, any amiga email client should cope. Mostly the people who don't conform to this vision of how things should be are scammers or not of interest.

I've got a amiga for nostalgia because I had a early 1.2 and it got me started on a career in low level coding stuff, so I have it for nostalgia, but there are certain advantages to being on a arch that nobody writes malware for any more and none of the traditional shellcode attacks work on. The attack footprint is very small, and you can easily get raw into the os to do bespoke things...

[Mrs Beanbag]

here's something else an Amiga could be used for:
http://www.squarewheels.org.uk/rly/programme-machine/