Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[EugeneNine]

Whats a good extension for the 1.3 CLI that gives tab completion and history? I can't recall what i used to use.

[idrougge]

You can try WShell. It's a replacement shell by William Hawes, creator of ARexx.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by appiah4

I guess this can go here..

What is the best way to take a modern day image (PNG, JPEG, RAW etc.) and reduce the resolution, colors and convert to a format an OCS Amiga can display?

Also, what is the best Amiga image viewer?

Originally Posted by s2325

XnView for Windows.

Disagree. That's one solution, but ASDG's various releases does some pretty amazing things for converting picture formats and image processing, Slowly on a real Amiga, but it's very very good for pictures that you want to display on a real Amiga. Newtek's Super-Ham (copper effect pseudo hires HAM) and similar hacky display modes, as well as the "official" ones. The snag is, finding the snap-in extra loader and saver modules for the base software.

It can save in ECS or AGA Amiga friendly formats, even on Amigas that can't display AGA graphics. There are some other Amiga based graphics interchange programs, but I always liked ASDG for sheer simplicity and flexibility in converting to optimum graphics file types. All conversion done on an internal 32 bit graphics buffer, regardless of what graphics the Amiga could display.

PNG JPG yes, not sure about the other file type.. RAW 24 bit, no problem. Later versions let you process frames of M-PEG streams, recode the stream. Very hard work for an Amiga, but the software could do it, and also take a scripting front end. Don't ask me what that was called, I forget now. Art Department, MorphPlus. Various front ends but I always like the low res control panel for single frames. The hires versions took up a lot of resources just displaying the front end. The low res version wasn't that slow at converting even on a 7MHz Amiga with 2MB fast RAM, at single frames. Few seconds for each one, maybe half a minute if doing a 24 bit operation.

I'm not sure there is a single "best" Amiga graphics viewer, in terms something you would use to release a slideshow of images. It depends what hardware you want it to display on. S-HAM isn't supported by all of them, I know that. I guess it partly depends on what hardware you want the image to display on. Classic one for older Amigas is Vilbm. I don't know about one for AGA equipped Amigas,apart from the ASDG stuff.

[redblade]

My question is:

Can you replace the 68020EC@16mhz with the 68020EC@25mhz on the A1200 mother board.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by redblade

My question is:

Can you replace the 68020EC@16mhz with the 68020EC@25mhz on the A1200 mother board.

You can, but it will still only run at 14MHz, half the Amiga native clock rate of 28MHz, I think.

Changing the native crystal for a 50MHz model as well isn't going to work, there is a reason why people charge money for accelerator cards.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

You can, but it will still only run at 14MHz, half the Amiga native clock rate of 28MHz, I think.

Changing the native crystal for a 50MHz model as well isn't going to work, there is a reason why people charge money for accelerator cards.

Damn, thought it would of been too easy.

[Pat the Cat]

...Yeah, you get lots more bells and whistles fitting something more powerful than an 020EC, but that means more complexity with the RAM. It was built that way because RAM cost $$$ at the time.

Simple fast RAM card does nice things to a stock A1200. Upgrading the processor means nicer RAM again really, because the 030 does nice tricks, especially the full flavour MMU, Faster 020s and fitting onboard FPU don't really do much to a stock A1200, but a bit of fast RAM too does help it dance.

if you want better performance, you need nicer RAM solution. Same is true on an accelerator too, you just get more bang for the buck that way.

You can apparently hack an FPU onto an A1200 motherboard to use the system bus (28MHz) clock frequency, but it's just a marginally reliable hack and won't do anything on software that doesn't use the FPU anyway. I wouldn't recommend it unless you were desperate to improve FPU software performance a little bit. The core CPU and system RAM still runs slow at 14MHz, it just does maths a tiny bit faster. If using FPU software, it's noticeable but not really life changing.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by idrougge

You can try WShell. It's a replacement shell by William Hawes, creator of ARexx.

Conman was also an early one, as well as amiga zsh.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by appiah4

What is the best way to take a modern day image (PNG, JPEG, RAW etc.) and reduce the resolution, colors and convert to a format an OCS Amiga can display?

PersonalPaint does an excellent job of converting and reducing colours, with options for different dithering and scaling techniques, as well as good palette reduction and the ability to use an existing palette (e.g. from a Workbench screengrab, which it can also take) as a target.

RAW format is an awkward one as that depends entirely on its encoding. Even RAW files from two different Nikon camera models will be different for example, and RAW files used by game developers can be whatever internal format they felt like using. You can get PersonalPaint to try to recognise the filetype and that can work, but it's far from guaranteed.

PersonalPaint 7.1c is available free from ppaint.com.

Also, what is the best Amiga image viewer?

Visage is excellent, with support for decent mapping of colours for displaying on older chipsets, scaling to fit screen or aspect, slideshow use and built-in support for all the major image formats. Limiting factor will be the CPU speed as scaling and colour reduction are CPU intensive. But if you're converting your images already as part of your first question, it's a great option even on low-end Amigas.

[appiah4]

Thanks for all the suggestions on converting images to Amiga formats, but incidentally out of all the suggestions so far the best is something I found online. This JAVA image converter named ham_convert by some random dude on the internet can convert most image files to HAM-6 or HAM-8 PNG or IFF. The IFFs at 320x240 HAM-6 displayed beautifully in my A500. It also supports a lot of dithering algorithms.

http://mrsebe.bplaced.net/blog/wordpress/?page_id=374

Original 24-bit PNG:


HAM-8 IFF:


That's amazing stuff right there. I love it. Give it a try.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by appiah4

Thanks for all the suggestions on converting images to Amiga formats, but incidentally out of all the suggestions so far the best is something I found online. This JAVA image converter named ham_convert by some random dude on the internet can convert most image files to HAM-6 or HAM-8 PNG or IFF. The IFFs at 320x240 HAM-6 displayed beautifully in my A500. It also supports a lot of dithering algorithms.

http://mrsebe.bplaced.net/blog/wordpress/?page_id=374

-----><8

That's amazing stuff right there. I love it. Give it a try.

Cool stuff, thanx for sharing.


Skickat från min LG-H850 via Tapatalk

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by appiah4

<snip>

That's amazing stuff right there. I love it. Give it a try.

Wow, that is very cool indeed

Is the file size also not too large after conversion?

[appiah4]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Wow, that is very cool indeed

Is the file size also not too large after conversion?

320x240 HAM-6 images are around 55-60K. 640x480 HAM-6 is around 250K. Didn't mess with HAM-8 but I guess they'd be double these? Pretty decent IMO.

I really like Visage but it doesn't seem to have a slideshow mode, you have to open images one by one. Is there a viewer that can display multiple images one after the other?

[daxb]

Visage can show pictures in slideshow mode in sorted or random order.

[appiah4]

Originally Posted by daxb

Visage can show pictures in slideshow mode in sorted or random order.

Wow I never knew.. Just tried without entering any names in a directory and it does cycle through images with mouse click. How do you set random vs sorted?

[Daedalus]

You can use the ORDER keyword (from Shell) or Tooltype (from Workbench):

ORDER=SORT

This will show them in alphabetical order based on filename.

[emufan]

256 colors / dpaint5 - using LibImageQuant algorithm

#1) reminder to myself: use postimg.org

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by appiah4

Thanks for all the suggestions on converting images to Amiga formats, but incidentally out of all the suggestions so far the best is something I found online. This JAVA image converter named ham_convert by some random dude on the internet can convert most image files to HAM-6 or HAM-8 PNG or IFF. The IFFs at 320x240 HAM-6 displayed beautifully in my A500. It also supports a lot of dithering algorithms.

http://mrsebe.bplaced.net/blog/wordpress/?page_id=374

Original 24-bit PNG:


HAM-8 IFF:


That's amazing stuff right there. I love it. Give it a try.

I don't get the connection... original Amigas couldn't do HAM-8 or 256 colours.

But, if you found an app that does the job you want, OK, fair enough.

[appiah4]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

I don't get the connection... original Amigas couldn't do HAM-8 or 256 colours.

But, if you found an app that does the job you want, OK, fair enough.

HAM-8 example was for A1200s,it also converts to HAM-6 that OCS/ECS can display..

[Pat the Cat]

And it doesn't do sliced HAM. Proprietary Newtek format. But you wouldn't see a difference with a low res pic, so not an issue.