Using an Amiga with OS4.1 for daily work.

[fondpondforever]

I'm thinking about Using an Amiga with OS4.1 for daily work instead of a PC or MAC. By this I mean using it for your job such as word processing to bring in documents, digital art creation for making posters and leaflets for local events going on such as live music and the internet for communicating such as email and making websites. Your printed labels or slogan could say 'Made By Amiga'.

[Predseda]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masochism

[fondpondforever]

Or the equivalent to Nintendo's 'Seal Of Quality'.

[thgill]

With all the silly questions and statements you are making on all the various Amiga forums, I can't help but think you are just trolling at this point.

[fondpondforever]

Thank you for your perspective. I feel very reassured in my new idea. Someone told me that it's good to have new projects to work on. Might as well stick to my plain jane PC and write down ideas on a notepad where no one can see them. My desk to the left is amazingly reassuring. Funny how I got some good answers on the amibay and amiga.org forums.

[rare_j]

Well why not? Give it a try, see how you get on, let us know what worked for you and what difficulties (if any) you encounter.

Just don't throw out your PC just yet, old chap.

[aszu]

"don't feed the troll"

[Leffmann]

Originally Posted by thgill

With all the silly questions and statements you are making on all the various Amiga forums, I can't help but think you are just trolling at this point.

You seem confused. Let me help: he's not trolling, it's just you being intolerant of people.

Originally Posted by aszu

"don't feed the troll"

Thanks for the reminder, I'll put you on ignore.

[Overflow]

I will just copy paste Broadblues reply on amiga.org http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost...5&postcount=14

Originally Posted by broadblues

The kind of work you describe can easily be done on an AmiagOS 4.1 machine.

I use Wordworth 7 for wordprocessing, poster / flyer creation. Printing to postscrit them converting to PDF with Ghostscript.

(my PDFMaker script isavailable here http://www.broad.ology.org.uk/docs/a...imple_App.html , realy ought to split that out of the tutorial an upload it to os4depot)

I use SketchBlock and ImageFX for graphics creation, saving the results inot 3 formats native (.skprj for further editing) , .ps for inclusing in Wordworth docs, and 24bit ilbm for previewing in wordworth (need imagefx for that). And ofcourse jpeg png etc for websueage where required.

Printing wise I have a HP laserjet Pro 200 color M251n which takes postscript data direct. This is important, don;t get any new printer that doesn't support postscript. You want a lasre for quality anyway, and all the other will lack somewhere in the driver chain.

[Locutus]

If not trolling, i'm sure this will just end in frustration, or frustration and some completely crazy apologist defense.

[Leffmann]

Originally Posted by Locutus

If not trolling, i'm sure this will just end in frustration, or frustration and some completely crazy apologist defense.

Why would anyone here have to defend their use of an Amiga? What a funny thing to post on an Amiga forum, to Amiga users.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Leffmann

What a funny thing to post on an Amiga forum, to Amiga users.

But the Amiga community is funny. We can't even agree on what an Amiga is

[Daedalus]

Don't forget you can also install Amicygnix which will let you run Abiword and Gnumeric under OS 4.1. Both of those are pretty good packages and have reasonable Word and Excel compatibility - far more than Wordworth anyway. There's also a port of Gimp for Amicygnix for graphics work.

Doing web development really depends on what you're doing. For palette-based graphics (GIFs etc.), PersonalPaint is excellent, and I still use it for some things that are just simpler to do there than in Fireworks etc. Text editors aren't a problem, neither are FTP clients. For prototyping websites there's a port of AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) so you can run a local webserver, and Amaya is a WYSIWYG webpage editor that also has a port for Amicygnix.

Email is reasonably well catered for with YAM and SimpleMail. YAM is more feature-laden, but doesn't support IMAP or HTML mail preview (though it can send them to a browser for viewing). SimpleMail does support IMAP and also has all the main features you'd expect from an email client.

At the end of the day, all the things you mention are possible on OS4.1, though there will be limitations of course and in most cases things would be easier using Windows or a Mac. Amicygnix in particular is slow enough to be frustrating unless you've a fast machine. Let us know how you get on anyway.

[fondpondforever]

Thanks for your feedback. Thinking about getting an Amiga 3000 but not if you could upgrade it's hardware to run Amiga OS4/4.1. Might be stuck with OS3.9 and not sure if that's below today's standards in terms of multimedia creation for your clients.

[Daedalus]

Hmmm... Even if you were to get an A3000 and a PPC accelerator, that would be too slow (and probably lacking RAM) for any of the Amicygnix applications I listed. If you really want the OS 4.1 route, you should look at getting a SAM 460 or better. If not, stick to OS 3.9 and use the older applications as Broadblues was saying.

[Overflow]

If you are sticking with AOS3.9 (which is what I do), then the Vampire board should take care of some of the issues regarding performance and memory.
Ofcourse fantastically underpowered compared to wintel machines, but top of the line in "classic" terms (not going to get into the whole what is true classic hardware/AOS3.9 runs under emulation too! etc).

And its cost effective.

[LuMan]

@fondpondfever - I say, "why not?" If that's what you want to do, and using the Amiga gives you the motivation and inspiration to create, then go for it
I don't think, for one minute, that it will be any simpler (or efficient) than using the more up to date tools on the (much) more powerful, modern systems, but that's really not the point. The point is that you get a result from a particular approach.

Oddly, when people produce music or artwork using an Amiga, and it gets showcased on this forum, everyone congratulates them. This really is no different - just a different output.

As for trolling... If this IS troll-feeding, then so be it. But there is a chance that someone will read the thread and decide to do something similar, based on these comments.

I just hope we get to see what fondpondfever produces.....

[gururise]

I think its possible to use a Classic Amiga for modern work assuming you have two things:
- Upgraded hardware (ie. Accelerator, Memory, Networking and Gfx card).
- Latest OS Software.

I've set up an emulated A4000 w/UAE gfx at 1280x720 resolution with the following software:
- ClassicWB + OS3.1
- MUI 4.0
- Wordworth 7 (word processing)
- DPaint 5 (graphics)
- Pagestream 3 (desktop publishing)
- Netsurf 3.5 (browser)
- AmigaAMP (music player)
- MicroGoldEd (text editor)
- Storm C 3.0 (if you do C development)
- YAM (mail client, in case you don't like GMail web interface)
- AmigaSAMBA (file sharing with other computers on my network!)
- DOpus 4 (file manager)

With the above software, you can actually get along quite nicely and have usable equivalents for everything you would do on a modern PC. Netsurf 3.5 browser is what really makes this shine, as we finally have a modern browser for classic systems. I'm using 256 MB of fast ram and have no problems multitasking and everyday usage, but you could get by with less (probably at least 32-64MB).

I'd imagine a real Amiga classic with at least 64MB ram, accelerator (68040+ or above) and gfx would actually be a usable machine even in 2016.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Thorham

But the Amiga community is funny. We can't even agree on what an Amiga is

Truer words have never been spoken.