General Public Domain Reviews  by S.English   ¿? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿?  BEST OF FISH ------------ The Best Of Fish disks are a great idea. While the Fish Disks would have to be the best globally known PD disk collection, they often contain programs and information that are not always useful to the average user. Indeed sometimes the programs are more suited to programmers or a very select crowd. The Best Of Fish collection overcomes this by providing the cream of programs, etc from the Fish Disks in a collection that is of much more use to the average user. That means you are more likely to find useful programs on these disks, besides what you ordered them for. I recently obtained several of these disks from MegaDisc. Below I have written short overviews of the programs contained on some of the ones that I received. The following are reviewed: 20, 46, 49, 57, 66, 84, 85 & 87  BOF 20 ------ FileRequest: An example of a File Requester done in Assembly code. New features include the ghosting of unavailable drives. Furnish: Erk, yick, yuck. This program allows your to design and furnish your rooms. I'd rather just move the real thing to see how it looked. IffLib: This is an update to the Iff shared library. Also contains a great screen grabber and iff viewer. MFix: Takes the rainbow screen from Marauder files. Apparently this speeds up the copying time by 25%. I wouldn't know. PopInfo: An updated version of Jonathan Potter's pretty famous program. Allows you to see your free memory, chip, fast, total ram usage and all that at the click of a mouse button! ProCalc: An amigarised version of the HP-11C programmable calculator. Uses it's own font. Good if your into this sort of thing I guess. I'm not really fussed with all this extra gadgetry. PtrAnim: Yet another bunch of Animated pointers which yet again I couldn't use.... so I converted some of them into Busy Pointers for use with WB2+ and NickPrefs... hopefully you'll see them pop up sooner or later in an issue of MegaDisc.  Print1.2: I'll get a printer before I try to tell you about this one. Allows you to print out Ascii or Hex data with or whithout page numbers. I'm not sure if that is a big deal or not.  Titlepage: Another one for Printer-Jocks. Prints out banners.  BOF 46 ------ This one is packed to the brim with the following games:  Flipper: Quite a well done Othello clone. Simple, and very very fast. Quite good for when you are waiting for your MandAnim to finish drawing its 60 or so frames. And no - it has absolutely nothing to do with dolphins.  Monopoly: This one shouldn't need much explanation. I don't know what it is about some board games, but they just seem to be made awkward when they ported onto computer. Monopoly is one of them. Things that are easy with the boardgame become a chore on computer.  Zerg: This was originally designed to be a BBS game so it isn't THAT flash. You play a character in a fantasy world and must go around killing dragons and rescuing damsels in distress. Poor graphics, poor game play.  Paranoids: Remember what I was saying about games feeling awkward on the computer? Here's another one. I am not sure if this was ported over from a boardgame or if it was just designed to be played as a board game. The graphics are very basic, the game play is a tad repetitive, but I guess if you got two people who were interested it might be fun. The aim of the game is to get your patients out of the Asylum while using your doctors to hamper your opponents own patients and doctors. I think you'll probably need shock therapy after an hour at this game.  BOF 49 ------  Escape From Jovi III: I have to report that whenever I tried to run this on my system (no matter what I tried), all I got was garbled screens. Even apparently after starting the game, these screens remained. I have an A500, 0.5meg chip, 2.5 meg fast, OS2.4. Andrew Quinan a friend of mine, tried it on a similarly set up A2000 using OS2.4 and it also presented with nothing but garbled screens. I would assume that it has troubles with OS2.x+ systems.  BOF 57 ------  AniPtrs: This contains a program for animating your pointers as well as four collections of actual animated pointers for your system. While I could not get any of these pointers to work (using my A500 with OS2.4), nor could a friend of mine (using his A2000 with OS2.4), I did find many of the icon pointers (they are iff images, useable with DPaint etc), were useable as busy pointers, standard pointers and icons (with a fair bit of work). If you can actually get the animated pointers to work then this would be well worth your while getting hold of because many of them are quite good!  SoundEditor: This is aa 8SVX Sound Editor/Digitizer. It can load in raw and mac files and has many features. Very handy if you want to digitize your own sound samples. Included for the SoundEditor program are three examples, Letsdoit (a sample from what sounds like a dance track), Keybd (a single key press on an electronic keyboard) and Wreck (a car skidding and inevitably crashing).  BOF 66 ------  3DTicTacToe: An enhanced version of the old pen and paper game we all played as kids. A good way to be humiliated by your Amiga.  MigaMind: A mastermind conversion. Very small, fast and compact. Nothing flashy but the game play is there and it is still a challenge. Good if you liked Mastermind.  Imperium Romanum: A stale simulation of Rome in the olden days. Too hard to get into. There is also a really big bug that you can take advantage of especially if you not playing against any other opponents. Dreary.  Puzz: Well I have just reviewed Yawn! for MegaDisc and then I saw this similar program. Among the things going for it is it's name - it makes some sense. This is one of the games where you move the pieces around in the grid to unjumble the picture or number sequence. There are about six or seven different puzzles on offer (including a great Bugs Bunny one), all of which are fiendishly tricky. Best puzzle thingy I have seen yet. You can even make your own.  Tricky: A weird concept. Very very weird, but it is only an average game because the difficulty is WAY too low. Once you actually work out what you are meant to be doing, everything is just too easy.   BOF 84 ------ Included on this disk are:  ButExchange: Not as suspicious as it sounds, this program merely swaps the functions of your mouse buttons over, much in the way programs such as LeftyMouse do.  FreeCopy: This program of oh-so-dubious nature allows you to remove the copy protection from your original software. I guess this will allow you to make back-ups ahem. It may also in some circumstances allow you to install a program on your HD with a little bit of fiddling. The program comes ready to work for a wide range of games and has the ability to learn how to 'crack' new ones I believe.  Genesis: This is another in the long line of fractal landscape generators. Quite good with heaps of functions to keep you busy. It is however disabled so that you can't save your creations until you register.  InputLock: Allows you to lock your keyboard and mouse so that your cat won't wipe your hardrive when it decides to go for a stroll across your keyboard, or your little daughter won't halt your raytracing 2 minutes before it is about to finish.  NoErrors: A floppy/HD utility from local software genius Nic Wilson.  PicSaver: Allows you to grab pictures on the current screen. Great for saving Genesis pictures without having to register - but is it ethical?  PWKeys: Sun mouse, accelerator, window shuffler, input locker - we've heard it all before.  TapeCover: Print out the covers for all of your tapes so that they don't look so tacky written in biro. Give them a real professional look. Great.... if you have a printer!  BOF 85 ------  Arq: One if the best PD programs that has come my way for a long time. Arq will give your requestors (WB1.3 OR WB2.x) that bit of pizzazz that they have been wanting for a loooong time. Now they have animations and can also include sound effects.  FontConv: Allows you to convert your Mac fonts into Amiga compatible ones.  Landscape: Really cool program for drawing your backyard in 3D. Yes, it really is fun. I swear! Does good pics too!  MightyMouse: Hold on folks, here we go again... Screen blanker, sunmouse, mouse blanker, clock, hot keys... but something that not many others have - memory warner, starts flashing when your memory gets low.  PicBase: A great way of storing information about all of your picture files, great if you are looking for a certain picture... it will tell you exactly on which disk to look for it... as long as you label your disks intelligently (ie don't leave them all labelled 'empty').  ScreenJaeger: Actually represents your Amiga's memory graphically. You can go skimming through it looking for ictures that you can then save off into files.  BOF 87 ------  IE: Stands for Icon Editor. And if you have been following MegaDisc for any amount of time you will have read Leigh Murry raving about it. In particular, if you want an inside look into IE, check out MegaDisc issue 27 for her article which looks at it (alternatively try START 1 from the MegaDisc catalogue). Version 3 is on this disk, and is fully functional though it has two VERY annoying Shareware messages and exits after you save an icon, but if you are serious about icon editing then IE looks to be the program to have. Only costs $20 to register and supports an aussie author.  MAK: I thought the Mandlebrots I created with MandAnim were flash! Check out what you can do with MAK (Mandlebrot Adventure Kit) if you use some imagination and perhaps a lot of time: one of the accompaning pics took over 38 hours but boy does it look amazing!  *** FISH DISKS *** ---------- Everyone knows what fish disks are (no they don't go well in water), and if you don't then you obviously just moved over to the Amiga from some other platform. Fish disks are THE most commonly recognised source of Public Domain software throughout the entire world. They have contained software from one extreme to the other. If there is a program that you are looking for that is in the Public Domain, chances are it will be on a Fish disk. Below I have given a brief over view of some of the Fish disks that I have recently obtained from MegaDisc. If something catches your eye, why not order it and check it out? The price doesn't get much better!  FISH 782 --------  DFA: This is an address book program with several differences. It contains room for email addresses for starters. It also has an Arexx port, font sensitivity, AppIcon support and Commodity support. What more could you ask for?  Twilight Zone: Now this Screen Blanker stands out from the crowd (and boy is it a large crowd!). It doesn't do so because it has a thousand and one features more then any other screen blanker - in fact it doesn't offer the diversity of some. The real reason that Twilight Zone appeals is because of the range of different screen blankers that are available. You can choose from Fireworks to Blue Balls (brrrrrrr! ;)) and another trendy little option is the Blank Now corner of the screen. Move your mouse here and the screen instantly blanks - great for hiding that top secret project or for just getting rid of that naughty picture when your mum comes in. Alternatively you can set up a Blank Never corner, which will stop the blanker working while the mouse is in that corner.  ValCon: Converts between decimal, binary, hex and octal. This is a big hit at late night engineering parties!!!  Yak: The author named this Yet Another Kommodity and he sure got that right. Sunmouse, window cycle, Zip/Shrink/Enlarge windows, blanker, pop keys, pizza order maker, remote nuclear device activator, space shuttle controller, when will it all end?!?!?!  =) Scott English  ¿? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿*? 35 ¿?