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{subhead} DOpus Plus CD{def}{p}
Review by Renne Nissinen
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DOpus Plus is a companion CD to DOpus Magellan II. It contains 390 MB of
all kinds of DOpus-related material: tutorials and documents, themes, icons,
sounds, pictures, enhancements and utilities, the DOpus Software Development
Kit and the full contents of biz/dopus in Aminet (up to October 26th, 1998).
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Let's start with the tutorials. They are excellent work; practically all of
the CD's contents are listed and well-presented in HTML and there are plenty
of links to everywhere in the pages. Aside from just listing the CD contents,
there are great tutorials on DOpus itself. Some parts are meant for people
who are familiar with DOpus 4, but mostly it's useful for everyone. The
tutorial is divided in four sections: starting, advanced, coding and fun stuff.
The Starting sections contains in-depth information on configuration, listers,
buttons and filetypes. The Advanced section tells you how to use themes, sounds
and patterns, third party products and even more info on icons, configuration
and filetypes. The Coding section discusses coding for DOpus in both ARexx
(a tutorial plus a more "reference"-style guide) and C (again, a tutorial
plus the SDK for reference).
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The themes are really excellent! There are only a couple "real" DOpus themes,
but thousands, hundreds or even dozens of themes converted from Windows themes
which work just as well. :-) Topics include: {bold}cartoons{nobold} (such as the Simpsons,
South Park, Beavis & Butt-Head etc), {bold}games{nobold} (Final Fantasy, Myst, Red Alert etc),
{bold}movies{nobold} (X-Files, Army of Darkness, MIB, King Kong, Hellraiser, Terminator2),
{bold}music{nobold} (Bjork, Garbage, Foo Fighters, Hendrix, Green Day, Madonna, Verve), {bold}people{nobold}
(Alicia Silverstone, David Duchovny [ where's Gillian Anderson?!? :-P~~ ], Cindy Crawford),
{bold}TV{nobold} (Buffy, Frasier, Mr.Bean, Xena, Friends), {bold}miscellanous{nobold} (fire, food, horses,
frogs, lunaria, M&M, Tolkien, Medieval and other weird stuff :-) and {bold}sports{nobold}
(Canucks, Colorado, Raiders, Senna and other Bulls(hit) :-).
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  The problem with themes might be the data types (WAVs, BMPs, GIFs and JPEGs), but
they should work fine with the proper datatypes installed. Another problem is that I
couldn't get any of them working properly, there must be a bug in the DOpus version
that I have (e.g. sometimes sounds just stopped working, I never got the "disk
removed" or "empty trash" sounds, God knows where they are played if anywhere :-).
Well, at least there are some fine samples to use in other programs, too (how about
a nice scream when you get email? :-).
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Then there are DOpus enhancements; theme converter, random themes, filetypes, ArcDir,
DirTree, Awari, FTPBatch etc. There are also some basic tools included: archivers
(LHA, ZIP and LZX), Birdie, browsers, MUI, Personal Paint 6.4 and some viewers.
Most of them are demo / evaluation versions unless they're freeware, but PPaint
is a complete program.
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Loads of icons, anyone? There are different styles of icons and program graphics
(e.g. button banks) for DOpus' own needs and for all sorts of programs. Included
are also the complete NewIcons release 4.1, GlowIcons v0.2 and AesIcons 1 - 9.
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And just to refresh your memory, this CD contains also the DOpus SDK, essential
for all coders who want to make DOpus modules, and 6.5 MB of DOpus stuff from
Aminet.
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The DOpus Plus CD is a great package full of DOpus goodies and great docs on
using DOpus, so I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to get the most of their
Directory Opus Magellan II!
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{bold}Available from{nobold}: Most Amiga retailers
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{bold}Overall{nobold}: 92%  {bold}** AIO Gold **{nobold}