Test reports

Test reports

1. Little helpers for everyday Amiga usage (by Christian Aichinger)

Welcome to the newest issue of "Little helpers". Currently it is relatively quiet around our favourite computer system. Is it the calm before the storm? Only a short, featureless Executive Update from Bill McEwen, and even the Aminet had only very few real good uploads. Still I went looking for some "pearls", and really found some.

This month, we have "RiVa", the ultrafast MPEG-Player for 68k-Amigas; "Type1Engine", which enables the Amiga to use Postscript fonts; the textviewer "EvenMore" and the "Warp" Datatypes from Oliver Roberts.

Have fun!

RiVa:

RiVa is a fast MPEG player, which, for a change, doesn't use a PowerPC board. In other words, RiVa is "68k-only" and, thanks to 100% assembler programming, everything but slow. It is configured by icon tooltypes or with arguments in the Shell.

The minimum requirement is an Amiga with a 68020-CPU, Kickstart 3.0, 1 MByte of free RAM and the AGA chipset. Of course, the recommended setup is a 68060 CPU combined with a fast graphics board. If the mpega.library is installed, RiVa also supports MPEG animations with audio. If the speed goes down because of this, you can also disable the sound.

You can export the audio track of a video as an MPEG2 audio file (to convert it to another format, for example).

RiVa supports all common Amiga graphics systems (CGFX/P96/AGA). Users without a graphics board or only a slow ZorroII one should use the DHAM6 mode. In this mode, my Amiga was able to play the Padilla video from Aminet (pix/mpg/padilla.mpg, 320x240 Pixel, on an 040/40MHz) almost absolutely smooth. However, the sound had to be disabled and I had to use the parameter "HALFHEIGHT".

Based on the fact that there is the DHAM6 mode, I think RiVa could be used on OCS- or ECS-Amigas, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't test this.

The demo version from Aminet displays video only in greyscale. It supports all graphics mode, but only in greyscale. Sadly, the registration and obtaining of the full version is somewhat problematical. You need to send the registration form and 30.-DM (or 15 US-Dollar or 10 Pound Sterling) to New Zealand. The author does not accept other forms of payment. If the money gets there, you get the registered version on a disk or via email. "No risk, no fun" ;).

Type1Engine:

The Type1Engine enables the Amiga to use Postscript-Type 1 fonts, which can be found in shoals in the Internet, just like any other Amiga font. The installation, either in German or English, is done easily with the Amiga installer.

After the installation, you should find the MUI-based configuration program "T1Manager" in the System drawer of the Workbench. It is used to install Postscript fonts and to optimally adapt them to your system.

You can change the type of the font (width, leaning, ..., serifs/etc.), the character set (Unicode/.../ISO 8859-2/etc.), predefined sizes to be shown in the font requester and some other things.

But don't mistake the T1Manager for a font editor. You can only edit the type definitions of a font. You could, for example, define the font "Times-New-Roman" as serif-less, but of course the serifs of this font will not disappear. A wrong definition can only lead to a faulty output (single characters would be overwritten). But with the integrated preview, you can avoid most problems.

Furthermore it includes a function to convert vector fonts into Amiga Bitmap fonts. This has the advantage of a dramatically reduced loading time. But the converted Bitmap fonts take up a lot up hard disk space, so you should only convert your most used sizes.

The handling of T1Manager is well designed. Each part of the program has an extensive MUI online documentation that makes the somewhat sloppy manual almost superfluous. The T1Manager can be localised in German or English. The Type1Engine itself, or, to be more accurate the type1.library is available in compiled versions for 68000, 68020 and 68020 with FPU. The manual remains silent about the system requirements. But hardware-wise an Amiga with 2 MB of free RAM should suffice. The minimum OS version can only be guessed (I think OS 2.0??). Since the configuration program is based on MUI, an Amiga capable of running MUI should be enough.

EvenMore:

And one more ... "EvenMore". EvenMore is another text viewer a la MuchMore, PPMore or Next. But EvenMore does not try to impress the user with a spartan but functional GUI, "SuperSoftScrolling" or 100% assembler programming. Instead, it relies upon a well chosen feature list. All functions can (following Amiga Style Guides) be accessed through menus, buttons, hotkeys and even ARexx. Texts may be printed, you can place bookmarks (up to five bookmarks are supported), save files (even XPK-packed...), edit them with an external program and perform statistical analyses. It contains a powerful search function, a configurable GUI, a history function, a quickload function for often used files as well as support for Drag&Drop, public screens, localisation and wheel mice.

Text passages can be marked using the mouse (Shift and left mouse button) and copied to the clipboard. This makes data exchange with word processors and text editors easy. The StyleGuide conforming design makes for a very gentle learning curve. The buttons in the upper part of the window have online help. If you move the mouse pointer over one of them, a description is displayed after a delay.

The configurability of the user interface is remarkable. While it is not comparable to the features of MUI, the speed is much better. You can change the design of the frames around the button, info and progress bar, the font, the text spacing, the graphics set, the functions of the buttons and many other options. If you don't like the design of the default MagicWB graphics set, you can use your own. The distribution contains some alternative sets, but they aren't very beautiful.

Besides normal ASCII files, EvenMore can also show AmigaGuide files. But all AmigaGuide mark-ups will be filtered out and the file will be displayed like a normal text file. All links are only marked in color.

EvenMore can display other types of files using external programs. It can for example start a web browser upon loading a file ending with "*.html". Well at least it is supposed to do this. I wasn't able to define additional "FileTypes" on my system, so this feature was unusable for me.

EvenMore works on all Amigas with at least AmigaOS 3.0 (V39). It can be localised. Catalogs for Spanish, Norwegian, French, Dutch and English are included. To install EvenMore, just copy the complete directory somewhere on your hard disk. If you want to use it to replace "More", you should only copy the executable and the appropriate catalog.

Warp-Datatypes:

The prefix "Warp" usually stands for an incredible speed, and has something to do with light speed and bending space. Trekkies should know more about that than me. But let me say this first: Graphics displayed using Warp-Datatypes do not appear before Multiview is started and the graphics file is loaded and the space-time-continuum isn't changed at all ;). But the Datatypes, which are available for the formats JPEG, BMP and PNG, exhibit a very high speed indeed. I'm not going to claim they are the fastest - which would only provoke a fruitless discussion - but they are definitely among the fastest. You can find some benchmarks in the English AmigaGuide documentation.

The three Datatypes are found in three separate archives in the Aminet. Installation and requirements are identical for all of them. You need at least an Amiga with a 68020 CPU, with either AmigaOS3.5/3.9 or AmigaOS3.0/3.1 with the picture.datatype from the Picasso96 or CyberGraphX distribution. To be more accurate, you need picture.datatype version 43 or newer installed. The PowerPC is supported through WarpUp V4+ or MorphOS (Beta-release 1 or newer). You also get optimised versions for 030/040/060 type CPUs. A graphics board is beneficial, but not required, since there are effective dithering mechanisms for native displays.

The installation, using the Amiga installer, is without problems. After a reboot, the Datatype is installed. It is advisable to install all three of them at once and then to make (only one) reboot.

If the Warp-Datatypes are installed for the first time on a computer, you can have the installer make a backup of your previous Datatypes. Problems are improbable, but you never know.

The Warp-Datatypes are very up-to-date. WarpPNG, for example, is based on libpng1.0.9/zlib1.1.3. So PNG files in 24bit, interlaced and with different compression algorithms are no problem for the Datatype system of the Amiga.

The same goes for the WarpJPEG Datatype, which not only supports official JFIF format, as approved by the JPEG group, but also modified versions, like those produced by Adobe-Photoshop and Windows. The WarpBMP-Datatype supports a wide range of BMP file formats (from 1 through 32 bit color depth and RLE compressed), too.

Oliver Roberts has announced another DataType for TIFF graphics. If you want to stay informed about it or about updates, you can subscribe to the WarpDatatype-Newsletter. To do so, send an empty email to futaura-announce-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Okay, that's all for this month. I hope you liked the programs in this issue. Mail me for mistakes, suggestions and criticism.

Christian Aichinger <christian@aakt.de>