CD Title:Workbench Add-On vol 1 Review: Workbench Add-On Vol 1 (By Pauli Porkka)
Workbench Add-On Volume 1 Bohus Blahut bohus@xnet.com The massive potential of the CD rom format took some time to reach the Amiga market, but discs like this one more than make up for it. While most Amiga users have hard drives, CD rom drives haven't reached the level of popularity as on other platforms. While many of the files on this disc are freely available for download from Aminet, the CD circumvents devoting hard drive space to file storage. This CD (and any other for that matter) is an inexpensive way to have a sizable library of files conveniently on hand. The files are also archived for use on BBS's, or to facilitate easy movement on floppy discs. In past articles, we've discussed the uses of CDs for the graphic artists or animator, but here's a disc designed to enhance the day to day enjoyment of your computer. This CD rom takes advantage of the massive storage (650 Megs) potential of the disc rom format by offering the Amiga a huge number of new tools. With Amiga development coming in fits and bursts from a number of different sources these days, this CD can help your Amiga continue to look modern. My favorite inclusion is artist Roger McVay's "New Icons"; an icon replacement set. New Icons is a set of very professional looking 256 color icons, although the icons still look snappy even under a 16 color ECS workbench. I've installed these on my DraCo, and Amiga 2000 to give both machines a sleek and professioanl appearance and get away from the rather anemic looking Commodore icons. Also included are several replacement icon sets by other authors including the popular Magic WorkBench. The CD includes an easy installer script that will set up your Workbench for New Icons, and also install MUI to help other applications on the disc run properly. Users of Amiga Workbench 3.0 and above have an included AmigaDOS CD rom driver. This CD driver can be flakey at times, and is also unavailable to OS 2.0 user, so I prefer the commercial product ASIMcdfs by ASIMware Innovations. ASIMcdfs includes several useful CD utilities. There is a Kodak photoCD to IFF convertor, and an audio CD player and librarian. Many other utilities like these are avilable as shareware on this disc as well, and at a discount! The CD's booklet contains discount coupons, and author's addresses for utilities such as: PowerPlayer, SuperView, and ShapeShifter. There is a Comm directory containing telecommunications and networking software including Term and AMItcp. The Sound directory has a sampling (pun intended) of IFF sound samples from the another available disc, the DaCapo sound CDrom. The DaCapo CD has more than 10000 samples, and 1400 MODs on it. Additionally there are several commodities, screen blankers, MODs by noted artists, music players, workbench games, text readers, and disk copiers, but here are my personal favorites... There is a graphics directory with the best WorkBench backgrounds and patterns that I've ever seen. There are many organic tileable textures, and tools for modifying icons. There are even directories of clipart and Compugraphic fonts for creating your own artwork. Also, there is an entire directory dedicated to emulation. There's a VIC-20 emulator, and the non-registered version of the ShapeShifter Mac emulator. The jewel in ShapeShifter's crown in this release is the inclusion of a complete 50 meg Mac boot partition. This means that you can drop the partition onto your hard drive, and get Mac-ing away. The Mac OS 7.0.1 is freely redistributable [sort of], and is enough to get you started. Ther are a couple of other fun Amiga utilities including LetterMatcher. This takes any 2bit graphic and converts it into ascii. (See the Amiga Logo at the Top of AR) I've often thought that it would be cool to take a batch of animation frames, and convert them to these ascii representations for a new look in animation. There's also IntuiCookie, a really neat random fortune cookie generator. One could conceivably drop this into the WBstartup drawer and get a different inspirational mesage every boot up. This CD is truly inspirational. Hopefully this will spin off more Amiga specific CD roms. Often when I'm "painted into a corner", I can reach into my stack of Amiga CDroms, and pull out a solution. While it's unfortunate that CDTV and CD32 weren't nearly as popular as they could've been, hopefully this will not prevent companies from producing more excellent CDs like this one. Bohus Blahut (BOH-hoosh BLAH-hoot) Bohus@xnet.com Modern Filmmaker 312.465.5158 DraCo gigolo